Leroy Jenkins, RIP

The violinist on the left, not the loudmouth avatar in Worlds of Warcraft, you idiots! Leroy succumbed to lung cancer over the weekend. If you don't own his groundbreaking album, Space Minds, New Worlds, Survival of America, you should.

To Hell with Self-Esteem

You could smell this coming for years, what with the silly-ass "Pumsy the Dragon" efforts to teach self-esteem in the early 1990s. Sure enough, researchers at San Diego State University are reporting unprecedented levels of narcissism among college students. This study falls into the "Well, duh" category.

When self-esteem is leavened with social responsibility, you end up with autonomous, strong individuals who recognize a shared need to help others. When "It's all about me" is repeated as a mantra, you end up with a self-obsessed society that pays no attention to true news on foreign affairs, environment, politics, economics, but instead twiddles over minutae regarding celebrities. (And thank you, Saturday Night Live, for the enlightening skit on Wolf Blitzer and Anna Nicole Smith Feb. 24.)

Don't even get me started on social-networking sites. There is a great grassroots component to MySpace and YouTube, encouraging those with talent to share music and video without a mediator. But when the dominant personality on such a site is a person that simply wants to be famous, without seeing the need for actually doing anything to be famous, you end up with the worship of the superficial. Lakshmi Chaudry told us where this might lead in an essay in The Nation.

To the vain, preening peacocks that make up most of modern society, a challenge: try making it through a whole day, discussing societal news and trends, without making a single self-referential statement. No matter what Time magazine said in its Person of the Year issue, it really isn't all about you.

She's Lost Control

Oh boy - a feature-length film on the life and death of Ian Curtis of Joy Division. I can hardly wait.

The Other Shoe Drops in Somalia

When the U.S. sent AC-130 gunships into Somalia Jan. 1 to conduct direct assaults on the Council of Islamic Courts, it was pretty obvious there was a bigger story going on, one the U.S. press was blithely and pointedly ignoring (hey, it was New Year's, everyone was hung over, right?). The New York Times has remedied this with a front-page story by Michael Gordon and Mark Mazzetti, detailing how Task Force 88 of the Central Command used an Ethiopian airfield to launch its assaults, and shared satellite intelligence with the Ethiopian military. The effort also involved F-15s flown from al-Udeid air base in Qatar, and U.S. Navy ships operating off the coast. The effort was allegedly made to track "key al-Qaeda operatives" around the small village of Ras Kamboni, but the few Islamic Courts activists tracked down in the swamps represented a sad result for a major U.S. military operation. Make no mistake, there is new terror activism going on in North Africa, but the CIC that temporarily took over Somalia was a relatively moderate Islamic bunch. Even a source like The Economist claims the U.S. would have been better off working with the CIC than providing CIA payments to the former warlords (the same factions that took down our Blackhawk in 1993) and shmoozing up to the current Ethiopian government. Linking Ethiopia closer to satellite bases in Qatar and Djibouti could be a mistake. Let's remember the great "intelligence base struggle" in the Horn of Africa during the Ford and Carter years, when the U.S. expanded and abandoned the Kagnew base in Ethiopia (now a part of Eritrea), while the U.S. and Soviet Union squabbled over an intelligence base in Berbera, Somalia. Allegiances flew back and forth all over the place during the Horn of Africa war in 1977. Payback time was reached in the warlord battles of 1992-93. And still we never learn. U.S. covert forces will be up to their necks in the collateral damage spun from the Task Force 88 actions on New Year's Day.

Charles Gocher of Sun City Girls, RIP

Charles Gocher of Sun City Girls, the band's resident bard and grump, has died of cancer at 54. Since you won't see much on the news wires, go to Sun City Girls for more info. The Bishop brothers have big shoes to fill.

Robert Seldon Lady: Naming Names

Now that Germans, Italians, and other NATO members are indicting CIA agents (mostly operating under false names) left and right for participation in the "extraordinary rendition" scandal, isn't it about time that U.S. journalists drop their silly reticence to name the key players, solely out of fear of violating Intelligence Identities Protection Act? The Italian Web site 4law, backed up by Wikipedia et al., says that the main planner for the kidnapings is Robert Seldon Lady, who was operating out of Milan during most of the period in question. He's now a retiree living in the U.S. Other key personnel included Jeffrey Castelli, then CIA station chief in Rome; Col. Joseph Romano of Aviano Air Base; and agents Sabrina De Sosa and Ralph Henry Russomando. Why isn't this regularly reported in the U.S.? Since Web reporting is international by nature, we can only chalk it up to the chickenshit nature of U.S. journalists.

A New US Space Base in Australia

The US government signed a pact with Australia Feb. 14 to use an existing Australian intelligence base at Geraldton, north of Perth, as a ground station for a Pentagon voice-band communication network called Mobile User Objective System.

I write a blog for EE Times in which I provided a recap of US space bases in Australia, MUOS and similar systems, and the danger of a new Pine Gap flap. Rather than repeat it all here, I'll just send you to my other blog entry. It's important to keep track of these basing agreements as they arise.