Author: Mick Hartley

botic mission to Pluto has lambasted the ruling, calling it “embarrassing”.

And the chair of the committee set up to oversee agreement on a definition implied that the vote had effectively been “hijacked”.

The vote took place at the International Astronomical Union’s (IAU) 10-day General Assembly in Prague. The IAU has been the official naming body for astronomy since 1919.

Only 424 astronomers who remained in Prague for the last day of the meeting took part….

Dr Alan Stern, who leads the US space agency’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and did not vote in Prague, told BBC News: “It’s an awful definition; it’s sloppy science and it would never pass peer review…

Stern said like-minded astronomers had begun a petition to get Pluto reinstated. Car bumper stickers compelling motorists to “Honk if Pluto is still a planet” have gone on sale over the internet and e-mails circulating about the decision have been describing the IAU as the “Irrelevant Astronomical Union”.

See also here.

If you’re a Westener working in the Arabian peninsula, watch out for shaven men wearing cheap sunglasses and a sport suit or regular suit….

“Below I will explain the jihadist way of action and the security measures to be employed by the jihad fighter [when he wants to kill a Westerner]:

“First of all, before carrying out the operation, pray [to Allah] to guide you on the good path.

“[Regarding your] external appearance – Try as much as possible to look like someone who is not religious. For example, wear [a kuffiyeh] with an ‘aqal instead of a turban, and wear cheap dark glasses during the day and regular glasses at night. Your clothes must be long, and try if at all possible for them to be heel-length, or longer; don’t be afraid of this. Wear a sport suit or a regular suit. Similarly, it is greatly preferable to be shaven.

“[Regarding] the items or the clothing in [your] car – Immediately get rid of everything in your car that indicates that you are religious, such as jihad cassettes, small papers such as post-its… The most important thing there must not be anything in the car indicating that the owner is a religious man… so that if the dogs of the security [apparatuses], the emergency [apparatuses], or the other [apparatuses] stop you in a suspicious place and search your car they will find nothing proving that you are religious, and will release you right away.

“While you are carrying out the operation, be careful not to take your cell phone with you – especially if it has a camera – so that it won’t cause you, or your friends whose numbers are in the phone, problems with unknown consequences.

“In order to carry out the operation when the time comes, you must have a weapon (a pistol or a submachine gun) or a good knife, if you are interested in slaughtering this infidel….

From the Islamist Al-Hesbah website, via MEMRI.

ch has never before arisen in the use of economic sanctions for diplomatic purposes, arises because of the state of the global oil market today.

Oil prices have more than doubled in the past three years because steadily rising demand, especially from China, has run up against the limits of global production capacity. If Iran, which is the world’s third-largest oil producer after Russia and Saudi Arabia, had even a small part of its exports removed by sanctions from world markets, the oil price would shoot up to $100 or more. As long as the percentage increase in oil prices was higher than Iran’s percentage loss of export volumes, sanctions would result in the Government’s total revenues going up, instead of down.

Iran also controls the Straits of Hormuz, the narrow strip that separates the country from the Arabian peninsula and which provides a passage for roughly 40 per cent of the world’s internationally traded oil. If Iran were to close the Strait of Hormuz or otherwise threaten foreign shipping in response to an attempt to impose economic sanctions, the oil price would jump not just to $100 a barrel but probably to $150 or beyond. […]

What then should America and its allies do in the face of Iran’s nuclear defiance? The answer is clear: concede defeat. Iran has won this tussle and there is no point in pretending otherwise. Instead of trying to stop Iran’s nuclear programme, the international community must bring Iran back into the civilised world. The only way to do that is to stop issuing empty threats and to start offering Iran real incentives for co-operative behaviour — non-aggression guarantees from America and Israel, removal of the residual US economic sanctions dating back to the 1980s and the prospect of steadily improving treatment in investment and trade. Of course, such a U-turn seems inconceivable while President Bush remains in office. But remember President Nixon’s historic opening to China as he was losing the war in Vietnam. To paraphrase Johnson, a politician’s mind can be concentrated wonderfully by the knowledge that he is faces defeat.

From the International Rescue Committee (via Coalition for Darfur):

More than 200 women have been sexually assaulted in the last five weeks alone around Darfur’s largest displaced camp, Kalma, an alarming trend that is yet another sign of the region’s plummeting security situation.

The situation is so dire that about 300 women convened a meeting in Kalma on Aug. 7 to plead for more help from the outside world — particularly from African Union troops mandated to protect civilians.

“This is a massive spike in figures. We are used to hearing of 2 to 4 incidents of sexual assault per month in Kalma camp,” said Kurt Tjossem of the International Rescue Committee, which collected the figures.

The numbers from Kalma, in south Darfur, are one measure of Darfur’s downward spiral, which is also being reflected in rising attacks on aid workers and in numbers of people fleeing their homes for displaced camps. The signing of a peace deal on May 5 has done nothing to halt the insecurity. Since the beginning of July, 14,780 newly displaced people have arrived at As Salaam camp in El Fasher, some after having spent two days on foot or riding donkeys to escape violence in north Darfur. They are among 50,000 people who have been displaced across Darfur in recent weeks. Last month alone, nine humanitarian aid workers were killed and 20 vehicles were hijacked in Darfur.

The women of Darfur are particularly vulnerable. They have no choice but to leave their camp confines in search of firewood – expeditions that force them to walk several miles into the bush. If men went instead, they would be killed. “We … have chosen to risk being raped rather than let the men risk being killed,” one woman said at the Aug. 7 meeting, summarizing how hopeless their plight has become. […]

What little protection exists in Darfur could be diminished further on Sept. 30, when the AU’s mandate ends. This will leave women even more in danger of attack and weaken international organizations’ abilities to deliver services to those in need.

do we get our role models then?

ABB: The only model to follow is pure Islam. Because Islam in its original form was tough and hard, not weak and pliable. Islam is fixed, stable, ordered and disciplined, and so are Muslims.

If we return to the real practice of true Islam we would be much stronger and that is when the kafirs will fear us. That is why we need to uphold the Shariah and return to real Islam. But the West is trying to weaken Islam from outside and inside. They attack our people and invade our countries from outside, and they weaken us from within with ideas like secularism, liberalism and democracy. This is all designed to contaminate our pure Islam.

Why do we Muslims have to learn from them? Islam is perfect, there is nothing to be added or changed. We have shown that Islam can rule the world perfectly for 14 centuries, and during this time of Muslim power we did not borrow ideas like democracy from others, so why do we need to learn democracy from them now? As long as Muslims were confident they could not be defeated, but now we are just puppets.

This is why we are calling for the upholding of the Shariah here in Indonesia. We demand an Islamic state, and not some form of Islamisation of society. We want the state to be Islamic, with Islamic leaders who have the courage and will to implement the Shariah in total. There is no other way.

he disagrees with Grass’s critics, but instead of just coming out and saying that, he makes out that he’s putting forward some deep thesis about the nature of mankind and of ethics. This is just terrible writing.

The moralists go on to condemn Grass further for waiting so long to make this short chapter of his early life public; he finally wrote and published his autobiography when he was in his 70s.

To me it is clear that he felt that it was only at this age that he could do any real justice to this incident, which was both a choice and an accident. And by “do justice” I mean to tell the story without any oversimplification, so that it could encourage true reflection in future readers. He chose the story’s time with the courage of a burrowing storyteller.

For clarity’s sake, I picture a triangle. One of its points is an extensive (and very painful) knowledge of human experience. Grass’s writings represent such a point. The triangle’s second point is ignorance, the direct opposite to the first. The bravura of Grass’ decision to join the Waffen SS is represented here. The triangle’s third point is neither knowledge nor ignorance, but the blank refusal of experience. And this is the moralists’ point. Such refusals have a long history. Remember the Pharisees.

But what about the point of innocence, you may ask; where is that? It is sometimes there, right at the end of a story.

What?? How on earth does Berger know that “it was only at this age that he could do any real justice to this incident“. Not, perhaps, because his memoirs are due out shortly, and with this latest revelation he’s guaranteed a best-seller? And how come he couldn’t do any real justice to this incident in all the years that he’s been taking the moral high-ground and assuming the mantle of post-war Germany’s conscience?

The comments are pretty much what you’d expect for the Guardian:

“Brilliant first paragraph and everything that follows – bravo!”

“John Berger is a writer of genius and I’m not embarrassed to admit that I revere him.”

But some reality manages to creep in:

“John Berger has written a forceful piece in defence of the writer Gunter Grass. But when Ayatollah Khomeini offered a three million dollar bounty for the murder of another writer, Salman Rushdie, Berger said that Rushdie only had himself to blame. I’m trying to square these two opinions into a coherent moral system. Can’t do it.”

I’d only disagree with the “forceful”.

For the case against Grass – as well as Oliver Kamm – see this (long!) piece, which suggests that the Stasi, the East German secret police, knew about Grass’s Waffen SS membership, and that the truth would have come out anyway when his Stasi file was published next year. Another reason, perhaps, why “it was only at this age that he could do any real justice to this incident“.

by the UN to block the domestic development of weapons of mass destruction. The third element was the establishment of “no-fly” zones in the northern and southern parts of the country so that Iraq’s air power could not be used against its own people. The containment system was, as we now know, highly effective. At least, it was effective in one sense: it prevented both weapons development and mass murder and so made the war of 2003 unnecessary. But in another sense it was a failure: it did not prevent the war.

The primary reason for the failure was, obviously, the ideologically driven policy of the Bush administration, which from the beginning favored regime change and war over containment. But there is another reason, less obvious, which needs to be stressed: the states that opposed the war on the grounds that containment was working were not themselves making it work. They were not participants in, or even supporters of, the containment system. [my emphasis – MH] The containment of Saddam’s Iraq began as a multilateral enterprise, but in the end it was the Americans who were doing almost all the work. Had there been many states, or even just a few more states, enforcing the embargo, insisting on inspections, and flying planes over northern and southern Iraq, the unilateral abrogation of the containment system by the U.S. government would not have been possible (or, at least, it would not have been as easy as it was). Had containment been an international project, American power might also have been contained within it.

There is a simple lesson here about the meaning of collective security. If measures short of war are to work against evil or dangerous regimes, they have to be the common work of a group of nations. They require multilateral commitment. Collective security must be a collective project. It won’t be successful if the costs of security are assigned to one state while all the others pursue business as usual. The state bearing the costs can’t be counted on to bear them indefinitely. Adventurous politicians will be tempted by the idea of a quick and radical alternative to containment. And regime change is the obvious alternative.

rselves. The whole point of the exercise, supposedly, is to confront us in the West with our hypocrisy as we express outrage over these cartoons: see? – now you know how we feel when you draw pictures of Mohammed. [Pictures of Jesus – the obvious equivalent – might somehow fail to produce the necessary outrage, in a culture where desecration of Christian symbols has been a staple of avant-garde art for decades.] To be outraged, though, we need to see them, so I trust that the Iranian House of Cartoons will make them available. Then the Western press, who notably failed to distinguish themselves over the Danish cartoons, could – should – publish them as widely as possible. Of course there’d be protests from Jewish organisations, but the point would be made. No riots, no bombings. And people could see for themselves the level of anti-semitic hatred around at the moment. It could turn into a major Iranian own-goal.

id psychic phenomena had no place in the judiciary.

The bench backed a medical finding that the judge was suffering from psychosis….

The judge said he had made a covenant with his dwarf friends that he could write while in a trance and that he had been seen by several people in two places at the same time.

Judge Floro reportedly changed from blue court robes to black each Friday “to recharge his psychic powers”.

In a letter to the court he said: “From obscurity, my name and the three mystic dwarves became immortal.”

However, the Supreme Court said dalliance with dwarves would gradually erode the public’s acceptance of the judiciary as the guardian of the law, if not make it an object of ridicule.

The Grand Mufti of Egypt Shaikh Ali Gomaa (according to Wikipedia, “one of the most respected and qualified traditional Islamic scholars alive”) writing in the Egyptian government daily Al-Ahram:

“Greetings to the Lebanese people, to the Lebanese government, and to the Lebanese resistance – to the small and beautiful country that has proved to the world that the ideals of determination, bravery and self-dignity still exist in this era that has been taken over by the blood-sucking murderers.

“Anyone who follows the news will discover that the Hebrew entity has turned into a [source] of [empty] talk, while the Arab discourse, which was characterized in the sixties [as empty talk], has developed significantly. [The Arabs] have learned a lesson and have moved from talk to action, and from the fostering of illusions to honesty, transparency, realistic goal-setting and ability to change. The Israeli discourse, [on the other hand], has turned to false declarations based on illusions, with wishful thinking taking precedence over facts.

“These lies have exposed the true and hideous face of the blood-suckers who were described by Filmange in his book The Treasure Hidden in the Talmudic Laws [sic], which tells how [the Jews] planned [to prepare] a matzo [unleavened Passover bread] using human blood. If we follow events, the most important thing [that we discover], in my opinion, is that the war going on [today] plants hatred in the next generations, as though one of its goals is to perpetuate the conflict for many years to come.

Well, here’s a guy who certainly knows a thing or two about planting hatred in the next generations.