So in a followup to the Chi Mei-Feng story, I finally came across (quite by accident!) a clip, on this weird Danish/Swedish/Norge (?) version of Stile. Good technique but no stamina, limited staying power it seems.
Taliban preparing spring attacks in what’s quickly becoming just another routine civil war in Afghanistan with the Taliban recruiting Pashtun to fight against the Uzbeks and Tajiks. Fighting vaguely conventional soldiers is one thing that the Pantagon is good at. Fighting a guerilla war is something no army is good at. It proved too much for the Marines. It’s tough to defend against people willing to sacrifice their lives.
Meanwhile, US troop numbers have doubled again. There are now four times as many US troops there as when they ousted the Taliban. And they still won’t acknowledge the Q word - quagmire.
I read one American’s comment on this: She was the one of the last of the old-style, if you will, royals. She had grace, and elegance, and charm
The ability of US citizens of a republic to have such fascinated affection for the last vestiges of the despotism they rebelled against never ceases to amuse me, but makes some weird kind of post-colonial psychoanalytic sense.
She was certainly in favour of the ancien regime all right: she was an obstacle to reform: a fan of pomp and circumstance who bitterly opposed the notion that members of the royal family should pay tax … adored Margaret Thatcher and apartheid-supporting South African PW Botha, disliked Europe, the unions and middle classes, was against immigration and regretted the loss of imperial possessions in Africa.
From a slightly less reputable source, I learn that she liked the Gee Gees and prompted even the Daily Mail (slightly to the right of the BNP) to call her Pampered, privileged and such an affront to decency.
Terra preta … guesses, covers at least 10 percent of Amazonia, an area the size of France. It has amazing properties … Tropical rain doesn’t leach nutrients from terra preta fields; instead the soil … fights back … over time it will re-create the original soil layer in its initial thickness … generated by a special suite of microorganisms that resists depletion. “at some threshold level … dark earth attains the capacity to perpetuate?even regenerate itself?thus behaving more like a living ’super’-organism than an inert material”.
…
terra preta was created deliberately. In a process reminiscent of dropping microorganism-rich starter into plain dough to create sourdough bread, Amazonian peoples … inoculated bad soil with a transforming bacterial charge … Faced with an ecological problem … the Indians fixed it. They were in the process of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.
Reading a paper with a dubious agenda such as the Irish Times is always fraught with danger. In the midst of an otherwise dull story about Fianna Fail trying to grab some law’n'order votes before the election, I noticed this throwaway comment by Mark Hennessy:
Last year, Dublin local authorities were forced to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds to clear up damage left by Travellers at Dodder Park and Ballyboden.
Personally it’s little “us-and-them” bizarro lines like this that amuse me and set me thinking. This offhand remark about “Travellers” or Gypsies just leapt out.
The Corpo and the Government spend literally hundreds of millions cleaning up all the refuse and shit and crap and effluent produced by the “settled” community every year. We don’t hear so many complaints about this. Yeah, some people pay taxes and fees and rates to subsidize this operation. However, many others do not but nobody would never suggest making it a criminal offence for those people to flush their turds down the toilet! Pols and developers zone and build identikit suburbs in greenfield sites then stick it to the taxpayers to fund the sewage and road infrastructure. People driving cars or SUVs with absurdly low mileage are not condemned for spewing excess pollutants and waste, instead their mobile pollution engines are envied. Ours is a culture that smiles on excessive consumption, as long as the damage is displaced either in time or space. Regions far away from centres of power are despoiled or denuded, while we condemn ourselves to a carcinogenic twilight of elder years while our grandchildren inherit a greenhouse world of heavy weather, enviromental chaos, and depleted natural resources.
Anyway, people living together in communities make messes, get over it. Some archeologists spend their entire career digging through millenia-old crap piles and shit houses. This is an old story.
What makes this Irish times piece most immediately interesting, however, is how the pschological feelings of racism have been conflated with feelings of disgust concerning a visible, alternative lifestyle.
This is of course also an old story. Medieval Christians used to feel physically repulsed by the “foulness” of Jews:
Early Christians, and later on the Nazis, found Jews disgusting: The Jew “smelled of excrement that was the true substance of the money he lent; he smelled of sex and women because of his diabolical desire for Christian flesh and blood. Nowadays, we can only be disgusted by those who offered up this nonsense as reasons for their disgust.
This is how discrimination and racism work, and how they work through mass media, and how they try to recruit your embodied feelings to short-circuit their non-rationality. Once upon a time priests fulminated from the pulpit about the stench of Jews, now we get “political commentators” talking about the dirt of Travellers. This is what Adorno and Horkheimer were talking about when they linked anal retentives, coprophiliacs, and fascism.
Same old shit.
A budding paedophile, sad but true. Eventually he will be compelled to actualize his paraphilia. A tragedy for all involved. And that’s deliberately wHAckjob, not wAckjob.
Let us remember the wise words of Our Prophet Gore Vidal in these troubled times…
Scientific American reports on a recent European study indicating that while the EU is still behind the US in terms of basic science metrics, the EU’s growth rate has risen while the US’s rate has “flatlined”.
There’s surely an element of boosterism by the authors, and alarmism by SA, but the figures stated for citations, GDP investment in science (Sweden now leads the US), and so on seem compelling. “There has been a decline in U.S. number of publications since 1995, following years of almost linear growth”. In fact, Scandinavia seems like a hotbed of research, because “On a per capita basis, Swedish, Danish and Finnish researchers produce up to twice the number of papers as the U.S., Japan or the E.U. as a whole.”
Of course, the US has always enhanced its science infrastructure by absorbing the best and brightest from overseas, but even here the wily Scandinavians seem to have developed some acuity: in Sweden “a quarter of foreign researchers’ income is tax-free for up to three years.”
The article is short on analysis but offers up one explanation for the decline in US science publications:
Which of course opens up that continuing argument about whether or not the new corporate-led culture of research->patent instead of research->publication enhances or restrains scientific development.
It’s always been a bit awkward that most of the funding for Al Qeada came from Saudi sources, most of the 9/11 kamakazi hijackers were Saudis, and thatthe country refused to let the incredibly expensive bases there be used to attack the Taliban in Afghanistan. So it comes as little surprise that, according to a variety of unusual sources, the Pentagon seems to be moving its infrastructure to nearby Qatar. The more pliant and useful headman there, apparently, will let them bomb Iraq, which they need to do soon if they are to produce a result favourable for the GOP by the November elections…
I think the Sauds know their special position is lessening a bit. The possibility that the US might start getting bulk oil from the Tanscaucasus through Afghanistan ought to give them the huge willies. They produced this farcical “peace plan” for Israel and Palestine which, given the current bloodthirst on both sides, doesn’t really have a chance. And then there’s critical articles like this in the US mainstream press:
[Saudi Arabian] Citizens have neither the right nor the legal means to change their government. Security forces continued to abuse detainees and prisoners, arbitrarily arrest and detain persons, and hold them in incommunicado detention. In addition there were allegations that security forces committed torture. .. The Mutawwa?in [religious police] continued to intimidate, abuse, and detain citizens and foreigners. Most trials are closed, and defendants usually appear before judges without legal counsel. The Government infringes on citizens? privacy rights. The Government prohibits or restricts freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, religion, and movement. … Other continuing problems included discrimination and violence against women, discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities, and strict limitations on worker rights. The Government views its interpretation of Islamic law as its sole source of guidance on human rights and disagrees with internationally accepted definitions of human rights.
Dudley got to snog Bo Derek.
Milton got to snog many Zeigfield Follies. He was also the wonderfully henpecked Russell in Mad Mad Mad Mad World.
On the whole I’d rather have been Milton than Dudley.