Keeping Tabs on the Situation in Afghanistan (because somebody oughta be doing it)

Kabul, Afghanistan (image via Wikipedia)

As reported by the The New York Times on 26 April 2012,

Acting at the behest of President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, senior American officials told a California congressman last weekend that he was not welcome in Afghanistan because of concerns that his sharp criticism of Mr. Karzai would undermine Washington’s efforts to rebuild trust with the government and restart preliminary peace talks with the Taliban.

The congressman, Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican, has made little secret of his desire to alter the Obama administration’s policies there radically. He has joined Afghan opposition leaders and former warlords in calling for a revamp of the Afghan government into a decentralized, federal state.

Here’s the kicker: 

Mr. Rohrabacher contends his approach would create a more stable Afghanistan...

No Time for Democracy?

Naomi Klein coined the phrase Disaster Capitalism to describe the way that corporate interests swoop in to take advantage of the state of shock that people are in after a disaster that these interests may or may not have themselves caused. She wrote about it in her book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism in terms of the military coup in Chile that brought Pinochet into power, the gentrification of New Orleans that occurred after Hurricane Katrina, and the bumbled attempt at a corporate takeover of Iraq. She has continued identify “emergency measures” taken that have furthered business interests in the wake of disasters such as the financial meltdown and the earthquake in Haiti. And most recently, she has been talking about the situation in Wisconsin and other states that have manufactured fiscal crises in order to diminish the rights of teachers and other government-paid workers.

The Real Mythbusters



Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart debate reasonableness. Photograph: Kris Connor/Getty Images

So the mystery has been solved: What are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert going to do at their big rally?

Unlike Glen Beck’s rally, where the tax-exempt co-sponsor of the event, the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, required all speakers to sign an agreement promising not to talk politics, yet the politically polarizing Sarah Palin was one of the main speakers, the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Keep Fear Alive was not in the least bit political. That’s right – no left-wing bias on stage, unless one considers diversity, the patriotic call to come together as a nation and stop allowing ourselves to be painted as opposing forces, and comedy itself to be left-wing biases.

Fragmented Reality

My most recent post at Because the World is Round... is the tale of how I could note make sense out of a Tehuelche legend that I was trying to translate from Castellano to English. It turned out that the version I had of the legend was just fragments of the complete story that had been posted on a tourism website, feigning interest in the indigenous culture that had been nearly wiped out in order to build the resort there. I was in some ways relieved, and in others, incensed. Relief came from knowing that my understanding of Castellano was not insufficient, that the problem was not due to a horrible translation from the original Tehuelche language into Castellano, although how accurate it is remains unknown to me; and that the Tehuelches were not simply horrible storytellers. My outrage sprang from the irony of the tourism industry utilizing what I would call a crude caricature of the Tehuelche culture to market their product amidst land disputes and the larger struggle of the indigenous Mapuche and Tehuelche people for not only justice but also to regain their dignity.