women worthless or worth less?

So, The NYTimes takes the men of Afghanistan at their word that “the Afghan people are being given some say in their future.” In a long article explaining the process and makeup of the Loya Jirga, not a word is said about the fact that women are almost ignored as participants or candidates in the voting which selected the delegates. You have to look in a separate fact box, or in other news sources, to find that women constitute only somewhere between 10 to 14 percent of the delegates, and most of those numbers are the result of “selection” not election, therefore something like a gift from the men.

The United Nations mission in Afghanistan has made painstaking efforts to work out a power-sharing deal that would be widely acceptable to the different ethnic groups and factions around the country.

That is, male ethnic groups and factions.
Remember that The United States Constitution recognized that blacks were to be counted as 3/5ths of whites, even as they were counted as slaves. What does it say that our own media today has no problem with counting the significance of women as somewhere between nothing and 1/4th that of men?

The Robbers

We asked the Italian waiter tonight about the title of a Verdi opera on a vintage LP used as part of the restaurant’s decor. He looked down and pointed at the (slash war) symbol on my shirt and said that in consideration of my, “How you say it?” to which I answered, “button,” that I might want to translate the title, I Masnadieri, meaning “the robbers,” as “Roomsfeld and Bussch!”
Schiller would be pleased.

“It was people”

In an article about the lack of systems for accessing information either to avoid disasters or to recover from disasters, we are given a peek at how one group of people managed to overcome the obstacles in a very human way after September 11.
Manhattan financial traders’ plans for recovering computer data in case of disaster were of no use after September 11, because so many had died, including those who knew the backup systems and the passwords.

So the traders, [one corporate executive] said, tried to guess: “They talked about where they went on vacation, what their kids’ names were, what their wives’ names were, what their dogs’ names were, you know, every imaginable thing about their personal life.” The traders did it: they broke into the ID’s and into the necessary systems, and were ready when the bond market opened a few days later. “No one said, `Our technology saved us,’ or `Our plan really worked,’ the executive said. “To a person, they said, `It was people.’ ”

follow-up on the Masai cows

Today the NYTimes provided a follow-up to the item I posted on June 3 about the Masai gift to the people of the United States. In spite of earlier reports, the cows may be on their way here after all.

“If we can get 80,000 men and machines into Afghanistan, we can get 14 cows out of Kenya,” [a Washington Times columnist] wrote. Others, too, want the cows to come home. One woman suggested they go to the Bronx Zoo. Another imagined putting them out to pasture — in Central Park.

follow-up on sodom in Jerusalem

Ok, now from the paper-of-record, its report on Gay Pride in Jerusalem. Certainly too much is being made of “god” by all parties, but perhaps the venue has something to do with that (must be awfully hard to sell secularism in that city).
My favorite:

“People can do what they like,” said Ofir Ben-David, 30, as he watched from his souvenir shop. “Live and let live. They’re colorful and they’re livening up downtown, which was dead.”

outing and blackmailing the Archbishop

From a party who would appear to be about as disinterested, in the better sense, as a party could be, a very good account of the Archbishop Weakland affair.

Only in this case, no child had been molested. Instead, a man had been outed — a bishop, a rare liberal one at that. What’s more, news organizations that ordinarily shy from exposing homosexuals plunged into this one. Somehow Weakland, like a dolphin caught in a tuna net, became just another priest hauled in by the burgeoning pedophilia scandal.

Apparently I’m not the only one who smells a rat.

“Love without Borders”

Jerusalem survived its very first lesbian and gay pride parade today. A colorful band of a few hundred “crazy fools” marched through the center of Jerusalem, a city revered as holy by three monotheistic faiths which all oppose homosexuality (except, privately, in its practice).

Banners called for “Love without Borders.”

The National Israeli Gay, Lesbian, Transsexual and Bi-sexual Organization which sponsored the parade is aggressively multicultural and welcomes people from all sections of Israeli and Palestinian society.
Ha’aretz reports that 4,000 people took part in the parade.

[Hagai Elad, parade organizer, said] “This is an important event, and not only gays should be proud of it. It’s our response to the voices of hatred.”
Among other elements in the parade, the Traveler’s Prayer were [sic]recited in Hebrew, Arabic and English, and black balloons, symbolizing both Jewish and Arab victims of the conflict, were released.

the unknown message

In Brussels wednesday, our oh so brilliant secretary of war, er, defense, attempted to defend the Bushie administration’s position that we cannot wait for proof before acting against other countries and groups who are suspected of copying our own posession and employment of weapons of mass destruction. I don’t think he made himself quite clear however:

“The message is that there are no knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns, that is to say there are things we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns — things we do not know we don’t know.
“So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say ‘well, that’s basically what we see as the situation’, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns.”

And then we go in and bomb the hell out of, whomever or whatever.

the terrible cost of (anti-)drugs

Did our insane obsession with a “war on drugs” cost us September 11, and will it continue to compromise our defense against repeat attacks, even after the Bureau’s vaunted reorganization plans?

While Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida minions were diligently preparing for their murderous mission, the FBI was looking the other way with equal determination. More than twice as many FBI agents were assigned to fighting drugs (2,500) than fighting terrorism (1,151). And a far greater amount of the FBI’s financial resources was dedicated to the war on drugs.
And this pathological prioritization of the drug war extended well beyond the allocation of money and manpower. It was ingrained in the culture. Counterterrorism units were treated like the bureau’s ugly stepchildren, looked down upon by FBI management because they weren’t making the kind of high-profile arrests that spruce up a supervisor’s resume and make the evening news.

peace is war; war is peace

The Washington regime is not disappointing those who expected the worst. [Sad, didn’t we once think that “the worst” was what they would do to mess us up at home?]

White House talk of never-ending-war to “make peace” is being actualized . Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense and civilian head of U.S. armed forces (formerly known as the Secretary of War), has been dispatched to make “peace” between India and Pakistan. George Tenet, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the war-abetting organization of spooks that has an indelible image of fomenting division, distrust and mortal combat around the globe, has been dispatched to the Middle East to “make peace”. And we wonder “why do they hate us?”