Anti-Insurgent Graphic Creations

The anti-insurgent sentiment in the U.S. has spawned graphic creations as a response.

 

 

 

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, An Excerpt

 

The central theme of this book is that culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilization identities, are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War world. The five parts of this book elaborate corollaries to this main proposition.

Part I: For the first time in history global politics is both multipolar and multicivilizational; modernization is distinct from Westernization and is producing neither a universal civilization in any meaningful sense nor the Westernization of non-Western societies.

Part II: The balance of power among civilizations is shifting: the West is declining in relative influence; Asian civilizations are expanding their economic, military, and political strength; Islam is exploding demographically with destabilizing consequences for Muslim countries and their neighbors; and non-Western civilizations generally are reaffirming the value of their own cultures.

Part III: A civilization-based world order is emerging: societies sharing cultural affinities cooperate with each other; efforts to shift societies from one civilization to another are unsuccessful; and countries group themselves around the lead or core states of their civilization.

Part IV: The West's universalist pretensions increasingly bring it into conflict with other civilizations, most seriously with Islam and China; at the local level fault line wars, largely between Muslims and non-Muslims, generate "kin-country rallying," the threat of broader escalation, and hence efforts by core states to halt these wars.

Part V: The survival of the West depends on Americans reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies. Avoidance of a global war of civilizations depends on world leaders accepting and cooperating to maintain the multicivilizational character of global politics.

Not a Politically Correct Music Site

This is not politically correct music but Age of Liberty portrays itself as an alternative to the usual Hollywood and left-leaning entertainment industry.

"Stupid in America," a Report by John Stossel

A report by John Stossel entitled "Stupid in America" is sobering, and scary.

About This Video

20-20 investigation by John Stossel entitled "Stupid in America" highlighting some of the flaws with the education system in the United States.

The story started out when identical tests were given to high school students in New Jersey and in Belgium. The Belgian kids cleaned the American kids' clocks. The Belgian kids called the American students "stupid", which gave the piece its name.

Jay Greene, author of "Education Myths," points out that "If money were the solution, the problem would already be solved. We've doubled per pupil spending, adjusting for inflation, over the last 30 years, and yet schools aren't better."

Lebanon in Chaos

In a development straight out of how not to elect a leader the Lebanese presidency ends in chaos. President Emile Lahoud leaves office refusing to recognize the Prime Minister's government.

There is now no elected successor and a bitter dispute looms over who is in power.

The pro-Syrian and anti-Western Lahoud left the presidential palace and he issued an order that the army should take over control.

However, pro-Western Prime Minister Fouad Siniora rejected the move and says that under the constitution he and his cabinet are in temporary power.

The president is elected by parliament, but a vote was scuttled by the pro-Syrian opposition who did not allow the necessary quorum to be achieved.

The election of a president requires a two-thirds majority, which means that the pro-Western ruling bloc--with only a slim majority--could not force its preferred candidate through parliament.

The streets reflected the chaotic mood with the army deployed in force and schools closed.

The US, Russia, Syria and Iran have all been intensely involved.

Russia should provide regional leadership and the U.S. should take a step back.

New Far Rightist Party Gains Ground in Germany

 

The National Democratic Party (NPD) is a neo-Nazi German entity that is gaining ground.

According to some Social Democrats, the Party is anti-Semitic and racist. It opposes a multi-party system and is undemocratic.

The NPD is prone to weekend demonstrations involving radical, violence-prone neo-Nazis.

In fact, the NPD was created in West Germany more than 40 years ago, mainly by Nazi war veterans. It lost members and direction until German reunification in 1990. As unemployment and unhappiness increased in the old east, the NPD gained ground.

Maybe the Party should look up how that whole unemployment and ill-will thing worked out in 1930s Germany.

American Students: As Good As Slovakia and Estonia

Students in Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan significantly outperform American students on math and science tests.

The study's author is Gary Phillips, chief scientist at the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit independent scientific research firm.

Eighth-grade students were compared with peers in 45 countries.

American students trailed the top students and were comparable to pupils in Slovakia and Estonia, but they were well above those in countries like Egypt, Chile, and Saudi Arabia.

The highest-performing state in math was Massachusetts; in science, it was North Dakota. The new study shows that average math achievement in Massachusetts was lower than in the leading Asian nations and Belgium.

Mississippi was the lowest-performing state in both math and science.

Is this really where the U.S. should be?

There Must Be 50 Ways . . . To Tell a Story With Web 2.0 Tools

There are so many more possibilities to tell a story; and, Web 2.0 Web 2.0 tools have increased the promise of the Web to relate stories in an effective manner.

Excellent Free Cleaner

An excellent and helpful (did I mention free!) tool is linked here.

Paul Berman Biography, Terror and Liberalism

Paul Berman is an American author and journalist who writes on politics and literature. His articles have been published in The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review and Slate, and he is the author of several books, including A Tale of Two Utopias and Terror and Liberalism.

Berman received his undergraduate education from Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1971. He has reported on Nicaragua's civil wars, Mexico's elections, and the Czech Republic's Velvet Revolution. Currently he is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, a professor of journalism and distinguished writer in residence at New York University, and a member of the editorial board of Dissent.

Totalitarianism and Islamic Fundamentalism

In Terror and Liberalism, Berman suggests that the appeal of totalitarian movements emanated from liberalism's apparent failure in the aftermath of the First World War. Movements like Fascism, Nazism, Falangism, and Communism all share, according to Berman, two essential similarities. Firstly, they envision themselves as a force being attacked by barbarians who can only be defended by the internal purification of the movement. Berman sees the Communist striving for ideological purity, the Falangist pursuit of religious purity, and the Nazi pursuit of racial purity as being related efforts in this regard. Together with this purifying impulse, Berman argues that these totalitarian movements share a similar nihilist strand.

Berman then tries to trace these commonalities between the various totalitarian ideologies into the modern Islamic world. He splits Islamic thought into two broad categories: Pan-Arabism and Islamic fundamentalism. Pan-Arabist movements like the Ba'ath Party, he suggests, was influenced by traditional European totalitarian thought. In the Islamic fundamentalist movement, Berman sees the re-emergence of the nihilist strand in the form of suicide bombings and the celebration of martyrdom.

History of the 1968 Generation

Berman's A Tale of Two Utopias and Power and the Idealists are the first two parts of a history of the so-called Generation of 1968 (of which he was a member). He argues that packaged together with the liberal ideals in this movement were decidedly disturbing elements. Joschka Fischer, for example, the 1968 activist who would later become the leader of the German Green Party and Foreign Minister, decided that there was in fact the presence of anti-Semitic impulses in this movement when he saw a fellow activist participate in the Entebbe hijacking. The hijackers split the passengers by religion, with Jews on the one side and non-Jews on the other, with the intention to kill all of the former. Similarly, Berman tracks major figures like Bernard Kouchner - the later founder of Doctors Without Borders - a member of the 1968 Generation who would later marry active improvement of human rights to established political goals.

At the close of the book, Berman considers the effect of the war in Iraq on these graduates of '68. He suggests that the war split the movement greatly, with many now deeply aware of the dramatic excesses of the regime of Sadaam Hussein, as well as the potential negative consequences if such a dictator remained in power. Nonetheless, they were deeply concerned by the arguments offered by the Bush Administration. Though his fellow activists were split, Berman argues that the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and 2003 invasion of Iraq were justified by the doctrine of "liberal interventionism" - intervention to safeguard and promote liberal democratic freedoms. Some have grouped Berman with neo-conservatives for these positions. Others believe he is more closely aligned with traditional liberal internationalism because of his disdain for the neo-conservative policies of George W. Bush.

Are Palestinian Kids Really Suffering Most From Outsiders?

If a recent report is to be believed, 93% of Palestinian kids suffer domestic violence and this would indicate that outsiders are the least of their problems.

New Family, a pro-family rights organization, reported these disturbing statistics in its annual 2007 report.

Their sources included the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion (PCPO). According to these sources, 93.3% of Palestinian children have experienced domestic violence. Only 52.2% of Palestinian families feel they can provide a safe environment for their children.

Undernourishment causes 10% of these Palestinian children to suffer impaired development. These people are poor; I'm not sure you can blame all this on Israel. The leading cause of infant deaths in Gaza is low body weight. The infant mortality rate is three times greater than that of Israel, and also higher than the rate in the Western world.

The study revealed that 95.1% of Palestinian girls spend the majority of their free time at home, in contrast to 80.5% of Palestinian boys, making the home the only place where female children suffer more violence than males. Because of family poverty, 73.4% of these children work for their families without pay.

Palestinian suffering sparks conflict and Israel opens a window into Middle Eastern Islam, abusive and poor.

Iranian Censors At It Again

The Iranians are out to get the latest damaging reading, this time a novel by Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Marquez almost got away with the dastardly deed--until censors actually translated its title for what it is.

The actual title is: Memories of My Melancholy Whores but this initially slipped by the censors and thus was published in Farsi as Memories of My Melancholy Sweethearts which is a horse of a different color.

The uncensored first edition of 5,000 had sold out before the authorities corrected their mistake and banned the work.

Violent Oppression of Women in Islam

The violent oppression of women according to the dictates of Islam has no correspondence in the West.

UK Preachers from Saudi Arabia and the UAE: Undercover Report

The deception is real because numerous of these groups are praised for their inter-faith efforts. However, British journalists went undercover to report the actual radical preaching done by Saudi and UAE imams.

On Janet Murray's work Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace

Janet Murray's work Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, asks whether the computer can provide the basis for an expressive narrative form, just as print technology supported the development of the novel and film technology supported the evolution of movies. I don't believe it can.

In fact, I think the future of the computer is impossible to predict due to the innovative uses the computer is being used for. Murray, on the other hand, provides an optimistic answer. Murray’s analysis rests on an understanding of the computer as a medium of representation with a distinct set of properties. I don't think it does.

The computer is not procedural, as she argues, but dispersive. The computer is often participatory, as she argues, but it is also just as easily isolating. One of the most interesting points of the work is the connection between research and artificial intelligence (AI) with cultural forms such as games, movies, literature, and television. The most promising of her connections is that between AI and games.

Nonetheless, Murray’s main point is that the new computer formats expand the possibilities of expression available for storytelling which has not been proven true as indicated by the failure of any major computer work to gain literary acceptance. Indeed, one of the major literary contributions of the computer age is one that for all intents and purposes predated computers. In 1984, William Gibson contributed Neuromancer which depicted the developing human-machine interface created by the widespread use of computers and computer network.

French Detain 7 Suspected Islamists

French authorities detained seven suspected Islamic militants who allegedly trained to fight in Iraq. Six of the men are French nationals of Bosnian origin, while the seventh is Algerian. They ranged in age from their early 20s to mid 40s. At least one was a student: another a teacher.

Islamic State: Against Democracy

The Islamic State of Iraq released a graphic video decrying the failures of democracy in Iraq. The production advocates the return to tribal warfare as an improvement over the imposed attempt to bring democracy to Iraq. The strident tone and the impassioned speakers on the video denounce their opponents and advocate violence against. them.

On the other hand, this is the same group which has issued the ideal establishment of their state. Their statement reads:

Anyone thinking that Islam can gain power through videos, books, appeals, parliaments and election leaflets is an ignorant [?] who does not know how this religion was established. Cf. The SITE Institute.

The Islamic State establishes itself as a non-democratic entity but criticizes the failures of democracy in Iraq. I guess that's clear.

And, meanwhile, roadside attacks against U.S. troops is down to the lowest levels in two years.

Musharraf, One of Our Thirty Tyrants

President Pervez Musharraf's imposition of a state of emergency is regrettable, inevitable, and a harbinger of ill times to come.

The U.S. is too closely allied with a repressive regime and one which we should have severed ties to a long time ago. He may be a draconian but he is one of our hoi triakonta, Thirty Tyrants, seems to be the thinking in Washington.

Musharraf's inability to rein in the Pakistani Taleban is part and parcel of his danger of being swarmed by a deep structural crisis at the heart of Pakistan.

The flaw is an over reliance on the army to sustain the constitution, the independence of the judiciary, the bureaucracy, a collapsing economy, and the dichotomy between army elites, the political parties, and civil society.

I've advocated that a greater regional stability is to be found in the combined efforts of India, Russia, and China. It is, after all, in their background that the Taleban is rising and it is their issue more immediately than it is of concern to the U.S. India's traditional hostility may be offset by the Russians and the Chinese.

News Reports All Muslims are Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

The British publication Guardian ran a story about a survey which shows a 'demonisation' of Muslims. I wouldn't want to suggest that Muslims did anything negative so as to be newsworthy but maybe it is implied in the study.

The research reflected one week's news coverage that showed 91% of articles in national newspapers about Muslims were negative; only 4% of the 352 articles studied were positive.

Journalists will have to spend more time finding positive, uplifting newsy stories about Muslims.

Wait, that's not what they do for anyone, including other religions.

India the New Player On the Block

India is making its presence known in the exclusive group of supercomputing nations. This is the arrival of India in the HPC crowd.

The U.S. leads supercomputing by a significant margin but India-based Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Ltd., which is actually part of a conglomerate itself, has just built the world's fourth most powerful supercomputer.

The supercomputer was built with Hewlett-Packard Co. servers using Intel chips with 14,240 processor cores. The system achieved a performance of 117.9 TFLOPS. The fastest system is quite a bit faster, with a 213,000 processing core, is IBM's BlueGene/L System, a joint development of IBM and the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. It achieved a benchmark of 478.2 TFLOPS.

India's supercomputers make up only nine, or just under 2%, of supercomputers. he U.S. houses 283 of the systems, or nearly 57% of the total. The U.K. is second best with 48 or nearly 10% of the supercomputing systems.

The question to wonder is India just a new player or will the nation be poised to make even more significant gains.