Prediction: With no one left to kill, TIME will soon start using their iconic “X” cover design motif whenever Facebook overpays for a web 2.0 start-up.
(j/k there will always be somebody to kill.)
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NYTIMES: U.S. Heads a Cast of Villains in Pakistan’s Conspiracy Talk
One result is that nearly all of American policy toward Pakistan is conducted in secret, a fact that serves only to further feed conspiracies. American military leaders slip quietly in and out of the capital; the Central Intelligence Agency uses networks of private spies; and the main tool of American policy here, the drone program, is not even publicly acknowledged to exist…
There are very real reasons for Pakistanis to be skeptical of the United States. It encouraged — and financed — jihadis waging a religious war against the Soviets in the 1980s, while supporting the military autocrat Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, who seeded Pakistan’s education system with Islamists.
DH: Ok, let me get this straight. The NY Times, specifically, Sabrina Tavernise - NY Times Istanbul bureau chief, is saying that Pakistanis have become paranoid, anti-American conspiracy nuts because:
A. The CIA has been secretely influencing their government and illegally killing Pakistani civilians with flying robots.
B. Pakistanis have more access than ever to digital media and satellite TV, which gives space to Fox News-esque hard right pundits who exploit paranoia and capitalize on nationalism.
I’m at a bit of a loss for an intelligent way to sum up how bizarre and convoluted the Times’ position on this is, so I’ll just go ahead and evoke Thomas Pynchon’s Proverbs for Paranoids:
1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
4. You hide, they seek.
5. Paranoids are not paranoid because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
Funny, but I don’t think the US has more points than the USSR yet, as they were in Afghanistan for a decade before they bowed out.
New Doubts Raised Over Famous War Photo
In “Shadows of Photography,” José Manuel Susperregui, a communications professor at the Universidad del País Vasco, concludes that Capa’s picture was taken not at Cerro Muriano, just north of Córdoba, but near another town, about 35 miles away. Since that location was far from the battle lines when Capa was there, Mr. Susperregui said, it means that “the ‘Falling Soldier’ photo is staged, as are all the others in the series taken on that front.”
Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb?
But as the computer model ran forward in time, through 2009 and into 2010, positions shifted. American and Israeli national-security players grudgingly accepted that they could tolerate Iran having some civilian nuclear-energy capacity. Ahmadinejad, Khamenei and the religious radicals wavered; then, as the model reached our present day, their power — another variable in Bueno de Mesquita’s model — sagged significantly.
