Author: Mick Hartley

Here’s an advert placed in the Tehran Times, by a group calling themselves Danes for World Peace:

Read down the first letters of each phrase.

(via)

I suppose what makes this “airplane-treadmill” question (via Anthony) so compelling is that each side’s so sure they’re right. Here’s the basic scenario:

Imagine a plane is sitting on a massive conveyor belt, as wide and as long as a runway. The conveyer belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction. Can the plane take off?

There are now 852 comments at the NYT site. I haven’t read them all, but, really, what an exercise in talking scientific-sounding bollocks. Of course the plane won’t fucking take off. Jesus Christ!

OK, the controversy’s now over everybody. Time to return to your normal lives.

This may be good news:

Outgoing UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has said he believes Sudan is set to approve the deployment of a joint UN-African Union force in Darfur.

Until now, President Omar al-Bashir has consistently opposed any involvement of the UN in the western region.

However, Sudanese officials say the government has now accepted the idea of a “hybrid” force of peacekeepers, including UN personnel.

But Bashir has a history of apparently acceding to Western pressure only to backtrack later.

I don’t think we should get too

election of former President Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a mullah-cum-businessman he had handily defeated in presidential election in 2005. […]

The power struggle in Tehran, however, is far from over. In the other election, held for municipal councils throughout the country, the ultra-radical faction led by Ahmadinejad did better. With more than 90 per cent of the results confirmed, Ahmadinejad and his allies, standing on separate lists, appear to have won control of councils in 27 of 30 provinces with some 73 per cent of the votes at national level. The conservative faction, led by Rafsanjani and his two protégés, former President Muhammad Khatami and former Parliamentary Speaker Mahdi Karrubi, collected 18 per cent of the votes at the national level and won control in two provinces. The remaining province, Tehran, the biggest in terms of population was won by a splinter group from Ahmadinejad’s faction, led by Muhammad-Baqer Qalibaf the outgoing mayor of the capital.

The blow dealt at Ahmadinejad is primarily a Tehran phenomenon. The capital city, with a population of some 15 million, is the stronghold of middle classes that have been frightened by the president[‘s] incendiary rhetoric and alleged cravings for a “Clash of Civilisations” that could lead to war. […]

Rafsanjani, possibly Iran’s wealthiest man, represents the fears of the middle and upper classes that have seen the economy on the verge of collapse, businesses frozen and the outflow of capital turned into a flood, since Ahmadinejad’s election. But it is hard to see what the Rafsanjani faction can do against an administration that has managed to maintain its base among the urban poor and remains popular within the segment of the Iranian population that still believes in the Khomeinist revolution.

The impact of Ahmadinejad’s defeat in the AOE elections on Iran’s foreign policy is even harder to gauge. Rafsanjani and his faction have no means of directly influencing decision-making in that field. But they could serve as a channel of communication between the European Union and Khamenehi and persuade the latter to offer at least some of the concessions needed to defuse the crisis over Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions.

However, that possibility may force Ahmadinejad to heat up his rhetoric further and adopt an even more aggressive posture to prevent any deal brokered by the European Union.

As always in Iranian politics under Khomeinism, good news comes mixed with bad. Ahmadinejad is wounded but still very much alive. And that, according to Machiavelli, is when a political animal is at his most dangerous.

So I’m not the only one who thinks Paris is a bit over-rated:

A dozen or so Japanese tourists a year have to be repatriated from the French capital, after falling prey to what’s become known as “Paris syndrome”.

That is what some polite Japanese tourists suffer when they discover that Parisians can be rude or the city does not meet their expectations.

The experience can apparently be too stressful for some and they suffer a psychiatric breakdown….

Many of the visitors come with a deeply romantic vision of Paris – the cobbled streets, as seen in the film Amelie, the beauty of French women or the high culture and art at the Louvre.

The reality can come as a shock.

Uzbekistan, north of Afghanistan, and east of Iran. In short, right in the middle of the central Asian cross wires, where nobody in their right minds would wish to be. But instead of tiptoeing around the Afghanis, or cowering before the Iranians, Turkmenbashi has adopted the fascinating foreign policy of pretending they do not exist. And acting accordingly. In 2002, he decided his country needed a new calendar. So he invented one. January was renamed after himself: Turkmenbashi. April was changed to his mother’s name, Gurbansoltan. And September became Ruhnama, the title of the large pink philosophy book he wrote, the one you have to answer questions on to pass your driving test. With the months done, he turned to the days of the week. Tuesday became Young Day. Wednesday is now Favourable Day. The other Main Day, formerly a Monday, he noticed that a woman speaker at an agricultural ceremony he was attending had capped her teeth with gold, as Turkmen women are apt to do. So he sent her off to his health minister – a dentist – to have them fixed. From now on, he decreed, Turkmen women must have white teeth. And the best way to maintain them was to do what he’d seen dogs doing when he was young: gnaw lots of bones.

The president is lucky to have seen a dog. In Ashgabat, Turkmenistan’s spotless white capital that he is building in the desert out of unfeasible quantities of imported Italian marble, dogs are banned. Turkmenbashi doesn’t like their smell. Also banned are foreign newspapers, journalists, opposition parties, and, apparently, women’s make-up, because, according to the president, Turkmen women don’t need make-up. They’re beautiful enough already. Cinemas, circuses and ballets are illegal too, on the grounds that they are un-Turkmen. So are video games, lip-synching on television, car radios, and recorded music at weddings.

Now, less than a week later, Niyazov is dead:

He was the centre of a personality cult with cities and airports named after him. He has no designated successor.

Turkmenistan has large gas reserves, but now faces an uncertain future as outside powers scramble for influence over resources, analysts say.

Mr Niyazov died of a sudden cardiac arrest, it was announced.

According to Turkmen law, the president is succeeded by the head of the legislative body, the People’s Assembly. But this post was held by Mr Niyazov himself.

Now we need to send Januszczak to North Korea, or maybe Zimbabwe.

From Darfur:

The United Nations evacuated more than 70 aid workers from the largest refugee camp in Darfur on Tuesday after gunmen looted their compounds, leaving some 130,000 refugees virtually without humanitarian help.

It was the largest single instance of an aid worker evacuation since the U.N. launched its large-scale humanitarian campaign in war-torn Darfur in 2004. Over the past year, worsening violence has made delivering vital aid to hundreds of thousands of residents difficult or impossible.

A group of over 20 gunmen raided several humanitarian compounds in the South Darfur refugee camp of Gereida late Monday, harassing staff and stealing vehicles, communication equipment and money, the U.N. office for coordination of humanitarian affairs said in a statement.

Though no humanitarian worker was hurt in the attacks, the situation was considered too unsafe and the U.N. said it airlifted 71 aid workers on Tuesday.

The U.N. said it was the eighth evacuation of endangered aid workers it has had to carry out so far this month in the western Sudanese region of Darfur.

And from Chad:

Nearly 40 people were killed in clashes between Chad’s security forces and Arab Janjawid raiders who attacked two villages and mutilated their victims, the Government said. The raiders gouged out the eyes of eight soldiers they killed and disembowelled one of fifteen Chadian civilians.

Here’s Oliver James, banging the drum for more psychotherapy:

Christmas No 1s are usually mawkish nonsense, but in 2003 it was the song Mad World. With the chilling line “The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had”, in some respects it is up there with TS Eliot’s Prufrock as a poetic account of bourgeois despair.

From Erich Fromm to RD Laing, authors have rightly asserted that the more well adapted you are to our crazy society, the crazier you will be. Yet the light of sanity still comes shining through. As a friend of mine recently pointed out, the really interesting question is: “Given what we know [of the personal and geopolitical lunacy of our leaders], how come the world is so good?”

I actually like Mad World, but really, the sub-Blakean lyrics don’t bear too much scrutiny. Tears for Fears, who did the original version back in the early Eighties, were followers of Arthur Janov’s primal therapy, made famous by John Lennon screaming about his mother on the Plastic Ono Band album. It was one of those semi-cultish therapies which tended to take over people’s lives. All therapies tend to be semi-cultish of course, but this one more than most. As far as I remember – it’s a long time since I read the book – your dreams were meant to alter as you screamed your way out of your neuroses, with the death of your old self. So the quoted lyric, far from being up there with TS Eliot’s Prufrock as a poetic account of bourgeois despair is just Tears for Fears following the official line of their chosen cult/therapy and showing what good boys they were.

As for Erich Fromm and RD Laing, well, this is a guy who hasn’t left the Sixties, the old One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest days, when those pure noble souls who weren’t prepared to bow down to the Man were driven insane by the System, and the only honest response was to drop out, smoke dope, and dream about what it was going to be like after the Revolution.

Still, he’s funny, is Oliver. Here’s his reaction to Bush’s re-election:

“I was too depressed to even speak this morning. I thought of my late mother, who read Mein Kampf when it came out in the 1930s and thought, ‘Why doesn’t anyone see where this is leading?’”

And here he is, celebrating Freud 150 years after his birth:

My father was psychoanalysed by Freud’s daughter, Anna, at the house in Hampstead where Freud died. One day, approaching the house for a session, my dad felt an unaccountable wish to leap over its wall. When he reported this to Ms Freud she asked, ‘And did you have an erection at that moment?’ He did. How strange that she could have known this.

Now he comes up with this:

What we urgently require is £20bn devoted to a Campaign for Real Therapy.

£20bn, on therapy. Yep, a funny guy.

course there are the political considerations:

Experts on Libya say Gadaffi is using the children as a pawn in his discussions with Western powers over burning issues including contracts for oil, arms and aircraft and diplomatic relations in the Middle East. Gadaffi also remains bitter about the pariah status he acquired after the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. Earlier this year Libya said Bulgaria should pay the families of the children $2.7bn (£1.8bn) in compensation – which is exactly the sum paid by Libya for the 270 lives lost in the Pan Am 103 bombing.

Gunkanjima is a tiny island off the west coast of Japan:

Long ago, the island was nothing more than a small reef. Then in 1810, the chance discovery of coal drastically changed the fate of this reef. As reclamation began, people came to live here, and through coal mining the reef started to expand continuously. Befor long, the reef had grown into an artificial island of one kilometer (three quarters of a mile) in perimeter, with a population of 5300. Looming above the ocean, it appeared a concrete labyrinth of many-storied apartment houses and mining structures built closely together. Seen from the ocean, the silhouette of the island closely resembled a battleship – so, the island came to be called Gunkanjima, or Battleship island.

In 1959, its residential area population density was 337 people per acre, or 83,476.2 inhabitants per km², supposedly the highest population density ever recorded anywhere. Since 1974 it’s been deserted.

Here (via Japundit) are some photos, in 1974, and now. Also here.