Le Figaro has suggested Sarkozy's war adventures could indeed be a vote-winner: "The president of the republic thinks the French experience a certain pride in seeing their country play an important role on the world scene and that this role is recognised outside its borders. It's good for morale," the paper said.The Guardian is keeping a close eye on Nicolas Sarkozy's transformtion into a hands-on military commander and his skillful use of the United Nations. Sarkozy's micro-managed intervention in Ivory Coast could win votes: The French president has avoided accusations of necolonialism in his carefully gung-ho Africa campaigns
Tuesday, April 12
Sarko Watch: "Inaction is not Sarkozy's default position"
Libya Stalemate
Here's the best overview of the military situation in Libya, as it stood yesterday. NATO is boxed in militarily as are the rebels and Gadhafi's forces:
CNN's THE SITUATION ROOM with Wolf Blitzer, anchor
Aired April 11, 2011 - 17:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[...]
WOLF BLITZER: Let's go to the military operation underway in Libya right now. A new U.S. concerns, a stalemate could be emerging. Our Pentagon correspondent, Chris Lawrence is joining us with this part of the story. What's the latest, Chris?
CHRIS LAWRENCE, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, Wolf, one senior U.S. official tells us that there's almost no chance that Libya's rebels can move further along on the ground towards Tripoli, and yet, another official tells us that Moammar Gadhafi's forces cannot undertake a major ground offensive. So, where does that leave you?
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
LAWRENCE (voice-over): Nobody wants to call it a stalemate, but U.S. officals privately say the rebels are holding Ajdabiya but don't have the organization, weapons, or manpower to move on. Gadhafi holds Brega, but air strikes have a destroyed a third of his ground armor and cut into his supply lines. U.S. and NATO officials now believed neither side can move. They also say it can't go on like this. If it does, al Qaeda is almost sure to take advantage.
ANDERS FOGH RASMUSSEN, NATO SECRETARY-GENERAL: If this ends up in a stalemate that eventually could also make Libya a failed state, that could become a breeding ground for terrorists and extremists.
LAWRENCE: In a political term, there's no such thing as a tie.
WILLIAM COHEN, FORMER DEFENSE SECRETARY: A stalemate would be a defeat. I think for the president and in terms of his stated goal of seeing Gadhafi leave.
LAWRENCE: Former Defense Secretary William Cohen says NATO must do more militarily.
COHEN: That would intensify the military operations.
LAWRENCE: U.S. and NATO officials have information notes civilians being killed, but Gadhafi's forces are enough now so mixed in so with civilians it's impossible to launch air strikes against them, unless, you use low flying aircraft that can fire extremely accurately, the kind that U.S.S. stop flying now that it is not leading the mission. In addition, Gadhafi may still have as many as 15,000 shoulder fired missiles. It's why NATO secretary-general now says there's no way to fight its way out of this.
RASMUSSEN: I want to be clear that there can be no solid military solution to the crisis in Libya.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
LAWRENCE (voice-over): Especially when it's getting harder for NATO to even tell the two sides apart. For example, last Thursday, NATO warplanes accidently bombed the rebels because they didn't know that the rebels now had tanks -- Wolf.
BLITZER: Chris Lawrence at the Pentagon, thank you.
[...]
CNN's THE SITUATION ROOM with Wolf Blitzer, anchor
Aired April 11, 2011 - 17:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[...]
WOLF BLITZER: Let's go to the military operation underway in Libya right now. A new U.S. concerns, a stalemate could be emerging. Our Pentagon correspondent, Chris Lawrence is joining us with this part of the story. What's the latest, Chris?
CHRIS LAWRENCE, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, Wolf, one senior U.S. official tells us that there's almost no chance that Libya's rebels can move further along on the ground towards Tripoli, and yet, another official tells us that Moammar Gadhafi's forces cannot undertake a major ground offensive. So, where does that leave you?
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
LAWRENCE (voice-over): Nobody wants to call it a stalemate, but U.S. officals privately say the rebels are holding Ajdabiya but don't have the organization, weapons, or manpower to move on. Gadhafi holds Brega, but air strikes have a destroyed a third of his ground armor and cut into his supply lines. U.S. and NATO officials now believed neither side can move. They also say it can't go on like this. If it does, al Qaeda is almost sure to take advantage.
ANDERS FOGH RASMUSSEN, NATO SECRETARY-GENERAL: If this ends up in a stalemate that eventually could also make Libya a failed state, that could become a breeding ground for terrorists and extremists.
LAWRENCE: In a political term, there's no such thing as a tie.
WILLIAM COHEN, FORMER DEFENSE SECRETARY: A stalemate would be a defeat. I think for the president and in terms of his stated goal of seeing Gadhafi leave.
LAWRENCE: Former Defense Secretary William Cohen says NATO must do more militarily.
COHEN: That would intensify the military operations.
LAWRENCE: U.S. and NATO officials have information notes civilians being killed, but Gadhafi's forces are enough now so mixed in so with civilians it's impossible to launch air strikes against them, unless, you use low flying aircraft that can fire extremely accurately, the kind that U.S.S. stop flying now that it is not leading the mission. In addition, Gadhafi may still have as many as 15,000 shoulder fired missiles. It's why NATO secretary-general now says there's no way to fight its way out of this.
RASMUSSEN: I want to be clear that there can be no solid military solution to the crisis in Libya.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
LAWRENCE (voice-over): Especially when it's getting harder for NATO to even tell the two sides apart. For example, last Thursday, NATO warplanes accidently bombed the rebels because they didn't know that the rebels now had tanks -- Wolf.
BLITZER: Chris Lawrence at the Pentagon, thank you.
[...]
Monday, April 11
Do Sarkozy's actions toward Libya relate to the day the world changed? Pundita turns to the spirit world for an answer.
July 16, 2009: The Day the World Changed
The Spiegel report that accompanies the historic photograph above (tersely credited to "DDP") starts as a snark piece about Russian President Dmitry Mevedev turning on the charm and getting German Chancellor to smile during their meeting in Munich on July 16, 2009. As you can see Chancellor Merkel had done plenty of smiling months earlier:
March 31, 2009: Merkel and Medvedev attend a meeting of German and Russian economic leaders at the Chancellery in Berlin
(Photo: Sean Gallup for Getty Images Europe) However, the Berlin meeting, which was to prepare for a G20 summit in London, was pro forma. It was the Munich meeting which was the biggie. After clowning around for a few paragraphs Spiegel moved to a discussion of Medvedev's approach to Russia's human-rights issues. Then after a riveting discussion of how to remove grass stains from socks the report finally doles out a few hints regarding the importance of Medvedev's trip to Munich:
The two sides also agreed to develop a common school textbook together. Work on the project is set to begin later this year. If anything concrete comes out of the efforts, it will be a remarkable success. Russians and Germans currently have a very different view of their shared history. A common school textbook could help to promote mutual understanding between the two nations. The chancellor went as far as to praise the way that German-Russian relations had "greatly intensified."In what might be the biggest understatement of this young century Schockenhoff added, "Last year, the Georgia war dominated the mood, but this year there is a very different atmosphere of trust."
[...]
Andreas Schockenhoff, the German government's commissioner on German-Russian relations, also says that more concrete projects need to be agreed upon in the future. "But the dialogue is getting more and more open," he says.
United Press International was a little more forthcoming about the import of the Munich meeting:
Medvedev in Germany to talk Nord StreamBut it was left to John Batchelor to put all the pieces together, which he did in such spectacular fashion that Stephen F. Cohen, the great Russia scholar, was struck speechless for a few seconds.
MUNICH, Germany, July 16 (UPI) -- Russian President Dmitry Medvedev met Thursday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to discuss energy security and the Nord Stream gas pipeline.
Sergei Prikhodko, an aide to Medvedev, said fuel and energy cooperation were at the top of the agenda for the meeting between the two leaders. He added the talks focused particularly on the political aspects of implementing the Nord Stream gas pipeline, which he described as of "strategic importance not only for Russia and Germany, but for the whole of Europe," RIA Novosti reports.
The Nord Stream gas pipeline would transit along a dual route through the Baltic Sea to Germany. Russia sees the project, and its South Stream counterpart, as an option to avoid politically sensitive routes through Ukraine that transfer 80 percent of all Russian gas to Europe.
Europe, for its part, puts its faith in the Nabucco pipeline, though that project suffers from a lack of firm commitments from potential gas suppliers and financial shortfalls.
Merkel in March said she wants no public funding for the $10.3 billion Nabucco project.[...]
Finally Dr Cohen said slowly, more to himself than to Batchelor, "I think you might be onto something."
So then everyone around the world who was tuned into Batchelor's radio show began scribbling notes like mad.
Batchelor saw the Munich meeting as a harbinger of the end of NATO as the world had always known it. Unfolding events over the next year showed he was correct. Yet there was no single event, no specific crisis to signal that a massive shift in old alliances was underway. However, with regard to Germany there were at least three situations that taken together were a large factor in Merkel's historic decision to turn over a new page in German-Russian relations, and which had taken years to come to a head.
2008: Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili on hold after putting through a call to State to learn whether the CIA would assassinate him for ordering a military strike on South Ossetia
1. The proposed Nabucco pipeline -- proposed to serve Europe as an alternative to Russian natural gas -- and proposed to be supplied with gas by those bastions of stability, "Iraq in cooperation with Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and possibly Egypt." Wikipedia adds helpfully:
Concerns have been raised about the safety of the project. The pipeline will cross through unstable areas of Turkey's Southeast region. In recent years the Kurdistan Workers' Party claimed responsibility for blowing up the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline and the Tabriz–Ankara pipeline in Turkey. ... Gas for the Nabucco pipeline coming from Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan will have to pass near areas of instability in the South Caucasus.Understand that Washington had wanted Germany to pick up a big share of the tab for funding the Nabucco nightmare, which, when Wikipedia last checked, still hasn't found funding.
2. U.S. and British machinations in Ukraine, which egged on Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko to escalate his cold war with Putin. This included holding Europeans who were dependent on Russia natual gas hostage to the prospect of freezing in the winter, and which threatened to crash a good chunk of the EU economy. And which by 2008 also had something to do with a cold war between the Kremlin and the British foreign office over a joint oil deal involving British Petroleum -- er, "BP."
3. The very same war in Georgia that Herr Schockenhoff delicately alluded to. You remember that war, right? The one where presidents Bush and Putin had to learn while sitting next to each other at China's Olympics that Georgia's president -- the necktie-chewing Mikheil Sakaashvili, installed as Georgia's President in a U.S.-orchestrated putsch ("The Rose Revolution") -- was trying to start World War Three?
Yeah. That war.
There are surely additional reasons not specifically related to the United States -- the economic crisis for one, which brought home to Germans that they couldn't continue bankrolling the expansion of the European Union at the rate they'd done in the past.
And there was simply the fact that a shaking out in alliances was inevitable when it became clear to West Europeans that continuing with the policy of using former Soviet republics to create an ever-expanding front against Russia was threatening to create the very instability on the Continent that had driven European fear of Russian hegemony. The Georgia war was the starkest demonstration that there had to be a realignment of priorities for Europe, even if this caused a major rift with the United States.
And so, when Medvedev showed up in Munich three days after the Nabucco Pipeline Intergovernmental Agreement between Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Austria was signed by five prime ministers with the European Union President Jose Manuel Barroso and Special Envoy for Eurasian Energy Richard Morningstar and Ranking Member of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Senator Richard Lugar looking on and beaming, Angela Merkel said to him -- paraphrasing here -- For God's sake, let's try for sanity.
And with such few or similar words, the small cracks in the NATO alliance widened to a gulf, which finally ushered in the true post-Soviet era.
The question is whether the Libya crisis -- the response of the United States and European NATO nations to the uprising in the country -- is part of a shift in alliances on the European continent, or whether the crisis was in some way precipitated by it.
In an attempt to divine an answer I must turn to the occult on account of the Beeb rolling up much of its operation in Russia, FNC shutting its Moscow Bureau, the ABC and CBS Moscow bureaus shuttered and reporters at CNN's Moscow bureau (if there's even one left) spending their days playing darts and yelling out the window to any Russian who looks like FSB, 'We're NOT spies!'
So give us a moment while we retrieve the Ouija board. [clattering sounds] All right; everyone quiet please because I've never tried this before with people listening in.
Oh Ouija, why did Nicolas Sarkozy decide to invade to Libya on the advice of a philosopher, and does the improved relationship between Russia and Germany have anything to do with the decision, and how can the United States get out of the mess in Libya?
All right; now I wait, and hope the spirit world is in a good mood. The last time I asked Ouija for insight into European affairs I got the spirit of a Prussian general. It gave me plans for laying siege to Paris and a recipe for pickled herring. I used to have a spy at the German embassy here in Washington, a young raccoon with a good ear for German and a gift for acting adorable, but then it bit a caterer -- ssshhh, Pundita! Quiet! [whispering] Just see what I have to go through because the editorial boards of the New York Times and Washington Post want to act like members of the NSC and desks at the U.S. Department of State instead of doing their job -- sssshh! The wedgie's moving!
"I-L-F-A-U-T-S-A-V-O-I-R-D-O-N-N-E-R-U-N-O-E-U-F-P-O-U-R-A-V-O-I-R-U-N-B-O-E-U-F"
"Il faut savoir" -- looks French. So now we have to traipse to a translator program......
Translation: "You have to know how to give an egg to get an ox."
Never what I want to know, always what the spirit world wants me to know. Well, let's see what inspiration we can glean from a French proverb about an egg and an ox. I think this requires a trip in the time machine:
March 17, 2009March 17, 2009. Why does that date have a familiar ring? Oh yes; the National Assembly vote on France rejoining NATO happened just a few days before the March 31, 2009 meeting between Merkel and Medvedev in Berlin ahead of the London G20 Summit. Moving ahead in the time machine:
Sarkozy wins French NATO re-entry vote
[no byline]
PARIS, France (CNN) -- Opposition lawmakers Tuesday ridiculed President Nicolas Sarkozy for taking France back into NATO's military command after more than 40 years, but were unable to stop the move when it came to a vote.
The National Assembly voted in favor of Sarkozy's plan, 329-238.
Socialist Laurent Fabius, a former prime minister, told Prime Minister Francois Fillon: "You tell us this would mean more independence and more influence. It would probably mean less independence and less influence."
The move did not technically require parliamentary approval, but the president's party scheduled the debate to give opponents a chance to voice their opinions -- and to show a majority backed it.
Asking the National Assembly to vote on the issue also showed how sensitive the matter is in France.
France was a founding member of the NATO alliance in 1949 but it left the military structure in 1966 amid friction with the United States.
"To cooperate is to lose your independence," French President Charles de Gaulle said at the time.
For the next 43 years, even though France selectively participated in NATO military operations, de Gaulle's principle remained the governing cornerstone of French foreign policy.
If Paris took orders from NATO military commanders, it was reasoned, the nation would no longer have complete control of its destiny.
Sarkozy, however, believes the opposite -- that cooperation in NATO is a guarantee of French independence.
Rejoining NATO's military command, he argued, will give France a seat at the table for decision-making.
From its earliest years, the organization's trans-Atlantic ties were strained because U.S. analysts warned that if the European allies failed to increase their contributions to the alliance, they risked losing the support of the United States, according to NATO.
Meanwhile, the European nations felt the United States was trying to dominate the organization, according to NATO.
De Gaulle's 1966 decision meant no French forces could be under permanent allied command and that France would have no participation in defense planning.
In 1995, France rejoined NATO's military committee, which advises NATO's political authorities on military policy and strategy and provides guidance on military matters to NATO's strategic commanders.
While France was still not a part of the military command, it contributed troops and funding to NATO activities, including actions in Kosovo and Afghanistan. Half of all French troops outside the country are assigned to NATO military operations.
Opponents of Sarkozy's move -- who include some members of his party -- believe de Gaulle, not Sarkozy, had it right. They started a last-minute petition drive to stop his march back into NATO.
"With this decision, France will return as a subordinate country and will lose its ability to represent another image in the world," said Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, a member of the French National Assembly.
The president's allies calculate Sarkozy's move will strengthen Europe's hand on defense issues.
"There will be more European weight in the way decisions will be made," said Louis Giscard d'Estaing, a member of the National Assembly's U.S. Friendship Committee. "Therefore, the balance of power between the USA and Europe will be re-established within this French move."
March 22, 2011I can't buy Sarkozy's stated rationale for opposing a NATO-led military operation in Libya because by his reasoning the Arab world would also be alarmed by any Western-led operation, including a French one.
Sarkozy opposes Nato taking control of Libya operation
Dissent from Germany, Turkey and Norway leaves question marks over command structure
By Kim Willsher in Paris
(U.K.) Guardian
The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has opposed handing over control of the military operation in Libya to Nato, saying the move would send the wrong message to Arab nations.
At a meeting of the North Atlantic Council, Nato's decision-making committee on Monday, the French representative reportedly stormed out after being accused of hindering Nato's involvement in the campaign. France had flatly refused to agree to the proposal, which was later agreed by a majority of member countries.
The German representative is also reported to have left the meeting after his country was criticised for not wanting to get involved.
Turkey, angered that the French president had failed to invite it to Saturday's summit in Paris, refused to give carte blanche for a no-fly zone over Libya.
Western diplomats say Sarkozy angered Britain and the US by announcing French planes were already in the air and ready to attack Libya before many of his allies had even left Saturday's meeting to decide on military action, and before informing his partners.
Afterwards, the French president -- who will be seeking re-election next year -- was congratulating himself for what the French called his "diplomatic blitzkrieg" in pushing through UN resolution 1973 authorising the offensive against Muammar Gaddafi.
However, after Monday's meeting, Norway said it was "suspending' participation of its F-16 fighter jets, which had already arrived in Italy before flying on to Crete, until it had "a clarification of the command [structure]".
Germany and Turkey do not want Nato to carry on the bombing campaign against Gaddafi's forces; Luxembourg, present at Saturday's summit, has said it will only take part if the operation is Nato-led; Italy is "reflecting on the use of its bases" for the operation.
The French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, said Nato was "willing to come to the support of the coalition in a few days", suggesting a role for the organisation that is complementary rather than central.
A French military source told AFP it was a case of "finding a way to get Nato involved without it being seen to head the operation".
While France has been giving the impression it is heading the operation, the military attacks on Libya are, according to Juppé, "an operation co-ordinated by the US in direct collaboration with the French and British authorities". It is being led from US bases in Germany and Italy.
This is apparently the first time London, Paris and Washington have failed to come up with a unified chain of command for the operation. [Pundita note: I think the reporter meant to write "an" operation.]
Laurent Teisseire, spokesman for the French ministry of defence, told journalists: "There is no centralised chain of command at this moment. Everyone is using their own military structures in a co-ordinated fashion."
This unprecedented, three-pronged command is reflected in the different names for the operation: The French are calling it Harmattan (the name of a hot wind that blows over the Sahara); in Britain, it is Operation Ellamy; and in the US, it is Odyssey Dawn.
Le Nouvel Observateur magazine described it as "a boat without a captain".
[...]
Yet Sarkozy is no fool. So while it's tempting to chalk up his headlong rush into the Libyan uprising to a response to a humanitarian crisis, or to show his political opponents that France would not be marginalized by NATO membership, or to an attempt to head off a massive influx of refugees, or even a big move in the chess game of oil politics or all the above, I remain perplexed by his very strong initial opposition to NATO control of the Libya operation.
Here I'm reminded of Diana Saluri Russo's January 30 article for the Global Journalist, Is the Foreign News Bureau Part of the Past? She writes:
While some might herald the futuristic era that web-based journalism -- with its blogs, tweets, and YouTube videos -- is bringing to foreign reporting, Tobias Piller, long-time Rome correspondent for a German newspaper, has a different take.I urge you to read the entire article, which is a sobering assessment of difficulties that present-day journalism is posing not only for individual news consumers but also for governments.
For Piller, relying on nonspecialists and drop-in coverage in place of regular foreign correspondents is, in fact, taking foreign coverage back to earlier days.
“When I arrived in Rome 17 years ago, there was what I would call an older generation of foreign reporting,” says Piller. “It basically consisted of something like a ‘letter from Rome’ maybe every two weeks—an analysis of the country’s curiosities, an analysis of politics now and then, mostly stereotypes. It was basically a generalist’s view.”
As mainstream media replace foreign correspondents with “hot spot” drop-in coverage, outsource to local hires and newswires, and even the Vatican turns to YouTube, Piller says the demand for and faster arrival of information creates a different type of journalism, which often results in a kind of painting in broad strokes.
Piller, who covers Rome for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, cites German confusion about Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s continuing popularity in Italy as an example of what only in-depth, authoritative reporting can offer.
“Germans can’t understand why Italians elect Berlusconi over and over again,” he says. “They say he is a crook, so why does this happen. Or they think Italians have been brainwashed. The fact is that Italy is very complicated. Italians don’t see it so much as black and white. You need to see it from the inside. If you are not an official journalist, you are not able to explain that.”
[...]
Things have come to the point where only the John Batchelor Show and the big news wire services such as Reuters and Associated Press routinely provide ongoing media coverage of regions around the world whether or not there's a crisis or big 'breaking' news story from a region.
That's how John was able to spot the importance of the Munich meeting, and why his audience could appreciate its significance: for years his show had routinely featured reports and analysis on Europe and Russia.
Munich is by no means the only instance when John noted an emerging trend before other analysts and the mainstream press saw it. He can be months and even years ahead of the curve; he's simply a brilliant analyst who's had many years of practice, which doesn't mean he can't make mistakes in his initial estimates of a situation. But no small part of his ability to spot important trends is because he tracks regional developments all around the world, over time.
Yet routine ongoing coverage of world regions is being reserved more and more for online magazines, subscription journals, specialty blogs and message boards; John's radio show is a rare exception in that it's available through a major mainstream mass-media outlet.
Photo Caption from Global Journalist: "Foreign news bureaus, such as this 1930s Associated Press London bureau, used to bustle with energy. Now many foreign bureaus are closing and switching to local reporters.AP Photo: Uncredited)"
Sunday, April 10
War as Wimbledon
Meanwhile, Libyan Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim said government forces had shot down two rebel helicopters in the east, but this also cannot been confirmed.Here is the rest of the Beeb's April 10 report, titled Libya: African leaders head to Tripoli talks.
He said: "A clear violation was committed by the rebels to [UN] resolution 1973 relating to the no-fly zone."
Nato says it is applying the zone fairly and on Saturday escorted a rebel MiG-23 fighter jet back to its base.
Wednesday, April 6
Glenn Beck takes the next step in building his media empire
This comes as no surprise to Beck watchers:PRESS RELEASE, April 6, 2011:
NEW YORK— FOX News and Mercury Radio Arts, Glenn Beck’s production company, are proud to announce that they will work together to develop and produce a variety of television projects for air on the FOX News Channel (FNC) as well as content for other platforms including FOX News' digital properties.Glenn's enemies will try to portray the news as a sign that he was eased off Fox. If anything it's the other way around:
Glenn intends to transition off of his daily program, the third highest rated in all of cable news, later this year.
Roger Ailes, Chairman and CEO of FOX News said, “Glenn Beck is a powerful communicator, a creative entrepreneur and a true success by anybody’s standards. I look forward to continuing to work with him."
Glenn Beck said, “I truly believe that America owes a lot to Roger Ailes and FOX News. I cannot repay Roger for the lessons I’ve learned and will continue to learn from him and I look forward to starting this new phase of our partnership."
Joel Cheatwood, SVP/Development at FOX News, will be joining Mercury Radio Arts effective April 24, 2011. Part of his role as EVP will be to manage the partnership and serve as a liaison with FOX News.
Ailes said, “Joel is a good friend and one of the most talented and creative executives in the business. Over the past four years I have consistently valued his input and advice and that will not stop as we work with him in his new role."
"Glenn Beck" is consistently the third highest rated program on cable news. For the 27 months that “Glenn Beck” has aired on FOX News, the program has averaged more than 2.2 million total viewers and 563,000 viewers 25-54 years old, numbers normally associated with shows airing in primetime, not at 5pm. “Glenn Beck" has dominated all of its cable news competitors since launch.
Warning Shots? Glenn Beck To Poach Fox News Bigwig, Suggesting Big PlansThe logical next big step for Glenn Beck would be his own cable channel, but that could be a few years down the line.
Colby Hall
March 21st, 2011
Mediaite
[...]
Mediaite has learned that Beck has planned to hire a Fox News bigwig to work within his production company, revealing, perhaps, much bigger and more innovative plans than anyone had previously thought.
A source close to the situation tells Mediaite, “There is a strong indication that Glenn Beck has bigger plans for his TV future than anyone thought, as it looks like Joel Cheatwood, SVP of Production/Development at Fox News, will be joining Mercury Radio Arts very soon to work closely with Glenn on his next creative idea.”
While no deal is officially done, indications are that Cheatwood will soon be joining Mercury.
[...]
By bringing on a senior television executive with Cheatwood’s track record, Beck seems to be telling to the television world (and perhaps his current employer) that his vision for his future in broadcasting is not entirely reliant on Fox News, the cable network that undoubtedly helped bring Beck from a lackluster 0.4 rating, while on HLN, to a robust 1.5 rating. Yes, Beck’s ratings have come back to earth from the astronomical (unsustainable?) numbers of late August of 2010, yet the number of viewers he regularly gets at 5pm is still impressive.
[...]
Regardless of how you feel about his politics, there are very few personalities in the news and information arena with as high a profile as Glenn Beck, and now more than ever, established brands are crucial to breaking through the mass media clutter, and attracting viewers.
Add to that Beck’s radio, web, publishing, and stage reach, and it’s not unfair to say that Beck enjoys a significant marketing platform that would certainly be attractive to a wide variety of networks and programming services looking for a cornerstone — a rising tide that would theoretically lift other boats.
Beck and Mercury have often been ahead of the digital curve, and have already built a robust subscription streaming business with Insider Extreme, something that would certainly hold appeal to the next iteration of video consumption a la Netflix.
Further, Beck has already started building programs to his network in which he doesn’t star, such as other programming on Insider Extreme, like the 4th hour with his radio co-stars Pat and Stu, as well as the new online show featuring S.E. Cupp, and let’s not forget our good friends at TheBlaze.com.
The hiring of Cheatwood makes the most sense in a scenario in which Glenn Beck is no longer on Fox News, an indication that all of the smoke surrounding this relationship reveals a deeper fire suggesting that the relationship is coming to an end.
[...]
It made my Wednesday morning, too
The Victim
April 6, 2011, 9:15 AM EDT:
Man barks at dog, gets arrested for animal harassmentPhoto: Associated Press
Posted by Barry Leibowitz
(CBS/AP) MASON, Ohio - It's the kind of story that makes a Wednesday morning worthwhile.
An Ohio man has been charged with a misdemeanor for barking at a police dog.
It happened in the Cincinnati suburb of Mason. The police report says 25-year-old Ryan James Stephens is charged with teasing the K-9, which was in a patrol car.
Officer Bradley Walker wrote that while he investigated a car crash at a pub early Sunday morning he heard the police dog barking uncontrollably inside his car. Allegedly, Stephens -- the "animal impersonator" -- was making barking noises and hissing at the real thing.
Officer Walker reported that when he asked the barking Mr. Stephens why he was harassing the canine, he replied, "The dog started it."
The officer also said Stephens appeared highly intoxicated (which is actually reassuring in this case).
He's due in municipal court on April 21. No word on whether he'll be in handcuffs -- or on a leash.
Monday, April 4
The 24-hour news cycle making you crazy? Take two readings of the CNN Effect and call me in the morning.
Heeerrreee comes the Six O'Clock News
Aside: It's not fair to CNN to keep calling it the 'CNN Effect; given that it's no longer limited to CNN or even television. But until someone thinks up a better term to codify hasty reactions by decision-makers in response to news generated by the instaneous globalized 24/7 news cycle, which manifests today on thousands of satellite and cable TV outlets and millions of internet outlets that are now available on teeny portable electronic devices, this post will stick with the original term.
I do not know, and I am pretty sure I do not want to know, exactly why Richard Goldstone took it into his head at this time to write an op-ed The Washington Post, in which he attempts to straddle the controversy about the Goldstone Report, which was controversial even before it was written. What is certain is that Goldstone's muddled, waffling attempt to retract a key finding of the Goldstone Report has created almost as much controversy as the report.
All the muddle, waffling and controversy could have been avoided if, at the start, the UN fact-finding mission on the Gaza War hadn't caved to public pressure and instead taken reasonable time to investigate an event of vast magnitude and complexity. I'm willing to bet there's still an investigation open in some forgotten department into incidents during the Boer War. Yet under pressure to quickly deliver, the UN mission concluded its investigation after only six months.
Now Mr Goldstone and the officials who rushed to support the Goldstone Report are having to live with the consequences of hasty judgment. This says nothing about the Israelis who've had to live with the report's flawed findings.
Nor do I know or particularly want to know who shot off his mouth in Afghanistan about the burning of a copy of the Koran in Florida. At this point I don't think anyone knows, although there are rumors it was Hamid Karzai trying to head off controversy about rumors that a Koran had been burned in Florida.
What is known is that within about 15 minutes of the announcement a murder rampage arose in Mazar-i-Sharif in reaction to news about the burning of the Koran, and that about 15 minutes later every world leader and high-profile politician not to mention General David Petraeus had issued a condemnation of the Koran burning.
The global uproars connected with the Goldstone op-ed and the Koran burning are illustrations of the CNN Effect, which is threatening to drive the entire freakin' planet bonkers. Even now, the CNN Effect dominates every nation excepting North Korea.
At this rate it could turn out that North Koreans, the world's most oppressed people, end up the world's only sane people. So I'm not sure it's a joke to predict that such a turn of events could open up a huge revenue stream and source of foreign exchange for North Korea, if people around the world clamor to get someplace where they can have a meditation retreat without hearing tinkletinkletinkle every time someone's Twitter account flashes a message to a cellphone.
Another illustration of the CNN Effect is found in the chorus of demands that President Barack Obama hurry up and lead the Free World's response to the crisis in Libya at a time when nobody on Earth had the slightest inkling of what was actually going on Libya.
Obama caved to the public pressure, or it could be that he caved to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was bitten hardest by the CNN Effect bug on the matter of Libya. The upshot is that the very same Americans who cried loudest on media outlets for a quick response from Obama are now donning sackcloth and casting ashes about the poorly-conceived U.S. intervention in Libya.
To put the cherry on top, sophisticated players have learned to manipulate the CNN Effect to their advantage, with ratings-hungry TV news outlets such as al Jazeera and CNN playing willing dupes and hordes of Tweeters playing useful idiots. Thusly, the Arab Spring hoax (which I'll make a stab at summarizing in the next post), which has unleashed such chaos across Arab lands that Iran's mullacrats are predicting the end of the world is well-nigh upon us.
For readers who are unfamiliar with the term, Wikipedia has a nice introductory article, which I quote from here with the advice that national leaders write on the backs of their hands in indelible ink Margaret Tutwiler's observation about the CNN Effect, then wave the backs of their hands at TV reporters every time the crisis du jour erupts:
The CNN effect is a theory in political science and media studies that postulates that the development of the popular 24-hour international television news channel known as Cable News Network, or CNN, had a major impact on the conduct of states' foreign policy in the late Cold War period and that CNN and its subsequent industry competitors have had a similar impact in the post-Cold War era.I hasten to add that sanity still reigns in some quarters. John Batchelor, whose job is to analyze big breaking news stories, peppers his radio broadcasts with reminders that the first three reports in war are wrong, a story is only in the developing stage, a report hasn't been confirmed, etc.
While the free press has, in its role as the "Fourth Estate", always had an influence on policy-making in representative democracies, proponents of the CNN effect argue that "the extent, depth, and speed of the new global media have created a new species of effects" qualitatively different from those which preceded them historically.[1]
The term's coinage reflects the pioneering role played by the network CNN in the field, whose "saturation coverage" of events like the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, the fall of Communism in eastern Europe, the first Gulf War, and the Battle of Mogadishu was viewed as being strongly influential in bringing images and issues to the immediate forefront of American political consciousness and beyond. Despite these origins, the term as used generally refers to a broad range of real-time modern media, and is not exclusive to CNN or even 24-hour broadcast cable news.
[...]
Former Secretary of State James Baker said of the CNN effect "The one thing it does is to drive policymakers to have a policy position. I would have to articulate it very quickly. You are in real-time mode. You don't have time to reflect."
Baker's former press secretary, Margaret Tutwiler, mirrors his sentiment: "Time for reaction is compressed. Analysis and intelligence gathering is out." [1]
[...]
And at the outset of the crisis in Egypt, Mark Safranski as much said on his ZenPundit blog that he wasn't going make a damn fool of himself by holding forth on a topic he knew virtually nothing about.
Pundita, who takes a more sporting approach to surviving life in a madhouse, published posts about the history of beer while her creator crammed on Egypt's military and political situation before plopping out with an opinion on the crisis.
There are other bloggers who make a studied attempt to avoid falling prey to the CNN Effect, Dave Schuler at The Glittering Eye among them. But the blogosphere, in the effort to keep up with the frantic pace of the Twittersphere, is in danger of losing its greatest value as a citizen-journalist enterprise: to dig up facts and provide thought-out analysis that the mainstream news media overlooks in its haste to make deadlines.
Digging and rumination take time, of course -- in a news environment that considers a week ago ancient history.
Just as troubling, the CNN Effect has received little public attention since social media and the proliferation of satellite TV channels greatly exacerbated its consequences and spread them outside the confines of public policy-making and defense issues. The reference Wikipedia provides for the quotes I featured is for a report that was published in 1997. And the latest reference Wikipedia provides is from 2005. Yet to glance through the titles and authorship of the reports Wikipedia cites is to immediately recognize the gravity of the CNN Effect (see Wikipedia for hyperlinks to the reports):
1. Livingston, Steven. Clarifying the CNN Effect: An Examination of Media Effects According to Type of Military Intervention(PDF). John F. Kennedy School of Government's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. 1997.The lack of recent public discussion about the CNN Effect has left publics around the world with the perception that they're beset with one crisis after another -- crises that their political leaders seem chronically unable to effectively address.
2. Belknap, Margaret H. The CNN Effect: Strategic Enabler or Operational Risk? (PDF). U.S. Army War College Strategy Research Project. 2001.
3. Shah, Anup. Media and Natural Disasters. Globalissues.org. 23 Oct. 2005. [...] External links: "CNN effect" is Not Clear-Cut, essay by Indiana University School of Law professor Fred H. Cate, in Humanitarian Affairs Review. 2002.
"The CNN Effect": How 24-Hour News Coverage Affects Government Decisions and Public Opinion, Brookings Institute/Harvard University forum transcript. 2002.
The "CNN Effect:" TV and Foreign Policy, Center for Defense Information America's Defense Monitor transcript. 1995.
The nearest the issue has come to public discussion in recent years, in the United States at least, has been in vitriolic arguments between partisans about alleged political biases of television news outlets, such as CNN and FNC (Fox News Cable). The unrelenting war of words has added to the American public's sense that the world is threatening to spin off its axis. And yet the war has obscured a problem far greater than political bias, one that is rooted in psychology, not politics.
Down through history the leader who says, 'I'll have to think about that' three times in a row is the leader who finds himself out of a job. And yet in today's world the almost universal availability of lightning-fast communication technology makes fools of leaders who try to form important decisions without adequate time to gather sufficient data and reflect.
Perhaps discussion of the CNN Effect doesn't receive enough airing outside academic and military circles because the media consider it a dry subject. As I hope this post indicates the topic is anything but dry, and it is arguably one of the most important issues civilization faces at this time.
Wednesday, March 30
Washington's headless horseman and President Obama's Address to the Nation on Libya
President Obama's Monday address to the nation about Libya ended at 7:57 PM ET. By 8:05 PM, CNN's Nic Robertson was reporting to Anderson Cooper from Tripoli that the Libyan opposition battling Moammar Gadhafi is deeply divided in their view of the International Coalition's intervention on their behalf, with one side believing that the intervention represents an attempt to split the country in order to steal Libyan oil. I have no idea how that side came to such a ridiculous idea.
But moving along, yesterday U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in London on a cat-herding mission for President Obama, who is rather desperately trying to persuade the International Coalition to think and speak in one voice on the matter of Libya.
Desperation would be an understatement on account of Obama's advisory bench being heavy on Arab affairs advisors and light on African affairs advisors. What this means is that Obama didn't realize at first that (a) Gadhafi thinks like an African, (b) Gadhafi plays the archetypical role of the African chief, and (c) many Africans think like Africans.
What (c) boils down to, in terms of the situation at hand, is that in the view of many Libyans you give the chief the shirt off your back no matter how much he abuses you and the stronger the chief the less you complain about the abuse.
That's the way things are in Africa. That's the way things have been in Africa for countless millennia, on the theory that new-fangled ideas of government come and go while a strong father's will to protect his children is eternal.
Will this theory eventually die out? Will the Libyan opposition on the other side of the split, with leaders educated in the USA and Europe, and including a wafer-thin stratum of democracy activists, someday prevail over the atavistic African model of the most reliable form of government? One would hope so, but right now the President of the United States is facing the stark prospect that not only might Gadhafi survive the International Coalition's onslaught but also that any support Gadhafi receives in Libya could further fracture the Coalition, which is already at loggerheads on how to proceed.
Prime Minister David Cameron made an appeal for unity at the London Summit, which was attended by senior diplomats representing no less than 40 countries, including some Arab countries:
None of the above goes near addressing the problem I mentioned in the last post, which is that the 'cooperative' side of the Libyan opposition -- the side that welcomes Coalition intervention against Gadhafi -- has elements that are sympathetic to America's enemies. Top of the enemies list is al Qaeda.
To put the cherry on top, Gadhafi is not a forgive-and-forget sort of person. Thusly, if he survives one must assume he'll divert a considerable portion of Libyan oil revenue to wreaking terrorism on the countries that shot up his air defense system. Top of the shooters list would be the United States of America. Against this prospect is the major rationale Obama cited last night for the timing of the U.S. military action in Libya:
However, governments are entitled to their propaganda and Gadhafi might have been lying in his teeth, so I won't labor the point about Obama's hair-trigger response to Gadhafi's military threat to Benghazi. Moving to the major secondary rationale Obama cited:
And yet the price of all that for America can't be counted because right now there is no limit to the cost of blinkered U.S. initiatives to bring about democratic reform in Egypt; that's because the sky's the limit for the unintended consequences.
If you ask what initiatives I'm talking about -- I forgot to mention that part, perhaps because of embarrassment that I led myself down the garden path after I read a Wikileaks leaked State Department cable about Egypt that the (U.K.) Telegraph published on January 28. You remember that cable; right? I discussed it in the February 14 post in which I contended that under cover of 'peaceful' protests Egypt's military had launched a successful coup to remove Gamal Mubarak and the Gamalists from power.
From the cable's wording it certainly seemed that the idea to have the Obama administration back Egypt's April 6 Youth Movement had been abandoned, so I assumed that the entire project had been shelved. What I didn't stop to consider was that there could be many similar projects afoot in Washington, and that these were never abandoned. So I got a nasty jolt, which frankly I'm still recovering from, when I read Associated Press Special Correspondent Charles J. Hanley's report on March 12 titled, US training quietly nurtured young Arab democrats, and which reads in part:
November 26, 2004
So, again, because there's no way to factor in the unintended consequences at this point there's no way to even estimate the cost to taxpayers who'll be stuck with the bill for putting Libya back together into some semblance of order.
Technically, the Gadhafi assets frozen by UN mandate should cover the costs for Libya, but those can't be disbursed immediately and immediately is what's needed. As to the cost in human lives and wrecked economies to -- again, there's no way to tell at this point how much it will add up to.
The taxpayer doesn't necessarily have to pay immediately, at least not the American taxpayer. That's because the Federal Reserve can simply make more money, or the appearance of more money, by pressing a few keys on computers. Of course there is a huge cost to that way of funding activities running into many billions of dollars. But large amounts of money must be found immediately. To quote again from Charles Hanley's report:
Anyhow the Times report came too late to warn Egypt's secular democracy activists who were engaged in the protests -- although I seem to recall that John Batchelor warned during the early days of the Egyptian protests that the Brothers and the military had cut a deal, and repeated the warning more than once on his show and his blog. Yet within days of Hosni Mubarak's departure from office, and without prompting from outsiders, many secular Egyptians who took part in the protests did become suspicious that they'd been duped by the military and even some of their leaders; unfolding events in Egypt have not eased their suspicions.
In short, it's going to take huge infusions of cash and technical help if Egypt's genuine democracy advocates are to have even a ghost of chance against a coalition of the military's old guard, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the most radical of Egypt's conservative organizations.
To argue that establishing a genuine democracy is always a rocky road would be to ignore or overlook that it would have been impossible for the military to stage a bloodless coup in Egypt without the assistance of the Western-trained democracy activists who planned and led the initial protests. That the activists might have been innocent dupes wouldn't change the fact that democracy activism, as taught and funded by Western organizations, made it possible for Egypt's military to palm a coup in full view of the world.
If you want to argue that there was no coup I'll be glad to debate you on that score, and I'll do it in a Note at the end of this post. For now, the point is that the more players involved in democracy-promotion initiatives that are mounted or supported by foreign governments, the harder it becomes to monitor them all and control how they're used, and where the funds actually end up.
It all started with the best of intentions, in the 1980s, with the establishment of the National Endowment for Democracy to promote democracy around the world. Its activities were to be closely monitored by Congress because even though it was a private organization it would receive federal funding. The idea worked so well that others started copying it. Not in a year or two but over decades a thick forest of NGOs, GONGOs (government-sponsored non-governmental organizations) and INGOs (international GONGOs) grew up.
The idea became attractive to all kinds of players, not all of them interested in democracy. But set aside democracy initiatives that are fronts for lobbies only interested in business deals or in manipulating a country's politics; set aside local crooks and transnational criminal gangs that set up phony NGOs to cover their tracks. I'm talking about what happened when the sincere democracy-promotion organizations morphed into a kind of industry -- a completely unregulated one.
Les Campbell spoke of the "many, many entry points in many centers of power," in America and called this a beautiful system even though it could produce conflicting policies.
But when the unintended consequences arising from the activities of thousands of people scattered across hundreds of organizations, agencies and departments that operate out of sight of the American voter and often in conflict or with no coordination and official mandate suddenly manifest in the screaming headlines of crisis, what then of the beautiful system?
What then is that there's no one to call to account -- no one to bring before a congressional committee or eject from political office, no one to ask, 'What were you thinking, you goddamn lunatic?'
There is only dense fog on a moonless night in Washington, the hooting of an owl wheeling along the dark waters of the Potomac River and the faint sound of a horse's hooves nearer and nearer --
March 30
******
Note
The Coup
First, for those who read my February 14 post on Egypt but missed the update I added on the 17th, I'll fill you in. On February 14 STRATFOR chief George Friedman joined Associated Press Cairo Bureau Chief Hamza Hendawi in concluding that the Egyptian military used the protests in the country to carry out a 'soft' coup that was aimed at forcing Hosni Mubarak to resign. And while Friedman stressed the military's fear that Hosni's youngest son, Gamal, would be the father's successor as president, he stayed with Hendawi's view that the coup was an ad hoc affair; i.e., improvised after the protests were already underway.(1)(2)
My analysis, the one I published on the 14th, had gone much further than Hendawi and Friedman; I'd concluded that a cadre in the military's high command (the 'Old Guard') had used youth groups to stage protests that masked a coup, which was aimed at routing not Hosni but Gamal and Gamal's closest associates.
However, I had little evidence to shore my contention that the military had planned the initial protests as cover for a coup, and the evidence I'd scraped together could only be considered suggestive. I'd based my conclusion almost entirely on what I'd learned about Egypt's military and its increasingly desperate struggle against the Gamalists, and also on logical argument. In the update I used the same logic to dispute Friedman's conclusion that the coup had been ad hoc:
Friedman had emphasized the military's struggle against Gamal, which was heating up as Egypt's 2011 presidential election drew near. Yet Friedman was willing to assume that despite their desperation the military's Old Guard would simply wait and hope for a serendipitious moment to give them an opportunity to oust Gamal.
The Old Guard was in no position to wait and hope. Ironically, a February 16 report from STRATFOR titled Egypt's Next Crisis: The Economy, aided my argument. The report, which was republished by the Market Oracle website, throws vastly more light on the Old Guard's reasons for wanting to oust Gamal than even the reports I'd used as the basis for my analysis.
What I found most astonishing about the STRATFOR report is that it revealed that Gamal and his band of reformers in the government had achieved more success in breaking the military's hold on the Egyptian economy than had been reported before to the public -- at least, the publics outside Egypt:
I also dispute Friedman's claim, in the February 14 report, that Hosni wanted his son to succeed him in the near term; see my Valentine's Day post for my reasons, although I won't plant a flag on that point. I'm willing to concede that the Old Guard might have had inside information that Gamal was going to make a try for the presidency in 2011.
I'll even concede that there could have been two coups - the one I outlined, and the kind of ad hoc coup that Hendawi and Friedman described. I can see how the Old Guard, once noting the military was being hero-worshipped by the protestors, might have decided to throw Hosni to the lions just to make Double Dutch sure that Gamal had no more supporters in the regime -- even though Hosni made every concession the they wanted on January 29 by naming Old Guard champion Omar Suleiman as vice president and calling for the resignation of Egypt's Cabinet, thus ejecting the peskiest of the Gamalist economic reformers from government.
But no matter how you slice and dice it the Old Guard had to act. If they didn't want to resort to a wave of assassinations to solve their Gamal problem their best window for action was the annual Police Day commemoration in Tahrir Square on January 25.
Their biggest problem would have been persuading the April 6 Youth Movement leaders and other activist group leaders that if they mustered their followers to come out in full force to protest on Police Day, they wouldn't be targets of a sting operation to single out and neutralize opposition ahead of the presidential election. They managed to persuade them, but all that for another day.
But moving along, yesterday U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in London on a cat-herding mission for President Obama, who is rather desperately trying to persuade the International Coalition to think and speak in one voice on the matter of Libya.
Desperation would be an understatement on account of Obama's advisory bench being heavy on Arab affairs advisors and light on African affairs advisors. What this means is that Obama didn't realize at first that (a) Gadhafi thinks like an African, (b) Gadhafi plays the archetypical role of the African chief, and (c) many Africans think like Africans.
What (c) boils down to, in terms of the situation at hand, is that in the view of many Libyans you give the chief the shirt off your back no matter how much he abuses you and the stronger the chief the less you complain about the abuse.
That's the way things are in Africa. That's the way things have been in Africa for countless millennia, on the theory that new-fangled ideas of government come and go while a strong father's will to protect his children is eternal.
Will this theory eventually die out? Will the Libyan opposition on the other side of the split, with leaders educated in the USA and Europe, and including a wafer-thin stratum of democracy activists, someday prevail over the atavistic African model of the most reliable form of government? One would hope so, but right now the President of the United States is facing the stark prospect that not only might Gadhafi survive the International Coalition's onslaught but also that any support Gadhafi receives in Libya could further fracture the Coalition, which is already at loggerheads on how to proceed.
Prime Minister David Cameron made an appeal for unity at the London Summit, which was attended by senior diplomats representing no less than 40 countries, including some Arab countries:
“We are all here in one united purpose, that is to help the Libyan people in their hour of need.”But when one notes that many Africans (a) consider the Arab Spring an Arab thing (b) still think of the Arabs in Africa as conquerors and colonialists, and (c) have never stopped fuming about European colonial adventures in Libya, I'm afraid that appeals to humanitarianism play better in the United States than where it counts.
None of the above goes near addressing the problem I mentioned in the last post, which is that the 'cooperative' side of the Libyan opposition -- the side that welcomes Coalition intervention against Gadhafi -- has elements that are sympathetic to America's enemies. Top of the enemies list is al Qaeda.
To put the cherry on top, Gadhafi is not a forgive-and-forget sort of person. Thusly, if he survives one must assume he'll divert a considerable portion of Libyan oil revenue to wreaking terrorism on the countries that shot up his air defense system. Top of the shooters list would be the United States of America. Against this prospect is the major rationale Obama cited last night for the timing of the U.S. military action in Libya:
Now, we saw regime forces on the outskirts of [Benghazi]. We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi –- a city nearly the size of Charlotte –- could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.As I noted in the March 15 post, Gadhafi had no intention of launching a massacre in Benghazi, which would have been counterproductive for his purposes. His plan was to partly encircle the city, then use a variety of measures to encourage and pressure the Benghazis to drive the rebel leaders through the opening in the circle, out into the desert, where he intended to pick off the leaders. So this was going to be a waiting game, not an invasion.
However, governments are entitled to their propaganda and Gadhafi might have been lying in his teeth, so I won't labor the point about Obama's hair-trigger response to Gadhafi's military threat to Benghazi. Moving to the major secondary rationale Obama cited:
A massacre would have driven thousands of additional refugees across Libya’s borders, putting enormous strains on the peaceful -– yet fragile -– transitions in Egypt and Tunisia. The democratic impulses that are dawning across the region would be eclipsed by the darkest form of dictatorship, as repressive leaders concluded that violence is the best strategy to cling to power. The writ of the UN Security Council would have been shown to be little more than empty words, crippling its future credibility to uphold global peace and security. So while I will never minimize the costs involved in military action, I am convinced that a failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America.Yes, the refugee problem is considerable. On Monday CNN correspondent Ivan Watson reported that refugees from Libya had been flooding into Tunisia and Egypt at the rate of 15,000 per day. That the flood had been stanched somewhat since the Coalition took military action didn't mean an end to the humanitarian crisis created by the refugees.
And yet the price of all that for America can't be counted because right now there is no limit to the cost of blinkered U.S. initiatives to bring about democratic reform in Egypt; that's because the sky's the limit for the unintended consequences.
If you ask what initiatives I'm talking about -- I forgot to mention that part, perhaps because of embarrassment that I led myself down the garden path after I read a Wikileaks leaked State Department cable about Egypt that the (U.K.) Telegraph published on January 28. You remember that cable; right? I discussed it in the February 14 post in which I contended that under cover of 'peaceful' protests Egypt's military had launched a successful coup to remove Gamal Mubarak and the Gamalists from power.
From the cable's wording it certainly seemed that the idea to have the Obama administration back Egypt's April 6 Youth Movement had been abandoned, so I assumed that the entire project had been shelved. What I didn't stop to consider was that there could be many similar projects afoot in Washington, and that these were never abandoned. So I got a nasty jolt, which frankly I'm still recovering from, when I read Associated Press Special Correspondent Charles J. Hanley's report on March 12 titled, US training quietly nurtured young Arab democrats, and which reads in part:
The revolutionary roar from the Arab street, shaking the palaces of the privileged, toppling presidents, has echoed around the globe, dominating the headlines and airwaves for weeks. But behind this story of political upheaval lies another, quieter story of outside organizations that, with U.S. government and other money, tutored a young Arab generation in the ways of winning in a political world.If readers who've been with this blog for years find Hanley's report to have a familiar ring, you might be recalling the following report from Ian Trayner at the (U.K.) Guardian, which I've mentioned several times over the years, and which received mention on the first day of this blog's existence, on November 28, 2004:
All involved emphasize that what has happened sprang from deeply rooted grievances in the autocratic Arab world, not from outside inspiration. But they say the confidence-building work of democratic coaches, led by the U.S. but also including Europeans, was one catalyst for success.
That success, meanwhile, points up a core paradox: A U.S. government that long stood by Mubarak and other Arab leaders as steadfast allies was, at the same time, financing programs that ultimately contributed to his and potentially others' downfall.
Some see American shrewdness at work, covering multiple political bets in Egypt and elsewhere. Others see an America too big and complex to be consistent.
"Speaking as a Canadian, one of the beauties of the U.S. system is that there are many, many entry points in many centers of power, and they can have conflicting policies," said Les Campbell, Middle East chief for the U.S. National Democratic Institute for International Affairs.
The NDI, affiliated with the Democratic Party, and the GOP-affiliated International Republican Institute (IRI) are links in the nurturing "democratic assistance" web, key conduits for grants from the State Department's Agency for International Development (USAID) and from the National Endowment for Democracy, a private organization funded by the U.S. Congress.
[...]
November 26, 2004
US Behind the Turmoil in KievIf American readers -- and for that matter, readers in Western Europe -- say, 'Forget the history lesson; how much is putting humpty-dumpty back together again going to cost us?' -- well, as I mentioned earlier, there are many unintended consequences spinning out from the magical ouster of Hosni Mubarak -- magical, that is, to audiences throughout the Middle East, who watched the CNN International and Al Jazeera Hollywood-style productions made from the Egyptian protests and thought, 'Oh snap, we can do that here, too.'
[...]
Ukraine, traditionally passive in its politics, has been mobilised by the young democracy activists and will never be the same again. But while the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.
[...]
The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute [NDI], the Republican party's International Republican Institute [IRI], the US state department and USAID are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros's Open Society Institute. [...]
So, again, because there's no way to factor in the unintended consequences at this point there's no way to even estimate the cost to taxpayers who'll be stuck with the bill for putting Libya back together into some semblance of order.
Technically, the Gadhafi assets frozen by UN mandate should cover the costs for Libya, but those can't be disbursed immediately and immediately is what's needed. As to the cost in human lives and wrecked economies to -- again, there's no way to tell at this point how much it will add up to.
The taxpayer doesn't necessarily have to pay immediately, at least not the American taxpayer. That's because the Federal Reserve can simply make more money, or the appearance of more money, by pressing a few keys on computers. Of course there is a huge cost to that way of funding activities running into many billions of dollars. But large amounts of money must be found immediately. To quote again from Charles Hanley's report:
National Endowment money, $100-million-plus a year, is at work in more than 90 countries worldwide. But it's the USAID grants, from an $800 million budget for developing "political competition" and "civil society" in 67 nations, that have proved vital to activists in a half-dozen Arab lands, from Morocco to Yemen. Some $104 million was requested for them in the proposed 2011 budget.Those are all wonderful projects. Pity they wouldn't be worth much in a country where the military cut a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood in exchange for the Brothers' help in ousting Gamal Mubarak. The March 24 New York Times report that discusses speculation about such a deal doesn't mention the part about a coup; to my knowledge the Times hasn't entertained the possibility that a coup happened.
In post-Mubarak Egypt, that help is about to balloon.
Of a $150 million Egyptian "transition fund" announced by Washington, $50 million will go toward democracy and governance programs like the ones that have nurtured hundreds of Egypt's rising democrats, The Associated Press has learned. That would triple the 2011 funding previously planned.
"We need more support, and fast," said Abdallah Helmy, 34, co-founder of Egypt's dissident Reform and Development Party and one who benefited in recent years from "hundreds and hundreds of hours" of U.S.-supported training in everything from managing campaigns and elections to using Twitter, Facebook and other social media for political messaging.
It's estimated more than 10,000 Egyptians since 2005 have participated in USAID-financed democracy and governance programs, carried out by NDI, IRI and 28 other international and Egyptian organizations - not only political training, but also projects to prepare judges, build PTA-style school associations and otherwise deepen civic involvement.
[...]
Anyhow the Times report came too late to warn Egypt's secular democracy activists who were engaged in the protests -- although I seem to recall that John Batchelor warned during the early days of the Egyptian protests that the Brothers and the military had cut a deal, and repeated the warning more than once on his show and his blog. Yet within days of Hosni Mubarak's departure from office, and without prompting from outsiders, many secular Egyptians who took part in the protests did become suspicious that they'd been duped by the military and even some of their leaders; unfolding events in Egypt have not eased their suspicions.
In short, it's going to take huge infusions of cash and technical help if Egypt's genuine democracy advocates are to have even a ghost of chance against a coalition of the military's old guard, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the most radical of Egypt's conservative organizations.
To argue that establishing a genuine democracy is always a rocky road would be to ignore or overlook that it would have been impossible for the military to stage a bloodless coup in Egypt without the assistance of the Western-trained democracy activists who planned and led the initial protests. That the activists might have been innocent dupes wouldn't change the fact that democracy activism, as taught and funded by Western organizations, made it possible for Egypt's military to palm a coup in full view of the world.
If you want to argue that there was no coup I'll be glad to debate you on that score, and I'll do it in a Note at the end of this post. For now, the point is that the more players involved in democracy-promotion initiatives that are mounted or supported by foreign governments, the harder it becomes to monitor them all and control how they're used, and where the funds actually end up.
It all started with the best of intentions, in the 1980s, with the establishment of the National Endowment for Democracy to promote democracy around the world. Its activities were to be closely monitored by Congress because even though it was a private organization it would receive federal funding. The idea worked so well that others started copying it. Not in a year or two but over decades a thick forest of NGOs, GONGOs (government-sponsored non-governmental organizations) and INGOs (international GONGOs) grew up.
The idea became attractive to all kinds of players, not all of them interested in democracy. But set aside democracy initiatives that are fronts for lobbies only interested in business deals or in manipulating a country's politics; set aside local crooks and transnational criminal gangs that set up phony NGOs to cover their tracks. I'm talking about what happened when the sincere democracy-promotion organizations morphed into a kind of industry -- a completely unregulated one.
Les Campbell spoke of the "many, many entry points in many centers of power," in America and called this a beautiful system even though it could produce conflicting policies.
But when the unintended consequences arising from the activities of thousands of people scattered across hundreds of organizations, agencies and departments that operate out of sight of the American voter and often in conflict or with no coordination and official mandate suddenly manifest in the screaming headlines of crisis, what then of the beautiful system?
What then is that there's no one to call to account -- no one to bring before a congressional committee or eject from political office, no one to ask, 'What were you thinking, you goddamn lunatic?'
There is only dense fog on a moonless night in Washington, the hooting of an owl wheeling along the dark waters of the Potomac River and the faint sound of a horse's hooves nearer and nearer --
March 30
Hillary Rodham Clinton remark at London [summit], "... to achieve their aspirations through political change ..." is the blandest way of describing what begins now as years of manipulation and misdirection by the Euro colonial powers to secure the energy fields of Libya without looking as if they are running 6 million people as feudal tenants.Who, then, is the victim in all this madness? For a headless horseman must always have a victim. The victim is America's most cherished values, which Barack Obama spoke with great feeling about during his address to the nation about Libya.
The obstacle to this utopian fairy tale is Q [Gadhafi]. Am told Q is looking at exile and sniffing, 'What about Charles Taylor, oh great Uncle Sugar?' You promised him safe exile in Nigeria if he'd depart his Monrovia nest; however, as soon as the Liberian gov changed hands and decided that Taylor was an outlaw (guided by the geniuses at George Bush State) the ICC closed in and Chuck T sits in the Hague playing video games and hiding his money.
[...]
Q knows the ICC is the threat, and he does not believe State. Also, the rebels are a nightmare of stooges and regime plants. Also the rebel soldiers are all featured on Al Q jihadist websites as heroes of Iraq and Afghanistan. Guys we used to chase we are now protecting with air.
Laughter is a useful emotional release for the You Can't Make This Stuff Up planet of chuckleheads and deadbeats called Earth.
Final note: the deep conflict in London is that Pop Q wants Saif Q to take command of apparatus at Tripoli and run election which he will win overwhelmingly. The Benghazi TNC, stooges all with Western educations and Euro bank accounts, reject this Son-for-Dad deal as the end of their days. Pop the popcorn, as the Italians and Turks love the deal, and the US and French hate it.
-- Saif to the rescue; John Batchelor
******
Note
The Coup
First, for those who read my February 14 post on Egypt but missed the update I added on the 17th, I'll fill you in. On February 14 STRATFOR chief George Friedman joined Associated Press Cairo Bureau Chief Hamza Hendawi in concluding that the Egyptian military used the protests in the country to carry out a 'soft' coup that was aimed at forcing Hosni Mubarak to resign. And while Friedman stressed the military's fear that Hosni's youngest son, Gamal, would be the father's successor as president, he stayed with Hendawi's view that the coup was an ad hoc affair; i.e., improvised after the protests were already underway.(1)(2)
My analysis, the one I published on the 14th, had gone much further than Hendawi and Friedman; I'd concluded that a cadre in the military's high command (the 'Old Guard') had used youth groups to stage protests that masked a coup, which was aimed at routing not Hosni but Gamal and Gamal's closest associates.
However, I had little evidence to shore my contention that the military had planned the initial protests as cover for a coup, and the evidence I'd scraped together could only be considered suggestive. I'd based my conclusion almost entirely on what I'd learned about Egypt's military and its increasingly desperate struggle against the Gamalists, and also on logical argument. In the update I used the same logic to dispute Friedman's conclusion that the coup had been ad hoc:
Friedman had emphasized the military's struggle against Gamal, which was heating up as Egypt's 2011 presidential election drew near. Yet Friedman was willing to assume that despite their desperation the military's Old Guard would simply wait and hope for a serendipitious moment to give them an opportunity to oust Gamal.
The Old Guard was in no position to wait and hope. Ironically, a February 16 report from STRATFOR titled Egypt's Next Crisis: The Economy, aided my argument. The report, which was republished by the Market Oracle website, throws vastly more light on the Old Guard's reasons for wanting to oust Gamal than even the reports I'd used as the basis for my analysis.
What I found most astonishing about the STRATFOR report is that it revealed that Gamal and his band of reformers in the government had achieved more success in breaking the military's hold on the Egyptian economy than had been reported before to the public -- at least, the publics outside Egypt:
Until just a few years ago, Egypt’s ruling military elite was able to “borrow” money from Egyptian banks with no intention of paying it back. President Hosni Mubarak’s son Gamal changed all that, reforming and privatizing the system in order to build an empire for himself.Based on all I've learned about Gamal I'd dispute that he undertook the reforms for the express purpose of building a personal financial empire. And in any event he would have needed all the financial empire he could muster in order to keep prying the Old Guard's fingers away from Egypt's throat.
[...]
One of the many changes [Gamal] made was empowering the central bank to actually enforce underwriting standards at the banks. The effort began in 2004, and early estimates indicated that as many as one in four outstanding loans had no chance of repayment.
By 2010 the system was largely reformed and privatized, and the military elite’s ability to tap the banks for “loans” had largely disappeared. The government was then able to step into that gap and tap the banks’ available capital to fund its budget deficit. In fact, it is this arrangement that allowed Egypt to weather the recent global financial crisis as well as it did. For the first time in centuries, Egypt’s financial position was not entirely dependent upon outside forces.
[...]
From Gamal Mubarak’s point of view, four problems had been solved. The government had more stable financing capacity, the old military guard had been weakened, the banks were in better shape, and he was able to build his own corporate empire on the redirected financial flows in the process.
But these changes and others like them earned the Mubarak family the military’s ire. Mubarak and his reform-minded son are out of the picture now, and the reform effort with them.
With the constitution suspended, the parliament dissolved and military rule the order of the day, it stretches the mind to think that the central bank will be the singular institution that will retain any meaningful policy autonomy.
If the generals take the banks back for themselves, Egypt will have no choice but to seek international funds to cover its budget shortfalls. Incidentally, we do not find it surprising that now — five days after the protests ended — the banks are still closed by order of the military government.
Yet Egypt cannot simply tap international debt markets like a normal country. While its foreign debt load is small, its total debt levels are very similar to states that have faced default and/or bailout problems in the past. An 8-percent-of-GDP budget deficit and a 72-percent-of-GDP government debt load are teetering on the edge of what is sustainable.
[...]
I also dispute Friedman's claim, in the February 14 report, that Hosni wanted his son to succeed him in the near term; see my Valentine's Day post for my reasons, although I won't plant a flag on that point. I'm willing to concede that the Old Guard might have had inside information that Gamal was going to make a try for the presidency in 2011.
I'll even concede that there could have been two coups - the one I outlined, and the kind of ad hoc coup that Hendawi and Friedman described. I can see how the Old Guard, once noting the military was being hero-worshipped by the protestors, might have decided to throw Hosni to the lions just to make Double Dutch sure that Gamal had no more supporters in the regime -- even though Hosni made every concession the they wanted on January 29 by naming Old Guard champion Omar Suleiman as vice president and calling for the resignation of Egypt's Cabinet, thus ejecting the peskiest of the Gamalist economic reformers from government.
But no matter how you slice and dice it the Old Guard had to act. If they didn't want to resort to a wave of assassinations to solve their Gamal problem their best window for action was the annual Police Day commemoration in Tahrir Square on January 25.
Their biggest problem would have been persuading the April 6 Youth Movement leaders and other activist group leaders that if they mustered their followers to come out in full force to protest on Police Day, they wouldn't be targets of a sting operation to single out and neutralize opposition ahead of the presidential election. They managed to persuade them, but all that for another day.
Monday, March 28
Hi Mister President Obama. Does your address to the nation tonight about Libya mention an al Qaeda-Benghazi tribes connection?
Springtime for Arabs
Hah! I see Charles Krauthammer's practicing super-dexterity on FNC 6 PM news panel tonight. FNC's Glenn Beck was up in arms on his show this afternoon about reports of a connection between al Qaeda and the Benghazi tribes that are main beneficiary of the "International Community's" intervention in Libya. So Krauthammer told the news panel that the goal would be for the US to find and promote the moderate, non-Islamist, democratizing members of the rebel forces -- BUT that any connections between radicals/terrorists and the rebels would become an issue for the USA only IF and WHEN there's been regime change.
How's about that for bailing water with one hand and threading a camel through a needle's eye with the other?
Anyhow, I've mucked around in reports and speculations about the AQ-Benghazi tribes connection. The most exhaustive report, and the best researched and documented one, I've found is at Mathaba website, which on March 24 published a long version of the report that Webster G. Tarpley wrote for his website.
I know Tarpley is always controversial but he is very good at gathering tons of useful data points in one writing. It's just at the interpretation and conclusion phase that he puts on his anti-imperialism agenda glasses and thus, often undercuts much of his painstaking research.
However, you'll easily be able to pick out the parts where he wanders off, and also where he ventures into speculation (the latter he's entitled to do). But the bulk of his report has footnotes with links to valid sources. And the data that form the basis of his report is solid:
I think historians could find issue with some of Tarpley's readings of history but there is one caveat I want to highlight here regarding a statement of fact in Tarpley's report:
It would be news to John Loftus that MI6 created the Muslim Brotherhood. My recollection of the data Loftus dug up from declassified DOJ documents is that MI6 helped the OSS (or maybe by that time it had become the CIA) identify Muslim Egyptians who would the fight the Godless commies for them.
And I do well remember Loftus drolly adding that MI6 forgot to mention to their US counterparts just one little detail about the helpful Muslims they found: the Muslims were Nazis.
Now I go fire up the popcorn maker in honor of President Obama's speech to the nation to explain how and why Americans got involved in Libya and how he plans to extricate the USA.
Hah! I see Charles Krauthammer's practicing super-dexterity on FNC 6 PM news panel tonight. FNC's Glenn Beck was up in arms on his show this afternoon about reports of a connection between al Qaeda and the Benghazi tribes that are main beneficiary of the "International Community's" intervention in Libya. So Krauthammer told the news panel that the goal would be for the US to find and promote the moderate, non-Islamist, democratizing members of the rebel forces -- BUT that any connections between radicals/terrorists and the rebels would become an issue for the USA only IF and WHEN there's been regime change.
How's about that for bailing water with one hand and threading a camel through a needle's eye with the other?
Anyhow, I've mucked around in reports and speculations about the AQ-Benghazi tribes connection. The most exhaustive report, and the best researched and documented one, I've found is at Mathaba website, which on March 24 published a long version of the report that Webster G. Tarpley wrote for his website.
I know Tarpley is always controversial but he is very good at gathering tons of useful data points in one writing. It's just at the interpretation and conclusion phase that he puts on his anti-imperialism agenda glasses and thus, often undercuts much of his painstaking research.
However, you'll easily be able to pick out the parts where he wanders off, and also where he ventures into speculation (the latter he's entitled to do). But the bulk of his report has footnotes with links to valid sources. And the data that form the basis of his report is solid:
... a December 2007 West Point study examining the background of foreign guerrilla fighters — jihadis or mujahedin, including suicide bombers — crossing the Syrian border into Iraq during the 2006-2007 timeframe, under the auspices of the international terrorist organization Al Qaeda. This study is based on a mass of about 600 Al Qaeda personnel files which were captured by US forces in the fall of 2007, and analyzed at West Point using a methodology which we will discuss after having presented the main findings ...And yes there is a pie chart and a graph and even a map, for readers who have trouble digesting data not presented in PowerPoint format. And the pdf link to the West Point study.
I think historians could find issue with some of Tarpley's readings of history but there is one caveat I want to highlight here regarding a statement of fact in Tarpley's report:
It would be news to John Loftus that MI6 created the Muslim Brotherhood. My recollection of the data Loftus dug up from declassified DOJ documents is that MI6 helped the OSS (or maybe by that time it had become the CIA) identify Muslim Egyptians who would the fight the Godless commies for them.
And I do well remember Loftus drolly adding that MI6 forgot to mention to their US counterparts just one little detail about the helpful Muslims they found: the Muslims were Nazis.
Now I go fire up the popcorn maker in honor of President Obama's speech to the nation to explain how and why Americans got involved in Libya and how he plans to extricate the USA.
Sunday, March 27
Batchelor on the latest in Japan's nuclear reactor crisis
The John Batchelor Show has been closely following the situation. Below is John's most recent post at his website on the still-unfolding crisis. See the website for links and photos included in the post.
10 Million Times
by John Batchelor on March 27, 2011 12:46 AM ET
Sudden darkening news from Fukushima includes a Reuters flash, now backed by a BBC report, that the water at Unit #2 is up to 10 million times normal, and that the workers must be evacuated. This is not a positive development after anecdote for the last days of workers damaged by radiation from working in water.
The Japanese government has aleady estimated the quake and tsunami and reactor disaster to cost over $300 Billion. The puzzle remains if it can be contained. The reports for several days have pointed to Unit #3 as the problem. Unit #2 (below, #2 control room as they restored lights) was not featured for several days and was presumed solved.
The evacuation zone outside of Fukushima continues to grow, with a quarter of a million already evacuated and the red line spreading into Fukushima Prefecture.
The challenge is how to measure the TEPCO failure at Fukushima. The reminder is that this is said to be a 60% man-made crisis caused by TEPCO's denial, arrogance, delay and deception in the first critical hours.
A strange victim, of many more to come, is Angela Merkel, who is now slated to lose a bi-election in Baden-Wurtemberg because she reversed course on nukes in Germany. The Germans have only 17 reactors, and they have closed the 7 most like Fukushima for the short-term. The Greens are rallying voters to the no-nuke cause.
It is coming the US way, and we have 104 reactors, with four on fault zones and more than twenty like the light-water reactors at Fukushima.
The ongoing crisis at Fukushima will weaken the nuke forces in all hemispheres. Worse, TEPCO is now baldly revealed as untrustworthy, and this case will spoil all trust of nuke operators.
The clock runs out on Jim Berkland's earthquake prediction for California
This post follows on the March 19 and March 25 posts.
The "major window" Berkland cited was between March 19 and 26. It's now 3:37 Pacific Time on Sunday morning, the 27th. There was a small earthquake on the 26th in Baja California, Mexico, which is on the Mexico-California border. While the quake was technically not in California I suppose diehard supporters of Berkland's earthquake prediction model would say that it counts. Yet my understanding of Berkland's prediction is that it was specific to a major earthquake in California.
If it should turn out that the small quake was a precursor to a major one in California during the coming week, then I'd say the quake on the 26th conceivably breathed oxygen into Berkland's model. And it's always possible that a part of the model, if hooked up with other factors, could generate predictions that are accurate and consistent enough to rule out chance.
As it stands now, however, Berkland needs to go back to the drawing board. I wish him luck in the endeavor; anyone who makes it a calling to attempt to predict earthquakes deserves thanks, not derision.
The "major window" Berkland cited was between March 19 and 26. It's now 3:37 Pacific Time on Sunday morning, the 27th. There was a small earthquake on the 26th in Baja California, Mexico, which is on the Mexico-California border. While the quake was technically not in California I suppose diehard supporters of Berkland's earthquake prediction model would say that it counts. Yet my understanding of Berkland's prediction is that it was specific to a major earthquake in California.
If it should turn out that the small quake was a precursor to a major one in California during the coming week, then I'd say the quake on the 26th conceivably breathed oxygen into Berkland's model. And it's always possible that a part of the model, if hooked up with other factors, could generate predictions that are accurate and consistent enough to rule out chance.
As it stands now, however, Berkland needs to go back to the drawing board. I wish him luck in the endeavor; anyone who makes it a calling to attempt to predict earthquakes deserves thanks, not derision.
3.6 earthquake rattles Baja California
by Ann M. Simmons
March 26, 2011, 3:38 pm (PT)
Los Angeles Times
A small earthquake struck Baja California on Saturday afternoon, but there were no reports of damage or injuries, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The magnitude 3.6 tremor occurred around noon, with its epicenter about 32 miles south-southeast of Calexico, Calif., and Mexicali, Mexico, on the U.S.- Mexico border, said Leslie Gordon, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Geological Survey, which reports and monitors earthquakes.
Gordon said that the quake was felt “very weakly” in Calexico, Mexicali and El Centro, Calif., and that there was no reports of it being felt in San Diego, about 100 miles west.
“This makes sense,” said Gordon. “Something this small, I wouldn’t have expected it to be felt.”
Friday, March 25
Burma earthquake, more on Jim Berkland's earthquake prediction for California, and a return to the curious case of the L'Aquila quake
I just googled Berkland's name and saw an article at the CBN News website which quotes him as saying on FNC (Fox News Cable) on March 14:
The CBN article also noted about Berkland's prediction:
I'll toss this in with no comment because I know nothing about auroras as applied to earthquake prediction: one CBN reader wrote in the article's comment section:
A question would be whether any of the variables Berkland uses for earthquake prediction might apply to the Burma quake. The last entry on Berkland's website about earthquake activity is from June 2010. So it seems one would have to sign up for his newsletter to receive whatever comments he might have about the Burma quake and any additional comments he's made about his California earthquake prediction since giving the interview at FNC.
There was also a 6.6 magnitude quake off the east coast of Honshu, Japan on March 22, which puts it within the time frame Berkland identified for a major California quake. But I'm assuming the Honshu quake was one of the many aftershocks from the March 11 earthquake in Japan, which is officially named the Tōhoku quake. The Tōhoku was so powerful that its aftershocks can continue for months and even years.
Wikipedia notes that China's Yunnan quake on March 10, which was overshadowed by the Tōhoku one, was near the Burmese border and that "Small tremors had been occurring in this region for two months ..."
Regarding the Burma quake:
When I get too frustrated with the rocky road of earthquake prediction I remind myself of how one Giampaolo Giuliani must have felt in the days running up to the April 6, 2009 earthquake in Italy's Abruzzo region, near its capital of L'Aquila. Giuliani predicted the earthquake; however, the authorities didn't take kindly to his attempts to warn the residents of L'Aquila. From the (U.K.) Guardian's April 6 report on the issue:
The article also notes:
"What I call a seismic window, this top seismic window in years, is developing between the 19th and 26th of this month."I suppose I should try to find the interview to double check but for now -- if the CBN quote is correct, that would extend the window one day beyond the day -- today -- that Natural News gave for his prediction, and which I quoted in my last post.
The CBN article also noted about Berkland's prediction:
Berkland correctly predicted the 1989 quake that hit California during the World Series in the San Francisco Bay area. He told Fox News that some of the same signs that preceded that quake have shown up again.As the Natural News article noted, Berkland's prediction model for a California quake references not one but four factors: the spring equinox and recent clockwise earthquake activity along the Pacific Ring of Fire in addition to unexplained marine life deaths and the supermoon at perigee.
He warned that the moon will be very close to the earth, which will increase tidal forces.
Also, he said animal behavior, such as the recent fish deaths, is indicating a change in the earth's magnetic field, which often happens before a quake.
"But I'm saying we just had a massive fish kill," he said. "Maybe a million fish died in Redondo Beach. They had a massive fish sweep in Mexico. We just had a bunch of whales come in close to San Diego."
"I used to just scoff at these kinds of things, because I was a mainstream geologist until I found out that earthquakes are fitting a pattern," Berkland explained. "The big earthquake in the Indian Ocean followed massive beachings of whales in Taiwan -- not Taiwan, but New Zealand and Australia and Tasmania. And then within couple of days, they had a 8.3 in south of New Zealand, and then came the 9.1 in the Indian Ocean, with the big tsunami, on the very day of the full moon."
"The previous big quake and tsunami was in Alaska, which is a 9.2 magnitude event, on the day off the full moon, on the 27th of March," he added.
I'll toss this in with no comment because I know nothing about auroras as applied to earthquake prediction: one CBN reader wrote in the article's comment section:
[...] I've observed major catastrophic earthquakes occur most often when auroral activity is at its peak in the arctic and antarctic regions. The site I use is: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/pmap/So far the only major quake within the March 19-26 window that Berkland identified has been in Burma, on March 24; that was a 6.8 magnitude according to the USGS. Burma's government put the magnitude at 7.0 but the USGS readings are considered the worldwide standard for quake measurement.
A question would be whether any of the variables Berkland uses for earthquake prediction might apply to the Burma quake. The last entry on Berkland's website about earthquake activity is from June 2010. So it seems one would have to sign up for his newsletter to receive whatever comments he might have about the Burma quake and any additional comments he's made about his California earthquake prediction since giving the interview at FNC.
There was also a 6.6 magnitude quake off the east coast of Honshu, Japan on March 22, which puts it within the time frame Berkland identified for a major California quake. But I'm assuming the Honshu quake was one of the many aftershocks from the March 11 earthquake in Japan, which is officially named the Tōhoku quake. The Tōhoku was so powerful that its aftershocks can continue for months and even years.
Wikipedia notes that China's Yunnan quake on March 10, which was overshadowed by the Tōhoku one, was near the Burmese border and that "Small tremors had been occurring in this region for two months ..."
Regarding the Burma quake:
The Geology section of Wikipedia's article on the quake notes:
March 24, 2011 11:12 AM
6.8-magnitude quake strikes northeastern Myanmar; no tsunami
Associated Press
Yangon, Myanmar — A strong earthquake struck northeastern Myanmar late [Thursday]shaking buildings as far away as Bangkok. No tsunami was generated.
The quake struck along Myanmar's borders with Thailand and Laos, about 70 miles (110 kilometers) from Chiang Rai. The northern Thai city sustained a little damage, according to Thai television.
The 6.8-magnitude quake was just six miles deep, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. At that strength and depth, the monitor said 600,000 people got shaking anywhere from strong to violent and that the buildings are considered vulnerable, so moderate to very heavy damage is expected in homes.
Buildings swayed in Bangkok, about 480 miles south of the epicenter.
[...]
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center says [the quake] was located too far inland to create a destructive wave.
The shallow earthquake occurred in northeastern Myanmar, on a geologically active area east of the subduction zone between the Indo-Australian Plate and Eurasian Plate, which created the Arakan Yoma mountains. The earthquake was triggered near fault lines extending from the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau toward central Thailand, apart from the main seismic zones in central and western Myanmar.[5] Other recent significant earthquakes in this area included the 2011 Yunnan earthquake and the 2007 Laos earthquake.[6]I share the frustration of the CBN reader who commented about Berkland's prediction:
[...] Did [Berkland] mention where in the 163,696 sq. miles of California it will hit? No one knew about the Northridge fault, let alone predicted the earthquake! I wonder how many "super perigee moons" there have been since 1906.Yes, well, as I mentioned in the last post, an astronomer has done a good job of debunking claims of a cause-and-effect connection between full moons and earthquakes. But again, Berkland is viewing the pull of a regular full moon and/or supermoon perigee on the earth's oceanic tides as one factor in the timing of major earthquakes.
When I get too frustrated with the rocky road of earthquake prediction I remind myself of how one Giampaolo Giuliani must have felt in the days running up to the April 6, 2009 earthquake in Italy's Abruzzo region, near its capital of L'Aquila. Giuliani predicted the earthquake; however, the authorities didn't take kindly to his attempts to warn the residents of L'Aquila. From the (U.K.) Guardian's April 6 report on the issue:
[...] Giampaolo Giuliani, a researcher at the National Physical Laboratory of Gran Sasso, based his forecast on emissions of radon gas coming from the ground in seismically active areas.I see that Wikipedia's article on the quake has an update on the uproar caused by Giuliani's prediction:
The first tremors in the region were felt in mid-January and continued at regular intervals, leading to concerns that a large earthquake was imminent in the medieval city.
Vans with loudspeakers had driven around the town a month ago telling locals to evacuate their houses after Giuliani predicted the quake was about to strike.
The scientists' warnings drew criticism from the city's mayor, and following complaints to the police, Giuliani was forced to take down warnings he had posted on the internet.
Italy's major risks committee met on 31 March to reassure the city's population that the seismic activity was nothing to be alarmed about. "The tremors being felt by the population are part of a typical sequence [which is] absolutely normal in a seismic area like the one around L'Aquila," the civil protection agency said in a statement that evening.
The statement added that it was impossible to predict an earthquake, but was nonetheless monitoring the situation.[...]
Predicting earthquakes based on radon emissions has been studied by scientists since the 1970s, but enthusiasm for it had faded due to inconsistent results.[72] In December 2009, Giuliani presented his research, without many important details, to the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco; the union subsequently invited him to take part in developing a worldwide seismic early warning system. On his return home, the Italian authorities lifted the gagging injunctions against his predictions.[73]The article doesn't mention how the indictments turned out; I'd be surprised if the accusations even made it to trial.
More recently [2010], Italian geologists and officials have been indicted for manslaughter for not predicting the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake.[74]
The article also notes:
The earthquake was felt throughout central Italy; 308 people are known to have died,[3] making this the deadliest earthquake to hit Italy since the 1980 Irpinia earthquake.The quake measured 6.3 on the moment magnitude scale (MMS), which has superseded the Richter scale for measuring earthquake activity. The Richter reading for the quake was 5.8.
Saturday, March 19
The sciences of heaven and earth, the 'still small voice in the night,' and earthquake prediction
March 25 Update
It seems the Natural News article (see below) gave the wrong date for the window of opportunity that Jim Berkland named for a major earthquake to strike California. According to an article I saw today that quotes Berkland, the window is from March 19 to 26, not March 25th. See my post today for details.
**************
March 19, 2011: Supermoon rises over Cascade Mountain Range. Photo taken from Seattle, Washington by Joshua Trujillo for Seattlepi.com
After giving much of my time in 2010 to reporting on natural events I'd pretty much stopped such coverage early this year. However, I'm going to make an exception regarding the March 19, 2011 supermoon:
A supermoon is so named because the moon's orbit occasionally takes it closer than normal to the earth at the time of perigee; i.e., moon's shortest distance from the earth during the lunar cycle. See this article at National Geographic Daily News page for a crash course on the March 19 supermoon, which came closest to the earth in 18 years, and for an explanation about why it could look pretty much the same to the naked eye as a normal full moon (notwithstanding the awe-inspiring moment that Trujillo captured).
The author of the Geographic piece also takes a swat at claims that supermoons can precipitate earthquakes and tsunamis. Yet it was an ordinarily good-natured astronomer named Phil Plait who pulverized the claims in a March 11 post at Discovery magazine. That wasn't the first time Plait had explained why the idea of a supermoon-earthquake connection was nonsense, but he was so exasperated by a (U.K.) Daily Mail scare piece on the connection between the moon and Japan's earthquake that he put on the hobnail boots. The result is one of those articles that are worth saving and passing on to your grandchildren.
However comma debunking the supermoon connection will not dissuade humanity from its quest to seek signs and portents that warn of an earthquake. One seeker is Jim Berkland, a retired geologist who claims to have developed a set of indicators that can predict major earthquakes. Other scientists have disputed Berkland's methods and the success rate he attributes to his method. Yet this hasn't dampened the general public's interest in his approach to earthquake prediction, perhaps because it feels intuitively correct: not by any one sign but by a particular convergence of these might a warning of the earth's upheaval reveal itself.
Intuitive reasoning, as mathematicians delight in demonstrating, can be spectacularly wrong. Yet there is a difference between perking an ear for intuition's whispers and the intuitive reasoning that keeps casinos raking in profits. And when one considers that 30 seconds is the most warning that even cutting-edge technology can provide for a tsunami that strikes land nearest an earthquake, it's not a fool's quest to sound every nook and cranny of intuition and to scan heaven and earth for signs and portents. Jim Berkland has taken just such an approach in formulating his latest prediction, which is that between March 19 and March 25 a major earthquake will strike California.
From the Australian Natural News article about the prediction:
And I note that the American Pacific Northwest (and southern British Columbia in Canada) are also situated along the Ring of Fire, so if the quake occurs as predicted it wouldn't necessarily strike in California.
In any event, a major earthquake in California could immediately unleash a tsunami against the coastlines of Washington and Oregon states as well as California's. And conceivably a major quake could effect the Cascade Volcanic Arc, a part of the Pacific Ring of Fire and Cascade Mountains that includes over 160 active volcanoes.
As we saw with Japan, which not only has cutting-edge tsunami warning devices but also a system unmatched elsewhere for instantly communicating the warning to the general populace, much can be accomplished with a warning of only 30 seconds. It's enough time to halt trains and factory machinery, allow drivers to make U-turns and the spryest to sprint for highest ground. But when one considers that the super-tsunami that struck Japan roared inland as far as an astounding six miles, I'd say this isn't the time to take only a purely academic interest in whether Berkland's prediction pans out.
Of course one cannot live on pins and needles all the time. But then it's only once in a long while that the kind of convergence Berkland talks about occurs. So between now and the end of this month (I'd tack a few days onto Berkland's prediction to be on the safe side) I'd say this is the time for Americans and Canadians living along the Ring of Fire to pay special attention to the behavior of their pets and neighborhood wildlife and to focus more inward, on the "still small voice" than on the passing show. And, of course, to review emergency disaster preparations.
It seems the Natural News article (see below) gave the wrong date for the window of opportunity that Jim Berkland named for a major earthquake to strike California. According to an article I saw today that quotes Berkland, the window is from March 19 to 26, not March 25th. See my post today for details.
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March 19, 2011: Supermoon rises over Cascade Mountain Range. Photo taken from Seattle, Washington by Joshua Trujillo for Seattlepi.comAfter giving much of my time in 2010 to reporting on natural events I'd pretty much stopped such coverage early this year. However, I'm going to make an exception regarding the March 19, 2011 supermoon:
A supermoon is so named because the moon's orbit occasionally takes it closer than normal to the earth at the time of perigee; i.e., moon's shortest distance from the earth during the lunar cycle. See this article at National Geographic Daily News page for a crash course on the March 19 supermoon, which came closest to the earth in 18 years, and for an explanation about why it could look pretty much the same to the naked eye as a normal full moon (notwithstanding the awe-inspiring moment that Trujillo captured).
The author of the Geographic piece also takes a swat at claims that supermoons can precipitate earthquakes and tsunamis. Yet it was an ordinarily good-natured astronomer named Phil Plait who pulverized the claims in a March 11 post at Discovery magazine. That wasn't the first time Plait had explained why the idea of a supermoon-earthquake connection was nonsense, but he was so exasperated by a (U.K.) Daily Mail scare piece on the connection between the moon and Japan's earthquake that he put on the hobnail boots. The result is one of those articles that are worth saving and passing on to your grandchildren.
However comma debunking the supermoon connection will not dissuade humanity from its quest to seek signs and portents that warn of an earthquake. One seeker is Jim Berkland, a retired geologist who claims to have developed a set of indicators that can predict major earthquakes. Other scientists have disputed Berkland's methods and the success rate he attributes to his method. Yet this hasn't dampened the general public's interest in his approach to earthquake prediction, perhaps because it feels intuitively correct: not by any one sign but by a particular convergence of these might a warning of the earth's upheaval reveal itself.
Intuitive reasoning, as mathematicians delight in demonstrating, can be spectacularly wrong. Yet there is a difference between perking an ear for intuition's whispers and the intuitive reasoning that keeps casinos raking in profits. And when one considers that 30 seconds is the most warning that even cutting-edge technology can provide for a tsunami that strikes land nearest an earthquake, it's not a fool's quest to sound every nook and cranny of intuition and to scan heaven and earth for signs and portents. Jim Berkland has taken just such an approach in formulating his latest prediction, which is that between March 19 and March 25 a major earthquake will strike California.
From the Australian Natural News article about the prediction:
He says that four factors are coming together that make an earthquake in California a likely event:With regard to the name of Berkland's website, I might have noted before on this blog that astronomical syzygy as an earthquake predictor has been roundly criticized by other scientists. And I think that with little effort one can find on the internet people who have gone to some trouble to critique every one of the signs that Berkland uses in earthquake prediction; e.g., not every instance of mass deaths of marine life can be tagged to an earthquake. But again, Berkland's method doesn't depend exclusively on syzygy or any one event. We'll learn, soon enough, if in this particular instance he's hit on a gestalt worth a closer look from his critics.
First, the moon will be full and at its closest point to the earth during that time, a factor associated with previous earthquakes.
Second, the spring equinox occurs during this time, producing some of the highest tides of the year.
Third, the recent massive and unexplained fish die-off in Southern California could signal a magnetic shift that affects animals with unusual behavior. For example, beached whales have preceded previous earthquakes in California.
And fourth, the Pacific Rim faults, known as the Ring of Fire, have experienced three recent quakes -- in Chile, New Zealand, and Japan. These earthquakes have proceeded in a clockwise direction, possibly indicating that the fault lines in California are next.
Berkland has a website at www.syzygyjob.com and a [print] newsletter through his site. [...]
And I note that the American Pacific Northwest (and southern British Columbia in Canada) are also situated along the Ring of Fire, so if the quake occurs as predicted it wouldn't necessarily strike in California.
In any event, a major earthquake in California could immediately unleash a tsunami against the coastlines of Washington and Oregon states as well as California's. And conceivably a major quake could effect the Cascade Volcanic Arc, a part of the Pacific Ring of Fire and Cascade Mountains that includes over 160 active volcanoes.
As we saw with Japan, which not only has cutting-edge tsunami warning devices but also a system unmatched elsewhere for instantly communicating the warning to the general populace, much can be accomplished with a warning of only 30 seconds. It's enough time to halt trains and factory machinery, allow drivers to make U-turns and the spryest to sprint for highest ground. But when one considers that the super-tsunami that struck Japan roared inland as far as an astounding six miles, I'd say this isn't the time to take only a purely academic interest in whether Berkland's prediction pans out.
Of course one cannot live on pins and needles all the time. But then it's only once in a long while that the kind of convergence Berkland talks about occurs. So between now and the end of this month (I'd tack a few days onto Berkland's prediction to be on the safe side) I'd say this is the time for Americans and Canadians living along the Ring of Fire to pay special attention to the behavior of their pets and neighborhood wildlife and to focus more inward, on the "still small voice" than on the passing show. And, of course, to review emergency disaster preparations.
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