Lessons From Commies

The Herald Tribune has a piece today about what NATO’s doing wrong in Afghanistan, and it turns out that its most ham-handed tactics — air raids, curfews, making sections of Kabul off-limits to locals — are no different from the Russians’ mistakes in the 1980s. Not only is NATO not making friends; it’s imitating aspects of the Evil Empire it had been founded to resist. And what is the point of NATO, so many years after the Cold War, if it’s just another big dumb bureaucracy with weapons?

I asked Edmund McWilliams, who was in charge of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in the late 1980s, about this. He confirmed that life under the doomed Soviet occupation wasn’t much different than it is today. There was a nightly curfew back then, when the KGB worked out of the same headquarters that the CIA uses now. The Communist president, Mohammad Najibullah, used to shut down air traffic for hours whenever he flew anywhere, just like Karzai does now. The Kabul sky teemed with armored helicopters and Mig fighters.

The “controversy” over Obama’s flag pin, believe it or not, falls into the same category. Who seriously thinks a lapel pin makes a person patriotic?

You know where else wearing a flag pin is a big deal? North Korea. Everyone seemed to be wearing one there. I was in a tour group and we were told that anyone not wearing their pin when they should had to write a self-recrimination letter to apologize.

     posted 17 hours ago by Michael Scott Moore

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More at 11

Very little explanation here. Not work safe.

     posted 2 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Plea to Indiana

Put it away, put it away, put it away now…

NEWS FLASH: Most Americans see Obama’s ex-pastor as nonissue, poll finds—in spite of a Soviet-style sensationalist news blitz in the States. “It’s like they gave him his own channel,” Chris Rock apparently said about the pastor … Was it really that bad?

UPDATE: Some personalities at Spiegel and the Huffington Post have already called the nomination for Obama. I think they’re right.

     posted 10 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Politicians Who Remain Human

... and how they sometimes fail to get elected, in the pettiest “great” nation on earth: William Pfaff slices a number of hamstrings in favor of Obama.

     posted 12 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Grammar Bitch Online 2

This is one of my favorite grammatic quibbles, the sort of thing everyone gets wrong when they realize they’re speaking in public. Even Barack Obama. Earlier this week, at his measured, mature, eloquent, patient bridge-burning operation that should have laid to rest the matter of his former pastor once and for all, in a rational nation — a great healthy nation populated by thoughtful citizens curious about their candidates for president, concerned about freedom and justice rather than the freak show of stray friends and associates that must surround every candidate, including John McCain (and by the way has anyone noticed that the most damaging dirt anyone has found on Obama is not even about the man himself? I mean how long has he been on the campaign trail? Isn’t that another unprecedented aspect of this election?), not a nation populated by hotheads easily distracted by any non-controversy kicked up by an irresponsible tabloid-TV journalism culture — sorry, where were we? — um, Obama said this:

But he was somebody who was my pastor, and married Michelle and I, and baptized my children…

Michelle and ME.

For fuck’s sake, people. What is the mental block here? But it happens to everyone, or every American, especially when they’re staring into klieg lights and TV cameras. Because we all had it drilled into our heads in second grade while we were subject to the half-assed grammatic tyranny of Mrs. Schneider, or whoever, telling us it was flat wrong to say anything resembling “Mrs. Schneider? Michelle and me kind of need to go to the bathroom?” That sounded so atrocious that Mrs. Schneider would give us a lecture — instead of letting anyone pee — along the lines of, “Always say ‘Michelle and I.’” And God help your soul if you dared to say “Me and Michelle.” I saw a boy flogged for that once in the locker hall.

But Mrs. Schneider was wrong. “Michelle and me” is right in certain cases, namely the accusative. There’s an easy way to check this point of grammar, even while you’re staring into klieg lights. Ask yourself if you would ever say, “He married I.” Sorry, bad example. How about: “He took I.” He was my pastor, he took Michelle and I to the store?

Does that sound like good grammar to you?

In some distant corners of the old British Empire it was called pidgin:

Old pirates, yes, they rob I
Sold I to the merchant ships
Minutes after they took I
From the bottomless pit

But when educated Americans make this mistake, they’re not thinking about the eloquent poetic license of Ras Tafari. They think they sound educated.

     posted 13 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Delia Makes a Döner

“Rather like slates on a roof.” Right. In any case this should serve as home instruction for everyone who won’t be able to afford a döner after the price goes up.

     posted 17 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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I Did Not Know That

“The United States is one of a handful of countries with no guaranteed paid maternity leave policy, along with Swaziland, Papua New Guinea, Lesotho and Liberia, researchers found last year.”

     posted 17 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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If the Waves Are Good

A group in Israel called Explore Corps is helping to set up the first surf club in Gaza and generally get Palestinian kids out into the fresh air. It now has a web site. The guy in charge, Matt Olsen, showed me around the coast of Israel and took me surfing when Arthur Rashkovan was busy. They’re both friends with Dorian Paskowitz, the venerable (and still-kicking) Californian pioneer of Israel’s surf scene. “God will surf with the devil, if the waves are good,” Paskowitz told journalists last summer, when he brought a quiver of boards across the Gaza border to help seed a surf scene there. “When a surfer sees another surfer with a board, he can’t help but say something that brings them together.”

     posted 18 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Shark!

A 66-year-old triathlete got killed by a shark on Friday off Solana Beach, where I lived for a year in college. Major news outlets disagree on whether it’s the first shark-attack death in Southern California since 1959 or 1994 or what. In San Francisco you count on at least one surfer per year appearing on the TV news, alive but in a cast, after getting chomped off a Marin beach; but the warmish south is a nursery for young sharks rather than a feeding ground for adults.

Surfline has details:

Local surfer Rob Blase was sitting in the lineup at Pillbox, just to the south, when the attack happened. “The group of triathletes swam straight out from the ramp at Pillbox,” said Blase. “They swam out towards the kelp beds and then headed north. They were maybe five minutes into their swim when I heard some screams. I heard the one guy yelling, “Shark!” By the time I was able to paddle to the swimmers, they were pulling him onto the beach and the lifeguards saw it too. They were on it, giving him CPR.”

Blase continued, “The top half of the bite was right above the kneecap level. They said the bite width was 22 inches across. It just shredded his wetsuit. From the time it happened until the time they brought him in, it was probably seven to eight minutes. But he was already as white as a ghost.”

More people get killed by elephants every year than by sharks, so these stories are a big deal.

But I’m skeptical about that death in 1994. AP seems to be misleading everyone by saying it was in San Diego County. This Malibu Longboards page places the 1994 death in “Central or Northern” California and the Ventura County Star says it was off San Miguel Island, in Central California, where the shark in question caught up with an unlucky abalone diver.

     posted 20 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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That Food Crisis Thingy

In case you had an impression that the violence from Haiti to Bangladesh was all about biofuels, or global warming, utterly unrelated to the rising price of gold or oil or other investment opportunities hedge funds have been seeking since US real estate went south, Spiegel has a comprehensive feature. William Pfaff also has an excellent column. Warren Buffett didn’t think there was a bubble in agricultural commodities last year, but even then he said, “It’s like most trends: At the beginning, it’s driven by fundamentals, then speculation takes over. As the old saying goes, what the wise man does in the beginning, fools do in the end.”

     posted 22 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Ampelmännchen Don't Surf

They just ride flash cars.

     posted 24 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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He Always Looks Like He's Casting a Spell

     posted 26 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Actual Wipeout of the Year

UPDATE: No that is not me. I think he’s French.

     posted 29 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Ride (and Wipeout) of the Year

Shane Dorian just won a Ride of the Year award from Billabong, a surfing prize which involved some well-deserved monetary compensation. But you get a false impression from the BBC report. Over direct video evidence to the contrary, the announcer says Dorian “manhandled” the wave and, “despite coming dangerously close to a wipeout … held on to scoop the award.”

Watch Dorian’s wave, either in the clip above (third segment) or on the BBC page. You’ll notice he managed a fast ride against most human odds through Teahupoo’s thick, notorious tube before getting hurled against the wave’s wall (instead of through it!) by the nasty spitting spray and then sent careening pinwheeling ass-over-tit into the air before the same wave finally decided to own him on a coral reef.

It was absolutely the ride of the year. But Dorian, I’m afraid, wiped out.

     posted 30 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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Täglicher Faschismus

London’s war on public photography has been a theme at Boing Boing for a while, and now they have a campaign to help one British MP defend innocent people for taking innocent pictures in the street. This shouldn’t, of course, be necessary: Taking pictures of things that happen in public is a normal freedom in the West. But since the “War on Terror” it has eroded because of paranoia about terrorists who take pictures of things; because of defensive cops worried about getting filmed while making arrests; and because of general police and rent-a-cop ignorance of what is and is not legal.

Alas, it’s not quite news that the War on Photography is alive and well in America, too.

But let’s be clear: The cops actually have no right, no power — none — to keep people from taking most of these photos. When police don’t know (or ignore) what’s legal or illegal, the rule of law is breaking down, and when the rule of law breaks down in the face of such a simple right, we’ve begun to get used to Täglicher Faschismus, everyday fascism — in particular when the same freedom is claimed by governments to put up cameras of their own.

     posted 31 days ago by Michael Scott Moore

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