BAGHDAD, June 29 (Reuters) - Iraq will spend $100 million to rebuild the east Baghdad slum of Sadr City and create jobs for many of its two million residents after years of violence and neglect, a government official said on Sunday.
The Shi'ite slum is a stronghold of anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army, whose fighters clashed with U.S. and government troops there in March and April until a ceasefire halted hostilities.
Sadr City was largely outside the government's control until the truce allowed Iraqi soldiers to deploy.
"The government has ordered an allocation of $100 million to reconstruct and develop Sadr City," Tahseen al-Sheikhli, civilian spokesman for security operations in Baghdad, told a news conference.
He did not give a timeframe for spending the money.
Let's hope this is for real.
For some sense of life inside Sadr City, here's a video from AlJazeeraEnglish:
(iraqi Gov't spokesman Tahseen) Sheikhly told journalists: “If you look at Baghdad through Google Earth, you can see that there is a black spot in southern Baghdad due to the accumulation of the sewage there.”
Ultimately, a large proportion of the city’s sewage ends up in the Tigris River or, worse, finds it way into the city’s water system. Millions of Baghdadis are forced to treat all their water with purification tablets or buy bottled water if they can afford it.
The rapper Jay-Z's position at the top of the Glastonbury bill has notoriously riled the likes of Noel Gallagher of Oasis, who implied it was the sort of thing that would never have happened in his heyday. 'I'm sorry, but Jay-Z? No chance,' guitarist Gallagher complained in April. 'Glastonbury has the tradition of guitar music ... I'm not having hip-hop at Glastonbury. It's wrong.'
Last night, before an adoring crowd, Jay-Z gave his response. As he took to the legendary Pyramid stage, vast video screens played images of Gallagher's criticism of the rapper, triggering a massive chorus of jeers aimed at the Mancunian guitarist. That was only the beginning. The rapper's opening track was a cover of Wonderwall, arguably Oasis's most famous track. Some sang along, most just chanted the rapper's name. 'How good was that intro?' said Liz Walters, 25. 'He's amazing.'
The next tour de force was a cover of Rehab by Amy Winehouse. 'For those that didn't get the memo my name is Jay-Z and I'm pretty fucking awesome,' hollered the triumphant rapper.
No question here. Mr. Jay-Z sir. Talk about flipping it.
For this I'm afraid we have no choice but to invite him to be this week's GHN Weekly Musical Guest:
I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately. -- George Carlin
Lots of obits to George Carlin today, of course. But this one by John Nichols at The Nation - George Carlin: American Radical is pretty good.
Carlin explained himself best in one of his last interviews. "There is a certain amount of righteous indignation I hold for this culture, because to get back to the real root of it, to get broader about it, my opinion that is my species--and my culture in America specifically--have let me down and betrayed me. I think this species had great, great promise, with this great upper brain that we have, and I think we squandered it on God and Mammon. And I think this culture of ours has such promise, with the promise of real, true freedom, and then everyone has been shackled by ownership and possessions and acquisition and status and power," he said. "And perhaps it's just a human weakness and an inevitable human story that these things happen. But there's disillusionment and some discontent in me about it. I don't consider myself a cynic. I think of myself as a skeptic and a realist. But I understand the word 'cynic' has more than one meaning, and I see how I could be seen as cynical. 'George, you're cynical.' Well, you know, they say if you scratch a cynic you find a disappointed idealist. And perhaps the flame still flickers a little, you know?"
Always kind of did make me feel uncomfortable. Just doing his job.
FURTHERMORE:
And just for the sake of a mild rebuttal to the above video some might want to check out this story from yesterday's 60 Minutes on the disappearance of the west coast salmon - The Fuss over Fish, which I think both confirms and challenges what George has to say.
Don't know how "legal" it is to go ahead and post the entire new BBC documentary Daylight Robbery: fleecing Iraq and the USA which first aired about two weeks ago, but we're going to do it anyway. Considering that the subject of the film is the "estimated 23 billion dollars which may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq", I think that our small act of larceny here comes out pretty mild in comparison, I must say. All apologies to the BBC, but this is a subject of much interest to us here at GHN, and like some desperate pack of greed stricken, politically connected military contractors with saliva dripping from our teeth and dollar signs in our eyes - we just couldn't resist.
Not when you're throwing around terms like "the largest war profiteering in history", and "maybe even one of the biggest crimes in history". We know a good opportunity when see one. So thanks. We really, really, appreciate it. The cheque's in the mail. (wink wink, nudge nudge) And good job mates. God's speed.
And just by way of comparison and out of blatant late nineties nostalgia - does anyone remember the Oil for Food scandal? How it was once trumpeted as one of the justifications for the inevitability of the invasion of Iraq in the first place. How Rex Murphy once stated that because of it the UN should be abolished, and Big Time Republican thumbsucker Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard once called it "the biggest scandal in human history", worth up to possibly 100 billion? Well I do. And I often wonder (often out loud, usually to myself) how tame the Oil for Food scandal now looks in comparison to some of the more recent malfeasance and corruption that has taken place in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. But just in case anyone is interested a good jumping off point for any reminiscence would be: The UN Oil-for-Food Program: Who is Guilty? - Brian Urquhart's Febuary 9, 2006 review of the Volcker Committee's findings in the NYR. Its really good, but you'd have to pay for it.
And below is a commerical for the Iraq Commission on Public Integrity. Its in Arabic and I have no idea what they're saying, but they look sad, like people who've been robbed. And then they disappear:
Being as susceptible to the delights of Schadenfreude as the next person I must admit that I have in the last 24 hours developed a perverse fascination with all the absolutely horrible reviews that the new Mike Meyers movie - The Love Guru - has been garnering. ( Another one - here. And whoa baby, this one's particularly vicious.) I'm almost starting to feel for him. It happened, and it happens, but I'm afraid that I have now read and thought enough about this completely irrelevant topic to the point where I have now developed my own theory about it, discovering, I feel, a truth that thus far seems to have eluded my colleagues in the international entertainment press, at least that I'm aware of:
In his publicity for this movie Meyers has talked repeatedly about how the death of his father in 1991 and his recent divorce caused him to go on his own personal, spiritual odyssey which lead him ultimately to Deepak Chopra and then to his subsequent embrace of a kind of Hollywood style Eastern mysticism, or whatever. Teachings and values he feels have informed the Love Guru, however silly; in the guise of "silliness". "I do silly, the language of silly", is I believe how he put it. And I think I saw him on E-talk Daily talking about how one can't look outside of oneself for validation, but can only journey in. Which in the case of an artist so profoundly and obviously insecure as Meyers must be no small feat. (And certainly explains why I'm here fucking blogging. About this!) But it has caused me to wonder:
What if this film's a fake?
In that its a fake as a serious attempt at a movie. Perhaps its not a movie at all, but a grand, extremely expensive spiritual exercise? What if, either of his own accord or perhaps encouraged by Chopra, Meyers deliberately set out to make the worst movie he could possibly make. One that he knew would repulse the critics, if not the viewing public at large, to such an extreme extent that they would have no choice but to heap every kind opprobrious insult on him they could possibly think of? (I mean in this podcast, the guy actually ponders whether or not Meyers might be, and I quote, "retarded" ?) And thus in the resulting fiasco, abandoned by the critics and perhaps even by his legions of fans, he would truly, finally be forced to love himself, to really, really love himself, unconditionally and without artifice, as everyone else would clearly despise him for subjecting them to what I heard one critic say could be one of the 'worst movies ever'. (My Uncle once told me that if people hate your play, they usually hate your soul.) Forced to face that which he is most afraid of, Meyers would finally begin a real and authentic journey towards true enlightenment. Without reservation, and no where to hide.
Finally, he would be free.
He met Chopra on a mountain somewhere in Beverly Hills and Chopra told him to make the worst movie he could make. But just don't tell anybody that is what you're up to. Because then it wouldn't count. You have to act like you're serious.
Because none of it is real. None of it. Not even Hollywood.
This is the age of Punk'd after all. What if Mike Meyers just punk'd everybody. And now he's somewhere, laughing like a buddha.
Enlightened.
That's the joke. And amazingly, the critics didn't get it.
And that's my theory.
I just wish he had left The Leafs out of it. They have enough bad karma.
The graph has two obvious and conspicuous features. First, a steady increase of carbon dioxide with time, beginning at 315 parts per million in 1958 and reaching 385 parts per million in 2008. Second, a regular wiggle showing a yearly cycle of growth and decline of carbon dioxide levels. The maximum happens each year in the Northern Hemisphere spring, the minimum in the Northern Hemisphere fall. The difference between maximum and minimum each year is about six parts per million.
Keeling was a meticulous observer. The accuracy of his measurements has never been challenged, and many other observers have confirmed his results. In the 1970s he extended his observations from Mauna Loa, at latitude 20 north, to eight other stations at various latitudes, from the South Pole at latitude 90 south to Point Barrow on the Arctic coast of Alaska at latitude 71 north. At every latitude there is the same steady growth of carbon dioxide levels, but the size of the annual wiggle varies strongly with latitude. The wiggle is largest at Point Barrow where the difference between maximum and minimum is about fifteen parts per million. At Kerguelen, a Pacific island at latitude 29 south, the wiggle vanishes. At the South Pole the difference between maximum and minimum is about two parts per million, with the maximum in Southern Hemisphere spring.
The only plausible explanation of the annual wiggle and its variation with latitude is that it is due to the seasonal growth and decay of annual vegetation, especially deciduous forests, in temperate latitudes north and south. The asymmetry of the wiggle between north and south is caused by the fact that the Northern Hemisphere has most of the land area and most of the deciduous forests. The wiggle is giving us a direct measurement of the quantity of carbon that is absorbed from the atmosphere each summer north and south by growing vegetation, and returned each winter to the atmosphere by dying and decaying vegetation.
The quantity is large, as we see directly from the Point Barrow measurements. The wiggle at Point Barrow shows that the net growth of vegetation in the Northern Hemisphere summer absorbs about 4 percent of the total carbon dioxide in the high-latitude atmosphere each year. The total absorption must be larger than the net growth, because the vegetation continues to respire during the summer, and the net growth is equal to total absorption minus respiration. The tropical forests at low latitudes are also absorbing and respiring a large quantity of carbon dioxide, which does not vary much with the season and does not contribute much to the annual wiggle.
When we put together the evidence from the wiggles and the distribution of vegetation over the earth, it turns out that about 8 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed by vegetation and returned to the atmosphere every year. This means that the average lifetime of a molecule of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, before it is captured by vegetation and afterward released, is about twelve years. This fact, that the exchange of carbon between atmosphere and vegetation is rapid, is of fundamental importance to the long-range future of global warming, as will become clear in what follows. Neither of the books under review mentions it.
Before making his assertion:
At this point I return to the Keeling graph, which demonstrates the strong coupling between atmosphere and plants. The wiggles in the graph show us that every carbon dioxide molecule in the atmosphere is incorporated in a plant within a time of the order of twelve years. Therefore, if we can control what the plants do with the carbon, the fate of the carbon in the atmosphere is in our hands. That is what Nordhaus meant when he mentioned "genetically engineered carbon-eating trees" as a low-cost backstop to global warming. The science and technology of genetic engineering are not yet ripe for large-scale use. We do not understand the language of the genome well enough to read and write it fluently. But the science is advancing rapidly, and the technology of reading and writing genomes is advancing even more rapidly. I consider it likely that we shall have "genetically engineered carbon-eating trees" within twenty years, and almost certainly within fifty years.
Carbon-eating trees could convert most of the carbon that they absorb from the atmosphere into some chemically stable form and bury it underground. Or they could convert the carbon into liquid fuels and other useful chemicals. Biotechnology is enormously powerful, capable of burying or transforming any molecule of carbon dioxide that comes into its grasp. Keeling's wiggles prove that a big fraction of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes within the grasp of biotechnology every decade. If one quarter of the world's forests were replanted with carbon-eating varieties of the same species, the forests would be preserved as ecological resources and as habitats for wildlife, and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be reduced by half in about fifty years.
It is likely that biotechnology will dominate our lives and our economic activities during the second half of the twenty-first century, just as computer technology dominated our lives and our economy during the second half of the twentieth. Biotechnology could be a great equalizer, spreading wealth over the world wherever there is land and air and water and sunlight. This has nothing to do with the misguided efforts that are now being made to reduce carbon emissions by growing corn and converting it into ethanol fuel. The ethanol program fails to reduce emissions and incidentally hurts poor people all over the world by raising the price of food. After we have mastered biotechnology, the rules of the climate game will be radically changed. In a world economy based on biotechnology, some low-cost and environmentally benign backstop to carbon emissions is likely to become a reality.
Well lets get on that then!
But seriously. As with most subjects I blog on I am the furthest thing from an expert on either Global Warming or certainly biotechnology, but my first question with all of this is I think the most obvious one. And that would have to be how does one account for - within this plan of replanting a quarter of the planet's forests with special super carbon-eating biogenetically engineered trees - the law of unintended consequences. (Which I guess being unintended doesn't fit easily into anyone's methodology) Once we plant and grow all these trees how can be sure they will do everything they're supposed to do and nothing else - like, I don't know, take over the entire ecosystem! But seriously. If we couldn't account for the actual law of unintended consequences, I think the perception of a possible, potential unintended consequence might be enough to stop any plan like this in its tracks. Which speaks to a larger, looming issue within this Very Big Issue - which is reconciling biotechnology - altering the genome and the genetic structure of plants and even I suppose potentially actual creatures themselves, even humans I guess - with the so-called 'environmental' movement. For all I know Dyson's plan might be the most brilliant one going and totally plausible in, as he says,like - fifty years. And by then who knows what state the planet is going to be in and how people are going to think and what their attitudes are going to be about biotechnology, but I think we can safely say that for now, in our time, one of the basic tenants of the so-called 'environmental movement' (and I do feel the need to keep qualifying it with 'so-called' because I hate to generalize and I don't think anything this large and amorphous can be easily defined) is a profound suspicion with scientific and technological hubris. (Though I suppose one person's hubris is another person's genius) Environmentalism, as I understand it, often speaks to and of learning to live within our basic nature and ecosystem and not outside it. That venturing 'outside of nature' has in fact been one of our grand collective failings as far as the 'environment' is concerned. That we are part of nature and not above it, and subsequently we need to respect it more and fuck with it a whole lot less. And in this sense there are still many potential carbon reducing technologies that could be rolled out in a far larger scale than at present which still incorporate this basic world view - Solar power, obviously, being the first one the leaps to mind. As Jeffery Sachs wrote recently in The Guardian:
The most promising technology in the long term is solar power. The total solar radiation hitting the planet is about 1,000 times the world's commercial energy use. This means that even a small part of the earth's land surface, notably in desert regions, which receive massive solar radiation, can supply large amounts of the electricity for much of the rest of the world.
For example, solar power plants in America's Mojave desert could supply more than half of the country's electricity needs. Solar power plants in northern Africa could supply power to western Europe. And solar power plants in the Sahel region of Africa, just south of the vast Sahara, could supply power to much of west, east, and central Africa.
But what of Dyson's basic suggestion of larger emphasis on the possible uses of biotechnology? Using our human intelligence to alter some of our most basic eco-systems in order to correct and roll back some of the environmental damage we've created and accumulated?
I think it will be met with much skepticism (if it is in fact met - at all) because it challenges some of the most basic assumptions of the religion of contemporary environmentalism. i.e. that we are where we are because we have sinned, and now the only way forward is to repent. Accept the base corruption of our nature, and our past, see the light, seize the day and now totally change our ways, and reengineer some of the most basic systems of our economy - (of which and in which we are all complicit) - making them more sustainable and carbon-neutral. I think its a general (there I go again) skepticism that greets all possible solutions to the crisis of Global Warming that seem, I don't know, too techno-positive. And let me be clear I do think we have "sinned" and continue to "sin" in all kinds of ways. We are a lot smarter, and certainly have the potential to be a lot smarter than we presently act and we shouldn't deny it and pretend otherwise. But I do think 'environmentalism' is very much, behaves, exits very much like a kind of contemporary religion (though one more firmly based on fact and in science than most other religions.). And I'm not suggesting that that's a bad thing. It may in fact be the best thing. The only thing. Its a point that Dyson concedes at the end of his review:
All the books that I have seen about the science and economics of global warming, including the two books under review, miss the main point. The main point is religious rather than scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world.
Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.
Though it has its aspects and cringe-worthy examples of fashionable hype and preening superficiality like everything else in this world - how can it go away now? Environmentalism? We are stuck with it now like we are stuck with the planet itself, complete with its brewing atmosphere. And we are stuck with it for the fundamental reasons that every one knows. Unlike Socialism, it can't go away. (Though I know many people who would argue the need and the necessity for Socialism has never gone away. What can I tell you. I hang with a bad crowd.)
Only through a massive exercise of collective denial, I suppose. Which I guess, isn't totally out of the realm of possibility.
The extent of the hype cycle's corruption of our minds can be measured by the frequency with which you hear people complaining that environmentalism has grown so fashionable, so chic, so trendy. Try to imagine a similar complaint from another political era: "I was totally into democracy—before they extended the franchise. I was all about socialism—but it became so working class."
Not so long ago, the phone rang in my office. It was Barack Obama. For more than a decade, Obama was my colleague at the University of Chicago Law School.
He is also a friend. But since his election to the Senate, he does not exactly call every day. On this occasion, he had an important topic to discuss: the controversy over President George W. Bush's warrantless surveillance of international telephone calls between Americans and suspected terrorists. I had written a short essay suggesting that the surveillance might be lawful. Before taking a public position, Obama wanted to talk the problem through. In the space of about 20 minutes, he and I investigated the legal details. He asked me to explore all sorts of issues: the President's power as commander-in-chief, the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Authorization for Use of Military Force and more.
Obama wanted to consider the best possible defense of what Bush had done. To every argument I made, he listened carefully and offered a specific counter-argument. After the issue had been exhausted, Obama said that he thought the program was illegal, but now had a better understanding of both sides. He thanked me for my time.
