Cones

BY Abner Isom

[Editor’s note: This is just a short story, and maybe not a particularly good one. The important thing is that this is fiction, and not suggesting anyone actually do these things.]

She just wanted to see what would happen. Some day, she figured, they were going to do something horrible and over the top — drop a nuke on someone, or start mass arrests, or maybe just that the war would become intolerable to enough people that such an action would be supported. Then this could come in handy, this little technique, and if it were replicated all over the country, it would cost the system billions and billions of dollars each day.

For now, she just wanted to test her hypothesis.

The highway department’s facility was near the main post office. There was gravel and cinders and heavy equipment and a couple of large storage sheds; and there were caution signs and traffic cones. It was fenced in with a 12-foot chain-link fence (and double barbed wire outriggers atop). But she’d walked around the facility and discovered that there was no fence on the side facing into the woods. If there hadn’t been, she’d have purchased a bolt-cutter to snip-snip-snip a passageway through the fence itself. A good bolt-cutter will go through chain-link like a warm knife through the butter. If she’d had collaborators, she might have posted them with cell phones both ways up the road for early warning, but she went in this time on chutzpah and toted out the cones through the woods to a place alongside the road almost a quarter mile away; it took her two hours.

Her map reconnaissance had shown that there were five main arteries that led commuters into the city. She had timed the van drive from point to point in places along the arteries where she had good access from a parking point off the artery itself. She had “liberated” 20 traffic cones from the highway department; and five caution signs. At each point, she set out four cones when there was no one on the road. It was 2 AM when she started and 4:20 when she finished.

The cones were placed in a long diagonal that slowly shifted traffic to the right lane and partly onto the shoulder of the highway. If she’d have been operating with teams, the whole thing could have been done in 15 minutes, simultaneously. But she was just testing.

She then put each caution sign 200 meters or so in advance of the first cone, to get the drivers to slow down. She wasn’t interested in hurting anyone, just plugging up the roads at rush hour. If this worked, she thought, then imagine what would happen if this happened in ten big cities, or 20. What if 1,000 activists added their own bodies to the roadblocks and sealed the cities completely. The trick was having enough public support so that people gave a shit.

But she had to try it… just to see how it worked. So here she sat, at 7:30 AM now, in a parking lot with her coffee, overwatching the highway.

THE END
Interesting story

Posted by stan as Analysis at 9:24 AM PST

Perhaps the fastest growing new “wealth-management” tool in the US is the reverse mortgage. The Federal Housing Administration insured 76, 351 such mortgages in 2006 compared with 43,131 in 2005. Industry officials expect around 120,000 reverse mortgages to be signed in 2007. In 1990, only 150 reverse mortgages were arranged. Traditional mortgages were the crucial means whereby millions of American families changed, especially after World War II, from tenants to home owners. True homeownership was/is the physical manifestation of the American Dream. Today’s reverse mortgages are a new means for liquidating that dream. They would better be described as “wealth-transfer” than “wealth-management” tools.

In traditional mortgages, home buyers pay lenders principal plus interest over many years to build up their home equity, to become genuine owners. In reverse mortgages, people who already own their homes borrow from lenders (receiving lump sums and/or monthly payments and/or lines of credit); in return, the lenders then acquire rising equity in those homes. Eventually the borrowers or their heirs must sell the home to repay the principal and accumulated interest. Tens of thousands of Americans aged 62 (the legally mandated minimum age for eligibility) or more are now receiving monthly reverse mortgage payments. They will get them for some or all of the rest of their lives. In this way, they can supplement the inadequate social security and often modest pension or investment income they must depend upon in retirement.

FULL from R. Wolfe at GlobalMacroScope

Posted by stan as Analysis at 11:41 AM PST

M. K. Bhadrakumar is a retired Indian foreign service officer (and Ambassador) who writes often for Asia Times. His latest, “Foreign devils in the Iranian mountains ,” (linked below) relates well to one of the thinkpieces written last August, at IA’s Analysis-Synthesis section, called Balochistan and the New World Order. Serious intelligence development efforts will seldom yield the same subject lines as those discussions engineered by either the government or the capitalist media. There is nothing “sexy,” in the mind of Western readers, about Balochistan. But there are things going on there that could have very dramatic impacts on our futures.

In a rare public criticism of Pakistan, the Tehran Times commented last week that an exclusive Islamabad-Washington nexus is at work manipulating the Afghan situation. The daily, which reflects official Iranian thinking, spelled out something that others perhaps knew already but were afraid to talk about publicly.

All the same, the commentary gave a candid Iranian insight into the state of play in Afghanistan. It estimated that without a comprehensive rethink of strategy aimed at addressing the problems of weak political institutions, misgovernance, corruption, warlordism, tardy reconstruction, drug trafficking and attendant mafia, and excesses by the coalition forces, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) couldn’t possibly hope to get anywhere near on top of the crisis in Afghanistan.

The commentary pointed a finger at Pakistan’s training the Taliban and providing them with “logistical and political support”. It highlighted that US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who visited Islamabad recently, chose to sidestep the issue and instead bonded with President General Pervez Musharraf. This is because Washington’s priority - that the “new cold war” objective of NATO is to establish a long-term presence in the region - can be realized only with Musharraf’s cooperation.

FULL ANALYSIS

Posted by stan as Analysis at 11:13 AM PST

The newest part of Jim Craven’s heuristic devices in the IA Pedagogy section is called The Hidden Algorithm and Agenda.

This is a card trick based on Set Theory. I use it to show how hidden algorithms in data or card sets can work like hidden agenda: They prescribe relationships, formulae, operations and steps to be performed leading to predetermined and discoverable outcomes.

Check it out!

Posted by BrianR as Pedagogy at 8:51 PM PST

Unlike almost anywhere else in Baghdad, you could dine at the cafeteria in the Republican Palace in the heart of the Green Zone for six months and never eat hummus, flatbread, or a lamb kebab. The palace was the headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the American occupation administration in Iraq, and the food was always American, often with a Southern flavour. A buffet featured grits, cornbread and a bottomless barrel of pork: sausage for breakfast, hot dogs for lunch, pork chops for dinner. The cafeteria was all about meeting American needs for high-calorie, high-fat comfort food.

None of the succulent tomatoes or crisp cucumbers grown in Iraq made it into the salad bar. US government regulations dictated that everything, even the water in which hot dogs were boiled, be shipped in from approved suppliers in other nations. Milk and bread were trucked in from Kuwait, as were tinned peas and carrots. The breakfast cereal was flown in from the US.

FULL (Google Cache of story who’s original link broke.) Here’s another link in case the first one breaks too.

Then follow up with THIS ONE, then THIS ONE.

Please forward this widely, with links. Layla Anwar doesn’t make anyone comfortable, but she has things to say that aren’t being said by anyone else as an Iraqi woman. Hear her bitterness; and you will know why this war cannot be “won,” and why the occupation itself is the basis of “inter-Iraqi violence.”

Posted by stan as News, Analysis at 7:36 AM PST

Bush is not responsible for the war in Iraq. Al Gore said during his campaign against Bush II that Bush I should have finished the job; and we never tire of pretending these days that the Clinton-Gore government was not attacking Iraq…. they were, regularly and lethally. War is inherent to civilization; and that is why we’ll have more and more of it, and why it will eventually percolate from the peripheries populated by Dark Others into our suburbs.

Everything we have that we list in our catalogue of civilization is forged out of fraud, theft, and murder. The cities of the world are built up on fraud, theft, and murder. Show me the exception, and I’ll take it back.

The fine woods and metals and animal guts that make the orchestras, the stones and steel and trees for our libraries, the fabric and workmanship of our clothing, and the food displayed strategically along our supermarket shelves… they all require war. They are taken from cultures who first refuse to cooperate, then who are forced to cooperate or be depopulated.

The expansive and expanding heaps of technomass — of asphalt and glass and plastic and paint and shiny right-angles — are scraped out of hillsides and coastlines, with the corpses of biomes and simpler cultures left behind as the mizzens of this wretched thing called civilization. The more this disease has spread, the more it has manifested and magnified its most acute symptom: war.

Technology is driven by scarcity, and scarcity by pillage, and new technology to correct for the iatrogenesis of the last technology. This is not a mark of superiority, but the cascading catastrophe of power seeking the enslavement of first women, then slaves and colonies and nature…

Conquest is a necessity to continue civilization. How long would this country last as it is without the oil from abroad? What if those abroad said, No? Be real, be realistic before you answer this question with pious abstractions. How long would things stay “stable” hereabouts if the supermarket shelves were suddenly bare? If the shutters went up on WalMart’s windows? How much of what we take for granted each and every day comes from someplace else, where the cop with the truncheon stands near the worker, and the sea lane is kept open by a Naval battle group?

Every “advanced” society exists as a parasite on those less “advanced,” and that can be proven empirically and decisively. Civilization cannot exist in the absence of war, because civilization is itself inherently exploitative. Los Angeles cannot exist without the water from Colorado. New York cannot exist without the “inputs” from abroad. We know damn well this is true, so we conceal it under pretty abstractions like “free market,” and pretend that the wars required to maintain the power of the powerful are moral failures, anomalies within civilization, instead of something as intrinsic to civilization as long ears on a rabbit.

Bring us to the point where we will at least admit of this truth; and there is a remote chance that we can figure out some tentative first steps how to stop the runaway train… that is, in the end, to change everything.

COMMENTS CAN BE POSTED AT HUFFPO It is already filling up with drivel about Man and She-Nature. Help!

Posted by stan as Analysis at 6:45 AM PST

From Fire on the Mountain

Representative John Murtha (D, PA) has a plan to end the war in Iraq (though at the moment he’s selling it only as a way to end “The Surge.”). This plan is based on attaching conditions to Bush’s “emergency appropriation” request. It has the backing of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic leadership, and presumably of those significant allies within the military’s High Command with whom Murtha has legendary ties going back decades.

The Murtha plan also serves to provide cover FULL ANALYSIS

Posted by stan as Analysis at 6:31 AM PST

I spent a whole day trying to convince people online (with varying degrees of success) that homophobia, misogyny and warfare are all tied up together. And here I see Bush managed to do the same thing, more effectively, in exactly seven words. Damn.

“Speaking of George Bush, with whom Sharon developed a very close relationship, Uri Dan recalls that Sharon’s delicacy made him reluctant to repeat what the president had told him when they discussed Osama bin Laden. Finally he relented. And here is what the leader of the Western world, valiant warrior in the battle of cultures, promised to do to bin Laden if he caught him: “I will screw him in the ass!”

What an odd twist it would be if people didn’t actually secretly all see male penetration of females as domination/superiority, eh?

I tried flipping Bush’s words so they’d be from a fierce female perspective, but it just doesn’t feel the same to me, somehow. What do you think, does this sound threatening? “I will let him screw me in the ass!”

Maybe if I say it while brandishing a scabbard?

–Audrey Mantey

Hat tip to De Clarke for a heads-up on this companion piece about the making of military males, and how it relates to patriarchy’s hatred of the body.

Posted by stan as Analysis at 5:28 PM PST

There’s some new writting by Steve McClure in the IA Analysis-Synthesis section called Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Mao and Jim Gilchrest. Check it out! Thanks for letting us post your writting on IA Steve!

Watching the anti-immigrant movement is an interesting case study of careful and well thought out political action. The minutemen under the leadership of Jim Gilchrest have artfully used the weaknesses of progressive social movements to advance a minority agenda at odds with the multi-cultural and inclusive ideological position of the urban majority. The anti-immigrant movement follows in the footsteps of the anti-abortion movement and others which successfully undermined the social democratic consensus of the post war era in the interests of the most reactionary bloc of capital. Understanding reactionary social movements from a strategic and tactical point of view might illuminate the weaknesses of progressive social movements, which seem constitutionally unable to (1) establish programmatic unity, (2) consolidate geographic base areas, or (3) understand the relationship between the contradictory geographies of power — economic and political.

Posted by BrianR as Analysis at 7:50 PM PST

When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free—truly free—to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say that when hope dies, action begins.

FULL

Posted by stan as Analysis at 2:01 PM PST