How slums can save the planet
(Thanx Stan!)
Basement Jaxx - Classic Essential Mix (1999)
3 minutes ago
Friday, 27 May 2011
Afghanistan war tactics are profoundly wrong, says former ambassador
Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, who also served as the UK's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, added that Petraeus should be "ashamed of himself" for making claims of the number of insurgent commanders his forces had killed.
"He has increased the violence, trebled the number of special forces raids by British, American, Dutch and Australian special forces going out killing Taliban commanders, and there has been a lot more rather regrettable boasting from the military about the body count," said Cowper-Coles. He added that the use of statistics was reminiscent of the Vietnam war. "It is profoundly wrong and it's not conducive to a stable political settlement."
Petraeus is due to leave Afghanistan to become CIA director this summer. Since taking command of US and coalition troops in Afghanistan last June, he has increased the use of special forces raids and drone attacks against Taliban commanders.
Earlier this year, Petraeus told Congress that his forces were killing or capturing 360 insurgent leaders every three months. His officers argue that the tactic is demoralising the Taliban and will ultimately make the movement more likely to agree to a peace deal on the terms of Kabul and the west.
Cowper-Coles insists the tactic will make it harder for the west to find a political settlement and end the war. "There is no doubt that Petraeus has hammered the Taliban extremely hard," he said. "I am sure that some of them are more willing to parlay. But, equally, for every dead Pashtun warrior, there will be 10 pledged to revenge.
"Of course it produces tactical success in cleansing insurgents out of particular areas, but it's essentially moving water around a puddle, and I think any general who boasts of the number of Pashtun insurgents he's killed should be ashamed of himself."
He added: "Regrettably, General Petraeus has curiously ignored his own principles of counter-insurgency in the field manual, which speaks of politics being the predominant factor in dealing with an insurgency."
He compared the US commander unfavourably with his predecessor, General Stanley McChrystal, whose central approach was to protect Afghan civilians, even if meant greater caution in the pursuit of the Taliban.
Alongside the former foreign secretary, David Miliband, Cowper-Coles focused his efforts while UK special envoy on persuading the Obama administration to concentrate on a political settlement and start talking to the Taliban.
Some reports suggest that Washington has initiated such contacts. But British officials say that Marc Grossman, the US special envoy on Afghanistan and Pakistan leading the outreach effort, is having trouble finding any credible Taliban representatives to engage in even talks about talks.
Few serving British and European officials are as critical of Petraeus as Cowper-Coles. Most argue that the Taliban have to be put under some kind of focused military pressure to persuade them that a negotiated settlement was in their interest.
However, there is growing unease in Whitehall that, despite orders to the contrary from Obama and the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, the military effort was still taking priority.
"There are different parts of the Washington establishment who are pulling in different ways," one official said. "But as long as Petraeus is in Kabul, the military approach will take precedence."
Petraeus is expected to leave Afghanistan in September. In any case, there are few expectations of much progress towards contacts with the Taliban until at least the end of the summer fighting season. Most serving officials are also less confident than Cowper-Coles that senior ranks in the Taliban are interested in a political settlement.
"In 2011, there have been more feelers coming out from more senior people, but there is no solid evidence that anyone in the movement has been tasked with finding a route to peace," one official said.
There have been several backdoor attempts to draw the movement into a dialogue, but they have made little progress. "Why would they negotiate?" asked Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA's Bin Laden unit and an expert on the Taliban. "They are winning; they are no longer ostracised in the Islamic world for links to Osama bin Laden. Why would you throw that away?"
But Scheuer, the author of a new book on Bin Laden, said that Petraeus's "decapitation" approach was also unlikely to work."The Red Army tried that for 10 years, and they were far more ruthless and cruel about it than us, and it didn't work so well for them," Scheuer said.
Julian Borger @'The Guardian'
Delia Derbyshire Early Dance track
A throwaway experiment by electronic musician Delia Derbyshire anticipated the beats of dance music more than three decades before they became fashionable.
@'BBC'
Delia Derbyshire - Sculptress of Sound
(Thanx Helen!)
The IMF versus the Arab spring
Without diminishing the seriousness of the sexual allegations against Strauss-Kahn, the role of the IMF, over past decades and at present, is a far bigger story. Of particular importance is its role at this crucial moment in the Middle East.
The new loans being negotiated for Egypt and Tunisia will lock both countries into long-term economic strategies even before the first post-revolution elections have been held. Given the IMF's history, we should expect these to have devastating consequences on the Egyptian and Tunisian people. You wouldn't guess it though, from the scant and largely fawning coverage the negotiations have so far received.
The pattern is to depict the IMF like a rich uncle showing up to save the day for some wayward child. This Dickensian scene is completed with the IMF adding the sage words that this time it hopes to see growth on the "streets" not just the "spreadsheets". It's almost as if the problem had been caused by these regimes failing to follow the IMF's teachings.
Such portrayals are credulous to the point of being ahistorical. They do not even mention, for example, the very positive reports the IMF had issued about both Tunisia and Egypt (along with Libya and others) in the months, weeks, and even days before the uprisings.
To some extent, though, the IMF is aware that its policies contributed to the desperation that so many Egyptians and Tunisians currently face, and is keen to distance itself from its past. Indeed, as IMF watchers will know, this is part of a new image that the IMF, along with its sister organisation the World Bank, has been working on for a while. The changes, so far, do not go beyond spin. You can't, as they say, polish a turd – but you can roll it in glitter.
Take, for example, the heartwarming IMF and civil society webpage, which as early as August 2007 was noting that civil society groups, by and large, "believe that global institutions also need to be accountable to a broader definition of stakeholders to be effective and legitimate".
Why then, is the IMF not (as Mohamed Trabelsi, of the International Labour Organisation's North Africa office, suggested when I interviewed him recently in Cairo) meeting the civil society groups and unions in Egypt and Tunisia? It would rather make backroom deals with Mubarak-appointed finance minister, Samir Radwan, and the generals currently running Egypt who are themselves members of an the economic elite that sees its privilege threatened by the approach of democracy.
Beginning in the 1990s, IMF-led structural adjustment programmes saw the privatisation of the bulk of the Egyptian textile industry and the slashing of its workforce from half a million to a quarter-million. What's more, the workers who were left faced – like the rest of Egypt – stagnant wages as the price of living rocketed. Though you wouldn't know it from western coverage, the long and gallant struggle of these workers, particularly the strike of textile workers of Mahalla el-Kubra, is credited by many Egyptian activists as a crucial step on the Egyptian people's path towards revolution.
This failure to appreciate the revolutions as a rebellion not just against local dictators, but against the global neo-liberal programme they were implementing with such gusto in their countries, is largely a product of how we on the western left have been unwitting orientalists, and allowed the racist "clash of civilisations" narrative to define our perceptions of the Middle East. We have failed to see the people of the region as natural allies in a common struggle.
It is this blindness that makes the revolutions appear as instantaneous explosions, like switches suddenly flicked, rather than as events in a continuum. A good place to start the story, if you want it to make sense, would be the Egyptian bread riots of 1977, which came following an initial round of economic liberalisation (which was as much a part of Sadat's change of cold war allegiances as his salute to the Israeli flag in Jerusalem). It should not have surprised us that as people's struggle to survive grew more and more grinding following the IMF-led reforms of the subsequent decades they would rise up once more.
Nor should we surprised at the moneyed fightback, which will no doubt be attempted. During this transition period, forces like the IMF will seek to lock in and enlarge the neoliberal project before there is an accountable government to complain about it.
The example of South Africa, as documented by Naomi Klein, immediately springs to mind. The ANC's famous Freedom Charter, she points out, contained many demands for economic justice including the provision of housing and health care, and the nationalisation of major industries. However, while Nelson Mandela was negotiating the structure of the new parliament, Thabo Mbeke was busy in economic talks with FW de Klerk's government during which, in Klein's words, he was persuaded "to hand control of those power centres to supposedly impartial experts, economists and officials from the IMF, the World Bank, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the National Party – anyone except the liberation fighters from the ANC".
The team of ANC economists busy drawing up their plan would find themselves unable to implement it once the party was in government. The consequences for South Africans have been disastrous.
These new loans from the IMF threaten to bind the newly democratic Egypt and Tunisia in much the same way. Once more, local elites could collaborate with the institutions at the helm of global capitalism to screw the broader population. If this occurs, these revolutions will be robbed of much of their meaning, and a terrible blow will be dealt to the broader Arab spring.
Austin Mackell @'The Guardian'
Beyond Afghanistan
LTG (Ret.) David Barno, Matt Irvine and I (Andrew Exum) have published a new report (.pdf) with the Center for a New American Security that attempts to identify the components of a successful U.S. strategy for Central and South Asia. Our research began in the fall of 2010 and included research trips to both Afghanistan and Pakistan. We also assembled several working groups comprised of both area specialists as well as functional area specialists to help us identify planning assumptions, U.S. interests, and policy options. In the end, we recommend the United States:
- Negotiate a Strategic Partnership Agreement with the government of Afghanistan.
- Develop a long-term but differentiated approach to Pakistan that strengthens its economy, civilian government and anti-extremist elements while pressuring factions that support terrorists.
- Reshape foreign and security assistance to Pakistan.
- Broker confidence-building measures between India and Pakistan quietly and as opportunities arise.
- Sustain and deepen a multidimensional U.S.-India relationship and encourage the peaceful rise of China.
- Promote open trade and transit across South and Central Asia to catalyze economic growth and enhance stability.
- Develop a strategic public engagement plan for the region to mitigate the effects of the intense anti-Americanism that preclude greater cooperation with the United States.
The Shadows of Srebrenica
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Blind people echolocate with visual part of brain
Blind people who navigate using clicks and echoes, like bats and dolphins do, recruit the part of the brain used by sighted people to see, a new study has found.
While few blind people use echolocation — emitting a sound and then listening for the echo to get information about objects in the surroundings — some that do are so good at it that they can use the ability to hike, mountain bike and play basketball, said Melvyn Goodale, one of the co-authors of the study published Wednesday in PloS One.
Goodale, a psychology professor and the director of the Centre for Brain and Mind at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont., said he was amazed by the abilities of the two blind men in the study.
"They can tell a flat thing from convex. They can tell a bush from a wall, a car from a lamp post," he said. One of the two subjects, Daniel Kish, 43, could localize objects to within three degrees — "incredibly accurate," Goodale said.
Both Kish and a 27-year-old male subject trained by Kish could also tell which way objects were moving. Goodale and his research team wanted to find out what was happening in the brain while people like Kish were echolocating...
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Emily Chung @'CBC News'
Why Are Spy Researchers Building a 'Metaphor Program'?
A small research arm of the U.S. government's intelligence establishment wants to understand how speakers of Farsi, Russian, English, and Spanish see the world by building software that automatically evaluates their use of metaphors.
That's right, metaphors, like Shakespeare's famous line, "All the world's a stage," or more subtly, "The darkness pressed in on all sides." Every speaker in every language in the world uses them effortlessly, and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity wants know how what we say reflects our worldviews. They call it The Metaphor Program, and it is a unique effort within the government to probe how a people's language reveals their mindset.
"The Metaphor Program will exploit the fact that metaphors are pervasive in everyday talk and reveal the underlying beliefs and worldviews of members of a culture," declared an open solicitation for researchers released last week. A spokesperson for IARPA declined to comment at the time.
IARPA wants some computer scientists with experience in processing language in big chunks to come up with methods of pulling out a culture's relationship with particular concepts."They really are trying to get at what people think using how they talk," Benjamin Bergen, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, told me. Bergen is one of a dozen or so lead researchers who are expected to vie for a research grant that could be worth tens of millions of dollars over five years, if the team scan show progress towards automatically tagging and processing metaphors across languages...
That's right, metaphors, like Shakespeare's famous line, "All the world's a stage," or more subtly, "The darkness pressed in on all sides." Every speaker in every language in the world uses them effortlessly, and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity wants know how what we say reflects our worldviews. They call it The Metaphor Program, and it is a unique effort within the government to probe how a people's language reveals their mindset.
"The Metaphor Program will exploit the fact that metaphors are pervasive in everyday talk and reveal the underlying beliefs and worldviews of members of a culture," declared an open solicitation for researchers released last week. A spokesperson for IARPA declined to comment at the time.
IARPA wants some computer scientists with experience in processing language in big chunks to come up with methods of pulling out a culture's relationship with particular concepts."They really are trying to get at what people think using how they talk," Benjamin Bergen, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, told me. Bergen is one of a dozen or so lead researchers who are expected to vie for a research grant that could be worth tens of millions of dollars over five years, if the team scan show progress towards automatically tagging and processing metaphors across languages...
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Alexis Madrigal @'the Atlantic'
Thursday, 26 May 2011
War crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic arrested
Ratko Mladic (left) with Radovan Karadzic in 1995
General Ratko Mladic’s ruthlessness was legendary: ‘‘Burn their brains!’’ he once bellowed as his men pounded Sarajevo with artillery fire.So was his arrogance: He nicknamed himself ‘‘God,’’ and kept goats which he was said to have named after Western leaders he despised.
Mladic, the wartime Bosnian Serb military chief wanted for genocide for Europe’s worst massacre of civilians since World War II, was the UN war crimes tribunal’s No. 1 co-fugitive together with his partner in crime, Radovan Karadzic.
Mladic, 69, had eluded capture since he was indicted by the tribunal in 1995.
But his days as a fugitive were numbered after Serbian security forces captured Karadzic on July 21, 2008, in Belgrade.
On Thursday, Serbia’s president announced that Mladic is in custody. Known for personally leading his troops in the 1995 Serb onslaught against the UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica - where thousands of Muslim men and boys were killed - Mladic was indicted for genocide against the Bosnian town’s population.
Just hours before the massacre, Mladic handed out candy to Muslim children rounded up at the town’s square and assured them that all would be fine - even patting one child on the head.
That sinister image is forever imprinted in the minds of Srebrenica survivors.
Born March 12, 1942, in the southeastern Bosnian village of Bozinovci, Mladic graduated from Belgrade’s prestigious military academy and joined the Yugoslav Communists in 1965.
Embarking on an army career when Yugoslavia was a six-state federation, Mladic rose steadily through the military ranks, making general before the country’s breakup in 1991.
At the start of the Balkan bloodbath, he was in Croatia leading Yugoslav troops in Knin and was believed to have played a crucial role in the army bombardment of the coastal city of Zadar.
A year later, he assumed command of the Yugoslav Army’s 2nd Military District, which effectively became the Bosnian Serb army.
Appointed in 1992 by Karadzic, Mladic led the Bosnian Serb army until the Dayton accords brought peace to Bosnia in 1995.
Among his men, Mladic commanded fierce devotion - many Bosnian Serb soldiers pledged to follow him to the death - and adoration bordering on the pathological.
As military leaderships go, his was omnipresent, from front-line trenches to chess games on high-altitude outlooks.
He was known for ordering push-ups as a prelude to battle, and he enjoyed reviewing pompous military parades and rubbing shoulders with UN commanders in Bosnia.
Obsessed with his nation’s history, Mladic saw Bosnia’s war - which killed more than 100,000 people and displaced another 1.8 million - as a chance for revenge against 500 years of Turkish-Ottoman occupation of Serbia.
He viewed Bosnian Muslims as Turks and called them that as an insult.
Convinced of the power of his army, he was known for telling his soldiers: ‘‘When I give you guarantees, it’s as if they are given by God.’’
Once, asking air traffic control to clear the way for his helicopter to land, he declared: ‘‘Here speaks Ratko Mladic - the Serbian God.’’
Sarajevans never forgot his commands to the Serb gunmen pounding the Bosnian capital in early 1992.
Mladic issued his orders through a military radio system, not bothering to scramble his words, which would be picked up, taped and broadcast on television the next day. ‘‘Burn their brains!’’ he ordered as his gunners trained their artillery on one suburb.
Mladic’s short temper only added to his popularity among Bosnian Serbs, who appeared to like him all the more when the general reportedly fell out with Karadzic in 1994.
With Karadzic, Mladic shares a tribunal indictment for genocide linked to the Srebrenica massacre, as well as numerous counts of crimes against humanity.
The allegations include the taking of peacekeepers as hostages, the destruction of sacred places, the torture of captured civilians and the wanton destruction of private property.
During the shelling of Sarajevo, Mladic was said to have commanded: ‘‘Scorch and destroy!’’ He denied ever giving such an order.
The US government offered $5 million for information leading to Mladic’s arrest or conviction in any country.
Mladic was dismissed from his post in December 1996 by Biljana Plavsic, then president of the Bosnian Serb republic.
In 2003, Plavsic was sentenced to 11 years in prison in her own war crimes trial on a reduced charge of persecution.In firing Mladic and his entire general staff, Plavsic cited their indictments for war crimes. But her main aim was to sever links with the late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, with whom Mladic was close.During the war, Milosevic - who died in 2006 while on trial in The Hague for genocide and crimes against humanity - was revered as the Bosnian Serbs’ chief patron.
But he later abandoned them when he signed the Dayton agreement, a deal intensely disliked by both Karadzic and Mladic. Evading arrest, Mladic began his fugitive years in Han Pijesak, a military compound in eastern Bosnia built for former Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito and designed to withstand a nuclear attack.With his wife, Bosa, Mladic settled down to imposed domesticity, passing the time caring for bees and goats.
His 23 goats reputedly bore the names of foreign dignitaries he despised, such as Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state.
Surrounded by security guards, he occasionally ventured out of the dence pine forest to mark events such the anniversary of the Bosnian Serb army and St. Vitus Day, a religious festival marking the 1389 Serb defeat by the Turks at Kosovo.
When in the late 1990s his trail grew too hot in Bosnia, Mladic moved with family into a posh suburban villa in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade.
In Belgrade, he was seen attending his son’s wedding. He showed up at soccer games, dined in plush restaurants and frequented elite cafes, refusing to give interviews and smiling quizzically when he happened to be photographed.
When Milosevic was ousted from power in October 2000, and Yugoslavia’s new pro-democracy authorities signaled they might hand Mladic over to the tribunal, tabloids had him leaving Belgrade for Bosnia.
But true to his style, Mladic countered those rumours and others that had him terminally ill in Belgrade.
Before going underground in 2002, he was repeatedly seen in public - sometimes with his guards, sometimes without them.
AFP
blakehounshell Blake Hounshell
Wait, NOW he's being accused of election fraud? RT @GEsfandiari: More Trouble For Ahmadinejad
Wait, NOW he's being accused of election fraud? RT @GEsfandiari: More Trouble For Ahmadinejad
Luomo - 'Plus' preview
Spy
Good Stuff
Good Stuff
Tracks taken from the forthcoming "Plus" album, Moodmusic Records 2011
More Information: http://www.luomomusic.org & http://www.vladilsavdelay.com
Luomo is the pop-experimental face of Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti. The music of Luomo stretches taut lines between shadowy experimentalism and shining club aspirations of the dancefloor, capturing tension and romance in shards of polished disco. Full of dark chasms and dangerous sharp edges, the restless experimentation and bittertenderness in Luomo’s songs have shattered and reformed our expectations of pop, songs like ‘Tessio’ became the foundation of what was soon known as ‘microhouse’, a genre characterised by minimal clicks’n’cuts cast in grooving bass.
More Information: http://www.luomomusic.org & http://www.vladilsavdelay.com
Luomo is the pop-experimental face of Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti. The music of Luomo stretches taut lines between shadowy experimentalism and shining club aspirations of the dancefloor, capturing tension and romance in shards of polished disco. Full of dark chasms and dangerous sharp edges, the restless experimentation and bittertenderness in Luomo’s songs have shattered and reformed our expectations of pop, songs like ‘Tessio’ became the foundation of what was soon known as ‘microhouse’, a genre characterised by minimal clicks’n’cuts cast in grooving bass.
California Told to Cut Prisoner Population
Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr. filed vigorous dissents. Justice Scalia called the order affirmed by the majority “perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation’s history.” Justice Alito said “the majority is gambling with the safety of the people of California.”
The majority opinion included photographs of inmates crowded into open gymnasium-style rooms and what Justice Kennedy described as “telephone-booth-sized cages without toilets” used to house suicidal inmates. Suicide rates in the state’s prisons, Justice Kennedy wrote, have been 80 percent higher than the average for inmates nationwide. A lower court in the case said it was “an uncontested fact” that “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six or seven days due to constitutional deficiencies...”
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Adam Liptak @'NY Times'
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