#1
In the absence of any other contributions and the advent of a personal emergency, I am obliged to postpone this thread's typical three recipe submissions until tomorrow.
Please stay tuned until it is time, once again, for all pork, all of the time, all of Ramadan. I leave you with this:
Smoky Martini Cocktail
Preparation Time: 2 Minutes
Serves: 2 People
Ingredients:
4-6 oz. Vodka
¼ TSP Scotch Whiskey
Well-Chilled Ice
Preparation:
Rinse chilled Martini glasses with a splash of Whiskey each. Pour the vodka into the shaker filled with ice. Shake furiously for fifteen seconds. Allow to rest for another ten or twenty seconds.
Pour the Whiskey out of the Martini glasses (choose your method), and strain the vodka Martini into the chilled receptacles.
Add a lemon twist, perhaps olives, or nothing at all.
Enjoy. This is haram like all hell, thank goodness.
Russia Should Count Its Cards in This Game of Nuclear Poker
by Sergey Strokan
The Korean crisis has temporarily diverted general attention away from Iran. But that does not mean that the Iranian nuclear problem can be put aside for good. The unpredictable Kim Jong-il messed with President Bush's hand, derailing this fall's decisive offensive against Iran. But this situation, which is so annoying for the United States, doesn't change anything: the American "fatwa" against the Islamic regime in Iran has been delivered, and like all fatwas, this one is irrevocable. Those in Iran, where everyone knows what a terrifying thing a fatwa is for those under its sentence, understand this perfectly well. The situation concerning Iran, though it has been relegated to backstage, is looking ever more critical and dramatic. Thus, the current agenda of world politics can be summed up in a single phrase: "We're writing Pyongyang, but we're thinking Tehran."
It is possible to talk for a long time about the coincidence of two outcast countries, both of which are governed by regimes hostile to the West, ending up in the same boat. But the most important thing is to see the principle difference between them. It is particularly important for Russia to understand that difference.
North Korea is basically lost to Russia. How and when Moscow lost it is another story. But, as they say, what's fallen from the truck is lost forever. By virtue of how North Korea presents itself today, the idea of Russia occupying some sort of lofty trade or economic heights or rolling out grandiose projects by Minatom or Gazprom is not only unrealistic it's in the realm of the fantastic. The political dividends from "special relations" with Pyongyang also do not promise Moscow anything good. Even if we had brought Kim Jong-il into the fold, even if we had taken extra care with his special train and brought him bread and salt [the traditional Russian greeting] at every Siberian way station, he would have still exploded his device, spitting on "special relations" with Moscow. But even if he didn't do that, Moscow would reap no benefits from having special relations with Pyongyang, which wields no influence whatsoever with other countries or in the region.
Iran is a completely different matter. In the first place, Moscow is on track to retain the victory wreath in the struggle for the spot in the sun in Iranian atomic energy. Secondly, projects for oil and gas partnerships are nothing to sneeze at. Another important thing is partnerships in military technology. Finally, in a geopolitical sense Iran is not only Iran itself but also everything "Iran-centric" and "Iran-inspired" in the Near and Middle East. And that in itself is more than enough.
In general for Russia, Iran is much more interesting than North Korea. This means that, in the vote in New York concerning a UN Security Council resolution on North Korea, Moscow can make the West pay a dear price for something that costs Russia itself practically nothing. Russia can "show adherence to principle" and support, if not fully, sanctions against Korea. But do so on one condition: to gain the right to say to the West, don't even think about sanctions against Iran. A typically cynical viewpoint from Russia. Mr. Strokan's photo pose shows him to be a man of deep thoughts. Simon & Schuster, he's ready for his close-up!
#2
Iran is a completely different matter. In the first place, Moscow is on track to retain the victory wreath in the struggle for the spot in the sun in Iranian atomic energy.
Hey Sergey, be careful what you wish for, you might well get some Iranian sunshine in Moscow...
Another important thing is partnerships in military technology.
Hmm, well let's see; Japan starts to really ramp up its defence industry in response to Kimmyboys curry-fart, some joint win-win projects with the US get initiated and then there's an 'incident' in Iran - well, your PoS stuff is going to look laughable...
Oh and please everyone, just click through, that guy's expression (and very trendy jumper) is sooo intellectual.
Posted by: Tony (UK) ||
10/12/2006 17:58 Comments ||
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#3
Russians love the Strongman, right up to the point he starts killing them by the millions.
Posted by: ed ||
10/12/2006 18:15 Comments ||
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#4
#2: "Oh and please everyone, just click through, that guy's expression (and very trendy jumper) is sooo intellectual"
I did, Tony. ROFLMAO! :-D
What an idiot.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
10/12/2006 18:58 Comments ||
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#5
The Japanese have a new PM {Abe} is very pro-western, pro-defense, and wants a reinterpretation/rewrite of the constitutional section dealing with the Japanese military. He now has the spectre of dozens of Hirosimas to focus the Japanese psyche with, and the Japanese contempt for the Koreans to help him out. Remember, that Japan occupied all of Korea for the first half of the 20th century, and considered the Koreans nasty, dirty little people only fit for the worst kinds of manual labor.
Now that the NKors have demonstrated even a fizzled nuke, the Japanese will be focused on how to defend themselves against this threat. Expect the Japanese to start "creatively interpreting" their constitutional limits on the military, very soon. Also watch how quickly the US ABM shield expands over the Pacific Basin, with the Japanese building compatible radars on any island they can.
by B.R. Myers, New York Times LRR. H/t Brothers Judd. Brings up an issue that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere else.
HOURS after Mondays nuclear test, President Bush issued a stern warning to North Korea but only against the passing of nuclear technology to other states or non-state entities. The presidents declaration thus reflected a confident consensus in Washington that while Kim Jong-il may try selling his nukes, he would never dream of using them himself. Why not? The explanation was given by a former national security adviser, Donald Gregg, on Monday: Dont panic. Kim Jong-ils objective is survival ... not suicide. . . .These long-term diagnoses of Mr. Kims psyche are a roundabout way of saying that because he is not a fundamentalist Muslim, he is unlikely to do anything really crazy.
This sort of cultural profiling, however, can get us into real danger. Japans emperor during World War II, Hirohito, was neither religious nor suicidal, and he led his nation into a war that no rational leader could have hoped to win. The point is relevant, because although journalists persist in calling North Korea a Stalinist state, its worldview is far closer to that of fascist Japan.
Like the Japanese in the 1930s, the North Koreans trace the origins of their race back thousands of years to a single progenitor, and claim that this pure bloodline makes them uniquely virtuous. The countrys mass games government-choreographed spectacles with a cast of more than 100,000 are often mistaken by foreign journalists as exercises in Stalinism. They are in fact celebrations of ethnic homogeneity. No masses in the world, the state-run Cheollima magazine reminded readers in 2005, are purer and more upright than our masses.
In state propaganda, Kim Jong-il is often linked, as Hirohito once was, to images of white horses, snow-capped mountain peaks and other symbols of racial purity. South Korea, on the other hand, is regarded as contaminated by too close contact with other races. At a recent meeting between generals from both Koreas, the North delegations leader condemned the South for allowing racial intermarriage. Not a single drop of ink, he intoned, must be allowed to fall into the Han River.
Naturally enough, the North Koreans race theory, like that of the Japanese fascists, actuates a blithe indifference to international law. A uniquely virtuous people has no reason to obey its moral inferiors, be they allies or enemies. China has now learned that despite decades of military and economic assistance it can draw on no residue of good will in dealing with Pyongyang.
Neither can the South Koreans, whom the North Koreans will revile for their ethnic treason no matter how much cash they pump northward. This utter imperviousness to gestures of friendship and conciliation bears obvious implications for the prospect of normal relations between North Korea and America.
The northern regime has so far restricted its racial propaganda to the home audience, because it wants the world to go on misperceiving it as a Stalinist state. This way we continue to pin our hopes on the kind of trust-building dialogue that worked so well with Communists in the 1980s and failed so disastrously with the pure-race crowd a half-century earlier. . . .
B. R. Myers, an associate professor of North Korean studies at Korea University, is the author of Han Sorya and North Korean Literature.
Posted by: Mike ||
10/12/2006 10:35 ||
Comments ||
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#1
I think we can all agree that Kim Jong is crazy. Anyone who attempts to stake the lives of millions by predicting his future behavior seems even crazier to me.
#2
Wasn't there some testomony once about how the North Korea treats 'repatrioted' women who are shipped back to North Korea from China who are pregnant (by a chinese father)? Something about forcing an abortion or killing the newborn - in order to retain 'racial purity'.
#5
I do not subscribe to the theory that Kimmie is crazy. I certainly don't have enough information to reach that conclusion. Dispicable, to be sure, but crazy? I certainly wouldn't do so on the basis of information from someone who calls the militarist Japanese government of WWII fascist and thinks the trust-building dialogue worked well with the Communidsts in the 1980s. It may have something more to do with the policy of confrontation used in the 1980s and 2000s vs the policy of appeasement in the 1990s and 1930s.
2006 will go down in European history as the year when Muslims as a group became a dominant factor in elections. The demographics indicated this long ago, but it still came as a surprise to many multiculturalists that Muslims tend to vote primarily along ethnic lines: Muslims vote for Muslim candidates, even if the political parties give the latter almost unelectable places on the list of candidates. As a consequence the Muslim candidates got elected to the detriment of indigenous politicians. Party leaders, who used to be able to get those candidates elected which the leadership favoured, have been taken by surprise by Turks voting only for Turks and Moroccans voting exclusively for Moroccans. The parties that put Muslim candidates forward are being cannibalized from the inside. They risk being taken over by radical Muslims. This is what is happening to the Socialist parties in Belgium and the Netherlands.
In some ways, this casts Europe back to the days of tribal demographics. Over many centuries Western-Europe has replaced the tribe or clan by the nation state as the main unit for people to identify with beyond family and local friends. This process was promoted by the emerging strong, centralised states, which could take over the task of protecting citizens from their respective clans, but even more so by the Church. Western Europe in the Middle Ages was unique in having a religious authority which contrary to Islam strongly opposed consanguineous marriage (marriage of blood relatives) and supported marriage based solely on the consent of the partners. The Church, over the centuries, progressively forbade intermarriage between relatively distant blood relatives, i.e. much further than medical grounds would dictate. It is believed by some that the main target of the Church during the Middle Ages were the aristocratic and royal elites which tended to intermarry frequently, As part of the power struggle between the Church and secular rulers, the Church wanted to weaken the elites as a clan. Furthermore, the Churchs doctrine of consensual marriage further reduced extended family ties and boosted the idea of individualism. In the Middle Ages it was rare, for instance, for French aristocrats to intermarry with cousins closer than the 4th or 5th degree of kinship. (in contrast with Iraq or Saudi Arabia, where even today more than half of all marriages are between cousins). For centuries the Church was the main, if not exclusive, arbiter of morals in Europe, so these rules had enormous impact on the organisation of Western society.
The result has not only been the disappearance of clans and tribes, but the emergence of a trust profile whereby European citizens tend to have equal trust in all other citizens of the same nation state outside their immediate family and circle of friends. This was a necessary condition not only for the emergence of a meritocracy and the success of a capitalist society in Europe, but also for democracy. Such a society would typically be called a high-trust society (although this only refers to the level of trust in the outside world, since the trust in the inner circle is actually relatively lower).
Why does trust matter? The Western societies we know would grind to a halt if we did not trust authorities, such as courts, the police, tax inspectors, to uphold the rule of law rather than take a decision based on kinship. We would not invest in or work for companies which decide about the promotion of employees or product prices on the basis of kinship rather than merit or price. We would not send our children to school if we did not believe children would be treated equally, with no favored treatment for relatives of the teachers. We (grudgingly) pay our taxes in the expectation that social security benefits will be paid on a non-discriminatory basis. We stop after being involved in a car accident to draw up the necessary paperwork with the other party in a dispassionate manner. We try to be as objective as we can in our pronouncements, because we expect the same from others. In short, we accept to treat others as we expect them to treat us. Because there is trust in reciprocity, things on the whole are fairly civilized, fair and orderly.
All this is quite different in the Muslim world or in Africa, where traditionally no nation states have existed to protect individual citizens. In such societies individuals inevitably have to fall back on their clan for protection. In the case of Islam there is another trust layer apart from the clan: the Umma, which is the community of all Muslims. Islam teaches extreme (by current Western standards) allegiance of believers to the Umma, and hence the trust profile of Muslims is unique : the individual is relatively unimportant compared to the clan or the community of believers, there is very high trust in the family and clan, very low trust in fellow citizens of the same nation and relatively high trust in fellow Muslims, wherever they are in the world. The latter helps explain why Jihad, conquests by Islam, has been so successful throughout history, and why it is so difficult for democracy and the rule of law to take root in Muslim countries. Such fundamental cultural traits have taken centuries to shape and do not change easily.
It may be difficult to objectively state whether so-called low trust cultures are in some way inferior to so-called high trust cultures indeed, both have their own attractions or advantages and left to their own devices they constitute a relatively stable equilibrium. However, it is easy to see that it is problematic to mix them together. We all go through a Prisoners Dilemma many times a day, deciding on a course of action in function of the trust we have in the other party. This is usually a straightforward thing within a culture with homogenous trust expectations, but breaks down in a multicultural society which is the equivalent of putting a German driver in rush hour traffic in Naples (or vice versa): what to do when the light turns red? The best defense in such circumstances often is to take the low-trust approach, i.e. assume the worst. When communities do not fully integrate in a host community, they largely preserve their own low-trust patterns. If this were to happen in Western Europe in the coming decades, following a large scale importation in public life of Middle Eastern trust patterns or governance, it would probably mean that trust levels in European society would fall to a level somewhere between present day Europe and present day Turkey or North Africa.
To get an indication of the gap in trust between the Western world and the Muslim world, a good proxy is the corruption index of Transparency International. Corruption is putting your own or your clans interests before those of the state or your employer. The 20 least corrupt countries are all European or Anglo Saxon, with the exception of Singapore and Hong Kong, two former British colonies. Turkey ranks 65th, just behind Jamaica and just ahead of Burkina Faso, while Morocco ranks 78th and Algeria 97th.
As Prospect Magazine has argued in the long run a multicultural society is probably incompatible with one with generous social welfare, because tax payers will be far more reluctant to pay a share for welfare recipients they feel no bond with.
This week Robert Putnam, Harvard professor and author of Bowling Alone, a book on the disintegrating social fabric in the US, told The Financial Times (Harvard study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity) that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone from their next-door neighbour to the mayor. The FT adds that when the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. Of course there is research which attempts to demonstrate not very convincingly, though the opposite. An example is the recent study by the Belgian professor Marc Hooghe, Ethnic Diversity, Trust and Ethnocentrism and Europe, [pdf] who claims to have found no correlation between trust levels and immigration in various countries in Europe, and states that other studies, which establish a negative correlation are premature (without claiming the opposite though). There are several criticisms one could level against this study, one of which is that it seems to compare a largely dynamic set of variables, i.e. changes in immigration, with the static one of existing trust levels, instead of far more relevant changes in trust levels over time.
There is little doubt that we live in the dying days of the multicultural fantasy. It will end in misery and may lead to the loss of Europe as a part of Western civilisation. Our children and grandchildren will look back to our days and wonder why so many so easily accepted what patently contradicted history and common sense. Then, however, the current thinking elites, just like Lenins useful idiots in the past, will have conveniently forgotten their part in the dismantling of 2000 years of European culture within a mere generation.
#1
"it still came as a surprise to many multiculturalists that Muslims tend to vote primarily along ethnic lines"
Needs a Master of the Obvious™ graphic.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
10/12/2006 19:13 Comments ||
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#2
A5089-Thanks for posting the article.
You live in Europe, right? I marvel at how you have been able to stay rational and calm in naming the problem of radical Islam in Europe when so many fellow continentalists can't see it. Yes, it helps persuade others when you are rational and clam, but you must be extremely frustrated and depressed at your fellow continentalists' blindness. I tip my hat to you.
#3
Tribes returning? F**king right they are. And you all are headed back to the 7th Century. Once this pack of piss takes charge, all you goody goodies who wanted to let them in are gonna be real damn sorry. Day late; dollar short as we say over here.
I've heard of 'tailoring your speech to your audience, but this is just ridiculous. Hey Condi, get a clue: Paleos are an INVENTION.
Last night, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice delivered the keynote address to the American Task Force on Palestine Inaugural Gala. In her remarks, she spoke out that,
Palestinians deserve to live better than they do and be free of the humiliation of occupation in a state of their own, said US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice on Wednesday night.
I promise you my personal commitment to that goal, Rice said at a dinner marking the third anniversary of the American Task Force on Palestine.
There could be no greater legacy for America, Rice told the group, which describes itself as nonpartisan and supportive of a Palestinian state living side by side with Israel.
The Palestinian people deserve a better life free of the humiliation of occupation, she said.
While America struggles with Iraq and tries to deal with assembling a coalition of Arab and European nations to deal with the Iran nuclear threat, is this a gesture to solidify support for sanctions against Iran. Perhaps this might be a quid pro quo.
Regardless, it seems that these very remarks might also be directed toward the Arab nations regarding their treatment of Palestinians.These nations that publicly declare their unending support for the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people have been in the forefront of nations that have abused them.
Most Arab nations have rejected as aliens the refugees that they have found themselves dealing with after their wars against Israel . They have (with the exception of Jordan) denied them citizenship and all the opportunities that flow from that status, and instead have kept them penned up in camps. This approach contrasts sharply with Israel, which warmly received the 600,000 Jews ethnically cleansed from the Arab world).
Arab nations have used Palestinians as a form of cheap, compliant labor and have not hesitated to expel them willy-nilly (as Kuwait did after the first Gulf War); they have used them as propaganda pawns to de-legitimize the state of Israel; and finally, and most shamefully, radicalized them and used them as cannon fodder in their attempt to terrorize Israelis and the rest of the Western World.
Do we think the State Department would ever be so bold to address the Arab world along these lines?
Take note, Senator Carl Levine a Democrat from Michigan was proudly in attendance at the gala for the Palestine Task Force. Nice to know that Israel has such a strong friend in Congress. Not.
#1
Interesting to note how fast Levine and Conyers have sold out to their Muzzie constituents in Dearborn isn't it ? If I lived up there, I'd be looking for new representation. Is this another Bush missive delivered thru the lips of Rice ? Or is this another idiot statement on her behalf ?
The complex nature of the "dirty trick" against the Republicans over the Mark Foley scandal is beginning to emerge. It doesn't involve a George Soros-funded group or emails that had been in the possession of the media or shopped around by Democratic operatives. Instead, the GOP has played a trick on itself. The party brought so-called gay Republicans into positions of power in Congress only to realize that the confidential information they held about a secret gay network was political dynamite that could backfire.
At this point in the scandal, the issue is not whether there was such a network, but how big it is. CBS Evening News correspondent Gloria Borger reported the emerging belief that "a group of high-level gay Republican staffers were protecting" Foley. A New York Times story by Mark Leibovich confirmed that gay Republicans have occupied "crucial staff positions" in Congress and "have played decisive roles in passing legislation, running campaigns and advancing careers."
The mystery man at the center of the scandal, Jeff Trandahl, is supposed to be a "lifelong Republican" who is gay. But Trandahl, who supervised the congressional page program as House clerk and knew about the controversial Foley emails many years ago, has a strange way of showing his Republicanism. A search of Federal Election Commission (FEC) records over the last six years shows no financial contributions to the Republican Party or Republican candidates. Instead, Trandahl in 2000 gave $1,200 to the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, which gives over 80 percent of its political campaign money to Democrats.
Continued on Page 49
#1
Hmmm - no mention of Juche, decided lack of spittle, and the KCNA slug was omitted, but the paranoia still gives it away.
Posted by: just sayin ||
10/12/2006 16:03 Comments ||
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#2
Seems to me the only guy we know covered it up was the guy who says he "blew the whistle" several years ago.
So he blew the whistle. Nothing happened, so he shut up? He kept it quiet for three years, never repeating his claims to anyone else, never leaked it to the New York Times, never wrote a letter to the editor, never met with Woodward and Bernstein in a dark garage, and so covered it up since the first 'whistle. Therefore, HE is guilty of the 'cover up' and ought to go to jail!
Why would anyone believe this scumbag that covered it up for three years?
Posted by: Bobby ||
10/12/2006 18:04 Comments ||
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Three recent books about the "fiasco" in Iraq "Cobra II" by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, "State of Denial" by Bob Woodward and just plain "Fiasco" by Tom Ricks have attracted a lot of attention, and sales. All three well-written exposes repeat the now well-known argument that our government's incompetence and arrogance have nearly ensured America's failure in birthing democracy in Iraq.
It's worth noting, though, that many of the authors' critical portraits rely on private conversations and anonymous sources. The most damning informants in these books are never identified and so can't be questioned.
The authors, as journalists, are well aware that after The New York Times' problems with Jayson Blair and other high-profile media scandals, the public no longer necessarily accepts what reporters write as gospel. That perhaps explains their and others' apparent adaptation of scholarly methods. Often these days journalists mimic the footnoting of historians giving the impression that their reporting is history documented by verifiable primary and secondary sources also available to the reader.
Indeed, the verifiability of source material is what distinguishes history from hearsay and what distinguishes the genre from journalism or first-person recollections. Since the time of the historian Thucydides who not only recorded what speakers said, but, more controversially, made them voice what he thought they might or ought to have said historians have developed protocols to ensure credibility. Whether or not historians use footnotes or citations, they at least now agree to draw on information that can be checked by others, who will determine how skillfully, honestly or completely such sources were employed.
But by too often using only the veneer of the historical method, the authors of these three books give their work a patina of scholarly credibility that can confuse the reader. In "Cobra II," for example, some citations at the end of the book state that information came from a "former senior military officer," "former Centcom planner" or "U.S. State Department official."
In "Fiasco," often verbatim quotations are not cited with specific attribution, but only vaguely noted in the text as "said a Bush administration official" or "recalled one officer." Among the endnotes in "State of Denial," we are apprised, "The information in this chapter comes primarily from background interviews with seven knowledgeable sources."
But who are these "seven knowledgeable" sources? Since Woodward so far won't name them, how do we really know that they are "knowledgeable" or even "primarily" used? Is the answer because they talked to Woodward (and not to others?), or were pre-selected because they happened to agree with his own views?
In "Cobra II," we wonder why one "former Centcom planner" would talk while others (more numerous?) choose not to. And in "Fiasco," is the talkative but unnamed "Bush administration official" getting even at his rivals by offering only his interpretation of shared past conversations?
There are a number of other things wrong with all this gossip.
First, note the disturbing pattern in this resorting to anonymity. Usually the unidentified source supports the author's critique and thus is almost always critical of the present policy in Iraq. Rarely do these journalists quote unnamed sources who dissent from their own views, although there are surely pro-U.S. Iraq policy candid voices among the thousands of retired generals.
Second, here is the cardinal rule for anonymous sources in this new genre of pseudo-history: Talk to reporters as soon as possible "off the record" in hopes that they will be sympathetic. If you keep quiet, some of your loudmouth enemies might unload on you from the safety of anonymity, ensuring their narrative, not yours, will become authoritative.
Third, we are not reading accounts of golf or fashion but the most important event since the end of the Cold War as it unfolds. When one writes military history in the middle of a war, there is a responsibility to be extra careful. Real-time interpretations don't just offer lessons about the past but may change the very course of events as they happen.
These past couple of weeks, current and former officials have been protesting that they were unfairly characterized in Woodward's book and have argued that conditions in Iraq are not as bad as alleged by anonymous sources. And while there have been on-the-record critics of all three books, none of the unnamed accusers cited in them has come forward.
These virtual histories all allege a "state of denial" and lack of accountability on the part of government officials. Perhaps but how odd then that the authors of "Cobra II," "Fiasco" and "State of Denial" have used the very secrecy and subterfuge they claim to deplore in their targets.
#1
I was really disappointed with Cobra II. I thought 'The Generals War' (by the same authors, about Desert Storm) was much better. IIRC, there were a lot of people 'named' in the interviews.
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked its beginning, and the claimed North Korean nuclear test marks its end. Between them was the era of partial credit. American presidents could claim that they did their best to solve enormous problems and should get credit for trying regardless of having failed abjectly. They did this to the accompaniment of the UN, diplomats in the role of French Olympic ice skating judges, awarding or deducting style points. President Bush has to disarm North Korea's nascent nuclear arsenal. There will be no credit given for nice tries: only results count. And Iran is watching.
President Bush has a number of options to pursue, each of which could solve the North Korean nuclear problem. One of them isn't the UN. China is already playing its UN card well, agreeing that sanctions should be imposed but objecting to any sanctions that aren't limited to those that affect only North Korea's nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. By ruling out tough economic sanctions - such as a global blockade of North Korean financial transactions - China means to prevent the UN from imposing any sanctions that will force North Korea to change its behavior. The UN cannot and will not deal effectively with North Korea just like it could not and did not deal with Saddam and cannot and will not deal with Iran. China, Russia and France make that certain. If the president remains stuck in the UN, he will fail in disarming the North Korean nuclear arsenal.
Continued on Page 49
If you asked the average member of the European elite when world affairs began to take a turn for the worse, my guess is that many of them would plump not for 9/11, but instead for the moment when the US Supreme Court ruled that George W. Bush had won the 2000 presidential election. As President Bushs reputation has sunk in Europe, so the reputation of Al Gore the lost leader has soared. The fact that Gore has become a standard bearer for action on climate change has only added to his saintly reputation.
I got a taste of Europes adoration of Al on Sunday night in Brussels, when Gore passed through town for a gala showing of his film, An Inconvenient Truth. No fewer than four worthies lined up to introduce Gores brief speech. One of them, a Swedish academic whose name escapes me, managed to liken Gore to both Albert Schweitzer and Gandhi.
Then we all trooped into Brusselss grandest theatre for a showing of the film. Gore was introduced yet again, this time by the EUs environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas. Mr Dimas ended his peroration by lamenting the fact that Europeans arent allowed to vote in American elections. Aint life a bitch, as they say on the other side of the Atlantic. Maybe the EU should take the issue up in trade talks with the United States. Perhaps there could be some sort of reciprocal arrangement. Greeks like Mr Dimas get to vote in the American presidential election and in return Texans get to vote in the French presidential election.
As for the Gore film itself - it pulled off the unusual feat of being simultaneously very compelling and strangely dull. The overall message is convincing, depressing and powerfully presented. But the film also drags a little, since it is essentially a glorified power-point presentation, with a few home movies from the Gore family album thrown in.
The addition of all this family footage also raised in my mind the (doubtless unworthy) suspicion that Gores motives for making An Inconvenient Truth may not be confined solely to raising public consciousness about climate change. Gore continues to deny that he will be a candidate for the presidency in 2008. But many a presidential candidate would kill for the chance to re-introduce himself to the American public, via a feature film showing on screens across the US. Many of the episodes highlighted in the film the idyllic childhood on a farm, the life-changing accident to a beloved child, the death of a sister are the kind of personal details that can be terribly useful to a presidential campaign.
Is that too cynical? I dont doubt Gores sincerity on climate change. Nor do I doubt the urgency of the message that he is trying to get across. But having seen his film, I would not be amazed to see him running in 2008.
After watching An Inconvenient Truth, I went down to the Grand Place in the centre of Brussels and had an ice cream. It is unusual to be eating ice cream outside at midnight in October in northern Europe. But then the weather is unseasonably warm at the moment. I wonder why?
It was supposed to be one of those international ho-hum conferences, dedicated to endangered species. But in a surprise move, the government of Saudi Arabia turned it into an international confrontation, using its veto power to prevent an American conservationist group from presenting what it called actionable information that tied top Saudi and United Arab Emirates leaders to al Qaeda.
UN officials called the Saudi move to ban the U.S group, which had official United Nations observer status, unprecedented. The UN actually tried to facilitate the appearance of the U.S. group at last Fridays meeting in Geneva of the 54th Standing Committee of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). That may have been a first in UN history.
The conservationist group, the Union for the Conservation of Raptors (UCR), said it was prepared to present new evidence of ongoing smuggling operations that tied top Saudi and United Arab Emirates leaders to al Qaeda. In a letter outlying their proposed testimony, the UCR said that it would present evidence of bribes paid to UN officials by UAE and Saudi officials in order to allow the smuggling of hunting falcons.
In exchange for the bribes which I am told totaled over a half-million dollars - the UN official authorized the shipment of smuggled falcons by the UAE and the Saudi government to royal hunting camps in Central Asia, where the Arab rulers met with top al Qaeda officials and international arms dealers, said UCR spokesman Alan Parrot.
The UCR also accused a top Saudi official, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abuldaul Aziz, of having used his diplomatic immunity to smuggle falcons to his father and uncle in Saudi Arabia. At the time, Prince Bandar was the Saudi ambassador to Washington, and his father was the Defense Minister. The UCR said that the Saudi Embassy paid a $150,000 fine in the U.S. Department of Justice in relation to the falcon shipments.
The threat of exposing Prince Bandars alleged involvement in the falcon trade is probably what triggered the unusual Saudi intervention last week in Geneva, since Prince Bandar continues to be a prominent member of the royal family and a key power broker. Let's not forget Bandar's wife funding the 911 hijacker/pilots Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi via Saudi intelligence agents Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Bassnan who welcomed the two the US and set them up.
Rest at link.
Posted by: ed ||
10/12/2006 19:34 ||
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#1
good catch ed.
The UN approved hunting camps: Royal Rag-Heads, Falcons, Machine Guns and Al-Q.
Time magazine did one of those Evolution updates last week, "How We Became Human," on its cover. There wasn't too much new -- just how little we differ genetically from chimpanzees.
Yet there was one sentence that stood out like a lightning bolt. It has enormous implications for understanding how human societies evolved and why they sometimes find it difficult to get along with each other. Here it is:
[T]he principle of gene-by-gene comparison [between species] remains a powerful one, and just a year ago geneticists got hold of a long-awaited tool for making those comparisons in bulk. Although the news was largely overshadowed by the impact of Hurricane Katrina... the publication of a rough draft of the chimp genome in the journal Nature immediately told scientists several important things. First they learned that overall, the sequences of base pairs that make up both species' [i.e., humans and chimps] genomes differ by 1.23% -- a ringing confirmation of the 1970 estimates -- and that the most striking divergence between them occurs, intriguingly, in the Y chromosome, present only in males.
Did you see that? It deserves much more attention than Time was willing to give it. Basically, the point is that, in crossing the little evolutionary distance that exists between chimps and humans, most of the changes occurred in males. In other words, what differentiates us from our mammalian relatives is changes that have occurred in the male of the species.
Actually, this is not news. Evolutionary anthropologists have long been aware of it. As far back as 1972, Elaine Morgan, a feminist, writing in The Descent of Woman, noted that in fact the role of females hadn't changed much from chimp to human. Mothers nurse and care for their offspring in basically the same way chimps do. In terms of social role, there really isn't much difference between human females and other animals.
What has changed is the role of males. Among chimps, males hang out in groups, form alliances, forage together, and do a lot of bickering over status. They do not participate at all in child rearing. By the time hunting-and-gathering tribes arrive, however, men have been folded into the family. Monogamy predominates and both parents participate in child rearing. The extraordinary innovation is "fatherhood," a role that doesn't really exist elsewhere in nature.
Last March in The American Spectator I wrote an article entitled "The Alpha Couple and the Primal Horde," speculating how this transformation might have taken place. Without recounting the whole argument, let's review some of key ways in which chimp society is unique among other mammals and how it might have evolved into human society.
One very unusual quality about East African chimps -- our closest relatives -- is that they are patrilocal. While females usually form the backbone of most mammalian societies, chimp troops are built around closely related males. They form a "brotherhood" that defends territory and keeps a population of females within its borders. (Interestingly, dolphins, the other species that most closely matches human intelligence, do the same thing.) Females usually stay within their native group but sometimes migrate to other troops -- something that males never do. In addition, these male bands occasionally go to war with neighboring troops, expanding their territory and capturing other females.
This social pattern does not even predominate among other chimp species. The notable example is the bonobo or "pygmy" chimps, a slightly more distant cousin of ours that lives in the deepest jungles of Central African. Among bonobos, females predominate and males out-migrate. The "sisterhood" of females is the core structure -- just as in most mammalian societies. Males even draw their rank from their mothers and are often physically defended by them, even after reaching maturity.
Bonobos are an easy-going species that indulge constantly in sex, both heterosexual and homosexual. In fact, ethnologists describe bonobo sex as a form of social conviviality that keeps tensions at a minimum. Frans de Waal, a Dutch scientist who has written extensively about bonobos, continually holds up this female dominance and the relative placidity among bonobos as a negative contrast to human society. Writing in Scientific American, he says:
At a juncture in history during which women are seeking equality with men, science arrives with a belated gift to the feminist movement. Male-biased evolutionary scenarios -- Man the Hunter, Man the Toolmaker and so on -- are being challenged by the discovery that females play a central, perhaps even dominant, role in the social life of one of our nearest relatives. In the past few years many strands of knowledge have come together concerning a relatively unknown ape with an unorthodox repertoire of behavior: the bonobo.
In fact, the discovery of bonobo society proves just the opposite. It is precisely because females play a dominant role and males are so passive and unambitious that bonobos did not produce an evolutionary line that led to human beings. Instead, they remain a relatively minor, underpopulated species holding their orgies deep in the jungle. The larger East African chimp, where males predominate, produced the line that led to humanity.
What is it about this "male brotherhood" that points the way to human evolution? First of all, male chimps have learned to work with each other in co-operative effort -- something nearly all other species don't do. Chimps have very rigorous rules about sharing females. Each male is allowed to mate with each female. As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of The Woman Who Never Evolved, has pointed out, this "confuses paternity," allowing each male to think that a female's offspring might be his own. This dampens sexual jealousy and eliminates the very cruel practice in other species where an alpha male will kill off any rival male's offspring in order to put females to work in producing his own.
Most important, male bonding enables chimps to practice cooperative hunting. Meat constitutes about 10 percent of their diet -- a figure that would rise steadily as humans evolved. Jane Goodall describes a scene where a troop of male chimps was foraging in the trees among a group of monkeys. Almost imperceptibly, without any overt signals, the chimps moved into positions where they had one young monkey isolated on a tree branch. Suddenly they pounced and killed him, sharing the meat. It is easy to see how chimp troops could have taken such skills onto the East African savannah, where the earliest human evolution occurred. Human tribes did not become big-game hunters for millions of years but they probably survived as scavengers and hunters of small game in the earliest stages. In an environment where rivals and predators were swift and common, this male cooperation was the only hope of survival.
As I outlined in "The Alpha Couple and the Primal Horde," in the new savannah environment, the crucial key to keeping a group of males together while avoiding sexual jealousy would have be monogamy. The chimp ritual of having every ovulating female mate with every male -- which often takes more than a week -- would be too distracting and time-consuming in the much more dangerous savannah environment. Nor would reverting to polygamy solve the problem. Polygamous species such as the gorilla form "harems," where a dominant male collects a large number of females while subdominant males are pushed into an isolated "bachelor herd." This works for the powerful gorilla, which has no natural predators. But it would have been impossible for a diminutive species of three-foot-tall chimpanzees trying to survive on the savannah. The advantage of monogamy is that it keeps the group together, since each member is guaranteed a mate.
Coincidentally (or was it perhaps Intelligent Design?), this conversion to monogamy also offered irreplaceable advantages in child rearing. The enlistment of males to child rearing made possible the development of human intelligence. The combination of enlarging brains and the new upright stature made birth more difficult for protohuman females. As a result, all humans are born premature -- earlier than body size would dictate and in a much greater state of helplessness than other creature in nature. The evolution of human intelligence would have been impossible without the change in male role and the adoption of monogamy. For that reason, it is not at all surprising to find that the key genetic changes have occurred on the male chromosome.
So what does all this suggest for the present? First, it says that feminism, in its most obviously primitive forms, is undermining human evolution. Everywhere in the Western world, the emancipation of women has initially led to rising divorce rates and plummeting births. After intelligent consideration, however, many "second-generation" feminists have been able to handle both careers and families, which means the human family may be able to reconstitute itself on a more equitable basis.
The real changes are on the other side of the world, however, where Muslim societies have regressed to polygamy, a form of marriages that was not present in the earliest stages of human evolutionary history. This has led to a re-creation of the "bachelor herd" -- a disgruntled population of excess males, which Islam has always handled very skillfully by turning it into an army of jihad warriors.
The brotherhood of males, the invention of "fatherhood," the creation of monogamous marriage within a larger social unit -- these have been the pathways to human evolution. Sustaining the family while keeping rival brotherhoods from becoming too murderous in their competition will be the key to keeping the experiment going.
#2
This has led to a re-creation of the "bachelor herd" -- a disgruntled population of excess males, which Islam has always handled very skillfully by turning it into an army of jihad warriors.
This point had been pointed earlier by other commenters.
#6
Are you people insane!? You can't report something of this potential magnitude! The Left will simply go apeshit!
Oops...
Perhaps I could have worded that somewhat better...
If you can find it check out the book "Demon Males" (I can't remember the author). It makes a mockery of the argument about "peaceful vegetarian chimpanzee tribes", stone age "holdovers" (ie some tribe still living in the stone age and discovered by some group of anthropologists in some remote area), and the myth of the peaceful, scavenging, nut & berry eating human ancestor.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
by B.R. Myers, New York Times
