Blood & Treasure

animal spirits

When Marines enter an abandoned house in Fallujah, Iraq, and hear a suspicious noise, they clench their weapons, edge round a corner and prepare to open fire.

What they find during the US-led attack on the 'most dangerous city on earth', however, is not an insurgent bent on revenge but a tiny puppy left behind when most of the city's population fled before the bombing.

Mrs Treasure reads pet books. This is a blurb for something called From Baghdad with Love, which appears in the back of her current pet book, which is about a cat which...well, nothing, it's just about a cat this bloke found. At Christmas. Ba-da-bing, there's yer book.

It's a huge sub-genre, way bigger than TV tie in-driven romany, midwife and servant memoirs, mere ephemera by comparison. It's expanding into current and historical events, which evidently have more cachet when they involve puppies. I think radicals should get into this: manufacturing consent with puppies. Seriously, it'd sell loads. I wouldn't be surprised to see Zizek getting into the field, sharp fellow that he is.

magic kingdom

In a wonderful demonstration of how absurd 'historically' based territorial claims can get, North Korea has discovered a unicorn lair, whose location proves that Pyongyang is the legitimate capital of all Korea. What I especially like is that they knew it was a unicorn lair because it had the characters for 'unicorn lair' carved on it.

And that's all we have time for today, children. Tomorrow, we'll show how the discovery of the bones of the lesser spotted blue heffelump in Tawang leads inevitably to all out thermonuclear war between China and India. Won't that be exciting!

our popular tribunes

The Leveson revelation reminded me, in passing, of this tragedy from a week or so back:

Other residents in the local area were reluctant to speak to the media about the tragedy, which was reported to have happened while Harry and his mother were at her parents' home.

One neighbour, who declined to give her name, told reporters: "It's very, very sad. Losing a baby must be heart-breaking however it happens, and they need to be left to grieve."

My emphases. Maybe people would be actually more willing to co-operate with journalists if they thought that they weren’t descending on local communities as a hostile force. If public support for statutory regulation is an actual threat to free speech rather than, say,  a cynical and self-serving helping of bollocks, then whose fault is that?

But what’s the point. What we’re actually in here is democracy failure.

and then they can be ordered to shoot

Here's a disturbing report on stress as it affects drone pilots. Contra to the idea of videogame, push-button warfare the problem seems partly to be one of intimacy:

The particular nature of drone warfare is also a contributor to the higher stress levels. While the number is very small, officials who conducted the study said they did encounter a handful of pilots who suffered symptoms of PTSD — post-traumatic stress disorder — directly linked to their experience running combat operations. Unlike traditional pilots flying manned aircraft in a war zone, the pilots operating remote drones often stare at the same piece of ground in Afghanistan or Iraq for days, sometimes months. They watch someone's pattern of life, see people with their families, and then they can be ordered to shoot.

Col. Kent McDonald, who co-authored the report, says the Air Force tries to recruit people who are emotionally well-adjusted, "family people" with "good values."

"When they have to kill someone," he says, "or where they are involved in missions and then they either kill them or watch them killed, it does cause them to rethink aspects of their life."

McDonald describes it as an "existential crisis."

You're not actually fighting enemies who are fighting you or dropping high explosives on people from vast distances way out of your sightline: you're coming into the office from a nice suburban home and waiting for an order to kill someone who you may have spent months watching interact with their family in the same way you interact with yours. What's especially disturbing about this is that a logical next step as far as counselling/training goes is a programme to dehumanise targeted communities; either that or to select for lack of empathy.

today in partnership

I started reading this article on Germany banning bestiality thinking that maybe Merkel was pulling a variant of Lyndon Johnson's old 'pigfucker' manouvre. "Where were the Social Democrats when the time came to push for this humane and necessary legislation? In ze barn, perhaps? ' But then I found myself astonished by this chap:

But Michael Kiok, the chairman of the pressure group Zoophile Engagement for Tolerance and Information (Zeta), said he was going to take legal action to fight the proposed changes.

"It is unthinkable that any sexual act with an animal is punished without proof that the animal has come to any harm," he said, adding that animals are capable of showing what they do, or do not, want to do.

"We see animals as partners and not as a means of gratification. We don't force them to do anything. Animals are much easier to understand than women," Mr Kiok claimed.

Needless to say I do not endorse this message. I am concerned a little for Mr Kiok's welfare if the other Zetas get to hear about his group. I'm not too sure that the Mexican cartel sense of humour stretches that far.

enter the Buddhiban

Dr Aye Chan is a very well-known figure in the Myanmar democracy movement, and also an Arakanese. Previously imprisoned by the junta as a dissident, he is now welcome because his scholarship and advocacy provide a veneer of legitimacy to anti-Rohingya sentiment. In September, he attended a conference on "National Identity and Citizenship in 21st Century Myanmar" in Yangon and was pointedly greeted at the airport by an Arakanese delegation. According to the Arakanese news agency: 

Arakanese were said to have held placards and banners that included one which read "Dr Aye Chan, Save the Land of Arakan" while welcoming him at the airport. [14]

News coverage approvingly noted his book on the Rohingya, Virus Influx. 

An absolutley immense article on the ongoing Rohingya pogrom in the context of Burmese democratisation and emerging regional Buddhist militancy. 'The Lady' does not emerge too well.

sex, flattery and fat young dynasts

Everybody knows by now about the notorious People's Daily photospread of Kim Jung-un as the sexiest man alive - now, sadly 404'd - which previously appeared in the Onion. Adam Minter has an interesting theory about why this happened here, involving Chinese state media's 'skinhua' tendencies:

The third, and final, bias is People’s Daily’s interest in sexy slideshows. On Sunday the paper posted a 52-image slideshow entitled “Attractive beauties at auto exhibitions” depicting, as the title suggests, models -- sometimes skimpily dressed -- lounging with cars (this was preceded, three days earlier, by “Sexy car models at 3rd Harbin Autumn Auto Exhibition”). No surprise, the sexy slideshows often descend into blatantly sexist agitprop, such as a now-notorious example, “‘Beautiful scenery’ at 18th CPC National Congress,” where the “beautiful scenery” turned out to be young women who worked at the all- important political event. Finally, there are the more prosaic, single-model examples (in which Kim Jong-Un is obviously working), such as Friday’s “Glamorous Li Xiaoran poses on beach.”

So the point isn't that the People's Daily was fooled by the Onion, though it might have been, but that the original was a handy means of providing cheap flattery of Kim Jong-un to be fed back in to Pyongyang leadership circles, thereby keeping Sino-North Korean relations on an even keel. I'd also like to believe that they were also doing it deliberately to take the piss out of the Kim dynasty.

What makes Minter's general analysis more credible is the the original Onion piece reflects fairly aaccurately  both how North Korean state media reports on Kim Jong-un and how it reports on foreign reaction to the Kims. Do the world's workers, peasants, broad masses and progressive and peace loving forces think that Kim Jong-un is the sexiest man alive? Why, of course they do!

you, too, can be a pro-American

The US Embassy in Islamabad on Obama re-election night. 21st Century messaging. 

movie night

Here’s a vintage propaganda newsreel about the internment of Japanese Americans, who as Adam Cathcart notes on twitter are described as ‘cheerfully handling the enormous amount of paperwork involved'.

And for those interested in proto-Gangnam style hi jinks, here’s the Nanjing victory dance from City of Life and Death: which, in context, was also a propaganda movie, though a much less outrageous one.

we've seen these conspirators before

The Daily Mail, for instance, ran a 12-page "special investigation" into Sir David Bell, former Financial Times chairman and an adviser to the Leveson inquiry. It "revealed" not that he is a paedophile, corrupt banker, war criminal or Satanist – though headlines referring to "a giant octopus", "a quasi-masonic nexus", "a nuclear bomb" and "dark arts" suggested all four – but that he helped set up the Media Standards Trust, which favours press regulation. The trust runs the Orwell prize for journalism which once made an award to the now discredited Independent journalist Johann Hari. Bell is therefore "linked" to Hari, a liar and plagiarist. He is also "linked" to the BBC's false allegations against Lord McAlpine because he is a trustee of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism which contributed to the disastrous Newsnight story.

The Mail story also identified Lord Leveson as an Orthodox Jew. I’m not sure what the connection between that and his deliberations is, but at least it enabled us to discover the network in full.

However, despite this Masonic-leftist-Jewish fronted conspiracy against free speech, I remain confident that the traitor Dreyfus will remain on Devil’s Island, as he deserves. In other news, I'm wondering how the hell the anti-Leveson campaign has managed to reproduce so much of the founding mythology of the French far right.