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Techmeme.

all things amazing.

here, then, seems to be the rebuttal by the govt to the Wikileaks documentst:
1. the leaks reflect what was known, done, any number of years ago under a different administration and things have changed.
2. the source clearly anti-Afghan war and not objective and hence their leaks are not objective ones.
3. many things have been changing and getting much better.

GOVT RESPONSE HERE

Guess. Hint: his first name is Mick. He is a musician.

[...] Other reports document U.S. soldiers’ frustration with the Pakistani military’s unwillingness to properly patrol the Afghan-Pakistani border. In one account, U.S. officers meeting with Pakistani soldiers to discuss border security in Afghanistan’s eastern region of Khost were assured that the area was tightly monitored – despite U.S. information that there had recently been a 300 percent increase in insurgent activity in the area. The report suggested that the Pakistani military would likely be of little help in stopping insurgents from crossing into Afghanistan, because the ISI “is likely involved with the border crossings.”

The White House has responded by condemning the release of classified information, and pouring cold water on claims that this trove of information presents fundamentally new information about the U.S. war in Afghanistan. “I don’t think anyone who follows this issue will find it surprising that there are concerns about ISI and safe havens in Pakistan,” read one White House e-mail sent to reporters. [...]
via Foreign Policy morning briefs.

The White House is being disingenuous here. Of course they knew this. Otherwise it would not have been in the report that they kept top secret from the public. But the public did not know this and now, aware of this,many of our supporters of this war may have to give serious thought to our efforts in Afghanistan …the intelligence wing of the Pakistan govt.military is NOT some jihadist bunch, bandits working outside the mainstream. They are the mainstream. We are funding them. They are killing us.

It is no more a question of if, but when. My assessment is that there will be a Talibanised government in Pakistan within two to three years, after a prolonged civil war. Pakistan is currently a ferocious Doberman held on a leash by the US, and fed with exotic bones. It was meant to bark at and bite the USSR (and India) when the cold war was on, but the US realised recently that the dog has developed rabies and has become ferocious enough to bite the owner and the neighbours.

The US has no clue on what to do with its rabid canine. Running away from it is one option. The other is to try its best to force India, the eastern neighbour, to distract it with more bones like joint sovereignty of Jammu & Kashmir. The hope is that the dog will be distracted enough to allow the US to make its getaway from Afghanistan. Whatever the scenario, the net result will be an increasingly Talibanised Pakistan.

The problems faced by Pakistan are of its own making. It sees itself as a leader of the Islamic world. One Egyptian professor told me after visiting Pakistan in the 1990s that they gave him the impression that Islam was invented on August 14, 1947. During the recent Facebook prophet controversy, it was Pakistan which banned all internet media — something that wasn’t done by many countries even in the Middle East. Some sections of Pakistani society have embarked on a dangerous path of searching for pure Islam. First, they targeted Hindus and Christians using blasphemy laws. Then they targeted Ahmaddiyas (or Ahmadis) by declaring them to be non-Muslims.

in full

the ordinary virtues of paying attention

You do not interest me. No man can say these words to another without committing a cruelty and offending against justice,” writes philosopher Simone Weil. To turn a deaf ear is an offence not only to the ignored person but also to thinking, justice and ethics. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner is cursed because no one will listen to his story. The Italian chemist-turned-writer Primo Levi was preoccupied with this fable because of his fear that on returning from Auschwitz people like him would be either ignored or simply disbelieved. Regardless, listening gets a very mixed press amongst critics and intellectuals. There is a suspicion of “wistful optimism” or the quasi-religious appeal to “hold hands” and play priest at the confessional. These qualms miss the centrality of listening to a radical humanism which recognises that dialogue is not merely about consensus or agreement but engagement and criticism. This is something that Primo Levi understood.

IN FULL.

Hyperrealism is a genre of painting and sculpture resembling a high resolution photograph. Hyperreal paintings and sculptures are not strict interpretations of photographs, nor are they literal illustrations of a particular scene or subject. Instead, they utilize additional, often subtle, pictorial elements to create the illusion of reality. We present below sample work from some of the best hyper-realist painters out there.

Here for gallery.

I’m a broke writer who can’t find a gig, so I decided to save myself — by helping students cheat

I entered this business purely by accident. A victim of the craptastic economy, I’ve done all sorts of things for money. I’ve cleaned maggots out of other people’s kitchens. I’ve scraped cat poop off carpets. I’ve watched small screaming children for hours at a time. But doing college homework for cash? That one took me by surprise. It began innocently. Having tutored writing at a small private school, I decided to offer my services to the larger market via Craigslist. Soon, a prospect contacted me.

“Can you just write the paper for me? I’d pay $100,” my new client wrote. She wanted a compare/contrast essay about Charles Dickens and had little interest in reading “Oliver Twist” or “Great Expectations.” She moaned about her great-grandma’s hunting accident/funeral and her busy weekend party schedule. I couldn’t have cared less about her motivations. She had me at $100.IN FULL

ROCK veterans THE ROLLING STONES are set to finally bow out after 50 years in music – with a giant farewell tour.

The foursome will have a combined age of 268 when the world tour kicks off next year.

The band – formed way back in 1962 – will reach its half-century during the jaunt, which is set to last into 2012.

(Continued)

…No other game, moreover, is so mercilessly impossible to play well or affords so immense a scope for inevitable failure. We all know that a hitter who succeeds in only one third of his at-bats is considered remarkable, and that one who succeeds only fractionally more often is considered a prodigy of nature. Now here, certainly, is a portrait of the hapless human spirit in all its melancholy grandeur, and of the human will in all its hopeless but incessant aspiration: fleeting glory as the rarely ripening fruit of overwhelming and chronic defeat. It is this pervasive sadness that makes baseball’s moments of bliss so piercing; this encircling gloom that sheds such iridescent beauty on those impossible triumphs over devastating odds so amazing when accomplished by one of the game’s gods (Mays running down that ridiculously long fly at the Polo Grounds in the 1954 World Series, Ted Williams going deep in his very last appearance at the plate); and so heartbreakingly poignant when accomplished by a journeyman whose entire playing career will be marked by only one such instant of transcendence (Ron Swoboda’s diving catch off Brooks Robinson’s bat in the 1969 Series)…

IN FULL.

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No toolbars or junk. No clicking Next. Just the apps you want, fast.

Ninite in action

1. Pick your favorite software below.

2. Click "Get Installer" and run it.

3. You’re done!

No Toolbars

Ninite says "No" to toolbars

and other junk.

No Clicking

Ninite automates installers offscreen.

via Ninite Easy PC Setup – Silent Unattended Install Multiple Programs At Once.

Today in the U.S. there are 77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social workers, 105,000 mental health counselors, 50,000 marriage and family therapists, 17,000 nurse psychotherapists, and 30,000 life coaches. Most of these professionals spend their days helping people cope with everyday life problems, not true mental illness. More than half the patients in therapy don’t even qualify for a psychiatric diagnosis. In addition, there are 400,000 nonclinical social workers and 220,000 substance abuse counselors working outside the official mental health system yet offering clients informal psychological advice nonetheless.

Compare this to the late-1940s, when there were only 2,500 clinical psychologists and 30,000 social workers in the U.S. Marriage and family therapists numbered less than 500 in those days, counselors worked mostly in vocational guidance, and nurse psychotherapists and life coaches didn’t even exist. We’ve experienced a more than 100-fold increase in the number of professional caregivers over the last 60 years, although the general population has only doubled.

What accounts for this great change? True, professional caregivers aggressively promote themselves, but that fails to explain why their services are in such high demand. For example, restrictions on who can “care” creates a shortage that credentialed caregivers eagerly fill. Yet life coaches, who lack licenses and a state-awarded monopoly, have increased at the same rate as licensed caregivers.

People want to be able to go about their daily lives with the knowledge that someone is there for them.

IN FULL

Poetry Daily: Today’s Poem.

James Robertes, William Shakespeare – Hamlet — Borrowed, Crawled and Pythoned

On this day in 1602, printer James Robertes entered in the Stationers’ Register, "A booke called the Revenge of Hamlett Prince Denmarke as yt was latelie Acted by the Lord Chamberleyne his servants.”Shakespeare seems to have written Hamlet about 1600; more certain is that two of the Chamberlain’s Men in the original cast at the Globe playhouse were Richard Burbage, as Hamlet, and Shakespeare, probably as the Ghost and perhaps as Claudius, too — a casting economy which might have given Gertrude a start.

(Continued)

Greene County, Georgia. Photo by Jack Delano.

A prisoner dancing while another plays the guitar at a prison camp.

via via

Juvenilia (Yale Series of Younger Poets #104) by Ken Chen – Powell’s Books.

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BS Top – Shenon Wikileaks Afghanistan The massive dump of U.S. military secrets about the Afghan war is believed to have come from the detained Army intel analyst. Philip Shenon reports he may not have been the lone leaker. Plus, the seven most shocking secrets from the WikiLeaks files.

A 22-year-old Army intellige

via Wikileaks Afghan Files: Did Accused Leaker Bradley Manning Act Alone? – The Daily Beast.

Techmeme.

Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was “unprofessional,” and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her under-age students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree. Snyder sued, arguing that the university had violated her First Amendment rights by penalizing her for her (perfectly legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was a public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of public concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected speech

More

Faulkner speaks! Fifty years after he spent two years as writer in residence at the University of Virginia, the school has posted online recordings of the two addresses, the dozen readings, and the 1,400 questions that students, faculty, and interested townspeople of Charlottesville, Va., posed to the author. For Faulkner fans, these 28 hours of talking and reading are Christmas in July.

read here.

Let’s be honest, almost everybody is superstitious about something. Maybe just a "lucky shirt" you wear to job interviews, or maybe you spent all weekend making sure that voodoo doll of your ex looked just right before ramming pins into its crotch.

Where do superstitions come from? And could their origins be more logical than we think? Is it possible that the superstitious old neighbor of yours who runs off black cats and wails over broken mirrors isn’t retarded?

Well… sort of.

READ HERE.

Until now, this country has been guilty only by association in the illegal transfer of prisoners. But the covert rendition of a Moroccan man by MI5 agents suggests that the practice was central to Britain’s ‘war on terror’

read here.

The recent press coverage of YouTube’s fifth anniversary virtually ignored the fact that it has also become an integral tool for jihadists worldwide. A case in point is the latest Anwar Al-Awlaki video, posted directly to YouTube on May 23, 2010. In it, he calls on Muslims throughout the world to “participate in this Jihad against America.” This video can now be seen on hundreds of YouTube pages.

IN FULL.

The deaths of a climate scientist and of meaningful climate-change legislation bode poorly for a prosperous energy-independent future.

READ HERE

…”If you’ve only got two-thirds as much time in your life as someone in a different neighbourhood, then all of your decisions about when to start having babies, when to become a grandparent and so on have to be foreshortened by a third,”says Nettle. “So it shouldn’t really surprise us that women in the poorest areas are having their babies at around 20 compared to 30 in the richest ones. That’s exactly what you would expect…

MORE

India Unveils $35 Tablet Computer

DEVELOPING: The fire alarm system on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig was disabled prior to the catastrophic explosion that caused the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a rig worker told the Wall Street Journal.

[or: who needs deep sea drilling in the Gulf?]

In Asia, a Gulf’s Worth of Oil Awaits Transport
By ANDREW E. KRAMER-NY Times, today

ATYRAU, Kazakhstan — Even as the petroleum industry continues drilling in the Gulf of Mexico at considerable expense and risk, a single field here in Central Asia stands ready to produce two-thirds as much oil each day as the entire gulf does, with less danger to the environment.

But 30 years after its discovery, this field, known as the Tengiz, is still running at only about half speed. Blame geopolitics, not geology.

The problem with the Tengiz field, whose lead operator is the American company Chevron, is not a matter of extracting the oil. More than 100 working wells have already been successfully drilled into the scrub brush desert of western Kazakhstan, near the Caspian Sea.

The challenge is getting the oil to the market.

The Tengiz field, one of the world’s largest known petroleum reservoirs, is tied to a 935-mile pipeline to the Black Sea that the Russian government has declined for years to expand. That refusal has held even though Chevron is a minority partner in the Russian-led pipeline, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, or C.P.C., which agreed a dozen years ago to more than double its carrying capacity when demand required. (Continued)

go here