Category: observations

One rule for the big boys, one rule for the small

Landline – 13/4/2003: Unfair meal gives taste of global trade pitfalls. Australian Broadcasting Corp

We’ve asked Antony Worrall Thompson to create a world-class meal but with ingredients we’ve bought from some of the world’s poorest farmers.

Almost three billion people in the world live on less than two dollars a day. Many farm the land. And from the rice fields of Haiti to the tomato fields of Ghana they tell you the rich world is harming them more through unfair trade than it helps them with aid.

“One rule for the big boys, one rule for the small. Nothing really changes, does it,” Antony Worall Thompson, Celebrity Chef, said.

History, they say, repeats itself as farce. Three decades after its last war with Vietnam, America is fighting another, not in the Mekong but the Mississippi Delta, not over communism but over catfish. To find the first ingredient for our unfairly traded meal we drove into the heart of catfish country.

appletalk in a hostile environment

I had been wondering how to print to some of the remote printers in my windows-dominated environment: they never showed up in Print Center. Well, I sorted it out today when I tried printing on the command line with atprint and used atlookup to see what I could see. It turns out I needed to initialize printing with AppleTalk by running at_cho_prn as root. This puts a default printer name in /etc/atalk/atprint.dat and all is well. After that, all other AppleTalk device show up just fine.

And I was amused to discover a few Macs on the network, not all of which are officially sanctioned by computing control.

VIETNAM 2 PREFLIGHT CHECK

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1. Cabal of oldsters who won’t listen to outside advice? Check.

2. No understanding of ethnicities of the many locals? Check.

3. Imposing country boundaries drawn in Europe, not by the locals? Check.

4. Unshakeable faith in our superior technology? Check.

5. France secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.

6. Russia secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.

7. China secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.

8. SecDef pushing a conflict the JCS never wanted? Check.

9. Fear we’ll look bad if we back down now? Check.

10. Corrupt Texan in the WH? Check.

11. Land war in Asia? Check.

12. Right unhappy with outcome of previous war? Check.

13. Enemy easily moves in/out of neighboring countries? Check.

14. Soldiers about to be dosed with *our own* chemicals? Check.

15. Friendly fire problem ignored instead of solved? Check.

16. Anti-Americanism up sharply in Europe? Check.

17. B-52 bombers? Check.

18. Helicopters that clog up on the local dust? Check.

19. In-fighting among the branches of the military? Check.

20. Locals that cheer us by day, hate us by night? Check.

21. Local experts ignored? Check.

22. Local politicians ignored? Check.

23. Locals used to conflicts lasting longer than the USA has been a country? Check.

24. Against advice, Prez won’t raise taxes to pay for war? Check.

25. Blue water navy ships operating in brown water? Check.

26. Use of nukes hinted at if things don’t go our way? Check.

27. Unpopular war? Check.

VIETNAM 2 YOU ARE CLEARED TO TAXI

“an army marches on its stomach”

WSJ.com – U.S. Tactics May Seem Original, But History Offers Some Lessons

HISTORY LESSONS
Key elements of the U.S. war plan in Iraq have been tried in earlier wars, to mixed results.

• Bypassing population centers in a rush: Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson did the same in his 1862 Civil War campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, leading to early successes.

• Long supply lines: They became a significant problem when Germans invaded Russia in World War II.

• Guerrilla warfare: Iraqis may be borrowing tactics that worked for fighters opposing Israel in Lebanon and the West Bank and Gaza Strip over the last 20 years.

• ‘Shock and Awe’: A much more extreme version — atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 — helped bring World War II to a successful end for American forces.

Napoleon said it best.

So we have underestimation of how hard the enemy would fight off an invasion and classic supply line management problems. The armchair generals are not looking so clever.