If the Lancet survey is right, then 2.5% of the Iraqi population - an average of more than 500 people a day - have been killed since the start of the war. [...]
2.5%.
Dead.
In four years.
That's one out of every forty Iraqis who were alive at the beginning of this monstrosity.
These private companies are part of a huge surge in the outsourcing of war, which is extremely evident in Iraq, as well as Afghanistan, Colombia, Haiti, and numerous other countries. Private contractors are the second-largest con- tingent of the “Coalition of the Willing” with a ratio of about one armed con- tractor for every two American soldiers. This is up from a ratio of one to sixty during the first Gulf War. The Pentagon estimates the number of contractors at around 100,000—but this is only an estimate because after four years in Iraq the military is only now beginning a survey to find the size of its contractor force.
"Bean counters in the Pentagon tell us that Army recruitment and retention are in good shape. Problem is, our cumbersome readiness reporting system only informs leaders in Washington of conditions on the ground many months after the force begins to break. Today, anecdotal evidence of collapse is all around. Past history makes some of us sensitive to anecdotes and distrustful of Pentagon statistics. The Army's collapse after Vietnam was presaged by a desertion of mid-grade officers (captains) and non-commissioned officers. Many were killed or wounded. Most left because they and their families were tired and didn't want to serve in units unprepared for war.
If we lose our sergeants and captains, the Army breaks again. It's just that simple. That's why these soldiers are still the canaries in the readiness coal-mine. And, again, if you look closely, you will see that these canaries are fleeing their cages in frightening numbers.
For all those journalists and politicians who keep insisting that there are new "glimmers" of "hope" in Iraq because of the new security plan started 6 weeks ago, here is a sobering statistic from the Iraqi government. (I'm looking at you, John McCain. See below for more on McCain).
Iraqis killed in February: 1806 (64.5/day) Iraqis killed in March: 2078 (67/day)
As the war in Iraq drags on and a favorable outcome seems unlikely, Americans will ask how we got into this land war in Asia. Fingers are already pointed to the neo-conservatives, oil executives, and naive strategists, most of whom have broad ideology and narrow interests, but narrower historical knowledge and no military experience. Yet clearly our generals, who began their careers amid another insurgency, also supported the present war, or at least acquiesced to it, and so are unlikely to emerge blameless. How did our military, which after Vietnam regarded politicians with suspicion and another guerrilla war with dismay, find itself waist-deep in Mesopotamia?
The US is scrambling to head off a "disastrous" Turkish military intervention in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq that threatens to derail the Baghdad security surge and open up a third front in the battle to save Iraq from disintegration.
In the rapidly unfolding crisis in Pakistan, no matter what happens to President Pervez Musharraf -- whether he survives politically or not -- he is a lame duck. He is unable to rein in Talibanization in Pakistan or guide the country toward a more democratic future.
Since March 9, when Musharraf suspended the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, public protests have escalated every day -- as has a violent crackdown by the police and intelligence agencies on the media and the nation's legal fraternity.
Britain has their hostages back but is worthwhile to look at what happened.
Call that humiliation? No hoods. No electric shocks. No beatings. These Iranians clearly are a very uncivilised bunch By Terry Jones
I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this - allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor servicewoman Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing the picture to be posted around the world - have the Iranians no concept of civilised behaviour? For God's sake, what's wrong with putting a bag over her head? That's what we do with the Muslims we capture: we put bags over their heads, so it's hard to breathe. Then it's perfectly acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate them to the press because the captives can't be recognised and humiliated in the way these unfortunate British service people are.
It is also unacceptable that these British captives should be made to talk on television and say things that they may regret later. If the Iranians put duct tape over their mouths, like we do to our captives, they wouldn't be able to talk at all. Of course they'd probably find it even harder to breathe - especially with a bag over their head - but at least they wouldn't be humiliated. And what's all this about allowing the captives to write letters home saying they are all right? It's time the Iranians fell into line with the rest of the civilised world: they should allow their captives the privacy of solitary confinement. That's one of the many privileges the US grants to its captives in Guantánamo Bay.
Our Marines are hostages. Two more were shown on Iranian TV. Petrol bombs burst behind the walls of the British embassy in Tehran. But it's definitely not the war on terror. It's the war of humiliation. The humiliation of Britain, the humiliation of Tony Blair, of the British military, of George Bush and the whole Iraqi shooting match. And the master of humiliation - even if Tony Blair doesn't realise it - is Iran, a nation which feels itself forever humiliated by the West.
A failed American attempt to abduct two senior Iranian security officers on an official visit to northern Iraq was the starting pistol for a crisis that 10 weeks later led to Iranians seizing 15 British sailors and Marines.
A Pakistani tribal militant group responsible for a series of deadly guerrilla raids inside Iran has been secretly encouraged and advised by American officials since 2005, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence sources tell ABC News.
Russian military intelligence services are reporting a flurry of activity by U.S. Armed Forces near Iran's borders, a high-ranking security source said Tuesday.
The Bush administration continues moving closer to a nuclear attack on Iran, and we ignore the obvious buildup at our peril.
Russian media is sounding alarms. In February, ultra-nationalist leader Vladimir Shirinovsky warned that the US would launch a strike against Tehran at the end of this month. Then last week, the Russian News and Information Agency Novosti (RIA-Novosti) quoted military experts predicting the US will attack Iran on April 6th, Good Friday. According to RIA-Novosti, the imminent assault will target Iranian air and naval defense capabilities, armed forces headquarters as well as key economic assets and administration headquarters. Massive air strikes will be deployed, possibly tactical nuclear weapons as well, and the Bush administration will attempt to exploit the resulting chaos and political unrest by installing a pro-US government.
Sound familiar? It's Iraq Déjà vu all over again, and we know how well that war has gone.
Even though my grandaughter,Robyn, left almost a week ago, I'm still recovering. I still need to get her pictures up.
Tuesday I met with a client. It happens that he needs to do 20x30 digital prints and wants to buy a printer that would reside at my house and I would do his printing. He kept talking trying to sell me on the concept. I was willing to say YES right at the beginning but I waited until he finally paused to agree. He needs a 24" wide printer and my vote was for a 24" HP Z3100. He probably won't be able to move on it until this summer, which is fine since I would have to finish off a room in the basement for it. Zoe wasn't excited about have a really large printer as the center of attention in the living room. I would be able to use it for my own printing. There still a few odds and ends I need for the fourth flash.
I have some product photography to do so I'm finally setting up my small-flash strobe kit.
This may be the last hot light shot. It's of my small-flash kit. (Thanks to Strobist.) Two Vivitar 285HVs and two Vivitar 283s along with three umbrella swivels that have an accessory shoe for the flashes and mount on light stands. I have two light stands (not shown) and super clamp, behind the 15 ft. pc cord for mounting the umbrella swivels. In the back are a couple of 43" collapsible umbrellas with a black removable cover so they can be shot into or through. The main flash is fired by a Wein safe synch hot shoe. The Pentax *ist DL doesn't have a pc synch. The Wein fits on the camera hot show and provides a pc synch but the Wein didn't work it fired once in about 40 tries. There are a couple of different optical slaves for firing the other flashes. I'm really anxious to start using these becasue they will give me a lot more flexibility for lighting but I will have to wait until B&H opens back up Wednesday to see if they will exchange the Wein hot shoe. Right now I'm using a pc cord but I will eventually make up some household cords for the flash. This is really a cheap way to get into strobes. I bought one new Vivitar 285HV for $90 and a used one for $45. I bought a used Vivitar for $20 and already had the other. Most of the other gear I bought at Midwest Photo Exchange. They have reasonable prices on lighting gear. Let there be light!
I put up a lot of links about Israel and Zionism. Zionism didn't spring forth upon the world in an immaculate conception. The history of Zionism is tied up with the Askhenazi Jews of Europe. There are other Jewish groups but it's the Askhenazi that created Isreal and largely run it today. The Israeli Askhenazi are the remnants of the Yiddish Civilization of Europe, a civilization that was ending even before the Nazi death camps. Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation, by Paul Kriwaczek, is a history of the Yiddish Civilization beginning with the fall of Jerusalem. Kriwaczek mentioned the photographer Roman Vishniac and his heroic documentation of the end of a way of life as he photographed Jewish communiteies in Eastern Europe. My local library had two of Vishniac's books: A Vanished World and Children of a Vanished World
Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation by Paul Kriwaczek
From amazon:
The Jews of Central and Eastern Europe may not have constituted a "nation" n the conventional sense because they lacked a central political authority and many of the other attributes of the modern nation-state. But they certainly were a civilization, with a common language, religion, and a myriad of shared cultural traits. Kriwaczek tracks the origins, flowering, and destruction of this unique, vibrant, and tenacious culture with a fine mixture of pride, regret, and eloquence. He begins with a haunting visit to the sites of several once-thriving Jewish communities whose current residents have virtually no memory of the Jewish past. Kriwaczek then proceeds with a chronological narrative, commencing with an interesting, often-surprising examination of Jewish centers in the Roman Empire north of the Mediterranean. He describes the gradual shift of Jewish life eastward after the slaughters of Jews in the Rhineland during the era of the Crusades. Out of this horror came the development of a rich culture centered upon religion and the Yiddish language. This is an outstanding survey of a civilization that endured against great odds but has now essentially vanished.
One of Kriwaczek's sources was the diary of Glikl bas Judah, 1647-1724.
Roman Vishniac's A Vanished World is an extraordinary record of the lives of German and Eastern European Jews in the years immediately preceding the Holocaust. Vishniac, a Russian Jew, began to take photographs of village life during World War I, when Russian Jews who lived near the front were accused of being German spies and were deported to Siberia. He later moved to Germany, where he witnessed the horrible events of Kristallnacht and the anti-Jewish legislation that allowed Hitler to declare his enemies stateless and therefore unworthy of international protection. As we study Vishniac's photographs--a surviving fraction of the more than 16,000 he took--we are aware that we are seeing the faces of those soon to die, witnessing a world that has all but perished. Yet that world, of shops and schools, of busy streets and quiet farms, remains with us if only as a ghostly memory, thanks in part to Vishniac's compassionate eye.
Children of a Vanished World by Roman Vishniac
Pictures of children, some of which appeared in A Vanished World.
Roman Vishniac ['vɪʃniæk] (Russian: Роман Вишняк; August 19, 1897 – January 22, 1990) was a renowned Russian-American photographer, best known for capturing on film the culture of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.
Disenchanted Israeli army veterans have turned into guides to one of the bleakest places on the West Bank, the Israeli-held part of Hebron, to highlight what they say is the ugly face of occupation most Israelis never see.
Over the past 20 months, former soldiers have led some 2,500 people, in small groups of around a dozen, mostly Israelis, on grim show-and-tell excursions meant to explain the brutalising effect of daily routine in an occupied city.
Stops on the tours include the positions from where former squad commander Yehuda Shaul says he fired his grenade machinegun, night after night, into a densely populated neighbourhood from where Palestinians, night after night, fired on Jewish settlements.
"A grenade machine gun is an awesome weapon, but it is inaccurate," he says. "The grenades kill everything within a radius of eight metres, injure anyone within a radius of 16. So, at first you worry about hitting innocent civilians. After a while, you shrug off the worries and get used to it. In the end, you look forward to blasting away."
When it was all over, the soldiers gave her a cookie and some halva. And just to be on the safe side, they added a threat: "Don't you dare tell your parents; otherwise we'll kill you," they told her before letting her go, knowing they had done a terrible thing. But little Jihan did tell, and so did her parents: The IDF is using children as human shields.
This is more or less the version we grew up with. Another mythology was that a major invasion took place in '48, a very strong Arab contingent went into Palestine and a very small Jewish army fought against it. It was a kind of David and Goliath mythology, the Jews being the David, the Arab armies being the Goliath, and again it must be a miracle if David wins against the Goliath.
So this is the picture. What we found challenged most of this mythology. First of all, we found out that the Zionist leadership, the Israeli leadership, regardless of the peace plans of the United Nations, contemplated long before 1948 the dispossession of the Palestinians, the expulsion of the Palestinians. So it was not that as a result of the war that the Palestinians lost their homes. It was as a result of a Jewish, Zionist, Israeli, call it what you want, plan that Palestine was ethnically cleansed in 1948 of its original indigenous population.
I got into photography seriously in the early 1970s. It was a black and white world. There were very few color photographers. Doing color was much more difficult that black and white. In the late 1970s I moved out of photography (not completely) into child rearing. I missed Eggleston (here and here) completely. I had seen some Stephen Shore and that had caught my attention. But it was Cape Light by Joel Meyerowitz that hooked me on the possibilities of color. Large format color. When I started getting back into photography 15 years ago, it was in color. Meyerowitz's latest effort, again with large format color, was documenting the clean-up of 9/11 in Aftermath.
Cape Light: Color Photographs by Joel Meyerowitz
From Amazon:
Originally published in 1979, Cape Light became an instant classic and one of the most influential photography books published in the latter part of the 20th century. Common scenestiny figures on a beach, a porch railing against a storm-darkened sky, a blue raft against a summer cottageall are transformed by the poignant light of the Cape and the photographers subtle and luminous vision. This exquisitely printed book captures every nuance of color and light in that unique juncture of sky, sea, and land that is Cape Cod.
Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive by Joel Meyerowitz
From Amazon:
After September 11th, 2001, the Ground Zero site in New York City was classified as a crime scene and only those directly involved in the recovery efforts were allowed inside. The press was also prohibited from the site, but with the help of the Museum of the City of New York and sympathetic city officials, award-winning photographer Joel Meyerowitz managed to obtain unlimited access. By ingenuity and sheer determination, he was the only photographer granted unimpeded right of entry into Ground Zero.
For 9 months, during the day and night, Meyerowitz photographed "the pile," as the World Trade Center came to be known, and the over 800 people a day that were working in it. Influenced by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange's work for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, he knew that if he didn't make a photographic record of the unprecedented recovery efforts, "there would be no history."
Even though Meyerowitz is now shooting 8x10 color, he started out as a black and white 35mm street photographer and co-wrote the definitive book on street photography. Here are some Meyerowitz links:
There's a helluva difference between Cairo University and the campus of Valdosta in the Deep South of the United States. I visited both this week and I feel like I've been travelling on a gloomy spaceship - or maybe a time machine - with just two distant constellations to guide my journey. One is clearly named Iraq; the other is Fear. They have a lot in common.
The politics department at Cairo's vast campus is run by Dr Mona El-Baradei - yes, she is indeed the sister of the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency - and her students, most of them young women, almost all scarved, duly wrote out their questions at the end of the turgid Fisk lecture on the failings of journalism in the Middle East. "Why did you invade Iraq?" was one. I didn't like the "you" bit, but the answer was "oil". "What do you think of the Egyptian government?" At this, I looked at my watch. I reckon, I told the students, that I just had time to reach Cairo airport for my flight before Hosni Mubarak's intelligence lads heard of my reply.
Much nervous laughter. Well, I said, new constitutional amendments to enshrine emergency legislation into common law and the arrest of Muslim Brotherhood supporters was not a path to democracy. And I ran through the US State Department's list of Egyptian arbitrary detentions, routine torture and unfair trials. I didn't see how the local constabulary could do much about condemnation from Mubarak's American friends. But it was purely a symbolic moment. These cheerful, intelligent students wanted to see if they would hear the truth or get palmed off with another bromide about Egypt's steady march to democracy, its stability - versus the disaster of Iraq - and its supposedly roaring success. No one doubts that Mubarak's boys keep a close eye on his country's students.
But the questions I was asked after class told it all. Why didn't "we" leave Iraq? Are "we" going to attack Iran? Did "we" really believe in democracy in the Middle East? In fact "our" shadow clearly hung over these young people.
Thirty hours later, I flicked on the television in my Valdosta, Georgia, hotel room and there was a bejewelled lady on Fox TV telling American viewers that if "we" left Iraq, the "jihadists" would come after us. "They want a Caliphate that will take over the world," she shrieked about a report that two children had deliberately been placed in an Iraqi car bomb which then exploded. She ranted on about how Muslim "jihadists" had been doing this "since the 1970s in Lebanon". It was tosh, of course. Children were never locked into car bombs in Beirut - and there weren't any "jihadists" around in the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s. But fear had been sown. Now that the House of Representatives is talking about the US withdrawal by August 2008, fear seems to drip off the trees in America.
This is the story you have not heard and the place you have not seen. In an signless, nondescript, windowless 1-story garage workspace in SOHO, bicycles are being made - click here. These creations are the work of Josh Hadar, born in Maplewood, NJ and a NYC resident since 1983. A Boston University film major, Josh was until recently a family partner in Studio 54. With a little friendly persistence, he was kind enough to permit me a short interview and these exclusive photos - click here. The bikes are hybrids - they can either be peddled or run on a small gas or electric motor. They are all handmade - a lot of cutting, tube bending, grinding and welding goes into these graceful, chopperlike vehicles - about 4 to 5 weeks time goes into each one. Only a dozen or so have been made over the last two years. He has a number of newer designs not yet completed which he asked that I not photograph. Josh assured me that a couple of these are street ridden in the city, but I have never seen one. Keep a very sharp eye out for a rare sighting ...
The bee population in North American and Europe is crashing at an alarming rate. Bees pollinate plants, without them, there will be no crops. Causes for the population crash, which is up to 70% on the east coast of the US, appear to be the usual culprits; monoculture, pesticides, and GM crops.
This is genuinely scary stuff. Celsias has a series of in-depth articles that explain what’s happening.
New "landmark" research finds that alcohol and tobacco are more dangerous than some illegal drugs like marijuana or Ecstasy and should be classified as such in legal systems, according to a new British study.
In research published Friday in The Lancet magazine, Professor David Nutt of Britain's Bristol University and colleagues proposed a new framework for the classification of harmful substances, based on the actual risks posed to society. Their ranking listed alcohol and tobacco among the top 10 most dangerous substances.
