Link Banana

Whoa. I’d grown to like and rely on the abstracting service Brijit over the last few months, but suddenly it’s gone. Their announcements seem thoroughly unsure about their future, but I hope to see it return in some form.

Jake Adelstein has a fascinating Op-Ed in today’s Washington Post about his time covering the impotent policing of organized crime in Japan. A snippet:

Most Americans think of Japan as a law-abiding and peaceful place, as well as our staunch ally, but reporting on the underworld gave me a different perspective. Mobs are legal entities here. Their fan magazines and comic books are sold in convenience stores, and bosses socialize with prime ministers and politicians. And as far as the United States is concerned, Japan may be refueling U.S. warships at sea, but it’s not helping us fight our own battles against organized crime — a realization that led to my biggest scoop.

(via brijit)

There’s some fascinating stuff in Peter Carlson’s story about the non-governmental National Security Archive. Like this brief list of things they retrieved through Freedom of Information Act requests:

A CIA guidebook called “A Study of Assassination,” which advised right-wing Latin Americans on the most effective ways to bludgeon, stab and shoot their enemies.

A National Security Agency study revealing that the agency “deliberately skewed” its account of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which led to the escalation of the Vietnam War.

A 2002 Pentagon PowerPoint briefing on plans for the upcoming invasion of Iraq — code name “Polo Step” — that assumed that only 5,000 American troops would remain in Iraq by the end of 2006.

Perhaps the most famous documents obtained by the archive were the CIA’s so-called “Family Jewels,” which detailed the agency’s illegal wiretaps and attempts to assassinate foreign leaders. The archive filed its FOIA request for the “Family Jewels” in 1992. Fifteen years later, in 2007, the CIA finally released them, and they made headlines around the world.

(via brijit)

Pretty interesting review of two books about the Civil War over at The New Republic. Of all the interesting bits though, this still seemed the most important:

The American government has learned, sometimes in fits and starts, to “manage” the problem of its troop casualties much as early nineteenth-century reformers learned to “manage” the punishment of social deviants: remove them from public view and institutionalize their recognition. As early as World War II, a major effort was made to keep photographs of dead and wounded American soldiers out of the media, and after televised newsreporting brought the Vietnam War “home” each night and helped to turn the American public against it, a dramatically different protocol was put in place for the first Gulf war and now for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. No battle footage, bleeding soldiers, or flag-draped coffins are to be seen. Remembrances are consigned instead to the dry print and official wordings of interior newspaper pages, and assimilated to the formal occasions marking collective sacrifice: Armistice Day, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July. It was remarkable, and telling, that well- placed commentators could regard the attacks of September 11 as heralding an end of American “innocence.”

(via brijit)

I didn’t follow “Waco” when it happened (in my defense, I was seven) and haven’t learned much about it since. Thus I was rather fascinated by Pamela Colloff’s excellent — though sometimes hard to follow — compilation of accounts of the events by those who were there, both Branch Davidians and law enforcement. 

(via brijit)

Sam Hurst’s long article for Gourmet about the farm bill is full of the needless exposition that I don’t usually like. The final point, however, is important.

While this year’s Farm Bill winds its way through the Conference Committee, grain processors, cattle feeders, and the ethanol industry still control the debate in Washington, and they all profit from overproduction. Prices are high today, but the more farmers expand production to meet the opportunity, the more prices will fall tomorrow. So raw-commodity prices stay low over the long term, and tax­payers pick up the tab to keep struggling farmers afloat from one harvest to the next. And President Bush’s veto threat still lurks if Harkin or other reformers try to add new money to the Farm Bill to pay for multifunctional reforms.

(via brijit)

A for shorter — and equally informative — explanation of the current farm bill is offered by The Economist.

Virginia Morrell’s article about how animals can learn and create was much more interesting than I expected. But then the last time I read National Geographic was when I was forced to in the sixth grade.

But if animals are simply machines, how can the appearance of human intelligence be explained? Without Darwin’s evolutionary perspective, the greater cognitive skills of people did not make sense biologically. Slowly the pendulum has swung away from the animal-as-machine model and back toward Darwin. A whole range of animal studies now suggest that the roots of cognition are deep, widespread, and highly malleable.

(via brijit)

Apparently this album, which I randomly stole “borrowed” from a friend a few years ago and instantly loved is ten years old. Appently it has a nearly totemic status in the indie-sphere. Who knew? That’s a rhetorical question, as the obvious answer is not me. I also didn’t know this bit (emphasis mine) — though now that I do, I see it clearly:

One of the reasons that Aeroplane has aged so well is that it deals with heavy stuff in this really personal way. It’s almost never precious, and when it is, it has the balls to be. The record works partly because Mangum addresses Anne Frank obliquely throughout (another “lesson” of the album is that the best concept record is the one you can listen to without even being aware it’s a concept album).

(via brijit)

Paul Watson offers a pathos-laden look into a music school in Burma. It’s interesting, even if not revelatory.

You can feel it walking up the front path, in the breeze of notes from four upright pianos, a baby grand, guitars and traditional instruments that drifts from the rehearsal rooms, where jazz legends such as Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie look down from photocopied portraits taped to the walls.

When the school opened, neighbors told the students they wouldn’t last long. They were still going strong last year, and a few foreign visitors began dropping by, so intelligence agents started showing up. They reminded the students that Myanmar’s security laws hold them responsible for anything their foreign guests do, and if the outsiders strayed into politics, the locals would go to jail.

(via brijit)

In the LA Times, Bruce Wallace takes a look at the (unexpectedly liberal) Pakistani media through interesting eyes:

Most Pakistanis know Saleem, 28, as Begum Nawazish Ali, a middle-aged widow who welcomes viewers into her drawing room on Saturday nights for a little gossip with the guests on “The Late Show with Begum Nawazish Ali.” Ensconced in the set’s chintz and candlelight, the Begum, who hasn’t lost the spark for sex, swaps fashion tips with female guests, flirts shamelessly with the men (even with a mullah on one night), and gets in frequent shots at politicians, including President Bush, for whom she carries a bit of a torch.

(via brijit)