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]

Free Ma-Ro

Above is a video clip of Ma-Ro, a Turkmenistani pop star. The song is standard, albeit slightly goofy, generic pop music. It is accompanied by pictures of Ma-Ro (Maksat "Maro" Karakbayev, the singer) and his friends. They appear to be having a good time, and they certainly are stylish in a Turmenistani pop star sort of way. I particularly liked the giant star belt buckle Ma-Ro sports. 

Entertainingly, a giant poster of the Turkmenbashi appears in the background of one of the pictures. Also, another shows what appears to be the base of the Twirling Statue of the Turkmenbashi I so admire.

Recently Ma-Ro appeared on a Tukish television show. Unfortunately for him he said something, nobody knows quite what it was, that infuriated Deputy Prime Minister Maysa Yazmukhamedova, the Minister of Culture or some such thing. He hauled Ma-Ro, his friend the fellow pop star Murad Ovezov and anybody else who appeared in the video (nooo... not Leyli and Angel) in for questioning.

The two pop stars were sentenced to 15 days in jail, but things got worse for Ma-Ro after his release. He, his father, brother and brother-in-law were arrested on trumped up charges over a TV antenna, and the lot of them were sentenced to 2 years in prison.

You can read the whole sordid story in the article: Popular Singers Arrested in Turkmenistan.

The family's best hope now for them now is to be granted amnesty. Unfortunately President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the Turkmenbashi's beloved successor, prefers patriotic music and songs singing his praises over pop music. Oh-oh. I wonder what the floor shows in Avaza are like if Ma-Ro is too risque for Turkmenistan?

At any rate, I say... enough is enough. Oh great and noble leaders of Turkmenistan, as somebody who uses the visage of the great Turkmenbashi as my aviator  I appeal to your sense of justice of free Ma-Ro and allow him to return to his music.

Then again, considering my numerous posts mocking the leaders of Turkmenistan, maybe things would go easier on Ma-Ro if the glorious leaders of Turkmenistan were unaware of my support.

Neutral means 'no'

"Members of Wisconsin State Employees Union, AFSCME Council 24, have begun circulating letters to businesses in southeast Wisconsin, asking them to support workers’ rights by putting up a sign in their windows.

If businesses fail to comply, the letter says, “Failure to do so will leave us no choice but (to) do a public boycott of your business. And sorry, neutral means 'no' to those who work for the largest employer in the area and are union members."

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, in the article WSEU circulating boycott letters, is reporting that Wisconsin State Employees Union has started sending letters to businesses in southeast Wisconsin. These letters are threatening a boycott unless the businesses display a sign supporting the Union in its battle with Gov Walker. Union officials claim these letters are also being sent out in other parts of the State.

Bear in mind, this is not just boycotting businesses that contributed to Walker and the Republicans, it is threatening a boycott against any business that will not overtly support them. It is a naked attempt to politicize small businesses and main street.

What next? Boycotts for businesses that don't contribute to Democrats? It is a mere step away from running a protection racket and it is a completely contemptible strategy.

By the way, I got the picture for this post off of the SEIU website. Entertainingly enough, considering the topic of this thread, it is from a flyer they were whining about that 'unfairly' complained about Union intimidation. Poor little angels.

Finally, if you want to help the folks in Wisconsin squaring off against the Unions, the blog Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion has a post, Help Get This Ad On The Air In Wisconsin, that gives information how to contribute money to offset Union money being spent on TV ads for their upcoming Supreme Court Judge election. It's a good cause.

Obama's Libyan speech made perfect sense

When I first read Obama's Libyan speech I thought it was contradictory and faintly incoherent. However, as I thought about it and then read it again, I realized that Obama's speech made perfect sense if you viewed it from the perspective of a transnational Europhile, which is precisely the world view Obama holds.

Obama mentions the U.S. Congress in passing in the speech, but in reality it is the international community, and what he calls an "international mandate" that he invokes as justification for the intervention. It is his transnational impulses that lead him to stress that the UN, NATO and the African Union give legitimacy to the action while never really conferring with Congress and largely ignoring the American public for over a week.

Consider his pride in the coalition being put together in only 31 days. We know that the U.S. has acted with greater alacrity in other interventions, but that's the rub -- to him a Nation calling on its allies for action is the old and failed style of diplomacy and war. To him multinational organizations like the UN, the EU, NATO, the Arab League and the African Union trump mere governments. From that view point the agreement was quickly reached, while any previous military actions were merely national in scope and thus suspect and could be safely dismissed as being out-dated and irrelevant.

That is also why, aside from a nod to "democratic impulses" in the region he never discusses democracy. To the transnationalist the citizens are secondary -- after all, they are often little more than bumpkins when all is said and done. Further, it is not congresses or parliaments of individual governments that matter, rather it is the conferences and meetings of governments that confer authority. And, in the end, it doesn't matter not in the least how these leaders came to power, it only matters that they sit at the negotiating tables and support the new civilized order of the world.

Such attitudes explain his contradictions in taking action against Gaddafy while keeping the door propped open for Gaddafy's survival. In the transnational world there are only two avenues for Gaddy to pursue: he either steps down and ends up on the docket of the ICC at some future date, or he moderates his behavior while he keeps pumping the oil. The people's aspirations don't really matter, just ask a Syrian if you doubt that, it is only the stability of the world order that weighs on the scale.   

Yes, there is a lot of spin and BS in his speech, but at its core I think that, considering his embrace of the transnational world view, it is clear he is acting consistently. Too bad it is the Senate, and not the House, that can exert its authority in matters of war and peace. We're on a bad path I fear.

Found Films

Found Films is a website I visit from time to time. The person who runs it finds old cameras with film still in them, or some times just rolls of old film, and processes them. Much of the film is damaged, and the resulting pictures sometimes have a dream-like quality to them. He posts and comments on the cameras that made them and the mysteries they reveal. The result is gallery after gallery of lost or discarded photos: family gatherings, portraits, picnics, vacations and all the other minutia of life.

The fascination with these photos is that the anonymous people in them are now all either elderly or gone, and perhaps some have been entirely forgotten. Of course, that is the fate of all of us, and all of us share these same sorts of moments the pictures record. Who knows, perhaps one day our photos will be taken from scrap boxes or lost cameras and posted on the internet to puzzle strangers, but in the meanwhile we can only look at these and wonder what is the story that they tell. 

Here's a few more of the pictures, with more after the jump...

Saturday Night Open thread

Of course I'm joking with the title of this post. Flares doesn't generate a lot of comments -- lately even my beloved Chinese Spambots have deserted me -- so an open thread would be asking for more humiliation than I've already invited with my polls. I've been doing a wee bit of blog maintenance, and just wanted to mention the changes.

First, speaking of comments, I've added the ability for people to log on using OpenID. That choice is now available in the box that pops up when you go to add a comment. 

Secondly I've added a couple of new links to the top of the two right rails. Realizing our email was nowhere to be found on the site, I've added a 'Contact Me' button to the rightmost rail. It pops up a form that will send an email to us. At the moment I have that email going to my account. I know we have a yargb account at gmail, but for the life of me I can't remember or find the password to it. If anybody knows, send it on to me and I'll switch the contact form to point to it.

I've also added a 'Log into Flares' button to the top of the inner rail. I'm always amused at the thought that newer viewers of the blog must wonder why there is such a humongous list of contributors when it must seem I'm the only one posting. A bit of history -- we started out as a group of commentors from Roger Simon's pre-Pajamas Media blog and grouped together so we had a place to post articles without the need to individually maintain a blog. Most have moved on, but  from time to time the other folks still do post articles. So, I'm just entertaining myself by keeping the candles burning -- besides, our archives still get a fair amount of traffic. Nothing sadder than a dormant blog.

Anyway, back to the 'Log into Flares' button. I've gotten a couple of emails lately where contributors had forgotten their password, changed email addresses or weren't sure their accounts were active. It occurred to me some folk might not even remember where to go to add an article. That link takes you to our dashboard where you can login if'n you get the urge.

Finally I've added a couple of links: Bob's Blog and ISRO. The ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) link is part of my latest scheme -- linking to Indian sites to cover that neglected part of the Anglosphere.

By the way, in the likely event that my joke is too obscure, the picture of Duchamp's bicycle wheel readymade is in homage to Charles "Nuttier than a Fruitcake" Johnson of LGF who, in between obsessing over Creationism, has posted a seemingly infinite series of articles featuring pictures of bicycle wheels, spokes, chains, pedals and the like.