Benazir Bhutto

She was known as Happy Bhutto at Harvard.

Michael Winterbottom’s recent film about Daniel Pearl (the WSJ journalist murdered in Pakistan a few years ago) — A Mighty Heart — gives a sympathetic portrait of good people trying to hold the country together.

I sense that for such people Bhutto was John F. Kennedy, a sophisticated ray of hope.

Pakistan was a basket case politically from birth. Got worse during the Soviet-Afghan war, as the US used Pakistan as the staging area of its war on the Soviet forces; the CIA bred the Paki secret police (ICI), as decades before it had bred Iran’s Savak. In this mileau both Al Qaeda (such as it is and was) and the BCCI octopus were born and raised.

When post 9/11 Bush-Cheney embraced Musharraf a la mode mafiosi, a fissure opened that perhaps will never seal. The state for many practical purposes was already partitioned before Bhutto’s murder today. Will it lead to more or less “unity”?

I remember feeling sorry for Musharraf during the months after the 9/11 attacks: a man compelled by force of circumstances to Seem Tough for television while sitting on a time bomb.

It seems the most dangerous place on earth. [Oops, I see in the 12/29 NY Times that Joe Biden has been saying this repeatedly on the campaign trail. Well, I concur…] Who can have any confidence about its nuclear weapons? Perhaps one will find its way to New York or Washington or Houston or Tel Aviv, perhaps sooner now than later.

737 wing tip knocks over a truck

Here’s a clip of the tip of the wing of a trundling 737-700 knocking over a truck without pause, and with hardly any damage to the wing (see closeup late in the clip).

Recall that the wings of the 757-200 — a heftier jet (255,000 lbs vs 155,000) — that supposedly flew into the Pentagon on 9/11 supposedly folded up like closing scissors upon hitting the concrete walls and disappeared into a 16-20 foot wide hole (there to disintegrate), with little damage to the walls where the length of the wings and the engines made contact.

Wing span 124 feet.

President of France has a Merry Christmas

Our Man in Moscow

Time Mag has named Vladimir Putin its Man of the Year. Interesting.

He gave a remarkable speech this past May, quoting and broadly echoing FDR’s famous “quarantine the aggressors” speech at Chicago in 1937. The theme then and now was international law, such as it is, and the need of civilized powers to band together against the aggressors. For FDR in 1937 the targets were Germany and Japan (which had just invaded China). For Vlad seventy years later, the target was the United States.

Here is Putin’s speech. Here is Roosevelt’s. Remarkable, eh what?

The Time piece (linked above) repeatedly reports that Putin has little charm. Yet if one watches the video interview, one sees humor, charm, intelligence, and an ability to converse on his feet reminiscent of Bill Clinton.

One can’t help but compare … The United States is led by a prairie apparatchik stuffed with paranoia and small ideas, operating behind a folksy yankee/cowboy schiz competent to run a tavern. Russia is led by a competent statesman.

Here is a piece capsulating Putin’s rise and the gnat’s life of democracy in Russia by Sergei Kovalev, who labored in the vineyards of Moscow as a democrat in the 90s before things fell apart.

Kovalev says he knows no one who likes Putin personally, but that his grip on the reins seems secure for the duration. Current plans are for Putin to move from the presidency to become prime minister next year.

My own affections for Putin are rooted in my fear and loathing of Bush-Cheney. Since we cannot control the latter ourselves, we need somebody overseas to do it for us. Our Man Vlad.

Go see: I’m Not There

The Dylan film is beginning to show across country.

Should/must be seen in a theater — the music and images flow and surround.

Tell me what you think. (My thoughts linked above)

Pfaff re U.S. torture

William Pfaff, one of our best thinkers about foreign affairs, seems to have been blacklisted in stateside newspapers, after many years with the L.A. Times, because, one imagines, his views are so sound and so at odds with the drip of the mainstream media.

Curiously, however, the NY Times Company continues to publish his column in The International Herald Tribune (which it owns), in Paris.

Here are his thoughts about the Shock, Shock in D.C. re not so much that the CIA tortures people but that they burnt some video.

His longer pieces do appear now and then in The New York Review of Books (our best periodical).

Here, for example, on the Bush-Cheney warmongery redux post 2006 elections. An interesting discussion but one that proceeds, in my humble opinion, from the false premise that the makers of the Iraq war were motivated by desire to bring freedom and democracy to the people of that hard land.

Lone Gunmen episode that forecasted 9/11 attack on WTC

I had heard about this Lone Gunmen episode before but never saw any of it until today. It was actually the series pilot, and aired March 4, 2001.

The story was about terrorists seizing control of an airliner with remote avionics, and flying it into the World Trade Center.

And it turned out that the terrorists were native: a “faction” within the U.S. national security apparat.

Their motive: to restart the cold war arms merchandizing. This seems (IMHO) the only element of the forecast to have been a bit off.

Recall Rice’s statement while testifying before the 9/11 Commission that no one in U.S. intel had anticipated terrorists flying jetliners into buildings. Seems the Octopus doesn’t watch television.

The series was an X-Files spinoff featuring the cool nerds (known to friends as the Lone Gunmen) who’d occasionally hack computers to aid the X-Files FBI paranormal team.

The X-Files (for those even less familiar with TV than me) was mostly about aliens in league, since Roswell, with certain Washington powers.

Here’s something: Journal of 9/11 Studies

Hamlet: the first novel

1. Several years ago, while ruminating upon the question of who wrote Shakespeare, I realized that Hamlet is not a play, but a novel.

This is why it’s all but impossible to satisfactorily stage and perform.

And why, nevertheless, with its bounty of psychology and its inviting hero (the stuff of novels), it’s so popular and beguiling (provoking more commentary over the centuries since Gutenberg than any piece in English aside from the bible).

2. The first part of Don Quixote was offered for publication in 1604, according to this (oft dubious) source.

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, pub’d in 1719, is often named as the first novel in English.

Same source observes “The era of “romances” had ended before 1719 and “novels” had been appreciated as an alternative as early as 1613, the date when the Novelas Exemplares were published.”

It would seem, then, that Hamlet was the first novel.

Wonder who wrote it …

Krugman re banking crisis

The most excellent Mr Krugman pens a simple overview of what’s wrong with the banks.

David Shulman book on waging peace in Palestine

See the New York Review of Books piece on Shulman’s new book. One’s heart goes out …