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all war, all the time
In the almost five years that I've been doing this blog I would have to say this essay is the most important in giving an understanding of the madness surrounding us. A *must* read.
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich on the New American Militarism
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At the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power. The skepticism about arms and armies that pervaded the American experiment from its founding, vanished. Political leaders, liberals and conservatives alike, became enamored with military might.
The ensuing affair had and continues to have a heedless, Gatsby-like aspect, a passion pursued in utter disregard of any consequences that might ensue. Few in power have openly considered whether valuing military power for its own sake or cultivating permanent global military superiority might be at odds with American principles. Indeed, one striking aspect of America's drift toward militarism has been the absence of dissent offered by any political figure of genuine stature.
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Under the terms of that consensus, mainstream politicians today take as a given that American military supremacy is an unqualified good, evidence of a larger American superiority. They see this armed might as the key to creating an international order that accommodates American values. One result of that consensus over the past quarter century has been to militarize U.S. policy and to encourage tendencies suggesting that American society itself is increasingly enamored with its self-image as the military power nonpareil
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Since the end of the Cold War, having come to value military power for its own sake, the United States has abandoned this principle and is committed as a matter of policy to maintaining military capabilities far in excess of those of any would-be adversary or combination of adversaries. This commitment finds both a qualitative and quantitative expression, with the U.S. military establishment dwarfing that of even America's closest ally. Thus, whereas the U.S. Navy maintains and operates a total of twelve large attack aircraft carriers, the once-vaunted [British] Royal Navy has none -- indeed, in all the battle fleets of the world there is no ship even remotely comparable to a Nimitz-class carrier, weighing in at some ninety-seven thousand tons fully loaded, longer than three football fields, cruising at a speed above thirty knots, and powered by nuclear reactors that give it an essentially infinite radius of action. Today, the U.S. Marine Corps possesses more attack aircraft than does the entire Royal Air Force -- and the United States has two other even larger "air forces," one an integral part of the Navy and the other officially designated as the U.S. Air Force. Indeed, in terms of numbers of men and women in uniform, the U.S. Marine Corps is half again as large as the entire British Army--and the Pentagon has a second, even larger "army" actually called the U.S. Army -- which in turn also operates its own "air force" of some five thousand aircraft.
All of these massive and redundant capabilities cost money. Notably, the present-day Pentagon budget, adjusted for inflation, is 12 percent larger than the average defense budget of the Cold War era. In 2002, American defense spending exceeded by a factor of twenty-five the combined defense budgets of the seven "rogue states" then comprising the roster of U.S. enemies.16 Indeed, by some calculations, the United States spends more on defense than all other nations in the world together. This is a circumstance without historical precedent.
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The new American militarism also manifests itself through an increased propensity to use force, leading, in effect, to the normalization of war. There was a time in recent memory, most notably while the so-called Vietnam Syndrome infected the American body politic, when Republican and Democratic administrations alike viewed with real trepidation the prospect of sending U.S. troops into action abroad. Since the advent of the new Wilsonianism, however, self-restraint regarding the use of force has all but disappeared. During the entire Cold War era, from 1945 through 1988, large-scale U.S. military actions abroad totaled a scant six. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, they have become almost annual events. The brief period extending from 1989's Operation Just Cause (the overthrow of Manuel Noriega) to 2003's Operation Iraqi Freedom (the overthrow of Saddam Hussein) featured nine major military interventions. And that count does not include innumerable lesser actions such as Bill Clinton's signature cruise missile attacks against obscure targets in obscure places, the almost daily bombing of Iraq throughout the late 1990s, or the quasi-combat missions that have seen GIs dispatched to Rwanda, Colombia, East Timor, and the Philippines. Altogether, the tempo of U.S. military interventionism has become nothing short of frenetic.
As this roster of incidents lengthened, Americans grew accustomed to -- perhaps even comfortable with -- reading in their morning newspapers the latest reports of U.S. soldiers responding to some crisis somewhere on the other side of the globe. As crisis became a seemingly permanent condition so too did war. The Bush administration has tacitly acknowledged as much in describing the global campaign against terror as a conflict likely to last decades and in promulgating -- and in Iraq implementing -- a doctrine of preventive war.
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Thus has the condition that worried C. Wright Mills in 1956 come to pass in our own day. "For the first time in the nation's history," Mills wrote, "men in authority are talking about an ‘emergency' without a foreseeable end." While in earlier times Americans had viewed history as "a peaceful continuum interrupted by war," today planning, preparing, and waging war has become "the normal state and seemingly permanent condition of the United States." And "the only accepted ‘plan' for peace is the loaded pistol."
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camera straps
I am now a camera strap manufacturer. I've sold four already! I had a friend back in the 1970s who thought that big straps on small cameras was wrong. He had a Leica M3 with a thin leather strap. I think he was right. I've been making my own leather camera straps from scrap belt leather from one of my customers, Ace Leather Goods. I recently traded one of the straps for some tasteful leather camera covering. Bob liked the strap so much that he said that if I could make one in black he would buy it from me. So I did. Bob hangs out at Rangefinder Forum. I figured there were other like minded souls there so I made a little web page that people could order from. As Bob said: "I think these straps are elegant and rugged all at once." Check it out if you own a camera. I'm putting a link to it under the navigation bar.
gordy coale's camera straps
I make wrist straps...
...and neck straps.
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responsibility
A must read essay about crimes of the past that we have benefited from. That past isn't always far away.
Missions and killing fields
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After reading Kristof I realized that it wasn't the Cambodian pieces themselves that bothered me. I have nothing but sympathy for the people telling these horrible stories as individuals. We all need to hear their stories, and understand to the bone the brutality human beings are capable of, so we can't ever wallow in the excuse that we don't believe such things can happen. But together the pieces on the horror of the Khmer Rouge leave an impression that such crimes are something we have nothing to do with, and that the only crimes that count are the ones that happen after we walk away. Kristof merely voices what was already implicit in the collection, without context, of the three essays: The United States must save the world from monsters.
And that allows us to wallow in the belief that while human rights crimes may be committed, they never happen when we're around. That's a lie, and a dangerous one.
* * * * * * * * * *
Over the next few weeks, I'll running to the store to buy tacky glue, and posterboard, and tempura, and whatever else my daughter needs to build her little gulag on the kitchen table. I'm hoping to avoid the sugar cube option, but it's her project, her call. I doubt I'll tell her about Father Quintana. I don't even let her watch PG-13 movies. I don't want to spoil her project. She's 10, and unlike Kristof and whoever wrote the gooey pamphlet from the Santa Cruz mission, she's entitled to the innocence of being 10.
But at some point I want her to understand how many of her privileges rest on old, half-forgotten crimes. Because if she doesn't understand that, whoever plays Nicholas Kristof's part in her generation will have no difficulty convincing her that the world is full of monsters to be slain, and the only danger is the refusal to build the mechanisms to slay them.
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photography
CHILDHOOD: Adventures in Neverland
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thanks to Conscientious
iraq
This is an excellent overview of where we are in Iraq...
Looking at Iraq
by Steve Gilliard
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Every day, US forces go out, take casualities and go back to their bases, trying to survive yet another attack that night. The US, in two years, have lost lives and material, but gained little. There is not one area the US can say that guerrillas cannot operate. And that is the most important fact. After two years and 1500 dead, the guerrillas control the highway to the airport, Baghdad's main drags and the country's highways.
This is not winning.
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How not to fight a war
by Steve Gilliard
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There is a limit to the stress men can take, and send them back to intense combat is one way to ensure they fail and unless the extremely unpopular draft is reinstituted, the pool of new recruits is limited. Even poor kids would rather work in Wal Mart than patrol Iraq.
How bad is it?
All war brings tragedy, but here's a story from a recent Nightline.
A soldier was in Iraq four days before he was wounded. He was sent home and in short order was found to have uncontrolled shakes and PTSD. He lives alone on his farm. He can't work. His wife left him, after she came out of the bathroom one night with a towel wrapped around her head and he pointed a gun at her. He wants to finish his degree, but he can't concentrate long enough to attend school. So he lives, alone and scarred on a Texas farm.
When the warbloggers talk about how we "liberated" Iraq, remember that soldier. He, not Assrocket and Goldberg, is paying the price for this war. It's easy to talk tough and cheer others on. It is very difficult to climb into a truck with an M-4 and drive around an Iraqi town every day for a year. And for some people, it never, ever ends. Even if they have all their limbs.
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The Girl Blogger from Iraq
Riverbend talks about her life, Iraq, and the world at large -- and how her blog makes sense of them all.
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On Aug. 17, 2003, Riverbend posted the first entry of her blog, where she introduced herself to her readers: "I'm female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. That's all you need to know. It's all that matters these days anyway."
Nearly two years later, the readers of “Baghdad Burning” know a whole lot more – both about Riverbend and Iraq. We now know that she has not just survived the war, but prevailed over its horrors, emerging from its ruins as a passionate advocate for her people and an incisive critic of the occupation. Even the most casual visitor to her site cannot fail to be impressed by her insight into the tragic, onerous, and sometimes absurd reality of everyday life in Iraq. As Village Voice correspondent James Ridgeway notes in the introduction to her new book -- an eponymously named collection of her blog entries -- "this anonymous 'girl blog' has made the war and occupation real in terms that no professional journalist could hope to achieve."
She responded to AlterNet's questions via e-mail from her home in Baghdad.
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thanks to Antiwar.com
Riverbend's blog, Baghdad Burning, should be required reading for everyone!
What I Didn't See in Iraq
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Trust me when I tell you things are so much better in Iraq," said one US military official to me on my recent visit to that war-ravaged country. I didn't know whether to scream or pull the remaining two strands of hair out of my head. I was in Iraq as part of a delegation of eight members of Congress, led by House minority leader Nancy Pelosi. Everything we have been told about Iraq by the Bush Administration has either been an outright lie or overwhelmingly false. There were no weapons of mass destruction; we have not been greeted as liberators; and the cost in terms of blood and treasure has outpaced even their worst-case scenarios. Trust is something I cannot give to this Administration.
If things in Iraq are so much better, why are we not decreasing the number of US forces there? Why is the insurgency showing no signs of waning? Why are we being told that in a few months the Administration will again ask Congress for billions of dollars more to fight the war? Why, according to the World Food Program, is hunger among the Iraqi people getting worse? It's time for some candor, but candor is hard to come by in Iraq.
We were in Iraq for one day--for security reasons, it is US policy that Congressional delegations are not allowed to spend the night. We spent most of our time in the heavily fortified Green Zone, which serves as coalition headquarters. It's the most heavily guarded encampment I've ever seen--and it still gets attacked. I even had armed guards accompany me to the bathroom. The briefings we received from US military and diplomatic officials were, to say the least, unsatisfying. The Nixonian approach that our military and diplomatic leaders have adopted in dealing with visiting members of Congress is aimed more at saving face than at engaging in an honest dialogue. At first, our briefers wanted to get away with slick slide presentations, but we insisted on asking real questions and attempting to get real answers.
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thanks to Antiwar.com
Iraqi Lawmaker Says U.S. Soldier Grabbed His Throat
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An Iraqi lawmaker accused a U.S. soldier of grabbing him by the throat and shoving him to the ground Tuesday after he parked his car in Baghdad's Green Zone.
Fattah al-Sheikh, an independent, said he had parked his car before a session of parliament when U.S. troops approached him and told him he didn't have the right permit.
He said a soldier then kicked his car, insulted him and grabbed him by the throat with both hands as others looked on, before tying his hands behind his back with white plastic cuffs and shoving him to the ground.
"I don't speak English and so I said to the Iraqi translator with them, 'Tell them that I am a member of parliament,' and he replied, 'To hell with you, we are Americans,"' Sheikh told parliament, fighting back tears as he recounted the story.
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thanks to Drudge Report
20 Killed, 42 Wounded
US Troops Humiliate Member of Parliament
by Juan Cole
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A tearful member of the Iraqi parliament, Fattah al-Shaikh, stood up before other MPs and told the story of how he was attacked and detained by US troops when he attempted to enter the Green Zone, the heavily fortified area near downtown Baghdad where parliament is held and the US embassy is situated. Wire services report that he said, '“I don’t speak English and so I said to the Iraqi translator with them, ‘Tell them that I am a member of parliament’, and he replied, ‘To hell with you, we are Americans.'" '
Al-Hayat reported that al-Shaikh, a member of the Muqtada al-Sadr bloc, said the US troops put their boots on his neck and handcuffed him. The Iraqi parliament was thrown into an uproar by the account, and demanded a US apology from the highest levels of government. Others demanded that the site of parliament meetings be changed. (This is not the first complaint by a parliamentarian of being manhandled).
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The incident will seem minor to most Americans and few will see this Reuters photograph reprinted from al-Hayat (which is not the one featured at the Reuters story on the incident on the Web). But such an incident is a serious affront to national honor, and Iraqi male politicians don't often weep.
It should be remembered that someday not so far from now, the US will come to the Iraqi parliament for a status of forces agreement (SOFA), and Fattah al-Shaikh and his friend will vote on it.
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Senate OKs $81B for Iraq, Afghanistan
thanks to Antiwar.com
space exploration
Build your own paper rocket
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thanks to The Cartoonist
the constitution
This is a must read.
The Unregulated Offensive
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But as Thomas's presence on the court suggests, it is perhaps just as likely that the next justice -- or chief justice -- will be sympathetic to the less well-known but increasingly active conservative judicial movement that Epstein represents. It is sometimes known as the Constitution in Exile movement, after a phrase introduced in 1995 by Douglas Ginsburg, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. (Ginsburg is probably best known as the Supreme Court nominee, put forward by Ronald Reagan, who withdrew after confessing to having smoked marijuana.) By ''Constitution in Exile,'' Ginsburg meant to identify legal doctrines that established firm limitations on state and federal power before the New Deal. Unlike many originalists, most adherents of the Constitution in Exile movement are not especially concerned about states' rights or judicial deference to legislatures; instead, they encourage judges to strike down laws on behalf of rights that don't appear explicitly in the Constitution. In addition to the scholars who articulate the movement's ideals and the judges who sympathize with them, the Constitution in Exile is defended by a litigation arm, consisting of dozens of self-styled ''freedom-based'' public-interest law firms that bring cases in state and federal courts, including the Supreme Court.
Critics of the movement note, with some anxiety, that it has no shortage of targets. Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago (and a longtime colleague of Epstein's), will soon publish a book on the Constitution in Exile movement called ''Fundamentally Wrong.'' As Sunstein, who describes himself as a moderate, recently explained to me, success, as the movement defines it, would mean that ''many decisions of the Federal Communications Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and possibly the National Labor Relations Board would be unconstitutional. It would mean that the Social Security Act would not only be under political but also constitutional stress. Many of the Constitution in Exile people think there can't be independent regulatory commissions, so the Security and Exchange Commission and maybe even the Federal Reserve would be in trouble. Some applications of the Endangered Species Act and Clean Water Act would be struck down as beyond Congress's commerce power.'' In what Sunstein described as the ''extreme nightmare scenario,'' the right of individuals to freedom of contract would be so vigorously interpreted that minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws would also be jeopardized.
Any movement with such ambitious goals must be patient and take the long view about its prospects for success. Michael Greve, an active defender of the Constitution in Exile at Washington's conservative American Enterprise Institute, argues that to achieve its goals, the movement ultimately needs not just one or two but four more Supreme Court justices sympathetic to its cause, as well as a larger transformation in the overall political and legal culture. ''I think what is really needed here is a fundamental intellectual assault on the entire New Deal edifice,'' he says. ''We want to withdraw judicial support for the entire modern welfare state. I'd retire and play golf if I could get there.''
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thanks to daily KOS
depth of field
You don't see those mysterious markings on lenses much anymore.
Those mysterious markings at the base of the lens show the area that is in focus. I use them all the time.
THE HYPERFOCAL DISTANCE METHOD OF FOCUSING
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The use of the Hyperfocal Distance of a lens is a most useful focusing method for the photographer to learn. Unfortunately, in this day of computer controlled cameras, it is a dying technique. You might ask why this is an important technique to learn, and that?s a fair question. To answer it, let me summarize the advantages and disadvantages of the method.
Advantages:
1. It allows you to maximize the depth of field of the lens. This can be especially useful in photographing scenics.
2. It is extremely fast, as it allows you to have the camera prefocused to cover a wide range of subject distances. It is much faster than an autofocus camera can operate in most instances.
3. Because of the above, it is perhaps the best method to use for candids, and street photography. You can raise the prefocused camera to your eye and shoot, and lower the camera before anyone is aware of what you are doing.
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But, what to do when your new lens doesn't have these magical markings? Fear not...
DOFMaster - DEPTH OF FIELD CALCULATORS
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Lenses used to have easy-to-use depth of field scales. Those scales were great tools. Unfortunately, vendors rarely put scales on new lenses. Until now, you've had to use confusing tables of numbers for depth of field calculations.
Use DOFMaster to print scales that work in the same manner as depth of field scales on lenses. Quickly read the near focus distance, far focus distance, and hyperfocal distance. Print and assemble calculators to take into the field.
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thanks to DANGEROUSMETA!
fdr
A Radical in the White House
by Bob Herbert
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Last week - April 12, to be exact - was the 60th anniversary of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. "I have a terrific headache," he said, before collapsing at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Ga. He died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage on the 83rd day of his fourth term as president. His hold on the nation was such that most Americans, stunned by the announcement of his death that spring afternoon, reacted as though they had lost a close relative.
That more wasn't made of this anniversary is not just a matter of time; it's a measure of the distance the U.S. has traveled from the egalitarian ideals championed by F.D.R. His goal was "to make a country in which no one is left out." That kind of thinking has long since been consigned to the political dumpster. We're now in the age of Bush, Cheney and DeLay, small men committed to the concentration of big bucks in the hands of the fortunate few.
To get a sense of just how radical Roosevelt was (compared with the politics of today), consider the State of the Union address he delivered from the White House on Jan. 11, 1944. He was already in declining health and, suffering from a cold, he gave the speech over the radio in the form of a fireside chat.
After talking about the war, which was still being fought on two fronts, the president offered what should have been recognized immediately for what it was, nothing less than a blueprint for the future of the United States. It was the clearest statement I've ever seen of the kind of nation the U.S. could have become in the years between the end of World War II and now. Roosevelt referred to his proposals in that speech as "a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race or creed."
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world pinhole photography day
Blaine reminded me that tomorrow, April 24, is World Pinhole Photography Day. I did some shots last for last year's World Pinhole Photography Day in Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Unfortunately, when I looked at the negatives I could see some weird flare in almost all the pictures. I didn't get around scanning the pictures for several months and found one image where the flare sort of fit but it was too late to submit. Fixing the pinhole has taken a back seat to all the "new" cameras I've been getting. I guess I will have to take another shot at it tonight and take some pinhole pictures tomorrow.
Last year's pinhole image that I scanned to late to submit
Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day
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1. Before April 24, 2005: Get your equipment ready!
2. On April 24, 2005: Go out and make your pinhole images!
3. After April 24, 2005: Process your images, and submit them on this site!
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the pope
14 Thoughts For The New Pope
Condoms. Female priests. Stop gay bashing. And dammit, do something about Christian rock
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OK, first things first.
They say you're a hard-line conservative, new pope Joseph Ratzinger (a.k.a. Benedict XVI) of Germany. Very old school and drab, a real lover of repressive, bitter, orthodox doctrine. No fun at parties. Catholic in chains. What glorious times of joy and progress the church is in for, millions now say, dejected sarcasm dripping from their once-hopeful mouths.
See, most spiritually progressive peoples the world over were sort of hoping for a new pope who would recognize this as a historic opportunity, an unprecedented moment for the church to finally get with the times, modernize, shake off the dust and roll some bones and pry open some of those old dungeon doors and bring in some goddamn light.
You know what we wanted? More sex. Love. Good TV. Gender freedom. Better wine. Less sneering doctrine and homophobia and sexism and more fun with condoms and music and spiritual joy. But, instead, we got you.
So then, before you venture forth on your ostensible path of increasingly bitter conservative dogma, Benedict, you need to be reminded. Right now. Before it's too late. Is it already too late?
Here, then, 14 random thoughts and ideas, all for you, Benedict, on the off-off chance you're open to such things. Which of course, you're probably not. But trust me here, this is what we were hoping for. And you need to hear it.
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reality keeps getting in the way
It's been a week since I've posted anything. Anybody still out there? It's been a crazy week. Zoe's mom (she has Alzheimer's) is living with us but all her stuff was at her house. We have a buyer for her house and now we are in the middle of packing her house and having a storage space built in our garage. In order to build the storage space in the garage we had to move all the boxes in the garage to the basement. In order to move all the boxes to the basement...well, you get the idea. That and I'm now a camera strap manufacturer, but more about that later. And did I mention the pesky customers who want me to work on their websites?
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