Don

“Precision airstrikes” distinguished phrase
amoung such non-sequitors as “honesty in politics,”
“Combat Helicopters” Military Intelligence” “Ice hockey
without Violence” “painless dentistry” free financing”
etc.

The battle for “hearts and minds” capturing imaginations, garnishing inspiration, respect, and co-operation, continues.

Can anyone tell me ?
Did Tiger Woods win playing like this ?
M

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080720/ap_on_re_as/afghan_violence

“KABUL, Afghanistan - U.S.-led troops and Afghan forces killed nine Afghan police Sunday, calling in airstrikes and fighting on the ground for four hours after both sides mistook the other for militants, Afghan officials said.”

The battle for “hearts and minds” capturing imaginations, to garnish inspiration, respect, and co-operation, continues.

Did Tiger Woods win playing like this ?
M

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080720/ap_on_re_as/afghan_violence

“KABUL, Afghanistan - U.S.-led troops and Afghan forces killed nine Afghan police Sunday, calling in airstrikes and fighting on the ground for four hours after both sides mistook the other for militants, Afghan officials said.”

“Afghanistan, like Iraq, is a real loser.”

Where to even begin a summation in support
of that observation.

I could diseratate for hours.

Most telling perhaps is that the combined resourches
of the touted ad-naseum western high-tech military,
has failed to deliver a decisive resolution in 8 years
of conflict.

Yet there are so many, perhaps still a majority who
cling to the notion that this is winnable, and worthwhile.

Even with Vietnam still well withing living memory, not realising that when you preface miltary campains
on lies, you can’t win.

Call it luck, Karma, or
having God on your side, or not.

We have paid, and apparently will continue to pay
for this for the forseeable future and regardless
of which “schmuck” ends up in the White House.

The US of A does seem to so enjoy these military mis-adventures, for fun and profit. Unfortunately we’re
not talking about a lemmonaide stand,

“the financial system may be collapsing, and the nation’s physical infrastructure is deteriorating rapidly (roads, sewers, bridges, schools, etc.), not to mention the fact that US’sproduction/technicalcapabilities have been going down the tubes,”

Nice tie in, the USA’s principle export is currently, WARFARE, in losing 4th generational conflicts.

MaX

Don

Thank you for those insights. My wife, Lorraine and I are moving toward many of the things you suggest. The big one is trying to avoid driving as much as possible. It is hard in our country that has become addicted to the automobile, but it can be done. I have been involved in many of the “town hall” meetings in our country to add bike and walking trails, and more mass transit, at least busses. I wish I could convince people in N. Va to invest in trolly systems, but the addiction to cars and strip malls still dominate.

Don

Here are some tactics that work for me — they probably will not meet your needs, but maybe they’ll be of academic interest:
1) Move to a country with a successful manufacturing sector. Observe how people such as carpenters cannot afford mistakes when working with power saws. Observe how ocean sailors cannot afford to have their ships break down in the middle of the ocean. Try to maximize your contact with economic sectors that have little tolerance for error. Countries with weak manufacturing often get over-run by very dysfunctional middlemen (salesmen, lawyers, safety regulators, etc.). Manufacturing countries have middlemen, but they pull their weight.

2) Cut corners on appearances to maximize benefits of essential factors; an example of this is to eat flavorless but nutritious food you can prepare on your own rather than relying on a restaurant to feed you. I like tasty food, but I absolutely adore being free of the tyranny of the palate.

3) Try to get as much of your personal technology as possible under your personal control. Run Linux and insist on administering your own machine personally. In some cities, you can live without personal motorized transportation. I love being free of the annoyances of parking, maintenance, and fuel.

I really sympathized with your complaint:
“Why cannot you just tell people that you just want a specific thing done, and that is what they do? ”

The only solution is to become a technologist, network with other technologists, and tinker.

4) Maximize your contact with technically skilled people who strive for technical excellence. (This can be easier to do in some communities than in others.)

I personally am delighted to say that while I often encounter disruptions to my planned schedule, few of them are due to actual incompetence. A store owner might decide he doesn’t need to open his store for the day, but that’s his personal entrepreneurial call. It would be entirely different if the store were open but staffed by incompetents, who would fail to serve my economic needs but manage to annoy me.

I got here from Shlok’s blog. For some of us grappling with problems of a similar nature in India, your books promises to be useful. When is your book expected to be out?

The West should be prepared for a “debacle” in Afghanistan in the coming months as the resurgent Taliban seek to take advantage of George W Bush’s lame duck status, says a leading Pakistani observer. The International Herald Tribune referred to him as “A prophetic voice on Taliban calls out again.”

There are no better insiders’ revelations provided than Ahmad Rashid’s Descent into Chaos- a shining example of the right book, by the right person at the right time. Ahmad Rashid is a conspiracy spotter to the world. “Descent into Chaos” reads like a compendium of all sorts of conspiracies-past, present and future. He can identify one brewing any where in between the Makran coast and the Caspian Sea. The Guardian’s Jason Burke recommends: Read Rashid to know what should never have happened. Writing in New Statesman, Time magazine’s once south Asia bureau chief Michael Fathers notes “Ahmed Rashid is an interventionist. He supported the US-led overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 and he dismisses the common belief that Afghans, especially Afghan Pashtuns, will always oppose foreign troops. He argues that, on the contrary, they welcomed Nato’s forces for the change they represented.”

A review in The Independent notes that the “descent into chaos” that Rashid has chronicled shows no sign of ending early. “One suspects that we shall be needing his dispatches from this, the most dangerous front line in the “war on terror”, for a long time to come.” Britain will be battling extremists in Afghanistan for 25 years, the British Defence Secretary, Des Browne declared in a speech at Brookings Institution in Washington, adding that British forces needed time and space to reconstitute themselves for a longer haul. Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British ambassador to Kabul, who has suggested the UK will have to retain a presence in Afghanistan for 30 years. All this is in stark contrast with what the then defense secretary John Reid, declared in the spring of 2006 when the British government dispatched 3,000 troops to southern Afghanistan to join the limited number who had been there as part of an international security force (ISAF) since 2001.

Reid expressed the hope that they would accomplish their mission in three years without a shot being fired. So what kind of need does Rashid’s book fulfill? In his writings one can get a narrative that can weave all this bits into one smooth script of gloom and doom? His recently launched book offers the reams of worst case scenarios with an ever-obliging nightmarish narrative to articulate how bad things are and in what ways they are going to get even worse. Why such books are in great currency? Is it because for politicians who desperately seek a distant crisis for capitalizing some political gains, Ahmad Rashid’s book comes as a recipe of all that can go wrong?

In a larger context, the recent writings of an Indiana University Law professor has some interesting pointers to offer: Does the framing of and reference to violent incidents and description of those suspected or alleged to be behind violence takes a specific form of treatment is the question examined by Steven Chermak author of Searching for a demon: the media’s construction of the militia movement. Looking back at coverage of violence acts by certain sections of the media is intriguing because of the similarities in coverage. These similarities thus represent some of the common practices deployed by the media when describing, defining, and creating events.

In an uniquely insightful article, Marketing Fear: Representing Terrorism After September 11 in the Journal for Crime, Conflict and the Media, Chermak offers a threadbare analysis of how some opinion makers, writers and media experts take full advantage of the propaganda opportunity by creating a symbolic threat, structuring the response to eradicate the threat, and declaring symbolic victories. He first describes the media role in the crisis that follows specific events. “Crisis is important because it justifies coverage of an issue, encourages media analysis of a targeted group, and stirs public and political reaction. “September 11th ignited [a] wave of legislative activity, and has been used to justify the war in Afghanistan and now Iraq.” In his article Chermak next focuses on the general frames used to define these two threats and explains why these frames were emphasized. Frames inject order and predictability into our daily interpretations of social reality. Media workers, sources, and the news-consuming public rely on shorthand reference schemes in order for reality to be consistent with existing conceptions. The frames used to describe events and groups are conceptualized here as organizing devices or conceptual tools. Reporters are selective in deciding how to portray an event and obviously prefer some interpretations to other equally plausible ones. Because specific frames are selected and promoted at the expense of other interpretations, the framing of events has inherent ideological power.

In Chermak’s observation, the mass media can control the scope of public debate in a democratic society, determining what facts are relevant, who the authoritative voices on issues are, and when a minority or alternative viewpoint is worthy of consideration. In this way the media provides blinders that prevent the public from viewing a problem from a different perspective.

Chermak suspects that “Often the most unusual and unrepresentative events can dominate media coverage for a long period of time, providing an opportunity to reshape public thinking about an issue. Much of the public’s reliance on the news media and the profit-potential of news making are in fact linked to their ability to satisfy the public craving for information. Sensational cases startle the public into accepting a new understanding by opening gateways to the public’s fears and frustrations, and igniting processes that illuminate the boundaries of a community.

Referring to the typical traits that he has observed, Chermak lists that the following tendencies were noted typically:

References to extremist/violent elements were useful for the generation of political capital. It really underscores a broader point about how the media has become a place to market fear. Terrorism is presented clearly and without perspective. The public is not only blinded from understanding anything except the media perspective, but the fear conjured up following these events provide enough justification to accept responses—war, bureaucratic expansion, civil rights violations—uncritically and without reservation.

Extremists’ “conspiracies are supported by picking and choosing anecdotal, fabricated, excerpted, or theorized evidence from speeches, media articles, political documents, myth, and mainstream and extremist publications.”

“Media professionals have learned by practice what events are worth covering, what events are worthy of substantial coverage, and how such events should be presented to the public. …The structure of news-making then directs them towards specific sources and documents.” Story placement illustrates what types of story are worthy of fetching a good headline.

Explaining the possible motives for resorting to such an approach Chermak concludes:
“The legitimacy of a threat depends only on the perception that the target is extremely dangerous to the security and stability of society. Thus a threat is successful when it produces fear. Fear is a vitally important cultural commodity that helps to justify the demonization of individuals and groups by people in power. The news media contributes directly to this demonization by sustaining and feeding off of the public’s fears. The news media will intensify its coverage when a threat is thought to be significant, but in doing so, it promotes and aggravates the corresponding fear. Framing Al Qaeda and militias as threatening helped to dehumanize these targets, and validate any planned responses by social control agencies and justify the need for additional resources to respond to them.”