A very good article about the US strategy in Pakistan tribal areas (an excerpt, but I suggest reading the whole article):

THIS article poses two questions: on the day after US/Nato forces invade and occupy some of Balochistan and Waziristan, what will we say we should have done, and why aren’t we doing it now? Is this far-fetched?
The facts suggest otherwise. Like the US invasion of Iraq, plans for covert operations and military strikes against Pakistan have not only circulated for long among influential US groups, they are visibly under implementation. Again, like Bush, the Obama presidency has provided the opportunity to implement these plans.
[…] There cannot be a clearer statement of US intentions. Nor are the outlines of likely US actions entirely unknown. The logic of the US action will be provided by Kampuchea; the tactics by Kosovo on our western borders and Palestine on our eastern borders. Naturally, historical analogies are far from exact, but they do merit study.
Even though the contextual background of the US bombing of Kampuchea departs from the situation in Pakistan on many points, what is common to the two is that US troops are bogged down in adjacent Afghanistan, the Americans believe that their ‘enemy’ is able to find ‘sanctuaries’ and ‘safe havens’ in Pakistan, and they have been conducting covert bombing operations in Pakistan for some time, which have progressively intensified.
We should not be misled by diplomatic pleasantries. In April 1969, Richard Nixon assured Prince Sihanouk that the US respected ‘the sovereignty, neutrality and territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Cambodia …’ Over the next 14 months the US dropped 2,750,000 tons of bombs on Kampuchea, more than the total dropped by the Allies in the Second World War. In 1970, Prince Sihanouk was deposed by his pro-American prime minister, Lon Nol. The country’s borders were closed, and the US and the Republic of Vietnam Army (ARVN) launched incursions into Kampuchea to attack the People’s Army of Vietnam and the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (VPA/NLF) bases.
The coup against Sihanouk and the US bombing destabilised Kampuchea and increased support for the Khmer Rouge. The parallels to recent developments in Pakistan are obvious.
Unlike Vietnam and Kampuchea around 1960, however, the Americans do not intend to withdraw from Afghanistan. Instead, in pursuit of a ‘surge’ strategy, some 17,000 US troops are expected to arrive in Afghanistan in the coming months; and the US appears to be digging in for a long stay. This creates enormous supply problems to which solutions, significantly, are being put together without dependence on Pakistan.

Thousands flee bomb attacks by US drones.

Posted by: andrew | Apr 6 2009 10:52 utc | 3

Antarctic ice shelf half the size of Scotland on verge of collapse
UK Observer 4/5/09

Wilkins shelf is about half the size of Scotland, or the same size as the US state of Connecticut. It is the largest slab of ice so far to disintegrate and retreat in the Antarctic. Pictures from the European Space Agency show that fresh rifts have appeared in Wilkins’ ‘ice bridge’ to Charcot Island and that a large chunk of ice has broken away, though the shelf still remains attached to other pieces of land. ESA estimated that the loss of the ice bridge could see the northern half of Wilkins break free, representing up to 1,400 square miles of ice floating off on the ocean in a gigantic ice berg.
Though the collapse of Wilkins shelf will not raise sea levels directly – as ice shelves float on the sea surface – its demise is a warning sign of potentially disastrous changes in the earth’s climate. Change at Wilkins has come fast, often taking scientists by surprise with the speed of the break-up. In February last year a 164- square-mile chunk broke off. Then in May another slab of ice, this time measuring 62 square miles, fell away. The ice shelf has lost a total of 694 square miles over the past 12 months, representing some 14 per cent of its size. That shrank the vital ice bridge to just 984 yards at its narrowest location. Now that bridge too is coming under huge strains.

Importance of ice shelf dislocation is that once floating free it stops slowing land ice joining sea.

Posted by: plushtown | Apr 6 2009 14:18 utc | 5

paul street: Reflections on a Largely Forgotten Book: Herbert Schiller’s The Mind Managers (1973)

Being an historian and a bibliophile, I probably get overly impressed at the extent to which certain past and forgotten authors anticipated and even to some degree transcended subsequent better-known authors and schools of analysis. Having admitted that up front, let me ask any and all fellow progressive critics of American corporate communications a simple bibliographic question: have you ever read or even heard of onetime communications professor Herbert Schiller’s thirty-six year-old book The Mind Managers (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1973)?
Dedicated to the notion that “the flow of information in a complex society is a source of unparalleled power,” his book was an important early effort to show how corporate thought-controllers” used “mainstream” (corporate) media and other means to conduct “a national communications pageant” (Schiller 1973, p.6) in support of “the state-capitalist [United States] economy” and its vast global and military reach. To a degree that I (perhaps naively) find surprising, his book is missing from the endnotes, indexes, and bibliographies of left media analysts. It disappeared in the bibliographical mist even as it seems to have anticipated numerous critical and important themes in a subsequent and impressive literature of left media and propaganda criticism in the U.S.
…
Schiller’s little 1973 book did not remotely anticipate Chomsky and Herman’s justly famous “propaganda model” for breaking down imperial bias in dominant U.S. media news content. Schiller gave no intricate, deeply researched history (ala McChesney) of government communications policy and how (largely through government action on behalf of private media monopoly) U.S. corporate media came into existence He advanced no sophisticated analysis (ala Bagdikian, McChesney, and Herman) of deepening corporate media concentration (far more advanced today than in 1973) and no ideas (ala McChensey and Nichols) for media reform. He lacked Carey’s elegant sense of the historical factors (the conflict between corporate power and the democratic tradition, the special thought-controlling skills and means afforded by American advertising and communications technology, and the ready availability of cultural and political symbols and mindsets conducive to elite mind-control) that would lead to the United States becoming the most heavily propagandized society in history (Carey 1997, 11-17). He naturally brandished none of the advanced media content research tools (e.g. Lexis-Nexis, various Internet search functions, and much more) that were available only to subsequent investigators. And he curiously failed to relate his findings to relevant warnings from important past thinkers like James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse.
Still, Schiller advanced a nuanced understanding, partly foreshadowing Chomsky and Carey, of why the hidden corporate manufacture-of-consent project could “reach its highest development in the United States” (Schiller 1973, p. 4). By Schiller’s account, the U.S. was a “state capitalist” society based on durable class divisions between “haves” and “have-nots” and directed from the top down by “a small group of corporate and governmental decision-makers” (p.3). But it was also a nation in which “pure suppression” was largely unavailable to the ruling class and where corporate and state “media managers” therefore found it particularly necessary to became systematic “manipulators” of mass consciousness. When the populace “escapes total suppression” but still lives under the “the profit system,” Schiller explained, “control of the informational and ideational process” becomes an especially pivotal aspect of how the small minority of “haves,” “winners,” and “order-givers” maintain rule over the majority of “have-nots,” “losers,” and “order-receivers.” By Schiller’s account, critical means for such elite control were provided by the simple fact of the capitalist class’s ownership of radio, television, newspapers, magazines, movie-making, recreational industries (e.g. Disney’s theme parks), and book publishing – all “largely in the hands of corporate chains and media conglomerates” (p.4).
In Schiller’s analysis, America’s powerful means of communications and mass culture were naturally enlisted in service to their owners’ quest for “maintenance of the status quo” (p. 29). They were employed to induce mass “passivity” and a paralyzing “diminution of mental activity,” with “a pacifying impact on critical consciousness” (p.30). As Schiller noted, “the aim of television and radio programming and films in a commercial society is not to arouse but to lessen concern about social and economic realities” (p. 31) – a goal that went far beyond the media’s related function of helping capitalists sell goods and services through advertising. Consistent with this deeply authoritarian objective, the leading U.S. communications organs were run by “consciousness controllers” who structured “intentionally devitalized programming” (p. 31) around five conservative, power-serving themes:
1. The possessive-individualist idea that meaningful human freedom and agency can be attained only at the individualized level and only in accord with “privatist” notions of purely personal choice and autonomy, without concern for larger social obligations and consequences.
2. The false notion that government, media, education, and other leading social institutions are “socially neutral” and thus beyond the controlling reach of corporate, state-capitalist ideology and interests. As Schiller explained, “for manipulation to be most effective, evidence of its presence should be nonexistent…It is essential, therefore, that people are manipulated believe in the neutrality of their key social institutions” (Schiller 1973, p.11).
3. The belief that the existing acquisitive and egoistic profits system and its military, repressive, and narrow-spectrum two-party political apparatuses accurately reflect an unchanging competitive, depraved, and anti-social “human nature.”
4. The absence of meaningful social conflict or protest and the related presentation of conflict as “almost always an individual matter in its manifestation and in its origin.” (“The social roots of conflict just don’t exist for the cultural-information managers,” something that helped explain “the banality of most programming, especially that which concerns momentous social events,” consistent with “elite control[‘s]” requirement of “the omission and distortion of social reality” [p.17]).
5. The “myth of media pluralism,” which confuses the technical abundance (rich) of media outlets with diversity of content (scarce): Americans are dazzled by the “multi-channel communications flow,” which lends [false] credibility to the notion of free informational choice” and cloaks preservation of the cultural and ideological status quo through the sameness and ideologically thin spectrum of content.
…

Posted by: b real | Apr 6 2009 14:25 utc | 7

Schiller is great.His son is a good media scholar too.

Consequently, it is a mistake to believe that the changes required to overcome the global, national, and local disparities in human existence will be facilitated by developing telecommunications systems. In fact, the opposite result may be expected. Existing differentials and inequities will be deepened and extended with the new instrumentation and processes, despite their loudly proclaimed and widely publicized potential benefits.

-HERBERT I. SCHILLER, INFORMATION AND THE CRISIS ECONOMY (1984). NORWOOD NJ: ABLEX
He was really prescient about the ways that new media would be used to maintain capitalist economic domination over developing world, and the use of emerging technologies for consumer surveillance. Cool dude.

Posted by: slothrop | Apr 6 2009 15:54 utc | 9

United States Delivers Massive New Weapons Shipment to Israel, Confirmed by Pentagon, Says Amnesty International.
Land of Ruins: A Special Report on Gaza’s Economy.

Posted by: andrew | Apr 6 2009 16:36 utc | 11

Six degrees of separation strikes again — one of my Feral Scholar articls is linked to in the Comments on the story B found at TinyRevolution — the one about the chem/agra companies’ bid to turn the Obama garden into a billboard for their latest line in neurotoxins 🙂
I’ll risk a vanity ticket here and link to the piece “It’s Not Rocket Science” in the hope that there might be some conversation. I’ve been harping away on the big lies of the so-called Green Revolution for years now, and maybe this is finally the time to get some wider discussion going…
greetings to all; sorry I have been pretty much incommunicada for some time now. and sorry if I already linked to this essay and have forgotten doing so! been busier than a bee in an almond orchard: trying to jumpstart a permaculture kitchen garden on a suburban lot at 50N, working on my boat, and enjoying a late and unexpected love affair that shows signs of becoming a good and lasting partnership. life is good, even though the news from the Big World seems uniformly stupid, criminal, and disastrous. I’m relocalising as fast as I can, investing in community and friendship networks, fruit and veggies, rather than financial instruments.

Posted by: DeAnander | Apr 7 2009 0:07 utc | 13