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afghanistan On the precipice in Afghanistan The United States military is now engaged in its largest operation against insurgents in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, involving the deployment of 2,000 of the 11,500 US-led troops in the country to violence-plagued sections of the east and south. The offensive is codenamed Operation Avalanche, which carries with it the unfortunate connotation that the country is heading for a precipitous slide into complete chaos. And all the indicators point that way. On Tuesday, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan presented his report on Afghanistan, and warned that international efforts to rebuild the country may fail unless the security situation improves. He called for better protection for UN and relief workers and another international meeting to boost financial and political support for Afghanistan. Another aid worker was killed this week, the second in a month.
Annan warned that the lack of security was hindering what he called the "critical political process" - an apparent reference to Afghanistan's meeting this week to adopt a new constitution. The grand council, or loya jirga, was to open meetings in Kabul on Wednesday. But it has been delayed until at least Saturday because delegates face delays in traveling to the capital. In Kandahar - the former spiritual capital of the Taliban - Zabul, Paktia and Paktika, the resistance is led by Taliban commanders. But despite having a very strong support base among the masses, the resistance is still at this stage a guerrilla movement. In Jalalabad, Kunar and Logar, where Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami is calling the shots, the resistance has more of a political, mass movement color as local warlords, tribal chiefs and ordinary citizens are more directly involved. As a result, resistance supply lines for arms, food and human resources have been been established in these regions.
Significantly, these areas are not far from Kabul.
photography
 Heavy munitions were brought up to the mouth of the Salang Tunnel by Ahmed Shah Massoud in case he needed to blow the tunnel. These Soviet cluster bombs now lie in the grounds of Olang Elementary School. [more] thanks to dublog
infallibility If you only read one thing today, make it this post from Body and Soul. The Doctrine of American Infallibility
 A rambling post in search of a complete thought "Catholics have fallen out of the healthy old habit of reminding each other how sinful Popes can be." -- Garry Wills Following hard upon a raid which killed nine Afghan children last week, yesterday the military announced that six more children died in an assault on a weapons compund. There were enormous differences in tone in the way news outlets headlined the story:
Children found dead? We attacked, and later we found some dead children, but we won't be so radical as to assume that the former resulted in the latter? For Christ's sake, are we so politically skittish that we can't tell a simple truth: The US was recently responsible for the deaths of at least 15 children.
drunks
Heavy Metal Madness: Seeing Pink Elephants
 As late as the '60s, drunks were still pretty happy as illustrated in this card deck, each festooned with a different drinking cartoon on the back. thanks to Coudal Partners
voting E-mail stolen from Diebold is a call to gouge Maryland An e-mail found in a collection of files stolen from Diebold Elections Systems' internal database recommends charging Maryland "out the yin-yang" if the state requires Diebold to add paper printouts to the $73 million voting system it purchased. The e-mail from "Ken," dated Jan. 3, 2003, discusses a (Baltimore) Sun article about a University of Maryland study of the Diebold system: "There is an important point that seems to be missed by all these articles: they already bought the system. At this point they are just closing the barn door. Let's just hope that as a company we are smart enough to charge out the yin if they try to change the rules now and legislate voter receipts." "Ken" later clarifies that he meant "out the yin-yang," adding, "any after-sale changes should be prohibitively expensive."
The e-mail has been cited by advocates of voter-verified receipts, who say estimates of the cost of adding printers -- as much as $20 million statewide -- have been bloated. thanks to Eschaton
photography
 [more] thanks to dublog
environment Whales Reveal Man's Damaging Impact on Oceans Sailing the world's remotest seas in search of the awesome sperm whale, the steel-hulled Odyssey has been dredging up some dark secrets about mankind's damaging impact on the oceans. A scientific research vessel circumnavigating the globe, the 93-foot sailing boat has been tracking the giant whales in the hope that they may hide in their bulk important clues to the state of the world's seas.
The mission is not over, but the early indications are ominous. Pollutants, the debris of man's life on land, have poisoned the waters that dominate the planet. thanks to Liberal Arts Mafia
shirt art The Vintage Hawaiian Shirt: An Artistic Retrospective
 [more] thanks to dublog
dean The secret of Dean's success has been twofold. Alone among the serious Democratic candidates he understood that the party was shirking its obligation to oppose -- indeed, that the grass roots was furious at the failure of its leaders to realize this. Second, his campaign became the real Meetup for millions of Americans who'd had no place to go to affect politics in the age of Bush. Dean's edge is that his campaign has provided thousands of young Deaniacs with a dimension of meaning that their hitherto disaggregated lives may have lacked. No other candidate is within light-years of offering that. In a sense, Al Gore's decision to endorse Dean is emblematic of the growing realization of the party's establishmentarians that they're outsiders after all. But Gore's been on this path for some time now. He was, we should remember, the first major Democrat to oppose Bush's war, speaking out against it in August 2002. Since losing the presidential race at the Supreme Court, he's also called for single-payer health care and recently come out against renewing our new-age version of star chamber justice, the USA Patriot Act. Gore's old entourage, however, remains, literally and figuratively, on K Street, from where his former chief of staff, Ron Klain, helps steer the insider-dominated Wesley Clark campaign. There are no outsiders on K Street; it's where Democrats go when they want to make deals even when they're otherwise on the outs. Gore clearly has decided that K Street's not for him, and so much the better for Gore.
Can a band of outsiders beat George W. Bush? Clearly, the congressional wing of the Democrats can only benefit from embracing its outsider status, but is the same true for the aspiring presidential wing? There are limits to the Meetup approach to building a presidential majority, but no one's ever tried it before, and we don't know what those limits are. thanks to daily KOS
typography Last summer I spent a couple of days reading a biography about Fred Goudy, and the weeks after I had romatic daydreams of starting my own letterpress. A few months ago I purchased a beautiful type specimen, manufactured and signed by the good Frederic, a Village Press type catalogue from 1914. The specimen shows the typefaces Kennerly, Forum Title, initial letters and some of Village Press own borders and florals. I thought I would share it with you.
 [more] thanks to Coudal Partners
iraq — vietnam on internet time This is a must read.
MOVING TARGETS The Bush Administration has authorized a major escalation of the Special Forces covert war in Iraq. In interviews over the past month, American officials and former officials said that the main target was a hard-core group of Baathists who are believed to be behind much of the underground insurgency against the soldiers of the United States and its allies. A new Special Forces group, designated Task Force 121, has been assembled from Army Delta Force members, Navy seals, and C.I.A. paramilitary operatives, with many additional personnel ordered to report by January. Its highest priority is the neutralization of the Baathist insurgents, by capture or assassination. The revitalized Special Forces mission is a policy victory for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has struggled for two years to get the military leadership to accept the strategy of what he calls “Manhunts”—a phrase that he has used both publicly and in internal Pentagon communications. Rumsfeld has had to change much of the Pentagon’s leadership to get his way. “Knocking off two regimes allows us to do extraordinary things,” a Pentagon adviser told me, referring to Afghanistan and Iraq.
One step the Pentagon took was to seek active and secret help in the war against the Iraqi insurgency from Israel, America’s closest ally in the Middle East. According to American and Israeli military and intelligence officials, Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been working closely with their American counterparts at the Special Forces training base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and in Israel to help them prepare for operations in Iraq. Israeli commandos are expected to serve as ad-hoc advisers—again, in secret—when full-field operations begin. (Neither the Pentagon nor Israeli diplomats would comment. “No one wants to talk about this,” an Israeli official told me. “It’s incendiary. Both governments have decided at the highest level that it is in their interests to keep a low profile on U.S.-Israeli coöperation” on Iraq.) The critical issue, American and Israeli officials agree, is intelligence. There is much debate about whether targeting a large number of individuals is a practical—or politically effective—way to bring about stability in Iraq, especially given the frequent failure of American forces to obtain consistent and reliable information there. thanks to The Agonist US Using Israeli Military to Train Special Ops to fight Iraqis Israel trains US assassination squads in Iraq Baker Takes the Loaf: The President's Business Partner Slices Up Iraq Well, ho ho ho! It's an early Christmas for James Baker III. All year the elves at his law firm, Baker Botts of Texas, have been working day and night to prevent the families of the victims of the September 11 attack from seeking information from Saudi Arabia on the Kingdom's funding of Al Qaeda fronts. It's tough work, but this week came the payoff when President Bush appointed Baker, the firm's senior partner, to "restructure" the debts of the nation of Iraq.
And who will net the big bucks under Jim Baker's plan? Answer: his client, Saudi Arabia, which claims $30.7 billion due from Iraq plus $12 billion in reparations from the First Gulf war.
In Revival Of Najaf, Lessons for A New Iraq
 The story of Iraq is written on the walls of the Prophet's Street. Staring down on the crowds of Najaf are portraits of men killed during 35 years of Baath Party rule. They were clergy, their families and followers who were assassinated or executed, often tortured first. Along the street's colonnade are leaflets celebrating the community's new freedoms. Signs announce the anniversary of the death of Shiite Islam's most revered saint, and rickety stands offer the beads and prayer stones of ritual long discouraged. On banners and posters are the demands of the resurgent community. Elections, some insist. Others urge loyalty to the clergy or call on the young to join the muammimeen, or turbaned ones. Through the landscape walked Heidar Moammar, a gaunt, 25-year-old cleric in a white turban.
"What was forbidden is beloved," he said, smiling as he glanced at the signs of the city's reawakening.
comic book art Classic Captain America 1940's Comic Covers
 [more] thanks to dublog
imperial storm troopers
This US Department of Defense (news - web sites) handout image shows a soldier in a lightweight uniform with advanced technological capabilities that researchers say will make troops safer and more formidable on the battlefield. thanks to Eschaton
children's books There are some delightful images scanned from old children’s books belonging to the University of Wales in Aberyswyth’s Horton Collection on display here. I snipped out a few which caught my eye: these follow below.
 [more]
private warriors Private corporations have penetrated western warfare so deeply that they are now the second biggest contributor to coalition forces in Iraq after the Pentagon, a Guardian investigation has established. While the official coalition figures list the British as the second largest contingent with around 9,900 troops, they are narrowly outnumbered by the 10,000 private military contractors now on the ground. The investigation has also discovered that the proportion of contracted security personnel in the firing line is 10 times greater than during the first Gulf war. In 1991, for every private contractor, there were about 100 servicemen and women; now there are 10. The private sector is so firmly embedded in combat, occupation and peacekeeping duties that the phenomenon may have reached the point of no return: the US military would struggle to wage war without it. While reliable figures are difficult to come by and governmental accounting and monitoring of the contracts are notoriously shoddy, the US army estimates that of the $87bn (£50.2bn) earmarked this year for the broader Iraqi campaign, including central Asia and Afghanistan, one third of that, nearly $30bn, will be spent on contracts to private companies.
The myriad military and security companies thriving on this largesse are at the sharp end of a revolution in military affairs that is taking us into unknown territory - the partial privatisation of war. This is a very disturbing trend. This lets politicians wage war without any oversight. It also means that stockholders won't be happy unless there is a war.
bank art
 [more] thanks to The J-Walk Weblog
don't ask, don't tell Gay Ex-Officers Say 'Don't Ask' Doesn't Work Three retired military officers, two generals and an admiral who have been among the most senior uniformed officers to criticize the "don't ask, don't tell" policy for homosexuals in the military, disclosed on Tuesday that they are gay. The three, Brig. Gen. Keith H. Kerr and Brig. Gen. Virgil A. Richard, both of the Army, and Rear Adm. Alan M. Steinman of the Coast Guard, said the policy had been ineffective and undermined the military's core values: truth, honor, dignity, respect and integrity. They said they had been forced to lie to their friends, family and colleagues to serve their country. In doing so, they said, they had to evade and deceive others about a natural part of their identity.
The officers said that they were the first generals and admiral to come out publicly and that they hoped that others would follow.
The facade continues to crumble. It's about time.
drawings Andrew Holmes' big passion is the mobile armature that sustains the artificial oasis that is Los Angeles, or rather the lines of transportation that artificially maintain the city across the harsh surrounding desert. Against the backdrop of the wide open skies of California, Holmes' photo realistically drawn tanks and trailers become larger than life. Reality is enhanced through colour pencil. The obsessive, compulsive reading of the transit steel architecture pumping through the urban desert reflects Holmes' insatiable urge to document, analyse, record and classify. His aim is to catch a glimpse of the fetishes of blue collar America, the classical Kenworth truck, the baroque curve of the stainless container and the pearlised gleam of the custom car. The lovingly embellished mass- produced objects become stand- ins for their owners.
 US Mail Pencil on paper [more] thanks to dublog
dean Gore's Endorsement Was Won Over Time and Under the Radar Al Gore was in Tokyo on Friday and Howard Dean was in a van in Iowa, and for 45 minutes, their cellphone conversation was not particularly extraordinary, people close to both politicians said. Dr. Dean had sent Mr. Gore a draft of a foreign policy speech that Dr. Dean was to deliver next week in California, and Mr. Gore was calling with a few suggestions. Then, at the end of their chat, Mr. Gore dropped the bombshell: "I've decided I want to endorse you," he told Dr. Dean.
As impulsive as Mr. Gore's move appeared, the reality is that behind the scenes, Dr. Dean had aggressively courted the former vice president for more than a year, people close to the men said Monday and Tuesday. He complimented him on speeches, sought out his advice, chewed over ideas and even stopped once in Nashville, where he spent 90 minutes with Mr. Gore and his wife, Tipper, to talk about the campaign. How does an obscure ex-governor of Vermont come from nowhere to seize a prohibitive frontrunner status two months before the first primary, against much bigger names in a wide-open and hotly contested race for the Democratic nomination?
First, Big Howard's message is resonating at the grassroots level, and so has yielded cash and warm bodies. But secondly and just as important, he is simply bigger and better at personal politics than anyone who has run for president since at least LBJ. The unions one year ago hated Big Howard. Instead of running against them, he ran straight to them, and asked for their support; now, he has the endorsement of the most politically powerful unions in the country. The Clinton/Gore alumni still hate and fear Howard Dean, yet Big Howard instead of running against Clinton/Gore (which his liberal supporters would love to see), reached out into the nest of vipers and brought Vice President Gore into the fold.
This is why Dean is the front runner. He does his homework.
photography
 Women`s Hall Mosque, Kuala Lumpur, 2001 [more] thanks to consumptive.org
fear of flags
Canadian flag causes flap in the U.S. Canadians should be careful not to appear "boastful" to Americans, who are insecure because of the war in Iraq and admit they are annoyed by northerners showing off the red maple leaf on their luggage when they travel, a recent federal report warns. In focus groups held this fall in four U.S. cities where the federal government is opening consulates, Americans acknowledged they don't know much about Canadians.
"Some participants expressed a certain amount of annoyance at what is perceived as a systematic attempt by Canadians to make the statement that they are not Americans by sporting the maple leaf," said the recently released report. "This underscores the American sensitivity at feeling rejected by the rest of the world ...." thanks to Joerg Colberg @ Conscientious Words fail me.
poster art Vintage Russian Circus Posters from the 20th Century
 [more] thanks to plep
major distraction My new monitor came in yesterday. It's a 19" Viewsonic CRT. I'm using a 1280x1040 display. Sweet! I was able to calibrate this monitor, which I couldn't with my old one (it was too dim). After spending several hours looking at sites on the bigger monitor, I scanned and cleaned up one of my old negatives. Here is a larger version.
 School #1l The next step is to print it.
dean
 Dean is not my perfect candidate. He is a little conservative for my taste in many things, not all. But he is the one with the resources and willingness to fight that winning this election is going to take. Dean for President! Some random thoughts about the Democratic primary race.
I had lunch today with someone who is not a politician but a fairly prominent Washington Democrat -- certainly not someone from the party's liberal wing. And in the course of answering a question, I said "If it [i.e. the nominee] ends up being Dean ..." At which point, with the rest of my sentence still on deck down in my throat, my friend shot back : "It's Dean."
HOWARD DEAN FOR PRESIDENT I'm a charter member of the 2004 ABB (Anybody But Bush) society. Whether the nominee turns out to be a right-winger (Clark, Lieberman) or a colorless bore (Edwards, Kerry, Gephardt), I'll vote for him over Bush, in the same spirit with which the late Afghan warlord Ahmed Shah Massoud reportedly toasted a meeting of anti-Soviet factions during the '80s occupation: "First we kill the Russians. Then we kill each other." But I have a preferance:
Howard Dean has the best chance to beat Bush.
Why I'm for Dean
All that helps explain why the party establishment had a hard time understanding the man and is so upset by the thought that he might be the nominee. Corny as it sounds, he might actually bring voters back into the story. Washington's smugness was shattered in the past few weeks as Dean picked up pathbreaking endorsements from Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. and SEIU and AFSCME, the two largest unions and heads-up, aggressive organizations. Dean continues to up the ante for his rivals--calling for reregulation of key industries and confronting the concentrated power of corporations and wealth. These are solid liberal ideas others are afraid to express so directly. The guy is a better politician than the insiders imagined, indeed better attuned to this season than they are.
No one has been waiting with bated breath for me to make up my mind about the Democratic presidential candidates, but I have, and you might be interested in how I got there. I'm for Howard Dean -- because he's going to win. thanks to BookNotes Randolph T. Holhut: 'Howard Dean isn't the politician you think he is'
However, those of us who have lived in Vermont do know - and lived through - much of it. It is a good thing that now the rest the nation will soon know what we do: that Howard Dean is not the second coming of George McGovern, Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis. He is an entirely different politician who didn't get to where he is in the presidential race by accident.
race
 [more] thanks to consumptive.org
voting Bev Harris on the Perils to Democracy by Electronic Voting BUZZFLASH: Explain the implications of Diebold withdrawing its lawsuit and how this impacts you? BEV HARRIS: First, the impact of Diebold's abusive use of copyright law did very serious damage to my organization and me. This triggered a shutdown of BlackBoxVoting.org, which lasted 30 days and derailed activism to monitor the California Recall Election, stripping away our activism base as it muted my voice on the issue. It nearly decapitated blackboxvoting.org. Diebold's withdrawal from the lawsuit was good; now Diebold should consider withdrawing from the elections industry. Even in baseball, you only get three strikes. At what point do we say to this company, "Sorry, I just can't trust you anymore." Now, as for the impact of their withdrawal from the lawsuit on me and what I will do next, let me explain. I was sent the Diebold memos by a leaker on September 5, during the middle of the night. On September 6, I delved into them and didn't come up for air until two days later. During that time, I read 7,000 memos and made 300 pages of notes divided into five categories. The impact of Diebold's withdrawal from the lawsuit is that I have arranged to make this body of work public. Until now, aside from placing a copy in the hands of someone who could disseminate the work were I to become unavailable, I have done nothing with them.
If the Diebold FTP files are in some ways similar to the Pentagon Papers, the memos are analogous to the Watergate Tapes. And whether or not issue is "as big as Watergate" -- it is actually more important than Watergate.
No Confidence Vote: Now here's the really interesting part. Forgetting for a moment Diebold's voting machines, let's look at the other equipment they make. Diebold makes a lot of ATM machines. They make machines that sell tickets for trains and subways. They make store checkout scanners, including self-service scanners. They make machines that allow access to buildings for people with magnetic cards. They make machines that use magnetic cards for payment in closed systems like university dining rooms. All of these are machines that involve data input that results in a transaction, just like a voting machine. But unlike a voting machine, every one of these other kinds of Diebold machines -- EVERY ONE -- creates a paper trail and can be audited. Would Citibank have it any other way? Would Home Depot? Would the CIA? Of course not. These machines affect the livelihood of their owners. If they can't be audited they can't be trusted. If they can't be trusted they won't be used. Now back to those voting machines. If EVERY OTHER kind of machine you make includes an auditable paper trail, wouldn't it seem logical to include such a capability in the voting machines, too? Given that what you are doing is adapting existing technology to a new purpose, wouldn't it be logical to carry over to voting machines this capability that is so important in every other kind of transaction device?
This confuses me. I'd love to know who said to leave the feature out and why? thanks to BuzzFlash
photography
 Prison de Lyon - Monluc, 1998 [more] thanks to Conscientious
economy Fiddling While the Dollar Drops Something ominous is happening when the United States reports its biggest surge in productivity in 20 years, as it did Wednesday, and yet the dollar plunges to an all-time low against the euro. The dollar is sinking these days on good news and bad, and the explanation is pretty simple: Investors around the world are worried that the Bush administration's policies are eroding the value of the U.S. currency. So they're rushing to unload greenbacks, in what could soon become a full-blown financial crisis.
"The dollar crisis is the story," warns James Harmon, an investment banker who headed the Export-Import Bank during the Clinton administration. "A lot of smart money has moved out of the dollar in the last six months," he explains. "Now the latecomers are rushing to sell, and that's adding to the momentum." thanks to Politics in the Zeros
photography
 [more] Life covers were a chronicle of life in the US. This cover is a picture of my grandfather after he returned from the North Atlantic Patrol. His experiences on the North Atlantic Patrol ended up in a book he wrote that is up on the site I've done about him called Griff's Story.
iraq — vietnam on internet time Rain! It has been raining… I love the rain. I think most Iraqis love the rain because it is a relative rarity in our dry part of the world. We have only a couple of rainy months during the year and they're not that rainy… more like drizzly. The air smells like rain. It's the most wonderful smell- wet dust. It's not the first time this year, but it's been somewhat continuous. Everyone has been praying for lightning because Iraqis love 'chimeh' or truffles. Those are those little potato-like veggies that grow like underground mushrooms and taste like wet socks. It is believed that the more lightning during the rainy season, the better/larger/tastier the truffles later on… don't ask me why.
The topic of the moment is currently Samarra… or 'Samir-reh' as we pronounce it. People are really confused about the whole thing. The US military are saying that 54 Iraqis are dead, with several wounded- almost all of them 'insurgents', but the Iraqi police claim there are only 8 dead- two of them an elderly Iranian couple who had come on a pilgrimage to a religious site in Samirreh. There were only 8 corpses found after the battle and the police say that not a single one of the corpses was in fida'ieen clothes. So where did the other bodies go? Iraqi forces don't have them and American forces don't have them- as far as anyone knows… did they just disappear? Those who try to do the undoable must also think the unthinkable. US strategists in Iraq are contemplating what they have always denied, the search for a "strong man with a moustache" to stop the present rot. If the result is not democracy, so be it. If the result is the dismemberment of Iraq, so be it. Iraq has become a mess. There is only one priority: to "get out with dignity". This strategy is now being rammed down the throat of the US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, by George W. Bush's new "realist", Deputy National Security Adviser Bob Blackwill. He answers to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, not US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and is the new boss of Iraq. The Pentagon, Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, architects of the old "idealist" strategy, are in retreat. The Iraqi Governing Council, which Bremer reluctantly created, will be disbanded. Washington must find someone with whom it can do business, someone who can deliver order in return for power. That search is Blackwill's job.
In a nutshell, Washington has bought the old British Middle East strategy, that you deal with local leaders and leave them to it. The fantasies of Rumsfeld and of Bush's recent "world democracy" speech are at an end. There must be no second Vietnam in Iraq. Necessity has become the mother of humiliating invention. thanks to Eschaton So, will someone tell me why we invaded Iraq? US special forces fighting a covert war in Iraq are receiving help from both Israel and former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party regime, according to a media report. The article - in the December 15 issue of the New Yorker magazine - cites unnamed US and Israeli intelligence sources. It says Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been helping US special forces train for operations in Iraq and are expected to secretly advise them in the field. The US and Israeli governments had decided to keep their co-operation secret, according to the report. It also cites an unnamed former Central Intelligence Agency official with extensive Middle East experience as saying US officials are relying on a former Saddam loyalist for intelligence on opponents of the US-led occupation. Farouk Hijazi, former director of external operations for Iraqi intelligence, "has cut a deal" since being captured in April, the source is quoted as saying.
US officials "are using him to reactivate the old Iraqi intelligence network," the source said Tough New Tactics by U.S. Tighten Grip on Iraq Towns As the guerrilla war against Iraqi insurgents intensifies, American soldiers have begun wrapping entire villages in barbed wire. In selective cases, American soldiers are demolishing buildings thought to be used by Iraqi attackers. They have begun imprisoning the relatives of suspected guerrillas, in hopes of pressing the insurgents to turn themselves in.
The Americans embarked on their get-tough strategy in early November, goaded by what proved to be the deadliest month yet for American forces in Iraq, with 81 soldiers killed by hostile fire. The response they chose is beginning to echo the Israeli counterinsurgency campaign in the occupied territories.
"With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them," Colonel Sassaman said.
NEWSWEEK: Gingrich Speaks Out Against Administration's Policy in Iraq, Saying The U.S. Went 'Off a Cliff'
notebooks Moleskine Notebooks, Journals, and Date Books
For two centuries now Moleskine (mol-a-skeen'-a) has been the legendary notebook of artists, writers, intellectuals and travelers. More popular than ever, Moleskine notebooks possess stylish minimalism and unmatched quality. This century new legends are being created with the help of this modest book. Moleskine journals help in daily life, work and play, at home and traveling the world. This is the journal that has been as it remains today a truly reliable friend - always at the ready. Helping in life - helping create and capture life stories. thanks to The J-Walk Weblog I use a small bound artist sketchbook that is always in my camera case. I'm a blank pages kind of guy. I use it to make exposure notes, paste in pictures, make sketches, and write down observations and thoughts. There is something about using a bound notebook. It makes your entries seem a little more permanent and important. Which, of course, they should be. No photographer should be without one. The binding on my notebook is starting to break. Maybe it's time for a Moleskine? Perhaps a large plain journal would do just fine.
Humiliation can scar a boy for life Prof. Mohammed Haj-Yahia, a senior lecturer in social work at the Hebrew University, lives in Shuafat. A few months ago he noticed, not far from his home, a boy of about seven, with a knapsack on his back standing and crying. Haj-Yahia stopped and asked the boy why he was crying. The boy pointed to a Border Police jeep standing at the bottom of the road and said that when he passed by the soldiers, they told him to stop and made him sing "Hummus, ful, ahla, Mishmar, Hagvul" (hummus, beans, way to go, Border Police). Haj-Yahia, who studies the effects of the two intifadas in the last 15 years, among other things, on the mental health of Palestinian children, is convinced that the boy's encounter with the Border Policemen will scar him for life. "
Palestinian children repeatedly refer to the feelings of humiliation," he says, "their own humiliation and especially the humiliation of their parents in front of them, which is an even more difficult experience for them, which only intensifies their sense of helplessness."
After more than a month of reserve duty in Netzarim, a group of Paratrooper officers declare: Israel has no reason to be there.
Trying to hide the dark backyard
How many Israelis have actually seen the separation fence? How many have given any thought to its significance? Every foreign visitor interested in what is happening in the region makes visiting the fence a priority and world media constantly point their cameras at it - half a dozen foreign documentaries have already been shot along it. But most Israelis have never seen it. In recent weeks, cracks have appeared in a three-year-old Israeli consensus that there is no Palestinian partner for a peace process, that the Palestinians' real goal is the liquidation of Israel, and that to negotiate with Palestinians before terrorism is ended is to "reward terrorism."
This consensus has enabled Prime Minister Sharon's government to maintain that its only option is to wage an unrelenting war against the Palestinians that, in the words of the Israeli Defense Force's chief of staff, Lieutenant General Moshe Ya'alon, will "sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people" before any political process can begin.
photography
 [more] thanks to Conscientious
media Media Reform Information Center In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. At the time, Ben Bagdikian was called "alarmist" for pointing this out in his book, The Media Monopoly. In his 4th edition, published in 1992, he wrote "in the U.S., fewer than two dozen of these extraordinary creatures own and operate 90% of the mass media" -- controlling almost all of America's newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations, books, records, movies, videos, wire services and photo agencies. He predicted then that eventually this number would fall to about half a dozen companies. This was greeted with skepticism at the time. When the 6th edition of The Media Monopoly was published in 2000, the number had fallen to six. Since then, there have been more mergers and the scope has expanded to include new media like the Internet market. More than 1 in 5 Internet users in the U.S. now log in with AOL Time-Warner, the world's largest media corporation.
 [more] thanks to Yolanda Flanagan
photography
 [more] thanks to Riley Dog
oil The oil industry is buzzing. On Thursday, the government approved the development of the biggest deposit discovered in British territory for at least 10 years. Everywhere we are told that this is a "huge" find, which dispels the idea that North Sea oil is in terminal decline. You begin to recognise how serious the human predicament has become when you discover that this "huge" new field will supply the world with oil for five and a quarter days. Every generation has its taboo, and ours is this: that the resource upon which our lives have been built is running out. We don't talk about it because we cannot imagine it. This is a civilisation in denial.
Oil itself won't disappear, but extracting what remains is becoming ever more difficult and expensive. The discovery of new reserves peaked in the 1960s. Every year we use four times as much oil as we find. All the big strikes appear to have been made long ago: the 400m barrels in the new North Sea field would have been considered piffling in the 1970s. Our future supplies depend on the discovery of small new deposits and the better exploitation of big old ones. No one with expertise in the field is in any doubt that the global production of oil will peak before long. What would you do differently if you knew you would run out of oil in your lifetime? That's the chilling question posed by two recent books, both of which flow from the work of geophysicist Marion King Hubbert. Born in the Texas oil patch and educated at the University of Chicago, Hubbert observed that the production histories of most oilfields follow a similar pattern. Output climbs slowly after discovery, rises steeply once the reservoir is mapped, slows during the peak-production years, and then declines steeply once the easy-to-get oil is gone. When plotted on a graph, this looks like a bell curve. Hubbert poured his own most productive years into directing research for Shell Oil, where he knew that the discovery of new U.S. oilfields had peaked in the 1930s. Hubbert factored this data into his bell-curve model, and predicted in 1956 that production of crude oil in the contiguous 48 states would peak sometime between 1966 and 1972. The oil industry dismissed his prediction and discredited his work.
U.S. crude oil production peaked in 1970, and has fallen steeply ever since. Ironically, neither book startles as much as one line in the preface to the revised edition of Hubbert's Peak, which states: "The year 2000 very likely will stand as the year of greatest oil production." Production fell in '01 and '02, and looks likely to fall again in '03. In other words, the zenith of the Oil Age may have already passed.
Which brings us back to that thorny question. Here in North America – where most of us consume more than our own body weight in crude oil each week – what drastic measures would you deem reasonable if you were certain that every last drop of crude has been found, that half of it is already gone, and that at the current rate of consumption the other half won't last 50 years?
post card art Postcard folders for U.S. cities are usually no big deal—beyond the nifty lettering on the front ("Greetings From Boise!"), what you typically find are silk-screened shots of hotels, natural attractions, statues, etc. Certainly, these images can be interesting, particularly if they capture things that no longer exist. But it's rare to see postcards for top-secret government military installations charged with producing doomsday weapons. Nevertheless, here it is: a postcard book for Oak Ridge, Tenn., issued shortly after the end of World War II. During the war, Oak Ridge was a "secret city," built from the ground up by the U.S. government and populated by locals from the surrounding area who weren't aware of the city's true mission: to build the atomic bomb.
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distractions There are several projects I've been working on that have been stalled and are now moving forward, mostly. Pinhole Photography My pinholes arrived Thursday. I paid good money for nothing. The set of 12 pinholes (for different focal lengths) fortunately were surrounded by a 1.5 inch square piece of .001" thick piece of stainless steel. It makes it easier to hold on to the pinhole. They came from Pinhole Resource, an excellent source of teeny tiny holes and things that hold them. I spent late into early Friday morning designing and making a mount for the pinhole to go on my Mamiya Super 23.
 The shiny spot in the center on the "lens" is not the pinhole. That is as close as I wanted to come to the pinhole as I applied the black laquer (via a Sharpie pen). The pinhole is much smaller. It's .0126" dia. I designed the pieces on TurboCad, printed them out on paper and glued the paper, with Barge cement, on cardboard. Then cut out the pieces and glued them together with Barge cement and glued the whole thing in the metal mounting ring from an old lens, with rubber cement.
 I'm running a test roll through the camera. This size pinhole, with the optimum focal length, uses an f/stop of f/204. Do you photographers out there know the f/stop progression beyond f/22? In trying to figure it out I ran across this great page explaining everything you wanted to know about f/stops, but were afraid to ask: A Tedious Explanation of the f/stop. It didn't tell me what I wanted to know, but I figured out the ratio between the f/stops and then figured out the f/stops beyond f/90 (which is as far as my Luna Pro light meter goes). After all that work I looked at my Black Cat Exposure Guide, and there they were. So, to answer the burning question that photographers lay awake nights pondering — What comes after f/22? — here is the sequence: f/22, f/32, f/45, f/64, f/90, f/128, f/179, f/256, f/358, f/512, f/717, and, last and least, f/1024. The end result of this is that I'm shooting 120 Fuji Reala at ISO 3 and f/64 (instead of ISO 50 at f/204), so that I can use my light meter. Reala is rated at ISO 100 but I figure a little extra light won't hurt at those long exposures. Bright and sunny comes out to 4 seconds. I will share any good pinhole photographs that might result from all of this effort. LP ripping My cartridge alignment tool arrived yesterday. The old cartridge was exhibiting a 60 cycle hum when it touched down on the record, so I decided to install a new cartridge. In trying to adjust the new cartridge, I ended up removing the tone arm from the pivot which I probably shouldn't have done. There are now two teeny, teeny ball bearings I'm going to have to hold in place somehow in order to reassemble it. I think I know how I'll do that, but the upshot is that I can now see that there is a broken wire coming out of the tone arm and I bet it's a ground for the cartridge, which would explain the 60 cycle hum. I will be doing further disassembly today and hopefully I will find where the other end of the broken wire goes. And more hopefully, I can get it all back together and begin ripping all my LPs. The prognosis is good. Panoramics This is another project I have been wanting to do for years. For reasons, explained below, it's been on hold, too. However, a link from Joerg, Ultra-High Resolution Digital Mosaics, has given me a conceptual jump-start. I've been playing with Pana-Vue's Image Assembler for stitching images, with mixed results. The Ultra-High Resolution Digital Mosaics tutorial, and some of the articles it linked to, made me realize the importance of manually adjusting the control points. The software automatically creates points in the overlap areas between images being stiched together. It uses those points to stitch the images together. If they are off, the resulting stitched image will be off. I've been using Image Assembler to stitch multiple scans of LP album covers.
 
  It's been a little dissapointing because, no matter how hard I try to line things up, anomolies happen.
 This morning, I figured out how to manually adjust the control points.
 Perfection.
 How a piece of software that costs under $70 can do that is totally amazing. I will be working on a series of panos around Whidbey Island. monitor My monitor is what has been holding me back on my photography. My current monitor is too dim to calibrate. Tomorrow my new 19" Viewsonic CRT, with flat glass, arrives. Once it is calibrated, I will be moving forward, not only with the pinhole and pano photographs, but also scanning and printing all my old negatives. Many pictures to come.
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