A trillion hours a year. That's a lot of brain drain.....
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Thursday, March 27, 2008
How have we allowed this to happen?
Taking stock of the war on terror
Not only has America not defeated al-Qaida -- but now terrorism has gone viral.
By Mark Danner
Mar. 27, 2008 | To contemplate a prewar map of Baghdad -- as I do the one before me, with sectarian neighborhoods traced out in blue and red and yellow -- is to look back on a lost Baghdad, a Baghdad of our dreams. My map of 2003 is colored mostly a rather neutral yellow, indicating the "mixed" neighborhoods of the city, predominant just five years ago. To take up a contemporary map after this is to be confronted by a riot of bright color: Shiite blue has moved in irrevocably from the east of the Tigris; Sunni red has fled before it, as Shiite militias pushed the Sunnis inexorably west toward Abu Ghraib and Anbar province, and nearly out of the capital itself. And everywhere, it seems, the pale yellow of those mixed neighborhoods is gone, obliterated in the months and years of sectarian war.
I start with those maps out of a lust for something concrete as I grope about in the abstract, struggling to quantify the unquantifiable. How indeed to "take stock" of the "war on terror"? Such a strange beast it is, like one of those mythological creatures that is part goat, part lion, part man. Let us take a moment and identify each of these parts. For if we look closely at its misshapen contours, we can see in the war on terror:
Part anti-guerrilla mountain struggle, as in Afghanistan;
Part shooting war-cum-occupation-cum-counterinsurgency, as in Iraq;
Part intelligence, spy vs. spy covert struggle, fought quietly -- "on the dark side," as Vice President Dick Cheney put it shortly after 9/11 -- in a vast territory stretching from the southern Philippines to the Maghreb and the Straits of Gibraltar;
And finally the war on terror is part, perhaps its largest part, virtual war -- an ongoing, permanent struggle, and in its ongoing political utility not wholly unlike Orwell's famous world war between Eurasia, East Asia and Oceania that is unbounded in space and in time, never ending, always expanding.
President Bush announced this virtual war three days after Sept. 11, 2001, in the National Cathedral in Washington, appropriately enough, when he told Americans that "our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil."
Astonishing words from a world leader -- declaring that he would "rid the world of evil." Just in case anyone thought he might have misheard the sweep of the president's ambition, his national security strategy, issued a few months later, was careful to specify that "the enemy is not a single political regime or person or religion or ideology. The enemy is terrorism -- premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents."
Again, a remarkable statement, as many commentators were quick to point out; for declaring war on "terrorism" -- a technique of war, not an identifiable group or target -- was simply unprecedented and, indeed, bewildering in its implications. As one counterinsurgency specialist remarked to me, "Declaring war on terrorism is like declaring war on air power."
Six and a half years later, evil is still with us and so is terrorism. In my search for a starting point in taking stock of those years, I find myself in the sad position of pondering fondly what have become two of the saddest words in the English language: Donald Rumsfeld.
Remember him? In late October 2003, when I was in Baghdad watching the launch of the so-called Ramadan Offensive -- five simultaneous suicide bombings, beginning with one at the headquarters of the Red Cross, the fiery aftermath of which I witnessed -- then Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was in Washington still denying that an insurgency was under way in Iraq. He was also drafting one of his famous "snowflakes," those late-night memorandums that he used to rain down on his terrorized Pentagon employees.
This particular snowflake, dated Oct. 16, 2003, and titled "Global War on Terrorism," reads almost poignantly now, as the defense secretary gropes to define the war that it has become his lot to fight: "Today we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror," he wrote. "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"
Rumsfeld asks the right question, for beyond the obvious metrics like the number of terrorist attacks worldwide -- which have gone up steadily, and precipitously, since 9/11 (for 2006, the last year for which State Department figures are available, by nearly 29 percent, to 14,338) -- and the somewhat subtler ones like the percentage of those in the Middle East and the broader Muslim world who hold unfavorable opinions of the United States (which soared in the wake of the invasion of Iraq and has fallen back just a bit since); apart from these sorts of numbers that, for various and obvious reasons, are problematic in themselves, the key question is: How do you "take stock" of the war on terror? At the end of the day, as Secretary Rumsfeld perceived, this is a political judgment, for in its essence it has to do with the evolution of public opinion and the readiness of those with certain political sympathies to move from holding those opinions to taking action in support of them.
What "metrics" do we have to take account of the progress of this "evolution"? Well, none really -- but we do have the guarded opinions of intelligence agencies, notably this rather explicit statement from the U.S. government's National Intelligence Estimate of April 2006, titled "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States," which reads in part: "Although we cannot measure the extent of the spread with precision" -- those metrics again -- "a large body of all-source reporting indicates that activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although still a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in both number and geographic distribution. If this trend continues, threats to U.S. interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide."
Dark words, and yet that 2006 report looks positively sanguine when set beside two reports from a year later, both leaked in July 2007. A National Intelligence Estimate titled "The Terrorist Threat to the US Homeland" noted that al-Qaida had managed to -- in the summary in the Washington Post -- reestablish "its central organization, training infrastructure and lines of global communication" over the previous two years and had placed the United States in a "heightened threat environment ... The U.S. Homeland will face a persistent and evolving terrorist threat over the next three years."
This NIE -- the combined opinion of the country's major intelligence agencies -- only confirmed a report that had been leaked a couple of days before from the National Counterterrorism Center, grimly titled "Al Qaeda Better Positioned to Strike the West." This report concluded that al-Qaida, in the words of one official who briefed its contents to a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, was "considerably operationally stronger than a year ago," "has regrouped to an extent not seen since 2001," and has managed to create "the most robust training program since 2001, with an interest in using European operatives." Another intelligence official, summarizing the report to the Associated Press, offered a blunt and bleak conclusion: Al-Qaida, he said, is "showing greater and greater ability to plan attacks in Europe and the United States."
Given these grim results, one must return to one of the more poignant passages in Secretary Rumsfeld's "snowflake," released to flutter down on his poor Pentagon subordinates back in those blinkered days of October 2003. Having wondered about the metrics, and what could and could not be measured in the war on terror, the secretary of defense posed a critical question: "Does the U.S. need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists?"
For me, the poignancy comes from Rumsfeld's failure to see that, in effect, he and his boss had already "fashioned" the "broad, integrated plan" he was asking for. It was called the Iraq war.
That the Iraq war is "fueling the spread of the jihadist movement," as the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate put it, has been a truism of intelligence reporting from the war's beginning -- indeed, from before it began. "The Iraq conflict has become the cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating support for the global jihadist movement" -- this point from the 2006 NIE is truly an example of a "chronicle of a war foretold" (to borrow from García Márquez). In fact, that NIE cites the "Iraq jihad" as the second of four factors "fueling the jihadist movement," along with "entrenched grievances, such as corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation, and a sense of powerlessness"; "the slow pace of real and sustained economic, social, and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations"; and "pervasive anti-US sentiment among most Muslims."
Any attempt to "take stock of the war on terror" must begin with the sad fact that the story of that war has largely become the story of the war in Iraq as well, and the story of the Iraq war (all discussion of the so-called surge aside) has been pretty much an unmitigated disaster for U.S. security and for America's position in the Middle East and the world. Which means that telling the story of the war on terror, half a dozen years on -- and taking stock of that war -- merges inevitably with the sad tale of how that so-called war, strange and multiform beast that it is, became subsumed in a bold and utterly incompetent attempt to occupy and remake a major Arab country.
That broader story comes down to a matter of two strategies and two generals: Gen. Osama bin Laden and Gen. George W. Bush. General bin Laden, from the start, has been waging a campaign of indirection and provocation: That is, bin Laden's ultimate targets are the so-called apostate regimes of the Muslim world -- foremost among them, the Mubarak regime in Egypt and the House of Saud on the Arabian peninsula -- which he hopes to overthrow and supplant with a new caliphate.
For bin Laden, these are the "near enemies," which rely for their existence on the vital support of the "far enemy," the United States. By attacking this far enemy, beginning in the mid-1990s, bin Laden hoped both to lead vast numbers of new Muslim recruits to join al-Qaida and to weaken U.S. support for the Mubarak and Saud regimes. He hoped to succeed, through indirection, in "cutting the strings of the puppets," eventually leading to the collapse of those regimes.
In this sense, 9/11 proved the culmination of a long-term strategy, following on a series of attacks of increasing lethality during the mid- to late 1990s in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Nairobi, Kenya; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; and Aden, Yemen. The 9/11 attackers used as their climactic weapon not transcontinental airliners or box cutters but the television set -- for the image was the true weapon that day, the overwhelmingly powerful image of the towers collapsing -- and used it not only to "dirty the face of imperial power" (Menachim Begin's description of what terrorists do) but also to provoke the United States to strike deep into the Islamic world.
It is clear from various documents and from the assassination, days before 9/11, of Afghan Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Masood, that bin Laden expected this American counterstrike to come in Afghanistan, which would have given al-Qaida the opportunity to do to the remaining superpower what it had done -- so the myth went, anyway -- to the Soviet Union a dozen years before: trap its arrogant, hulking military in a quagmire and, through patient, unrelenting guerrilla warfare, force it to withdraw in ignominious defeat. In the event, of course, the Americans, by relying on air bombardment and on the ground forces of their Afghan allies in the Northern Alliance, avoided the quagmire of Afghanistan -- at least in that initial phase in the fall of 2001 -- and instead offered bin Laden a much greater gift. In March 2003, they invaded Iraq, a far more important Islamic country and one much closer to the heart of Arab concerns.
Why did Gen. George W. Bush do it? Lacking in legitimacy and on the political defensive, the president and his administration moved instantly to transform the war on terror into an ideological crusade, one implicitly crafted as a new Cold War.
"They hate our freedoms," Bush told Congress and the nation a few days after the 9/11 attacks. "Our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with one another ... We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions -- by abandoning every value except the will to power -- they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies."
Drawing a lurid picture of a new Cold War, with terrorists playing the role of communists, Bush rallied the country behind the war on terror, obliterating the subtleties of the struggle against al-Qaida and with them the critique of U.S. Middle East policy implicit in the assault. "This is not about our policies," as Henry Kissinger put it soon after the attack. "This is about our existence." In this view, the attack came not because of what the United States actually did in the Middle East -- what regimes it supported, for example -- but because of what it stood for: the universalist aspirations it symbolized. Iraq quickly became part of this crusade, the great struggle to protect, and now to spread, freedom and democracy.
One can argue long and hard about the roots of the Iraq war, but in the end one must tease out a set of realist compulsions (centrally concerned with the restoration of American credibility and American deterrent power) and idealist aspirations (shaped around the so-called democratic domino effect). The realist case was well summarized, once again, by Kissinger, who, when asked by a Bush speechwriter why he supported the Iraq war, replied: "Because Afghanistan wasn't enough." In the conflict with radical Islam, he went on, "they want to humiliate us and we have to humiliate them." The Iraq war was essential in order to make the point that "we're not going to live in the world that they want for us."
Ron Suskind, in his fine book "The One Percent Doctrine," puts what is essentially the same point in "geostrategic" terms, reporting that, in meetings of the National Security Council in the months after the 9/11 attacks, the main concern "was to make an example of [Saddam] Hussein, to create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States."
Set alongside this was the "democratic tsunami" that was to follow the shock-and-awe triumph over Saddam. It would sweep through the Middle East from Iraq to Iran and thence to Syria and Palestine. ("The road to Jerusalem" -- so ran the neoconservative gospel at the time -- "runs through Baghdad.") As I wrote in October 2002, five months before the Iraq war was launched, this vision was detailed and well elaborated:
Behind the notion that an American intervention will make of Iraq "the first Arab democracy," as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz put it, lies a project of great ambition. It envisions a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq -- secular, middle-class, urbanized, rich with oil -- that will replace the autocracy of Saudi Arabia as the key American ally in the Persian Gulf, allowing the withdrawal of United States troops from the kingdom. The presence of a victorious American Army in Iraq would then serve as a powerful boost to moderate elements in neighboring Iran, hastening that critical country's evolution away from the mullahs and toward a more moderate course. Such an evolution in Tehran would lead to a withdrawal of Iranian support for Hezbollah and other radical groups, thereby isolating Syria and reducing pressure on Israel. This undercutting of radicals on Israel's northern borders and within the West Bank and Gaza would spell the definitive end of Yasir Arafat and lead eventually to a favorable solution of the Arab-Israeli problem.
This is a vision of great sweep and imagination: comprehensive, prophetic, evangelical. In its ambitions, it is wholly foreign to the modesty of containment, the ideology of a status-quo power that lay at the heart of American strategy for half a century. It means to remake the world, to offer to a political threat a political answer. It represents a great step on the road toward President Bush's ultimate vision of "freedom's triumph over all its age-old foes."
One can identify two factors underlying this vision: first, the great enthusiasm for a moralistic foreign policy based on universalized principles and democratic reform that dated back to containment's main rival, the "rollback" movement of the 1950s, and that had been revivified by the thrilling series of Eastern European revolutions of the late 1980s and by scenes of popular, American-aided democratic triumph (as it was then thought to be) in Afghanistan; and, second, the recognition that terrorism, at the end of the day, was a political problem that arose from a calcified authoritarian order in the Middle East and that only a dose of "creative destabilization" could shake up that order. "Transforming the Middle East," in Condoleezza Rice's words, "is the only guarantee that it will no longer produce ideologies of hatred that lead men to fly airplanes into buildings in New York and Washington."
The latter perception -- that terrorism as it struck the United States arose from political factors and that it could be confronted and defeated only with a political response -- strikes me as incontestable. The problem the administration faced, or rather didn't want to face, was that the calcified order that lay at the root of the problem was the very order that, for nearly six decades, had been shaped, shepherded and sustained by the United States. We see an explicit acknowledgment of this in the "Bletchley II" report drafted after 9/11 at Defense Department urging by a number of intellectuals close to the administration: "The general analysis," one of its authors told the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, "was that Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where most of the hijackers came from, were the key, but the problems there are intractable. Iran is more important ... But Iran was similarly difficult to envision dealing with. But Saddam Hussein was different, weaker, more vulnerable."
In this sense, many of the Bush administration's leading Iraq war backers constituted a kind of guerrilla force within the U.S. government, fighting against a long-standing strategic alignment in the Middle East. This guerrilla status, which defined many of the government's most knowledgeable Middle East hands as enemies to be isolated and ignored, helps to account, at least in part, for a great many of the extraordinary incompetencies and disasters of the war itself. That the roots of the war lie in stark opposition to established U.S. policy also helps explain the central conundrum of the current U.S. strategic position in Iraq and the Middle East. This was defined for me with typical concision and aplomb by Ahmed Chalabi in Baghdad last year. "The American tragedy in Iraq," said Chalabi, "is that your friends in Iraq are allied with your enemies in the region, and your enemies in Iraq are allied with your friends in the region."
Chalabi's concision and wit are admirable (and typical); but his point, once you look at the map, is obvious. The United States has made possible the rise to power in Iraq of a Shiite government that is allied with its major geopolitical antagonist in the region, the Islamic Republic of Iran. And the United States has been fighting with great persistence and distinctly mixed results a Sunni insurgency that is allied with the Saudis, the Jordanians and its other longtime friends among the traditional Sunni autocracies of the Gulf.
This is another way of saying that the U.S. policy built on the famous meeting between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and King ibn Saud aboard Roosevelt's cruiser on the Great Bitter Lake near the end of World War II -- a policy that envisioned a vital, mutually beneficial and enduring alliance between the Saudis and the Americans -- having been put in grave question by the Saudi insurgents at the controls of those mighty airliners of Sept. 11, now smashed full on into the strategic assault perpetrated by the Bush administration insurgents led by Paul Wolfowitz and his associates. Their "creative destabilization" was aimed not just at Saddam Hussein's Iraq, but at more than half a century of American policy in the Middle East.
Al-Qaida, opportunistic as always, was willing to play this game, seizing on the occupation of Iraq as the golden opportunity it most certainly was and focusing on the Shiite-Sunni divide on which U.S. policy was foundering. The late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's famous intercepted letter to Ayman al-Zawahiri and bin Laden, in which the insurgent leader of al-Qaida in Mesopotamia told the al-Qaida potentates -- the front office, as it were -- that his aim in Iraq was to "awaken the sleeping Sunnis" by launching a vast bombing campaign against the "Shiite heretic," describes precisely both the national and the regional strategy: "If we manage to draw them into the terrain of partisan war, it will be possible to tear the Sunnis away from their heedlessness, for they will feel the weight of the imminence of danger."
This is a strategy that, after the bombing of the revered al-Askari mosque and shrine in Samarra in February 2006, bore terrible fruit. My map that shows divisions running through Baghdad will show, if one zooms out, those same divisions running through Iraq and beyond its borders. Like the former Yugoslavia, Iraq is a nation that gathers within itself the cultural and sectarian fault lines of the region; the Sunni-Shiite divide running through Iraq in effect runs through the entire Middle East. The United States, in choosing this place to stage its democratic revolution, could hardly have done al-Qaida a better favor.
At this moment, the Iraq war is at a stalemate. Confronted with a growing threat from those "enemies allied with its friends in the region," the Sunni insurgents, the Bush administration has adopted a practical and typically American strategy: It has bought them. The Americans have purchased the insurgency, hiring its foot soldiers at the rate of $300 per month. The Sunni fighters, once called insurgents, we now refer to as "tribesmen" or "concerned citizens."
This has isolated al-Qaida, a tactical victory. But because these purchased Sunni fighters have not been accepted by the Shiite government -- the allies of our enemies -- the United States has set in motion a policy that will require, to keep violence at current levels, its own permanent presence in the country. This at a time when two in three Americans think the war was a mistake and when both surviving Democratic presidential candidates vow to begin bringing the troops home "on Day One" of a Democratic administration.
On the horizon, after such a withdrawal, is a reignition of the civil war at an even more brutal level, helped by the American rearming of the Sunni forces -- and indeed the American arming of Shiite government forces as well. It is a curious reality, if we look again at the regional map, that the current geostrategic situation in the Middle East resembles nothing so much as the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s, in which the United States, along with Egypt, the Saudis and the Jordanians, supported Saddam Hussein's Iraq in its great war against Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran. We see a similar array of forces today, with these two differences: First, we must move the line of conflict about 200 miles west, shifting it from the Iraq-Iran border to a line running through Baghdad along the Tigris River. Second, the United States is now arming and supporting both sides. And behind the current configuration and the supposed "success of the surge" looms the darkening threat of regionalization -- a regionwide struggle fought over the body of Iraq in the wake of an American withdrawal. It has become, to appropriate a phrase, a very complicated war.
Whether or not this darkest of dark visions comes to pass, that very complicated war in Iraq, as the intelligence analysts and our own eyes tell us, will continue to pay vast dividends into the account of political grievances with which terrorist groups recruit. This has only partly to do with the original al-Qaida itself (or "al-Qaida prime," as some analysts now call it); for however much it has managed to "reconstitute" itself, the true game has moved elsewhere, toward "viral al-Qaida" -- "spontaneous groups of friends," in the words of former CIA analyst and psychiatrist Marc Sageman, "as in [the] Madrid and Casablanca [bombings], who have few links to any central leadership, [who] are generating sometimes very dangerous terrorist operations, notwithstanding their frequent errors and poor training."
While U.S. and allied intelligence agencies have had considerable success attacking the various formal nodes of al-Qaida prime on the Arabian peninsula and elsewhere, those struggles have about them the air of the past; we have really passed into a different era, the era of the amateurs. Today's network is self-organized, Internet reliant and decentralized, dependent not on armies, training or even technology but on desire and political will. And we have ensured, by the way we have fought this forever war, that it is precisely these vital qualities our enemies have in large and growing supply.
So how, finally, do we "take stock of the war on terror"? Let me suggest three words:
1. Fragmentation -- brought about by "creative destabilization," as we see it not only in Iraq but in Lebanon, Palestine and elsewhere in the region;
2. Diminution -- of American prestige, both military and political, and thus of American power;
3. Destruction -- of the political consensus within the United States for a strong global role.
Gaze for a moment at those three words and marvel at how far we have come in half a dozen years.
In September 2001, the United States faced a grave threat. The attacks that have become synonymous with that date were unprecedented in their destructiveness, in their lethality, in the pure apocalyptic shock of their spectacle. But in their aftermath, American policymakers, partly through ideological blindness and preening exaggeration of American power, partly through blindness brought about by political opportunism, made decisions that led to a defeat only their own actions -- that only American power itself -- could have brought about.
A small coven of America's enemies, using the strategy of provocation so familiar in guerrilla warfare, had launched in spectacular fashion on that bright September morning a plan to use the superpower's strength against itself. To use a different metaphor, they were trying to make good on Archimedes' celebrated boast: Having found the perfect lever and place to stand, they proposed to move the Earth. To an extent I am sure even they did not anticipate, in their choice of opponent -- an evangelical, redemptive regime scornful of history and determined to remake the fallen world -- lay the seeds of their success.
This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.
-- By Mark Danner
Not only has America not defeated al-Qaida -- but now terrorism has gone viral.
By Mark Danner
Mar. 27, 2008 | To contemplate a prewar map of Baghdad -- as I do the one before me, with sectarian neighborhoods traced out in blue and red and yellow -- is to look back on a lost Baghdad, a Baghdad of our dreams. My map of 2003 is colored mostly a rather neutral yellow, indicating the "mixed" neighborhoods of the city, predominant just five years ago. To take up a contemporary map after this is to be confronted by a riot of bright color: Shiite blue has moved in irrevocably from the east of the Tigris; Sunni red has fled before it, as Shiite militias pushed the Sunnis inexorably west toward Abu Ghraib and Anbar province, and nearly out of the capital itself. And everywhere, it seems, the pale yellow of those mixed neighborhoods is gone, obliterated in the months and years of sectarian war.
I start with those maps out of a lust for something concrete as I grope about in the abstract, struggling to quantify the unquantifiable. How indeed to "take stock" of the "war on terror"? Such a strange beast it is, like one of those mythological creatures that is part goat, part lion, part man. Let us take a moment and identify each of these parts. For if we look closely at its misshapen contours, we can see in the war on terror:
Part anti-guerrilla mountain struggle, as in Afghanistan;
Part shooting war-cum-occupation-cum-counterinsurgency, as in Iraq;
Part intelligence, spy vs. spy covert struggle, fought quietly -- "on the dark side," as Vice President Dick Cheney put it shortly after 9/11 -- in a vast territory stretching from the southern Philippines to the Maghreb and the Straits of Gibraltar;
And finally the war on terror is part, perhaps its largest part, virtual war -- an ongoing, permanent struggle, and in its ongoing political utility not wholly unlike Orwell's famous world war between Eurasia, East Asia and Oceania that is unbounded in space and in time, never ending, always expanding.
President Bush announced this virtual war three days after Sept. 11, 2001, in the National Cathedral in Washington, appropriately enough, when he told Americans that "our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil."
Astonishing words from a world leader -- declaring that he would "rid the world of evil." Just in case anyone thought he might have misheard the sweep of the president's ambition, his national security strategy, issued a few months later, was careful to specify that "the enemy is not a single political regime or person or religion or ideology. The enemy is terrorism -- premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents."
Again, a remarkable statement, as many commentators were quick to point out; for declaring war on "terrorism" -- a technique of war, not an identifiable group or target -- was simply unprecedented and, indeed, bewildering in its implications. As one counterinsurgency specialist remarked to me, "Declaring war on terrorism is like declaring war on air power."
Six and a half years later, evil is still with us and so is terrorism. In my search for a starting point in taking stock of those years, I find myself in the sad position of pondering fondly what have become two of the saddest words in the English language: Donald Rumsfeld.
Remember him? In late October 2003, when I was in Baghdad watching the launch of the so-called Ramadan Offensive -- five simultaneous suicide bombings, beginning with one at the headquarters of the Red Cross, the fiery aftermath of which I witnessed -- then Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was in Washington still denying that an insurgency was under way in Iraq. He was also drafting one of his famous "snowflakes," those late-night memorandums that he used to rain down on his terrorized Pentagon employees.
This particular snowflake, dated Oct. 16, 2003, and titled "Global War on Terrorism," reads almost poignantly now, as the defense secretary gropes to define the war that it has become his lot to fight: "Today we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror," he wrote. "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"
Rumsfeld asks the right question, for beyond the obvious metrics like the number of terrorist attacks worldwide -- which have gone up steadily, and precipitously, since 9/11 (for 2006, the last year for which State Department figures are available, by nearly 29 percent, to 14,338) -- and the somewhat subtler ones like the percentage of those in the Middle East and the broader Muslim world who hold unfavorable opinions of the United States (which soared in the wake of the invasion of Iraq and has fallen back just a bit since); apart from these sorts of numbers that, for various and obvious reasons, are problematic in themselves, the key question is: How do you "take stock" of the war on terror? At the end of the day, as Secretary Rumsfeld perceived, this is a political judgment, for in its essence it has to do with the evolution of public opinion and the readiness of those with certain political sympathies to move from holding those opinions to taking action in support of them.
What "metrics" do we have to take account of the progress of this "evolution"? Well, none really -- but we do have the guarded opinions of intelligence agencies, notably this rather explicit statement from the U.S. government's National Intelligence Estimate of April 2006, titled "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States," which reads in part: "Although we cannot measure the extent of the spread with precision" -- those metrics again -- "a large body of all-source reporting indicates that activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although still a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in both number and geographic distribution. If this trend continues, threats to U.S. interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide."
Dark words, and yet that 2006 report looks positively sanguine when set beside two reports from a year later, both leaked in July 2007. A National Intelligence Estimate titled "The Terrorist Threat to the US Homeland" noted that al-Qaida had managed to -- in the summary in the Washington Post -- reestablish "its central organization, training infrastructure and lines of global communication" over the previous two years and had placed the United States in a "heightened threat environment ... The U.S. Homeland will face a persistent and evolving terrorist threat over the next three years."
This NIE -- the combined opinion of the country's major intelligence agencies -- only confirmed a report that had been leaked a couple of days before from the National Counterterrorism Center, grimly titled "Al Qaeda Better Positioned to Strike the West." This report concluded that al-Qaida, in the words of one official who briefed its contents to a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, was "considerably operationally stronger than a year ago," "has regrouped to an extent not seen since 2001," and has managed to create "the most robust training program since 2001, with an interest in using European operatives." Another intelligence official, summarizing the report to the Associated Press, offered a blunt and bleak conclusion: Al-Qaida, he said, is "showing greater and greater ability to plan attacks in Europe and the United States."
Given these grim results, one must return to one of the more poignant passages in Secretary Rumsfeld's "snowflake," released to flutter down on his poor Pentagon subordinates back in those blinkered days of October 2003. Having wondered about the metrics, and what could and could not be measured in the war on terror, the secretary of defense posed a critical question: "Does the U.S. need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists?"
For me, the poignancy comes from Rumsfeld's failure to see that, in effect, he and his boss had already "fashioned" the "broad, integrated plan" he was asking for. It was called the Iraq war.
That the Iraq war is "fueling the spread of the jihadist movement," as the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate put it, has been a truism of intelligence reporting from the war's beginning -- indeed, from before it began. "The Iraq conflict has become the cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating support for the global jihadist movement" -- this point from the 2006 NIE is truly an example of a "chronicle of a war foretold" (to borrow from García Márquez). In fact, that NIE cites the "Iraq jihad" as the second of four factors "fueling the jihadist movement," along with "entrenched grievances, such as corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation, and a sense of powerlessness"; "the slow pace of real and sustained economic, social, and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations"; and "pervasive anti-US sentiment among most Muslims."
Any attempt to "take stock of the war on terror" must begin with the sad fact that the story of that war has largely become the story of the war in Iraq as well, and the story of the Iraq war (all discussion of the so-called surge aside) has been pretty much an unmitigated disaster for U.S. security and for America's position in the Middle East and the world. Which means that telling the story of the war on terror, half a dozen years on -- and taking stock of that war -- merges inevitably with the sad tale of how that so-called war, strange and multiform beast that it is, became subsumed in a bold and utterly incompetent attempt to occupy and remake a major Arab country.
That broader story comes down to a matter of two strategies and two generals: Gen. Osama bin Laden and Gen. George W. Bush. General bin Laden, from the start, has been waging a campaign of indirection and provocation: That is, bin Laden's ultimate targets are the so-called apostate regimes of the Muslim world -- foremost among them, the Mubarak regime in Egypt and the House of Saud on the Arabian peninsula -- which he hopes to overthrow and supplant with a new caliphate.
For bin Laden, these are the "near enemies," which rely for their existence on the vital support of the "far enemy," the United States. By attacking this far enemy, beginning in the mid-1990s, bin Laden hoped both to lead vast numbers of new Muslim recruits to join al-Qaida and to weaken U.S. support for the Mubarak and Saud regimes. He hoped to succeed, through indirection, in "cutting the strings of the puppets," eventually leading to the collapse of those regimes.
In this sense, 9/11 proved the culmination of a long-term strategy, following on a series of attacks of increasing lethality during the mid- to late 1990s in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Nairobi, Kenya; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; and Aden, Yemen. The 9/11 attackers used as their climactic weapon not transcontinental airliners or box cutters but the television set -- for the image was the true weapon that day, the overwhelmingly powerful image of the towers collapsing -- and used it not only to "dirty the face of imperial power" (Menachim Begin's description of what terrorists do) but also to provoke the United States to strike deep into the Islamic world.
It is clear from various documents and from the assassination, days before 9/11, of Afghan Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Masood, that bin Laden expected this American counterstrike to come in Afghanistan, which would have given al-Qaida the opportunity to do to the remaining superpower what it had done -- so the myth went, anyway -- to the Soviet Union a dozen years before: trap its arrogant, hulking military in a quagmire and, through patient, unrelenting guerrilla warfare, force it to withdraw in ignominious defeat. In the event, of course, the Americans, by relying on air bombardment and on the ground forces of their Afghan allies in the Northern Alliance, avoided the quagmire of Afghanistan -- at least in that initial phase in the fall of 2001 -- and instead offered bin Laden a much greater gift. In March 2003, they invaded Iraq, a far more important Islamic country and one much closer to the heart of Arab concerns.
Why did Gen. George W. Bush do it? Lacking in legitimacy and on the political defensive, the president and his administration moved instantly to transform the war on terror into an ideological crusade, one implicitly crafted as a new Cold War.
"They hate our freedoms," Bush told Congress and the nation a few days after the 9/11 attacks. "Our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with one another ... We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions -- by abandoning every value except the will to power -- they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies."
Drawing a lurid picture of a new Cold War, with terrorists playing the role of communists, Bush rallied the country behind the war on terror, obliterating the subtleties of the struggle against al-Qaida and with them the critique of U.S. Middle East policy implicit in the assault. "This is not about our policies," as Henry Kissinger put it soon after the attack. "This is about our existence." In this view, the attack came not because of what the United States actually did in the Middle East -- what regimes it supported, for example -- but because of what it stood for: the universalist aspirations it symbolized. Iraq quickly became part of this crusade, the great struggle to protect, and now to spread, freedom and democracy.
One can argue long and hard about the roots of the Iraq war, but in the end one must tease out a set of realist compulsions (centrally concerned with the restoration of American credibility and American deterrent power) and idealist aspirations (shaped around the so-called democratic domino effect). The realist case was well summarized, once again, by Kissinger, who, when asked by a Bush speechwriter why he supported the Iraq war, replied: "Because Afghanistan wasn't enough." In the conflict with radical Islam, he went on, "they want to humiliate us and we have to humiliate them." The Iraq war was essential in order to make the point that "we're not going to live in the world that they want for us."
Ron Suskind, in his fine book "The One Percent Doctrine," puts what is essentially the same point in "geostrategic" terms, reporting that, in meetings of the National Security Council in the months after the 9/11 attacks, the main concern "was to make an example of [Saddam] Hussein, to create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States."
Set alongside this was the "democratic tsunami" that was to follow the shock-and-awe triumph over Saddam. It would sweep through the Middle East from Iraq to Iran and thence to Syria and Palestine. ("The road to Jerusalem" -- so ran the neoconservative gospel at the time -- "runs through Baghdad.") As I wrote in October 2002, five months before the Iraq war was launched, this vision was detailed and well elaborated:
Behind the notion that an American intervention will make of Iraq "the first Arab democracy," as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz put it, lies a project of great ambition. It envisions a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq -- secular, middle-class, urbanized, rich with oil -- that will replace the autocracy of Saudi Arabia as the key American ally in the Persian Gulf, allowing the withdrawal of United States troops from the kingdom. The presence of a victorious American Army in Iraq would then serve as a powerful boost to moderate elements in neighboring Iran, hastening that critical country's evolution away from the mullahs and toward a more moderate course. Such an evolution in Tehran would lead to a withdrawal of Iranian support for Hezbollah and other radical groups, thereby isolating Syria and reducing pressure on Israel. This undercutting of radicals on Israel's northern borders and within the West Bank and Gaza would spell the definitive end of Yasir Arafat and lead eventually to a favorable solution of the Arab-Israeli problem.
This is a vision of great sweep and imagination: comprehensive, prophetic, evangelical. In its ambitions, it is wholly foreign to the modesty of containment, the ideology of a status-quo power that lay at the heart of American strategy for half a century. It means to remake the world, to offer to a political threat a political answer. It represents a great step on the road toward President Bush's ultimate vision of "freedom's triumph over all its age-old foes."
One can identify two factors underlying this vision: first, the great enthusiasm for a moralistic foreign policy based on universalized principles and democratic reform that dated back to containment's main rival, the "rollback" movement of the 1950s, and that had been revivified by the thrilling series of Eastern European revolutions of the late 1980s and by scenes of popular, American-aided democratic triumph (as it was then thought to be) in Afghanistan; and, second, the recognition that terrorism, at the end of the day, was a political problem that arose from a calcified authoritarian order in the Middle East and that only a dose of "creative destabilization" could shake up that order. "Transforming the Middle East," in Condoleezza Rice's words, "is the only guarantee that it will no longer produce ideologies of hatred that lead men to fly airplanes into buildings in New York and Washington."
The latter perception -- that terrorism as it struck the United States arose from political factors and that it could be confronted and defeated only with a political response -- strikes me as incontestable. The problem the administration faced, or rather didn't want to face, was that the calcified order that lay at the root of the problem was the very order that, for nearly six decades, had been shaped, shepherded and sustained by the United States. We see an explicit acknowledgment of this in the "Bletchley II" report drafted after 9/11 at Defense Department urging by a number of intellectuals close to the administration: "The general analysis," one of its authors told the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, "was that Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where most of the hijackers came from, were the key, but the problems there are intractable. Iran is more important ... But Iran was similarly difficult to envision dealing with. But Saddam Hussein was different, weaker, more vulnerable."
In this sense, many of the Bush administration's leading Iraq war backers constituted a kind of guerrilla force within the U.S. government, fighting against a long-standing strategic alignment in the Middle East. This guerrilla status, which defined many of the government's most knowledgeable Middle East hands as enemies to be isolated and ignored, helps to account, at least in part, for a great many of the extraordinary incompetencies and disasters of the war itself. That the roots of the war lie in stark opposition to established U.S. policy also helps explain the central conundrum of the current U.S. strategic position in Iraq and the Middle East. This was defined for me with typical concision and aplomb by Ahmed Chalabi in Baghdad last year. "The American tragedy in Iraq," said Chalabi, "is that your friends in Iraq are allied with your enemies in the region, and your enemies in Iraq are allied with your friends in the region."
Chalabi's concision and wit are admirable (and typical); but his point, once you look at the map, is obvious. The United States has made possible the rise to power in Iraq of a Shiite government that is allied with its major geopolitical antagonist in the region, the Islamic Republic of Iran. And the United States has been fighting with great persistence and distinctly mixed results a Sunni insurgency that is allied with the Saudis, the Jordanians and its other longtime friends among the traditional Sunni autocracies of the Gulf.
This is another way of saying that the U.S. policy built on the famous meeting between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and King ibn Saud aboard Roosevelt's cruiser on the Great Bitter Lake near the end of World War II -- a policy that envisioned a vital, mutually beneficial and enduring alliance between the Saudis and the Americans -- having been put in grave question by the Saudi insurgents at the controls of those mighty airliners of Sept. 11, now smashed full on into the strategic assault perpetrated by the Bush administration insurgents led by Paul Wolfowitz and his associates. Their "creative destabilization" was aimed not just at Saddam Hussein's Iraq, but at more than half a century of American policy in the Middle East.
Al-Qaida, opportunistic as always, was willing to play this game, seizing on the occupation of Iraq as the golden opportunity it most certainly was and focusing on the Shiite-Sunni divide on which U.S. policy was foundering. The late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's famous intercepted letter to Ayman al-Zawahiri and bin Laden, in which the insurgent leader of al-Qaida in Mesopotamia told the al-Qaida potentates -- the front office, as it were -- that his aim in Iraq was to "awaken the sleeping Sunnis" by launching a vast bombing campaign against the "Shiite heretic," describes precisely both the national and the regional strategy: "If we manage to draw them into the terrain of partisan war, it will be possible to tear the Sunnis away from their heedlessness, for they will feel the weight of the imminence of danger."
This is a strategy that, after the bombing of the revered al-Askari mosque and shrine in Samarra in February 2006, bore terrible fruit. My map that shows divisions running through Baghdad will show, if one zooms out, those same divisions running through Iraq and beyond its borders. Like the former Yugoslavia, Iraq is a nation that gathers within itself the cultural and sectarian fault lines of the region; the Sunni-Shiite divide running through Iraq in effect runs through the entire Middle East. The United States, in choosing this place to stage its democratic revolution, could hardly have done al-Qaida a better favor.
At this moment, the Iraq war is at a stalemate. Confronted with a growing threat from those "enemies allied with its friends in the region," the Sunni insurgents, the Bush administration has adopted a practical and typically American strategy: It has bought them. The Americans have purchased the insurgency, hiring its foot soldiers at the rate of $300 per month. The Sunni fighters, once called insurgents, we now refer to as "tribesmen" or "concerned citizens."
This has isolated al-Qaida, a tactical victory. But because these purchased Sunni fighters have not been accepted by the Shiite government -- the allies of our enemies -- the United States has set in motion a policy that will require, to keep violence at current levels, its own permanent presence in the country. This at a time when two in three Americans think the war was a mistake and when both surviving Democratic presidential candidates vow to begin bringing the troops home "on Day One" of a Democratic administration.
On the horizon, after such a withdrawal, is a reignition of the civil war at an even more brutal level, helped by the American rearming of the Sunni forces -- and indeed the American arming of Shiite government forces as well. It is a curious reality, if we look again at the regional map, that the current geostrategic situation in the Middle East resembles nothing so much as the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s, in which the United States, along with Egypt, the Saudis and the Jordanians, supported Saddam Hussein's Iraq in its great war against Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran. We see a similar array of forces today, with these two differences: First, we must move the line of conflict about 200 miles west, shifting it from the Iraq-Iran border to a line running through Baghdad along the Tigris River. Second, the United States is now arming and supporting both sides. And behind the current configuration and the supposed "success of the surge" looms the darkening threat of regionalization -- a regionwide struggle fought over the body of Iraq in the wake of an American withdrawal. It has become, to appropriate a phrase, a very complicated war.
Whether or not this darkest of dark visions comes to pass, that very complicated war in Iraq, as the intelligence analysts and our own eyes tell us, will continue to pay vast dividends into the account of political grievances with which terrorist groups recruit. This has only partly to do with the original al-Qaida itself (or "al-Qaida prime," as some analysts now call it); for however much it has managed to "reconstitute" itself, the true game has moved elsewhere, toward "viral al-Qaida" -- "spontaneous groups of friends," in the words of former CIA analyst and psychiatrist Marc Sageman, "as in [the] Madrid and Casablanca [bombings], who have few links to any central leadership, [who] are generating sometimes very dangerous terrorist operations, notwithstanding their frequent errors and poor training."
While U.S. and allied intelligence agencies have had considerable success attacking the various formal nodes of al-Qaida prime on the Arabian peninsula and elsewhere, those struggles have about them the air of the past; we have really passed into a different era, the era of the amateurs. Today's network is self-organized, Internet reliant and decentralized, dependent not on armies, training or even technology but on desire and political will. And we have ensured, by the way we have fought this forever war, that it is precisely these vital qualities our enemies have in large and growing supply.
So how, finally, do we "take stock of the war on terror"? Let me suggest three words:
1. Fragmentation -- brought about by "creative destabilization," as we see it not only in Iraq but in Lebanon, Palestine and elsewhere in the region;
2. Diminution -- of American prestige, both military and political, and thus of American power;
3. Destruction -- of the political consensus within the United States for a strong global role.
Gaze for a moment at those three words and marvel at how far we have come in half a dozen years.
In September 2001, the United States faced a grave threat. The attacks that have become synonymous with that date were unprecedented in their destructiveness, in their lethality, in the pure apocalyptic shock of their spectacle. But in their aftermath, American policymakers, partly through ideological blindness and preening exaggeration of American power, partly through blindness brought about by political opportunism, made decisions that led to a defeat only their own actions -- that only American power itself -- could have brought about.
A small coven of America's enemies, using the strategy of provocation so familiar in guerrilla warfare, had launched in spectacular fashion on that bright September morning a plan to use the superpower's strength against itself. To use a different metaphor, they were trying to make good on Archimedes' celebrated boast: Having found the perfect lever and place to stand, they proposed to move the Earth. To an extent I am sure even they did not anticipate, in their choice of opponent -- an evangelical, redemptive regime scornful of history and determined to remake the fallen world -- lay the seeds of their success.
This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.
-- By Mark Danner
Friday, February 8, 2008
The Implicit and the Explicit
Like everything there is, the image that appears in our mind
whether that is an individual or a collective, there is always
more that underlies the image.
The image can be thought of as the Explicit. Look at this screen
and have an image of words or pictures or even children for instance.
What is underlying that image is electromagnetic movement, dots,
computer code even the air in the room you are in effects what
what is implicitly behind the thing that becomes a filtered
image.
Most of us have been convinced that looking for the implicit is
not worth our time. That it it confusing, frustrating and ultimately
not what you 'want to' be doing.
That's dogma. Radical Fundamentalist Dogma is the most explicit form
of dogma. Implicitly, it exists all around us in the form of cultural
conditioning.
Once you become aware of it's existence, it becomes possible to see
more clearly, to understand things as they are rather than as they
appear (or in many cases, are made to appear) to be.
whether that is an individual or a collective, there is always
more that underlies the image.
The image can be thought of as the Explicit. Look at this screen
and have an image of words or pictures or even children for instance.
What is underlying that image is electromagnetic movement, dots,
computer code even the air in the room you are in effects what
what is implicitly behind the thing that becomes a filtered
image.
Most of us have been convinced that looking for the implicit is
not worth our time. That it it confusing, frustrating and ultimately
not what you 'want to' be doing.
That's dogma. Radical Fundamentalist Dogma is the most explicit form
of dogma. Implicitly, it exists all around us in the form of cultural
conditioning.
Once you become aware of it's existence, it becomes possible to see
more clearly, to understand things as they are rather than as they
appear (or in many cases, are made to appear) to be.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Sheeple
Ok, coincidences are on occasion too much to be ignored. After reading a rant yesterday which used the word sheeple, this video surfaced in the chunk of cyberspace that attracted my attention.
It requires a certain amount of patience to get to the piece which is most significant in the final fifteen minutes. Well worth the lesson and well worth understanding.
It requires a certain amount of patience to get to the piece which is most significant in the final fifteen minutes. Well worth the lesson and well worth understanding.
A Nation of Sheeple
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Zeitgeist: A recursive concept?
zeitgeist |ˈtsītˌgīst; ˈzīt-|
noun [in sing. ]
the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time : the story captured the zeitgeist of the late 1960s.
ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from German Zeitgeist, from Zeit ‘time’ + Geist ‘spirit.’
Poking around in cyberspace in an attempt to learn more about an individual who has some potential to be the next leader of this country turned up a few interesting things. Among them, Zeitgeist the movie. First time through this was pretty amazing. It actually created a shift in belief.
Then looking at the site, it made a lot of sense to do exactly what it says right there under the movie, which is also the message of Krishnamurti, dont' believe this. Find out for yourself.
A little research settled some questions and some sleep created the motivation to write to the guy who put it together and share some observations. Rather than rewrite that again, here it is, find a link to the site for the movie below the comments. Here they are:
Comment#1: Love the piece on religion. This is an amazing and perhaps the most compelling argument to ignore organized religion that i have ever seen. I spent a good deal of time over the past year talking with people of strong religious belief, just to find out exactly what their story is along with coming to some practically useful conclusions for myself and these are inherently nice people.
So, i would love to send them your movie. Unfortunately, it slips over the edge by, in some spots, using the same sort of tactic (in spite of your 'find out for yourself' monition on the site) that it attempts to debunk. So, perhaps it is too late now to go back to the drawing board and re-edit. Perhaps not. The core message and material is all there.
I do believe that you can potentially 'save' a large number of people from wasting significant chunks of their lives under the weight of these delusions with this formation. In my opinion, you reach a wider audience and have a much higher success rate when you stop making people feel like idiots for the beliefs that they currently hold. A practice that Dawkins has yet to come to understand.
Comment#2: I had a friend who was at work on the top floors of the WTC on Sept 11.
I used to work in those buildings myself. I had heard people talk about this conspiracy theory before and walked away from the conversation every time, not wanting to go there. Your invitation to find out for myself was taken up by me as a result of the compelling nature of the movie. Three or four hours of reading Google searches was sufficient to come to the conclusion that the you come very close in part II to doing just what you uncovered as farce in part I.
Comment#3: Are you familiar with fractals? The work of Stephen Wolfram? G.W. Bush can not simultaneously be an idiot and a genius at the same time. The sheer number of people who would have needed to be involved in that 'plot' is staggering to imagine. The whole idea that the sounds of breaking steel or concrete as the buildings were collapsing being construed as explosions rather than phenomenon which took on the 'appearance' of explosions to people who never experienced an explosion outside the context of a movie or television is totally believable in a much larger way to me than the possibility of an army of subversives having entered the core of those buildings to systematically cut beams and wire the skeleton with explosives.
For that three or four hours of reading, it became apparent to me that the conspiracy theories are based on three things: 1. people getting paid to do things that they could not actually do because all of their experience (up to the time of that occurrence) was theoretical, attempting to cover their own asses for fear of the extended implication i.e. that others would point fingers at them as bearing responsibility. 2. too much t.v. (as you clearly point out) 3. the desire on the part of the govt to keep information out of the hands of other idiots who might use it (as in the case of the tapes from buildings around the pentagon).
Please do not construe this as some rant in favor of GWB. I believe that he is a human no smarter and probably no dumber than the average American. So thanks for the invitation to look into this stuff, now i am satisfied that i understand it well enough.
Comment#3: Again, back to the fractal theory. The probability of this being part of some grand plan 60+ years in the making is, to me at least, very close to the absurdity of creationism given what current 'science' has to say about observable evidence. Is there some small group of individuals who own the so called 'International Banking Cartel'? Who are these people? The Bush/Rockefeller families?
Again, just too implausible and again probably with more research, probably dis-provable. The rest of Part III however is again beautiful work that was educational. Love the concept of not filing a return or paying taxes, unfortunately, if you have assets in the country, sooner or later, they will start taking money out of your account. Sadly this is the truth. Millions of people own the banks. In fact you probably do too.
Anyone with a dime in a pension invested in stock owns them and yes, the pigs at the top of each corporation take an enormously excessive chunk right off the top for themselves. And yes, education is the only thing that is going to change that. Evolution (you appear to embrace that theory with your Carl Sagan clips) according to the experts is much closer to the fractal theory end of the spectrum than the grand plan theory. i.e. small (not meant as value judgment but in the sense of the spectrum from atom to universe) things effecting others create the impression of something larger and planned where impression is the operative word and planned is the resulting illusion.
If you got this far, thanks again, the whole thing has been very enlightening. Fifteen minutes into the first viewing I was formulating a plan to get it shown here in my town but an hour into it, those plans had dissolved back into the ether from whence they arose. Again, i believe that you could(and should in my opinion) be making the same argument about parts II and III that you made about part I. Don't believe this conspiracy stuff any more than you might the religious mumbo jumbo. The truth lies in the middle. That coupled with your closing remarks is a message that I could, would and should go out and help to deliver every day of my life. Zeitgeist 2.0! You already have the attention of a couple of million people, a rethink/re-edit might get you up to 2 percent of the population of this country. And, as you state in closing in the same sense that the middle way has, possibilities of enormous proportion. (but don't believe me, find out for yourself).
Final point here, are you familiar with Scott Atran? He has a message about terrorism, Bin Laden and the misconception of the masses that you would undoubtedly find worth a 20 minute investment. Summary (teaser) these people are losers/drug dealers who have nothing better to do with their time (no jobs) and zero organization. Take a look at what he has to say here http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5701806759199654816
Good luck with this and if you get to a point where you can debunk these two other conspiracy theories as well as you have debunked the first one get in touch. I have lots of time to spread the message of 'don't believe this, find out for yourself' that is all (i.e. including iteslf) inclusive.
noun [in sing. ]
the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time : the story captured the zeitgeist of the late 1960s.
ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from German Zeitgeist, from Zeit ‘time’ + Geist ‘spirit.’
Poking around in cyberspace in an attempt to learn more about an individual who has some potential to be the next leader of this country turned up a few interesting things. Among them, Zeitgeist the movie. First time through this was pretty amazing. It actually created a shift in belief.
Then looking at the site, it made a lot of sense to do exactly what it says right there under the movie, which is also the message of Krishnamurti, dont' believe this. Find out for yourself.
A little research settled some questions and some sleep created the motivation to write to the guy who put it together and share some observations. Rather than rewrite that again, here it is, find a link to the site for the movie below the comments. Here they are:
Comment#1: Love the piece on religion. This is an amazing and perhaps the most compelling argument to ignore organized religion that i have ever seen. I spent a good deal of time over the past year talking with people of strong religious belief, just to find out exactly what their story is along with coming to some practically useful conclusions for myself and these are inherently nice people.
So, i would love to send them your movie. Unfortunately, it slips over the edge by, in some spots, using the same sort of tactic (in spite of your 'find out for yourself' monition on the site) that it attempts to debunk. So, perhaps it is too late now to go back to the drawing board and re-edit. Perhaps not. The core message and material is all there.
I do believe that you can potentially 'save' a large number of people from wasting significant chunks of their lives under the weight of these delusions with this formation. In my opinion, you reach a wider audience and have a much higher success rate when you stop making people feel like idiots for the beliefs that they currently hold. A practice that Dawkins has yet to come to understand.
Comment#2: I had a friend who was at work on the top floors of the WTC on Sept 11.
I used to work in those buildings myself. I had heard people talk about this conspiracy theory before and walked away from the conversation every time, not wanting to go there. Your invitation to find out for myself was taken up by me as a result of the compelling nature of the movie. Three or four hours of reading Google searches was sufficient to come to the conclusion that the you come very close in part II to doing just what you uncovered as farce in part I.
Comment#3: Are you familiar with fractals? The work of Stephen Wolfram? G.W. Bush can not simultaneously be an idiot and a genius at the same time. The sheer number of people who would have needed to be involved in that 'plot' is staggering to imagine. The whole idea that the sounds of breaking steel or concrete as the buildings were collapsing being construed as explosions rather than phenomenon which took on the 'appearance' of explosions to people who never experienced an explosion outside the context of a movie or television is totally believable in a much larger way to me than the possibility of an army of subversives having entered the core of those buildings to systematically cut beams and wire the skeleton with explosives.
For that three or four hours of reading, it became apparent to me that the conspiracy theories are based on three things: 1. people getting paid to do things that they could not actually do because all of their experience (up to the time of that occurrence) was theoretical, attempting to cover their own asses for fear of the extended implication i.e. that others would point fingers at them as bearing responsibility. 2. too much t.v. (as you clearly point out) 3. the desire on the part of the govt to keep information out of the hands of other idiots who might use it (as in the case of the tapes from buildings around the pentagon).
Please do not construe this as some rant in favor of GWB. I believe that he is a human no smarter and probably no dumber than the average American. So thanks for the invitation to look into this stuff, now i am satisfied that i understand it well enough.
Comment#3: Again, back to the fractal theory. The probability of this being part of some grand plan 60+ years in the making is, to me at least, very close to the absurdity of creationism given what current 'science' has to say about observable evidence. Is there some small group of individuals who own the so called 'International Banking Cartel'? Who are these people? The Bush/Rockefeller families?
Again, just too implausible and again probably with more research, probably dis-provable. The rest of Part III however is again beautiful work that was educational. Love the concept of not filing a return or paying taxes, unfortunately, if you have assets in the country, sooner or later, they will start taking money out of your account. Sadly this is the truth. Millions of people own the banks. In fact you probably do too.
Anyone with a dime in a pension invested in stock owns them and yes, the pigs at the top of each corporation take an enormously excessive chunk right off the top for themselves. And yes, education is the only thing that is going to change that. Evolution (you appear to embrace that theory with your Carl Sagan clips) according to the experts is much closer to the fractal theory end of the spectrum than the grand plan theory. i.e. small (not meant as value judgment but in the sense of the spectrum from atom to universe) things effecting others create the impression of something larger and planned where impression is the operative word and planned is the resulting illusion.
If you got this far, thanks again, the whole thing has been very enlightening. Fifteen minutes into the first viewing I was formulating a plan to get it shown here in my town but an hour into it, those plans had dissolved back into the ether from whence they arose. Again, i believe that you could(and should in my opinion) be making the same argument about parts II and III that you made about part I. Don't believe this conspiracy stuff any more than you might the religious mumbo jumbo. The truth lies in the middle. That coupled with your closing remarks is a message that I could, would and should go out and help to deliver every day of my life. Zeitgeist 2.0! You already have the attention of a couple of million people, a rethink/re-edit might get you up to 2 percent of the population of this country. And, as you state in closing in the same sense that the middle way has, possibilities of enormous proportion. (but don't believe me, find out for yourself).
Final point here, are you familiar with Scott Atran? He has a message about terrorism, Bin Laden and the misconception of the masses that you would undoubtedly find worth a 20 minute investment. Summary (teaser) these people are losers/drug dealers who have nothing better to do with their time (no jobs) and zero organization. Take a look at what he has to say here http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5701806759199654816
Good luck with this and if you get to a point where you can debunk these two other conspiracy theories as well as you have debunked the first one get in touch. I have lots of time to spread the message of 'don't believe this, find out for yourself' that is all (i.e. including iteslf) inclusive.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Make up your own mind
This is a beautiful piece of 'mash up' work. The true meaning of the piece was not apparent despite having looked at it a few times. The book, 1984 written in 1949 by George Orwell tells an amazing story for a number of reasons, one among them, the ability of people to constantly overstate the potential horror of the immediate future, a very popular thing to do since the dawn of language as a means of communication. The story itself, is summarized like this:
Here is a thought provoking quote:
The people who put this together clearly remembered how adept the Clinton team is of re-fabricating reality to best suit their purposes. Undoubtedly, the news fodder of the past week has been no surprise to them. It would be nice to see this video resurface now that this extremely accurate prediction has come to fruition.
Here is the comment on the video right off Youtube:
Make up your own mind. Decide for yourself who should be our next president. NOTE: This is a mashup of the famous Apple 1984 Super Bowl ad. Search for the original on YouTube.
1984 presents an imaginary future where a totalitarian state controls every aspect of life, even people's thoughts. The state is called Oceania and is ruled by a group known as the Party; its leader and dictator is Big Brother.
Here is a thought provoking quote:
"'Who controls the past', ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'" Part 1, Chapter 3, pg. 37
Here is a concept from the book that it would appear the Clintons have at least perfected on themselves:
Doublethink: The practice of thought control necessary to be a good Party disciple. No Party member can ever admit that the Party might be wrong. However, sometimes reality shows something to the contrary. Through using doublethink, the Party member can deal with any problems or inconsistencies with the Party. Party members simply block all awareness of the Party's falsities from their mind and then, as another act of doublethink, they forget that they have even used doublethink.
The people who put this together clearly remembered how adept the Clinton team is of re-fabricating reality to best suit their purposes. Undoubtedly, the news fodder of the past week has been no surprise to them. It would be nice to see this video resurface now that this extremely accurate prediction has come to fruition.
Here is the comment on the video right off Youtube:
Make up your own mind. Decide for yourself who should be our next president. NOTE: This is a mashup of the famous Apple 1984 Super Bowl ad. Search for the original on YouTube.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
On Truth, Honesty, Integrity, Values
The Fact that 'The Clintons' are even in the running for the leadership position in the United States says something about the decline of morality in this country. The excerpt below is from a Wikipedia piece on the history of the Clinton as president. Click on the title to go directly to the piece. The video in the most polite way, raises the same question that should be at the front of the list for every American every time they see either of the Clinton team on a television screen or news source using any of the words in the title of this post.
Denial and subsequent admission
News of the scandal first broke on January 17, 1998, on the Drudge Report website, which reported that Newsweek editors were sitting on a story by investigative reporter Michael Isikoff exposing the affair. The story broke in the mainstream press on January 21 when it hit the Washington Post. The story swirled for several days and despite swift denials from Clinton, the clamour for answers from the White House grew louder. On January 26, a visibly flustered President Clinton, standing with wife Hillary Rodham Clinton, spoke at a White House press conference, and issued a forceful denial while wagging his finger:
Now, I have to go back to work on my State of the Union speech. And I worked on it until pretty late last night. But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you.
Pundits debated whether or not Clinton would address the allegations in his State of the Union Address. Ultimately, he chose not to, which may have helped his image with the American people through his strategy to appear more "presidential" and above the fray. First Lady Hillary Clinton publicly stood by her husband throughout the scandal. On January 27, in an appearance on NBC's The Today Show she famously said, "The great story here for anybody willing to find it, write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president."
For the next several months and through the summer, pundits and the media endlessly debated whether an affair had occurred and Clinton had lied or obstructed justice, but nothing could be definitively established beyond the taped recordings because Lewinsky was unwilling to discuss the affair or testify about it. On July 28, 1998, a substantial delay after the public break of the scandal, Lewinsky received transactional immunity in exchange for grand jury testimony concerning her relationship with Clinton. She also turned over a semen-stained blue dress (which Tripp had encouraged her to save without dry cleaning) to the Starr investigators, thereby providing a smoking gun based on DNA evidence that could prove the relationship despite Clinton's official denials.
Clinton admitted in taped grand jury testimony on August 17, 1998, that he had had an "improper physical relationship" with Lewinsky. That evening he gave a nationally televised statement admitting his relationship with Lewinsky which was "not appropriate".[1]
Who is actually running for 'president'? Who will make the decisions/tell the
'truth'?
Friday, January 18, 2008
Sedona Real Estate Stats Jan 2008 Report
For those of you who like statistics and numbers, here are some numbers as of Jan. 1, 2008.
Number of listed homes & condos in all of the Sedona market: 548 (was 635, 60 days ago)
Number of homes & condos listed below $400,000: 135 (was 159, 60 days ago)
Number of homes listed over $1 million: 110 (was 126, 60 days ago).
Median listed price: $594,750. (was $599,900 60 days ago).
Number of homes & condos sold year in 2007: 313
Median sales price of all homes and condos sold in 2007: $525,000.
Number of listed home-sites in all areas of the Sedona market 383 (was 437 – 60 days ago)
Number of lots listed below $300,000: 89 (was 95 - 60 days ago)
Number of lots listed above $1,000,000: 32 (was 38 – 60 days ago)
Median listed price: $475,000 (was $489,000 – 60 days ago)
Number of home-sites sold year in 2007: 68 (this pace has been steady at about 6 per month)
Median sales price in 2007: $353,500 (this trending up in the last 60 days)
Number of listed homes & condos in all of the Sedona market: 548 (was 635, 60 days ago)
Number of homes & condos listed below $400,000: 135 (was 159, 60 days ago)
Number of homes listed over $1 million: 110 (was 126, 60 days ago).
Median listed price: $594,750. (was $599,900 60 days ago).
Number of homes & condos sold year in 2007: 313
Median sales price of all homes and condos sold in 2007: $525,000.
Number of listed home-sites in all areas of the Sedona market 383 (was 437 – 60 days ago)
Number of lots listed below $300,000: 89 (was 95 - 60 days ago)
Number of lots listed above $1,000,000: 32 (was 38 – 60 days ago)
Median listed price: $475,000 (was $489,000 – 60 days ago)
Number of home-sites sold year in 2007: 68 (this pace has been steady at about 6 per month)
Median sales price in 2007: $353,500 (this trending up in the last 60 days)
Thursday, January 17, 2008
words worth listening to
The quote of the day from a Google Widget which dishes up a sentence of wisdom from Einstein on a daily basis. What if?
The only real valuable thing is intuition. The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery.
Given that this guy is what many consider to be one of the greatest minds of the modern era,
does it make sense to give pause and actually listen to that message?
The word itself at a minimum merits looking into for the sake of clarity.
intuition |ˌint(y)oōˈi sh ən|
noun
the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning : we shall allow our intuition to guide us.
• a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning : your insights and intuitions as a native speaker are positively sought.
DERIVATIVES
intuitional |-ˈi sh ənl| adjective
intuitionally |-ˈi sh ənl-ē| adverb
ORIGIN late Middle English (denoting spiritual insight or immediate spiritual communication): from late Latin intuitio(n-), from Latin intueri ‘consider’ (see intuit ).
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
on Being One With All That Is
What if there was a way to look at this proposition which allowed for the shift in perspective through redefining one word?
Don’t you know what it means really to love somebody to love without hate, without jealousy, without anger, without wanting to interfere with what he is doing or thinking, without condemning, without comparing – don’t you know what it means? Where there is love is there comparison? When you love someone with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your body, with your entire being, is there comparison? When you totally abandon yourself to that love there is not the other.
Freedom from the Known - 82
Don’t you know what it means really to love somebody to love without hate, without jealousy, without anger, without wanting to interfere with what he is doing or thinking, without condemning, without comparing – don’t you know what it means? Where there is love is there comparison? When you love someone with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your body, with your entire being, is there comparison? When you totally abandon yourself to that love there is not the other.
Freedom from the Known - 82
interpretation for today:
does the word comparison imply the assignment of random qualitative labels to the entities involved in the process? is is possible to compare without first executing that step in the process?
if so, does the question then become: is love the state in which there is no subjective qualitative (and is subjective ever not qualitative) labeling of the entities involved?
if that were to be possible would it imply the reduction of the situation to a quantitative observation of self and other in relationship?
and if self and other were to be experienced as they are in reality - as manifest energy
does that not simply lead to the dissolution of the separation of self/other and the existence of one?
the question that arises from this is: ok so how do we experience anything in the normal course of affairs? and the answer points right back to language. the random assignment of labels (primarily qualitative/subjective?)
see something fascinating about brain function and a process called 'pruning' which takes place in the brain during development effectively creating the different brain 'areas' which have been observed as the processors of certain inputs and therefore the creators of different perceptions.
The meeting of science and humanities - From Molecules to Metaphor a talk given by V.S. Ramachandran
Monday, January 14, 2008
Someone convinced you that terrorism of the kind most recently experienced in this country is a threat that is being addressed in a fashion which will produce results?
and what if they were wrong about both the threat and the way that it was being addressed?
Find out about a guy who spends quite a lot of his time looking into that question
And find out what he has to say about it in this video from Beyond Belief 2.0
Too coincidental to let go by
Love does not obey
Love is not the product of thought which is the past. Thought cannot possibly cultivate love. Love is not hedged about and caught in jealousy, for jealousy is of the past. Love is always active present. It is not ‘I will love’ or ‘I have loved’. If you know love you will not follow anybody. Love does not obey. When you love there is neither respect nor disrespect.
Freedom from the Known - 82
interpretation for today:
one basic law of the universe is the conservation of energy. energy is never lost, only converted into different forms. live in thought, let your energy be dissipated into heat returned to the universe from which it came, live in love, let it be recycled back to you for growth.
love is an expression of learning, the fuel for growth. when a real connection has been made between two entities, then there is love, growth is possible. is growth possible at other levels yes, of course, it is a continuum. that's where that thing called choice comes into play....subject for another day.
Love does not obey
Love is not the product of thought which is the past. Thought cannot possibly cultivate love. Love is not hedged about and caught in jealousy, for jealousy is of the past. Love is always active present. It is not ‘I will love’ or ‘I have loved’. If you know love you will not follow anybody. Love does not obey. When you love there is neither respect nor disrespect.
Freedom from the Known - 82
interpretation for today:
one basic law of the universe is the conservation of energy. energy is never lost, only converted into different forms. live in thought, let your energy be dissipated into heat returned to the universe from which it came, live in love, let it be recycled back to you for growth.
love is an expression of learning, the fuel for growth. when a real connection has been made between two entities, then there is love, growth is possible. is growth possible at other levels yes, of course, it is a continuum. that's where that thing called choice comes into play....subject for another day.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Remembering to Forget
The process of retraining the mind, just as the process of training it was, is one that requires active attention. Each of the many individuals who have devoted a significant part of their lives to figuring out whether or not this was actually possible gave the process a different name.
Remembering was one of those names. This word, on the surface could be taken simply and from a commonly accepted perspective. It could on another hand, be taken to mean forgetting.
Or in some sense, simply detaching from memory. Doing the thing that we all did from the moment of birth until that time around the age of five or six when the system of language as a vehicle for understanding/learning/knowing replaced the one which we all had/have, the vehicle with which, the system called language was learned. Does that make sense? Is it actually possible that the thing which produces a smile on the face of an infant is not some qualitative reaction to a stimulus but rather a quantitative display of knowledge gained?
Why is the concept of a seventh sense, perhaps the one which might be identified as the first sense, one which provides for knowing in the absence of language such a bizarre concept? How is it that at this very moment and at every single moment of time for the last 150,000 years at least, while this very process is/has been occurring all around everyone everywhere it escapes our collective attention? How did it come to be true that the first sound uttered by a child began to elicit some value judgment about it's content and not a remark like wow, how did that happen? How do you learn language without the pre existence of language in the learner?
Excuse me if that is a dumb question but it's become a favorite and not one that elicits a Duh! response followed by the simple observable example that some others do. Is part of the explanation that language-less communication has simply come to be viewed as an oxymoron?
Or is this simply another example of anthropomorphic narcissism? This may be entirely due to ignorance but that question takes on a similar taste to the one which asks: can the mind actually observe the mind? Is there some corner into which the inquiry can not reach as that place is occupied by the inquiry itself? Or is that line of thinking simply one constrained by a faulty western cultural world-view which has for a few hundred years ignored a big big chunk of reality? One which makes the expression 'the universal mind' not that difficult to imagine as a real possibility.
At about 60 minutes into the video you can find at the end of this link http://thesciencenetwork.org/BeyondBelief/watch
/watch.php?Video=Session%2010
you can find an amazing talk by Neil DeGrasse Tyson which can bring tears to your eyes where this scientist gives an incredibly understandable explanation for how you are one with everything that exists in the universe.
What does that have to do with language? Well, in the big picture, language is actually a pretty small part of what IS, not to mention the fact that it has been around for what amounts to a pretty short span of that good old thing we call time. The essential question that comes out of this inquiry for me is this: Is language the medium through which we actually ever know anything or is it simply one methodology that we have for expressing what amounts to a quantity that transcends language in the same way that the universe transcends our galaxy?
Put another way, if language is a vehicle for transporting knowledge in the way that jets and bicycles are vehicles for transporting matter, is it possible that as a species, we have allowed one vehicle for knowing to atrophy?
and is there a very simple method for reversing that process which we can practice every day? a practice that we all engaged in for four solid years and abandoned at the flip of some random culturally conditioned switch?
end of post
Remembering was one of those names. This word, on the surface could be taken simply and from a commonly accepted perspective. It could on another hand, be taken to mean forgetting.
Or in some sense, simply detaching from memory. Doing the thing that we all did from the moment of birth until that time around the age of five or six when the system of language as a vehicle for understanding/learning/knowing replaced the one which we all had/have, the vehicle with which, the system called language was learned. Does that make sense? Is it actually possible that the thing which produces a smile on the face of an infant is not some qualitative reaction to a stimulus but rather a quantitative display of knowledge gained?
Why is the concept of a seventh sense, perhaps the one which might be identified as the first sense, one which provides for knowing in the absence of language such a bizarre concept? How is it that at this very moment and at every single moment of time for the last 150,000 years at least, while this very process is/has been occurring all around everyone everywhere it escapes our collective attention? How did it come to be true that the first sound uttered by a child began to elicit some value judgment about it's content and not a remark like wow, how did that happen? How do you learn language without the pre existence of language in the learner?
Excuse me if that is a dumb question but it's become a favorite and not one that elicits a Duh! response followed by the simple observable example that some others do. Is part of the explanation that language-less communication has simply come to be viewed as an oxymoron?
Or is this simply another example of anthropomorphic narcissism? This may be entirely due to ignorance but that question takes on a similar taste to the one which asks: can the mind actually observe the mind? Is there some corner into which the inquiry can not reach as that place is occupied by the inquiry itself? Or is that line of thinking simply one constrained by a faulty western cultural world-view which has for a few hundred years ignored a big big chunk of reality? One which makes the expression 'the universal mind' not that difficult to imagine as a real possibility.
At about 60 minutes into the video you can find at the end of this link http://thesciencenetwork.org/BeyondBelief/watch
/watch.php?Video=Session%2010
you can find an amazing talk by Neil DeGrasse Tyson which can bring tears to your eyes where this scientist gives an incredibly understandable explanation for how you are one with everything that exists in the universe.
What does that have to do with language? Well, in the big picture, language is actually a pretty small part of what IS, not to mention the fact that it has been around for what amounts to a pretty short span of that good old thing we call time. The essential question that comes out of this inquiry for me is this: Is language the medium through which we actually ever know anything or is it simply one methodology that we have for expressing what amounts to a quantity that transcends language in the same way that the universe transcends our galaxy?
Put another way, if language is a vehicle for transporting knowledge in the way that jets and bicycles are vehicles for transporting matter, is it possible that as a species, we have allowed one vehicle for knowing to atrophy?
and is there a very simple method for reversing that process which we can practice every day? a practice that we all engaged in for four solid years and abandoned at the flip of some random culturally conditioned switch?
end of post
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
