“Yeah Blair, what are you doing?” Bush asks.
What are either of them doing? Do they know?
What’s for sure is, they didn’t know the microphone was on until Blair found it and muted it.
More interesting at the G8 summit lunch in Russia than George W. Bush’s profane discussion of irony was the lowly fealty of Tony Blair throughout the conversation.
After Bush says “What about Kofi?…I don’t like the sequence of it. His attitude is basically ceasefire and everything is settled…,” Blair responds with “Yeah, no. I think…” and stammers on from there about the need to get “international visits agreed.”

Standing near Bush and leaning over, Blair hopefully proclaims “I am perfectly happy to try to see what [inaudible], but you need that done quickly–“

Bush explains: “–Well she’s going, I think Condi’s gonna go pretty soon…I told her your offer too.”
“It’s only if…if she needs the ground prepared, as it were,” Blair graciously deflects after a few seconds.
After Blair says that Condi (Rice) has “got to succeed as it were” in a diplomacy mission (as opposed to him), Bush then moves the topic to Syria, and says “See, the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbollah stop doing this sh** and it’s over.”

Blair later backs Bush up on Kofi (Annan): “What does he think? He thinks if Lebanon turns out fine, if we get a solution in Israel and Palestine, Iraq goes in the right way.”
The way that Blair turns the disaster in Iraq into something so peripheral is downright cowardly. How much chance, the British people should ask him, that Iraq “goes in the right way,” given present trends?

In this war between Hizbollah (and Hamas, and Lebanon) and Israel, that Bush and Blair failed to provide necessary leadership in pushing for a ceasefire is by now obvious, with or without the recording of their conversation.

Bush and Blair are both now highly unpopular in their own countries. Their war for Iraq is an historic disaster, and no amount of round-the-clock coverage of the war going on just to the west of it can obscure the fact that it remains the deadlier conflict, even over the last week.
Now the dark specter of further war looms over the paranoid rants of neoconservative commentators and other assorted Iran haters and Syria bashers. These people have a truly hateful, worthless ideology that is now preaching the predictable–that punishment has come upon those with insufficient faith in the cult of militarism and forced “democratization.” Not that such a critique could apply to Tony Blair.

So what of a ceasefire now? Well, according to the AP from papers on Monday, Bush hasn’t acquired much of a taste for one:
“However, White House national security spokesman Frederick Jones said after the meeting that “our position on an immediate cease-fire is well known and has not changed.“”

On the other hand, at least one foreign and commonwealth official is applying serious pressure, while the Blairite spin management trys to deflect the impact–soon they are claiming that he “had not joined calls for an immediate ceasefire.”
According the Guardian in Britain:

“Mr Howells ignored the diplomatic convention that he tone down his comments because of his presence in the host country, saying the Israelis “have got to think very hard about those children who are dying.”
…
Yesterday, in an interview in the northern Israeli city of Haifa, Mr Howells said the Israelis
“know only too well it is not enough just to seek a military victory, they have got to win a wider political battle. That means they have got to think very hard about those children who are dying. It is not enough to say it is unfortunate collateral damage. Every person who has got a mobile phone, every person who can take a photograph of somebody being blown to bits, or a child with a limb missing, is a reporter now”.
At some stage, he said, the Israelis had around 60 jets flying over the Mediterranean, readying for strikes in Lebanon. “I think it is something the whole world should worry a great deal about,” he said.
Mrs Beckett, interviewed on BBC Radio Four yesterday, insisted there was no difference between the line espoused by Downing Street and herself, and Mr Howells. “I think basically what he is saying is that Israel has been saying all the way through that they are targeting Hizbullah. And there are bound to be problems because Hizbullah have entrenched themselves in relatively speaking ordinary neighbourhoods – not totally, but to a very large extent,” Mrs Beckett said.
“What Kim is saying is that targeting Hizbullah is one thing and one understands why it is being done, but it is not working in the way that Israel had hoped and claimed that it was. And so that’s why we have to continue to … urge recognition of that danger on Israel.”
Asked whether Israel had heeded calls for restraint, Mrs Beckett said she would not disclose private conversations with Israelis.
Foreign Office diplomats confirmed over the weekend there were significant differences between No 10 and the Foreign Office, and within the Foreign Office about how to respond to the conflict. No 10 also claimed that Mr Howells was merely calling for restraint all round and had not joined calls for an immediate ceasefire.”
So it does not appear that Bush and Blair have made any substantive change to their views since their G8 luncheon talk, despite the continuing casualties with hundereds of Lebanese dead and dozens of Isrealis dead already thus far in the war. They made the wrong call about how much war Iraq needed and they are miscalculating again, while Kim Howells gets to make the visit Blair asked Bush permission to take.
[photo: AFP]

How quickly has Minnesota Congressman Gil Gutknecht reversed course on his views of the Iraq war? According to the Washington Post:

“The evolving Republican message on the war contrasts with the strong rhetoric used by House and Senate Republicans recently in opposing a deadline for withdrawal from Iraq. During a debate last month, Gutknecht intoned, “Members, now is not the time to go wobbly.” This week, he conceded “I guess I didn’t understand the situation,” saying that a partial troop withdrawal now would “send a clear message to the Iraqis that the next step is up to you.””

How does it work, that one month he was helping to spread Republican lies and intimidation about the war, but now he expects to be taken completely seriously in arguing differently? Does he really now, as Gutknecht implies, “understand the situation?” Or this a sign that mercifully, finally, the political advantages of supporting Iraq withdrawal overpower the bloodlust and bravado of even the stupidest Republican representatives?

Jessica and I had dinner and then stopped by the dance party at 111 Minna in San Francisco on Wednesday, July 19, 2006.

(Book review: The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman, 2005, ISBN 0-374-29288-4)

Reading Thomas Friedman’s book of mangled preaching about the world economy, it becomes clear before long that The World is Flat is like one long, terrible newspaper column whose premise is misguided and whose writer is a charlatan, a moron and an apologist for authoritarianism.

“Yes, China has had a good run for the past twenty-five years,” Friedman states, “and it may make the transition from communism to a more pluralistic system without the wheels coming off. [p. 247]”

Does this transition include events like the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989? It certainly is included in the “good run” he speaks of.

It sometimes seems that Friedman, a New York Times columnist, thinks that America’s economy would work a lot better if the country adopted strategies from Communism. He certainly finds a lot of things right with China’s system, and enlists some of his friends to bolster his point. Here’s Google board member John Doerr:

“‘You talk to the leadership of China, and they are all engineers, and they get what is going on immediately. The Americans don’t, because they’re all lawyers.’ [p. 280]”

Bill Gates met with President Hu of China recently, and in The World is Flat he’s all about that Chinese way—even, or especially, the system of government:

“‘The Chinese have risk taking down, hard work down, education, and when you meet with Chinese politicians, they are all scientists and engineers. You can have a numeric discussion with them—you are never discussing `give me a one-liner to embarrass [my political rivals] with.` You are meeting with an intelligent bureaucracy.’ [p. 281]”

Friedman also offers his own parenthetical remark:

“For a Communist authoritarian system, China does a pretty good job of promoting people on merit. The Mandarin meritocratic culture here still runs very deep [p. 34].” [‘authoritarian’ corrected from ‘authoritarianism’ 7-22-2006]

As far as labor standards, Friedman aims to at least demonstrate his good will, if less than thorough investigation, on the matter. Talking about a place in India, he reports back:

“Although I am sure that there are call centers that are operated like sweatshops, 24/7 is not one of them. [p. 22]”

Friedman makes a false claim about Salt Lake City, where members of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in reality make up about half the city’s population:

“So he based his home reservation system in Salt Lake City, where the vast majority of the women are Mormons… [p. 37]”

The book is filled with frequent nagging that people in America (presumably other than himself) need to study engineering and be fired at the drop of a hat.

A little outsourcing to Russia, and Friedman scrambles for the paranoid interpretation:

“Wait a minute: Didn’t we win the Cold War? If one of America’s premier technology companies feels compelled to meet its engineering needs by going to the broken-down former Soviet Union, where the only thing that seems to work is old-school math and science education, then we’ve got a quiet little crisis on our hands. [p. 274]”

Here Friedman presses the need for lots of firing-ability for companies (like they don’t have that now or something), using dubious reasoning to try to make a point that could either have been made better or didn’t need to be made at all:

“The easier it is to fire someone in a dying industry, the easier it is to hire someone in a rising industry that no one knew would exist five years earlier. [p. 246]”

Why didn’t Friedman focus on the Middle East, about which he claims to be an expert and has previously written books on? Could it have anything to do with his cheerleading for the Iraq War, which has obviously dented his credibility and given the “liberal hawk” label a bad name? When he finally takes a stab at the region, it doesn’t work out very well anyway. What would his old friend, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, make of this patronizing propaganda?:

“The Arab-Muslim peoples have an incredibly rich cultural tradition and civilization, with long periods of success and innovation to draw on for inspiration and example for their young people. They have all the resources necessary for modernization in their own cultural terms, if they want to summon them. [p. 405]”

Apparently one element of modernizing the Middle East, according to Friedman, is keeping
tabs on what’s happening on the village level—by flying unmanned drones over people:

“He explained that a U.S. Predator drone—a small pilotless aircraft with a high-power television camera—was flying over an Iraqi village, in the 24^th MEU’s area of operation, and feeding real-time intelligence images back to his laptop and this flat screen. [p. 39]”

I’m not sure if Friedman thinks the Iraq invasion was done on “their own cultural terms,” or what that exactly is supposed to mean. Often, throughout the book, it is hard to understand what some his arguments are actually supposed to mean. In many cases the serial abuse of the concept described by the book title, “flat,” serves to mangle into nonsense what are otherwise banal or debatable points:

“All of this is going to have to be sorted out anew. The most common disease of the flat world is going to be multiple identity disorder, which is why, if nothing else, political scientists are going to have a field day with the flat world. Political science may turn out to be the biggest growth industry of all in this new era. [p. 201]”

If that is true, engineering majors should take note.

Sometimes the ill-defined jargon cascades into an avalanche of meaningless chatter:

“How does searching fit into the concept of collaboration? I call it ‘in-forming.’ In-forming is the individual’s personal analog to open-sourcing, outsourcing, insourcing, supply-chaining, and offshoring. [p. 153]”

Got it? Try this:

“I call my own version of this approach compassionate flatism. [p. 277]”

Friedman also goes into the two most predictable business school case studies, Wal-Mart and Dell, during the course of the book. First an un-sourced (un-sourcing? Is that one of those new terms we need to remember?) “estimate” about Wal-Mart:

“Thanks to the efficiency of its supply chain alone, Wal-Mart’s cost of goods is estimated to be 5 to 10 percent less than that of most of its competitors. [p. 135]”

Then later, on page 414, Friedman shares a breathless, boring story about his Dell laptop and its demonstrably fine lineage.

After all that, it is hard to take Friedman seriously as an insightful commentator with anything interesting to say, especially considering that he admits that he built the book out of an inexplicable concept and a confirmation bias:

“Unlike Columbus, I didn’t stop with India. After I got home, I decided to keep exploring the East for more signs that the world was flat. [p. 32]”

Many of Friedman’s comments look, a little more than a year after publication, misguided or stupid. In this argument he seems not to realize that, rather inconveniently for his premise, India is indeed developing and testing ballistic missiles (although recent unsuccessful tests of missiles by India might even deflate some of Friedman’s hype of India’s scientific progress):

“But today, alas, there is no missile threat coming from India. [p. 278]”

Here, Friedman discusses the price of oil, “the path to reform,” and the unrealistic construct of “energy independence”:

“If President Bush made energy independence his moon shot, in one fell swoop he would dry up revenue for terrorism, force Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia onto the path of reform—which they will never do with $50-a-barrel oil—strengthen the dollar, and improve his own standing in Europe by doing something huge to reduce global warming. [p. 283]”

So what does he think will happen with oil at over $73 a barrel, now?

In the book, Tom Friedman’s attitude toward the rich and powerful is very much like the “junior media advisor” of Colin Powell that he quotes:

“‘My friends were all impressed,’ she said. ‘Little me, and I’m talking to the secretary of state!’ [p. 213]”

As for the history part of the subtitle in The World is Flat, this segment offers part of the narrative:

“It wasn’t only Americans and Europeans who joined the people of the Soviet Empire in celebrating the fall of the wall—and claiming credit for it. Someone else was raising a glass—not of champagne but of thick Turkish coffee. His name was Osama bin Laden and he had a different narrative. [p. 55]”

At the end of the day, Friedman is a guy who talks (in this book) about his favorite TV commercials. Is that who you want to tell you the history of the 21^st century?

On Mission Street near 3rd Street in San Francisco, a handful of people wait in line to watch cream puffs made in front of them. Maybe Krispy Kreme should move in–you know, it makes me think of the “Latte” cafe that I saw a few blocks earlier: inside, it was a doughnut shop.

The series of events: abductions of Israeli soldiers by Hamas and Hizbollah, the Israeli air assaults on Gaza and Lebanon, the rockets fired by Hizbollah [corrected from ‘Hamas’: 7-17-2006] into Haifa and other parts of northern Israel, the Israeli artillery responding–all of these happenings and more now amount to the larger picture–a new Middle East war.
America supplies Israel with enormous airpower, and war jets (F-15s and the like) are able to destroy parts of large, visible targets like the Lebanon airport and the Hizbollah TV headquarters. But how much does this really further Israel’s war aims, and how much does it give Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his cabinet an exaggerated sense of power?
Did Israel overplay its hand due to its military reach and fall into a dangerous provocation? The attack on the airport near Beirut was followed by an attack on an Israeli warship off the coast, which has reported four sailors missing, Reuters writes, and continues:

“Israeli media have said the ship was hit by an airborne drone packed with explosives late on Friday. The army said the vessel was badly damaged and had been towed back to Israel.”

Hizbollah is definitely using some serious hardware in their attacks, perhaps with some connivance of official powers in Lebannon. Long thought of by some as a Shia proxy of Iran, it may have backing from the Iranians on some weaponry. If that is true, then bombing oil tankers and U.S. Naval vessels in the straits of the Persian Gulf would be like shooting, say, shooting fish in the barrel, by the way. Regardless, war mongers have found the war planets (Mars and stuff..) in line or something, and are cheering for more blood, like “Moonbat” Michael Ledeen here:

“The only way we are going to win this war is to bring down those regimes in Tehran and Damascus, and they are not going to fall as a result of fighting between their terrorist proxies in Gaza and Lebanon on the one hand, and Israel on the other. Only the United States can accomplish it.”

America has enough to deal with right now, like overcoming the moralizing pretensions of chicken-hawks like Joe Lieberman and George W. Bush and withdrawing from Iraq (that, at least, is the view of this chicken-dove: that while America has unleashed a nightmare in Iraq, that is not what it was trying to do; so now, I do not envision that American power is working toward a compounded nightmare, however..you see where I am going with this), and any suggestion of attacking Iran or Syria because of this new war by the Mediteranean is stupid and absurd. Those trying to draw America into a third front (after Afghanistan and Iraq) should reconsider.
As for those directly involved in this mess–Israel, Hizbollah controlled southern Lebanon (and it’s hard to tell how much else of the country) and Hamas-administered Palestine–they should all realize that last month’s angry stalemate is better than today’s war. But many in all three places may doubt that, and those in Gaza must be wondering what all that talk of “withdrawal” was all about. But for all these groups, those playing them off each other are complicit in what is happening, including the attacks on civilians and disproportionate escalations.
This war is a proxy war to some extent–none of these groups could fund their military or paramilitary operations on their own, which sends a clear message: that all regional powers should stop arming them.
[photo: AP]

Neil Young’s new album, Living with War, is a remarkable rock album with a bold political agenda and a patriotic tone. Where it is easy to hear criticism of the Bush administration in 2004’s Greendale after a few listens, ‘Living With War’ proclaims “Let’s impeach the president for lying/Thank God/Thank God” on and goes on from there. Where ‘Greendale”s “Leave the Driving [to us]” snarked, ‘Living With War”s “Restless Consumer” attacks without quarter: “Don’t need no Madison Avenue War/…/Don’t need no more lies”.
The songwriting in ‘Living With War’, the rock guitar with Young’s distorted chords and solos accompanied by a good band and occasional backup singers or horns makes for an outstanding collection of rock songs, enjoyable for Neil Young‘s fans but accessible to any fan of rock. “Listening to Bob Dylan singing, in 1963/Watching the flags of freedom flying.”
Sometimes the words can seem powerful set to music, but Young’s lyrics about Iraq are devestating, really because of the weight of the issue and the starkness he portrays:
“Back in the days of shock and awe/We came to liberate them all/History was a cruel judge of overconfidence/…/Thousands buried in the ground.”

Germany had drawn praise for their attacking style, for their now-popular coach Jürgen Klinsmann, and for star forward Miroslav Klose’s goals. But after a scoreless regular time and well into the second half of overtime, Italy scored a goal off of a few sharp passes in the penalty area, then gained another point from their feared counterattack right after to finish the game off 2-0.
Italy is a highly-skilled team that was every bit a match for the very strong German side. They will probably enter the final game as the favorites, given their impressive win and strong performance throughout the World Cup. The other team in the final won a close and difficult match against Portugal that saw a fearsome corner kick very near the end as Portugal tried relentlessly for the equalizer, even seeing their goalie make a feed toward the goal from probably only 35 yards out. But Portugal could never overcome the one goal scored by Zinédine Zidane on a penalty kick in the first half. France has seen an amazing performance from their captain in terms of skills and leadership. Portugal did not create enough chances against France but they had had an impressive run, advancing to the semifinals after a hotly argued game against England in the previous round. England striker Wayne Rooney and Portugal star Cristiano Ronaldo were at odds early in the second half, culminating in a kick toward the groin from Rooney and a slow-developing red card from the referee. As the English search for villains, they have pointed a lot of fingers in many directions, including Rooney, departing coach Sven-Goran Eriksson, and David Beckham, who has announced that he is stepping down as England’s team captain.
[photos: German fans by AFP; Zinédine Zidane by AP]

Jessica and I met some friends in North Beach and we had some food and wine in one of the small places on Grant. It was a very nice evening at the small restaurant, with good red wine and lively conversation and a flamenco guitarist playing in the background. I walked outside for a while at one point and took a few pictures from Telegraph Hill.

Vicente Fox has seen one anti-climatic failure after another during his term of office. His anointed successor, Felipe Calderon, had been leading in the polls for president. (The PRI has failed to field a successful comeback candidate–Roberto Madrazo looks out of the running.) Now Calderon, the PAN candidate, appears to be in a too-close-to-call finish to the race with PRD candidate Andres Manuel López Obrador.
Now the question for Mexican voters comes down to a judgment on Fox’s term. His six years in office started with great fanfare and expectations. In the first months of George W. Bush’s first term Mexico was treated like the most important ally. It is hard to believe that now given the tensions between the countries, mostly instigated by right-wing Republicans but reaching to areas such as support for the Iraq invasion (Mexico did not give it). The international record of Fox in other matters includes making enemies with Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez recently and a May 2004 diplomatic row with Cuba, traditionally a country with good or decent relations with Mexico.
Domestically, Fox has never managed to gain a legislative majority for his PAN party and has not passed many of the reforms he came in promising. Would Calderon do any better in a country that seems unlikely to elect a right-leaning majority any time soon? The sale of oil has brought revenues, and Fox has overseen some economic progress. But just as Brazil’s Lula was treated like a bogeyman before his election, many publications like to portray Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor, as a left-wing revolutionary. The New Republic went to its normal depths by portraying Obrador as a fire-breathing, pistol-slinging Tobasco comrade cowboy, while The Economist hissed thusly on Obrador’s debate performance: “His man kept his sometimes volatile temper under tight control. But he seemed punch-drunk at times, oddly swaying back and forth. Having been the frontrunner for so long, he seems to have forgotten how to play the challenger.“
When a man has enemies like these, who call him “angry” because of their anger at his relatively positive and optimistic plans for a more progressive agenda in a country still dealing with large areas of poverty and crime, it is time for the people of Mexico to make him their president.
[photo: AP]