Footnotes from a small village

Back to blogging, but not here so much

2009-05-01T08:22:00.006+02:00

It looks like 2009 will indeed be another Year of the Dog. Make that Year of the Three Dogs. Because a couple of months ago we unexpectedly acquired an addition to our pack, Bamm Bamm, from a friend in Germany who felt we could give him a perfect home. We're doing our best. ;)

Bamm Bamm is an almost four-year-old brown and white border collie with a very sweet temperament, excellent manners (unless you leave him alone in a room with food accessible), and already highly developed frisbee skills, thanks to his previous owner. A few photos:

photo by Andreja Rener

www.agility-slo.net

photo by Andreja Rener

2009 is also apparently The Year of the Frisbee Club: Slovenia's first dogfrisbee club, Flipsi, was officially established in March, and contributing to its successful operation is keeping me pretty busy. For more information about our activities, check out our website and blog.

I may still blog here occasionally, but most of my efforts will be on display over at the Flipsi blog. I also finally broke down and joined Facebook, so anyone who is so inclined can find little tidbits of news about me there.

Life is short. Aim high and bite hard!

2008-10-06T17:23:00.005+02:00

This post might be better entitled "Send me money!" but that seemed a little too blunt even for me. First of all, apologies to my two or three faithful and curious readers for leading you on and then failing to deliver. This blog back in June was not, apparently, on the verge of being revived. Though it all depends on what the meaning of "on the verge of" is. Using a geologic time scale, four months is a mere femtosecond. And I've spent most of that femtosecond happily and busily running around doing fun things with dogs, leaving no time for blogging. Back in January I started composing a post entitled "2007: The Year of the Dog", because dog activities and accomplishments had dominated the events of that year. I never got around to finishing it, because The Year of the Dog became Two Years of the Dog, and dogging continued to take priority over blogging. No idea what 2009 has in store. Possibly The Year of Muddling Through, or The Year of the House (one of these femtoseconds I really need to get cracking on that project, I'm about to go through my fifth winter with no central heating). Maybe even The Year of the Blog. Or even better, the Year of the Book. Two Books, actually. But for now, I'm still in the dog phase, and pretty intensively at that.

So why do the dog and I need your money? Because at the European Championship in Dogfrisbee, my canine partner Lyra and I finished sixth in the Open Freestyle category, thereby qualifying for an invitation to the USDDN Disc Dog World Finals in Cartersville, Georgia. I never dreamed of ranking that high so early in our career; we've only been doing this sport together for a little over a year. We both love it, and make a good team. Years of playing frisbee as a kid helped me develop a pretty good throwing arm, though it was with a Doug, not a dog--Doug's my big brother and was about my only opportunity to practice throwing balls and frisbees in an era when girls were not supposed to enjoy or be good at sports. For her part, Lyra is a natural athlete and loves to leap, chase and catch just about anything. Frisbees are probably further down the list than pine cones, sticks, balls, and squeaky toys, but in the absence of those other four she'll enthusiastically pursue a plastic flying disc.

So, here we are with an invitation to the World Championship and no funds of our own to make it happen, since just about all my discretionary income over the past year or so has already gone for traveling to and participating in seminars and competitions elsewhere in Europe (primarily the Czech Republic and Germany), and buying frisbees. So I've put out an appeal for donations to my fellow Slovenian dog sports fans and competitors (you can read more here if you know Slovene). The response has been terrific but we're still short a few hundred euros. If you live in Slovenia and would like to help send a representative from this country to the World Championship in Dogfrisbee, email slo.frisbee@gmail.com with your pledge.

The title of this post is a quote from Bryan Lamky, canine judge at the EC and former world-class competitor, who in turn was inspired by his partner Tatiana. Words to live by!

So who is this dude Obama anyway?

2008-06-07T12:50:00.006+02:00

Scary swarthy Muslim terrorist?

Old school Marxist with a radical liberal failed ideology?

A god?

The embodiment of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream for America?

A system-saving better brand of toothpaste?

I like Dennis Perrin's take (last link above) but I think Jeremiah Wright may have summed it up best:

"He's a politician, I'm a pastor. We speak to two different audiences. And he says what he has to say as a politician. I say what I have to say as a pastor. Those are two different worlds. I do what I do. He does what politicians do."

Back to blogging

2008-06-05T09:23:00.003+02:00

This blog is on the verge of being revived. Usual topics--dogs, politics, walks. Just a head's up for anyone who still checks this site. And a preview of things to come:

photo credit: http://www.agility-slo.net/

Blowback 101

2007-08-24T23:05:00.000+02:00

I don't have time to provide the background to this or elaborate further just now (there are reasons why I haven't been blogging much of late), but just in case anyone happens to migrate over here from the comment I left at The Washington Note, below is the text of the editorial I was referring to (I also mentioned it briefly in a post here over a year ago). The editorial was written in late 2002, for a local newspaper in Lafayette, Indiana, where I happened to be living at the time, in response to the establishment of Purdue University's "Homeland Security Institute."

'Blowback 101': The Missing mission of Purdue's new security institute

I welcome Purdue University's initiative to establish a new Homeland Security Institute. Few tasks are as important as ensuring the safety of citizens. But there's something missing from the list of “critical mission areas” serving the strategic objective of preventing terrorist attacks.

It's American foreign policy.

What is it that our government does around the world that makes America such a favored target of terrorists? It's a reasonable question, and a 1998 report by the Cato Institute asked it outright: “Does U.S. intervention overseas breed terrorism?” In a word, yes. Author Ivan Eland analyzed the recent historical evidence and found a strong correlation between U.S. military intervention abroad and terrorist attacks against the United States. His conclusion: “The United States could reduce the chances of such devastating and potentially catastrophic terrorist attacks by adopting a policy of military restraint overseas.”

In other words, terrorism against our population can be prevented if our government can be restrained from bombing other nations and propping up despotic, unpopular regimes with American military power. Hardly a surprising or controversial conclusion, but certainly worth bearing in mind by anyone working in the field of homeland security.

I suggest the institute offer a course called "Blowback 101" or "How to avoid creating lethal enemies in the first place: What can we learn from the failed foreign policies of the past?" An interview given by former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski to the French publication Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998 is especially instructive here, and sure to spark a lively class discussion.

Brzezinski boasted that CIA aid to the mujahedin in Afghanistan actually began well before the Soviet military intervention -- that it was in fact deliberately intended to provoke the Soviet Union into invading, thereby giving the Soviets their Vietnam and contributing to the collapse of the regime. Asked whether he regretted having supported Islamic fundamentalism, that is, having given arms and advice to future terrorists, Brzezinski replied, "What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?"

Let us hope that graduates of Purdue's Homeland Security Institute will learn from miscalculations like Brzezinski's. Unfortunately, concerns about Afghanistan, the Taliban and even al-Qaida no longer occupy the American political mind, which is currently fixated on Iraq. Yet here, too, lessons from the past abound. For instance, just how smart was it to provide Saddam Hussein with massive military aid during the Iran-Iraq war, including the materials for making chemical and other weapons of mass destruction?

Americans must be slow learners. As part of the new global war on terrorism, 67 countries have received or are about to receive U.S. military aid, according to the Federation of American Scientists. Thirty-two have been identified by the State Department as having "poor" human rights records, or worse, the same group reports. So don't be surprised if today's partners in the coalition against terror turn out to be the Osamas and Saddams of the future.

Perhaps the most significant discovery of the new Homeland Security Institute will be one we already know, from disciplines as diverse as agriculture and theology: What a man sows, so shall he reap.

Lyra takes up a new sport

2007-08-03T17:07:00.000+02:00

And seems to be rather good at it. Or maybe it was just beginners' luck.

Results from our first disc dog competition, at Stromovka Park in Prague, July 29:

Freestyle Beginners

Super Minidistance Open

Here she is, posing with her winnings:

And here are a couple of action shots of Oli, with whom I tried one round of minidistance, without having done virtually any training at all.

At this stage of the game, her misses

are more frequent than her catches

but I expect with time and training her skill level will approach more closely her level of enthusiasm.

Border/aussie blogging

2007-05-11T12:05:00.000+02:00

Quick round-up of recent news before we head off on the next adventure--walking the Pot spominov in tovarištva/Path of Remembrance and Comradeship around Ljubljana to commemorate the liberation of the city from Nazi/Fascist occupiers on May 9, 1945. For more information about that event and about the commemorative path and walk, see here, here, (both in English), and here (Slovenian wiki entry). Report will follow.

Some holiday postcards from Lyra--in addition to an afternoon jaunt to the seaside (no pictures, she said she was too busy swimming in the ocean to mess around with taking photographs), the next day she got to attend a picnic in the village of Krka, where the source of the Krka River lies.

I got her back from her foster family in time for an agility competition on Saturday April 28 in Ptuj, where she finished fifth. The course for the agility run was extraordinarily challenging. There was only one clean run, and 13 of the 23 A2 competitors were eliminated. Considering the circumstances, Lyra did okay. We got 10 faults for missing a difficult slalom entrance, twice, and 3.88 seconds in time penalties while we corrected it (twice!). Everything else was good apart from a very slow teeter. Still working on that one. After the first run we were in seventh place.

In contrast to the agility course, the jumping course was almost ridiculously easy. There were nine clean runs, including ours; Lyra's was the fourth fastest, a respectable showing for us. With a fifth place overall, we didn't bring home a cup this time, but she did acquire some points towards the national championship, in which she is currently (after three competitions) leading.

We also got in a third run (jumping) for the team. She ran clean, the only one of our three-member team to do so. A little slow since by then she was tired, and the day was hot. A nice feature of the Ptuj grounds is the stream that runs alongside; Lyra took frequent dips but even so the heat got to her.

No photos or videos this time, sorry.

I do, however, have a few shots from the Open Day hosted by the Komen Kennel Club on Sunday April 29 (click to enlarge):

The Postojna and Ajdovščina kennel clubs were invited to do an agility demonstration in the afternoon. Unfortunately someone forgot to truck in the obstacles, so we improvised a little show to fill in the time and amuse the spectators while waiting for the agility course to arrive. As you can see, Lyra and I did a little impromptu frisbee:

Okay, she missed that catch, but you gotta admit it's a spectacular leap.

Olivia got in on the action, too.

In fact, Oli, despite her relative inexperience and clumsiness with the frisbee compared to Lyra, arguably turned in the better performance. Lyra was distracted, unfocused, and hard to motivate--she's supersensitive to environmental factors and clearly didn't feel comfortable in the setting. I finally managed to coax a few of her trademark leaps out of her, but for much of the time her chasing was half-hearted and her catches mediocre.Oli , on the other had, displayed an enthusiasm, will to work/play, intense focus, and desire to please that were extremely gratifying. She just needs to hone the technique a bit (well, me, too). She shows this drive and enthusiasm for just about any task we give her--frisbee, agility, obedience, tricks. Very fun to work with. I would love to see her try out herding--I bet she'd be brilliant.

Eni grejo na počitnice, drugi pa v šolo

2007-04-25T16:05:00.000+02:00

I am temporarily Lyra-less. J and D swung by to pick her up and take her with them on an afternoon jaunt to the seaside. Whenever she does well at a competition, she is rewarded with počitnice pri Jani in Deanu. (The "jockey" only gets a beer.) Her last major vacation with J and D was in January. Things look a little different now. Instead of shoveling snow, I have been mowing dandelions. I can't really call it grass. But I couldn't quite finish the job since I ran out of gas for the lawn(dandelion)mower and couldn't refill the tank since yesterday I poured what was left in the gas can into my car's tank so I could drive to Sežana to pick up a desperately needed prescription for antihistamines.

Oli has school this evening in Ljubljana. Fortunately I got a payment today, so I can buy gas for the trip.

This is a fairly typical day in my life.

Good dog, happy woman

2007-04-22T09:55:00.000+02:00

Is that a border collie in that picture?

So what if my house is a mess, my garden a disgrace, my love life pathetic, my finances precarious at best? I have a damned fine dog, and that's what really matters. (Two fine dogs, actually, but this post is dedicated to Lyra.)

Saturday I left the house shortly after 5 a.m. to travel to an agility competition at the other end of the country, in Gornja Radgona. Okay, that's not as impressive as it sounds once you realize I live in a country the size of New Jersey, but a three-hour drive one-way by my standards is a long haul.

I very nearly didn't go. As with last year's competition in distant Slovenska Bistrica, I found myself in the (not atypical) situation of having lots of work and little money. A sensible person would have made a serious effort to earn more and spend less. Specifically, she would have stayed home and translated (and cut the grass and cleaned house) instead of taking the whole day off and spending money on entry fees and travel expenses.

Last year I took the sensible option, and regretted it. This year I sensibly decided to act irresponsibly. Good move. No regrets. We had a terrific time, enhanced even further by winning a cup, a bag of dog food, and a dog blanket:

photo by www.agility-slo.net

Thereby breaking the Eukanuba curse that we somehow incurred last season. I had set what I thought was the attainable goal of ranking in the top three in the Eukanuba Cup for our category, but with the exception of the first competition of the 2006 Cup (which was also our first time na stopničkah), our worst performances invariably occurred in the Eukanuba competitions, and we finished the season a mediocre seventh or eighth in the Cup.

Videos of our Saturday runs available here (agility run) and here (jumping run).

Despite taking our sweet time on the teeter-totter, which was even more fearsome than usual, we were second after the agility run, since so few dogs had clean runs (the course was a challenging one; nearly half the competitors were eliminated after the first run). Jumping was clean and relatively fast--we had the best time of the clean jumping runs--but not quite fast enough to make up for our slow agility run and overtake the first-place dog, Kala.

This follows a second-place finish at Ajdovščina on April 7:

(Videos: agility run, jumping run)

Saturday was an upbeat conclusion to an otherwise stressful and generally crappy week, marked by an extraordinarily high pollen count which set my allergies raging, controversy and conflict in village relations over the erection of industrial-sized streetlights along our narrow unpaved rural lane that would illuminate my yard as though it were a shopping mall parking lot (considered by some a sign of progress, by others unnecessary and unacceptable light pollution), major challenges at work, and dissatisfaction in my love life (such as it is). After experiencing a series of mini emotional breakdowns, I'd decided it's time to seek help from a professional therapist. But now I'm thinking--who needs therapy when you have a border collie and agility?*

And music. Check out song #11--my personal favorite.

And speaking of dog therapy--check out what Tina and Chica have been up to, bringing good cheer to residents of a retirement home.

*Sorry, Elizabeth, if this catches on, you may be out of business.

If you say so

2007-04-13T22:29:00.000+02:00

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

A week in my life: March 11-17

2007-03-19T16:12:00.000+01:00

It was a good one, despite me being sick the whole time. It started out with a leisurely Sunday afternoon walk through the Karst landscape in the company of a visiting friend and Lyra, who knew exactly what to do when we came across a kal:

A kal, for those who may not be able to read the Slovene Wikipedia article linked to, is a small Karst pond, a depression in the landscape that fills up with rainwater (and may dry up during a severe drought). In the past they were used as a source of drinking water for human households (before being superseded by wells, which offered a cleaner and more constant source of water for human consumption) and for watering the livestock which were driven to pasture every day:

(The pond pictured above is now a road; for more photos and information about Karst ponds go here and here.)

Typically, every Karst village has a man-made kal; a couple of weeks ago, during a village party held in part by the Kopriva kal, a local woman now in her sixties recalled going there to wash clothes in her childhood.

This particular kal, which Lyra so happily made use of,

is a natural pond, located beside a piece of land (one of about thirty) that belonged to my ex-husband and has now passed to our daughter. It's about half an hour's walk from the village along a track just wide enough for a tractor. About 18 years ago we spent several days cutting wood on that land; as we worked, Miloš mentioned drinking from the pond in his childhood, when he and his mother and grandmother would be out there mowing in the hot summer weather (by hand, using scythes--before the land became overgrown by brush and trees).

On the way back, we stopped to play some tug of war:

The weather was stupendous all week long. My health was notably less than stupendous. I had a nasty head cold, characterized by a very sore throat, long and frequent fits of explosive incontinence-inducing sneezing, and nonstop production of vast loads of thick yellowy snot. Lovely. Tea helped. And being outside—it was actually easier working outside than in, though my physcial stamina and consequently labor productivity were low.

On Monday I finished raking the old dead grass and cleaning up the brush around the property, transplanted strawberries, and sawed, split and stacked some wood cut from my pasture in January and hauled home a few weeks ago. Tuesday (having canceled my Ara EFL classes since I couldn't talk) I dug up the garden bed by the garage, scattered manure pellets, planted black currant and white currant bushes (no red to be had, will add later), and installed tomato poles--at the edge of my yard as a slalom obstacle for now, since tomato-planting won't occur till later in the year. Wednesday I dug up the garden beds by the cottage and the flower bed in front of the house, planted a few flowers, and sowed lettuce and radicchio. Thursday I again tackled the pile of wood, sawing the ca. one-meter-long pieces into shorter lengths with the chainsaw (2-3 cuts), splitting the thicker ones, and stacking the cut and split pieces in the shed under the garage, before heading up to Ljubljana for agility lessons. Where I nearly expired, since I couldn't breathe, run, or call out commands to the dogs for shit.

On Friday I took the day off. I had day care for the dogs, drove to Nova Gorica, took the train up through the lower Soča Valley and Baška Grapa to Bohinjska Bistrica (map here), where I luxuriated in the pool and especially saunas at Vodni park Bohinj. Outstanding. I was practically alone in the saunas (just two other people) and the Turkish (steam) sauna in particular was just what my respiratory system needed. For the first time in a week I could use my partially unclogged nostrils for taking in air. Stopped off in Most na Soči on the way back for a scrumptious dinner with a friend, got home about 10 p.m., exchanged greetings with the dogs, fell into bed.

On Saturday we went to an agility competition in Prestranek. No need for an extremely early start, since it's only about 40 minutes' drive and now that we're in dvojka (level 2), we start later. Oli came along and behaved very well. And we got a delivery of seven dog frisbees and got to try them out. AND...we were second in the competition! We had a clean first run (agility)--she did the teeter without much hesitation or prematurely jumping off and she entered and proceeded through the slalom from our "bad" side without mistakes, a performance good enough for second place after the first run. I got disoriented in mid-course during the second run (jumping), momentarily lost sight of the next obstacle, had a terrible line, and she ran by a jump while I was trying to recover, picking up five faults. After that mistake I wasn't expecting to place but other competitors also made mistakes, and we somehow managed to retain second place overall. A nice end to the week, and a good start to the 2007 season.

photo by www.agility-slo.net

AIPAC Democrats

2007-03-19T15:56:00.000+01:00

Inside America's powerful Israel lobby

Before and after the dinner, the presidential candidates and their colleagues from Congress schmoozed with the AIPAC delegates. Circulating through the crowd, Joe Biden made sure his presence was registered. "Hi, I'm Joe Biden!" he said repeatedly, adding several times, "I've been hanging out with AIPAC for years!"

[...]

Following the dinner, Clinton and Obama held competing dessert receptions in the conference center -- in rooms about 25 yards apart -- both eager to highlight their pro-Israel credentials.

Leaping Lyra

2007-03-19T14:20:00.000+01:00

(Click to enlarge photos.)

It's a border collie thing.

This day in history

2007-03-08T20:22:00.000+01:00

International Women's Day (IWD) originated as part of a protest against the abysmal wages and working conditions which women faced in textile factories. On March 8, 1857 women workers in the garment industry in New York City stopped working to draw attention to their conditions; 12-hour days, lack of benefits, sexual harassment, sexual assault on the job, and unfair wages. Three years later women garment and textile workers formed their first union, but conditions did not improve significantly. Fifty years later on March 8, 1908, women once again mobilized to ask for change. This time they were also demanding an end to child labour and lobbying for votes for women.

The protests about working conditions did not move the government to change the labour laws until a fire on March 25, 1911 at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory killed 145 women in New York City. They were locked in the building to ensure that they would not take breaks away from their stations even to use the one washroom, which did not work adequately.

Police and onlookers standing by the bodies of women who leapt from the burning building in the Triangle Factory fire, New York City on March 25, 1911:

The factory conditions which led to the deaths of these women were common in the 1,463 sweatshops existing in the garment industry of the time. The women worked in a sea of flammable materials with no sprinkler systems. The fire escapes, which did exist, were accessed by inward opening doors, many of which were locked. Eighty thousand workers marched through a pouring rain to the funeral held for the women who perished.

The government was silent. No laws were immediately changed. The following January 11, 1912, fifteen thousand women garment workers went on strike, demanding shorter working hours, an end to child labour, safe working conditions, and equal pay. Their claim was, “Better to starve fighting than starve working.” The women stayed out on strike for nearly three months.

Their slogan and song – “Bread and Roses” – rang through the streets – bread a symbol of economic security, and roses symbolizing social justice and a better life.

The Bread and Roses Strike of 1912:

Each year on March 8, women around the world take time to reflect on the current status of women and demand equity under the law, safe and equitable working conditions, and freedom from violence in society at large.

Reflect on this, please:

Outrage following more Bangladesh garment worker deaths

Three tragedies hit Bangladesh factories in one week, leaving scores dead, wounded

Hundreds were reported dead or injured following three separate incidents in the Bangladesh garment and textile sector last week, according to various local and international news and Bangladeshi trade union reports. [...]

[...] The spate of tragedies began on Thursday, February 23 when a fire, possibly caused by an electrical short circuit, destroyed the four-story KTS Textile Industries in Bangladesh's port city of Chittagong. Initial reports stated that 54 were killed and at least 60 were injured, however other sources peg the death toll at several hundred in what local garment workers rights' advocates are calling the worst tragedy in the history of the Bangladesh garment industry. Over 1,000 workers were reportedly in the factory at the time of the 7 p.m. fire. According to the workers, the exits were locked. [...]

Garment workers participating in a national strike March 2nd 2006 in Bangladesh to demand justice in the wake of recent deaths and injuries in garment and textile factories:

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose?

Good question

2007-03-03T12:09:00.000+01:00

"Do they have a nice broad roof on that embassy to land helicoptors on?"

--from a commenter responding to a Washington Post article about the billion-dollar mega-embassy the Americans are constructing on expropriated land in the center of Baghdad.

Update: It appears that the photo is of the current US Embassy, which is housed in a palace built under Saddam Hussein. See comments for more information.

Snowier adventures of a frolicsome border collie

2007-01-28T20:49:00.000+01:00

This time from Tamar:

Olivia also got to play in the snow--we got about 25 cm here on Thursday. Not much left now, after two days of strong sunshine, but it was fun while it lasted.

Me neither

2007-01-25T17:23:00.000+01:00

Not that I ever said I would support John Edwards, but after reading Bob's post I can say with 100% confidence that Edwards will never get my vote. As Bob says, "That Edwards believes that Iran is a threat, and that he feels it is more important to speak to Israelis than to Americans, is enough to cross him off my list."

Bob raises a good question: "Why is it that most states get two senators, while Israel gets 100?"

Democrats are, if anything, even more reflexively pro-Israel than Republicans. As Joe Biden helpfully explained to Jewish journalists in October, 2006, the Democrats' support for Israel "comes from our gut, moves through our heart, and ends up in our head. It's almost genetic." (No need to cross Biden off my list; he was never on it. I cannot stand the man or his politics.)

Compared to this sorry bunch of Democrats, Hagel is looking better all the time. He got the lowest score--3.88 on a scale of 1-10--of all the 2008 presidential candidates ranked for Haaretz by a panel in response to the question "How good is the candidate for Israel?" (Note, though, that the best qualified candidate of all, Dennis Kucinich, is not even on Haaretz's list.) And Hagel has been one of the most vocal opponents of Bush's escalation of the war on Iraq.

But on virtually all the other issues his politics could not be further from my own. A 0% rating by NARAL on women's reproductive rights. A 100% rating by The Christian Coalition. An A grade from the NRA. Supports Bush 95% of the time, favors privatizing social security, opposes more federal funding for health care.

No. Just...no. I can't.

New blog in town

2007-01-25T15:34:00.000+01:00

It's called Piran Café, and is described by author "Pirano" (a fiendishly clever pseudonym) as "a tremendous waste of precious time." I'm pretty sure he meant his time, not the reader's time. For readers, I'd say it's well worth a (daily) visit. Want to learn about the hazards facing Martin Strel in his attempt to swim the entire length of the Amazon River? Need some shopping tips for just the right souvenir that best represents Slovenia's cultural contribution to the world? And do check out my cameo appearance here.

Snowy adventures of a frolicsome border collie

2007-01-24T22:12:00.000+01:00

Lyra is visiting friends this week in Ljubljana. Yesterday it started to snow in the northern, alpine part of the country (the Gorenjska region), and so Lyra and her friends went off to frolic in the white stuff. Photographic documentation follows (click to enlarge):

Oli and I are stuck in the rainy Karst. We saw a bit of white stuff today when it hailed, but mostly we have mud and puddles on the ground. Oli doesn't mind the rain, or the mud. She's been taking advantage of Lyra's absence to play with her frisbees. Getting rather proficient. And quite muddy. No photographic documentation, but use your imagination to visualize a wet, muddy blue merle aussie with brown where the white markings used to be. (Photo below was taken a month ago, above Bohinj. She was clean then.)

Photo by Iztok Noč

Won't Bernie Sanders please run for president?

2007-01-22T22:16:00.000+01:00

Because I sure as hell won't be voting for Hillary or Obama.

Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, speaking at the National Conference for Media Reform, transcript courtesy of Democracy Now!:

[...] If you are concerned, as been said, about healthcare, if you are concerned about foreign policy and Iraq, if you are concerned about the economy, if you are concerned about global warming, you are kidding yourselves if you are not concerned about corporate control over the media, because every one of these issues is directly controlled and directly relevant to the media.

Let me just talk about a few. Four years ago, George W. Bush told the American people that a third-rate military power country called Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that they were about to attack the United States of America. That's what he told us. I can tell you, because I was there in the middle of that, in opposition to that -- that day after day, those of us who oppose the war, among many other things, would be holding national press conferences that you never saw. I can tell you, as you know, that hundreds of thousands of people in our country were so disgusted with the media simply acting as a megaphone for the President that they turned off American media, and they went to the BBC or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

In terms of the war in Iraq, the American media failed, and failed grotesquely, in exposing the dishonest and misleading assertions of the Bush administration in the lead-up to that war, and they are as responsible as is President Bush for the disaster that now befalls us. Media plays a role. And the disintegration of Iraq, the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, of over 3,000 Americans, the cost of hundreds of billons of dollars out of our pockets -- directly related to the failure of the media.

Let me touch on another issue, an issue that I am deeply involved in. If you were to ask me what the most significant untold story of our time is, in terms of domestic politics, I would tell you very simply that that story happens to be the collapse of the American middle class. Simply stated -- I don’t want to speak at great length on it, but simply stated, despite an explosion of technology, huge increase in worker productivity, tens of millions of our fellow Americans have seen a decline in their real wages and are working longer hours for lower wages. In fact, what you probably don't know is that the working people in our country work longer hours than do the working people in any other industrialized nation on earth.

How did that happen? How did it happen today that a two-income family has less disposal income than a one-income family did thirty years ago? How does it happen that thirty years ago, one person working forty hours a week could earn enough money to take care of the family; now, you need two, and they're still not doing it? Now, one might think that this is an interesting story. One might think that globalization and disastrous trade policies, which have lowered the standard of living of millions of American workers, might be a story that should be covered.

What I can tell you is that when NAFTA was first passed over ten years ago -- and I strongly opposed NAFTA -- we did some research. We did some research. We went through the editorial pages of every major newspaper in America, every single one of them was prone after, and today, despite a $600 billion trade deficit, the loss of millions of good-paying blue-collar and white-collar jobs, these corporate titans are still in favor of unfettered free trade, despite the disastrous impact it has had on America's workers.

Now, what is all of this about? What happens? If the reality of working people's lives are not reflected in the TV, in the newspapers, what happens? This is what happens. People lose their jobs, because corporations shut down. Just had an instance in Vermont this week. 175 workers shut down, lost their jobs, because of free trade.

People working long hours, people working for lower wages, they turn on the television set, they do not see that reality. What they see is the issue is personal responsibility. You can't afford healthcare? You're losing your pension? Then the problem is with you. Work a little bit harder. It is not a systemic problem. It is not a problem that can be solved by government. It is not a problem which asked you to be involved in the political process. You are the only person who can find a job that pays you a living wage. That's your fault! And you are the only person who can’t find a job that provides you with healthcare. That's your fault! And you're the only father who can't afford to send your kid to college. That's your fault! Don't get involved in the political process. It won't do any good. So people turn on the television -- they’re hurting, they're exhausted -- they do not see a reflection of their reality in the media. They do not understand that participation in the political process can bring about change, and that is not by accident.

When we wake up in the morning and we brush our teeth, for better or worse, we see our own reflections in the mirror. When we turn on the television, somebody is providing us a mirror to the world, and what we want is that mirror to reflect the reality of ordinary people and not the illusions of a few.

Talk about healthcare. We are told that it is quite amazing. After sixteen years in the Congress, you hear these guys getting up on the floor announce, “We have the best healthcare system in the world. Yeah!” 47 million Americans have no health insurance. Even more are underinsured. We pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. Costs are soaring. Best healthcare system in the world.

But, you know, go out on the street and ask people how many major countries in the world do not have a national healthcare program, which guarantees healthcare to all people. And you know what? Most people do not know, because they have not seen it reflected in the media, that the United States of America is the only nation on earth that does not guarantee healthcare to all of its people. They do not know about the healthcare systems in Scandinavia. They do not know about European healthcare systems. And the only thing they will hear about the Canadian healthcare system are the problems that that system has. That's what they will hear.

I can remember in the early 1990s, during the early years of the Clinton administration, there was a lot of debate about the need for real healthcare reform. Do you happen to know which piece of legislation in the House had far more support than any other concept? You probably don't. It was legislation to support a single-payer national healthcare system. That's a fact. But, as somebody who was involved in that fight, we would turn on the television and say, “Hey, single payer has more support than any other concept. Are you going to talk about single payer?” “Oh, no, no. We don’t talk about single payer. It's not feasible.” Virtually no coverage about what a single-payer concept is about. Virtually no coverage about international healthcare and how other countries are doing a better job than we are doing.

In terms of the environment. In terms of the environment, if we are told over and over again that there is a serious scientific debate about the causation of global warming or whether global warming actually exists, it has an impact upon our consciousness. Why should we break our dependency on fossil fuels, why should we move to sustainable energy, if there is a debate among the scientific community? And that is, in fact, what you hear in the media. Well, you know what? There is no debate among the scientific community.

Now, here's an issue that I’m sure you see on the TV almost every night -- it probably bores you, you see it so much -- and that is that the United States today has the most unfair distribution of wealth and income of any major country on earth. I was joking. You don't see that on television very often. Now, here is at issue, you know, which is of enormous significance from an economic point of view, as well as a political point of view, as well as a moral point of view. Richest 1% of the population in America owns more wealth than the bottom 90%. Richest 13,000 families earn more income than do the bottom 20 million families. In many ways, in my view, we are moving toward an oligarchic form of society. Do you think that maybe this is an issue that should be thrown out there on the table? Do we think it's a good idea that so few have so much and so many have so little? But that is an issue that is beyond the scope of what establishment media is literally allowed to discuss.

Now, I have been in politics for a long time. I have been asked a thousand questions by media. Not one member of the media has ever come up to me and said, “Bernie, what are you going to do to deal with the outrage of America having the most unfair distribution of wealth of any country on earth? What are you going to do about it?” Have you ever heard any political leader ever being asked that question? Why not? Why is that issue outside of the scope of what we are allowed to talk about?

Pay me in poetry

2006-12-13T11:07:00.000+01:00

Li Bai Chanting a Poem

One of the more interesting aspects of my line of work is the opportunity it provides to learn things I likely never would have encountered otherwise. This morning, for example, in the course of editing an article summary, I was introduced to the Chinese poet Li Bai (or Li Po), apparently considered one of the two greatest poets in Chinese literary history. Before today my knowledge of Chinese poetry was nil; now, thanks to the article I'm editing, Wikipedia, and hyperlinks leading to pages such as this one, I am practically an authority on the life and poetry of Li Bai. I now know, for example, that he "is best known for the extravagant imagination and striking Taoist imagery in his poetry, as well as for his great love for liquor" and that he "is said to have drowned in the Yangtze River, having fallen from his boat while drunkenly trying to embrace the reflection of the moon."

Of course, this aspect of my job has its drawbacks as well, since what should be a perfunctory fifteen-minute editing task can easily turn into an endless excursion through the vast fields of human knowledge. I don't need any of this background information to correct the common errors in word order, subject-verb agreement, use of articles, and so on in the texts I work with, but curiosity drives me to find out more, even as it reduces my labor productivity and hence hourly wage (I'm paid by the page, not the hour). But think how much more impoverished my life would be if I had never read this poem:

Alone and Drinking Under the Moon

Amongst the flowers I
am alone with my pot of wine
drinking by myself; then lifting
my cup I asked the moon
to drink with me, its reflection
and mine in the wine cup, just
the three of us; then I sigh
for the moon cannot drink,

and my shadow goes emptily along
with me never saying a word;
with no other friends here, I can
but use these two for company;
in the time of happiness, I
too must be happy with all
around me; I sit and sing
and it is as if the moon

accompanies me; then if I
dance, it is my shadow that
dances along with me; while
still not drunk, I am glad
to make the moon and my shadow
into friends, but then when
I have drunk too much, we
all part; yet these are

friends I can always count on
these who have no emotion
whatsoever; I hope that one day
we three will meet again,
deep in the Milky Way.

So the theorizing on the cause of his death appears to have some basis. As for his hope of meeting his friends deep in the Milky Way, perhaps it was fulfilled; if not, he may at least feel some satisfaction knowing that, according to Wikipedia, a crater on the planet Mercury has been named after him. That, along with a thousand or so poems, still delighting random readers more than 1200 years after his death, is a better legacy than most of us get to leave.

A plan for Iraq

2006-11-18T12:45:00.000+01:00

Summarized here:

The McGovern-Polk Plan Summary and Highlights

1. Staying in Iraq is not an option. Withdrawal is not only a political imperative but also a strategic requirement. Withdrawal is not without cost (neither is staying), but it is also inevitable and we will pay costs at some point. The decision to withdraw soon will not require additional expenditures on the contrary it will effect massive savings. We are not advocating "cut and run" we are urging an orderly withdrawal on a reasonable schedule that will prevent further damage to U.S. interests.

2. The Iraq government would be wise to request the short-term services of an international force to police the country during and immediately after the period of American withdrawal. Such a force should be temporary with a firm date fixed in advance for withdrawal. Our estimate is that such a force would be needed for two years during this period the force would be slowly but steadily cut back. It's focus should be limited to public security. Such a force would be most acceptable if its composition were drawn from Arab or at least Muslim countries, as suggested by Brent Scowcoft in a Washington Post column of January 16, 2006.

3. During the period of withdrawal if the Iraqi government requests U.S. assistance the U.S. should do all it reasonably can to assit it in embodying and training a permanent national police force. Once the American troops are withdrawn, the Iraqi public is unlikely to continue to support the insurgents, so the level of combat is almost certain to fall. This has been the experience in every comparable guerilla war. The American withdrawal plan should include a provision of $1 billion to help the Iraq government create, train, and equip such a force the cost of four days of the American occupation.

4. America should immediately release all prisoners of war it holds and close detention centers. Physical control of former members of the Iraqi regime who have been indicted by the Iraqi government should be made to the Iraqi government. A respected nongovernmental organization should be appointed to process claims of and pay compensation to those who have been tortured as defined by the Geneva Convention.

5. America should not encourage the growth and heavy armament of a reconstituted Iraqi army as such have frequently acted against civil governments and Iraqi citizens. The U.S. should encourage the transfer of soldiers it has already recruited to a national police force or to a national reconstruction corps. The U.S. should commit to an allocation of $500 million, the cost of two days occupation, for the training of a national reconstruction corps.

6. Withdrawal of U.S. forces must include immediate cessation of work on U.S. military bases. Fourteen so-called "enduring bases" are under construction and five are already built massive bases amounting to virtual cities.

7. Americans should withdraw from the Green Zone, their vast sprawling complex in the center of Baghdad. The U.S. is spending $1 billion on its headquarters in the Green Zone, which contains or will contain some three hundred homes, Marine barracks and 21 other buildings along with its own electrical, water and sewage systems. This should be turned over to the Iraqi government.

8. Before the turnover the U.S. should buy, rent or build a "normal" embassy for a much-reduced complement of U.S. officials. This should be outside of the Green Zone so it is symbolically not part of the occupation.

9. Mercenaries (euphemistically known as Personal Security Detail) now amount to 25,000 armed men a force larger than the British troop contingent hired directly or indirectly by the U.S. government. They must be withdrawn rapidly and completely. The way to withdraw them is simple stop the payments we make to them.

10. The U.S. must assist in digging up and destroying the land mines and unexploded ordinance and clean-up the depleted uranium in artillery shells and their targets. Much of this work should be turned over to Iraqi contractors in order to employ Iraqis but it does require professional training. The U.S. should make available a fund of $250 million one day's occupation to assist in the survey and planning the removal.

11. Rebuilding should be, and can be, done by Iraqis, alleviating the socially crippling rate of unemployment. The U.S. should make a generous contribution to this effort in the form of grants and loans through the Iraqi government. This will also increase the power of the government. The U.S. should also allocate funds for survey, planning and organization of the rebuilding of the Iraq economy a sum of $1 billion (four days of wartime expenditures). After this survey the U.S. and Great Britain should determine in consultation with the Iraqi government what it is willing to pay for. Parallel to reconstruction should be the demolition of the ugly monuments of warfare, i.e. dismantling and disposing of miles of concrete blast walls and wire barriers erected around American installations. Further U.S. destruction of Iraqi cultural sites, including building military installations on top of them, needs to be corrected and a fund of $250 million (one day of war) should be made available to assist in the restoration of these sites. Rebuilding should also include civic institutions where the U.S. should provide fellowships for the training of lawyers, judges, journalists, and a variety of nongovernmental social workers. This should cost $500 million (two days cost of war). Many skilled Iraqis have left their country and the U.S. should assist in encouraging their return, another $500 million should be provided for this effort.

12. An independent accounting of Iraqi funds is urgently required. This will cost approximately $100 million. If funds were misappropriated or misused they should be repaid.

13. The U.S. should make reparations to Iraqi civilians for loss of lives and property it caused. The British have already begun to do so in their zone. The U.S. already authorizes individual military units to make condolence payment of up to $2,500. This amount compares to $400,000 paid to beneficiaries of an American military casualty. If the number of unjustified deaths is 50,000 and compensation is $10,000 per person the probable total allocation would be approximately $500 million. If the number of those incapacitated is between 15,000 and 25,000 (the best we can make) and the same payment is made the total cost would be about $200 million.

14. The U.S. should not object to the Iraqi government voiding all contracts for petroleum exploration, development, and marketing made during the American occupation, so these can be renegotiated or thrown open to fair bidding.

15. The U.S. should encourage with large-scale assistance various UN agencies including the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Food Program and the Food and Agricultural Organization as well as nongovernmental organizations to help reconstitute organizations to help reconstitute the Iraqi public health system. While this is a massive undertaking the total cost of such rebuilding would only amount to eight days of the occupation, about $1.7 billion.

16. Finally, America should express its condolences for the large number of Iraqis killed, incapacitated, incarcerated, and/or tortured. A simple gesture of conciliation would go far to shift our relationship from occupation to friendship. It is a gesture without cost but with immense value.

More on the sentencing of Saddam Hussein

2006-11-06T11:10:00.000+01:00

A politically astute Slovene acquaintance responded thusly to Craig Murray's wish that Saddam Hussein had been tried at the Hague:

But trial at the Hague was of course impossible. The US-appointed judiciary had to work hard to find the one Hussein crime that the US (probably) was not involved in. All his considerably more serious offenses - starting with his first murder (attempted assassination of president Abdul Karim Qassem, in which Hussein personally fired shots that killed his driver - the attempt was of course organized by the CIA), through the Halabja affair (accomplished with poison produced with know-how and equipment from the USA), to the bloody crushing of the Shia rebellion in the south in 1991 (when the USA obligingly allowed the Republican Guard to pass through US lines, and ignored Iraqi helicopters flying into the Basra area, and prevented Shia insurgents from getting weapons from Iraqi army depots in the south) - all were accomplished with considerable US support or at least a green light. The problem with war crimes and crimes against humanity is that anybody who was in position to prevent them but didn't can be charged with aiding and abetting.

Interestingly, if they actually hang him, it will be an extra-judicial killing, that is, murder, attributable to the US of A. According to the Hague Protocol and the Geneva Convention, any government set up by or with consent of the occupying force is a puppet government, and it has no legitimacy: the occupying force bears full responsibility for anything that a puppet government does.

Wouldn't that be the ultimate irony: Dubya charged with the murder of Saddam Hussein?

And in other election campaign news...

2006-11-05T19:48:00.000+01:00

...former U.S. ally and CIA asset is sentenced to death by hanging for crimes againts humanity.

Will Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and accomplices be in the dock next?

Riverbend comments. As does Craig Murray.

Okay, now I understand how it works

2006-11-03T14:27:00.000+01:00

American midterm elections: a primer

This educational video was produced in 2002, but the process is pretty much the same in 2006. (h/t to commenter marquer at Hullabaloo)

This guy also gets it

2006-11-01T13:46:00.000+01:00

How to cut and run
We could lead the Mideast to peace, but only if we stop refusing to do the right thing
By William E. Odom
Lt. Gen. WILLIAM E. ODOM (Ret.) is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a professor at Yale University.

October 31, 2006

THE UNITED STATES upset the regional balance in the Middle East when it invaded Iraq. Restoring it requires bold initiatives, but "cutting and running" must precede them all. Only a complete withdrawal of all U.S. troops — within six months and with no preconditions — can break the paralysis that now enfeebles our diplomacy. And the greatest obstacles to cutting and running are the psychological inhibitions of our leaders and the public.

Our leaders do not act because their reputations are at stake. The public does not force them to act because it is blinded by the president's conjured set of illusions: that we are reducing terrorism by fighting in Iraq; creating democracy there; preventing the spread of nuclear weapons; making Israel more secure; not allowing our fallen soldiers to have died in vain; and others.

But reality can no longer be avoided. It is beyond U.S. power to prevent bloody sectarian violence in Iraq, the growing influence of Iran throughout the region, the probable spread of Sunni-Shiite strife to neighboring Arab states, the eventual rise to power of the anti-American cleric Muqtada Sadr or some other anti-American leader in Baghdad, and the spread of instability beyond Iraq. All of these things and more became unavoidable the day that U.S. forces invaded.

These realities get worse every day that our forces remain in Iraq. They can't be wished away by clever diplomacy or by leaving our forces in Iraq for several more years.

Read the rest here. Sober analyis and sound advice from the guy who also said, more than two years ago, "I'm not sure I want to help the administration move on. I'd rather impeach them."

Will the Democrats listen, or do anything to solve the problems should they gain control of one or both houses of Congress next week? Of course not. They won't cut off funding for the war, and they won't impeach the war criminals who launched it.

The U.S. has lost the war and "should pull out very fast"

2006-10-29T17:17:00.000+01:00

So says John Brady Kiesling, a former career foreign service officer who resigned from the State Department in early 2003 in protest over the Bush administration's impending invasion of Iraq.

Kiesling, who resides in Greece, just returned from a speaking tour in the U.S. to promote his new book, Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower. It's on my reading list, along with ex-diplomat Craig Murray's memoir, Murder in Samarkand.

And countless other titles, of course. But I have a particular interest in Kiesling's book since I did an interview with him over three years ago for the Slovene newspaper Delo. It was published in Slovene translation in Sobotna priloga, a magazine supplement that accompanies the Saturday edition of the paper. The original English version is posted below; many of Kiesling's comments about Iraq have proved prophetic.

At the time the interview was published, Slovenia was being pressured by American government officials to sign a bilateral agreement granting immunity to American nationals from prosecution before the International Criminal Court. To its credit, Slovenia, which had signed and ratified the Rome Statute, refused (although to its disgrace, Slovenia's government has betrayed the nation's founding principles and its citizens by caving in to American pressure on a number of other international issues. But this is a long story, to be told on other occasions.)

Although in an earlier post I spoofed my own efforts over the years--hell, I'm old, better make it over the decades--to make the world a fairer and more peaceful place, characterizing them as mostly exercises in futility, I like to think that publishing this interview when and where I did may have made a small positive difference to the outcome. An arm-twisting American "immunity team" had descended on Slovenia on June 2, 2003, and set a June 30 deadline for signing a bilateral agreement--or else. Of course, the "or else" consisted of largely empty threats, but even though Slovenia as a nation was in a strong position, its foreign minister, the execrable Dimitri Rupel, had time and again displayed his penchant for kissing American ass, and speculation was rife at the time that once again he would embarrass the nation he was supposed to be serving and faithfully execute the bidding of his American masters instead.

The Kiesling interview was published June 14, 2003. In it I asked Kiesling about his views of the ICC. He was strongly supportive, and went on to give Slovenes some advice on how to hold firm in the face of superpower bullying. Who knows, maybe his words instilled some Slovene government officials with the courage and confidence they had previously lacked.

Here is the full text of the interview:

Looking for signs of intelligent life in American foreign policy

Interview with former American diplomat John Brady Kiesling published in Delo, June 14, 2003

In early February of this year, credulous leaders from the Vilnius group of countries, helpfully coached by American neoconservative lobbyist Bruce Jackson, were coming to the conclusion that America’s “compelling” evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and links to international terrorism called for urgent and forceful intervention. About the same time, seasoned American diplomat John Brady Kiesling was watching events unfold from Athens with a sinking heart.

Kiesling had long suspected that the Bush administration’s case for war on Iraq was bogus. He worried that it would bring neither security to Americans nor freedom to Iraqis. A career diplomat with a master’s degree in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archeology and years of field experience in southern Europe and the Caucasus, he was particularly sensitive to the damage that such a war would inflict on America’s relationships and alliances abroad. As Political Counselor at the American Embassy in Greece, he was expected to persuade Greeks to back a policy in which he himself had no confidence. The set of “talking points” provided to him and his colleagues to make the case for war were, he recalls, “pretty pathetic” and unlikely to convince “an audience of sophisticated people who have some experience with the world, who are profoundly nervous about the Middle East and terrorism, and who would like to see some signs of intelligent life in American foreign policy.”

Unfortunately, the Bush administration values loyalty from its members above all else, including intelligence. It was clear that no dissent on Iraq, whether it came from European allies or the State Department’s own experts, would be tolerated. And so, after nearly twenty years of conscientious service, Kiesling felt he was left with no other option. “I concluded that if I resigned I would at least have the right to speak out and be heard, for at least fifteen minutes anyway,” he told me in a phone interview from Greece.

Since the publication of his eloquent and heartfelt letter of resignation on February 27 in The New York Times, Kiesling’s voice has been heard for perhaps longer than fifteen minutes. In the months since his resignation, he has, by contributing numerous interviews, lectures, speeches, and articles, helped to open up a much-needed debate about the troubling direction of American foreign policy under Bush. Currently at work on a book about the role of America in Europe and the world, Kiesling parts company with the Bush administration on more than just Iraq: the current U.S. stance on the International Criminal Court, he said, makes him “furious.” And he confesses to having “a guilty secret”—a belief in the European Union as “a successful force for democracy and development,” in striking contrast to the United States, which, he has said, “as far as most of the world is concerned…currently has no useful vision to offer.”

In his letter of resignation, Kiesling wrote that “the policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests.” Other State Department resignations followed his own, and there is no telling how many more sympathizers still work within the system. One day, perhaps, an American government led by a different president will conclude that it is wiser to listen to such voices of reason than to unleash toxic and unwelcome policies on an apprehensive world.

Your resignation was prompted in part by the realization that the White House never really wanted inspections or diplomacy to work, that it was determined to go to war no matter what. At what point did this become clear to you?

I went through ups and downs on this. I was very down in September of last year. Then when we decided to go to the United Nations, I thought that the UN would be able to stop this war, or convert it into something legitimate. All of our Iraq diplomacy throughout 2002 consisted of the drumbeat of weapons of mass destruction. No other arguments were being made. And that argument struck me as incredibly flimsy. I tried to make the best of it, but from a political point of view it was stupid to go ahead on that basis if we could not provide our allies with evidence that was better than what we had. So that made me nervous—the fact that we were pushing so hard with so little convinced me that something was going wrong.

The decision to go to the UN made me feel a little better. Certainly it gave us time. But the whole inspection process was kind of a roller coaster itself. The American public heard only about the deceit and the evasion, while Saddam’s own people were pledging full compliance, but I’m not sure the American people heard that part of it. It was clear that the certainty that the US would intervene militarily if he didn’t comply was causing Saddam to gradually open up, and that process meant that there was no urgency to go to war at all. The only urgency came from our military build-up in the region.

It’s hard for me to tell at exactly what point I realized that the war was going to happen no matter what. There was something in Bush’s facial expression on television one moment in early February that told me it was all over. It had been all over a long time before then, but my remaining faith disappeared then.

Now that the war has actually been waged, how would you assess the current situation? And what happens next?

All the plans we thought we had have evaporated. I don’t know that [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz and company were actually dumb enough to believe that [the leader of the Iraqi National Congress] Ahmed Chalabi had sufficient viability and credibility to serve as any sort of a leader, but certainly once they got in, they discovered that he didn’t. So now they’re improvising and fumbling. And while they fumble, the center of gravity is moving toward those few groups that know what they want, like the hard-core militant Shia theocrats and the people who want an autonomous Kurdistan. The Sunni are caught in the middle, with no real legitimate leadership of their own, but terrified to be caught between the Kurds and the Shia. We went in with the understanding that the only viable solution was a state with a federal structure, with the northern part dominated by Kurds, a central part dominated by Sunni, and a Shia-dominated south. If that’s going to happen, the borders had better be set pretty quickly before the groups can start fighting over them. I think the framework needs to be put in place. There’s no earthly mechanism that would cause the contending factions to be able to settle on a federal constitutional structure on their own, left to their own devices. I’d argue that we need to have the United Nations come in and bless the process. We need to diffuse responsibility for the new shape of Iraq as widely as possible, because if it’s an American plan, it will not last. It will crumble because it has no legitimacy at all, whereas if there is a broader international political fig-leaf, there will be enough vested interests in maintaining stability to keep it propped up at least long enough to give the population a breathing spell.

The sad fact is that anything that has a “Made in USA” stamp on it makes the local population puke. They’re simply not going to tolerate it. But we need to find a way to live up to our responsibilities while creating a structure that has some claim to legitimacy, that isn’t simply imposed by US force on an unwilling and hostile population. Frankly, I don’t know how to do it. If I knew how to do it, I might have been more easily persuaded of the need to take out Saddam Hussein. But I really don’t.

The Kurds don’t want to be worse off than they were, so a federal state is the minimum they will accept. I’m not sure the other parties will be as happy with that. But if it’s a good enough package, with lots of money and guarantees of democratic rights, they might accept it. In the Shia territory this means basically coming to terms with a theocratic Shia federal state. We will either have one with US blessing, or one without US blessing, but we’ll have it regardless.

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about how American foreign policy has effectively been taken over by the Pentagon, with the State Department relegated to a very minor role. Administration officials Paul Wolfowitz at the Department of Defense and Richard Armitage of the State Department recently denied the existence of any conflict between the two departments. But what is the reality from your perspective?

The reality from my perspective is that these are very powerful men with a lot of ideological similarities who certainly would never stoop to saying anything nasty about one another in a meeting, and certainly not with the president watching. But there is a very sharp competition going on, and within that competition, the State Department has won an occasional battle but has always had to pay for it, whereas the Pentagon has been much better at winning and not paying for it. There’s definitely tension and conflict between the two departments.

Is the Pentagon winning?

It certainly was, but I get the feeling that since the war in Iraq ended the Pentagon has pulled back quite a bit. Iraqi reconstruction has to be paid for, and the bureaucratic logic of the situation is that the Pentagon would have to pay for it, and the Pentagon would prefer to spend its money on tanks and weapons and so on. So Rumsfeld is going to try to find a way to gradually pull the Pentagon back from involvement in Iraq, but that’s hard. And I think that gradually the United Nations is going to have a role, and the State Department, and AID [United States Agency for International Development, a government agency providing economic and humanitarian assistance worldwide], and all these other organizations that Rumsfeld has nothing but contempt for. But Iraqi reconstruction is such a mess, and so expensive, and he will not cover himself with glory from it, so he doesn’t mind farming it out to others.

How should we interpret the replacement of retired Army Lieutenant General Jay Garner by ex-State Department official Paul Bremer as chief administrator in Iraq? Some say that this is an indication that the State Department is getting more involved again, while others point out that Bremer’s primary affiliation is to the group of known neoconservative ideologues that so dominate this administration, and it doesn’t really matter which department he’s from.

Bremer reports to Rumsfeld, that’s very clear. Bremer’s own ideology is actually pretty slippery. He is a very shrewd bureaucrat who adopts whatever ideological coloration is required. He endeared himself to Rumsfeld by being a real counter-terrorist hawk, and of course that’s an easy way to win brownie points in Washington under any circumstances. So what Bremer really thinks, I don’t think anybody really knows. If Bremer is successful in Iraq, Rumsfeld will take the credit. If Bremer fails, Rumsfeld will remind everyone that Bremer is really a State Department guy.

Recently we heard Rumsfeld say that Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction may have been destroyed before the war, and Wolfowitz said that the weapons were used as the main pretext for war in Iraq primarily “for bureaucratic reasons.” This has sparked demands in both Britain and the United States for investigations to find out whether the administration manipulated intelligence and lied to Congress and the public about the threat posed by Iraq. Do you think anything will come of this?

Well, what can they say? They did manipulate. Rumsfeld and all these people had talked themselves into absolute certainty that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. They don’t know much about the Middle East, the intelligence was pretty ambiguous, they misread Saddam, and they thought it was fine to fudge the evidence, assuming that once they went in they would find something. They miscalculated badly. And so they deserve to be hung out to dry, because the whole doctrine of pre-emptive strikes, even assuming you agree with it, requires that you act only on good intelligence, and our intelligence was crap.

But do you think the people responsible will be held accountable in any way?

I’m fairly skeptical, but I think they’ll be a little more cautious in future. That’s about the best that I can say now. Unfortunately history tells us that the people who do best are the ones who don’t apologize for having lied, they just keep on doing it. But this has really added to the political cost that Tony Blair is going to pay. I suspect that Bush will pay a lesser cost since the American public is not nearly as curious about it.

How badly has the US damaged its relations with the rest of the world over Iraq?

The damage is fixable. The only problem is that the way we fix it is by showing a competence and perseverance in Iraq that I don’t think we have. If we fix Iraq, and make it better than it was when we broke it, then people will judge us more kindly. Also the president’s personal commitment to the Middle East peace process is important. I don’t want to be too cynical about it—but given his reluctance to pay attention to this process before, it’s clear that Bush was genuinely shocked by how much of a mess he made in Iraq, and is now trying to make up for it and redeem himself. I hope he succeeds, but I’m not that optimistic. The Middle East peace process is very, very difficult. The United States has to try, because nothing will happen without the personal prestige of the American president and the wealth and power of the United States government being brought to bear on the issue. The personal prestige of the American president works better when the president has a slightly clearer idea of what’s going on, but who knows, maybe he’s learning.

So you wouldn’t rule out progress in the Middle East peace process during this presidency? Or do we simply have to wait and hope we get something better in 2004?

I don’t rule anything out. I think that it’s possible that we can move the Middle East peace process a stage down the road toward a Palestinian state, but it will require a huge amount of attention over the next few months. I think President Bush has made a personal commitment to Tony Blair to make this effort, and I believe Bush does take this kind of personal commitment seriously, even though he doesn’t take telling the truth to the American people very seriously.

Your resignation from the State Department in February of this year was the first public resignation since 1994, when five State Department officials quit their jobs because they were frustrated by the Clinton administration's inaction on the crisis in the Balkans. You shared this frustration. But did you also consider resigning at the time?

Not at that time. I was always on the fringe of the Bosnia policy. As a Romania desk officer, I was providing moral support and helped with some of the drafting of the dissident activities. My involvement with Bosnia was purely voluntary, and if things got too intense I had the option of stepping back. I was appalled and disgusted at what was going on, but I wasn’t up against any moral crunch, and I didn’t think I had the seniority to really make a difference.

How did the change in US policy towards Bosnia come about? What finally led the US to intervene?

Basically it seemed to come down to too many dead bodies on television. Prior to that Clinton’s feeling had always been that the situation was too difficult and messy for him to want to get involved. There was a permanent bureaucratic battle going on, though the battle lines kept shifting. The State Department and part of the Pentagon were in favor of intervention, but most of the Pentagon felt it would be a quagmire, so the military tended to give assessments that were unrealistically negative—that it would require too many troops and cost too much money and so on.

Wasn’t the lack of a clear exit strategy also cited at the time as a reason not to intervene?

Well, anytime there’s a clear exit strategy, it’s because someone is lying. Exit strategies never really work, but you have to be able to convince skeptics, particularly in the US Congress, that we’re not going to be there forever.

Some people argue that even in the absence of an Iraqi arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, there was a compelling moral case for military intervention and regime change in Iraq. You were one of the earliest advocates of intervention in Bosnia, yet you opposed war in Iraq. What is the difference between the moral argument for intervention in Iraq as compared to that in Bosnia?

I would argue that certain kinds of humanitarian disasters generate a kind of legitimacy. To put it brutally, enough blood on the pavement generates legitimacy. When people are dying in large numbers, and there is a real prospect that military intervention will save lives, then this creates a moral obligation for the international community to act. There can never be a full accounting of costs and benefits, but in the case of Bosnia it seemed to me that the status quo was evil and many thousands of people were dying unnecessarily, and that we could stop it at a relatively small cost and offer something better.

There were times in Iraq’s history when equally terrible things were taking place, and we did absolutely nothing. The moment we chose to intervene in Iraq was actually not one when Saddam Hussein was slaughtering his own population with any particular enthusiasm. The short-term costs of the war would certainly be worse for most Iraqis than the continuation of the status quo, and the long-term situation was based on a whole bunch of imponderables, most of all on the willingness of the United States and the international community to pay billions of dollars that we don’t and won’t have in order to make things better. There was not enough blood on the pavement to generate a kind of moral momentum to intervene. You could argue that the time to intervene was when Saddam Hussein was gassing the Kurds at Halabja, but he was our ally at the time.

How many more people inside the system share your concerns, and what issues or actions would be flashpoints for them?

I think if we started any new wars against Syria or Iran, there would be a large number of resignations, because it would mean that all of our Middle East policy had collapsed in a heap. Also our relations with our allies would be even more seriously damaged than they already are. I’m not expecting war with either of those; I think we’ll see some saber-rattling but not actual war.

What about some kind of covert action in Iran?

My strong belief is that we’re living in a fool’s paradise if we think that there’s the kind of motivated opposition that we could work with in Iran the way we worked with the Contras in Nicaragua. Iran is a little more civilized. We could make a mess there, but a mess in Iran doesn’t actually serve our interests. At the moment there is basically a status quo state that is not very strong and doesn’t have control over all of the activities within the country, but if we were to destabilize it, there are thousands of Iranians who would love to do us harm, and if control broke down, they would be far freer to do it. Covert action aimed at the destabilization of the current regime would be an insanely stupid thing to do.

But is there sufficient awareness of this among the people in the US administration responsible for promoting one policy over another?

I don’t know. I think so. The Europeans have much better ties to Iran than we do, and I think they could give a more realistic assessment. I don’t think Tony Blair is ready for another bruising of the kind he’s gotten so far over Iraq. I think we’re smarter than to do that. I hope we are.

What are your views on the International Criminal Court? As you know, the United States is pressuring a number of countries, including Slovenia, to sign a bilateral agreement granting immunity to American citizens before the ICC. Do you think this administration’s objections to the ICC are justified?

The US view of the ICC is one of this country’s greatest embarrassments. I hated dealing with it when the issue came up. The whole point of the ICC was that in the course of the 1990s enough truly horrible things happened that we and the rest of the civilized world concluded that we needed some international body to try war criminals and serve as a deterrent to future war crimes. We all agreed with this, and then suddenly the issue was hijacked by the worst kind of American rabble-rousing populists, you know, the UN-bashers and the like. President Clinton basically shirked his responsibility on this one. He saw that it was politically a losing issue. So we ended up making a mockery of our principles—at least what I thought were our principles; at this point it is clear that the rejection of the ICC is perfectly in keeping with the principles of certain members of this administration.

The International Criminal Court was a courageous attempt to move international law a step forward. Then the United States lost its nerve, for completely spurious reasons. We had already gutted the ICC to the point where there was no plausible threat from it to us. It was not going to be taken over by hostile UN Assembly members and used to embarrass Henry Kissinger. We have a system that will punish war criminals and the primary jurisdiction lies with the individual states. It was not our finest hour; our position on this issue made me furious. I understand why some states feel compelled to give in to US pressure—that’s normal when you’re a small state and a large superpower is behaving childishly and irrationally—but I’m embarrassed for the US.

Slovenia seems to be holding firm on the issue for now, in large part due to the intense counter pressure applied to the Slovene government by civil society, which is strongly supportive of the ICC and increasingly critical of current US policy. Do you have any advice for countries on the receiving end of this administration’s bullying and manipulative tactics?

The key thing to remember is that all of the countries who are joining the European Union in this tranche have nothing to worry about. The United States does not have any meaningful bullying power which it cares to exercise. It will use guilt, it will use threats, but there’s not a lot that it can really carry out. On this particular issue it would be helpful if the European Union would be a little bit clearer, but then the EU is trapped, too: they are not sure how nasty the US is willing to be on this issue, and they don’t want countries to suffer unnecessarily. So the EU has basically decided that it’s up to the member states to make their own arrangements, but they have signaled to the accession states that whatever they do had better be “EU-compatible.”

I would say that Slovenia can get away with just making earnest noises and doing nothing. There are other countries that are more easily browbeaten; Romania, for example, is in a more awkward position. Romania tried to have the best of both worlds by signing an agreement very rapidly with the US and then saying that they had to wait for EU permission before ratifying it.

This is not an all-or-nothing issue for the United States, and a country like Slovenia, because it doesn’t need a US troop presence for peacekeeping or anything, can say to the US, “Look we are loyal friends of the United States, but we are also loyal friends of international law, and a good friend does not ask another good friend to violate their principles except in a time of supreme emergency, which this is not.”

So far the only concrete threat that has been made publicly is the withdrawal of 4 million USD in military aid.

The point is that this military aid is in US interests as well as Slovenia’s interests, and everybody knows it. It is not in US interests to weaken the bonds of affection between the US and other militaries. So even if it’s cut off, it will be restored eventually. If Slovenia politely says that it is too difficult for a democracy like ours to sign this agreement, the long-term consequences will be minimal.

Does the NATO alliance have a future, and if so, what is it likely to look like?

The original purpose for NATO is gone. There’s no question about that. That said, I think NATO is helping the European integration process, and as such may have a few years left to run. There is a major philosophical question as to whether NATO should be turned into an instrument of either the United Nations, which the US would not let happen at this point, or else of the community of nations, and serve as a highly competent organized planning and logistical body that will make military intervention, when it’s required, as effective, cheap, multilateral, and surgical as possible. NATO does have incredible infrastructure for intelligence, for planning, for communications and the like. I’m happy to put it to use, but it needs to be put to use within an international framework. That’s the big question. In a reinforced international community, where the UN is made more disciplined and stronger, NATO could be quite helpful. But that vision is not one that most Americans would share at this stage.

Is there a danger of NATO, under US domination, turning instead into what International Herald Tribune columnist William Pfaff termed last fall as “a self-financing foreign legion for the Pentagon?”

If the European Union develops a little more unity and discipline, so that the American voice in NATO is not quite as dominant, then I think that NATO has a lot of useful work to do.

What does diplomacy at its best look like?

Diplomacy is essentially the tending of human relationships. Our current theory of foreign policy is that we don’t need relationships because we’re powerful, so we can either demand that people do things or we can pay them to do things. And this is of course nonsense. Human nature doesn’t work that way. People do what you ask them to because they know you, they trust you, they have some sense that your interests and theirs coincide. And the job of a diplomat serving in, say, a country like Greece, where personal relationships are really everything, is to have contacts with the whole of the meaningful spectrum, and that’s not just politicians, but also academics and journalists and occasionally with real, ordinary people for a reality check, and certainly with the business community. There needs to be a point of reference, so that when Greeks think of Americans, they think of American diplomats and recognize that we have a shared tradition and shared interests and shared values, and that when things need to happen, I pick up the phone, the ambassador picks up the phone, we make a request, and they say “we’ll do it because we trust you.” Personality is crucial, and one of the most bizarre things I saw was Warren Christopher, who, although he was a very decent person, didn’t like talking to people. He didn’t establish empathy with people, and as a result our diplomacy was much weaker. Whereas with someone like Richard Holbrooke, though I have some doubts about him, there was no question that he invested his personality in real relationships, and he used those relationships to get people to do things they would not have done in the absence of that relationship.

In closing, is there any particular message that you would like to convey to Slovenes?

The basic point that I would like to make is that the European Union is a grand and visionary thing, and it’s a great experiment that I and a lot of Americans strongly endorse. It is crucial that Europe and the United States stick together. Our relationship goes through ups and downs, but in the long run our interests are the same. Both sides have to work permanently to tend the relationship.

One year old today

2006-10-24T13:12:00.000+02:00

Bravo, naši in naši sosedi!

2006-10-07T08:51:00.000+02:00

News from the FCI Agility World Championship in Basel:

Slovene Silvia Trkman has won the jumping individual medium with La. For the third time!

The Slovenia team came in second in the agility team large, just behind Croatia.

More events to come today and tomorrow.

You can see sketches of the courses here, and photos of the Slovene team in action here (registration required).

A continuing series of rejections

2006-10-06T11:19:00.000+02:00

Much to blog about here, including more than a month's worth of agility adventures, but I have too much work and too many unpaid bills to be able to indulge my inner blogger. So Im going to cheat and reprint things I've written in the past. Well, "reprint" is not quite the right expression, since they were never printed to begin with: I'm going to post the many letters I've sent to the New York Times over the years that were never published. (After a while you might notice a recurrent theme, to wit: Slovenia good, America bad.)

Today's letter is about health care. It was written and sent on February 1 of this year, in response to a January 31 column by Nicholas Kristof entitled Take a Hike (link provided, but unfortunately it's only accessible to paying subscribers). In this article Kristof proposes to solve America's health care crisis by banning French fries and other fatty junk foods from the schools and declaring a general "War on Sloth." In the penultimate paragraph, he concedes that what America really needs is a universal single-payer health care system, but he's not even going to go there, because it's "not politically feasible." Odd, that, because every other developed democracy has managed to provide its citizens with comprehensive high-quality health care at substantially lower cost than the United States, and the health outcomes of these nations tend to be more favorable than those of the U.S. Moreover, a strong majority of Americans favor such a system. So for anyone naive enough to believe that the American political and economic system is rational, efficient, and responsive to the needs and preferences of voters, please note that "feasible" in American political terms means "not vehemently opposed by the powerful monied lobbies that run things in Washington, D.C." Which rules out universal single-payer health care, because, while it would deliver better care to more people at lower cost, it would cut into the profits of insurance, pharmaceutical, and other corporations in the health care industry. It is thus by definition "not feasible."

What really irked me into responding to Kristof's column was his denigration of Slovenia. It is typical of many Americans to assume that the U.S.A. is the best country in the world in every possible way, and to express shock when they stumble across rude facts which puncture their smug illusions about American superiority. They are particularly disturbed when "countries like Slovenia" turn out to do things much better than their country does. Slovenia, you see, is supposed to be some less evolved primitive nation form just recently emerged from the primordial slime of communism, and supposedly needing a generation or more to "catch up" with the more advanced and enlightened nations of the capitalist West, in particular the U.S. This impression is not helped, to say the least, by the public actions and statements of Slovene politicians like Foreign Minister Dimitri Rupel, who seems to have made a career out of going round groveling before western and especially American leaders, apologizing for Slovenia's backwardness and inferiority because, well, you know, that damned socialist legacy and communist yoke held Slovenia back during the postwar years.

I have a growing file called "countries like Slovenia" with examples of this mentality. (And an even fatter file on Rupel and his exasperating anti-Slovene acts.) Material for a future blog post perhaps (once those bills are paid); Kontra! has already posted on a couple of such incidents, regarding evolution (similar post in English at Glory of Carniola) and information technology infrastucture. In each case American commentators are scandalized because Slovenia ranks higher than the United States.

As was Kristof, when he learned that Slovenia's health care is better than what Americans get. Which prompted me to write this letter:

To the editor:

Mr. Kristof finds it “scandalous that babies born in the United States are less likely to survive their first year than babies born in Slovenia.” Why is he not equally scandalized that the United States is bested by Sweden, Finland, and France—or Cuba, South Korea, and Macau?

In June, 1993 I traveled from Slovenia to Washington, D.C. for a reunion of North American Rhodes Scholars, where there was elation over the Clinton administration’s recent passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act, obligating employers with more than fifty employees to grant unpaid leave for up to twelve weeks for the birth of a child or other family medical event.

I remember feeling sorry for my American peers, having to start families and bring up children in such a backward and underdeveloped country, and thankful that I’d had the good luck, or the good sense, to give birth in a country like Slovenia, whose system of national insurance covered my family’s medical expenses in full and provided a year’s paid parental leave after the birth of my child.

Mr. Kristof goes on to claim that universal health care, which all other industrialized democracies in the world (not to mention quite a few less developed ones) manage to provide to their citizens, is “not politically feasible” in the United States. Yet a majority of Americans favor such a system, as do many health care professionals, because it produces better results at lower cost. If by “not politically feasible” Mr. Kristof means that the decisions of Americans’ elected representatives in Washington are more influenced by the lobbyists and political donors that profit from the current inefficient system than they are by the needs of their consituents and the findings of independent studies, why doesn’t he just come out and say so?

Mr. Kristof may rest easier, knowing that Slovenia’s health outcomes will soon be at least as bad as those of the United States: the current Slovene government and its (U.S.-trained) neoliberal economic advisors are determined to privatize more of the Slovene economy, including the health care sector, thereby ensuring that in Slovenia, too, private greed will prevail over the public interest—just as it does in the United States.

True to form, the letter went unpublished. This time I didn't even try to stay under the suggested 150-word limit, since I knew from long experience they wouldn't publish me in any case. There's a lot more to say on the topic than what I wrote above, and I'll say it. But not today. It's a sunny day in the cusp between summer and fall, in a region between the Mediterranean and the Alps. And it's my birthday. I think I'd rather spend it doing things outside.

Brief follow-ups to the last post

2006-10-03T12:02:00.000+02:00

The New York Times carried an article on Saturday about the art teacher in Texas who was fired because her kids saw naked statues at the Dallas Museum of Art. It's on the list of the paper's ten most emailed.

Excerpt:

Over the past decade, more than half a million students, including about a thousand from other Frisco schools, have toured the museum’s collection of 26,000 works spanning 5,000 years, he said, “without a single complaint.” One school recently did cancel a scheduled visit, he said. He did not have its name.

The uproar has swamped Frisco school switchboards and prompted some Dallas-area television stations to broadcast images of statues from the museum with areas of the anatomy blacked out.

Good Lord above, what would these parents do on a tour of Europe's cities, or *shudder* a visit to some of Europe's beaches and campgrounds in summer? Swoon and faint, I guess.

And there have been two more school shootings in the last few days.

No updates on Eric Hamlin, the world geography teacher who was disciplined for displaying non-American flags in his classroom, and ended up leaving teaching. I guess no news is good news; I have contacts among global studies/geography teachers in the U.S. who put up all kinds of international displays, including flags, in the classroom. As far as I know no one has been arrested. Yet.

The hazards of attending school in the United States

2006-09-29T11:34:00.000+02:00

So if you were the parent of a child who attended an American school, which of these incidents would you find most threatening to the health, safety, and moral development of your child?

This:

A seventh-grade geography teacher who refused to remove Chinese, Mexican and United Nations flags from his classroom was placed on paid administrative leave Wednesday by Jefferson County officials who were concerned that the display violates the law.

This:

Art Teacher Loses Job After Kids See Nude Sculpture
Children Were On School-Approved Field Trip

FRISCO, Texas -- An award-winning Texas art teacher who was reprimanded after one of her fifth-grade students saw a nude sculpture during a trip to a museum has lost her job.

Or this:

Student and Gunman Die in Colorado High School Standoff

DENVER, Sept. 27 — A gunman and a teenage girl he had taken hostage in a high school southwest of Denver both died Wednesday as a SWAT team stormed a classroom in an attempt to save the student and the man opened fire, shooting her and then himself, the police said.

Summing up:
- Display of flags from countries other than the United States in a geography classroom: Not OK, treasonous, unpatriotic, anti-American.
- Exposure to nude sculpture while on a school-approved field trip to an area art museum: Not OK, shocking, morally degenerate, disgusting.
- Easy access to guns for any crazed lunatic off the street: OK, no problem.

May I take this opportunity to publicly give thanks yet again because I and my daughter live in Slovenia and not America. Thank you.

Hedgehog habitat

2006-09-14T20:57:00.000+02:00

Every night for the past week or more the dogs go all hysterical out in the yard during for their pre-bedtime (and sometime middle of the night, in Oli's case) bathroom break. Apparently my yard is prime hedgehog habitat. They don't know quite what to make of the funny little creatures, but the general rule of thumb seems to be: when in doubt, surround the intruder and go into a barking frenzy.

Fortunately, so far neither dog has done this.

(Yes, that's an Australian shepherd--two actually. You can read more about them, and the hedgehog, and sheep, here.)

And since we're on the subject of wildlife habitat, I can report after a late afternoon stint of sawing wood that my woodpile is--or was--home to scorpions and spiders. Haven't encountered any snakes yet, but I often see specimens of Anguis fragilis when I'm mowing.

Update: After signing out of webmail and getting ready to shut down for the night, I scanned the headlines at siol.net and stumbled across this little news item from Serbia. For the benefit of non-Slovene speakers, here's a rough translation of the lede:

In Serbia, impotence treated with a hedgehog

Kragujevac - A 30-year-old man from the environs of Kragujevec, Serbia, has barely survived massive hemorrhaging from his penis after a local healer encouraged him to have sexual intercourse with a hedgehog.

I hope the hedgehog is all right.

Drnovšek profiled in the New York Times

2006-09-10T21:45:00.000+02:00

Has anyone read Drnovšek's book? Is it really a "New Age thumb sucker"?

September 9, 2006
The Saturday Profile
Slovenian President Finds Peace and Wants to Share It
By NICHOLAS WOOD
LJUBLJANA, Slovenia

THE best-selling book here right now, a New Age thumb sucker called “Thoughts on Life and Awareness,” is predictably full of platitudes about “finding our inner balance, peace and integrity and then transferring this to our surroundings.” Dedicated readers, and there seem to be many, can also consult the blog and advice column by the same author, who happens to be the president of Slovenia, Janez Drnovsek.

For well over a decade he has been at the center of Slovene politics, first as prime minister and then as president, a cool and reserved politician best known for his expertise in controlling inflation. But seven years ago, he was stricken with cancer of the kidney, which he says he survived only after rejecting conventional medical treatments and adopting a vegetarian diet, fasting and natural remedies. He says he was transformed by the experience, suddenly emboldened to speak his mind on all sorts of topics, from advice to the lovelorn to peace in Darfur.

He has frequently criticized the government and the Roman Catholic Church, and started a raft of initiatives that his advisers say they can barely keep up with. Above all, he believes he has found “a higher consciousness,” and now wants to share what he calls his “positive energy” with the rest of the world.

Mr. Drnovsek (pronounced der-NOW-shek) has not seen a doctor in a year and a half. Though questions were raised about his health after he fainted during a ceremony in June, he maintains that he has fully recovered, and that he is now obliged to help others.

“I am trying to help the people,” he said in an interview in his offices in Ljubljana. “I would say it’s a result of my own personal development. I have developed my awareness. I can help people, I think, because they are finding themselves down the road I have passed some time ago.”

Frequently smiling, and looking relaxed but older than his 56 years, Mr. Drnovsek outlined how overcoming the “formations,” as he called the cancer that at one stage had spread to his lungs, changed his personality. “This disease that I have overcome in the last few years — certainly it can have an impact,” he said. “You realize that life could be really short. Before, I was concentrated on pragmatic issues as prime minister. But then I was able to establish some distance. I think that I should do a little more to help the others.”

He says he no longer feels he has to hold back on issues that others consider too delicate. “I don’t have to make a compromise, just to say what is right,” he said.

Rather than live in his official residence, Mr. Drnovsek stays in a village on a mountain half an hour’s drive from the capital. He says that he lives on fresh vegetables and bread that he bakes himself, and that he periodically fasts for as long as eight days at a time.

In January, he resigned from his political party and formed a group called the Movement for Justice and Development, a platform for his new political and moral vision. He has a blog on the group’s Web site, in which he comments on topics as diverse as microlending, Jesus Christ, herbal medicine and the responsibilities of public office. “Someone in power should be a person who wishes it the least; a person who is honest, and who is aware of all the traps and the huge responsibility of authority,” he wrote in one entry. “Such a politician will work for the people, for the municipality, the state and humankind.”

MR. DRNOVSEK’S frankness has made him one of the most popular figures in the country. Last Christmas, his popularity surged when a woman surprised him with the revelation that he had a 19-year-old daughter, from a relationship they had in the 1980’s. The disclosure only added to his popularity, as father and daughter were publicly united for the first time.

“I think that after this personal struggle, people saw that he was someone like them, and because he can share things with them,” said Tina Horvat, an editor with Jana, the woman’s monthly magazine that publishes his advice column. “If presidents of other countries would be like him, it would make the world a better place.”

But it is the application of the president’s new vision to world affairs that has courted the most controversy, and not a little ridicule.

Last October, he began a campaign to resolve the future of the disputed province of Kosovo, now administered by the United Nations. His proposal — to give the province conditional independence from Serbia — angered both the Albanian and Serbian sides in the dispute, and prompted the Serbs to cancel an official visit by Mr. Drnovsek to Belgrade.

This year he has made repeated suggestions about ways to solve the conflict in Darfur, going as far as inviting the leaders of the rebel factions and the Sudanese government to a peace conference in Ljubljana. None came.

In August, an envoy Mr. Drnovsek had sent to Sudan — Tomo Kriznar, a prominent Slovene human rights advocate — was sentenced to two years in prison by a Sudanese court for entering the country illegally. Mr. Kriznar, who was trying to draw up an agreement among rebel groups that were not yet parties to an existing peace deal with the Sudanese government, had crossed over the border from Chad without a visa. After intervention by the Slovene government and the European Union and a letter from Mr. Drnovsek, Mr. Kriznar was pardoned Sept. 4 and set free.

“People are suffering more and more,” Mr. Drnovsek said. “So I thought that I had to do something, and Tomo Kriznar also thought I had to do something.” Mr. Drnovsek’s handling of the affair prompted calls for his resignation from a right-leaning magazine, Mag. Diplomats deplored what they said was the amateur nature of his initiative and the damage it did to Slovenia’s reputation. (His five-year term ends in December 2007, and he said in June that he would not seek re-election.)

THE Sudanese affair does seem to have cut into his political support. But he shows no signs of curtailing his role as a peacemaker. “Did the whole international community make progress, with so many hundreds of diplomats who are paid for this?” he asked. “Nothing, neither in Darfur nor in Kosovo. Nothing.

“That’s why I started my initiatives, hoping perhaps I can move things. But one should be surprised why the whole international community isn’t more efficient, in any case, and not why I’m not.”

Still, the affair has raised questions about his judgment. “I am not sure how much the president knew about Sudan,” said Ali Zerdin, deputy editor of Mladina, a weekly magazine. “It was definitely naïve to expect that such a complex problem would be solved with the power of positive thinking.”

More ominously, several politicians and at least one doctor have raised questions about whether diet and positive thinking really have cured Mr. Drnovsek, particularly after his fainting spell in June. “I’m no prophet,” wrote Tine Velikonja, a retired surgeon who said he had spoken with the president’s former doctors. “But I can say for certain that if Drnovsek insists on his vegetarian diet, he will not walk this earth in 2007.”

I get what I want (sometimes)

2006-09-08T17:49:00.000+02:00

My T-shirts have arrived. "We will not be silent", in English, Arabic, and Farsi.

"We Will Not Be Silent" is a statement attributed to a student-resistance movement in Nazi Germany called The White Rose. It is a statement of purpose, intended to inspire acts of resistance and dissent against a corrupt government that abuses its power, and abandons the rule of law.

All of us who believe in our freedom and that of others, and are against a policy of war, torture and lies, cannot afford to be silent.

You can order yours here.

Chicken blogging

2006-09-07T07:58:00.000+02:00

Courtesy of Elizabeth, we have a transcript of Hillary Clinton's interview with the chicken pictured in the previous post:

Chicken: Why won't you debate Jonathan Tasini before the Democratic Primary?

Hillary: Frankly, if I'm forced to disclose my positions, I'll lose votes in New York State.

Chicken: Why do you support the U.S. occupation of Iraq?

Hillary: Because I'm beholden to the same corporations as the Bush administration.

Chicken: Why don't you support Medicare for all, like Tasini does?

Hillary: Because I get more health care lobby money than any other senator except Santorum.

Chicken: Why do you support NAFTA and other trade policies that send jobs overseas?

Hillary: I was on the board of Wall-Mart for 6 years. I know what's good for the corporations.

Chicken: But what about caring for the people?

Hillary: I care about the people in the boardrooms.

Chicken: Why did Rupert Murdoch and other Republicans give you a fundraiser?

Hillary: Because I am a Republican.

Chicken: No, you're running against Jonathan Tasini in the Democratic primary on September 12th.

Hillary: I've been a Republican since I worked for Goldwater in 1964.

Chicken: Whatever. But I know what you really are.

Hillary: What?

Chicken: CHICKEN!!!!

(Hillary runs away, chased by Chicken)

Meanwhile, Hillary votes in favor of dropping cluster bombs in heavily populated areas. She wants the United States to continue supplying such munitions without restriction to Israel, which dropped hundreds of them on Lebanese towns and villages, most of them in the last days of the conflict before the cease-fire took effect. They continue to kill and maim, especially children.

What was the title of that book of hers again? "It takes a cluster bomb to kill a child"? Something like that.

Surprise, surprise

2006-09-03T09:05:00.000+02:00

The New York Times editorial board endorses Hillary Clinton in the senate primary. They explain why:

[I]t is hard to imagine [Clinton's opponent Jonathan Tasini] working well in a large body of egotistic and generally conservative politicians.

They also cite Clinton's name recognition (thanks to the constant promotion by the Times and other corporate media outlets, as they ignore Tasini) and her obscene amounts of campaign money (thanks to corporate lobbies) as reasons to support her, even as they point out that "she has hardly been a profile in courage... Mrs. Clinton’s biggest flaw is her unwillingness to risk political capital for principle. That is not to say that she lacks principles, but whenever her moral convictions become politically inexpedient, she will struggle to find a way to cloak them in vague rhetoric or deflect attention with a compromise that makes the danger go away."

This seems like a good time to share a letter from Tasini supporter Bill Strzempek, written in reponse to an August 21 Times editorial reproaching Clinton for refusing to debate Tasini. The Times did not see fit to print it, but I do:

It is brazen hypocrisy for the Times to complain on its op-ed page that Hillary Clinton "has successfully ignored" her progressive opponent, Jonathan Tasini, when the Times is guilty of the same thing. To read your pages one would think only Connecticut has a Democratic primary. Rather than displaying crocodile tears over the lack of debate between Tasini and Clinton, you might instead provide your readers with in-depth coverage of their opposing views on Iraq, healthcare, NAFTA, workers' wages, corporate donations to politicians, gay marriage, and Walmart, just to get started. Or you could sponsor a debate between the two yourselves.

Your call for debate does not absolve you from your responsibility to provide equal coverage of both candidates in your pages.

Agility update: Part 1

2006-08-31T09:55:00.000+02:00

It's been a while since my last agility post. This is only partly due to the August hiatus in the competition season, when it's (usually, though not this year) too hot to compete comfortably and safely, and people go away on vacation. More because I found it too difficult to go from photos and reports like these to these in the same blog. I've actually thought about taking the politics blogging elsewhere, and reserving this site for more personal blogging about my life and dogs. I think some readers come here for the former, and others for the latter, and I don't know how much the constituencies overlap. But for now I guess I'll keep it all under one roof.

We've been to two competitions since the last update. The first was in the Slovene coastal town of Portorož, about an hour from here. The competition, the fourth of six counting towards the Eukanuba Cup, started in the afternoon and went into the night, under lights. It was hot driving down there in my old non-air-conditioned beater, and hot, too, for the first run. However, the nearby Adriatic Sea offered some relief (well, until a lifeguard let us know that dogs weren't welcome, even though we stayed way way off to the side where there weren't any people). There was also a spray hose with fresh water provided on the grounds that we made frequent and liberal use of, but Lyra greatly prefers swimming to being hosed.

On the first run (agility) we encountered trouble early on--the second obstacle was the accursed teeter-totter. We've been training on that, especially after getting some very helpful, individualized instruction from Finnish agility expert Mia Laamanen at the recent seminar in Domžale. Lyra started up very confidently, then surprised me by jumping off to the side at the midpoint, just as it started to move. We both recovered fairly quickly, but got five faults for missing the contact zone on the down side. She was good on most of the rest of the course but I got a little disoriented on a crossover turn after the slalom and she left me behind as she sailed over the next three jumps. I made the mistake of calling her so I could catch up and this caused her to run by the next obstacle, a tunnel, instead of entering it, which resulted in another five faults. Our standing after the first run was 9th of fifteen.

The second run (jumping) was clean, but slow. We came fourth in the second run, and sixth overall. Quite respectable, and enough to gain 10 points towards the 2006 Cup (we're currently tied for seventh place, having moved up in the standings from tenth place after this competition).

Part of the reason she was slow was because she was worn out from playing a little too much frisbee during "halftime". You can access a video here; go to "arhiv oddaj" and click on the video icon next to 29.07.2006. The first segment--about 15-20 minutes--is on the Pororož competition, and Lyra makes several appearances, usually airborne as she snags a frisbee. If you don't understand Slovene, you won't get much out of the interviews, but a lot of the filming is of dogs in action, on the course and off.

Colorado geography teacher leaves school

2006-08-29T09:16:00.000+02:00

Seventh-grade geography teacher Eric Hamlin has decided not to return to his classroom at Carmody Middle School in Lakewood, Colorado.

Can't say as I blame him. I don't think I'd want to teach in a school whose administrators declared me "insubordinate" for displaying the flags of foreign nations and the UN in a world geography class, and insisted on micromanaging my lesson plans.

Hamlin was allowed to teach on August 22, but at the end of the day, he was called down to Principal Schalk’s office. “He presented me with a letter of reprimand,” Hamlin says. If Hamlin wanted to return in good standing, the letter said he would have to agree to “not display any flag of any foreign nation,” Hamlin recalls. “And I had to receive administrative approval for any display I was putting up in my classroom.”

Hamlin says he told Schalk that he “could not morally comply” with those terms.

The next day, shortly after Hamlin arrived at school, Schalk handed him a letter placing him on administrative leave.

It was only after the story gained prominence in the national media that the school, faced with an onslaught of negative publicity, backed down and dropped its demands. But by then the damage had been done. Hamlin was sufficiently shaken by the experience to prefer to move on, and out.

Some of the comments on the incident over at The Denver Channel were amusing, if disturbing. For example, here's "SJM in Arizona" on the subject:

Eric Hamlin is one of these liberal teachers who thinks illegal aliens should be allowed to be educated at taxpayer expense, just as if illegal aliens were as good as everyone else instead of trash, scum and filth.

Eric Hamlin is a teacher paid by US taxpayers in US funds. This "multi-flag" baloney is just a disguise for his pro-Mexico, anti-American agenda.

Colorado state law prohibits what he's doing, and he wants to ignore the law that he doesn't like, just like the illegal aien scum do.

If Hamlin wants to teach Mex, let him go to Mex and stay there. Better yet, let him go to China and pull his behavior there.

Or go to teach in the Catholic schools, where the Catholic pedophile priests support the illegal alien scum.

Hamlin needs to be made a public example, telling all these liberal one-world teachers that we won't allow them to promote illegal aliens on the taxpayers' money.

Hamlin is an enemy of America.

And "Jebster" adds his two cents worth:

This guy is a lib commie. It was his underhanded way to support communist China and illegals (that is people breaking our laws). Then he goes running to the ACLU as all anti-American turds do.

Fortunately these two seem to be in the minority. Most commenters thought the whole affair was utterly ridiculous, and a parent of a former student of Hamlin's wrote this testimonial:

Our daughter was in Mr. Hamlin's 7th grade class last year. Mr. Hamlin is one of the best teachers our family has ever encountered. He does not have a right or left wing agenda, but a desire to educate 7th graders. He is very knowledgable [sic] in the subject matter that he teaches and highly skilled and effective as a teacher. The fact that there is a law like this is wrong. The school is wrong for standing by this "letter of the law" type argument. Let him teach, the kids will be better for it.

Hamlin may teach again, though not at Carmody, or he may not. He says he is concerned about a "law that limits educators."

Assistant Principal Victoria Winslow and Principal John Schalk interpreted the law very narrowly. Colorado Revised Statute 18-11- 205 prohibiting the display of any flag other than that of the United States of America or the state of Colorado in state buildings allows the following exemption: "the display of any flag ... that is part of a temporary display of any instructional or historical materials not permanently affixed or attached to any part of the buildings ... ."

However,

"the principal looked at the curriculum, talked to the teacher, and found that there was really no curriculum coming up in the next few weeks that supported those flags being in the classroom," Jeffco Public Schools spokeswoman Lynn Setzer said Wednesday.

Hamlin argued that although his curriculum may not speak specifically about those flags, they are used as reference tools for world geography.

"It's much along the lines of a science teacher who puts up a map of the solar system. They may not spend every day and every lesson talking about Mars, but they want the students to see that and to see the patterns of the planets and the order, and the students will observe that and absorb that learning visually," Hamlin said.

Hamlin said that the school district not only deprived him of a teaching tool but also took away from his students' education.

Speaking of education, here are some recent statistics reflecting the scale of geographical illiteracy among young Americans:

- Thirty-three percent of respondents couldn't pinpoint Louisiana on a map.
- Fewer than three in 10 think it important to know the locations of countries in the news and just 14 percent believe speaking another language is a necessary skill.
- Two-thirds didn't know that the earthquake that killed 70,000 people in October 2005 occurred in Pakistan.
- Six in 10 could not find Iraq on a map of the Middle East.
- Forty-seven percent could not find the Indian subcontinent on a map of Asia.
- Seventy-five percent were unable to locate Israel on a map of the Middle East.
- Nearly three-quarters incorrectly named English as the most widely spoken native language.
- Six in 10 did not know the border between North and South Korea is the most heavily fortified in the world.
- Thirty percent thought the most heavily fortified border was between the United States and Mexico.

Let's not forget that these are the promising young citizens of a nation which thinks itself entitled to rule the world.

I pledge allegiance to the flag...

2006-08-25T10:45:00.000+02:00

News from Colorado:

A seventh-grade geography teacher who refused to remove Chinese, Mexican and United Nations flags from his classroom was placed on paid administrative leave Wednesday by Jefferson County officials who were concerned that the display violates the law.

Uh, it's a world geography class. Although this may be news to many Americans, there are other nations in the world besides the United States. In fact, the vast majority of the world's inhabitants--like about 95%--live in the approximately 192 countries that are NOT called the United States.

Some confusion is understandable. After all, the United States consumes roughly a quarter of the world's resources, so Americans might be forgiven for thinking that there are only, say, three other countries they need to share the planetary wealth with. Also, a large majority of Americans do not have passports and do not travel outside their country's borders (apart from periodic trips to Canada and Mexico to buy cheaper prescription drugs). Globalization notwithstanding, maybe they simply haven't noticed the existence of other countries. I guess they don't read the labels on the clothes and other products they buy, or pay much attention to American foreign policy.

Nevertheless, I would think that the job description of this world geography teacher would include making his seventh-graders at least vaguely aware of the existence of other nations in the world. Displaying the flags of all these other countries in his classroom is a simple, graphic, and entirely reasonable means of doing so.

Fortunately, the teacher stood his ground, and the school backed down.

Some commenters over the Huffington Post instinctively wanted to pin the blame on Republicans for this latest jingoistic stupidity. In fact, it was DEMOCRAT Carl Miller, a former state representative from Leadville, who sponsored legislation in 2002 strengthening a 1971 law restricting the display of foreign flags. According to the follow-up story in the Denver Post, Miller supported the school's decision to place the teacher on leave, and was disappointed that he had been allowed back so soon.

Here's his response to Jefferson County Superintendent Cindy Stevenson's comment that the resolution of the issue was a "win-win situation":

"The only win-win I see is that Mr. Hamlin wins, China wins, Mexico wins and the United Nations wins," he said.

Proving once again that Democrats can be just as xenophobic, ethnocentric, and jingoistic as Republicans.

In related news, American high school students testified before Congress in hearings devoted to improving the nation's geographical literacy, and researchers surveyed the American street for their opinions on future geopolitical strategies for their nation.

Hey, what's the matter with Colorado, anyway? Some weird things goin' on there.

Flying without planes, or wings

2006-08-23T22:51:00.000+02:00

Airborne aussie Chica (Alpine River Breeze of June)

More tips on flying

2006-08-22T16:26:00.001+02:00

Don't wear T-shirts with Arabic writing
Don't look Middle Eastern or speak Arabic while looking at your watch
Don't try to bring Craig Murray's Murder in Samarkand on board

Worthy and unworthy victims

2006-08-22T11:00:00.000+02:00

Photo on the left: Jon Benet Ramsay, blue-eyed, blonde-haired former child beauty queen who was murdered ten years ago after being sexually assaulted

Photo on the right: Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi, who was raped, shot dead, and burned by American soldiers (who also murdered Abeer's mother, father, and little sister) in March, 2006

Only one of the young victims above is considered newsworthy by American cable news networks. Guess which.

Juan Cole:

The message US cable news is sending by this privileging of some such stories over others of a similar nature is that some lives are worth more than others, and some people are "us" whereas other people are "Other" and therefore lesser. Indeed, it is precisely this subtle message sent by American media that authorized so much taking of innocent Iraqi life in the first place. British officers have repeatedly complained that too many of those serving in the US military in Iraq view Iraqis as subhuman (one used the term Untermeschen). Where did they get that idea?

For more on how it works, read here.

Speaking of subhumans and T-shirts (see previous post), apparently there is a T-shirt available in PX stores that says "Who's your Baghdaddy?" in English and Arabic. Popular with the troops, private contractors, pajamas media bloggers (see comment #24), the little green footballs crowd...Do you suppose JetBlue and JFK security officials would have insisted that a traveler wearing such a shirt remove it before flying?

Or how about shirts carrying some of the bilingual slogans mentioned here?

I want this T-shirt

2006-08-21T21:35:00.000+02:00

Via Democracy Now!, I learned that a man was detained and questioned at JFK for wearing a T-shirt that said "We will not be silent" in English and in Arabic.

This is because the Arabic translation of "we will not be silent" is "I am a terrorist," at least in the opinion of linguistically, culturally and politically challenged Americans (i.e. the majority). The man, Iraqi peace activist and blogger Raed Jarrar who now resides in the US, was ordered to change his shirt if he wanted to board the plane.

Jarrar was returning from a trip to the Middle East, where he and the others in his group met with Iraqi parliamentarians to talk about ending the American occupation. While in Syria they visited a Lebanese refugee camp, where, when it was learned that they had come from America, they were yelled at for funding the bombs dropped on Lebanon, and made to leave.

Read more here; as Raed ruefully concludes,

It sucks to be an Arab/Muslim living in the US these days. When you go to the middle east, you are a US tax-payer destroying people's houses with your money, and when you come back to the US, you are a suspected terrorist and plane hijacker.

Unhinged conservative politically aspiring neonuts for Tasini

2006-08-21T17:41:00.000+02:00

Could there possibly be a connection between these two events?

On Wednesday August 16 I left a comment on the weblog of John Spencer, a Republican candidate for senator challenging Democratic incumbent Hillary Clinton, who as everyone knows plays politics with America's national security and is in league with Osama bin Laden. In my comment I urged people to support the campaign of Jonathan Tasini, who is challenging Clinton in the Democratic primary.

A day later, according to this report in the New York Times, Spencer's campaign sent out an email message "urging his supporters to take a look at Jonathan Tasini."

Nah. Must be a coincidence.

In related news, the work of the Crusading Proofreader rated a mention in the New York Daily News.

I hope you're as impressed as I am.

Let it never be said that a single individual cannot make a difference

2006-08-19T17:05:00.000+02:00

I've been worrying about the state of the world and the fate of humanity for a long time now, and acting whenever, wherever, and however I could to nudge things in what I felt was a more promising direction. Most of the time these earnest efforts have been exercises in futility.

For instance, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, thoroughly alarmed about the threat of nuclear holocaust hanging over us all, I threw myself into research and activism on nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the US-Soviet arms race, and so on. I attended and organized conferences on the topic on my university campus, got involved with Pugwash, made several visits to the USSR to engage directly in official and unofficial dialogues with people there, penned articles and edited newsletters, networked intensively with leading activists in the British women's peace movement while at Oxford, attended demonstrations, went briefly on hunger strike...well, you get the general idea.

And to what avail? Nil. In 1980, as my activism got under way, the "doomsday clock" of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists stood at seven minutes to midnight. The time today? Seven minutes to midnight.

In 1990, inspired by the results of the December 23, 1990 plebiscite overwhelmingly in favor of Slovenia's independence, I sent a telegram to American President George H.W. Bush from the Šiška post office in Ljubljana, urging him as a fellow freedom-loving American to support Slovenia's aspirations for democracy and independence. He failed notably to take my advice. Instead, on the eve of Slovenia's formal declaration of independence on June 25, 1991, Bush's Secretary of State James Baker made a visit to Belgrade to convey the message that the United States would not object to the use of force by the JLA to keep Yugoslavia together as a single country. Given the choice between backing the communist, ultra-nationalist, dictatorial regime controlled by budding war criminal Slobodan Milošević, and supporting the brave dissenters of Slovenia struggling peacefully for greater democracy, pluralism, and market-based economic reform, Bush ignored my plea and came down firmly on the side of the former.

In November of 2002, during a period of temporary residence in Indiana, I published a guest editorial in the Lafayette Journal and Courier proposing that the highly touted, handsomely funded, soon to be established "Purdue Homeland Security Institute" include a study of American foreign policy among its "critical mission areas" if they were serious about preventing future terrorist attacks. Among other things, I suggested they offer an introductory course to students majoring or minoring in Homeland Security called "Blowback 101."

They didn't adopt any of my suggestions, and the Purdue Homeland Security Institute four years on has not had any effect whatsoever on America's terrorist-creating foreign policy. (It may well have played a major role in the Department of Homeland Security's designation of Indiana as the national center of terrorism, with 8,591 potential targets, but that wasn't my idea so I can't claim any credit.)

In 2003, I made two trips to the Indianapolis office of Senator Richard Lugar as a member of citizen delegations organized through MoveOn. The first was in January before the invasion of Iraq, to encourage Lugar to use his influence to prevent it happening, and then again in October, to urge him to vote against Bush's request for another $87 billion to fund it. The impact of our respectful but impassioned antiwar statements on Lugar's thinking? Zero. Bush got his war and his funding, thanks to the enthusiastic support of Lugar and so many others in Congress.

Another senator who blew me off is Joe Biden, who was all over the airwaves on February 5, 2003, touting the support of "New Europe" for a unilateral U.S. invasion of Iraq, with or without a UN mandate, and horrifying the Slovenes whose unconditional backing he was falsely claiming. I contacted his office multiple times, in writing and by phone, pointing out factual errors in his statements and requesting, in the interests of public accuracy, that he issue a correction. His response? Zilch.

And then there's all those letters to the editor I've written, which never get published or read or have any impact whatsoever on the public debate.

So given this string of failures, why the fuck do I still bother?

Because every so often, I score a victory. I have an impact. I make a difference. And these accomplishments, however small, these signs of progress, however incremental, are what give me the strength and the inspiration and the resolve to carry on.

Case in point: the other day, via a link from WIIIAI, I came across an ad by John Spencer, a Republican challenger to Democratic incumbent senator Hillary Clinton. The original version of this "hard-hitting and factual" ad proclaimed that "Islamic facists still hate us and want to attack us," and that Hillary Clinton was making their job easier by voting against vital programs, leaving America vulnerable.

I left a comment pointing out that it should be Islamic fascists, not facists. And you know what? When I checked back a couple of days later, the error had been corrected! I am convinced this was due directly to my own personal intervention. I could have remained silent. I could have looked the other way. I could have left it up to someone else to speak truth to power. I could have spent the time enjoying a walk in the countryside with my dog instead of trolling the sites of unhinged conservative politically aspiring neonuts who attack my values and hate me for my freedom. But conscience and a highly trained proofreading eye drove me to speak up, and by damn, I made a difference.

And who knows, my influence may not stop there. I also encouraged people to join the struggle to oust Clinton, who plays politics with America's national security, by voting for Jonathan Tasini.

Oh fuck it, maybe I should just go back to dog-blogging.

Battle scene from the global struggle of ideas between Australian shepherds and border collies

But which one is the fascist?

Who's buying?

2006-08-19T13:08:00.000+02:00

So, Osama Walks into This Bar, See? and Bush says, “Whad’l'ya have, pardner?” and Osama says, “Well, George, what are you serving today?” and Bush says, “Fear,” and Osama shouts, “Fear for everybody!” and George pours it on for the crowd. Then the presidential bartender says, “Hey, who’s buying?” and Osama points a thumb at the crowd sucking down their brew. “They are,” he says. And the two of them share a quiet laugh.

Looks like they're buying big over at CNN. Go watch. Now. Then come back.

Are you thoroughly inebriated and indoctrinated? Pissing yourself in fear? Having shaking, shivering, screaming nightmares about Islamic fascist terrorists bent on global domination coming to YOUR town and murdering you and your loved ones in your beds? In need of an antidote? Here, try some Craig Murray or Bill Blum. My treat.

I wonder if CNN plans to do a story called "Target: World" portraying actual victims of ongoing terrorism committed by the United States and Israel.

Probably not.

I don't watch CNN. I don't have cable or satellite TV, and even if I did, I wouldn't waste my limited TV-viewing time on CNN. I do get four Slovene channels. Two nights ago one of them showed John Pilger's film, "Palestine Is Still the Issue." I watched it with my fourteen-year-old daughter; she was fascinated but horrified, and kept asking me questions I couldn't answer, like "Why does America support Israel when Israel is doing all this to the Palestinians?" Afterwards, I found her poring over her geography atlas, studying the maps of the Middle East. She'd like to travel there, and to many other places.

Has this or any other Pilger film ever been shown on a major American network? I don't know, but I doubt it. And maybe that's part of the answer to my daughter's question.

If you haven't seen the film yourself, you can watch it here, at the Information Clearing House site. Motto: "News you won't find on CNN". Indeed.

The terror plot that wasn't

2006-08-17T17:04:00.000+02:00

Craig Murray follows up on the dastardly plan by terrorists to cause "untold death and destruction":

[A]fter eight days of detention, nobody has been charged with any crime. For there to be no clear evidence yet on something that was "imminent" and "Mass murder on an unbelievable scale" is, to say the least, rather peculiar. The 24th person, who was arrested amid much fanfare yesterday, has been quietly released without charge today. Breaking news, another "suspect" has just been released too.

Of course, none of this means that there wasn't a plot involved:

The sinister aspect is not that this is a real new threat. It is that the allegation may have been concocted in order to prepare us for arresting people without any actual bombs.

I wonder which of the 50,000 people who read the item on Murray's blog, and the countless others who quoted and reposted the item (I confess! I confess!) will be arrested first.

Skepticism. It's the new terrorism.

Breaking news!!!

2006-08-17T11:12:00.000+02:00

There's an insurgency in Iraq! And it's getting stronger! Apparently Iraqis don't take kindly to being occupied!

Don't worry, the New York Times is on it, in a front-page story chock-a-block with truly revelatory quotes from anonymous senior officials:

“The insurgency has gotten worse by almost all measures, with insurgent attacks at historically high levels,” said a senior Defense Department official who agreed to discuss the issue only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for attribution. “The insurgency has more public support and is demonstrably more capable in numbers of people active and in its ability to direct violence than at any point in time.”

The official also noted that the Earth was generally considered by most experts to be a round body that rotates on its axis, but asked not to be quoted by name on this point since he had not been authorized to speak about it. The Bush administration is trying to classify the information to prevent it reaching the general public, and has already detained some "Al Qaeda types" who were caught, by means of NSA warrantless surveillance, discussing this sensitive topic.

In this article, the Times has apparently moved beyond trying to explain the insurgency, and has simply acknowledged it as a fact of life, however mysterious the origins. Did it evolve by natural selection acting on random mutation, or is it being guided by an intelligent designer? The article doesn't speculate, focusing instead on the more pressing question of what to do about it:

“Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy,” said one military affairs expert who received an Iraq briefing at the White House last month and agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity.

Uh-oh.

Terrorists in the skies and under the bed

2006-08-14T14:56:00.000+02:00

London police Deputy Commissioner Paul Stephenson: "We are confident we have disrupted a plan by terrorists to cause untold death and destruction. Put simply, this was intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale."

Craig Murray's take: It's "more propaganda than plot", accompanied by middle of the night raids, and confessions likely extracted via torture

Robert Fisk to Paul Stephenson: "I would love to have the Met in Beirut to counter terror in my part of the world."

We write letters, which are rejected: Part 2, of a long and continuing series

2006-08-12T19:47:00.000+02:00

Here's another Times reject. This one was written in response to a May 15, 2005 article called "The Mystery of the Insurgency." I'm prompted to post it now since there was an op-ed in today's Washington Post with some similar head-scratching over the puzzling question of why Iraqis tend to greet American troops with IEDs instead of flowers. Mind you, I don't want to be too hard on WaPo: unlike the Times, they have published most of the letters I've written, or issued a correction when I pointed out some error in their reporting on Slovenia (a country most people have never heard of but one I happen to know a lot about).

Anyway, here's the letter.

To the editor:

There is nothing “mysterious” about the Iraqi “insurgency.” When the troops of a foreign occupying power lay waste to Iraqi towns, kill, maim and orphan Iraqi children, break into and loot Iraqi homes, forcibly incarcerate Iraqi citizens in ghastly prisons where they are humiliated, tortured and brutalized, defame a religion which is revered by the local population, and attempt to commandeer the country's territory and resources for the needs of the foreign power rather than those of Iraqis, resistance is only to be expected.

Americans would never tolerate this kind of treatment. Why do they think Iraqis would welcome it? Americans would fight to the death to expel a foreign invader from their country. Why are they surprised when other nations do the same?

No mystery here. It’s more like “duh.” And the obvious solution to the “problem” of the insurgency is to withdraw the offending foreign troops who should never have been sent there in the first place.

I guess the New York Times doesn't appreciate sarcasm

2006-08-12T18:53:00.000+02:00

On August 1, the New York Times ran the photo above with this caption: "A Gaza home destroyed by Israel Monday. The Israeli Army called the homeowner to warn him about the attack, and his family was evacuated."

The photo accompanied an article (now archived and no longer freely accessible) by Steven Erlanger about Israel's attacks in Lebanon, in which the statements of various Israeli military and government officials, named and unnamed, were dutifully reported without critique or challenge.

I was moved by the photo caption to write the following letter:

To the editor:

In today's online version of your newspaper I read this photo caption: "A Gaza home destroyed by Israel Monday. The Israeli Army called the homeowner to warn him about the attack, and his family was evacuated."

I write to thank you for highlighting the humanity of the Israeli Army. A naive reader might have wondered why Israel was systematically destroying the homes of Gaza residents, but your caption, by focusing on the positive, helps to deflect such negative thinking. Many critics of the American media have deplored its excessively negative coverage of Middle East wars; I applaud your efforts to portray events there in a more positive light.

I do, however, have two questions which remained unanswered after I read the article. First, why is there a picture from Gaza above an article about Israel's attacks in Lebanon? And second, did the homeowner and his family, whose names and faces you omitted from your coverage, no doubt due to space limitations, manage to evacuate safely, or were they fired on and killed by an Israeli helicopter, as happened to the 23 family members of Ali and Ahmad al-Ghanam while fleeing, on Israeli orders, the Lebanese village of Marwaheen on July 20?

Regrettably, the Times did not see fit to print it. Can't imagine why. Though I do detect a definite pattern here, because they haven't printed any of the dozen or so letters I've written in recent years. Is it something I said?

"You are terrorists, we are virtuous"

2006-08-12T13:07:00.000+02:00

Yitzhak Laor on the Israeli Defense Force:

As soon as the facts of the Bint Jbeil ambush, which ended with relatively high Israeli casualties (eight soldiers died there), became public, the press and television in Israel began marginalising any opinion that was critical of the war. The media also fell back on the kitsch to which Israelis grow accustomed from childhood: the most menacing army in the region is described here as if it is David against an Arab Goliath. Yet the Jewish Goliath has sent Lebanon back 20 years, and Israelis themselves even further: we now appear to be a lynch-mob culture, glued to our televisions, incited by a premier whose ‘leadership’ is being launched and legitimised with rivers of fire and destruction on both sides of the border. Mass psychology works best when you can pinpoint an institution or a phenomenon with which large numbers of people identify. Israelis identify with the IDF, and even after the deaths of many Lebanese children in Qana, they think that stopping the war without scoring a definitive victory would amount to defeat. This logic reveals our national psychosis, and it derives from our over-identification with Israeli military thinking.

[...]

The IDF is the most powerful institution in Israeli society, and one which we are discouraged from criticising. Few have studied the dominant role it plays in the Israeli economy. Even while they are still serving, our generals become friendly with the US companies that sell arms to Israel; they then retire, loaded with money, and become corporate executives. The IDF is the biggest customer for everything and anything in Israel. In addition, our high-tech industries are staffed by a mixture of military and ex-military who work closely with the Western military complex. The current war is the first to become a branding opportunity for one of our largest mobile phone companies, which is using it to run a huge promotional campaign. Israel’s second biggest bank, Bank Leumi, used inserts in the three largest newspapers to distribute bumper stickers saying: ‘Israel is powerful.’ The military and the universities are intimately linked too, with joint research projects and an array of army scholarships.

[...]

The truth behind this is that Israel must always be allowed to do as it likes even if this involves scorching its supremacy into Arab bodies. This supremacy is beyond discussion and it is simple to the point of madness. We have the right to abduct. You don’t. We have the right to arrest. You don’t. You are terrorists. We are virtuous. We have sovereignty. You don’t. We can ruin you. You cannot ruin us, even when you retaliate, because we are tied to the most powerful nation on earth. We are angels of death.

Read it in its entirety here.

"Anti-Israeli sentiments are rife among Democrats"

2006-08-12T11:57:00.000+02:00

I guess it's all a matter of perspective: if you're rabidly pro-Israel, like these writers, "evenhandedness" qualifies as "anti-Israeli."

In the past, Israel could depend upon a basic consensus among both Republicans and Democrats that it was a valuable, indeed indispensable, ally that occupied the moral high ground. The political sands, however, are shifting. Anti-Israeli sentiments are rife among Democrats - 59 percent want the U.S. to be more "evenhanded" in the Middle East - some of whom appear to be convinced that the Bush administration's deposition of Saddam Hussein was masterminded by "neo-conservatives" in Israel's interest.

Senator Joseph Lieberman's August 8 loss in the Connecticut primary, and the evident triumph of the Democrats' neo-McGovernite wing, signal trouble ahead.

Lieberman was beaten by Ned Lamont, who, as Israel's army was massacring Lebanese civilians, many of them children, turning cities and villages into rubble, displacing 20-25% of the population, deliberately targeting and destroying infrastructure like bridges and power plants, polluting the environment, and committing a long list of other war crimes, came out with this statement:

At this critical time in the Middle East, I believe that when Israel’s security is threatened, the United States must unambiguously stand with our ally to be sure that it is safe and secure...It is not for the United States to dictate to Israel how it defends itself.

I'd sure like to know who those 59% of Democrats aspiring to "evenhandedness" are. I haven't noticed a single one, with national prominence. On the contrary, Republicans and Democrats seem to be vying fiercely for the title of most vociferous champion of Israel. And Lamont looks quite willing to continue the bipartisan tradition of America's carte blanche support for Israel.

(For more on Lamont and Israel, see here.)

Meanwhile, Jonathan Tasini, who is challenging Hillary Clinton (D - Israel) in the New York senate primary race, is barred from debating his opponent on TV, because his campaign isn't considered rich enough. Tasini dared to criticize--fairly mildly, at that--Israel's conduct in Lebanon; a spokesperson for Clinton called his remarks "beyond the pale.”

No, I don't think we'll see much shift in this debate--hell, I don't think we'll even see any sort of debate--about American policy towards Israel any time soon. Not in American national politics.

Update: Billmon has a post on The War Party that I'd missed while I was away. It should be read in its entirety, but here are some excerpts I found especially sobering:

But there's one big problem with all this hyperventilating: It wildly exaggerates the anti-war fevor that Ned Lamont supposedly represents. Oh I know Ned says he's anti-war, but he only means the war in Iraq. The war in Lebanon, on the other hand, is just fine by him. And he's already pledged he'll be just as staunch a friend of Israel and the Israel lobby in this war as Holy Joe ever was or ever could be. So bombs away.

[...]

What's become clear to me is that the Democratic Party (even it's allegedly anti-war wing) will not try to stop this insanity, and in fact will probably be led as meekly to the slaughter as it was during the runup to the Iraq invasion. Watching the Dems line up to salute the Israeli war machine, hearing the uncomfortable and awkward silence descend on most of Left Blogistan once the bombs started falling in Lebanon, seeing how easily the same Orwellian propaganda tricks worked their magic on the pseudoliberals -- all this doesn't leave too much room for doubt. As long as World War III can be sold as protecting the security and survival of the Jewish state, I suspect the overwhelming majority of Democrats, or at least the overwhelming majority of Democratic politicians, will support it.

[...]

I had hopes once that the Democratic Party could be reformed, that progressives could burrow back in or build their own parallel organizations (like MoveOn.org or even Left Blogistan) and eventually gain control of the party and its agenda -- much as the conservatives took over the GOP in the 1980s and '90s.
But I think we've run out of time. Events -- from 9/11 on -- have moved too fast and pushed us too far towards the clash of civilizations that most sane people dread but the neocons desperately want. The Dems are now just the cadet branch of the War Party. While the party nomenklatura is finally, after three bloody years, making dovish noises about the Iraq fiasco, I think their loyalty to Israel, or their fear of the Israel lobby, almost certainly will snap them back into line during the coming "debate" over war with Iran.

I'd been rooting for a Lamont win over Lieberman ever since I heard of his challenge. A month ago I would have been thrilled, ecstatic, euphoric over the primary result. But after Lamont came out with those statements in support of Israel, revealing both his biases and his ignorance, and after noting the deafening silence on Lebanon at the most enthusiastic of the pro-Lamont blogs (which I no longer bother reading), I have written off the Democratic Party for good. I believe there will be change, there may even be progress, but it's not going to come from the ranks or the leadership of the U.S. Democratic Party.

Life goes on and dogs must frolic

2006-08-02T15:22:00.000+02:00

And so must I, though I'm not really in the mood. But I'm on vacation.

And if we go back in history even further...

2006-08-01T14:22:00.000+02:00

Sir: Bruce Anderson is wrong to say, "No one has ever looked foolish by sounding gloomy about the Middle East". A century ago, the region was bubbling with ideas and experiments, universal education, women's liberation, parliamentary democracy, the secular state, scientific revival.

That was before the British and French decided they should take control of the Arab world, with the help of Zionists and local stooges. We were nearly forgiven after Dwight Eisenhower, then US President, secured our withdrawal from Suez in 1956 and after Harold Macmillan's "Wind of Change" blew away the remains of the Empire.

Now George Bush and Tony Blair have put relations with Islam back to the state they were in during the Crusades, except that then Europe was still learning from the Arabs about science, mathematics and medicine.

P J STEWART
OXFORD

Did you know that Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni are the children of terrorists?

2006-08-01T13:23:00.000+02:00

I didn't, until today. Or at any rate I didn't know the details. As a university student 20-odd years ago, I specialized in Russian language and Soviet studies. After that, I moved to Slovenia in what was then Yugoslavia, and spent the next decade or so learning about that part of the world. It's only in the last five years that I've been paying closer attention to the Middle East, though I have yet to travel there. My education continues, thanks in part to this recent article by Johann Hari from The Independent:

While Lebanon burns, a sour little ceremony in Jerusalem points the way to sanity

As Israeli forces killed more than 300 civilians and drove half a million people from their homes in the name of stamping out “terrorism”, a small, sour historical irony passed unnoticed last week in Jerusalem. The veterans of another “terrorist” organisation gathered, right under the nose of the Israeli forces, to celebrate the slaughter of 91 people, including 28 Brits, in a hotel. It fondly recalled planting bombs that blew up civilians on buses, in marketplaces and cafés, introducing these tactics to the Middle East tango. It looked back on rounding up the population of an entire village – 251 men, women and children – and shooting them all. It even marked the memory of kidnapping the other side’s soliders and holding them for weeks – before hanging them by the neck until they were dead.

So has this “terrorist” organisation been punished with aerial bombardment from the Israeli Defence Force? Not quite. The group was called the Irgun, and it was made up of Jewish nationalists whose children now comprise the Israeli establishment. Through the 1930s and 1940s, it planted bombs across Palestine, targeting both British soldiers and Palestinian civilians. It had two goals: to drive the British imperialists out, and to terrorise the Palestinian population into unconditionally accepting the creation of Israel. Ehud Olmert, Israel’s ‘war on terror’ Prime Minister, can scarcely condemn them. He spent the first three years of his life living in one of their terror training camps while his parents worked as their gun-runners. Tzipi Livni, the Israel foreign minister widely tipped as a future PM, is the daughter of the Irgun’s director of military operations, a mastermind of civilian-slaughter.

Yesterday I left a comment over at The Washington Note on the futility of bringing about change in American foreign policy via the ballot box (I guess it's Diebold voting machine nowadays), since no American politician or candidate dares criticize Israel. (Jonathan Tasini and others have aptly called the Israel-Palestine conflict the third rail of American politics.) I added:

"As the Lebanese pull the mangled bodies of their children out of the rubble of Qana, and the Palestinians bury their dead in Gaza, I could forgive them for thinking that the only way to bring fairness and justice to a world now ruled by the morally obtuse and the politically purblind is through violence and extremism."

which in turn drew this response from commenter MP:

"Except, of course, that is precisely what got them there to begin with."

I think MP might want to go a little further back in history to trace the roots of this particular conflict.

Something about this review makes me want to buy this book

2006-07-30T19:07:00.000+02:00

"It is probably your patriotic duty not to buy it"

It sounds like an Agatha Christie murder mystery, but in fact it's the memoir of British ex-diplomat Craig Murray, who refused to look the other way as his government and its senior partner, the United States, cozied up to to a regime of thugs, torturers, and murderers in Uzbekistan, a key ally in the war on terror. Or rather, formerly a key ally. Karimov, like so many American-supported tyrants before him, got tired of being told what to do, and formally evicted his erstwhile masters exactly a year ago.

Murder in Samarkand: The Curmudgeon Review

By Philip Challinor in The Curmudgeon

It begins with an expression of amazement by a member of the British embassy staff in Uzbekistan. The source of his amazement is the fact that the British ambassador to Uzbekistan has any interest in what might be happening in that part of Uzbekistan which lies outside the gates of his residence. Craig Murray's predecessors, and presumably successors, displayed no such interest.

As Murray discovered to his cost, this was not incompetence or negligence on their part. Uzbekistan, under the dissident-boiling regime of Islam Karimov, was a designated vital ally in the War Against the Abstract Noun and therefore an automatic recipient of the Bush administration's seal of approval as a burgeoning democracy. Accordingly, it was the British ambassador's patriotic duty to sit on his hands, make appropriate noises at social functions, and congratulate the regime on its nonexistent reforms while Karimov's goons raped as many people and pulled out as many fingernails as they dashed well pleased.

Although a promising diplomat with experience in Nigeria, Ghana and Poland, Murray was unpatriotic enough to allow his personal distaste for torture and totalitarianism to get in the way of his professional judgement. The Foreign Office offered him the gentleman's way out: a chance to resign rather than be kicked out on charges so incompetently fabricated they were an insult to the craft of trumping-up. Murray compares it to the good old-fashioned Britishness of being given a revolver and expected to do the decent thing; instead of which "I picked it up and started shooting at the bastards". Truly, our values are not what they once were.

Starting with his witnessing of a dissident "trial", which was largely a platform for the judge to make bad jokes about Muslims before passing sentence, Murray recounts his professional and personal adventures and vicissitudes from his arrival in Tashkent to his formal suspension from duty and resignation from the diplomatic service. It is clear that he made thoroughly unscrupulous use of his ambassadorial status not only to promote British commercial and cultural interests in Uzbekistan, but also to investigate human rights abuses and even, in one instance, to encourage asylum seekers to apply to the United Kingdom for accommodation. It is heartening to report that, for a change, they were turned down quickly enough to spare the taxpayer both the expense of deporting them and the tedium of reading about them in the Daily Mail.

Naturally, the Foreign Office did all it could to rein in Murray's excesses. Their efforts to keep him from making a fool of himself led naturally to the ruin of his health, both physical and mental; and naturally, having nothing to hide, the Government has censored his book, delayed its publication and done its best to suppress the correspondence (released under the Freedom of Information Act) which substantiates Murray's claims. Fortunately, these documents have been mirrored elsewhere, so it is still possible to gain some idea of the Government's honesty, innocence and pristine attachment to principle.

Like many enemies of truth and decency, Murray exerts a certain dangerous charm. Despite the often harrowing subject matter, his book is always readable, never boring and sometimes hilarious. It is probably your patriotic duty not to buy it; and you certainly will not sleep better if you believe it, even though it does include a tip on how best to drink vodka with the KGB. Doubtless this is why the Government has done so much to protect us from it.

Okay, I love my dog, but...

2006-07-30T17:12:00.000+02:00

...this is more than a little ridiculous:

Baltimore's Ottobar holds a group "interspecies" marriage ceremony, for patrons who so love their animal companions that they have chosen to marry them.

Damn, those Republicans pushing for an amendment banning gay marriage had it right all along! It's a slippery slope. Allow gays to marry, and next thing you know, it'll be man on dog, man on box turtle...

"I came over here because I wanted to kill people"

2006-07-30T14:15:00.000+02:00

Over a mess-tent dinner of turkey cutlets, the bony-faced 21-year-old private from West Texas looked right at me as he talked about killing Iraqis with casual indifference. It was February, and we were at his small patrol base about 20 miles south of Baghdad. "The truth is, it wasn't all I thought it was cracked up to be. I mean, I thought killing somebody would be this life-changing experience. And then I did it, and I was like, 'All right, whatever.' "

He shrugged.

"I shot a guy who wouldn't stop when we were out at a traffic checkpoint and it was like nothing," he went on. "Over here, killing people is like squashing an ant. I mean, you kill somebody and it's like 'All right, let's go get some pizza.' "

Why Democrats oppose John Bolton

2006-07-28T08:52:00.000+02:00

"My objection isn't that he's been a bully, but that he's been an ineffective bully," said Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat.

Why yes, I'm quite certain that a Congress and White House run by Democrats would result in a saner, juster, and more peaceful foreign policy for the United States. Uh-huh.

Incidentally, I only belatedly caught this bit from the letter by the AIPAC Democrats:

"The goal of the invasion in Iraq was not to remove one threat in favor of another. The President's stated goal was to establish a strong liberal democracy in Iraq, which would help to bring stability to the Middle East."

WTF??? Where were these guys in 2003? Remember weapons of mass destruction--for bureaucratic reasons "the one issue that everyone could agree on", as Paul Wolfowitz candidly ackowledged?

Oh, by the way, the other two "fundamental concerns" cited by Wolfowitz were "support for terrorism" and "the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people."

Yeah, that invasion turned out real well on all three counts.

As for bringing "stability to the Middle East," when was that ever a goal of this administration?

"Creative destruction is our middle name."

"What we're seeing here, in a sense, is the growing -- the birth pangs of a new Middle East."

Israeli self-defense

2006-07-27T12:48:00.000+02:00

Israeli strike hits aid truck

AN Israeli air strike today hit a truck carrying medical and food supplies donated to Lebanon by the United Arab Emirates, killing its Syrian driver and wounding two others, security sources said.
The truck was destroyed just a few kilometres from Lebanon's eastern border with Syria in the town of Anjar. Israel has been hitting targets in southern Lebanon, Beirut and other parts of the country in a war with Hezbollah.

An Israeli air strike on July 18 hit another truck carrying aid donated by the UAE. The truck, whose driver was killed, was travelling from Damascus.

Israel deliberately bombs U.N. post

UN Officials: Observers Asked Israel 10 Times To Halt Bombs

By Associated Press

JERUSALEM (AP)--U.N. peacekeepers in southern Lebanon called the Israeli military 10 times over a six-hour period to ask it to halt its nearby bombing before their observation post was hit, killing four people, according to details of a preliminary U.N. report on the incident released to The Associated Press on Wednesday.

During each phone call, an Israeli official promised to halt the bombing, according to a U.N. official who had seen the preliminary report.

The U.N. peacekeepers at the post said the area within a kilometer of the post was hit with precision munitions, including 17 bombs and 12 artillery shells, four of which directly hit the post Tuesday, the report said.

Israeli missiles target ambulances

All the crews were injured - one with a piece of shrapnel in his neck - but what worried the Lebanese Red Cross was that the Israeli missiles had clearly pierced the very centre of the red cross painted on the roof of each vehicle. Did the pilots use the cross as their aiming point?

Israel drops cluster bombs on Lebanese villages

According to eyewitnesses and survivors of the attack interviewed by Human Rights Watch, Israel fired several artillery-fired cluster munitions at Blida around 3 p.m. on July 19. The witnesses described how the artillery shells dropped hundreds of cluster submunitions on the village. They clearly described the submunitions as smaller projectiles that emerged from their larger shells.

The cluster attack killed 60-year-old Maryam Ibrahim inside her home. At least two submunitions from the attack entered the basement that the Ali family was using as a shelter, wounding 12 persons, including seven children. Ahmed Ali, a 45-year-old taxi driver and head of the family, lost both legs from injuries caused by the cluster munitions. Five of his children were wounded: Mira, 16; Fatima, 12; ‘Ali, 10; Aya, 3; and `Ola, 1. His wife Akram Ibrahim, 35, and his mother-in-law `Ola Musa, 80, were also wounded. Four relatives, all German-Lebanese dual nationals sheltering with the family, were wounded as well: Mohammed Ibrahim, 45; his wife Fatima, 40; and their children ‘Ali, 16, and Rula, 13.

Israel using phosporus weapons

CNN video correspondent, Karl Penhaul, follows a family that had been mistakenly caught in an Israeli air strike. The doctor treating the family says that there is phosphorus in the weapons that cause extremely painful burns on its victims.

Israel orders Lebanese families to flee their homes, then bombs them in their cars

The Sha'itas had thought they were on the road to safety when they set out yesterday, leaving behind a village which because of an accident of geography - it is five miles from the Israeli border - had seemed to make their home a killing ground. They had been ordered to evacuate by the Israelis.

But they were a little too slow and became separated from the other vehicles fleeing the Israeli air offensive in south Lebanon. Minutes before the Guardian's car arrived, trailing a Red Cross ambulance on its way to other civilian wounded in another town, an Israeli missile pierced the roof of the Sha'itas' white van. Three passengers sitting in the third row were killed instantly, including Ali's grandmother. Sixteen other passengers were wounded.

Israeli Soldiers: There's No Such Thing As a Civilian

Israeli soldiers frankly admit that they are not bothering to distinguish between Hezbollah fighters and innocent women and children in Lebanon. From ABC News:

"For Israeli troops deployed inside Lebanon, the fight is difficult and dangerous. We spoke with a group of soldiers returning from 48 hours of intense fighting, including the rescue of soldiers from a tank destroyed in the fighting.

"They are attacking us in a very organized position," one soldier said. "They know where we are coming from. They know everything. They shoot us wherever they like. It's their country."

He added they are "very well armed."

Now more Israeli soldiers are on the way, including an armored unit being transferred from Gaza to Lebanon. They have been told civilians have left the region where they will fight.

"Over here, everybody is the army," one soldier said. "Everybody is Hezbollah. There's no kids, women, nothing."

Another soldier put it plainly: "We're going to shoot anything we see.""

Israel set war plan more than a year ago

More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail.

Juan Cole:

That this war was pre-planned was obvious to me from the moment it began. The Israeli military proceeded methodically and systematically to destroy Lebanon's infrastructure, and clearly had been casing targets for some time. The vast majority of these targets were unrelated to Hizbullah.

Official justification for Israel's invasion on thin ice

As Lebanon continues to be pounded by Israeli bombs and munitions, the justification for Israel's invasion is treading on very thin ice. It has become general knowledge that it was Hezbollah guerillas that first kidnapped two IDF soldiers inside Israel on July 12, prompting an immediate and violent response from the Israeli government, which insists it is acting in the interest of national defense. Israeli forces have gone on to kill over 370 innocent Lebanese civilians (compared to 34 killed on Israel's side) while displacing hundreds of thousands more. But numerous reports from international and independent media, as well as the Associated Press, raise questions about Israel's official version of the events that sparked the conflict two weeks ago.

The original story, as most media tell it, goes something like this: Hezbollah attacked an Israeli border patrol station, killing six and taking two soldiers hostage. The incident happened on the Lebanese/Israel border in Israeli territory. The alternate version, as explained by several news outlets, tells a bit of a different tale: These sources contend that Israel sent a commando force into southern Lebanon and was subsequently attacked by Hezbollah near the village of Aitaa al-Chaab, well inside Lebanon's southern territory. It was at this point that an Israel tank was struck by Hezbollah fighters, which resulted in the capture of two Israeli soldiers and the death of six...

...Whether factual or not, these alternative accounts should at the very least raise serious questions as to Israel's motives and rationale for bombarding Lebanon.

But of course, since Israel is only acting in self-defense, it would be wrong and anti-Semitic to criticize its actions:

Dean Calls Iraqi PM an 'Anti-Semite'

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) - Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean on Wednesday called Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki an "anti-Semite" for failing to denounce Hezbollah for its attacks against Israel.

Al-Maliki has condemned Israel's offensive, prompting several Democrats to boycott his address to a joint meeting of Congress and others to criticize him. Dean's comments were the strongest to date.

"The Iraqi prime minister is an anti-Semite," the Democratic leader told a gathering of business leaders in Florida. "We don't need to spend $200 and $300 and $500 billion bringing democracy to Iraq to turn it over to people who believe that Israel doesn't have a right to defend itself and who refuse to condemn Hezbollah."

Bob begs to differ.

"The Iraqi leadership has made statements in conflict with the interests and policy of the United States"

2006-07-26T20:18:00.000+02:00

Damned impertinent little puppet! How dare you? Smack!

Thanks to Stop Me Before I Vote Again, I found the text of the letter by AIPAC Democrats on Maliki (see two posts down):

Dear Speaker Hastert:

We are writing to object to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's planned address to Congress this Wednesday. In the wake of comments made by Mr. Maliki and other members of the Iraqi leadership denouncing Israel, it is clear that their foreign policy goals are at odds with those of the United States. The Speaker's podium reflects our nation's values. We the Members of the House, under your leadership, decide who receives that honor, and the list should not include anyone whose interests conflict with the United States.

On Wednesday, July 19th, in reference to the conflict in Lebanon, Prime Minister Maliki said, "I condemn these aggressions and call on the Arab League foreign ministers meeting in Cairo to take quick action to stop these aggressions. We call on the world to take quick stands to stop the Israeli aggression."

Additionally, the Iraqi Parliament voted unanimously to condemn Israel, calling Israel's actions "criminal aggression." These comments and actions are in direct conflict with the position of both President Bush, and the United States House of Representatives which voted 410-8 to support "Israel's right to take appropriate action to defend itself, including to conduct operations both in Israel and in the territory of nations which pose a threat to it, which is in accordance with international law, including Article 51 of the United Nations Charter."

This is not the first time that Iraqi leadership has made statements in conflict with the interests and policy of the United States. Today, 50 Members of Congress sent President Bush a letter denouncing the hate filled comments of Iraqi Parliament Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani.

But our concerns go beyond these statements. In recent months there have been extensive reports indicating that Maliki and many in the Iraqi leadership are increasingly influenced by the government in Iran. Further, they have expressed support of terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah, the latter of which was responsible for the death of 241 United States Marines in Beirut. The House should not allow an address from any world leader who has taken such action.

This is a disturbing and dangerous trend. The goal of the invasion in Iraq was not to remove one threat in favor of another. The President's stated goal was to establish a strong liberal democracy in Iraq, which would help to bring stability to the Middle East. The aforementioned comments and actions raise serious questions about the success of this mission.

With evidence mounting that the Iraqi leadership's goals are not in the best interests of the United States -- nor the Middle East -- Prime Minister Maliki's address is inappropriate. We are unaware of any prior instance where a world leader who worked against the interests of the United States was afforded such an honor. We would like to know how Prime Minister Maliki was chosen to receive the honor, and absent an apology by the Prime Minister, urge you to cancel the address.

Among the signers of the letter were [Rahm] Emanuel, Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), Jan Schakowsky (D-Il.), Gary Ackerman (D-NY), Steven Rothman (D-NJ), Michael McNulty (D-NY), John Lewis (D-Ga.), Frank Pallone (D-NJ), Nita Lowey (D-NY), Joseph Crowley (D-NY), William Delahunt (D-Mass.), C.B. Maloney (D-NY), Barney Frank (D-Mass.), John Olver (D-Mass.), Sander Levin (D-Mich.) [shouldn't that be Carl?], George Miller (D-Calif.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Tim Bishop (D-NY), Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.) and Artur Davis (D-Ala.)

I dunno, I think the executive summary was better, and anyway I'm all blogged out. What do you think?

“determination to work immediately to reach with the utmost urgency a cease-fire"

2006-07-26T19:07:00.000+02:00

Diplomats dither.

ROME, July 26 — In the face of United States opposition, an international conference here today stopped short of calling for an immediate cease-fire in the Lebanon crisis.

The conference instead adopted more nebulous language that reflected America’s desire to give Israel time to continue its bombardment of Hezbollah targets.

In a statement, diplomats from the United States, Europe, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia expressed their “determination to work immediately to reach with the utmost urgency a cease-fire that puts an end to the current violence and hostilities.”

The diplomats also called for an international military force to be deployed in southern Lebanon under the auspices of the United Nations, after NATO members said their alliance was already overstretched. And they called for a regional conference, including Syria and Iran, to discuss security issues.

The release of the diplomats’ prepared statement was delayed by almost two hours by wrangling over its contents. The key sticking point was the phrase concerning a ceasefire, according to two European diplomats who were in the room.

Most of the officials in the room were seeking, at the very least, a phrase that said the group would “work towards an immediate ceasefire,” one of the diplomats said. But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice refused, and won, he said.

“She insisted it say ‘work immediately to bring a ceasefire,’ not ‘work to bring an immediate ceasefire,’” the diplomat said. He said that the group argued about that for more than 30 minutes before ceding the point to the United States.

Meanwhile, in Lebanon...

Get the smelling salts, quick

2006-07-26T17:37:00.000+02:00

This would be funny if the context were not so tragic. AIPAC Democrats in Congress, as Juan Cole aptly describes them, are swooning and fainting and threatening to boycott the appearance of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki before that august body unless Maliki apologizes for criticizing Israel's barbaric attacks on Lebanon, and denounces Hizbullah as a terrorist organization. A bunch of House Democrats sent a letter to Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert demanding that the invitation to Maliki be revoked unless he publicly recants.

I've been trying to get the full text of the letter, so far without success, but fortunately Arthur Silber provides an executive summary of the message to Maliki:

After we destroy your country and unleash a vicious civil war which takes the lives of between 100 and 200 innocent Iraqis every day, and after we see that you are installed as leader of this dying country and prop up your doomed and ineffectual government, we expect you to repeat our propaganda without question or criticism. If you do not, you obviously cannot expect to be warmly received in Rome. We have lost American lives and treasure on this disastrous venture. True, we had no justifiable reason whatsoever for taking these actions, and it was absolutely none of our goddamned business. But we did so anyway, out of the endless beneficence of our magnanimous, "civilizing" hearts. So you will express appropriate thanks, you ungrateful bastard. Otherwise, get the hell out of town.

As Cole helpfully points out,

The US Congress, aside from a strange inability to recognize the disproportionate use of force when it sees it, does not seem to realize that the Dawa Party of Iraq, from which Nuri al-Maliki hails, is a revolutionary Shiite religious party not that much different from the Lebanese Hizbullah.

The members of Congress also don't seem to realize that the Iraqi Dawa helped to form the Lebanese Hizbullah back in the early 1980s.

...did they really think [Maliki] was going to condemn Hizbullah and take Israel's side?

And if he did, do they think that the Shiite religious parties that backed him would let him stay in office?

I am continually amazed, if dismayed, at the lethal combination of ignorance and arrogance displayed by American politicians when it comes to international affairs.

Odd ones out

2006-07-25T00:02:00.000+02:00

Bill Blum on the Middle East

2006-07-22T19:16:00.000+02:00

Put simply, clearly, and honestly. From today's Anti-Empire Report:

The End Is Near, but first, this commercial

There are times when I think that this tired old world has gone on a few years too long. What's happening in the Middle East is so depressing. Most discussions of the eternal Israel-Palestine conflict are variations on the child's eternal defense for misbehavior -- "He started it!" Within a few minutes of discussing/arguing the latest manifestation of the conflict the participants are back to 1967, then 1948, then biblical times. I don't wish to get entangled in who started the current mess. I would like instead to first express what I see as two essential underlying facts of life which remain from one conflict to the next:

1) Israel's existence is not at stake and hasn't been so for decades, if it ever was, regardless of the many de rigueur militant statements by Arab leaders over the years. If Israel would learn to deal with its neighbors in a non-expansionist, non-military, humane, and respectful manner, engage in full prisoner exchanges, and sincerely strive for a viable two-state solution, even those who are opposed to the idea of a state based on a particular religion could accept the state of Israel, and the question of its right to exist would scarcely arise in people's minds. But as it is, Israel still uses the issue as a justification for its behavior, as Jews all over the world use the Holocaust and conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

2) In a conflict between a thousand-pound gorilla and a mouse, it's the gorilla which has to make concessions in order for the two sides to progress to the next level. What can the Palestinians offer in the way of concession? Israel would reply to that question: "No violent attacks of any kind." But that would still leave the status quo ante bellum -- a life of unmitigated misery for the Palestinian people forced upon them by Israel. Peace without justice.

Israel's declarations about the absolute unacceptability of one of their soldiers being held captive by the Palestinians, or two soldiers being held by Hezbollah in Lebanon, cannot be taken too seriously when Israel is holding literally thousands of captured Palestinians, many for years, typically without any due process, many tortured; as well as holding a number of prominent Hezbollah members. A few years ago, if not still now, Israel wrote numbers on some of the Palestinian prisoners' arms and foreheads, using blue markers, a practice that is of course reminiscent of the Nazis' treatment of Jews in World War II. [1]

Israel's real aim, and that of Washington, is the overthrow of the Hamas government in Palestine, the government that came to power in January through a clearly democratic process, the democracy that the Western "democracies" never tire of celebrating, except when the result doesn't please them. Is there a stronger word than "hypocrisy"? There is now "no Hamas government," declared a senior US official a week ago, "eight cabinet ministers or 30 percent of the government is in jail [kidnapped by Israel], another 30 percent is in hiding, and the other 30 percent is doing very little."[2] To make the government-disappearance act even more Orwellian, we have Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking in late June about Iraq: "This is the only legitimately elected government in the Middle East with a possible exception of Lebanon."[3] What's next, gathering in front of the Big Telescreeen for the Two Minutes Hate?

In addition to doing away with the Hamas government, the current military blitzkrieg by Israel, with full US support, may well be designed to create "incidents" to justify attacks on Iran and Syria, the next steps of Washington's work in process, a controlling stranglehold on the Middle East and its oil.

It is a wanton act of collective punishment that is depriving the Palestinians of food, electricity, water, money, access to the outside world ... and sleep. Israel has been sending jets flying over Gaza at night triggering sonic booms, traumatizing children. "I want nobody to sleep at night in Gaza," declared Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert[4]; words suitable for Israel's tombstone.

These crimes against humanity -- and I haven't mentioned the terrible special weapons reportedly used by Israel -- are what the people of Palestine get for voting for the wrong party. It is ironic, given the Israeli attacks against civilians in both Gaza and Lebanon, that Hamas and Hezbollah are routinely dismissed in the West as terrorist organizations. The generally accepted definition of terrorism, used by the FBI and the United Nations amongst others, is: The use of violence against a civilian population in order to intimidate or coerce a government in furtherance of a political objective.

Since 9-11 it has been a calculated US-Israeli tactic to label the fight against Israel's foes as an integral part of the war on terror. On July 19, a rally was held in Washington, featuring the governor of Maryland, several members of Israeli-occupied Congress, the Israeli ambassador, and evangelical leading-light John Hagee. The Washington Post reported that "Speaker after prominent speaker characteriz[ed] current Israeli fighting as a small branch of the larger U.S.-led global war against Islamic terrorism" and "Israel's attacks against the Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah were blows against those who have killed civilians from Bali to Bombay to Moscow." Said the Israeli ambassador: "This is not just about [Israel]. It's about where our world is going to be and the fate and security of our world. Israel is on the forefront. We will amputate these little arms of Iran," referring to Hezbollah.[5]

And if the war on terror isn't enough to put Israel on the side of the angels, John Hagee has argued that "the United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West". He speaks of "a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ."[6]

The beatification of Israel approaches being a movement. Here is David Horowitz, the eminent semi-hysterical ex-Marxist: "Israel is part of a global war, the war of radical Islam against civilization. Right now Israel is doing the work of the rest of the civilized world by taking on the terrorists. It is not only for Israel's sake that we must get the facts out -- it is for ourselves, America, for every free country in the world, and for civilization itself."[7]

As for the two Israeli soldiers captured and held in Lebanon for prisoner exchange, we must keep a little history in mind. In the late 1990s, before Israel was evicted from southern Lebanon by Hezbollah, it was a common practice for Israel to abduct entirely innocent Lebanese. As a 1998 Amnesty International paper declared: "By Israel's own admission, Lebanese detainees are being held as 'bargaining chips'; they are not detained for their own actions but in exchange for Israeli soldiers missing in action or killed in Lebanon. Most have now spent 10 years in secret and isolated detention."[8]

Israel has created its worst enemies -- they helped create Hamas as a counterweight to Fatah in Palestine, and their occupation of Lebanon created Hezbollah. The current terrible bombings can be expected to keep the process going. Since its very beginning, Israel has been almost continually occupied in fighting wars and taking other people's lands. Did not any better way ever occur to the idealistic Zionist pioneers?

But while you and I get depressed by the horror and suffering, the neo-conservatives revel in it. They devour the flesh and drink the blood of the people of Afghanistan, of Iraq, of Palestine, of Lebanon, yet remain ravenous, and now call for Iran and Syria to be placed upon the feasting table. More than one of them has used the expression oderint dum metuant, a favorite phrase of Roman emperor Caligula, also used by Cicero -- "let them hate so long as they fear". Here is William Kristol, editor of the bible of neo-cons, "Weekly Standard", on Fox News Sunday, July 16:

"Look, our coddling of Iran ... over the last six to nine months has emboldened them. I mean, is Iran behaving like a timid regime that's very worried about the U.S.? Or is Iran behaving recklessly and in a foolhardy way? ... Israel is fighting four of our five enemies in the Middle East, in a sense. Iran, Syria, sponsors of terror; Hezbollah and Hamas. ... This is an opportunity to begin to reverse the unfortunate direction of the last six to nine months and get the terrorists and the jihadists back on the defensive."

Host Juan Williams replied: "Well, it just seems to me that you want ... you just want war, war, war, and you want us in more war. You wanted us in Iraq. Now you want us in Iran. Now you want us to get into the Middle East ... you're saying, why doesn't the United States take this hard, unforgiving line? Well, the hard and unforgiving line has been [tried], we don't talk to anybody. We don't talk to Hamas. We don't talk to Hezbollah. We're not going to talk to Iran. Where has it gotten us, Bill?"

Kristol, looking somewhat taken aback, simply threw up his hands.

The Fox News audience does (very) occasionally get a hint of another way of looking at the world.

NOTES

[1] Washington Post, March 13, 2002, p.1

[2] Washington Post, July 16, 2006. p.15

[3] Washington Post, July 3, 2006, p.19

[4] Associated Press, July 3, 2006

[5] Washington Post, July 20, 2006, p.B3

[6] Sarah Posner, The American Prospect, June 2006

[7] FrontPageMag.com, Horowitz's site

[8] Amnesty International news release, 26 June 1998, AI INDEX: MDE 15/54/98

Israel's destructive, dysfunctional and irrational response

2006-07-22T10:24:00.000+02:00

to a reality it helped create but doesn't like. Enabled, as always, by the United States. Of course.

U.S. Speeds Up Bomb Delivery for the Israelis

WASHINGTON, July 21 — The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday.

The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration, the officials said. Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah.

The munitions that the United States is sending to Israel are part of a multimillion-dollar arms sale package approved last year that Israel is able to draw on as needed, the officials said. But Israel’s request for expedited delivery of the satellite and laser-guided bombs was described as unusual by some military officers, and as an indication that Israel still had a long list of targets in Lebanon to strike.

Here are what those bombs are being used for:

Israel's declared goal in pulverizing Lebanon with American-supplied munitions is to drive Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon. A sure-fire strategy for success--so long as you ignore history and reality, as described in, of all places, today's WaPo:

...Israel's previous military campaigns and occupations of Lebanon played a decisive role in creating this new enemy. Some analysts in Lebanon believe that the new bloodshed and a renewed attempt to fashion Lebanese society to Israel's advantage could generate yet another permutation, one that is perhaps even more irreconcilably hostile to the Jewish state.

"Now you risk producing something worse than Hezbollah, maybe al-Qaeda number two," said Fawaz Trabulsi, a Lebanese professor at the American University of Beirut who helped lead a leftist organization that fought Israeli troops alongside Palestinian guerrillas during the 1982 invasion.

"It's '82 all over again," Trabulsi said. "What's similar is the idea of destroying the infrastructure, of the PLO then, and now of Hezbollah. The difference is Hezbollah is Lebanese and you can't expel them."

[...]

"When I hear the Israelis talk about getting Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon, I have to laugh," said a veteran Middle East official and analyst who requested anonymity because of his sensitive position. "They live there."

From an interview earlier this week with Rami Khouri, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper and an internationally syndicated political columnist and author:

...there’s a kind of an irrationality to Zionism that we’re seeing today, or at least to the Israeli political leadership, that just don't seem to get it, that when you repress somebody and you brutalize them, what you get is not acquiescence and subservience. What you get is defiance and resistance...

...Hezbollah, Hamas and these groups represent an organic natural reaction that has brewed and percolated and now is materializing after 15-20 years, a reaction of societies in the Arab world that has been extremely disappointed by the autocracy and corruption and ineffectiveness of their own Arab regimes, by the brutality and occupation of Israel, and by the rather racist and then now neocolonial and imperial in the military policies -- whatever you want to call them -- of the United States...

...People are not going to live in a vacuum, and they’re not going to be humiliated and degraded. And they’re going to look for alternatives. And the alternative now that seems to be sweeping this region is the Islamist movements, including the ones doing serious military resistance to Israel.

Alexander Cockburn also provides some historical context for the rise of Hezbollah:

Occupy a country, torture its citizens and in the end you face resistance...

...Of course they won’t destroy Hezbollah. Every time they kill another Lebanese family, they multiply hatred of Israel and support for Hezbollah.

And for the popularity of Hamas:

The years roll by and Israel does its successful best to destroy all possibility of a viable two-state solution. It builds illegal settlements. It chops up Palestine with Jews-only roads. It collars all the water. It cordons off Jerusalem. It steals even more land by bisecting Palestinian territory with its “fence”. Anyone trying to organize resistance gets jailed, tortured, or blown up.

Sick of their terrible trials, Palestinians elect Hamas, whose leaders make it perfectly clear that they are ready to deal on the basis of the old two-state solution, which of course is the one thing Israel cannot endure. Israel doesn’t want any “peaceful solution” that gives the Palestinians anything more than a few trashed out acres surrounded with barbed wire and tanks, between the Israeli settlements whose goons can murder them pretty much at will.

And finally, blogger Elizbeth offers a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Makes sense to me. Go read.

America stands with Israel

2006-07-21T09:41:00.000+02:00

as Israel commits war crimes:

In Scramble to Evade Israeli Bombs, the Living Leave the Dead Behind

...When Israeli loudspeakers warned villagers to evacuate the village of Marwaheen last Saturday, the families packed their belongings and headed for safety. More than 23 of them piled into a pickup and drove toward Tyre, with the brothers trailing behind. Another group set off for a nearby United Nations observation post, but were promptly turned away.

As the pickup raced to Tyre, Ali al-Ghanam said, Israeli boats shelled their convoy, hitting the car and injuring the women and children in the back. But within minutes an Israeli helicopter approached the car, firing a missile that blew the truck to pieces as the passengers struggled to jump out, he said.

His brother Mohammad, his wife and their six children, were killed instantly along with several of their relatives. The only survivor in the car was the brothers’ 4-year-old niece, who survived with severe burns to much of her body...

Read the whole report.

This is how Israel "defends itself." With the full backing of American politicians.

"Progressives", too.

Nancy Pelosi declares her unwavering support for Israel:

"I will support this resolution and urge my colleagues to do so as well. At a difficult time for the state of Israel, this resolution reaffirms our unwavering support and commitment to Israel and condemns the attacks by Hezbollah. The seizure of Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah terrorists was an unprovoked attack and Israel has a right and an obligation to respond."

Shared values

2006-07-20T23:07:00.000+02:00

Israel Bombs Milk, Pharmaceutical Factories, Aid Convoys

The humanitarian crisis in Lebanon continues to worsen. At least 500,000 people have been displaced from their homes. Scores of roads and bridges have been hit making it hard to transport food or humanitarian aid. Recent Israeli strikes have targeted the country’s largest milk factory, a major food factory and two pharmaceutical plants. Earlier bombs hit water processing plants, power plants and grain silos. On Tuesday a convoy of two trucks carrying medical supplies donated by the United Arab Emirates was hit. The trucks were destroyed and both drivers died. The Israeli military has denied targeting the factories or aid trucks. Two ambulances were also bombed on Tuesday. They were carrying Lebanese soldiers who were injured in an Israeli attack on their base that had killed eleven soldiers. A Greek Orthodox Church also suffered a direct hit. Inside the church were civilians who had taken refuge. At least 10 people were injured.

Congress Is Giving Israel Vote of Confidence

Both Parties Back Ally, Court Jewish Support

By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 19, 2006; A05

Democratic and Republican congressional leaders are rushing to offer unalloyed support for Israel's offensive against Hezbollah fighters, reflecting a bipartisan desire to not only defend a key U.S. ally but also solidify long-term backing of Jewish voters and political donors in the United States, according to officials and strategists in both parties.

With Israel intensifying its air and artillery attacks on Lebanon and warning of a protracted war, the Senate yesterday unanimously passed a bipartisan resolution endorsing Israel's military campaign and condemning Hezbollah and its two backers, Iran and Syria. A few hours earlier, Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) delivered his most strident defense of Israel since the conflict erupted a week ago. The House is expected to pass a similarly pro-Israel resolution today.

Words fail

2006-07-19T08:46:00.000+02:00

"[Israel] no longer recognizes any boundaries, geographical or moral.”

--Michel Warschawski, Towards an Open Tomb: The Crisis of Israeli Society (2004).

"We will stand with Israel because Israel is standing up for American values as well as Israeli ones."

--Sen. Hillary Clinton, speaking recently at a pro-Israel rally in New York

"Since almost all the missiles used to kill the civilians of Lebanon over the past four days were made in Seattle, Duluth and Miami in the United States, their use already suggests to millions of Lebanese that America is behind the bombardment of their country."

--Robert Fisk

Agility update: a first, a fourth, and a fiasco

2006-07-14T10:22:00.000+02:00

Last weekend we had agility competitions on Saturday AND Sunday, both in Ljubljana.

Saturday (July 8) was nice. It was cloudy for much of the day, hence not so hot. This competition took place on a soccer field borrowed for the occasion in Slovenia's capital and largest city, Ljubljana. Very little shade, and no natural bodies of water. The cloudiness made it much more bearable. I do have a strong preference for competitions located in scenic alpine settings with mountain streams and forests located conveniently nearby! Like this one, in Hrušica :

Lyra relaxing by a mountain stream in between agility runs last year at Hrušica

But back to Ljubljana last Saturday. Lyra had a clean run on the agility--a first for us. She's had a couple of clean jumping runs (the second of the two runs at each competition) in the past, and she did have one clean agility run in a team competition (on, ironically, a more difficult course), but this was the first time she's done it in an individual run. Two more of these, and we can advance to the next level, A2.

There were six clean runs in the A1, an unusually high number and an indication that the course was relatively easy. Our time was the fourth-best.

On the second run, she was unfocused and all over the course. We had several near-misses, coming within a hair’s breadth of disqualification, and I did not run it at all as I'd planned when I did the walk-through. Nevertheless, despite a sub-standard performance overall, we got off lightly--just five faults for entering the slalom incorrectly (my fault for standing too close, not giving her enough space). Foruntately she got it right the second time. With the five faults and a very slow time (due to all the extra ground she covered as she wandered from obstacle to obstacle), we were 11th in the jumping run.

We still managed to end up in fourth place overall. Not bad. Out of the money, but good for accruing some points towards the 2006 national championships (we're currently seventh in our category), and our first ever clean agility run in A1 is a notable landmark.

In contrast, the competition on Sunday, July 9, was a fiasco. On the first run, Lyra and I had no connection whatsoever. She was completely unfocused and scatter-brained. It reminded me of our performances when we were just starting out: wild, out of control, and invariably ending in disqualification.

I can't blame it on Lyra; it's always the handler's fault, not the dog's. But I was annoyed and disappointed, and she felt it.

The second run was much better. Following Primoz's advice, before the run I spent some time offering her treats and a ball to get her attention; we were connected when we went in and maintained it throughout. We accumulated fifteen faults on the slalom, but there again I have to take responsibility for not giving her enough room.

But in any case the result for the second run was irrelevant to the outcome, since we'd already been disqualified on the first run. No bags of Eukanuba dog food for us this time around. We're not doing so hot in the Eukanuba Cup. Our third-place finish in the first of the six competitions has been followed by two disqualifications, dropping us down to tenth place in the standings.

Poor Olivia became increasingly stressed out and overstimulated as the weekend wore on. On Sunday the sun and heat were oppressive; everyone felt hot and bothered. Oli needs her naps during the day in this hot weather; she doesn't sleep away from home, except in a moving car if very tired. And she didn't have Monika for comfort, since Monika was away at the seaside. Oli regressed behaviorally, and was easily provoked, striking the pose below on a number of occasions:

To be fair, she was worlds better than that time I was on my own with the two of them in Ptuj earlier this year. There were many sustained periods where she was in close proximity to other dogs and people, with lots of activity going on around her, and she lay quite nicely at my feet or in my lap. Still, the hotter and tireder she got, the more likely she was to react to stimuli. After a point, the best solution seemed to be to get the hell out of there, so we left for home, with relief, right after Lyra's second run. And hit major rainstorms and even hail once we got to Primorska.

We'll get another whack at moving up in the Eukanuba Cup this coming Saturday, in Portorož. At training yesterday she ran quite well, but competitions are always full of surprises, so I wouldn't lay any bets.

Why I'm glad I live in Slovenia and not America: Reason #93756

2006-07-13T09:26:00.000+02:00

This could not possibly happen here, on a tour of, say, Snežna jama or Škocjan Caves, or Vilenica, or any of the numerous other caves in Slovenia.

Interesting coincidence

2006-07-09T16:45:00.000+02:00

"The 87% of the Senate that believes U.S. forces in Iraq can stay indefinitely is also the percentage of Iraqis who want the United States to have a timetable for departure--"

but, as the author of this article Stephen Zunes hastens to add

"...the sentiments of Iraqis have never been of particular concern for American politicians of either party."

Zunes's article is worth a read--especially by anyone who thinks that all we need is a Democratic majority in Congress come November 2006, and America will be set on the right path. Bullshit. It was a Democratic Congress that authorized "Bush's" war on Iraq. And Democrats (with a few honorable exceptions) who continue to vote with the Repubicans to fund it, and refuse to call for a withdrawal.

72% of troops serving in Iraq believe their mission there is futile or bogus. (As do I.) A majority of Americans want their troops out of Iraq. (As do I.) A majority of Iraqis believe that foreign occupying troops are legitimate targets for attack. (As do I.)

But then, when were the sentiments of American troops, or American voters, let alone Iraqis, of any particular concern to American politicians?

Post-game analysis and pre-game mental prep

2006-07-07T20:30:00.000+02:00

I never did file a report from the Domžale competition on June 24. Obviously we made it back alive. And in fact my fears about the "killer" courses set by the visiting Finnish judge were groundless, since she judged the A2/J2 and A3/J3 courses, but NOT the easier A1/J1 category that Lyra and I are in.

So, briefly (since it's already late and we have competitions in Ljubljana on Saturday AND Sunday), here's a report:

First run: It started out all right, not a particularly difficult course, I felt like we were both in good form, BUT: early on in the course, maybe the third or fourth obstacle, a jump, I got the positioning wrong and this caused Lyra to run past it instead of over. I realize now I made a mistake by trying to do a fancy instead of a straightforward turn, so that she would be on my left side going into the slalom, the next obstacle. (We're very one-sided on the slalom; working on that.) But the timing was off; I wasn't where I needed to be as she approached it, and she ran wide. Then, on the second attempt, she knocked a pole down—first EVER in competition. It could have been due to the awkward angle at which we approached it, or maybe it was because I tripped over the wings of the jump and caused the pole to fall. The wings on some of these jumps were quite wide (see photo below), much wider than what I train on--in fact, most of them are wingless--and I ran by too close.

I got up as quickly as I could after falling; Lyra barely skipped a beat as I lay sprawled on the ground, continuing on to the next obstacle without much guidance from me. The slalom, and she nailed it perfectly. Good for her!

The remainder of the course was fast and clean, but due to those mishaps early on we finished with 10 faults (five for a runout, five for a knocked pole). That put us 14th of 29.

Second run: Damn, it felt good. Fluid, connected, focused. Like there was an invisible elastic thread linking my dog and me. And then--problems where you least expect them. We had a straight, uncomplicated approach to a tunnel, I sprinted straight ahead, took my eye off her, assuming she was with me, and she inexplicably veered to the right and over a wall before I could call her back. Off course, disqualification. A wall! We hardly ever train on walls, because they're more work to set up than simple jumps, and it's odd that she would feel a pull in that direction. The lesson here is never assume anything, and try to keep the dog in your field of vision at all times.

We came back through the tunnel later in the course, and at that point were supposed to go over the wall next. I guess she had it fixed in her head that the wall was a no go zone, ignored my cue, and sailed over a straight jump instead. Well, it didn't matter, we were already knocked out. We did the wall for practice, at a very awkward angle, as you can see below, because she was making a U-turn back from the jump she wasn't supposed to go over.

So, no great results this time, but, as always, good experience and some learning oppotunities.

Olivia, on the other hand, succeeded at her job of looking beautiful and photogenic:

I was intending to write up a few notes on the agility seminar on Sunday, but I'll have to defer that till later. Early start tomorrow and I need to get a good night's sleep.

American soldiers really need to get the hell out of Iraq. Now.

2006-07-06T16:34:00.000+02:00

American troops are preparing to bulldoze the center of the Iraqi town of Ramadi and turn it into a mini Green Zone. According to a recent report in The New York Times, here are some signs that marines put up on the walls of their quarters:

"Be polite, be professional and have a plan to kill everyone you meet."

"Kilo Company: Killed more people than cancer."

Ramadi. Fallujah. Abu Ghraib. Mahmoudiya.
Haditha. Countless nameless other massacres.

Support the troops? I support their right to refuse to participate in state-sponsored terrorism in Iraq. I feel compassion for the vets who can't find jobs or homes or get the medical and psychiatric care they need so desperately once back in the United States. I share the outrage of the guys who signed up for the National Guard so they could help out in American communities hit by natural disasters, and got sent to Iraq instead, where they make human disasters.

I do not support what they are doing in Iraq. Never have, never will. And I will never vote for any American politician who supported this war in any way, shape or form.

Ever.

In the meantime, work continues on fourteen permanent military bases in Iraq. This despite the intensive grassroots activism by American citizens which led the U.S. House of Representatives to pass a measure prohibiting the Pentagon from using funds towards building any permanent military bases in Iraq. A similar amendment was passed by the Senate, stating that no future funds could be used to “establish permanent United States military bases in Iraq, or to exercise United States control over the oil infrastructure or oil resources of Iraq.”

So what happened? Republican staffers removed the provisions from the bills. Just like that.

American democracy in action.

As Raed says, "The perception that the U.S. intends to occupy Iraq indefinitely is one of the major reasons behind the escalating violence there."

Perception? Makes it sound like those bases are just mirages in the desert instead of mini-Americas with Subways, Pizza Huts, football fields, Hertz rent-a-car offices, swimming pools, movie theaters, bus routes, and miniature golf courses. And tens of thousands of American soldiers.

America, get OUT of Iraq.

American soldiers, keeping the streets of Iraq safe

2006-07-05T10:28:00.000+02:00

Caption: Pfc. Steven Green, B Co. 1-502 prepares to blast a lock off the gate of an abandoned home during a search of homes in Mullah Fayed on Dec. 2.

The photo accompanies an article entitled Coalition forces keep streets of Iraq safe, from the propaganda service of the U.S. Army.

Wait a minute--Steven Green...doesn't that name ring a bell? Oh yeah, here it is:

Federal prosecutors accused a former U.S. soldier of raping and murdering a young woman in Iraq, gunning down her family and burning all the bodies in an apparent cover-up.

(Spotted by Today in Iraq)

UPDATE: Well, well, well. The Ministry of Truth has now scrubbed out Green's photo. If you access the cached version of the article you can still see it.

Now here's a dog who's not afraid of the teeter-totter

2006-06-29T23:27:00.000+02:00

Aron in action. They don't call it agility for nothing.

Pasji picnic

2006-06-29T19:03:00.000+02:00

In honor of Lyra's third birthday.

Dogs and people had a great time.

Group photo above, from left to right: Lyra, Grin, Olivia, Aika, Missy, Aron.

Too hot here to write more. I'm melting over my keyboard.

Not as quiet over here as it seems

2006-06-23T12:22:00.000+02:00

Judging by the dates of the posts below, it looks as though I haven't posted for awhile. In fact, the latest ones were written over the last few days. But I recently discovered and have put to use a useful little feature that lets you falsify the dates. Just so you know.

Additionally, I've been spouting off all over the internet in the form of comments on other blogs, on the topic of American war crimes in Iraq and the dickery-bickery politicians in Washington, D.C. who are responsible for them. Won't repeat myself here.

Agility alert: big competition tomorrow in Domžale. There are nearly forty dogs entered in A1/J1, and the forecast is for hot, dry weather, conditions which don't match our usual recipe for success, so I don't have great expectations. But despite some trepidation, I'm really looking forward to the event, and the challenge. The visiting judge from Finland who will be officiating has a reputation for setting killer courses. On that basis, I'll be happy if we make it back alive, thrilled if we're ranked (i.e. not disqualified on either run), and ecstatic beyond words if we bring home a cup.

A day in my life: June 13

2006-06-13T23:59:00.000+02:00

Drink morning coffee on the patio. The real stuff today, after two days of instant (ran out over the weekend, only replenished the supply yesterday afternoon). Take Monika to school. Put in load of laundry. Water and fertilize the flowers in the garden. Dump compost, gather cultivated wild strawberries (about forty of them make a decent-sized and flavorful mouthful). Admire growing lettuce and parsley, which have so far escaped being dug up by Olivia. Pull up dead tomato plants and prepare soil for second attempt with new plants, to be purchased tomorrow. In between garden chores, play tag and keep away with Olivia, sometimes getting on my hands and knees to better mimic a dog. Lyra is still in Ljubljana, on vacation with Jana and Dean as a reward for coming third in Maribor, enjoying the attractions of the big city (especially Tivoli Park) and being wined and dined by Slovene TV celebrities.

Leave Olivia in yard, go off to talk to neighbor about plight of tomato plants. She confirms what another neighbor told me, that chopping up nettles and soaking them in water for a day or two and then watering the plants with the (smelly) mixture will keep away pests. While we’re talking, Oli appears out of nowhere, having found an escape route from the fenced yard. She considerately refrains from attacking my neighbor. Good dog.

Back home, translate text on the dire straits of the Slovene book market under the new capitalism and commercialized “cultural industry.” Apparently these days culture is only worth something if it can turn a profit.

Hang up sheets to dry in the June sunshine and breeze. After school, take Monika and a friend to the coastal town of Koper for clothes shopping for the “valeta” the next day—a dance thing put on for the benefit of students and parents (and teachers) to mark the end of primary school. It’s extremely hot outside, and hence in the car (old car, no air-conditioning). Leave Oli with aussie-owning friend near Koper for dog-sitting while we shop. I expect to get a phone call of distress any moment—Oli has spent time with Lilit and Grin before on group hikes, but we’ve never just up and left her in the care of near-strangers before. I don’t know what to expect, but trouble seems the most likely. But my fears prove to be groundless: Lilit sends periodic text messages about how wonderfully Oli is behaving—not growling or barking, playing well with Grin, following Lilit around, coming when called…phew, that’s a relief! In fact over the course of the afternoon Lilit becomes so enamored of Olivia that her last message says she’s in love and we can just leave Oli there. (Photographic documentation of Olivia's afternoon vacation by the sea courtesy of Lilit here.)

Shopping is fruitless and frustrating for the first three hours. Nothing fits, nothing works. During the last half-hour, in a burst of productivity, Monika finds skirt, shirt, belt, shoes, and hose that all add up to a nice outfit. Mission accomplished.

Back at Lilit’s, we linger a while for drinks and chat in the garden. Lilit’s mother is an avid and experienced gardener, and yet another practitioner of the nettle formula theory. In fact, she has just watered the garden with the mixture, and apologizes for the resultant smell. It is stinky, no denying—reminiscent of liquid cow manure.

We leave (with Olivia, whom Lilit has—reluctantly—agreed to relinquish) as dusk is falling and the air is cooling off, which makes the return trip far more comfortable than the outward one. All in all, a satisfying day.

World Cup soccer mania

2006-06-12T12:01:00.000+02:00

Watch video here.

(And in case you're wondering, no that's not a border collie in the goal--a real border collie would never have let the ball get by.)

Agility round-up

2006-06-11T19:00:00.000+02:00

Agility season (like allergy season) is in full swing, with competitions just about every weekend now. I was intending to write a full account after each one, but here it is late Friday evening in June, I've been to four competitions in the last six weeks (none reported here as I write this), and I'm off to another one tomorrow. So tonight's goal, as I wait for Monika's return in the wee hours from an end-of-the-year fun trip to Ljubljana--and then get up before the butt-crack of dawn a few hours later--is to dutifully start filing reports of the ones already gone by. Turbo agility blogging. I'm post-dating this one so it'll be on top.

Believe it or not, there are actually people out there who read this shit, and find it interesting. But even if they didn't, I would still yield to the compulsion, to have a record for myself and to help me analyze our performance, and try to improve on it the next time.

My excuses for not getting to this sooner: I've had a flurry of translations to do (hvala bogu--they pay the bills), along with a load of garden chores, the usual responsibilities associated with parenting and running a household, plus I'm lazy and undisciplined. As for the ongoing struggle against U.S. imperialism, well, my shoulder is temporarily off that wheel, but thankfully there are stalwarts like Eli to keep up an unrelenting attack. We dog-owning single mother peasant women are allowed to take a day off now and again, especially during the agility season.

Maribor, June 3

2006-06-11T14:13:00.000+02:00

Hm, competitions in eastern Slovenia that take place on rainy days and attract fewer competitors than usual that I run in hiking boots seem to be our recipe for success: we achieved another third-place finish. Over twenty dogs had been entered, but only twelve came on the day, likely due to the bad weather. We weren't brilliant--five faults in the first run for a missed contact zone, and Lyra needed lots of time (and courage) to negotiate the teeter-totter. On the second run she ran underneath the pole of a jump after a tight turn, so we went back and tried again. At the time I thought that was grounds for disqualification (shows how well I know the agility rules), but it's only five faults, and she was clean on everything else. And so we came home with a cup (and a bag of dog food!).

Oh, for those days of innocence, when I was thrilled to make it through even one run without being disqualified...I'm getting ambitious, and third place is getting old, especially in such a small field of competitors.

But the day was special in other ways, too: Olivia's breeders and their dogs and her brother Bryce and his owner Stefan came to watch: Maribor is only about 50 km from Bryce's home in Austria. It was great to see them. Olivia did not seem to remember her earliest caretakers, but gradually warmed up to them. After the competition we followed them over to the village of Eibiswald, Austria and had a delicious and much appreciated dinner at Stefan's. The next morning the sun made an appearance after nearly a week of dreary weather, and we went for a hike along the Slovenia-Austrian border at Radlpass. Oli played tag with her brother and cooled off by flopping in a mud puddle, which turned her from a blue merle into a blue merle with lots of tan.

Driving back home, I was struck yet again by how beautiful and green a land Slovenia is. And how yummy the the famous Trojane doughnuts are.

Ložnica pri Žalcu, May 13

2006-06-11T13:43:00.000+02:00

Ložnica is near the town of Žalec (pop. 5314). There are a lot of hop-growers in the surrounding region, whose harvest is used in the making of "liquid bread"--a product which is reputed to be very, very good for you. I consume a lot of it myself, and just look how healthy I am.

The grounds of the Pluton Kennel Club are quite close to the main highway between Ljubljana and Maribor, but give the impression of being in the middle of nowhere, surrounded as they are by crop-fields on one side and a small forest on the other, and reached by gravel road. The four representatives of the Ajdovščina team (and their border collies) traveled in one car (Monika and Oli stayed behind on this trip), with Lyra sharing the rumble seat squished between Aron and Aika (and emitting growls of displeasure from time to time) and Kena lying at Franc's feet in the front.

We finished the first run with five faults, which put us 11th of 25. On the second run we messed up multiple times on the slalom, and then on the second to last obstacle, a tire, Lyra jumped through the side, instead of through the middle, which resulted in disqualification. A little disappointing, since this competition was one of six which count towards the Eukanuba Cup, but there will be other opportunities, with the ranking at the end of the season based on the best four results of six.

And anyway I have reason to be proud of Lyra's performance that day, since there was also a team agility run, and Lyra had the best result of our four, despite being the least experienced. She was the only member of our team to have a clean run--Kena had five faults (knocking down a pole on the very last jump, aargh), Aron ten, Aika was disqualified. Lyra came 17th out of 61 competitiors total; our team was 8th of 16. This is actually the first (and so far only) time she has had a clean run on the agility portion (as opposed to jumping); it's ironic that it happened on a more difficult, A2 course. And yes, she did encounter the dreaded teeter-totter on this course, and negotiated it without any faults, just very, very slowly--which is why our time of 34.05 was a good ten seconds slower than that of the fastest dogs.

Since I didn't have my car with me, I used one of the wooden kennels on the site for stowing Lyra from time to time for periods of rest (in between competing, playing ball, and going for walks in the woods). And so I could watch in peace. I can't have her with me when I watch other competitors; she goes nuts whenever she sees other dogs on the course, and barks incessantly and uncontrollably. It's easiest just to put her somewhere out of visual range of the course. At Ložnica she got an extra large box with a soft blanket in it, in the shade of a large stand of pine trees. It looked so inviting I crawled in there with her for a time during the mid-afternoon heat, stretching out, snoozing and listening to the wind in the pines.

I took pity on her and asked for permission to have her with me in the back seat on the way back, instead of sardined with Aika and Aron. It was a little cramped, with Nuska and a bunch of luggage there too, but there was less growling.

And now it's time for a lunch break--I hear liquid bread is on the menu.

Selca, May 6

2006-06-11T09:03:00.000+02:00

Selca is a village of about 700 inhabitants, located in the Selška Sora River Valley, between Škofja Loka and Železniki, about half an hour's drive northeast of Ljubljana. The grounds of the Škofja Loka - Železniki Kennel Club/Kinološko društvo Škofja Loka - Železniki are located in an absolutely idyllic setting, part of an expansive area of parks, fields, and meadows at the outskirts of the village of Selca along the Selška branch of the Sora River. A footpath parallels the river, with several access points where dogs can go splash in and cool off. And the weather that day was fabulous.

Our agility results were a little less than fabulous. Lyra had 15 faults on the first run--ten for making mistakes twice on the slalom and five for missing a contact zone on the bridge. This put us far down in the rankings for the first run and pretty much eliminated any chance of making the top three, even if we'd been able to pull off a fast clean performance in the second run. In fact we were disqualified in the second run (as were nine other dogs, of 22 competitors total). The tunnel was set up in a U-shape, and the dog had to go in the correct entrance, which Lyra didn't. Nevertheless, I was well satisfied with her second run, since she was perfect on everything else. And just being in a beautiful setting on a pretty day, watching and doing agility, walking and playing with my dog--life doesn't get much better than that.

It was a great experience for Olivia, too (aka the Australian Shepherd from Hell). Lots of socialization as well as exercise and play. She and Monika went on frequent walks throughout the day, sometimes with me and Lyra, more often with Petra and border collie Veni, their classmates from puppy kindergarten. Poor Veni! Olivia regularly terrorized her when they were sitting on the sidelines watching, even though she played nicely with her when they were out on walks. Veni tried to hide from her persecutor by climbing into Petra's lap.

We left a little early (one advantage of not getting a cup! You don't have to hang around till the end of the day to collect it. But damn those cups were nice-looking...AND they gave out bags of dog food to the winners...sigh). Instead of going back by way of Ljubljana and the motorway, we took the scenic route, continuing through the Selška Sora Valley to Podbrdo, and from there through the Bača River Valley, with the Julian Alps to our right. At Most na Soči we turned south, along the lower Soča Valley, and followed the road home. Great day.

Ptuj, April 29

2006-06-09T22:01:00.000+02:00

English speakers will no doubt have some difficulty with that initial consonant cluster. One of these days I will indulge my inner linguist and write a post on phonotactics. If you can say “Patooey” that’s close enough for now.

Ptuj is in eastern Slovenia, not a part I know very well. About a two and half hour drive from here. I left at about 5:30 a.m., with both dogs. Monika stayed home, ostensibly to study. It was some extra work and stress for me to have Olivia along without Monika to handle her, but she benefits enormously from the socialization experience—the exposure to crowds, strange sights and sounds and people and dogs--so I took her.

Olivia and Lyra have completely opposite behaviors in cars. In a moving car, Oli curls up (or stretches out, depending on her mood) and goes to sleep almost the moment the engine starts, and pretty much stays that way unless she needs a bathroom break, which she lets us know by whining restlessly. Lyra is alert the entire way, sitting up, looking out the window, occasionally trying to herd a passing or oncoming car. In a parked car, on the other hand, Lyra curls up into a little ball in the back seat, pressed up against the door, and snoozes, pretty much oblivious to the environment. Meanwhile, Oli turns into a slavering vicious beast, jumping all over the interior and snarling and lunging at anyone who passes within a few feet. We’re working on that. And, er, many other things as well.

It rained most of the way there, and indeed most of the day. Not hard, but steadily. The course was wet, but not, fortunately, overly muddy. I ran in hiking boots, which slow me down but keep my feet dry and provide much better traction than the smooth soles of my worn sneakers. We had ten faults on the first run, for missing a contact zone on the bridge and flubbing the first slalom attempt. I think. Hard to recall the details now. I do remember she was unfocused in her attitude and helter-skelter in her movements, and I wanted to do a nice slow controlled run, especially in the wet conditions, so I called her back a few times when she got too far ahead of me. I was pleased, and a little suprised, when she took the bridge right in stride, since in previous competitions she's been hesitant. Unfortunately, she was a little too bold and forward-going, and leaped off right over the contact zone. We lucked out in one respect: originally the teeter-totter was one of the obstacles on the agility course, but the judge replaced it with an ordinary jump when the first competitor, a very seasoned and unflappable small dog, slipped on it during his run. The teeter-totter is Lyra's bête noire.

We were sixth after the first run, of 14 competitors. Lower turnout than usual, probably because some people wimped out at the last minute due to the rain. Then we had a clean run on the second, jumping run. Many of the dogs in the small and medium categories were disqualified on the chute obstacle, having balked at going through the sopping wet fabric. Didn’t seem to bother the border collies, though, with their speed and size. With a clean second run, overall we managed to come third, and took home another cup. No dog food, alas—not all competitions are sponsored by dog food manufacturers. A little disappointing, especially given the relatively high travel costs—I had no idea the motorway between Ljubljana and Maribor cost so much.

Still, it was well worth the trip: there was a team competition in addition to the individual, so Lyra got to go a third time, on a more challenging course (J2). She made quite a respectable showing for a relative novice. Just five faults for missing the entrance on the slalom the first time. My fault; I should have positioned myself on the other side of her and come at it at less of an angle. She corrected it quickly, and sailed through the rest. Our Ajdovščina team came tenth of sixteen. Four members can compete on a team; the best three results are used in the ranking. Since there were only three of us Ajdovščina folks competing, this is a solid result.

The star of the day was Aron, with three clean and fast runs, winning in his A2/J2 large category, and contributing the best performance of our team.

As for Olivia, she started out as a menace, snarling threateningly at passing dogs and people, especially when crowded, gradually toned it down to the level of a nuisance(dirty looks, muffled growls, and avoidance), and by the end of the day was mingling with the others happily and safely.

On the way back home I dropped Lyra off in Ljubljana, for a mini-vacation with her friends Jana and Dean. She adores them, and the feeling is mutual.

Graduation Day

2006-06-08T07:02:00.000+02:00

Haditha

2006-06-02T18:27:00.001+02:00

The massacre of Iraqi civilians by US Marines that occurred more than seven months ago in Haditha has been getting a lot of attention lately, including, amazingly enough, in the United States, the home country of the grunts who did the killing and of their superiors (right on up to the Commander-in-Chief). Indiscriminate killing of Iraqis by US troops has been going on for more than three years now, but rarely does it generate much media coverage, let alone any outcry, in the country responsible. So what's so special about the Haditha "incident" (as these people and their stenographers prefer to call it)?

Two things, I think. First, the story was reported in Time magazine (though that just begs the question of why other such "incidents" were not) and second, it has seriously upset Congressman John Murtha, who is vocal with his outrage. This gives the Haditha massacre a visibility that cannot be ignored by the American press, public, or political elite, despite the military's efforts to cover it up. And as such it may well mark the beginning of the end of America's occupation of Iraq.

I'm not in a position to comment at length on the subject, but I recommend reading Dahr Jamail's and Rahul Mahajan's commentaries, and the recent posts on the subject at Left I on the News (here, here, here, and here). And I’d like to share a couple of observations of my own, after browsing the blogs and news reports over the past few days.

One thing that struck me was how much of the reporting, and especially the quotes from various American officials and think-tankers, present the Haditha massacre primarily as a P.R. problem for the US. Never mind the dead and orphaned, the most worrying effect is the tarnishing of the US (and Republican) image, and the undermining of support for the war. And so we are treated to thoughtful soul-searching analyses such as this:

One senior Republican Congressional aide said the members of his party on Capitol Hill were nervous about the political impact of the episode and wanted to get information out quickly to avoid a "drip, drip" of news stories leading up to November.

"You've got an election that the White House is doing everything possible to prevent from being a forum on the president and Iraq," said the aide, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid appearing to criticize Republicans. "And here you have the biggest P.R. problem since Abu Ghraib running right smack into the summertime before a major campaign."

and this:

The case just added to the administration's many Iraq woes. Just when things seem like they can't get any worse, they do.
''When something like Haditha happens, it gives the impression that Americans can't be trusted to provide security, which is the most important thing to Iraqis on a day-to-day level,'' said Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
''It tends to confirm all of the worst interpretations of the United States, and not simply in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan and in the region,'' Cordesman said.
The disclosure of the allegedly unprovoked killings of civilians in the Iraqi town comes with the war looming large in this year's congressional elections, and with the administration still struggling to explain the American treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

[...]

Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, compared Haditha to My Lai ''on a smaller scale.''
''My Lai symbolized the wanton reckless use of force that was associated with B-52 bombings, and the use of napalm, and the screaming children with their clothes burned off their skin by American incendiaries,'' O'Hanlon said.

And, while U.S. use of force in Iraq is on a far lower order of magnitude, ''these sort of things do reverberate,'' he said. ''And, yes, Iraqis do pay attention to the media, and they watch TV. Their overall impression of the U.S. is not very favorable, and this will make it a little worse.''

Gee, ya think? Now if only we could stop the media from reporting on it, the Iraqis probably wouldn't even notice all the violent deaths in their towns, and the bright US image would remain untarnished.

The other thing that struck me was the stubborn, deluded mindset of some Americans, who are prepared to defend US actions abroad no matter how demonstrably heinous they are. When I read some of the commenters here, like the one who closes every post with "God Bless America and God Bless the American military" or the one who morally justifies the killing of pregnant women and little kids as legitimate enemy targets, I'm reminded of William Blum's opening paragraphs in a recent Anti-Empire Report:

I'm often told by readers of their encounters with Americans who support the outrages of US foreign policy no matter what facts are presented to them, no matter what arguments are made, no matter how much the government's statements are shown to be false. Included amongst their number are those who still believe that Iraq had a direct involvement in the events of September 11, that Saddam Hussein had close ties to al Qaeda, and/or that weapons of mass destruction were indeed found in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.

My advice is to forget such people. They would support the outrages even if the government came to their homes, seized their first born, and hauled them away screaming, as long as the government assured them it was essential to fighting terrorism (or communism). My (very) rough guess is that they constitute no more than 15 percent of the population. I suggest that we concentrate on the rest, who are reachable.

I am the anti-Condi!

2006-06-02T10:17:00.000+02:00

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been in the news lately, and so it seems like a good time to play some one-up(wo)manship. File this one under the category of shameless self-promotion.

I am the anti-Condi. Really, I am. A trusted friend and authority on world affairs told me so. See, about a year ago I posted an ad on an online dating site. (No, not in the London Review of Books. Maybe I'll try that next.) I haven't actually gotten any dates, but I like to think that's because most of the men who contact me live many thousands of miles away, and not because they find me unattractive. After all, the photos I posted of myself are at least as seductive as the one of Condi above. Anyway, I've gained a few pen-friends, we swap information about our bodies, our selves, our lives, our dogs, our fetishes, our politics, etc., and after learning more about me, including the fact that I used to play rugby for the Oxford Old Boys RFC, one fellow paid me the ultimate compliment:

Jean, you are the anti-Condi!

Jean: Plays rugby football with Old Boys in spite of disapproval of male power elite.
Condi Rice: Pretends to like American football to suck up to old boys in male power elite.

J: Former Sovietologist working for world peace.
C: Former Sovietologist working for world war.

J: Serves as mentor to Slovenes wishing to speak English as a second language.
C: Serves as mentor to president who can't speak English as a first language.

J: Sometimes gets in trouble for speaking the truth to power.
C: Lies through her ass to support those in power.

J: Bathes in Alpine streams after walking over verdant mountains.
C: Bathes in blood after walking over mountains of dead Iraqis.

This is one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me, and I just can't help bragging.

Hey, would anyone like a date with the anti-Condi?

Why I'm glad I live in Slovenia: Reason #3595

2006-05-21T09:36:00.000+02:00

Because I can enjoy what the country offers without having to pay (at a minimum) $3595 for the privilege. And that's not including airfare, which the tour agency says runs from $1000-1200 round trip. Who the hell can afford this kind of trip? And where is the money going? If my math is correct, that works out to about $300 per night.

Although prices have been going up in recent years, Slovenia is still a relatively inexpensive corner of Europe to travel in. A couple of weeks ago I paid about $25 per person (plus 4 euros for each dog) for a room and half board at a farm tourism place in Selca, near Škofja Loka. At Christmas I really splurged and paid an extravagant $60 per person (plus 10 euros for a dog) per day for half board and a good-sized room with a balcony and view of the sea in a classy hotel in Portorož. The cost included free access to the thermal pool complex and a discounted rate for the 12-room sauna complex.

From where I live, the places mentioned in this itinerary are a few hours and half a tank of gas distant at most. How extraordinarily lucky I am.

Junkie without a drug

2006-05-20T14:34:00.000+02:00

There's an agility competition in Slovenska Bistrica today, and I'm not there. A shortage of funds and abundance of work conspired to keep me at home this weekend. And now I'm going through withdrawal. Wasting time moping and longing and craving instead of mowing the lawn, digging up the soil, preparing materials for a seminar, and accomplishing myriad other accumulated tasks.

And text messaging my teammates in Slovenska Bistrica, where the news after the first run is: Primož/Aron and France/Kena disqualified, Nuška/Aika ... in first place! Good luck in the second run!

Update: Nuška and Aika got five faults in the second run and came fourth overall. Or, as Primož put it, "je dosegla nehvaležno 4. mesto." Never mind--fourth place is an impressive achievement, cup or no cup.

This is a border collie. (And an Australian shepherd.)

2006-05-14T19:47:00.000+02:00

Isoglossia has linked to my blog with the phrase "border collie." For the benefit of readers migrating from there to here, I am posting a photo of a border collie. Otherwise they might think a border collie looks like a beanstalk, the subject of my last post.

(The border collie is the one on the left. This picture was taken today, by Lilit, who, unlike me, has a digital camera. One of these days I will join the rest of you in the 21st century.)

Update: Many more photos of frolicking dogs here.

From the "what a wonderful world" department

2006-05-12T16:31:00.000+02:00

Or maybe the department of banal, but profound, observations:

I find it truly amazing that I can toss a few seeds into dirt, and have edible plants come up not long after. I planted some green beans about ten days ago. At first I thought some critters had run off with most or all of the seeds, but today there are discernible bean plants in every single spot where I dropped the seeds. I expect to go out there tomorrow and see a beanstalk leading to a castle and a giant in the sky.

Now if only I had a digital camera, I could show you what it looks like. Sort of like this.

From the "what a small world" department

2006-05-12T15:44:00.000+02:00

Today I called Telekom Slovenije to let them know that the wires hooking me up to phone (and ADSL internet) service are in imminent danger of being blown down. Some near neighbors of mine recently put a new roof on their house, and in the process inadvertently ripped out the telephone line to mine. A guy from Telekom (same jolly fellow who installed a new phone and ADSL for me a year and a half ago) came out promptly to diagnose and fix the problem when I reported the loss of service last week, but apparently the solution was only temporary, because my near neighbor has been warning me for a couple of days now that the next strong wind will take down the wire.

So this morning I called 116 to report the problem. I was talking on my cell phone outside so I could get the house number (so the repairmen will know where to go) as well as take a closer look at the wire--it is indeed hanging precariously and flapping about. I had both dogs with me: Olivia the beast was leashed, while Lyra the wonder dog was free to roam. However, she roamed into somebody else's garden, and so I called her back (obedient soul that she is, of course she responded immediately. Well, sort of immediately.). Anyway, the woman at the other end of the line heard me talking to Lyra--in English--which led to an explanation/apology on my part that I had dogs with me, which led her to ask "which breed?", which led to a discussion of border collies and agility and her cousin from Občina/Opicina (in Italy just across the border from Slovenia) who has a border collie and competes most weekends in agility. From her description it sounded like the dog was a blue merle. I think I know who she means. I'll ask next time we meet--maybe tomorrow.

I'm something of a recluse by nature, and really cherish my solitude, but even so I like having friendly human social interactions with people who provide the services of modern life that we often take for granted. A few years ago I got the "ABC" thingie for the avtocesta (an electronic device that allows you to sail through toll booths--assuming you have enough credits--instead of paying manually each time you exit the motorway). I almost always get on and off in Senožeče, where one person staffs the booth for both directions (in contrast to the multiple lanes in Sežana). While the ABC lanes are very convenient (especially when you exit in Ljubljana), I found that I missed the contact with the guys who worked in Senožeče. There are probably only three or four who work there, in shifts, and I used to know most of them by sight, since I would make eye contact and exchange greetings with them whenever I passed through, to take my turnpike ticket before getting on, and pay it when I got off. Now I just look at the numbers on an electronic board that tell me how much toll money I have left, and bypass the humans. It feels rude.

But I still make a point of topping up in Senožeče, not Ljubljana.

More cute silly dog photos because I don't have time to write

2006-05-12T12:54:00.000+02:00

These are a few months old. Just got them back recently (won't somebody please buy me a nice digital camera?). I keep intending to write up the last two episodes of "Adventures in agility" but the time slips by--and there's already another one coming up tomorrow. In the meantime, my garden is crying out for my attention. Bye.

Note to self:

2006-05-11T22:24:00.001+02:00

Do NOT leave toilet paper roll and Olivia unattended in same room.

Border humor

2006-04-28T08:16:00.000+02:00

Click on the top one to enlarge and read. (I'm sure the announcer wasn't going to say "popular...Australian shepherd"!)

Clicking on the "party" cartoon doesn't make it any bigger; here's what it says:

Henry! Our party’s total chaos! No one knows when to eat, where to stand, what to…Oh, thank God! Here comes a border collie!

p.s. to last post

2006-04-22T12:41:00.000+02:00

Scenes from last year's competition. I wasn't exaggerating about the mud. No, that's not Lyra, we gave up and went home early, while we could still get the car out of the parking lot.

This year was better in all respects!

Agility competition in Ajdovščina

2006-04-17T09:30:00.000+02:00

So, Saturday our home club of Ajdovščina hosted the first outdoor agility competition of the season. Unlike last year, when it poured all day and competitors had to run through knee-deep mud, the weather and the footing were dry.

The course for the first run was quite easy and straightforward, but nevertheless Lyra and I came within a millimeter of being disqualified. For some reason after coming off the bridge she veered left instead of going straight at the next jump, and I was barely able to call her back in time. Got five faults for a runout/refusal.

Even before that her performance on the bridge was shaky. That was really weird and unexpected, because it's our home training ground, and she's galloped across that same bridge countless times with no hesitation whatsoever. I always thought the reason she balked on other bridges, at competitions, was because the obstacles themselves had an unfamiliar look and feel. Now, though, I'm thinking it's the crowds that unsettle her--the bridge (the tail end of which you can see in the photo) was located very close to the edge of the field where spectators were clustered. That may account for why she veered away afterwards, too.

Anyway, apart from that little hiccup, she ran well. Slalom was flawless. It used to be the obstacle that troubled us the most, but she's getting very reliable--assuming the course is set up so that we can enter it with her on my left, which fortunately this one was.

There were an extraordinarily high number of clean runs--nine out of 26 competitors. Lyra and I, with our five faults, were in 10th place. But even with a clean run we wouldn't have moved up more than a place or two, since we don't (yet) run at the breakneck speed of many competitors.

The course for the second run (jumping) also looked easy--but fast--on the walk-through. But appearances can be deceptive: only two dogs had clean runs, whereas 14 were disqualified. Including us, when Lyra went off course by veering right into a tunnel instead of going straight over a wall. Before that we'd already collected 10 faults by messing up twice on the slalom. This, too, was unexpected--she entered correctly and usually if she nails the entrance she moves smoothly and accurately through to the end, so I was already focused mentally on the next obstacle when she ducked out at the second to last pole. Then we screwed up again when we went back to correct it. Besides the faults, this had the effect of disrupting our rhythm and concentration, which made further mistakes, including "fatal" ones like going off-course, more likely. As to why she went the wrong way--it could have been because the wall is not an obstacle we practice on much (we should), and she preferred the more familiar-looking tunnel. And/or it could have been related, again, to the presence of the crowd on the sidelines, and she ran right instead of straight to put more distance between them and her.

I wasn't too disappointed to be disqualified. The faults on the slalom would have put us well down in the ranking anyway--well out of the top three--and we're not eligible for the national championships (državno prvenstvo) so we wouldn't have collected any points even if we'd been ranked. As a member of the crew/home club I got a free jacket (thanks to sponsors) and a couple of free meals AND I didn't have to pay the entry fee, just membership for the year. So we didn't come away empty-handed. Also, I'm in no hurry to qualify for competition at the next level (A2, which requires three clean runs at A1), since I plan on staying in A1 for the whole of the season regardless.

I've set a modest goal of placing in the top three in the Eukanuba Cup--we collected some points for that already with our third-place finish at Prestranek--so I'm hoping to place well in the remaining five competitions over the season that count towards that. And just gain as much experience as possible. We need lots and lots of experience at competitions--conditions can't be duplicated at training. She needs to get used to the crowds and distractions, encounter unfamiliar obstacles in unfamiliar settings, I need to get less nervous. This will only come with competition experience.

We need to train seriously as well, of course, but agility, though a favorite activity, is not all we do, and I'm neither able nor willing to focus single-mindedly on achieving top results in the sport, to the exclusion of all else. I enjoy the competitions and the training, and while it's surely more satisfying to come home with a trophy than a disqualification, I don't want it to matter so much that we can't have fun doing it no matter what the outcome. On Saturday only 8 of 26 competitors--less than a third--successfully completed both runs. It sucks to be disqualified, and it happens in a heart-breaking split second, but realistically, if Lyra and I are ranked in just one competition out of three, we're not doing too badly.

Overall results available here. The youngest and oldest members of our home team produced the best performances--Veronika and Nala were 2nd in A1/J1 medium, Tena and Tara were 5th in A1/J1 small, and Franc and Kena--just returned from maternity leave--were 9th in A3/J3 large. Tine, me, Nuska and Primoz were disqualified. Oh well. better luck next time.

Aussie puppy Olivia would have benefited from the socialization opportunity, but unfortunately Monika has been ill the last few days, and I took them home right after our first run so Monika could go back to bed. I guess I'm a lousy mother, since I went back to the club and left her alone (well, with Oli for company) for the day.