This Is What Democracy Looks Like

In Afghanistan.

For an hour, the minister of energy and water listened in silence as his employees complained about their department's dismal image: People called them lazy, corrupt and inefficient. Customers accused them of demanding bribes for the smallest services.

Ismail Khan sat on a stage in a dank meeting hall and glowered beneath his wild white beard. His eyes were narrow slits beneath his fierce black eyebrows. At last he spoke.

"Baseless lies!" he spat out. That was the end of it.

Khan runs his ministry the way he once ruled over western Afghanistan as supreme warlord from his headquarters in Herat. His word is law.

But Khan the warlord is now also Khan the public servant. In his gleaming white robes and black-and-white headdress, he still looks like a strutting pasha. However, he works in an office adorned with ancient maps of Kabul's power grid. And he is accountable to the public for failures in what even his critics acknowledge is an impossible mission.

Afghans expected a great leap of progress after U.S. forces, aided by Northern Alliance warlords such as Khan, toppled the Taliban regime five years ago. But electrical service is as unreliable as ever, despite millions of dollars in aid and U.S. promises of a modern, developed Afghanistan. Khan's ministry is barely able to provide two hours of electricity per day to Kabul, the capital, and 90% of the rest of this ruined nation gets none. His own ministry's offices are without power several times a day.

Khan represents one of the grand experiments of the post-Taliban era: the transformation of warlords into public servants. Five years ago, President Hamid Karzai declared that Afghanistan's "era of warlordism is over."

With U.S. help, he strong-armed Khan and other major warlords into relinquishing their roles and maneuvered them into jobs as ministers and governors, asking them to deliver services for Afghanistan's first democratically elected government.

But despite Karzai's declaration, the warlords are among the most powerful forces in the country. Scores of them are as entrenched as ever in the provinces, fielding private armies, profiting from the opium trade and co-opting police officials. Those who have come to Kabul know they could easily reconstitute their militias. In the meantime, they are untouchable.

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Afghanistan






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Blair Admits Defeat

Iraq war 'pretty much a disaster', Blair concedes

Gee it only took him three years. Seems he suffers from self inflicted delusions like his buddy Bush.

But since this interview was broadcast on the new english languate al-Jazeera the PM's office is saying he was misquoted.
On TV.
In an English language interview, with Sir David Frost.


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Book Your Flight With The Pentagon

Is this the real reason that they turfed Rumsfeld? And they don't give out airmiles either.

Pentagon pays for $500M travel site, but would Orbitz work better?:
You can apparently add a $500 million travel booking system to the $600 toilet seat cover, the $434 hammer and other expensive boondoggles approved –- and paid for -– by the Pentagon. The latest effort is the travel booking site, which Senate investigators say "fails to find the cheapest airfares, offers an incomplete list of flights and hotels and won't recognize travel categories used by the National Guard and Reserves," according to The Associated Press. A Senate investigation committee looked at the half-billion-dollar "Defense Travel System." The Pentagon implemented the system hoping that it would be a money-saving travel portal to help its workers book travel. But, in addition to faults like not finding all available airfares, workers say the clunky system takes 30 minutes to complete a booking that can be done in as little as five minutes by a travel agent or at sites like Travelocity or Expedia.

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Harper Treats Us Like Idiots

Guardian columnist George Monbiot is touring Canada promoting his new book on Climate Change.

And what does he think of Canada's Clean Air Act?

"Oh!" he says, his disgust clear in that single syllable. "It seems, to a complete outsider, to be a misreading of the national mood. That bill was treating people like idiots, both lumping together local pollution with carbon dioxide pollution, and talking about the intensity of carbon emissions. It's almost like putting up a sign saying 'I think the people of this nation are suckers." The Harper government, he says, is becoming an international embarrassment because of its environmental policies.

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Ambrose

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Cheese Science

Missing a day at the Cheese Factory allowed for the creation of the periodic table of elements.


UCLA Chemist Provides New Insights into one of Science's Icons and its History

Mendelev, who called himself the Newton of chemistry, conceived the periodic system while writing a textbook, "The Principles of Chemistry," and spent at least four years refining the periodic table. He also developed the Russian oil industry, served as director of the Russian institute for weights and measures and was a consultant to Russian cheese factories. On the day he devised the periodic system, he was supposed to inspect a cheese factory, Scerri said, and decided not to go; Mendelev sketched his first periodic table on the back of an invitation that day, Feb. 17, 1869.

Mendelev produced the first version of a full periodic table that included most of the known elements, even though the background ideas may have been developing over a period of about 10 years, Scerri said. The first published periodic system of Mendelev's contains divisions into main and subgroups. Significantly, there are several vacant spaces in the table, and in this first publication, Mendelev made several predictions, anticipating many unknown elements -- far more predictions than any of the co-discoverers of the periodic system.

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Bush Finally Gets It

Three years after everyone else got it Bush finally figures it out. Amazing what that loss of 'political capital' to the Democrats can do to ones political insight.

Bush draws parallels with Iraq in Vietnam

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Murder Most Foul

Had this happened to a MSM journalist it would be all over the news. However the death of freelance reporter Brad Will in Oaxaca is as under reported as the events in that province itself. Because it challenges the fact that the current self appointed el Presidente of Mexico is facing a crisis of dual power.

The Inconvenient Death of Brad Will Mexican police gun down a counterculture hero by Sarah Ferguson November 14th, 2006 11:51 AM

The last time I saw independent journalist and activist Brad Will was in September in an East Village yoga studio. I turned my head and found him lying on the mat next to me in the darkened room, his pale, flat stomach rising and falling serenely with the rhythm of his breathing. So on October 27, when I saw the photos posted on the Internet showing the 36-year-old Will's mortally wounded body laid out on a street in Oaxaca, Mexico, I cringed. There was that same pale, flat stomach now punctured by a bullet.

Around the world, activists and friends who knew Will—and many people who didn't—were having the same visceral reaction. Within hours of his shooting by plainclothes gunmen firing on a group of striking demonstrators, images of his murder ricocheted around the Web. There were photos of Will's limp body being carried through the streets by frantic demonstrators screaming for help. Equally shocking were the pictures posted by El Universal and other Mexican media showing his alleged killers firing brazenly into the crowd, as if aiming at the cameras. The same gunmen who shot Will also wounded a photographer for the Mexico City daily Milenio, who was at Will's side.

When images of the shooters aired on Mexican TV, viewers began phoning in to identify the gunmen. They have since been confirmed in the media as the police chief and two officers from Santa Lucia del Camino, the municipality where Will was shot, along with the town councillor for the state governing party, his chief of security, and the former head of a neighboring barrio.

Then came the most horrifying evidence of all: Will's final videotape, uploaded on the Web the next day. In his zeal to capture the state-backed repression of the popular uprising that has rocked Oaxaca for the last five months, Will succeeded in recording his own murder.

Armed with an HD camera he had picked up on eBay, Will went to Oaxaca to document the broad-based movement of striking teachers, peasants, urban residents, and left-wing forces that had seized control of government offices and taken over the central square to demand the removal of governor Ulises Ruiz.

But by becoming the first American journalist killed in the unrest, Will became a pretext for Mexican president Vicente Fox to send in 4,000 federal police officers to put down the revolt, which Fox characterized as "radical groups, out of control," who "had put at risk the peace of the citizenry." Since then at least two more protesters have died in the heavy clashes with federal police, who stormed the barricades with tear gas and water cannons, and more than 80 demonstrators have been arrested as the federales continue to vie for control of the city.

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Oaxaca Mexican Revolution Continues

Dual Power In Mexico

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No Nukes

Our PM denounces nukes in North Korea but remains silent about that other rogue nation that has nukes and does not belong to the Non-Proliferation Pact; India.

Opps thats right we sold them the nuclear reactors.

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India





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More On Friedman

Two good articles on the death of the daddy of neo-conservative economics; Milton Friedman.

Relentlessly Progressive Economics

and

Milton Friedman and the Economics of Empire


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Made In Canda Kyoto Accord

Looks like the Conservatives convinced the world that it is 'impossible' for any country to meet its Kyoto obligations.

Congratulations to Rona Ambrose for getting the UN to sign on to her Made In Canada Kyoto accord.

It is a pragmatic decision, one that recognizes that you cannot reform capitalism to make it sustainable. Now lets get on with making lots of money before the heat death of the planet.

Canada has joined more than 165 countries in agreeing to review the Kyoto Protocol in 2008, setting the stage for the next phase of the treaty to combat global warming.

The agreement imposes no new emissions-cutting commitments on countries but it keeps the Kyoto process alive at a time when some feared the whole effort could collapse.

"Canada's very pleased with the outcomes," Environment Minister Rona Ambrose said.

Member countries acknowledged for the first time that global carbon dioxide emissions must be cut 50 per cent to avoid dangerous climate change.

Industrial countries hope the next phase of the treaty will involve new commitments by developing countries, especially China and India, but this is not a sure thing.

Environmentalists were disappointed, saying the conference did not recognize the need for urgent action.

Following a long week of criticism, blame and damage control, Environment Minister Rona Ambrose said she was finally ready to show the world Canada can make the Kyoto Protocol a success back at home.

"When I was appointed as environment minister, we were faced with a very difficult challenge, and at that time, I was very hesitant about saying that we would participate in this protocol in the way that we hoped we could," she said.

"We've made a lot of progress in the last nine months to make sure that we can align our domestic policy with what we'd like to do internationally _ with our international obligations _ and so now we can say that."

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Ambrose

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