For lack of anything better to say (while I craft away at the next hillarious episode of TGFS) here’s some news.
Kerrrazy Weather Times!
Since our ridiculously balmy time in New York and Toronto I have been watching the US weather as it lurches from Fall to Spring to Winter and back to Spring on an ongoing basis.
Blue Mountain where we spent three days skiing on man-made snow is reporting temperatures between -1°C and -19 of the same.
So it seems that at least there winter has settled in – though they are still getting mostly flurries rather than real solid snow.
What’s more interesting/bizarre is the weather in the US where temperatures are yo-yoing all over the place, in California the Governator is looking for disaster relief for crops lost due to cold and Texas is covered in ice, but still no real snow some northern states where it should be white as a U.S.-based company’s South African workforce.
A pedestrian runs to cross a downtown Montreal street
Monday, Jan 15, 2007,
during the first snow storm to hit the city this winter.
(CP / Paul Chiasson)
The Neocon Newshound!
And on the neo-con front, here’s a refreshing approach to regime-change[1] in Iran. Michael Ledeen is a classic neo conservative who wants to export democracy and freedom[2] to arabic nations in the Middle East[3].
And for some time now he’s been advocating the boom-boom approach to bringing peace and `freedom` to the world.
But he does also have another, more interesting approach which he mentions in an interview with Salon.
I want to support the pro-democracy groups in Iranian society, which includes like 80 percent of the population.
I want to support them politically and financially if they want it.
I want to broadcast at them, exactly as we did into the Soviet empire during the Cold War. I want to replicate Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which we’re really not doing. I mean, they pretend to do it, but they really don’t. Farsi service on [the Voice of America] is sort of a replica of CBS News or something like that.
They want to be balanced; they give both sides. And we’re not giving them what they need, more than anything else, which is the experiences of people who have participated in successful nonviolent revolutions.
Michael Leeden
I am in no way a proponent of the notion of exporting any sort of ideology for the `betterment` of another society.
While I do support projects that aim to provide people living in `oppressive`[4] societies access to information, I don’t support his call to broadcast to the Iranians. It’s simply propaganda, no matter how you look at.
However, what I do appreciate about his approach is that he wants to promote non-violent change by supporting civic activism from within Iran.
Of course this is not because he is a pacifist who cherishes human life but because he believes that the US can achieve its goals without having to spend money and political capital on bombs.
But it is a more pragmatic take on the value of letting a society change itself if it wants to rather than just bombing the shit out of it for its own good.
It’s because people generally take it out of context. If you read what I said about the war, I said two things. I said, first of all, that it was much too military and much too little political, and that we should spend much more time supporting democratic forces in Iraq, the same thing I said about Iran, the same thing I said about the Soviet Union, et cetera. And the second thing that I said about the war before we went in was that Iran was the primary target and that we should not invade Iraq before we dealt with Iran, and that we could deal entirely politically with Iran and not militarily at all.
And yes, so once the national policy was that we were going to go militarily into Iraq, I supported it. But I kept on saying that we were going to have all these problems, and that it would have been better to do it the other way, and that dealing with Iran was inevitable, and so it has proven to be.
And all those people who think that my only position was that we should invade Iraq and send armies to invade Iraq just haven’t read what I wrote, or they haven’t read enough of it. And I will plead guilty to not having put those lines into everything I wrote, but you really can’t. You can’t put everything into 700-word articles, as you know.
Of course he could just be another standard neo-con covering his own ass before the hunt for scapegoats goes into overdrive.
His blog is also worth a look[5] – if only for this reportage of the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei[6].
In spite of the official denial by the Foreign Ministry and Iran’s UN ambassador over the weekend, American researcher Michael Ledeen, who was the first to report of Khamenei’s death, continued to insist in his blog that “(Khamenei’s) continued absence from all official events suggests that the source may be right.”
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
