wmd's



before we get too carried away with this question of rogue nations' weapons of mass destruction, let's refresh the knowledge base about which nations really do possess them. it looks like this (detailed analysis at the center for defense information and the national resources defense council (NRDC):

total number of nuclear weapons possessed by

Pakistan ........................ 24-48
India ............................. 60+
United Kingdom ............. 185
Israel ............................ 200+
France .......................... 350
China ............................ 400
Russia ........................... ~10,000
United States ................. 10,656

and let's throw in a few random expenditure figures for good measure

$3.5 trillion: amount the United States spent between 1940 and 1995 to prepare to fight a nuclear war.

$27 billion: amount the United States spends annually to prepare to fight a nuclear war.

$2.2 billion: cost of one B-2 bomber (21 were authorized by Congress).

$2.5 billion: the lifecycle cost of each B-2 (RDT&E, procurement, operations, maintenance, and support).

these indisputable statistics bespeak a pathology of folly - the terrible, craven acceptance of a great nation's literal descent into insanity, the toll of that decades-long inhabitation of the crypto-hallucinogenic atmosphere of paranoia that drew the leaders of the world's two superpowers into an ever-escalating face-off. the bald truth is that the west's 'victory' in the cold war was simply a function of its limitless credit: the former USSR was forced to bankrupt itself to keep step with the MAD (mutually assured destruction) numbers game. in consequence, the fate of the entire planet has come to rest on the shoulders of a series of mediocre men whose policies have been dictated by the multinationals who bankrolled that nuclear insanity. the current incumbent - this Texan dilettante with a very limited grasp on reality - is hardly bothering to conceal the real purpose behind his presidency: to plunder the entire globe in order to make the richest men on earth even richer.
as a citizen of the country with, literally, infinitely more wmd's than have been discovered in the country we helped invade in order to pre-empt its 45-minute-imminent (for that's what they told us) capacity to use them on us (a slight - ahem - exaggeration?) I ask this of my great leader: what, exactly, are you defending me and my family and friends from that justifies the continued presence in my backyard of 185 armed, active, excruciatingly vulnerable, and exorbitantly cash-absorbent nuclear warheads?
(citizens of the US already know the answer, of course - all 10,656 of yours are targeted on Nusquam and Ubique, the twin capitals of the People's Republic of Terror)

For nearly three decades Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" lay partially submerged in the Great Salt Lake. Since 1999, as drought has lowered the water level, this seminal work of early land art — a 1,500-foot coil of black basalt rocks — has slowly emerged from its ever-evaporating context. Now it is completely exposed - as un-jettied as the ex-Aral Sea's un-boats.




more info here
(via cronaca)

face-off


"The Daily Nation released an image of one of the two suicide bombers who tried to assassinate President Musharraf. The force of the blast detached his face from his head and it flew up and fell off the roof of the nearby police station. He was identified as a bomber from the amount of explosive material on the face."
Pakistan News PakTribune.Com


why does this image make me think of this?

is it just the obvious comparison between two puzzles - part of this attempt to make sense of the insanity - two anonymous faces lifted out of history as a result of an equally impossible set of random circumstances and placed before us as icons of meaning. it is equally possible that both images are fakes - that what they purport to represent is nothing more or less than a manipulative artifice. but if they really were who they are represented to be, where does that leave us, other than mired, still, in this endless, centuries-old bog of superstitious intolerance, fear, and hatred.

Losing your ears to music: The hearing loss epidemic and musicians

we have this saying

US fighter jet 'bombs' East Yorkshire farm

with friends like this, who needs enemies?

could be worse

this Kilroy-Silk business seems almost trivial compared with this:

Tilos Rádió to go off air?
By Balázs Dóczy

THE Chairman of the National Radio and Television Commission (ORTT) has said the organization would launch an investigation after a Tilos Rádió broadcaster said Christians should be exterminated.

(The Budapest Sun Online)

charismatic covers


this?         or this?    

how's a poor rhino to choose? equal charisma, equal charm, I'd say.
alas, no mp3 samples. plenty more here.

primary epiploic appendagitis

by far and away the most riveting christmas story of 2003 comes from the defective yeti (ew).

the inept hijacker:
"Take this plane to Tucson." The pilot says, "But it's going to Tucson." Guy says, "Act like it's my idea, nobody gets hurt..."
(context and more here)

teiotu brothers - debut album



"Danny, Newtown and Teiotu Jnr, three of the Teiotu brothers from Atiu, now residents in Australia have recently released their first album titled 'Mummy and Daddy.'
Danny's twin brother Inaina composed the title song which features as the last number on the album.
The song tells the story about living so far away from their parents."

(via cook islands news)

for the love of a yak


this glorious old fellow is ap chuni dorji, composer of the song, 'yak legpai lhadar gawo', an hour-long little ditty about the tragic parting between a yak herder and his beloved yak. this song has been the top of the bhutan hit parade for the last fifty years (until they got satellite tv a year or so ago). it is immortalised on the soundtrack of the film being made by the professionally perfect
dzongar jamyang khyentse rinpoche, who is, apart from being a film-director, the reincarnation of a 19th-century tibetan saint, and one of himalayan buddhism's most revered lamas. their stories, which read like a vertiginous crossing of a rickety rope bridge spanning the middle ages and now with nothing in between, can be found in the bhutan online newspaper Kuensel Online and in this
TIME Asia article.

"Congratulations Paul! you have an IQ of 131!
According to the sorts of questions you got correct, we can tell your Intellectual Type is a Word Warrior.
This means you have exceptional verbal skills. You can easily make sense of complex issues and take an unusually creative approach to solving problems. Your strengths also make you a visionary. Even without trying you're able to come up with lots of new and creative ideas."
this is exactly the sort of ego-boost a clapped-out old miseryguts needs on new year's day. (I'm assuming 131 is sort of ok-ish-to-average, which is as far as I aspire.)
wahay!
utter bullshit, but fun bullshit - try it
yourself - go on - I dare you.

the life of onni

onni was a finnish pig, who lived a short but happy life through most of 2001 before becoming bacon. this is the very sweet, slightly strange, but ultimately unsentimental
Life of Onni, courtesy of helsingin sanomat - the perfect antidote to all that seasonal saccharine disney anthropomorphism.

terrorists manual




so apparently if you're seen carrying one of these around you're liable to be hooded and cuffed and whisked off for a free holiday in guantanamo bay - so don't say you weren't warned.

Iran: Death Toll In Earthquake Expected To Exceed 20,000
I wanted to be able to visualise that figure, so I managed half, here.

flawed truth

AP
"This front page of Al-Moutamar newspaper published in Baghdad on Thursday shows a picture of Saddam Hussein, shaven and in captivity, sitting on the floor across from Ahmed Chalabi, a member of Iraq's American-picked Governing Council."
this is how the Fort Worth Dallas News captions this pic.
but look at the pic - Chalabi is obviously sitting on a stool, and Saddam, equally obviously, is sitting on a low stool, but Chalabi is elevated because his stool is perched on a step up from the floor of the cell - the iconography of reversed status is quite well enough established by that visual statement without having to embellish it with petty, obvious untruths. saddam is not sitting on the floor, in lowly abasement before his captors, but that's how this newspaper wants us to remember this picture, and that's how the american media have been bamboozling the citizens of that poor benighted land throughout this tragic set of misadventures - by feeding the collective fantasy of moral outrage against this monstrous dictator, and thereby disguising the unacceptable truth about this black episode in american history. one only has to look at this pic with eyes undazzled by the hype to realise that the caption is untrue - not mistaken, untrue, because picture editors are not stupid - but it's the notion conveyed in the caption that matters, so it becomes true enough, because it's what we want to see, therefore unquestionably true.

roll of honour
jg ballard, lucian freud, albert finney, doris lessing, michael frayn, claire tomalin, bernie ecclestone, humphrey lyttelton, john cleese, helen mirren, john cole, alan bennett, ken loach, david hockney, david bowie, inter alia: I may have been a bit snooty about some of you in the past, but I salute you all now.

Jessica Lynch - Plural


an exhaustive, brilliantly illuminating and admirably dispassionate article by Stan Goff - a former special forces master sergeant and father of a serving soldier on active duty in Iraq - that exposes all the hypocrisy, lying, and shameless political opportunism surrounding this sorry episode.
(via xymphora)

so can I have my cake................



..............................................and eat it?

creeping golliphilism


snapped this earlier today hanging outside a small shop in the high street. hard to say which I find the more odious - this continuous local flaunting of a diehard blindness to the racist overtones (as evidenced in the local carnival - blogged last month here and here), or the whimsical jolliness of this smirking ex-pat's utter carelessness about all that silly pc stuff.