News Brief, Sober Weekend Edition

I’m in in ur browser, killing ur time, over at The Conjecturer.

Defense & The War

• We’ll see if the CSIS Smart Power blog has anything interesting to say. So far, it’s nothing new, or at least nothing interesting.
• Michael Kinsey on the childish antics of MoveOn.org… and how it’s highlighted the politics of umbrage.
• Salam Adil at Global Voices Online posted a roundup of Iraqi blogging on the most recent Blackwater incident. An eye witness account accuses the Blackwater employees of even killing policemen rushing to the scene as well as unarmed civilians fleeing the fighting being shot in the back. Other bloggers note that the uncontrolled shooting during motorcades—an action condemned repeatedly by military commanders—generate a tremendous amount of ill will toward the U.S. In other words, these PMCs are actively hurting the mission in Iraq—if the dozens of unprosecuted murder charges are not enough to make us reconsider their use, then surely the way they actively undermine our reason for being there should.

Around the World

• Leslie Gelb writes a devastating critique of Mearsheimer and Walt’s book that blames our bad foreign policy choices on the Jews. But she does us the favor of not just calling them anti-Semitic, but shoddy scholars. While she tries to explain away this sloppy work as their desperate need to explain as bad a decision as the Iraq War, I think that misses the point: the fact that otherwise respected scholars would throw together slapdash critique of Israel makes it appear to be driven by anti-Semitism, rather than ass-covering.
• Meanwhile James Dobbins (who wrote an excellent piece in the current Foreign Affairs blaming Iraq on institutional failures, rather than nefarious motives, an argument I find convincing, as I’ve come to think the government’s foreign policy establishment malfunctions on a rather fundamental level), whose work at RAND on nation building have been extraordinarily eye-opening, wrote a piece on how truly dangerous the Middle East remains, in the context of a possible war between Israel and Syria. Here is some more skepticism of that Israel sir strike (though from what I’ve seen, it now most likely looks to be a batch of SCUDS).
• NATO keeps insisting it’s finding Iranian arms and saying it’s government policy, I keep wondering why they don’t think it’s the drug lords along the open border. I mean, the Iranians have NO reason to try to destabilize a friendly government in Kabul to benefit a terrorist group they almost went to war with. Right? Would they miscalculate that badly—like Americans? Meanwhile, Péter Marton sees some surprisingly slippy reporting out of RFE/RL, which is ordinarily a first class news agency.
• The Acorn notes that the protesting monks of Burma are setting a new high in non-violent protest. I think he’s right—considering the consequences they face, which are severe, those monks are worthy of our adulation and, more importantly, our support. We should pressure China to stop supporting the junta, just as we’ve pressured them to stop supporting the thugs who run Sudan.
• East Africa is a hot mess. Ethiopia is as on the verge of war as ever, we seem to be pushing Eritrea into more alienation and extremism, Somalia still can’t get its head straight, and there are now hundreds of thousands fleeing violence in Kenya. It’s like nothing ever stops there, no one ever gets a break.
• Irony rules: Pirate Bay, the Sweden-based bit torren service, is suing some big names in the media industry for acts of sabotage, to include denial of service attacks and hacking attempts, originating from these companies. Naughty naughty, those companies will do anything to protect their decaying obsolete business models, won’t they?
• Indeed the SS vacation photos are shocking—for how banal they all considered the business of genocide. It makes me wonder what goes through the heads of those who today commit mass murder: do they realize what it is, become numb, or decide not to care? How can they live with themselves?

Back at Home

• H4x0rS hate teh RIAA. Also is it sad I own that Angelina Jolie movie?
• Sometimes, I wish evolution really worked.
• The U.S. coal industry seems dead set on polluting our gas tanks. Seeing up close the ways in which they have quite literally rendered vast tracts of West Virginia uninhabitable through strip mining and mountain top removal, and how they have ruthlessly distorted that state’s politics (to the point to where the legislature will vote to extend coal rights over elementary schools), you can color me unimpressed. Aside from the environmental impact of wasting coal-produced energy to turn coal into a different power source (a process that uses around 6 gallons of water per gallon of fuel), it does not address our far more fundamental problem. What we don’t need is more coal, but rather alternatives to carbon-based energy.
• Someone is finally taking American employers to task for unpaid overtime. An a so-called “exempt” employee, I really don’t like making the same amount of money whether I work 30 hours in a week or 90. While I can understand the argument that it may be a way of subsidizing unproductive hours at work, or less-active work, I think you can view it a different way: productivity. After the 65th hour or so, my productivity drops way the hell off… and apparently it was never that great to begin with—Europeans tend to be more productive per hour worked, which has resulted in high incomes and drastically shorter average work weeks (and vacation lengths that make most of us here blanche). Unfortunately, my Protestant work ethic (curiously not related to my current Protestantism) would drive me bonkers if I were forced into a 35-hour work week; that being said, I wouldn’t mind more than 10 days’ vacation a year. Or maybe just fewer weekend spent working. Or a lot more money to do so.