Author: Mick Hartley

The new UN chief hits the ground running:

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called for a “good governance pact” in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“I would like to invite you to work out a pact with yourselves and the people you represent as well as with all your international partners,” Mr Ban said.

He was addressing members of the DRC parliament at the start of a five-day tour of Africa – his first official foreign trip since taking office.

Good governance – it’s an exciting idea. Why has no one else thought of it? Once again again the UN shows the way.

Calling on the Congolese politicians to co-operate, he said: “This would be a kind of good governance pact, because restoring the state’s authority and ensuring the primacy of the rule of law across the country are indispensable for consolidating peace and democracy.”

Having sorted out the Congo, Sudan’s next in line:

Mr Ban is also due to meet President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan at the AU summit, which opens in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, on Monday.

Our correspondent says in theory the Sudanese leader has accepted the idea of a joint AU-UN peacekeeping force in the troubled region of Darfur, but it has not happened yet.

The UN chief said the situation in Darfur was “on the top” of his agenda.

Perhaps he’ll try the “good governance” line on Bashir. That should do the trick.

money. The two men agreed to go into the body business together. Last November they sought out a prostitute they knew in nearby Yan’an — the city where Chairman Mao began his Communist revolution — but she threw them out after they said that they could not afford to pay her £20. They returned the next morning and killed her.

On December 3 they completed a similar body handover with Mr Li on the bridge. This time they made only £530 because the buyer was unhappy with the quality of the body and, after costs, Mr Yang and his two friends each earned £100 on that deal.

Old Li had made a name for himself in Xixian county by selling clothes to outfit the dead and by handing out cards that offered to help families in need of a spirit marriage. They want young and good-looking dead brides for their sons and regard the family of the girl as “in-laws”. Police discovered that Mr Li paid between £530 and £660 for a body and sold it on for as much as £2,300.

acialist. He thinks that your race is the most important fact about you. It is so important that it determines your identity and your community. If you are mixed race, you will have neither.

Mr Phillips is mistaken. Despite her brown skin, my daughter is no harder to identify than her white father or her black mother. She is a no more vague, nebulous or otherwise indefinite creature than any other human being.

Nor is she marooned between two communities. For I do not live in the white community and my wife does not live in the black community. As far as I know, there are no such communities. Despite our different colours, all three members of the Whyte family live in the same community, a nice bourgeois suburb. […]

I do not worry about my brown daughter suffering racist discrimination. That is rare in our community. I am more worried that she fall for the idea that her skin is her identity, and believe herself the victim of fantastical injuries such as identity-stripping. Then her “racial identity”, or lack of one, really will become a problem for her.

The interests of do-gooding organisations are always at odds with their goals. Succeed and you put yourself out of business. With racism in rapid retreat and mixed-race children on the rise, there is one great contribution the Commission for Racial Equality could make to its official cause. Stop existing.

At its summit in Addis Ababa on January 29-30th, the African Union will decide which country will hold the chair for 2007. Last year Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir was by-passed, but he’s bidding for the chairmanship again this year. Human Rights First are campaigning against his election:

Electing Sudan to chair the African Union would be like putting the fox in charge of the hen house….

If President Omar-al-Bashir is elected chair of the A.U., he will control the A.U. peacekeeping forces, the only security that currently exists for many Darfuris.

About 7000 A.U. peacekeepers are all that protect innocent civilians from brutal attacks carried out predominantly by government forces and their militias. President Bashir has to date refused to allow United Nations peacekeeping forces to replace the A.U. forces, and has consistently dodged attempts by the international community to resolve the impasse through the deployment of a hybrid joint A.U. and U.N. force.

Bashir, meanwhile, has admitted that his government has been bombing Darfur, despite earlier denials, in violation of cease-fire agreements. They had no choice, apparently:

Rebel commanders in northern Darfur said on Monday that government aircraft had hit three villages over the weekend – claims the Sudanese government strongly denied.

But in an exclusive BBC interview broadcast on Wednesday, President Bashir confirmed his troops had carried out the bombardments.

He said the government had no option but to strike as 80% of attacks on civilians in the region were carried out by rebels groups, undermining security.

ate change as the primary cause.

The latest finds in Australia add more weight to the human intervention argument:

Giant kangaroos, marsupial lions and wombats the size of a car survived all that climate change could throw at them but were wiped out by the arrival of mankind, according to a study.
Fossil remains of the animals were found in a cave on the Nullarbor Plain, in southern Australia, and scientists have been astonished by the number and variety of creatures preserved.

At least 69 species of mammals, birds and reptiles, a third of them now extinct, have been unearthed at the site after falling and becoming trapped in the deep caves 400,000 to 800,000 years ago.

Among the hundreds of fossils were giant kangaroos that weighed 31½st (200kg) and stood 10ft (3m) high, and the first complete skeletons of Thylacoleo carnifex, the marsupial lion. Eight kangaroo species previously unknown to science were uncovered at the Thylacoleo caves, including two that lived only in woodland, and a giant bird, Leipoa gallinacea.

It had previously been assumed that for the land to support such a range of large animals it would have to have been wet enough to sustain woodland and lush vegetation of a type that is absent from the arid Nullarbor Plain today.

Analysis of the remains, however, has revealed that the climate when the animals died was just as dry as it is now — and yet it supported far more vegetation.

The finding, reported in the journal Nature, means that palaeontologists must rewrite theories on Australia’s environmental history that has hitherto held Ice Age-driven climate change to be the cause of the animals’ extinction. […]

The research leader, Professor Richard Roberts, of the University of Wollongong, said that the animals had survived repeated climate change yet had disappeared suddenly in the past 50,000 years.

“Suddenly and during quite pleasant climatic conditions when the megafauna should have thrived, they went extinct. Why? The only new ingredient in the mix at that time was humans,” he said.

“Humans very likely played the decisive role in the extinction event through hunting of juveniles, burning of the vegetation cover and changing the plant composition to disadvantage the browsers and grazers.”

perfect and ideal state, it should be noted that the world desired by Islam is not a far-fetched idea like the utopia of the West in which the realities of today’s society have no effect. Since the natural growth of man is toward sublimity, dedicated Muslims in each and every era strive to materialize the characteristics of the promised society to the best of their ability… The Father of the Islamic Revolution, Imam Khomeini (may his soul rest in peace) used to emphasize this and would say: We, of course, cannot fill the world with justice now. If we could we certainly would. But since we cannot, he, the Savior must come. The world is full of oppression and if we can prevent oppression we will have carried out our part of the duty…”

“With the reappearance of Imam Mahdi… conflicts, differences and discriminations that stem from lack of faith and atheism in the society will be eliminated. The shortcomings of religions and schools of thought will be clarified and Islam will prevail as the perfect pinnacle of faith. In other words, methods will become one and oneness will appear in people’s beliefs. The Mahdi will materialize the call of the holy Qur’an, which throughout its text has urged mankind to unite and worship the One and the Only God without associating partners to him. The writer of the book Imamate and Mahdaviyat, says: the idea of placing humanity under one religion irrespective of their color, gender, language, class and ethnicity is a gift given by Islam to humanity…”

ection of its beliefs but rather the dogmas — “this is good, this is not good” — which he felt made the quality of belief that much poorer. He turned to kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, “which I found richer, wider, more open”. And now? “I have no beliefs. It’s a black, black hole. You can never know why you are here. These are questions which are completely unresolved. It makes you have vertigo, thinking about this,” he says.

Ten, 20, 30 years ago? He’s 61 now, so he was 50, or 40, or maybe 30, when he decided Catholicism was too dogmatic. Another sure sign of a keen mind. Most of us don’t work that out until we’re at least – oooh, 14 or 15. And wondering why we’re here, in a German accent and, to judge from the picture in the Times, wearing open sandals over socks in the middle of winter, is a sure-fire sign of a towering intellect.

It could drive you mad, I say. “Yes, but if it did I wouldn’t have my art,” he says. “I think of the manager, having to fly around the world every day for his work, thinking about these questions. What a horrible life.”

It’s so much more spiritually meaningful to make wonky towers: then you can sneer at those shallow materialistic fools who make stuff that’s actually useful.

But he’s doing the same thing, just making art instead of negotiating deals, surely. “No, I don’t produce work to get away from the black hole. I produce work in the black hole. In way it makes me more connected to a possible answer. You feel something but you cannot grasp it.”

But, given the recurrence of the themes of apocalypse and renewal, you sense that Kiefer feels some kind of hope. He says Hinduism is his favoured religion now, because it recognises the value of other religions. “Mythology is the only way you can try and understand the connections in the world. Science can’t do that.”

No indeed: science doesn’t provide a religious explanation of the world. Very perceptive. And he’s aware of his own worth, of course:

Kiefer studied law, not art, at the beginning “because I had a genius complex. I thought I was a genius. I never wanted to practise law but I was interested in its construction and philosophy.”

Interestingly, Kiefer studied with Joseph Beuys during the 70s – the great self-mythologiser of modern art. What he’s learnt from the master, clearly, is that in the modern art world the most important step is, first of all, to set yourself up as a genius. With so many credulous art critics around, that’s not difficult. Then, by definition, everything you do, even a wonky tower, is a masterpiece.

If true, this is not good news:

North Korea is helping Iran to prepare an underground nuclear test similar to the one Pyongyang carried out last year.

Under the terms of a new understanding between the two countries, the North Koreans have agreed to share all the data and information they received from their successful test last October with Teheran’s nuclear scientists.

North Korea provoked an international outcry when it successfully fired a bomb at a secret underground location and Western intelligence officials are convinced that Iran is working on its own weapons programme.

A senior European defence official told The Daily Telegraph that North Korea had invited a team of Iranian nuclear scientists to study the results of last October’s underground test to assist Teheran’s preparations to conduct its own — possibly by the end of this year.

There were unconfirmed reports at the time of the Korean firing that an Iranian team was present. Iranian military advisers regularly visit North Korea to participate in missile tests.

Now the long-standing military co-operation between the countries has been extended to nuclear issues.

Theodore Dalrymple on heroin use:

It is not only those who take heroin who are blinded by illusions, but almost the entire population, including – or especially – the experts. Every problem in contemporary society calls forth its equal and supposedly opposite bureaucracy. The ostensible purpose of this bureaucracy is to solve that problem.

But the bureaucracy quickly develops a survival instinct and so no more wishes the problem to disappear altogether than the lion wishes to kill all the gazelle in the bush and leave itself with no food for the future.

In short, the bureaucracy of drug addiction needs drug addicts far more than drug addicts need the bureaucracy of drug addiction. Thanks to propaganda assiduously spread for many years by everyone who has concerned himself with the subject, there is now a standard or received view of heroin addiction that is almost universally accepted by the general public, by the addicts and by the bureaucracy.

This view serves the interests of the addicts who wish to continue their habit while placing the blame elsewhere, as well as the bureaucracy that wishes to continue in employment, preferably forever and at higher rates of pay.

This standard or received view conceives opiate addiction as an illness and therefore implies that there is a bona fide medical solution to it. When all the proposed “cures” fail to work, as they usually do, and when the extension of quasi-medical services to addicts is accompanied not by a decline in the prevalence of the problem but, on the contrary, by an increase, who can blame addicts if, in continuing their habit, they blame not themselves but the incompetence of those who have set themselves up as their medical saviours and offered them solutions that do not work?

But where bureaucracies are concerned, nothing succeeds like failure….

The addict has a problem, but it is not a medical one: he does not know how to live. And on this subject the doctor has nothing, qua doctor, to offer. What he ought not do, however, is to mislead the addict, or allow the addict to mislead him, into thinking that the problem is medical and requires, or is susceptible to, a medical solution.

That’s from the Australian, which adds, “Dalrymple has worked as a prison doctor and as a psychiatrist in a general hospital in a British slum”. I suppose Britain has slums like the US has ghettoes. Sounds dated, but fits in nicely with Dalrymple’s persona as one reporting back from the forgotten world of Britain’s lumpenproletariat.

r-old woman:

This is the most monstrous crime unimaginable in human society…. The U.S. forces in south Korea are infected with an abnormal sexual desire and sexual abuses are part of their daily routine…

That abnormal sexual desire stuff – they’re not making a point about the large number of black US troops in South Korea, are they? The North Koreans wouldn’t stoop to such crude racist stereotyping, surely?