I have have spent some number of pixels on the Turk-American-Kurd issue. While the Kurds can carryout hit-and-run attacks against Turkish troops, I have been curious about the end game. How do the conflicting interests resolve? As usual, John Robb presents a plausible scenario, applying his global guerilla heuristic to the question.
Current tightness in the oil markets (peak oil?) has presented the PKK, the Kurdish guerrilla group fighting the Turkish government, with an amazing opportunity. It can become responsible for sending oil prices over $100 a barrel and sowing panic in global markets.
How? This objective can be accomplished through a series of attacks on the BTC pipeline that runs from Azerbaijan to the Turkish port of Ceyhan (in a fashion similar to earlier attacks that PKK has made on less substantial pipelines). With over 750,000 barrels of oil flow a day (1 m a day next year) over 1,092 miles of pipeline, ongoing disruption would result in [several consequential outcomes].
It can't just be me. Pharrell is getting better. That's quite an achievement given the critic's judgement in 2006. From that spot, Mr Williams' "Blue Magic" is sincerely sinister. It plays like inevitability -- the drums sound like fate itself knocking from the speaker. A preliminary video is below. (Aside: "Blue Magic"'s drums require playback with deep bass. And volume. And a chip on your shoulder.)
Williams' versatility matches his excellence for expressing specific moods -- such as the vanity, fun, and exceptionalism, for which he's most famous. Timberlake party track? The Jam. He's got range. See 'despondent' under 'd' in his alphabetically sorted discography. Pharrell's lyrics amplify the sentiment: "I'm out of my mind, I'm running from guilt, but there's no one around". Despondent is cross referenced with 'saudade' in the 'S' section.
PS: My co-editor's claims to London compel me to keep the pulse of British hip hop: "acting immaturely in a hurry to be old" is an unforgettable irony. I follow New Orleans' bestMC out of habit. Minnesota's Minne-appleseed continues to release hit records -- herewith Brother Ali (myspace):
"I just don't believe in quitin' time"
Brother Ali is label mates with Slug. Who is a label mate to Eyedea. Slug and Eyedea rap together. MTV's Sway was easily won over.
"peace, make steps, on the run with BDP in tape deck"
Slug's rapped with lots of folks. In addition to Eyedea, he's recently hooked up with Los Angeles' Murs to create an entity named Felt. They worked well together -- the evidence is posted here for your review:
"but in the middle of the night, reached for a second helpin', got a handful of sheets, I was all by myself, and"
The second song in this couplet is a personal favorite. It's about gratitude.
I can't believe the things that Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) comes up with. I'm beside myself after reading thisTimes article. Yesterday, he kept up his promise to America...
Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado, a Republican presidential candidate whose fierce opposition to illegal immigration is the center of his campaign, contacted the immigration service yesterday demanding that agents raid a senator’s news conference.
The afternoon event on Capitol Hill was held by Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the leading sponsor of a bill that would give legal status to illegal immigrants who are high school graduates, if they attend college or serve in the United States military for two years. The bill is scheduled to come up for an important procedural vote in the Senate this morning.
Mr. Tancredo announced yesterday morning that he had contacted Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency, calling for the arrest of illegal immigrants he said would attend the news conference.
“If we can’t enforce our laws inside the building where American laws are made, where can we enforce them?” Mr. Tancredo said in a statement.
How hot was Anderson as blogger? Those posts were so money, I've made him a permanent contributor. And in his honor, I give you E.R.A. Comedy Mondays. I loved it from his All The Riches Baby blogging days, and I'm importing it for the good of DR readers. Today's edition comes via Zach via Opinionator:
The political experts have found Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign to be less than a Delta Force for change, mostly because his money-raising has been Missing in Action. Now, however, comes an announcement that could lift Huckabee’s sails, or at least karate-chop them: Chuck Norris has endorsed Huckabee’s candidacy.
“Like most of you, over the summer and into the fall, I’ve been watching, listening, studying and praying about who could lead this country as our next president,” Norris writes at WorldNetDaily. He adds:
I won’t leave you in suspense. Though Giuliani might be savvy enough to lead people, Fred Thompson wise enough to wade through the tides of politics, McCain tough enough to fight terrorism and Romney business-minded enough to grow our economy, I believe the only one who has all of the characteristics to lead America forward into the future is ex-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
Norris says he chose Huckabee for his “integrity, commitment, truthfulness and respect” and because Huckabee “is a compassionate Christian conservative. Though solid in his faith and standing for traditional family values, he’s not an uncaring extremist.”
Norris also compares the former Arkansas governor to, yes, King David:
Seven men were poised and paraded for the position of king, but David was left in the field shepherding because he wasn’t “a frontrunner in the polls.” They overlooked the best because they were too busy judging by outward appearance. But God appointed David king.
The folks who run The Palmetto Scoop think that Norris’s article will secure the White House for Huckabee: “Huckabee will now be unstoppable. And by unstoppable, we mean they face the wrath of a man who is rumored to have played Russian Roulette with a fully loaded gun and won and who reportedly grinds his coffee with his teeth and boils the water with his own rage.”
Norris’s endorsement is quite serious, though it isn’t being treated that way in blogland. But hey, if two of the stars of the action movie “Predator” – Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger — can become governors, why can’t the star of “Walker, Texas Ranger” become a presidential kingmaker?
I remain curious about the timing of Foreign Affairs Armenian genocide vote. All of the available evidence suggests that local politics principally informed the committee members' votes: election year plus Armenian constituents equals 'yay' vote.
George Harris, a former State Department analyst now at the Middle East Institute, said the machinations of domestic politics were playing a key role in the affair -- one year out from the next presidential elections.
I looked for district demographic data to support that, but it wasn't immediately forthcoming. Nevertheless, the "all politics is local" model seems sensible enough. And where the geopolitical repercussions were so apparent that even President Bush anticipated them, it's doubly disappointing. (After all, the President is a man that expected to spend $50B liberating Iraq -- one ninth of the spend to date.)
In end, I'm just happy to see that the responsibility of government isn't affecting the Democratic moralistic ethos:
The committee this week passed the bill to the full House floor after Lantos had called a vote of "conscience" and argued the United States had a moral duty to describe the killings as "genocide" despite the consequences.
Oh, brother.
The same "conscience" doesn't flinch at the sight of Turkish tanks rolling towards northern Iraq's Kurds, and the American soldiers there?
I'm not saying that Sullivan is wrong here, maybe not even inconsistent, but it's still a curious calculus of facts, and negations. On the one hand, speaking of Congress:
The decision...to make...a point about the Armenian genocide of almost a century ago is foolish in the extreme.
It is easy to become numb to an outrage. But what just happened in Tehran - the Holocaust denial conference - really requires us ">not to give in to numbness. Anyone who seriously wants to question the fact of one of the greatest crimes in human history is a monster. Period.
So, it's wrong for the American Congress to recognize the American genocide; it's also wrong for the Iranian president to not recognize the Jewish genocide. Perhaps agnosticm of genocides is the safest position.
You may have noticed the ellipses in my excerpt of Sullivan. That deliberate rhetorical tactic modified this statement in Sullivan's original:
The decision to antagonize our most important ally in the war against Islamist extremism to make a symbolic point about the Armenian genocide of almost a century ago is foolish in the extreme.
Sullivan leaps to conclusions that warrant parsing. "The decision to antagonize" -- no. One of the effects of the Congressional decisions was to antagonize the Turks. At least if you accept the superficial facts. Why this? Why now? Middle Eastern politics, a storm of oil, money, identity politics, (and 150K American soldiers) begs those questions.
Underscoring that freshly possible scenario, Democrat Tom Lantos argued: "We have to weigh the desire to express our solidarity with the Armenian people... against the risk that it could cause young men and women in the uniform of the United States armed services to pay an even heavier price than they are currently paying."
Dear Democratic Primary Voter in Iowa or New Hampshire,
I am concerned tonight. Should Gore go on to win the Nobel Prize, he would stand hardly a chance in an open, national election for the American presidency. I pray you remember: he's already i) associated with a premature withdrawl and ii) won an Academy Award. Adding an award from iii) an elite European institution group does him no favors. It's like adding injury to insult -- the third mark in a signature trifecta of "let the terrorists win"-ism .
Please vote for Biden. Or the black guy. I don't know if they're more electable, mind you. I just like them better all the same.
Thanks, Eric
i) above comes with all the usual caveats. I wasn't in Florida, etc.
Update!: This is rich -- even for the National Review.
I'm taking the contrarian position on the too-briefly considered Pentagon weapons research to "create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and them more interested in sex" than warfare. It sounds like a splendid weapon. Under different circumstances, not infrequently achieved in San Francisco, such a "weapon" would popularly be considered a polite party favor.
Unfortunately, I think, the sexual orientation to be impacted scandalized us too much. I suppose the ideal ammunition would be orientation neutral, liberalizing sexuality more generally. Sullivan shows that there's latent, local demand among citizens of predominantly Islamic states. A soft power angle in the Long War? I should say so. And what of collateral damage -- perhaps only to ancient mores.
Such a weapon would impart lighter logistical burdens on us. The current best guess in this conflict, the military occupation of Iraq, has produced a scenario where it's hard to know what to do, and hard to do anything at all. The sunk costs are significant; the vested interests developed; the inert mass very, very heavy.
Watching them drive by at 30 miles per hour, would take 75 days. Bumper-to-bumper, they would stretch from New York City to Denver. That's how U.S. Air Force logistical expert Lenny Richoux described the number of vehicles that would have to be shipped back from Iraq when the current deployment is over. These include, among others, 10,000 flatbed trucks, 1,000 tanks and 20,000 Humvees.Even in an emergency, said Col. Richoux in DefenseNews, the evacuation of 162,000 troops in 23 ground combat brigades and millions of tons of equipment would take some 20 months. Military shipping containers, end to end, would stretch from New York City to the gates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The main resupply route for convoys that runs 344 miles from Kuwait (skirts Basra to the north) to Baghdad is already under the constant threat of hit-and-run insurgency attacks, including improvised explosive devices. Driving empty, on their way back to pick up another load in Kuwait, convoys are just as vulnerable.
In lieu of high level discussion, I thought I might start here with a stunning picture from this morning's Sartorialist. That it pushes down the lady wearing a garbage can lid is a happy side effect.
I'll be in Brazil, so I'm handing the reins over to a more than capable blogger. It's my pleasure to present you Mr. Eric Robert Anderson. Sometimes, he blogs here. Check out his old stuff and you'll see why he's nonpareil.
A recent conversation I had via e-mail will also shed some light:
WASHINGTON - Federal employees wasted at least $146 million over a one-year period on business- and first-class airline tickets, in some cases simply because they felt entitled to the perk, congressional investigators say.
A draft report by the Government Accountability Office, obtained Tuesday by the Associated Press, is the first to examine compliance with travel rules across the federal government following reports of extensive abuse of premium-class travel by Pentagon and State Department employees.
The review of travel spending by more than a dozen agencies from July 1, 2005, to June 30, 2006, found 67 percent of premium-class travel by executives or their employees, worth at least $146 million, was unauthorized or unjustified.om a subordinate employee.
The State Department is among the worst offenders.
Many of the cases involved high-ranking senior officials or political appointees who claimed exceptions to federal travel rules by citing old medical records or questionable approval from a subordinate employee.
NEW YORK, September 27, 2007—Today at the Clinton Global Initiative, Teach For America announced its commitment to launch Teach For All, a new organization that will support entrepreneurs in other countries who are pursuing the development of the Teach For America model locally. These local organizations will channel the talent and energy of their countries’ top recent college graduates against educational disparities facing tens of thousands of children in their high-poverty communities. Teach For All was created in partnership with Teach First, an adaptation of Teach For America in the U.K., and with significant start-up support from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation and the Amy and Larry Robbins Foundation.
How hot is that? More details at the Clinton Global Initiative here.
In at least two cases, Blackwater paid victims’ family members who complained, and sought to cover up other episodes, the Congressional report said. It said State Department officials approved the payments in the hope of keeping the shootings quiet. In one case last year, the department helped Blackwater spirit an employee out of Iraq less than 36 hours after the employee, while drunk, killed a bodyguard for one of Iraq’s two vice presidents on Christmas Eve.
The report by the Democratic majority staff of a House committee adds weight to complaints from Iraqi officials, American military officers and Blackwater’s competitors that company guards have taken an aggressive, trigger-happy approach to their work and have repeatedly acted with reckless disregard for Iraqi life.
But the report is also harshly critical of the State Department for exercising virtually no restraint or supervision of the private security company’s 861 employees in Iraq. “There is no evidence in the documents that the committee has reviewed that the State Department sought to restrain Blackwater’s actions, raised concerns about the number of shooting episodes involving Blackwater or the company’s high rate of shooting first, or detained Blackwater contractors for investigation,” the report states.
The senator ran into additional religious trouble in a BeliefNet interview in which he said, "I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation." This despite the fact that the Constitution, which McCain has presumably read, does the exact opposite.
"I admire the Islam. There's a lot of good principles in it," he said. "But I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles, personally, I prefer someone who I know who has a solid grounding in my faith."
Apparently, McCain later realized he'd made a mistake, because the transcript of the interview added, "McCain contacted Beliefnet after the interview to clarify his remarks: 'I would vote for a Muslim if he or she was the candidate best able to lead the country and defend our political values.'"
In other words, McCain was for discrimination before he was against it.
Former Bush White House aide David Kuo, now a BeliefNet contributor, said McCain was "pandering to what he thinks the Christian conservative community wants to hear" and predicted he "will have a lot of explaining to do about this interview."
Founded in 1970, Harlem Children's Zone, Inc. is a pioneering, non-profit, community-based organization that works to enhance the quality of life for children and families in some of New York City's most devastated neighborhoods. Formerly known as Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, HCZ Inc.'s centers serve more than 13,000 children and adults, including over 9,500 at-risk children. The emphasis of our work is not just on education, social service and recreation, but on rebuilding the very fabric of community life. The Children's Zone intentionally develops programs where other agencies are not located and poor children and families have no one, or even a place, to run for help.
From their business plan:
These twin principles — a critical mass of engaged, effective families, and early and progressive intervention in children's development — have led the Harlem Children's Zone in recent years to concentrate more of its activities on the families in a 24-block region of Central Harlem called the Harlem Children's Zone Project. Taking this concentration of effort to its logical fulfillment - reaching a greater percentage of residents in the Zone with a wider, more effective mix of services, particularly at earlier ages - is the first and most far-reaching of the imperatives of this Business Plan. In fact, most of the other imperatives flow from that one, and all of them rest on the same governing principles."
