|
| |
Archives
empire
I've been reading The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic by Chalmers Johnson. The title is pretty self-explanatory. To sum it up: as bad as you might think it to be, it's really much worse. What Johnson describes is an unending expansion from revolutionary times to the end of the westward expansion in the 1890s, which then spilled out onto the world with the Spanish American War and it's subsequent non-stop growth of ever expanding control. It's like watching an unstoppable cancer enveloping and destroying the world. (And they wonder why they hate us!) But, enough of the light stuff. There are way too many horror stories, but here are three that also offer some enlightenment about the recent actions by and towards some of our client states allies.
Israel
| |
[page 153]
Both reports are supposed to be issued quarterly but actually appear intermittently. Neither report is inclusive, since many bases are cloaked in secrecy. For example, Charles Glass, the chief Middle East correspondent for ABC News from 1983 to 1993 and an authority on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, writes, "Israel has provided the U.S. with sites in the Negev [desert] for military bases, now under construction, which will be far less vulnerable to Muslim fundamentalists than those in Saudi Arabia." These are officially nonexistent sites. There have been press reports of aircraft from the carrier battle group USS Elsenhower operating from Nevatim Airfield in Israel, and a specialist on the military, William M. Arkin, adds, "The United States has 'prepositioned' vehicles, military equipment, even a 500-bed hospital, for U.S. Marines, Special Forces, and Air Force fighter and bomber aircraft at at least six sites in Israel, all part of what is antiseptically described as 'U.S.-Israel strategic cooperation.'" These bases in Israel are known simply as Sites 51, 53, and 54. Their specific locations are classified and highly sensitive. There is no mention of American bases in Israel in any of the Department of Defense's official compilations.
| |
This makes the US hardly a disinterested bystander in the Israel/Palestine conflict. As the Arabs have been saying all along, Israel is there to militarily control the entire Middle East. Nor, with the investment in bases, is the US military going to do anything to put them at risk, such as actually to try and stop Israel's butchering of the Palestineians.
Australia
| |
[page 162]
In 1975, Australia's Labor Party prime minister, Gough Whitlam, wanted to close the then-secret satellite intelligence base at Pine Gap. He threatened to reveal that the base, which except for its antennas is mostly underground, was a wholly American-run military operation under the command of a CIA officer, facts that had been kept hidden from him. On November 11, 1975, in Australia's greatest constitutional crisis, the governor-general of Australia, Sir John Kerr, after being briefed by the CIA, obligingly fired Whitlam and appointed opposition leader Malcolm Fraser as caretaker prime minister until elections could be called. Fraser was prepared to mobilize the army to maintain order, and Australia teetered close to revolution. In 1977, Warren Christopher, then assistant secretary of state for East Asia and later secretary of state, promised the deposed Whitlam that the United States would never again interfere in Australian domestic politics. But, of course. Pine Gap was not closed or brought under Australian government control.
| |
Read that again. The US overthrew the democratically elected government of an ally.
England
| |
[page 164]
Sigint (signals intelligence) bases designed to intercept the first two types of communications are quite conspicuous because they involve fields full of antennas covered in hard plastic domes to protect them from the weather and hide the direction in which they are pointed. There are, for example, over twenty telltale satellite dishes at Menwith Hill and fourteen at Misawa. With their covering domes, they look like huge golf balls. Sigint bases in England are disguised as Royal Air Force (RAP) stations even though there are few if any British personnel assigned to them. For example, Chicksands Priory, created in 1941 by the RAF for electronic spying on northern Germany and Poland during World War II, was turned over to the U.S. Air Force in 1950. Ever since, the United States has operated Chicksands for its exclusive use, not even sharing the information gathered there with NATO. These arrangements reflect the historical fact that the two governments never entered into any formal agreements on American bases in England. Parliament has, moreover, never taken a vote on the matter. What exists are letters dating from the early Cold War era drafted by British civil servants and countersigned by the American ambassador giving the United States the right to use RAF bases. For these reasons, it has never been possible to say with precision how many U.S. bases there are in Britain (although one well-informed source claims there were 104 by the end of the Cold War).
Much information about the disguised American bases in Britain comes from peace activists like Lindis Percy, coordinator of the United Kingdom's Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases, who has been arrested many times for breaking into them. One recent escapade occurred at RAF Croughton, twenty-five miles southwest of Stratford-upon-Avon, where Percy was charged with "aggravated trespass." She then revealed to the press that the RAF designation was phony and that Croughton is actually a U.S. Air Force base. One authoritative but unofficial source says that the base's active-duty personnel include 400 Americans and 109 employees of the British Ministry of Defense. Its function is communications with U.S. Air Force aircraft, including nuclear bombers. The Americans dropped charges against Percy to prevent "embarrassing evidence" from being presented in open court.15 In June 2002, she had five injunctions against her for entering such bases, including Menwith Hill.
Since 1948, a highly classified agreement among the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand allows them to exchange information not just about target countries but also about one another. This arrangement permits the United States's National Security Agency, Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Canada's Communications Security Establishment, Australia's Defense Signals Directorate, and New Zealand's General Communications Security Bureau to swap information with one another about their own citizens—including political leaders—without formally violating national laws against domestic spying. Even though the U.S. government, for example, is prohibited by law from spying on its own citizens except under a court-ordered warrant, as are all the other countries in the consortium, the NSA can, and often does, ask one of its partners to do so and pass the information its way. One former employee of the Canadian Communications Security Establishment revealed that, at the request of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain, the GCHQ asked the Canadians to monitor certain British political leaders for them.
| |
Read this book. Please.
economy
Maestro of Chutzpah
| |
The traditional definition of chutzpah says it's when you murder your parents, then plead for clemency because you're an orphan. Alan Greenspan has chutzpah.
Last week Mr. Greenspan warned of the dangers posed by budget deficits. But even though the main cause of deficits is plunging revenue — the federal government's tax take is now at its lowest level as a share of the economy since 1950 — he opposes any effort to restore recent revenue losses. Instead, he supports the Bush administration's plan to make its tax cuts permanent, and calls for cuts in Social Security benefits.
Yet three years ago Mr. Greenspan urged Congress to cut taxes, warning that otherwise the federal government would run excessive surpluses. He assured Congress that those tax cuts would not endanger future Social Security benefits. And last year he declined to stand in the way of another round of deficit-creating tax cuts.
But wait — it gets worse.
| |
[more]
photography
Richard Caldicott
| |
"Caldicott has a reverence for formal issues comparable to that of any modernist. Hence his devotion to his unorthodox material: Tupperware works because it’s colorful, translucent, and organically geometric. Caldicott’s earnestness urges us to acknowledge that while Color Field originated as painting, its legacy is hardly medium-specific."
-Martha Schwendener, Artforum
| |
[more]
thanks to Conscientious
haiti
Another democracy bites the dust thanks to the US. Venezuela is next.
Why they had to crush Aristide
Haiti's elected leader was regarded as a threat by France and the US
| |
Jean-Bertrand Aristide was re-elected president of Haiti in November 2000 with more than 90% of the vote. He was elected by people who approved his courageous dissolution, in 1995, of the armed forces that had long terrorised Haiti and had overthrown his first administration. He was elected by people who supported his tentative efforts, made with virtually no resources or revenue, to invest in education and health. He was elected by people who shared his determination, in the face of crippling US opposition, to improve the conditions of the most poorly paid workers in the western hemisphere.
Aristide was forced from office on Sunday by people who have little in common except their opposition to his progressive policies and their refusal of the democratic process. With the enthusiastic backing of Haiti's former colonial master, a leader elected with overwhelming popular support has been driven from office by a loose association of convicted human rights abusers, seditious former army officers and pro-American business leaders.
It's obvious that Aristide's expulsion offered Jacques Chirac a long-awaited chance to restore relations with an American administration he dared to oppose over the attack on Iraq. It's even more obvious that the characterisation of Aristide as yet another crazed idealist corrupted by absolute power sits perfectly with the political vision championed by George Bush, and that the Haitian leader's downfall should open the door to a yet more ruthless exploitation of Latin American labour.
| |
[more]
Haiti as Target Practice
How the US Press Missed the Story
| |
But those who view Haiti's current violence as merely one of an eternal humanitarian crisis in temporary overdrive miss the story. It is no simple tale of a corrupt regime collapsing under the weight of popular anger and bad management. A cursory glance at events of the last fourteen years suggests that the fall of the Aristide regime was a foregone conclusion at the entrance of President George W. Bush and the installation of a cabal of appointees with a grim record of utilizing official and covert channels to destabilize uncooperative governments in the Western Hemisphere. What is immediately ominous about the current crisis in Haiti is the likely prospect that leaders of armed groups making a final assault on the capital will play important roles in a post-Aristide order. Such armed groups include the Tontons Macoutes, the gunmen who viciously supervised repression under both father and son Duvaliers' dictatorships until 1986. They also include members of the disbanded Haitian army that held power for three years following the coup against President Aristide in 1991, and the FRAPH death squads that mowed down the ranks of democratic civil society during that period, leaving over 3,000 dead and thousands more in exile. What is also now worrisome about this crisis is what it likely indicates about the intentions of the U.S. State Department and security apparatus elsewhere in the Caribbean.
| |
[more]
The Fire This Time in Haiti was US-Fueled
The Bush Administration Appears to have Succeeded in its Long-Time Goal of Toppling Aristide Through Years of Blocking International Aid to his Impoverished Nation
Haiti Destabilization by the Book
From His First Day in Office, Bush Was Ousting Aristide
photography
Andreas Gefeller
The site is in German but Joerg, at Conscientious, has translated and pointed us to the good parts...
[more]
Andreas Gefeller's work amazes me, too. I think I like photographers that are doing things similar to what I do or what I would like to do or make me say "Why didn't I think of that?" Andreas does that for me. Specifically, the Spaces and Places series.
iraq — vietnam on internet time
Ashoura Tragedy...
by Riverbend
| |
The explosions in Karbala and Kadhimiya were horrible. We heard the ones in Kadhimiya from a distance. There were a couple of dull thuds and we didn't know what it was. We found out later on the news and everyone has been horrified ever since. It's so hard to believe this has happened. The shots on Al-Arabia and the other channels were terrible- body parts everywhere- people burning alive... who could do this? We've all been asking each other that... who would have anything to gain from this?
Fingers are being pointed everywhere. Everyone has been afraid that this will be the metaphorical straw that breaks the camels back- except it's not a straw... it's more like an iron anchor that is just to heavy to carry. Fortunately, the reactions have been sane, yet sorrowful. Sunnis and Shi'a are sticking together... more now than ever before. It's like this catastrophe somehow made everyone realize that there are outside forces trying to drive us all apart and cause unrest or 'fitna'. People are refusing to believe that this was done by Iraqis. It's impossible. It's inexcusable and there is nothing that can justify it.
| |
[more]
Fresh U.S. troops in Iraq mean adjustments to violence, trust for both sides
| |
Shaha Saleh and four of her daughters were planting peas when they heard the explosion last week near a U.S. military convoy that was passing through their speck of a village in remote northern farmlands.
Saleh grabbed her daughters by the hands and the hair, dragging them out of range of American soldiers firing back at faceless attackers. But they didn't run fast enough, Saleh said Wednesday from her bed at a hospital in Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad.
The soldiers left one daughter dead, another unable to walk and their mother with a leg so mangled it had to be severed at the knee. This was the village's introduction to the 25th Infantry Division, based in Hawaii, which arrived in northern Iraq just weeks ago as part of the largest troop rotation in U.S. military history.
| |
[more]
thanks to Yolanda Flanagan
'Bullet magnets' prepare for Iraqi frontline
The largest troop rotation in US history starts this month - but the reservists have little training or appetite for battle
Iraq civil war: Rumors and reality
| |
As cracks appear in the Bush administration's campaign to portray Iraqi setbacks as the work of foreign terrorists and al-Qaeda, Iraq's homegrown factional fault lines are becoming increasingly evident. Repeated calls for direct elections by Iraq's majority Shi'ites have in effect pushed a succession of US plans and deadlines into the wastebin, with the United Nations issuing repeated cautions against a descent into civil war.
Amid the exponentially expanding US reports of al-Qaeda and foreign-terrorist action in Iraq, the US-led coalition's failures in addressing domestic Iraqi pressures in the war's aftermath have made potential civil war a stark reality. Despite Washington's spin, domestic Iraqi lines have been drawn both along factional borders and between those who are Islamic and secular. The potential for conflict is abundant.
| |
[more]
Commander, USFI?
| |
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is fielding all kinds of questions these days. He is asked about the need for a draft ("No, of course not."). He gets asked about rifts – past, present and future – with the State Department ("What rifts?"). He is asked about the progress in Iraq after "liberation" and says things are better, even that "the electricity is starting to come back on," albeit almost a year after we arrived to save the day.
One topic he will soon be asked about is the new command he is proposing to ensure continued military control over Iraq after a so-called sovereign government takes the reins in July of this year. In the mode of United States Forces Korea (USFK), centered in Seoul since the mid-fifties and formalized just over 25 years ago, we may well see the permanent establishment of a United States Force Iraq, complete with a four-star general in Baghdad to run the place.
The Washington Times reports this plan, and with their connections into the Pentagon hierarchy, it bears a reading. The new command set for Baghdad would be modeled on USFK, the four-star command within Pacific Command that controls US and South Korean Forces.
When this information is combined with the words of other senior personnel, it becomes more believable. Chairman of the JCS Dick Meyers says that while the length of time U.S. troops will be deployed in Iraq is unknowable, it will be for some time. Retired Lt General Jay Garner is far more forthright, recently telling the Government Executive magazine that our troops will be in Iraq for the next few decades.
| |
[more]
thanks to Information Clearing House
I think the Iraqis have a very different idea about the US Army hanging out for the next few decades.
factory art
Heavy Metal Madness: My Smokestack is Bigger than Your Smokestack
There was a time when big industry was esteemed and industry moguls were respected, and graphics of the era reflected their stature. Now, these same images have only bad connotations. In this installment: Gene casts back to a time when industry triumphed, or why smokestacks make the man.
[more]
thanks to Conscientious
korea
Talks aside, North Korea won't give up nukes
| |
The long-awaited second round of "six-way talks" over North Korea's nuclear-weapons program ended, as expected, without agreement in Beijing, and a real solution to the dispute appears to be as distant as ever. It is therefore worth considering seriously the possibility that North Korea has decided once and for all that possession of nuclear weapons is the country's surest form of defense - namely against Washington - and that negotiations are merely aimed at buying time for building up its stockpile.
Pyongyang has suggested such a nuclear-stockpile defensive strategy previously, and an examination of its behavior over the past decade and the increasingly adverse geopolitical environment facing leader Kim Jong-il's regime certainly points to this outcome: Talk but don't give up nukes.
This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that in the six months since the first round of talks, there has been no meaningful shift in the position of the two protagonists: the United States and North Korea.
Herein lies the crux of the problem: if North Korea possesses nuclear weapons - and it is believed already to have from two to five - then the United States' ultimate fears come closer to reality; if North Korea abandons its nukes, its own ultimate fears of US hostile intentions come closer to reality. The truth of the matter is that neither side trusts the other, making it virtually impossible to conduct sincere and productive negotiations.
| |
[more]
fractals
Cosmic Recursive Fractal Flames
[more]
thanks to The J-Walk Weblog
pakistan
THE DEAL
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
| |
On February 4th, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, who is revered in Pakistan as the father of the country’s nuclear bomb, appeared on a state-run television network in Islamabad and confessed that he had been solely responsible for operating an international black market in nuclear-weapons materials. His confession was accepted by a stony-faced Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s President, who is a former Army general, and who dressed for the occasion in commando fatigues. The next day, on television again, Musharraf, who claimed to be shocked by Khan’s misdeeds, nonetheless pardoned him, citing his service to Pakistan (he called Khan “my hero”). Musharraf told the Times that he had received a specific accounting of Khan’s activities in Iran, North Korea, and Malaysia from the United States only last October. “If they knew earlier, they should have told us,” he said. “Maybe a lot of things would not have happened.”
It was a make-believe performance in a make-believe capital. In interviews last month in Islamabad, a planned city built four decades ago, politicians, diplomats, and nuclear experts dismissed the Khan confession and the Musharraf pardon with expressions of scorn and disbelief. For two decades, journalists and American and European intelligence agencies have linked Khan and the Pakistani intelligence service, the I.S.I. (Inter-Service Intelligence), to nuclear-technology transfers, and it was hard to credit the idea that the government Khan served had been oblivious. “It is state propaganda,” Samina Ahmed, the director of the Islamabad office of the International Crisis Group, a nongovernmental organization that studies conflict resolution, told me. “The deal is that Khan doesn’t tell what he knows. Everybody is lying. The tragedy of this whole affair is that it doesn’t serve anybody’s needs.” Mushahid Hussain Sayed, who is a member of the Pakistani senate, said with a laugh, “America needed an offering to the gods—blood on the floor. Musharraf told A.Q., ‘Bend over for a spanking.’”
| |
[more]
Bin Laden and The ISI
| |
There have been a lot of rumors concerning bin Laden's imminent capture lately so I thought I would bring to your attention comments from a recent Stratfor report.
Stratfor says,"the source of the news is clearly inside the Bush administration, which obviously wants the world to know what is coming."
And Stratfor also confirms our earlier suspicion that Musharaff and the US cut a deal about nukes and bin Laden: "[A]dministration sources have said that Washington and Islamabad have cut a deal under which the United States will be permitted to send thousands of troops into Pakistan and will be provided with Pakistani intelligence assistance as to the location of bin Laden. In exchange, the United States will not make an issue of the pardon given Pakistan's chief nuclear scientist, who was charged with disseminating nuclear technology."
| |
[more]
Weekly News Roundup (including Pakistan)
thanks to The Agonist
jesus
The Real Face Of Jesus
Advances in forensic science reveal the most famous face in history.
| |
From the first time Christian children settle into Sunday school classrooms, an image of Jesus Christ is etched into their minds. In North America he is most often depicted as being taller than his disciples, lean, with long, flowing, light brown hair, fair skin and light-colored eyes. Familiar though this image may be, it is inherently flawed. A person with these features and physical bearing would have looked very different from everyone else in the region where Jesus lived and ministered. Surely the authors of the Bible would have mentioned so stark a contrast. On the contrary, according to the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus was arrested in the garden of Gethsemane before the Crucifixion, Judas Iscariot had to indicate to the soldiers whom Jesus was because they could not tell him apart from his disciples. Further clouding the question of what Jesus looked like is the simple fact that nowhere in the New Testament is Jesus described, nor have any drawings of him ever been uncovered. There is the additional problem of having neither a skeleton nor other bodily remains to probe for DNA. In the absence of evidence, our images of Jesus have been left to the imagination of artists. The influences of the artists' cultures and traditions can be profound, observes Carlos F. Cardoza-Orlandi, associate professor of world Christianity at Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta. "While Western imagery is dominant, in other parts of the world he is often shown as black, Arab or Hispanic." And so the fundamental question remains: What did Jesus look like?
| |
[more]
Do you think Mel Gibson might have got Jesus, and everything else, wrong? Just maybe.
peak oil
Will The End of Oil Mean The End of America?
| |
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig tells the story of a South American Indian tribe that has devised an ingenious monkey trap. The Indians cut off the small end of a coconut and stuff it with sweetmeats and rice. They tether the other end to a stake and place it in a clearing.
Soon, a monkey smells the treats inside and comes to see what it is. It can just barely get its hand into the coconut but, stuffed with booty, it cannot pull the hand back out. The Indians easily walk up to the monkey and capture it. Even as the Indians approach, the monkey screams in horror, not only in fear of its captors, but equally as much, one imagines, in recognition of the tragedy of its own lethal but still unalterable greed.
Pirsig uses the story to illustrate the problem of value rigidity. The monkey cannot properly evaluate the relative worth of a handful of food compared to its life. It chooses wrongly, catastrophically so, dooming itself by its own short-term fixation on a relatively paltry pleasure.
America has its own hand in a coconut, one that may doom it just as surely as the monkey. That coconut is its dependence on cheap oil in a world where oil will soon come to an end. The choice we face (whether to let the food go or hold onto it) is whether to wean ourselves off of oil—to quickly evolve a new economy and a new basis for civilization—or to continue to secure stable supplies from the rest of the world by force.
As with Pirsig’s monkey, the alternative consequences of each choice could not be more dramatic. Weaning ourselves off of cheap oil, while not easy, will help ensure the vitality of the American economy and the survival of its political system. Choosing the route of force will almost certainly destroy the economy and doom America’s short experiment in democracy.
To date, we have chosen the second alternative: to secure oil by force. The evidence of its consequences are all around us. They include the titanic US budget and trade deficits funding a gargantuan, globally-deployed military and the Patriot Act and its starkly anti-democratic rescissions of civil liberties. There is little time left to change this choice before its consequences become irreversible.
| |
[more]
bicycles
BikeReader
| |
Tour de France winners undergo a secret initiation involving a malformed baguette and a recording of Placido Domingo. It is not painful but it makes one think.
| |
[more]
thanks to Whole Wheat Radio
voting fraud
Diebold, electronic voting and the vast right-wing conspiracy
| |
If Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell has his way, Diebold will receive a contract to supply touch screen electronic voting machines for much of the state. None of these Diebold machines will provide a paper receipt of the vote.
Diebold, located in North Canton, Ohio, does its primary business in ATM and ticket-vending machines. Critics of Diebold point out that virtually every other machine the company makes provides a paper trail to verify the machine’s calculations. Oddly, only the voting machines lack this essential function.
State Senator Teresa Fedor of Toledo introduced Senate Bill 167 late last year mandating that every voting machine in Ohio generate a “voter verified paper audit trail.” Secretary of State Blackwell has denounced any attempt to require a paper trail as an effort to “derail” election reform. Blackwell’s political career is an interesting one: he emerged as a black activist in Cincinnati supporting municipal charter reform, became an elected Democrat, then an Independent, and now is a prominent Republican with his eyes on the Governor’s mansion.
| |
[more]
thanks to Yolanda Flanagan
shiny aluminum
The fixed gear bicycle project is going slow right now, but it is moving forward. Blaine has the frame in order to remove the braze-ons. He should have it done next week. He's also considering doing a fixie. If he does, it won't be normal. I will have pictures of it, if it happens. But there is still work to do on the components. David, at our local bike shop, adjusted the bearings on my old front hub. It still turns well after all these years but was not very shiny anymore. A little Flitz polish and it's nice and shiny again. I always find polishing well used aluminum bicycle parts to be very satisfying. Taking something used and tarnished and making it shiny again for a renewed life. I know, if I was a real American I would just buy a new one.
I need to make a paint booth for frame painting. Out with the duct tape and cardboard.
weapons of mass destruction
One WMD They Couldn't Hide
The Bravo H-Bomb Test
| |
"There's a story I can tell you", a fellow called Bruno Lat said to me a few years back in Hawaii. "I was 13 at that time. My dad was working with the Navy as a laborer on Kwajalein", an atoll in Lat's native Marshall Islands controlled by the US military. "It was early, early morning. We were all outside on that day waiting in the dark. Everybody was waiting for the Bravo."
That day was fifty years ago, yesterday. March 1, 1954. Bravo was not the first, or the last, just the worst of America's nuclear tests in the Pacific, a fission-fusion-fission reaction, a thermonuclear explosion, an H-Bomb, America's biggest blast. In today's poverty of expression, it would be called a WMD. Except that it was "ours", and so real that days after marveling that some strange sun had lighted the western sky with "all kinds of beautiful colors", young Bruno also took in the sight of refugees from downwind of the blast at Bikini Atoll, miserable and burned and belatedly evacuated to Kwajalein. Their scalp, he recalled, "you could peel it like fried chicken skin".
| |
[more]
griff and hot lights
I've been distracted the last couple of days. My sister, Madelane, called up Tuesday night. She is the one that sent for the information that I've been putting up on the site about my grandfather: Griff's Story. He was a naval combart artist in WWII. I've scanned the paintings, sketches, and drawings that were in his books but I've wanted to getter better quality images. The Naval Historical Center, in Washington, D.C. (the wrong Washington), has 53 pieces by Griff. The Naval Historical Center allows people to come in and take copy pictures of their collection and I've mentioned this to Madelane. Tuesday she told me she has enough money coming back on taxes to fly the both of us back to D.C. so I can shoot Griff's pictures. Now I need to write a letter to the Naval Historical Center and find out how we can make it happen.
I also need to figure out how to shoot flat art. I have a good camera for this — a medium format Mamiya Universal. But, for me, using studio lights has been one of those mysteries of life. I've been wanting to get some strobes but I haven't been able to afford them. Shooting Griff's pictures means I will need to do something for not a lot of money. So Googlin' I went. The Internet will reveal all. Using continuous tungsten lights seemed cheaper than strobes. You know, the round aluminum reflector you get at a hardware store with a significant light bulb in it.
Using One Light
Controlling Light for Photography
Not only is this article about using tungsten lights it's about using one light. That sounds good. It has to be half the price of two lights, right? Well, it was even better than that.
| |
While a studio-type electronic flash unit has the advantage of producing a big punch of dependable, daylight-balanced light, even modest units are much more expensive than a tungsten source. Additionally, a flash meter is required and Polaroid film tests are almost unavoidable if you want to see what the lighting looks like in advance. This poses no financial problem for a pro, but it’s a sizeable investment for those with more limited means. This article will emphasize what you can do using using an economical 500–750W tungsten-halogen (quartz) mini-light. Tungsten-halogen illumination consistency is far greater than short-life photo floods you may have used years ago. Most large camera stores carry them. With their continuous-burning illumination, what you see is what you get—no Polaroid is needed; and your in-camera light meter can be used to determine the exposure.
The Lowell Tota-light is one such mini-light. Smith-Victor makes one too; they call it (odd-ly) a Broad Light. With light stand, umbrella and a few accessories, the total package costs about $300—about a third of the cost of the cheapest, entry-level studio-type electronic flash power pack, lamp unit, stand, flash meter and necessary accessories. I like the Tota-light because it accepts an umbrella directly without a separate swivel umbrella adapter.
| |
It also talks about how shooting flat art with only one light is really a good idea. This is what I wanted to hear.
| |
Here’s where one light is better, even though many lighting texts routinely describe a formula for using two. One light is cleaner, more flexible, and superior when flat art has dimension. Examples: brush strokes in a painting are best seen under singular illumination; a fan of prints laid across a surface are better rendered with a unifying shadow edge; and textured paper is properly revealed under one light, but not two.
| |
[more]
I started to search on Lowel Tota-lights and found all sorts of encouraging comments.
Lowel-light
| |
My first Lowel lights were the Tota-lights because they fold up to a small shape. In their folded form they are totally protected and travel well (all over the world, have never lost a Lowel Tota-light in over twenty-five years). I have used Lowel Tota-lights even outside in the tropical jungles of Belize, Central America. At the remotest Maya ruins in Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala, Lowel Tota-lights have aided in recording, and hence rescuing, information about ancient cultures.
Lowel lights are used world wide. When I was photographing in Australia, I saw Lowel lights in the leading museum of that far away continent. When I was visiting in Denmark, the PhaseOne studio included Lowel lights.
| |
[more]
Bill Pierce's Nuts & Bolts
"Hot Lights"
| |
Stupid Suggestion: Now comes the stupid suggestion. To learn lighting, use tungsten and halogen lights. Still photographers tend to stick to electronic flash. But, I remember being knocked out by the studio portraiture of a young photographer who lit his subjects with household bulbs in hardware-store-type aluminum reflectors. (I also know some old pros who use tungsten.) When you can see it, you really can be more creative with it.
The movie industry has provided us with a lot of lightweight location gear. Lowel-Light makes a huge variety of location gear. Probably the most popular are: (1) the Tota light, a small, rugged flood with a folding gull wing reflector that provides a variety of light patterns and bulb protection when the unit is being transported; (2) the Omni light with a parabolic reflector that can produce a beam angle from 16 to 53 degrees with a standard reflector. Bigger units, smaller units, soft boxes, even focusing spotlights with fresnel lenses, and an unbelievable range of accessories are all available.
| |
[more]
By now I'm getting pretty stoked about these Tota-lights. I checked B&H Photo and they are going for $110 which is a whole lot less than strobes and these seem like real quality units. On to the Lowel site...
lowel
[more]
Unfortunately, all the Lowel catalog pages are PDF files but that's OK. Nice stuff! The Theban Mapping Project uses Tota-lights...
Tota-light, stand, lamps, and umbrella for around $215. Add some foamcore for a reflector and I'm in business. Of course, if I write to the Naval Historical Center and they already have high quality copy negs of Griff's work, I will be disappointed. Not really. I've wanted to do studio lights for a long time and this seems a really good way to do it. I'm excited. And Lowel even has a book on lighting I need to get. It's in my Amazon wish list.
iraq — vietnam on internet time
Ashoura...
by Riverbend
| |
The tension in the air is almost electric. Everyone feels it. It is the beginning of the Islamic year or Muharam, the first month of the Hijri year. This time of the Hijri year is important because of certain historical events that occurred hundreds of years ago. The Prophet Mohammed's remaining family were killed, and some captured, in Karbala, in south-east Iraq. It's a long, sad and involved story.
| |
[more]
Angry Arabs and American Media...
by Riverbend
| |
We were all watching Al-Itijah Al-Mu'akis or "The Opposite Direction" on Al-Jazeera. It was pretty good today. We had just cleared the dinner table and were settling down to watch some film when E. turned the channel to Al-Jazeera expecting a news brief. I instantly recognized the man in the lemon yellow shirt with his longish curly hair pulled back in a ponytail- Asa'ad Abu Khalil. I remembered him from an interview he did on Al-Arabiya or Al-Jazeera- I can't remember which- immediately after the war, slamming Radio Sawa. Tonight, "The Opposite Direction" was hosting Asa'ad Abu Khalil, better known as The Angry Arab, and Ibraheim Al-Ariss, a writer for Al-Hayat newspaper which is based in Lebanon but is funded by some rich Saudi.
The subject was American propaganda in Arab media. Asa'ad Abu Khalil was brilliant. He discussed the effects of American propaganda on current Arab media and the way the current American government was pressuring certain Arab publications and networks into a pro-America stance. Unfortunately, his argument was way above Al-Ariss's head. Al-Ariss apparently thinks that pro-American propaganda is nothing less than a front-page headline saying, "WE LOVE AMERICA!!!"
Asa'ad Abu Khalil was discussing the more subtle changes taking place in some newspapers- the change in terminology, the fact that some newspapers have stopped covering the news and taken to translating articles directly from New York Times or some other American news outlet. He almost gave Ibraheim Al-Iriss, a reddish, portly man, an apoplectic fit. Poor Ibraheim fell short of pounding the table with his fists and throwing crumpled papers at Abu Khalil, who kept admirably cool. In other words, Asa'ad Abu Khalil ibarid il gallub.
| |
[more]
Bremer's constitutional follies
by Helena Cobban
| |
The 24-member group of (mostly) blunderers who were appointed by the occupying forces to be the "Iraqi Governing Council" have been engaging in just-about-impossible contortions and ructions in their attempt to pull together an Interim Basic Law--that is, a sort of transitional constitution for their country--before the end-of-Feb deadline announced by Ayatollah Paul Bremer in November.
This effort has three major problems:
- It's illegal.
- It's quite pointless and diversionary.
- It's unnecessarily divisive in a country that, God knows, has enough other internal divisions to deal with, too.
Need me to run thru the arguments quickly here?
| |
[more]
Feel guilt. Then move on
Those who supported the war because of Bush and Blair's lies now cast themselves as victims. This won't help Iraq's dead and dying
Iraqi Experts Tossed With The Water
Workers Ineligible To Fix Polluted Systems
prints
Dawn and Twilight
woodblock prints of Kawase Hasui (1883-1957)
Morning at Nijubashi
[more]
thanks to plep
Down and out in The Hague
| |
It's been a long time since I've felt so small, uncomfortable and red-faced as during the show of whining and whimpering organized by Israel at The Hague. Colorful posters displaying photographs of 935 terror victims; Zaka rescue team workers led by Yehuda Meshi Zahav wearing their "work clothes"; memorial candles; parents talking about the pain of bereavement; doctors describing the savage nature of the suicide bombers; the wreckage of a burnt-out bus with a bereaved mother standing next to it, distributing "one-way tickets" - these are just some of the sights.
At the Foreign Ministry, these demonstrations are seen as an appropriate "J'accuse" against those who dare to put us in the guilty seat. In practice, it is a display of wretchedness and woe designed to tug at the heartstrings of international public opinion - like beggars who show off the stump of an arm or leg to make the world feel sorry for them.
These sights create a lingering sense of discomfort, not least because Israel is thought of - not only in the Middle East, but all over the world - as a powerhouse. In keeping with that image, the last thing one would think Israel needed was pity. Just this week, Israel received two snazzy new F-16Is capable of flying to anywhere from Libya to Timbuktu. When the rest of the shipment arrives, Israel, with all its problems, will be bigger and stronger than ever before. To see it playing "poor Samson," as Levi Eshkol liked to say, is just not credible.
| |
[more]
Talking with an Islamist
by Helena Cobban
| |
Here's a little fragment from my recent trip to Israel/Palestine that I wanted to share.
I was sitting with a colleague at Bir Zeit University who'd been telling me about the Islamic List having recently swept to (yet another) victory in the Student Council elections. I enquired if I could have a quick talk with one of these student leaders; and soon thereafter a very interesting young man came by.
| |
[more]
Land grab in Gaza casts doubt on pullout
| |
Israel is seizing Palestinian land in Gaza to expand one of the most controversial Jewish settlements three weeks after Ariel Sharon said he intended to remove all settlers from the territory.
| |
[more]
Palestinian refugee issues
by Helena Cobban
| |
I've been thinking a lot about the Palestinian refugee issue these past few days, in connection with a big writing project I'm working on. It's hard issue to discuss much, publicly, here in the US, where much of the hardest of hard-line Israeli rhetoric about the refugees has just been accepted at face value.
That is, such mendacious old canards as (1) the refugees all left their homes in 1948 because the Arab leaders told them to. (Therefore they don't have any "right" to return to their homes... ) Or (2) that the refugee camps are all run as training camps for the Palestinian militant groups and should be disbanded immediately. Or (3) that the Palestinians should all just resettle in the countries where they now are. (What's all this about a "right" of return, anyway?). Or (4), that Arafat only raised the issue of the refugees in late 2000, suddenly and "capriciously", with the sole aim of torpedoing the negotiations. Or (5), that anyway, before the Jews started going to Israel in the 20th century there weren't even many Arabs there at all; the ones who were there just before 1948 were nearly all recent migrants who'd been attracted only by the Jewish wealth being poured into the country to "make it bloom"...
Are those the main ones? Any more?
I've been trying to figure out just why it is that the Palestinian refugee issue pushes such ultra-sensitive buttons for so many Israelis and so many of their supporters worldwide. What's the big deal? Why is it that these ultra-Zionists feel they have to be so combative (defensive) about the refugee question that oftentimes they just refuse to discuss or even examine the claims of the refugees at all?
| |
[more]
Can Israel Ever Live At Peace With The Arabs?
America's Albatross
The Israeli Crisis
shrimp is evil
God Hates Shrimp
| |
Shrimp, crab, lobster, clams, mussels, all these are an abomination before the Lord, just as gays are an abomination. Why stop at protesting gay marriage? Bring all of God's law unto the heathens and the sodomites. We call upon all Christians to join the crusade against Long John Silver's and Red Lobster. Yea, even Popeye's shall be cleansed. The name of Bubba shall be anathema. We must stop the unbelievers from destroying the sanctity of our restaurants.
| |
[more]
thanks to reading & writing
don't forget, jesus was brown
'The Passion' of the Americans
By William Rivers Pitt
| |
The television airwaves have been filled for the last several days with a lot of back-and-forth about Mel Gibson's new film, 'The Passion of The Christ.' A great deal of debate centers around whether Gibson has fashioned a broadside against Jewish people in the manner of the Medieval anti-Semitic passion plays of old. There are plenty of rabbis arguing with Christian ministers on just about any channel you might choose to watch, so I'm going to leave that question to them for the time being.
My question is much simpler: Why would Mel Gibson make a movie about people in the ancient Middle East and cast it with so many white people? To look at the central actors in this film, you'd think Jesus did his work near Manchester, New Hampshire instead of the Holy Land. The answer to that question lies within the United States, the prime market for this film. There are millions of Christians in America, some 25% of whom would characterize themselves as evangelical. It stands to reason that this film would do very well here, especially given the controversy that has surrounded the content.
The whiteness of the cast, however, speaks to a decidedly un-Christian truth that lies near the heart of this republic. Simply put, nailing a white Jesus Christ to the cross on film will generate a far more emotional response from the American viewing public than the crucifixion of a savior who actually looks like he is from the Middle East.
| |
[more]
One kind of wonders if our conservative right wingers would worship someone who would have a hard time getting throught airport security.
sinking to new lows
ShareThePassionOfTheChrist.com
| |
The website of official licensed products for Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.
Our mission is to reach the world with the message of hope by creating jewelry and gifts of exceptional quality, which will inspire people to express and share their faith.
| |
[more]
thanks to Politics in the Zeros
we really should do as we say
U.S. has lost its moral right to preach
By Gideon Levy
| |
Look who's preaching to Israel: Last Wednesday, the U.S. State Department released its annual report on the state of human rights around the world. The chapter devoted to Israel makes the usual detailed and gloomy reading. Washington is critical of all the ills of the occupation, about which the human rights organizations and Israel have long since raised a hue and cry. On the one hand, it will now be hard to claim here that criticism of Israel emanates only from those who hate the country; now even its great friend is pointing a finger of accusation at the administrative detentions (arrest without trial), the mass demolition of houses, the light finger on the trigger, the targeted assassinations, the torture by the Shin Bet security service (which hasn't stopped, according to the report), the deprivation of freedom of movement, the uprooting of trees, and the discrimination against Israel's Arab citizens. From this partial point of view, the report is important.
The other side, however, is that the United States has by its own hand lost its moral right to preach to any country in connection with human rights. To begin with, since 1976, no fewer than 820 people - 35 percent of them blacks - have been executed in the United States. About 43.6 million Americans don't have medical insurance, among them about 8.5 million children. That in itself should stop the U.S. from speaking in the name of justice.
Second, the State Department, which authored the report, represents a state that tramples human rights more than most others. The policeman of the world is naked, especially after Sept. 11, 2001, when security in the United States became - as it is in Israel - a supreme value above all others. In the United States, exactly as in Israel, human rights have become a nuisance, an obstacle to security. According to the organization Human Rights Watch, the United States arrested about 1,000 people after the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, crassly violating their legal rights.
A country that is holding 660 Afghan detainees at Guantanamo without trial and depriving them of basic rights is in no position to criticize administrative detentions carried out by other countries. A country that is holding members of the Iraqi political leadership in detention without trial, far from view, is in no position to complain about the conditions of detention in the prisons of other countries. And a country that is maintaining a tough military occupation regime in Iraq doesn't have the right to fulminate against a different occupation regime, however cruel it may be, in the Palestinian territories
| |
[more]
photography
The Mary Dillwyn Album
| |
It is a great surprise to many that some of the leading pioneers in the early days of photography were Welsh. But the names of John Dillwyn Llewelyn (1810-1882), of Penlle'r-gaer, and Reverend Calvert Richard Jones (1802-1877), of Swansea, are becoming more well-known. Another among the early pioneers was Mary Dillwyn (1816-1906), sister of John Dillwyn Llewelyn, and one of the first women to work in the field.
The album contains forty two salt prints and one loose albumen print. Seventeen of the prints in the album are initialled MD and it is from these photographs that the album became known as the Mary Dillwyn Album. The photographs in the album date from ca.1853 and main themes: flower studies, fowl studies, and portraits reflect the interests of the family. The Dillwyn Llewelyns were a cultured family, especially interested in all aspects of scientific endeavour, and the pages of the album offer an insight on the individuals closely connected with intellectual life of south Wales and beyond. In addition there are a small number dealing with everyday life at Penlle'r-gaer, including two evocative images of building a snowman.
| |
[more]
thanks to wood s lot
corporate thought control
To the "Frontline" and Back
Travels in the Morally Vapid Universe of Corporate-State Media
| |
Traveling across the mainstream American corporate-state television broadcast spectrum with an eye for the sickening truth of United States policy is like watching the stars for certain astronomical occurrences. Most of your time is spent peering into the vapid abyss of nothingness. When you do get a glimmer, you'd better look closely, you'd better look fast, and you need the right equipment to identify, record, and interpret what you're seeing. It's over before you know it, the meaning often unclear, as the corporate-state communications universe returns to its normal state of dull, monotonic, power- and privilege-friendly thought-control.
| |
[more]
thanks to thoughts on the eve of the apocalypse
island living
Here is a site about an island near Australia that isn't New Zealand.
Leatherwood Online
Tasmania's Journal of Discovery
| |
Welcome aboard.
Leatherwood Online, Tasmania's Journal of Discovery is dedicated to sharing the unique lifestyle of this smart, clean, green island.
Tasmania sits between Australia and Antarctica.
| |
[more]
Wonderful articles and photography.
Inveresk Railyards: doors to the past
[more]
economy
If the Face Fits II
| |
LOU DOBBS: We're putting up a graph right now which goes to the -- to that issue. Precisely what you're talking about. Now, why in the world would FICA be limited at $87,000 of earnings, taxing -- taxation on $87,000? Why not carry that straightforwardly through for everyone at higher levels?
JOHNSTON: Well, it's limited to the 90 percent of wages in the country. And the theory is that that's as high a benefit as the government is going to pay. So your benefit caps out, that's why the tax stops. If we simply had a pay as you go tax and it stopped at that end, Lou, I don't think there would be an issue. Since we were told you have to pay in advance. Of course a tax paid in advance costs you a lot more than when you can defer off into the future. That you are going to pay in advance for the benefits.
And now that money has not been spent to pay off the debt. Now Mr. Greenspan says you are not going to get those benefits but we should not raise taxes on those that make millions of dollars a year. It seems to me what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted in 1983 has come true. He said this was thievery and the middle class were going to have their pockets picked by the rich.
[...]
DOBBS: Let's put the graph up. We have a graphic of this from your book that we want to show you maxing Social Security taxes per person doing exactly what David suggested. This is a remarkable -- to look at the income growth from 1970 to 2000, for the bottom, if you will, 99 percent of this country versus the top ... one percent, is staggering. I follow these trends rather carefully but I had no idea of the discrepancy there. (editor's note: ROFLOL)
JOHNSTON: If you chart, Lou, the increase in income for the bottom 99 percent of Americans over that 30-year period, for each dollar that each person got in increased income -- and the average was $2,700, less than a hundred dollars a year -- you made it one inch high. For the top one-one-hundredth of 1 percent, or 27,000 people, it is 625 feet high. 625 feet to one inch.
| |
[more]
digital collages
Istvan Horkay
[more]
thanks to Giornale Nuovo
some good news
Behind Enemy Lines
| |
I spent last night at a fundraiser for a Republican legislator. It was very interesting to hear most of the attendees bitching about Bush. Most of the griping centered around his mishandling of the economy and fiscal matters, with a not-insignificant portion devoted to sniping at the marriage amendment.
But what was really surprising was the table talk at the private dinner after the fundraiser. With two exceptions, everyone at the table declared they would vote for anybody but Bush. One of the exceptions was an absolute die-hard Bush supporter, who declared he would vote for Bush no matter what. The other exception was the legislator, who said he wasn’t sure he could vote for Bush.
| |
[more]
coffee
vacpots
| |
Vacuum coffee brewers came in various shapes, sizes and were made from glass or metal. Vacuum coffee brewers were used extensively during the 1930s, '40s and '50s. Silex was the first to market the stovetop brewer in the mid '20s, see Fry Silex. Silex became the largest producer of these vacuum brewers, see below.E
| |
[more]
thanks to Sublimate
the thing that eats your brain
One Producer of U.S. Beef Wants to Test All Its Cattle
| |
A beef producer in Kansas has proposed testing all its cattle for mad cow disease so it can resume exports to Japan, but it is encountering resistance from the Agriculture Department and other beef producers.
American beef exports have plummeted since Dec. 23 when a cow in Washington State was diagnosed with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or B.S.E., a fatal disease that can be passed to humans who eat infected cattle tissue.
To assure the safety of its meat, the company, Creekstone Farms of Arkansas City, Kan., a subsidiary of the Enterprise Management Group, wants to use rapid diagnostic tests that are routinely used in Japan and many European nations.
But no rapid tests have been approved by the United States Department of Agriculture, and department officials pointed out yesterday that it was against the law for any company to sell or market any unapproved diagnostic test. They said they would not respond to Creekstone's request until they evaluated the legal, regulatory and trade implications raised.
Other meat producers are upset by the company's request, saying it has broken ranks in an industry besieged by bad news. Dan Murphy, vice president for public affairs at the American Meat Industry, said American beef was so safe that widescale testing was unnecessary.
| |
[more]
Why would the Agriculture Department and the beef industry be so afraid of testing? Are they afraid of what they know they will find?
photography
One more of my school series. There may be two more.
School #7
[more]
Update: That's it for the school series. The other two negatives just have too many problems.
griff's story
I've added another section to my grandfather's story as a naval combat artist during WWII. He travels from Cairo to New Delhi, and around New Delhi, from February 22 to March 14, 1944.
REPORT NO. 7
[more]
|
|
|
|
