Author: Mick Hartley

Via Secular Blasphemy, here’s a stirring tale:

A parcel which vibrated and made strange noises caused panic in a post office in eastern Germany on Wednesday before it was revealed that it was an inflatable erotic doll, police said.

“The post office worker thought it could have been a dangerous object, even a bomb,” a spokesman for the Chemnitz police said.

The police were called and noticed that the sender’s address was on the package.

When they confronted the red-faced sender of the parcel, he explained it was a lifesize sex doll which he had packed up to be sent back to the manufacturers because it had failed to have the desired effect.

“He opened the package and expertly removed the batteries,” said the spokesman. “It was rather embarrassing for the sender.”

“Everybody now knows change is inevitable. We just have to give the situation one final shot to make sure that this change is peaceful.” At Amarji, Syrian author Ammar Abdulhamid suggests how peaceful change could come to Syria:

I hate violence, but this regime seems incapable of understanding any other language. But, perhaps there is still time for a last ditch effort to avoid sanctions and violence. Perhaps there is still a chance for quiet diplomacy to work.

This regime cannot be trusted to come up with the necessary vision for reform on its own. Frankly, it does not have the necessary know how, awareness and skills to envision and, independently, lead such process. Left to its own devices, the best it can do is to dig in, retrench and hope the crisis will blow over.

To avoid this, the vision for change must be supplied from outside – a clear vision with clearly enunciated steps and a timetable, including: guarantees for basic freedoms, releasing of all political prisoners, return of the exiles, formation of independent political parties and holding general elections on a given date to write a new constitution for the country. In other words: the whole shebang.

In exchange, the reformers within the regime, which need to include the President, if we wish to be realistic, should receive clear promises that peace talks with Israel would resume once the internal situation is stabilized. After all, a return of the Golan Heights is required in order to give the entire process of reform the required internal legitimacy, within the ranks of the regime itself as well as the general population.

Also, the reformers need to know that they will be supported should they encounter any internal difficulty or opposition as a result of implementing the approved plan.

This is how things could work….

Read on for the details, and comments.

According to a US-based rights group, China has released a leading Uighur political prisoner prior to Condoleezza Rice’s visit to Beijing.

Rebiya Kadeer, 58, was allowed to leave China for medical treatment in the US, the Dui Hua Foundation said.

Mrs Kadeer, a successful businesswoman, was given eight years’ in jail in 2000 for sending press cuttings overseas, “endangering national security”.

The release comes ahead of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s arrival in Beijing on Sunday.

The US has said that resolving the case of the Chinese Muslim businesswoman was one of its highest priorities in discussions with China over its human rights record.

Although the release was officially granted for medical reasons, it is thought to have been prompted by Ms Rice’s arrival, the BBC’s Tony Cheng in Beijing says. […]

A prominent member of the Uighur ethnic minority in China’s north-west Xinjiang province, Mrs Kadeer was charged with passing information to foreigners, separatism and attempting to overthrow the state.

According to transcripts, her trial centred on local newspaper clippings on the treatment of Uighurs that she had sent to her husband in the US.

China is intolerant of any dissent in the sensitive border region of Xinjiang, and is worried about several groups it brands as separatists.

For some background on the huge province of Xinjiang, north of Tibet, see here and here.

Oliver August in the Times looks at the struggle of the late Iris Chang against the horrors she uncovered in her book “The Rape of Nanking“, and the strain of being a political football between a China now wanting to remember after decades of suppression, and a Japan unwilling to face up to its past:

On November 6 she spoke to Paula Kamen, whom she knew from university, and told her that she was struggling to deal with the magnitude of the misery she had uncovered, listened to and written about. She begged to be remembered as lively and confident. It was the last conversation they would have. Two days later, Chang was even more despondent than she had previously been. Her husband tried to calm her down but eventually fell asleep.

At some point in the night, Chang got into her white 1999 Oldsmobile, taking with her a six-round pistol that she had bought from an antique weapons dealer to defend herself from attackers. She drove to a country road, loaded the pistol with black powder and lead balls, aimed it at her head and fired. She was found a few hours later, along with a farewell note to her family.

Yet even in death Chang was not rid of the controversy. In recent memorial services across China, historians have blamed intense hostility from Japan for her death. The People’s Daily in Beijing hailed Chang as a “warrior full of justice” and a “dart thrown against the Japanese rightists”. In April the massacre museum in Nanjing will add a statue of Chang to its commemorative collection, in effect giving her the status of a massacre victim, with a finger pointed firmly across the Sea of Japan. The San Francisco Chronicle seemed to concur: “Many wonder if the gentle, sympathetic young woman was the massacre’s latest victim.”

Meanwhile, Japanese right-wingers interpreted her suicide as belated support for their contention that the massacre never happened. “By the end she must have known that her arguments were without merit. We exposed the lies in her book,” said Fujioka [Nobukatsu Fujioka, a right-wing commentator who campaigned to prevent publication of her book in Japan and published a book denouncing Chang as a propagandist funded by Japan-haters].

Ian Buruma has written well about the contrasting attitudes to their past of the Germans and the Japanese.

ll not sell arms to China for fear of jeopardising its American interests, and in the end only France will benefit.

It is difficult to understand the EU’s decision to consider lifting the arms embargo until China improves its human rights record.

She’s a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and reportedly a close ally of Jack Straw. So why is her government supporting this decision?

n, A. W. F. Edwards, put his finger on it.

The error is easily illustrated. If one were asked to judge the ancestry of 100 New Yorkers, one could look at the color of their skin. That would do much to single out the Europeans, but little to distinguish the Senegalese from the Solomon Islanders. The same is true for any other feature of our bodies. The shapes of our eyes, noses and skulls; the color of our eyes and our hair; the heaviness, height and hairiness of our bodies are all, individually, poor guides to ancestry.

But this is not true when the features are taken together. Certain skin colors tend to go with certain kinds of eyes, noses, skulls and bodies. When we glance at a stranger’s face we use those associations to infer what continent, or even what country, he or his ancestors came from – and we usually get it right. To put it more abstractly, human physical variation is correlated; and correlations contain information.

Genetic variants that aren’t written on our faces, but that can be detected only in the genome, show similar correlations. It is these correlations that Dr. Lewontin seems to have ignored. In essence, he looked at one gene at a time and failed to see races. But if many – a few hundred – variable genes are considered simultaneously, then it is very easy to do so. Indeed, a 2002 study by scientists at the University of Southern California and Stanford showed that if a sample of people from around the world are sorted by computer into five groups on the basis of genetic similarity, the groups that emerge are native to Europe, East Asia, Africa, America and Australasia – more or less the major races of traditional anthropology.

The North Koreans are fighting a losing battle against the information age (via The Marmot’s Hole):

The construction of cellular relay stations last fall along the Chinese side of the border has allowed some North Koreans in border towns to use prepaid Chinese cellphones to call relatives and reporters in South Korea, defectors from North Korea say. And after DVD players swept northern China two years ago, entrepreneurs collected castoff videocassette recorders and peddled them in North Korea. Now tapes of South Korean soap operas are so popular that state television in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, is campaigning against South Korean hairstyles, clothing and slang, visitors and defectors have said. […]

More than showing middle-class family lifestyles, which can be staged in a studio, the soap operas also provide images of a modern Seoul – the forest of high-rise buildings, the huge traffic jams, the late-model cars.

With such images showing a stark contrast with primitive conditions in North Korea, Mr. Kim ordered the formation of a special prosecutor’s office last November to arrest people who deal in South Korean goods, largely videotapes, or who use South Korean expressions or slang, analysts in South Korea say.

To crack down on home viewing of imported videotapes, the North Korean police developed the strategy of encircling a neighborhood in the evening, cutting off electricity, then inspecting players to find videotapes stuck inside, according to Young Howard, international coordinator of the Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights, a Seoul-based group. Recent defectors have also told Mr. Howard that police cars with loudspeakers have patrolled neighborhoods, warning residents to maintain their “socialist lifestyle” and to shun South Korean speech and clothing and hairstyles, he said. […]

Draconian controls on internal travel and on travel to China have been breaking down…and hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have traveled to and from Korean-speaking areas of China, exposing them to a thriving market economy and more South Korean television broadcasts.

“They are gradually learning about South Korean prosperity,” Dr. Lankov [a North Korean expert who writes for NK Zone] said. “This is a death sentence to the regime. North Korea’s claim to legitimacy is based on its ability to deliver the worker’s paradise now. What if everyone sees that it is not delivering?”

The British media now report on European football, and it’s fairly easy to look up the Italian or Spanish league tables, but Latin America’s still a blank outside the World Cup. How many people could name the four big Rio clubs? – surely the sort of information every well-educated gentleman should have at his fingertips. Here’s an interesting item from the BBC on how the successful clubs now, both in Brazil and Colombia, are to be found outside the capitals.

The sad truth is that Rio, so crucial to the past of Brazilian football, is considerably less important to its present.

A glance at the Copa Libertadores is enough to prove the point. Brazil has five entrants in South America’s version of the Champions League.

One is from Coritiba in the south and the other four are from the state of Sao Paulo.

Rio has not had a team qualify for the competition since 2002, when Flamengo lost four out of six games and finished bottom of their group.

Rio’s big four – Flamengo, Vasco da Gama, Fluminense and Botafogo – are these days more likely to be found battling relegation than fighting for national titles and qualifying for the Libertadores.

And here’s the latest on the Copa Libertadores 2005, where, in Group 3, Bolivia’s The Strongest are sadly proving to be The Weakest.

arm these vast tracts of land, huge ploughing machines, and I had a hippie guy with a beard standing in front of one with a sword, and a thing coming out of this giant farm machine, and I did this for one of the issues for the cover and the people that ran the paper said, “No, this is not good because it will alienate the farmers.” There was always something, you could never win with them.

You’d have to ask Aline why we moved to France. It was her decision. I’m passive, and just went along with the whole thing. I’m in two minds about it. For one thing, I miss all those large-butted American women. French women are just too small and skinny. I know they are feminine and people think they are sexy but they don’t do anything for me. Too elegant. In England, you just look at the women, and wow! England and Scotland, great-looking women. They stride down the street unself-consciously. You’d never catch a French woman doing that.

So…he’s not political; he just wants a quiet life, to be left in peace to ogle; his wife is more the one with the agenda.

As with a great deal of anti-Americanism, Crumb’s target is surely not so much America, as people in general. America, being the richest and biggest and brassiest, is where you see humanity most clearly in all its glory and all its squalor. Well okay, yes, it is all about America, because he’s American, and anyway what would Robert Crumb be without America? But just as, say, Hogarth is inseparable from London but really is satirising humanity in general, so Crumb’s America is just humanity writ large.

Robert Hughes provides an appreciation of Crumb, and wonders why he alone of the Sixties underground generation continues to flourish and develop. I’m not so sure that’s true though. It’s more a case of his best early work gradually coming out into the open. Much is made of his recent collaborations with wife Aline, but if you’ve seen these it’s clear that it’s pretty poor stuff. Juxtaposition with the master sadly only serves to emphasise that Aline really isn’t very good, and the storylines are plodding.

Times cartoonist Peter Brookes gives the best appreciation:

Ironic, isn’t it? This paper of record wouldn’t in a million years print what Robert Crumb is really all about: outrageous, sexually explicit and politically incorrect cartoon strips that have pervaded alternative America’s consciousness since the late 1960s and made him into a counter-culture hero.

Yet here we are celebrating his genius in these pages to mark a major Crumb-fest of exhibitions (one even at Bonham’s, for God’s sake). There’s also a new compilation, The R. Crumb Handbook, but all we can show here is Crumb-lite, not Crumb hardcore.

But pornography it isn’t. The cartoonist has always held that there is a difference between what he does and straight porn, which is interested only in titillation. One difference is humour. Crumb is very funny, with a ribald drawing style to match, and the sexually explicit is hardly dangerous when you can laugh at it.

Robert Hughes, Time’s distinguished art critic, has compared him with Breughel. Well, anyone with half an art school education (and most of us got only that in the 1960s) knows this is nonsense.

No, he’s much, much better than that.

achinery away.

Dr. Araji said his account was based largely on observations by government employees and officials who either worked at the sites or lived near them.

“They came in with the cranes and the lorries, and they depleted the whole sites,” Dr. Araji said. “They knew what they were doing; they knew what they want. This was sophisticated looting.” […]

The peak of the organized looting, Dr. Araji estimates, occurred in four weeks from mid-April to mid-May of 2003 as teams with flatbed trucks and other heavy equipment moved systematically from site to site. That operation was followed by rounds of less discriminating thievery.

“The first wave came for the machines,” Dr. Araji said. “The second wave, cables and cranes. The third wave came for the bricks.”

Hajim M. al-Hasani, the minister of industry, referred questions about looting to Dr. Araji, who commented during a lengthy interview conducted in English in his office on Wednesday and a brief phone interview on Friday.

Dr. Araji said that if the equipment had left the country, its most likely destination was a neighboring state.