Novelist Elif Şafak-Euronews

Euronews — June 06, 2010 — Elif Şafak is Turkey's most popular female writer. She has also gained fame abroad, not only for her literary accomplishments but also because of the lawsuit brought against her in Turkey because, in one of her novels she refers to the mass killings of Armenians in 1915; that is in The Bastard of Istanbul. The suit was dropped. Euronews met up with Şafak in Lyon, France, where she was attending a book festival. We asked her about her impressions of Europe, her writing and culture.

Euronews: 2 stories

"Eyes in the sky helping with major disasters"

The tragic earthquake in Haiti last month triggered a vast international rescue effort. And space played a vital role in saving lives. Observation satellites are helping by providing crucial information in the emergencies that follow major natural disasters....




Euronews interview with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan

Mustafa Topaloğlu - Obama Video Klip

Maybe unintentional satire is the best, although it's also somewhat touching in its (probably delusional) optimism. Via Abu Muqawama.

Various items 15 Mar 09

from Dead Horse[Reuters video] Turkey: Skull found at suspected mass grave.


Foreign Policy, March 2009, "The Worst Kind of Stimulus: why a global weapons boom is the last thing we need" by
Travis Sharp

from Fora TV[video]: Does the US Spend Too Much on Foreign Aid? - Peter Singer(longer version here).

??AIDS and Germ warfare [video]

Two items from 2007; I never posted them and they merit being noted:

Gary Farber discusses the reputation of Gregg Easterbrook, which he deems inflated.

CNN's Arwa Damon on prostitution in Iraq

finally, from Slate, Feb. 2003: "who's for the war, who's against it"

Tiny little dots and other points of interest

Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe calls UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown "a little tiny dot on this world",

Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch:Did the Elites Want MLK Dead

via the Christian Science Monitor: Abdullahi Ahmed an-Naim:The Islamic state is a dead end.
I don't know too much about this guy, but he seems more serious than, say, Irshad Manji who, in her eagerness to cozy up to characters like Glenn Beck, often strikes me as a sort of Muslim Uncle Tom.

also: Turkish scholars aim to modernize Islam's Hadith


Avedon Carol: "Back in 1967, someone named Arthur Miller (no relation) wrote an article on the dangers of giant national data bases to personal privacy, published in The Atlantic. It was a real find for a poster at Modern Mechanix - as Cory Doctorow agrees, it got everything right, and could easily have been written today."

Think Progress:"Pentagon employee erases mention of homosexuality on dead soldier’s Wikipedia page."

(Andrew Sullivan writes: “I can see why outing someone who is alive and closeted is unethical; inning someone who is dead and was out is a function of utterly misplaced sensitivity, rooted in well-intentioned but incontrovertible homophobia.”)

Mitch Ratcliffe, ZD Net: Creeping totalitarianism: The NSA, personal data and you


And, oh yeah: Bush insists he wasn't out of the loop viz-a-viz approving the torture memos.

"As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged."
-- Justice William O. Douglas, Supreme Court justice

the ides of October

photo:punknews.org

skimble:"we are not better off today",

...For American voters who want a better economy, there is no other choice. The Democratic Party is now the party of business — they have won the title by default.

Mary Jo Foley,ZDNet: "Why are Windows machines automatically updating themselves?"

The mystery continues. After Patch Tuesday last week, some Vista users noticed that Windows Update had changed their Automatic Update settings and rebooted their machines without their consent. A Microsoft spokesman says the company has no idea what happened and is asking for help.

By John Dickerson, in Slate:"Rudy's Debating Secret: Why Giuliani keeps trouncing his opponents when they go head to head"

(summary: the secret appears to be-- he knows his facts, he thinks quickly on his feet, and he often seems to make a point to obscure the afore-mentioned facts in ways that are easy to miss in the to-and-fro of a debate.)

xymphora discusses the ever-powerful Armenian lobby

Dang it:the illustration the New Republic refused to run,meant to accompany an article about cursing. Via cursor.( no, really...)

No, it is NOT Hammer time

Vast Left discusses MC Hammer's unfortunate "anti-war" song(via Avedon.):

If MC Hammer can help save our troops with his new video, "Bring Our Brothers Home," why should I quibble?

Well, because it's deeply dishonest.

Still, I agree with the chorus, which is actually pretty catchy:

Bring 'em home
Bring our brothers home
Too much dying
They've been gone too long
People crying
That this war is wrong
Right or wrong, it's time to come home

Also, the endless montage of war footage and flagged-draped caskets is quite moving. How could it not be?

Unfortunately, Hammer has been Hannitized for our mutually assured destruction.

I have to agree with "Vast Left." Hammer has bought in to the idea that domestic criticism of the war is "hating the troops." Another sample:

Man it must be hard
With all the things you're going through
Got the world on your shoulders
Everybody watching you
Keep us all safe
And out the same mouth we hate you.

and Hammer seems to be saying that the problem with the war was just that we stayed there too long:

You did what we needed
In our darkest hour
While our peoples was dyin'
In them burning twin towers
Never before have we seen it like this
The enemies we looking for
Was living in our midst
So we brought it to 'em
And we hit 'em where it hurts
Stuck they heads in the sand and knocked they dicks in the dirt
They know what it is, sir,
Job well done
Now pick up the phone and tell our boys
Come on home.

"Stuck they[sic] heads in the sand and knocked they[sic] dicks in the dirt, They know what it is, sir, Job well done?"

Apparently he's decided to be a racist to boot. Too bad. The title is "Bring Our Brothers Home," and you can look for it if you are determined; but like hell I'll embed the Youtube video here.

I wonder how many people will also decide, years down the road when(and if) the Iraq occupation is finally over, that it was the right thing to do, but we "just stayed over there too long." For all I know it may already be a common sentiment among the blood-n-guts crowd that keeps buying those damn bumper stickers. (If I displayed a bumper sticker that said "I support the troops, except the deranged and sadistic ones," I imagine I'd be compromising my safety, even though it strikes me as a pretty reasonable sentiment. What if I also specified "And I support extensive mental health treatment for the deranged ones?" No, I think it still would be unwise...)

Anyway: as I said the other day, our mass media operators seem pretty determined that people don't make connections and don't put the pieces together, and Hammer's view is tailor-made for giving a way for people to unreflectively square the sheer waste of the war with the aims of the once and future war machine. It's not that different, if you stop and think about it, from John Kerry's "message" in 2004 that the problem with the war was that it was prosecuted badly.

It wasn't always this way. Remember when Jon Voight and Jane Fonda won the lead acting Oscars for Coming Home? I'm not saying the Oscars are or ever were a meaningful measure of film art (clearly they're not, and if they ever manage to be it's only coincidentally so), but they are a measure of what the Hollywood elite holds up as valuable, and it's unimaginable that a film like Coming Home, were it made today, would receive that kind of conferred legitimacy. Today Hollywood courts Hillary Clinton and (to a lesser degree) Obama, with their "all options on the table" talk viz-a-viz Iran, and even in the last cycle they wouldn't touch Howard Dean when he still seemed viable in late 2003.

If you want another reason to see Hammer's view as small and mean, consider this, from another era:


(larger image here.) photo courtesy "Rom Tobbi"

(a total of about half a million soldiers died at Gallipoli in a few months' time, roughly half on each side, the British and French, and the Turkish. The custom of sending soldiers' bodies back to their home countries is a comparatively recent development. Incidentally the man who wrote the words fought there too.)