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April 13, 2009
Links April 13 09

Colonialism:

  • The ‘civil’ side: Allies Ponder How to Plan Elections in Afghanistan – (NYT)
  • The ‘disinformation’ side: Warning that Pakistan is in danger of collapse within months – (SMH)
  • The ‘kinetic’ side: 60 drone hits kill 14 al-Qaeda men, 687 civilians – (The News)
  • The ‘results’ side: Targeted killing of women’s rights activist shocks Afghans – (Globe&Mail)
  • After doubting deadlines for troops in Iraq, Odierno (is forced to) repeal – Commander Says U.S. Still on Schedule to Leave Iraq – (NYT)

Second World Depression:

  • Classic overproduction – China’s runaway steel train – (Globe&Mail)
  • The Fed will have to print more: China Slows Purchases of U.S. and Other Bonds – (NYT)
  • Wonderland: Credit Default Swaps – Through The Looking Glass –
    Satyajit Das     – (Wilmott)

Israel-Iran watch:

  • Good technical explanations: How a Centrifuge Works – (FAS)
  • Good: Roger Cohan: Realpolitik for Iran – (NYT)
  • Slightly disguised slander – Can Iran Change? – High stakes in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reëlection campaign. – (New Yorker)
  • Roane Carey, Will Israel Attack Iran? – (TomDispatch)
  • Borderline? – [Israel:] Borderline outcast? – (FT)

Please add your news and views in the comments.

Posted by b on April 13, 2009 at 06:28 UTC | Permalink
Comments

Add to “Second World Depression”
http://www.leonardo-energy.org/drupal/node/2277
http://firstenvironment.com/html/first_environment_press_releas.html#EnvFinance2009
Newt Gingrich was laughing on George Stephanopolous today that mayors and governor wonks finally figured out, duhh, after two years of graduate school wonk training on the taxpayer dole, since they’re just sitting at their desks anyway waiting for the recession to end, that Cap & Trade is the most gyngantic clusterfook in the history of the planet. If you have to recalculate the C&T tax for every business connected to the grid, every time the grid sheds load or adds a new power plant, that creates a super-agency level employment larger than DHS-FEMA, whose sole job is to go around climbing fences and reading meters and crawling so far up your ass, the universe could free fall collapse into a wormhole, and nobody would know it.
But at least there will be full-time employment for the Ecology policy wonks, even if no light, warmth or humor is able to escape their intensely serious gravitas!!!
0.58% is what I’m reading for the incremental impact of carbon dioxide on warming.
We are chasing the last one-half of one percent, at a cost that will bankrupt USA.
Eco-Taliban don’t care. They have their C&T-Koran, their beards and their turbans. Al Gore is Mullah Omar, and Barak Obama is Osama bin Laden on this Cap & Trade WTC.
No wonder Bush-Cheney pushed the pedal to the metal to deferred comp out at the top.

Posted by: Verification Body | Apr 13 2009 7:40 utc | 1

So, ok, I comment here very rarely and I’m going off topic, so apologies in advance. But will someone go and tell the New Yorker that their new style guidelines on double vowels is just plain silly? I’m perfectly capable of understanding that “reelection” means “re-election” and am not in danger of trying to parse out the meaning of the imaginary word “reel-ection,” as much as it might bring some amusing possibilities to mind.
P.S. I normally grouse about imperialism, racism, militarism, and capitalism on the Internet, but that just got my goat.

Posted by: Rojo | Apr 13 2009 8:41 utc | 2

In The ‘kinetic’ side the hyperlink does not work.

Posted by: Beni | Apr 13 2009 8:43 utc | 3

Rojo, I noticed that too, but the article was so brilliant (thanks, b) that I chose to ignore the weird punctuation. So what´s new? ….. Hasn´t America been destroying the English language for years? 😉
The Roane Carey article is also a Must-Read (as well as being much shorter and devoid of irritating punctuation!).

Posted by: Parviz | Apr 13 2009 9:11 utc | 4

@Beni , thanks, corrected.

Posted by: b | Apr 13 2009 9:35 utc | 5

Nice rant from Joe Bageant in the form of a lecture to psychology students at two universities. Working on from the “we now live in corporate financial state” perspective.

Posted by: anna missed | Apr 13 2009 9:45 utc | 6

Thanks, anna_missed, he´s really amusing too, had me laughing throughout.

Posted by: Parviz | Apr 13 2009 9:49 utc | 7

anna missed@6-
Sweet rant… Reminds me of something Uncle $cam would’ve linked to.
I would love to see the world, or at least the united states, go a week without television. One of the ways the houses of the super wealthy differ from most everyone else (besides the extra 20 thousand sqft, and multimillion dollar price) is that they don’t have a freaking tv staring at you from every room in their house. Instead they are hidden in cabinets and tucked away in media rooms with ten-foot screens for previewing Academy nominations.
You can go to some poor guy’s house and find a television in every room, even sometimes the bathroom (which may be the most fitting place for such a pile).
Today I’m cleaning the old apple shed I use for a workshop/storage space. I have probably 10 to 15 televisions I’ve collected over the years and I’m going to stack against one wall… someday I want to use them as frames for an art show of my pinhole photographs.
Also I’ve dreamed of doing a funny article called, “how to fix a television” which will be a series of photos of me taking a television outside and placing it upon a big tarp. Then using various objects from guns to rocks to “fix” the television by smashing the screen.
I thought it would be fun (and dangerous) to have the television tuned to something like a golf game and driving a golf ball into the screen… Or heck, a 1/4 stick of dynamite placed under a tv that’s showing a political speech… Ah yes, springtime, the time when my mind blooms with happily creatively destructiveness. And what better an object to focus such energy?
Kill your TV! (maybe the neighbor’s too, when they’re not looking)

Posted by: DavidS | Apr 13 2009 15:08 utc | 8

D 8) Kill your TV and dance the last waltz! (China)ese and (India)ns have each made graduating 500,000 engineering students a year their goal to ‘capture the global technology outsourcing opportunities’, as described here: http://www.acm.org/globalizationreport/pdf/fullfinal.pdf and as are happening every day across America while the deliberately engineered recession (OK, the banker-brokers’ intent was to loot our communal equity by financial structural engineering, a recession simply followed by osmosis) is cutting high wage jobs off at the knees. Americans are being forced into part-time, low-wage ‘right to work’, no benefits, no pensions, support role positions for the lion’s share being done in Chindia, whose combined graduations in math and science are 1000% larger than USs.
Then add “free labor” to “free trade” and “free capital” as the (Mongol)oid opp-sim to that Hapsburg City-State which so well preserved Empire and stasis far beyond our short time on stage. Better start ‘sourcing’ your metal shopping cart and that plastic tarp, monkey boy. http://tinyurl.com/cbptl3

Posted by: Mai Chung | Apr 13 2009 20:00 utc | 9

In reply to your Pakistan “collapse” link I give you this link:
Take a deep breath on Pakistan

Posted by: Anthony | Apr 13 2009 22:24 utc | 10

2nd Degree Murder Conviction in Phil Specter Trial
….
1st Degree Embezzlement Charged in Goldman Sachs Report
Why [English] banks failed the stress test:
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/speeches/2009/speech374.pdf
….
Obama Tells US Bankers, keep quiet on stress test results
http://www.redclaymedia.com/blog/index.php/2009/04/13/apparently-some-of-the-19-largest-banks-failed-the-stress-test/
Just think what you’ll know 24 hours from now?

Posted by: Ponce Deloit | Apr 14 2009 0:17 utc | 11

If there are any Spaniards here I have a wet sloppy blubbering fawning kiss for you, not that that is exactly what you want but te amo.
( http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-04-13/the-bush-six-to-be-indicted/ )

Posted by: …—… | Apr 14 2009 2:09 utc | 12

@ …—…
As a basque as I am, I know very well what the Audiencia Nacional is:
It’s a sort of “Guantanamo court” for special cases, a little bit of narcotraffic and lots of terrorism.
But they are very open-minded while judging terrorism, ie, a basque teenager can be brought to prison for four years for giving fire to a trash container on a street in Bilbao, under the charge of being a supporter ETA, ergo a terrorist of ETA. A valencian teenager setting fire to a trash container would pass a night in police station in the worst case.
An the main sheriff judge of the Audiencia Nacional is Baltasar Garzón, an “intruction-judge” that could ask interpol to catch Tony Blair for the Iraq war, but was in the wedding of Aznar’s daughter.
It’s nice that 3 months before the wedding he gave an international order to arrest Berlusconi. But both were invited to the wedding by Aznar and they walked happily, all togheter, to El Valle de los Caídos to the wedding on a hundred of meter long red carpet, in the main symbol of Franco’s victory in Spain.
So, don’t worry, it’s just a bit of noise to appear in the media.

Posted by: Auskalo | Apr 14 2009 3:24 utc | 13

[Under Second Great Depression – ]
Allvoices.com
The steps China took in the 70s to normalize or to say more correctly, inhibit its ever growing population are now reaping some bitter fruits that the legislators and the policy makers did not foresee at that time. The famous one child policy that was enforced back in the 70s came out to be so effective that many countries followed its lead.
The controls may have prevented some additional 44 million births that the authorities have claimed in the world’s most populous country with a total population standing at 1.3 billion. But an essential fact that they didn’t take care of was the desire to have a male child. The policy did prevent parents from having more than one child but where it failed massively was to prevent them from having a male child.
First, the moment parents find out the gender of their child, thanks to the wonderful invention in the medical history called a sonogram, they immediately abort the fetus if it’s a female. Hence, the female genocide got on the rise! Second, this desire to have a male child has resulted into an alarming gender imbalance in the population.
According to a latest study which has been published in the British Medical Journal, there are 32 million more young males than young females in China.
—
Maybe that’s why Pakistanis lock up their daughters!? Think how many tens of millions Paki-Indian males, without the faintest potential of finding a female, like West Side Story (on super-steroids) meets Slum Dog Millions and Millions.
Wow, can you imagine the subtext?! Boy meets girl meets boy meets boy, booyah!

Posted by: Mai Chung | Apr 14 2009 6:06 utc | 14

arcade fire-wake up

Posted by: Lizard | Apr 14 2009 6:09 utc | 15

Oh man, just wreck my day why don’t ya.

Posted by: …—… | Apr 14 2009 13:49 utc | 16

@14 — yah, and another point that i remember being made, a few years back, is that cultures which are significantly skewed towards the male end of things are much more likely to go to war than those skewed towards the female side.
It may have been feminist agitprop — i haven’t actually seen the report — but it makes sense to me.
So what i’m thinking is that this will be China’s biggest, unspoken, and most difficult-to-measure problem, in the coming years.
“Ah Q” all over again —
The really interesting thing is, however, that if China actually can avoid that war, then a few generations from now y’all’re going to see their population decrease precipitously —
at exactly the same time the rest of the world is imploding from too many people.
Think about it: a one-child policy, coupled with a huge surplus of men, means a really big decrease in the number of Han babies.
And, incidentally: the one-child policy applies to urbanites. Farming families get two kids, and minorities are totally exempt from the policy.
So the future is going to hold some extremely interesting demographic change for China.

Posted by: china_hand2 | Apr 15 2009 13:07 utc | 17

Anthropologist, Laura Nader – When the Rule of Law is Illegal

Talk by Laura Nader, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and co-author (with Ugo Mattei) of Plunder: When the Rule of Law is Illegal. The talk was given at the Law of the Commons Conference March 13, 2009 at Seattle University and sponsored by the Seattle Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Apr 15 2009 13:44 utc | 18

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