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Radio interview here with Seymour Hersh about his New Yorker revelations that the US and Saudis are funding al Qaeda, the group that attacked the US on 9/11, as a supposed check on Iran, which the US foolishly empowered by invading Iraq in '03. The Sunni jihadis are already setting up shop in Lebanon to combat Hezbollah. Elliott Abrams, the same person who brought you "selling arms to the Iranians to fund the Nicaraguan contras" in the '80s, is behind this cynical mess of a policy. And President Cheney, of course. Will Congress stop the treachery?
Paddy Johnson on the one art fair this blog would have attended if it had known about it: the Comic-Con, at the Javits Center.
This preference is not because of some chip-on-the-shoulder resentment about the high-falutin' art world so much as a standing revulsion to the idea of having fairs in a city with the largest year-round real estate commitment to art. Every year dealers take work from where it looks the best, bubble wrap it, and schlepp it over to where it looks the worst. All for the convenience of a few uber-mavens who don't want to walk around Chelsea (one supposes). That, and the ultra-distilled odor of commerce that wafts over all fairs, makes it just too depressing for this sensitive artist.
Just checking out Contemporary Home Computing, a webzine by Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, with articles and blogs about our favorite appliance, its metaphors, and its place (or willed absence) in the culture at large. The perspective here is low-res and retro (in a good, non-Ludditic way). Sample article: Espenschied's Where did the computer go?, considering the drive to dematerialize hard drives and screens in the home and workplace, bringing us closer to the Platonic ideal of data as pure light and air. Kind of like factory farming, where meat magically appears in stores in shrink-wrapped cubes and the slaughter and biochemistry takes place somewhere else.
Excerpt from recent post by Juan Cole:
Iraq is an Oil War in the mind of politicians like Dick Cheney. It was necessary to deny it to China and other rivals thirty to fifty years in the future. It was necessary to open its vast petroleum fields up for exploration and cast aside anti-American Baath socialism.("3 Boxes" GIF by Jack Masters or Kasey Kite returning soon.)
Likewise, the religious rigidity of the Pushtun peoples of Helmand province is not the real reason for the US insistence on occupying Afghanistan. It is the vast Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan gas fields that Cheney has his eye on. It was the US hope to use a pipeline from Turkmenistan to supply Pakistan and India, and so forestall a deal by those two countries with Iran. The inability of the Bush administration to calm things down in Afghanistan sufficiently for anyone to dream of putting in such a pipeline and having it avoid routine sabotage has made it likely that Iran will break out of the Bush boycott toward the East.
Hunger for future rights to petroleum and positioning the US to remain a superpower in a world of hydrocarbon scarcity is also driving the campaign to get up a war against Iran. Why can Pakistan have a nuclear weapon, and that is all right, but Iran cannot? Pakistan has very little petroleum. Iran has a lot, and maybe 750 trillion cubic feet of gas in the southwest. If it gets a bomb, regime change becomes impossible, and if Iran wants to tie its supplies up in proprietary contracts with China and India, locking out the United States, it will be able to do so.
Continued heavy dependence on gas and oil therefore not only turns the world into a hothouse, with rising seas, ever more destructive hurricanes, and possibly disastrous shifts in the ocean currents, but it also drives the United States to more and more wars.
And, note that the wars are not even successful in allowing a practical oil grab of the sort Cheney and Lee Raymond dreamed of.
Indeed, you could now, in retrospect, turn their whole argument around on them. US militarism cannot secure petroleum and gas supplies from places such as Iraq, because the pipelines are so easily sabotaged and local nationalisms and religious activism make it impossible for people to accept that kind of US hegemony.
Since the Pentagon cannot practically speaking hope to safeguard US petroleum supplies from the Gulf, national security requires a massive and rapid research and development program of green energy. A lot of green technology, especially solar, would come down in price rapidly if enough government money were thrown at it. We need to press Congress on this, and maybe Californians can craft some of their famous referendum items. That would be one way to promote a new generation of electric cars.
Green energy-- wind, thermal, solar, maybe ultimately fusion, etc.-- is what would allow the US to retain its autonomy and independence into the next century, and what would allow it to avoid losing more cities the way Bush and Cheney lost New Orleans. Oil and War will, in contrast, ruin us all.
 by pupsintrouble, from an idea suggested by jmb. The ascending, Renaissance altarpiece-meets-celebrity-shrine feel of this amuses--also the bad Photoshop gradients, European film poster source, doubling of Maude, pious Geraldo, tabloid explosions, fetishized Jag-hearse, gratuitous gleams... It's funny on many levels. |
A DVD version of my YouTube drawing demo. The quality of the photo is lousy, but quality is sort of not the point here. *** Last night I dreamed I rented a car and took it out on the highway. I pulled over on the shoulder, got out, and stood by a wire mesh fence perpendicular to the road. A woman was standing on the other side of it. She had also parked on the shoulder and was talking incessantly into a cell phone. I started banging/strumming the wire mesh, which made interesting, peculiarly resonant noises. I got really absorbed in it. I wondered if the woman could hear them but she seemed oblivious. I walked back to the highway and saw a cop car pulling onto it after stopping where ours were. I looked for my rental car and couldn't find it anywhere--it had been stolen while I was standing there. |