[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] The Ministry of Justice in the Kingdom of Bahrain has filed a lawsuit seeking to dissolve the National Democratic Action Society (Waad) on grounds that it committed legal violations. Waad is one of the political groups, which has based its work on the principles of democracy and the civil state. It is part of the progressive enlightenment movement that struggled since it was in exile under the name of the National Liberation Front, a leftist and communist party. After it was established, Waad declared it was one of the opposition groups.
Practices are what test any political group’s speeches and loyalty to principles. Political elites are always preaching us when they criticize "authoritarian acts," practices of individuals, and stances of other political parties. Actions are also supposed to reflect the principles on which these parties were formed and the latter are thus supposed to devote themselves to serve these values often conveyed through their speeches.
Daily practices should strive to harmonize rhetoric of the political groups and influence how they choose their alliances and electoral lists. Their rhetoric should also match their position vis-à-vis regarding laws and regarding women-related affairs, expatriates’ civil rights and pluralism, diversity and non-discrimination.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
03/28/2017 00:00 ||
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[LI] The head of America’s "largest privately held" coal firm has expressed optimism for his industry under President Donald Trump after a meeting held last month.
Murray Energy’s CEO and founder Robert Murray spoke with The Guardian on Monday. He believes that Trump will stick to his campaign promises for the coal industry by reducing regulations and overturning a few of President Barack Obama’s plans related to climate change.
It’s hard to deny his thoughts as coal communities in Virginia have seen a drastic positive change since Trump became president.
#2
#1 Skidmark. the water is then stored in the lower reservoir until it can be pumped back up to the top reservoir using cheaper, off-peak power or another renewable energy source.
Intriguing. There will be some energy losses in pumping water from the lower reservoirs to higher reservoirs. This is where renewable fuels come in. Got to obey those Laws of Thermo.
[Fortune Magazine Excerpt] Trump, so far, has given no public hint of a position on the dispute. Lindsay Walters of the White House press office told me the President would not be available to discuss the case or his approach to defense contracts. In February, Trump included a $54 billion increase for the Pentagon, a 10% hike, in his budget proposal.
Normally that would not be a good sign that a Commander-in-Chief is interested in being budget conscious. On the other hand, he has tweeted repeatedly about the cost of the F-35 and Air Force One and had his ostentatious meetings with the CEOs of the two companies producing them (Lockheed Martin and Boeing). What's more, he has promised that with a premier dealmaker at the helm, the government is going to be much smarter when it comes to writing checks.
Whether Trump is serious and, if so, whether the Iron Triangle can ultimately beat him back remains to be seen. But with a judge having ruled in Palantir's favor, and with its boosters being so close to Trump, the Palantir-Army fight seems to be the most likely instance where Trump will keep that promise. He or Defense Secretary Mattis simply have to tell the Army not to appeal a losing case and to do what the Court of Claims ordered. In other words: Give Palantir a fair chance.
The more important question is, What happens after that? Will Palantir's victory become, as Philippone says he hopes, the case that finally forces the government to buy superior products from private-sector technology companies rather than pay Beltway contractors to make products from scratch that rarely meet projected costs or work as planned?
History suggests the odds are steep. In 2010, J. Ronald Fox, a Harvard Business School professor who has spent much of his career studying Pentagon procurement, wrote a book about taming the Pentagon's checkbook. "Since 1959, seventeen Defense Secretaries have made commitments to bring about effective and efficient management of the defense acquisition process," Fox concluded. "Indeed, each has taken specific steps to identify problems and initiate improvements. But each has left office before reform implementation has become institutionalized." alantir may prevail in this instance, but it will take a lot more than one defeat to break up the Iron Triangle.
[DAWN] The continuing furore over the events leading up to the Abbottabad ... A pleasant city located only 30 convenient miles from Islamabad. The city is noted for its nice weather and good schools. It is the site of Pakistain's military academy, which was within comfortable walking distance of the residence of the late Osama bin Laden.... raid in which the late Osama bin Laden ... who is now sometimes referred to as Mister Bones... was killed is perhaps inevitable given the unwillingness of all sides to publicly acknowledge the issues.
Consider the latest twist in the public debate. In response to a leaked letter purporting to show that the then-PPP government conspired to presumably allow US spies into the country en masse, former prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani ... Pakistain's former prime minister, whose occasional feats of mental gymnastics could be awe-inspiring ... has demanded an explanation for how Bin Laden lived undetected inside Pakistain for many years and how US forces were able to penetrate Pak airspace and launch a ground operation.
Mr Gilani is right, but his riposte does not address the principal though unspoken allegation against the PPP: the security establishment’s concern that alleged secret cooperation between the PPP and the US government was meant to somehow either undermine the military’s authority or subvert the national interest.
Therein lies the problem. The historical civil-military strife reached another high point in the early years of this decade as Pak-US relations plunged to another low. Bin Laden was the world’s most wanted terrorist, so merely helping to track him down should not have been cause for a significant civil-military rupture.
The Bin Laden episode, then, was an indication of a deeper malaise: the civil and military sides of the state had drifted apart to the extent that both sides believed the other was out to harm it. Indeed, in the dredging up of allegations that the PPP facilitated American spies, the original fear is detectable -- namely, that the US was interested in far more than simply tracking down Al Qaeda and was perhaps conducting espionage against India- or Afghan-centric jihadi groups tolerated by the state here at the time, or even gathering information on Pakistain’s nuclear programme.
Therefore, any political facilitation to the American effort, even if narrowly focused on Al Qaeda, was viewed with immense suspicion and hostility by the security establishment.
Whether the political government was unduly careless or the security establishment overly paranoid can perhaps be answered with the unveiling of the Abbottabad Commission report. Mr Gilani was again correct in demanding that the report be made public -- the people deserve to know the facts and the state needs to absorb the lessons from the tumultuous Bin Laden episode.
But the current national furore suggests that the more fundamental questions, about who is to steer national security and foreign policies and based on which principles, remain contested.
Ideally, the civilian and military leaderships should find a way of working together until constitutionally mandated civilian leadership in all policy domains becomes the norm.
However, a lie repeated often enough remains a lie... harmful old suspicions still appear to lurk in the background, undermining the trust of both sides in the other. The true national interest cannot be served if legitimate policy differences are either denied or regarded as anti-state.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/28/2017 00:00 ||
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#1
In response to a leaked letter purporting to show that the then-PPP government conspired to presumably allow US spies into the country en masse
Such rubbish! No one is beyond the penetration of our Intelligence Community, no one I tell you !
#2
an explanation for how Bin Laden lived undetected inside Pakistain for many years and how US forces were able to penetrate Pak airspace and launch a ground operation.
That may seem like a contradiction, but IMAO, the key to understanding Pakistain is to think of not as a country, but as collection of geographically co-located groups, tribes and factions engaged in a Hobbesian war of all against all. You can apply this recursively to discrete entities like the Army or the ISI.
"Stereotypes" are usually based on experience. As Alan Quatermain once said It is a hard thing when one has shot sixty-five lions or more, as I have in the course of my life, that the sixty-sixth should chew your leg like a quid of tobacco. It breaks the routine of the thing. If sixty five Moslems try to kill you, you're surprised if the sixty sixth doesn't. This is not fear. It is good sense.
[DAWN] According to the consensus narrative, immigrants -- specifically Moslem ones -- are flooding the West and carrying out (or condoning) terrorist attacks because they hate Judeo-Christian values, democracy and Western freedoms. This was the narrative assigned to Khalid Masood until he was revealed to be Adrian Elms, a 52-year-old born in Kent with a history of violent crime, and a late-life conversion to Islam,
...if he converted at around age 40, here in the West that is early middle age, not late in life. We consider late life to be the far side of 70 -- or according to my mother, some years beyond 100...
indicating that longstanding mental and social issues rather than exposure to the faith may have driven his actions on March 22.
Elms’ profile is typical of many attackers in the West, who tend to be natives of the country in which they act, often live within an hour’s distance of the attack location, and have a history of petty or serious criminal activity. But who needs facts when there’s a more compelling narrative that can be peddled for cynical political purposes? As Nesrine Malik put it in The Guardian, "an infrastructure of hate promotion has been established and incorporated within the mainstream". This is exemplified by Nigel Farage’s immigrant-bashing hours after the Westminster attack, and Donald Trump ...New York real estate developer, described by Dems as illiterate, racist, misogynistic, and what ever other unpleasant descriptions they can think of, elected by the rest of us as 45th President of the United States... Jr’s attempts to criticise London mayor Sadiq Khan after this attack for sensible comments he made last year about terrorist incidents being a part of life in major cities. These narratives have enabled political coups ranging from Brexit to Trump to Le Pen.
As attacks in western cities increase, people will cling more desperately to the established narrative, no matter how often it is disproved. This is because it is too terrifying to contemplate a world in which everyday objects like knives and cars can be weaponised by anyone who bears a grudge, has a mental illness, had a difficult or abusive childhood, or struggles with addiction.
Public debate about violent extremism in the West has long made the mistake of treating radicalisation as a product of demography rather than biography. The assumption is that radicalised individuals must fit a particular type: Moslem, male, young, immigrant, unemployed, internet savvy. But we have repeatedly seen that these stereotypes don’t hold true, and that it remains unclear what causes someone to become radicalised and take the step of committing an
extremist act. In most cases, perpetrators have histories like Masood’s, rooted in personal experiences, traumas and failures, that are harder to generalise, typify and predict. More importantly, individual experience is harder to convert into sweeping policies or regulations (travel bans, surveillance, visa vetting) than stereotype.
Since the launch of Raddul Fasaad, the security forces in Pakistain have increasingly resorted to demography, arresting Afghans and Pakhtuns, and stirring ethnic resentment. It is true that generalisations about the types of people who join violent krazed killer organizations may work better in a context like ours where murderous Moslem groups are prevalent, operate openly, run social welfare programmes, and have at some point benefited from state patronage. When we resort to generalisations, we are not blurring the boundaries between demography and biography; rather, we are denying the roots of violent extremism, which is largely the consequence of strategic policies gone awry, and not an organic process.
In either case, the failure to acknowledge the drivers of krazed killer violence in a particular context means that publics and politicians rely on ill-conceived narratives that ultimately cause more societal damage, rather than address the underlying issues that could help stem radicalisation. Irrespective of where terrorism takes place, it should not be exploited for short-term political gain -- we owe at least that much to its victims.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/28/2017 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Moslem Colonists
#1
longstanding mental and social issues rather than exposure to the faith may have driven triggered his actions
#6
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, it might be a hippo but it's probably a duck! The 80% assessment is a good model for avoiding major mistakes, and over time, the missed opportunities average out. Islam is as much political and military strategy as religion, and its overt advocacy of violence and deceit make it a dangerous thing to trust. Sorry to the innocent Muslims that get short changed, but sometimes you just draw the short straw!
#8
Methinks the Pak Islamists and their Gubbamint/ISI/Mil supporters are getting a bit nervous about the change in attitude among Westerners. No longer willing to give the blind eye?
Calling them out is a start. Isolation and eradication may have to be the end. And in the end, really what would the world lose? An infection previously politically denied
Posted by: Frank G ||
03/28/2017 19:45 Comments ||
Top||
#1
it’s that it doesn’t seem like he knows that he’s a failure. Perhaps some signage would remind him to wipe that smug, smarmy grin off his face, and inspire him to achieve something other than nothing.
Ouch, that would hurt if Ryan were in touch. I used to think Boehner was just a House doorstop. Ryan seems to be following in that tradition.
I even heard Trump say the other day, "if we just had 60 votes" in the Senate. Ryan and Mitchell need to get out there and represent (fight for) the people who elected them, rather than entrenched Washington establishment. They need to get a backbone.
#2
Quite the tortured metaphor the author spins here. POTUS campaigned on a vision for an O-care replacement that would "take care of everyone" including those with pre-existing conditions. Oh, and of course it would be Great. On the other hand there was already a sizable block of house members as well as a handful of senators that were on record promising full repeal or go home. Foisting blame exclusively on Speaker Ryan is quite simple. Then again so is the author.
#3
Ryan was actually a VP candidate. What the heck happened there? If he is so politically niave why would Romney (who was outside the beltway) have picked him at all?
#4
Romney outside the beltway? He may not physically reside within the geographical boundaries of the Beltway but my impression has always been that he certainly is there is spirit.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
03/28/2017 12:15 Comments ||
Top||
#6
Speaker Ryan did not actually want the job when John Boehner retired during the last session, He only took it with the promise that his fellow Republicans would work together. Unfortunately, promises made in the last session do not seem to be binding on either the older hands or the new guys.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[DAWN] The continuing furore over the events leading up to the 
