Falling Flat

Wicked WICD; The Case of Al Gosling; Afghanistan’s blurred lines; AND: Why Jackie Robinson is not Clarence Thomas

So I finally get around to replacing Network Manager 0.7—the wireless client from hell—with wicd, seemingly the only viable alternative in KDE. Guess what? It works. Seamlessly.

Since I’m running openSUSE on the laptop, my other other choice was ifup, YaST’s built-in network manager. But I found ifup to be less useful since, as far as I could see, there wasn’t an easily-accessed, tray-iconified GUI.

But wicd 1.6.1 very simply and effectively solves all the bullshit problems I had with NetMan—connectivity, password bullshit, messy graphics, no icon showing network levels. Had to install something called urwid, but other than that, the hardest part of the install was uninstalling NetMan. wicd asks for access to the root at every load, but other than that, I never get a prompt for a password again and my Internet connection is constant like it should be, crappy wireless card and all. Easy little notification icon in the system tray, too.

Case closed. Not bad for an app without a logo.

The Case of Al Gosling

Joe Fiortio’s Star column features the story of Al Gosling, the 82-year-old who was evicted from Toronto public housing and ended up on the street and in the hospital. Fiortio reports that Gosling died this weekend.

According to TCHC, Al neglected to fill out his annual declaration of income a couple of years in a row; the declaration is a requirement if your rent is geared to income. In the absence of such a valuable declaration, TCHC hit Al with market rent and he ran up arrears and was threatened with eviction.

TCHC says it tried to get through to Al, to reason with him. I am no judge of what they did or did not do. All I know is that, in the end, they threw him out.

What an utterly revolting story. Is it that hard to realize that an octogenarian tenant may not have the wherewithal to fill out a form or two? That rent left unpaid might be a sign of trouble on the tenant’s end?

I can’t think of one problem solved by kicking an old man onto the street.

I suspect whomever collects the market rent for Gosling’s old unit might be able to.

Whom are we fighting?

Gareth Porter writes that Washington’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan is based upon the false belief that Al-Qaeda is on the verge of returning to Afghanistan.

But two former senior intelligence analysts who have long followed the issue of al Qaeda’s involvement in Afghanistan question the alleged new intelligence assessments. They say that the Taliban leadership still blames Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda for their loss of power after 9/11 and that the Taliban-al Qaeda cooperation is much narrower today than it was during the period of Taliban rule.

Premise being that Al-Qaeda, not the Taliban, is the reason America got its hands dirty in the graveyard of empire in the first place.

The Central Intelligence Agency’s former national intelligence officer for the Middle East, Paul Pillar, expressed doubt that the Taliban’s relations with al Qaeda are tighter now than before the Taliban regime was ousted.

"I don’t see how you can say that," Pillar told IPS. "If you look at the pre-9/11 relationship between the Taliban and al Qaeda, in many ways it was far more extensive."

In the civil war between the Taliban regime and its Northern Alliance foes from 1996 through 2001, Pillar observed, "bin Laden’s Arabs and money" represented a far bigger role in supporting the Taliban than the one al Qaeda is playing now.

"You can say that there are more groups which have relationships with al Qaeda now, but I don’t see any as close as that which existed before 9/11," said Pillar.

If this assessment is true, it’s important for a couple reasons.

One, the obvious, that Afghanistan policy would seem aimless. What is the point of fighting the Taliban when they’re not Al-Qaeda? The medieval Taliban couldn’t possibly be as dangerous as Osama bin Laden’s group of sophisticated extremists.

Second, Al-Qaeda strategy is working—and not working at the same time. The core group of bin Laden followers in Pakistan looks like it’s cornered, as far as the Americans are concerned. (As far as the Pakistanis are concerned, well, they’re pissing their pants, and probably for good reason.) Seems like Al-Qaeda proper hasn’t been in the position to pull off a major attack on the U.S. for a while, probably since mid-decade. But Al-Qaeda lite—all those little fanboy radicals around the world—are buzzing with activity. The whole American anti-terrorism strategy needs a rethink, especially in the context of a real vision of American foreign policy. Without the latter, counter-terrorism can’t be weighed against larger goals (relations with China, democracy promotion, global markets and capital regulations, implementing a truly global climate change strategy, for examples) and we end up wasting our Western time and money and clout on wars against extremists in all corners of the world.

LA Weekly

Jackie Robinson, Republican

The Republican re-branding effort is about as hilarious as a black man running the party that is the refuge of such wonderful defenders of Confederate pride as Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms and George Allen. And this, on a GOP.com list featuring famous alleged Republicans, is right up there (from HuffPo):

The inclusion of baseball star Jackie Robinson on the list seems particularly egregious. The former Dodger, who broke baseball’s color barrier, was far from a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. Robinson’s ties to the GOP seemed more driven by a personal admiration for Nelson Rockefeller—the New Yorker who would end up being vice president under Gerald Ford—than it was core ideological convictions. In his biography, Robinson said that as the Republican Party leadership tilted towards Barry Goldwater conservatives, he began to have "a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany."

Ah, but it gets better:

"Every chance I got, while I was campaigning [for Rockefeller], I said plainly what I thought of the right-wing Republicans and the harm they were doing." [Robinson wrote.] "I felt the GOP was a minority party in term of numbers of registered voters and could not win unless they updated their social philosophy and sponsored candidates and principles to attract the young, the black, and the independent voter. I said this often from public, and frequently Republican, platforms. By and large Republicans had ignored blacks and sometimes handpicked a few servile leaders in the black community to be their token ‘niggers.’ How would I sound trying to go all out to sell Republicans to black people? They’re not buying. They know better."

Really, Jackie Robinson? Coulda fooled Michael Steele. End.