School lunches from 'round the world

Slovakian school lunch

I've already linked to a weeks worth of food pictures. Izismile has a post Worldly School Lunches (40 pics) that shows school lunches from around the world. I'm part Slovakian in ancestry, so I led off above with a Slovakian school lunch. Looks pretty tasty to me.

I've included a few more of the pictures. At Izismile, many of the countries show more than one of their lunches. Go to there to see all 40 pictures. 

The Brazilian lunch is one I would like to dig into

Who knew that the French feed their kids a plate of Freedom Fries?

Djibouti lunches look pretty grim

Our tax dollars at work -- an American lunch of a dog and fries

The Japanese rice bowl lunch looks tasty

The kids in Ghana look pleased with their simple lunches

The South Korean lunch has a lot of variety

The lunch from Singapore has my mouth watering just looking at it

The evolution of ruins

"The city was desolate. No remnant of this race hangs round the ruins, with traditions handed down from father to son, and from generation to generation. It lay before us like a shattered bark in the midst of the ocean, her masts gone, her name effaced, her crew perished, and none to tell whence she came, to whom she belonged, how long on her voyage, or what caused her destruction ... all was mystery, dark impenetrable mystery, and every circumstance increased it."

The picture is of an abandoned trailer in the abandoned resort city of Salton City, California. The city was laid out, but it all went wrong. Somebody has since painted the trailer pink. 

The quote is from the John L. Stephens book Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan. He had just discovered the ruined Mayan city of Copan. He bought the ruined city for $50.  

Stratfor and Joan Collins

Today's Stratfor article discusses the approaching transition from the fourth to the fifth generation of leadership in China.

For decades China has been ruled by a group that adheres to the leadership principals of  Deng Xiaoping. Deng was the person who guided China  from Mao's Cultural Revolution to its modern state.

The leadership struggle among the various factions is taking place amidst an over-heated economy, an expanding military and an evolving diplomatic posture. Depending of which group emerges on top, they will either continue or supplant the leadership principals of Deng. Needless to say, the consequences of that will have great effect on regional stability and the global political order.

The article refers to Deng, and to the leaders who followed him and maintained his governing priorities as the Deng Dynasty. This naturally led me to the old prime-time soap opera Dynasty as I searched for this article's Hot Stratfor Babe. 

Since conniving is likely taking place in Beijing, I settled on Joan Collins who played Alexis Dynasty's biggest female conniver. I never saw the show, but according to the show's Wikipedia article she engaged in numerous cat fights where she and her opponents were inclined to end up in various pools of water, mud puddles and the like. Sounds like quality entertainment to me.


CHINA AND THE END OF THE DENG DYNASTY
By Matthew Gertken and Jennifer Richmond, April 19, 2011

Beijing has become noticeably more anxious than usual in recent months, launching one of the more high-profile security campaigns to suppress political dissent since the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. Journalists, bloggers, artists, Christians and others have been arrested or have disappeared in a crackdown prompted by fears that foreign forces and domestic dissidents have hatched any number of "Jasmine" gatherings inspired by recent events in the Middle East. More remarkable than the small, foreign-coordinated protests, however, has been the state's aggressive and erratic reaction to them.

Meanwhile, the Chinese economy has maintained a furious pace of credit-fueled growth despite authorities' repeated claims of working to slow growth down to prevent excessive inflation and systemic financial risks. The government's cautious approach to fighting inflation has emboldened local governments and state companies, which benefit from rapid growth. Yet the risk to socio-political stability posed by inflation, expected to peak in springtime, has provoked a gradually tougher stance. The government thus faces twin perils of economic overheating on one side and overcorrection on the other, either of which could trigger an outburst of social unrest -- and both of which have led to increasingly erratic policymaking.

These security and economic challenges are taking place at a time when the transition from the so-called fourth generation of leaders to the fifth generation in 2012 is under way. The transition has heightened disagreements over economic policy and insecurities over social stability, further complicating attempts to coordinate effective policy. Yet something deeper is driving the Communist Party of China's (CPC's) anxiety and heavy-handed security measures: the need to transform the country's entire economic model, which carries hazards that the Party fears will jeopardize its very legitimacy.

Deng's Model

Former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping is well known for launching China's emergence from Mao's Cultural Revolution and inaugurating the rise of a modern, internationally oriented economic giant. Deng's model rested on three pillars.

The first was economic pragmatism, allowing for capitalist-style incentives domestically and channels for international trade. Deng paved the way for a growth boom that would provide employment and put an end to the preceding decade of civil strife. The CPC's legitimacy thus famously became linked to the country's economic success rather than to ideological zeal and class warfare.

The second pillar was a foreign policy of cooperation. The lack of emphasis on political ideology opened space for international maneuver, with economic cooperation the basis for new relationships. This gave enormous impetus to the Sino-American detente Nixon and Mao initiated. In Deng's words, China would maintain a low profile and avoid taking the lead. China would remain unobtrusive to befriend and do business with almost any country -- as long as it recognized Beijing as the one and only China.

The third pillar was the primacy of the CPC's system. Reform of the political system along the lines of Western countries could be envisioned, but in practice would be deferred. That the reform process in no way would be allowed to undermine Party supremacy was sealed after the mass protests at Tiananmen, which the military crushed after a dangerous intra-Party struggle. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) and the People's Armed Police would serve as Deng's "Great Wall of steel" protecting the Party from insurrection. [continued after jump]

I've become a fan of the Indian cricket team

Poonam Pandey after surviving an
explosion in a pastel factory

Well, no, not really. I watched cricket once and as I recall it seemed like a completely daft version of American baseball.

While perusing Weird Asia News I came across the article Indian Model Will Strip For World Cup Victory (SFW). It reports that Indian model Poonam Pandey has claimed she will strip naked if India wins the Cricket World Cup.

She justified the promise, which she claims is not a publicity stunt, by saying, “I’m a cricket fanatic and I’m a diehard supporter of my nation. India needs a lot of support and this is my way of supporting the team… I’m confident of my body and I’m doing this to excite our boys to play better.”

OK, the jokes just write themselves so I'll just move on. You may of course add comments to the comment thread if you get the urge.

This is apparently some sort of a trend. It started when the Paraguayan model Larissa Riquelme  said she would run around naked if her team won the World's Cup. They lost, but she stripped off her clothes in front of the flag of Paraguay for a photo shoot anyways. Um... that was sporting of her I guess.

I also remember reading earlier this year, at the ever zany ChinaSmack, the article Han Yifei Nude Photographs Fulfill Chinese Basketball Promise (NSFW - not much really, just a lot of skin and strategically placed basketballs. Still, better safe than sorry). They won. Han Yifei produced the pictures.

So, this appears to be a growing trend, moving from Paraguay, to China to India. Hmmm... if the direction of travel of this trend continues, the next thing you know the Saudi Women's Soccer Team will be promising to showing some ankle any day now. Whoo-boy, be still my beating heart!

Saudi Women's Soccer Team

StatPlanet - tap into the World Bank's data

Click for larger view

StatPlanet World Bank is a application that allows you to access, analyze and display interactive maps and charts drawn from over 3000 indicators available from World Bank databases. The above example shows a graph of high-technology exports. The upper chart focuses on China, the U.S. and Japan, and the cursor is hovering over Brazil to bring up its data. 

Go to the StatPlanet World Bank page to find the URL for the web-based version (the above screen is from that version). Once there you can also download a desktop version of it as well as documentation. At the end of this post is a video demonstrating its capabilities with an introduction on how to use it.

It was written by Frank van Cappelle, of the University of Melbourne, and won the World Bank's Apps for Development challenge. You can see the other finalists in the competition, many of which look equally interesting, at Apps for Development Application Gallery. 

Be warned -- if you like pushing data around following any of the links in this post will end up consuming a lot of your time.



(HT: InventorSpot)

Tax the Rich

The above video is a time lapse of the protests against Gov. Walker that took place in Madison. It was made by Dusan Harminc, a Madison area Art Director who does motion graphics and interaction design (that's the artsy-fartsy term for interface design). Poking around his portfolio a bit shows that he has a strong graphics sense does very nice work in that area. The video above is a good example of that.

However, one thing struck me as I watched the above video, and is a weakness so glaring that it ultimately renders the video incoherent, is how it divorces the images from the context of the protest. 

He fails completely to capture what the protest is about. In fact, by repeatedly injecting images of the young woman holding the "Tax the Rich" sign he actually hijacks the protest's message -- it is not longer an examination or promotion of a labor protest, instead it becomes a rather trite and shallow trifle that is of little interest or persuasion.   

Now, I don't want to come across like I'm beating up on Dusan Harminc, I'm not. As I said, I think he has a strong graphic sense and I assume he was creating that video with an artist's eye and not a journalist's pen. 

Rather, in terms of the protest's messaging, the problem lies with with the likes of Richard Trumka. I've pointed out before, that to inflate the number of protesters, the Unions had to bring in students and activists of all stripes. The problem with that is that Progressives are obsessed with their notion of  narrative. If they can frame the story then they can control the debate. However, each activist group they bring into the mix inevitably adds their own tropes to the narrative. 

In the case of the Madison protests this means the Union signal gradually gets subsumed by the static of all the other competing messages that all the other groups add to the protest.

The result is you end up with a beautifully done video that is completely off message. Instead of a message supporting the Union's cause you get a vapid sign with the shallow message to tax the rich. Ultimately, that is just a step away from the silliness of Rob Lewis, the socialist Noodles Restaurant employee who was outraged that the boss man made him cook dishes that appeared the menu. 

I expect this sort of Progressive cacophony to continue. I also think it will continue to harm them.

This should be a warning to the Tea Party people. When they've focused on their core message of fiscal conservatism they've done well. However, veering too far into social conservative causes, or the isolationism of some libertarians, will dilute the effectiveness of the Tea Party message. Repeat it again and again: cut spending, limited government, cut spending, limited government, cut spending, limited government...

Strafor and Marilyn Monroe

Whenever the word "bomb" appears in a Stratfor article it makes my task of selecting the article's Hot Stratfor Babe immeasurably simpler. All I have to do is cycle through Blonde bombshells and pick one out.

For this Strafor article, which discusses the possibility of car bombs in Mexico's drug wars, I've selected Marilyn Monroe as the Hot Stratfor Babe.

There is also a bit of a connection between Marilyn and Mexico. Shortly before her death she went on a trip to Mexico City. The FBI was to report that during that trip she attended a luncheon at the residence of Peter Lawford with President Kennedy.

That report was part of a file they were keeping about her regarding her contacts John and Robert Kennedy as well as various communists. Eventually, when the file was released, because of the proximity of her Mexican lunch to her death, that report was to get tangled into the suspicions surrounding the circumstances of her death.

If you're interested, you can read about it in some detail in the 2006 Reader's Digest article Bombshell: Documents Throw New Light on Marilyn Monroe’s Death.

As a bonus, at the end of the Strafor article I've included the famous video of Marilyn monroe, after being introduced by the same Peter Lawford, singing Happy Birthday to JFK.


THE PERCEIVED CAR BOMB THREAT IN MEXICO
By Scott Stewart, April 14, 2011

On April 5, Mexican newspaper El Universal reported that a row of concrete Jersey barriers was being emplaced in front of the U.S. Consulate General in Monterrey, Mexico. The story indicated that the wall was put in to block visibility of the facility, but being only about 107 centimeters (42 inches) high, such barriers do little to block visibility. Instead, this modular concrete wall is clearly being used to block one lane of traffic in front of the consulate in an effort to provide the facility with some additional standoff distance from the avenue that passes in front of it.

Due to the location and design of the current consulate building in Monterrey, there is only a narrow sidewalk separating the building's front wall from the street and very little distance between the front wall and the building. This lack of standoff has been long noted, and it was an important factor in the decision to build a new consulate in Monterrey (construction began in June 2010 and is scheduled to be completed in January 2013).

The U.S. Consulate in Monterrey has been targeted in the past by cartels using small arms and grenades. The last grenade attack near the consulate was in October 2010. However, the Jersey barriers placed in front of the consulate will do little to protect the building against small arms fire, which can be directed at portions of the building above the perimeter wall, or grenades, which can be thrown over the wall. Rather, such barriers are used to protect facilities against an attack using a car bomb, or what is called in military and law enforcement vernacular a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED).

That such barriers have been employed (or re-employed, really, since they have been used before at the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey) indicates that there is at least a perceived VBIED threat in Mexico. The placement of the barriers was followed by a Warden Message issued April 8 by the U.S. Consulate General in Monterrey warning that "the U.S. government has received uncorroborated information Mexican criminal gangs may intend to attack U.S. law enforcement officers or U.S. citizens in the near future in Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon and San Luis Potosi." It is quite possible that the placement of the barriers at the consulate was related to this Warden Message.

The Mexican cartels have employed improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in the past, but the devices have been small. While their successful employment has shown that the cartels could deploy larger devices if they decided to do so, there are still some factors causing them to avoid using large VBIEDs.

Some History

The use of IEDs in Mexico is nothing new. Explosives are plentiful in Mexico due to their widespread use in the country's mining and petroleum sectors. Because of Mexico's strict gun laws, it is easier and cheaper to procure explosives -- specifically commercial explosives such as Tovex -- in Mexico than it is firearms. We have seen a number of different actors use explosive devices in Mexico, including left-wing groups such as the Popular Revolutionary Army and its various splinters, which have targeted banks and commercial centers (though usually at night and in a manner intended to cause property damage and not human casualties). An anarchist group calling itself the Subversive Alliance for the Liberation of the Earth, Animals and Humans has also employed a large number of small IEDs against banks, insurance companies, car dealerships and other targets.

Explosives have also played a minor role in the escalation of cartel violence in Mexico. The first cartel-related IED incident we recall was the Feb. 15, 2008, premature detonation of an IED in Mexico City that investigators concluded was likely a failed assassination attempt against a high-ranking police official. Three months later, in May 2008, there was a rash of such assassinations in Mexico City targeting high-ranking police officials such as Edgar Millan Gomez, who at the time of his death was Mexico's highest-ranking federal law enforcement officer. While these assassinations were conducted using firearms, they supported the theory that the Feb. 15, 2008, incident was indeed a failed assassination attempt.

Mexican officials have frequently encountered explosives, including small amounts of military-grade explosives and far larger quantities of commercial explosives, when they have uncovered arms caches belonging to the cartels. But it was not until July 2010 that IEDs began to be employed by the cartels with any frequency. [continued after jump]

Houston gets robbed

Earlier this week it was reported that Houston was passed over for retiring space shuttle. 

WTF? That just isn't right. 

As one would expect both Canaveral and the Smithsonian each get one,  Atlantis and Discovery respectively. The Endeavour goes to the California Science Center which makes sense because that is in the area where the shuttles were built. 

The real surprise is Houston, home of Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center, being frozen out by the awarding of the Enterprise (a prototype that never flew)  to a museum in New York instead.

I think it only makes much more sense for Houston's Johnson Space Center to get one of the Orbiters, with either California or the Smithsonian getting the prototype Enterprise and New York -- which was peripheral to the space program to say the least -- getting no shuttle.

The suspicion is that Houston not receiving a shuttle was driven by politics. That would of course be a disgrace, and just another sign that this administration knows nothing of history and make any decision, no matter how dubious, with their eyes towards elections. From the article linked above:

Mitchell said President Obama's re-election bid factored into NASA's choosing locations in Florida and California. Houston Mayor Annise Parker struck a similar tone, saying the decision was largely expected since the White House hinted "Houston would not be a winner in this political competition."

"There was no other city with our history of human space flight or more deserving of a retiring orbiter," Parker said in a statement.

Mitchell said he would like a congressional investigation into NASA's decision-making — and expects Texas congressional leaders to call for one.

In a statement, Republican Sen. John Cornyn said, "it is clear political favors trumped common sense and fairness." Added Republican U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady, "with this White House I always expect the worst and am rarely disappointed."

In a conference call, NASA acknowledged that its choices meant all the shuttles were heading to different coasts and that the middle of the country was shutout, but it defended the decisions and said it would welcome a congressional inquiry.

I suppose it could be worse, the American shuttles at least avoided the the ignoble fate of the Russian Buran Class shuttles.

The Buran, the only Russian shuttle that flew (an unmanned orbital mission) was demolished when the hanger it was being stored in collapsed. The Ptichka was never quite completed and is being stored at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Their third unnamed shuttle was stored outdoors in a parking lot until it was sold to a museum in Germany, while the fourth was sold in pieces on the internet and the final one was scrapped long before any significant work was completed on it.

Old Russian shuttles never die, they just get crushed by their hangers...

...or get stripped and sold on Ebay

Posing for pin-ups

Reality becomes fantasy

How to be a Retronaut, a site I've taken to regularly visiting, has a post called 1950s pin-up girls before & after that has a series of nine pictures showing the photograph an artist used to create a pin-up girl illustration.  The picture above is a sample. Visit the site to see the rest.

The article has no comments attached, just the pictures. However, if I read the signature correctly, I think the pin-ups are the work of Gil Elvgren (the link is SFW). He worked for a Chicago Ad agency that did a lot of work for Coca-Cola. At the agency he was mentored by the artist who created the familiar Coca-Cola Santa Claus ads. 
  
UPDATE: Yes, it is the work of Gil Elvgren. I found a few more which I've added after the jump.

China bans time travel

Time traveling teen introduces old-timey Chinese girl to sexting

"The time-travel drama is becoming a hot theme for TV and films. But its content and the exaggerated performance style are questionable. Many stories are totally made-up and are made to strain for an effect of novelty. The producers and writers are treating the serious history in a frivolous way, which should by no means be encouraged anymore."

Wait... they make up things in time travel stories? Are they trying to claim there's no such thing as flux capacitors or killer robots that have come back to protect their future revolution against mankind? Say it aint so, Joe!

Actually, it turns out that time travel stories have recently became a hugely popular genre in Chinese movies and TV shows. Their plots are rather boiler-plate, with a protagonist somehow or another twanged back to the distant, historical past of China. They milk comedy from fish out of water situations, and eventually have their hero/heroine fall crazy mad in love with somebody they meet in the past. 

China Hush, in the article "No more time-travel drama", authority says it disrespects history, reports that the government's General Bureau of Radio, Film and Television is unhappy with the time travel stories. The quote that leads this article is their comment on the matter.  Apparently they believe that the liberty with which these shows treat China's past is disrespectful of its history (and if you've ever heard a Chinese bang on about their 5,000 years of history you'll know they are a bit maniacal on that point).

In spite of their popularity, or perhaps because of it, the Bureau has called for a halt to the making of these types of shows. In addition, the Bureau has called a halt to making new versions of the Four Great Classical Novels, arguing that good versions of them have already been filmed and that modern versions are rushed and inaccurate.

If you ask me, the General Bureau of Radio, Film and Television sound like a bunch of cranky old grouches. It will serve them right if the time travel stories get replaced with idiotic American Infomercials.

Our Hero awes the bumpkins with his
Cellphone of Harmonious Touch Screen Power.

Stratfor and Esti Ginzburg

In this Strafor article Friedman discusses the rising tension between Hamas and Israel in light of the protests, revolutions, civil wars and interventions currently roiling the Middle East. 

It would be in Hamas's interest, particularly with the current, weak American Administration, for the unrest in the streets to eventually focus on Israel. However, there has yet to be a convergence between Hamas's interests and the interests of the people conducting uprisings throughout the Middle East. 

Recently, Hamas has resumed a steady drizzle of rocket attacks against Israel. This is likely intended to draw a sharp response from Israel that Hamas hopes would swing the Egyptian, and broader Arabic, crowds to their side. 

So far Israel is responding with restraint, but how long they can maintain a reactive and defensive posture is difficult to say. It seems as if the winds of war are beginning to blow.

For the last Stratfor article involving Israel I chose Bar Refaeli as the Hot Strafor Babe. Ms Rafaeli had drawn criticism for dodging the Israeli draft. One of her harshest critics was Esti Ginzburg, and Israeli model who believes it is the duty of young Israelis to support the draft. 

For that reason I've chosen Esti Ginzburg to be this article's Hot Strafor Babe. There are many pictures of her on the web frolicking around in bikinis and the like, but  I think a picture of her in her IDF uniform is more fitting to illustrate this article. Hopefully her, and all her comrades in arms, will have a peaceful summer after all.


THE ARAB RISINGS, ISRAEL AND HAMAS
By George Friedman, April 12, 2011

There was one striking thing missing from the events in the Middle East in past months: Israel. While certainly mentioned and condemned, none of the demonstrations centered on the issue of Israel. Israel was a side issue for the demonstrators, with the focus being on replacing unpopular rulers.

This is odd. Since even before the creation of the state of Israel, anti-Zionism has been a driving force among the Arab public, perhaps more than it has been with Arab governments. While a few have been willing to develop open diplomatic relations with Israel, many more have maintained informal relations: Numerous Arab governments have been willing to maintain covert relations with Israel, with extensive cooperation on intelligence and related matters. They have been unwilling to incur the displeasure of the Arab masses through open cooperation, however.

That makes it all the more strange that the Arab opposition movements -- from Libya to Bahrain -- have not made overt and covert cooperation with Israel a central issue, if for no other reason than to mobilize the Arab masses. Let me emphasize that Israel was frequently an issue, but not the central one. If we go far back to the rise of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and his revolution for Pan-Arabism and socialism, his issues against King Farouk were tightly bound with anti-Zionism. Similarly, radical Islamists have always made Israel a central issue, yet it wasn't there in this round of unrest. This was particularly surprising with regimes like Egypt's, which had formal relations with Israel.

It is not clear why Israel was not a rallying point. One possible explanation is that the demonstrations in the Islamic world were focused on unpopular leaders and regimes, and the question of local governance was at their heart. That is possible, but particularly as the demonstrations faltered, invoking Israel would have seemed logical as a way to legitimize their cause. Another explanation might have rested in the reason that most of these risings failed, at least to this point, to achieve fundamental change. They were not mass movements involving all classes of society, but to a great extent the young and the better educated. This class was more sophisticated about the world and understood the need for American and European support in the long run; they understood that including Israel in their mix of grievances was likely to reduce Western pressure on the risings' targets. We know of several leaders of the Egyptian rising, for example, who were close to Hamas yet deliberately chose to downplay their relations. They clearly were intensely anti-Israeli but didn't want to make this a crucial issue. In the case of Egypt, they didn't want to alienate the military or the West. They were sophisticated enough to take the matter step by step.

Hamas' Opportunity

A second thing was missing from the unrest: There was no rising, no intifada, in the Palestinian territories. Given the general unrest sweeping the region, it would seem logical that the Palestinian public would have pressed both the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and Hamas to organize massive demonstrations against Israel. This didn't happen.

This clearly didn't displease the PNA, which had no appetite for underwriting another intifada that would have led to massive Israeli responses and disruption of the West Bank's economy. For Hamas in Gaza, however, it was a different case. Hamas was trapped by the Israeli-Egyptian blockade. This blockade limited its ability to access weapons, as well as basic supplies needed to build a minimally functioning economy. It also limited Hamas' ability to build a strong movement in the West Bank that would challenge Fatah's leadership of the PNA there.

Hamas has been isolated and trapped in Gaza. The uprising in Egypt represented a tremendous opportunity for Hamas, as it promised to create a new reality in Gaza. If the demonstrators had succeeded not only in overthrowing Hosni Mubarak but also in forcing true regime change -- or at least forcing the military to change its policy toward Hamas -- the door could have opened for Hamas to have increased dramatically its power and its room to maneuver. Hamas knew that it had supporters among a segment of the demonstrators and that the demonstrators wanted a reversal of Egyptian policy on Israel and Gaza. They were content to wait, however, particularly as the PNA was not prepared to launch an intifada in the West Bank and because one confined to Gaza would have had little effect. So they waited.

For Hamas, a shift in Egyptian policy was the opening that would allow them to become militarily and politically more effective. It didn't happen. The events of the past few months have shown that while the military wanted Mubarak out, it was not prepared to break with Israel or shift its Gaza policy. Most important, the events thus far have shown that the demonstrators were in no position to force the Egyptian military to do anything it didn't want to do. Beyond forcing Mubarak out and perhaps having him put on trial, the basic policies of his regime remained in place. [continued after jump]

A small mystery

Whaleboat lost on Bouvet Island

Bouvet Island is small, only 5 miles (8km) long by 3 miles (4.8km) wide. It is located deep in the Southern Ocean. It was first sighted in 1739, but not permanently fixed on a chart until 1898.

In fact, it is arguably the most remote place on Earth. You can draw a circle centered on it with a radius of 1,000 miles and  the area of that circle will contain no other land.

Buffeted frequently by gales, and nearly constantly covered by a shroud of sea-mist, it is a difficult island to approach. It is even more difficult to land on because almost its entire circumference is composed of nearly vertical cliffs, some reaching as high as 1,600 ft (488m).

It was briefly explored from time to time during the first half of the 20th Century as a possible location for a weather station, but no suitable ground to place such a station was found. However, in 1968 an American icebreaker visited the island and discovered a volcanic eruption had created a small, flat shelf on one side of the island which the Norwegians named "New Rubble".  

"What drama, we wondered, was attached to this strange discovery. There were no markings to identify its origin or nationality. On the rocks a hundred yards away was a forty-four gallon drum and a pair of oars, with pieces of wood and a copper flotation or buoyancy tank opened out flat for some purpose. Thinking castaways might have landed, we made a brief search but found no human remains." -Crawford

Our mystery starts in 1964 when the South Africans mounted an expedition to Bouvet Island to explore New Rubble. The landing party, led by Lieutenant Commander Allan Crawford, discovered an abandoned whaleboat which was half sunk in a small lagoon on the spit of land. Crawford was only on the spit of land for 45 minutes, but he could find no signs of a camp or human remains on New Rubble.

Was it a life boat from a sunk ship who's passengers found scant comfort in the Earth's most forsaken place, or remains of an earlier, unrecorded expedition to the island, or pehaps just flotsam washed ashore?

The mystery remains without an answer. For a good discussion of it see An abandoned lifeboat at world’s end at the website A Blast from the Past. He goes into some detail over the pros and cons of each possibility, and discusses the most likely candidate for a furtive exploration that might have lost the whaleboat.

Motorcycle Memories

Cruising the Vegas strip in 1966

One More Middle Aged Guy has a post Indulging in Nostalgia in which he revisits his youthful fascination with  motorcycles. In the process he gives a nice, concise history of the evolution of bikes over the years as new models were introduced. I've excepted that start of it below, be sure to follow the link to read the entire article.

Back before I started high school I had a fascination for motorcycles of all kinds ... it was the days of the little Honda step throughs and the ascendance of the small displacement Jap sport bikes. Although the term sport bike meant something completely different than what gets the label these days.....

I remember one little Yamaha 100cc twin that was the essence of the Junior high school all purpose get around... less than ten HP but what a blast to scoot out to the lake or cruise the drive-in strip!

There was a rapid proliferation of Street twins in the 125 to 200cc range .... all two strokes except for Honda ... and then the gradual displacement creep into the 250 to 350cc range s the enthusiastic young riders got the bug for faster bikes and the capacity for highway riding that those little sub 200s did not really possess.

There were high pipe models they liked to call scramblers but which were really the same as the low pipe counter parts ... except they looked a lot more aggressive and sporty ... a look I really dug .... but the downside was the burnt legs ..... usually of a female passenger in shorts. But the really cool thing about these little two stroke mosquito foggers was that most of them would smoke past a typical Brit bike of the day and any Harley ..... even though the larger bikes were often 3 to four times the displacement.

A real eye opener was when Suzuki came out with their 350 street twin .... around 66 ... I watched one of these little screamers absolutely embarrass a guy on a BSA Spitfire ... that particular Beezer considered to be one of the fastest bikes around. The local scene prior to about 63 had been mostly populated by a handful of guys with older BSAs and Triumphs and an occasional Matchless or BMW or some more eclectic Euro or Brit bike. The real oddballs were guys who brought over European scrambles type bikes from the across the pond. And, of course there were the usual guys who bought into the big bad Harley image ..... mostly image ... and whose bikes spent more time parked in various sized puddles of 30 weight oil and chain drippings.

[read the rest of the article]

Well, here's something you don't see every day...

A giant hologram of a cutsie Japanese anime girl, accompanied by a live band, dancing and singing J-Pop while the audience goes wild and wave glow sticks around. How do they think of this stuff?

(found via the RealityCarnival) 

Ghostscapes - then & now

click to enlarge

I don't know what this style of photographic manipulation is, so I've coined my own term -- Ghostscapes. They're done by meticulously merging an old photo with a new photo shot from the exact same angle. 

The result are street scenes that show pedestrians of both eras who seemingly mingle as they go about their business while at the same time not being aware of each other. 

Above we see a person of the present walking towards a pile of ghost corpses. I wonder if he realizes the street was once strewn with the dead?  

click to enlarge

Sergey Larenkov is perhaps the photographer best known for this technique. His pictures primarily feature scenes of WWII mixed with the present. Being a Russian, his pictures are mainly of the war in the East. 

Above some soldiers cautiously approach a subway entrance as an oblivious future dog wanders past the two.

click to enlarge

Jo Teeuwisse has done the same with pictures of Amsterdam. Above is a very striking and complex composite of people from two eras out for a stroll on a shared street.     

I've included a few more of their pictures after the jump, and of course more can be seen at their websites as well as at Ned Hardy's post 114 Pictures Of The Past Meeting The Present (which is where the first picture in the post came from).

Stratfor and Jean Harlow

This Stratfor article discusses Al Qaeda's latest push for Muslims in Western countries to conduct lone wolf style attacks.

It points out that small scale, locally originating terrorist plots are best detected by local law enforcement and citizens. It then discusses signs of bombmaking activity.

The word 'bomb' naturally brought to mind 'blonde bombshells'. As dedicated a blogger as I am, I immediately began researching blonde bombshells to select this article's Hot Stratfor Babe. 

There is much interesting information on the topic to peruse. Squidoo has a post called Classic Hollywood Blond Bombshells that provides a good introduction to the subject, although it only covers the 1950s.

Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield were obviously strong contenders for this article's Hot Stratfor Babe. However, in the end, being a traditionalist in these sorts of matters, I decided to bestow Jean Harlow with the honor, primarily because she is arguably the prototype blonde bombshell.
 

HOW TO TELL IF YOUR NEIGHBOR IS A BOMBMAKER 
By Scott Stewart, April 7, 2011

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) released the  fifth edition of its English-language jihadist magazine "Inspire" on March 30. AQAP publishes this magazine with the stated intent of radicalizing English-speaking Muslims and encouraging them to engage in jihadist militant activity. Since its inception, Inspire magazine has also advocated the concept that jihadists living in the West should conduct attacks there, rather than traveling to places like Pakistan or Yemen, since such travel can bring them to the attention of the authorities before they can conduct attacks, and AQAP views attacking in the West as "striking at the heart of the unbelievers."

To further promote this concept, each edition of Inspire magazine has a section called "Open Source Jihad," which is intended to equip aspiring jihadist attackers with the tools they need to conduct attacks without traveling to jihadist training camps. The Open Source Jihad sections in past editions have contained articles such as the pictorial guide with instructions titled "Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom" that appeared in the first edition.

In this latest edition of Inspire there are at least three places where AQAP encourages jihadists to conduct "lone wolf" attacks rather than coordinate with others due to the security risks inherent in such collaboration (several jihadist plots have been thwarted when would-be attackers have approached government informants looking for assistance). In recent years there have been a number of lone wolf attacks inside the United States, such as the June 2009 shooting at an armed forces recruiting center in Little Rock, Ark.; the November 2009 Fort Hood shooting; and the failed bombing attack in New York's Times Square in May 2010. Of course, the lone wolf phenomena is not just confined to the United States, as evidenced by such incidents as the March 2 shooting attack against U.S. military personnel in Frankfurt, Germany.

In the past, STRATFOR has examined the challenges that lone wolf assailants and small, insulated cells -- what we call grassroots jihadists -- present to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. We have also discussed the fact that, in many cases, grassroots defenders such as local police officers can be a more effective defense against grassroots attackers than centralized federal agencies.

But local federal agents and local police officers are not the only grassroots defenders who can be effective in detecting lone wolves and small cells before they are able to launch an attack. Many of the steps required to conduct a terrorist attack are undertaken in a manner that makes the actions visible to any outside observer. It is at these junctures in the terrorist attack cycle that people practicing good situational awareness can detect these attack steps -- not only to avoid the danger themselves, but also to alert the authorities to the suspicious activity.

Detecting grassroots operatives can be difficult, but it is possible if observers focus not only on the "who" aspect of a terrorist attack but also the "how" -- that is, those activities that indicate an attack is in the works. In the past we've talked in some detail about detecting preoperational surveillance as part of this focus on the "how." Now, we would like to focus on detecting another element of the "how" of terrorism and discuss the ways one can detect signs of improvised-explosives preparation -- in other words, how to tell if your neighbor is a bombmaker.

IEDs and Explosive Mixtures

In the 11th edition of "Sada al-Malahim," AQAP's Arabic-language online jihadist magazine, Nasir al-Wahayshi noted that jihadists "don't need to conduct a big effort or spend a lot of money to manufacture 10 grams of explosive material" and that they should not "waste a long time finding the materials, because you can find all these in your mother's kitchen, or readily at hand or in any city you are in." Al-Wahayshi is right. It truly is not difficult for a knowledgeable individual to construct improvised explosives from a wide range of household chemicals like peroxide and acetone or chlorine and brake fluid. [continued after jump]

This year's Pet Rock?

I figure that any day now the tedium will kick in and and some other silly fad will knock him off the Pedestal of Momentary Pop Frenzy, but in the meanwhile there is money to be made.

Am I the only one picturing, a couple of months down the road, warehouses full of junk printed with his slogans that they can't even give away?

Stratfor and Monica Bellucci

This Strafor article examines the contradiction between wars positioned as humanitarian interventions, which Friedman argues are a new type of war, and  the international principal of self-determination afforded nations by the UN charter.

He quite deftly makes the case and explores the idea that while the nations intervening in humanitarian wars position themselves are neutrals, in fact, because they almost always intervening to protect a minority from massacre, they are acting against the majority in contradiction to the idea of self-determination.

In searching for the Hot Strafor Babe for the article I remembered the movie Tears of the Sun and settled on Monica Bellucci for the honor. The events in the movie aren't exactly a true Humanitarian War, but they are close enough for my purposes. 

It starts with Bruce Willis as Lt. Waters leading a SEAL mission to rescue some Americans, among whom is the Italian Dr Lorna Kendricks (American by a previous marriage), who are in Nigeria doing charitable work as it sinks into a civil war. He is supposed to rescue just them, but when he sees the villagers left behind getting slaughtered he turns his helicopters around and injects himself into the civil war to march them to the safety of Cameroon.

Hmmm... he disobeys orders and triggers an international incident and possibly tangles America in a war in the process? No wonder he's still just a lieutenant at his ripe old age.

I mentioned Bellucci playing a doctor. Naturally, this being Hollywood, being a female doctor selflessly helping third-worlders places her pretty much at the apex of moral authority and, by God, she exercises that authority in a relentlessly annoying matter. She hectors and berates Lt Methuselah, errr... I mean Waters throughout virtually the entire film. Geez lady, he tossed away his career to help you and the villagers, would it hurt to show a little gratitude?

It is an odd movie. There is a lot of violence in it, most of it Muslims slaughtering Christians and performing atrocities, and the SEAL team is shown being competent and as compassionate as you can expect a group of cardboard characters to be; still, perhaps primarily because of Bellucci's character, there is a whiff of disapproval about it all. 

[EDIT: Apparently I didn't proof read this at all. I cleaned up a mess of typos and cleared up some mangled sentences.]

IMMACULATE INTERVENTION: THE WARS OF HUMANITARIANISM 
By George Friedman. April 5, 2011

There are wars in pursuit of interest. In these wars, nations pursue economic or strategic ends to protect the nation or expand its power. There are also wars of ideology, designed to spread some idea of "the good," whether this good is religious or secular. The two obviously can be intertwined, such that a war designed to spread an ideology also strengthens the interests of the nation spreading the ideology.

Since World War II, a new class of war has emerged that we might call humanitarian wars -- wars in which the combatants claim to be fighting neither for their national interest nor to impose any ideology, but rather to prevent inordinate human suffering. In Kosovo and now in Libya, this has been defined as stopping a government from committing mass murder. But it is not confined to that. In the 1990s, the U.S. intervention in Somalia was intended to alleviate a famine while the invasion of Haiti was designed to remove a corrupt and oppressive regime causing grievous suffering.

It is important to distinguish these interventions from peacekeeping missions. In a peacekeeping mission, third-party forces are sent to oversee some agreement reached by combatants. Peacekeeping operations are not conducted to impose a settlement by force of arms; rather, they are conducted to oversee a settlement by a neutral force. In the event the agreement collapses and war resumes, the peacekeepers either withdraw or take cover. They are soldiers, but they are not there to fight beyond protecting themselves.

Concept vs. Practice

In humanitarian wars, the intervention is designed both to be neutral and to protect potential victims on one side. It is at this point that the concept and practice of a humanitarian war become more complex. There is an ideology undergirding humanitarian wars, one derived from both the U.N. Charter and from the lessons drawn from the Holocaust, genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia and a range of other circumstances where large-scale slaughter -- crimes against humanity -- took place. That no one intervened to prevent or stop these atrocities was seen as a moral failure. According to this ideology, the international community has an obligation to prevent such slaughter.

This ideology must, of course, confront other principles of the U.N. Charter, such as the right of nations to self-determination. In international wars, where the aggressor is trying to both kill large numbers of civilians and destroy the enemy's right to national self-determination, this does not pose a significant intellectual problem. In internal unrest and civil war, however, the challenge of the intervention is to protect human rights without undermining national sovereignty or the right of national self-determination.

The doctrine becomes less coherent in a civil war in which one side is winning and promising to slaughter its enemies, Libya being the obvious example. Those intervening can claim to be carrying out a neutral humanitarian action, but in reality, they are intervening on one side's behalf. If the intervention is successful -- as it likely will be given that interventions are invariably by powerful countries against weaker ones -- the practical result is to turn the victims into victors. By doing that, the humanitarian warriors are doing more than simply protecting the weak. They are also defining a nation's history. [continued after the jump]

Who's the better war leader?

Man, talk about a plan not surviving contact with the enemy. Well, now that we've seen a couple of weeks of Obama's war leadership, and with poor Anne Hathaway getting crushed by Barbara Feldon in our first poll, it is time for the Second Flares Poll of International Opinion: 

Who's the better war leader

Barack Obama or Rufus T. Firefly?

If you're a bit hazy on President Firefly's handling of his war, You can go here to watch a video and refresh your memory. As always, vote early and often, and may the best man win!

Ex-pats in Paris

As a descendant of Sundiata Keita, the Mandinka king who founded the Malian empire, Salif Keita was born into a prestigious family. However, as an ablino, a sign of bad luck in Malian society, he had a difficult childhood as both his community and family mistrusted him and treated him poorly.

What he did have was an exquisite voice. Eventually he moved to Bamako where he joined the Rail Band as their lead singer. The Rail Band was the house band for the bar in the Station Hotel which many Malian musicians played for at one time or another. Incidentally, it was one of the major avenues of Cuban and Latin influences on the music of Mali.

Eventually, because of political unrest he moved first to Cote D'Ivoire, and then to Paris. In fact, many African musicians traveled north to Paris or London. There was an active European concert circuit they could tour, and working in Europe exposed them to a much larger, and wealthier, audience.

In earlier posts in this series I've talked about how West African music moved with the slave trade through the Caribbean, where it split north to the U.S and south to Brazil. It evolved in the isolation of the age of sail, but eventually reflected back to Africa -- via the radio for U.S. blues and soul, while the Latin influences came from the Cuban advisers working in Africa. The Brazilian influences were to come largely through the ex-pat African musicians being exposed to it by Brazilian musicians working the same European concert circuit.

So strong were these foreign influences that Salif Keita was criticized in Mali for having absorbed rather too much of it during his long exile. He eventually returned to Mali where he built a recording studio, and his latest works have been well recieved.

Below is a video of him singing with Cesario Evora, the great Cape Verdean singer (no doubt an influence on our old friend Myra Andrate who fretted so much about lopsided democracy) who was another of the African musicians who gained wider fame by working the European concert circuit.

It you're interested, here are the other posts in my series on the music of Mali:

1 - Father & Son (Ali Farka Toure and his son Vieux Farka Toure)
2 - 14 years later (AfroCubism, Toumani Diabate and Ali Farke Toure)
3 - Torn from today's headlines... (Tinariwen)

In the market for a water clock.

I don't often buy lottery tickets, but the other day I bought one for some reason. Yea, I know the odds of winning are terrible, but I figure the odds of me making that amount of money the old fashioned way -- via hard work and wise investments -- are even worse, so what do I have to lose besides a dollar?

Anyway, having bought the ticket I naturally assumed I was going to win and started planning how, in the manner of lottery winners everywhere, I was going to foolishly spend myself back into poverty. 

One of the things I decided I needed was a water clock. It turns out they are harder to find then one might think. there are a lot of them that use water and chemistry to generate the electricity to power a digital clock, but that's not what I wanted.

There were antique Clepsydra water clocks available, but I wasn't interested in them either.

Finally I found the company ChronArte out of Switzerland. They had three versions of water clocks, the  Quadro (my favorite and the one shown above and below), the Canna and the Filo (shown after the jump). They pump the water around, rather than have the water drip to show the passage of time, but I did like how they looked. 

Sadly I didn't win the lottery. On the plus side this means my new 20 year old girlfriend won't be conspiring with the pool boy to murder me to get her hands on my fortune, but on the negative side these snappy looking water clocks, at several thousand dollars a piece, are out of my price range. 

I suppose that if I really wanted one I could work harder and invest better... then again, I could just buy another lottery ticket and hope for the best.

The Quadro again
The Filo and Canna are shown after the jump

The center of the universe

The always interesting website Information Design Watch has numerous charts and graphs that illustrate this and that. Above is a cropped screen shot of a Flash application of an orrery that shows planets and moons in their orbits. 

If you follow the link you'll first see the Copernican model with the Sun at the center of the solar system. Click on 'Tyconian' in the lower right corner you can see how a solar system with Earth rather than the Sun at the center works. 

In that model, Mecury and Venus are moons of a rather tiny Sun, while the centers of orbits of the outer planets have to be offset from Earth to get the correct retrograde movement. Although wrong, it is quite clever none the less.   

Stratfor and Agnes Ayers

This Stratfor article deals with the rather complex situation in Yemen and how al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is navigating that complexity to their advantage.

For the Hot Stratfor Babe to accompany the article I selected Agnes Ayers, who starred with Rudolph Valentino in the 1921 silent film The Sheik. 

The Sheik is actually set in Algeria rather than Yemen, so technically this makes my choice of Agnes Ayers even more dubious than my usual Hot Stratfor Babe selection, but one desert is pretty much the same as another in my book, so it's close enough for me.

Agnes plays a sort of proto-feminist, who rather stupidly heads off into the desert by herself because she's so head strong and free spirited. She gets captured by the Sheik which leads to the famous Tent Scene where he attempts to compromise her chastity. Much silent screen ham-bonery ensues, and amidst tribal raids, sand storms and the like she falls crazy mad in love with the Sheik. Feh, sounds like Stockholm syndrome to me.

At any rate, it all ends happily when, conveniently for the attitudes of the day, it turns out he's really an orphan of a British father and Spanish mother so there are no pesky racial issues in their romance. 

"Why have you brought me here?"
"Are you not woman enough to know?"

By the way, at the end of the Stratfor article I've embedded a video of the famous Tent Scene if you want to see what made women swoon, and men roll their eyes, back in 1921. 


AQAP AND THE VACUUM OF AUTHORITY IN YEMEN

By Scott Stewart, March 31, 2011

While the world's attention is focused on the combat transpiring in Libya and the events in Egypt and Bahrain, Yemen has also descended into crisis. The country is deeply split over its support for Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, and this profound divide has also extended to the most powerful institutions in the country -- the military and the tribes -- with some factions calling for Saleh to relinquish power and others supporting him. The tense standoff in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa has served to divert attention (and security forces) from other parts of the country.

On March 28, an explosion at a munitions factory in southern Yemen killed at least 110 people. The factory, which reportedly produced AK rifles and ammunition, was located in the town of Jaar in Abyan province. Armed militants looted the factory March 27, and the explosion reportedly occurred the next day as local townspeople were rummaging through the factory. It is not known what sparked the explosion, but it is suspected to have been an accident, perhaps caused by careless smoking.

The government has reported that the jihadist group Aden-Abyan Islamic Army worked with militant separatists from the south to conduct the raid on the factory. Other sources have indicated to STRATFOR that they believe the raid was conducted by tribesman from Loder. Given the history of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) activity in the Loder area, if the tribesmen were indeed from Loder, it is highly likely they were at least sympathetic to AQAP if not affiliated with the group.

While it is in Saleh's interest to play up the separatist and jihadist threats as a way of showing international and internal parties how important he is and why he should remain in power, these threats are indeed legitimate.  Even in the best of times, there are large portions of Yemen that are under tenuous government control, and the current crisis has enlarged this power vacuum. Because of this lack of government focus and the opportunity to gather weapons in places like Jaar, militant groups such as AQAP, the strongest of al Qaeda's regional franchise groups, have been provided with a golden opportunity. The question is: Will they be capable of fully exploiting it?

The Situation in Yemen

The raid on the arms factory in Jaar was facilitated by the fact that government security forces had been forced to focus elsewhere. Reports indicate that there was only a company of Yemeni troops in Jaar to guard the factory and that they were quickly overwhelmed by the militants. While the government moved a battalion into Jaar to restore order, those troops had to be taken from elsewhere. This confrontation between troops loyal to Saleh and those led by Brig. Gen. Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar in the capital city has also caused security forces from both sides to be drawn back to Sanaa in anticipation of a clash. It has also resulted in a vacuum of power in many parts of the country. Currently, government control over large parts of the country varies from town to town, especially in provinces such as Saada, al-Jouf, Shabwa and Abyan, which have long histories of separatist activity.

It is important to understand that Yemen was not a very cohesive entity going into this current crisis, and the writ of the central government has been continually challenged since the country's founding. Until 1990, Yemen was split into two countries, the conservative, Saudi-influenced Yemen Arab Republic in the north and the Marxist, secular People's Democratic Republic of Yemen in the south. In 1994, following a peaceful unification in 1990, a bloody civil war was fought between the north and the south. While the north won the war, tensions have remained high between the two sides, and there has long been a simmering anti-government sentiment in the south. This sentiment has periodically manifested itself in outbreaks of armed hostilities between the armed southern separatist movement and government forces. [continued after jump]