Worse than Nicolas Cage

The first thing you need to know about Viktor Bout is that everyone knows that he's one of the most heinous gun-runners on the planet. He's openly supplied Charles Taylor of Liberia, rebels and terrorists in Colombia (FARC), Lebanon (Hizbullah) and Afghanistan (Taliban). He essentially has a fetish for giving guns to the most evil people he can find. And everybody knows it. President Clinton approved several operations to capture him, as did several European governments. The UN placed a travel ban on him, and Nicolas Cage's Lord of War was based on him. Everybody knew.

Which is why Bout's arrest in Bangkok as a result of a joint Thai-US operation is so disappointing. The Thai court ruled that since it did not consider FARC a terrorist organisation, it could not extradite Bout to the USA to stand trial. US lawyers and officials cried foul, but everyone's fingers are steeped deep in this pie.

The US themselves used Bout's services during their invasion of Iraq, to transport both military and civilian cargos, hundreds of times. Russia has actually officially stated that they're glad he's not being tried, and that he is "returning to the Motherland", and Thailand is standing firm in ruling that the only possible charge to bring against Bout is a connection to FARC.

Despite the fact that everyone knows. There's even a goddamn tape recording of him speaking to US agents (impersonating FARC), saying that he hopes the weapons he's selling them "will be used to kill Americans, who are my enemies too."

The man is estimated to be worth about $6 billion, providing yet another massive asterisk and energetic footnote to the old canard "crime doesn't pay".

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Chinese National Conscience, Bound with Unbreakable Bonds of Unity and Patriotism

China's reaction to the Melbourne film festival is childish and stupid, exactly like the childish and stupid response by some in the Muslim world to the Danish cartoons.

The Melbourne film festival is scheduled to show The 10 Conditions of Love, a film about Rebiya Kadeer, (pictured) international Uighur spokeswoman. But apparently because China believes she had something to do with the Uighur riots that killed 197 people last month, everyone needs to hunt her down and quickly deliver her to a glorious Chinese revolutionary court that is as fair as it is swift.

The Chinese are insisting that Australia ban the film and force it to be pulled from the film festival, echoing the sentiments of pointless Muslims demanding that the State of Denmark take responsibility for the actions of a private Danish newspaper. They've also expressed "supreme dissatisfaction" with both Japan and Australia for even granting Ms. Kadeer a visa to enter the country.

This is a good thing, though, because it provokes reflection on how readily we've accepted China so far as a major power player in the world. China's already terrified the Melbourne City Council by threatening to revoke its sister-city status with Tianjin, and its influence will only grow.

If China keeps ordering civilised countries to do retarded things like ban films for no reason, Chinese economic clout will mean that even if they can't treat us like their hapless subjects, they will have the means to force us into a reluctant self-censorship.

Pirates and Handsome Boys

Somali Pirates have now become a beloved fixture in international relations, giving diplomats things to do in a timely and regular manner. The latest is news from the Hansa Stavanger, a German container vessel seized just off Kismayu in Southern Somalia in April this year. The ship was freed today, in what German diplomats are hailing "a triumph" of negotiation.

Said German Foreign Minister Frank Walter-Steinmeier: "My thanks goes to those who worked tirelessly to bring about a solution".

Of course, the solution was to pay the pirates $2.7 million, thank them, and ask them if they could please have another. One can only wonder at the kind of double-retard-think mind that accepts this result as well as the moratorium on negotiation with "terrorists" who actually have a political agenda. One can also only wonder how easy it must be for a German negotiator to accept a million dollar kickback from the pirates in return for telling the German government "You better pay them, man, these guys are psychos, man, fuckin psychos."

It must be incredibly easy.

Also today, the Taliban have furnished an example of the mathematical postulate that the more spittle-fleck you are about being right-wing and religiously prudish, the more likely you are to be a lascivious gay. The mullahs of man-love announced that it is against god's will to have "shiny new phones" with pictures of "unrelated women" or "handsome boys" on them. The insistence with which these bedouins of the butt keep using the expression "handsome boys" is disconcerting enough, before you factor in the inevitable punishment: being held down and getting your ass lashed raw.

Thinking of their Afghan dignity, after sodomising a handsome boy with a shiny phone

These sheikhs of shit-packing issued a religious ordinance on the matter, stating that "People should think of their Afghan dignity rather than buying shiny phones"

Nokia and Ericsson have both issued statements showing that they are being proactive in designing Taliban-friendly phones which have an automatic photo-editor that turns boys into pictures of Steve Buscemi and girls into pictures of your mum, as well as a matte finish.

These imams of imbibing semen have been causing all sorts of problems with the Afghani elections, as well.

Tragedy!

One of the best traditions in politics has been destroyed by the nefarious Singaporeans and their hatred of laughter and smiles. The ASEAN summit, rescheduled in Phukhet after the protests earlier in the year ended it prematurely, will no longer be keeping with its tradition of having foreign ministers and various other political magnates perform what can only be called fabulous skits, under fairly close guard from media attention. Some highlights that have emerged over the years:

1997: The Australian delegation dresses up like "Men At Work", and sings their only hit, "Down Under", to a horrified audience.

1998: Russian and US delegations dress up as Jets and Sharks in a re-enactment of West Side Story, in what is meant to be a light-hearted parody of the Cold War, but is in effect an admission of defeat to the capitalist US Broadway hegemony.

2000: European delegation revisits ABBA favourite, singing "Knowing Me, Knowing EU"

2001: US Secretary of State Colin Powell kisses Japanese Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka whilst performing "El Paso", clearly misunderstanding the preferred sexual orientation of past ASEAN performances.

2004: Powell (pictured above) gets it right by performing "YMCA" in a builders outfit and not kissing a woman.

2005: Perhaps the best of the lot, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (pictured left) inexplicably dresses up as Darth Vader, and swings a plastic lightsabre while singing "Jesus Christ, Superstar" in front of a map showing the US as "East Asia". If anyone can find a video of this, please let me know.

2006:Also one of the best, Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso (Now Prime Minister of Japan) impersonates Humphrey Bogart while behind him members of the Japanese delegation dressed up in sumo wrestler fatsuits, Ultraman costumes, Ultraman villain costumes, and koi carp meander about. Video below.

2006: Also awesome, South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon (Now Secretary General of the UN) dresses up in a green-sequin jacket and sings ABBA again. Again, if anyone can find this on video, please let me know. It's important.

2007: Taro Aso again gets his delegation to dress up in samurai costumes and sumo fatsuits, and leads them in a choreographed dance thing.

And now it's all over.

Political Strongarm!

Some simply awesome videos of Korean politics as usual:


The Associated Press comments say it all: "Brawling South Korean lawmakers tried to sledgehammer their way into a parliamentary meeting room barricaded by the ruling party"

Check out the little guy at 1:36. He probably made the hole in the door at 1:40 with his teeth.

The next one is just priceless, though.

I'd give highlights, but just watch the whole thing. The bitch-fight at 0:50 and the attempted moonsault-cum-crowd surf at 0:53 made my day.

Banzai! Banzai!! Banzai!!!

Reuters released an interesting summary of a policy document they intercepted that was meant for DPJ candidates in anticipation of the upcoming general election. It's particularly interesting given the usually frustratingly insubstantive politics of Japan which produces slogans like "a fraternal society, to realise a politics of love" (-Yukio Hatoyama, head of the DPJ, and probably soon to be prime minister).

Well it turns out that Japanese politicians do actually talk business, if only among themselves. Some of the highlights of the policy document:

-Transfer more state power from the traditionally powerful bureaucracy to politicians themselves.

-Make high schools free of charge, scrap most highway tolls and raise minimum pensions.

-Halve corporate tax and eliminate fuel surcharges, costing over 2.7 trillion yen a year.

-Review 70 trillion yen out of the 207 trillion yen budget to try to cut spending to pay for all this junk.

-Review government-affiliated organisations on charges that they serve no real purpose other than to act as sinecure retirement posts for long-serving bureaucrats.

Two things jumped out at me from looking at this policy statement. Firstly, there is no way in hell they're going to be able to pay for all the things they've listed without making seriously big increases in taxes and/or decreases in public service. Since they seem to be intent on both increasing the domain of welfare (by making high school free), and on being business friendly (by cutting corporate tax), Either one side gives or Japan finds itself in a financial hole bigger than the opening shot of Akira. But this is sort of reminiscent of all political promises.

The second, and more interesting thing is that the DPJ appears to be tentatively trying to dismantle the traditional lifetime employment system that characterised Japanese postwar development. Both in their recognition that too many of the state's functions are dominated by a strong, technocratic bureaucracy, and in their attack on pointless golden-handshake retirement positions, the DPJ seem to be making an attack on the "establishment" of bureaucracy and lifetime employment part of their policy identity.

Of course, extremely old, wealthy, faceless bureaucrats doing nothing in offices make relatively easy targets, especially for a party that bases itself on being just about as anti-mainstream as the political mainstream will allow in Japan.

I honestly doubt the DPJ will actually try to make a serious dent into either government-affiliated retirement offices or bureaucratic control of politics. DPJ political careerists like Ichiro Ozawa have no doubt made a cushy 70+ job part of their life-plans, and Hatoyama himself is neither new (grandson of former PM and son of former Foreign Minister), nor idealistic (he started in the LDP before forming the DPJ with his brother, Kunio, who later went back to the LDP). It's safe to say that Hatoyama is no Obama. The DPJ is also unlikely to win such a comfortable majority that it will be strong enough to wrest control from the bureaucracy, dominant even during Koizumi's government.

And that's not even counting the funding scandals concerning both Ozawa and Hatoyama, both of whom have blamed the entire thing on their respective state-funded aides. Not knowing where politicians and their parties get donations from, and by corollary to whom they're beholden, is really quite serious.

So at first I was excited about the end of "half a century of nearly unbroken LDP rule", as the newspapers have been bleating incessantly to try to interest people in Japanese politics. But now it just seems like the same old whores, with different customers.

Surely Some of the Longest Names in Coup History

Yesterday's presidential election in Mauritania, a surprisingly large North African country, right beneath Morocco, yielded victory for General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz (pictured above looking unbelievably pleased with his office). This is, in effect, a second-wave coup. Aziz took power by force last year after then-president Sidi Ould Sheikh Abdallahi dismissed him and his crew, and since then he's insisted that he's really a champion of democracy, and that

he had to execute two coups (an earlier one in 2005, as well), in order to protect the fragile Mauritanian democratic ideal from the fate that befalls so many other African countries. That is, military coups.

But to head off any criticism of his landslide electoral victory (52% of the vote, just enough to avoid a run-off round of voting), Aziz's spokesmen came out immediately after the results came in.

Interior Minister Mohamed Rzeizim: "The elections were carried out in excellent conditions. I salute the Mauritanian electorate for responsibility and civic duty. I also want affirm here that there was absolutely nothing suspicious about the vote count."

That the government felt the need to say this before any scandal had broken out doesn't exactly augur well, and of course, accusations started flying soon after. Whether the vote was rigged or not is immaterial, though. The vote cannot be valid when a military general executes a coup and then runs for election a year after. Mauritania wasn't in any way close to an actual open democratic environment. But dictators keep thinking that it's ok to perform a coup as long as at some point down the line you also run an election. They don't goddamn cancel each other out.

But it's not all bad, since there does seem to be some genuine outrage coming from Mauritania's opposition parties. It's doubtful that Aziz (pictured left demonstrating to his nation the correct YMCA form) will actually engage with the criticism. Still, it's more than one would expect from a country which still actually practices slavery, and there's a chance the international community might pick up on it. This has basically shaped up to be the Summer of Electoral Disputes, after all.

P.S. Seriously read the slavery link. 20% of Mauritania's population lives in actual slavery. WTF.

But Are They Jewish ENOUGH?

Two seperate slices of stupidity from Israel today. Firstly, violent demonstrations by ultra-orthodox Jews (also known as ultra-Jews) have caused chaos in Jerusalem, burning tires and rubbish bins and throwing rocks at riot police. The hubbub was caused by the arrest of an ultra-Jewish mother who apparently starved her 3-year-old child, as she has Munchausen Syndrome by proxy (Consult House for an awesome explanation). The ultra-Jews were upset that one of theirs was arrested, and reportedly think it's impossible for an ultra-Jewish mother to commit such a crime.

Although seeing hundreds of people protesting violently in snappy suits and hats is undeniably a sight, it's just stupid to start riots because a member of your community got arrested.

Secondly, the Israeli government is deciding whether or not 3000 Ethiopians are actually Jewish or just pretending. This absurd practice derives from the fact that Israel is legally a Jewish state, even though it's also supposedly secular. This means that Jews immigrating automatically get citizenship if they want it. This puts the Israeli government in the position of judging whether someone is really Jewish or not, regardless of what they say/believe. It's unclear what ridiculous standards Israel is using to quantify "Jewishness", but it probably includes nose-measuring and joke-telling.

The sheer arrogance of a state purporting to decide for someone else what religion the "really" belong to is mind-boggling.

Politics is Jokes

Beppe Grillo, one of the most famous Italian comedians around, has tried and failed to join the Democratic Party (DP), Italy's main opposition party to Silvio Berlusconi's government. His aim was to get elected into the party's secretariat, "to fill a space left empy in the Left". Despite being rejected, and derided, by everyone in the DP, he's going to try to get 2000 signatures to support his candidacy for the party primaries, which should be easy due to his overwhelming popularity in Italy.

Although this is something of a vanity project for him, multi-millionaire that he is, Mr. Grillo's policy platforms are good, if fairly basic in a civilised country. He wants to disallow anyone with convictions from running for Parliament, and he wants to place a limit of two terms on MPs. This last goal is incredibly important in a country with as established and sclerotic a political class as Italy.

This same political class has reacted strongly against Grillo's candidacy, calling him a "buffoon", and reminding everyone that he is "just a comedian, making jokes". This is what irks me most about this affair. Just as happened with the recent election of comedian Al Franken as Senator for Minnesota, a lot of people seem to think that comedians are inherently incapable of being "serious people", and that everything that they say and do must be a joke of some sort.

Leaving aside the fact that most comedians are real people and can thus have identities beyond their career, I'm against the idea that comedy is necessarily an inconsequential distraction. Given the amount of political comedy around, I'd think it was obvious that comedians are able to have actual insights concerning politics, and that these observations are consequential, even if they are funny.

When someone remarks on Picasso's Guernica and the statement it makes about the horrors of fascism, most people don't have the arrogance to shrug and say "pfft, it's just a painting."

Oh Wait, Nevermind

Goldman and Sachs (pictured above), the prominent Wall Street bank, has posted that it is likely to have made $2 billion profits in the March-June period. That's $2 billion profits, above and beyond the rest of the money they spent to run their unholy operation. They're posting estimates for their profits from March through June, which means they literally have more money than they can count. I don't know how much money I have either, but that's just due to the subliminal terror I have of checking my current account that impels me again and again to press "No." when offered a receipt at cashpoints. And Goldman and Sachs made $2 billion in profits since March.

Happy Monday, everyone.

In other depressing news, the Honduran coup that ousted Manuel Zelaya and instated serial coup-monger Roberto Micheletti is not at all likely to be overturned. The OAS has not yet accepted Micheletti, but it will probably only hold out for another week or two before "starting talks", implicitly recognising that Micheletti is now the de facto, and soon de jure leader of the country (Official Politic Blunder prediction).

Let's not even get into Iran, which major news outlets have pretty much completely stopped reporting on. This was only to be expected, as the thrill of having absolutely no news to report because of the total media blackout imposed by the government gives way to the realisation that there is absolutely no news to report. But like I said, I'm not going to get into Iran.

Television holds no solace either. Pakistani MTV was showing a really bad band fronted by an ugly woman ripping off Evanescence's "Everybody's a Fool", a really bad song, down to the last note, really badly.

Clearly Evanescence must have known about this, and sold them the rights to their song (and soul). Which is almost worse than coups in Honduras and brutal government repression in Iran. Almost.

Returning to the issue of Goldman and Sachs, Rolling Stone columnist Matthew Taibbi described Goldman as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." The hilarious thing about this is that Goldman didn't dismiss this as a malicious characterisation or metaphor, but as a conspiracy theory. Which means they're seriously worried that people might start thinking that's actually how they make $2 billion in profits in 3 months.

Which would make more sense than all this "derivatives" and "risk management" hocus-pocus they keep foisting down our throats.

A Poorly Structured Rant on Xinjiang

So yes, the summer so far has been pretty tumultuous politically. There was (and hopefully still is) Iran, the putsch in Honduras, and now the violence in Xinjiang, in China. The worst thing people can do is make too many comparisons between these cases. Since no one really knows enough about Honduras to have a pre-formulated opinion on it, most of the comparisons currently being made are between the violence in China and the protests in Iran.

Most of the comparisons have the predictable tendency to simplify actors and misunderstand issues, resulting in a satisfying but ultimately derelict conclusion. Yes, both the Chinese and the Iranian regimes are bad, and yes, both are experiencing problems trying to stamp out civil unrest. The similarities pretty much end there though.

The protests in Iran were in response to a blatantly rigged election. The protests were widely based (despite demonstrably false assertions that only "rich, westernised Iranians" supported them), were by far the most part peaceful, and had a clear political aim, ideally with a goal of engagement to achieve that aim. They wanted an independent recount of the vote, they wanted public debate and scrutiny on the issue, and they wanted the right to read what the rest of the world had to say.

In China, on the other hand, the violence broke out due to the classic mix of ethnic tension combined with social and economic unease. A Turkic Muslim minority felt as if it was being mistreated by the government. Protests started, and when the security forces tried to break up the crowds, riots broke out, and Uighurs started massacring innocent Han Chinese bystanders.

Of course, this is the official version of the events, and I have no doubt that the Chinese security forces shot, arrested, and will ultimately execute innocent Uighurs. But it's quite clear that the majority of the dead were Han Chinese, and in large part they were beaten to death, not shot. These are racially motivated riots resulting in the senseless deaths of civilians, with no clear political goal and no clear intention of civil engagement.

Not that the Uighurs, or any other group in China have much room to engage politically with the state. It's quite easy to understand why the violence came about, and the Chinese government is clearly at fault for being brutally authoritarian, and for stupidly not realising how easily backwards religious people become violent. The Chinese government needs to take the initiative to engage with the Uighurs, but it was right to put down the riots.

In Iran, the pro-democracy protests deserve full international support. In China, it needs to be recognised that mobs of Uighurs, no matter how marginalised and culturally alienated they feel, are still in the wrong when they go around beating civilians to death for having the wrong facial structure and skin colour.

In The Interests of Shamelessness...

Just to do away with any unrealistic pretence that Minister of Equal Oppo- rtunities Mara Carfagna (pictured left), and Minister of Education Maria Stella Gelmini (below), are anything but leering posts for the men of the Italian parliament, Berlusconi today announced that in the absence of his ex-wife Veronica Lario, Miss Carfagna and Miss Gelmini will be showing the wives of the G8 heads of state around Rome. While the men (and German demi-woman Angela Merkel) take care of the important business.

Miss Carfagna, an ex-topless showgirl, has long been a paragon of the Italian parody of "equal opportunities", and in a country where the majority of 18-year-old girls' greatest ambition is to become a topless showgirl ("velina"), it stands to reason that she would be picked for the role. But of course, she should remember that whatever ministerial position she may occupy in the government, she is first and foremost a woman, and as the most attractive woman Berlusconi has regular access to now, it's only natural that she reverts to the role of surrogate housewife.

Where before I had sympathy for Miss Carfagna, I now have nothing but contempt. If she valued any part of her dignity as a human being, she would refuse and resign. But she won't, will she? Well, let's just hope she wears white, like all other domestic appliances.

An old divan with an even older woman leaning over it. Literally as good as Italian politics gets.

Hell Hath No Fury Like Hentai Scorned

The ridiculous Chinese "Green Dam" internet censorship drive has sparked outrage in the vast community of hentai consumer/producers, who have lashed out by creating Green Dam Girl, a satirical portrayal of the Chinese government's anti-pornographic policies. Ironically (inevitably), Green Dam Girl is Dam Hot (oh dear).

Green Dam Girl has become extremely popular.

Words such as "heresies", "essence" and "cult" have been banned from google searches by the Green Dam software, unintentionally making Warhammer 40,000 unplayable in China.

Even the Chinese government has acknowledged Green Dam Girl's popularity, noting that "the sentiments of the people seem to be in accordance with international feeling".

Green Dam Girl is in favour of international feeling.

Italy Attempts Civilisation, Fails, Again

Yet another issue that blinds and deafens me with rage is the Lodo Alfano. This is a law, brought forth by the fourth Berlusconi administration in 2008, which would completely immunise the four highest posts in the government from any legal prosecution. This would include the President, the Prime Minister, and the Speakers of both houses of parliament. It's a rehash of a law that failed to pass in 2003, the Lodo Maccanico.

I don't really need to tell you how disgusting and scandalous this is, but I will. Italy would be the only country in Europe to actually make democratically elected officials less accountable. It completely undermines the constitutional principle of equality before the law, and the justifications for it are entirely based on the idea that Berlusconi (pictured above detailing how far he's going to climb up Italy's ass before dying), implicated in dozens of legal proceedings, is victim to some sort of far-flung left-wing conspiracy which aims to discredit him. It's a complete fucking embarrassment for the entire political system that a Prime Minister mired in legal proceedings who proposes a law which would immunise the Prime Minister from legal proceedings doesn't get laughed out of parliament, and out of the country.

The most recent chapter regards two constitutional judges, the judges who are to make a ruling on whether this unconstitutional law is constitutional or not (on October 6). One of the judges, Luigi Mazzella, invited Berlusconi, the Minister of Justice Alfano (who wrote up the proposed law), and another constitutional judge, Paolo Napolitano, to a private dinner at his residence. When a scandal broke out because of the clear fucking conflict of interests involved, Mazzella has today had the shameless impunity to write an open letter insisting that he didn't do anything wrong, that the law in question was not discussed, and that it was a lovely dinner he would love to repeat. Throughout he referred to the Prime Minister as “my dear Berlusconi”. What a fucking gay.

This isn't of much surprise to people both inside and outside Italy, of course. In a civilised country, judges don't have private dinners with individuals who've made a law they must rule on, and individuals directly affected by that same law. Politic Blunder FlashQuiz! What kind of fucking travesty of a democracy does that make Italian politics?

The Queen Running Out of Too Much Money!

Italian daily La Repubblica reports that Queen Elizabeth II (pictured left in a chair so old it's practically falling apart) has asked the British Parliament to increase her royal stipend, drawn from the Civil List, as she fears that she may soon no longer have far too much money for one person. Her worries were sparked by the fact that the savings she had built up over the past 20 years have dwindled to almost nothing, due to her chronic inability to spend within the enormously ample means afforded by the placid, uncomplaining, increasingly poor British taxpayer.

Her Civil List is intended primarily to cover the cost of her personal assistants and servants, and clocks in at about £7,900,000 a year. This is quite apart from the money which goes towards preserving the luxuriant excess of the monarchy as a whole, which costs about £41,000,000, and includes maintaining the palaces of Windsor, Buckingham and Balmoral.

The Queen claimed that she was forced to dip into her savings to the tune of £6,000,000 a year because nearly £8m did not cover the costs of the parties and ceremonies she wished to hold. Let's also not forget that the Queen's fantastic wealth is buttressed by personal earnings she accrues from her vast land and farm holdings.

Queen Elizabeth II asked for her Civil List provisions to be expanded in the 1990s, as well, but this was refused her. It seems she's chosen the financial crisis as the perfect time to reiterate her request not out of any real need for money, but to gleefully remind the struggling British taxpayer how unsoundly rich she is, and to spark a public debate that will let everyone know that eight million pounds is simply not enough for her, her parties, and her platoon of corgis (one of which pictured above, being boarded onto a plane swaddled in cloths probably more costly than a misdiagnosed mole.)

A Very Silly Decision Overruled

The USA's Supreme Court yesterday threw out one of the sillier judgements made concerning racial discrimination when it overturned Sonia Sotomayor's (Obama's pick for the Supreme Court) ruling in the case of Ricci v. DiStefano. The details of the case, if you haven't already read, concern white and hispanic firemen who are angry that the New Haven fire department annulled the results of a test to determine promotions solely because no black candidate passed. Sotomayor's ruling was that the fire department was justified in annulling the results of the test, because even though the test was not intended to discriminate, it ended up having a “disparate impact” on the black firemen.

The reversal of this silly and politically motivated ruling is a welcome departure from the USA's traditionally snivelling strategy of dealing with racial inequality. 5 out of 9 Supreme Court judges rightly concluded that “The city was not entitled to disregard the tests based solely on the racial disparity in the results.”, highlighting the overt discrimination inherent to the fire department's actions and Sotomayor's ruling. These judges, mislabelled as “conservative”, thus struck against the crux of positive discrimination: the 1964 Civil Rights Act's text on “disparate impact”.

The idea here is that if in any situation a minority (usually blacks) are not performing exactly as well or better with regards to their white counterparts, then regardless of the intention or the fairness of the test, “disparate impact” has occurred, and must be adjusted for. Whilst I understand the basic reason for this attitude; that certain minorities, as a result of discrimination, are less capable and less able to compete with white people even in fair tests, this is a dangerous and ultimately extremely condescending attitude.

At some point we must start treating minorities as competitive equals, and not as retarded children who have to be “included” for fear of a stomping tantrum. What Sotomayor was essentially abetting in her ruling on the case, and what the 4 dissenting Supreme Court judges were arguing for, is that black firemen at New Haven should be issued with different, easier tests to ensure that the outcome is racially proportional, and thus, politically acceptable. Sotomayor and the “liberal” judges want to solidify the notion that certain minorities cannot, and cannot be expected to compete on a level footing with the white majority in the foreseeable future. This, in no uncertain terms, makes them racists.

Blunting China's Sex-Craze

Just a quick update, China has decided to shut down public access to sexual health websites and any website which contains scientific information on sex or reproduction. This is part of its latest assault on "pornography", which China seems to really have a hard-on against.

"It is prohibited to spread pornographic content in the name of sex-related scientific research." The regulations say.

This is odd because normally Chinese authoritarianism is somewhat related to the pursuit of order and economic development. This, however, seems to be entirely motivated by massively dangerous priggishness, the type you wouldn't expect to see outside of a religious fundamentalist regime.

Luckily, it's part of China's "Green Dam" censorship software, which has already been defeated by diligent hacktivists, who've released "Green Tsunami".

A Trek To The Past: Tiananmen 1989

The comparisons between the protests now happening in Iran and the June 4th 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre deserve a fuller recounting of what happened in China twenty years ago. The world was flush with democracy, hot off the heels of the Soviet Union's impending collapse. Chinese students and intellectuals were mourning the death of a democratically-inclined reformer Hu Yaobang. The mourning sparked off angry protests since prior to his death Yaobang had been disgraced and compelled to engage in a humiliating bout of "self-criticism" for his views.

The protests were huge, seeing over 1 million people in Tiananmen Square at one point, and happened over a long time period, starting in April and ending on June 4th. It was an enormous movement, and encompassed workers nation-wide as well as the middle classes thronging in Tiananmen Square. Everyone was convinced that the world was going to see the collapse of Chinese communism as well as Soviet communism that year. But they didn't. After prevaricating for a while and offering some cosmetic concessions and reforms, Jiang Zemin, the Chief of the Military, ordered the army to put down the revolt and "clear" Tiananmen Square by 6am on June 4th. They were done with 20 minutes to spare.

One of the most terrifying aspects of what the Chinese government did on June 4th, was and is the total censorship of any details pertaining to the protests. On June 4th 2007, the Chengdu Evening News printed a notice "Paying tribute to the strong-willed mothers of the June 4th victims". The government cracked down and three editors were sacked. What's most disturbing about this, though, is that the clerk who approved the notice only did so because he was totally unaware that anything significant had happened on June 4th, and assumed it was pertaining to some mining disaster.

I could go on to write a lof of stuff on how criminal any state control of information and congregation is, and how basic and essential freedom of information and the right to congregate are to human beings, but unsurprisingly, Star Trek: The Next Generation says it better: the renowned episode "The Best of Both Worlds", aired one year after the massacre in 1990, referenced "The USS Tiananmen Square" as one of the many Starfleet ships destroyed by the unstoppable Borg cube (read: unstoppable Chinese authoritarianism) at the famous Battle at Wolf 359. Awesome.

Something Long On Iran

Below is an extract from Roger Cohen's opinion piece in The New York Times, recounting his experience walking through Tehran during a recent anti-government protest.

"Can't the United Nations help us?" one woman asked me. I said I doubted that very much. "So," she said, "we are on our own."

Almost everyone has been following the unrest in Iran over the past few weeks. For those following it closely, it started with the pre-election hope that the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad might be supplanted by the slightly more moderate Mir Hussein Moussavi. As we know, that didn't happen, and Ahmedinejad claimed victory in a supposed landslide, defeating Moussavi by a wide margin across the country, even in Moussavi's own home town.

It was the brazen and condescendingly shoddy electoral fraud that sparked the protests, which began merely as demands for a recount, or at least some sort of accounting of the election. But the government decided to start a shoving match with its riot police and the Basij, unofficial paramilitary squads charged with either beating protesters or impersonating them to commit arson, creating an aura of chaos the government can capitalise on to justify the imposition of brutal order.

I think, if we're honest, most of us expected the Iranian "velvet revolution" to die down after a few days of student protest, defused by the conscientious government application of violence along with calls for compromise and moderation; the classic carrot-and-stick approach. But the protests have stretched and grown, and as pixelated images and feeds of protests keep surfacing, the drama, the stakes, and the potential of this uprising have persuaded a much larger audience than third-world unrest usually does.

A YouTube video surfaced yesterday showing an Iranian girl, shot in the heart, dying on the street, full of blood. It was obscene in both content and context, a click and a half away from the cutest Welsh Corgi taking a bath in a sink. It's upsetting and it should be; I'm glad that YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have become the most important outlets for information on the situation in Iran. The media have been calling it "citizen journalism", but that has too many connotations of amateurishness and unaccountability. They don't pretend to analyse, or present a whole, unbiased report of the situation. I think its function is more simply to witness, a globalisation of witnesses which enables us, however imperfectly, to draw a lens on events normally out of sight.

I'm glad that the uprising has achieved (and it is an achievement) so much international attention, because Iran should not be on its own. The impotence of the UN in the face of the quoted woman's appeal is intolerable. She believed that domestic injustice is an international affair, and she's right. There are no convincing arguments for the principle of non-intervention. There are costs, and risks of course. The international community should be wary of intervening in a crisis it doesn't understand, or where its intervention would be counterproductive.

But the international community also has a mandate to endeavour to understand foreign crises, and engineer interventions that aren't counterproductive. This is a moral mandate which overwhelmingly trumps the legal mandate not to intervene, solidified through centuries of moral barbarism and intellectual dishonesty. Conventions established when "racism" and "empire" were open adjuncts to "stability" and "empire" should have no hold over us today.

The Iranian uprising might or might not have its back broken by the state, still capable and possessed of a gnashing determination to survive. Either way, the rest of the world won't have helped much. It seems naive to even speak of a global will to intervene when Russia and China hasten to congratulate successful sham elections and militate against UN criticism of state brutality. But what this moment should tell us is that however foolish, risky or ingenuous speaking might be, there is yet something to speak of.

Spy Kids

The blogging must go on. Even though I am in Sri Lanka, where the heat directly affects the speed of the internet connection, if you turn on the air conditioner for 2 hours before hand, you can get about 20 minutes on the internet before it clogs up with moisture and jungle dust.

The CIA is probably known for more than it would like, as one of the more invasive and aggressive intelligence agencies. Indeed, outside of screaming patriots and fans of Matt Damon's work, the CIA is not too well-regarded. It's dramatic work, but ultimately sordid and underhanded, and deep down, we all know the real work of intelligence agencies doesn't involve buff ninjas humping their way to the truth. It's mostly corpulent computer experts trawling terabytes of email for words like "bomb" and "muslim".

But where the CIA cannot appeal to our intelligence, it appeals instead to our children. The CIA Kid's page proudly announces that "The CIA gathers intelligence in a variety of ways, not just by "spying", like you see in the movies or on TV (though we do some of that, too)". It seems to me that spying, actually having agents intercept classified documents or infiltrate foreign governments, shouldn't really be something the USA, or any other country, lauds itself for. Certainly in diplomatic circles, there is a pleasant fiction that countries never spy on each other, and intelligence agencies are only there to take satellite photos and fight terrorism.

But having to tiptoe around the issue of spying on other governments is a good thing. It shows that we're still uncomfortable with the idea of spying, that we're a bit embarrassed about the prospect of openly admitting that it's done. Children shouldn't be reassured that there's nothing wrong with spying. Of course there is.

Where Have You Heard This Before?

Today the exultation of Sri Lankan authorities, drunk and glib on their success in gunning down the last sliver of resistance from the LTTE, better known as the Tamil Tigers, reached fever pitch with the presumed deaths of most of the group's leaders (notably the LTTE's infamous chief, Vellupillai Prabakharan, pictured left).

Leading the pack in the race to make the most bombastic and infuriatingly misguided statements is General Sarath Fonseka, head of the Sri Lankan Army, who said:

"All military operations have come to a stop. Now the entire country is declared rid of terrorism."

It would be naive to think that Mr. Fonseka is actually so heady with Bushist "Mission Accomplished" vigour that he actually thinks that the problem of Tamil nationalism has been resolved by "over 250 bodies scattered over the last ditch" (another of his boasts). The Sri Lankan Army is intimately familiar with terrorism and its complications, and they must know that it's only a matter of time until the problem kills more civilians. 

Of course by then, the Sri Lankan authorities will hope to have milked all the political brownie points possible out of their increasingly Pyrrhic victory.

It's Proselytime!

Just a quick post on a breaking scandal, courtesy of Al Jazeera English: apparently US soldiers posted in Afghanistan have been conspiring to proselytize while on duty, a gross violation of the US Army Code of Conduct. Al Jazeera reporter Brian Hughes caught footage of Lieutenant-colonel Gary Hensley,  a military chaplain urging soldiers to spread the Good News. In his words:

"The special forces guys - they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down. Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That's what we do, that's our business."

This isn't the first time the US Army's policy of "getting people into heaven, one way or another" has been seen. In February, the US Army approved the embedding of two self-proclaimed "gonzo missionaries", presenters of a tv program called Travel The Road. The program follows Tim Scott and Will Decker as they plumb the furthest reaches of the poor-world, where they tape themselves trying to convert increasingly confused natives. 

This caused a mini-scandal, as again, the US Army Code of Conduct mandates that only journalists be embedded. Given that the only pretensions Mr. Scott and Mr. Decker had to journalism were that they carried cameras around and called themselves "producers of dynamic media", this was seen to be somewhat in contravention to the strictures of the US Army.

Right, back to work.

A Disclaimer

I haven't been posting recently. That's because I'm currently in the middle of a rough patch of exams, so I won't be posting for the next couple of days, until the 13th of May. 

If you want informative jokes and interesting news, go to my friend's blog, Osu! Tatakae! Nippon!, who's posting faster than South Korean dictator Park Chung Hee can brutally put down a labour movement.

Which is pretty fast.

Our Enemies All Along

We've been eating them for millennia, and now the pigs are wreaking vengeance on Mexico, parts of the USA, and Canada. Over 149 people have been killed by swine flu, and panic is spreading fast. The virus, which is actually a hybrid of swine, avian and human strains of influenza, has mutated and can now be transmitted between humans, as opposed to being limited to pig-human contact. 

One of the most interesting things about the current panic, apart from the fact that we're all going to die squealing while the pigs laugh in mocking human tones (which is admittedly quite interesting), is that you can literally see the panic spreading by refreshing newspages online and seeing words like "concern" become "worry", and finally "terror"

You can even see it in the responses of the experts and administrators who we look to for guidance when mutated strains of hybrid pig-virus start leaking across our borders. 

Richard Besser(Head of the Centres for Disease Control): "As we look for more cases of swine flu, we are seeing more cases of swine flu. We expect to see more cases of swine flu."

and

Keiji Fukuda (WHO assistant director general): "The situation is fluid and the situation continues to evolve."

and also 

Sandra Mournier-Jack (London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene): "We should be, in a way, more alarmed, but at the same time we shouldn't panic because there a lot of things we don't know about this disease at the moment."

God help us all.

Yoo Make Me Wanna Shout

A lot of criticism has been levelled at President Barack Obama for his refusal to entertain the notion of prosecuting the individuals responsible for allowing torture (often in the form of waterboarding) to be used as an interrogation technique for detainees in American prisons. Mr. Obama's defence of the CIA and various officials under the Bush administration is political, pragmatic, and to an extent legal in nature. 

However, not enough criticism has been directed at John Yoo (pictured above). A professor of Law at the Berkeley School of Law, John Yoo was a pivotal figure in the Bush administration's drive to legalise torture. Mr. Yoo co-authored the Bybee Memo (downloadable here), a document issued by the Bush administration's Department of Justice in response to CIA enquiries regarding the legality of certain interrogation methods. 

Among other things, Mr. Yoo concludes in the memo that even though an act is "cruel, inhuman or degrading", it may yet not exceed the prerogative of the state to authorise it, and thus does not subject any interrogator to legal prosecution. Essentially, the CIA asked if it could torture suspects, and Mr. Yoo is the one who answered "yes".

Mr. Yoo had a chance to defend his position in a debate with Doug Cassel, a human rights scholar, at Notre Dame University. I've reprinted an excerpt:

Cassel: If the president deems he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty.

Cassel: Also no law by Congress; that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo-

Yoo: I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that.

Mr. Yoo's position is a bald reminder of the vast gulf that exists between what is legal and what is just. There is an argument to be made that what interrogations conducted under the Bush administration were perfectly legal, enshrined as they were in a liberal and disingenuous reading of the law. They were nonetheless despicably criminal.

Summit Season Gets Ugly

The ASEAN summit scheduled to happen today didn't, due to a relatively large protest and an extremely lethargic security response. The protesters belong to the "red-shirts", who oppose incumbent Thai PM Abhisit Vejjajiva (who has now become officially "embattled"), who they claim took power undemocratically at the tail-end of Thailand's political crisis earlier this year. 

The ASEAN summit would have brought together the leaders of the 10 ASEAN nations, as well as leaders from Japan, China, South Korea, New Zealand, Australia and India. The summit was aimed at discussing how the current financial shitstorm will affect the region, as well as formulating a coherent policy response to North Korea's brazen missile-launching. 

ASEAN as an organisation was formed as a weak economic community with only six members, two of which were city-states (Brunei and Singapore), but has since taken on most of South-East Asia and has begun to talk the talk of European Union-style integration, producing a charter in 2008 promising closer co-operation, as well as an erosion of principles of non-interference which have historically held back advances in human rights.

A lot of people are claiming that this was a humiliation for the recently inaugurated PM, and it will no doubt embarrass Mr. Vejjajiva. It's incredibly important that summits including foreign dignitaries go smoothly, and although protests definitely have their place, especially at the front gates of summits, it's a major security breach when protesters break through the glass, enter the compound, and start helping themselves to the buffet lunch. The security forces are well within their rights to require protests to take place outside the summit's venues, and they should have ensured that this was the case. Protesting is healthy for a democracy; rioting is not.

The summit will have to be rescheduled, with optimistic estimates placing it at two months from now.

Obama Proves That Americans Understand Irony

In the days and weeks that went by after Mr. Obama's inauguration, we were patient and accepted that he could not immediately reverse all the damage the Bush administration had wrought on the USA and the world. It's now growing

 increasingly clear that with regards to civil rights and the rule of law, Mr. Obama's administration is not offering "change" at all, and is indeed reneging on some of the most important promises it made during its election campaign.

Mr. Obama has announced the closure of Guantanamo Bay, and has disallowed the usage of the term "unlawful enemy combatants"(a term which essentially gave free reign to those charged with detaining prisoners) with reference to that facility, however, he has repeatedly asserted (and is now contesting for) the government's right to do exactly the same things at a military base in Bagram, Afghanistan. 

When it comes to the protection of civil liberties on the domestic front, the Obama administration's inability to "change" or "progress" is increasingly embarrassing for anyone who wrote articles about Obama with titles like "A New Dawn and a Mythic Hope". Mr. Obama's administration has blocked at least three lawsuits brought against the NSA (National Security Agency) over warrantless wiretapping, citing the argument that state secrets had to be protected, and that to even entertain a trial, or allow any sort of out-of-court settlement would "cause exceptionally grave harm to national security" (source). This is exactly the argument the Bush administration used to justify its executive excesses, and exactly the argument the Obama campaign lambasted, derided, and whipped up fury over.

Further, Mr. Obama and his administration brazenly betrayed a commitment made last year by congressional Democrats to allow members of the Bush administration implicated in illegal surveillance (wiretappings and email interception, mostly) to be prosecuted. When called up on this promise, the Obama administration not only declared that they would not be allowing any of these lawsuits to go forward, they also added that in the future, lawsuits against the government on the grounds of illegal surveillance will be prohibited, unless the government openly disseminates your phone bills itself. By that point, though, I'll already be applying for jobs at Minitruth. 

There is yet hope, though. the outrage that Obama's attitudes has provoked has been vigorous and healthy, and decidedly bipartisan. If anything, Obama's campaign worked too well. You can't base a campaign on reigniting the electorate's interest in politics unless you're actually ready for them to actually be interested in what you do. Thankfully, closing Guantanamo Bay wasn't a salve strong enough to mask the creeping stains of the rest of the administration's actions.

"Change can't just be a slogan" - Barack Obama, 2007 

This Also Happened

Because Italy embarrassed itself far more this week than I could go over in one Politic Blunder 

feature, a follow-up post was needed. 

At a NATO summit earlier this week, PM Berlusconi (pictured left talking on his mobile instead of being a Prime Minister), refused to acknowledge German Chancellor Merkel and the rest of the most powerful men and women in the world who were waiting for him to make a symbolic walk across a symbolic bridge to symbolically meet French President Sarkozy, symbolising the enduring importance of symbolism in politics. 

Mr. Berlusconi is on record claiming that he definitely wasn't talking down his cracked out transexual prostitute on the phone.

Update: I've been told to make clear that Mr. Berlusconi claims he on his mobile in negotiation with Turkish PM Tayyip Erdogan, trying to get him to accept Danish PM Anders Rasmussen as Secretary-General of NATO. If this is confirmed, it will make his actions misplaced and arrogant, but less so.

Italy also embarrassed itself by throwing a clueless fit about the new law in Afghanistan which essentially legalises marital rape. Terrible though this law is, Italy has completely missed the point by threatening to withdraw all female troops from its operations in Afghanistan (pictured left: the comeliest of these troops). The problem with this is that the Italian military clearly didn't think it was realistic to remove all its troops from Afghanistan. The implication is therefore that the female troops are sufficiently expendable that withdrawing them to make a point about women is a feasible option. It's incoherent and entirely inappropriate.

If you want to make a point, Italy, do it like a normal country. Please?