by Richard Gowan | Jan 6, 2009 | Influence and networks, South Asia
So, Benazir Bhutto’s daughter has released a rap video lamenting the loss of her mother just over a year ago:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RxgiLARd5I&feature=related]
Now, I’ll admit I didn’t expect that. But those arbiters of taste at Vanity Fair know what this means. It means they can diss Puff Daddy (a.k.a Sean “Diddy”… you know the rest):
As tributes go, Bhutto’s video is superior to “I’ll Be Missing You,” Puffy and Evans’s musical memorial to the Notorious B.I.G., who was murdered on March 9, 1997. For one thing, Puffy’s big budget (and bigger ego) lured him off-topic, and there are too many shots of him riding his tricked-out motorcycle and spinning in the rain.
Bhutto’s video, while amateurish, is filled with inspiring montages of her mother campaigning shortly before her death and of the masses mourning her.
The songs are different too. Puffy’s shameless sample of the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” may have won him a Grammy, but it was also the first sign of his impending ubiquity. It’s all about him missing his dead friend. Bhutto keeps the focus on her late mother…
Which, evidently, would be too much effort for the VF guys. That’s 2009 off to a tasteful start.
by Richard Gowan | Jan 6, 2009 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks, North America, South Asia
Bob Herbert of the New York Times:
Our interest in Afghanistan is to prevent it from becoming a haven for terrorists bent on attacking us. That does not require the scale of military operations that the incoming administration is contemplating. It does not require a wholesale occupation. It does not require the endless funneling of human treasure and countless billions of taxpayer dollars to the Afghan government at the expense of rebuilding the United States, which is falling apart before our very eyes.
The government we are supporting in Afghanistan is a fetid hothouse of corruption, a government of gangsters and weasels whose customary salute is the upturned palm. Listen to this devastating assessment by Dexter Filkins of The Times:
“Kept afloat by billions of dollars in American and other foreign aid, the government of Afghanistan is shot through with corruption and graft. From the lowliest traffic policeman to the family of President Hamid Karzai himself, the state built on the ruins of the Taliban government seven years ago now often seems to exist for little more than the enrichment of those who run it.”
Think about putting your life on the line for that gang.
If Mr. Obama does send more troops to Afghanistan, he should go on television and tell the American people, in the clearest possible language, what he is trying to achieve. He should spell out the mission’s goals, and lay out an exit strategy.
He will owe that to the public because he will own the conflict at that point. It will be Barack Obama’s war.
by Alex Evans | Jan 6, 2009 | Global system, Influence and networks
James Meek’s meditation in G2 yesterday on how the credit crunch was born was a tour de force, both fresh and considered. Definitely worth a look if you missed it.
“Nowadays,” wrote Saul Bellow in his novel Humboldt’s Gift, “the categories are grasped by those who belong to them.” It’s not just that we see the economic crisis rearing up out of the sea in the distance, like a slow-motion tsunami from which, despite its creeping speed, we cannot escape. What makes the situation peculiar is that the crisis that threatens us also seems to be us; we are simultaneously menaced by the wave, and exist as elements of the wave. After all, that is what an economic crisis is: the sum of all the individual actions of billions of people around the world, deciding whether to lend or hoard, borrow or save, sell or buy, move or stay, hire or fire, study or look for work, be pessimistic or optimistic.
It’s like those mysterious polls of “consumer confidence” in which pundits set so much store. How confident am I about the future? Well, I’m confident if everybody else is confident. I’ll tell the survey how confident I am when I see what that confidence survey says.
