Gotta Love the Junta: Generals Putting Their Names on Foreign Food Aid in Burma (not Myamar)

Ugly, but completely predictable story, here.

Myanmar junta hands out aid boxes with generals' names

Sat May 10, 3:08 PM ET

Myanmar's military regime distributed international aid Saturday but plastered the boxes with the names of top generals in an apparent effort to turn the relief effort for last week's devastating cyclone into a propaganda exercise.

Despite international appeals to postpone a referendum on a controversial proposed constitution, voting began Saturday in all but the hardest hit parts of the country. With voters going to the polls, state-run television continuously ran images of top generals including junta leader, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, handing out boxes of aid at elaborate ceremonies.

"We have already seen regional commanders putting their names on the side of aid shipments from Asia, saying this was a gift from them and then distributing it in their region," said Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, which campaigns for human rights and democracy in the country.

Sometimes I am Embarassed to be a Canadian: Mark Steyn on Trial

Nice oped here.

A miserable quote or three:

We do not envy the Canadians. They have entrusted to their government a power Americans never would, and they follow it into foolishness.In the week of June 2, a body of bureaucrats called the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal will call on the carpet author Mark Steyn. A bellicose champion of the West, Steyn predicts in his new book, "America Alone," that Muslims will swarm over Europe, ban alcohol and put women in veils. Maclean's magazine printed an excerpt that outraged Islamic Canadians, who complained to human-rights tribunals in Ottawa and the provinces.

...

British Columbia now bans all words and images "likely to expose a person ... to hatred or contempt" because of race, religion, age, disability, sex, marital status or sexual orientation." This sounds like a libel law for groups, except that libel is a misstatement of fact that damages an individual reputation. In the United States, for a public figure to be libeled, the false statement has to be made maliciously or recklessly.

...

Racial harmony in Canada would have been safer had the question never become official.

There are extreme sports and then there is....

HT: AS's MHB

Military Parade at Red Square, Moscow (May Day 1941)

Le plus ce change, le plus ce meme chose

More info on today's fun here.

Hillary's Downfall

The Burmese Cyclone From Above

Harrowing Photo Essay of the Aftermath of the US Nuclear Attack on Hiroshima

The photo essay can be found here.

It's a strange thing, but when I think of Hiroshima I think of pictures like the one above, a photograph denuded of the bomb's effect on the citizens of Hiroshima and, if you are like me, a long hard look at the photographs above are a necessary correction to this odd lacunae. The story behind how it is that these harrowing photographs are only available to the public now is also very much worth a read. Israel's bombing of Syria's nascent atomic weapon facilities looks all the more prescient.

HT: AS

Sound Familiar: Hitler's Plans for War on America

HT: AS

Some Secret: A Public Tour of Iran's Peaceful Nuclear Site

Photo essay here.

Nice Piece on Ansel Adams in NYT: HT JPK

Ansel Adams

Austria's Greatest Tragedy? I Think Not

From the letters section in today's National Post.

Austria's Greatest Tragedy?
Re: Man Traps Daughter For 24 Years; Kept In Dungeon, Bore His Children, Police Say, April 28.
Much has been said over the past few days about "Austria's greatest tragedy ever." Twelve years ago I stood at the Mauthausen concentration camp with my father, a former inmate of the camp, and I also wondered how among the many farms surrounding the camp not one was able to identify what was going on in their midst for so many years during the war.

Furthermore, Mauthausen was surrounded by other concentration camps, including at least one death camp, from where my father was liberated after spending weeks burying Jewish victims.

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day and I challenge the Austrian people to finally admit that this was in fact the greatest tragedy in the history of their nation.

Marvin Stenge, Montreal.

After all, this is the Country where Hitler was a German and Mozart an Austrian. I did once have the opportunity of visiting Mathausen. It's truly frightening how the horrors of the past can be so sanitized by the weather of 50 years. More info on just how bad Mathausen-Gussen and the smaller satellite camps can be found here. It is true that Nazi Germany did invade Austria, but they were not exactly met with much resistance. Even today, the famous Vienna Synagogue that survived the war -- it was to be made into a museum -- there are no signs leading to it, and both my friend Adam Sandler, who speaks fluent avrit (modern Hebrew), and me with a last name like Rabin, were unable to get past the Israeli security.

Email of the Day (Name of the Guilty and the Guilty Bastard's Wife Changed)

Dear Louise,
Would you please remove my email address immediately and substitute it with my wife XXXXXXX’s email address: XXXXXXX@sympatico.ca for all correspondence including this one.
Thank you very much,
Jack Arsehole

What precipitated this bizarre and less than kind note was an introductory email by Louise to the parents of the children that are on the soccer team that Louise and I are coaching. Now what to make of this? Surely, a father might be interested just a little, wee bit in his son's soccer? Or if he felt so strongly (and why does he feel so strongly?) could he not just forward it on to his wife and ask that his wife be included on subsequent emails? And no, it's not that the fellow's email account is so precious or secure that mere soccer mail was unsuitable. It is in fact, as you can see, a domestic sympatico account. Also, this is that this family (his wife?)asked Mooredale to use for soccer correspondence.

Not Quite Sure of What to Make of This (Leave Comment)

You Would Think Bush Would Want to Keep a Backup, (in the style of Borat) 'Not!'

Great story here about how the Whitehouse have just happened to misplace something on the order of 5 million emails over the course of Bush's presidency. Will Hillary go back to Lotus Notes, I wonder?

Poor Anastasia; The Remains of All The Czar's Children Have Been Found

This was a story, that so to speak, would never die.

Every few years, a self-styled Princess would surface calling herself Anastasia and laying claim to the Russian throne, having somehow been spared the vicissitudes of the Bolshevik Revolution, who shot the family in a basement, threw them down a mine shaft, and poured over acid over so as to hide the complete discovery of the crime for 90 years. I can remember in my lifetime at least 3 or 4 different claimants.

A parallel, but less known story, is that had the British Royal family invited the Romanoffs to England--Nicholas and George V were cousins, you can see the family resemblance in the photo above--, they, unlike 40 million others, would have escaped one of the worst regimes of all time. Alas, no such invitation was forthcoming and no such counter factual history made factual.

YEKATERINBURG, Russia (Reuters) - Scientific tests have confirmed that remains found in Russia last year belong to the last Tsar's male heir and his daughter, missing since the royal family were executed in 1918, officials said on Wednesday.

...

Bolshevik executioners shot the family in 1918 in the basement of a merchant's house in Yekaterinburg, 1,450 km (900 miles) east of Moscow. Attempts were made to destroy the bodies, then they were dumped into pits.

.

Full story here.

More Great Cold War Era Music

Cold War and Central Committee. Series. 4: Plenums of the Central Committee of the CPSU, 1941-1990. Woodbury, CT: Research Publications, 2001. 181 reels, 690 fiche (Media Commons)
This collection documents the plenums of the Central Committee of the CPSU from the Stalin era until the demise of the Soviet Union. During each plenum a team of stenographers compiled an "uncorrected stenogram" or verbatim transcript of the proceedings. However, speakers were permitted to revise and extend their remarks. These corrected versions, called the "author's copy," were then collated into the "corrected copy." After additional editing, usually with an eye to maintaining ideological consistency, the remarks were distributed to members of the Politburo, the CPSU Secretariat and members of the Central Committee as a final "edited copy." This publication contains nearly all versions - from uncorrected stenogram to edited copy - of Central Committee plenums. Of particular interest to scholars, the author's copies often contain the handwritten corrections of the participants as well as the inclusion of newly drafted remarks.

If you Look Really Closely, You Can See the Olympic Torch Passing Unmolested.

The amazing picture above shows the two Koreas at night. If you look really closely, you can see the Olympic Torch in the middle of darkness of North Korea.


North Korea welcomes Olympic torch

You have to love the article below from The Star.

KYODO/REUTERS

April 29, 2008
ASSOCIATED PRESS

PYONGYANG–North Korea mobilized tens of thousands of citizens yesterday to celebrate the Olympic torch relay in Pyongyang, the flame's first visit to the authoritarian nation.

Men in their best suits and women wearing traditional high-waisted dresses waved flags and paper flowers in the capital, greeting the torch like a visiting head of state.

Unlike some other parts of the relay ahead of the Beijing Olympics, everything went off without a hitch in North Korea. Only the most loyal Communist elite are allowed to live in Pyongyang, a showpiece city filled with monuments to the hard-line regime.

China is North Korea's main ally and a key provider of aid, and the torch relay was used to herald their ties. North Korea has condemned disruptions of the relay elsewhere, and supported Beijing in its crackdown on violent protests in Tibet.

Leader Kim Jong-il was not seen at yesterday's event, but he was "paying great interest to the success of the Olympic torch relay," Pak Hak-son, chair of North Korea's Olympic committee, said at the relay start, according to a report from Pyongyang by Japan's Kyodo News Agency.

"We express our basic position that while some impure forces have opposed China's hosting of the event and have been disruptive, we believe that constitutes a challenge to the Olympic idea," Pak said.

The torch began its run from beneath the giant red stained-glass flame that tops the 170-metre-tall obelisk of the Juche Tower, which commemorates the national ideology of "self-reliance" created by the late founding president Kim Il-sung, father of Kim Jong-il.

An attentive and peaceful crowd watched the start of the relay, some waving Chinese and Olympic flags, APTN footage showed. The ceremony was presided over by the head of Parliament, Kim Yong-nam. Kim passed the flame to Pak Du-ik, a former soccer star who played on North Korea's 1966 World Cup soccer team.

As the 19-kilometre relay wound through Pyongyang, thousands of cheering people lined the streets waving pink paper flowers and small flags with the Beijing Olympics logo and chanting "Welcome! Welcome!" Middle-aged women in traditional dresses danced and beat drums in one square, while young girls held red balloons and bouquets of flowers.

Security was far lighter than in most other cities visited by the torch.

The relay ended after about five hours at Kim Il-sung Stadium, where female marathoner Chong Song-ok used the torch to light an Olympic cauldron, China's official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Later yesterday, the torch arrived to a warm welcome in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Carter is Outed by a Frenchie as the Anti-Semitic Peanut Farmer That He is

From the WSJ.

The Sad End of Jimmy Carter
By BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY
April 25, 2008

The problem is not that he is, or is not, talking to the Syrians – everyone does it to some degree.

It isn't that he went to Damascus to meet with the exiled head of Hamas – everyone, including the Israelis, will one day have to do that too, in accordance with that old rule which says that in the end it is with your enemies not your friends that you have to come to an understanding and make peace.

No.

The problem is how Jimmy Carter went about it.

The problem is the spectacular and useless embrace he exchanged with the senior Hamas dignitary, Nasser Shaer, in Ramallah.

The problem is the wreath he laid piously at the grave of Yasser Arafat, who, as Mr. Carter knows better than anyone else, was a real obstacle to peace.

It is that in Cairo, if we are to believe another Hamas leader, Mahmoud Zahar, whose statement has so far not been denied, Mr. Carter apparently described Hamas as a "national liberation movement" – this party which has made a cult of death, a mythology of blood and race, and an anti-Semitism along the lines of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into the linchpin of its ideology.

The problem is also the formidable nose thumbing he got from Hamas's exiled leader, Khaled Mashaal, who, at the very moment he was receiving Mr. Carter, also triggered the first car bombing in several months in Keren Shalom on the Gaza strip – and that this event elicited from poor Mr. Carter, all tangled up in his small-time mediator calculations, not one disapproving or empathetic word.

The former president, it will be recalled, is an old hand at this sort of thing.

Going off track like this is not new for the man who 30 years ago was one of the architects of peace with Egypt, but who since then has not stopped vilifying Israel, comparing its political system to that of South Africa during apartheid, ignoring Israel's desire for peace, which is no less real than its errors, even denying its suffering.

A year ago, he told CBS that for years his beloved Hamas had not committed any terrorist attacks resulting in civilian casualties – this, a few months after the assassination of six people at the Karni Terminal, and the attack on Aug. 30, 2004, which killed 16 passengers in two buses in Beersheba.

And it is one thing to speak to CBS, and another to say these words, which are unofficial but have indisputable moral authority, to the belligerents.

It is one thing to say, in Dublin on June 19, 2007, that the true criminals are not those who proclaim, like Mashaal, that "before dying" Israel must be "humiliated and degraded," but those who would prefer that these charming characters be pushed out of the circles of power, sooner or later, with a distinct preference for "sooner." It is quite another to come over in person and put all one's weight behind the most radical elements, those who are the most hostile to peace, the most profoundly nihilistic in the Palestinian camp.

The truth is, if one wished to discredit the other side, to fully humiliate and ridicule the only Palestinian leader (Mahmoud Abbas) who at the risk of his life continues to believe in the solution of two states – if with a word one wanted to ruin the last dreams of men and women of goodwill who still believe in peace – one would be absolutely on the right track.

So what happened to this man, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate?

Is it the vanity of someone who is no longer so important, who wants a last 15 minutes in the spotlight before he has to leave the stage forever?

Is it the senility of a politician who has lost touch with reality and with his own party? Barack Obama, even more clearly than his rival, has just reminded us that it will not be possible to "sit down" with the leaders of Hamas unless they are prepared to "renounce terrorism, recognize Israel's right to exist, and respect past agreements."

Could he be suffering from a variant of self-hatred, or in this case a hatred of his own past as the Great Peacemaker?

All hypotheses are permitted. Whatever the reason, Mr. Carter has demonstrated an unusual capacity to transform a political error into a disastrous moral mistake.

Jimmy reads Rawls too, I understand. HT: KPF

There's Something Refreshing About a bad Review

A Belated Message from Anne Frank

Story Here