"Don't Take The Brown Acid"

Sorry for the Woodstock reference - anyone who gets that is probably old enough to need a knee replacement - but I can't help thinking how, all these years after Woodstock, New Yorkers still can't handle being outdoors.

Anyway, that's the impression I'm getting from watching the Occupy Wall Street streaming video. The Fire Department seized OWS's generators this morning due to fire safety violations, so now they are hunkering down under tarps and wondering what they'll do when they get covered with snow tonight.

The Livestream comments are more interesting then the video. There has been a thread all day alleging that today's unseasonably early snow in the Northeast is really an attack on OWS by the Military Industrial Complex via its HAARP program. Maybe somebody got into the brown acid after all.

From other comments I learned that:

-- Brandon is barefoot because somebody stole his shoes
-- Another guy had his MacBook Pro broken when somebody stepped on it
-- Homeless guys are stealing stuff from the food tent
-- Abraham, OWS's "real big" security guy is keeping "the riffraff" [!!] away
-- Somebody thinks Kosher salt will de-ice the concrete in Zuccotti Park
-- Somebody is asking for baked potatoes as organic hand warmers
-- Somebody is quoting "Frm Secretary of State Brzezinski" [sic]
-- "Brian from the Comfort Section" is begging for tents and dry clothes

This has become my favorite reality show.

Slow Motion Suicide In Sarajevo

The WaPo report on today's shooting incident in front of U.S. Embassy Sarajevo quotes the AP and Sarajevo city officials saying that the shooter was a Muslim from Novi Pazar, Serbia, and that he wounded a policeman guarding the embassy before being shot by responding police. None of the Embassy employees was injured.

Radio reports are saying the embassy office building was struck by rifle rounds. Fortunately, the building is a new Fortress Embassy, completed almost one year ago, so the bullets bounced right off. Ha!

Bosnian TV identified the shooter as a follower of Wahabi Islam, and noted that he was dressed in "an outfit typical for followers of the conservative Wahabi branch of Islam." That must explain the highwater pants, since they are fashionable among young Bosnian Muslims, apparently in imitation of the shortened thobes (the white man-dresses) worn by the more devote Wahabbis of Saudi Arabia, who in turn are imitating the dress of the companions of the Prophet.

There is a good set of photos at the UK Daily Mail, here.

After Highpants paced back and forth for about 30 minutes, essentially daring the police to shoot him, they finally did so with a single head shot. Naturally, that moment was captured and posted to YouTube. The video is tastefully non-graphic.

You Don't Want To Die With A Full Magazine

Now that Muammar Gaddafi is dead and his Old Regime overthrown, Libya is moving on to Act Two of the classic four-act structure of revolutions, i.e., the Rule of the Moderates. You can take that from Mustafa Abdel Jalil himself.

Historically, the Rule of the Moderates has been followed by the Rise of the Radicals, and finally the cycle culminates in a Thermidorian Reaction and the consolidation of power in the hands of a new dictator. Anyway, that has been the pattern of modern revolutions.

So now is a good time for historian Andrew Robert's piece in The Daily Beast about How Dictators Die, since he points out the extremely unusual manner of Muammar Gaddafi's death and the favor he did the Libyan people by staying in the country and fighting rather than escaping into exile.

Usually dictators do not actually die on their feet, weapon in hand, as Gaddafi appears to have done. All too often they escape from the countries they brutalized, or are captured and not executed, or (most often) they die in office, full of honors, surrounded by sycophants and only loosening their grip on power when their hands go cold. For Gaddafi to have fought to the last, not escaping to Chad or Niger, but believing in his diseased mind that the silent majority of Libyans still loved him, is quite exceptional for dictators.

Quite exceptional, indeed. Maybe even unique. I had not noticed before how very, very, hard it is to find an example of a dictator who went down fighting.

Roberts notes that Hitler killed himself. Benito Mussolini and Nicolae Ceausescu both surrendered and were promptly shot to death. Josef Stalin, Francisco Franco, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Marshal Tito, Papa Doc Duvalier, Vladimir Lenin all died in power, as will, most likely, Robert Mugabe, Fidel Castro, and Hugo Chávez. Saddam Hussein was pulled out of a hole in a bedraggled state and gave up without a fight. Idi Amin, Ferdinand Marcos, Alfred Stroessner, and Mobuto Sese Seko all died in exile. Pol Pot died under house arrest in 1998 and Slobodan Milosevic died while on trial in The Hague, where Charles Taylor of Liberia is currently on trial. Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic was removed from power, imprisoned, then died in his home country. Jan Kambanda of Rwanda is serving a life sentence in Mali.

It seems that dictators, as a group, have almost no willingness to go out like James Cagney in a 'come and get me coppers!' blaze of glory.

But if, like Gaddafi, they do, then that removes a potentially destabilizing influence that could impede the new regime's normal political development.

Robert's piece concludes:

The moral of the Gaddafi story is that it is very rare for dictators to meet their end bravely, still inside the country they are fighting to recapture. It was fortunate that he chose to stay and fight, rather than destabilizing Libya from abroad, perhaps for decades to come. As he was never going to go quietly, the manner of his demise at long last gives Libyans something for which they can thank Colonel Gaddafi.

Thank you Colonel, for rendering that one last service for your country.

I Was So Much Older Then

Apropos of nothing, except that I've been listening to it on my iPod while flying back from TDY today, this is from Bob Dylan's 30th anniversary concert.

Dylan wrote My Back Pages in 1964 to step away from the more strident kind of protest song.

Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

The Byrds did a popular cover version, but it didn't include all six versus. Dylan, of course, recorded the full version, but, frankly, his rendition is too eccentric for me. This collaborative version is the best of both worlds - you get the entire song, and you can understand the words.

My Kind Of Town

Also known as: the City on the Make, Hog Butcher for the World, Paris on the Prairie, and - my favorite - the Miami of Canada.

I'm working in Chicago tonight, on my first trip ever to the city, and I must say I am loving the place. Yesterday, I walked past blocks and blocks of wonderful architecture on Michigan Avenue, and tonight I found this red brick Victorian Gothic building of "luxury flats" from 1882.















It's a historical landmark building, one of the first significant pieces to be completed after the Great Fire, and today it contains a Starbucks (of course). I am all over that like white on rice.

The Lexus And The Olive Tree Ball Cap And The Browning

According to a BBC report from Sirte, the Libyan rebel who discovered Qaddafi, a kid named Mohammed al-Bibi, was wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap at the time. That's him in the photo, holding up a gold-plated Browning P-35 pistol that he took from Qaddafi. (An excellent pistol, by the way; I used to have one myself, but just in plain blued steel.)

There are surely more important things to say about the end of Qaddafi, but I'm kind of struck by the weird mashup of cultural artifacts in that photo: dusty peasant militiamen, designer sunglasses, American ball caps, and a pimped-out pistol made in Belgium. There is a story about globalization and consumption somewhere in there, twisted around a political narrative about oppression and post-colonial violence.

Mo' Better Fortresses

Consumer Notice: This post is certified 100% free of Matters of Official Concern that are not referenced from publicly available sources of information.

We all hate those Fortress Embassies, don't we? Well, some of our diplomatic premises aren't nearly fortress-y enough but, in general, yes, we all hate them.

So it was good news when the Office of Overseas Buildings Operations met with its Industry Advisory Panel yesterday, and then sent out a press release about how it is exploring ways to design less fortress-y embassies. This is all part of the Design Excellence initiative that is slowly replacing OBO's established practice of standardized embassy design.

Here's the press release. Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations Introduces New Perimeter Design Concepts for Diplomatic Facilities:

The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO) announced the new Embassy Perimeter Improvement Concepts (EPIC) initiative during its Industry Advisory Panel meeting today. The EPIC team studied compound perimeter designs to improve the quality and appeal of the built environment surrounding United States diplomatic facilities abroad. The EPIC initiative [see a summary here] is one of many efforts OBO is undertaking in its renewed commitment to Design Excellence.

OBO and the Bureau of Diplomatic Security collaborated with Davis Brody Bond Aedas, Rhodeside & Harwell, and Weidlinger Associates to observe and document the perimeters of four existing embassy compounds. After analyzing the function and aesthetic realities of perimeter designs, the team developed a range of alternate approaches to achieving mandated security requirements.

The goal of EPIC is to design new embassy perimeters that present a more positive and welcoming image of the United States abroad, while meeting all perimeter security standards and the functional needs of these facilities.

Design Excellence, implemented in 2010, is a holistic approach to building U.S. diplomatic missions abroad. Using the Guiding Principles of Design Excellence in Diplomatic Facilities as a road map, Design Excellence furthers OBO’s mission to provide safe, secure, and functional facilities that represent American values and the best in American architecture, engineering, technology, sustainability, art, culture, and construction execution.

OBO has gotten away from the standard embassy design a couple times in recent years to do one-offs, most notably in Beijing. See some photos of that Unfortress Embassy here, and an artist's rendering from the embassy's website, below.













Wow. All that glass, water features, fancy landscaping, and cultural sensitivity. What's not to like? No Fortress there. Why not do more of those?

Here's my take-away from OBO's Design Excellence guidance and how it might affect future embassy construction:

-- Urban site selection for most new buildings. We can expect to see taller chancery buildings on smaller plots of land closer to the urban core. At least, we can expect that in those cities where OBO doesn't need to provide on-compound amenities like dining and recreation facilities, or on-compound housing. For the worst of the Third World, and for the highest-threat posts, big compounds in - necessarily - remote locations will continue to be needed.

-- Representational (not just functional) embassy buildings that are fitted into the surrounding architectural environment. No more Big Box diplo-kitsch productions that all come from the same template.

-- Grounds and landscaping will be an important part of the design. They will no longer be ignored, value-engineered away, or left for the regional bureau to pay for later. I could rant a little here about one of this year's new construction projects in which the entire compound is landscaped with a foot-deep cover of loose rock that looks like a barren moonscape, can't be safely walked on, soaks up solar heat until it feels like a frying pan, makes it impossible to establish a helicopter landing zone for emergency evacuations, and would become secondary fragmentation in the event of a bomb attack. I could rant about that, but I'm trying to ease up about it.

-- A higher value will be placed on selecting excellent designers (“seek to hire the highest quality American architects and engineers”), as opposed to hiring anyone willing to sign a firm fixed price contract for less than the next guy.

-- Designs will take lifecycle analysis into account, thereby reducing long-term costs for operations and maintenance.

-- Historical, cultural, and architectural legacy buildings will be preserved. OBO does this now, however, I hope it will more fully develop adaptive work-arounds for meeting security requirements, especially perimeter security requirements, in protected cultural properties. I see no reason why such buildings can't be preserved both in the cultural sense and in the literal sense of being preserved from destruction by mobs and vehicle bombs.

-- OBO will seek the best value when contracting. The guidance states that "current [OBO] policy emphasizes low first cost at the expense of design quality and lifecycle costs." Indeed, it does. They can admit that kind of thing now that General Williams isn’t around.

Come to think of it, General Williams has been gone for almost four years. What took OBO so long to shake off his influence?