I've written before about energy depletion guru John Michael Greer, one of the presenters I saw at ASPO's conference in DC last year. I ran across his dystopian blog novel, Star's Reach, well over a year ago, and have thought about reading it from time to time, but never quite got around to it. But I read the first chapter this morning: [Read more]

One wet day as we walked north toward Sisnaddi, old Plummer told me that all stories are scraps of one story, one great and nameless tale that winds from world’s beginning to world’s end and catches up everything worth telling on the way. Everybody touches that tale one way or another, or so he said, if only by watching smoke from a distant battle or lending an ear to some rumor in the night. Other folk stray into the one story and then right back out of it again, after carrying a message or a load of firewood on which the fate of kings and dreams will presently depend. Now and then, though, someone no different from these others stumbles into the deep places of the story, and gets swept up and spun around like a leaf in a flood until finally the waters drown him or toss him up gasping and alive on the bank.

He said all this between one mouthful of cheap whiskey and the next, as we waited out a fall rainstorm under the crumbling gray overhang of an old ruin, and I rolled my eyes and thought he was drunk. Now, though, I am less sure. Yesterday, after I arrived at the one place on Earth I least expected ever to come, and nearly died in the process, the thought has occurred to me more than once that this journey of mine is part of something a good deal bigger than the travels of one stray ruinman from Shanuga, bigger than Shanuga or Meriga itself. That something bigger might be Plummer’s one story, for all I know, and if that is the way of it, I know to the day when it caught me up and set me on the road to Star’s Reach.

You know who I really, really wouldn't run against on a national-security platform? A Nobel Peace Prize winner who killed Osama bin Laden.

But that's just me. Last week Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, in an extended and generally thoughtful interview with President Obama, asked the following question:
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When will the Israelis attack? That's what the world has wondered ever since 1984, when an anonymous source predicted that Iran would develop a nuclear bomb within two years.

Twenty-eight years later, Israeli may have finally set a date for its long-awaited assault according to United States Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

Panetta reportedly told David Ignatius of the Washington Post that Israel is likely to strike Iran sometime in April, May, or June of this year.

According to Panetta, the Israelis believe that Iran will soon enter what they call the "zone of immunity," which sounds like either a science fiction episode or a game of tag. Soon after the Post reported Panetta's remarks, the Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak confirmed that the Israelis were very concerned about Iran's imminent arrival in the Immunity Zone.

But the report raises an intriguing question:

Why did Leon Panetta announce the schedule for Israeli's surprise attack? [Read more]

There is something odd happening here in Brazil. There is an oil spill – courtesy of Chevron – off the coast here. That’s not the odd part. In fact, it increasingly seems like a normal occurrence. Chevron has thus far lied about the oil spill and has shown a lack of preparation in dealing with it. But there’s nothing strange about that, either. [Read more]

The Libyan revolution is coming to a rapid end, although there is fighting left to do. Twenty-seven weeks ago, Muammar Qadhafi's armed forces fired on peaceful protestors across Libya. Today, he's in hiding, and a rebel army that didn't exist six months ago, combined with NATO's air power, has managed to take control of most of the country.

Let me point out a basic truth: that was really fast.
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While I was away from the internet last week, some suit on CBS said that once an entity was downgraded, they stayed downgraded. I bought a Washington Post to read more about the crappy debt ceiling agreement. I read the whole damn thing, then put some recycled wood trim on top of it for scraping, cleaning and restaining. Our old trim is hard, or heart, pine, and is much harder than the soft pine they sell now. You can dent soft pine with a fingernail. [Read more]

I found the TED video above on McClatchy's Mexico unmasked blog: 

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MINAS GERAIS — Brazilian officials are in Washington, D.C., today to speak with the Food and Drug and Administration to attempt to get them to change their minds about building an FDA office in Brasilia.

In what Brazilian magazine Epoca is calling the first speed bump in President Dilma Rousseff’s dealings with the United States, the U.S. announced on April 26 it’s plans to build an FDA office in Brasilia – a move Brazilian officials are saying was never discussed with them. [Read more]

We are in US summer driving season, but Tom Whipple observes that both oil and gasoline stocks are unusually low :

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I found this rather long vimeo, Redefining Progress (25:10), on Adbusters.

As Air France pilots fought for control, the doomed A330 dropped 38,000 feet, rolling left to right, its engines flat out but its wings unable to grab enough air to keep flying.

Aviation industry sources told Reuters that this action went against the normal procedures which call for the nose to be lowered in response to an alert that the plane was about to lose lift or, in technical parlance, 'stall'.

"A stall is the moment at which a plane stops flying and starts falling," ... "why did the pilot flying (the aircraft) appear to continue to pull the nose up[?]"

It isn't too hard to see that the world economy is stalling. Belarus has devalued their currency, Greece is near default, Spain has massive unemployment, Pakistan can barely keep the lights on, third world countries can't even afford food and water. In the US jobs aren't really coming back, housing isn't really coming back, car sales aren't really coming back, and the Wall Street Journal lets an oped writer call it stagflation instead of whatever new sort of -flation it is. But we continue to try to pull the nose up. We continue tax cuts to the rich, the financial sector creates more commodity bubbles, even with food, the Fed issues ever more debt, we're mired in expensive resource wars but the media assures us that business will continue as usual if we keep believing.
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Since Pakistan's recent double embarrassment in the Osama bin Laden affair, in which they proved unable to detect either bin Ladin living half a mile from their chief military academy or an American helicopter raid deep in the Pakistani interior (i.e. half a mile from their military academy), angry American legislators have been asking What Pakistan Knew about OBL's presence in their country.

Let me try to reframe that question with another one:

Does the President of Pakistan know who had his wife killed?
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Update: Currently, the STF is requesting that the Brazilian Congress pass a bill to make this the Law of the land as rights to Gay & Lesbian couples can be denied without legal ramifications. With this decision, however, Gay & Lesbian couples can sue to receive any rights denied, and would win as precedent has been set.

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Brazil's 11-member Supreme Court decided that those in same-sex civil unions will have the same rights as heterosexual married couples. From Brazil's Veja Web site:

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It is strange to rejoice at death.  And there has been a lot of death related to this rich kid, this jihadist, this narcissist, this bin Laden.  The deaths of 9/11.  The deaths of wars following 9/11. Lots of death.  I have never in my life been happy about a death.  It's not nice, and it's not how I was raised.  But tonight in hearing that American forces killed Osama bin Laden, yes, I am happy and unapologetically so.  Crowds on my TV are waving flags and cheering.  But what will it mean? What does it mean?  

For now, security is heightened in military theaters.  There is a fear, a concern, that there will be violence against Americans for the sake of the American taking and killing of bin Laden.  I don't think so. [Read more]

Israel supporters rejoiced on Friday after international jurist Richard Goldstone recanted some conclusions from his investigation into Israel's military actions during the Gaza war two years ago.

"If I had known then what I know now," Goldstone wrote in a Washington Post op-ed, "The Goldstone Report would have been a different document."

...

The Israeli government and its supporters have long denounced the Goldstone Report as deeply flawed and complain that it has tarnished Israel's reputation. On Sunday, in fact, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans "to reverse and minimize the great damage that has been done by this campaign of denigration against the state of Israel."

But while Israel's supporters and detractors alike often take the importance of the Goldstone Report for granted, it's worth considering the extent of the "great damage" done to the state of Israel since the report was released and questioning what such investigations, accusations and condemnations actually accomplish.

Read the full article at CNN.com

While I have more or less been clear about my feelings toward war, I am nonetheless a realist. I understand that the War in Libya is happening and won’t end until all objectives are met.

Thus, when President Barack Obama gave his speech this week explaining the humanitarian reasons for the U.S.-led UN-Approved No-Fly Zone War on Libya, I, like many liberals, stood behind my President 100 percent. And while Obama did not lay out any type of exit strategy, I have my own modest expectations on how this humanitarian war effort will proceed:

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Juan Cole's strongly worded "Open Letter To The Left" about Libya seemed designed to take down a very dangerous bit of information that's come out recently but hasn't gotten nearly enough attention in my opinion -- the Libyan rebels we're defending have real and substantial ties to Al-Qaeda. [Read more]

One of the frequent talking points about the Libyan rebels is that they only have about a thousand trained soldiers in their ranks. As the meme went around, it sometimes turned into only 1000 soldiers, period, which is clearly not true. And the "1000 men" meme has been used to shore up certain anti-intervention talking points, even though it undermines others.

The most obvious use of the "only 1000 soldiers" point was to imply that intervention was hopeless, because there was no way the rebels could win. That argument doesn't look as good this morning, after the rebels have taken Ajdabiya and pushed onward, but things might swing against the rebels again in a few days or weeks. [Read more]

There, I said it.  It was not an easy thing to say.  Especially not after reading this from the Atlantic 10 years ago.

In 1994, 800,000 Rwandans died because the U.S. dithered, hemmed and hawed about the role of U.N. peacekeepers and the use of U.S. forces to stop an unfolding genocide there.  This failure has guided U.S. foreign policy ever since.  The U.N.'s "right to protect" doctrine is a direct effect of the Rwandan genocide. Our current actions in Libya spring from that.  It seems to have been decided that the U.S. should have sent its forces to Rwanda and fought a war, if necessary, to have stopped the slaughter. [Read more]

Barack Obama's decision to join the attack on Libya is very much of a piece with his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. There are various grounds on which a reasonable person could object to the Libya strikes (diplomatic reasons, military reasons, pragmatic reasons, reasons of consistency, even Constitutional reasons). But the decision absolutely fits within a coherent and very traditional moral philosophy. Obama walked through most of the key points of that position in his Nobel Prize speech, with one important omission. That omission is perhaps the key to understanding his conduct as a war leader.
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