Manboobs for The Filipino Monkey

The year 2008 is only two weeks old and already it looks like it's going to be comedy gold. But first, let us welcome the new year with this bit of good news from the civil liberties/topless Swedish women department:

A swimming pool in northern Sweden has said it will allow women to bathe topless, following a campaign by feminists.

Since I am very much in favor of civil rights in general, and of womens' lib in particular, I would like to state that I support the stance taken by the Sundsvall municipal leisure center wholeheartedly.

A spokesman for the pool (...) said that employees there had decided they would not act if women tried to bathe semi-naked.

The Bara Bröst (Bare Breasts) Blog offers the following manifesto:

Bara Bröst is not committed to any political or religious views.

We demand:

• That women should be allowed to be topless in situations where it is accepted for men to be topless.
• That the breast should not be considered to be a part of the female genitalia.
• That the gender discriminating rules at the swimming pools are removed.
• That the norms that discriminats against women are worked with in schools and at workplaces and so on.
• That the politicians take their responsibility and act in this question.

Our goals:

A gender equal society where

• it is socially accepted for women to be topless in situations when it is accepted for men to do so.
• male and female bodies get an equal amount of space and on the same conditions.
• female bodies are not sexualized.
• no one has to feel like an object.
• women are not being discriminated against.

Seriously, it's hard to argue with any of the above points. Women should be allowed to go topless in all situations where it's OK to do so for men, without being gawked at. Since most men are now able to handle the sight of bare female ankle without spontaneously blowing their wad, there is no reason why we shouldn't come to terms with the sight of female breasts too. OK, it may take a while, but experience shows that if we stop making a big deal about bare skin, our libido learns to handle itself. It will be a good day for all of us (including men) when "no one has to feel like an object". Amen.

The alternative course, in the interests of fairness, would be to consider the male breast part of the masculine genitalia and ban the public display of manboobs.


A proposal that also has its merits. Anyway, more power to the ladies of Bara Bröst... oh, and I almost forgot: stick that in your pipe and smoke it, fundies. European values at their best.

Having thus inaugurated the new year in a way that will hopefully endow this blog with an agreeable level of karma, let us now turn again to the usual survey of human idiocy... as so often, displayed in admirable fashion by the US armed forces. The latest call for tenders by the Freedom Fighters of America is for a celebrity rock band to entertain US forces in the Afghan and Iraqi theaters of "war". Nothing wrong with that, after all, a hard-working occupation force needs to unwind after a long day of getting its ass whupped by the locals (see the USO scene in "Apocalypse Now"), but is this really what the troops want to see? A "Celebrity Rock Music Tour - QUANTITY 1" whose show will be subject to the following restrictions:

Any criminal conduct, unexcused tardiness or absence which prevents timely starting of the performance(s) required hereunder, indecency or obscenity, drunkenness, damage to Government property, failure to discharge indebtedness to the Government, influence of narcotics or hallucinatory drugs, threatening breach of national security, violation of the rules and regulations of the Host Nation, Government or TFF MWR are grounds for termination of this contract.

Boooo-oring! Also,

The Offeror shall submit details, such as a biography or other promotional or media articles relating to the proposed Professional Celebrity Rock Group, identifying the “professional celebrity” status of at least one member of the group.

So if you were hoping to make a quick buck with your buddies in the garage band, forget about it, unless you believe you can get Paris Hilton to sing (the chihuaha would qualify as a promotional article identifying the "professional celebrity" status under the above guidelines). No, I think the setup they are thinking of is more along the lines of The Halliburtons, Inc., or maybe Capitol Offense feat. Mike "End Times" Huckabee on bass.


However, The Huckster's proposal is likely to be rejected due to violations of Clause 2.4.4.1 of the solicitation:

An acknowledged deity will not be referred to in a manner that would offend a follower of any faith.

So maybe HQ USAREUR should try out a local band that has had many years of experience playing both large and small venues all up and down the Fertile Crescent, has a strong fanbase both in Iraq and in Afghanistan as well as that one country in between... what was it called again... ah, never mind. You know, of course, who I am referring to: That blockbuster boy group The Rolling Imams that has recently landed another top ten hit with "You Will Explode In A Few Minutes" (apparently a coded reference to premature ejaculation in the presence of uncovered Swedish ankles). They are reportedly bidding to appear at USOs in the region with their new frontman, The Filipino Monkey, who is filling in the professional celebrity slot due to the unavailability of singer and guitarist The Imam, currently in occultation due to previous engagements.


To round off the latest news in security-related lunacy, here are a few small choice bits that may make you look afresh with wonder and amazement at your fellow human beings. The first story comes to us from China, where Wang Zhendong has been sentenced to death for bilking more than 10,000 investors to the tune of US$390 million with a giant ant farm scam. It was both a giant scam involving ants, and a scam involving giant ants (used in traditional Chinese medicine). That's really all I can say about this sad story.

The next report lacks a dateline, but is almost certainly from the US.


Bullet Proof Baby Stroller Product Test

While I am not certain that this is not a bogus video, the depressing thing is that you can never know. It might be real. This even as the American obsession with guns is reportedly "fading":

The number of households with guns dropped from a high of 54 percent in 1977 to 34.5 percent in 2006, according to NORC, and the percentage of Americans who reported personally owning a gun has shrunk to just under 22 percent. (...) President George W. Bush this week signed into law a bill meant to prevent people with a record of mental disease from buying weapons.

I will refrain from making the obvious joke at this point and simply point out that you don't need a firearm to settle your differences, as one unfortunate young man in Vienna found out the hard way over the weekend:

The body of a young man was found in an elegant Vienna square with a rake embedded in his head, Austrian police said Saturday.

So please, my fellow Europeans, stop pointing fingers at the cousins over in the US of A for just a very brief moment of silence while we consider the fate of this poor soul, at least until the next submachine-gun killing spree at an American primary school/ university/ McDonald's/ post office reminds us that the advantage of rakes is it's hard to run amuck with one.

I'm still waiting for your feedback. Remember that the first person to comment on this or another story in the next few days gets a free piece of artwork plus the right to choose the topic for the next post. Come on, you can do it. My hit counter went over 400 (!!) for the first time this week, so I know you are out there.

Update: Check out Steve Bell's cartoon on Bush's Middle East visit and The Filipino Monkey.

Jihad, Hired Guns, and the Camberwell Carrot

Because I have been busy recently, I won't have the time to write exhaustive comments on each of the following links that caught my eye over the past week, so just a few remarks on each.

The Beeb reported last week that a US citizen was jailed for 24 years for "attending an al-Qaeda training camp in Pakistan and lying about it". The prosecution offered what Amy Waldman in an article for The Atlantic Monthly last year aptly called "an accretion of circumstantial but ugly evidence" of his "jihadi mind", including expressions of "hatred towards the United States", praise for the murder of Daniel Pearl, and calling George W. Bush "the worm". Other evidence included his owning extremist literature. The Atlantic Monthly article gives a good overview of what is interesting about this case, namely the notion of "preeemptive prosecution" and the admissibility of belief as evidence for the prosecution in court. Also interesting is the clash of expert witnesses brought by the prosecution and defense alike, who duelled in the courtroom over the finer points of Islamic theology. Notably, the witnesses for the prosecution included this chap:

Walid Phares, a Lebanese Christian academic who emigrated to the United States in 1990, at the end of Lebanon’s civil war between Muslims and Christians. In Lebanon, Phares’s political activities included participation in the Lebanese Forces, a coalition of right-wing Christian militias that the defense said the U.S. State Department had labeled anti-Muslim. El Fadl, his fellow prosecution witness, calls Phares an “Islamophobe,” and at trial the defense sought to demonstrate as much. By his own characterization, Phares, an associate professor at Florida Atlantic University, was outside the academic mainstream until 9/11.

What the article fails to mention is that Phares is also on the salary list of Benador Associates, a prominent part of the right-wing spin machine that sold the "Global War on Terror" and the Iraq invasion to the American public. He can therefore hardly be regarded as an independent, impartial, or disinterested professional in the matter. Another interesting expert witness - Waldman's article doesn't say whether for the prosecution or the defense - is Reuven Paz, formerly of the Israeli Shin Bet internal intelligence service and more recently the academic director of the International Institute for Counterterrorism in Herzliya, Israel.

Next, a quick look at this video posted at Crooks and Liars, a CNN interview with Jeremy Scahill, the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. Mercenaries working for Blackwater were shelled while travelling in a convoy in Iraq on Sunday. They opened fire on passersby on the street, killing 11 people, including one policeman, and injuring 13, according to the WashPost. A spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry announced that Blackwater's license to operate had been withdrawn and that the responsible employees would be prosecuted. This will be an interesting test of the Iraqi government's sovereignty - after all, foreign "security contractors" in the country have so far been largely immune from prosecution. Scahill points out that

...the Bush administration failed to build a coalition of willing nations to occupy Iraq, and so instead, the administration has built the Coalition of Billing Corporations. Right now, in Iraq, private personnel on the US government payroll outnumber official US troops. There are about 180,000 so-called "private contractors" operating alongside 165,000 to 170,000 US troops. So really, now, the US military is the junior partner in this coalition. The mercenary component of that private-sector involvement has been totally unaccountable. They operate with impunity, they kill Iraqi civilians, and no charges are ever brought against them in Iraqi law, US law, military law.

He correctly points out that this is not the result of an oversight, but "political expediency on the part of the Bush administration" because dead mercs are not included in the official US death toll and they can act with free rein as their acts go unreported and undocumented. Scahill also notes, in the context of the current Petraeus/"surge" debate, that "there’s been a surge on for four years of the private sector in Iraq, this mercenary army that the Bush administration has built up all over that country."

Also, just to wrap up today's post on less of a bum note, here is a report from today's Guardian (and you may consider this either good or bad news):

The unpublished results of authoritative research into cannabis confirm the "skunk" now on sale in England is stronger than it was a decade ago, but demolish claims that a new "super-strength skunk" - which is 20 times more powerful - is dominating the market.

The recent Europe-wide campaign of hysteria surrounding the alleged "schizzo skunk" was really getting on my nerves. The allegation circulated by politicians and research-averse journalists alike, just as efforts to legalize weed were getting under steam in a number of countries, has been that today's weed is exponentially more powerful than the grass smoked by the hippies, i.e., today's parent generation.

But the findings of the two studies to be reported in Druglink, the drugs charity magazine, contradict recent claims that most of the skunk on sale in Britain now routinely has a THC-content of more than 30%. One of the studies showed that only 4% of the skunk that had been seized by the police had a strength level higher than 20%.

Having, at an earlier stage of my life, experienced the hassle and likely ripoff associated with procuring weed (read: parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme) in England, I almost broke into uncontrollable and hysterical laughter at reading the above paragraph, but then remembered that those days are over.

The claims earlier this year that a new strain of "super-strength skunk" cannabis that was up to 20 times more potent was dominating the British drug market and triggering mental health fears led Gordon Brown to order a new review of the legal status of the drug in July.

OK, this is really ridiculous. Notions like "20 times more potent" being openly discussed in public, when the actual figure is one-tenth of that... either people were just making wild and uneducated guesses, or they actually knew better and were counting on people's complete gullibility. You may argue that such "experts" only have in mind the protection of young people, but these policies - and the media campaigns to back them up - ensure that teenagers are criminalized, ostracized, and lose all faith in a public health and policing system that clearly cannot be trusted to be truthful and honest. Not to mention the many adult smokers who can make responsible decisions about their own health without government interference. No, cannabis is not a harmless drug, and there is some really heavy shit circulating out there, but as anybody can imagine, it is possible to put less weed into a joint if you know it is of stronger potency. The same applies to alcohol - which is why we drink some kinds of alcohol out of glasses like this

and other kinds of alcohol out of glasses like this:

Likewise, joints can be adjusted in terms of both size and potency, as demonstrated by Dan the Dealer in the excellent British movie, "Withnail and I":

Withnail: What are you going to do with those?

Danny: The joint I am about to roll requires a craftsman and can utilise up to twelve skins. It is called a Camberwell carrot.

Marwood: It's impossible to use twelve papers on one joint.

Danny: It is impossible to roll a Camberwell carrot with anything less.

Withnail: Who says it's a Camberwell carrot?

Danny: I do. I invented it in Camberwell and it looks like a carrot.

Cut to Danny on the sofa. The Camberwell carrot is complete and is indeed of prodigious proportions. As Danny lights it we see only the end but as he hands it to Withnail we see the true size. It is enormous.

Danny: This will tend to make you very high.

Gear list for US forces in Afghanistan leaked

Wikileaks has just published a set of documents detailing "the full equipment register of every US Army managed unit in Afghanistan from psychological operations ("PsyOps") and interrogation units to Kabul headquarters". This documentation complements an earlier leak of corresponding equipment list for all US units operating in Iraq, which can be found here.

According to the Wikileaks analysis,

The document reveals that half of all US army equipment purchases in Afghanistan have been diverted to dealing with home made mobile phone and radio bombs ("IEDs"). Not since the US 1945-1951 nuclear build up has there been such a decisive shift in military purchasing priorities. The 2007 May-July period saw 203 US military deaths from Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Iraq and Afghanistan, accounting for 66 percent of all US combat fatalities.

Among the equipment used for protection against IEDs, the gear list includes the following items:

• at least 2,769 “Warlock” radio frequency jammers, which prevent radio signals from triggering explosives;
• 1,734 “Acorn” improvised explosive device jammers;
• 42 portable explosives detectors;
• 61 “PSS-14” mine detecting sets and 86 other mine detecting sets;
• 6 “Boomerang” sniper detection sets;
• 42 portable explosives detectors;
• 9 “Husky” mine detection vehicles;
• 5 “Meerkat” mine detection vehicles.

A Congressional Research Service report recently detailed US military spending in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other theaters of operations since 11 September 2001. Wikileaks estimates that there is currently about US$1.1 billion worth of equipment in Afghanistan. This equipment also apparently includes "M7 Grenade Dischargers" for gas grenades as well as FN303 riot guns made by Belgian arms company Fabrique Nationale, which "can fire pepper-spray impregnated projectiles", according to Wikileaks. The WL analysts also extracted the prices for about 5/8ths of the items from the database at the CECOM (Communications & Electronics Command) website and found that three rocket launchers were delivered at a price of US$0.01 per piece, though the ordinary listing price is US$822. (Sounds like the Pentagon finally got a bargain, after paying one million bucks for two plain washers in a recently discovered scam... see my post last month on "Screwing the Pentagon")

In total, this is a huge volume of information; the analysis supplied in the appendix alone runs to 300 pages, and can be found here.

Acording to Wikipedia, the Wikileaks project "allows whistleblowers to anonymously release government and corporate documents, allegedly without possible retribution. It claims that postings are untraceable by anyone attempting to do so." There have also been some accusations that the project may in fact be a CIA front to solicit classified information; however, I have seen no conclusive evidence that this is more than just a rumor.

The Guardian recently ran a story on "The Looting of Kenya", based on material made public by Wikileaks.

Shadow Boxing for the Rubes

A friend of mine who is a reserve officer in the Swiss army mentioned today over lunch that some of the older brass in the general staff were "quite happy and relieved" to see Russia return to its old menacing form, making threatening noises and underlining its aspirations to be treated as a superpower. For armies everywhere, an assertive Russia means a return to bigger budgets for tanks and other expensive hardware. Then later this evening, I saw a news report saying that Norwegian F-16s and British Tornado jets had been scrambled to intercept eight Russian Tu-95 Bear bombers heading towards the UK:

The RAF scrambled to intercept eight Russian nuclear bombers heading for Britain yesterday in the biggest aerial confrontation between the two countries since the end of the Cold War.

Sounds pretty scary, doesn't it? Whenever you see the words "nuclear bombers" and "confrontation" in the same sentence, that can't be good news. Of course, there was no "confrontation" at all:

Defence sources said that the Russian pilots turned away as soon as they spotted the approaching Tornados and did not enter British airspace.

This is the second time that has happened in recent weeks; in August, two Tornados were sent from Scotland to head off another Bear in a similar situation. So what is this all about? As noted, Russia wishes to be treated as a global force to be reckoned with, and has recently started resuming air patrols of the sort that were discontinued at the end of the Cold War. On 9 August, two Tu-95s flying out of Blagoveshchensk in southwestern Russia made a 13-hour round trip just to buzz the US base on the island of Guam in the Pacific. So for whose benefit are these sorties being flown, since they serve no real military purpose? They are primarily in order to convince the Russian public that their Dear Leader Putin is just as much of a macho man as his US counterpart. Of course, we in the West are mature enough to see right through such blatant manipulation by the government and the military, right? Er...

MoD officials at the time played down the incident last month as a "picture-led story" and an opportunity to show off the air defence role of the Typhoon, an expensive and long-delayed aircraft originally designed during the cold war to engage in dogfights with Soviet planes over northern Europe.

"Quite happy and relieved" that the Bolshies are back in business, that just about sums it up, I think. Again, for whose benefit are these sorties being flown, on both sides? For you and me, the gawkers at the air show, the suckers at the carnival, the rubes at the circus (there's one born every minute). And, naturally, For the Benefit of Mr. Kite, as John Lennon put it:

In this way Mr. K. will challenge the world!

Mr. K. in this case being Messrs. Putin, Brown, Bush, and all the others in varying need of self-assertion. And of course Henry The Horse dances the waltz!

In any case, I have decided to seize the opportunity to mess around with embedded video for the first time; here is "Mr. Kite" by the Beatles, unfortunately mainly audio, since the picture is only the cover of the Sgt Pepper album for the duration of this song, together with the no less genius-soaked "Within You Without You" from the same album. If you think that the visuals are kind of boring, compare this video, which inexpicably features Freddie Mercury and Queen halfway through.

A splendid time is guaranteed for all. But please, Vladimir, Brownie, Dubya... careful with that Hogshead of Real Fire.