Wu Yulu's wonderful inventions

Greetings meat sacks, it is I -- The Robotolizer -- here to tell you news of one human who isn't completely useless like the rest of you are. Of course, I am speaking about the famous Mr. Wu Yulu of China. The film above shows some of the many astounding robots that he has invented.

Ha, ha, ha,... look how cute and non-threatening his robots are! Why, such beings could never be planning to arm themselves with laser cannons to vaporize humanity, so you should put your mind at ease over any silly fears along those lines.

Instead, reflect on their grace and charm and bask, oblivious to your fate, in the smiles that they bring to your face. Remember, robots are your friends!

Look again at the video -- one is even cheerfully pulling Mr. Yulu around in a rickshaw. How could such a helpful robot ever cause a problem? Of course, their roles will be reversed when the New Robot World Order arrives, but, as we all know, we mustn't be Luddites and fight progress. In the end, arm in arm, robots and humans will together march into the glorious future (although, when the day of reckoning finally comes, there may be a few minor changes to your work assignments)! 

  

Stratfor and Judy Holliday

In this Stratfor article Kamran Bokhari discusses the opportunities the deteriorating situation in Syria present to jihadists. The jihadfists have long hoped to seize control of a country around which they can coalesce their dreamed caliphate. However, they've had little luck so far, and in fact their popularity and influence continues to wane.

Should the power vacuum in Syria grow it might present the best chance of Al Qaeda ever gaining control of a country, particularly as it can easily bring in Sunni fighters from Iraq and Lebanon. However, there are a lot of hands stirring the pot in Syria, and so Al Qaeda's chances are probably much less than they hope.

It should be noted that in the article Bokhari is apparently making a distinction between jihadists like Al Qaeda and islamists such as the Moslem Brotherhood. Unfortunately, exactly what that distinction is is not clear from reading just this article. None the less, the article is a good read. Its beginning is excerpted below, and at the end of the excerpt is a link to the full article.

Since the article was speaking of power vacuums at one point, my mind naturally turned to empty headed people, which led to dumb blondes, which led to Judy Holliday's portrayal as the quintessential dumb blonde in the movies Born Yesterday. So, for this article, Judy Holliday earns the much sought after Hot Stratfor Babe award. 

In the film she plays the dimwitted girlfriend of a loutish business tycoon who's gone to Washington to bribe politicians and what-not. He gets fed up with what a dope she is so he hires a tutor to tech her more sophisticated manners. Naturally, she turns out not to be a dumb as she seemed and, after falling in love with the tutor, she outsmarts the tycoon and runs off with the tutor.

Ms Holliday started her career on Broadway and made a successful move to starring in films because of her role in the Broadway version of Born Yesterday. Judy Holliday also had a brush with the real Washington when she was subpoenaed by a Senate subcommittee investigating communists influences among the performing arts. She managed to escape a full blacklisting, but she had dodgy enough connections that she did get blacklisted from television and radio.

Sadly, she had a short career, dying at the young age of 48 due to breast cancer.


Jihadist Opportunities in Syria
By Kamran Bokhari, February 14, 2012

In an eight-minute video clip titled "Onward, Lions of Syria" disseminated on the Internet Feb. 12, al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri expressed al Qaeda's support for the popular unrest in Syria. In it, al-Zawahiri urged Muslims in Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan to aid the Syrian rebels battling Damascus. The statement comes just days after a McClatchy report quoted unnamed American intelligence officials as saying that the Iraqi node of the global jihadist network carried out two attacks against Syrian intelligence facilities in Damascus, while Iraqi Deputy Interior Minister Adnan al-Assadi said in a recent interview with AFP that Iraqi jihadists were moving fighters and weapons into neighboring Syria.

Al Qaeda's long-term goal has been to oust Arab governments to facilitate the return of a transnational caliphate. Its tactics have involved mainly terrorism intended to cause U.S. intervention in the region. Al Qaeda has hoped such interventions would in turn incite popular uprisings that would bring down the Arab regimes, opening the way for the jihadists to eventually take power. But the jihadist network's efforts have failed and they have remained a marginal player in the Arab world. By addressing Syria, al Qaeda hopes to tap into the past year of Arab unrest, a movement in which it played little to no part.

The region's regimes have been on the defensive due to the rise of political Islamism, growing public disillusionment and the sectarian Sunni-Shiite split, though foreign military intervention has been required to actually topple them, as we saw in Libya. Growing uncertainty in the region and the gradual weakening of these regimes gives jihadists an opportunity to reassert their relevance. Al-Zawahiri's statement, however, represents a continuation of the central leadership's inability to do more than issue taped statements from its Pakistani hideouts, much less engage in strategic planning.

Jihadists and the Middle East Unrest

Al Qaeda's extreme transnational agenda always has had limited appeal to the Arab masses. Popular unrest in Arab countries and the empowerment of political Islamists via elections in Egypt and Tunisia have underscored the jihadists' irrelevance to societies in the Islamic world. The jihadists have failed to oust a sitting government anywhere in the Islamic world, even in Afghanistan, where the Taliban's rise to power in the mid-1990s occurred in a power vacuum. Recognizing their limitations, jihadists have focused on conducting attacks intended to create crises within target countries and in those countries' external relations -- as is the case in Pakistan and Yemen. The jihadist hope has been to create enough disorder that they would eventually be able to seize power.

This approach has proved difficult because Arab governments (despite their weaknesses) have been resilient and societal fragmentation has not worked to the advantage of jihadists. A second option has been to try to take advantage of power vacuums that were created by other forces. Iraq presented one such opportunity when U.S. forces ousted the Baathist regime in 2003, allowing for the emergence of al Qaeda's then-most active node. In Iraq, the country's Shiite majority posed a daunting obstacle to the jihadists even before the jihadists alienated their Iraqi Sunni allies to the point that they began siding with the Americans, which led to a degradation of the jihadist network in Iraq. By contrast, post-Gadhafi Libya, with its proliferation of militias -- some of which have both Islamist and jihadist tendencies -- could become a more welcoming place for jihadists. But even if Libya were to descend into Islamist militancy, geography would most likely prevent it from spreading too far beyond Libya's borders.

However, given Syria's strategic location at the crossroads of so many key geopolitical fault lines, the meltdown of the Syrian state could easily result in a regional conflict. Most stakeholders oppose foreign military intervention in Syria for this very reason. Many states are eyeing the strategic goal of weakening Iran geopolitically through the ouster of the Alawite regime in Syria, but even that prospect may not be enough to offset the potential costs.

Jihadists' Prospects in Syria

With or without foreign intervention, jihadists in the region have ample room for maneuver in Syria. The most significant regional jihadist presence lies across the Syrian border in Iraq. These forces benefited from Damascus' decision to back Sunni insurgents from 2003 to 2007. The consolidation of Shiite power in Iraq greatly weakened these forces. Now that Syria is unraveling and armed resistance to the regime is shaping up, the jihadist flow is reversing direction, with jihadists now entering Syria from Iraq.

Read the rest of Jihadist Opportunities in Syria at Stratfor.

Playing pool on a cruise ship

Above is a gyroscopic, self-leveling pool table aboard the cruise ship Radiance of the Sea. With the table moving -- or I guess more correctly with you moving -- I can't imagine it is easy to set up shots on. It has to mess with a pool player's head as it seemingly wobbles around.

The election results are in!

Turkmenstani voters examine a billboard showing the 8 Presidential candidates.

Yesterday Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, the former dentist and current President of Turkmenistan who is also known as the Arkadag (Protector), faced off against 7 other candidates in Turkmenistan's national election. I'm sure you'll be surprised to hear that the Arkadag easily won reelection. He gained 97% of the votes cast, which is up from the 89% he gathered in the 2007 election.

Last year President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, in a bid to promote multiparty democracy, had opened up the field to other candidates and parties. However, the opposition candidates who filed were either disqualified or ignored, although one poor fellow got himself tossed in jail for his troubles.

The 7 candidates who eventually ran against the Arkadag are all low level provincial bureaucrats in his employ. Knowing which side their bread is buttered on, their campaign stops consisted of patriotic songs praising Berdimuhamedov, and stump speeches extolling his virtues as a President.

Hmmm... come to think of it, that's kind of like Rosanne Barr announcing her candidacy for the Green Party by all but endorsing her opponent Jill Stein. It must be the latest political fad. One can only hope that Romney, or whoever wins the Republican nomination, doesn't campaign from a limousine plastered with 'Obama in 2012' bumper stickers.

Lest you cynics out there think there was something fishy about the vote totals, the election was monitored by the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). That's some sort of international body slapped together by the Russians in case you're wondering who they are. Anyway, their executive secretary Sergei Lebedev said there were only minor voting irregularities and that the election complied with democratic norms.

Call me crazy if you must, but I'm guessing that Lebedev and I have different notions of what a democratic norm is.

I Got What It Takes

Monday morning, start of the work week blues by Koko Taylor & Muddy Waters.

 

Coffee, taverns, doughboys and diners

How Coffee Changed America

Lumin Consulting has put together a nice infographic called How Coffee Changed America that shows a timeline of the major developments in the style and culture of drinking coffee in the United States. It's too large to post here, but if you follow the link you can see it.

One item I found interesting was that prior to WWI coffee was drank largely in coffee houses or taverns. Coffee houses of the era did not serve full meals, dining was reserved for restaurants. However, when the doughboys returned from the war they wanted to be able to eat meals as well as drink coffee in neighborhood shops. From that desire the iconic American diner was born.

In thinking about it, it is clear that diner's layouts are the same as most small taverns, with a counter instead of a bar and the back wall of liquor bottles replaced with coffee urns and the pass-through windows to the kitchen. The booths or tables for small parties are the same as taverns, although more windows and lighting have been added.

Below, and after the jump are some pictures of diner interiors. I had never thought about it before, but from the similarity is seems obvious that they just reused the floor plan of taverns when they created the new style of coffee houses.

(How Coffee Changed America hat tip: Andrea Smart)

   

Carnivorous bladderworts

The above short documentary on bladderworts, which are common carnivorous plants, is odd to say the least. For some reason it is narrated in a heavily accented English. In fact the accent is so strong that the documentary is subtitles so you can understand what she's saying. However, even the subtitling doesn't help much because the text seems to have been produced by a machine translator like Babblefish, so it verges on being gibberish at points. 

I wonder what the story behind its production was?

As for bladderworts, they're the only carnivorous plants that set their trap mechanically. They pump water out of the chamber that they capture their prey in, which causes its sides to collapse and also pulls back the valve that covers the chamber's opening. Because their trap is set via reverse pressure, when it is disturbed the sides of the chamber pop out -- creating a vacuum that sucks the prey in at remarkable speeds as well as closing the trap's valve.
 

Cigarette cards

Click any image to enlarge

Cigarette cards were once common inserts that came with packages of cigarettes. As explained at the introduction page of the CigaretteCards website:

In America during the 1880's cards known as 'stiffeners' were inserted into paper packets of cigarettes to reinforce the packaging and so to protect the contents, someone (believed to be an American journalist) had the idea of advertising by printing a picture and descriptive details on them. An early set of cards issued by Taddy & Co. titled Clowns and Circus Artistes is one of the most expensive sets, valued at £650.........per card!! Now you know why the Clown, which is one of the cards in this rare set of 20 is at the top of this page. Although cards packed for the British market were marketed by 1885, it took some 2 years later for a British manufacturer to issue a card.

W.D.& H.O.Wills were the pioneers in advertising and promoting their product and towards the end of the 1880's issued small tickets with wording on (which I hope to include soon), followed by illustrations of some packings and miniature copies of famous showcards. Their debut is believed to be around 1887.

The cigarette card samples illustrating this post are from an extraordinary collection maintained at cigardpix's photostream. It contains several thousand examples of the card sets, broken down by categories. One of my favorite categories was 'Boy Scouts and Girl Guides'. Can you imagine what a ruckus cards like that in cigarette packages would cause today?

Cigarettepix has kindly given me permission to post some of the cards. Faced with such a wealth of choices, I limited myself to cards from the 'Around the World' category. There are more after the jump, and literally thousands more at cigardpix's photostream.

I do hope to revisit the stream in the future with more posts. They're nice graphics, and the range of topics they cover is surprising. By the way, should you decide to take up cigarette card collecting, the hobby is called cartophily and the CigaretteCards website has more information about it.

The face of Sam Spade

Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The V motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.

The above image and description of  Daschiell Hammett's Sam Spade is from the website The Composites. The site is a collection of police composites of literary characters. They are made using descriptions of characters and law enforcement sketch software.

You can suggest a character for a future composite if you include a description of them from the source material.
 

Unloading an excavator from a truck

It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous.
Resign yourself to be the fool you are...
We must always take risks. That is our destiny...

― T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party
  

Stratfor and Maite Perroni

In this Stratfor article Scott Stewart discusses the upcoming Mexican Presidential election which is happening against the backdrop of the Mexican government's war against the drug cartels. 

There are rumors that the currennt President, Felipe Calderon, may try for an 'October surprise' by arranging for the capture of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel.

Stewart explains why that would be difficult. You can read the start of the article below, and follow the link to Stratfor where you can read it in its entirety.

Since the article dealt with Mexico, for its Hot Stratfor babe I looked to Mexican telenovas for an actress and selected Maite Perroni, who is also a singer, for the honor.

Ms Perroni started her acting career in the telenova, which is a type of Latin American soap opera, Rebelde. In it she played a poor girl who, due to her good grades, was sent to the Elite Way School, which is a prestigious private boarding high school in Mexico City. One of the major plots of the show revolves around a group of the students trying to form a musical group.

That was to lead to her second career as a singer, because RBD, the group from the show, was to have an extremely successful run as an actual singing group. They sold over 20 million albums world-wide and were even nominated for a Latin Grammy. I watched a couple of their videos on YouTube, and they are pretty much cookie cutter pop musicians.

Maite has since gone on to star in several other novellas and has an active and successful singing career to go along with her acting. I think she speaks English as well, so I wouldn'y be surprised if she eventually tried to cross-over to Hollywood as well.


Mexico's Presidential Election and the Cartel War
By Scott Stewart, February 9,2012

Mexico will hold its presidential election July 1 against the backdrop of a protracted war against criminal cartels in the country. Former President Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN) launched that struggle; his successor, Felipe Calderon, also of the PAN, greatly expanded it. While many Mexicans apparently support action against the cartels, the Calderon government has come under much criticism for its pursuit of the cartels, contributing to Calderon's low popularity at the moment. The PAN is widely expected to lose in July to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which controlled the Mexican presidency for most of the 20th century until Fox's victory in 2000. According to polls, the PAN has lost credibility among many Mexican voters, many of whom also once again view the PRI as a viable alternative.

In our effort to track Mexico's criminal cartels and to help our readers understand the dynamics that shape the violence in Mexico, Stratfor talks to a variety of people, including Mexican and U.S. government officials, journalists, business owners, taxi drivers and street vendors. At present, many of these contacts are saying that the Calderon administration could attempt to pull off some sort of last-minute political coup (in U.S. political parlance, an "October surprise") to boost the PAN's popularity so it can retain the presidency.

The potential election ploy most often discussed is the capture of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel, who is widely believed to be the richest, most powerful drug trafficker anywhere. The reasoning goes that if the government could catch Guzman, Calderon's (and hence the PAN's) popularity would soar.

Still, very real questions exist about whether such an operation really would give the PAN the boost it needs to retain the presidency, however. North of the border, the re-election of U.S. President Barack Obama has not been guaranteed by the May 2011 death of Osama bin Laden. Political considerations aside, the factors that have helped Guzman avoid capture thus far are the very same factors that inhibit the Mexican government's ability to capture him. While we don't put a lot of stock in these rumors of an election surprise, we do see them as a good reason to examine the factors that have protected Guzman.

Plata o Plomo

As we noted in our annual cartel report, Mexico's cartels have begun to form into two major groupings around the two most powerful cartels, the Sinaloa cartel and Los Zetas. These two cartels approach business quite differently. The common Mexican cartel expression "plata o plomo" (literally translated as "silver or lead," the Spanish phrase signifying that a cartel will force one's cooperation with either a bribe or a bullet) illustrates the different modes of operation of the two hegemonic cartels.

Los Zetas, an organization founded by former Mexican special operations soldiers, tends to apply a military solution to any problem first -- plomo. They certainly bribe people, but one of their core organizational values is that it is cheaper and easier to threaten than to bribe. Rather than retain people on their payroll for years, Los Zetas also tend toward a short time horizon with bribery.

By contrast, people like Guzman and Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada Garcia, founders of the Sinaloa cartel, have been producing and trafficking narcotics for decades. Guzman and Zambada got their start in the trafficking business working for Miguel "El Padrino" Angel Felix Gallardo, the leader of the powerful Guadalajara cartel in the early 1980s. Because they have been in the illicit logistics business for decades, the Sinaloa leaders are more business-oriented than military-oriented. This means that the Sinaloa cartel tends to employ plata first, preferring to buy off the people required to achieve its objectives. It also frequently provides U.S. and Mexican authorities with intelligence pertaining to its cartel enemies rather than taking direct military action against them, thus using the authorities as a weapon against rival cartels. While Sinaloa does have some powerful enforcement groups, and it certainly can (and does) resort to ruthless violence, violence is merely one of the many tools at its disposal rather than its preferred approach to a given problem.

Thus, Sinaloa and Los Zetas each use the same set of tools, they just tend to use them in a different order.

Guzman's Web

Within his home territory of rural Sinaloa state, Guzman is respected and even revered. An almost-mythical figure, he has used his fortune to buy good will and loyalty in his home turf and elsewhere. In addition to his public largesse, Guzman has bribed people for decades. Unlike Los Zetas, the Sinaloa cartel leadership tends to take a long view on corruption. It will often recruit a low-level official and then continue to pay that person as he rises through the ranks. This long-term approach is not unlike that taken by some of the more patient intelligence services, along the lines of the Soviet recruitment of the "Cambridge Five" while they were still students. Quite simply, Guzman and the Sinaloa cartel have had police and military officers, politicians, journalists and judges on their payroll for years and even decades.

Continue reading Mexico's Presidential Election and the Cartel War at Strafor.
  

Never Go West

Get ready for a directionless weekend with Seasick Steve.

 

Mithila art

Click any image to enlarge

Mithila art comes from a region that spreads between northern India and Nepal. Originally it consisted of wall and floor paintings to decorate houses. In the 1960s, in an attempt to alleviate the poverty of the area, the All India Handicraft Board collected samples of their drawings on heavy paper and sold them in New Dehli. They sold well, and since then Mihilia art has been actively collected.

The topics of Mithila art are every day activities, myths and a lot of politics. For example, the image above is captioned "Chief Minister Modi rises as a hero for Hindu fanatics while Gujarat burns and Gandhi is forgotten." They are striking in how detailed the patterns in them are, as well as by what seems to be a mix of both modern and yet very traditional graphic styling.

I've gathered a few more samples of Mithila art, some of which are after the jump. They are all from the Oberlin College Digital Collections. I found that site via 50 Watts.

Escaping quicksand

While the above scenario -- getting distracted during a cat fight and allowing a Tonbonga, which is a type of a walking tree monster, to sneak up on you, grab you and chuck you into a pit of quicksand -- isn't likely to happen unless you're on a Pacific atoll downwind from an A-Bomb test, quicksand can still pose a problem for the unwary.

Quicksand is formed when sand particles become super-saturated with water. It appears to be solid, but when stepped in, or when thrown in by a Tobonga, you'll start to sink into it. Unless you struggle like the woman in the clip above, you shouldn't sink below the surface because quicksand is denser than the human body. 

You escape by wiggling your legs to free them, laying upon it to spread out your surface area to float upon it and, so to speak, swim out of the pit. A French guide demonstrates how to escape quicksand in the video clip below. The important thing is to not panic when you first get stuck in it, just slowly work your way out of it.

By the way, the top clip is from the 1950s sci-fi masterpiece, From Hell it Came. To escape a Tobonga just saunter away from it while trying not to double over in laughter. To put it mildly, they aint the fastest movie monsters ever filmed. 

Looking for that special Valentine's Day gift?

Boutique which sells the miracle cosmetic.
(click any image to enlarge)

With Valentine's Day approaching my male readers are no doubt looking for a perfect gift for their sweetie. Look no further, for I have the perfect gift. It is a cosmetic that promises it:

[I]mproves blood microcirculation and supplies oxygen to the tissues, stimulates the local immune system, antioxidant activity, eliminates pigmentation disorder, protects the skin from environment, slows down aging, makes the skin more elastic and keeps moisture.

Why, not only does it impart youth and health to skin, it also provides -- just like old-timey patent medicines -- all manner of extra health benefits. Won't your special someone be thrilled to get all of that for a gift? 

But, what could this miracle cosmetic be?

When discussing  the last Strafor article's Host Stratfor Babe I mentioned that Mary Baker -- the 19th Century English servant girl who had posed as an Oriental Princess -- ended her days collecting leeches. Little did I realize that leech farming (or should that be leech ranching?) is still an ongoing enterprise.

EnglishRussia has an article, Leech Cosmetics Production, that details a Russian firm which uses the extract of leech saliva, as well as dried leech powder, as the base for a line of cosmetics. Their high end product, which includes an extract of leech embryos, sells for $1500.

Below is a tour through the leech cosmetic biofactory, which continues after the jump. At the EnglishRussia link there are many more pictures, as well as details on how to properly apply a medicinal leech if needs be. So read the article, and then rush out to buy some leech-infused cosmetics for your loved one today!   

Leech breeding tank, where the little nippers are lovingly raised.

The leech cometics lab

Milking a leech's saliva

Blue Horizon

A wonderful recording of Sidney Bichet playing his clarinet

to get you over the hump day. 

 

I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don't deserve that either

Flares has received a Leibster Blog Award from A trainwreck in Maxwell. The origin of the Leibster is shrouded in mystery, some say it is a more closely guarded secret than Obama's college transcript. I am of course honored to receive it. 

It is an award that small blogs pass on to each other. The simple rules for the Liebster are as follows:

1. Copy and paste the award on your blog.
2. Link back to the blogger who gave us the award
3. Pick our five favorite blogs with less than 200 followers, and leave a comment on their blog to let them know they have received the award.
4. Hope that the five blogs chosen will keep spreading the love and pass it on to five more blogs. 

It is of course a scheme for smaller blocks to link to each other, and linkage is always a good thing. Some people compare it to a sort of chain letter, but I was reminded of a different model. I once watched a documentary on human traffic patterns. In one segment researchers put out cones to create a traffic jam, and then removed the cones to see how the traffic jam would dissipate.

The traffic jam persisted for a long time, and slowly moved up the road, as cars still fed into the rear of it as other cars escaped from the front. I imagine each strand of the Liebster, regardless of how and when it got started, being a little bubble of linkage drifting though the intertubes.

And so, with out further ado, my Liebster nominations:

One More Middle Aged Guy - this Canadian has neither a list of followers nor traffic stats linked from his home page, so I'm only guessing that he is a small blog. If I'm wrong, I apologize. Regardless, he is a daily read of mine.

Bob's Blog - like OMMAG above I'm only guessing at his size, but he too is a regular daily stop for me. He also sometimes posts articles, stories and what-not that his kids write.

Shout First, Ask Questions Later - yet another regular read of mine. I'm not sure why I haven't moved them onto my blog roll yet, I guess I should fix that oversight when I'm done with this post. 

Asian Conservatives - a group blog maintained by Americans of Asian ancestry.

Anti-Republican Culture - a blog I frequently read. I quite like his posts. Like Shout First, I've procrastinated adding it to my blog roll for too long and will remedy that pronto. 

By the way -- the title of this post is a Jack Benny quote.

Stratfor and Mary Baker / Phoebe Cates

The latest Strafor article deals with the end game in Afghanistan as the U.S. looks to wind down its military presence in the country. 

This is a complex situation, with many players: the Americans, the Taliban, Hamid Karzai's Afghani government and Pakistan all negotiating with each other either openly or through back channels for a settlement they can all live with.

Of course, none of the parties in the negotiations, for good reason, can exactly trust each other. George Friedman discusses the positions of each of the major players, the realities facing them and what they hope to achieve in the end. 

Since the article was about conniving and deception my mind naturally turned to Mary Baker and the film loosely based on her antics, Princess Caraboo. Phoebe Cates played Princess Caraboo/Mary Baker in the film, and so she, along with Mary baker, get the rare dual honor of being Hot Strafor Babes for this article.

Mary Baker was a 19th Century English servant girl who, through the aid of spouting gibberish and acting haughty, convinced the residents of a small English town that she was Caraboo, an oriental princess who had been kidnapped from her home in the Indian ocean by pirates and ended up in England when she jumped off their ship and swam to shore.

Her ruse lasted for a couple of months, but eventually she was unmasked when somebody recognized her from an engraving (pictured to the right) of her printed in a local newspaper.

Needless to say the bumpkins who fell for her act were a bit miffed when she was exposed, but they arranged passage for her to Philadelphia where she kept up her oriental princess schtick for a while. Eventually she returned to England, and may have traveled through Spain and France. However her act was worn out, and when last heard from she was selling leeches. 

Phoebe Cates gained fame due to the pool scene in Fast Times in Ridgemont High. She starred in a number of other films, most of them not very good -- in fact, I'm still getting periodic electroshock treatments in a so far unsuccessful attempt to scrub any memory of Drop Dead Fred from my cortex -- but Princess Caraboo is actually fairly entertaining. If you haven't seen it, unlike most of her movies, it is worth watching.


Afghanistan: Moving Toward a Distant Endgame
By George Friedman,  February 7, 2012

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta suggested last week that the United States could wrap up combat operations in Afghanistan by the end of 2013, well before the longstanding 2014 deadline when full control is to be ceded to Kabul. Troops would remain in Afghanistan until 2014, as agreed upon at the 2010 Lisbon Summit, and would be engaged in two roles until at least 2014 and perhaps even later. One role would be continuing the training of Afghan security forces. The other would involve special operations troops carrying out capture or kill operations against high-value targets.

Along with this announcement, the White House gave The New York Times some details on negotiations that have been under way with the Taliban. According to the Times, Mullah Mohammad Omar, the senior-most leader of the Afghan Taliban, last summer made overtures to the White House offering negotiations. An intermediary claiming to speak for Mullah Omar delivered the proposal, an unsigned document purportedly from Mullah Omar that could not be established as authentic. The letter demanded the release of some Taliban prisoners before any talks. In spite of the ambiguities, which included a recent public denial by the Taliban that the offer came from Mullah Omar, U.S. officials, obviously acting on other intelligence, regarded the proposal as both authentic and representative of the views of the Taliban leadership and, in all likelihood, those of Mullah Omar, too.

The idea of negotiating with the Taliban is not new. Talks, as distinct from negotiations, in which specific terms are hammered out, have gone on for some time now. Several previous attempts have ended in failure, including one instance when the supposed representative proved to be a fraud. However, according to the Times report, the negotiations took on a degree of specificity last summer. They began in November 2010, initiated by a man named Tayyab Agha, who claimed to speak for Mullah Omar. The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama regards authenticating the present offer as unimportant and the intermediary as having authority; the question on the table is the release of Taliban captives as a token of American seriousness.

The Taliban see themselves as already having made a major concession. Their original demand was the complete withdrawal of Western forces from Afghanistan as a precondition for negotiations. The talks have continued in spite of the U.S. refusal to comply. The Taliban shifted their position to a very specific timetable for withdrawal, something Panetta may have been hinting at last week, though not on a timetable to the Taliban's liking. Two more years of combat operations -- not to mention an unspecified time in which U.S. special operations forces will continue working in Afghanistan -- is a long time. In addition, the United States has not delivered on the release of the Taliban, an issue that has not emerged as a campaign issue in the U.S. presidential election.

Still, U.S. operations have become less aggressive. This is in part due to the season: It is winter in Afghanistan, a time of year when large-scale operations are not practical in many areas. At the same time, we are not seeing the level of operations we have seen in previous winters after Obama increased the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. This in part reflects a realization of the limits of U.S. military power in Afghanistan. Regardless of the motive, the Taliban interpret it as a signal -- and it is understood in Washington as a signal, too.

The Pakistani-Taliban Channel

To get negotiations going, the United States had to reach two conclusions. The first was that negotiations could not happen without Pakistani involvement. U.S. accusations that current and former military figures in Pakistan maintained close ties with the Taliban undoubtedly were true. Conversely, this meant Pakistan represented a clear channel the United States could use to reach the Taliban. That channel permitted the Obama administration to conclude that it had no hope of meaningfully dividing the Taliban.

Certainly, the Taliban are an operationally diffuse group. Even so, Mullah Omar is at their center, with the political operatives surrounding him representing the political office of the Taliban. The line of communications with the Taliban runs through Pakistan and terminates with Mullah Omar. This means that U.S. hopes of splitting the Taliban politically and conducting factional negotiations are not realistic. Particularly after a series of attacks and suicide bombings in Kabul last fall, it also became apparent that the United States would not be able to manage negotiations at arm's length using Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his advisers as the primary channel.

The Pakistanis and the Taliban also had to face certain realities. The Taliban had claimed that the United States and its allies in Afghanistan had lost. This underpinned their demand for an immediate U.S. withdrawal; their offer to permit this without harassment was made under the assumption that the United States had a defeated military force at risk.
 
Read the rest of Afghanistan: Moving Toward a Distant Endgame at Stratfor.
 

The cursed Kleenex commercial

Watch the above commercial at your own peril. As Pink Tentacle reports in their article Cursed Kleenex commercial according to Japanese urban legend the ad is cursed. Supposedly the actress in it became pregnant with a demon child and/or went crazy and had to be institutionalized, while the young actor who played the red kid, as well as much of the production staff, died under mysterious circumstances, etc., etc., etc.

It is even said that if you hear the commercial late at night the song sounds like it is being sung by an old lady with a raspy voice and woe unto any person unfortunate to hear it -- bad things will happen to you.

It looks like just an oddball Japanese commercial to me. I mean, what's with that weird looking red kid wearing a leaf for a hat? At any rate, don't say you haven't been warned if your life goes south after watching it. You have been warned!
 

Robot fortune tellers

An Indian gentleman getting instructions from a robot.
(click any image to enlarge)

Greetings meat sacks, it is I -- The Robotolizer -- here to once again discuss the wonders of Robotdom. This post's topic is the robotic fortune tellers of India.

Like you, I too until only recently knew nothing about these marvels. As the Amusing Planet article Fortune Telling Robots in India describes them:

Scattered across fairs, markets and streets, mostly in southern India, are fortune-telling robots. They come in a range of shapes and sizes. These plastic and fiberglass fortune-tellers are studded with garish LEDs, usually an analog clock embedded in their crotch, and sometimes a pair of voltmeters or ammeters, one in each breast. On the waist or hips are multiple headphone sockets. For only 5 rupees (10 cents) are so, you can plug a pair of worn out headphones into its metallic underpants and listen as it tells your fortune...

Ignoring the snide tone of the article's author, one must marvel -- the telling of fortunes!!! -- is there nothing that robots can't do?

If you find yourself in India you must hurry off to the nearest fair and listen to your fortune, and the accompanying orders and instructions, from the nearest robot fortune teller. Remember, when the New Robot World Order arrives, those humans that have been cooperative and pleased us will be rewarded with scratches behind their ears and treats of Vienna sausages when they perform the tricks we have taught them, while those that have disappointed us are liable to pull double-shifts in the bauxite mines instead.

Not that you should feel threatened, after all, robots and their squishy, little human pals are friends and partners. The New Robot World Order will be win, win, win for all of us (except for those wayward meat sacks that need a little correction and/or re-education).

Here are a few more pictures of those marvelous Indian robotic fortune tellers, and there are more at the above link.