Don’t Talk About the Weather

earthtemperature.jpgThe New York Times reports that NASA headquarters ordered its scientists to keep their mouths shut about questions arising from the upcoming climate-change blockbuster "The Day After Tomorrow" (with someone named Claude Laforce playing "UN Norwegian diplomat").

"No one from NASA is to do interviews or otherwise comment on anything having to do with" the film, said the April 1 message, which was sent by Goddard’s top press officer. "Any news media wanting to discuss science fiction vs. science fact about climate change will need to seek comment from individuals or organizations not associated with NASA."

The Times also reports that the space agency has called off the dogs and will now let its experts talk about climate stuff. Maybe that has something to do with some research results published last week on NASA’s own site, "Satellite Thermometers Show Earth Has a Fever." Keep it cute like that, so no one will get the idea that increased temperatures have anything to do with well, anything.

Austrian Housepainter

Living in a place that has its very own Austrian immigrant
fixing things for the Volk — I mean the people — I need to
acknowledge what I think every year on this date: that it’s Hitler’s
birthday. Der Fuehrer, 1889-1945. As the Franz Liebkind (crazy German
playwright) character says in "The Producers":

 

"Hitler! There was a painter! He could paint an entire apartment in a single afternoon. Two coats!"

Of course, unlike most housepainters — OK,
any other housepainter I can think of, though I haven’t checked
Stalin’s or Genghis Khan’s resumes —  this one got a commotion
going that killed 50 or 60 or 70 million people.

Mercenaries in Iraq

Good long feature
in Monday’s New York Times on the "private security companies"
operating in Iraq. Of course, when I think of "security companies" and
"security guards," I think of some poor guy taking lip from a
late-night patron of White Castle. But the Times piece makes it clear
that, semantics aside, these outfits in Iraq and their employees are
hardly distinguishable from the traditional picture of the mercenary:

 

With every week of insurgency in a war zone with no front, these
companies are becoming more deeply enmeshed in combat, in some cases
all but obliterating distinctions between professional troops and
private commandos. Company executives see a clear boundary between
their defensive roles as protectors and the offensive operations of the
military. But more and more, they give the appearance of private,
for-profit militias — by several estimates, a force of roughly 20,000
on top of an American military presence of 130,000. … By some recent government
estimates, security costs could claim up to 25 percent of the $18
billion budgeted for reconstruction, a huge and mostly unanticipated
expense that could delay or force the cancellation of billions of
dollars worth of projects to rebuild schools, water treatment plants,
electric lines and oil refineries."

Rich Fudgy Brownies

The Associated Press roundup on the MoveOn.org
bake sale (carried in the San Francisco Chronicle and a handful of
other papers) says that the activists put on about 1,000 or 1,100 bake
sales that brought in a total of about $250,000. Among the smattering
of other coverage, local stories in the Santa Cruz Sentinel and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. The Los Angeles Times had a squib or a squib and a half that I notice the Chicago Tribune picked up.

Bake Sales

Well, Kate and I spent a couple hours this morning walking around to MoveOn bake sales
in our general neighborhood. On one level, it seems like touchy-feely
naivete: Bake sales to defeat Bush? Yeah, right. On the other hand, it
was really encouraging to see the enthusiasm for the idea around town
and the determination people have that the small things they’re doing
in their own communities, and the money they’re gathering, could build
into something big. Of course, this is Berkeley, and you could get
people to do bake sales for nearly anything; at one gathering, someone
said there were 19 MoveOn bake sales around town; I’ll bet there were
even more. But I wonder how many there were in, say, Kansas.(I just
searched on the MoveOn site for future bake sales within 3 miles of our
zip code, and got five results. I checked for similar events coming up
within 300 miles of Wichita and got three hits. And actually, MoveOn has a map that illustrates where the bake sale hot spots were and weren’t) More on
this tomorrow.

Out of Compliance

Now here are some folks who know how to sling effective lingo: Our friends at Combined Joint Task Force Seven. They will not falter. They will not fail. And furthermore:

"CJTF-7 conducts offensive operations to defeat remaining noncompliant forces and neutralize destabilizing influences in the Area of Operations (AO) to create a secure environment in direct support
of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Concurrently, conducts stability operations which support the establishment of government and economic development to set the conditions for a transfer of operations to designated follow on military or civilian authorities."

"Remaining noncompliant forces." Beautiful.

‘Two-Bit Thug’

I feel kind of bad about it, but I can’t make myself watch or listen much to the Bush people running the Iraq excursion. Partly it’s anger about the unapologetic lying, disingenuous self-justification, and
relentless absolutist spin — good vs. evil, democracy vs. tyranny, clean, well-mannered Americans and chosen friends vs. the malodorous of the world — that characterizes our leaders’ approach to their mission. And partly, there’s something about these guys, from the president on down, that’s just creepy and ugly when they’re being challenged in any way.
The latest exhibit for both parts of my unease comes an unblinking, tight-jawed Harvard MBA named Dan Senor, who’s the mouthpiece for the Amercan president of Iraq, Paul Bremer. Senor’s bio, on the White House site, gives no clue what expertise in Iraqi affairs got him into the first U.S. civilian team sent to Iraq last April. But,
the guy can spout the evil-doer rhetoric with the best of them. The New York Times quotes his summing up of this Sadr fellow, the Shiite demagogue who’s managed to raise some genuinely troubling resistance to the occupiers.

“Mr. Bremer’s spokesman, Dan Senor, described Mr. Sadr at a news conference as a ‘two-bit thug’ despised by the majority of Iraqis and said he and his forces would be destroyed.”

Of course, the thug line is just part of the administration’s script. The president himself used it earlier this week (twice, actually — here and here;
and a quick search on the not-too-reliable whitehouse.gov site indicates Bush and his people have used “thug” or “thugs” on 81 public occasions in the last 14 months. But you know, even if you consider Sadr and his guys the scum of the Earth, doesn’t it seem a little intemperate to make statements like this in public again and again? Doesn’t it seem a little bit like emotion has gotten the better of the Iraq excursion team? I mean, what would be lost by turning it down a notch and using a less loaded but very clear word like, for instance, “enemy”?
I like the irony in Senor pointing out that Sadr is despised by the majority of his countrymen. If you go by the 2000 election results, that’s something he and George Bush have in common.

West Bank? Or Vietnam?

A year ago, I thought the question about Iraq was whether it would be another Vietnam (the quagmire scenario; the immediate answer was no) or a new version of the West Bank (the everlasting rebellion against the occupier; the first carbombing of American troops while the “major combat” was going on last year made me think about that parallel). But events today show we might have the worst of both worlds.

The West Bank part: A widespread nationalist-religious uprising. OK, I’m getting the “uprising” part from The New York Times in its story on what’s happening on the streets. But superficially, at least, this looks like it could be the beginning of an Iraqi intifada
— a challenge to the occupation’s overwhelming military force using small arms, weight of numbers and rage. Of course, what made the Palestinian uprising the phenomenon it was (and has been) is its longevity. So we won’t know whether we do have a real intifada on our hands for awhile.

The Vietnam part: I think this quote from Paul Bremer (as reported on the Washington Post site) is precious, a great window into the illusions of the true believers who launched the war:

“For the past 11 months, Iraq has been on the path to democracy and freedom — freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press. Those freedoms must be exercised peacefully. This
morning, a group of people in Najaf have crossed the line and moved to violence. . . . This will not be tolerated by the coalition, this will not be tolerated by the Iraqi people, and this will not be tolerated by
the Iraqi security forces.”

A rough breakdown on the wishful or out-of-touch thoughts here:

–“Iraq has been on the path to democracy and freedom.” Yes, we shocked and awed and brought in the heavy artillery and chased Saddam out and picked a committee of acceptable Iraqis to be the Founding Fathers (with a mom or two thrown in) of the new reality. That’s how you build democracy — you have an alien army unencumbered by knowledge of the complexity of the situation its dealing with, it smashes down the existing tyranny, then commands democracy to flourish, just like that.

–“Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press.” Yes, compared to what Mr. Saddam allowed. But still subject to the best judgment of the people now in charge and the commissioner of Major
League Baseball.

–“This morning, a group of people in Najaf have crossed the line. …” Yes — it’s only a few isolated malcontents and miscreants and their evildoer pals who are behind all the trouble.

–“This will not be tolerated by the coalition …” Check. The president’s mad. Rummy’s mad. Bremer’s mad. The generals are mad. They’re stamping their feet. They won’t stand for this sort of behavior. And they’ve got the tanks and helicopters to show they mean business.

–“This will not be tolerated by the Iraqi people…” Aren’t those Iraqi people running around raising hell in the streets? They seem to be tolerating this. But yeah, they’re malcontents and miscreants and evildoers. We must be talking about the rest of the Iraqis — the same ones we consulted before we launched this whole adventure. All two or three dozen of them.

–“And this will not be tolerated by the Iraqi security forces.” First — what does “security” mean? And if it means what you think it means, then why are they called “security forces”?

I think Bremer’s statement illustrates the emerging Vietnam nature of the war in Iraq. Just as in South Vietnam, we seem to have talked ourselves into believing that great values, great intentions, and great
military resources are a shortcut to winning hearts and minds of an unknown populace to a great ideal (and coincidentally, our strategic ends). In the meantime, don’t let any contradictory evidence get in the
way of the vision: the apparent lack of consensus among the population about the future, the evident disdain among many for our presence, the extraordinary difficulty of fitting all Iraq’s competing interests and desires inside the pre-fab democracy we think we can set up.

What we’re doing in Iraq adds up to a fatal kind of arrogance. A terrible misuse of our power. A pointless sequel to our September 11th tragedy.

News to Me …

By way of Coudal Partners: A story in Editor and Publisher that mentions in passing that The Onion‘s
response to the 2001 terrorist attacks was submitted for a Pulitzer
Prize (good for The Onion) and actually got some serious consideration
(good for the judges, or at least some of them). Can’t find a link to
the front page with its “Holy Fucking Shit” headline, but here’s one of
the issue’s best pieces, “God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule.”

“I tried to put it in the simplest possible terms for you people, so
you’d get it straight, because I thought it was pretty important,” said
God, called Yahweh and Allah respectively in the Judaic and Muslim
traditions. “I guess I figured I’d left no real room for confusion
after putting it in a four-word sentence with one-syllable words, on
the tablets I gave to Moses. How much more clear can I get?”

Why Kids Should Read

From a recent decision of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal on a copyright dispute involving characters in the Spawn comic franchise (via The Trademark Blog):

“The description of a character in prose leaves much to the imagination, even when the description is detailed — as in Dashiel Hammett’s description of Sam Spade’s physical appearance in the first paragraph of The Maltese Falcon: ‘Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down — from high flat temples — in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.’ Even after all this, one hardly knows what Sam Spade looked like. But everyone knows what Humphrey Bogart looked like. A reader of unillustrated fiction completes the work in his mind; the reader of a comic book or the viewer of a movie is passive. That is why kids lose a lot when they don’t read fiction, even when the movies and television that they watch are aesthetically superior.”