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From the Scotsman:

They have seen the feel-good movies that captured the spirit of the good old days. They have eaten the food and even rebuilt a stretch of the Berlin Wall. Now the German appetite for ‘Ostalgia’, the love of all-things from the former communist east, is being satisfied with a spell in the army.

Germans who lost their pride along with their country nearly 15 years ago are queuing up in large numbers to spend £190 on martial weekends where the discipline is tough, the food grotty, but the thrill “unbeatable”.

The venture has been launched by two brothers, Reinhard and Christophe Heyes, who have bought several monster T-55 Soviet-made battle tanks from a scrap metal dealer in Czech Republic along with a set of armoured cars. The guns no longer work but the engines still roar like thunder, and, for stood-down personnel of the former East German “People’s Army” in particular, the thrill of what-might-have-been is what lures them to the tanks’ battleground 50 miles north of Berlin.

It sounds like a masochist’s ball: sleeping under canvas, up at 6am on cold and wet mornings for 20 minutes brisk physical training in the mud followed by an ice-cold shower, bed-making and “personal care”. Woe-betide the weekend warrior who doesn’t get his olive-green Volksarmee-issue bedside closet gleaming like a crown jewel.

If they’re so keen on the military life, there’s a struggle going on in Iraq at the moment to build some sort of liberal democracy against Jihadists and assorted Baathist remnants, where help might be appreciated. But that’s, you know, for real…

Resident Observer medic Dr John Briffa has been inundated with e-mails from concerned readers after the Lancet published a study on the effects of taking vitamin supplements, with the quote “The prospect that vitamin pills may not only do no good but can also kill their consumers is a scary speculation, given the vast quantities that are used in certain communities” emblazoned on the cover. Briffa is not impressed:

The deficiencies in this study’s scope and methodology led the authors of the editorial to conclude that it did ‘not offer convincing proof of hazard’. Oddly, the Lancet’s front-cover splash was lifted (out of context) from the same editorial. It’s a sad day for science when one of the world’s most respected medical journals chooses not to let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Seems to be something of a habit with the Lancet.

On the Iraq civilians story, Fred Kaplan has the most comprehensive demolition I’ve yet seen, though no doubt we’ll here more on this one. In particular he disputes the pre-war mortality rate used in the study. Kaplan cites with approval the Iraq Body Count, who arrive at a figure of around 15,000, but it’s worth noting that Oxblog have been raising questions about the IBC methodology.

Here (via Mirabilis.ca) is the Language Guesser: enter some text and it claims to tell you the language. After some testing, I’m not that impressed. “Je ne crois plus au pere noel” was thought to be Latin, and for “hot diggety doggety daggety doo” it came up with Somali. Mind you, it did say English for “twas brillig and the slithy toves”.

Yes, I probably do have better ways to occupy my time.

From Lebanon’s Daily Star:

BEIJING: State oil giant Sinopec Group has signed a $70 billion oil field development and liquefied natural gas agreement with Iran, China’s biggest energy deal with the No. 2 OPEC producer, an Iranian official said Friday.

The preliminary deal may yield political benefits far sooner than commercial ones as Iran courts China’s favor on the UN Security Council, where Beijing holds a potential veto over any action against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. […]

Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh is on his last day of a two-day visit to Beijing to pursue closer ties with China, whose biggest oil supplier is Iran, contributing 14 percent of imports.

Chinese companies have been prominent investors in the underperforming oil industry of OPEC’s second-biggest producer, including Sinopec’s construction of a huge oil terminal on the Caspian and deals to upgrade several refineries.

But Beijing has thus far been wary of incurring U.S. wrath through the Iran Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA), which threatens penalties for firms making big investments in Iran.

Iran denies U.S. claims its nuclear power program is a smokescreen for developing an atomic bomb, but its nuclear dossier is edging closer to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions.

urity situation in Iraq. Nothing to do with the forthcoming election, then? Certainly not to “skew” it, according to Les Roberts, the lead researcher:

“I e-mailed it in on September 30 under the condition that it came out before the election,” Roberts told The Associated Press. “My motive in doing that was not to skew the election. My motive was that if this came out during the campaign, both candidates would be forced to pledge to protect civilian lives in Iraq.

“I was opposed to the war and I still think that the war was a bad idea, but I think that our science has transcended our perspectives,” Roberts said. “As an American, I am really, really sorry to be reporting this.”

Hmm.

Update: Tim Worstall at TCS is not impressed.

the Soviets could at least claim some prowess. So we get the Boston Symphony Orchestra making European tours to promote a notion of the US as a home of culture, and squabbles about the possible political motivation behind defining Abstract Expressionism as a new American art movement. But the high Soviet culture of the Bolshoi ballet and so forth was, appropriately for a society whose cultural highlight was queueing for hours to see the embalmed remains of the Great Leader, nothing more than the make-up on a corpse. The true health of a society is measured by its popular culture. In the Soviet Union there wasn’t any: in the US there was an explosion of music, film, literature, that went joyfully on its way regardless of the CIA or the government or anyone else. Jerry Lee Lewis vs Shostakovitch? No contest.

Ali at Iraq the Model posts about a “Letter from Liberal Arabs and Muslims”, which has already collected over 10,000 signatures, addressed to the UN Security Council and the UN Secretary General, requesting the establishment of an international tribunal “to prosecute individuals, groups, or entities including, but not limited to, Muslim clerics who issue religious edicts (fatwas) inciting terrorist acts”.

As you are deliberating to recommend practical measures to be imposed on individuals, groups, or entities involved in or associated with terrorist activities pursuant to Resolution 1566, we, the signatories of this letter, a group of Arab and Muslim liberals, would like to draw your attention to an extremely dangerous source of terrorism. This source is the purported religious pronouncements “fatwas” issued by some psychotic members of dogmatic Muslims encouraging the commission of terrorist acts in the name of and under the banner of Islam.

Mark Cousins in Prospect (via ALDaily) looks at the rise of Asian film, with a style radically different from Western cinema. In Taiwan, there’s a different style to politics (via Marmot’s Hole):

They’ve fought with fists. They’ve thrown paper at each other. And on Tuesday, Taiwan’s rowdy lawmakers had an old-fashioned food fight.

Legislators began chucking white cardboard takeout lunch boxes full of rice, meat, hard-boiled eggs and vegetables at each other during a heated debate over whether Taiwan should spend billions on weapons sold by the United States.

It was difficult to figure out who started the battle. Local TV showed the legislators yelling at each other as they sat at long tables in a committee room during a lunch meeting.

Opposition lawmaker Chu Fong-chi stood up and began shouting at ruling party lawmakers when she appeared to duck to avoid being hit by an object. She picked up a lunch box and flung it across the room at legislator Chen Chong-yi of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party.

Chen grabbed a lunch box and tossed it back at Chu, who had what appeared to be food stains down the back of her blouse. “My whole body smells like a lunch box!” she shrieked to TV cameras covering the melee.

The food fight, which lasted just minutes, left tabletops, chairs and the floor littered with rice and chunks of hard-boiled eggs.

Fisticuffs were common in the legislature during the late 1980s and early ’90s in the newly democratic Taiwan. But in recent years, lawmakers have become less violent, although tempers flare almost daily. Yelling, insults and other uncivil behavior is part of the political culture.

Brendan Simms’ “Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia” was the definitive book on Bosnia, outlining the shabby policies of the Major government in particular and the EU in general as they sat back and watched the ethnic cleansing of Milosevic’s thugs, refusing even to allow the Bosnian Muslims to defend themselves. Here he looks at the unhappy situation in Kosovo, but insists intervention was necessary – as it was in Iraq:

It may well be that, as the former British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd has argued, Kosovo represented the high-water mark of international intervention. However, the recent elections in Afghanistan, for all their faults, confounded the sceptics; they would not have been possible without the removal of the Taleban. But the template of robust humanitarian intervention and regime change has not transferred easily to Iraq. Clearly, having gone to war on a genuinely-held but false premise about Saddam Hussein’s WMD does not help. The invasion should have been more explicitly couched as an overdue humanitarian intervention to remove a murderous tyrant, whose crimes far exceeded those of Milosevic.

One thing, however, is clear. Intervention in the Balkans disproves the notion that American foreign policy, or the variant espoused by neoconservatives, is somehow intrinsically anti-Muslim. If it were not for the United States, those who voted on Saturday would now be refugees or dead. Anybody who knows this will not be surprised that the most Muslim area in Europe, Kosovo, should also be the most pro-American and the most supportive of the War on Terror; there were certainly no “stop the war” protests in Kosovo. Bosnia and Kosovo remain examples of what Western intervention can and should do.

for normality, for adopting universal values, and for rejecting again the destructive and messianic attitude of “We are Jews.”

The vote on disengagement, therefore, is a watershed for the settlers. Until 1967, in the shadow of the Holocaust that brought additional parts of the Jewish people onto the Zionist wagon, messianism was relegated to a corner. The victory and occupation in 1967 granted it a new launching pad. The confused secular public has long forgotten that Zionism always regarded territory as a means to achieve normalization for a wandering people. This is the absolute opposite of turning land into a sacred value.

Thus, it is also a watershed for Israelis. If the “We are Jews” argument gains the upper hand again over the aspiration for normal life, it will be the moment signifying the final tragic surrender of Zionism to Jewish messianic madness.