US Air Force Secretary Suggests Using Non-lethal Weapons to Control Domestic Crowds First

Because

Domestic use would make it easier to avoid questions in the international community over any possible safety concerns, said Secretary Michael Wynne
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Excellent idea-- if we do it in our country it's only fair we do it in yours.
Now I'm going to go read some Kafka to get my bearings straight.

Balochistan after Bugti

In the late eighties my eleventh grade took a cultural trip from Lahore, Punjab to Quetta, Baluchistan. Our class met the regale Akbar Bugti in the Governor House. Our enduring memory: with us was a recent PhD in Philosphy from Punjab University who'd won a gold medal to boot. He asked her to explain 'a nation is born epicurean but dies stoic', she stared at him for half an hour until finally he answered his own question.
On August 26, 2006 Akbar Bugti, Bugti tribe leader and once Governor of Baluchistan, was killed in an army attack. Some consider Bugti a tyrant concerned with only power, others a man who cared about his province and its people. Ahmed Rashid talks of the repercussions following the way Bugti was killed for Balchuchistan and Pakistan.

The army argues that millions have been spent in development, but projects such as the building of the Gawadar port, the building of cantonments and even new roads do not necessarily benefit ordinary Baloch.
The projects are defined by the army and its national security needs, rather than through consultations with the Baloch or even the Balochistan provincial assembly. Then the projects are carried out by outside companies who give few jobs to the Baloch.
By killing Bugti, the president has now earned the permanent enmity of not just the Baloch rebels but the wider Baloch population who may not believe in taking up arms, but are still frustrated with Islamabad for its failure to develop the province.
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Pankaj Mishra responds to Martin Amis

On the fifth year anniversary of 9/11 British author Martin Amis wrote a 3 part essay for the Guardian-- a vitriolic essay dripping with sarcasm so much so that any valid points he may make are marred by his 'mean spirited' tone. After all one expects more from the 'rational' Westerner (Amis contends that all Muslims are irrational while all Westerners are, by the very virtue of being 'western' rational) and that too a celebrated author, meaning, for me, a deep thinker empathetic enough to examine issues from every side without needing to resort to petty linguistic tricks. Pankaj Mishra's response fills the slot.

Many people, such as Martin Amis last weekend, may continue to berate Muslims for their apparent incompatibility with 'Western' values of democracy and rationality. We could go on debating forever whether the terrorist acts of British Muslims are directly linked to British policy in the Middle East. But a more urgent question is: where will all this rage and distrust end? Are we hurtling towards the kind of wars that made the previous century so uniquely bloody? How can we change policies that have so comprehensively failed?

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Work Sucks. School Sucks. Life Sucks.

Canada, Montreal, Dawson College, Cafeteria: A 25 year old randomly shoots for fifteen minutes (talk about fame) because, 'work sucks, school sucks, life sucks.' Apparently his favorite video game is Super Colombine Massacre. Wtf-- if such video games must be birthed must they be named after actual massacres thus making a mockery out of a tragedy i.e. super? His mother, when questioned, is wiping away tears.
This act of unconditional love reminded me of Lionel Shriver's brilliant novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, where a 15 year old kills seven high school students in the gymnasium. The novel is written from the mother's point of view and is a particularly disturbing read about the often sugar coated relationship between parent and child, as well as the psychology of unconditional love. Shriver talks about this and much else in an indepth interview at Identity Theory.

LS: It's funny this business of treating children as peers, I know that I have a weakness for it myself. I am not always comfortable around children. And I am very sensitive about the prospect of being condescending towards them. I hated being condescended to, when I was a child. So I always try to speak to them as if we're on the same level and the same age and they are perfectly intelligent. Well, they may be perfectly intelligent, but they are not the same age. As a consequence they have no idea what I am a talking about. Children do need at certain ages to be talked down to and if you don't talk down to them or come down to their level, you don't communicate.
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There are some novels that stay with you long after The End either for a character (Anne of Green Gables), or brilliant language (The English Patient), or structure (The God of Small Things). I read We Need to Talk about Kevin two years ago and it still creeps me out for all the questions it raises about being a parent, good or bad, and nature versus nurture.

ps. fifteen year old Margaret Ann changed her name to Lionel Shriver because she 'thought men had an easier life'.

'Digging to America'

Anne Tyler's 17th novel is a rare treat, a beautiful exploration of what it means to be an American today through the lives of a white-American family and an Iranian-American family who both adopt daughters from Korea. For all the doom and gloom these days, and today 9/11 of all days, this novel offers a hopeful perspective of class, culture and color. I loved it. Anne Tyler's rarely gives interviews so here is an interview from 1977 when she'd only written seven novels, and here is a more recent one on writing Digging to America. Also a short review by Zohreh Ghahrem.
ps. I've been thinking all day of the 9/11 messages on answering machines by people on the planes and in world trade centers: 'I love you, be good, take care, I love you.'

James Frey readers to be refunded

Random House is going to reimburse people who bought A Million Little Pieces, the much fabricated memoir by James Frey. Let's hope publishers beef up their methods to verify claims made in memoirs and writers who feel the need to grossly exaggerate their lives realize they're actually writing fiction.

Does 'The God of Literary Trends' still apply

In 2002 Noy Thrupkaew wrote a rather damning take on the exoticism of the South Asian author and book in the US publishing world. Four years later, has anything changed? What would Kaavya Viswanathan, plagiarism withstanding, have to say?

"You know, you really should be looking for the next Arundhati Roy."
I plucked at the phone cord wrapped around my neck, sighed, and said, "Oh, absolutely."
It was 1998, and I was working at a publishing company that had jus launched an imprint featuring "the writing of women of all colors." It was my internly task to call independent booksellers across the country to find out what and whom they thought we should publish. Their advice inevitably boiled down to variations on one response: "That Indian subcontinent is really hot. Oh, oops, do you say 'South Asia' now?"

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U.S. admits to the not so secret prisons

President Bush admits the existence of CIA secret prisons in time for the fifth anniversary of 9/11 when emotions and nostalgia will run high. To keep us safe the President would like
1) military tribunals without key legal safeguards for those on trial
2) the legalization on the now officially outed CIA prisons
3) an expemption for U.S. officials from prosecution for possible war crimes.

To keep us moral human rights activists and detainee lawyers cannot possibly agree with the above.

"The president's acknowledgements today do not gloss over the gross illegalities at Guantánamo or in secret CIA prisons," said the Center for Constitutional Rights, a group that works with detainees.
In a related development, the Pentagon issued a new manual on the treatment of prisoners that explicitly prohibits water-boarding, sexual humiliation, electric shocks, the threatening use of dogs and other degrading or painful tactics.
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There are plenty of loopholes, however, which will allow for the very torture tactics prohibited above if needed. Anyway the President still maintains that the United States does not torture since CIA tactics "while tough, did not amount to torture'". Okay. We'll take your word for it.
Do safety and morality have to be exclusive of each other?

"How to be an Ordinary Muslim in Britain"

Urmee Khan offers tips in the Guardian on how to blend in with Britain so as not to be mistaken for a terrorist even if you don't 'bacon, booze and bingo', the supposedly quintessiental British things to do. Amongst her advise is quit wearing heavy coats, shave your beards off guys and gals, and don't be a succesful Muslim sportsman/woman, actually a successful Muslim anything. For all it's tongue in cheek this is distressing stuff for Muslims who are just as terrified of terrorist attacks as other folks.

Britain's top Muslim police officer put his finger on it when, following the travel restrictions put in place after the Heathrow terror plot, Superintendent Ali Dizaei said, "We are in danger of creating a new offence of travelling while Asian." And a few days later the joke became real, when two Asian men on a flight bound for Manchester were removed from the plane after a passengers' revolt over their wearing big coats, talking in a foreign language which might have been Arabic and generally being shifty and not white. As one of the passengers said, "Everyone agreed the men looked dodgy."
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