Page Rank Contradiction

Google page rank of this blog is now one. A pleasant enough achievement, considering its age was more than two years. In first six months its page rank rose to 2 but not long afterwards drove to n/a before then becomes 0 until yesterday.

 
According to some SEO's experts, Page rank reduction is caused by many factors, one of which is the paid post.  It is become a contradiction, because all pay per post providers requires a high page rank for article with a huge payment.

 

By the way, happy page rank 1 anyway.

Kabul 30 years ago, and Kabul today. Have we learned nothing?

I sit on the rooftop of the old Central Hotel – pharaonic-decorated elevator, unspeakable apple juice, sublime green tea, and armed Tajik guards at the front door – and look out across the smoky red of the Kabul evening. The Bala Hissar fort glows in the dusk, massive portals, the great keep to which the British army should have moved its men in 1841. Instead, they felt the king should live there and humbly built a cantonment on the undefended plain, thus leading to a "signal catastrophe".

Like automated birds, the kites swoop over the rooftops. Yes, the kite-runners of Kabul, minus Hollywood. At night, the thump of American Sikorsky helicopters and the whisper of high-altitude F-18s invade my room. The United States of America is settling George Bush's scores with the "terrorists" trying to overthrow Hamid Karzai's corrupt government.

Now rewind almost 29 years, and I am on the balcony of the Intercontinental Hotel on the other side of this great, cold, fuggy city. Impeccable staff, frozen Polish beer in the bar, secret policemen in the front lobby, Russian troops parked in the forecourt. The Bala Hissar fort glimmers through the smoke. The kites – green seems a favourite colour – move beyond the trees. At night, the thump of Hind choppers and the whisper of high-altitude MiGs invade my room. The Soviet Union is settling Leonid Brezhnev's scores with the "terrorists" trying to overthrow Barbrak Karmal's corrupt government.

Thirty miles north, all those years ago, a Soviet general told us of the imminent victory over the "terrorists" in the mountains, imperialist "remnants" – the phrase Kabul communist radio always used – who were being supported by America and Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Fast forward to 2001 – just seven years ago – and an American general told us of the imminent victory over the "terrorists" in the mountains, the all but conquered Taliban who were being supported by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The Russian was pontificating at the big Soviet airbase at Bagram. The American general was pontificating at the big US airbase at Bagram.

This is not déjà-vu. This is déjà double-vu. And it gets worse.

 

Almost 29 years ago, the Afghan "mujahedin" began a campaign to end the mixed schooling of boys and girls in the remote mountain passes, legislation pushed through by successive communist governments. Schools were burned down. Outside Jalalabad, I found a headmaster and his headmistress wife burned to death. Today, the Afghan Taliban are campaigning to end the mixed schooling of boys and girls – indeed the very education of young women – across the great deserts of Kandahar and Helmand. Schools have been burned down. Teachers have been executed.

As the Soviets began to suffer more and more casualties, their officers boasted of the increasing prowess of the Afghan National Army, the ANA. Infiltrated though they were by the "mujahedin", Moscow gave them newer tanks and helped to train new battalions to take on the guerrillas outside the capital.

Fast forward to now. As the Americans and British suffer ever greater casualties, their officers boast of the increasing prowess of the ANA. Infiltrated though they are by the Taliban, America and other Nato states are providing them with newer equipment and training new battalions to take on the guerrillas outside the capital. Back in January of 1980, I could take a bus from Kabul to Kandahar. Seven years later, the broken highway was haunted by "mujahedin" fighters and bandits and the only safe way to travel to Kandahar was by air.

In the immediate aftermath of America's arrival here in 2001, I could take a bus from Kabul to Kandahar. Now, seven years later, the highway – rebuilt on the express instructions of George W but already cracked and swamped with sand – is haunted by Taliban fighters and bandits and the only safe way to travel to Kandahar is by air.

Throughout the 1980s, the Soviets and the ANA held the towns but lost most of the country. Today, America and its allies and the ANA hold most of the towns but have lost the southern half of the country. The Soviets secretly sent another 9,000 troops to join their 115,000-strong occupation force to fight the "mujahedin". Today, the Americans are publicly sending another 7,000 troops to join their 55,000-strong occupation force to fight the Taliban.

In 1980, I would sneak down to Chicken Street to buy old books in the dust-filled shops, cheap and illegal Pakistani reprints of the memoirs of British Empire officers while my driver watched anxiously lest I be mistaken for a Russian. Last week, I sneaked down to the Shar Book shop, which is filled with the very same illicit volumes, while my driver watched anxiously lest I be mistaken for an American (or, indeed, a Brit). I find Stephen Tanner's Afghanistan: A Military History From Alexander The Great To The Fall Of The Taliban and drive back to my hotel through the streets of wood-smoked Kabul to read it in my ill-lit room.

In 1840, Tanner writes, Britain's supply line from the Pakistani city of Karachi up through the Khyber Pass and Jalalabad to Kabul was being threatened by Afghan fighters, "British officers on the crucial supply line through Peshawar... insulted and attacked". I fumble through my bag for a clipping from a recent copy of Le Monde. It marks Nato's main supply route from the Pakistani city of Karachi up through the Khyber Pass and Jalalabad to Kabul, and illustrates the location of each Taliban attack on the convoys bringing fuel and food to America's allies in Afghanistan.

Then I prowl through one of the Pakistani retread books I have found and discover General Roberts of Kandahar telling the British in 1880 that "we have nothing to fear from Afghanistan, and the best thing to do is to leave it as much as possible to itself... I feel sure I am right when I say that the less the Afghans see of us, the less they will dislike us".

Memo to the Americans, the Brits, the Canadians and the rest of Humpty Dumpty's men. Read Roberts. Read history.

Digging Into 'Déjà Vu'

The title track of Déjà Vu, the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album from 1970, popped up on the RealPlayer the other day, and as music generally does for me, it sparked a couple of memories.

First, I recalled the review of the album in the St. Cloud Tech High student newspaper, written by a couple of fellow seniors in the autumn of 1970, not long after the album was released. What I recall is the reviewers’ complaint that the title tune failed because it had nothing of the sense of what a déjà vu experience feels like. I had the record at home, and agreed with them. I knew, though, that writer David Crosby was using déjà vu as a metaphor, although I wasn’t certain what the point of the metaphor was. A few years later, as the record played at a Friday night party somewhere in St. Cloud, I got the reincarnation references.

The second memory also comes from around the time the album was released: During the first semester of my senior year in high school, I took a course in psychology. We examined the stresses of everyday living, looking at how mood, temperament and environment affect our sense of who we are and our actions. I thought at the time the course had a pretty loose definition of “psychology,” but it was a fun and fascinating semester.

Along the way, we students were periodically assigned to bring in examples from the mass media of news reports, magazine articles, television programs, songs or anything else we found that showed some connection to the course’s definition of psychology. Again, that cast a pretty wide net, but we had some lively sessions, and our teacher was good at sifting through the stuff we brought in and pointing those discussions in thought-provoking directions.

When it came my turn to offer a media artifact for discussion for the class, I brought in Déjà Vu and cued up the record’s third track, Crosby’s lament, “Almost Cut My Hair,” with its somewhat tongue-in-cheek examination of alienation. We had a good time dissecting Crosby’s intent and the song’s take on life, and the other members of the class were a little impressed that I’d changed from a musically clueless goof a year earlier to someone who had the new CSN&Y album before almost everybody else. (Demonstrating that change, I think, was the real reason I was determined to find something on the album that I could share in my psychology class.)

But as the track “Déjà Vu” played the other evening, I thought of another track on the same album that I could just as well have shared in that long-ago class: Neil Young’s “Helpless.” Tucked inside Young’s memories of his Ontario childhood, the recurring chorus of “Helpless, helpless, helpless, helpless” sings of alienation and loss as vividly as any part of the David Crosby track I did play. The elegiac tempo and the country-ish instrumentation of Young’s track tie the song firmly in all our pasts, pasts that – if I interpret Young correctly – we are helpless to entirely escape.

That may be too deep and intense a reading of the song, but now, almost forty years after the nearly simultaneous events of the song’s release and my first steps at leaving my own childhood behind, that’s what I hear. I’d be interested in thoughts from others.

I’m not sure where the song ranks in Neil Young’s catalog. That depends entirely on the mood I’m in when I hear it or any other work by Young; the wide range of moods, styles and approaches he’s shown us in his career make his work more difficult to assess, categorize, and in fact comprehend as a whole than the work of anyone else in rock music I can think of. (Well, maybe Bob Dylan.)

It’s a song that’s not been covered by a lot of folks. In its assessment of the song, All-Music Guide notes covers by Nick Cave, Yukihori Takahashi, Nazareth, Trip Shakespeare and Fareed Haque. Another version, one I enjoy, is by k.d. lang on her 2004 CD of songs by Canadian writers, Hymns Of The 49th Parallel.

But I think the best cover of “Helpless” that I know of is the one that AMG said was the first, by Young’s fellow Canadian Buffy Sainte-Marie on her 1971 album, She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina.