(Thanx HerrB!)
Saturday, 31 July 2010
DJ Dex - Summer 2010: The Roundtrip Mix
undergroundres UR061's (DJ Dex aka Nomadico) Summer 2010: The Roundtrip Mix is now available for direct download at www.ur061.com !!!
Original visual by David Lynch
Directed by Eno
Produced by Jean-Luca Della Montagna
Editing by Philippe Gariépy
Effects by Antonin Brault Guilleaume
via kfmw
Fans hit out at increased kit changes by clubs
Fans groups have hit out at the increased number of Premier League clubs who are launching a new home shirt every season.
In 2000, the Premier League charter pledged that replica strips would be released every two seasons to save fans digging into their pockets too often. But 18 clubs issued a new home shirt last season and all 20 Premier League clubs are doing the same this term.
Tottenham have launched three new kits every year for six seasons in a row.
The north London club have also decided that a different sponsor will adorn their home, second and third kits for Cup games this season, meaning there will be six shirts on offer, costing £45 each on the club's website.
Arsenal and Liverpool are the only teams who are releasing a new kit this season, who did not do so last term.
While Premier League clubs are within their rights to release a new home kit every season, the extent of the current situation is in stark contrast to recommendations made by the Football Task Force, chaired by former MP David Mellor, which were included in the 2000 Premier League charter to give fans a fairer deal.
The group's suggestions, which also included issues around ticket pricing, encouraged clubs to ensure a two-year gap between new replica shirts, which led to clubs releasing home and away shirts in alternate years.
"This gives the shirt more longevity in comparison to releasing one every season and our fans better value for money," a Liverpool spokesman told BBC Sport.
According to Premier League rules clubs must "allow for market research to be undertaken with regard to the frequency of strip changes and to its design".
They must also "identify the intervals at which strip changes are intended to take place and the date of the next intended change" and each club's customer charter must be available to the public, outlining its policy with regard to ticketing and merchandise.
But Tottenham Supporters Trust chairman Bernie Kingsley said his group had not been consulted, while Football Supporters Federation chairman Malcolm Clarke labelled the club's decision to offer six new shirts as "frankly ridiculous".
Kingsley told BBC Sport: "The club do talk to us but any decisions that might affect their income revenue they don't generally consult us.
"Last season we said that we didn't like the yellow stripe on the home shirt and asked if it could be changed, but the club said if they changed it based on what the fans said they would be considered a laughing stock."
Kingsley said the request had been based on a similar discussion between fans of the Dutch club Feyenoord where supporters' requests were granted.
Birmingham City have also just launched a new kit for the coming season where fans chose the design from four on offer.
A Tottenham spokesman denied Kingsley's claims and told BBC Sport: "Our aim going forward was to continue to meet demand for greater variety and choice in all of the merchandise ranges that we offer, including replica kit.
 Birmingham's Cameron Jerome (left) in a kit chosen by fans |
Clarke said: "I think Spurs' actions are frankly ridiculous. Given the price of watching football in London you have to be very rich to be a Spurs fan already. If you're paying for six shirts that would be about £250."
Kingsley added: "It is down to the individual whether to buy them or not but in the current financial climate I think the club should be more sensitive.
"The club will argue that by issuing new kits it provides more revenue streams in which to buy new players and some supporters will go along with that, but it's just another example of football ceasing to be a sport and more a business."
Manchester United and Manchester City are another two clubs who have both released new home and away shirts for the coming season having done the same thing last term.
Allan Galley, chairman of the Manchester City Supporters Club said: "People do want to wear them as a way of relating to the club, but I think it's unfair to bring them out every season at £45 each.
"It's not a popular policy. Young children like to wear them too, but it's not as if they are particularly cheap for them either."
But Mark Longden of the Independent Manchester United Supporters Association said: "If you are daft enough to buy a new football shirt every season then that is up to you.
"You don't have to buy them, the only thing that concerns me is the ticket prices and the club have not put them up this season, so it doesn't directly affect me."
Former sports minister Kate Hoey, who was in government when the Football Task Force was active, said the issue was more relevant for people who could not afford to go to football matches but added that parents had to take a firm stand against persuasive children.
"The Premier League clubs are a law unto themselves and if people keep buying them then they will keep selling them," she told BBC Sport.
"I don't take the line where children come home and say, 'everybody else has got a shirt why can't I have one?' I was brought up in an era where I was told by my parents, 'we can't afford it, sorry'."
Alistair Magowan @'BBC'
Friday, 30 July 2010
Fuck Ronald Reagan!
Bonus Audio:
Gorillaz Live In Damascus
.
What you are about to hear is the sound of a band coming full circle while embarking on a new beginning.
When Damon Albarn decided to extend his Gorillaz project for a third album, he looked to Syria for inspiration. It was March 2009, and the Britpop icon was obsessed with Arabic orchestral music, so he took his demos to Damascus and recorded with the National Orchestra for Arabic Music.
While in Syria, Albarn worked with conductor Issam Rafea, who composed a gorgeous piece full of strings, woodwinds and hand percussion for Gorillaz’s third album, Plastic Beach. The sessions only resulted in the intro and outro of “White Flag,” the album’s not-so-ambiguous plea for peace in the Middle East, but those two minutes helped cement the relationship Rafea and his musicians had with Albarn.
Just look at what happened on Sunday night.
Gorillaz returned to the desert with Plastic Beach‘s cast of all-stars in tow for a special performance at the Damascus Citadel, a 1,000-year-old walled palace in the northwest corner of the city. Under a full moon, the cartoon crew — stripped of its members’ animated alter egos — shared the stage with Syria’s National Orchestra and marked what we can only hope is a new era of music in the Middle East.
“The pinnacle of our exploit,” Gorillaz bassist Murdoc Niccals tells NPR Music in a rambling introduction to the concert. “It shows that it is possible to perform there. This shouldn’t be a one-off gig — it should be the start of many, many bands going over there.”
This wasn’t the first time Rafea’s orchestra played live with Gorillaz — the band brought it along to festival performances in Spain, Denmark and Glastonbury, England — but it meant so much more this time around. Rafea got to showcase his composition from the podium in an extended intro to “White Flag,” complete with
British MCs Bashy and Kano
The lineup included:
- Bobby Womack
- De La Soul
- Bootie Brown of The Pharcyde
- Paul Simonon and Mick Jones of The Clash
- Shaun Ryder of The Happy Mondays
- Bashy
- Kano
The most important guest, however, might have been Eslam Jawaad, the Syrian rapper whom Albarn met in London and worked with in The Good, The Bad and The Queen. Murdoc Niccals credits Jawaad with bringing Gorillaz to Damascus, and the rapper is billed as an inspiration in Plastic Beach‘s liner notes under his given name, Wissam Khodur. When he launched into Arabic in the show-stopping “Clint Eastwood,” the thousands of screaming fans reacted as if they’d been waiting all their lives to hear it. It’s a truly magical moment.
May there be many more like it to come.
Listen @'npr'
Endgame in Afghanistan: 'It's taken a year to move 20km'
As the war in Afghanistan enters its final chapter, Sean Smith's brutal, uncompromising film from the Helmand frontline shows the horrific chaos of a stalemate that is taking its toll in blood
• Read Sean Smith's extraordinary diary of his time on the Afghanistan frontline
• Read Sean Smith's extraordinary diary of his time on the Afghanistan frontline
Jazzcats Crossing The Hudson
Click to enlarge
The classic painting “Jazzcats Crossing the Hudson” will appear on the next edition of Madlib Medicine Show, the 8th in the series, a jazz mixtape titled “Advanced Jazz”.
from Wikipedia:
“Jazzcats Crossing the Hudson is an 1851 oil-on-canvas painting by German American artist Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze. It pre-emptively commemorates the arrival in New York City of jazz greats Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Steve Kuhn and others. The painting is remarkable for the fact that it was created decades before the birth of any of these jazz artists.”
Coca-Cola Moves into Mezcal
Little Earl, who maintains a certain interest in our local drink, took a twenty-peso tour of the new mezcal distillery located on the road to Tlacolula de Matamoros, on the Cristobal Colón highway, about half an hour from Oaxaca City. Tlacolula lures tourists to its huge weekly market where you can buy live turkeys, oxen yokes, seasonal vegetables, rice drinks, enamel pots, and artisan work ranging from carved fantastic animals to embroidered blouses. Occasional musicians entertain while shoppers stroll areas dedicated to fresh produce, shoes, socks, and plastic buckets. Along the main street, small shops sell mezcal. It’s artisan mezcal: an artisan liquor cooked in clay containers, from home-grown agave.
When Little Earl entered the Casa Armando Guillermo Prieto (Casa AGP) distillery, whose security little Earl describes as “tough as any airport”, they waived their metal detecting wand over him and discovered his digital camera. “No sir,” the security guard said. “It is the policy of Coca-Cola to not allow photographs.” Coca- Cola? Who knew? His cell phone in the other pocket suffered the same temporary confiscation.
S.A. de C.V. stands for “Sociedad Anónima de Capital Variable”. It describes a company whose capital partners are anonymous and of variable investment. Most foreign investments in Mexico are designated S.A. de C.V. CIMSA S.A. de C.V.-Coca Cola, a consortium of businesses “100% Mexican” produces Casa AGP mezcal. I also saw it written in inverse order, as Coca-Cola-CIMSA.
CIMSA was founded in 1925 and currently operates through three self-described “Strategic Business Units”: Soft drinks; BEDLA (Bebidas de los Angeles) which sells purified water; and Casa AGP, the newest unit, oriented toward commercialization of mezcal, to sell inside Mexico about 20% of product, with 80% destined for foreign consumption. To put the enterprise in perspective, the same Group that bottles Coke in Cuernavaca built the mezcal plant in Oaxaca. It also built the international airport in Cuernavaca.
Casa AGP inaugurated its Oaxaca distillery in August, 2008 in a village named Lanacci. Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, Senator Adolfo Toledo Infanzón, Secretary of Tourism Beatriz Rodríguez Casasnovas, and Secretary of Economy Enrique Sada Fernández among other officials, all carefully pre-selected, attended. Head honcho Colombo Álvarez asserted then, that in five years Oaxaca mezcal would be positioned in the international European and Asian markets. In the first year the product would arrive in Spain, the USA, China, Korea and Thailand. Subsequently, they would sell in Germany, Russia and Italy. He was right on.
Director General José Luis Magaña stated that more than US$ 48,000,000 was invested in plant construction. Purita Guillermo Prieto Rivera, an owner of CIMSA-Coca Cola in sites such as Toluca, Cuernavaca and Ciudad Altamirano, (her surnames “Guillermo Prieto” indicate her Casa AGP connection) and Antonio Gómezlince, also of Grupo CIMSA, stated Casa AGP’s goal: immediate production of 15,000 liters daily, at one-third of full capacity. Casa AGP presently (February, 2010) bottles about 20,000 liters daily.
CIMSA is sister to GEMSA, another corporation listed along with Coca-Cola; the precise relationships of the players remains hidden. CIMSA Group, according to their own advertising, is expansionary, bringing into production new products and brands. The fancy gold label on its mezcal bottles displays its brand-name: Zignum, Made in Mexico. “Casa Armando Guillermo Prieto,” it reads, “brings to your palate a mystic drink made with art, quality, technology and the warmth of its people.” Umm.
And an output of 45,000 liters daily for the global market? That’s not art, it’s agro-industry. Casa AGP, in partnership with Coca-Cola and with an investment minimum of 60 million dollars, manufactures mezcal inside an industrial complex. AGP Wine & Spirits Group, the international trade name, distills its product with technical standards, very different from artisan mezcal; the average artisan palenque bottles 2– 3,000 liters per month, cooking agave plants over wood burning fires. Each bottle off the AGP line, in contrast, precisely mirrors the others; following a chemical test for each vat, slight artificial adjustments are added as necessary, to produce consistent “flavor, pain, color, and aroma.” By vat, I mean stainless steel drums. Despite the photo prohibition, Coca-Cola doesn’t keep the gleaming, vast manufacturing process a secret: on the Zignum website flash the bright stainless-steel drums, the rows of assembly-line bottles. Intermixed in Zignum’s on-site film runs the art and warmth part: scenes from other mezcal localities. You can also check YouTube...
Continue reading
Nancy Davies @'NarcoNews'
Apologies that this information is from some months ago, but with all the news on the web and the business practices that maintain secrecy of involvement, is little wonder I took so long to find, with the recent resolution by the UN declaring Water and Sanitation Basic Human Rights, http://www.truth-out.org/un-declares-water-and-sanitation-basic-human-rights61817 , the disappearance of valuable water supplies in areas of multinational exploitation takes on new meaning. Can the people in these regions ever be truly compensated by business for the destruction of such life-sustaining water supplies?
 Zignum Mezcal label D.R. 2010 Zignum Me |
S.A. de C.V. stands for “Sociedad Anónima de Capital Variable”. It describes a company whose capital partners are anonymous and of variable investment. Most foreign investments in Mexico are designated S.A. de C.V. CIMSA S.A. de C.V.-Coca Cola, a consortium of businesses “100% Mexican” produces Casa AGP mezcal. I also saw it written in inverse order, as Coca-Cola-CIMSA.
CIMSA was founded in 1925 and currently operates through three self-described “Strategic Business Units”: Soft drinks; BEDLA (Bebidas de los Angeles) which sells purified water; and Casa AGP, the newest unit, oriented toward commercialization of mezcal, to sell inside Mexico about 20% of product, with 80% destined for foreign consumption. To put the enterprise in perspective, the same Group that bottles Coke in Cuernavaca built the mezcal plant in Oaxaca. It also built the international airport in Cuernavaca.
Casa AGP inaugurated its Oaxaca distillery in August, 2008 in a village named Lanacci. Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, Senator Adolfo Toledo Infanzón, Secretary of Tourism Beatriz Rodríguez Casasnovas, and Secretary of Economy Enrique Sada Fernández among other officials, all carefully pre-selected, attended. Head honcho Colombo Álvarez asserted then, that in five years Oaxaca mezcal would be positioned in the international European and Asian markets. In the first year the product would arrive in Spain, the USA, China, Korea and Thailand. Subsequently, they would sell in Germany, Russia and Italy. He was right on.
 Ulises Ruiz inaugurates mezcal plant “Casa Armando Guillermo Prieto” D.R. Photo 2008 El Piñero |
CIMSA is sister to GEMSA, another corporation listed along with Coca-Cola; the precise relationships of the players remains hidden. CIMSA Group, according to their own advertising, is expansionary, bringing into production new products and brands. The fancy gold label on its mezcal bottles displays its brand-name: Zignum, Made in Mexico. “Casa Armando Guillermo Prieto,” it reads, “brings to your palate a mystic drink made with art, quality, technology and the warmth of its people.” Umm.
And an output of 45,000 liters daily for the global market? That’s not art, it’s agro-industry. Casa AGP, in partnership with Coca-Cola and with an investment minimum of 60 million dollars, manufactures mezcal inside an industrial complex. AGP Wine & Spirits Group, the international trade name, distills its product with technical standards, very different from artisan mezcal; the average artisan palenque bottles 2– 3,000 liters per month, cooking agave plants over wood burning fires. Each bottle off the AGP line, in contrast, precisely mirrors the others; following a chemical test for each vat, slight artificial adjustments are added as necessary, to produce consistent “flavor, pain, color, and aroma.” By vat, I mean stainless steel drums. Despite the photo prohibition, Coca-Cola doesn’t keep the gleaming, vast manufacturing process a secret: on the Zignum website flash the bright stainless-steel drums, the rows of assembly-line bottles. Intermixed in Zignum’s on-site film runs the art and warmth part: scenes from other mezcal localities. You can also check YouTube...
Continue reading
Nancy Davies @'NarcoNews'
Apologies that this information is from some months ago, but with all the news on the web and the business practices that maintain secrecy of involvement, is little wonder I took so long to find, with the recent resolution by the UN declaring Water and Sanitation Basic Human Rights, http://www.truth-out.org/un-declares-water-and-sanitation-basic-human-rights61817 , the disappearance of valuable water supplies in areas of multinational exploitation takes on new meaning. Can the people in these regions ever be truly compensated by business for the destruction of such life-sustaining water supplies?
Proto-fascism
Is the Tea Party racist? Democrats who play liberals on TV say it isn't. Vice President Joe Biden says that "at least elements that were involved with some of the Tea Party folks expressed racist views."
Certainly a sizeable minority of tea partiers' "take America back" rhetoric is motivated by resentment that a black guy is president. "Take America back" from whom? You know whom. It ain't white CEOs.
Thursday, 29 July 2010
Die young, live fast: The evolution of an underclass
When life expectancy is short, it makes sense to have babies early (Image: Paula Bronstein/Getty)
From feckless fathers and teenaged mothers to so-called feral kids, the media seems to take a voyeuristic pleasure in documenting the lives of the "underclass". Whether they are inclined to condemn or sympathise, commentators regularly ask how society got to be this way. There is seldom agreement, but one explanation you are unlikely to hear is that this kind of "delinquent" behaviour is a sensible response to the circumstances of a life constrained by poverty. Yet that is exactly what some evolutionary biologists are now proposing.
There is no reason to view the poor as stupid or in any way different from anyone else, says Daniel Nettle of the University of Newcastle in the UK. All of us are simply human beings, making the best of the hand life has dealt us. If we understand this, it won't just change the way we view the lives of the poorest in society, it will also show how misguided many current efforts to tackle society's problems are - and it will suggest better solutions.
Evolutionary theory predicts that if you are a mammal growing up in a harsh, unpredictable environment where you are susceptible to disease and might die young, then you should follow a "fast" reproductive strategy - grow up quickly, and have offspring early and close together so you can ensure leaving some viable progeny before you become ill or die. For a range of animal species there is evidence that this does happen. Now research suggests that humans are no exception.
Certainly the theory holds up in comparisons between people in rich and poor countries. Bobbi Low and her colleagues at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor compared information from nations across the world to see if the age at which women have children changes according to their life expectancy (Cross-Cultural Research, vol 42, p 201). "We found that the human data fit the general mammalian pattern," says Low. "The shorter life expectancy was, the earlier women had their first child."
But can the same biological principles explain the difference in behaviour between rich and poor within a developed, post-industrialised country? Nettle, for one, believes it can. In a study of over 8000 families, he found that in the most deprived parts of England people can barely expect 50 years of healthy life, nearly two decades less than in affluent areas. And sure enough, women from poor neighbourhoods are likely to have their babies at an early age and in quick succession. They have smaller babies and they breastfeed less, both of which make it easier to get pregnant again sooner (Behavioral Ecology, DOI: 10.1093/beheco/arp202).
"If you've only got two-thirds as much time in your life as someone in a different neighbourhood, then all of your decisions about when to start having babies, when to become a grandparent and so on have to be foreshortened by a third," says Nettle. "So it shouldn't really surprise us that women in the poorest areas are having their babies at around 20 compared to 30 in the richest ones. That's exactly what you would expect."...
Continue reading
Mairi Macleod @'New Scientist'
Neil Young readies Volume 2 of his Archives series
On top of the recent Twisted Road tour, helping with the Elton John, Leon Russell, and T Bone Burnett collaboration, and working with Daniel Lanois on a brand new studio album, Young has announced the release of Volume 2 of his Archives series, reports NoDepression.com.
Archives, which has been in the works since the late ’80s, is essentially Young clearing attic space, doling out previously unreleased tracks and rarities taken from both the studio and his live performances.
Volume 1, which was released in June 2009, covered Young’s work between 1963 and 1972. For Volume 2, according his NY Times site, the legendary singer/songwriter is “rebuilding” three unreleased albums – Chrome Dreams, Homegrown, and Oceanside-Countryside — and one live recording, Odeon-Budokan, that were made between 1972 and 1982.
A release date for the package has not yet been set, but NY Times confirms it will initially be “released in vinyl from analog masters as they originally were created for that format.” Translation: dust off your record player (if you haven’t already).
In other news, AmericanSongwriter.com reports Young and Lanois will perform four songs from his other upcoming release — aka that aforementioned new studio album — at the October 2nd Nuit Blanche festival in Toronto. Explained Lanois in a recent interview with the Toronto Star, “At the strike of midnight, we will premiere four tracks from the Neil Young record, visually and sonically.” Neat-o.
Chris Coplon @'CoS'
The Opposites Game - All the Strangeness of Our American World in One Article
Have you ever thought about just how strange this country’s version of normal truly is? Let me make my point with a single, hardly noticed Washington Post news story that’s been on my mind for a while. It represents the sort of reporting that, in our world, zips by with next to no reaction, despite the true weirdness buried in it.
The piece by Craig Whitlock appeared on June 19th and was headlined, “U.S. military criticized for purchase of Russian copters for Afghan air corps.” Maybe that’s strange enough for you right there. Russian copters? Of course, we all know, at least vaguely, that by year's end U.S. spending on its protracted Afghan war and nation-building project will be heading for $350 billion dollars. And, of course, those dollars do have to go somewhere.
Admittedly, these days in parts of the U.S., state and city governments are having a hard time finding the money just to pay teachers or the police. The Pentagon, on the other hand, hasn’t hesitated to use at least $25-27 billion to “train” and “mentor” the Afghan military and police -- and after each round of training failed to produce the expected results, to ask for even more money, and train them again. That includes the Afghan National Army Air Corps which, in the Soviet era of the 1980s, had nearly 500 aircraft and a raft of trained pilots. The last of that air force -- little used in the Taliban era -- was destroyed in the U.S. air assault and invasion of 2001. As a result, the "Afghan air force” (with about 50 helicopters and transport planes) is now something of a misnomer, since it is, in fact, the U.S. Air Force.
Still, there are a few Afghan pilots, mostly in their forties, trained long ago on Russian Mi-17 transport helicopters, and it’s on a refurbished version of these copters, Whitlock tells us, that the Pentagon has already spent $648 million. The Mi-17 was specially built for Afghanistan’s difficult flying environment back when various Islamic jihadists, some of whom we’re now fighting under the rubric of “the Taliban,” were allied with us against the Russians.
Here’s the first paragraph of Whitlock’s article: “The U.S. government is snapping up Russian-made helicopters to form the core of Afghanistan's fledgling air force, a strategy that is drawing flak from members of Congress who want to force the Afghans to fly American choppers instead.”
So, various congressional representatives are upset over the lack of a buy-American plan when it comes to the Afghan air force. That’s the story Whitlock sets out to tell, because the Pentagon has been planning to purchase dozens more of the Mi-17s over the next decade, and that, it seems, is what’s worth being upset about when perfectly good American arms manufacturers aren’t getting the contracts.
But let’s consider three aspects of Whitlock’s article that no one is likely to spend an extra moment on, even if they do capture the surpassing strangeness of the American way of war in distant lands -- and in Washington.
1. The Little Training Program That Couldn’t: There are at present an impressive 450 U.S. personnel in Afghanistan training the Afghan air force. Unfortunately, there’s a problem. There may be no “buy American” program for that air force, but there is a “speak American” one. To be an Afghan air force pilot, you must know English -- “the official language of the cockpit,” Whitlock assures us (even if to fly Russian helicopters). As he points out, however, the trainees, mostly illiterate, take two to five years simply to learn the language. (Imagine a U.S. Air Force in which, just to take off, every pilot needed to know Dari!)...
Continue reading
Tom Engelhardt @'TomDispatch'
The piece by Craig Whitlock appeared on June 19th and was headlined, “U.S. military criticized for purchase of Russian copters for Afghan air corps.” Maybe that’s strange enough for you right there. Russian copters? Of course, we all know, at least vaguely, that by year's end U.S. spending on its protracted Afghan war and nation-building project will be heading for $350 billion dollars. And, of course, those dollars do have to go somewhere.
Admittedly, these days in parts of the U.S., state and city governments are having a hard time finding the money just to pay teachers or the police. The Pentagon, on the other hand, hasn’t hesitated to use at least $25-27 billion to “train” and “mentor” the Afghan military and police -- and after each round of training failed to produce the expected results, to ask for even more money, and train them again. That includes the Afghan National Army Air Corps which, in the Soviet era of the 1980s, had nearly 500 aircraft and a raft of trained pilots. The last of that air force -- little used in the Taliban era -- was destroyed in the U.S. air assault and invasion of 2001. As a result, the "Afghan air force” (with about 50 helicopters and transport planes) is now something of a misnomer, since it is, in fact, the U.S. Air Force.
Still, there are a few Afghan pilots, mostly in their forties, trained long ago on Russian Mi-17 transport helicopters, and it’s on a refurbished version of these copters, Whitlock tells us, that the Pentagon has already spent $648 million. The Mi-17 was specially built for Afghanistan’s difficult flying environment back when various Islamic jihadists, some of whom we’re now fighting under the rubric of “the Taliban,” were allied with us against the Russians.
Here’s the first paragraph of Whitlock’s article: “The U.S. government is snapping up Russian-made helicopters to form the core of Afghanistan's fledgling air force, a strategy that is drawing flak from members of Congress who want to force the Afghans to fly American choppers instead.”
So, various congressional representatives are upset over the lack of a buy-American plan when it comes to the Afghan air force. That’s the story Whitlock sets out to tell, because the Pentagon has been planning to purchase dozens more of the Mi-17s over the next decade, and that, it seems, is what’s worth being upset about when perfectly good American arms manufacturers aren’t getting the contracts.
But let’s consider three aspects of Whitlock’s article that no one is likely to spend an extra moment on, even if they do capture the surpassing strangeness of the American way of war in distant lands -- and in Washington.
1. The Little Training Program That Couldn’t: There are at present an impressive 450 U.S. personnel in Afghanistan training the Afghan air force. Unfortunately, there’s a problem. There may be no “buy American” program for that air force, but there is a “speak American” one. To be an Afghan air force pilot, you must know English -- “the official language of the cockpit,” Whitlock assures us (even if to fly Russian helicopters). As he points out, however, the trainees, mostly illiterate, take two to five years simply to learn the language. (Imagine a U.S. Air Force in which, just to take off, every pilot needed to know Dari!)...
Continue reading
Tom Engelhardt @'TomDispatch'
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