August 2006

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Official sources- Iraq has WMDs and other tales

August 28, 2006 in Media, Politics | Permalink

After being panned for using unnamed sources, journalists seem to have switched to just replaying the official communiques from the government. Once upon a time the stories used to rely exclusively on first hand reporting and by that I mean talking to multiple people belonging to differing factions, visiting the place of action and all mixed with the little wisdom gleaned from one’s own “sources”. Today all that has changed and what has been left of reporting is quotes from public statements from the government or other official or publicly authorized sources. What is even more alarming is that often times the bankrupt official versions are juxtaposed with first hand reporting to sabotage what the journalists have gleaned first hand. Of course this farce is only perpetrated when it suits the narrow political aims of the news organization or the journalist. Take for example the recent shameful reporting on the Lebanese conflict by The New York Times. New York Times took care to always weave in an official Israeli government reaction to any news about casualties in Lebanon. The paragraphs went something like this — ‘So many civilians died when an apartment building collapsed in a particular town. These many people died. Israeli army said that the building was being used as a Hezbollah hideout.’

Whatever the truth may have been there, it should have been arrived with due care mixed with reporting from the scene and talking to multiple people. For what does and empty line of an official source really tell us? Why does it become part of reporting? Journalists’ job is to analyze and assimilate multiple sources and piece together what really happened. It is not to quote Israeli or Hezbollah sources. Including direct quotes from official sources or including summary of official line of thought uncritically in midst of first hand reporting amounts to perversion of the basic principles of journalism.

The sad repercussions of bankrupt reporting that relies repeatedly on official sources were on full display in the Iraq WMD fiasco. NY Times, after a full year, came out with a report saying “mea culpa” and made assertions that it has learned from its mistakes but the recent reporting from Lebanon shows that not much has changed at the Grand Old Lady. Of course, New York Times, by far, is not the worst culprit of doling out official wisdom as reporting, that title of course is reserved for government lapdog Fox News, which makes it living by distributing government propaganda with just the right amount of titillation, rancor and graphics. On the other hand, the demise of true reporting at this touchstone of journalism is much more disturbing.

American Foreign Policy: Should US citizens care?

August 28, 2006 in Politics | Permalink

People around the globe have always been mystified by American public’s seeming indifference towards the style of foreign policy that American government conducts. Yes, there are occasional rallies and protests but the overwhelming impression, and correctly so, is that most Americans just don’t care. This brings up the inevitable question – why don’t Americans care?

The answer really is fairly straight forward – Americans don’t need to care. Despite of all that is happening in Iraq and all that happened in Vietnam, America has emerged from it virtually unscathed. American economy is doing well, and life hums on as usual. Yes, the oil prices have shot up and three quarters of all news now is solely about terrorizing tyrannical freedom-hating terrorists, at least until drum beating about wrong arrests in child beauty queen murder fills up every ticking minute of news for days on end. But fundamentally nothing has changed; at least no discernible echo of doubt has survived Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Jon Benet. I think the ability of these pop news items to wipe news clean of terrorism is indicative of how much of a concern terrorism is in itself to average Americans.

Color coded terror alerts and the rabble-rousing shenanigans of political pundits on television have reduced the topic of terrorism to nothing more than some form of macabre entertainment. Americans may seem to people around them to be living in this self-proclaimed post-9/11 mindset perennially under collective fear psychosis but doesn’t mean that they will miss a good sale at Macy’s or the latest gossip about Tom Cruise. The fact is that while America may seem to be in grip of the collective memory of past trauma, in the meantime they will also do business and do biotechnology and browbeat countries to get better trade deals. Let me summarize the point that I am trying to make since it is not all that obvious, Americans don’t care about the foreign policy ramifications even their self proclaimed “post-9/11″ world and all the concern is more or less skin deep. The fact that American don’t care that deeply about the perils of terrorism, even though it may look otherwise, shouldn’t come as a surprise because as I mentioned earlier the footprint of terrorism on US has really been a minor one, as compared to other countries. So in a way there really is no cause for alarm since there really never was a fire, well not at least as big as one made out to be.

So in all a lot of pundits may cajole people into thinking that America needs to worry about how the world thinks about us and one must just switch channels. American companies are still selling a lot of goods in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and China (yes –selling) and will continue to do so as long as they stay away from drawing cartoons about Muhammad.

All is hunky dory but still the world is in midst of conflict. It may be the natural state of world, the uncivilized freedom-hating barbarians, or the chaos may have been financed by US; it doesn’t really matter. Except if Americans are willing to answer the moral question. As luck would have it, they have answered that too. Americans will tell you that they have all along been waging a moral war – from Ho-Chi-Minh to Baghdad and if the world doesn’t want to become free – well too bad. Whether Americans have arrived at the right answer is immaterial for whatever the answer, they will continue to thrive.

To USA!

Walmart trips on ‘Young’ one’s words

August 18, 2006 in Spincycle Select | Permalink

“In the Sentinel interview, Young was asked about whether he was concerned Wal-Mart causes smaller, mom-and-pop stores to close.

“Well, I think they should; they ran the `mom and pop’ stores out of my neighborhood,” the paper quoted Young as saying. “But you see, those are the people who have been overcharging us, selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs; very few black people own these stores.”

Washington Post

Andrew Young, respected civil rights leader, was hired expressly to improve Walmart’s public image.

Liquid explosives on a plane

August 18, 2006 in Politics | Permalink

The Register, British technology news website, conducted a detailed analysis about the feasibility of using liquid explosives on a plane and found it to be nearly impossible.

The recent “terror alert” over the alleged terrorist plot of smuggling liquid explosives on to an airplane brings into question why would terrorists choose airplanes over much easier targets like buses, subways, etc. that go relatively unmonitored and where damage and loss of life can be equally great? There doesn’t seem any sane reason as to why a terrorist would attempt to target airliners, where the security is inarguably the greatest among all the mass-transportation modes, forgoing other easier targets.

Method to the madness: Logic of Suicide Terrorism

August 11, 2006 in Middle East, Politics | Permalink

“Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism”, a book by Associate Professor Robert Pape at the University of Chicago powerfully dismantles the traditional myths around suicide terrorism.

Over the past few years suicide terrorism has come to be exclusively seen, in the west, as a terror tactic with no strategic objective and practiced by “people who hate our freedom” aka Muslim fundamentalists.

Dr. Pape, who over the years has “collected the first complete database of every suicide-terrorist attack around the world from 1980 to early 2004″, using a variety of sources ranging from local newspapers to informational “products” from the “terrorist community”, found after analyzing the data that “overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.”

Of course the idea that some how “hating the freedom” that we have motivates people to blow themselves does not to stand up to any sort of reasoning. The clique of people who “hate our freedoms” obviously goes beyond Islamic fundamentalists. In the previous iteration it was Communists, who hated our freedoms, and yet there were very few, if any, suicide attacks against US or the posse of nations who considered themselves the beacon of freedom.

The idea that suicide terrorism is somehow tied to Islamic fundamentalism also falters for the most famous practitioners of suicide terrorism are a nationalist Hindu group, LTTE –better known as the Tamil Tigers.

Brand power: Are consumers in charge now?

August 10, 2006 in General | Permalink

“Not long ago, the value of a company consisted largely of its “book value”: physical assets such as factories and equipment plus money in the bank. But today book value accounts for only about a third of the stock market capitalization of the top 150 U.S. companies, down from three-quarters two decades ago. In the new economy, corporate value lies in intangible assets: patents, databases, know-how — and brands,” notes Sebastian Mallaby in his latest column for the Washington Post, A New Brand of Power.

As the importance of brand to a company’s bottom-line has grown, so has the money spent to market the brand. Today companies spend millions of dollars to market to you what kind of cereal is cool to eat and what kind of footwear is “in”. The reliance on marketing (or information control) has provided an unexpected chink in the armor of the behemoths. “As brands have grown bigger, they have also grown more vulnerable,” notes Mallaby. The vulnerability stems from two sources – aware consumers and the distributed nature of the Internet. Consumer awareness, generally limited to certain brands and causes and primarily propelled by NGOs like GreenPeace etc., has put pressure on corporations to reform their practices – e.g. Nike paying its sweat shop employees better or McDonald’s, the erstwhile king of transfat, introducing a line of salads. The other, and by far more challenging problem comes from the distributed information architecture of the Internet that makes it all but virtually impossible to control information, a vital need for brands. As the recent fiasco of AOL, in which a recorded phone conversation with an aggressive sales rep. was released on the Internet, has shown brands are increasingly vulnerable.

A horde of economists and analysts have said that this is a virtually un-pluggable hole and hence committed activists and distraught consumers can launch successful action against brands. Unfortunately, this positive prognosis of the growing influence of consumer power doesn’t always hold true. Yes, the Internet is distributed but users still rely on a very narrow range of websites for their daily information. If the recent mergers and acquisitions on the internet are any indication, the future of the Internet looks a lot more like the current media environment. It may very well be so that the little openness we saw while the conglomerates hesitated to join the Internet bandwagon may just be a small window that will shut down as the media agglomeration gathers pace. More importantly, the channels through which Internet is run is almost all owned by large conglomerates that may change the way information is delivered as in the two-speed Internet where corporate content is prioritized while “some websites” can only be accessible via a special fee, much like cable. The other damning piece to this is that today companies can easily build successful “underground” Internet marketing campaigns by buying ad space on blogs, sponsoring bloggers and starting up their own sites and blogs to funnel propaganda.

The analysts also seem to underestimate the corporation’s ability to spin given their vast resources. For example, “BP” has gone “beyond petroleum” without ever quitting petroleum and McDonald’s is selling salads with dressings that lace them with more calories than some of their sandwiches. Add to this the fact that corporate marketing departments are perfectly positioned to take advantages of the rapid advances in our understanding of cognitive science that are coming our way. And with rapid advances in IT, that allow data mining and cognitive science, they will have a far better understanding of each of us.

Lastly, it is important to realize that information rarely translates into action. A lot of people in this country know that eating fatty food is bad for health and yet they consume it in ever increasing amounts. And thats why consumer awareness hasn’t always translated into consumer action. We all want sweat shop labor to stop but then “Walmart is just to close by” or “the prices so cheap” or “I don’t want to think about it”. Billions of dollars rides on consumer apathy and millions are spent to keep the consumer apathetic. So it is no wonder that consumer chooses against his/her conscience or health. This, unfortunately, is the biggest spanner in the sunny optimism of the brand power enthusiasts. The future doesn’t look bright.

Galloway skewers Murdoch’s SkyNews

August 8, 2006 in Politics | Permalink

Given the unvarnished bias and wholesale disinformation that have become the norm on US television news, I try to avoid the aggravation and stress inevitably feel after watching news on Television. Fortunately with Youtube and Google Video, I can now watch some of clips worth watching on the Internet. One such piece that fits such criterion is posted below. The video features George Galloway dressing down Rupert Murdoch majority held news company SkyNews’s anchor over its coverage on Lebanon.

Muslim issues, humanitarian issues

August 4, 2006 in Middle East | Permalink

The latest Lebanese crisis [I cringe at using the word crisis for it seems news organizations use it all too frequently to condense all human suffering and all other news into this pointless pithy] has been covered in the Arab media as a predominantly Muslim affair where a Jewish state is attacking Muslims. While the thrust of the statement remains true, the fact of the matter is that what is happening in Lebanon is a humanitarian crisis, a human tragedy if you will and has little or nothing to do with people there being Muslims or non-Muslims. The portrayal is all the more bankrupt given the fact that Lebanon has about 40% Christian population. Kashmir, Chechnya, Palestine, Lebanon or Bosnia are and should be treated as humanitarian crisis and not as Muslim crisis by the Arab media. There is a subtext in all the coverage in the Arab media that a Saudi resident or an Arab should feel more about the Lebanese than say someone sitting in EU. There is subtle and not to subtle racism that accentuates the us vs. them schism that has opened up between the world and Islam as a whole. There are mitigating reasons that are offered including the fact that Arab press is deliberately framing it as a Muslim issue to demand action from their ostensibly Muslim governments but then again I think it is giving too much credit to the Arab media for this deep rooted problem that finds its face in all major Muslim media from Indonesia to Pakistan.

Of course the Western media can’t go scot-free either. Western media outlets eager to portray Hezbollah as a Shiite militia backed by Iran and eager to portray Lebanese as a bunch of ‘enemy terrorists’ have overlooked the fact that “Hezbollah is principally neither a political party nor an Islamist militia. It is a broad movement that evolved in reaction to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982″ NY Times

Roger Pape, in his NY Times op-ed piece, adds,

“Evidence of the broad nature of Hezbollah’s resistance to Israeli occupation can be seen in the identity of its suicide attackers. Hezbollah conducted a broad campaign of suicide bombings against American, French and Israeli targets from 1982 to 1986. Altogether, these attacks — which included the infamous bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983 — involved 41 suicide terrorists.

In writing my book on suicide attackers, I had researchers scour Lebanese sources to collect martyr videos, pictures and testimonials and the biographies of the Hezbollah bombers. Of the 41, we identified the names, birth places and other personal data for 38. Shockingly, only eight were Islamic fundamentalists. Twenty-seven were from leftist political groups like the Lebanese Communist Party and the Arab Socialist Union. Three were Christians, including a female high-school teacher with a college degree. All were born in Lebanon.”

Beirut and Grozny: view from above

August 3, 2006 in Middle East | Permalink

A few years after Grozny earned the dubious distinction of being the first city since WW II to be completely obliterated, Israel is trying its best to add Beirut to the list. Satellite photos of a suburb of Beirut. Compare these photos to the ones of Grozny – Before, and After

Urban Landscapes: The coming inertness

August 3, 2006 in General | Permalink

Modern architecture with its heavy use of bleached wood, glass and aluminum has robbed countless buildings of charm and turned entire buildings into soulless boxes where people only have a tentative relationship with the environment.

Architecture has a huge impact on the way people interact with their surroundings. The severity of the lines, soulless glass vistas all together reflect a sense of oppressiveness detachment, making one feel lonelier and almost afraid of interacting with the environment. The sense one gets at being in the building is that of the powerlessness and of the fact that the environment is controlled by same faceless czar. This dehumanizing architecture today has become the most felicitated form of architecture and countless new architects use concrete, glass and aluminum to carve out a new form of social death every day.

When I look at buildings today, I can’t imagine how these buildings will age. It is hard to imagine that the building is even inhabited by people today and that these people have personalities and that the building will allow space so that people can leave an imprint of their personalities on them. The little poster boards on which people will stick their family photos in these vacuous orifices are dwarfed and overwhelmed by the almost too bright sunlight shining on the aluminum bar through the glass wall.

These inert architectural spaces are here for a reason and that the rapid commercialization of the social spaces. When you come to really think of it – where do we interact now with people – in malls and in movie theaters and restaurants. The public, non-commercial physical space in which we can interact with other people is rapidly coming to an end. We must reclaim our space before it overwhelms us.

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Roger Cohen of the New York Times -Paris vs. Havana; 2008/12/08

“But squalor connects. When you clean, when you favor hermetic sealing in the name of safety, you also disconnect people from one another. When on top of that you add layers of solipsistic technology, the isolation intensifies. In its preserved Gallic disguise, Paris is today no less a globalized city than New York.”

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