Tuesday, 13 September 2011
Security for Peace: Setting the Conditions for a Palestinian State
Editor and contributing author Andrew Exum writes, “There should be no doubt that peacekeeping in a future Palestinian state would be fraught with difficulties, not simply because of the unique history and circumstances of the region but also because the international record of such operations is mixed. As this project makes clear, policymakers should tread cautiously when considering such an option. Any initiative to broker peace in the Middle East carries risk, but the more risks policymakers and leaders understand beforehand, the better prepared they will be to mitigate and manage them.”
Security for Peace takes an “end-around” approach to the problems of the Levant, imagining the goal – the establishment of a future Palestinian state – and asking what kind of security arrangement would be necessary to serve as a facilitator for such a state. Chapters in the edited volume include:
• Case studies on Southern Lebanon by CNAS Fellow Andrew Exum and Research Assistant Kyle Flynn, East Timor by Scott Brady, and Kosovo by CNAS Non-Resident Senior Fellow Dr. Richard Weitz;
• Military Lessons, by CNAS Non-Resident Senior Fellow Colonel Robert Killebrew, USA (Ret.), who draws on experience planning peacekeeping missions in Rwanda and Haiti, to illuminate key lessons learned in the field of peace operations since 1945;
• Political Lessons, by Ambassador James Dobbins, who draws on personal experience overseeing U.S. post conflict reconstruction operations in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan and research on peacekeeping since the Second World War; and
• An examination of four scenarios, by CNAS Non-Resident Senior Fellow Marc Lynch, that could precede a possible peacekeeping force.
Authors: Dr. Andrew M. Exum, Scott Brady, Dr. Richard Weitz, Kyle Flynn, Colonel Robert Killebrew, USA (Ret.), James Dobbins, Dr. Marc Lynch
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Christopher Hitchens, a Man of His Words
This fifth and, one fears, possibly last collection of his essays is a reminder of all that will be missed when the cancer is finished with him.
Let’s begin with the obvious. He is unfathomably prolific. “Arguably” is a great ingot of a book, more than 780 pages containing 107 essays. Some of them entailed extensive travel in inconvenient places like Afghanistan and Uganda and Iran; those that are more in the way of armchair punditry come from an armchair within reach of a very well-used library. They appeared in various publications during a period in which he also published his best-selling exegesis against religion, “God Is Not Great”; a short and well-reviewed biography of Thomas Jefferson; a memoir, “Hitch-22”; as well as various debates, reading guides, letters and rebuttals — all done while consuming daily quantities of alcoholic drink that would cripple most people. As Ian Parker noted in his definitive 2006 New Yorker profile of Hitchens, the man writes as fast as some people read.
The second notable thing about Hitchens is his erudition. He doesn’t always wear it lightly — more than once he remarks, upon pulling out a classic for reconsideration, that he first read the work in question when he was 12 — but it is not just a parlor trick. In the book reviews that make up much of this collection, the most ambitious of them written for The Atlantic, he takes the assigned volume — a new literary biography of Stephen Spender or Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham, or a new collection of letters by Philip Larkin or Jessica Mitford — and uses it as pretext to review, with opinionated insights, the entire life and work of the writer in question, often supplementing his prodigious memory by rereading several books. He is a master of the essay that not only spares you the trouble of reading the book under review, but leaves you feeling you have just completed an invigorating graduate seminar...
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Monday, 12 September 2011
Shortwave Pirate Radio
Shortwave pirate radio broadcasts are some of the most original & entertaining programming one can hear. These stations bring the reality that radio can be spontaneous, creative & unrestrained along with a direct connection to the listener, even if they're across the ocean!
The recordings from the 90's were made with a Grundig Satellit 500/random longwire (94'-96') & a Drake R8A/50ft. sloper (96'-00') on both reel to reel & cassette. Unless noted, the rest of these (2000 & up) were recorded using a Ten Tec RX-340 receiver and various antenna configurations along the way (T2FD/phased Wellbrook loops/EWE & finally a DX Engineering 4 Sq.) by minidisc & currently hardrive media using Audacity recording software through an M-Audio Delta 66 interface via the Ten Tec's DC-Coupled audio tap for SSB or Sherwood Engineering's SE-3 for AM. Also, the majority of these stations were recorded from North East Florida. Some of these I do not have exact dates/times/frequencies, but will add the info later if found.
I record pirates often, and have a large collection which I will continue to add here. Keep in mind the nature of shortwave as conditions can change to varying degrees and some of the recordings are better than others, but always entertaining!
Enjoy! : )
Sealord
sealord40m at gmail dot com
VBR ZIP (11.5GB)
Or individual trax
@'The Archive'
wikileaks WikiLeaks
Fench nuclear waste explosion today. The MOX plutonium cables: cablegatesearch.net/search.php?q=f…
Breaking:
fieldproducer Neal Mann
RT@SkyNewsBreak: AFP: Emergency services say risk of leak after French nuclear plant blast
RT
The Chancellor & The Cocaine
So there was definitely, there was cocaine on that night on the table. George Osborne did take cocaine on that night. And not just on that night. He took it on a regular basis with me, with his friends. There were more witnesses, not just me, that witnessed George Osborne taking cocaine. So it's you know, there are other people out there that know the truth. On that particular night he had taken a line. And I said to George jokingly that when you're prime minister one day I'll have all the dirty goods on you. And he laughed and took a big fat line of cocaine.
Transcript/Audio
@'ABC'
Kate Bush New LP!
'Snowflake'
'Lake Tahoe'
'Misty'
'Wildman'
'Snowed In At Wheeler Street'
'50 Words For Snow'
'Among Angels'
Via
Perfect Storm: The England Riots Documentary
"If the young are not initiated into the village, they will burn it down just to feel its warmth." -- African Proverb.
This mini-documentary film looks at the initial causes and wider context surrounding the recent England riots. Politicians refuse to acknowledge their role in creating a deeply unfair and failing society, a perfect storm of police brutality, city poverty and austerity measures, that will only get worse unless the root problem is addressed.
Did you know for the rioters to be on par with the looting by the financial bailouts, corporate tax avoiders and Libyan invasion, they would have to repeat the same level of damage......4,320 times?
Massive credit to http://www.youtube.com/user/huntingtigers who had the balls to do what the mainstream media didn't and give a fair interview to those on the ground in Tottenham.
http://wideshut.co.uk/perfect-storm-the-england-riots-documentary/
Haruki Murakami's cult trilogy 1Q84 poised to take the west by storm
It is a launch more reminiscent of a Harry Potter book than a lengthy, difficult novel by a Japanese author, but bookshops in the US are planning to stay open until midnight to cope with the demand for the translation of Haruki Murakami's 1,000-page trilogy, 1Q84.
There is a video trailer on YouTube and Spotify song lists of music associated with the jazz-loving author. Others have put up their own sections of translation on the internet for fans unwilling to wait the two years it has taken since the book was first published in Japan, selling an extraordinary 1m copies in two months.
Literary blogs have pored over revelations about plot and character and themes that Murakami has visited before – from love to messianic cults to cats and music, to his use of surreal devices. Murakami's English-language publishers, Knopf in the US and Harvill Secker in the UK, are anticipating an equally extraordinary level of interest when 1Q84 is published next month. The story follows the characters of Aomame, a hired killer, and Tengo, a novelist, whose lives increasingly overlap in a world that seems ever more unreal.
In the US, interest has been such that Knopf has already ordered a second print run. In the UK, Bethan Jones, of Harvill Secker, said inquiries from booksellers were running at 10-15 a day. "He is huge in Japan. Here he started out as an alternative, cult author. But this book looks as though it will be immense. It is really unusual for a book in translation, but we have produced a massive print run."
Following the runaway success of the book in Japan – its title is a play on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, with the English letter "Q" pronounced the same as the Japanese word for nine, kyu – his publishers took the unusual decision to ask two of his regular translators, Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, to work simultaneously on the three books to speed up the production of an English version.
That in turn, as his British publisher Liz Foley explains, led to some contradictions in translation, which required arbitration by Murakami himself. "There is something really special about him," said Foley, mentioning how Murakami mixes up the everyday with the fantastical. "There is a cult element who are ardent about everything he writes, and that club is rapidly spreading."
Rubin also remarked on Murakami's ability to convey the commonplace in an extraordinary way. "What I love," he said, "is how he can describe eating yoghurt at midnight or the best way to cook a hamburger or someone pouring ketchup into a sock drawer. He is very down to earth, but also has passages that are very comically detailed.
"And it is not because he is writing about Japan that people love him. I'm not sure his readers are interested in Japan. It is about the moment to moment sensation of being in his world. Inside his head."
Rubin said the scale of 1Q84 was all the more extraordinary because when The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was first translated its publishers abridged it, uncertain that there was a market for a Japanese literary novel of that length. These days at least there appears to be no question that Murakami's English-language fans will read anything that the marathon-running author writes.
One unresolved question is whether he is even finished with 1Q84. When the first two volumes were published in Japan in 2009, readers had no idea that a third book was planned for publication.
Rubin said that Murakami had left room to continue with the story of Aomame and Tengo – even hinting that there may be more to come. Speaking to a Spanish newspaper earlier this year, Murakami said: "A fourth volume featuring an older Tengo may come out. Who knows?"
The first two books of 1Q84 are being published in a single volume on 18 October and the third on 25 October.
Pete Beaumont @'The Guardian'
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