Hiatus

I know it's not much that I was taking a break from, but there you have it. Coping with what I'm told is rather severe depression, although there haven't been any psychotic breaks yet. I created this blog to get better at reading and analyzing things, despite unfortunately not having anything original to say, special analytic talent, etc. It only makes sense that it would join the long list of projects I've half-started and abandoned in the course of my life.

I'll get back to doing this; that's what I'm telling myself.

Oh my God, we're going to die!

The headline in this article from the Times of London is "Tehran has enough material for two nuclear bombs, IAEA says."

Terrifying! A few days is all that stands between America and nuclear destruction! ...assuming of course, that the Iranians are crazy, and nuclear weapons are permissible, but only when held by the US and its friends.

In the NYT about a week ago, for example, you find the US possesses 5,113 nuclear weapons. The military strategists who write the article say, in a fit of astounding noncomformity, that "That is exactly 4,802 more than we need." This, they say, is enough to annihilate a population and its industrial capacity, or "should we want to hit an enemy without destroying its society, the 311 weapons would be adequate for taking out a wide range of 'hardened targets' like missile silos or command-and-control bunkers." Just a thought, you know, that you might not want to destroy a society. They advocate distributing a hundred in ICBMs scattered throughout the US, giving nineteen to B-2 stealth bombers, which, along with nuclear submarines carrying around 192 missiles at any given time, should allow us to project the threat of atomic annihilation anywhere around the globe.

That what these thinkers advocate, far beyond anything Obama has proposed or is likely to accept, is something like the dovish option in today's military climate, is unneeded further evidence of our collective insanity. But how many nuclear warheads are too many for Iran to have? One. And apparently they have two, or will in the very near future.

Or not. When you read the article, you find "Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium stands at two tonnes, enough to arm two nuclear warheads if enriched further." (emphasis added) Do these three words change the meaning of the headline? Let's consider analogies.

"I could have drowned if there were water in the pool."
"Put your hands where I can see them! We are prepared to use deadly force, or would be if our firearms were loaded!"
"Iraq's WMD could have deterred a US invasion if they existed."

Iran doesn't have fissile material enriched to the level necessary for weaponization and won't for years. So what this article is breathlessly warning us is that the situation is actually unchanged

As an aid fleet approaches Gaza, Israel vows to block it. Laila el-Haddad writes movingly about what Gaza suffers under the siege, the Weisglass "diet" that is simultaneously supposed to make non-cooperation intolerable for Palestinians, but not be a humanitarian disaster. As The Wall Street Journal puts it, "Israel Prepares to Fend Off Ships Heading to Gaza." Yes, "the only democracy in the Middle East" is also the only country that has to "fend off" humanitarian aid. Results: 70% of the population survives on under a dollar a day, and 65% of babies are anemic. As this page points out, Gaza has in fact been blockaded since 1967.

In Israeli media, working with the flotilla tars MK Hanin Zuabi as associated with Hamas. This is a convenient way to discredit anyone working for the relief of Gaza.

Ameer Makhoul, director of Ittijah, a union of Palestinian-Israeli community organizations, on the other hand, was arrested without charge four weeks ago and tortured. Thursday, he was indicted for recruiting for Hizballah and providing information on military facilities, based on information obtained under the torture. Torture of Israel's prisoners has been illegal since 1999, but is not prosecuted, and continues apace. Makhoul's lawyers have been denied access to his medical reports.

Makhoul has supported the international boycott of Israel and Amnesty says the charges are "pure harassment" of a political dissident.

---

Hatoyama reneges on moving the Futenma air base off Okinawa; his poll numbers have fallen to twenty percent. I've seen it suggested that this decision has to do with South Korea's determination that the Cheonam was indeed sunk by a North Korean torpedo, but think it reflects what he wanted to do anyway.

Nukes, oil, and black holes.

From SMBIVA, a brief video about the legal black hole that is Bagram.

This post has way more about the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico than I've seen in any of the news stories I've read.

You'll have heard by now about Israel's offer to give nukes to apartheid-era South Africa.

Did you also know Israel at one point considered nuclear terrorism against the Soviet Union? I didn't, but Jonathan Schwarz and Seymour Hersh did:

Moshe Dayan's mission in late 1967 and early 1968 was to convince his fellow cabinet members that if the Soviets could be persuaded that the Israeli threat was credible, they might decide that there was no Middle East war worth fighting... when Israel developed its first bomb in a suit case, Moscow would be told -- and reminded that there was no way to stop Mossad from smuggling a nuclear weapon across the border by automobile or into a Soviet port by boat.

News of Yesterday

Inspired by the Danish far right, non-Muslims in America united yesterday to make a hated minority even more uncomfortable, in the name of free speech. For a brilliant overview of why "free speech" isn't an excuse for Jyllands-Posten, see Lawrence of Cyberia. The "Lets Draw Mohammed" Facebook page crows that it's about free speech and not anti-Muslim, and demonstrates this even-handedness by choosing as its user avatar the J-P picture with Mohammed's turban replaced with a lit bomb. Many of the submissions are worse.

People will ask you to compare this with the "Piss Christ" photograph, a shot of a crucifix standing in a jar of urine, and saw that if one is acceptable, then so is the other. To my mind, an analysis failing to take into account surrounding social dynamics is useless. "Piss Christ" offended the beliefs of the dominant religion in the US in the name of freedom of speech, whereas the Mohammed cartoons were commissioned by Danish bigots to deliberately offend an embattled minority. The Facebook cartoons piggyback on this effort. There seem to be a few different groups of people involved:

1. Hardcore racists. They want to offend Muslims, who they may believe to all be terrorists.
2. The totally clueless. They believe they are fighting terrorists, and don't realize or don't care that they offend a billion other people.
3. People who believe that they are defending free speech. They mistakenly believe that someone is actually trying to curtail their ability to draw things. They fail to distinguish between "can't" and "shouldn't," which is strange because they surely have other rights that they fail to exercise. Just because I have the legal right to draw Mohammed, or protest at a soldier's funeral with a sign saying "Thank God for dead soldiers," it doesn't make it the right thing to do. Yet the existence of a "cultural" enemy leads them to piss people off to defend a right they aren't in danger of losing.
   

The person running the page seems to see it as a new front in the War on Terror: "Al Qa'eda has put a $50,000 price tag on the heads of ANYONE caught drawing pictures of Muhammad, lets see how high we can get the bounty!" Surely al-Qa'ida will take especial interest in the brave people circulating drawings on the Internet.

The results are things like; e.g., Pakistan temporarily banning Facebook.

Freedom marches on.

---

On the anti-Muslim, Rima Fakih, a Michigan woman of Lebanese descent, has won Miss USA, giving Americans an opportunity to more vividly get their crazy on. Hero-scholar for Western Civilization Daniel Pipes believes there's an insidious kind of affirmative action going on recently, allowing Muslim women to win American beauty pageants. Debbie Schlussel informs us that Hamas and Hizballah have been backing her... why? Perhaps to infiltrate the American psyche with her shapely breasts. This seems to be the depth of the theory, although Schlussel claims several relatives and backers of Fakih are associated with Hizballah. Yes, Donald Trump is in cahoots with them as well.

Some people are happy with the victory, seeing it as representing a normalization and acceptance of the existence of Arab-Americans. Assimilation is not always a good thing (to understate), and I have trouble seeing immigrants cheering on the commodification of their own daughters, in the American fashion, as progress.

---

Also, there's this awesome video of Dan Fanelli the guy who's running against Alan Grayson in Florida. His campaign strategy, in the words of the page I found the video on: XTREME RACISM.

Thailand in quotes:

• An overnight curfew was initially imposed on Bangkok, but later extended to 24 provinces, with security forces authorized to shoot looters and arsonists.
• A news blackout was imposed, with local TV running programs of dancing and flag-waving Thais, periodically interrupting them for government statements.
• Troops in armored vehicles and firing semi-automatic weapons advanced on the protesters' camp on Wednesday morning, breaking through the protesters' three-meter-high (10 feet) barricades of tires and bamboo.
• "I am confident and determined to end the problems and return the country to peace and order once again," Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said in a televised address on Wednesday night.
• "The situation is worse than expected now and it's very difficult to stop," said Kavee Chukitsakem, head of research at Kasikorn Securities. "After the red shirt leaders surrendered, things were out of control. It's like insects flying around from one place to another, causing irritation. We don't know who they are and why they are doing this."

So far seventy irritating insects have been successfully squashed, with another two thousand injured, their irresponsible behavior totally inexplicable.

• Analysts said some investors bought on news the military had moved in to disperse protesters who have paralyzed a central commercial district for more than six weeks.
  
• "For investors, it is going to take years to bring credibility back to the country. The market fundamentals are just not the same any more," said Kongkiat Opaswongkarn, head of Asia Plus Securities.

Watch for the stock market to rebound once the protesters have been completely crushed.

For the other side, read the comments, which seem to reflect disparity in internet access and English language education among Thais. The red shirts are terrorists, dupes, paid off, and need spankings they didn't get as children. My favorite is that anyone who sets fire to private property deserves what's coming to them. Defending the status quo often requires putting a low premium on human life.

Sure you've seen this, but just in case...
"Russia and China, which have close ties to Iran, joined fellow permanent council members Britain, France and the United States as well as non-member Germany in supporting the sanctions proposal, ignoring a deal that Tehran agreed to a day earlier to try to stave off the penalties." For a moment I was worried that the eminently sensible enrichment deal would somehow preclude the drive to war.

Peter Hart of FAIR, with aid from Chomsky (who seems to pop up here every day), here points out what I did yesterday, but better, highlighting the difference between US media's version of the "international consensus" and the actual positions of most people and countries. Chompers:

To take another illustration of the depth of the imperial mentality, New York Times correspondent Elaine Sciolino writes that "Iran's intransigence [about nuclear enrichment] appears to be defeating attempts by the rest of the world to curtail Tehran's nuclear ambitions." The rest of the world happens to exclude the large majority of the world: the non-aligned movement, which forcefully endorses Iran's right to enrich Uranium, in accord with the non-proliferation treaty (NPT). But they are not part of the world, since they do not reflexively accept U.S. orders.

We might tarry for a moment to ask whether there is any solution to the U.S./Iran confrontation over nuclear weapons. Here is one idea: (1) Iran should have the right to develop nuclear energy, but not weapons, in accord with the NPT. (2) A nuclear weapons-free zone should be established in the region, including Iran, Israel and U.S. forces deployed there. (3) The U.S. should accept the NPT. (4) The U.S. should end threats against Iran, and turn to diplomacy.

The proposals are not original. These are the preferences of the overwhelming majority of Americans, and also Iranians, in polls by World Public Opinion, which found that Americans and Iranians agree on basic issues. At a forum at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies when the polls were released a year ago, Joseph Cirincione, senior vice president for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress, said the polls showed "the common sense of both the American people and the Iranian people, [who] seem to be able to rise above the rhetoric of their own leaders to find common sense solutions to some of the most crucial questions" facing the two nations, favoring pragmatic, diplomatic solutions to their differences. The results suggest that if the U.S. and Iran were functioning democratic societies, this very dangerous confrontation could probably be resolved peaceably.

This text is in fact from 2008, but could be written now with no amendment. Strong echoes of Iraq... "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

---

So what's the plan for Iran? Apparently there are about 70,000 soldiers in Afghanistan but there will be soon be something like 250,000 DoD outside contractors there, in line with the ideology of privatization in general and further removing "our troops" and mercenaries from oversight. A sane observer might note that the US can't pay for a war, but where there's a will, there's a way. We've overthrown Iran's government before. Our politicians watched the Green Revolution and salivated last year, and our publicly touted new military strategy relies on training the natives of the countries we need to control to quell unrest, a sort of delegation of war. Are these things connected?

I should also link Richard Estes on the planned reconfiguration of NATO. That sort of entry (and some of the comments to it) are the exact sort of thing I wish I could do here.