zenpundit.com

Thanks to courtesy copy sent by Tom, I just began reading this:

Many people, including myself, have had the experience of a loved one suffering with cancer or battled cancer themselves. Cancer is an onerous, arduous disease, but having your child be diagnosed with cancer must be another whole level of terrifying.

Will have a review and something extra soon.

[ by Charles Cameron — Africa, military, witchcraft, need for analysis ]
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From a transcript of yesterday’s CNN News Stream: [h/t @Intelwire]

Rebel fighter Mohammed shows me something else he found on the battlefield, what he says are pages of African witchcraft or black magic designed to protect fighters from enemy bullets. Saturday, he says, he got chills when it appeared to work on an armed Gadhafi soldier casually walking in the open.

Mohammed says he and 10 fellow fighters opened fire on the man from 200 meters.

MOHAMMED, REBEL FIGHTER: We tried to shoot him with different guns — Kalashnikov, 14.5 gun, but no one can hit him. And…

HOLMES: He’s out in the open. You’re putting all kinds of weapons at him, including anti-aircraft guns, and you’re not hitting him.

MOHAMMED: We didn’t hit him and he reached the car. He go in the car and go away.

HOLMES: An obviously unnerved Mohammed says he found these writings in another car next to the one the man escaped in.

This isn’t an area that I’ve been tracking in any detail, so I’d welcome further bibliographic suggestions – but two books I ran across recently might be of background interest, Peter Geschiere‘s The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa and Christopher Taylor‘s Sacrifice as Terror: the Rwandan Genocide of 1994

I’ve mentioned these before, but so might James R Price and Paul Jureidini‘s 1964 Witchcraft, Sorcery, Magic, and Other Psychological Phenomena and their Implications on Military and Paramilitary Operations in the Congo, and Roger D Hughes‘s 1984 Emergency in Kenya: Kikuyu and the Mau Mau Insurrection.

Magical bullet-proofing as a spiritual theme turns up all over the place. The Ghost Dance shirts of the Lakota were supposed to make their wearers impervious to attack, and similar mythic powers were attributed to Johnny and Luther Htoo [picture credit: BBC], the twins who led God’s Army in Myanmar…

It would be useful to have a cross-cultural study of magical weaponry and protection, no?

Have not done this in a while…

Top Billing! Thomas P.M. Barnett –Rogoff’s “second great contraction” and why I’m mad as hell at Washington

….Worse, I have a White House that claims I’m the problem because I don’t pay enough taxes and so it wants to soak me because that’s an evil state of affairs.  Funny thing is, I pay the Fed a whopping sum every year – about three times as much as my dad ever made in a year while he supported us seven kids.  So naturally, when more than one out of every three dollars I make goes to the government, I feel like I’m supporting all sorts of programs for the needy, plus I’m doing the right thing by the mortgage, plus I keep up my charity donations, plus I pay 3 private grade school tuitions (saving the public schools) and two public college tuitions (eldest daughter and wife).  I don’t ask for any hand-outs from the government.  Hell, I fund them and am glad to do so.  But then I’m told I’m the reason why the government is so in debt (not enough taxes from the “rich”) and yet I’m the dupe who continues honoring that mortgage from another era while paying for the bail-outs of those who can’t. And you know, I don’t feel like I’m the problem – or evil for doing all that.

In short, I’m doing everything I can to help this economy. I’m working my ass off, I’m honoring all long-term debts and keeping myself out of any short-term credit. But you know what that takes in this economy?  It means I am as stingy as possible on consumer spending. It means I put off business investments for as long as possible.  It means I’ve got nothing for venturing investments.  It means I’m more incentivized than ever to stuff as much into retirement funds to avoid the tax man.  It means I will vote for anybody who seems to spell reasonable restraint and relief – and that sure as s–t ain’t Obama.

I’m not a Tea Partier.  I’m very middle-of-the-road: a conservative Democrat on domestic and a liberal Republican on foreign. I crave compromises in Washington because our political elite’s inability to make those deals happen reasonably means I compromise across the board.  They do nothing to lift the economy out of its doldrums and I reciprocate. Everything I read from them says, “Screw you” and I can’t help wishing them the same.

President Obama is managing to lose foreign policy experts from his own party who were invited to his inauguration festivities. That’s a neat political trick I don’t think I have seen since Jimmy Carter.

Small Wars Journal –Interviews with Stephen P. Cohen and C. Christine Fair

Octavian Manea continues his outstanding series of interviews with leading COIN, strategy and foreign policy experts

Two new blogs on the blogroll, The Mellow Jihadi and iRevolution.

Sultan Knish –The Warrior’s Tale

…Before there were cities or nations, and railways and airports, computers and telephones– the tale was told around campfires. Acted out in pantomime, dressed up in animal furs and cave paintings. But the tale was the same. The people were confronted with a threat and they called upon the best and strongest of their men to go out and fight it. These were their warriors. What they did in the face of that threat is the tale.

Hat tip to Morgan.

Metamodern –My next book: Radical Abundance, 2012

Radical Abundance will integrate and extend several themes that I’ve touched on in Metamodern, but will go much further. The topics include:

• The nature of science and engineering, and the prospects for a deep transformation in the material basis of civilization.
• Why all of this is surprisingly understandable.

This country needs a book with some kind of optimistic narrative. 

SEED – Full Steam Ahead on CS-STEM

Mark Cuban – If you want to see more jobs created – change patent laws and My Suggestion on Patent Law

How “innovations” in patent law keep lawyers employed, Americans out of work and real innovations off the market

Recommended Viewing:

Steven Pressfield on creativity and writing.

That’s it.

[ by Charles Cameron — taqiyya, diplomacy, or theology? ]

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I understand that Robert Fisk is viewed differently by different segments of the public, and hope we won’t get entangled in that discussion here – because I want to quote a story he tells, with an eye for two or three significant details.

The first detail, which you’ll find right at the end of the story, has to do with a leader’s standing when he must “withdraw” in front of his men – in other words, it’s a matter of honor and shame, and Fisk clearly feels that’s a motif of significance in his tale, though we might miss it if we weren’t specifically looking for it…

Here then is the story as Fisk tells it:

19 March 1997. There was a sudden scratching of voices outside the tent, thin and urgent like the soundtrack of an old movie. Then the flap snapped up and Bin Laden walked in, dressed in a turban and green robes. I stood up, half bent under the canvas, and we shook hands, both of us forced by the tarpaulin that touched our heads to greet each other like Ottoman pashas, bowed and looking up into the other’s face. Again, he looked tired, and I had noticed a slight limp when he walked into the tent. His beard was greyer, his face thinner than I remembered it. Yet he was all smiles, almost jovial, placing the rifle which he had carried into the tent on the mattress to his left, insisting on more tea for his guest. For several seconds he looked at the ground. Then he looked at me with an even bigger smile, beneficent and, I thought at once, very disturbing.

“Mr Robert,” he began, and he looked around at the other men in combat jackets and soft brown hats who had crowded into the tent. “Mr Robert, one of our brothers had a dream. He dreamed that you came to us one day on a horse, that you had a beard and that you were a spiritual person. You wore a robe like us. This means you are a true Muslim.” This was terrifying. It was one of the most fearful moments of my life. I understood Bin Laden’s meaning a split second in front of each of his words. Dream. Horse. Beard. Spiritual. Robe. Muslim. The other men in the tent were all nodding and looking at me, some smiling, others silently at the Englishman who had appeared in the dream of the “brother”. I was appalled. It was both a trap and an invitation, and the most dangerous moment to be among the most dangerous men in the world. I could not reject the “dream” lest I suggest Bin Laden was lying. Yet I could not accept its meaning without myself lying, without suggesting that what was clearly intended of me – that I should accept this “dream” as a prophecy and a divine instruction – might be fulfilled. For this man to trust me, a foreigner, to come to them without prejudice, that was one thing. But to imagine that I would join them in their struggle, that I would become one with them, was beyond any possibility. The coven was waiting for a reply.

Was I imagining this? Could this not be just an elaborate, rhetorical way of expressing traditional respect towards a visitor? Was this not merely the attempt of a Muslim to gain an adherent to the faith? Was Bin Laden really trying – let us be frank – to recruit me? I feared he was. And I immediately understood what this might mean. A Westerner, a white man from England, a journalist on a respectable newspaper – not a British convert to Islam of Arab or Asian origin – would be a catch indeed. He would go unsuspected, he could become a government official, join an army, even – as I would contemplate just over four years later – learn to fly an airliner. I had to get out of this, quickly, and I was trying to find an intellectual escape tunnel, working so hard in digging it that my brain was on fire.

“Sheikh Osama,” I began, even before I had decided on my next words. “Sheikh Osama, I am not a Muslim.” There was silence in the tent. “I am a journalist.” No one could dispute that. “And the job of a journalist is to tell the truth.” No one would want to dispute that. “And that is what I intend to do in my life – to tell the truth.” Bin Laden was watching me like a hawk. And he understood. I was declining the offer. In front of his men, it was now Bin Laden’s turn to withdraw, to cover his retreat gracefully. “If you tell the truth, that means you are a good Muslim,” he said. The men in the tent in their combat jackets and beards all nodded at this sagacity. Bin Laden smiled. I was saved.

I’m interested in the honor / shame angle because I have just been reading my friend Richard Landes‘ paper Edward Said and the Culture of Honour and Shame: Orientalism and Our Misperceptions of the Arab-Israeli Conflict and his blog post Game Theory and Social Emotions… I may not always agree with Richard, but he certainly sets me thinking…

The second point of interest here — which I’ve noted before — is the emphasis in the minds of bin Laden and his followers on the prophetic nature of dreams.

It is the third that is, if Fisk is accurate in his recall here, the most interesting – that bin Laden would utter the words “If you tell the truth, that means you are a good Muslim.” Fisk is not threatening him, so this is not an occasion for taqiyya as I understand it – perhaps it is an occasion, as Fisk himself suggests, for diplomacy.

But how does that remark sound as theology in the mode of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab?

Congrats to Dave Dilegge, Bill Nagle, Robert Haddick and Mike Few for the bold new look at Small Wars Journal, stil the best site for military and national security affairs on the web!

Users will now need to create an account or, if they are active on the Small Wars Council, there are instructions for resetting your password. Don’t get left out of the discussion.

Here is more from Dave and/or the Editors:

Welcome to SWJ 2.0

…. Site Sections

We are live now with the SWJ Blog and Journal. All posts, articles, and user comments have been migrated into our new system. You can still find feeds of recent activity on our Home page, more recent activity on the main pages of the SWJ Blog and Journal sections.

The Journal and SWJ Blog are now separate features instead of a cross-threaded stream. Search is site-wide and the home page gives a cross-site view, but the archives views within the SWJ Blog and Journal sections are section-specific. We will be evolving out publishing over the next few months to place more commentary and Op-Ed in the SWJ Blog, and the analytical and/or feature length works in the Journal.

The Library section as it exists now is a shadow of its former relevance but a placeholder for future greatness.  We brought the old Reading List and Reference Links pages into the library are outdated and full of dead links, yet they are not completely useless so we didn’t completely destroy them. More below on future changes there.

Almost There Items

All the existing SWJ content has been migrated, but it will take us some time to get some of it out of its legacy format and into the new system.

• The new system has much better support for guest author bylines and author archives. Over time, we’ll move the author’s byline, bio, etc. in the old content out of the article out of the body content and into the new system. We will reach out to past authors soon to provide info on how to submit any updates you want to provide.
• The new system will support us publishing Journal Articles fully in-the-system rather than as PDF links. We hope to be doing that within a few weeks. Readers will have the option of generating print-optimized or PDF versions on-the-fly, content will be more searchable, and we’ll be able to offer full length Journal Articles via a Kindle feed. We are not sure how far back into the legacy articles we’ll update things, but we should be rid of PDFs for future articles.
• We will continue to publish Journal Issues as a PDF.  Our new Journal Issues feature an automatic index of the month’s individual articles, plus the cover, table of contents, and download link for the PDF Journal when it exists for a given month.  The index portion is live now, and we should have the PDFs added within a week or so.  We hope to bring more features into future Journal Issues.
• The way-back issues of the Journal (2005-2007) are only available here for now, and the articles are only in the PDF.  We will eventually get those articles into the system as individual articles and a complete issue.
• Of course there are tons of little things that need doing for your usability and our efficiency. Kai zen, and all that.

Coming (Soon?)

As we move in and clean up in our new site, we’ll also be taking advantage of new features.  Look for these developments in the future:

• We will have a new content section on Latin America where we integrate content published here and from all over. We have a lot of talented people signing on for the effort and we are very excited about this new feature on a hugely important topic.
• In the next few months we will be changing the way we publish the News, moving from the blog-based Roundup to a more effective and user friendly display. We know that feature is very popular, and we’ll do you justice with it while making it something that is more sustainable for us.
• Library 2.0 is coming. Instead of updating our dusty old flat files, we’ll be moving the Library into a system that allows for mutliple views, tagging, search, your comments and ratings, editors picks, etc.  That will be rolled out with new News section, and will continue to grow as we do.