Saturday, 27 August 2011
Pacing - A Short-Film by Aidan Moffat
Recently, on the final touring weekend of three with Malcolm Middleton, I started to relieve the boredom by messing about with the video camera on my phone. I’d forgotten it was there; I’m still getting used to the idea of having a multi-functional device in my pocket. I made a little film that was intended to be part of a longer (short) movie about how boring the backstage areas at gigs are these days. There was a time when the dressing room was a consummate den of debauchery, but these days I’m happy with a cup of tea, some nuts, a few ciders and a good Wi-Fi connection. The plan was to continue to make little films like this and then compile them, but I got bored with that pretty quickly and never got round to making another. It turns out making a movie about being bored was pretty boring – who could have guessed?
Anyway, as you’ll see, I’m a pacer.
Via
Ready for Day One (Meet the Libyan postwar planners who put the Bush administration's Iraq team to shame)
Allow me, in what I'm sure is a spirit of a priori hopefulness, to offer some tiny grounds for optimism. For the last several months, I have been following the deliberations of the Tripoli Task Force. This body was established in April by the National Transitional Council (NTC), the rebel government based in Benghazi, in order to plan for the post-Qaddafi transition. One of the peculiar advantages of the military stalemate that lasted until this past weekend is that it gave the task force ample time to plan for Day One of the new government.
Over time, the group's core members moved from Benghazi to Dubai. By the time the Qaddafi regime fell, about 70 people were engaged fulltime in the task of planning. This group oversaw a network of hundreds of Libyans, mostly professionals, divided into 17 teams responsible for policing, water supply, fuel, schools, and the like. They made a point of studying precedent. According to Sohail Nakhoody, who served as chief of staff to Aref Ali Nayed, a Libyan businessman who headed the task force (and now serves as the new government's ambassador to the United Arab Emirates), "We had in front of us the experience of Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, Somalia." Iraq served as a kind of anti-template, especially on questions like how to treat regime elements -- i.e., no "de-Baathification."
Let me pause for a moment to recall the absurdity of the George W. Bush administration's own planning process for Day One of a post-Saddam Iraq. Back in the summer of 2002, the U.S. State Department established the Future of Iraq Project, a study exercise that brought Iraqi exiles together with American academic experts and government officials. But once Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld persuaded Bush to transfer control of postwar Iraq to the Defense Department, the entire effort was scrapped. In The Assassins' Gate, journalist George Packer describes meeting an Iraqi-American lawyer in Baghdad desperately trying to interest the new authorities in the State Department's 250-page report on transitional justice, and finding no takers. The planning process was transferred to a group of retired military officers heading something called the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), whose very name denoted the strict limits of its mandate. Security was outside ORHA's mandate; so were politics and governance. Those things were supposed to take care of themselves. As we know now, they didn't...
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James Traub @'FP'
Friday, 26 August 2011
Gadhafi’s Loose Weapons Could Number a ‘Thousand Times’ Saddam’s
It’s a concern familiar to those who watched Iraq’s insurgency evolve. Saddam Hussein, like Gadhafi, amassed a vast array of conventional weaponry for defense against enemies both foreign and domestic. In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion in 2003, looters made off with tons of explosives from unprotected military arsenals, making arms available to a brewing insurgency. With the end of Gadhafi’s rule seeming nigh, arms control and human rights experts are paying close attention to the security of the country’s weapons stockpiles, fearing they could end up in the hands of a pro-regime insurgency or other militants outside the country.
Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch, has spent time on the ground in Libya during the uprising. He tells Danger Room that “weapon proliferation out of Libya is potentially one of the largest we have ever documented — 2003 Iraq pales in comparison — and so the risks are equally much more significant.”
Many in the West worry about the remnants of Gadhafi’s chemical-weapons program and shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles. However, Bouckaert says it’s Libya’s vast arsenals of low-tech gear like artillery shells and Grad missiles that are most likely to be fashioned into insurgent weapons, such as improvised explosive devices. The Libyan military certainly has plenty of them. Only a few months into the war, thousands of 122-mm Grad rockets were found stashed in abandoned bunkers in eastern Libya. “If Gadhafi loyalists decide to mount an Iraqi-style insurgency, they have access to a thousand times the explosives that the insurgents in Iraq had,” says Bouckaert.
Libya’s mines are also useful as weapons in a possible post-Gadhafi insurgency. Precise estimates of just how many mines Gadhafi’s forces have accumulated over the years are hard to come by. For their part, rebels estimate that pro-Gadhafi forces have already laid tens of thousands of the device to halt rebel movement...
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Adam Rawnsley @'Wired'
Depleted Uranium Weapon Use Persists, Despite Deadly Side Effects
War and the Tragedy of the Commons, Part 5
By 2003, reports were surfacing of cancer clusters and birth disorders in conflict areas of the Balkans and Iraq, raising fears about human exposure to depleted uranium (DU) and its fate and transport in war environments. Gulf War Syndrome, a catchall for mysterious and disabling symptoms and conditions suffered by nearly 40 percent of 540,000 veterans of the three-week ground war (which killed fewer than 200 US soldiers), remained an unyielding conundrum. A colleague and I prepared a fact sheet on depleted uranium, given its first use in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and growing use by the United States and Britain in subsequent wars. We labored in a meager research environment and detected an unsettling complacency around the question of environmental health impacts of DU munitions.
Little governmental research on Gulf War veterans was being conducted other than a small study on 29 veterans with DU metal shrapnel fragments in their bodies, cancer cluster reports were dismissed as anecdotal and alarmist, and DU was pigeonholed as "weak" and "feeble" radiation with no predictable risk. Thus, the US decision to use DU in weapons was made in an environment of uncertainty and intentional ignorance about the health risks to those exposed in conflict and post-conflict situations. Accustomed to policing and polluting everyone's backyard, the Department of Defense (DoD) still maintains a shroud of secrecy around depleted uranium, as it has with abandoned hazardous waste contaminating military bases and countries in which our government has waged war...
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H. Patricia Hynes @'truthout'
Barbarian Flashmob Converts 'Marcus Bachmann' in Glitter Baptism at Clinic
Join the Horde! http://www.twitter.com/CGoHome
http://www.facebook.com/ColumbusGoHome
Stop taxpayer funds to Bachmann's anti-gay clinic: http://bit.ly/rkViU8
Producer: Sarah Webster Norton
Choreographer: John Agurkis
Edited by Dan Feidt & Gus Ganley
Earlier today in Lake Elmo, Minnesota, an army of gay barbarians marched on Michele and Marcus Bachmann's "clinic", condemning the couple's attempt to "pray away" their discredited gay conversion therapy.
The flashmob protest — inspired by Marcus's assertion that gays are "barbarians who need to be disciplined" — comes in the wake of the unlicensed therapist's peculiar reversal, now denying he or his "therapists" ever practiced the harmful therapy.
In an attempt to clear up the confusion, the group of "gay barbarians" approached the clinic earlier this morning in hopes to speak to Marcus. When the staff saw a horde of over 100 barbarians approaching, they locked the clinic doors.
Undaunted, the barbarians at the gates demanded to see Marcus. Significant medical evidence suggests the "therapy" is a farce.
The barbarians were locked out of the office, but remained undaunted and fabulous at the gates, along with newly converted "Marcus."
The barbarians then began chanting "you can't pray away the gay, baby I was born this way!". Finally, a visibly frustrated "Marcus" emerged in front of the clinic and confronted the horde yelling "you barbarians need discipline!" as he reprimanded the dancing barbarians with a black leather whip. They responded by showering him with glitter, and after the sparkling baptism "Marcus" gave in to his barbaric urges, joining the horde in their infectious flashmob dance.
The Marcus impersonator was a local actor.
"Let's be clear: Marcus Bachmann is the practitioner of an unhealthy, unscientific and dangerous practice," explained Nick Espinosa, one of the event organizers. "It seems all too convenient that the minute Michele Bachamann becomes a candidate for President Marcus starts making a desperate attempt to walk back his previous statements."
Marcus's inexplicable change of orientation on the use of "ex-gay" therapy comes a month after an interview in which he claimed to only use the therapy "at the patient's discretion." This statement also contradicts video evidence from an undercover investigation that shows employees of the clinic clearly encouraging the widely-discredited therapy.
"The American people have a right to know: does the Bachmann family profit from bogus "gay reparative therapy" or not," continued Espinosa. "The medical evidence against the practice aside, the Bachmann's subversive marginalization of the LGBT community is despicable."
Today's action was organized by the same young man who previously glittered Newt Gingrich, inspiring a national trend in political protest of anti-LGBT sentiments from political candidates and campaigns.
"It's clear that the Bachmanns are the real barbarians here, and their archaic views on LGBT equality will no longer be tolerated," Espinosa said.
BACKGROUND:
Michele Bachmann has a long history of controversial anti-gay politics, and has compared the gay lifestyle to "bondage and slavery."
Her anti-gay views have been a focal point of her career as a politician, but lately she has shied away from reporters' questions about her controversial comments and taxpayer-funded "reparative therapy" clinic. While Michele Bachmann has long railed against federal safety net programs like Medicaid, the Bachmann & Associates clinic has received over $137,000 in Medicaid funds and over $27,000 in other state and federal funds.
For years, the scientific and medical communities — including groups like the American Psychology Association — have dismissed "reparative therapy" (also known as "conversion therapy" or "ex-gay therapy") as dangerous and unethical.
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