That's Not My ...Name.

Conditions: A warmer kind of cold.


Satiroversy.

So, New Yorker magazine wanted an artist to do a cover for their magazine that would sum up all the zany right-wing fears some people have about Barack Obama becoming president, to show how zany they were. The resultant painting depicts Omaba in Muslim attire, burning the American flag in the white house fireplace beneath a portrait of Bin Laden while saluting his militant wife. Too far?

(CNN) -- Sen. Barack Obama's campaign has sharply criticized The New Yorker magazine over the publication's latest cover illustration, which appears to portray the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and his wife as terrorist enemies of the United States.
[...]

"The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement. "But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree."

An e-mail from The New Yorker to CNN on Friday with an advance copy of the cover said, "Please note that it is satire -- we are poking fun at the scare tactics and misinformation that some have employed to derail Obama's campaign."

- edition.cnn.com

Furthermore...

The illustration, by Barry Blitt,is called "The Politics of Fear" and, according to the NYer press release, "satirizes the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the Presidential election to derail Barack Obama's campaign." Uh-huh. What's that they say about repeating a rumor?

Presumably the New Yorker readership is sophisticated enough to get the joke, but still: this is going to upset a lot of people, probably for the same reason it's going to delight a lot of other people, namely those on the right: Because it's got all the scare tactics and misinformation that has so far been used to derail Barack Obama's campaign — all in one handy illustration. Anyone who's tried to paint Obama as a Muslim, anyone who's tried to portray Michelle as angry or a secret revolutionary out to get Whitey, anyone who has questioned their patriotism— well, here's your image.

Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton called it "tasteless and offensive" and, according to Jake Tapper at ABC, another high-profile Obama supporter called it "as offensive a caricature as any magazine could publish."

- huffingtonpost.com

In a country that both praises and protests the confederate flag, denounces and yet creates monuments for the ten commandments, and features a giant statue depicting Liberty while frantically removing peoples rights and torturing anyone they consider an insurgent, this could almost be par for the course. A mirror in which everyone with an axe to grind sees their particular ...axe-grinding device. Cultured liberals see this as a mockery of all the stupid fears right-wing nutjobs yell about on talk radio 24/7. Right-wing nutjobs see this as a confirmation of everything they've been saying since Obama came into the spotlight.

But what about the ones who actually matter: the few, the very few, voters left in the middle who haven't yet made up their mind. Is it fair to the Obama campaign to have such a depiction of a man who is desperately trying to show how normal and cultured he is? Is it effective satire when it's so embracing of the fears some people have? And would a cover depicting John McCain as a cigar-chomping, medal-wearing, gun-toting soldier of fortune type standing astride a bunker with a bullet-ridden flag above it be as damaging to McCain's campaign to attract voters as this image is to Obama's? I think not, I think what Obama is going for is more delicate than what McCain is going for, because negotiation, respect and peace is always more delicate than intractableness, aggression and stubborness, which is why crap like this doesn't help. This better not be the 08 version of Ralph Nader.


Tom Tomorrow has weighed in with a defense of satire, arguing that the whole point is to mock stupidity - including the stupidity of those who don't get the satire. The problem is that the people who don't get the satire still vote. So the more of them there is, the more misinformed 'the people' are.

[...]




Okay then! With no room for misinterpretation whatsoever -- that's comedy gold!

Remember: satire does not work unless it literally portrays the intended target!

- huffingtonpost.com

Look at the first image. Look at it. Sadam and Osama together, friends. *Exactly* the idea the Bush administration promoted in any way they could in the run up to the Iraq war. An idea the American public bought and swallowed, hook, line and sinker. Has too much time passed? Have we all forgotten how paranoid, how fearful, how *stupid* America was in the wake of the 9/11 attacks? And so a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, has devastated the country and the region, has inflamed tensions to new heights, and has massively damaged the world economy, was launched off a campaign of deceit and pure uncut ignorance. - Did that image help America see how absurd it was to picture Osama and Saddam as friends? Does it now? No, it does not. As satire, it is weak and pathetic. It's the equivalent of wearing a 'Da Bomb' t-shirt onto an airplane. Sure, some extreme and obnoxious comedians will laugh and clap at your audacity. But every single person on that airplane will think you're an idiot, and through no fault of their own will end up late to where they were going simply because you wanted to be 'clever'. I'm sick and tired of people wanting to be clever at a huge expense to everyone else. The world is in the state it's in today because of powerful people who wanted to be clever without thinking through the possible unintended consequences.

So, yes. People are stupid. But unfortunately we have to live with them. And so insulting and ignoring them with "satire" tends to lead to them doing the wrong thing. Again. Frankly, I don't think civilisation as we know it can afford for that to happen any more.


More: Framing Obama.
http://www.truthout.org/article/the-bad-frame




Making It Official.

The problem with occupying Iraq today is that it's essentially illegal. The U.S has been trying to fix this through getting the new Iraqi government to sign a long-term security agreement, essentially making it all official. But the Iraqis have played hard-to-get, over issues such as 'who exactly blew up the market from a jet the other day?' and 'are the Americans allowed to just shoot at anyone everytime a I.E.D goes off?'. So in the face of such complexities, and many others, the two sides have given up. That's the spirit.

U.S. and Iraqi negotiators have abandoned efforts to conclude a comprehensive agreement governing the long-term status of U.S troops in Iraq before the end of the Bush presidency, according to senior U.S. officials, effectively leaving talks over an extended U.S. military presence there to the next administration.


In place of the formal status-of-forces agreement negotiators had hoped to complete by July 31, the two governments are now working on a "bridge" document, more limited in both time and scope, that would allow basic U.S. military operations to continue beyond the expiration of a U.N. mandate at the end of the year.

The failure of months of negotiations over the more detailed accord -- blamed on both the Iraqi refusal to accept U.S. terms and the complexity of the task -- deals a blow to the Bush administration's plans to leave in place a formal military architecture in Iraq that could last for years.

- huffingtonpost.com

There's nothing quite like having armed burglars put a gun to your head and force you to give them permission for breaking into your house.



Killing The Enemy.

What happens when occupying soldiers with itchy trigger fingers monitor large groups of people making a lot of noise? A history of Iraqi and Afghani weddings under American occupation.

The age of the bride involved is unknown to us, as is her name. No reporters were clamoring to get to her section of the mountainous backcountry of Afghanistan near the Pakistani border. We know almost nothing about her circumstances, except that she was on her way to a nearby village, evidently early in the morning, among a party 70-90 strong, mostly women, "escorting the bride to meet her groom as local tradition dictates."

It was then that the American plane (or planes) arrived, ensuring that she would never say her vows. "They stopped in a narrow location for rest," said one witness about her house party, according to the BBC. "The plane came and bombed the area." The district governor, Haji Amishah Gul, told the British Times, "So far there are 27 people, including women and children, who have been buried. Another 10 have been wounded. The attack happened at 6.30AM. Just two of the dead are men, the rest are women and children. The bride is among the dead."

U.S. military spokespeople flatly denied the story. They claimed that Taliban insurgents had been "clearly identified" among the group. "[T]his may just be normal, typical militant propaganda," said 1st Lieutenant Nathan Perry. Despite accounts of the wounded, including women and children, being brought to a local hospital, Captain Christian Patterson, coalition media officer, insisted: "It was not a wedding party, there were no women or children present. We have no reports of civilian casualties." The members of an Afghan inquiry, appointed by President Hamid Karzai, later found that, in all, 47 civilians had died, including 39 women and children, and nine others were wounded.

- alternet.org

And on Thursday:

Kabul - U.S.-led coalition troops have killed eight Afghan civilians in an air strike in the western province of Farah during a raid against suspected militants, the U.S. military said.

The acknowledgement came as reports of more civilian deaths caused by a fresh air raid by foreign forces emerged on Thursday from the neighboring province of Herat.

The air strike on Tuesday was summoned after a coalition convoy came under sustained attack from machine gun and indirect fire from a number of houses adjacent to a road in the Bakwa district of Farah, the U.S. military said.

"The coalition convoy returned fire and called for close air support on the enemy positions. A house was hit; eight civilians were killed, two others injured," it said in a statement late on Wednesday.

"Coalition forces never intentionally target non-combatants, and deeply regret any occurrence such as this where civilians are killed and injured as a result of insurgent activity and actions," it said.
[...]

The issue of civilian casualties is highly sensitive one for the Western-backed government and undermines Afghan support for the presence of foreign forces who are fighting the Taliban-led insurgents in Afghanistan.

There has been a sharp rise in violence in Afghanistan this year, the bloodiest since U.S.-led and Afghan forces overthrew the hardline Taliban in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The U.S. military says it is investigating reports by Afghan officials that around 60 civilians were killed in two separate air strikes by U.S.-led coalition forces this month in eastern Afghanistan.

More than 800 civilians have been killed since the start of 2007 in Afghanistan by foreign and Afghan forces, according to Afghan officials and the U.N.

- truthout.org

We're. Just. Not. Learning.

More:
the-wedding-crashers-a-short-till-death-do-us-part- history-bushs-wars




Pointless Waste.

Two years ago this month, Hizbullah ambushed an Israeli border patrol, sparking a war that claimed 1,200 lives. On the same day that two wounded soldiers, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser were dragged from their stricken Humvee, Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah's leader, vowed the only way they would go home would be in a prisoner exchange. The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said that Israel would not negotiate the lives of its soldiers with terrorist organisations. But Israel did, and yesterday Nasrallah's words came true.
[...]

As the analyst Amal Saad-Ghorayeb wrote, the prisoner swap is both a strategic and moral defeat for Israel. Strategic, because it is an admission of Israel's responsibility for the 34-day war. Israel insisted the war was a response to the abductions, while Hizbullah said all along it wanted a prisoner exchange. By agreeing to the swap now, Israel has tacitly admitted that its real purpose was not the release of its soldiers, but the dismantlement of Hizbullah's military infrastructure. It achieved neither the release of its soldiers nor the destruction of Hizbullah through war.
[...]

The best that can be said for this deal is that Israel and Hizbullah have settled their accounts with each other - for the time being. If Israel was prepared to swap prisoners, it should have done so soon after their soldiers were captured. Over 1,200 Lebanese and 159 Israelis would now be alive today if they had.

- guardian.co.uk

Revolution In The Airways?

I've always felt there's something unnatural about cellphones. These tiny devices that operate just like regular phones, there's always been a suspicion that something that works that well must have some kind of bad side effect. And for years now there's been the low-level conspiracy theory that cell phones cause cancer, an idea mostly laughed at by scientists and cellphone companies. But. Could it be the tide is starting to turn? The latest, biggest study isn't even completed yet, and has brought some curious findings to light. We already know cellphones produce certain amounts of energy (basically, what radiation is), and so the standards for cellphones limit the amount of energy they can emit to levels that cannot hurt human tissue:

But Joachim Schüz, head of the department of biostatistics and epidemiology at the Danish Cancer Society, suspects that heat isn't the only way radiation causes health problems. So far, no one has been able to prove definitively that its "nonthermal" properties have any detrimental effect on living tissue. "You find one cell reacting, one not," he says. "So you can't really say it's due to the radio waves."

Since 1999, Schüz has been a principal investigator for the Interphone project, which has produced the largest body of epidemiological work on cell phones and cancer to date. The official results aren't ready yet, but 8 of the 13 countries involved have already released their initial data. Several of these early studies show a strong correlation between long-term cell phone use and brain tumors, both malignant and benign.

Strong correlation? Holy Nokia! Could this be the beginning of a realisation of massive oversight regarding cellphones?

Schüz cautions that the individual studies by themselves are too small to overcome some significant problems with the data. Finding subjects who have brain tumors and who have used their cell phones for more than 10 years is difficult, especially considering that the tumors typically take 10 to 20 years to develop. What's more, people are notoriously bad at remembering how much they've used their phones and which ear they hold their cell phone up to - especially if they're looking around for something to blame a brain tumor on.

- truthout.org

So, the nature of the damage they (may) cause, and the amount of time said damage takes to (possibly) manifest itself, means basically that any cautionary legislation is going to be too late for a great number of affected users. Possibly affected users. Maybe.



Washing Up On The Shore.

Fresh images from the European spacecraft currently in orbit around the red planet.



- huffingtonpost.com

Does that not look like a coastline to you?





- Peace out.