Stratfor and Whitney Able

This Stratfor article discusses the drug trade, cartel violence, corruption and their effects on both Texas and the northern Mexican border states. 

Scott Stewart makes the interesting observation that along the border, in terms of geography, culture and economics the boarder lands are in many ways very similar, with relatives even living on both sides. Yet, the security situation shows a very clear demarcation between Texas and the Mexican border states.

He then discusses how the drug trade impacts both, and why there is such a clear difference between the two areas.

For some odd reason, all of this talk about the Mexican border brought to mind the independent Sci-fi movie Monsters. As a result, the film's female lead Whitney Able lands the honor of being this article's Hot Stratfor Babe.

The film's premise is that six years earlier a NASA probe bearing aliens life samples crashed in Mexico, and now all of northern Mexico is the "Forbidden Zone". A free lance photographer (i.e., a bum) is tasked to bring his rich boss's daughter back to the States. One thing leads to another, and they lose their ferry tickets and have to hire a guide to take them through the Forbidden Zone to the U.S. border.

Although frequently over-rated by critics, it's not a bad movie. The director is successful in disguising just how slender his budget was, and his low key approach means he avoids many pitfalls -- for example he never beats you over the head with the obvious irony of Americans hiring a coyote to smuggle them back into the States.

However, like many independent film makers, he has trouble finishing what he's set-up, which brings us to the completely ridiculous scene that brought this movie to mind as I pondered border movies for a Hot Strafor Babe. The two have been hacking their way through a jungle when they come upon an Aztec pyramid. They climb to the top and, just a mile or two to the north is the U.S. border. 

Yes, in this film the south bank of the Rio Grande is a rain forest, and you can see downtown El Paso from the top of Aztec pyramids dotting the landscape. One wonders what sort of grades the film makers got in grade school geography. I won't spoil the goofy ending for you (and yup, it gets goofier), but will recommend you watch it if it ever pops up on TV. There are many parts of it that are well done enough to warrant a viewing.


CORRUPTION: WHY TEXAS IS NOT MEXICO
By Scott Stewart, May 19, 2011

As one studies Mexico's cartel war, it is not uncommon to hear Mexican politicians -- and some people in the United States -- claim that Mexico's problems of violence and corruption stem largely from the country's proximity to the United States. According to this narrative, the United States is the world's largest illicit narcotics market, and the inexorable force of economic demand means that the countries supplying the demand, and those that are positioned between the source countries and the huge U.S. market, are trapped in a very bad position. Because of this market and the illicit trade it creates, billions of dollars worth of drugs flow northward through Mexico (or are produced there) and billions of dollars in cash flow back southward into Mexico. The guns that flow southward along with the cash, according to the narrative, are largely responsible for Mexico's violence. As one looks at other countries lying to the south of Mexico along the smuggling routes from South America to the United States, they too seem to suffer from the same maladies.

However, when we look at the dynamics of the narcotics trade, there are other political entities, ones located to Mexico's north, that find themselves caught in the same geographic and economic position as Mexico and points south. As borderlands, these entities -- referred to as states in the U.S. political system -- find themselves caught between the supply of drugs flowing from the south and the large narcotics markets to their north. The geographic location of these states results in large quantities of narcotics flowing northward through their territory and large amounts of cash likewise flowing southward. Indeed, this illicit flow has brought with it corruption and violence, but when we look at these U.S. states, their security environments are starkly different from those of Mexican states on the other side of the border.

One implicit reality that flows from the geopolitical concept of borderlands is that while political borders are clearly delineated, the cultural and economic borders surrounding them are frequently less clear and more dynamic. The borderlands on each side of the thin, artificially imposed line we call a border are remarkably similar in geographic and demographic terms (indeed, inhabitants of such areas are often related). In the larger picture, both sides of the border often face the same set of geopolitical realities and challenges. Certainly the border between the United States and Mexico was artificially imposed by the annexation of Texas following its anti-Mexico revolution as well as the U.S. annexation of what is now much of the U.S. West, including the border states of Arizona, California and New Mexico, following the Mexican-American War. While the desert regions along the border do provide a bit of a buffer between the two countries -- and between the Mexican core and its northern territories -- there is no geological obstacle separating the two countries. Even the Rio Grande is not so grand, as the constant flow of illicit goods over it testifies. In many places, like Juarez and El Paso, the U.S.-Mexico border serves to cut cities in half, much like the Berlin Wall used to do.

Yet as one crosses over that artificial line one senses huge differences between the cultural, economic and security environments north and south. In spite of the geopolitical and economic realities confronting both sides of this borderland, Texas is not Mexico. The differences run deep, and we thought it worthwhile this week to examine how and why.

Same Problems, Different Scope

First, it must be understood that this examination does mean to assert that the illicit narcotics market in the United States has no effect on Mexico (or Central America, for that matter). The flow of narcotics, money and guns, and the organizations that participate in this illicit trade, does have a clear and demonstrable impact on Mexico. But -- and this very significant -- that impact does not stop at the border. This illicit commerce also impacts the U.S. states north of the border.

Certainly the U.S. side of the border has seen corruption of public officials, cartel-related violence and, of course, drug trafficking. But these phenomena have manifested themselves differently on the U.S. side of the border.[continued after jump]

図式マン

From Z, for those Fridays where only some Japanese Emo Scream Punk will get you ready for the weekend.
 

Obabbler's speech

Obama gave his big Middle East speech today. My reaction to it is colored by my suspicion, which I cannot shake, that Obama has largely dialed out of the foreign policy component of the Presidency. 

The initiatives he tried to implement in the beginning of his Presidency have all been reduced to a shambles; and rather than rethink his policies, the biggest Brainiac in the Universe has simply shoved the mess aside. Out of sight, out of mind.

My belief is that when he clocked out of directing foreign affairs other elements in his administration began to, in the resulting power vacuum, struggle with each other over the direction of America's policy.  I think you see this in the confused response to the Egyptian crisis, then in the dithering and eventual incomprehensible intervention as Europe's lapdog in Libya, and in the US's obvious uncertainty as to what to do in Syria. Even the multiple and conflicting stories that came out of the raid that killed Bin Laden point to multiple sources pushing multiple narratives.

As a result I thought he speech was a bit of a hodgepodge: his Howard Zinn-like understanding of history as a pastiche of exploited fuzzy-wuzzies, mixed with the Clintonista's pro-Arab slant, mixed with the State Department's usual inertia.

With regards to the North African protests a more deft politician, and one who hadn't painted themselves into a corner regarding Iraq, would have moved from the Iraqi experience of blending Shite, Sunni and Kurd, to Egypt's need to protect its minorities (the Copts) to be truly democratic, to Syria which is being ruled by a brutal minority group who are currently mowing down their protesting majority.

Which is to say, a more astute politician would have realized Syria, and not the Palestinians, are the real prize. A Syria detached from Iran is the goal worth aiming towards.

However, Obama is Obama, so he could not resist ending his speech in that graveyard of peace-makers -- the Israel/Palestinian fiasco. And so he laid out the end points for negotiation: a Palestine that recognizes a Jewish Israel and an Israel the commits suicide behind the 1967 borders. Neither position is tenable, and so Obama's speech, like all of his speeches, will be forgotten in a day or two.

Meanwhile Israel will have try to dodge the bullet and to hope for the best in the 2012 elections; the Palestinians will try to rush the borders Gandhi-like, but being Palestinians will never grasp the whole "non-violent" component; the European elite, unaware that their increasingly right-leaning population may rather enjoy the fact that cuffs were slapped on the likes of DSK, will babble about the ICC; and the Arab bloc known as the U.N. General Assembly will recognize Glorious Palestine this autumn just to make the mess complete.

My hope... if your going to give North African's money attach a lot of strings and, with luck, the Palestinian embrace of Iranian-backed Hamas will turn out to be a rug that gets yanked out from underneath them in that Sunni dominated region. WWII is long gone, so too should be the last refugee camps from that era.   

In the meanwhile, our foreign policy is still adrift.

 

Food Propoganda today!

Modern food posters to compliment the previous post. 

GMO fears, vegan diet, locally grown food, and food justice
replace the issues of earlier eras. 

Food Propoganda

WWI poster

I'm a little late, but in 2010 Cory Bernart, in collaboration with the National Agricultural Library, created an exhibit entitled "When Beans Were Bullets: War-Era Food Posters" of posters from the WWI, the inter-war period, and WWII.

I've included a small sampling on this page and after the jump. You can see many more examples, including some videos, from the exhibit at the website: War-era Food Posters.

Inter-war poster

WWII poster

If I knew... I would have got dressed up

Looking for your own face - Attar

Your face is neither infinite nor ephemeral.
You can never see your own face,
only a reflection, not the face itself.

So you sigh in front of mirrors
and cloud the surface.

It's better to keep your breath cold.
Hold it, like a diver does in the ocean.
One slight movement, the mirror-image goes.

Don't be dead or asleep or awake.
Don't be anything.

What you most want,
what you travel around wishing to find,
lose yourself as lovers lose themselves,
and you'll be that.

Odd-looking red poodle

A skinny, short-haired, mutated poodle quenches its thirst.

A few years ago Mrs. Sinistral claimed to have spotted a Florida Panther in our backyard. Upon further viewings it turned out that it was nothing more than the neighbor's rather fat cat. So, when a few months ago she claimed to have seen a fox, I derided her as probably mistaking a poodle for a fox.

Shortly afterwards she produced a picture of the creature. It was about 50 yards away from the camera and a bit blurry looking. Still, it was odd looking, and rather reddish for a poodle. None the less, after studying the photo carefully I solemnly declared that it was obviously a poodle.

Today she produced the above photo. It was right outside our door drinking from a bowl of water we put out for the neighborhood cats. 

Ermmm... uhh..... looks like a poodle to me. At any rate, that's my story and I'm sticking to it, although I doubt I'll try to pet it if I ever get close enough to it. 
 

Stratfor and Karolina Kurkova

The Visegrad Group (V4) consists of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, all countries that had been behind the Iron Curtain. It was formed when the Soviet Union collapsed. 

On May 12th they announced that they were going to form a Battle Group, independent of NATO and under the overall command of Poland. Today's Stratfor article discusses the rationale of the V4, all sandwiched between Germany and Russia, forming a force to act as a mutual defensive force.

For the article's Hot Stratfor Babe I looked for a woman soldier in a movie and was delighted to find the Czech supermodel Karolina Kurkova who played Courtney “Cover Girl” Kreiger in the film G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.  

I've never seen the movie, but her name appears suspiciously far down in the credits, which leads me to believe she may not be the female lead. That's a shame, 'cause nothing signals a commitment to a realistic portrayal of ass-kicking soldiers more than casting an anorexic supermodel as one of the warriors.

Ah well, what do you expect out of a movie based on dolls (a.k.a action figures in the vernacular of my younger readers), comic books (graphic novels) and cartoons (animated films)?

EDIT: I almost forgot, be sure to click on her picture and check out the camouflage pattern on her uniform. No reason for a girl not to be stylish when going to war.


VISEGRAD: A NEW EUROPEAN MILITARY FORCE
By George Friedman, May 17, 2011

With the Palestinians demonstrating and the International Monetary Fund in turmoil, it would seem odd to focus this week on something called the Visegrad Group. But this is not a frivolous choice. What the Visegrad Group decided to do last week will, I think, resonate for years, long after the alleged attempted rape by Dominique Strauss-Kahn is forgotten and long before the Israeli-Palestinian issue is resolved. The obscurity of the decision to most people outside the region should not be allowed to obscure its importance.

The region is Europe -- more precisely, the states that had been dominated by the Soviet Union. The Visegrad Group, or V4, consists of four countries -- Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary -- and is named after two 14th century meetings held in Visegrad Castle in present-day Hungary of leaders of the medieval kingdoms of Poland, Hungary and Bohemia. The group was reconstituted in 1991 in post-Cold War Europe as the Visegrad Three (at that time, Slovakia and the Czech Republic were one). The goal was to create a regional framework after the fall of Communism. This week the group took an interesting new turn.

On May 12, the Visegrad Group announced the formation of a "battle group" under the command of Poland. The battle group would be in place by 2016 as an independent force and would not be part of NATO command. In addition, starting in 2013, the four countries would begin military exercises together under the auspices of the NATO Response Force.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the primary focus of all of the Visegrad nations had been membership in the European Union and NATO. Their evaluation of their strategic position was threefold. First, they felt that the Russian threat had declined if not dissipated following the fall of the Soviet Union. Second, they felt that their economic future was with the European Union. Third, they believed that membership in NATO, with strong U.S. involvement, would protect their strategic interests. Of late, their analysis has clearly been shifting.

click to enlarge

First, Russia has changed dramatically since the Yeltsin years. It has increased its power in the former Soviet sphere of influence substantially, and in 2008 it carried out an effective campaign against Georgia. Since then it has also extended its influence in other former Soviet states. The Visegrad members' underlying fear of Russia, built on powerful historical recollection, has become more intense. They are both the front line to the former Soviet Union and the countries that have the least confidence that the Cold War is simply an old memory.

Second, the infatuation with Europe, while not gone, has frayed. The ongoing economic crisis, now focused again on Greece, has raised two questions: whether Europe as an entity is viable and whether the reforms proposed to stabilize Europe represent a solution for them or primarily for the Germans. It is not, by any means, that they have given up the desire to be Europeans, nor that they have completely lost faith in the European Union as an institution and an idea. Nevertheless, it would be unreasonable to expect that these countries would not be uneasy about the direction that Europe was taking. If one wants evidence, look no further than the unease with which Warsaw and Prague are deflecting questions about the eventual date of their entry into the Eurozone. Both are the strongest economies in Central Europe, and neither is enthusiastic about the euro.

Finally, there are severe questions as to whether NATO provides a genuine umbrella of security to the region and its members. The NATO strategic concept, which was drawn up in November 2010, generated substantial concern on two scores. First, there was the question of the degree of American commitment to the region, considering that the document sought to expand the alliance's role in non-European theaters of operation. For example, the Americans pledged a total of one brigade to the defense of Poland in the event of a conflict, far below what Poland thought necessary to protect the North European Plain. Second, the general weakness of European militaries meant that, willingness aside, the ability of the Europeans to participate in defending the region was questionable. Certainly, events in Libya, where NATO had neither a singular political will nor the military participation of most of its members, had to raise doubts. It was not so much the wisdom of going to war but the inability to create a coherent strategy and deploy adequate resources that raised questions of whether NATO would be any more effective in protecting the Visegrad nations. [continued after jump]

Billboard houses

Earlier I did a post on Japanese architects, because of the premium on land, constructing buildings with extremely narrow footprints. Recently the Polish firm Front Architects has suggested recycling old billboards into small dwellings they call billboard homes. I can't find much on the web about them, although the website the Best of Remodeling has a post that includes a floor plan of a billboard home. 

The idea seems fairly daft to me. I can't imagine anybody wanting to live in such a small structure, I don't see how urban space is used effectively, and I don't know why anybody would want a cabin on a pole in a rural setting.

Still, with the housing market as depressed as it is, perhaps affordable options like this will catch on with the home buying public. So, not wanting to miss the chance to get in on the ground floor of a potentially booming market, I've designed my version of a bilboard home so I can step into the nitch and line my pockets with money.

Click on the "read more" link below to see my billboard home design.

You know you're a Russian Redneck if...

...you pave your roads and paths with used AK-47 magazines.

(via: Gypsy Palace)

Hood ornaments

They started out as devices called motormeters. They were thermometers built into the radiator cap to monitor engine temperature. They didn't look very good, so decorative flourishes were added to them to make them look better.

When temperature gauges moved inside the car, automobile designers continued to decorate the radiator caps giving birth to the hood ornament. They were to stay in style until the 1960s, when a the trend towards sleeker aerodynamic cars, as well as cost cutting measures I suspect, began to lead to their disappearance.

Below are a couple of more hood ornament pictures, and there are many more examples after the jump.

Blast from the past

Balance of Power screen capture

While wandering the internet I came across the site My Abandonware. It features computer games from 1979 to 1997 that have been 'abandoned' by their producers, which means they're no longer being sold or supported, or that the OS they were written for has became obsolete. It should be noted that they are not in the public domain, although the copyright holder rarely enforce their copyrights on the abandonwares.

The games are ported, so you can download and play them on you modern computer if you are feeling nostalgic. However, just browsing through the games, and looking at their screen shots, can bring back a lot of memories if you have a history of playing computer games.

Above is a screen shot of Balance of Power, the first Windows game I ever played. The premise was you were either the U.S. President or the leader of the U.S.S.R. and you had eight turns to try to raise the prestige of your country. Each turn covered a year of events. It seems sparse, but you had a wealth of information about the world's countries and their orientation to the two Cold War rivals, as well as coups and newspaper accounts of goings on in the rest of the world. Country by country you could send troops, provide aid, or engage in covert shenanigans to advance your cause. 

While it sounded good on paper, in execution it was complete lunacy. Failure at the game resulted in nuclear war -- and you always failed. No matter what you did you got the snotty black screen that told you, "You have ignited an accidental nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure."

To say that the game assumed we were perpetually teetering on the brink of nuclear annihilation would be an understatement of the first order. Finally, after one game where I triggered WWIII by sending aid to Mexico of all things, I got fed up and launched a game where I did absolutely nothing. I just clicked continue through each of my 8 turns.

It was the only time I ever won the game.

Yeesh, talk about a silly bias built into the game. The only winning move was to do nothing but sit back, hoard your aid and watch your allies fall like dominoes. 

After being reminded of Balance of Power, curiosity got the better of me and I looked around to see if there was a sequel to the game. Sure enough, there is a Balance of Power: 21st Century that  starts with 9/11 and heads to who-knows-where. I'm guessing nowhere interesting or realistic. The below quote is from a review of the newer game by gimcrack'd, I think it probably says it all.

Admission #1: I think Chris Crawford (ED: Balance of Power's creator) is, by and large, crazy...
Admission #2: I have not beaten Balance of Power 21st Century, if such a thing is possible...

Cities at night

Keeping track of disaster

World map with icons displaying current natural and man-made disasters

The National Association of Radio Distress-Signalling and Infocommunications (RSOE) that maintains a web page showing world-wide disasters (the Alert Map). The above image is a screen grab of part of that page, you can click on it to get a larger view.

You can click on an icon at the RSOE Alert Map page to get information on what the disaster is, and then drill down into the data to get even more information. For example, from the screen shown above I can discover that there has been a head-on crash with a bus in Northern Nigeria which killed 18 people, that there are 34 wildfires burning in Siberia (the details even link to images of the fires), and that a 58 year old man in Santa Fe, New Mexico is in a hospital and recovering from a case of the bubonic plague.

Passing storm front

You can also zoom in on continents and regions to get an even more detailed view of what's going on. The small image to the left is  showing the Florida peninsula. It shows the weather system that passed over my house a while ago, and the associated severe weather warnings across the State.

The RSOE Alert Map page also has lists of current emergencies, short term events and links to free data bases, useful information and help screens explaining the icons.

For those who worry about such things, RSOE also maintains a Climate Map where you can view heat waves, droughts, storms, melting ice caps and the like as you fret about the carbon you are exhaling. 
 

Tea & Pistols

An elegant tea setting accented with porcelain pistols

If you're planning an elegant tea party, along with the designer tea bags, some of Yvonne Lee Schultz's porcelain pistols are a nice touch. Modeled after James Bond's Walther PPK or the contemporaneous P99, the porcelain pistols are painted with patterns that match the tea serving.

The contrast is interesting. The porcelain pistols are fragile chinaware, painted with feminine floral patterns that serve only as odd decorative accents to a table setting. Real pistols are of course an entirely different beast composed of metal, machined parts, intricate mechanisms and gun oil. It also goes without saying that their penultimate purpose is far more active than to just lay on a table cloth.

They are a clever subversion of the old Louis Sullivan design cliche "That form ever follows function. This is the law." Although the form of the objects is the same, there is in fact no intrinsic connection between the form and the function. Ah well, to cite another cliche, "rules are made to be broken."

(via How to be a Retronaut) 

matching floral patterns

Stratfor and Isabelle Adjani

This Stratfor article discusses the Al Queda leadership in Yeman, with attention payed to al-Awlaki, the American who has risen high in the ranks of the terrorist organization.  

By tradition, for Yemani articles I scour desert movies for a candidate as the Hot Stratfor Babes. For this article, after my usual exhaustive search, I selected Isabelle Adjani who appeared in the box office bomb Ishtar.

Ishtar was supposedly an attempt to make a modern movie in the style of the old 'Road' films made by Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. The attempt was a resounding flop as most of the critics and audience hated it. However, there are some people who think it some sort of a cult classic. I've never seen it, so I have no opinion.

In it Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman as a couple of terrible lounge singers who get tangled up in some sort of international hijinx in Morocco. Since I've never seen it, and didn't care to wade through a synopsis of it, I have no idea what Adjani's role in the film was.

I always considered Adjani as the prototypical French girl with a permanently transfixed pout, so I was surprised, while digging around for information for this introduction, to discover that she wasn't actually ethnically French at all. Her father, Mohammed Cherif Adjani, was an Algerian who served in the French army in WWII (I couldn't find if it was the Free or Vichy version of the French army) while her mother Agusta was German (hmmm... ).

Adjani was raised in an immigrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris and her first language was German. At age 12 she began acting in plays, and by age 14 she landed her first movie role. I've seen her in one film, Camille Claudel, and her acting was quite impressive in that film. 


AL QAEDA'S LEADERSHIP IN YEMEN
By Scott Stewart, May 12, 2011

On May 5, a Hellfire missile fired from a U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) struck a vehicle in the town of Nissab in Yemen's restive Shabwa province. The airstrike reportedly resulted in the deaths of two Yemeni members of the Yemen-based al Qaeda franchise group al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and injured a third AQAP militant. Subsequent media reports indicated that the strike had targeted Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born member of AQAP, but had failed to kill him.

The May 5 strike was not the first time al-Awlaki had been targeted and missed. On Dec. 24, 2009 (a day before the failed AQAP Christmas Day bombing attempt against Northwest Airlines Flight 253), an airstrike and ground assault was launched against a compound in the al-Said district of Shawba province that intelligence said was the site of a major meeting of AQAP members. The Yemeni government initially indicated that the attack had killed al-Awlaki along with several senior AQAP members, but those reports proved incorrect.

In 2009 and 2010, the United States conducted other strikes against AQAP in Yemen, though most of those strikes reportedly involved Tomahawk cruise missiles and carrier-based fixed-wing aircraft. Still, the United States has reportedly used UAVs to attack targets in Yemen on a number of occasions. In November 2002, the CIA launched a UAV strike against Abu Ali al-Harithi and five confederates in Marib. That strike essentially decapitated the al Qaeda node in Yemen and greatly reduced its operational effectiveness for several years. There are also reports that a May 24, 2010, strike may have been conducted by a UAV. However, that strike mistakenly killed the wrong target, which generated a great deal of anger among Yemen's tribes, who then conducted armed attacks against pipelines and military bases. The use of airstrikes against AQAP was heavily curtailed after that attack.

All this is to say that a UAV strike in Yemen is not particularly surprising -- nor is a strike targeting AQAP or al-Awlaki. Indeed, we noted in January our belief that AQAP had eclipsed the al Qaeda core on the physical battlefield due to the efforts of its tactical commanders and on the ideological battlefield due to the efforts of its propaganda wing, Al-Malahem Media.

One thing that has struck us as odd about the May 5 airstrike, however, is the way al-Awlaki has been characterized in the press. Several media outlets have referred to him as the leader of AQAP, which he clearly is not (he is not even the group's primary religious leader). Other reports have even speculated that al-Awlaki could be in line to become the global leader of the jihadist movement following the death of Osama bin Laden. In light of such statements, it seems a fitting time to discuss once again the leadership of AQAP and to examine al-Awlaki's role within the organization.

Stepping Into the Void

Yemen became a focus of U.S. counterterrorism efforts following the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen; the 9/11 attacks; and the October 2002 bombing attack against the oil tanker Limburg off the Yemeni coast. As noted above, following the November 2002 UAV strike that killed Abu Ali al-Harithi, the jihadists in Yemen entered a period of disorganization and operational dormancy. This period was also marked by the arrests and imprisonment of several important Yemeni jihadists. There remained many jihadists in Yemen, and many more sympathizers, but the movement in Yemen lacked effective leadership and direction.

This leadership void was filled by a man named Nasir al-Wahayshi, who is also known by the honorific name, or kunya, Abu Basir. Al-Wahayshi is an ethnic Yemeni who spent time in Afghanistan while allegedly working closely with Osama bin Laden. Some reports even indicate al-Wahayshi was bin Laden's personal secretary. Al-Wahayshi fled Afghanistan following the battle at Tora Bora and went to Iran, where he was arrested by the government of Iran in late 2001 or early 2002. Al-Wahayshi was repatriated to Yemen in 2003 through an extradition deal with the Iranian government and subsequently escaped from a high-security prison outside Sanaa in February 2006, along with 22 other jihadists. Other escapees in the group included Jamal al-Badawi, who is wanted by U.S. officials for his alleged role as the leader of the cell that carried out the suicide bombing of the USS Cole, and Qasim al-Raymi, who became AQAP's military leader. Al-Raymi is said to be an aggressive, ruthless and fierce fighter (some have likened him to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi). Al-Raymi has also been unsuccessfully targeted by an airstrike.

Following the 2006 prison break, there was a notable change in jihadist activity in Yemen. In September 2006 there was an attack involving dual vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs) against oil facilities. This was the first use of VBIEDs on land in Yemen (large IEDs in boats had been used in the USS Cole and Limburg attacks). [continued after jump]

Je T'aime

Some lounge music from Jazzamor to get you ready

for a weekend of martinis and civilized debauchery.
 

Budget Vacations - giant weathervanes

A puny Michigan weathervane

This is another of my public service posts suggesting budget vacation destinations for summer travel. 

When going on vacation a person generally wants to see something unique and awe inspiring if possible. So, with that criteria in mind, my thoughts naturally turned towards wondering where the world's largest weathervane was located. 

A quick Google search reveals that Montague, Michigan claims to have the world's largest weathervane. They even have the WLRA Weathervane webpage dedicated to it.  On the top of it is a replica of a lumber schooner and, at 48ft tall, with a length of 14ft and weighing 4,300lbs, it would seem to be a solid contender.

Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news to the good citizens of Montague, but...

Swiss one-upmanship

 On the shore of Lake Geneva, in Ouchy, Switzerland there is a weathervane that is also quite large. It appears to be larger than the one in Michigan. I don't have the actual dimensions for it, but from looking at several pictures of it from numerous angles (obviously, a highly objective method of weathervane size detection), it appears to be taller and wider. 

It also has four pillars around it, with a hemispherical notch cut into each pillar. When you line up the pillar's notch with the curve of the weathervane and get an 'O' you can tell the direction the wind is coming from. 

Boaters report that not only is it useful for gauging the direction of the wind, it is also helpful, since it sits on a breakwater, in locating the entrance to the harbor. 

It's a fine contender as the world's largest weathevane, but could there be one even larger?

Now, this is a weathervane worthy of the World's Largest title

Why, yes there is a larger weathervane. In Whitehorse, Canada there is a DC3 mounted on a pivot which is billed as a weathervane. A 15mph breeze is strong enough to swing it into the wind. The plane is an old Canadian Pacific Airlines 'Gooney Bird' that flew her last flight in 1970.

So there you have it -- if you're near Switzerland or Michigan you can pack up a picnic lunch and view the also-rans, otherwise you can trek up to Whitehorse to see the real Champion of Giant Weathervanes.

Death from above

The Diplomad has a post, The SEALs and Abbottabad: What it Means for Islam, in which he discusses the War on Terror. He states the following in it:

Islamic civilization is a rotten house. Constant outside pressure either will collapse it, or force its miserable occupants to begin a serious effort at reforming and rebuilding it.  Islam holds sway among some of the world's potentially richest and most advanced countries, but that, in fact, are among the poorest and most retrograde on the planet.  Islam as practiced is a failed ideology: it leads to slavery, stupidity, and poverty on a mass scale.  The greatest victims of Islam are the Muslims forced to live under its tyrannical, mind-numbing, and brutal rule.

I agree. Islam is fundamentally a triumphalist religion, and by that I mean it assumes its domination over others. The image that leads this post is of the roof tops of Cairo. Note the vast number of satellite dishes on those rooftops. Those TV signals, along with radio, movies and the internet and the message they carry of the differences between the lives of them and us are a poison seeping into that triumphalism.

We often times overlook that the Muslim world, the Ulema, historically has been contracting. We know about their lost Andalusia on the Spanish peninsula, but how many of us forget they earlier lost Sicily, were pushed south out of Russia, and back eastward by the Chinese? Also, within the last 200 years they've been ejected from large swaths of the Balkans and their expansion out of the islands of Indonesia may be in retrograde.

That must eat at a people who imagine they are fated to be at the pinnacle of civilization. Yet, what seeps through those satellite dishes is even worse. The subversiveness of images of affluence and dynamism elsewhere, while so much of what they see in their neighborhoods is squalor and torpor cannot be underestimated.

The Muslim Brotherhood started as a reaction against British rule. Sayyid Qutb, their most influential thinker, was shocked by his travels in the U.S. It should be noted that his shock was not a revelation, rather it was a vindication of beliefs he already held. He had wondered, on the boat trip to the States, “should I travel to America, and become flimsy, and ordinary, like those who are satisfied with idle talk and sleep. Or should I distinguish myself with values and spirit. Is there other than Islam that I should be steadfast to in its character and hold on to its instructions, in this life amidst deviant chaos, and the endless means of satisfying animalistic desires, pleasures, and awful sins? I wanted to be the latter man.”

That thought is revivalism pure and simple. Just like he imagines he has to cling onto his steadfast character in this life, so to the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafists, Wahabists and the rest think they have to cling to something pure -- in all their cases that purity is the example of the first three generations of Muslims -- so that they can stave of this world's chaos and return things to their rightful place. In their minds it is bad behavior that has caused the poverty, powerlessness and contraction of the Ulema, and they can only erase the decline by returning to the pure path of Mohamed's days.

We tend to think that because Islamic radicals take the long view, after all they still mourn the loss of Spain, that they have all the time in the world to wear us down. However, the problem that all revivalists face is there has to be a revival. Sooner or later there has to be a revival. 

In reality, if what is pouring through their TV sets doesn't soon match reality, then they don't have decades much less centuries. The revivalists have to produce or soon they'll join the pan-Arabics and earlier followers of Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah in the obscurity of lost causes.

That sad thing is, arriving at that lost cause is going to be a bloody mess. 

Boy meets girl, boy loses girl

A short film in which the director gets a bit carried away.

(HT: Open Culture)

Unscheduled comparison

I swiped the above audio clip from KurtP's post I've never heard it sung like this at his blog A Trainwreck in Maxwell. It a 1916 recording of 'Swing low, sweet chariot' by the Tuskegee Institute Singers. It. is from the Library of Congress collection.

As KurtP alludes to, the singers were probably the children or grandchildren of slaves, so this version is likely closer to the version slaves would have sung. The U.S. transatlantic slave trade was banned in 1787, with the signing of the constitution, which means the singers would have been only about 120 years removed from African born slaves.

I've been talking about the music of Mali in a series of posts; and how African music traveled to the New World via the slave trade, evolved there in the isolation of the Age of Sail, and then reflected back via records and the radio. The above piece comes towards the tail end of that isolation.

Listening to it, I was reminded of how Salif Keita (who we've met before in the post Ex-pats in Paris) sometimes intertwines his vocal lead with a backup choir of female singers in a similar manner -- almost a call and response, but not exactly. Below is a video showing an example. It is interesting to see the same vocal device used in the two songs.

Stratfor and Kristanna Loken

This Stratfor article discusses the deteriorating diplomatic relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan in the aftermath of the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. Both sides have some common interests, but neither side can entirely trust the either. How this crisis plays out will have a significant effect on the future of the region.

Since the act of Bin Laden getting his noggin ventilated is the prime mover in the article, I naturally turned towards female movie assassins to find this article's Hot Stratfor Babe. I selected Kristanna Loken who played T-X in the movie Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Although she plays a Killer Robot from the Future instead of a SEAL, I figure that results-wise, considering the ensuing mayhem, it's close enough.

In the film Loken plays the Bad Terminator that has to fight Arnold, who's the Good Terminator, as she to tries to kill John Connor once again. Frankly, the more we see of these Terminators the more they seem to be pretty much a pack of bunglers when it comes to the whole 'Killing Machine' ethos they're supposed to epitomize. Mr. Terminator has turned into a goody-two-shoes by this movie, and as for Ms Terminator completing her mission? Well, let's just say the door is open for a sequel.  

As a bonus, I've embedded a video of a fight between the two Killer Robots, T-X and T-101, after the end of the article.


U.S.-PAKISTANI RELATIONS BEYOND BIN LADEN
By George Friedman, May 10, 2011

The past week has been filled with announcements and speculations on how Osama bin Laden was killed and on Washington's source of intelligence. After any operation of this sort, the world is filled with speculation on sources and methods by people who don't know, and silence or dissembling by those who do.

Obfuscating on how intelligence was developed and on the specifics of how an operation was carried out is an essential part of covert operations. The precise process must be distorted to confuse opponents regarding how things actually played out; otherwise, the enemy learns lessons and adjusts. Ideally, the enemy learns the wrong lessons, and its adjustments wind up further weakening it. Operational disinformation is the final, critical phase of covert operations. So as interesting as it is to speculate on just how the United States located bin Laden and on exactly how the attack took place, it is ultimately not a fruitful discussion. Moreover, it does not focus on the truly important question, namely, the future of U.S.-Pakistani relations.

Posturing Versus a Genuine Breach

It is not inconceivable that Pakistan aided the United States in identifying and capturing Osama bin Laden, but it is unlikely. This is because the operation saw the already-tremendous tensions between the two countries worsen rather than improve. The Obama administration let it be known that it saw Pakistan as either incompetent or duplicitous and that it deliberately withheld plans for the operation from the Pakistanis. For their part, the Pakistanis made it clear that further operations of this sort on Pakistani territory could see an irreconcilable breach between the two countries. The attitudes of the governments profoundly affected the views of politicians and the public, attitudes that will be difficult to erase.

Posturing designed to hide Pakistani cooperation would be designed to cover operational details, not to lead to significant breaches between countries. The relationship between the United States and Pakistan ultimately is far more important than the details of how Osama bin Laden was captured, but both sides have created a tense atmosphere that they will find difficult to contain. One would not sacrifice strategic relationships for the sake of operational security. Therefore, we have to assume that the tension is real and revolves around the different goals of Pakistan and the United States.

A break between the United States and Pakistan holds significance for both sides. For Pakistan, it means the loss of an ally that could help Pakistan fend off its much larger neighbor to the east, India. For the United States, it means the loss of an ally in the war in Afghanistan. Whether the rupture ultimately occurs, of course, depends on how deep the tension goes. And that depends on what the tension is over, i.e., whether the tension ultimately merits the strategic rift. It also is a question of which side is sacrificing the most. It is therefore important to understand the geopolitics of U.S.-Pakistani relations beyond the question of who knew what about bin Laden.

Book people

In the past I've done posts about people posing with money and record albums. Today it is the turn of people posting with book covers. They seem not to have taken the care posing themselves that the money and record album people did, but some of them are still good.

There are more samples after the jump, and more can also be found at Fun With Book Covers.

Budget Vacations - Atomic Annie

280MM Atomic Cannon in Junction City, Kansas

With the price of gas being so high, I imagine a lot of us are planning scaled back vacations this summer. As a public service I've decided to suggest off-beat, yet interesting, vacation destinations for the budget minded. To start I've selected the Atomic Annie located in Junction City Kansas. To get there take I-70 west from Kansas City.

The Atomic Annies were A-Bomb chucking field artillery developed in the 1950s. They had a bore of 280MM and could fire their Mark 9 nuclear artillery shells several miles down range. The Mark 9 was a 15 kiloton tactical nuclear warhead. 

It was test fired once, on May 25th, 1953. You can watch a video of that test below.

Eventually 20 of the Atomic Annies were built and some were deployed to the Far East and Europe. They were taken out of commission in the 1960s. Eight of the twenty remain. Here are the locations of all of them if Junction City is too far for cheap travel:

-Army Ordnance Museum, Aberdeen, Maryland (still has the two large "prime movers" attached)
-Atomic Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico
-Fort Sill Museum, Oklahoma (the one that was test fired)
-Freedom Park, Junction City, Kansas
-Rock Island Arsenal, Memorial Field, Rock Island, Illinois
-Virginia War Memorial Museum, Newport News, Virginia
-Watervliet Arsenal, Watervliet, NY -- where they were all manufactured.
-Yuma Proving Ground, Yuma, Arizona

If you're near any of them, pack yourself a picnic lunch and take a day trip, or a long weekend, and visit a relic of the Cold War.
 

SLR Camera Simulator

Simulated low light photograph - notice the blurred pinwheel

If you're not trained in photography a camera's controls are confusing. Aperture, shutter speed and the other settings are a mystery, made worse by the fact that adjusting one may require the adjustment of another to compensate. How all of this influences exposure, depth of field and motion blur can be baffling.

Camerasim is an online SLR simulator that allows you to experiment with a camera's settings and see how they impact the resulting photo.  

Its viewfinder shows a scene of a little girl who's holding a spinning pinwheel and standing in front of some playground equipment. You start by setting the ambient light and your distance from her, then you can adjust focal length, ISO, aperture and shutter speed while referencing your light meter before snapping your picture to see the results.

The simulator also has brief explanations of the various terms used in photography and what the settings do. Try it out, maybe it will give you confidence to turn your digital camera's 'auto' setting off and fiddle with the controls a little.   
  

Sunday Open Thread

Nobody much comments on Flares, so I'm joking with the Open Thread title. I use these posts as information dumps about tweaks I'm making to Flares into Darkness. 

In the far right rail I've added a link list titled 'Recommended'. These are sites like Instapundit, Hot Air, etc. that would dominate the top of my blogroll if I put them there. I segregated them because I like the fact that the blogroll cycles sites with new posts to the top, and I don't want the smaller blogs buried by the aggregaters and group news sites.

I also moved Jim Miller and Lileks to that area because they weren't providing feeds when they posted new articles. This meant they were always at the bottom of my blogroll, and that made them look dormant when they were in fact active. I don't want them to be inadvertently overlooked.

I've added Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion and Fausta's Blog to the blogroll. I was surprised that Fausta's wasn't already linked. Wasn't she one of the original blogs in our blogroll? I must have forgotten to add her when I redid the template. At any rate, her -- and her weekly tango videos -- are back.

I've also mentioned wanting to expand into the Indian blogsphere. I've been poking around trying to find accessible Indian blogs and have added the first: Sepia Mutiny (in the 'Recommended' section). It's actually an Stateside blog maintained by Americans of Indian descent, so it is a bit of a cheat. None the less, it provides a different perspective on politics and cultural issues and is an interesting read. 

Finally, I have opened up the commenting considerably. Anonymous comments are now allowed. It is hard to imagine, aside from spambots, comments ever being an issue on Flares, but we'll see if this policy change causes a problem or not.

Happy Mother's Day

I'm not sure why they've created a holiday specifically for Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, but who am I to argue with the American Greeting Card Industry? So, happy Mother's Day to you all.

In his song Trouble, Zappa was singing about the Watts riots, but the lyrics work just as well today. Enjoy the above version, he plays a nice guitar solo in it.

Well I'm about to get sick
From watchin' my TV
Been checkin' out the news
Until my eyeballs fail to see
I mean to say that every day
Is just another rotten mess
And when it's gonna change, my friend
Is anybody's guess

So I'm watchin' and I'm waitin'
Hopin' for the best
Even think I'll go to prayin'
Every time I hear 'em sayin'
That there's no way to delay
That trouble comin' every day
No way to delay
That trouble comin' every day

 

A short history of America

From field to street corner, a plot of land ages.

Illustrated by R. Crumb. Music by Joni Mitchell.

 

Our European betters and Muslim rage

Sombre & civilized Europeans
at the news of a dead dictator

Sultan Knish, who's in our blogroll and is always a good read, has an new article called Friday Afternoon Roundup - Muslims Ragefully Mourn Bin Laden. 

In it he discusses the European's simpering and finger-wagging over the barbarism of Americans' pleasure over the killing of Osama Bin Laden.

As he points out, "On 29 April 1945, the bodies of Mussolini, Petacci, and the other executed Fascists were loaded into a moving van and trucked south to Milan. There, at 3:00 am, they were dumped on the ground in the old Piazza Loreto. After being shot, kicked, and spat upon, the bodies were hung upside down on meathooks from the roof of an Esso gas station. The bodies were then stoned by civilians from below. The corpse of the deposed leader became subject to ridicule and abuse."

That's El Duce and a couple of his buddies dangling off meat hooks in the picture above. Presumably the crowd has all doffed their hats for a moment of silence because, after all, every life is precious.

He continues the article will a long series of quotes from Muslims outraged that we would kill Osama, with his fisking of each ridiculous quotation. Be sure to check it out, it is a good read. 
 

Life's too short for the wrong job

click to enlarge

A German job placement company (at least that's what I think they are) is running a clever series of ads in which they illustrate the innards of vending machines as being people as drones frantically doing the work of the machine. Their ad copy translates to, "Life's too short for the wrong job"

click to enlarge

There are a few more examples after the jump, and you can view more at the German site hosae & friends.

Friday Night, Saturday Morning

To get you ready for the weekend we have Nouvelle Vague, featuring Daniella D'Ambrosio, doing their ennui laden version of the Specials' song Friday Night, Saturday Morning.

Stratfor and Nihad Alaeddin, aka Igraa

This Sratfor article discusses Syria, and gives an explanation as to why Syrian President Bashar al Assad may be more secure in power than other Middle Eastern leaders who's regimes are coming apart during the Arab Spring. 

 Nihad Alaeddin, better known by her stage name Igraa, may seem a little long in the tooth to be an article's Hot Strafor Babe, but I couldn't find another picture of her, yet her story is illuminating and she deserves the well-earned honor.

In the 1950s she traveled to Cairo with her sister where a promoter renamed them Seduction (Igraa) and Charm and launched them on a highly successful belly dancing career. By the 1970s her sister took to the veil and became a conservative Muslim while Igraa began to make films. In her first big film, The Leopard, she did the region's first nude scen. The movie created a lot of controversy, but was well received by the public.

She went on to appear in numerous other films, and wrote 25 screenplays.  She was unapologetic about her work, and often critical of the sexual mores of the area. “My films criticized the double standard of the Eastern man,” she said. “He studies in Europe, but he comes back East and returns to his old attitudes. If he could lock his wife and sister up, he would.”

You can read more about her in the NY Times article Syrian Actress Tests Boundaries Again.


MAKING SENSE OF THE SYRIAN CRISIS
By Reva Bhalla, May 5, 2011

Syria is clearly in a state of internal crisis. Facebook-organized protests were quickly stamped out in early February, but by mid-March, a faceless opposition had emerged from the flashpoint city of Daraa in Syria's largely conservative Sunni southwest. From Daraa, demonstrations spread to the Kurdish northeast, the coastal Latakia area, urban Sunni strongholds in Hama and Homs and to Aleppo and the suburbs of Damascus. Feeling overwhelmed, the regime experimented with rhetoric on reforms while relying on much more familiar iron-fist methods in cracking down, arresting hundreds of men, cutting off water and electricity to the most rebellious areas and making clear to the population that, with or without emergency rule in place, the price for dissent does not exclude death. (Activists claim more than 500 civilians have been killed in Syria since the demonstrations began, but that figure has not been independently verified.)

A survey of the headlines would lead many to believe that Syrian President Bashar al Assad will soon be joining Tunisia's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak in a line of deposed Arab despots. The situation in Syria is serious, but in our view, the crisis has not yet risen to a level that would warrant a forecast that the al Assad regime will fall.

Four key pillars sustain Syria's minority Alawite-Baathist regime:

-Power in the hands of the al Assad clan.
-Alawite unity.
-Alawite control over the military-intelligence apparatus.
-The Baath party's monopoly on the political system.

Though the regime is coming under significant stress, all four of these pillars are still standing. If any one falls, the al Assad regime will have a real existential crisis on its hands. To understand why this is the case, we need to begin with the story of how the Alawites came to dominate modern Syria.

The Rise of the Alawites

Syria's complex demographics make it a difficult country to rule. It is believed that three-fourths of the country's roughly 22 million people are Sunnis, including most of the Kurdish minority in the northeast. Given the volatility that generally accompanies sectarianism, Syria deliberately avoids conducting censuses on religious demographics, making it difficult to determine, for example, exactly how big the country's Alawite minority has grown. Most estimates put the number of Alawites in Syria at around 1.5 million, or close to 7 percent of the population. When combined with Shia and Ismailis, non-Sunni Muslims average around 13 percent. Christians of several variations, including Greek Orthodox and Maronite, make up around 10 percent of the population. The mostly mountain-dwelling Druze comprise around 3 percent.

Alawite power in Syria is only about five decades old. The Alawites are frequently (and erroneously) categorized as Shiite Muslims, have many things in common with Christians and are often shunned by Sunni and Shiite Muslims alike. Consequently, Alawites attract a great deal of controversy in the Islamic world. The Alawites diverged from the mainstream Twelver of the Imami branch of Shiite Islam in the ninth century under the leadership of Ibn Nusayr (this is why, prior to 1920, Alawites were known more commonly as Nusayris). Their main link to Shiite Islam and the origin of the Alawite name stems from their reverence for the Prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, Ali. The sect is often described as highly secretive and heretical for its rejection of Shariah and of common Islamic practices, including call to prayer, going to mosque for worship, making pilgrimages to Mecca and intolerance for alcohol. At the same time, Alawites celebrate many Christian holidays and revere Christian saints.

Alawites are a fractious bunch, historically divided among rival tribes and clans and split geographically between mountain refuges and plains in rural Syria. The province of Latakia, which provides critical access to the Mediterranean coast, is also the Alawite homeland, ensuring that any Alawite bid for autonomy would be met with stiff Sunni resistance. Historically, for much of the territory that is modern-day Syria, the Alawites represented the impoverished lot in the countryside while the urban-dwelling Sunnis dominated the country's businesses and political posts. Unable to claim a firm standing among Muslims, Alawites would often embrace the Shiite concept of taqqiya (concealing or assimilating one's faith to avoid persecution) in dealing with their Sunni counterparts. [continued after jump]