inkbluesky

First this small excerpt from a biography of a CIA agent ,

I am convinced that, on many first-order topics, we cannot gain the knowledge we need without a time-consuming effort to deal directly with people who are immersed in the area of interest. This is much more easily said than done, given the mass of available information and the substantial fragment of that mass which arrives in an analyst’s electronic inbox every day. Moreover, the culture often seems to push in the opposite direction: quickness may seem more highly valued than depth, and moving from one assignment to another more career-enhancing than sticking to one topic.

What are the events that lead the reviewer ( and agent himself) to his conclusion. 9-11 perhaps. Iraq? While those elements figure in it at the end the reviewer is speaking of an intelligence analyst who’s conclusions didn’t fit into the prevailing military and political orthodoxy of Vietnam. A Review of Who the Hell Are We Fighting? The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars

Ultimately Mr Adams bashed heads because he thought it was more imporatnt to tell the truth then dump down or tailor the truth to what his boss wanted to hear. Not much has changed.

ben loyal scotland wallpaper. not a play on words that is the name.

Herman Melville’s Politics of Imperialism: Colonizing and De-Colonizing Spaces of Ethnicity, this excerpt is from the abstract, the full paper is in pdf at the link.

Indeed, this is what makes Melville such a difficult figure to decipher both literarily and historically. By marking these races as alien and “other,” indeed by striving to “mark” them at all, Melville at once conducts a constructive anthropological study as well as sets the destructive foundation for a race-driven, American imperialist project aimed at alienated and “othered” races. Indeed, Melville constructs for his readership a difficult paradox; his texts on the one hand call for white intervention and colonization of ethnic and racial spaces, and on the other, they illuminate the counter-productivity of such colonization. What, then, was Melville’s relationship to the ongoing imperialist project of nineteenth-century America? To reach an answer to this question we will examine Melville’s political relationship to two Pacific Ocean land groups (the Marquesan Islands and the Sandwich Islands), establish a pattern to his paradoxical imperialist and anti-imperialist philosophies, and finally, construct a model of his international, inter-ethnic political philosophy.

Moby Dick alone has taken up some scholars entire careers examining every passage for its meaning or multiple meanings so I can appreciate the difficulty here. I’ve read Moby, Billy Budd and some short stories, while there was some “others” aspect to those works it didn’t stand out at the time. I think there was a tendency for me at least to give him a little lack because of the era he lived in.

neon lights on rain

Literary porn - Why we’re secretly titillated by misery memoirs

These days, if you pop in to your local bookshop you are far more likely to pick up yet another autobiography revealing the sordid details of a despondent childhood than to leaf through an uplifting story of human endeavour. Welcome to the ever-expanding misery memoir market. The titles weighing down the shelves of bookshops throughout Britain, and on the other side of the Atlantic too, tell their own story. Behind Closed Doors, Don’t Ever Tell, God’s Call Girl, A Child Called It, Don’t Tell Mummy, Sickened - they all point to the dark and menacing secrets of a childhood dominated by toxic parents and other assorted paedophiles.

If you have lived long enough you’ve seen a few trends in book themes come and go - the lawyer/political thriller years i.e. Grisham/Clancey, the self analytical self help trend, and very recently the plethora of books on the middle-east. All trends gets tiresome. A subject is mined for all it is worth and the public moves on to the next trend, so to that extent I was ready to sympathize with Mr. Furedi. Then he ends with this trite antedote,

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that none of my friends revel in painful childhood memories. Back in August, four of us met up for a drink, and we talked a lot about how we got into trouble together when we were kids. We recalled accidents, misunderstandings, arguments – but instead of morosely dwelling on the bad stuff that occurred, we talked about what we did and what we became. And that, too, is ‘real life’, something which we forget at our peril.

That some people have pretty good or at least not remarkably miserable childhoods is great. But that attitude which I have seen too many times is, hey you’re childhood was scared by violence-abuse OK, so what life is hard move on, is jarring in its callousness. It is all too common for people to avoid confronting painful memories and how those memories shape their lives. That Furedi doesn’t want his rose colored view of what happens behind closed of the middle-class in a western culture that is supposedly past engaging in any sordid mean behavior is one version of hey dude you’re bringing me down, ruining my trip. It might have been a more helpful observation if he had suggested that as a culture we face our demons, that individual victims get help in coming to terms with them, and find a way to live a happier life despite any abuse they may have suffered. He is mistaken to extract from this current passing trend that the U.S. or Britain is enjoying a culture of misery. On the contrary, those books are selling because of two reasons. Some people who’ve had similar experiences find solace in the fact that they are not alone. The others gain insights into experiences they have not had - a function that written stories have served since Chaucer.

Eugene Manet on the Isle of Wight by Berthe Morisot 1280×1024

Berthe Morisot (1841-1895)

Berthe Morisot, French painter and printmaker. She was associated with Impressionism. She was born in Bourges, the daughter of a government official who was an enthusiastic amateur painter and supporter of the arts. She was also the granddaughter of Fragonard.

Right Wing bloggers wrong again. Anyone surprised?

devil’s elbow lighthouse 1280x 

Western analysts are forever bleating about the strategic importance of the middle east. But despite its oil, this backward region is less relevant than ever, and it would be better for everyone if the rest of the world learned to ignore it.

The first mistake is “five minutes to midnight” catastrophism. The late King Hussein of Jordan was the undisputed master of this genre. Wearing his gravest aspect, he would warn us that with patience finally exhausted the Arab-Israeli conflict was about to explode, that all past conflicts would be dwarfed by what was about to happen unless, unless…

…Strategically, the Arab-Israeli conflict has been almost irrelevant since the end of the cold war. And as for the impact of the conflict on oil prices, it was powerful in 1973 when the Saudis declared embargoes and cut production, but that was the first and last time that the “oil weapon” was wielded. For decades now, the largest Arab oil producers have publicly foresworn any linkage between politics and pricing, and an embargo would be a disaster for their oil-revenue dependent economies.

…Exactly the same mistake keeps being made by the fraternity of middle east experts. They persistently attribute real military strength to backward societies whose populations can sustain excellent insurgencies but not modern military forces.

Just some snips from Mr. Luttwak’s highly recommended dose of sanity. I came away thinking that if I had a few of those mythical wishes from a genie’s bottle that I’d use one to let him run both the U.S. and British State Departments for a few years. Sometimes, and admittedly it takes courage and resolve, the best way to handle a pernicious problem is to mostly ignore it.

Talk about a genuine problem, a hands down sociopath, few in history can match Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (Joseph Stalin) -  Fine young criminal 

The great Tiflis heist, the ambush of a coach full of money in the main square, became a scandal reported all round the world. Attacking with bombs and guns, Stalin’s gang produced 90 casualties, 40 of which resulted in death. It was a huge embarrassment for the Bolsheviks, but Lenin, who was just as unscrupulous as his Georgian acolyte, did not want the money to dry up. Stalin’s insanely violent henchman, Kamo, left for Finland with the equivalent of £1.7 million, which he handed over to the cause. The Mensheviks, who received none of the money, set out to destroy both Lenin and Stalin. Lenin truly admired Stalin’s ruthlessness. “That is exactly the sort of person I need,” he said.

It was almost as though he was born to be a thug joining in with a street gang or band of terrorists/thieves when he was young. The village where he grew up was known for it’s street violence, but and this is something of a paradox, he was somewhat well read and liked to write poetry on occasion.

bullet train japan. I believe that is mt. fuji in the background. i love fuji, monument valley, niagara falls, those arches in utah and death valley. the problem is that stock photo companies tend to throw a picture of one of those places in with every disc. these photo subjects have become like the cracker-jack prize or the bazooka bubblegum cartoon that you’re already gotten a few dozen times.

 The Imagery of Postcards sold in Micronesia during the German Colonial Period (PDF file) - By Dirk HR Spennemann

   The first picture postcards of Micronesia were produced for the German colonies. Starting in 1898, cards existed for the Marshall Islands, soon followed by cards for Pohnpei, Yap, Palau and the Marianas. In total three main series can be identified: generic lithographed cards with reproductions of drawing or paintings, early photographic cards with undivided  backs and white space on the image side for messages, and full-face image cards. The motifs on the early cards are scenic and ethnographic, while those on the second and third series predominately reproduce symbols of German colonial power and achievement. Cards that are exploitative of women (along the lines of ‘dusky maidens’), which were so  popular in Samoa, are very rare in the German Micronesian setting.

screen cap from pdf of the colonial postcards. Doesn’t really do the art work and subjects justice, but gives you an idea of what they look like before you download the 3.8mb file.

Step-by-step plan for withdrawing from Iraq