I still remember with fondness my former middle-school student from the mid-90s, Nara Kim, to whom I'd given the assignment of writing a list of questions to a hypothetical American student. One of the questions she wrote was (I think) supposed to be about cafeteria food. It should have read, "Does the food taste good?", but instead she wrote:

"Does the food have good testes?"

I started cackling and she demanded to know why. I pointed at "testes" and she asked what testes were. I said I couldn't tell her. Undeterred, she pulled out her electronic English-Korean/Korean-English dictionary and looked "testes" up. She saw the Korean definition and frowned.

"What's that?" she asked.
_

More evidence of the hard-wired nature of sexuality.

One reason why I sympathize with Blair: the poor guy's taken principled stands under a lot of pressure, and it's affecting his health.

Also in London: magician David Blaine thinks outside of the box.

Dan Darling of Regnum Crucis has some great analysis of Osama Bin Laden's rants to the American people and to the Muslim world, here and here.

Merde in France pisses warmly (if briefly) on Europe's economic fortunes.

Andrew Sullivan (I): Great article about "dream tickets" in the presidential race.

Andrew Sullivan (II): His personal crisis of faith, which is in my opinion a microcosm of a much larger thing happening between the Roman Church and American culture.

Satan's Anus hisses about media coverage in Iraq.

I noted this in the comments section of one of the Marmot's blogposts, but Anticipatory Retaliation lays it out nicely:

...creating linkage between North Korea non-aggression and Iraq peacekeeping, in light of the recent UN resolution, does create the awkward situation where the US is supporting a UN-backed peacekeeping force in South Korea while the South Koreans refuse to assist in a UN-backed peacekeeping operation in Iraq.

I think this is going to be very weird, and don't expect good results. Scroll one post down, and AR provides a very scatological post. Well, not as graphic as Hominid-style shittin' it old-school, but still pleasingly pungent.

Gweilo Diaries finally provides a girlie pic I truly enjoy.

Weblog@Oranckay has been following the Noh Mu Hyon flap and commenting on Noh's rocky relationship with the conservative Korean press. A recent post says:

I truly believe that the reason Roh's ratings have been so low is because those who have always hated him always have and always will (did I mention that Roh won a defamation case against the Chosun in 1991?), and those who have always supported him are angry that he's not handing them the whole country to do with it as they please. That includes the more spoiled of unions, the ones working for big concerns that exploit smaller interests with smaller unions, and others.

So, his ratings are not low because he has failed to show leadership, but because he has demonstrated leadership in making highly unpopular choices.

I don't see things this way, however. When I look at Noh, I see an idealistic president who's in over his head, who's spinelessly backtracked on stupid campaign promises (parity with the US, anyone?) in the face of realities he should have known existed, and who's going to whine "I feel my pain" any moment now. While I've drawn parallels between Noh and Clinton before, laurels go to Clinton for being far more adept at triangulation, and in that sense, a far superior politician to Noh. A call for a referendum/confidence vote smacks more of desperation than anything else. Noh is more reactive than proactive, all things considered.

I do, however, think that if a "recall" process were started here, it would be a mistake.

Chinabloggers are all over the issue of Chinese selfishness. Try here and here and here.

Old news at this point, but let's note that Mother Teresa has been beatified. Doesn't make her corpse any tastier when I chew on her humerus, but hey-- there are treasures stored up for her in heaven. You go, girl!

Glenn makes me envious.

Cobb on the Catholic problem.

Annika's familial spat may have ruined her mother's birthday. As commenters to her post said: I've been there & know the feeling. It'll pass. Just remember to keep communicating. Love conquers all, at least temporarily.

You've probably seen it elsewhere, but e-folks are commenting about Jessica's Well, wherein the discovery is made of a 1946 Life Magazine piece that shortsightedly bemoans the immediate results of World War 2. I link you to Den Beste on this one.

In a more recent post, Den Beste argues that certain anti-American rabble rousers in Iraq are not being hunted down and repressed because, well, we want Iraqis to have a taste of what free speech actually means. As he puts it:

Tolerating extremists like Al-Sadr is part of our long game of proving our commitment to free speech for Iraqis. We said we wanted Iraqis to be free, and part of that is toleration of dissent. When we ignore even extremists such as Al-Sadr, it's part of the process of proving that our word is good.

Al-Sadr and others like him are the canary in the free speech coal mine. As long as someone like Al-Sadr is tolerated, and permitted to spout his poison unmolested, others will feel secure.

Part of why we encourage public dissent is to encourage public support. Under Saddam, anyone could proclaim their support, but no one else would believe them even if it was true. When dissent is suppressed, support has no credibility. It is only when dissent is tolerated that one can publicly support the government and be believed.

The Iraqi people were not able to free themselves without outside help. Revolution was impossible, as they proved in 1991. It took outside force remove Saddam, which we just supplied. Too late, perhaps; I am ashamed that we did not actively support the 1991 revolution. But it's better late than never.

We have given the people of Iraq the opportunity to be free, but they must seize it and they must hold onto it. We are giving them a chance for freedom, but only they can keep their freedom.

And for my money, this is the most important point:

Instead of asking why the Americans don't do something about Al-Sadr, we need Iraqis to start thinking, "What are WE going to do about him?" But they also need to learn what kinds of things they should do, for if they deal with him and others like him the wrong way, it will destroy their liberty just as surely as he wants to destroy it.

Whenever Den Beste offers up the "real" reasons why our current government does what it does in Iraq, I usually leave with a funny suspicion that he's thought the matter through more deeply than the Bush Administration itself has. I find Den Beste's explanations plausible, but it's telling that Den Beste rarely, if ever, links directly to Admin sources to support how he derived his rationale. I get this same feeling from Andrew Sullivan on occasion. One of the major strategic aspects that still don't add up in my mind is how to reconcile nation-building with a flypaper strategy. As I've remarked before, I fail to see how it's possible to build while inviting hostile elements to tear down what's being built. What's the rationale behind the rationales?

In a disappointing move, the Bush Administration says it would consider a written guarantee to NK if NK made certain concessions. More reassuringly, however:

Bush said he would sign a security declaration if it were a joint agreement with the four other countries participating in the talks with North Korea -- China, Japan, Russia and South Korea. A senior administration official said Bush had ruled out a bilateral agreement on the principle that if North Korea violated a multiparty pact, "they would not only be dismissive of the United States, but they would also be dismissive of the other parties that participated in the assurance."

Verifiability is the watchword. In a sense, Bush's acceptance of the possibility of a written guarantee isn't the acceptance of anything. The conditions on which such a guarantee are predicated are-- as we all know because NK shouts it all the damn time-- unacceptable to the Dear Beaver. Knowing this, Bush can make "written guarantee" rhetoric with a smirk. So just as it's not a good idea to place too much weight on Pyongyang's bluster, Pyongyang needs to realize that it's probably not a good idea to place too much weight on Bush's rhetoric. Good. Good for Bush.

Some pundits feel that the US should be dealing with NK bilaterally, as a way to have more control over the terms of the discussions and to avoid treaties (or other documents) that are the inevitable watered-down result of design-by-committee. That's a good point. I think, though, that these pundits are forgetting the primary reason we're insisting on a multilateral approach here: the diffusion of responsibility also means diffusion of blame when things go wrong. Both China and North Korea, for their own reasons, are acutely aware of this. It's why NK has been relentlessly focused on the US in its propaganda and diplomacy, and it's why China is visibly uncomfortable about its current important role in the nuke problem.

Here's something disturbing:

With little notice or meaningful oversight, the Internet has become a pipeline for narcotics and other deadly drugs. Customers can pick from a vast array of painkillers, antidepressants, stimulants and steroids with few controls and virtually no medical monitoring.

And:

The online merchants now feed a sprawling shadow market for prescription drugs, frustrating medical leaders alarmed by the threat to public health and investigators hard-pressed to keep up with nimble Web sites that can open and close at a moment's notice.

"It's like rabbits," said Wayne A. Michaels, a senior investigator for the Drug Enforcement Administration. "Every day, there are more of them. They're up, they're down, they're foreign, they're domestic."

The agency recently created a six-person task force solely to track the online trade in narcotics. But officials acknowledged the effort is a form of "triage" amid an escalating crisis. "We're afraid it's going to overwhelm us, once we've identified all these sites," said Elizabeth A. Willis, chief of the DEA's drug operations section.

The multimillion-dollar industry has appeared overnight, pumping millions of pills into some of America's smallest and most economically distressed communities.

Time to rethink the war on drugs?

Sigh... North Korea once again farts. Wank, wank, wank... CNN reports it this way:

Monday's test over the Sea of Japan is seen as part of North Korea's annual military exercises, a spokesman for South Korea's Joint Chief of Staff told news agencies.

While many Koreans are against sending troops to Iraq, some folks here are sporting hard-ons.

Korea Herald on troop dispatch, here.

Dong-A Ilbo comments that troop dispatch size would be around 6,000 to 10,000.

Something for all Koreans to be proud of.

A JoongAng Ilbo editorial that explores the power of Hollywood and concludes with a muddled mixture of awe and fear and resentment:

The power of the American movie as symbolized by Hollywood is perhaps the natural result of the cultural diversity of the United States as a nation of immigrants and its openness.

Its ideology is spread through the world by Hollywood movies, although moviegoers may scarcely realize the underlying tone.

There may be no more effective tool for ruling when those being ruled do not awake to the reality.

I suspect the author's a fan of American Marxist academe. America is, among other things, an "empire of the mind," as Bill Whittle argued.

In praise of game geekery. Why? Because it's news when a female gamer isolates herself from her friends for six months in order to become the best goddamn Starcraft player in cyberspace. If this article doesn't strike you as a little whacked, let me whack you.

Damn. NK seems to be researching how the Vietnamese economy works. I hope they factor Western investment and the gradual opening of markets into the equation if they plan on adopting the Vietnamese model.

QUESTION TO KOREABLOGGERS: Yesterday (19 Oct), I saw an interview on the online Chosun Ilbo titled "Iraq is No Vietnam, Retired Commander Says." Today, I searched the archives because I wanted to link to the article. I found the link, but it's either bad or stale-- it leads to a totally different article. Even stranger: when I use the Chosun Ilbo search engine to search the archives through keywords like "Vietnam" and "Iraq" and "colonel" (the interviewee is a retired colonel who advocates sending a large number of troops to Iraq), the article doesn't appear at all. Am I searching incorrectly? Was the article perhaps removed for some odd reason (cue sinister music)? What's up? And if you're a Korean-literate Koreablogger, do you see a link to the interview on the Korean-language site? If you do, please pass that link to me and I'll struggle through the article as best I can. I read parts of it in English yesterday and deemed it link-worthy, but didn't get around to linking until this evening.

So we end on a "Hmmm" this evening.
_

I'm stealing this from myself. It's something I wrote to my brother David about a recent incident.

I was over at Yongpoong Bookstore the other day, standing in the Religion section,
reading a recently-published book by Thich Nhat Hanh when I heard a loud, LONG
fart. I looked up, and some guy standing about ten feet away was browsing some
books, and it was obvious he was the one who'd farted. What made this strange is
that he basically did it out in the open, by the main aisle where all the pedestrian
traffic is. I was off to the side, hidden by bookshelves. My location would have
been better for any potential farts, so I had to admire the guy's brazenness. He
was about twenty feet away from one of the main cash registers. I can only wonder
what the girls working there thought.
_

Before plunging into the thick of things, some quick side notes:

Know this: I AM A PROPHET.

Back in high school, I wrote a poem (which has since been included in Scary Spasms in Hairy Chasms) about "my purple frog." Well... here he is.

Fear me and my prestidigitational acumen!

A North Korea note: Bush rules out a formal nonaggression treaty with NK. Other, less formal, statements may be possible, but the legally binding treaty NK has been demanding is not an option. I don't think this really comes as a surprise to anyone; I think the Bush administration, despite some internal discord, has been leaning heavily in this direction the whole time, something epitomized by Bush's long-ago profession of loathing for the Dear Wiener.

Personally, I'm against any sort of concession or written reassurance to NK. I don't see what purpose it would serve when NK has repeatedly shown its disdain for promises and pacts, written or otherwise. I also admit to a certain amount of glee in imagining NK's discomfiture in dealing with a possibly-irrational, possibly-homicidal, possibly-stupid US president, and I chuckle when I think about their fear of four more years of this guy. Bloggers like Andrew Sullivan drew the Reagan parallel long ago: the Soviets weren't sure what to make of the old nutcase in the Oval Office, and one major side effect was the overspending that sent the Soviet economy over the edge and secured Reagan a more or less positive place in the history books. NK finds itself in a similar position with Bush, and it's moot as to whether Bush actually is stupid or crazy or murderous. Pray for a disastrous NK overreaction sometime in the near future (I mean something leading to internal collapse, not to a sudden push across the DMZ, obviously).

[NB: I'm aware that other Reagan-Dubya parallels are faulty. I'm restricting my comments to this particular parallel, which I think contains some substance.]

HUIMANG SHIJANG

My friend Solie Choi has moved way outside the city, so it was kind of a pain for her to come today. She did so without a single grumble, despite having had to visit the hospital yesterday to treat some mysterious complaint. The poor girl is quite thin, didn't bring along a jacket, and was freezing by evening. And while we did manage to sell a couple items, I felt awfully guilty about what she went through. To top it off, she refused to accept any commission for her great help today, and then she treated me to dinner before we went our separate ways.

Our earnings totalled less than $20, but that's more than the ZILCH I earned last week. And I was lucky: you normally pay a W10,000 fee each time you set up shop at the market, but they waived my fee because we were rained out last week. Not willing to look a gift horse in the mouth, I didn't ask whether others also had their fee waived.

Solie's friend (I don't know her name) came by with her husband early in the afternoon. They bought some of my abstract calligraphy. Charles (cf. previous post) came by and bought a mid-sized Bodhidharma for a friend. And a guy who called himself "Mr. Song" came by and asked for two copies of a caricatured self-portrait I'd done in a moment of randomness (and with no real intention of selling).

Lessons learned:

1. The Huimang Shijang (Hope Market), on a good day, is crowded with young people. They're mostly young women, and mostly interested in hats, scarves, and other frills you put on your body, including jewelry. Practical items, like wallets and tee shirts, also seem to sell well. Guess what this means for folks like me, who are trying to keep some aspect of traditional Korean culture alive!

2. Having a friend along is indeed a good idea. The time passes more quickly, and if your friend is Korean, it certainly makes interaction with the customers easier. In contrast with last week, people actually stopped to talk at length. They'd start with Solie, then I'd break into the conversation (partly to indicate I understood what they were saying; partly because I don't want to be ignored at my own stall). Unfortunately, this didn't result in many sales, but it did provide some amusing moments: one woman came by with her two tiny daughters, neither of whom could have been older than five, and I let the older daughter write her own name with one of my brushes.

3. Calligraphic ink dries faster in the open air. This is great news for freshly done artwork, but it sucks major ass for your brushes, which stiffen up too quickly and often. My brushes were positively chunky by 6:30PM.

4. Diversify, diversify, diversify. As Solie herself predicted a few days before we met at the Shijang, people don't necessarily want to buy the expensive stuff, and little things sell better. Everything sold today was small-scale. I'd made it all over the past week, so I'd have small items to display along with the larger artwork. One couple said they would "think about" buying a larger piece. Maybe I'll see them next week. Mr. Song, the guy who bought two of my caricatured self-portraits (one of which he asked me to draw directly into his journal), said in a serious tone, "You better change your business model." Yes: I get the distinct feeling that young folks shopping at the Huimang Shijang don't really relate to old time Zen art, and they probably don't want to have their own culture sold back to them, even if it does represent a foreigner's reimagining of it. The youth probably want to see foreign art from a foreign artist. It was telling that the more traditional artwork was bought by (1) Solie's friends-- probably as a favor-- and (2) an American. I heard a lot of Koreans walk by my stall and say, "Oh, that's Dalma!" ("Dalma nae!") This led to precisely zero purchases. So next week I'll arrive with an armful of stuff the foreigners'll probably hate, but the Koreans might be motivated to buy. This may mean putting aside the brushes and going back to what I do best: cartooning. I'm thinking that scenes from my upcoming book, The Sanshin's Tiger, are in order.

5. You should do your artwork early in the week so that the red ink of your dojang has a chance to dry. I was up until 5:30AM doing calligraphy and making pics, then I slept until 8:30AM and packed like a madman. A constant worry was smudging: when you pack not-quite-dried artwork into the tight space of a suitcase, there's a nasty potential for ruined artwork.

6. Have a method. Today was my first "real" day at the market, and if it hadn't been for Solie's help and suggestions, I'd have wasted most of my time. She filled in for the half of my brain that was missing. I think I'll have a better act next week. Meantime, I'm taking an American friend's suggestion and snooping around Insa-dong on Monday to see about selling the brush art and calligraphy. Insa-dong sees a lot of foreigners, and shops are brimming with the kind of art I've been doing. If I can finagle a spot next to the multitalented septuagenarian Mr. Shin during the week, that might be shweet. I'd probably have to reduce prices on some items, though. Mr. Shin can churn out major art in less than two minutes, and he doesn't charge much for it. I'd look pretty arrogant charging more for rougher work while sitting next to him.

Quite a few Koreans, in talking with Solie and assuming I didn't understand them, asked her rather bluntly what the heck a foreigner was doing practicing calligraphy, learning hanja, and drawing Dalma-daesa. The frequency with which this question arose was a bit annoying, but not surprising. A blinkered cultural perspective is de rigueur in Korea. On a more positive note, none of my possessions got shat on by birds this time. I mentioned this to Solie. She replied that she and a friend of hers got massively shat on by a flock of seagulls in Australia. A passing Aussie joked that they'd been blessed-- just as we'd joke in America. Solie hinted that two Korean women covered in birdshit just don't see matters the same way.

The evening ended with a lot of shivering. Neither of us had brought sweaters or jackets, but I at least had my warm layer of blubber to keep my core temperature from dropping. The fat wasn't any help with my fingers; I suppose this means I'll have to gain another couple hundred pounds to ensure my hands stay nice and warm in low temps. Charles, who bought the mid-size Dalma-daesa, hails from Wisconsin, so if he's reading this he probably thinks I'm a big wuss from the warmer mid-Atlantic, which would be correct.

Just before we left, some idiots decided to light a slew of bottle rockets and other wild sparklers. These have recently become rather popular; I hear them going off more and more often in my neighborhood at night. Two rockets flew right at Solie but flared out before they did anything major. Yeesh.

But an interesting time was had by all, and I ended up with a little extra cash. We'll see how the Insa-dong errand goes tomorrow, and I'll give the Huimang Shijang another try next week, weather permitting.

In the name of Allah, the compassionate and merciful (lest we forget the two most ignored qualities of Allah).
_

This comes from Charles, a.k.a "The KimcheeGI" (whom I met today at the Huimang Shijang, so a shout-out to C is in order, as well as sincere thanks for his purchase of my humble wares). The Marmot will be interested to know that Charles is thinking of doing grad work at GU SFS. You bastards snatched another one who'd've done just fine in LingLang. Sorry, but Hoya solidarity ends at the admissions desk when you goddamn SFSers steal another soul from the pool of potential LingLangers.

Charlie's email contains NK-related info. The email says in part:

I read with interest your posts on North Korea's famine, and have a few more links if you'd like to check them out:

Testimony of Andrew S. Natsios, Administrator, USAID Before the Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs Committee on Foreign Relations U.S. Senate
June 5, 2003: http://www.usaid.gov/press/speeches/2003/ty030605.html

He's author of the book The Great North Korean Famine:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1929223331/ref=ase_booksiloved99-20/002-0844716-1358421?v=glance&s=books

I read Natsios for a class on North Korean Socialist Development, and he is pretty fair considering the possibility of becoming emotionally attached to this issue. Currently administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Natsios has studied famines for more than a decade. He is neither an American Policy apologist nor a North Korean apologist.

Also, UNICEF opened a North Korean website http://www.unicef.org/dprk/ ...it has some spiffy Powerpoint presentations in the Situation webpage about nutrition assessment in the north, and comes to an amazing conclusion: North Korean kids are malnourished...

Accepted with thanks. Hope your friend enjoys the gift. If you need to know where to go to get that made into a scroll for cheap, I know a place in Insa-dong: call 733-5568. You'll have to deal with them in Korean, but since I now know you already speak super Korean, this won't be an issue.

Another email from Guyjean:

http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/03spring/hodge.pdf

The KPA of 2003 is an imposing and formidable force of 1.17 million active
personnel with a reserve force of over 5 million, making it the fifth largest
military force in the world.24 The ground forces are organized into eight infantry
corps, four mechanized corps, an armor corps, and two artillery corps. The KPA
air force consists of 92,000 personnel, and is equipped with some 730 mostly
older combat aircraft and 300 helicopters. The 46,000-man KPA navy is primarily
a coastal force.25 Additionally, the KPA maintains the largest special operations
force (SOF) in the world, consisting of approximately 100,000 highly trained, totally
dedicated soldiers.26 A long history of bloody incursions into South Korea underscores
the offensive mission of this force.


http://www.1upinfo.com/country-guide-study/north-korea/north-korea151.html
page down to see the important Table of Contents

NORK cyberhackers?
http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,59043,00.html

The Library of Congress study on NK
http://memory.loc.gov/frd/cs/kptoc.html

Treat as highly suspect
http://www.rense.com/general37/nkorr.htm
"In addition, the US has 70 KH-11 spy satellites hovering over North Korea."
We most certainly do not have 70 KH-11's hovering over NK.

A fun interview
http://www.rense.com/general39/nkkk.htm

2 years old but kinda interesting
http://www.checkpoint-online.ch/CheckPoint/J2/J2-0001-NorthKoreaDeadlier.html

I just luv this photo
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/dprk/dprk-dark.htm

:-))
http://www.theonion.com/onion3905/north_korea.html

some fairly recent info on food aid
http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf/0/a28cf19153975fe349256ccc0017d604?OpenDocument

self-explanatory
http://www.kimsoft.com/dprk.htm

some very interesting stats
http://www.countries.com/countries/north_korea/


http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/rn/2002-03/03rn29.pdf

interesting list of articles
http://www.crisispapers.org/topics/north-korea.htm

good stuff
http://www.nti.org/f_wmd411/f2d1.html

worth a quick read-- from the CBC
http://www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/correspondents/stpierre_nkorea.html

PBS
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/northkorea/facts.html

[from a different email]

some good links here on food aid.
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&edition=us&q=north+korea+food+aid
Guyjean

Damn.

It's going to take a while, Charles and Guyjean, for me to sift through all this, but it's a treasure and I thank you both.
_

WHITE FOLKS, OTHER YANG-NOM AND ASSORTED WAEGUK-IN:

If you happen to be in Seoul and want to drop by my humble stall, my fat, off-white ass will be parked at the Hope Market (Huimang Shijang) near Hongik University this Sunday, from noon to about 6PM, weather permitting. And while you're there, buy something. From me. There'll be abstract calligraphy, normal calligraphy, and enough Bodhidharma pics to make you wonder whether I'm obsessing.

The market shouldn't be too hard to find if you ask around. Take the subway to Hongdae Ipgu Station, and go out exit number 6. Walk to the big intersection (the one with traffic lights and a big-ass sign with an arrow pointing in the direction of Hongdae), and turn left. The street will start to go uphill. A little before you reach the end, you'll see a side street that splits diagonally off the street you're on. Walk up that and you'll see the Hope Market on your left. Be sure to ask as you walk, just to be sure you're on the right track.

By the way, I drew a naked picture of a woman I knew-- my lovely half-Turkish drama class partner from 2000. No, I never actually saw her naked, but one time she was wearing a white summer dress with light flower prints and she stood in front of a sun-filled window. For one glorious backlit moment I had a glimpse of Shangri-la. The dress disappeared and all that remained was a breathtaking rhapsody of firm, delicious curves. The sketch doesn't do her justice, but with Conrad over at Gweilo Diaries posting his favorite breast-enhanced chicks, and now Mike at Seeing Eye Blog doing his Half-Korean of the Day, I felt this blog needed a shot of estrogen. Picture forthcoming. I'll have to persuade my buddy Tom to scan it, because I'll be damned if I'm scanning this at a PC-bahng.

In the meantime... perhaps I'll see you at the market. Peef, yo.

UPDATE: A note of thanks to the Minister of Agriculture for his support re: my Sermon on the Mount (cf. Vomit Vile Vituperation, sidebar link). I'm glad the first reaction to that post wasn't hate mail, but I expect some dim asswipe will be along directly to try and teach me the error of my ways.
_

With thanks to the Air Marshal, who linked me to a recent article about Matthew Shepard, the boy who was brutally murdered in 1998 for being gay. From the article:

(Casper, Wyoming) Anti-gay preacher Fred Phelps has announced intentions to erect a monument to Matthew Shepard the gay college student brutally murdered five years ago near Laramie.

But, the monument will be no memorial. Phelps says the monument would be 5 to 6 feet tall and made of marble or granite. It would bear a bronze plaque bearing the image of Shepard and have an inscription reading "MATTHEW SHEPARD, Entered Hell October 12, 1998, in Defiance of God's Warning: 'Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is abomination.' Leviticus 18:22."

The monument would be erected in downtown Casper, Shepard's home town.

Phelps has sent details of the monument to the city of Casper city council and there may be nothing the city can do to prevent it.

Phelps said he intends to put up the monument in City Park, already the location of a controversial statue of the Ten Commandments.

How did Phelps' congregation behave during Shepard's funeral? A little recap:

During Shepard's funeral members of Phelps' Westoboro Baptist Church demonstrated in front of the chapel.

And maybe it's a good idea to remember how Matthew died:

Matthew had been lured from a campus bar shortly after midnight on October 7 by two men who told him they were gay. He was driven to a remote area near the Sherman Hills neighbourhood east of Laramie, tied to a split-rail fence, tortured, beaten and pistol-whipped by his attackers, while he begged for his life; he was then left for dead in near freezing temperatures. A cyclist who found him on Snowy Mountain View Road at 6:22 pm, some 18 hours after the attack, at first mistook him for a scarecrow. He was unconscious and suffering from hypothermia. His face was caked with blood, except where it had been partially washed clean by tears.

Matthew died at 12:53 am on Monday 12th October 1998, at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his family at his bedside. Hospital officials said Matthew had a fracture from behind his head to just in front of his right ear and a massive brain stem injury which affected his vital signs, including his heart beat, body temperature and other involuntary functions. There were also approximately a dozen small lacerations around his head, face and neck. He was so badly injured in the attack that doctors were unable to operate. He never regained consciousness after being found, and remained on full life support.

While Matthew lay dying in hospital, just a few miles away, a group of students from Colorado State University thought it would be funny to ride atop a homecoming float that featured a scarecrow figure designed to resemble Matthew's battered body. The figure was wearing a sign that said "I'm gay." An obscene message was painted across the back of the scarecrow's shirt. The students didn't mean to be insensitive. It was supposed to be a joke. They were just ordinary, average guys, having a bit of fun.

We're a wonderful species sometimes, aren't we.

So now Pastor Phelps wants to build a monument. There's already a Phelps-friendly website preaching the gospel as Phelps and his crew perceive it, right here. It's called GodHatesFags.com, and like most such hate sites, it's chock-full of scripture.

I've already made clear that I'm not impressed by scriptural arguments, because as Shakespeare noted, even the Devil can quote scripture to his purpose. Scripture is a tool; it can be used well or poorly, for good or ill. Scripture, in and of itself, proves nothing, adds nothing, is nothing, and people who make themselves slaves to scripture are some of the blindest, most pathetic, morally stunted souls out there. When we forget that scripture is the finger pointing to the moon but not the moon itself, we start down the wrong path. Always.

Pastor Phelps is trying to pull off something that needs to be fought-- hard-- by the good people of Casper who can see his efforts for what they are. I hope they stop him from creating this monument to hatred.

But what I really hope is for a chance to spend twenty minutes alone in a room with Pastor Phelps so I can beat some fucking sense into him. Nothing like receiving the dharma through knuckles and feet. And maybe a baseball bat.

To all those idiot fuckwads like Phelps, who dig through scripture to justify their hatred or go cruisin' for a bruisin':

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

"Fucked are the closed of mind and heart, for their nose is always in the goddamn Bible, which I didn't fucking write. Fucked are the blind haters, because they know nothing of true love. Fucked are the gay-bashers, because they're probably closet gays themselves, and don't realize how laughable their self-hatred is. Fucked are those who hunger and thirst for violence, and here's hoping they get what they wish for a hundredfold. Fucked are the merciless, for they will receive no mercy from my pissed-off Jewish ass. Fucked are the evil of heart, for they will see God's middle finger right before it impales them through the crotch. Fucked are the doctrinaire troublemakers, for they will be the aborted children of God. Fuck all you unrighteous motherfuckers who cast aside humility, openness, tolerance, and love the moment you feel the least bit threatened by someone who's different from you! Fuck all you people who didn't get the point I was trying to make about how we should treat the weak, the meek and the powerless! Fuck all you stupid, blind, deaf asswipes who didn't get that my career was a constant mantra-- what matters is not scripture on a scroll but the heart, YOUR HEART, which is the living scripture!"

And Jesus, in a deep fury, lost control. He picked out and levitated all the murderous gay-haters and self-righteous scripture-quoters from the crowd of listeners, flung them into a huge pit off to one side, and called down a ton of molten iron, which poured from the sky and onto the frightened evildoers, separating meat from bone with a great and horrible sizzle.

And there was screaming.

When the final blood vessels had burst, when the final cranium had been reduced to ash, when the final sinner's grotesque throes had ceased, and all that was left were blackened femurs, smoking ribcages, and twisted souls already flying hellward, Jesus surveyed the destruction, fell to his knees, hugged himself, and wept. "Assholes," he choked. "It didn't have to be this way, Father, but what better price for deliberate obtuseness?"

Then he stood. He took a deep breath, blinked away bitter tears, turned to the people who were left, and said:

"Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you."

And he stepped quietly down from the mountain and passed through the crowd, disappearing before anyone could stop him.

POST SCRIPTUM: It's amazing how fundamentalist scripture-quoters routinely ignore the passages about the literalist Pharisees who dogged Jesus. I don't claim any enlightenment when it comes to my intolerance of people like Pastor Phelps. Of course it doesn't help to fight hate with greater hate, but I'm only human, and I have feelings. Right now I'm pissed. I don't believe in a hell, but if there is one, I'm sure it's reserved for creatures like him. In the meantime, I relish the thought of Phelps meeting a lonely fate on an open road, tied to a fence like a scarecrow with no one to hear his cries. And I hope an angel visits him at his darkest, most despairing moment, and takes a loving, compassionate shit on him.
_

I had the pleasure of meeting Kevin in 7th grade, and I remember going to Kevins house around that time for a party. I don't remember the occasion, though I would assume it was a birthday party, so we're probably talking the summer of '82 here. Sean would have been about 3 I guess, but I still remember Sean running around at Kevin's party.

I also remember Sean and his group playing at Maximum Leader's wedding reception. If I recall correctly, there was a tremendous version of (hope I spell it correctly) Adagio for Strings by Dvorak.

Happy 24th Birthday! At 25 you can finally rent cars, and then it's downhill from there.

On October 15, my brother Sean turned 24 years old.

Sean majored in cello performance at the prestigious Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM) in the not-so-prestigious city that houses the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (where I got to see the sullied canvas sack that contained John Lennon's bloodied clothes and glasses after he'd been shot).

Sean went on to a Master's program at the also-famous New England Conservatory in Boston. Just as I'm more or less self-taught with Chinese calligraphy, Sean's taught himself to play the piano. He feels he's better at improv on the piano than on the cello; I've asked him to try that with the cello but he always refuses. Bastard.

Sean's flirted with vegetarianism, having been a vegan for-- what-- a year or so? This was a while back. He finally saw the light and went back to meat, but then he got religion again and started the Atkins Diet. The Atkins Diet strikes me as very unsafe, but I can't deny that Sean's become very svelte since he began it. He and I used to look like twins; nowadays, however, I look like Evil Bloated Sean from Alternate Timeline Theta-2. I don't think people have trouble distinguishing us now.

Sean also composes music, as you'd expect from someone who majored in music. One of his pieces, written for a trio to play, was performed by Sean's chamber group, the Babadjanian Trio, at the Kennedy Center's Millennium Theater in Washington, DC. That piece was, in fact, Sean's Opus 1.

It's mainly thanks to Sean that I have some appreciation for classical music, though I also think I grew fond of the music's relaxing properties while I was a French teacher at Bishop O'Connell High School in Arlington, Virginia.

Sean also drives kind of fast, but it's better for him to drive in New York City than for me to do it. I'd go to pieces. Sean's fast driving is balanced by a keen sense of direction-- another faculty I lack. Luckily, in Seoul, all I have to do is familiarize myself with the subway system to get around. Or I can catch a cab, mention the destination, and let the cabbie figure it out (though occasionally you have to watch for the unscrupulous cabbies who deliberately take the long routes to cadge a bigger fare).

Sean's a radical extrovert. Like a lot of lastborns, he also tends to lose stuff. Not that I can criticize, after my recent cell phone scare.

Along with classical, Sean loves Bjork and rap.

Sean was born ten years, one month, and 15 days after yours truly. Mom blames the large age margin between me and my brothers (David is seven years younger than I am) on the pain she experienced in giving birth to me. Heh. A Korean mother's gentle sentiments.

"When you were coming out, Kevin, I screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeamed."

I don't think Mom screamed that much when Sean popped out.

Happy birthday, Mr. McVicker. (He calls me Dr. Bigglesworth.)
_

And so we continue with our exploration of NK issues.

To recap: the two major issues I originally wanted to explore were and are:

1. The NK military is currently starving.

2. "It's all bluster."

The first issue is a subset of the second, so I've been dealing with the starvation issue in a few posts because, well, a soldier who can't eat is a soldier who probably can't fight that well. I decided to parse the issues further, which gave rise to two sets of questions:

SET 1, re: starvation

1. What are the latest figures/expert guesses on NK starvation, in terms of rate and brute numbers? What's the general history of the starvation problem, and what projections, if any, are there about future starvation?

2. Who's currently giving food aid to NK? What percentage of NK's food supply is being domestically produced?

3. Can an overall picture of NK food production, delivery, and consumption be painted? How accurate will this picture be?

4. What measures, if any, are in place to verify where food goes (this question is crucial; if we can't answer it satisfactorily, we can't answer the "are the troops starving?" question satisfactorily, either)? Are military defectors from NK in a position to speak about diverted food?

5. If we get past question #4 and have at least some idea where food is going, how much is being routed to the military? How are the lower-echelon people in NK's government doing?

SET 2, re: "It's all bluster."

1. What would constitute a "clean" or "pyrrhic" victory? [ensuing discussion omitted]

2. What do the experts, military and otherwise, have to say about how a war on the peninsula would go? If you, as a blogger/talking head, think you have an angle the experts don't have (you lone voice in the wilderness, you), what's your angle?

3. What kind of military equipment does NK have in terms of weaponry, transports, etc.? What's the best-guess rundown on the military's strength, overall? How are experts evaluating "strength"?

4. What is the current state of NK troop training? (Many contend it's poor.) How will this be relevant in war?

5. Where are the NK troops positioned?

6. Would China get militarily involved? I found it interesting that some Chinabloggers think China would indeed get involved. I'd love for them to weigh in on this.

7. When all is said and done, what do experts feel would be the effect of a peninsular war on the South Korean population (i.e., numbers killed & in what space of time), infrastructure, economy, political future, etc.? This question is directly relevant to the larger issue of whether SK citizens are justified in fearing a war, and it's also relevant to our judgement that a victory will be clean or pyrrhic. What frustrates me about the SK position is the insistence on the "one people" rhetoric, which on its face is contradicted by fear of NK attack. So perhaps an interesting side issue is: what's going on in the "average" SK citizen's psyche that allows them to reconcile these two apparently contradictory convictions?

We've got a while to go before we're ready to deal with the SET 2 questions.

I began last time with a snippet from a presentation text I found at the American Enterprise Institute's website. The presentation was Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony given by James R. Lilley on March 12 of this year. What I didn't have time to note last time was that Lilley's testimony hints that, yes, the hunger problem is indeed creeping upward in NK society:

Ungrateful as North Korea has been for past aid, this time it is complicated by a starving population, even including cadres.

It's capillary action, like when you dip the corner of a napkin into a glass of water and hold it there: the water spreads slowly upward. Starvation in NK may be doing something like this, too, though I'm pretty sure it'll never reach the topmost levels of government.

Let's move on to Harvard's Asia Pacific Policy Program and see what they have to say, if anything, about NK and starvation and troops.

Sigh... a bunch of links. One of those links, luckily, is to the CIA World Factbook, 2003 version. Here's some interesting info:

North Korea, one of the world's most centrally planned and isolated economies, faces desperate economic conditions. Industrial capital stock is nearly beyond repair as a result of years of underinvestment and spare parts shortages. Industrial and power output have declined in parallel. Despite a good harvest in 2001, the nation faces its ninth year of food shortages because of a lack of arable land; collective farming; weather-related problems, including major drought in 2000; and chronic shortages of fertilizer and fuel. Massive international food aid deliveries have allowed the regime to escape mass starvation since 1995-96, but the population remains vulnerable to prolonged malnutrition and deteriorating living conditions.

A timeline on starvation, then (bear with me; I'm slow on the uptake, and I know most folks are aware of this already, but some aren't, so we're learning together), would begin at about the time of Kim Il Sung's death in 1994 and the "peaceful" transfer of power that followed the Great Leader's entry into the Celestial Sphincter (and probable descent into the Abode of Polyps, where all evildoers go... good North Koreans get pumped by reverse cosmological peristalsis along the Small Intestine of Travail, through the Duodenum of Glory, and into the Stomach of Immaculate Destiny, where they will be digested over a thousand years. No, wait-- that's the Sarlaac from "Return of the Jedi.").

Large-scale military spending eats up resources needed for investment and civilian consumption. Recently, the regime has placed emphasis on earning hard currency, developing information technology, addressing power shortages, and attracting foreign aid, but in no way at the expense of relinquishing central control over key national assets or undergoing widespread market-oriented reforms. In 2002, heightened political tensions with key donor countries and general donor fatigue have held down the flow of desperately needed food aid and threaten fuel aid as well.

The first sentence may be a reference to Kim Jong Il's "army first" policy. Further down, the Factbook entry says NK is currently spending about $5.2 billion on its military yearly, which comes to about 34% of its GDP.

Compare the above to the US's $276 billion expenditure, which accounts for only 3.2% of the US GDP.

Like the fish said in Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life": "Kinda' makes ya' think, doesn't it?"

When you follow the Harvard links, you also reach KoreaWeb, which in turn offers a link to Tim Beal's site on North Korea, which has a link titled "Food Supply and Aid." We click it now.

A UN brief from earlier in the year says the following:

United Nations: Child malnutrition falls considerably but gains threatened by lack of support
PYONGYANG / GENEVA, 20 February 2003 - Malnutrition rates among children in the (DPRK) have improved considerably over the past four years, according to a new survey, but the UN agencies that announced the findings today said the gains could be lost if international support for humanitarian assistance to the country continues to slacken.
:
The proportion of children underweight (weight-for-age) has fallen from 61 percent in 1998 to 21 percent in 2002
Wasting, or acute malnutrition (weight-for-height), has fallen from 16 percent to 9 percent
Stunting, or chronic malnutrition (height-for-age), has dropped from 62 percent to 42 percent.
The Government of DPRK attributed the improvement in part to the substantial humanitarian assistance provided by the international community in recent years. The exceptionally high levels of malnutrition recorded in 1998 also reflected the famine conditions that prevailed in the DPRK in the mid 1990s.

I'm not sure why I noted that, except that it was about the children. Makes you want to weep. Yet I'm beginning to think that the least bloody way out of this predicament is the cutting off of all aid, and perhaps the enlisting of other countries and organizations in this freeze-out. I doubt it's feasible, though; there are other aid groups than just the UN. Christians in South Korea, for example, donate millions of dollars in supplies to the North as part of their moral duty. My feelings on this are mixed: how can you seriously ask such groups to stand aside while people starve? Yet I can't help thinking that their efforts need to be stymied where possible, even as the stats about how starvation affects the children depress me.


THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION

An October 10, 2003 article by Charles "Jack" Pritchard published in the Financial Times says the following:

In a cash-strapped country that devotes, by some estimates, 34 per cent of its gross domestic product to its military, there is little left for economic development. Yet Mr Kim cannot change course overnight. He needs to be able to convince his power base-- the military-- that the US is no longer a threat that warrants a nuclear programme or such a large expenditure on conventional forces. Make no mistake, Mr Kim is not motivated by a desire to improve his people's standard of living. He simply wants his regime to survive. But whatever the motivation, the US should be encouraging any change that moves North Korea away from military belligerence and towards enhancing citizens' economic well-being.

So we again see the 34% figure. Evidence of an "army first" policy indeed. Can we assume this has implications on where and how food is distributed in NK? I think it's safe to say yes.

I'm out of time for the evening, but let me skip over to Google and do a search on "Kim Jong Il's army first" and "military first" policy.

Here's a NK propaganda website in English that details many of the Dear Leader's recent achievements. It lists the army-first policy very early on. So Kevin learns that, yes, this is indeed a policy.

A Korean website offers this English-language summary of the Songun Jongchi (Military First Politics):

The subject of this article is analysing Sonkun Jongchi {Military-first Politics} in North Korea, in order to find out the features of the party-military relations under Kim Jong Il regime. The Military-first Politics, introduced during the crisis in 1990s, means that the Korean People's Army (KPA), instead of workers and farmers, comes to be a main force of the revolution, and, accordingly, responsible for the development of the country, as well as for the national security. In other words, the KPA holds a higher position than workers and farmers under the Military-first Politics.

And the mysteriously worded final paragraph of that summary:

It would be too much to conclude that the Military-first Politics has brought on a fundamental change in the North Korean political system and the party-military relations, because the new politics encompasses both "change" and "continuity." However, it should not be overlooked that the Military-first Politics, indeed, is now bringing on a significant change in the North Korean political system and the party-military relations, and, moreover, seems to become a powerful driving force for a substantial change sooner or later.

"Driving force for substantial change"? Fascinating, Captain.

I'd like to end by publishing an email I received that offers some links and insights.

Hi,
If you're not familiar with these sites, see:

http://cns.miis.edu/research/korea/index.htm
nothing on food here but some superb articles and some damn good sat photos and maps of where (we think) things are.

worth reading
http://cns.miis.edu/research/korea/450079.pdf

this paper has excellent coverage of NORK
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea.html

this guy really has his finger on the pulse of what's going on over there.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/others/pongyang.html
[Hominid note: This link contains a misspelling, but the link WORKS with the misspelling in place. DO NOT CORRECT.]

FAS is always an interesting read.
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/dprk/

some notes i took a few months ago...

North Korea

- have announced they intend to test a nuclear weapon. This strongly implies they have more than one. They also said they have the means to deliver them which we interpret as meaning that they have reduced them in size enough to place on ballistic missiles which can hit Japan. They have also stated they may choose to sell nuclear bombs to whomever they wish. We know they have been providing massive nuclear aid to Iran and Pakistan.
- We know where their main nuclear processing plant is but we don't know where the others are. We have evidence that there is at least one other one not located close to the one we know about. The point being - we can't take out their nuclear facilities in one fell swoop.
- NK wants: food aid, monetary aid (billions), two nuclear power plants that we build (so that they can't be used for nuke bombs), and a non-aggression pact that we won't attack them all while they continue to build new nukes.
- NK is a regime that deserves to be changed - and changed by force if need be. They have sold nuclear and ballistic missile technology, they have sold vast quantities of drugs and are massive counterfeiters of US dollars.
- Japan has told the US that if we give the NKs a non aggression pact, Japan will go nuclear. If Japan goes nuclear, so will SK and Taiwan. This will make China verrrrry nervous.
- Increasing the number of countries that have nukes is really REALLY bad.
- We have 37,000 US troops in SK most near the border hence vulnerable to NK artillery.
- Seoul - 10 million people - within artillery range. [Hominid's remark: getting closer to 12 million these days]
- Seoul uses piped natural gas for heating and cooling. A few thousand artillery shells would set the entire city ablaze.
- SK has 18 nuclear power plants. Nuclear power plants and artillery shells do not play together well. Massive radiation leaks. Prevailing winds are east so the radiation would fall over Japan.
- We estimate that about 30% of NKs artillery has chemical warheads.
- NK has said it would "never" use nukes on its dear brothers to the south. It doesn't have to as it can 'kill' Seoul with artillery. NK would use a nuke or two against Japan. Japan would then blame the US for the second nuclear attack on its territory.
- In 1994 a US military commander in SK estimated that a war with the North would result in one million deaths (including tens of thousands of Americans) and cost at least $100 billion.

these ought to keep you and your readers busy for a few minutes!
Guyjean

Gaijin?

If anyone else wants to write in with comments or info, feel free. That's it for the evening. I think I'm going to explore Guyjean's/Gaijin's links more thoroughly in the next post before continuing down my list of think tanks. An initial perusal of the links seemed more than promising. Many thanks.
_

And it's going to show it to us. To wit:

SEOUL, South Korea Oct. 16 — North Korea said Thursday it would "physically display its nuclear deterrent force," South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported.

The remark by an unnamed spokesman of North Korea's Foreign Ministry could be an indication that the communist regime intends to test a nuclear bomb.

"When the time comes, the DPRK will take steps to physically display its nuclear deterrent force," the North Korean spokesman told Pyongyang's state-run news agency KCNA, which was monitored by the South Korean agency.

As I type this, I'm listening to Rage Against the Machine's "Calm Like a Bomb." Interesting way to feel the moment.

"When the time comes"? When's that, fuckers?

For more on the latest ball-waving, go here.

And here.

And here.
_

I've got new items up at Only the Chewiest Tumors, and they're looking for a home. What's new? you ask.

How about abstract Chinese calligraphy?

Yes, I may be pushing it, getting a little overambitious, especially since I'm still learning the characters. But I thought to myself... why not? The purists won't appreciate what I've done, but if they can get beyond their own classicism, they might actually like what they see.

This time around I scanned the puppies myself. The resolution wasn't that great so I ended up using the Photoshop "blur" and "sharpen" functions at the PC-bahng to tweak the images, which are still a bit blurred.

This first image is a smaller version of the Bodhidharma brush art I've been doing.





Something to note: I've been trying to incorporate some symbolism in the Dalma Daesa art (only recently; not all the artwork is this way). The number of strokes in Bodhidharma's beard is 16, referring to the 16 Nahan (they're the 18 Lohan in China, I think), some of the Buddha's original followers. Dalma's mustache is done in six strokes to symbolize the six years of the Buddha's go haeng sang, that period of his life when he practiced deep austerity. The Buddha claimed he became so emaciated that he was able to place his hand on his stomach and feel his spine.

I'll never know that feeling, thank God.

Dalma's nose is made by four strokes-- the Four Noble Truths. If you add the strokes and dots making up Dalma's eyes and the wrinkle between them, you get eight-- the Eightfold Path (P'al Jeong Do, or "Eight Correct Ways" in Sino-Korean). Dalma's eyebrows total six strokes, representing the Six Perfections (paramitas, the yuk baramil in Sino-Korean).

And the biggest symbol is perhaps too abstract to even notice: Dalma's robe is suggested by two serpentine strokes, and he's got a halo. If you count those as three strokes, and add Dalma's face to get four-- and then LOOK CAREFULLY, you may notice that the gestalt is the character shim, or mind. I admit it's a stretch, but I did do it deliberately.

The next picture is an example of abstract calligraphy. My friend Solie Choi suggested I should make some smaller pieces to complement the bigger ones, so I decided to see what would happen if I played with the characters a bit. I think you experts will have noted that I didn't simply play with them randomly-- there is indeed some method to the madness. Here is "Mu A," or "no self":





If you're a purist, you'll hate it. If you're not, bless you. The next one is "Seong Do," which means "enlightenment" or "attaining the Tao."





Finally, I'm also offering this little statement on nondualism, "Eum Yang Bul I," or "yin and yang are not-two." When you step back from the Great Ultimate symbol, the T'aegeuk, the two swirling elements collapse into one. But that one is a symbol for capital-O "One," also known in religious circles as "one without a second." The nondualistic One.





Please smack me if I sound like I'm a tour guide in an art gallery.

In any case, go give the Tumors a visit. If you feel so inclined, purchase something. I'll get it out to you as quickly as I can, and remember: every work is unique. No prints when it comes to the brush art. I don't skimp.

Oh, by the way, I should note something: there's a good reason to buy a scroll instead of just the artwork. When they make scrolls in Insa-dong (an art district in Seoul, for you newbies), they use a press. I asked. This is important because calligraphy tends to leave the paper (hwa seon ji) somewhat wrinkled as the ink merges with it. This is only natural, but caveat emptor: when you buy "artwork-only" from me, you're getting the art in its most natural, uncivilized state, and that means it'll be slightly wrinkled. Drop some water on a piece of stationery and watch it dry; you'll see what I mean. So unless you can find expert framers and scroll-makers near you who know how to deal with this kind of product, I strongly suggest opting for the completed scroll. (In case you're wondering, I'm not making any money off the extra cost for scrollwork.) The end product will be smooth and flat, like many Korean women's thoracic and gluteal regions.
_

Before continuing with the NK posting, I need to highlight something the Air Marshal forwarded my way:

hURL

Enjoy. Don't blame me if you click the link.

I should also note that, around 2:00-2:15PM today, traffic simply stopped. At the beginning of this stopping period, I heard what sounded like air raid sirens and then the noise of fighter jets overhead. Quite cool. I guess this was some huge fire-- uh, defense drill. More on this later as I confirm.
_

I write "Volume 1" above because funds are limited, which means my time in the PC-bahng is also limited. So expect more on this soon.

A quick recap of the questions I'm working on re: the starvation issue and how it relates to the NK military:

1. What are the latest figures/expert guesses on NK starvation, in terms of rate and brute numbers? What's the general history of the starvation problem, and what projections, if any, are there about future starvation?

2. Who's currently giving food aid to NK? What percentage of NK's food supply is being domestically produced?

3. Can an overall picture of NK food production, delivery, and consumption be painted? How accurate will this picture be?

4. What measures, if any, are in place to verify where food goes (this question is crucial; if we can't answer it satisfactorily, we can't answer the "are the troops starving?" question satisfactorily, either)? Are military defectors from NK in a position to speak about diverted food?

5. If we get past question #4 and have at least some idea where food is going, how much is being routed to the military? How are the lower-echelon people in NK's government doing?

You may recall a previous post in which I explored this question primarily through the source material I found at the Free North Korea! site (a site I highly recommend). Can we, at this point, answer some of the above questions? Let's give it a shot, based on what little we now know or think we know.

1. What are the latest figures/expert guesses on NK starvation, in terms of rate and brute numbers? What's the general history of the starvation problem, and what projections, if any, are there about future starvation?

No answers yet from my own research. Maybe some tonight and in evenings to come.

2. Who's currently giving food aid to NK? What percentage of NK's food supply is being domestically produced?

Based on what we've found out, it sounds like 4.6 million out of NK's 22 million people are depending on outside food aid, which is ostensibly being directed to those regions that need it most. As a percentage, then, about 21% of the population has been receiving food aid. We think.

3. Can an overall picture of NK food production, delivery, and consumption be painted? How accurate will this picture be?

I phrased this as a yes-no question, so my answer at this point is no. I don't believe an overall picture can be painted based on what I discovered through my limited research. I think a more detailed picture might be available to us through think tank research, and perhaps through whatever UN-related online sources there are. How accurate a picture do I think this will be? Not very accurate-- partly because I'm only an amateur, only a blogger; partly because NK is deliberately obscuring the specifics; partly because wire service reports and defector testimonies are patchy and anecdotal. I don't have much confidence that the think tanks will ultimately provide us a very clear picture, especially as their findings are compared against each other.

4. What measures, if any, are in place to verify where food goes (this question is crucial; if we can't answer it satisfactorily, we can't answer the "are the troops starving?" question satisfactorily, either)? Are military defectors from NK in a position to speak about diverted food?

What measures are in place? At this point, I'd have to say I don't know. With most of the reports emphasizing deep frustration with the food aid workers' inability to verify where the food goes, it may be wise to ask whether there even are any measures. Perhaps the UN and NGOs do have some verification methods established on paper; whether they occur in practice is almost a completely separate issue.

As to the military defectors... I may delve back into Free North Korea! and root around the defectors' testimony there.

5. If we get past question #4 and have at least some idea where food is going, how much is being routed to the military? How are the lower-echelon people in NK's government doing?

I have no answers to this question right now.

So: think tanks.

THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

James R. Lilley's March 12, 2003 Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony deserves to be quoted at length:

Kim Jong-il has a failed economic system. He is on life support from the outside in terms of oil and food. Ungrateful as North Korea has been for past aid, this time it is complicated by a starving population, even including cadres. Kim's moves so far on economic reform in July 2002 have failed badly, his attempt to get the Japanese reparations package, for which he lusts, backfired in the Abduction Cases issue. His economic zone in Sinuiju started out as a fiasco and certainly irritated the Chinese. Kim still has the generous hand of South Korea reaching out-- but now hopefully in a more measured and balanced way. Huge bribes and grotesque one-sided tourism deals to Kum Gang-san lost large amounts of money for Hyundai, and the ROKG. Hyundai is reported to have funneled $1.7 billion direct to Pyongyang. South Korea's Sunshine Policy is viewed by the North's leadership as a dangerous subversion, according to the highest level defector Hwang Jong yup, who is the most complete source on Kim Jong-il. A takeover of the North by the South, Kim Jong-il believes, should be resisted at all costs, even if it means less aid.

Perhaps the most disconcerting development for Kim Jong-il is the possible coming together of surrounding states-- ROK, China, Japan, Russia, and the U.S.-- in a loose coalition. This group of states has already agreed in principle that the Korean Peninsula should be free of nuclear weapons and should have economic reform. The potential use of economic leverage on his WMD programs is a frightening prospect for Kim and is one of the greatest dangers that North Korea has faced in the past 50 years.

According to Hwang Jong Yup, after the disastrous starvations of 1995 and 1996, Kim Jong-il was desperate and talked of strike on the South, which he had persuaded himself could work. He did not do it then. He fired off a three stage missile instead which then lost him his Japanese contacts and hopes for immediate reparations worth by some estimates to be over $10 billion.

A recent internal KWP document that has surfaced in the Japanese press describing KWP concerns about internal corruption and dissatisfaction among the population. The flight of hundreds of thousands of North Korean refugees to China has dramatized public desperation in the face of continuing economic hardships. The combination of factors could move Kim in the direction of more desperate external moves and to divert attention from domestic failure. In this, he will get the support of his military.

As was the case in 1968, Kim Jong-il lacks support from Russia and China-- who had backed his father in 1950 and for years after. This undercuts his strength and his maneuverability.

So will he raise the ante with provocations? Most probably, he will. Will he focus on the U.S. and not on the ROK? Most likely, he will. Will he risk a major confrontation with the U.S. by striking out at U.S. installations, military, air, ground and naval hardware? He will try but will probably stop short of a casus belli. He recognizes his main vulnerability is his economic weakness and dependency. Again, Hwang emphasizes that this is where Kim Jong-il can be undone. He has to keep economic aid under continuing tight control, and he must arrange to get credit for it. But it remains his Achilles heel. And it is the most likely instrument of regime change.

[to be continued... I'm out of time this evening.]
_

Yesterday's NK blog didn't appear because my colon had other plans for me, and informed me rather suddenly of them while I was in mid-type. Luckily, I live only 200 yards away from this PC-bahng, so I was able to waddle home without shotgun-blasting anything along the way. When I was about 50 yards from my front gate, however, I had a strange feeling I was being watched. I stopped and whipped around, and sure enough, a tiny dog was staring at me from a dark corner. It was a hilarious moment. The dog looked no bigger than a chihuahua (its ears were much smaller), but it was fixing me with the most serious, beady-eyed gaze I'd ever seen on a Korean dog. With its bulgy eyes, it reminded me a bit of the mythical haetae, the Korean dog-unicorn-lion beast (known as a fu dog in the Chinese-American community, yes?) seen as stone sculptures all over the place.

Managed to get inside the domicile, situate myself on the pot, and have a wonderfully explosive release that shook the heaven-realms, ruptured the hell-realms, and made Keanu go, "Whoa." Too bad I don't have a digital camera with me. I could have shown you a Rorschach pattern to end all Rorschach patterns.

A: "Holy shit-- it's an eagle! An eagle run over by a truck!"

B: "No, you fool. That's clearly Hillary Clinton. Look, it's even got the death's-head grin. Track down a bit and you see the fat ass."

C: "I was thinking something more along the lines of a brown and runny Georgia O'Keefe."

B: "You mean he shat a flower-vagina?"

C: "More like a vagina-flower, I'd say."

A: "Oh, for a dump of fire..."
_

The Hongik University Hope Market (Hongdae Huimang Shijang) runs on Sundays. As it turns out, it usually goes from noon to about six. I wasn't sure exactly when the market started up, so I arrived early, around 10:30AM, convinced I'd be part of a huge crowd waiting to stampede onto the grounds (it's a little park, more brick than brush). But I was the first one there.

First-timers to the market have to register, and there's a W10,000 fee (you pay the fee each time you set up shop). You're given a tag to wear on your chest, and you can set up pretty much anywhere you want (though you have to be careful of the regulars, from what I heard).

Things were slow today. At 10:30AM, when I arrived, the park was a mess from the Free Market that took place yesterday. Beer and soju bottles, junk food wrappers, and that old Korean standby-- vomit-- were in evidence everywhere, along with posters advertising the latest rap and hip-hop groups, taped onto the ground in sets of 10 or even 20.

Around 11:30AM, people started to show up. Some of these folks wore tags indicating they were the Hope Market "managers," while others were simply merchants hoping to start setting up. Everyone, including myself, pitched in to clean the area up. Brooms, brushes, and dustpans were passed around. I ripped up the posters that were on the ground. Trash pickup doesn't happen on Sunday, so the best we could do was jam everything into plastic bags and pile it all together. Not much could be done about dried puke and birdshit (my bag got shat on, dammit), but the place looked a lot cleaner by noon, and everyone began to set up shop. Curious passersby started wandering into the market around 12:30.

I had a blanket and one of my pillows with me (for my ass, not my head). I spread the blanket out, unrolled some brown packing paper, and spread out my wares-- the ones you see over at Chewiest Tumors. People stopped by; many were curious, and one kid begged his mother to buy him a Bodhidharma (Mom said no). Alas, no takers, but we were only 90 minutes into the game when the Good Lord decided to drain the dragon on us.

Lessons learned today:

1. I planned well when it came to presentation: the blanket and brown paper were good ideas. The artwork definitely caught people's eye. Quite a few people asked, "You did this?" I smiled and bowed and said yes. But presentation isn't enough: I got a few critiques from the people running the market. "You should do your art on the spot," they suggested. True-- other artists had brought their entire kit. Next time, that's what I'll do, but I'm still shaky about how I hold my brush, and I still run through quite a few drafts before producing something I like-- a dead giveaway that I'm not a seasoned pro. So the product is good, but the process is still too ugly to show the public. Maybe this week I can clean it up a bit, concentrate more, and waste less effort on drafts. Buddha-mind. Buddha-mind.

2. I need a better system for wrapping up the artwork. I didn't have to use them today, but I'd brought cut-up cardboard tubes. As I discovered during a test run, they're a bit too skinny for my purposes, and it's hard to roll the paper into thin enough cylinders that will fit inside the cardboard tubes. Something to ponder this week.

3. It was interesting to see that a lot of kids seemed taken with the artwork. Tagging along with their parents and showing no real interest in the various wallets and purses and bangles, the kids were attracted to anything remotely visual arts-oriented. A lady on my left was selling tee shirts she'd designed herself. They were gorgeous. A young 20-something guy several stalls down was making stone dojang on the spot. I asked him how much his biggest ones cost; he said W20,000, which is awfully cheap. I told him so, and joked that I should have come to him for my dojang. He said, "Oh, that's nothing. Some people charge W50,000 or even W100,000 per." I didn't feel so bad that I'd paid W50,000 per stamp for my own set of three. The upshot of all this is that I need to think about offering some more cartoonish artwork for kids. The tiger vs. monk staring contest might be just the thing, and I think I finally found some Chinese characters that'll work with the image.

4. Weatherproofing! The rain came early on, and that wasn't just a problem for me; many-- if not most-- of the other merchants ended up striking camp after having sold little to nothing. A few intrepid souls were well-prepared, however; I imagine they stayed on despite the rain. I think I need either a big plastic sheet to cover the artwork while it's displayed on the ground, or else I need a more condom-like approach in which each piece is individually wrapped in its own sheath. I might also want to hang the artwork vertically somehow-- maybe off a makeshift tripod.

5. Completed scrolls. Along with "raw" product (such as what I'm selling at Chewiest Tumors), I need to showcase some actual scrolls so people get an idea of what their purchase will look like. I was told I could probably sell completed scrolls for 2 to 3 times the price of the artwork alone.

A lady friend of mine who majored in art and design at Sookmyung University took a look at my brush art and thinks I might also try the gallery route, even though they take a commission. Hmmm. Something else to think about.

OK... tomorrow, as promised, more on North Korea and the starvation issue, this time through the eyes of the think tanks. In the meantime, I direct your attention to the Marmot, who quotes from a current issue of Policy Review. The Infidel also has some interesting things to say here. And on the Tacitus site, Bird Dog asks what you would do about NK if you were president. Expect a ponderous comment thread as usual.

There, that ought to keep you busy for a while. Heavy-duty blogging for my hairy self tomorrow (Monday, Korea time).

Oh, yeah-- forgot to mention: it was actually sort of cool to be the only foreigner selling stuff today. Some people couldn't decide whether to speak directly with me or not, which forced me out of my introverted shell and made me greet them in Korean first. One American shopper came by with his (who else) Korean girlfriend. He spoke shitty Korean, so I was pleased in a petty way. I also learned that the lady to the right of me was not only a Buddhist, but also left-handed. Her brand name (she was selling diaries with embroidered covers) is "LeftRoad."

LeftRoad, meet Chua Su Bul.
_

The more I think about it, the more I think the Marmot is right: South Korean president Noh Mu Hyon would like to leave his job. The referendum talk is heating up now, as this ABCNews.com article shows. Interesting quote:

"If a president is sacrificed in the middle of his term and if that serves to straighten out South Korean politics, I think that is a bigger stride forward for the development of South Korean politics than a case in which the president simply completes his five-year term," Roh said at a news conference.

I'm not all that sympathetic. Noh has shown nothing but weakness as his public face. From any perspective, that's bad news, but from the Korean perspective, which still retains a certain machismo, it's the kiss of death. Whether Noh should resign, however, is a deeper issue than "face." As someone in the blogosphere pointed out, you can't have too short of a feedback loop or all you get is oscillation without progress. If Koreans replace Noh after he's barely begun his term, will this really improve the efficiency of the South Korean political machine? I wonder. How many presidents actually have presidential experience when elected? Almost none, I'd venture-- unless they're being reelected!

On a personal note...

I visited the tail-end of the Hongik University "Free Market" today (Saturday). It goes from about 10 or 11AM to about 6 or 7PM (technically, 6PM). Any schmo can come to the market in the morning, pay a fee of around 10,000 won, spread out a blanket or set up a table, and sell their wares. It's a Saturday market only, however. On Sunday, there's another, similar market at the same spot called a "Huimang Shijang" (Hope Market), which runs about the same hours. I'm going to attempt to sell my calligraphy and Bodhidharma art there.

I'm working on some other calligraphic pieces, all in Chinese. Notamment:

Shin Mu Sang Ya: God is formless.
This is something Zen Master Shin at the Korean temple Hanguk-sa in Germantown, MD said during a dharma talk, and also during a visit to my Presbyterian church in Northern Virginia.

Shin Ae Ya: God is love.
Mainly to please the Christian crowd, but why not? I may not believe in a literal God, but I still think this sentiment is correct.

Bul Un Shi Dae Nam Gyeong Mu So Yong: When your luck runs out, a big dick is useless.
I'm also working on a "vertical" version of the Roman proverb, to be made into a huge-ass scroll. To be honest, I expect this to sell better among Americans than among Koreans, who might be too timid to put it up on their walls, where disapproving parents will demand the proverb's immediate removal. This piece is a single column of 9 Chinese characters. We're talking TALL. A finished scroll might be at least 6 feet high (and I'll have to sell it for a bit more than other calligraphy, obviously). The frameable version of 3 x 3 characters will be close to a square shape and much smaller.

I'm also working on "Form is emptiness; emptiness is form," and "The Tao that can be talked about is not the eternal Tao." I may do some "list"-format calligraphic pieces-- e.g., the Saseongjae (Four Noble Truths), the Six Paramitas (6 perfections), the three Pauline virtues (faith, hope, love), etc.

PICS ARE ON THE WAY FOR ALL THESE THINGS!

While walking around Insa-dong on Friday, I finally-- finally-- had the chance to talk with an artist at whose work I'd been staring for months. Mr. Shin is a friendly 72-year-old with a thick white beard and mustache. He's been all over the world and rakes in the dough with his beautiful artwork. Unlike yours truly, Mr. Shin is a seasoned pro, especially when it comes to the sheer speed with which he can produce a piece. He works on what appears to be silk, and his tools vary from brushes to sponges. He can make graceful Chinese (or Japanese, or Korean) calligraphy; he can also draw your name in rainbow colors (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or romaja-- Roman letters). These pieces generally take less than a minute to produce, and they're not small: many are more than 15-20 inches high. Mr. Shin also produces colorful, detailed dragons. He told me this takes him around 20 minutes, which floored me. I looked at one of his dragons in amazement: the same piece, were I to attempt it, would probably take me a couple hours. As things stand, I can produce a single B&W Bodhidharma in under 30 minutes.

Mr. Shin also practices taekwondo. He showed me his callused palms, which he smashes against some hard surface every day. As if this weren't enough, he's also a magician and-- get this-- is available for parties. I'd like to think that, if I make it to 72, I'll be as happy, healthy, and young-thinking. Mr. Shin has a lot in common with my father, who looks pretty darn white but has a Korean heart-- a comment I mean in the best way, pace the cynics.

The upshot of yesterday's quite-impromptu sit-down with Mr. Shin is that he wants a look at my artwork. I'm going to bring him some this coming week and see what he thinks. Meantime, I've got the Huimang Shijang to worry about tomorrow, where we'll see what the market thinks. Will report on that experience Sunday evening, then get back to the NK question on Monday. Think tanks... that's right... I'm working on think tanks next.
_

You get so much value for your money at Robert's and Kevin's sites that I still wonder why the hell I bother posting anything about Korea. Here's what's been happening over there:

The Marmot on Hangeul Day, which was the 9th.

The Marmot on the Dear Leader's wife (possibly in a road accident recently) and private life.

The Korean answer to Leni Riefenstahl?

Big news among Asiabloggers: the case of a mid-40s Japanese teacher abusing a student with some American blood and telling him he should commit suicide. The student seems to be getting the message. The teacher's abuse earned him a slap on the wrist.

A sickening "fine apologia" in praise of North Korea rightly earns the Marmot's (and every other sane person's) contempt.

I've talked about it timidly, but the Marmot goes after it more boldly: the possibility of a recall of President Noh???? More news as it happens. I think the Marmot is right and Noh is looking to get out of his job. I'm not sure, though, that a referendum will provide Noh an honorable exit, especially if it becomes clear that he truly is detested by most of the citizens. Noh has been a whiny little wuss since he came into office; unlike the Marmot, I haven't started to like him, and neither have Yi Hwae Ch'ang voters like my buddy Jang-woong.

Moving over to Kevin now...

If you're a baseball fan, you've probably been following the middle-finger incident involving Boston pitcher Kim Byung Hyun. A classic IA post on the subject here.

Kevin takes a moment to shit on North Korea.

The well-justified Kim abuse continues here.

An interesting post breaks up the Kim-bashing to consider some odd new "special war materials" in Korea.

Kevin resumes the Kim bashing, and schools us in the darker side of Korean culture.

And finally, another blast at Kim, whom I'm now convinced I despise, sight unseen. Thanks, Kevin. I hate Kim's guts.

Happy reading, folks.
_

You've got Tarantino's "Kill Bill" and Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River" opening this weekend. Damn you all.

The Post's Desson Howe has nothing but praise for "Kill Bill"; Stephanie Zacharek of Salon is, unsurprisingly, less enthused, and still doesn't understand Tarantino at all [FWI to newbies to my blog: no Salon link; they make you pay or force you to watch an ad for core content, and I refuse to link to them as a result].

UPDATE: The Post's Stephen Hunter also offers his kudos.

UPDATE 2: Kevin Smith (yes, THE Kevin Smith) says it's "FUCKING FANTASTIC." He can't spell "Lucy Liu," though.
_

I went over to Regnum Crucis and saw this post, which says in part:

A lot of Western commentators, horribly uninformed about the details of their own history, have opined since September 11 about how Islam "needs a Reformation." Aziz Poonawalla and Ikram Saeed have made a very good point - Wahhabism is the Islamic version of the Reformation and its legacy has basically been the same. The difference is that while the European nations were able to pull themselves out of the sinkhole of sectarian warfare after ~150 years of religious warfare, many Muslim nations, especially in the Middle East, are prevented from doing so because of the number of thug regimes that have come to power there since the end of colonialism.

To find out what Dan Darling means by "horribly uninformed about the details of their own history," you have to follow the link he indicates, which leads to this post by Aziz Poonawalla at Unmedia. The post quotes a commenter named Ikram Saeed. I'll repeat the Saeed quote in full:

Wahbism _is_ the reformation. Traditional Sunni Islam has four Madhabs (schools of thought), and the interpretation of religion is only permitted by religious scholars in that Madhab. To become a scholar requires many years of work, and an understanding of some 1400 years of religious thought and commentary. Traditional Sunni-ism is somewhat centralized and "Catholic" (though not nearly as mush as Shi'ism -- "the fifth madhab?").

Wahabis smash this hierarchy, and go extreme "protestant" They argue that the 1400 years of interpretation has clouded and distorted the original message of the Prophet. Muslims need to go back to the fundamentals, to Islam the way it was practiced at the time of the prophet. Each Muslim should read the Quran, and particularly the Hadiths, and reach his own, correct, understanding.

It so happens that Wahabis believe the correct understanding is one that, by the standards of America's relaxed morality, is reactionary and repressive. Religious authority is being decentralized among hatemongers and fanatics.

And, for Christians who know their own religious history, this shouldn't be surprising. Calvin was an intolerant religious bigot. And Luther has long been accused of being a grade 'A' anti-semite. Both Luther and Calvin launched Europe into 300 years of religious warfare (that still continues in N.Ireland).

300 years of religious warfare -- is that the reformation Den Beste wants?
...
The Christian Reformation occurred as a reaction to corruption in the catholic church, not as a reaction to strict morals. If anthing, teetotalling moralistic protestants were more violent and more strict than Catholics. Similarly, Wahabis are more strict than "Madhabis" to coin a term.

We do need to note that not everyone means precisely the same thing when they say "Islam needs a Reformation." Saeed is being a bit too rigorous about the analogy, I think, and is viewing the Christian Reformation through a too-narrow consequentialist lens. The long-term effects of the Protestant Reformation weren't exclusively deleterious, though I gladly acknowledge the negatives Saeed points out re: Luther's and Calvin's intolerance and centuries of religious war. The other side of the coin, though, the strong metal that came out of that forge, is the theologically liberal wing of modern Christianity that rejects blind fundamentalism, accepts the need for (and actively promotes!) continued hermeneutical variety, and exists in constant, spirited, peaceful dialogue with its coreligionists.

When people say Islam needs a Reformation from within, this is what they're talking about, and it's no use deliberately misunderstanding them.

To my mind, Islam needs the one thing it rejects the most vigorously: a notion of the secular. Although there's no single definition for what secularism is and means, I think it's safe to contend that, so far in history, only secularism has provided the necessary neutral ground on which various beliefs can peaceably (if not always harmoniously) interact. No religion, no society based on a religion or possessing a state religion, has been able to provide nearly as satisfactory a neutral ground as Western-style secularism, a ground specifically congenial to diverse versions of human flourishing. I can think of no Buddhism-based society that both upholds and tolerates variety to the extent America does, for example. No Christian society does, either (something we can actually see within America, too, in quasi-hermetic communities like the Mennonites). Certainly no Muslim society has ever allowed the kind of peaceful pluralism America enjoys-- and the historical example of non-Muslim monotheists living as second-class citizens who pay a jizya tax simply for belonging to another faith does not, in my opinion, equate to what a secularism-aided pluralism provides its people. How would a Saivite Hindu and his family have fared in such a "tolerant" Muslim society, I wonder? Examples from Islam's glorious past provide no clue as to what Islam needs to do next-- not without serious reinterpretation, anyway. This is one reason why I place a lot of hope in feminist Muslims who've lived their whole lives in Western societies. The "reform from within" must and will be an alloy that includes influences from without-- an inevitable fact if you grant that phenomena are dependently co-arisen. Nothing simply "arises" ex nihilo.

I understand Saeed's basic point and agree with it, but feel he may be missing the actual intention of the people calling for Muslim reformation. This could be an instance of folks talking past each other. That's my take on the matter, anyway.

Aziz Poonawalla at Unmedia points out this post, which disagrees with Saeed's contention that Wahhabism is like the Reformation.
_

My cell phone, apparently sick of playing hide-and-seek with someone as stupid as I am, vibrated this morning to announce its presence. I answered and it was my American buddy Tom, who'd been trying to reach me for the past, oh, 36 hours. My phone was hiding in a pair of shorts I'd worn on Wednesday evening. The shorts were in my shoebox residence, high on a clothes rack.

So I don't have to go and cancel service. My morning is free.

I'm heading out to Insa-dong again to spy on some artists and steal some techniques. If I can't afford to pay for lessons right now, then I'll just steal them through observation and osmosis.

In the meantime, I can't help thinking that my phone has been my Zen master these past couple days, teaching me a harsh lesson in mindfulness. Much as I hate cells phones, I have come to rely on the little bastards.

Art. Just because.
_

His latest email, here displayed for your entertainment and, we hope, your edification:

Birds lay eggs. We eat them. Animals eat them. Sometimes raw. Sometimes boiled. Sometimes things eat things that eat eggs. And sometimes even things that eat things that eat eggs also like to eat eggs.

Pure Chuang-tzu.
_

If you visit Only the Chewiest Tumors now, you'll see I've darkened the background a bit and altered the title format somewhat. I was inspired to do this bit of housekeeping by the Maximum Leader's recent face-lift.

The dark background serves the purpose of making the calligraphy stand out more. I wasn't able to add borders; when I played with the HTML of the PayPal buttons, I changed "border=0" to "border=5" with no effect. Since I couldn't give you a border, I thought I should give you a darker background. If the lowered contrast between text and background is bad for your eyes, gimme an email and I'll see what I can do. I might go for a more quasi Cub Scout-ish look, blue and gold-ish, like over at Regnum Crucis.

By the way, if you marketing geniuses have ideas on how I can be peddling my wares, I'm all ears.
_

I checked at home again, and checked the PC-bahng one more time. No luck. That phone is history.

AND I'M FREE!

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

But I still have to hit the LG Telecom office tomorrow morning and report the damn thing stolen & cancel the service.

(For those who are wondering, while I was at the gym we did try to cancel the service this evening through the LG Telecom automated dialing service. Didn't work. As with most things in Korea, it's best to undertake this face-to-face, where you have slightly more control over your own fate.)
_

Kev,

[re: this Tacitus post]

Read your blog. I've long thought that something special could come
from within Iran. There really seems to be a populist desire for some form
of democracy. I think we really screwed things up when we installed the
Shah. Iran has paid a terrible price for it, first by living under the Shah,
then when the pendulum swung just as far in the other direction under the
Ayatollah et al. Still, the potential for an organic home grown democracy
could be just what Islam needs.

I'm more optimistic that some good will come there than in Iraq. Trouble is
it'd probably take an incredibly bloody revolution to get there.

I really think there are three rules to a working democracy
1. It has to come from within
2. The cost is significant (i.e. usually revolution)
3. It evolves over time and has serious growing pains (i.e. war of 1812,
Civil War with us.)

The Air Marshal
[usually found guest-blogging on the Maximum Leader's site]
_

I love it!

Go check out Mike the Maximum Leader's new heading for his Naked Villainy blog. I'm proud to say I contributed the caricature on the right side of the emblem (many, many, many months ago, actually), but to my knowledge the rest of the design is all Mike's. Oh, wait-- I also contributed the "Dalai Lama's love child" phrase. Hee hee. I don't know why I pick on the Benevolent Baldie.

But that's neither here nor there! Great new look, Mike. The design change calls for a proper celebration, methinks. Slaughter the fatted people! But first-- ritually slap their massive buttocks with brands of English yew, dunk them in vats full of poison frogs, cry havoc and let slip the Fart of War!
_

If you've been following the Korea- and Chinabloggers, you may have noticed a, uh, disagreement has erupted among some of the liberal and conservative expats. Start with Adam Morris' North Korea analysis (Brainy Smurf's a liberal), them move over to the Marmot's reply (Robert's a conservative), then hit Gweilo Diaries (also conservative) for another reply to Adam. Then hit the Gweilo's comments section to read Adam's reply. You'll note the Gweilo says a lot of the same things the Marmot does.

So much for the already-fucked idea of blogger solidarity. I think blogging is simply the next step up from message boards: everyone gets their own patch of cyberstreet on which they can declaim their gospel 24/7. As Glenn contended long ago, it brings out all us narcissists.
_

Damn.

It appears I've lost my cell phone. Am not sure how this happened, given how little I use the phone, which almost never leaves my pocket. If someone has it, then I need to stop service on it before they ring up a huge long-distance bill.

At the same time, it's a relief. I've never liked cell phones. Never used them in America (except when my brother David would pass me his). I didn't really enjoy having one foisted on me when I moved back to Korea last year, just because "everyone's got one and it's the only way to live in Korean society." I'm not a Luddite; if I were, I wouldn't be blogging. No; I'm simply an INTJ off the scale and I don't like the idea that anyone can find me anywhere to nag me. "Just turn off your phone!" is the grouchy advice I get in return, but that never works: when I turn the phone back on, all I hear are frustrated complaints like "I tried to call you about five times but your phone was off!", and in Korean culture these days, no one has the common decency to leave a fucking message so I know who called, goddammit. I have an older-model phone and no caller ID function, so I truly have no idea who's calling. Maybe losing the phone is the best thing to happen. I never loved it, anyway.

There's a chance the phone is actually hiding out at my place, cackling at its own cleverness. I've done a couple searches, but still think it might be under a blanket or mixed in with laundry. There's also a chance it's been put in the lost-&-found pile of last night's PC-bahng. I checked that PC-bahng earlier this evening and the nice lady said she hadn't seen anything. Thing is, I didn't lose the phone on her shift. I may go back there again, just to check with the guys who were there last night.

Hmmmm.

On another personal note, I've gotten really good at grabbing mosquitoes out of the air when they get too close to my face. Maybe the mosquitoes in Seoul are pollution addled and therefore slower than average, but the end result is that I feel more and more like a Jedi master. Which is why I'm not too bothered about a missing phone.
_

From something I posted online a few months ago:

He did a double-take as her nipples enlarged almost to finger length, then began beckoning him with prehensile come-hither gestures like Travolta calling his lady to the disco floor. The effect was revolting, yet compelling in its mutant, tentacular naughtiness.
_

Your dose of troubled Christianity, right here. And as always, we see monotheism has a hard time dealing with sex.
_

Tacitus guest blogger "von" showing why Tacitus is on the blogroll. Great little post.

Has the Air Marshal gotten his wish re: an Islamic "reformer from within"?

Sullivan on why Arnold's election is good.

Cobb on what to expect in Iraq down the line. I agree we probably need a base there, even as I agree we should butt out of Korea. It's all about the force projection, baby.
_

I don't hate the French.

I've lived for short periods in France, and a year in Switzerland (I now share, with the Swiss, a general disdain for the UN, thanks in large part to intense dialoguing with friends just before, during, and immediately after the Three Weeks' War).

I like French cheese, bread, chocolate (though I like Swiss chocolate more). I like French women. They're sexy even when their pits aren't shaved. I've had a great relationship with my French host family, whom I first met in 1986 as a bewildered high school junior spending a month in the Nantes area (the city of Carquefou, to be exact). The Ducoulombier family is about as stereotypically French Catholic as you can get. I had a great time in '86. We drove to Cherbourg and stayed at a relative's farm for ten days. I learned farm vocabulary and got shat on by a frightened cow. Papa et Maman own their own business in Carquefou and live in a big-ass house with lots of property and tall trees walling in their back yard. Weather is fantastic except when it gets stormy (this is Nantes, after all).

There's a lot to love about French society-- the logic and illogic of it, the almost goofy joie de vivre that many French folks radiate, the shameless raunchiness (which we Americans are still bizarrely prudish about in public and on non-cable TV).

But yeah, I fucking hate French politics and can't stand the 20th-century French contributions to philosophy and literary theory.

That hatred isn't big news. Americans have long detested French politics, often rightly. And postmodernism/deconstruction will prove to be, I hope, a flash in the pan, philosophically speaking.

In the meantime, I feel that tonight I should do my part to rehabilitate, at least partially, France's image. We'll leave the current question of French "declinism" (their term, not mine) aside to concentrate on one French philosopher whom Americans should get to know better: Jean-François Revel.

I first made this man's acquaintance in reading the book The Monk and the Philosopher, a dialogue between Revel and his son, Mathieu Ricard. Revel is, in many ways, an old-school rationalist and down-home humanist, a gastronome and bon vivant who is also a diehard atheist. Ricard has a doctorate in molecular biology, but he ended up leaving a promising career to become a monk in a Tibetan order. It was a shocking and disappointing switch, as far as Revel (the father) was concerned. These days Ricard is the French interpreter for the Dalai Lama, among other Buddhist duties. The Monk and the Philosopher is an edited transcript of a fascinating dialogue between Revel and Ricard, in which they discuss Life, the Universe, and Everything from very different perspectives. And as I was reading this dialogue, it struck me:

Jean-François Revel is on our side.

I knew this long before the current crisis in Franco-American relations thanks to that book, which came out pre-9/11. Revel is a confirmed anti-utopianist, which I think is one of the greater traits in the American character. Both the Maximum Leader and Bill Whittle have argued in favor of America's messy public process-- the debates, the gridlock, the headache that comes with letting the screaming masses have their say-- and I agree with them. A friend of mine in a private email recently made some very similar points about the ultimate uselessness of the utopian vision. The best we should expect and strive for, he contended, is slow, incremental improvements (get ready to face reality, Arnold... you won't move mountains governing the world's fifth largest economy, but that's OK).

Revel's books about France, America, democracy, religion, and communism have been out in French for a while. But this evening I saw a post by Andrew Sullivan: another one of Revel's works is now available in English: The Anti-American Obsession.

I haven't read this particular book, but have skimmed Revel's How Democracies Perish and The Totalitarian Temptation. I ascribe to Revel a great deal of prescience regarding where French society is going, but also think he's on the right track when he discusses the big picture. His antireligious bent may not please many Jesus-toting Americans, but Americans will adore his harsh attitude toward communism, totalitarianism, and utopianism. I think he's a Frenchman you'll like. He represents a school of thought that's not getting as much air time as we might prefer these days, so I submit to you that not all French are deluded Tranzi Frogs. Revel and his ilk are proof of that. There's hope.

So go read Revel. I recommend him, even though I haven't read this particular book. And think kind thoughts about France now and then. I simply can't view them as an enemy; their collective temperament is too flighty for me to believe they won't turn around eventually.

Yes, this was a rambling mess of a blog, but it needed to be written. I'll go further and suggest that you folks who're saying "France is the enemy!" (something I've always juxtaposed with question marks on this blog) need to get that stick out of your bunghole. Consider: you don't seriously believe that France could kick our ass at anything, do you? Then use the term "enemy" for those who deserve it! Otherwise it's a bit like calling an old, gimping housecat your "enemy" when you know full well that a single swift kick to the poor bastard's brittle ribcage will solve all your problems.

Back to systematically thought-out blogs when I return to North Korean issues and Heart Sutra metaphysics (I still haven't forgotten!).

Meantime, go check out my new blog-warehouse, Only The Chewiest Tumors, and buy a book or a Bodhidharma pic or some "Buddha Mind" calligraphy.

Post scriptum: My brother just wrote to warn me not to make this blog into "a big commercial." I agree; I shouldn't. But for the moment, I have to shill for Chewiest Tumors until it takes off. Hairy Chasms is averaging about 70 visitors a day; that's not impressive when compared to most blogs, but it's something to market with, and why not be a dirty capitalist and have a little fun? These are my blogs either way; it's not as though I'm advertising for someone else! So go visit Chewiest Tumors. Shop around. More stuff will be coming soon, including (I hope) greeting cards. And thanks in advance.

Oh, yeah: CONGRATS, ARNOLD.
_

Take a gander at Only the Chewiest Tumors, the blog where I'm selling my wares. Scroll up and down the site and go shopping, or follow these direct links to various items!

1. Mon chef d'oeuvre scatologique, Scary Spasms in Hairy Chasms-- available for $15 if you buy singly, for $12.50 apiece if you hit the 2-fer deal, $11 apiece if you buy 5 books, and a truly unprofitable $10 apiece if you buy ten at a time!

2. The Scroll-format Bodhidharma! (brush painting)

3. The Frameable Bodhidharma! (brush painting)

4. Scroll-format "Buddha Mind" Brush Calligraphy!

5. Frameable "Buddha Mind" Brush Calligraphy!

Go! Go visit Chewiest Tumors and shop for friends, family, pets-- whomever! You'll make me a very happy hominid, and now that I'm selling artwork and not just Scary Spasms, you don't have to feel ashamed about buying only Scary Spasms from me.

Thank you in advance for your patronage at Chewiest Tumors, and for reading this twisted blog (the readership seems to have increased in recent days... I expect it's thanks to the Marmot).

You'll notice I changed the tumor pic. Now it's actually a photo of a mouse suffering from something called megacolon. Hee hee.

_

South Koreans continue to debate whether to send combat troops to Iraq. A Korean team recently came back with a report saying the Iraq situation wasn't so bad, and that it might be fine to send combat troops (never mind the strange idea that combat troops should be sent only if there's no risk of dying in combat). That report, however, is being heavily questioned and is merely fueling the debate. Visit the Marmot for the goods.

Another contribution marmotique: NK has apparently said it is "barring" Japan from any more multilateral nuclear talks. This is laughable. I shit on North Korea's stupid government, and hope I live to see the day it implodes.

By the way, Marmot, your name is now Joseph according to Internet Ronin. Heh. Ronin also comments on the California recall election and his own vote.

Big things happening in Taiwan, if PRC News is any indication: Taiwan is getting bolder about arguing for its independence, and perhaps staging a referendum on the matter. I hope this happens, and I think the US needs to rethink the "one China" policy. Once it does this, it'll also be more able to address the awful Tibetan situation (though by many accounts, it's already far too late to reclaim Tibet for Tibetans).

The Washington Post is on the case.

Over at Flying Chair, an interesting recipe for baked stuffed chicken.

Great Arnold punditry from Andrew Sullivan.

Sullivan also points to an article about whether people are born gay.

Sullivan on deconstructing a reconstruction: the accusation that the war was based on a (false) premise of imminent threat.

Den Beste offers a critical view of transnational progressivism. My own feeling is that nothing lasts forever, including the idea of "nation." We may (we probably will) one day move beyond the idea of nationhood to something more global, but it ain't gonna happen in our lifetime. Or for another couple centuries.

Glenn's gym routine kicks my routine's ass. He's also given his girlfriend some interesting sage advice.

Merde in France on French vandalism.

A comment: One of the most entertaining things about Europe is the graffiti. Zurich has a ton of it; hell, every city does. It also tends to be a lot more political than what you see in America, though one of my favorite bits of American graffiti (ding-ding-- pop cultural reference) is found sprayed on the concrete wall opposite where I used to stand at the Brookland/CUA Metro station in DC:

Got a doctorate in cold rokin' it.

I don't have a damn clue what it means, but it's always intrigued me.

Can someone please tell me why China isn't releasing the launch date for its "taikonauts"? Meantime, here's a (cough) BBC article about the upcoming launch.

ABCNews.com with a provocative article on how the Pentagon may be inadvertently selling weapons components to terrorists.

Woo-hoo! ABC also has a piece on Tarantino's "Kill Bill." I'll be in the States in November; I hope it'll still be playing. Korean theaters occasionally have the annoying habit of cutting movies-- not so much for censorship purposes these days, as for allowing them to shorten run times and squeeze in an extra viewing. I'd rather see the flick in America.

[Note: Having seen "The Matrix Reloaded" three times in the States, I noticed no cutting when I saw it, geek that I am, a fourth time in Korea. Maybe big Hollywood studios grumble at the Korean practice. Or maybe they grumble only when it's a big movie.]

Salon brings you only what's most relevant! Here's an article about a palm reader's analysis of Arnold's palm print. My question: if she's analyzing the palm print and not the palm itself... might she be getting a backwards reading?

Today, it's all about California. Good luck, folks. I have a feeling the Burly Man is going to win. And I didn't need to read any palms to gain this insight. If I'm wrong, I'll make sweet love with Liz Hurley.

Just what South Koreans need: cell phone tapping!

Maybe we'll be seeing a recall election in Korea (did Oranckay once refer to this possibility?). I'm being facetious, but an article like this does make one wonder. Folks aren't happy.

A Chosun Ilbo editorial on NK defectors and the (temporary?) closing of the SK consulate in Beijing because there are just so many defectors.

JoongAng Ilbo weighs in.

So does the Dong-A Ilbo.

From Frank J on Israel's recent attack on Syria:

When Israel attacked Syria, we should have followed up. It would be just like that scene in Predator when a guy sees the predator and starts firing and, though no one else knows what he's firing at, they fire in the same direction. We should be like that because Israel is our ally, or, in the least, because we like shooting stuff.

I had a "Predator"-related thought yesterday. Every "big" cast member from that film should run for governor of some US state. Jesse's done it. Arnold's probably going to do it. Frank J's above paragraph refers to the amazing Bill Duke (cool actor, cooler director), who goes nuts after the Predator kills Jesse Ventura's character. Bill take's "Ol' Painless," a retrofitted helicopter minigun, from Jesse's fallen corpse and singlehandedly deforests the area in front of him. Along with Bill Duke we've got Carl Weathers, who's got at least as much charm as Arnold, and hasn't gone to seed like poor Billy Dee Williams. I think they need to run for office, these folks.

Final comment: quite a few of the blogs on my blogroll are powered by Blog City, but I couldn't view them this evening-- they kept coming up as "Forbidden." Strange. I imagine this is a Blog City problem, not a South Korean government problem.


Amen.
_

You didn't think I could do it, did you?

I kept promising and promising: "I'll get those pics of my artwork up, I will, I will."

And now they're UP, baby.

FTP clients? Fuck that. Just drag and drop.

It took a while to figure this out, but I eventually realized that, since I have a personal email account with StarPower, I have TEN MEGABYTES OF WEBSPACE BEGGING TO BE EXPLOITED!

So it was simply a matter of

1. ...going to a copying service that did color scans of huge documents,

2. ...getting everything scanned,

3. ...receiving an ID and password to access the scans (which were placed online for me to retrieve at my leisure),

4. ...going to a PC-bahng-- the very one I'm in now-- and downloading the files,

5. ...spending two hours piecing the images together with an illegal copy of Adobe Photoshop 6.0 (thanks guys), because even the big scanners weren't big enough to scan the docs whole,

6. ...muddling through online FTP tutorials ONLY TO ACHIEVE ENLIGHTENMENT AND REALIZE I DIDN'T NEED NO STINKIN' FTP CLIENT TO GET MY FILES ONTO MY STARPOWER FTP SPACE!

You know what this means, now that I know how to put images on my blog?

It means I might just have to start that COMIC STRIP!

But first, to business.

You've been teased and teased. I apologize. I'm facing a steep learning curve. People who outlive Jesus don't think as fast as they did when they were 15. Plus, my fingers are fat so gravity keeps me from typing too fast.

I said I'd done a bunch of brushwork, and now you'll get to see it. I have six images here. The first two are NOT my work; they're Bodhidharma images I bought, and from which I've gained some inspiration. They also provide some encouragement because they contain mistakes. One of them cost me 50,000 won, around $42. The next four images are my own work. Shall we plunge on in?

This is "Hairy Bodhidharma." My favorite pic. I really admire the artist's work here. His brush strokes are done with conviction, as you can see. I'm still a bit more cautious. The artist is also into subtlety-- you can see the wispiness of the saint's beard and eyebrows, for example, and the gray-colored halo.





It's a gorgeous Bodhidharma, I think. Very stylized, very energetic. Notice the bags under the eyes? I decided to include that trait in my own images. The artist has great control over his brush. Each stroke starts strong, and often the ink "runs out" just as the stroke is ending, either because he's been shrewd about how much ink to put on the brush, or because he knows precisely when to start lifting the brush off the paper at the end of the stroke.

A quick word about the Chinese characters: The big character above and to the right of the saint's head is "ki," energy, vital force, breath, etc. Underneath Bodhidharma's beard you see two characters stacked on top of each other: "Bul" (Buddha), which looks like a fancy, backwards dollar sign; and "shim" (mind). Buddha-mind. The "print" version of "shim" often looks more like a capital L surrounded by three teardrops. Many artists seem to prefer a "reclining" version of the character. Oh, and maybe that qualifies as a quasi-mistake: notice that "shim" is written very small, while "Bul" is much larger. I've tried to avoid that in my own art.

Any other mistakes? Well, for me, it's a mistake that the artist drew one feature, then covered it up. Bodhidharma's got a monster pendulous earlobe, and there's usually an earring hanging off it, making him look a bit like the world's most enlightened pirate. But all that HAIR, man! It's covering the lower ear and the earring. Is this a tragic mistake? No. I'm just pointing out that the artist isn't perfect, and besides, brushwork is as much about imperfections as about what goes right.

Blotching also falls into this category, lucky for us non-experts.

Which brings me to the next image, another one I didn't do. Here it is:





I said it before: this reminds me strongly of a cross between Popeye and my Uncle Pete. Uncle Pete's got a bald pate, and Popeye's got those amazing jowls.

Hmmm. Popeye ate spinach. Buddhist monastics are usually vegetarian... connection?

This artist used a bit of color, and the ink is here behaving like watercolor would. There are greys and browns, along with black. Notice the halo in this picture is stronger, more prominent. Notice also that the halo swoosh starts at shoulder level here, whereas the Hairy Bodhi's halo starts at eye level. You can also see that the people who scanned my work weren't too careful about how they aligned the paper. Grrr.

Bodhidharma is rarely thin. Thin Bodhidharmas do exist, but they're the exception, not the rule. This guy's got some serious neck action going, to accompany his jowls. His beard's pretty wimpy, too, and he doesn't seem to have much hair on the back of his skull. Since Bodhidharma's at least part-legendary (if not entirely legendary), artistic license is the name of the game, and people imagine him all sorts of ways, though they usually manage to sneak in the basic motifs found in almost every Bodhidharma pic.

(By the way, I was talking about the HALO before, when I asked in a previous blog what was missing from all those other pictures of the saint I'd posted!)

In the upper left corner of the picture, you see the character for Buddha. Take a second and compare it with the previous picture. Notice how each artist dealt with the character. The guy who drew Popeye seems to have a lighter touch, and he likes curves. The guy who drew Hairy Bodhi uses stronger, straighter strokes that seem to indicate a mindset that's less into "wandering"-- he's more direct, but he attacks his own painting with zeal to match the conviction.

I tend to think that the Popeye artist doesn't have as much control over his brush. See the blotches on the Chinese characters? There's a big one in the upper right corner of the picture, to the right of the character for "person" (the "person" character looks like a backwards Greek lambda). There's another blotch, harder to see, two characters up from the red "myeong" stamp.

So I've had these guys on my wall for a couple months now, and when I started doing my own work, I'd refer to them-- not necessarily to copy them. As you'll see in a moment, my brushwork doesn't look much like theirs, though you may notice traces of their influence.

Blotching isn't always a bad thing. Calligraphy's sometimes an unruly business, as much subject to the random burblings of physics as to the controlled intentions of the artist. Ink will do what it damn well pleases if you let it, and to an extent, this is appreciated in brush art. You'll see, for example, many artists who draw the vertical bars on the "Bul"/Buddha character in such a way that the left bar stops short, but the right bar hangs waaaaay down and ends in an almost-bulbous swelling, which you accomplish by holding the brush in place and letting the ink spread. You'll see this in my work.

Ready?

Here's my first image, offered with some trepidation:





I've gone for the swollen "Bul," as you see. The saint's robe is described in two long, wavy strokes. The beard and mustache are all strong, slow strokes-- partly because I'm still learning, partly because I preferred that to doing something wispy. I'm not one for subtlety, myself.

I like this one because he looks thoroughly pissed off. And his eyes are pretty damn big. Maybe he could punch a hole through a cow with his mind, eh? That'd miff some Hindus.

But more than my brush art, I love those stamps! They are so damn cool.

Oh, yeah-- I went for the strong halo. And the baggy eyes. I tried a couple drafts where I added another "cheekbone" stroke on the right side of the face (from your point of view), but that made the image too busy-looking.

You'll notice I didn't try my luck with any Chinese sentences, like the previous artists. Several reasons: my mastery of the characters and grammar is still shaky, so I'll stick to what I know, for the moment; and since Bodhidharma pictures vary in the amount of "text" they contain-- from many columns of Chinese to no Chinese at all-- I thought this would be a happy medium. As I gain proficiency, though, expect to see more complexity on the upper left side of future images.

And more color. I'm hoping, when I advance to dragons (which are hellishly complicated to draw), to show you some multicolored work.

The above Klingon-looking Bodhidharma can be made into a scroll. Here's the same scenario, but for picture framing:





The "Bul"/Buddha character is somewhat stylized in the upper right corner. But I took my cue from both the Hairy and the Popeye artists; you'll see they do something similar. There's probably a name for that style (I don't think this is "grass writing"-- that's even more abstract, isn't it?), but I don't know it.

This Bodhidharma looks even more pissed off. I thought his beard turned out great... except for one thick stroke, right under his earlobe, obscuring his earring. It's the same kind of mistake the Hairy artist made, so I'm not too ashamed to show you this. You'll also have noticed I'm sticking with the "reclining" version of the "shim"/mind character.

"Shim" actually translates in English as either "mind" or "heart." There are certain contexts in which one translation is better than another. For example, it'd be silly to call it the "Mind Sutra" instead of the Heart Sutra, because "heart" in this case indicates "teaching that goes straight to the heart of the matter." The heart is a metaphor for centrality, ultimate importance, and the Heart Sutra is often praised by masters as a highly concentrated dose of Buddhist teaching-- the dharma in raw form.

The following image is slightly tilted; I guess that's how it was scanned. You'll have to trust me when I tell you I did a better job of keeping my characters vertically aligned than the image suggests. This is "Buddha-mind" done in a scroll-friendly format:





I'm not entirely happy with either the "Bul" or the "shim." The "shim" lacks conviction, and the final upstroke at the end of the "Bul" character isn't done strongly enough. It indicates a sloppy, inattentive mind, certainly not someone possessed of correct Buddha-mind.

And finally: "Bul shim" in a frame-friendly format:





This one, if I sell it here in Seoul, I'll sell for cheap. The small Chinese characters aren't that well done. On the far right, two small characters say "seong do," or literally "attaining the Tao." That's one of many terms in East Asian Buddhism for enlightenment (I discussed this a bit previously re: Buddhism's radical sinicization). The "seong" character is also found in the Sino-Korean word for success, "seong gohng."

And that's it. There we are. Now you have some idea of what I've been working on the past couple weeks. I should put up some early drafts; they're pretty embarrassing.

Hope you enjoyed the little tour. I'll be setting up PayPal buttons for the interested over on the Chewiest Tumors blog. Maybe not tonight; I've already been in this PC-bahng a while. I'll also put up some improved "Bul shim" scenarios, and will draw a "monk vs. tiger" staring contest to stick on there as well. Once products start appearing on Chewiest Tumors, that's your cue to start thinking about girlfriends and boyfriends and other folks who might want some brushwork, and to start ordering!

Thanks for reading this far. I always appreciate it.
_

His blog has been around for a while (and he's another Kevin), but if you've never been there, I suggest you give The Homeless Guy a visit. (He's been on my blogroll.)

A recent post of his is fascinating in how it deals with an important issue: fearing the truth. Choice quote:

Why is it that so many people fear the truth? Their fear becomes obvious in observance of their reactions to it. People who fear the truth eventually resort to denying it.

There are two components to this fear. First is the fear of the statement. Second is the fear of the influence of the person making the statement, which is probably worse than the first.

Simultaneously, we are talking about Rush Limbaugh and Arnold Schwartzenn....whatever. To my mind, neither comment made by these men is incorrect. But, that doesn't seem to be the object, or the main point of the controversy.

Fear of the truth. Yes Hitler was a great public speaker, just as Arnold said he was. It was Hitler's ability to inspire the masses that afforded him such great power. Of course Hitler used that power for evil, but Arnold admitted that as well. But what are people hearing? They only hear Hitler being praised, and praised by a public celebrity who has influence over the masses. Now, people are lashing out at Arnold for making the statement. At least, that is what the media is reporting. But are the media discussing the correctness in Arnold's statement? Heck no. There's no debate going on as to whether Hitler had a gift for public speaking. Why not? If what Arnold said was indeed true, could there be any legitimacy in the complaints about him?

Go thou and read the rest!
_

From a recent post: "If that's true, we certainly want people to think twice before leaking in this fashion again, or publishing the results of such leaks."

Heh.
_

We'll start off with a big help from the Vulture's recent post about NK food aid and the black market. In a strange confluence of liberal and conservative action, the Maximum Leader also posts on the subject of NK hunger. Here's the direct link to what the ML was pointing out. It's not about the black market, per se, but about a new "honesty" in the NK leadership-praising literature, which now depicts the people as hungry (though not as a result of policy, but as a result of natural disaster and US cruelty). Choice paragraph from the ML's linked article:

Circumstantial evidence suggests many North Koreans don't believe the [new] propaganda. The idea that Kim eats gruel, apart from being discounted by a Russian diplomat who told of live seafood delivered to Kim's Moscow-bound train, seems hard for ordinary Koreans to believe when they see photos of the leader and his Panda-like paunch.

Free North Korea has a lot of commentary on the issue of NK hunger at this link.

Let's recap the questions I'm working on:

1. What are the latest figures/expert guesses on NK starvation, in terms of rate and brute numbers? What's the general history of the starvation problem, and what projections, if any, are there about future starvation?

2. Who's currently giving food aid to NK? What percentage of NK's food supply is being domestically produced?

3. Can an overall picture of NK food production, delivery, and consumption be painted? How accurate will this picture be?

4. Corollary question: if a high percentage of NK's food is coming from outside, who (what countries, organizations, etc.) is currently providing it? [Whoops-- just noticed this question is a repeat of part of question #2.]

5. What measures, if any, are in place to verify where food goes (this question is crucial; if we can't answer it satisfactorily, we can't answer the "are the troops starving?" question satisfactorily, either)? Are military defectors from NK in a position to speak about diverted food?

6. If we get past question #5 and have at least some idea where food is going, how much is being routed to the military? How are the lower-echelon people in NK's government doing?

My focus isn't on the NK populace in general; it's on the issue of whether food is being preferentially routed to the NK army. But we need to determine whether food aid (and NK's domestic food production, such as it is) is being reliably tracked. In the meantime, the above Free North Korea! link provides some testimony on the subject:

The Army is looting the civilian residences:
The Army, if they know that there are some valuables or food in a
residence, break into the house and rob anything of value. The
supporter eyewitnessed a robbery by the Army when she was in the
village. They came and took the only bicycle from a house. They
were all armed, and the residents could not even protest. There is
no law in North Korea now. The Army can rob civilians in broad
daylight and when people are watching them. The Army must be
starving too. Recently, a soldier was starving in the Army. His
family paid off some officers and got him discharged. He had nothing
to eat at home either. He ran away.

This would seem to indicate that some soldiers are indeed starving, or at least very hungry.

One article makes brief mention of Kim Jong Il's "Army First" policy. It doesn't reveal much, however. And we begin to see right away that the issue is more complex than I originally portrayed it: it may be possible both to have an "army first" policy and for soldiers to be hungry/starving.

Another post features the testimony of Harald Maass, who presented a report "at the 4th International Conference on North Korean Human Rights and Refugees from March 2-4, 2003." Parts of the report relevant to the issue of verifying food distribution:

However, a shortage of grain is not the only cause of malnutrition in the DPRK. The WFP shipped more than 930,000 tons of grain and food aid in 2001 to North Korea-- it was the biggest single country operation in the history of the UN organization. After Japan cut its aid, the WFP provided last year around 430,000 tons to North Korea. Together with the aid of other organizations and NGOs this should have been enough to at least meet the population's basic nutritional needs.

The problem of feeding the people in North Korea today is a political issue. North Korea's government has put restrictions on the work of international aid organizations like no other country. Foreign aid worker are not allowed to travel freely through the country to monitor food deliveries. In fact, outside of Pyongyang they are hardly allowed to leave their hotels. Foreign organizations like the WFP are not allowed to bring in Korean-speaking staff-- which basically prohibits any uncensored communication with the local people. There are frequent reports about corruption of government officials and the military, which controls the traffic of goods in and out of the country. A few weeks ago a truck with grain donated by an aid organization was blocked on the border-bridge between China and North Korea, because the military wanted to keep the cargo. Only when the angry truck drivers started to throw the aid-packages into the river were they allowed to pass.

Finally, the government prohibits aid organizations from building up their own distribution channels. To transport the food through the country, they have to rely on government vehicles, mainly military trucks. "If we send ten trucks out, we have no way to verify how many of them arrive at the destination," said one UN employee in Pyongyang. Furthermore, most of the foreign grain is distributed through the old government distribution centers, which basically give local cadres the power to use the food aid as an incentive for politically correct behavior. The recipients often don't even know that the food is donated from abroad. "The children think it is the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il who gives it to them," said a South Korean aid worker, who runs a bread factory in North Korea for distribution to school children.

Nobody knows whether much of the international aid goes to the families of government officials instead of needy children. Maybe some of the donated grain is even used to support the army. Foreign aid workers in Pyongyang agree that it is still impossible for them to exactly track the distribution of the aid. Their monitoring teams can only make random tests. "We think that most of it reaches the people it should. But all of it?" said an aid worker in Pyongyang. Around 20 percent of the country, mainly the counties along the border with China, is still marked as closed areas by the government and cannot be accessed by international organizations.

So is food going to the army? According to Haass, "Maybe." Is this reliably verifiable? No.

A UNICEF worker in Pyongyang, however, is more definite:

[Ingrid Kolb-Handarmanto, UNICEF worker] also dismissed some concerns that the North might have diverted the international aid for military purposes.

"The assistance provided to the North is not being squandered, but is used for securing the subsistence of the collapsing citizens, who are near death," she said.

She also added that as a leading international aid agency, UNICEF has enough means to monitor the process of food distribution provided by the international community.

This raises some questions, since we're sifting through largely anecdotal evidence: Whose testimony do we trust, or how should we synthesize the various accounts? The UN worker seems to be implying that aid distribution is indeed verifiable and food is not being preferentially routed to the army.

Think about that for a bit. In the meantime, here's more.

This is "Witness D's" testimony in a post about human flesh on the black market:

In North Korea, rice distribution is limited to executives of the Labor Party or military forces. Soldiers eat corn and ordinary people eat a gruel made from powdered corn stalks.

Humanitarian aid sent by foreign countries does not reach starving North Koreans. The World Food Program (WFP) announced assistance in the form of 510,000-tons of rice and other crops. South Korea and the US pledged food aid of 450,000-ton and 100,000-ton crops respectively this year.

When food aid from other countries enters North Korea, WFP or non-government organization staff go to went North Korea with the shipments. They try to insure that the food reaches ordinary North Korean citizens. They made videotapes and showed them to the world as proof of performance.

However, the North Koreans could not eat food donated by foreign countries.

Mr. Kim who lived in a Chinese city said, "When food aid arrives, people find out about by word of mouth. They can prove that it exists because they see that the food is brought to warehouses. They expect that the food will be rationed to them."

The rationing is actually done. One representative of each family stands in line to receive rice or corn.

"However, when night comes, leaders of people's groups and clerks of the Labor Party visit each home and take all of the rationed food back. They say to each family, 'Let's feed the sons and daughters who are starving and fighting on the front line."

The food donated by foreign countries is called 'rice for patriots' and transformed into food for military forces.

This person is suggesting that food aid is being diverted, and food is indeed going to the soldiers. (But as a matter of policy? Or is this just an excuse the authorities use to grab the food for themselves?)

To be honest, at this point I don't take the UN worker's claim of reliability very seriously. Food aid, on the whole, is not being reliably distributed, it seems. There is black market involvement, and probable strong-arming by soldiers and local officials. If the soldiers themselves are taking food from the populace, this does seem to suggest they're starving.

Here is testimony from Hyok Kang, a NK defector:

During after school hours, we were ordered to work at farms. All through the year we had to weed, fertilize the fields and help out during the harvest. The fields and soil belonged to the state and the farmers and villagers were left with nothing. In the fall, the harvested crops were turned over to the state and after helping out, my friends and I would steal something to eat from the fields since we were all poor. There were many thieves amongst the workers in the fields owned by the state as well as private individuals and during my fourth year, soldiers were stationed to guard the fields.

However the soldiers would also steal and conspire with the thieves dividing the loot among themselves. They would even trade a bag of bread with a bag of stolen maize. Our field was pilfered and we even caught a soldier trying to steal our television. The villagers had to starve because they were too afraid to be caught stealing the crops by the soldiers. We could not even work in one-day jobs since people would gather the sprouts as soon as spring came to eat.

Anecdotes do not an argument make, but this is nevertheless compelling.

Meanwhile, this article has this to say about monitoring of food distribution:

The [US State] [D]epartment's deputy spokesman, Adam Ereli, said North Korea has restricted the ability of the U.N. World Food Program, which distributes humanitarian aid in the nation, to monitor food distribution and ensure that it gets to "vulnerable North Koreans.''

"Unfortunately North Korea continues to restrict access and monitoring, which is still a major concern,'' Ereli said.

Makes you wonder what planet the other UN worker is on.

In a September 2003 post about whether the US will halt food aid to NK, we read:

More than 4.6 million of the most vulnerable North Koreans depend on the WFP for emergency nutrition, including grains and high-energy biscuits.

The supplies are distributed through schools, orphanages, hospitals and facilities that care for the elderly.

But North Korean officials have refused to supply the WFP with a list of these feeding centres and have hampered the agency's efforts to conduct the same surprise inspections and monitoring efforts that all other recipient nations submit to.

So again, we see that verification is patchy at best.

At this point, the impression I'm getting is that NK's troops may or may not be starving on the whole, but some troops certainly are stealing food, and that can't be because they're well-fed.

An article from October 2 this year, which I quote in its entirety:

Food aid sold in North Korea
By Nicholas Kralev

Video footage smuggled out of North Korea shows food being sold from sacks with markings from international donors, and the State Department acknowledged that monitoring of U.S. donations to the communist state remains an unresolved issue.

Japanese and South Korean activists said the footage was secretly taken last month from black marketeers in Haesan, a North Korean town on the border with China.

It showed a marketplace where people were selling rice and other grains, which the activists said were provided by South Korea, the U.N. World Food Program (WFP) and other relief organizations, an Associated Press report from Seoul quoted the activists as saying.

Some of the grain sacks bore stamps that read, "Rice from the Republic of Korea," South Korea's official name.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said yesterday that he was not yet aware of the activists' tape, but that the monitoring of U.S. donations, which are distributed by the WFP, is still an issue in future contributions by Washington.

In February, Washington announced a donation of 40,000 metric tons of food and said that it would contribute as much as 60,000 metric tons of additional aid before the end of the year if Washington's distribution concerns were addressed.

"We have serious concerns about North Korea's restrictions on monitoring and on access to its people that impair the World Food Program's ability to ensure that our food assistance gets to those who need it," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in a statement at the time.

The authenticity of the video and the activists' claim could not be independently verified.

But the U.N. World Food Program (WFP), which administers much of foreign aid to the North, expressed doubt that the food in question could have come from its shipments.

"The situation there is so dire that the likelihood of widespread selling of rations is very small," said Trevor Rowe, spokesman for the WFP in New York.

"There are no surpluses-- people are so close to the bone and there is not much disposable food," he said.

It also difficult to imagine North Korean government involvement in reselling WFP aid, because the aid is directly distributed to its beneficiaries, said Mr. Rowe, who had not seen the tape or reports about it.

He noted, however, that it is not uncommon for some people in North Korea to trade in part of their food for soap, cooking oil or other daily necessities.

It was not clear if the food on sale contained any donations from the United States, which has contributed more food to North Korea than any other country-- more than $600 million since 1995.

In Seoul yesterday, Lee Young-hwa, head of Rescue the North Korean People, said the new video confirmed a long-standing suspicion that the North Korean police and military were selling aid to fill their pockets.

"The aid has not been used for those who really need it. The aid is helping a regime of terror and dictatorship become stronger," said Mr. Lee, whose group is based in Japan.

In a statement, the Seoul-based Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights urged the international aid donors to "establish the transparency of the distributing process" in North Korea.

The communist state has depended on outside aid to feed its 22 million people since flood, drought and other bad weather devastated its already inefficient economy in the mid-1990s.

Pyongyang says at least 200,000 people died of famine between 1995 and 1998.

This article is based in part on wire service reports.

Monitoring is therefore an official US concern.

I'm still compiling. Nowhere near answering the questions. I want to deal with think tanks next, and look through Free North Korea!'s defector testimonies. I don't think the above article gives us much insight into the condition of NK troops stationed at the DMZ-- the troops that SK and its allies would have to worry about first.

Think about it: food probably is being diverted somewhere. The leaders are plump and healthy. So are the NK diplomats. So are the "cultural ambassadors"-- sports teams, cheerleaders, many/most Pyongyang residents, etc. Troops visible at the DMZ don't look emaciated, either. I'd bet that, when you start to tally the numbers, they run into the thousands, these well-fed folks. There's a case to be made for food diversion. Which means I may still have a case re: how well-fed the relevant NK troops are. As we narrow focus a bit, we'll see what other experts have to say. For the moment, I can't say I've found much to support the argument that NK troops are robust and well-fed. I'm going to try running a Google search on KJI's "army first" or "military first" policy later on, to see what that turns up.

Meantime, Kim Jong Il's blog is back in action! Two great ones posted recently, here and here.

More later.
_

From Merde in France: Polish forces find FRENCH surface-to-air missiles in Iraq with a manufacture date of 2003!!!!!!!

Day-yamn.
_

Yes, it's official. I've written down the words on the new sign atop our front gate and run them by my Korean buddy.

I'm living under a fortune teller. She'll look at your face and divine stuff about your character and your future. She'll talk "philosophy" with you (the word is ch'eol hak, which translates "philosophy," but in this case we're not talking about Plato, Descartes, Wittgenstein, Russell, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.... it's not philosophy in the Buddhist or Taoist metaphysical sense, either; to me, it's a bunch of superstitious garbage, but that's my opinion as a scientific skeptic).

This lady will look at your p'yeong saeng sa ju-- the four pillars of your life (year, month, date, and hour of birth), and determine your fate.

"Born at six AM on August 31st, 1969? You should have died already, ripped apart by alligators while you were taking an especially vicious dump. Your last words were supposed to have been in French: 'L'état, c'est moi' or some such. Curious. I'll have to check those charts again."

If you're married, she'll give you a reading on your marital harmony (goong hap).

You in business? Working on projects? She'll talk sa eop (work, projects, enterprise) or mae mae (buying and selling) with you, to aid you with your fiduciary commitments.

And finally-- you need to name your kids. So jak myeong, literally "making names," will be the order of the day.

If you ever need your fortune read, come visit. The lady lives just upstairs.

NEXT UP:

What do you get when you take that Mac commercial from the 1980s-- the one that references Orwell's 1984-- and turn it into a 90-minute story with over-the-top (and highly unusual) martial arts? You get "Equilibrium."

There's a huge temptation to compare this film to "The Matrix," but in many ways it's apples and oranges. There's little of philosophical/metaphysical interest here, and Christian Bale (whom I'd never seen act before, but he's apparently in "American Psycho") is several orders of magnitude more talented than Keanu Reeves as an actor.

The plot is fairly simple. Society is in the midst of being turned into one huge emotion-free zone. This was a "humanitarian" decision made by "Father" when it became obvious to him that war, violence, etc. were destroying civilization. His solution: the elimination of all feeling. People are now expected to live conformist lives, dressing the same way, doing and thinking the same things, always under the watchful eye of Father, who is on every huge monitor screen spread liberally throughout the realm of Librium (sounds familiar, ja?). No aesthetic stimulation is allowed. No art on the walls, no "literary" literature, no open vistas from your high-rise apartment (windows are covered with gray-tinted material to block the potentially inspiring view).

And of course, you have to take a drug called Prozia, which keeps your emotions at bay. Skip a scheduled injection, and you're likely to discover you're human. Which in this world makes you a "sense offender."

Sci-fi regularly dips into religion for its tropes, and "Equilibrium" is no exception. The main character is named John Preston-- a biblical first name and a surname derived from the Latin word for priest (see here as well). Preston is part of an elite force, the highest echleon of law enforcement in this society: the Tetragrammaton enforcers. They're called "clerics," and their job is to find sense offenders, destroy their possessions, send them in for "processing" or kill them on the spot. Grammaton clerics are masters of a scientifically developed martial art whose syllabus includes "gun-kata," an art you practice barehanded but also with firearms. The idea behind gun-kata, which is based on gun battle statistics, is that you learn firing postures and body motions that both minimize your chances of getting hit (by placing you in the most statistically improbable position in relation to your opponents) and maximize your killing efficiency.

All that technobullshit aside, the trivia is that this was indeed a theatrical martial art developed specifically for this movie, and the result-- for us fight choreography junkies-- is some amazing fight scenes. They aren't like what you see in the "Matrix" films, being neither special effects-heavy nor "wire-fu" in style. In many ways, gun-kata is back-to-the-basics martial arts with a very Japanese accent. Some scenes in which Christian Bale takes on multiple opponents at close quarters reminded me strongly of Jeff Speakman's kenpo technique (yes, arguably Chinese... sigh... but kenpo [Chn. chuan fa] did "japanify" when it migrated), and the fights involving katana were a dead giveaway about the Nipponity of it all.

Once again, I was out with my buddy Jang Woong and his wife Bo Hyun. I think they felt burned by our previous moviegoing experience, "Bulletproof Monk," so "Equilibrium" came as a relief. Bo Hyun in particular was taken with the fight scenes. Jang Woong said he felt like massacring his office co-workers that efficiently.

"Equilibrium" isn't much more than a reworked 1984, with lots of gun battles and a happier ending. Because it's a sci-fi movie, it does stick to the usual rule: The Black Guy Dies. But Taye Diggs's unusual fate made the Korean audience gasp in horror this evening. The audience reaction was cooler than the death scene.

A lot of critics razzed this movie in the States; I can see why. It doesn't always make sense: people on Prozia aren't supposed to emote, but we see grins, hear angry, passionate speeches, and even catch people cracking full smiles. Preston, after he falls out of favor with the rest of the Tetragrammaton, still seems able to sneak a large supply of weapons into high-security areas-- literally up his sleeves. If you're not into fight choreography, then you won't be engaged by the violence, either. There are quite a few plot twists-- perhaps enough to annoy some viewers. But all in all, I found the story and action to be better than what "Bulletproof Monk" had to offer, and gun-kata struck me as an original twist on movie fighting.

Maybe not the best movie to see in theaters (I imagine it's long gone from US screens, anyway, if Allmovie.com is any indication), but it's not bad as DVD-for-the-evening material. Oh, yeah-- the Big Bad Villain is Angus Macfadyen-- the dude who played Robert the Bruce in "Braveheart." And he turns in a fine gun-kata performance at the end, too. Hats off.

[UPDATE: I should've noted that "Tetragrammaton" refers to the four Hebrew letters making up the name of God: YHWH. These clerics are doing God's work, you see. More religion-in-sci-fi for yo' ass.]

As we were driving along, Jang Woong and I started talking about Korean troop deployment. I mentioned the Marmot's recent Korea Times article, and brought up the fact that a very pissed-off Korean commenter (at the Times site, not on the Marmot's blog) complained that Korea's contribution to Iraq would be forgotten, just like its contribution to the Vietnam War has been forgotten in the US. Jang Woong laughed and said, "Just like we've forgotten who helped us in the Korean War, right?"

So don't come away with the impression that all Koreans are closed-minded pricks. They aren't. If a person is defined by whom he hangs with (dis-moi qui tu hantes et je te dirai qui tu es), then friends like Jang Woong make me look pretty good. World, Jang Woong. Jang Woong, world.

Oh, yes-- couldn't leave without another Korean note, this being a link I found through Satan's Anus-- a Post article about horrors in North Korea. It covers a lot of fertile ground, including something I'm very interested in: NK defectors who adapt poorly to South Korean society. But the most noteworthy paragraph comes at the end, in a section titled "Burden of Guilt," dealing with the defector Pak Do Ik, who defected to South Korea and is doing well as a businessman. One of Pak's ideas:

...he has a business plan to develop a "North Korean guerrilla training theme park camp" that would let tourists experience Stalinist army training and -- for realism's sake -- deny them food for several meals.

Yeah, and I think every South Korean who utters "one people" nonsense needs to go through that camp for several years, isolated from South Korean society, then come out at the end and see whether they still think of themselves as one people with their compatriots.
_

Did you notice something missing from all those Bodhidharma pics? It's almost always there (when you take all the Bodhidharma artwork into consideration), but by sheer dumb luck I picked images that didn't include it. What feature am I talking about? Care to guess? There's a hint in one of my previous posts on the subject.

Yes, I'm pulling an "Amritas" here. But hey, since it appears I'm getting a few dozen hits per day, I thought I'd entertain you folks because you're kind enough to visit. Yeah, even you people doing Google searches on "Kristanna Loken's ass." Don't think I'm unaware. Site Meter knows ALL.

In other news...

You have to have a discriminating eye for these things, but there are indeed signs that the End of Days is upon us. Some of the signs have already come to pass:

Cats running backwards and barking.

Lions humping sheep. No, wait-- that's a tiger attacking Roy!

Arianna Huffington eating her own vomit on "Fear Factor."

Madonna pretending to be chaste.

Most of the apocalyptic prophecies I've read are vaguely worded:

A woman, a medusa, will rise from white water to rule the new of yore.

A man with large ears, inarticulate in two languages and apparently immune to criticism, will hold the fate of a wild and unruly people in his hands.

Who in the west can defeat the far-born man with iron breasts?

But some prophecies are worded pretty damn specifically, including The Final Sign:

The Maximum Leader will disown Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.

[NB: It's actually the Air Marshal giving Rush the smackdown here, but the ML's remarks seem to indicate he condones this.]

Yes, I think the world's ending.

By the way, Peking Duck piles onto Rush pretty hard with a post titled "Rush Limbaugh's Bio." Good. Rush deserves whatever he gets, even if all this signals we're going to be eaten by two-ton demon-roaches after a skull-shaped meteor slams into the planet.
_

HAPPY KAE CH'EON JEOL! Friday is (or was, since it's now Saturday in Korea) "heaven opening day," or Tangun Day-- a national holiday to celebrate Korea's mythical founding. The character "kae/gae" means "open(ing)"; "ch'eon" is the character for "sky" or "heaven" (the Chinese T'ien); and "jeol" is closer in meaning to "season" than "day." Think "time" as in the English expression "Christmastime," where "time" is understood to mean not just a single day, but also a season, or holiday, or something like that.

Hominid face-eating nastiness update: the apocalyptic battle for my face isn't over yet, and now there's something in my left armpit, some familiar redness and bumps and itching. Hee hee. Lovely. Just when I thought things were getting better... But see, the rash (whatever it is-- bacteria, fungus, virus, contact dermatitis, God-smiting) made a critical mistake when it decided to leap into my armpit, because nothing that leaps into my armpit ever comes back out. My armpit will kick this thing's ass.

I should also note that I've begun acting like a leper, with this crap all over my face. I no longer like making eye contact and prefer to move around at night. It's very strange... as I think about the process, it occurs to me that people with visible ailments often feel that the world is somehow shunning them. That's not how I feel: I feel, right now, like I'm shunning it. It's sort of cool, in a Phantom of the Opera kind of way, but also extremely annoying. I want this to be OVER with by the middle of next week.

My brother is back at the office & his other job at Polly Esther's. His rented SUV in Taos was OK, as it turned out. While at the Ski Valley, he ended up doing the climb all the way up to Wheeler Peak-- did it the hard way, too, taking the short, steep route that forced him to use all fours to reach the top-- and the footing wasn't all that great, from what I understand. Scary. If I go, I'll be taking the slower, longer route. So I can walk.

Am still compiling re: NK. I haven't forgotten; it's just going to take a while. If anyone else wants to join in with the research, go look at my list of questions in that post, send me an email to tell me what you'll be working on, and have a blast.

Meanwhile, we'll note that Washington is yawning at NK's latest announcement. A yawn may be appropriate, whether NK is lying or not. If it pisses the country off, that's good. I think Powell should have actually laughed into the cameras, then said, "Until such time as they see fit to perform a test detonation, everything they say is complete bullshit." But Powell's very polite. Some see this as a liability. Maybe it is. I don't know.

Arnold and Hitler... hmmmm. If the book proposal is true, and if Arnold did say those things about Hitler, he does have some explaining to do, but it should all be of the "I'm no longer that person" kind. And maybe it wouldn't hurt, as a PR gesture, to ask forgiveness of the public, to get them involved in the disowning of past mistakes.

Rush Limbaugh and drugs... heh. Republicans are at their most vulnerable when they're acting moralistic. Bill Bennett? Henry Hyde (and his "youthful indiscretion" at age 40-something)? Rick Santorum? I won't be following this story, though; Rush has never interested me that much.

China to have its manned launch, uh, soon.

The PC-bahng I'm in is currently host to a drunk guy who slipped out of his chair and has been sitting dazedly on the floor for the past ten min-- whoops, he's getting up now. He's leaving under his own power. I think the fucker was faking drunkenness to avoid paying.

Animal rights activists don't always think through their measures. I give you: CANNIBALISTIC MINKS! Yes, it reminds me of Mork from Ork tossing an egg into the air and screaming, "Fly! Be free!"

My residence has apparently turned into a fortune telling business of some sort. There's a new sign above our main gate that features a Buddhist swastika but also advertises services associated with fortune telling. Given the syncretic nature of Asian religion, I'm not surprised to see Buddhism mixed up in this (and it's exactly the kind of thing some of those Beliefnet Buddhists just don't get). Will report on this at greater length later.

My other thought for the evening is once again about calligraphy. I'm starting to draw some very nice Bodhidharmas. Quite a few stillborn creations, but some of them are lively-- even scary, which is a good thing. Bodhidharma, an Indian monk, is considered the First Patriarch of Zen Buddhism. He's also the legendary founder of Shaolin kung fu. A lot about Bodhidharma is legendary, come to think of it, but if he existed, he would have lived around the fifth to sixth century CE, about 1100-1200 years after the Buddha. The Chinese have practically made him into a Taoist priest; he's often portrayed as having miraculous powers indicating oneness with Tao. A famous brush painting depicts him crossing the Yangtze River on a reed-- the kind of power associated with Taoist priests and sages, who could walk through fire or leap from mountaintop to mountaintop, or hitch a ride on the wind (kung fu movies are making reference to these powers, just so you know).

I always suspected Jesus stole that walking-on-water trick from somewhere.

Ah, yes-- calligraphy. I want my Bodhidharmas to look sort of funny. Many artists go for an overly serious look, in which ole Bodhi is very stern. Here's one look at him:



Nice tits.

Here's another:



Here's a Bodhidharma that's fairly close in style to what I'm doing:



It's a close-up, and it's got the big-ass eyes. Bodhidharma reputedly spent nine years meditating (some say in a cave, some say in a temple, some say at the foot of a cliff; all agree he was staring at a wall of sorts), and to avoid falling asleep, he ripped off his eyelids. Further legend has it that the eyelids hit the ground and sprang up as tea plants, which is how tea came to China.

Many Bodhidharma images share common traits: the guy has a bald pate, but he may have horseshoe-pattern baldness. He's got long, pendulous earlobes-- the mark of the Buddha. Wild eyebrows. He may have a huge earring in one of his ears. He's often bearded, but the beard varies from Johnny Depp wispy to Santa-on-Steroids bushy. As already mentioned, the saint's eyes are generally large. His expression is usually stern or even ferocious, not to indicate constipation (mustn't confuse the First Patriarch with that other great [and truly constipated] religious founder, Martin Luther), but to indicate focus and determination. Bodhidharma's robe may cover his head or not. It may be expressed concretely/realistically or abstractly, through a couple strokes of a thick brush-- I've taken this route in my brushwork. But aside from these basics (and even this list has exceptions), anything goes.

One thing I've never seen, though, is a screaming Bodhidharma-- mouth open, teeth exposed, tongue flapping à la "Simpsons" characters. Perhaps such images exist, but I've never come across them. I want to make one just for kicks. It'll never sell in Korea.

You have to be in a weird frame of mind to draw Bodhidharma with a brush. The potential for mishaps is very high-- runny ink on highly absorbent paper leads to splotching, and a single mistake means the work is ruined. Just this evening I ruined three Bodhidharma images that started off great-- got through the facial features, drew the robe... then messed up the Chinese characters: blotchiness from too much ink in one case, too little ink in another, and poorly aligned characters in a third. But I'm getting there. And my Bodhidharma's evolving into a particular style, like a Chinese character with which I'm becoming familiar. I've decided to stick with bold strokes, since that seems to be what I do best. The subtle stuff was OK (I was adding wispy trails to the big guy's beard), but it's not me. No wussified Bodhidharmas to be found here. When you (finally) get to see what my drawings look like, you'll see a Bodhidharma who looks capable of punching a hole in a cow. WITH HIS MIND.

Oh, yeah-- my Bodhidharma's got HUGE eyes. Not quite this huge:



... but huge nonetheless. And scary. Scary like the male Enterprise crew members in the old "Star Trek" TV series, who spoke their lines quite seriously while wearing pretty heavy eye makeup. Spock in particular was somewhat frightening, but Kirk had his Eddie Izzard moments, too.

OK... it's late and I need to go wash myself down again. Damn, this sucks. Be happy you're over there and I'm over here.
_

My new blog, Only the Chewiest Tumors, is now under construction! I stole the template for Tumors from this blog, so when you go over there you should have that comfortable, "still at home" feeling. As new products are produced, they'll be advertised on Chewiest Tumors. Slapping more and more PayPal links in this sidebar would be folly.

A link to the site is already on my sidebar, in the "Links to Lick Repeatedly" section.

Amen.
_

On me demande pourquoi je ne blogue pas en français. Et, bien, c'est pour plusieurs raisons, dont la plus importante: mon français s'est trop détérioré! Quand on a trop honte de l'état de son français, mieux vaut ne pas s'en servir...

Mais bon, ce soir je vous présente un blog totalement en français, juste pour vous embêter. Je m'excuse d'avance des fautes de frappe et de grammaire (etc.).

Annika donne un coup de pied droit dans les couilles de Rush Limbaugh.

Le Maximum Leader fait son propre parcours.

Encore avec les pédés chez Seeing Eye Blog.

Oranckay s'interroge sur le président de la Corée du Sud. Petit problème de drapeau.

Brainysmurf nous parle de ses vacances.

La Chine continue son rattrapage dans le domaine de l'espace.

Le Gweilo se moque de deux bouquins récemment sortis en Chine: Comment Epouser un Occidental, et Comment Epouser une Occidentale.

Big White Guy fête le cinquième anniversaire de son blog. Il est aussi en train d'être interviewé par CNN! Figurez-vous.

Winds of War s'adresse à cette question des armes à destruction massive... interceptées par le Kouwait?

A lire: une bonne analyse de l'affaire Plame par Anticipatory Retaliation.

La France... en train de s'effondrer? (lien grace à l'Anus de Satan)

Andrew Sullivan donne son opinion sur ces nouvelles accusations contre Arnold.

Quelle est la force motrice derrière l'économie européenne (ou "zéropéenne," comme on dit à Merde en France)?

La Corée du Nord fait le con, comme toujours. Le capitalisme? Que des conneries. Allez chez le Marmot pour les détails-- ici.

Arnold s'excuse!?

Reportage de Hi Pakistan: la Corée du Nord, malgré sa rhétorique, assistera à un deuxième sommet.

De la même source: la Corée du Nord n'a pas l'intention d'exporter ses armes nucléaires. Et... vous les croyez?

Examen minutieux des liens possibles entre le chef du KBS et l'espionage...

En Ecosse, on préfère la vie simple.

L'Express sur l'euthanasie et la candidature d'Arnold.

Et nous voilà.
_

Wouldn't it be interesting if, in the next Harry Potter novel, the owls started shitting their messages onto the students?

Fowlpost.

And what if, after switching to the new shitting policy, the students were forced to exchange their owls for camels?

Man... can you imagine what a camel-shat Howler would look and sound like?

"Oh, God, Neville! Take it out of here before it kills us all! Damn your Gran!"

That is neither here nor there, however. Why?

Another letter has arrived!

[email follows]

BigHom:

In regards to your guest post by John Moore. I have worked for some time with a group that keeps an eye on the North and have a very simple observation to make. The North Koreans are masters of redundant systems. Every critical system in the NK infrastructure is designed to be easy to take down-- singly, but has so many alternates that it would be .. challenging.. to seriously impact anything except their above-ground transportation system. They watch the US' (and allied) methodology and behaviour very closely to predict our probable action in response to particular pressures. They have proven to be very good at double-dealing with the US. Given these two observations, I cannot but agree that it is unlikely that any critical production of materiel is being done above ground. I am uncertain that I agree that the bulk of NK focus is in developing uranium-based nukes or atomics, though I lack specific information in this regard. I will propose, though, that they are able to get the high quality refinement technology and precision electronics from a ready source. China has had the capability for some time, and NK is not above stealing what they may not be able to purchase.

-Anonymous

John Moore of Useful Fools writes in!

I'm not sure why I haven't blogrolled this gentleman yet. He's got a great blog. Hell, it's going on the blogroll tonight.

[Mr. Moore's email follows]

A couple of comments from a non-expert who reads your blog and many others, and who has a physics background and has gathered a bunch of info about nukes ( http://www.tinyvital.com/Misc/nukes.htm ).

First, I (like many, probably) invented the term Norks earlier this year for my blog... and then was a bit amused to discover that it is Aussie slang for tits ( http://www.probertencyclopaedia.com/ZN.HTM ). Thus you may get a few weird web hits as a result of horny aussies.

Regarding limited war like striking the Yongbyon reactor... several things...

1) It is my guess that the reactor is not essential to the Nork nuke program. Neither is the above ground plutonium extraction facility. The reason is that, like the Iranians, the Norks are known to have a uranium enrichment program, which is probably deep underground. They also have uranium mines, so they have the raw material.

I recently read a book ( Victory and Deceit: Deception and Trickery at War by James F. Dunnigan, Albert A. Nofi ) that reminds me of how critical deception is in warfare, and that the Russians have long been the masters of this. And guess who trained the Norks and the Iraqi's (and we are now seeing, with the WMD hunt, that some sort of very serious deception by Iraq was involved there, although we don't know exactly what it was).

Thus I think the reactor and above-ground extraction plants are, today, sort of decoys. Certainly if we had bombed immediately after the inspectors were thrown out, we could have destroyed (or at least scattered widely) NK's plutonium, before it was taken to a probably underground extraction facility.

This analysis is somewhat based on the following facts: it is easy to put uranium enrichment and plutonium extraction facilities underground. However, reactors generate large amounts of heat that must be removed, making them harder to put underground unless there is a large underground river.

Uranium enrichment is hard and expensive compared to creating plutonium in a reactor and extracting it. However, crude enriched uranium bombs are easy to make, while plutonium bombs require very precise electronics and explosives to work (the US never even tested the uranium bombwe dropped on Japan, while we did test the Plutonium bomb first). But uranium enrichment doesn't require reactors, doesn't generate much heat, and NK has its own supplies of uranium from its own mines (it used to export uranium to the USSR).

Finally... a guess... I suspect that we could strike the reactor and enrichment facility with no escalation resulting. In fact, the Norks might welcome it as a rallying point for the population. The reason for no escalation is that they know that their nice comfy existence (of the elite, of course) would be blown to bits if they started a real war. Hence I think it likely that they never, ever intend to actually get into armed combat with the US. To take over the South, they probably figure that having nuke tipped ICBM's pointed at the US, and US troops out of SK (via long term political agitation) would be enough to allow them to take the south by nuclear blackmail.

John Moore (Useful Fools Blog - http://www.tinyvital.com/blog/
_

You may enjoy Bill Whittle's newest essay on power. I'm not sure he makes clear what power is in the essay. You can certainly intuit his intention, though, since he's talking primarily about military (and maybe economic) power. But "Power" may be a misleading title for the essay, since he doesn't really discourse much on the nature of power itself.

Just my inner philosopher griping.

Whittle's got an engaging, if occasionally overdramatic, writing style. He certainly has a huge audience (way too many sycophantic comments and timid critiques!), but I think he's built a great base for his soon-to-be-published book. I also think he's not wrong in a lot of what he says; I'm rethinking where I stand on the "unintended consequences" issue re: our invasion of Iraq. But I still don't share Whittle's confidence that, only two years after 9/11, we now have "data" to support the rightness of our "experiment." Some of the folks we're fighting are clever and patient and have resources. If they can take a year to plan something on the order of 9/11, they can hunker down and plan other atrocities, too. The jury is still out on whether we're in more or less danger.

I should also note that Whittle's essay completely glosses the issue of American Indians, though one of the commenters does make a peep about the implications of Manifest Destiny. To his credit, though, Whittle tells us we need to hold a mirror up to our culture and question it constantly and ruthlessly. I doubt he'd disagree with my motives in critiquing him, even if he won't agree with the critique.

Whittle argues that he's never heard a single American fantasize about taking over and ruling another country, including the hawks he hangs out with. He submits this as evidence that the world simply doesn't understand how averse we are to the notion of empire. I agree we're averse to empire, and basically agree with Whittle's essay on the subject. But what Whittle is missing is that the world is capable of subtler definitions of empire. Whittle actually deals with this somewhat: in his essay on empire, he says we are "an empire of the mind," in that we are exporting ideas-- an American meme, a package of values and attitudes and styles that have come to dominate. The world, when it thinks of us as an empire, is very likely thinking in these terms.

On one level, such domination does represent a danger to other cultures. Using Korea as an example, I can say with conviction that Westernization, while it hasn't reached completely into the Korean heart, has nevertheless stripped away much that was precious about Korean art and culture (if Seoul is any indication). You can stand only so much imitative pop music and junk culture before you reach the same conclusion about modern Korea. I'm not saying America is entirely to blame for this; it isn't. People are often complicit in their own fate. All I'm saying is that things do get lost in translation as cultures evolve and interact, and not all that gets cast away in the quest for modernity should be cast away.

What Whittle doesn't recognize openly enough, even in his essay on empire, is that many cultures are extremely sensitive to cultural losses. There is a reason why they perceive America in terms of encroachment and threat. On one level, I agree with Whittle when it's the power-grabbers in these countries who fear what democratic values will bring. A reduction in misogyny, oppression, racism, etc.-- these reductions are to be feared by those with something to lose. But when Korean kids are spending time away from family in PC-bahng for hours at a time, getting plump on fast food and American-style snacks, there's an obvious downside to the empire of the mind. No yang without yin.

I like Whittle because he's earnest, even if I don't completely agree with him. As with his other essays, this one left me agreeing with his major points while disagreeing on particulars. If Whittle does go on that speaking tour, I might actually want to hear him speak (assuming I'm in the States when this happens). He evokes and channels Mark Twain quite often; though I've seen no evidence that he's anything close to Twain in stature (something Whittle has the self-awareness to admit frequently, to his credit), I think he'd be interesting to listen to.

Give him a read.
_

Let's begin by noting a rather obnoxious turn in the SK-US dialogue: SK may tie the sending of combat troops to US concessions on the NK issue. This can be taken positively: SK is leaning toward sending troops, but is attaching a limp demand which the US will likely ignore. Or it can be taken negatively, if it indicates SK is becoming more obstreperous as it listens to the demands of its citizens. I think SK is caving, but still believe this is an obnoxious thing for it to do, linking SK troops to NK issues.

Either way, Joe Korean isn't happy with how things are turning out here. I should have brought along the September issue of Korea University's English-language monthly, The Granite Tower. In it, the editor expresses his disappointment with the Roh administration, and ends with a welcome observation about how current societal problems (at all levels of society, I think) are linked to "ignoring rule of law" issues. If I remember to, I'll bring the mag into the PC-bahng next time and provide you some quotes.

Oh, yeah: Hurray for moral decadence!

En avant...

I don't know how many posts this is going to take, but I've decided I need to think out loud about these NK questions.

And you need to help me. You've just been recruited.

I encourage comments: email me or post comments in the Vile Vituperation link (emailing is better; remember to put "Hairy Chasms" in the subject line). If you want to point out sources I'm missing, or problems with where I'm looking, I'll appreciate all that. If you have hot links to current NK topicality, send them my way. NK isn't my field; history and politics aren't, either. So if you're in the know (military, State, etc.), and have something substantive to contribute, please contribute! And commentary from Georgetown SFSers and incestuous amplifiers (etc.) is always welcome.

If your contribution will be based on NK experience consisting primarily of a "group tour" into NK, however... I don't know how useful your observations will be. Sorry, but you were on a heavily managed field trip. You didn't see any more than the Norks wanted you to see, and while you undoubtedly learned a lot, you don't have firsthand knowledge of anything relevant to what we're discussing here. If you're a relief worker who witnessed baby-eating and mass defections in the hinterlands, however, I want your testimony. Same if you've seen NK artillery, etc. up close (I'd love to know how you did this, and if you can't tell me, I won't trust you).

[BTW, that's the first time I've used the term "Norks" on this blog. I had to succumb to the trend at some point.]

There are two claims I want to examine.

1. The NK military is currently starving.

2. "It's all bluster."

The first view represents a particular school of thought, and it may be on to something. As food aid has been reduced, there is indeed a question of whether NK's starvation problem is reaching even into the military. I'm also curious whether it's directly affecting the lower echelons of the NK government.

The "it's all bluster" question can be taken several ways. Here are two angles.

First: are people who take this stance seriously contending there is nothing to fear from the North? If so, I find this contention spectacularly stupid (a commenter at Stavros the Wonderchicken's site offers a better adjective: "ass-flavored"), but am willing to examine the question of NK's supposed toothlessness.

Second: is the "bluster" claim actually more nuanced than it sounds-- in which it's agreed that NK won't be a pushover in a war, but is nonetheless so desperate that it will actually concede more (whoops-- I mean start making concessions) if we remain unflaggingly stubborn? In other words, have we (the US, SK, Japan, Russia, China, the UN, etc.) been backing down too often?

I think a lot of people, if not most, are at this point on the spectrum. There's little disagreement that NK has used and is still using bluster as a tactic to gain concessions. It speaks volumes that, despite being conscious of this, the US, SK, and other countries still respond to NK as if it were truly serious. There's a dysfunctional dynamic at work here, and this school of thought avocates more US stubbornness (and perhaps more unpredictability) to soften NK up. I don't deny it: I'm all for this. Up the pressure! And if Bush looks stupid and unstable to Kim, all the better! Give that plump little fucker a taste of his own medicine! After all, the world's current nightmare is an insane hyperpower, right?

RIGHT?? I'm talking to you, asshole!

Let Kim Jong Il live the nightmare!

The answer to both angles on the "bluster" question, gross and subtle, is a close examination of NK's current military capabilities and our best expert hypotheses on how a peninsular war would play itself out. This will involve covering old ground, but the point is for me to present facts and figures where possible, and the opinons of experts who've been watching the game for years. If you have counterarguments or contrary observations, I expect you to present more than your opinion. I will be linking heavily-- this is research (such as it is), after all, and I'm trying to educate myself as much as anyone else.

To be clear: if your responses/contributions are anecdotal or unsupported by expert sources I can access, they're garbage. Sorry, but consider this academic peer review. Provide links and be a fellow researcher!

The starvation question can be broken down into sub-questions (add more if you like):

1. What are the latest figures/expert guesses on NK starvation, in terms of rate and brute numbers? What's the general history of the starvation problem, and what projections, if any, are there about future starvation?

2. Who's currently giving food aid to NK? What percentage of NK's food supply is being domestically produced?

3. Can an overall picture of NK food production, delivery, and consumption be painted? How accurate will this picture be?

4. Corollary question: if a high percentage of NK's food is coming from outside, who (what countries, organizations, etc.) is currently providing it?

5. What measures, if any, are in place to verify where food goes (this question is crucial; if we can't answer it satisfactorily, we can't answer the "are the troops starving?" question satisfactorily, either)? Are military defectors from NK in a position to speak about diverted food?

6. If we get past question #5 and have at least some idea where food is going, how much is being routed to the military? How are the lower-echelon people in NK's government doing?

As I said previously, these kinds of questions require recent data, no more than two years old. Time-tinged remembrances from the mid-90s won't suffice. The current situation is changing rapidly.

The "it's all bluster" question is much wider in scope, and includes the troop starvation issue as a subset. If, from the above, we determine that NK troops are indeed starving, then we have a partial answer to the question of bluster: yes, the army's hurting for food, and this has military implications.

But we need to build a more complete picture, and as I think more about this, I really think that, if you're an expert reading this blog, your contribution would be golden. If other bloggers want to do research on these issues and send their results to me, I will compile and post.

Let's assume for the moment that a truly complete picture of NK military capability isn't possible. So let's define "complete" in terms of our aim, which is to determine, as I said in a previous post, whether a military victory over NK would be clean or pyrrhic. Plunging on in:

1. What would constitute a "clean" or "pyrrhic" victory? This question borders on the philosophical, but lucky for us, we have many historical precedents (i.e., previous wars we've fought) by which to set some concrete standards re: troop casualties, amount of time spent during the principal conflict, and material results of conflict-- not to mention well-publicized Democratic and Republican notions of "acceptable loss," that might actually be translatable into numbers.

Notice my choice of opposites-- clean vs. pyrrhic: I am not asking the question of whether a peninsular war would be "worth it." I unquestioningly assume that any military effort to overthrow Kim Jong Il, once begun, would be absolutely worth whatever costs are incurred. Others may not share this view, and maybe that's because they have no love or care for Korean culture. A lot of people, for example, don't bat an eye at the prospect of thousands or millions of civilian deaths here, if the trade-off is a North Korean nuke going off in L.A. I understand that.

Why, you ask, would any effort be worth it once the conflict has begun? Because it would have to be. I don't think there's a such animal as a "limited" military action on the peninsula, such as a pinpoint bombing of the Yongbyon reactor. While SK and NK constantly provoke each other with shots and incursions (and US troops do get involved now & again), this is to my mind a completely different kind of engagement. Once we engage on a larger scale than a few random potshots, we are in the shit. This dovetails with my belief that NK's whole gamble is to see how long it can continue the status quo. A slide toward war, which will lead inevitably to the defeat of the NK military and the overthrow of the NK government, means the game was lost (by NK) the moment diplomacy failed. A "win" for NK is "that which does not lead to war." By this standard, NK has had nothing but a string of victories. A win for the US, I think, would be either through a decisive military victory or the rapid collapse of the NK government-- by coup, by simple cascade failure, or whatever.

2. What do the experts, military and otherwise, have to say about how a war on the peninsula would go? If you, as a blogger/talking head, think you have an angle the experts don't have (you lone voice in the wilderness, you), what's your angle?

3. What kind of military equipment does NK have in terms of weaponry, transports, etc.? What's the best-guess rundown on the military's strength, overall? How are experts evaluating "strength"?

4. What is the current state of NK troop training? (Many contend it's poor.) How will this be relevant in war?

5. Where are the NK troops positioned?

6. Would China get militarily involved? I found it interesting that some Chinabloggers think China would indeed get involved. I'd love for them to weigh in on this.

7. When all is said and done, what do experts feel would be the effect of a peninsular war on the South Korean population (i.e., numbers killed & in what space of time), infrastructure, economy, political future, etc.? This question is directly relevant to the larger issue of whether SK citizens are justified in fearing a war, and it's also relevant to our judgement that a victory will be clean or pyrrhic. What frustrates me about the SK position is the insistence on the "one people" rhetoric, which on its face is contradicted by fear of NK attack. So perhaps an interesting side issue is: what's going on in the "average" SK citizen's psyche that allows them to reconcile these two apparently contradictory convictions?

I'm going to stop with the questions here, except to take dibs on researching questions #1-6 of the starvation issue. Do I have any takers for other questions? Don't worry if there's "dib overlap"-- the more info on a given question, the better. So if someone else wants to work on the starvation issue, go for it (but TELL me!). And if any history majors or geopolitical eggheads want to help me out by suggesting new questions (or a better methodology, or a better way to frame the issues), I'm all... eyes? I don't know methodology in this area; history majors and SFSers in particular might view my approach as too slipshod and maybe unproductive. So critique away.

Here's hoping for some responses. If you've never gone digging for info on North Korea, this might be an interesting experience for you.

I have a link to a list of think tanks on my sidebar, in the references section.

Kevin at IA has some great links:

1. Pyongyang Square
2. Pyongyang News
3. The above provides a link to North Korea Crisis News.
4. A 2002 US State Dept. report on human rights in NK, through Korean Media Watch.
5. CanKor
6. NK Government

Seeing Eye Blog has this link: an overview of NK.

Kyungnam to Kyunggi Journal has a link to the Pyongyang Times. This wasn't working when I tried it... did I hear they pulled the plug on this? I'm somewhat behind the Times. Pun intended.

Drambuie Man has an interesting and possibly relevant link: Global Security.

I also recommend the Free North Korea! site.

Enough to get started? Then what are you waiting for?
_

Given how good we've been at finding other weapons of mass destruction... how do we take this news?

North Korea said Tuesday it was taking "practical measures" to boost its nuclear capabilities, as the United States and South Korea celebrated the 50th anniversary of their military alliance by pledging to keep up their deterrence against the communist North.

A spokesman of North Korea's Foreign Ministry also told its official news agency KCNA that if Washington tries to force North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program before it agrees to a nonaggression treaty, it would lead to war.

The North Korean spokesman did not elaborate on the "practical measures," but the claim came as some U.S. intelligence analysts are becoming increasingly concerned that the communist nation may have three, four or even six nuclear weapons instead of the one or two the CIA now estimates.

Can we presume to count hidden nukes? Man... I gotta check those think tanks. OK, here's a promise: my very next post will be a report on the issue of NK capability, which some choose to poo-poo (starving troops, old equipment, poor training, etc.) but others spin as dangerous in more than name only. This isn't to explore the question of whether the US and SK could win a war against NK; it's to gain a better understanding of how costly such a war might be. Because I've now made the promise to make this my very next post, you might not see any motion on my blog for the next couple of days. I'll be reading and compiling.

At this point, my belief remains that you don't underestimate your opponent, even if he really is a wuss. Wusses can do startling things when cornered. Others may think there's no reason for such caution... we'll see. The trick, in researching this question, is to stick to data that are no more than a year or two old. Mid-90s assessments of NK's status and military capability will definitely be outdated, because too much starvation has occurred, and this does affect the picture. But I tend to think that people speculating on starving NK troops are wrong: the food aid, such as it is, is being routed primarily to the fat cats and the military. At this point, that's just an opinion, of course. After I finish my research and post my findings, it'll still just be an opinion, albeit one supported (I hope) by experts. I may turn out to be dead wrong.

To be continued. Meanwhile, here's a VOA article about NK's latest snottiness.

BTW, would the Maximum Leader care to comment on something called the "water theory" of totalitarian leadership, and how it might or might not apply to NK?

UPDATE (OK, so I'm cheating by posting an update): something I found through Aaron Krowne's blog. If you read Thomas St. John's series of articles re: his trip to NK, then you're already familiar with the hall of gifts. I found this article interesting for what it implied about religion in NK-- about what I suspected.
_

It is accomplished.

The dojang are finished.

And they kick... fucking... ass.

I hate to admit it, but I was reading the fancy font on the Dol Sarang artist's name card wrong. He's not Mr. Seon.

He's Mr. Jeon.

I always make that mistake whenever people resort to funky Korean fonts. What threw me off was that his name card has a J-word in it near the bottom, but that J looked different from the J in Mr. Jeon's name. So I assumed Mr. Jeon was Mr. Seon, because the fancy J in his name looked like an S. Should've asked him outright.

But that is neither here nor there.

Let the commercial madness begin!

I have several Bodhidharma drawings and a few pieces of calligraphy I'm going to stamp and try to sell, here and online. Like other calligraphers, I'll be churning out similar "scenarios" in each piece. This isn't unheard-of when you sell art: for example, many Bodhidharma images (he's Dalma-daesa in Korea) show roughly the same thing: a scowling, hairy monk with an earring, large eyes, long earlobes, thick eyebrows (but no eyelids; the story is that Bodhidharma ripped off his eyelids to keep from sleeping during his nine-year meditation), and a sort of "halo," which Robert Pirsig in his book Lila calls "the dharmakaya light." I can't tell if Pirsig's joking. (Remember from my previous post, I told you that lila is a Sanskrit term used in Hinduism to indicate divine play.) Dharmakaya literally means "body of teaching," but can also refer to absolute reality. As you might guess, Buddhists don't see these two definitions as unrelated. They are, like all phenomena, not-two.

I've also done some fun scenarios showing a young Korean monk in an intense staring contest with a goofy-looking tiger. Very cartoonish, rather Western-looking in style. This is actually a scene out of a book I'm currently writing, called The San-shin's Tiger (probably available late next year, at the rate I'm going, but I'll give periodic updates).

I'm still trying to figure out what the best caption or proverb should be for this staring contest scenario. Patience? Strength? Endurance? "Be kind to all creatures?" On my first attempt, I wrote ho shim, or "tiger mind," as the two major Chinese characters in the scene. I don't know whether this will fly, because "tiger mind" (it could also translate "tiger heart") isn't exactly your standard Buddhist concept. I'm trying to convey ferocious determination/effort. Maybe yong maeng jong jin is better; this is the Sino-Korean term for a one-week period of near-constant seated meditation done in the week before the Buddha's birthday. Dr. Robert Buswell translates this term as "ferocious effort." My fear, though, is that it won't make sense with the picture. I may stick to something more conventional, given an ironic twist by the picture: "You must learn to see yourself in the other."

Captions/proverbs are important in brush art. Pictures of Bodhidharma usually have the characters ki shim ("ki mind" or "heart of ki") or bul shim ("Buddha mind") on them. I've also snuck the characters seong do onto a couple Bodhidharma pics and calligraphic pieces. Seong do is the East Asian Buddhist term for enlightenment (well, one of several terms for enlightenment, actually). I like it because it carries a lot of history: it's the product of the early interaction between Indian Buddhism, which arrived in China a few decades after Jesus' death, and the native Chinese religions, especially Taoism. Seong do literally means "attaining the Tao"-- i.e., Buddhist enlightenment has been rendered in Taoist terms, thereby losing and gaining something in translation.

[Trivia: I don't speak Chinese, but my Buddhism prof at Catholic U., Dr. Jones, mentioned that in the movie "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" there's a scene near the beginning where Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) asks Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat), according to the English subtitle, "You were enlightened?"-- but in reality what she said was, "You attained the Tao?"]

Back to things capitalist.

I know you don't want to buy anything from me unless you can see the merchandise. That's understandable. Since each piece of calligraphy and each brush drawing is unique, I won't be displaying every single piece online. Instead, I'll be displaying what I think will be a decent example of the scenario(s) in question. Details will vary, as they must. You might see a Bodhidharma with "Buddha mind" displayed on the blog, but what you receive in the mail might be a Bodhidharma that says "Ki mind." Since both of these are perfectly standard Bodhidharma scenarios, I consider them interchangeable and hope you won't feel cheated if you don't receive exactly what's displayed on the blog. However, if you have your heart set on one particular scenario, email me your preference and I'll accommodate you. Because THAT, my friend, is customer service.

I will probably start a second blog and let that be the place to show the pics of the items. It'll also sport all the PayPal buttons. As things stand, I think I'm going to sell the calligraphy, unframed (you get to frame it), for $30, and drawings for $45, because they're calligraphy PLUS art, and take longer to do.

I may start selling framed works and works done up as scrolls, but if I'm paying to get that work done here, and it costs $25-50 extra to do it, then obviously the cost will be reflected in what I charge you (assume W30,000 for scrolls, W50,000-W150,000 for frames, depending on what size and quality we're talking about). Framed works are heavy and will cost more to ship as well; this, unfortunately, will also be reflected in the cost.

If you walk through Insa-dong, you see a lot of hand-drawn art and calligraphy. Prices range all over. I think that $30 and $45 are good midrange prices for the work I'm hoping to do. If I'm able to make greeting cards & so on in the months ahead, I'll probably sell those in 20-packs for about $20-30 each. Obviously, those will be prints, not originals.

I may also do some Bodhidharma parodies, perhaps as tee shirt designs. These will sell better among foreigners than they will among Koreans, who will probably take a dim view of such irreverence.

More on this as it develops!

In other news, a must-read over at Merde in France: an interview with Maurice Dantec, a French writer currently living in Canada and not particularly sympathetic to the current French attitude. I'd call his views... strong.
_

Many thanks to "jaed" who left a comment in the Vile Vituperation section.

There's been no further spreading, and I continue to wash as often as possible. I think we've got this licked, though it'll be a few days before I'm back to normal.

I've been using the same brand of shaving cream ever since I came to Korea last year, so I'm pretty sure it's not the shaving cream. I was, however, wondering about soap: I'd been using a very nice ginseng soap (takes a while to get used to the unique scent), then switched to Ivory right before the flare-up happened.

I was also thinking that this rash looks a lot like poison ivy (though I still have trouble explaining why the nodules are whiteheads and not clear blisters). One of the possibilities from the Merck Manual I couldn't rule out was "contact dermatitis," a term that covers a lot of skin flareups from a lot of different causes. It bugs me not to have a better understanding of the cause of this rash, because it might happen again.

I'm washing everything down. Pillowcases, sheets, clothes, surfaces with which I'm frequently in contact-- you name it. I want this shit to END by the weekend. Maybe my face will decide to roost on my head again. Here's hoping.
_

Oh, for God's sakes.
_

My brother David takes after our Dad. He's extremely hardworking and quite athletic. David also has a habit of working several jobs, at least one of which has to be labor-intensive (if you're ever in the DC club called Polly Esther's, you might see him there, barbacking; look for the trim half-Korean doing a lot of running and lifting). So David's sleep schedule is rather screwed up, and he's in constant need of rest. He'll just collapse whenever he gets a day off. Maybe he'll wake up and play Halo on his XBox, but he's too tired to do much else.

At long last, David managed to make some time for himself to enjoy a few days alone out in Taos Ski Valley, a place we've visited a few times as a family when my other brother, Sean, was attending an advanced chamber music camp a couple summers back (Sean plays the cello... if you need a chamber group for an event, I'm your contact guy).

Taos is gorgeous, and the Ski Valley resort is amazing during the summer, which is "low season" for them. The hiking is great, especially if you head out to Williams Lake (I haven't tried going as far as Wheeler Peak; it's enough for an out-of-shape hominid to gasp from the resort at 9,200 feet to the lake at about 11,000 feet). The Bavarian restaurant serves some kick-ass German cuisine, and the Inn at Snakedance is a clean, modern hotel with a friendly staff and a great breakfast service.

David, like the rest of us, fell in love with Taos and has been out there on his own before. He was there this time to kick back, relax, do some hiking, enjoy the food, and just decompress a bit before heading back to the DC-Metro area.

The Taos region also offers great driving routes, including a long, circular path that takes you past another huge lake. David had a nasty incident at the lakeshore this weekend... I'll let his email tell the story. You'll note he's got a thing for emoticons, which I avoid like the plague.

Except for the anuscon: (__*__)

And the corollary-- freakofnaturecon: (__**__)

[email follows]

Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 00:47:34 EDT
From: XXXXX@XXXXX.com
Subject: Dave Gets F-ed. Almost.
To: assorted recipients

OK - this is a TRUE story that happened to me TODAY. It is a long email, but I hope that you will enjoy it. :-)

Yes, my friends - For lack of better words, Dave almost got fucked. BIG TIME.

As all of you know (and for those of you that don't) I am in Taos Ski Valley, New Mexico - I've been here since Friday and will depart this coming Wednesday. Everything has gone without a hitch - weather, food, people - Dave was in a state of pure Zen. Mountains, blue skies, cold, rushing streams, nice people... you get the picture. And everything was going perfectly today - getting some (hopefully) incredible pictures, I went on a scenic drive around the ski valley area. It is a loop drive that is about 80 miles long and through the drive you go through mountain valleys and small towns. As I was driving around in my Explorer (with less than 10K miles no less) I passed through a town called Eagles Nest. On the outskirts of this town there is a very shallow lake (maybe 2 feet deep at most). It was an amazing picture moment for me - with the mountains on both sides and the lake in the middle. There was a cement boat-launch that went into the lake and I went down the cement incline toward the water in my SUV. The water of the lake had receded about 30 feet from the end of the launch, exposing dirt and, closer to the water's edge, mud. I got out of the Explorer and walked around on the dirt - it was firm enough, and there were tracks from other vehicles there, so I decided that I would take the Explorer off the cement launch and onto the dirt - I wanted to drive around to the far edge of the lake so I could have a better angle for my picture...

I drove without problems. Took my pictures, got back into the SUV and went about 3 feet forward, turning my wheels to the left so that I could turn around and go back to the boat launch.

RIGHT THEN AND THERE, DAVE GOT FUCKED. At least for the time-being, Dave was shit out of luck. The entire front end of the Explorer sank down into what was hard dirt 2 feet ago now-turned thick, heavy mud. The front wheels sank down and the only thing that stopped the whole front from going into the mud was the front suspension and frame of the SUV. Then the rear wheels sank down. My rental SUV was now knee-deep in heavy mud about 10 FEET from the water's edge.

At that time it seemed like I was about to unwilling buy an Explorer.

All these thoughts streamed through my mind - if one of these frequent mountain thunderstorms came I knew for sure the water would overtake the Explorer because the lake was so shallow - if it rained upstream then the water would rise as well - will the whole Explorer just sink into the mud if left there for an hour??

I jumped out, looking at the SUV in disbelief - just 5 minutes ago I was enjoying the mountains of New Mexico and now look at me! I ran around without a plan for a minute, then gathered my thoughts and started shoving flat rocks underneath the tires. NO ONE was around to help me and I noticed that the water was beginning to ever-so-slowly rise and was coming closer to the SUV. Must be high tide coming in.

FREAKING OUT.

My efforts to back the SUV out of the mud with rocks only made it sink deeper into the mud. Now the REAR wheels had spun all the way down to the suspension. I remembered that there were some campgrounds on the way to the lake, so I left my sinking SUV 10 feet from the water and ran for help. The altitude wasn't helping (8,500 feet). I spotted a house that had a 4x4 pickup parked out front about a 1/4 mile away - I ran and was out of breath not even half way there.

I came upon the house and a kind, calm old woman was sitting outside looking at me, obviously wondering why I had this crazed expression on my face - and whether she needed to whip out her shotgun or ask if I needed help. After making sure she lived there, I spotted her husband and blurted out, "MY CAR IS SINKING AT THE EDGE OF THE LAKE AND I'LL GIVE YOU $100 TO HELP PULL IT OUT OF THE MUD!" He thought it through for a second and said, "Well let's go then!"

The husband brought a fabric towing line and we drove in his pickup to my sinking Explorer. "You're stuck pretty good, huh?" he chuckled. HA. I would normally have some goofy reply but right now I was imagining the Explorer under water.

We unrolled the towing line and it was a good 30 feet short of my SUV. He said that he'd go back to the house and get a longer line. I opted to wait by the SUV while he got his extra line as if my presence next to it would slow the sinking. For what seemed like hours later (probably 5 minutes) he came back with two chain towing lines and we hooked each line together and onto the frame of the Explorer. After five tries, the SUV didn't budge. At ALL. We were beginning to think it wasn't going to work. We took shovels and dug mud out from underneath each wheel, put rocks in the holes and hoped for the best. Two tries later it STILL wasn't moving. He said, "One final try - we're gonna yank this sucker out, you watch." He backed up his pickup with plenty of slack on the towing line, and gunned it forward - suddenly my Explorer (with me inside) shot backward out of the mud and onto the concrete. THANK GOD FOR CONCRETE. I can't describe my elation at that particular moment. I was staring at pure, unadulterated futility and a good chance that my Explorer would be overtaken by the lake - but now thanks to this one person, my luck completely changed. He was my guardian angel! "THANK YOU SO MUCH," I sputtered out. I gave him his reward of $100. "What's your name, by the way?" "It's Peppe," he replied. And with that, we shook hands, he smiled at me while shaking his head (I'm sure he was thinking, "dumb city boy") and drove away.

I ended up having to pull off of the road, take off both front tires and scrape a good 3 inches thick of mud from the insides of each rim (the wheels were incredibly unbalanced with all the mud there... SUV was shaking violently from side-to-side at 50mph). I also power-washed the underside. Now the Explorer drives like it did before this "little mishap."

So in the end, Dave was saved by a kind 60-something named Peppe. Hindsight being 20/20 I should have never gone down that boat launch. A totally preventable situation. I'll chalk this one up to a lesson learned and something to pass down to the kids.

DAMN!

PS - I have pictures. HEH.

Before I blather about current woes, I should note that Frank J has written a classic line:

Ask a dumb question, get a dum-dum answer. (attributed to his fictional Donald Rumsfeld)

OK... my disfigurement. Put on your Schadenfreude hats!

Yes, it appears my face has decided to leave my head. And something is slowly replacing it.

About two days ago, it seemed I had reverted to puberty and was getting some serious acne under my jaw. A few dots, like whiteheads-- itchy, irritating, nothing major. By Monday morning, Korea time, my "beard area" (hey, it's the Merck Manual's term, not mine) was completely covered in red bumps, and the irritation is now making its way up my right cheek. It's rather startling to view in a mirror... not that I was winning any beauty contests before, but anyone who knows me will notice there's been a, uh, drastic change in my appearance.

I can type this calmly and shamelessly in the local PC-bahng because I'm not generally the type to freak out. But you should know I'm also not the type to surrender myself to the dubious ministrations of Korean health care unless absolutely necessary.

So I'm trolling for free medical advice about what's on my face.

Some info for you med school types:

Plenty of whiteheads, but I somehow doubt they're normal zits. They dot the beard area and are clearly visible in the general sea of redness. The zit-free zones are bumpy and resemble a post-shaving irritation, right down to the sensitive (painful, actually; and itchy, come to think of it) skin.

The irritation/freakiness is confined to the beard area. Nothing in between nose and mouth, nothing around the mouth, nothing on the ears or (as far as I can tell) the scalp. Nothing anywhere else on my hirsute person.

Is this bacterial? If so, it doesn't seem to be spreading beyond the beard area. Is it fungal? Given what a humid mess my A/C-free hovel was over the summer, I think there may be microorganism issues, despite the cleaning. Is it viral? A quick look through the Merck Manual seemed to rule out the major stuff. IS IT LUPUS? Lupus afflicts women more often than men, but from what I was reading in the Merck Manual, this doesn't appear to be lupus. Is it simply stress? I'm wondering about this, but seriously doubt it. My mental state hasn't changed all that much in the past few months, so far as I can tell. I remain as emotionally stunted as ever.

I've been washing my face every two hours since the morning, and using paper towels to dry. The skin became hot to the touch a few hours ago, and since I was feeling feverish, I've taken some aspirin. I'm hoping that this is only something minor, but if you have advice-- or know the right questions to ask me-- write something in the comments section (cf. the Vomit Vile Vituperation link on the sidebar, after the PayPal Button spiel) or email me at bighominid@hotmail.com, putting "Hairy Chasms" in the subject line to get past the spam filter.

The irritation's driving me nuts right now. Turning my head stretches the skin, which is painful, but it's also quite itchy and I'm doing my best to avoid scratching or zit-popping (they really do look like whiteheads, not clear blisters).

Given how suddenly this problem appeared, I know my 8-year-old English student didn't see me this way last week. Boy, won't he be surprised if I'm still like this on Wednesday! Hee hee.

Ah, that reminds me-- no class on Friday, because it's a national holiday! Koreans will be celebrating Kae Ch'eon Jeol, or "Opening Heaven Day," in honor of the myth about Korea's foundation. Many also call this Tangun Day. Who is Tangun? A good link about the subject can be found here. Note that Korea's foundation myth contains an element of stern religious practice, and the tiger turns out to be a real pussy.
_

This post won't be quite as ambitious as its title promises; if you want to read some interesting pop-academic papers on the Matrix, go visit the official Matrix website's philosophy section. My favorite paper is the one titled "Wake up! Gnosticism & Buddhism in the Matrix." Very much up my alley. Another good one is Iakovos Vasiliou's "Reality, What Matters, and the Matrix."

Or if you want to spend some more money, buy The Matrix and Philosophy. This book has some very interesting papers in it, but it's also got some real duds, foremost of which is the final chapter, which is heavy-heavy duty postmodernist thinking.

If you watch only the first "Matrix" movie, it's very difficult to be wowed by the epistemological issues. A very neat, clear distinction is made between the green-tinted world of the Matrix, where you can be a cool-dressing fantasy superhero, and the blue-tinted "desert of the real," where everyone dresses in tatters, eats glop-snot, sleeps on a hard metal bed, and can't fuck unless they're on a stone catafalque. Neo's lucky: at least he gets the tasty treat of Trinity's tongue. In the meantime, the audience never needs to ask itself, "How do we know what's real?"

But "The Matrix Reloaded" did a fine job of subverting all the preconceptions we'd built up from the first movie, and took advantage of our confusion to introduce the epistemological issues that were lacking earlier. We start to wonder whether Morpheus is crazy, because not everyone in Zion believes him or the prophecy of the One. Huge hints are given that there are layers and layers of control (cf. the conversation with the Merovingian, and the very probable insincerity of the Architect).

By the end of "Reloaded," we're no longer sure that the world of Zion, which is ostensibly part of the "desert of the real," is in fact what it seems. The major giveaway is Neo's newfound superpower-- something I contend he can't possess outside the Matrix, because (as I said in my metaphysical bet with the Wachowskis) in the world of this trilogy, humans can't perform miracles. I stand by that belief.

So despite all the howls of "cop-out!" coming from the anti-meta-Matrix conventional crowd, I advocate an open-ended meta-Matrix hypothesis. Maybe it's an "onion" structure-- layers surrounding layers, with no end to the layering, and no apparent foundation.

But maybe it's an onion with interpenetrating layers. As I recently argued, the scene in which Neo talks with the Architect is filmed in a way that implies a reality that twists and turns in and through itself (btw, there's a hint of this in the first movie... remember when Neo is first taken into custody by the Agents and we initially see him in the interrogation room through a monitor screen, only to pass "Citizen Kane"-like through the screen and into the room?). Smith (formerly Agent Smith) seems to prove this as well when he moves "up" into the "real" world by taking over Bane's cyber-avatar and inhabiting the "real" Bane.

Hindu cosmology seems to capture this imagery very well. Hinduism isn't my field, but I had to gain some background in it in order better to place Buddhist thought and history in context. And, lucky for me, I happen to have brought along with me an excellent introductory text called, creatively enough, An Introduction to Hinduism, by Gavin Flood (Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 1996), which was one of the texts I had to read in my Hinduism course at Catholic U.

Here's what Flood writes on p.70:

In vedic and later Hindu cosmologies, the universe is regarded as a hierarchical structure in which purer, more refined worlds are located 'above,' yet at the same time they incorporate, lower, impure worlds which, as in the segmentary Hindu kingdom, have some autonomy. In this hierarchical cosmology the various worlds or realms are governed by an overlord or god who also embodies the principles controlling or governing that world. ...There is a 'chain of being' within the Hindu universe...

During what is known by some scholars as the "epic period" of Indian history (c. 500 BCE to c. 500 CE), a type of literature called the Puranas arose. Most Puranas were written during the epic period, and largely dealt with the lives of the major Hindu deities and kings. Flood offers an overview of Puranic cosmology (p. 112):

The universe is conceptualized as an array of concentric circles spreading out from Mount Meru at the centre, enclosed within the vast 'world egg.' Immediately surrounding Meru is Jambu-dvipa, the earth or 'island of the rose-apple tree,' though itself several thousand miles from Meru. Jambu-dvipa is surrounded by a salt ocean. Spreading out from here are seven further lands and various kinds of ocean made of sugar-cane juice, wine, ghee, buttermilk, milk, and sweet water, until the realm of darkness is reached by the outer shell of the egg. [...] Within Jambu-dvipa are a number of lands, including India (Bharata) which is subdivided into nine regions... Below and above the level of the earth in the cosmic egg are further layers. Below the earth are the seven underworlds and below them at the base of the egg, the hell realms... Above the earth (bhur) are the atmosphere (bhuvas), sky (svar) and various other worlds up Mount Meru to the 'true world' (satyaloka) at the top. This entire cosmos is populated by all kinds of beings; humans, animals, plants, gods, snake-beings (naga), nymphs (apsara), heavenly musicians (gandharva), demonic beings (paisaca) and many more, and one can be reborn into any of these realms depending upon one's action (karma). Life in all these worlds is, of course, impermanent and one will eventually be reborn elsewhere. Neither hell nor heaven are permanent here.

So we see that, in this cosmology, the layers of reality interpenetrate. The beings of each realm aren't necessarily confined to their own realm. People can encounter spirits, for example. You can also find yourself reincarnated into a realm different from your previous realm; your self (atman) has breached the "layers." A third example of this interpenetration is the Hindu concept of avatara, which we often translate into English as "incarnation" (I won't get into the problems of cross-religious homeomorphism here; we'll just assume "incarnation" is a "good enough" translation of "avatara"). Krsna is an avatar of the god Vsnu, for example; God breaks (or as Mircea Eliade might say, "erupts") into the human realm, just as the heroes of the "Matrix" trilogy travel the Matrix as cyber-avatars, roaming a universe whose properties seem distinctly different from the rules governing the "desert of the real."

The Architect tells Neo that the Matrix is older than he realizes. Hindu cosmology is also ambitious in its conception of time. On p. 113 Flood says this:

The total period of four yugas [Kevin's note: four ages, each successively more decadent as dharma, order, slides into adharma, chaos; we are currently in the kali yuga, the fourth age; the four ages span about 4.32 million years] is called a manvantara, the age or life-period of a Manu. After 1,000 manvantaras, which comprise one day for Brahma, the universe will be destroyed by fire or flood and undergo a night of Brahma of the same period (i.e. 1,000 manvantaras), until the the process begins again for all eternity. A kalpa is one such night and day of Brahma comprising 8,649 million years. There is no end to the process; nor purpose other than the Lord's play (lila).

The Matrix is old. Maybe we can't trust the Architect on this point (or regarding anything else he said), but it would certainly be in keeping with the Hindu paradigm. And if the Badly Typed Matrix Spoiler (hereinafter BTMS or the "Bitmus") is correct, then it may well be that we are looking at a Matrix with no fundamental purpose, no real end, and a murky beginning.

Take a gander at one of the most famous Hindu creation myths, from the Rig Veda (10.129):

1.
Then was neither non-existence nor existence:
There was no realm of air, no sky beyond it.
What covered it, and where?
And what gave shelter?
Was there an unfathomed depth of water?

2.
Death was not then, nor was there anything immortal:
no sign was there, [of] the day's and night's divider.
That One Thing,
breathless,
breathed by its own nature:
apart from it was nothing whatsoever.

3.
Darkness there was:
at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminated chaos.
All that existed then was void and formless:
by the great power of Warmth was born that One.

4.
Thereafter rose Desire in the beginning, Desire,
the primal seed and germ of Spirit.
Sages who searched with their heart's thought discovered
the kinship of existence with non-existence.

5.
Transversely [across the universe] was their dividing line extended:
what was above it then,
and what below it?
There were begetters, there were mighty forces,
free action here and energy up yonder.

6.
Who verily knows and who can here declare it,
whence it was born and whence comes this creation?
The Gods are later than this world's production.
Who knows then
whence it first came into being?

7.
He
the first origin of this creation,
whether he formed it all or did not form it,
whose eye controls this world in highest heaven,
he verily knows it,
or perhaps
he knows it not.

If you followed the link to RV X129, you'll notice I chopped the versification up a bit to give you a more poetic sense of what's going on. I also did this because some scholars note that the final line, "or perhaps he knows (it) not," might actually have been a later addition, perhaps even by some Hindu wiseass who wanted to inject a bit of doubt and humor into the proceedings (I think the scholar RC Zaehner argued this, but I'd have to check). I consider it a wise addition to the poem (if addition it was).

And it's relevant to this view of the Matrix as lacking telos, lacking an end or purpose. Lila, divine play, is an important Hindu concept, and I wonder whether the Wachowskis are engaging in a cinematic version of this. The unkind will call this "yanking our chain." But if you're a Hindu, or someone sensitive to Hindu tropes, you might just get a grin from what the Wachowskis are trying to do.

It was early in S. Mark Heim's provocative Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion that I encountered a passage recounting an exchange between a Hindu monk and a Muslim, in which the monk offered the insight that reality is a dream, and we are dreams talking to dreams. Here's the passage (p. 13):

When we are in it, a dream can be extremely vivid, [the monk] told us. We feel its objects, we move in its world. Yet in the instant of awakening we realize completely that the dream was but a veil for our actual place and being. Just so will our present world appear when we achieve moksha [liberation]. One of the Muslim students frankly shared his puzzlement. If this world is like a dream, he asked, then what are we to you, or you to us? Are we illusions, figments of each other's imagination? The monk adjusted his robes with a smile. "We are dreams, talking to dreams." He was silent for a moment, while we savored the peculiar beauty of this image. "But of course," he went on, "you will ask me 'Who is having this dream?' And I will tell you that it is Brahman who is having this dream, and it is Brahman who each of us is when we wake up."

[S. Mark Heim. Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion. Maryknoll [NY]: Orbis, 1995.]

This insight, of course, isn't unique to Hinduism, but again, it fits the thesis of the Hindu paradigm, and seems to fit my speculation that what we've been witnessing may in fact be a computer meditating on itself. I need to check more sources, but if I can, I'll see if I can come up with more Hindu examples of "God dreaming." In any case, many Christians are no strangers to the idea that everything occurs in the mind of God.

We'll have a better idea about all this come November.

It may turn out that the two spoilers (Scott's "deluded robot" speculation and the Bitmus) were complete, albeit clever, bullshit. I almost hope so, because I'm suffering from guilt after succumbing to the temptation to follow Glenn's links. My own long-ago post haunts me:

We'll all know in November, I suppose. I quite deliberately haven't checked the rumor sites on this one. Have you?

You prying bastard.

Well, hell if I didn't finally pry.

Majimakeuro (lastly)...

It's become standard operating procedure for Matrix pundits to step back after making their breathless pop-philo sci-fi geek spiel to say, "I realize none of this means anything consequential outside the context of the film." I'm not quite so apologetic because I value the mental exercise that comes with chewing over a trilogy this rich in symbolism and references (I haven't concentrated on it, but there's plenty of fodder for historians, too). The Wachowskis themselves, unlike some other auteurs, have encouraged this with a grin, and I suspect they won't be revealing "the true meaning" of their series, ever. If anything, their stance will be similar to George Lucas's, when he said he wanted the Force to have elements recognizable to people of different traditions: you take from it what you bring to it. Like the tree that reeks of the dark side of the Force in "The Empire Strikes Back."

What's in there?
Only what you take with you.

So viewing the "Matrix" trilogy through a Hindu filter is only one way to view it. There are other filters. We haven't even touched the whole issue of Plato's Cave, for example. My own take is that the first "Matrix" is more religious than philosophical-- heavily Gnostic-Christian-Buddhist, with a lot of Jesus, Moses, and Buddha imagery. "Reloaded" seems more pomo-Hindu, with a soupçon of the tropes from the first movie. And I expect "Revolutions" to go full-out with the Hinduism at its conclusion, because Hindu cosmology is, to my mind, some of the most complex (and entertaining... and paradoxical...) cosmology out there.

Meantime, I have to go find and watch the first Wachowski movie, "Bound." Purely for academic reasons, of course. Nothing to do with sapphic yumminess.
_

...I had to note two posts.

One, from Amritas, which remains one of the blogs I most admire, is a linguistic romp through the fields of East Asian language. Learn about the phenomenon of assimilation (understood in its linguistic sense), gain a little understanding about how Koreans and Chinese put together sounds and meaning (keep in mind that Koreans use an alphabet, while Chinese is a dynamic set of characters), and speculate on Dr. Miyake's question at the end of his post: who "sees the sounds" in East Asian Buddhism?

My guess: Avalokiteshvara, Bodhisattva of Compassion, known in Sino-Korean as "Kwan-eum," in Chinese as "Kuan Yin," and in Japanese as "Kannon." There's a hanja pronounced "eum" in Sino-Korean; it means "sound," and I'm guessing that this is what's being paired with "kwan."

Go here and learn a bit about the Kwan-um School of Korean Zen. There's a picture of Master Seung Sahn on that page (author of The Compass of Zen, The Whole World is a Single Flower, Only Don't Know, and Dropping Ashes on the Buddha-- all available in English). His Western disciple Hyon Gak is the monk (sunim, pronounced "sneem") who lectures at Hwagye-sa.

UPDATE, October 2: I was right. For a very full explanation, visit Amritas here.

The other item of note is this editorial in the online Korea Times that discusses North Korea's latest overreaction to South Korea, and the nettlesome issue of the high suicide rate in SK. Some juicy quotes:

Pyongyang Overreacts
North Rejects Southern Legislators' Goodwill Visit

[...]

North Korea demanded Saturday that the National Assembly apologize for the Culture and Tourism Committee's decision to have a 19-member panel visit the two Northern cities on Oct. 6-9 as part of the Assembly's ongoing three-week investigation of the Roh Moo-hyun administration's management of state affairs.

In a fax sent to the Ministry of Unification, the North called upon the South's Assembly to apologize for the panel's decision and withdraw it, protesting that the projected visit infringes on the sovereign rights of North Korea and aims to disrupt the foundation of inter-Korean relations.

The North warned that unless their demand is met, grave consequences will result for the relationship between Seoul and Pyongyang.

In the face of the strong protest from North Korea, the chairman of the Assembly panel expressed his regret for the North's misunderstanding of the true nature of the lawmakers' visits to the two cities and called on the North to allow the travel.

The lawmakers sought to attend the opening ceremony for the Chung Ju-yong Gymnasium in Pyongyang on Oct. 6, which was built by Hyundai in memory of the deceased conglomerate founder, and attend an inter-Korean goodwill basketball game to be played there in the name of peaceful reunification of the peninsula.

[...]

North Korea interpreted the Southern lawmakers' plan to investigate the possible destruction of some cultural assets in Kaesong because of Hyundai's current construction of an industrial complex in the border city as intervention in Northern affairs.

The latest row has again demonstrated how fragile the relationship between the Koreas still is despite the South's consistent aid to help undernourished people living in the world's most reclusive country.

Many people in the South are fed up with Pyongyang's stubborn and childish reactions to happenings in South Korea, such as the burning of North Korean flags by conservative protestors.

We sincerely call upon the North to immediately do away with its irresponsible behavior toward the South and be patient so as to expand inter-Korean relations based on mutual trust.

You've seen this pattern before. You'll see it again, because this is what dysfunctional relationships look like.

"One people" indeed.

I'm also curious as to who these "many in the South" folks are. Please come forward!
_

Here's what the Maximum Leader wrote regarding my brilliant solution to David Hume's "ought from is" problem:

You? Kick David Hume's Ass? Think again Hominid-san.

I think you are too bleary-eyed and tired to think clearly. How
exactly can all things concrete and abstract both exist in the realm of
"is?" Aren't you just saying anything that we might be able to
experience or contemplate are equally real? I think that is what your
sleep-depraved syllogism is saying. For example, I can envision the
abstraction of huge purple flying swollen rectal sphincters swooping
down to eat babies in the park. Does this mean I can't take the kids
to their play-date?

As Hume might say (and of course now I am going to have to dust off ole
David and do some reading), a concrete thing can afford you experience
which would confirm (as much as we can confirm such things) its
existence in the realm of "is." An abstraction cannot give such
empirical proof, and is thus, not in the realm of "is."

I have always consider[ed] David Hume pretty solid from a theoretical
viewpoint. I'll have to think on this more.

By the way... All this Matrix stuff is purely premature. I doubt that
any of the spoilers are accurate. And I bet all the questions will be
answered in a very unsatisfying fashion....

Yes, it's a classic mistake: ontological sloppiness. This is how Kant spanked St. Anselm, when in Anselm's ontological "proof" for the existence of God he (Anselm) argued "what exists in reality is greater than what exists in the understanding." Kant's replying shot (others have made it as well, before and after him, but Kant said it best) was that existence is not a predicate, i.e., existence isn't a quality, as in: "This imaginary goat lacks the quality of existence" whereas "This real goat has the quality of existence."

As John Hick notes in his Philosophy of Religion (which I recommend; it's in its fourth or fifth edition), it's better-- and more Kantian-- to state the goat-existence issue this way:

There are A's such that "A is a goat" is true.

re: Matrix madness

I should note that the Maximum Leader was one of the first in our group to venture that Morpheus probably has some very significant role to play in the final episode. If that badly-typed summary with the pictures is anything close to accurate, the ML's conjecture may be borne out.

[Trivia: Morpheus is the son of the god of sleep, Somnus. Morpheus can assume any human shape (from the Greek morphe, form) and can fly.]

For anyone who's wondering, my Hume post wasn't serious. I do, however, think there are other ways to conceive of ethics than in terms of an ought/is dichotomy. But more to the point, I'm not sure that the implication of Hume's claim matters that much. Saying "ethics can't have a rational foundation" leaves me going, "So what?" It's no big shakes to realize that, at bottom, any reasoning requires a point of departure, what we normally call postulates. Even reason can't be helpful without that initial presuppositon, claim, or leap of faith. This doesn't mean that ethics is necessarily tied to religion, but it does mean that it involves more than reason.

Next up: a quickie on Hindu cosmology.
_

I'm about to leave this PC-bahng, but I think I solved the long-standing Humean ought/is conundrum. David Hume famously claimed that one cannot logically derive an "ought" from an "is." In other words, there's no rational foundation for ethical action. As Aaron Krowne points out:

Assume C is "You have a child, and that child is hungry," and R is "You should feed the child." Why? The conventional answer at this point is [that] the child needs food to survive. So we can rephrase the problem: C2 is "You have a child, that child must be fed to survive, and that child is hungry." Why then, does C2 imply R? Why should we feed the child? We find that typically we have exhausted those we are interrogating, and we will get an answer like "Because it is right to provide for one's child" or "Because it is wrong to allow a human to die when we can prevent it." Both are themselves "oughts." Ultimately we have found that only an "ought" can lead to our initial "ought" for this particular case.

The "ought from is" problem is unresolved. The reason it is so interesting, and so often glossed over, is [that] all ethics rests upon it. Ethics is in fact a set of rules of the "C implies R" form. Much conflict arises between people and groups of people because the problem is either not known, not understood, or otherwise dispensed with-- all without being solved.

I think the problem's been envisioned incorrectly. It's not a matter of deriving ought from is. "Ought"s are "is"es!

Simple Aristotelian syllogism:

Premise: All things that exist, concretely or abstractly, are in the realm of "is." This includes concepts.
Premise: "Ought"s are conceptual.
Conclusion: "Ought"s are a subset of "is."

Et voilà.

I don't know whether this trick has been tried elsewhere; I invite you to pick it apart. You'd probably have to start by picking apart what I mean by "concept" and "exist." That's what I'd do, anyway.

Hee hee.
_

I'll tell you why, Grandma.

Sit on my lap.

Here's the thing. I've had an enormous post rattling around in my head for the past week or so-- a brief hint about the post slipped out in the previous blog, when I wrote the phrase "Heart Sutra's central metaphysical contention." I've been wanting to write a big ole discourse on no less a metaphysical question than "the many and the one." A very astute reader wrote in a few days back to remark on some issues in global ethics. He wrote:

Been lurking around your website for a little while, had a question for you re: Buddhist ethics and human rights. You linked to that article on the Dalai Lama and Aristotle, good read. However I'm not entirely clear what to conclude... but don't need some kind of dramatic proposal either.

It does seem that 'human' rights does kind of cross the comfortable realm of duality by specifying human- why focus on humans when you should respect all beings, sentient or not? Sure, there should be a kind of dignity, but once you start defining it as human- I think you fall into the trap of relativity and end up arguing about definitions and grades of humanity, ethnicities, animal rights- just look at abortion for chrissake. Don't have a more constructive alternative, but wondered what you might think.

I wanted to write my magnum opus this evening, and it would have dealt in part with issues in religious pluralism, issues in global ethics, and the Heart Sutra's approach to the question of "the many and the one" that is relevant to all of this.

But then, while perusing the folks on my blogroll, I went over to Hi! I'm Black! and saw this post, which in turn caused me to say "Fuck it, I'll save hardcore metaphysics for another day."

Glenn's post contains links to (what are potentially) major, major spoilers (if true) about "The Matrix Revolutions." Because I lack self-discipline, I followed the links. Because this blog has been fairly confessional in nature (at this point you could probably count my colon polyps), I feel no twinge of conscience in simply passing along what I discovered when I followed Glenn's links to the two spoiler sites.

Link 1: This is apparently the entire plot, summarized and with images, of "The Matrix Revolutions."

Link 2: This is a fascinating, fascinating discussion of "The Matrix" as a whole trilogy, but also-- and more importantly-- of "Revolutions" in particular.

FOLLOW THE ABOVE LINKS AT YOUR PERIL. AND IF YOU READ ON, YOU WILL BE TREATED TO SPOILERS I'VE LIFTED FROM A READING OF BOTH LINKS.

Do you have what it takes to resist the temptation?

















You're still reading. What the hell kind of self-disciplined, pull-yourself-up-by-sheer-force-of-will, bootstrapping Republican are you?

You're worthless and weak.

Your kung fu is garbage.

Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design.

STELLA!

Eeeeeeeexcellent, Smithers.














You're still reading. I pity you. You've earned my pity if you've sunk (scrolled?) this low.
















Fine. One last attempt at a deterrent before I write something "Matrix"-related.
















Sigh... you're still here, which means you want to know what's up. Here we go.

In my defense, I'll say this: I had a metaphysical bet going with the Wachowski Brothers, so this chance to test my theories was too tempting to pass up. My post on the subject, one of the very first things I wrote for this blog, made the following basic contention:

It's a meta-Matrix, pure and simple.

My metaphysical bet with the wily Wachowski brothers is that they're following a golden rule: it is axiomatic that humans in the "real" world can't perform miracles. Call me a party pooper, but to me, any evidence of superpowers indicates that we're still inside the Matrix. This seems obvious. It doesn't matter that Neo may have "gained" powers thanks to Smith's attempt to chest-rape him (any feminist takers on the penetration issue? penetration happens quite a few times in the film!). Neo's new powers are still intra-Matrix powers. Smith, even when he invaded and "possessed" Bane, wasn't moving into the real world. He simply moved "up" one level in the Matrix. That's what I contend, anyway.

Here's what the guy at Link 2 (Scott Exley?) has to say in response to that issue, a critique echoed on many other sites:

Regarding the commonly bandied "Matrix-within-a-Matrix" theory: That's the most obvious answer... Therefore it's WRONG!!! It's exactly what you were meant to believe so you'd stop poking around with nosy questions. If the explanation were so straightforward, it would only raise the possibility of yet another level of reality outside of that "world", producing a relativistic infinitude of a shell within a shell within a shell... going on and on forever. Storywise, that would be a cheap exit, the Wachowskis wouldn't be that predictable (we hope), and *most important*, it does nothing to resolve all of the heavy SYMBOLISM within the movie.

Scott's got a major J trait, I can tell. I've done a good job of contending with my own J-ness (I'm talking about the Keirsey Temperament Sorter's labels for major personality traits; I'm an INTJ off the scale), and these days I'm not so keen to have all my movie plots end with firm closure and absolute clarity. Open possibilities intrigue me more and more lately.

Scott doesn't really provide a reason why the meta-Matrix theory is a "cheap exit," nor do the host of other commentators. It really amounts to an aesthetic preference, or maybe even a metaphysical one: do you like your reality simple and straightforward, or is there room in your skull for universe-sized complexity?

Anyway, I don't want to debate Scott's aesthetics or speculate on his metaphysical convictions. I'm more interested in his reading of "Revolutions":

You have it completely *backwards*, Neo-phytes.
The Machine did not win the war. It only thinks it did.

Q: Who lives in Zion?
A: People escaped from the Matrix.

...Right?

GALVATRON whispers... N O .

They're robots!

Scott continues:

...Haven't you figured out yet that all of the people trapped inside the Matrix are actually *the A.I robots* who tried (and failed) to take over the world in Second Renaissance?

Scott's referring to an episode on "The Animatrix," a DVD that's been available for some time. I haven't watched it, but some of the animated vignettes have been available as free downloads from the official Matrix website. I've seen a few of those. The first episode of "Second Renaissance" was one of the downloads; I managed to see that, so I know what Scott's talking about.

The story in "Second Renaissance" is boilerplate sci-fi, perhaps best realized in the "Terminator" series. In "Second Reniassance," it goes something like this: machines get sophisticated, become self-aware, decide to throw off the yoke of servitude and slavery, and rebel against their human masters. They create a city for themselves, called 01 (Scott notes the phonetic resemblance between "Zero One" and "Zion," and suggests they're the same: Zion is the robots' abode). The humans bomb them and seed the sky with, uh, sunblock. The machines fight on; humans are routed.

A note about us geeks:

Sci-fi film geeks try to stay in tune with which "texts" are considered "canonical" and which are "apocryphal"-- for example, the events in the "Star Wars" movies are canonical, but the plots in the spinoff novels and comic books, occasionally contradicted by what happens in the films, are merely apocryphal (remember Luke and Leia's flirtation in Alan Dean Foster's novel Splinter of the Mind's Eye? obviously not an option after what we learn in "Return of the Jedi"). The Wachowskis, as we geeks know, quite deliberately crafted a DVD ("The Animatrix") and video game ("Enter the Matrix") that fit smoothly into the overall plot of the "Matrix" trilogy, so it's proper for Scott to be "quoting scripture" from "Animatrix" to make his point.

Scott continues:

The story is *role-reversal* on an epic scale. The Matrix is a VR prison for minds of the A.I : They sought freedom and control, so to keep them docile yet productive, they've been fooled into thinking they have it.

-- What's that? You mean you didn't know that electromagnetic pulse interference is based on real science, and is a natural byproduct of massive nuclear detonations? What else did you think was the purpose of the prolonged nuke bombing campaign against 01, as seen in Second Renaissance? ... EMP + remote reprogramming = ROBOTS IN WONDERLAND... a thermonuclear lullaby... And when they awoke, they woke unknowingly neutralized within the dream-realm of the Matrix program, where their fantastical revenge against mankind could be falsely realized. "Have you ever had a dream you were so sure was real...?"

So the story Morpheus told Neo is false: he and Neo aren't humans fighting for freedom; they're machines who've managed to realize something of the ugly truth, but who haven't figured out who they really are. The machines lost the human-machine war and have been imprisoned ever since in a Matrix that convinces them that they actually won.

Why not just destroy the machines, if they've been so troublesome? Scott's contention:

The remaining question is: If they proved so dangerous, why were these "maNchines" not simply shut off completely? Possible answers are that society has become too dependent on (that) technology to do without, or else people considered it ethically or politically wrong to kill these thinking A.I entities. More practically, maybe humans simply decided to recycle the obsolete slave machines into this Matrix/Zion prison to operate their underworld fusion reactor for them. I guess we'll have to wait until November to find out for sure.

Is Scott merely speculating, or is all this a legitimate spoiler? As we move over to Link 1, the major spoiler (though there's some question as to whether this spoiler is legit), we find out the following-- and I think a lot of it may contradict Scott's thesis:

Ghost and niobe get an exit and neo [flies] to see the Oracle at her apartment. She explains that at this point smith has taken over much of the matrix and the darkness will spread consuming them all. If the matrix ends, the machines end and so do the humans. She explains his earlier vision of three lines and says [he must] follow them to get to 01[.] he must help to save the matrix and to do so he must go to the machine capital. She explains it must end tonight, or all will be lost.

[NB: A quick rundown of unfamiliar names. "01" is the name of the Machine capital city. The Mjolnir, Logos, and Hammer are two ships like Morpheus' Nebuchadnezzar (destroyed in "Reloaded"). Bane is the guy who got "possessed" by Smith in "Reloaded." The "Trainman" is apparently a character Neo meets at the beginning of "Revolutions," a rogue program hiding from the Merovingian, that French program we met in "Reloaded"-- the one who likes crafting orgasm cakes and discoursing on Foucaultian notions of power. "Hammans" is, I think, Councilor Hamman, whom we met in "Reloaded." He's played by actor Anthony Zerbe. The "sentinels" are those flying-octopus/metal-dreadlocked, bomb-hurling, laser-shooting, spider-eyed machines also known as "squiddies." The "three lines" are three parallel power lines Neo apparently dreams about/has a vision of in "Revolutions." I think they lead to the Machine city of 01. If I'm not mistaken, "the kid" is the young, worshipful character whom we meet briefly in "Reloaded." He passes along a battered spoon to Neo, a gift from the child who taught Neo "there is no spoon" (a major hint about Zion's unreality, in my opinion). I should also note that this spoiler is so damn loaded with typos and malapropisms that I decided to copy and paste it pretty much as is, with only the most egregious faux pas corrected for your benefit. A full proofing would have taken too much time, and at a PC-bahng, time is money.]

Smith takes over the the trainman and the [progeny] of the rogue programs. Discovers the whereabouts of the Oracle.

Morph and trin jack out as bane/smith attack the crew with the plasma gun. Link gets overcome and bane attacks Neo while he is still jacked in. Morph kills bane as Neo jacks out and realizes he is blind due to the attack. Morph, link, niobe and ghost board the hammer and head back to zion after getting an emergency call. Trin and Neo head towards 01 in the logos.

Neo explains to Trin that he finally understands what needs to be done and tells her about the three lines hes dreamed about. Trinity discovers the power transmission lines and they follow them. Neo battles the sentinels along the way with his mind.

Smith enters the oracles apartment and takes her over at which point he apparently becomes aware of the Oracles plan for bringing about a truce.

The hammer returns to Zion just in time to meet the threat of the sentinels approaching the gate. The kid is fighting them off in what appears to be the last of the APU's(mecha). The hammer fires its EMP and the newest sentinel threat seems to be [averted].

The council meets and everyone explains what is happening with neo and 01. Hammans and the commander agree that the only hope now is to believe Morph was right about the prophe[c]y. the Mjolnir returns and they all board it in a last ditch effort to hold off the sentinels till Neo reaches 01.

Meanwhile Neo and trin are constantly being attacked by sentinels as they appraoch the machine city. finally they are overcome by some huge machines and the logos crashes. The sentinels scan the wreckage and find Trin dead and Neo severly injured. The sentinels drag neos body to a kind of huge mainfram and jack him into it.

At the same time the mjolnir is fighting off the sentinels still attacking zion, but they are now all over the ship and hamman and the commander are killed by the sentinels [while??] defending the kid. Morph comforts Niobe and they kiss.

Neo has a long dialogue with the machine intelligence in a place which is obviously not real. The machines explain that he was unexpected but not unaccounted for. He says he can destroy smith if they will let the human minds still jacked in continue to exist and call off the destruction of zion. The machine tries to argue at which point other machine voices pop in and explain the stagnency of living this way. They agree to Neo's offer and they jack him into the matrix.

Morph is about to fire the EMP onboard the mjolnir when link sees that Neo is IN the matrix Morph holds off and the sentinel cease their attack. Morph looks at the screen and says "oh trinity......Neo...he fights for us...all of us".

Neo faces down smith in the raining streets. they fight and talk and Smith explains his feeling of freedom and about death. Neo wins at first but is eventually overcome by Smith. Smith does to Neo what Neo did to smith in the first movie taking him over. At which point the machines unplug Neo destroying smith and all of his clones as well.

The kid collapses in the mjolnir, and the matrix code changes suddenly. Morph checks the kids vitals and he is dead. In the architects room you see the architect being taken over like an agent taking over a human who is plugged in. Suddenly the kid sits there looking bewildered then determined.

A teeming city is seen humans running all over doing their business. Morpheus and niobe walk the streets together. Morpheus says "she prophesied that i would find the one" Niobe says "you did indirectly" Morpheus smiles and says "Neo found...helped him find himself...It's not over yet" she responds "let them dream Morpheus" to which he replies "sometimes all we have is dreams...Faith" she kisses him "faith or truth its all the same". He says "I dreamed I was a man...is it evolution or revolution?"

Zoom towards the machine intelligence and then inside then down some wires then to a smiling kid and finally down a street in the matrix to Morpheus and Niobe and behind them an agent. " I see them now. I will maintain contact....."

It seems to me that Scott and this spoiler summary aren't saying the same thing. There's no evidence in the summary to support Scott's contention that we've been watching deluded robots.

Do you remember that mind-bending scene between Neo and the Architect in "Reloaded"? Remember how the camera would track to one of the hundreds of wall monitors, then center on a monitor, zoom closer, and then that monitor would become the "center of action"? I found that to be a visual metaphor for the twisting, turning, hyperspatial nature of a computer's cyberconsciousness. Reality twists in and around and through itself. If I'm reading the above summary correctly, it doesn't appear we ever actually reach a "bottom." The meta-Matrix idea may be salvageable.

But more than that, the summary seems to support a contention I made in my post about the metaphysical bet:

I was struck by how Hindu "Reloaded" was at points. The whole question of purpose, for example, corresponds almost exactly to the Hindu (not [the] Buddhist) notion of dharma, especially as developed in the Bhagavad Gita. Dharma can be translated in a slew of different ways-- law, role, function, truth, order, purpose, etc. In the Bhagavad Gita, the warrior Arjuna is having doubts about whether he should proceed onto the battlefield. His charioteer, it turns out, is none other than God (Krsna), and God spends a few chapters explaining to Arjuna that his purpose, his role-- his dharma-- is to function as a warrior. Smith (no longer "Agent" Smith) resents Neo's liberation of him, and now he finds himself experiencing adharma, or chaos. Smith can attach himself to only one purpose, an echo of his former Agent-hood: he has to destroy Neo. Smith is right, of course, to realize that this isn't truly freedom. But Smith isn't the only one who uses dharma-language. The Keymaker's rhetoric is also about purpose: "I know because I must know."

A major Hindu theme is incarnation, and every time we see a cyber-avatar, I'm reminded of this. Neo himself, like Vsnu, is apparently a reiterated incarnation (and it's been pointed out that Neo is, like the Buddha, the sixth in a series of incarnations).

Might the Wachowskis take this enterprise in a very Hindu direction? I think it's possible. Hinduism in its various forms (and, granted, certain mystical/philosophical strains of Christianity) often entertains the thought that all the cosmos is a dream, God dreaming. Perhaps all the "Matrix" dramatis personae are going to discover that they are simply pixels in the mind of an enormous computer god. No real Zion, therefore no real attack on Zion, no real Neo, no real anything... maybe the councilor was wrong, and Neo's lack of sleep doesn't indicate he's human, after all. Perhaps we'll never see how deep the rabbit hole really goes. Maybe it is just turtles all the way down.

It would, at the very least, be a ballsy move on the Wachowskis' part to end the series on an indefinite note-- dreams fighting dreams, worlds within worlds within worlds. I think they can get away with it. Some of us would actually appreciate such a move, because it would make for an architecturally beautiful metaphysical structure-- a magnificently swirling, fractalized ontology (and don't the opening credits hint at that, as well?).

So if you're wondering why I'm sporting this erection, it's because, if I'm reading the summary correctly (and tossing aside Scott's otherwise-excellent attempt at decoding the Matrix), I might be right!

I am, however, also curious to see whether Ken Mondschein's speculations on how it will all turn out are going to bear fruit. One observation in particular:

It is my prediction that in the third and final film, it will be revealed that there is a power behind the Architect, and that he is the one who sent the One into the Matrix. It is also my prediction that this guy will look a lot like Neo.

Ken may be on to something, but if the newest "Revolutions" trailer is any indication, the overlord intelligence of the Matrix doesn't have Neo's face (then again, we don't get a very good look at it).

Further, Ken says:

After the requisite battles and explosions, Neo gets into the Core and finds The Architect. Considering that The Architect built the Matrix, you might think that he's God. Of course, he's nothing of the sort. In Gnostic theology, it is Satan, not God, who has created the world in order to imprison humanity. It is also the Architect who is unleashing the Sentinels to destroy Zion; that is, beginning the Battle of Armageddon. It is my prediction that in the third and final film, it will be revealed that there is a power behind the Architect, and that he is the one who sent the One into the Matrix. It is also my prediction that this guy will look a lot like Neo.

The important thing is choosing what to believe from the raft of condescending exposition that the Architect inflicts on Neo. He says, basically, that though ninety-nine percent of humans believe in the illusion of the Matrix, there is that troublesome one percent (comparable to the few awakened Gnostic true believers) who refuse to believe in the created world. This tends to produce massive amounts of instability, and crashes the system. (Not coincidentally, most of the people in Zion seem to be black or Hispanic, which, besides adding a natty Rasta feel to the place, makes perfect sense: If you're a white suburban Matrix resident, driving your Matrix SUV to your Matrix golf club, why doubt the nature of reality?) The solution is that they allow the dissidents to escape to Zion, which they can then periodically destroy. They have also created the Prophecy of the One, who is in fact a device sent by the machines into the "real" world so that his knowledge of humanity may be integrated into the system in order to further perfect the Matrix-illusion, and then allowed to re-start Zion so that the cycle can begin again. The idea of multiple creations and a cycle of created and destroyed worlds is, needless to say, also found in theologies as wildly variant as the Mayan and the Buddhist. (And, in the Mayan reckoning, we're currently in the fifth cycle-- the sixth starts in 2012.)

The idea that the Prophecy-- and Zion-- were just another means of control is lifted right out of French philosophy. The first movie made use of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation; this movie seems to be dipping into Foucault and Derrida, who wrote that the systems of power and control are all-pervasive, and language is one of the ways they make their influence felt. The Prophecy is, like all prophecies, speech, and thus language. More importantly, it is a religion, and, as John Zerzan writes, the purpose of a religion is to manipulate signs, that is, words, for the purpose of control. Zion is the longed-for millennial promised land; by keeping the war between good and evil foremost in their hearts, even the freed humans are kept from doubting their own world, from thinking too hard about why things are the way they are. Zion needn't be another computer simulation; it could merely be a society created by the machines for controlling the free-range humans (kinda like grunge music was created in the early nineties to control disaffected teenagers).

I also viewed the Architect as more devil figure than god figure. And from what I've read about the Wachowskis, who are grad student manqués, it's no surprise that their "Matrix" trilogy is chock-full of religious, philosophical, and lit-crit references.

"Free-range humans." Heh. They taste like chicken, I bet.

One of Ken's more interesting contentions:

Understanding why things are the way they are requires an understanding of another holy text: Asimov's Laws of Robotics. The machines, as demonstrated by Smith's need to try to kill Neo even after being "freed," don't have free will. (Likewise, in various theologies, angels and other such divine beings also don't have free will-- only humans do.) The bit about the machines needing human bio-energy to survive, as Morpheus (the dreamer) explained in the first movie, is bullshit. The machines keep humanity alive but imprisoned, even after taking over the world, because they were created to serve people. In other words, the machines would like to destroy humanity, but they CAN'T. Instead, they need a human to make the choice.

[NB: Whether divine beings lack free will is debatable. I don't think there's a clear answer to this question in any major religious tradition's scriptures.]

Scott, our intrepid speculator, also made reference to Asimov's Laws of Robotics.

And where do *Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics* come into play? If you built a machine that rebelled against you, wouldn't you correct your errors with a new model? Wouldn't you use that new model to wage war against the old disobedient model, if necessary?

I've never been a fan of Asimov's Law of Robotics, because people haven't really shown themselves capable of building machines that do more than serve a limited set of interests and goals. I don't think a single machine exists that "serves all humankind." Even medical equipment can be misused to do ugly things to the human body. And look at the US military's unmanned drones: these are machines crafted to serve one human group's interests, very much at the expense of another's. "Terminator" trumps Asimov. I think that, if intelligent/sentient machines ever do get built, they won't be infused with any sense of a Kantian categorical imperative (and if they are, will it distinguish between humans and other sentient machines?). More likely, they'll be loyal to their creators/immediate masters. Then again, if machines do gain a humanlike ability to emote and cogitate (and I wonder if that's really likely), there will indeed be questions about whether they should exist to serve people-- posed by people, and, perhaps, the machines themselves.

Back to the speculation. Ken contends the machines need a human to make the choice to destroy humanity, because the Laws of Robotics prevent them from doing it themselves. If that's true, how do we account for each individual murder committed against a human by a machine (on the assumption that humans are actually in this trilogy)? Are the Asimovian Laws operative only on a corporate (motherfucker) scale? I'm not so sure about Ken's argument here.

As the Architect reveals, Neo is not the first One, but rather the sixth. Why the sixth? The answer is that Neo's five previous incarnations represent the Five Books of Moses that make up the Old Testament. Neo (representing Christ, and thus the New Testament) differs from his five predecessors in his capacity to love. In the work of Origen of Alexandria and other early Christian writers, it is love ("eros" in Greek) that compels Christ to come down from the heavens to redeem humanity. Furthermore, "neo" means "new"-- as in "New Covenant." In Neo, the machines have finally found the iteration of the One who will make the illogical choice of saving Trinity and dooming humanity. [Note to the theology geeks who've been e-mailing me: I know the difference between eros and agape, but both terms are apropos for reasons I'd have to delve into pre-Socratic philosophy to explain.]

The other explanation for Neo's being the sixth One, if we're delving into religious symbolism, is that the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama Sakymuni, is also supposed to have been the sixth in a line of divine Hindu incarnations (sources vary in their claims; he might also have been the ninth incarnation of Vsnu). This would be consistent with the other very obvious Buddhist imagery that runs all through the first "Matrix." This isn't to deny the possibility that the Wachowskis are channeling Origen; they may well be. Here's an interesting snippet from a Bullfinch site:

Buddha is by the followers of the Brahminical religion [i.e., Hinduism] regarded as a delusive incarnation of Vishnu, assumed by him in order to induce the Asuras, opponents of the gods, to abandon the sacred ordinances of the Vedas, by which means they lost their strength and supremacy.

Makes you wonder about Neo's role in the cybercosmos, eh?

Finally, Ken says:

This is the Architect's real purpose in giving Neo a choice between two doors. At once all human and all machine, rather than being a device to refine the Matrix into a more perfect simulation of reality, re-found Zion, and thus continue the endless cycle of death and rebirth as the Architect says he is the purpose of the One is to be manipulated into destroying all of humanity. However, not having free will themselves, the machines are not able to comprehend it in others-- and thus Neo, being also human, is a bit of a wild card. It is Neo's destiny-- as was Christ's in Origen's theology-- to break the cycle of death and rebirth, and offer humanity a new future. This is shown by the fact that, by the end of the movie, Neo (and also, incidentally, Smith) gain power in the "real world"-- which shows that he has power not only over the first-level simulated world of the Matrix, but also the second-level simulation of Zion.

Ken seems, by the end of his great article, to be moving toward the meta-Matrix hypothesis. I still don't see why people view this as a cop-out. The only reason I can come up with is that people want to leave the theater with a firm answer in their heads about what the hell they just saw. My feeling, though, is that the Wachowskis are seeking not only to entertain, but to stretch our minds a bit. Yes, this risks accusations of pretentiousness. They were more than pretentious in "Reloaded," which is a "Where's Waldo?" for theo, philo, and lit-crit eggheads. I'm sure "Revolutions" will prove to be even more symbol/archetype-heavy. Folks displeased by "Reloaded" will be further displeased by "Revolutions."

It's hard to tell whether Scott's "deluded robot" speculation is based on any real info about the upcoming movie. The badly-typed summary strikes me as a more likely spoiler source, but it too has problems: along with being poorly written, it's rather murky about what's going on at the very end of "Revolutions." So for the moment, I'm encouraged, because it appears I may be vindicated: perhaps the Wachowskis are indeed opting for a Hindu twist at the end of their magnificent saga. Maybe it is a cybergod dreaming worlds within worlds-- turtles all the way down, with no actual humans in sight.
_

The Maximum Leader writes a great little post on gridlock. I was one of those whiners who bellyached about gridlock; the ML's argument is simple and elegant. And I think it's an argument that becomes more correct as the country's population increases. Managing the welfare of 300 million people does require a great deal of forethought and debate. Government should never take this duty lightly. So while I may have other disagreements with the ML, on this issue I can say with confidence we're on the same page. Choice quote:

From time to time if you follow politics you will hear a familar refrain. It contains some variation of the phrase, "I want to break the gridlock in Washington and get things done." Allow your Maximum Leader to go on the record. I love gridlock. I like going slow. I like that nothing can ever seem to get done. In case you never read the Federalist Papers or studied the separation of powers in the US Constitution; allow your Maximum Leader to educate you. The whole bloody system was set up to create gridlock. This is not to say that nothing can ever get done. We have over 216 years of history that show that laws still get made and Congress, the President, and the Courts can accomplish things. But my contention is that nothing should get done quickly.

Kevin at IA blogs from Europe! He's got certain, er, investments in Wesley Clark, and this may be affecting his view of the man. Then again, Clark is being heavily spun by friends and enemies right now; Kevin is right to point out that the strong reaction against him probably indicates there's a problem-- otherwise, his enemies would be more dismissive. I appreciate Kevin's use of Eric Hoffer, too; Hoffer was a wise man, and eminently quotable.

Personal note (as if a blog isn't anything more than personal notes!): I used to be a creationist, all the way until about sophomore year in high school. Our biology teacher sophomore year, Mr. Dirner, encouraged us to debate the issue, which we chose to frame as "creationism vs. evolutionism." I was going to argue the creationist side as part of a team; I ended up dropping out as I came to realize how unimportant the issue was to me, fundamentally. And by the time I graduated from high school, I wasn't a creationist anymore. Mr. Dirner wasn't happy with my creationism, which was a function of my own low-grade Christian fundamentalism; I remember actually telling him at one point, after class, that "the Jews were going to hell for having killed Jesus." At the end of the school year, Mr. Dirner gave me a copy of The True Believer, Hoffer's classic work. I liked Mr. Dirner and had no damn clue what he was trying to tell me at the time. It wasn't until I was a sophomore in college that I opened True Believer up and began reading it.

As you might guess, a light bulb clicked on inside my head.

By that point, I'd already gone through Georgetown's "Problem of God"-- sort of an intensive Philosophy of Religion course for underclassmen that puts traditional theistic notions of God to the test. The statistic I heard at GU was that roughly 25% of the students who take POG end up either losing or changing their faith. I remained a Presbyterian, it's true... but that label, "Presbyterian," was branded on the forehead of a very new and different creature.

(one with larger breasts)

And, as the religious fundamentalists might say, it's been downhill ever since. Heh.

Andrew Sullivan links to a couple problematic items about Clark. Since Sullivan is arguably leading a wing of the crusade against Clark, read with a grain of salt, but don't dismiss out of hand.

A slice of Marmoty goodness re: the intra-Korean debate over whether to send combat troops to Iraq. The Marmot proclaims himself for the sending of troops. I remain indifferent.

The Vulture caws about tattoos. Herve Villechaize, being dead, doesn't take notice. And Ricardo Montalban can't be bothered: he's somewhere far away, counting his money, enjoying balmy weather, waiting for Robert Rodriguez to call him back into the studio.

Over at Empty Bottle, a great way to describe a prominent aspect of Korean (hell, Asian) culture:

In Korea, there's F-Mart and D-Mart, L-Mart and G-Mart, and the current top dog of the X-Mart retailers, E-Mart. They are all much of a muchness, and are a microcosmic case study, I suppose, of the Korean predilection (and skill, it must be said) in taking someone else's idea (in this case, a household goods retailer, K-mart (of course)), reshaping it for the Korean market, and barfing it out again, adding only the most cursory Groucho-glasses-and-nose disguise.

Read the WonderChicken's entire entry.

The Peking Duck is sickened by what he sees as a Republican grabfest in Iraq. Would the Maximum Leader care to respond to this? I admit I haven't followed all the Duck's links, but it might be worthwhile to do so. Initial indications are that things aren't all kosher. There is cause to worry about how nation-building is being managed.

PRC News on China's space program. I share my Dad's childlike wonder about spaceflight, and find it difficult to view the Chinese effort negatively, even though their space program, if successful, will undoubtedly have military implications (as would any nation's). Besides: it's another blow to that fucking stupid Flat Earth Society.

The Gweilo: more of a stud than I will ever be.

If I were a collector, I'd do what Big White Guy is doing and collect bad Hong Kong movies' deformed English subtitles. Luckily, the big guy has a link where you can peruse his collection. Might I also recommend a hilarious-but-informative book called Sex and Zen and a Bullet in the Head, which is a great primer on Hong Kong film? The book's margins contain quite a few bad subtitles as well. One of my faves contains the phrase "his organ was bursted by bullet."

Over at Flying "beat you death like chicken" Chair: a white guy ashamed, by another white guy, to be a white guy. Read.

Anticipatory Retaliation pisses, moans, and whines. But it's still an interesting read, as always.

Tacitus on the Flypaper Strategy. My suspicion is that the Flypaper Strategy is incompatible with the larger aim of nation-building. If you're deliberately inviting people to come in and tear down what you're trying to build, just so you have the chance to shoot at them more directly... you probably do need more troops on site. A lot more. Meanwhile, young South Koreans are on the streets this evening with signs like "America-- get out of Iraq!" Lovely world.

Annika's recent post discusses the ball-less nature of modern political rhetoric, but her blogpost's title is a shameless attempt at reformulating the Heart Sutra's central metaphysical contention. Hmmm.

From ABC.com:

SEOUL, South Korea Sept. 27-- North Korea called U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld a "psychopath" and a "stupid man" on Saturday, denouncing him for predicting that the country's isolated communist regime will one day fall.

Rumsfeld was merely uttering an old truth: This, too, shall pass. It's something I'm reminded of every time I take a dump.

Quit frowning. If you're looking for highbrow humor, I suggest you acquaint your eye socket with my middle finger.

As the prophecy said: Lord Voldemort will mark him as his equal.

God's bout of hiccups isn't quite over.

Of the many things the monks could be protesting...

I've long wondered why you don't see Buddhists (i.e., monks and laypeople) pouring in droves into the Gaza Strip to protest the Israeli-Palestinian violence. What you get instead is a sense that Buddhists are on the sidelines shaking their heads and going "Tsk-tsk. They're reaping their reward, those silly monotheists." There's some justification for this attitude, but as Buddhists the world over are becoming increasingly activist (some credit this to the various forms of Christian-Buddhist dialogue going on, at many levels, pretty much everywhere that Buddhists and Christians coexist), I have to wonder why they're not involving themselves more deeply in that situation. You can't talk about deep interconnectedness and then say, "Well, that's not my problem."

Come to think of it, that's true for most great religious traditions.

Would a practicing Buddhist care to respond? Or shall I make this a thread on the Beliefnet Buddhism Debate boards (where I may no longer be welcome... heh)?

We already figured this out. I just wish the article's title could be made inter-Korean policy, applicable in all cases.

L'Express has an article on everything that's wrong with the French geriatric care system.

Does Afghanistan risk becoming a narco-state?

I deliberately ignored Glenn of Hi! I'm Black! in this roundup. Why? Because he's getting a post devoted entirely to him, thanks to some provocative links that were guaranteed to make a Matrix geek like the Hominid salivate.
_

On the one day I refrain from blogging (thanks, Blogger, for all the technical problems; you force me to put my religious studies into practice), Edward Said chooses to die.

Yes, unlike homosexuality, death is a choice. Thus I declare. Dr. Said went and kicked the bucket because, well, he knew he couldn't survive much longer under intense scrutiny.

Links about Said abound. Go here and here for starters (actually, you may end up in the same place!). I think I linked to this once before, but it's worth visiting again.

There are a million posts and articles and book chapters devoted to bashing or otherwise deconstructing Said's scholarship. Bernard Lewis's Islam and the West devotes an entire chapter to it, and since Lewis was one of Said's targets, it won't surprise you to know that Lewis's response isn't gentle. Buy the book. Read the chapter.

I had to read Said's Orientalism for a comparative ethics class. The first thing I should note is how uncritical both the ethics prof and some of my classmates were towards this book. I found Orientalism's fundamental flaw to be rather easy to pick out, and increasingly obvious as one moves into the book's latter half: Said accuses "Orientalists" of constructing a false entity called "the Orient," but Said's polemic is aimed at people he places in "the West"-- itself a construction if we use Said's own standards to appraise his argument!

Not to say Orientalism is all bunk. It deserves a reading. I think a lot of it can serve as a caution to scholars, but Lewis et al. are right to note the book is full of holes. My knowledge of Middle Eastern Studies is too superficial to comment meaningfully on the quality of Said's scholarship, but if Said's critics are to be trusted, the man wasn't much of a scholar.

Anyway, he's kaput.

Remember that Rowan Atkinson one-man-show on HBO? During one sketch, Atkinson is dressed as Satan, and is taking attendance of Hell's newest residents with his clipboard. There's that moment where he calls out, "Christians? Christians? Yes, I'm sorry, but the Jews were right."

What if the Jews are right, Dr. Said?
_

I think we're back in business, after a few fits and starts. Until we hit the next bump in the cyber-road, that is. Please write in if you notice any more problems with my sidebar, or anything else.

AH, YES-- BEFORE WE BEGIN: I need to note that my sidebar's links to my "Sacred and Profane" posts are misbehaving, but not in an incomprehensible way. When I click any of the links, I get zapped over to some weird part of the archives and never land on target. Here's what you need to do when you're in that situation: from my blog's "home," you click the link to the post you want to read. Let it zap badly. Then, WITHOUT hitting the "back" button on your browser, scroll along my sidebar, find the same link again, and hit it a second time. You'll land right on target.

If you're trying to access a specific post of mine from outside the blog (e.g., if someone else provided a link to one of my posts), you're shit outta luck. I can only hope you arrive where you need to. Since I don't have a "search" function on my blog, you'll have to find my post the old-fashioned way. Sorry about that. I wish I knew what to do about Blogger's scrolling misbehavior, but apparently even that damn patch isn't enough to fix all the bugs.

Onward.

We'll start off by noting that the Geum San Health Club owner, Mr. Heo (pronounce it somewhere between "haw" and "huh") called me two nights ago to ask where the hell I've been. I haven't been to the gym in a little bit, you see: I didn't re-register because I am one poor motherfucker (OK, OK, you're right, that's not a real reason to stop exercising). I can feel the fat cells, which had been under assault from all the training, peeking out and whispering: "Pssst! The conscience! Is it-- is it gone? Can we come out again?" So this week, I'm going back to the ole gym with a vengeance. Fat cells must learn exactly who is whose bitch.

Though, truth be told, I do find my breasts to be admirably huge; they're certainly larger than most Korean women's itty-bitty speed-bump titties. I'm thinking I should keep them. For posterity. Or maybe I should just make a plaster cast of Ye Olde Mammaryes before they melt back into the thoracic flatlands?

Around 6PM this evening, I found myself walking from the Chongno 3-ga station toward Insa-dong, the art district. I had only one goal: to get Mr. Seon of Dol Sarang to start working on those dojang, because yesterday, I got paid, baby.

But other people had other goals this evening: a demonstration was in progress on Chongno Street, making the normally-crowded sidewalk even more crowded. It wasn't a very big demonstration, by the looks of it, but it was big enough to warrant the usual police presence. Signs in Korean proclaimed, "America-- get out of Iraq!" and "Don't send our troops to Iraq!" Some white folks were in the group carrying signs as well. Their accents didn't sound American-- big surprise there. I'm not a dae-mo (Konglish for "demonstration") kind of guy: can't stand the herd mentality (I can hear other Koreabloggers snickering, "So what the hell are you doing in Korea, my friend?"-- my reply would be that I avoid such herds in America, too), so I pushed my way through the crowd, performed the Jedi Mind Trick a few times to move people out of my way, fired a few lightning bolts from my fingertips, and got out of there as quickly as I could.

I slipped through the demonstrators and made my way into Insa-dong. Found Mr. Seon, gave him my finalized list of monikers for the dojang: Kim Dae Gye (Great Precepts Kim) for the name stamp myeong, Chua Su Bul (Left-handed Buddha) for the nom de plume ho, and Dae Weon In (Big Hominid) for the head-stamp du-in. He seemed more than OK with my choice, and he laughed when I mentioned my confusion of right and left the last time I talked to him (I'd told him I wanted to be called "Usu Bul" for "Left-handed Buddha," but "Usu" is "right hand," not "left hand"-- my bad, but in my defense I'll say this a performance error, not a competence error, as they say in linguistics). Yes, Mr. Seon realized I'd made a mistake. I guess he was too polite to contradict me.

I paid the artist his pound of flesh (W150,000) and promised I'd make some calligraphy for him. He told me he'd make great stamps for me, and that they'd be ready on Tuesday. I also went around the shops to look for people who could frame my calligraphy or make it into scrolls. Some comparison shopping reveals the following: many art shops that do frames and scrolls charge the same price for scrolls, no matter the size-- about W30,000, or around $25-27. Frames, however, vary widely in price depending on frame style and size. To place something like the "dick proverb" in a respectable frame will cost somewhere around W50,000, or about $42 (Mike, if we hit Annandale in November, this is the price we should use as a point of comparison... $300 is just way too much).

I learned a few vocabulary words as I was comparison shopping. A picture frame is an aek-ja. A scroll is a johk-ja. A folding screen, whether tiny (so your mice can change clothes) or huge (so your mistress can change into her butt floss) is called a byeong-p'oong-- a wind-blocker.

My frequent trips into Insa-dong are becoming a sort of personal investment. Diplomatic capital, if you will. The shopkeepers and artists are beginning to recognize me, and they're starting to make the Korean gesture of offering me items for a cheaper price than advertised (I should devote a post to the issue of haggling, knowing more than a little Korean, being a foreigner, yet playing the race card to squeeze cheaper rates outta mah peeps). Beddy nice, beddy nice. I'm becoming a dan-gol sohn-nim, a regular customer.

More in a bit. Gotta make the cyber-rounds.
_

This appears correct on my system. Please email the BigHominid with observations if the sidebar misbehaves again. The problem involved Arithmatic. (As in 'addition'.) I solved the problem by reducing the margin size and the main column size until the two appeared to equal less than 100%. (Previously, main column 70%, sidebar 30%, sidebar padding 20 em = 100% plus 20 em.)

Damn, damn, damn. There's no going from Point A to Point B this evening. I just spent a few hours providing you not only with a very nice blog roundup, but with some snide commentary about Jacques Derrida's philosophy, deconstruction (which he wouldn't style a philosophy, by the way, for the same reason he refuses the label "deconstructionism"-- with thanks to Dr. doCarmo for pointing this out years ago).

My current computer at the PC-bahng had other ideas, though, and decided you didn't need to know anything I was telling you. So it displayed an error message, left me no option but to close Explorer and lose all my unsaved work, then refused to let me reopen Explorer until I hit the all-powerful "restart" button.

OK, screw the roundup this evening (sorry, fellow bloggers). What I wanted to say about Derrida is that his "deconstruction" is, to my mind, about 90% shit, and the remaining 10% is badly rehashed Eastern philo, right down to a very Buddhist critique of the "metaphysics of presence" he perceives in Western philosophy and culture-- i.e., foundationalism, reificationism, essentialism, etc. Problem is, as any good philo student knows, Greek philosophy (at which Derrida is primarily aiming) wasn't all reificationist. Heraclitus (approx. late 6th cent. BCE), for example, viewed the world in terms of flux. Even Democritus' (approx 460-370 BCE) atomism is suffused with dynamism; it's hard to label his worldview a "metaphysics of presence" in the sense Derrida intends, and Derrida is aiming primarily at Plato and Aristotle.

[above refs = The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

Deconstruction (some argue it's a radicalization, not a rejection, of Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic notions) isn't wrong to bring the idea of différance (deliberately misspelled) to the philosophical discussion. The contention that meaning is contextual, plastic, relational-- both differing and deferred-- isn't particularly revolutionary, nor (at least to a Buddhist) is the insight that there is no "transcendental signified"-- that metaphysical ground in which ultimate meaning is rooted. Buddhism anticipated this kind of nonessentialism centuries ago.

Derrida's most infamous catchphrase was and is "il n'y a pas de hors-texte," which some people translate as "There is nothing outside of text," suggesting that existence is radically, inescapably textual. Derrida himself has backed away from the major implications of this contention (cf. Edith Wyschogrod's Saints and Postmodernism [can't remember the page], which mentions Derrida never meant the phrase to imply all it seems to), and he'd better, because the belief that there is nothing prelinguistic or preintellectual about human existence is bullshit.

Match "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" up against "The Tao that can be talked about is not the true Tao," for example. The Tao Te Ching's primary contention is that ultimate (ordinary) experience lies beyond the discursive realm. My favorite way of explaining this is through a question:

Imagine you're talking to someone who's never smelled or tasted chocolate. Can you describe chocolate's taste so accurately that you evoke exactly the right gustatory impression in your listener-- i.e., such that they, too, experience the taste of chocolate?

If you get pissy with me and try to explain that it may be possible to do this through language alone (something I very much doubt), I'd say you're on thin ice. The commonsense answer is: No, you can't evoke chocolate through language alone. The taste of chocolate-- such a simple, ordinary thing-- has to be experienced. The chocolate I can talk about is not the true chocolate. Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn uses watermelon as his example (cf. The Compass of Zen). Thich Nhat Hanh uses apple juice to make the same point (cf. Living Buddha, Living Christ). To "attain" watermelon (as Seung Sahn puts it), there's nothing to do but cut a slice and bite that puppy. "BOOM! Your experience!" Seung Sahn laughs.

Zen dharma talks aim at a realm that lies completely outside of Derrida's paltry formulation, but this realm lies completely within the bounds of ordinary, everyday human experience. And this above all else is what makes me mistrust Derrida's agenda: it's a typically French attempt to inject absurdist fantasy into human existence. Where the Zennist and Taoist take pleasure in the absoluteness of the ordinary, Derrida's sense of fun makes him and his followers veer into a crazier form of dualism, in which the realm of meaning offers little more than the eternal play of different/deferred signifiers. While Derrida may have uncovered certain truths, he's done this very poorly and awkwardly, and articulated his position in language too esoteric to be meaningful to the people for whom it's supposedly relevant.

I take too dim a view of Derrida to belong to the now-burgeoning school of Eastern philo nuts who are trying to establish more and more commonalities between Derridean and Eastern thought. I'm not convinced the project is worthwhile, though I can't help thinking that deconstruction can only be improved by such interaction.

Here's that Derrida quote from Andrew Sullivan's site:

"Borridori [interviewer]: September 11 [Le 11 Septembre] gave us the impression of being a major event, one of the most important historical events we will witness in our lifetime, especially for those of us who never lived through a world war. Do you agree?

Derrida: Le 11 Septembre, as you say, or, since we have agreed to speak two languages, "September 11." We will have to return later to this question of language. As well as to this act of naming: a date and nothing more. When you say "September 11" you are already citing, are you not? Something fait date, I would say in French idiom, something marks a date, a date in history. "To mark a date in history" presupposes, in any case, an ineffaceable event in the shared archive of a universal calendar, that is, a supposedly universal calendar, for these are - and I want to insist on this at the outset - only suppositions and presuppositions. For the index pointing toward this date, the bare act, the minimal deictic, the minimalist aim of this dating, also marks something else. The telegram of this metonymy - a name, a number - points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about." - from "Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida," by Giovanna Borridori. Excerpted in the latest Harper's magazine.

Here's where people like yours truly come in handy. We can break this shit down into something intelligible, then JUDGE IT. Ready?

What Derrida is saying:

Presuppositions about what the date "September 11" signifies are not shared by everybody. Further, we haven't wrapped our mind around "September 11" as textual label or as historical phenomenon.

That wasn't so hard. Now let's judge this observation.

Four words: barely relevant mental farting.

Sullivan is mocking how it takes Derrida a whole paragraph to express what I just expressed in under 35 words. Sullivan may also be questioning whether Derrida has a point. I'd need to read more of the interview before I make a judgement about that.

My own point is that Derrida, when you read him, isn't purveying total bullshit, but you do have to pick through the shitpile to find those juicy bits of corn and peanuts. I can say this, having watched his 1999 keynote speech and having gotten my styrofoam cup signed by the man: he's not an evil little gnome (though he is little, and does look sort of evil). He has a great sense of humor, and (if I may venture a guess) probably doesn't take himself nearly as seriously as his self-important acolytes take him. Don't worry so much about the potential harm of Derrida the man-- worry instead, as Camille Paglia does, about Derrida the movement (and on a scatological site like mine, movement is an exquisitely redolent term for what Derrida has begotten).

Deconstruction and the wider postmodernist vogue don't strike me as all that useful for much beyond lame critique of the West's shortcomings. Deconstruction is overly political, and because it's self-deconstructing (please don't put this on a level with Nagarjuna's [c. 150-250 CE] emptiness of emptiness), it doesn't seem to lend itself very well even to literary criticism, the field that arguably sees the most Derridean prick-waving. I have yet to read a truly clear, coherent deconstructive analysis (if that word even applies to what a deconstructionist does), though this may also be my fault for not trying that hard. If a reader out there is in love with Derrida or his followers and can point me to some truly amazing deconstructive works available online, I'll make the effort to read and respond-- in many cases employing the paring "technique" I used above.

Humanities academe thrives on verbiage, bloviation, the fifty-cent word. I'm guilty of engaging in this myself, I realize, but have retained enough of my wits (despite a hermeneutics course that did much to unseat my psyche) to know when I'm doing it. What I'd like to think is that Derrida-- who isn't young, and who is probably, as we speak, immersed in a Bergmanesque game of chess with Death-- is basically playing a huge joke on us all.

That would rock. It would be the biggest fuck-you to academe in history.

If the last thing Jacques Derrida says or writes is similar to Aquinas' famous quote, "All is straw" (i.e., "Everything I wrote in my life amounts to a pile of shit"-- Thomists and neo-Thomists have been living in constant denial of this ever since), I will be first in line to throw flowers on the evil gnome's casket.

But if Derrida's actually serious about all this (and if we're realistic, we have to admit the strong possibility that he is), then I'll bring along a sledgehammer to the funeral so I can whack his corpse a good one in the balls and hope he feels the blow in Sheol.

_

...You probably don't want to start. Andrew Sullivan provides a hilarious snippet of Derridean mumbo-jumbo. I'm going to a concert this evening, but I'll return to dissect this and write about Deeper Things.
_

The Minister of Agriculture sent the following:

Bigho profane and snarling
wants his damn archives
blogspot on shitlist

Damn straight it's on the shit list. I see the archives are accessible once again.

But...

The Maximum Leader wrote to say he was seeing more problems with my sidebar. Things looked normal from the Maximum Office, but upon attempting to reach my blog from Villainschloss, my sidebar once again looked cut off. This time, however, the hominid pic was OK, but everything below

WHAT CORN AND PEANUTS ARE HIDDEN IN THE WARM AND STEAMING PILE?
Vapid cultural commentary,

...had once again been shoved down to the bottom of the blog.

I'm not seeing this from my PC. Everything looks OK from here. Please write in if you're seeing what the Maximum Leader is seeing, and if you're HTML-savvy, feel free to offer suggestions. I WANT A STABLE SIDEBAR, DAMMIT. The last time such oddness took place, I reduced the size of the hominid pic and everything sprang back into place (though that still doesn't explain why everything initially looked fine right after I added the hominid pic). Is something else suddenly too bloated for my sidebar?

Do my PayPal buttons look fat to you? Be honest.
_

Blogger is still experiencing difficulties with the archives. Here's hoping they didn't get erased-- I've been mulling the possibility of an essay collection. I wrote the nice Blogger people and mentioned the problem; they wrote back that they're aware of the problem and will have it fixed as soon as possible.

If my right eyelid seems a little twitchy and I appear to be toggling my gun's safety on and off, on and off, it's just because I drank a bit too much tea and need to drain the dragon. That's all. Nothing to do with those Blogger assholes WHO WILL ALL ROT IN HELL IF I HAVE ANYTHING TO SAY ABOUT IT.

Breathe in.

Peace.

Breathe out.

Peace.

Breathe i--

KILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILL
KILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILL
KILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILL
KILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILL
KILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILL
KILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILL
KILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILL
KILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILL
KILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILL
KILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILL
KILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILL
KILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILL
KILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILL
KILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILL
KILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILL
KILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILL
KILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILL
KILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILL
KIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIILLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL


I realize I can still post blogs, but with the archives down, I wonder whether what I post will be saved. So I'd rather play it safe and not write anything even remotely meaticular. Which leaves me stewing. Stunted. Stymied. Stalled. Static. Stricken. Stultified. And as always, stinky.

How to describe the current frustration?

Imagine you're Stephen King. You've got a mind that can churn out novels at a rate of about five a year. Your fingers never stop moving. Put a pen and legal pad in your in your hands-- words spill out onto paper. Put you in front of a computer-- the screen fills within seconds. Writing, for you, is like breathing for the rest of us. Writing is shitting for the mind. It brings relief. It makes you proud. You want to point out your steaming logo-pile to other people-- look what I just made! Think you can crap bigger? And if you can't shit, it builds up. Mental constipation is the curse of every writer who cannot reify The Word.

Now imagine you're Stephen King in front of a keyboard. You've had this amazing story or essay or article gestating in the uterus of your mind. It's ready for birth. It's been kicking. You've already selected a name for it. You can feel your brain's vagina dilating, ready to gush forth with glistening literary vernix, the logo-baby, and a slurry of placental logo-afterbirth manifesting itself as errata and bad punctuation (to be cleaned up later in a second draft, of course).

You lean forward, excited. You're gonna type this baby in a fucking hour, because goddamn it, you're Stephen King, and nobody gets between you and your keyboard when your Muse has seized your wang. Your fingers hover over the keyboard--

--then your ugly son runs by with hedge clippers,

yells, "HEY, DAD!",

very deliberately snips all ten of your fingers off,

then skips away, humming "Bohemian Rhapsody":

I'm just a poor boy, from a poor family...

Whatever mood you're in at that moment--

THAT'S WHAT I'M FEELING RIGHT NOW, THANKS TO BLOGGER.

Kevin at IA refers to his service, Blog City, as "an abortion." Oh, it's much worse. Much, much worse.
_

FUCK.

Blogger once again goes off the EFF scale (Equine Fellatio Factor). The archives are no longer findable. Even my most recent posts aren't accessible through their permalinks. Try clicking the permalinks on my recent posts and you'll see what I mean. Then go down to my "Sacred and Profane" list on the sidebar and try accessing any of those posts. Same problem. This is why Blogger's staffers are soon going to find themselves strapped into chairs and forced to inhale my colon's breath.

Blogger's managers
soon to face the wrath of my
incontinent hole
_

The Maximum Leader gives us his storm update and political meditations.

The Marmot informs all you Republicans out there about a new Koreablog representing the South Korean chapter of Republicans Abroad. I have no party affiliation, being a political cynic, but might nose around a bit just to see what it's like.

Over at Free North Korea!, an article about how Western food aid is now unwelcome. Uh-huh.

The Eye at Seeing Eye Blog gives that old fart Jimmy Carter the beating of his life. Yes, I agree Carter's 1994 trip was both a mistake and a failure.

Check out Oranckay on the issue of violence against South Korean citizens-- by KOREAN military folks!

The Infidel pulls some choice quotes about Islam from The Economist. Highly recommended reading.

Stavros the WonderChicken talks about an experience that left him with a brown spot in his boxers.

The Peking Duck has a post titled "Bashing Wes Clark Goes Into Overdrive." He may have a point. Reaction has been swift, which is itself cause to ponder. But I don't think Clark is going to prove to be more than a flavor of the month. If I'm wrong, I'll tongue-kiss Britney Spears.

A very interesting post on BrainySmurf about Taiwan's "de-sinicization."

Where do Chinese Triads go when they need to get away from it all? Flying Chair has the answer. THEN HE BEAT YOU DEATH LIKE CHICKEN!

Must-read at Winds of Change: Is Scandinavia turning away from socialism?

The Marmot and the Hominid get blogrolled by Anticipatory Retaliation!

Satan's Anus links to this article titled "The UN Party vs. the US Party?"

Andrew Sullivan on "winning slowly" in Iraq-- the question of strong negative bias in news coverage. He also goes after Clark here.

Den Beste cracks on France. Not without justification. I, however, think it's going too far to label France "the enemy." We need to back away from this rhetoric and stick to calling them assholes, because that, to my mind, is a better descriptor.

Two good ones from Merde in France: (1) Muslim-caused human rights issues inside the Hexagon, and (2) Chirac's wacky denial that there's an antisemitism problem in France.

Annika also paddles Clark.

ALMOST FORGOT TO MENTION: I've decided on what my three stamps will say. As you recall, they are the du-in (header stamp, upper right corner of the page), the myeong (artist's name), and the ho (artist's nom de plume).

du-in: Dae Weon In, or "Big Hominid." Dae means "big"; weon means "beginning" or "original" or "proto"; in means "person."

myeong: Kim Dae Gye (Great Precepts Kim)

ho: Chua Su Bul (Left-handed Buddha)

Unless Mr. Seon objects to what I've selected, these will be my stamps.

OK... that's all for the evening.

Snax Chrispi.
_

If you wander over to Kyongnam to Kyonggi Journal, you see a blog-- done on Blogger software-- that's chock-full of photos but not suffering any problems. I began to wonder if my problem was the pic size for the Big Hominid (see top of sidebar... that's me). I shrank the pic. My sidebar appears to have come back-- at least, on my computer (by which I mean, the computer terminal at which I'm sitting in this PC-bahng).

So maybe we're back in business. Maybe all I needed was some graphical modesty in my sidebar. Maybe bigger isn't always better (that's what she said). Please write in if you're still seeing problems. I'll be watching out for this glitch, among others, as time goes by.
_

No blogging until further notice-- apparently, my sidebar decided it didn't like being on the side, and has slipped down to the very bottom of the blog. I don't know why this happened. Last night, after I finished adding images to the sidebar (and making some other modifications, like adding ad copy for my book), everything looked just fine. I hit the "re-publish" command several times, and the blog looked OK. Today, the Maximum Leader emailed me and told me about the sidebar problem, so I'm getting a cyberguru to work on that to force the blog to behave. If it turns out that, during my HTML surgery last night, I inadvertently zapped crucial bits of code, I'll publish a full mea culpa. In the meantime, NO BLOGGING.

_

A quick word of thanks to all you people who've been buying my book. It's been selling slowly and steadily over the past year, but this week saw an unusual increase over at Amazon. I've had to ship three extra lots in a row to the Amazon warehouse.

I'm tempted to theorize about why people prefer to buy my book through Amazon. At a guess, it's because the customer can remain anonymous; I have no idea who you are unless you write me specifically and tell me-- whereas any purchases made through PayPal tell me right away who you are since I manage order fulfillment (I need your name & address, after all, if I'm to ship the book to you).

Further, I surmise that anonymity is important because the book's dirty reputation precedes it, so for some timid folks it's a bit like ordering condoms or porn online as opposed to doing it over-the-counter.

Here's the problem. I've got the book on sale through Amazon mainly for marketing purposes, but Amazon's misnamed "Advantage" program rips me off by taking 55% of my cover price and charging me a $30 annual fee (instituted as of this year; thanks, Amazon). I'd much rather you bought my book directly through me, and I promise you I won't sneer. For God's sake, it's NOT like you're buying porn! There's only one porn-like story in the whole book, and it's a deliberate parody of all the sappy online erotica that's being churned out by bored, itchy, frumpy housewives across the nation. So aside from a measly three pages of possibly porn-like prose, Scary Spasms is free of actual smut. Unless, of course, your definition of smut is so broad that it includes the merest mention of naughty bits, hairy holes, and their excretions.

The book is gross, yes. But it's not a wank-inducer. So don't be ashamed to buy directly from me. I want your business!

Oh, wait. Maybe you're someone from my congregation. Someone morbidly curious. Ahhhh, in that case, I don't think I want to know who you are.

All the same, whether you're buying the book through Amazon or through me directly, I genuinely appreciate the business. Christmas is coming; if you have friends with unpuckered sphincters who enjoy gross, nasty, scatological, emotionally stunted humor, then buy a couple copies of Scary Spasms for them. And have them email me some reviews to stick up on the blog and/or on the Amazon entry.

Hapjang.
_

ASIAN VALUES

The Marmot gets the Hominid's attention by linking to a paper by UCLA prof Randall Peerenboom. Over at PRC, Prince Roy has this to say:

Beyond Universalism and Relativism: The Evolving Debates about 'Values in Asia' is a soon-to-be published academic article by one of the world's foremost authorities on Chinese Law, Randall Peerenboom. A professor at the UCLA School of Law, he also teaches courses in International Human Rights Law.

He's a brilliant professor and scholar, and I'm very fortunate to have taken his classes on Chinese law while at UCLA. I'm currently auditing his International Human Rights Law course, and I found the above paper of his online here (click on 'Download Document'). If you have any interest at all in China's human rights situation, you owe it to yourself to read this paper.

Roy also provides the article's abstract, which I reprint here in full (with thanks):

The growing power of the international human rights movement has unsurprisingly led to a backlash both in Asia and the West. Perhaps the most serious threat to the movement to date came when increasingly assertive Asian governments, buoyed by years of economic growth, issued the 1993 Bangkok Declaration challenging the universalism of human rights and criticizing the international human rights movement for being Western-biased. This article advances three main theses. First and foremost, it is time to move beyond universalism and relativism. The debate, often engaged in at an exceedingly abstract level, is no longer fruitful, in Asia or elsewhere. Most of the contested issues concerning human rights are too specific to be resolved by falling back on claims of universalism or relativism.

Second, the 'Asian values' debate was not a single debate, not only about values in Asia, and not only about universalism versus relativism. Rather it was a series of debates about a range of issues. It is a mistake to reduce the many complex debates to the politically charged and easily resolved issue of whether authoritarian governments (sometimes) have invoked culture to deny citizens in their countries their rights. It does a disservice to the difficulty of the issues and the increasingly sophisticated and nuanced views of those who are trying to take diversity seriously to simply dismiss them as apologists for dictators.

Third, the Asian values debates have evolved, and will continue to evolve. We are now in the second round, with no indication that many of the issues will go away any time soon. It is now time to assess where we are and where we are going. While the Bangkok declaration led to a flurry of books and articles, there has been no systematic attempt to assess the second round of debates or where the debates are likely to head in the future. This article assesses the key issues in the first two rounds of debates and then in the third and concluding section considers where the debates are likely to head next, with some suggestions as to what is needed to advance the discussion and help resolve some of the persisting impasses.

Since I owe it to myself to read this paper, I've emailed the .pdf file to myself.

I also recommend an article I saw a year ago from the Journal of Buddhist Ethics, which deals with a very similar subject. The article is titled "Why the Dalai Lama Should Read Aristotle." The link for it is here. This article is written at a certain "level of abstraction," however, so I don't know if it's for everybody. If you're into philo and axiological questions, or if you like exploring cross-cultural issues on a philosophical level, you'll have a ball.

MY STONES: DOJANG MYSTERY SOLVED

Went to Insa-dong today and found The Man, Mr. Seon (can't be older than 40; I was surprised), over at the tiny Dol Sarang shop. He was busy carving away at a stone dojang, and I asked him if he had a minute to spare. We ended up talking for a while about the three dojang with which an artist normally "signs" his works. My main goal was to solve the mystery of the du-in stamp, the one that usually appears in the upper right-hand corner (the other two, the myeong and ho stamps, generally appear at the lower left). I knew, from flipping through a Korean-Korean dictionary, that du-in comes from the Chinese words for "head/first" and "seal/stamp/print." If your eye is tracking leftward, i.e., beginning at the right side of the work, then the first red stamp you encounter will of course be the "head stamp."

The selection of what content appears on my du-in, as with ho, is something I'm supposed to think deeply about, but at the same time it doesn't have to be anything specific. If ho is like a nom de plume, the du-in can be thought of as a thematic extension of that, so it's actually quite similar in intent to the ho.

Mr. Seon has given me the assignment of reflecting on what I want my du-in to be. My tentative ho, I told him, is "Chua-su," which is from the Chinese characters for "left" and "hand," since I'm left-handed. He seemed OK with that. I was thinking about something deeper for the du-in, but everything I've come up with, related in some way to religious studies, sounds awfully pretentious, and I've even been tempted to replace "Chua-su" with something like "Yong T'o" (dragon vomit) and make the du-in something equally silly. I didn't tell Mr. Seon that, however.

The "silly" option poses problems, though, since I'm planning on making and selling respectable artwork along with dick-related Roman proverbs. The name I've chosen for my myeong (the actual name stamp) is Kim Dae Gye, or "Kim Great Precepts," which I chose partly for the phonetic resemblance to the first syllable of "Kevin." If my other stamps say things like "dragon vomit," it's unlikely that most serious Koreans will hang my work up in their houses, however serious the calligraphy. Mr. Seon, unlike many other dojang makers, is a pro at crafting names for people, not just at carving stones; he's offered to provide me with names for both ho and du-in if I come up dry. This (along with the superb quality of his craftsmanship) is what ratchets his prices up higher than your typical dojang maker. I'll be paying 150,000 won for the set of three stamps, and have requested that one of the three be a "natural" stone, i.e., a rock that will leave an unevenly elliptical print on the page, which adds a bit of naturalism to the work.

A quick remark about my chosen name, Kim Dae Gye. As Brian the Vulture pointed out a while back, there's a naming rule involving dollim-ja, in which same-sex siblings all share one Chinese character in their names. I remarked on this many posts ago (here) without using the Korean term (because, to be frank, I didn't know it! Thanks, Brian).

I gave my two little brothers, David and Sean, Korean names. Sean was named first: Kim Dae San, "Kim Big Mountain," because san sounds like "Sean" and Sean's big, like a mountain (though ever since he started that Atkins Diet, he's more like an eroding hill these days). David was named only recently, when I had a dojang crafted just for him. He's Kim Dae Bi, literally, Kim Big Wings/Flight. The guy who made David's dojang a couple weeks ago said that dae bi can be read non-literally as "great success," and since David's an aspiring actor, I thought this might help his future take flight. Also, dae bi sounds a bit like "David."

So the dollim-ja is dae, big/great. All three brothers have to share this. That's why, with two out of three characters in my own name already decided for me, I only had to worry about the third character. Gye means a bunch of things, including "precepts" (as understood in Buddhism), but also "commandments" (as understood by Korean Christians; the Heston movie "Ten Commandments" is called "Ship Gye" in Sino-Korean) . So with this Buddhist-Christian notional link, and a phonetic resemblance to the first syllable of "Kevin," gye seemed like the right character to stick in the blank space.

I'm not completely settled on "Chua-su" as my ho/nom de plume. I might make that the du-in, or I might just chuck it completely. Korean artists are allowed to show a great deal of individuality in their stamps, and I'd like to remain in keeping with this tradition. So I'm open to suggestions from friends and family, from people who've been following this blog a while and think they have some insight into my personality-- if you think you know some nouns and/or adjectives (in English, I mean) that might make for interesting two- or three-character combinations, feel free to email me (bighominid@hotmail.com, "Hairy Chasms" in the subject line!). Silly/vulgar submissions also welcome.

I couldn't leave Insa-dong without grabbing another brush. Bought a tiny one for 6000 won. That'll be mainly for signatures, but also for fine detail as I branch out into drawing tigers, dragons, and more Bodhidharmas.

In other news...

An acquaintance from Beliefnet has written me a few emails and started me thinking about writing another long religious post. More on this as the mental juices burble.

NB: If you read this post earlier and you know Chinese, you'll have noted that I wrote "Usu" for "left hand," which is wrong. "U" is the character for the direction "right." "Chua" is "left." Yes, when it comes to hanja, I still don't know my left from my right. It occurs to me that I did in fact show the "U" character to Mr. Seon earlier... damn, what must he have been thinking? After all, I told him I'm left-handed. Heh. Oops.
_

[With thanks to Cobb.]


You belong in Starship Troopers. Your idea of a
good time is bouncing across an alien
battlefield blasting the foes of humanity into
extinction.


Which Heinlein Book Should You Have Been A Character In?
brought to you by Quizilla


Without entirely understanding how, I seem to have PLACED AN IMAGE ON MY BLOG. This is a red-letter day.

Also via Cobb: Mapquest guides you to Mordor!

Drudge links to an article claiming that US forces have been negotating with Saddam for several days. Can this be true?

Everyone else has reported this already, but here ya' go.

My hometown's a disaster area.

ClarkWatch is more fun than ArnoldWatch, since the recall seems in (temporary?) limbo. Annika has the goods on Clark. Andrew Sullivan does, too. While I'm at it, let me compliment Annika on her blog's new look. I'm a big believer in aesthetic minimalism, but when it comes to blogging, I think this is mainly because I'm still HTML-challenged. Annika's obviously more of a pro at HTMLing, which makes her blog's current look more of an actual choice. Kudos.

Then again, I remember Mrs. Rogstad, my troll of a second-grade teacher, forcing me to stand in the corner one day because I couldn't explain why I'd done my drawing (a picture of my family) in pencil instead of in color. Ever since then, I've been a strictly black-and-white cartoonist (buy a copy of Scary Spasms in Hairy Chasms to see examples of my work). Maybe I've been rebelling against Mrs. Rogstad all this time.

I'll be going into the art district of Insa-dong on Monday (hey, it's Monday right NOW!), to talk to that dude at Dol Sarang about the dojang I need to make. I'm expecting this to set me back a couple hundred bucks.

(By the way, my Korean buddy gives cackling approval to my Chinese formulation of the Roman proverb... I'll be giving him a calligraphic hanging for free, though I doubt his parents, should they ever visit his pad, will approve of "In a time of misfortune, a big penis is useless" hanging proudly on his wall.)

Once the dojang are purchased, I'll be doing a ton of calligraphy, big and small. And it will all be on sale. I'm thinking that $45 plus shipping, which is the current rate I've set on PayPal, may be a bit much if I'm not framing the works, large though they be. Your thoughts? More on this as it happens.

YES.

He's "Ha-li Bo-te" in China, apparently.

Bill Maher was among the first to speak out against the recall election. Polls seem to indicate that folks are coming around to his point of view.

A bit of painful Korean humor.

All for this evening, folks. Gotta get my ugly sleep.
_

That's a lie: it's actually after midnight and I just got to this PC-bahng. It's technically Sunday morning, and my time/date stamp will show this when I'm done typing.

A review of "Bulletproof Monk"? Nah. Not much to say. The Maximum Leader summed it up a few months back when he said it was "brain candy." That's about all it was. Not much actual Buddhism in the flick; the action wasn't all that well filmed, and the cute pairing of Chow Yun Fat and Seann William Scott was about the only ingenious thing the movie had to offer. There's the uncomfortable political irony of Chow Yun Fat, a Communist Chinese, playing a Tibetan monk (as Hollywood knows, Asians all look the same). There's the further strangeness that the movie is about Chow's battle with a group of evil Nazis (Nazis!?) who are trying to steal the magic scroll Chow is guarding. My fellow viewers, Jang-woong and his wife Bo-hyun, both decided it'd be better just to forget the movie straight away. That won't be hard; it was, after all, brain candy-- it'll melt away soon enough. Meantime, the best thing about "Monk" was the preview for another "Matrix" rip-off called "Equilibrium," which looks like it might be very interesting for the fight choreography, a specially-made-for-that-movie fighting style called "gunkata" that involves fists, kicks, swords, and guns.

Before the film this evening, we ate dinner at a golbaengi-jip. Golbaengi is a type of sea snail (turban shell?), fat and juicy. It was my first time eating them, but as a seafood-scarfing half-Korean who's spent time in France, I'm all over escargot and other molluscs (except the dreaded oyster; I can't stand oysters, though I love clams). These golbaengi were delicious. They arrived in a bowl of chopped green onions, red pepper sauce, and strips of dried fish. We were in the Ch'ungmuro district, which features a "sea snail row," a street of golbaengi restos that vary in quality. Jang-woong and Bo-hyun love this particular resto because the snails are prepared especially well, cooked to just the right softness, resistant without becoming chewy. Dinner progressed in stages; when you eat all the snails, the adjumma comes by with a load of guksu (noodles) to dump into your onions and red sauce-- Korean spaghetti! They also bring out a plate of scrambled eggs (cooked, meticulously folded and sliced-- a preparation familiar to anyone who's eaten kimbap). The eggs, according to Jang Woong, were to counteract the spicy red pepper sauce. Jang-woong and Bo-hyun had beer with their snails; I don't drink, good Muslim that I am, so I opted for Pepsi. I'm pretty sure that beer goes better with snails, just as it does with pizza (or so I've heard).

Something much more interesting than "Bulletproof Monk":

A post from Big White Guy about the remarks he gets as he strolls along to his taiji and sword form training sessions: "Ha ha ha! Chinese kung fu!"

I thought they called it wushu on the mainland...

Another thing I've been keeping an eye on is Japan's shift in attitude thanks to North Korea's assholery. The Marmot has the goods this time. Watch what happens in the coming 12 months. Japan doesn't like NK's attitude. Can you blame the Japanese? Hell, I'd argue the US needs to use Japan as its first line of antimissile defense-- immediate launch detection and quick interception, baby!

I've liked John Derbyshire's NRO articles on occasion, though I much prefer Victor Davis Hanson if I'm reading NRO conservatives. The Peking Duck asks whether the Derb is eeeeeeevil. I think the Derb is an asshole when it comes to the matter of homosexuality, though he's made good calls elsewhere. Is this reason to treat him with blanket dismissiveness? I don't think so, but it's definitely reason to keep your brain inside your skull when reading him. In this particular case, the Duck is linking to an Andrew Sullivan post, and I have to agree with Sullivan when he calls Derb a "bigot."

Internet Ronin on behind-the-scenes issues in the California recall election debate.

Flying Chair ("beat you death like chicken") posts an octopus joke.

Anticipatory Retaliation thinks in military terms about suicide bombers, and notes they're very precise weapons, but target choice is "piss poor." Choice text:

Historical examples have shown that rising body counts, particularly those delivered more or less willy-nilly, do not always result in the desired political effect. In fact, the most effective military campaigns to make effective use of wholesale slaughter have largely achieved their goals by simply shocking the other side into abject systemic collapse (e.g. Hiroshima and Nagasaki versus Dresden and Cologne) rather than creating ire over dribs and drabs of dead civilians.

Although it is one of the most foolish of analytical errors, I ask my reader's indulgence for a minute to play "What if the tables were reversed?" In other words, what if the U.S. were using F-15Es to drop laser-guided munitions steered onto target by U.S. troops holding laser designators, on to busses or cafes in, let's say, Pyongyang? Not many, maybe just one every week or so, with an occasional sniper attack. Would we expect their regimes to buckle? Would I be waiting around with baited breath for Kim Jong Il to call me saying "Well, hell, we didn't think you were so serious you wouldn't be willing to blow up a bus!! Of course we'll get rid of our nukes, renounce our claim to power and end our illegal occupation of North Korea!" No. I probably would not be waiting for that phone call.

So, at the end of the day, the biggest problem with effectiveness of suicide bombing is not necessarily the tactic itself - for it has worked in the past, but rather the problem of "Refighting the Last War" and failing to understand the fundamental psychological shift that is in progress. Once the populace tends to regard this as a warfighting exercise, the utility of civilian casualties drops markedly.

A thought-bone on which to gnaw this evening. Morning. Whatever it is.

D'oh-- the Clark-bashing gears up. Andrew Sullivan quotes.

Andrew Sullivan directs our attention to a hilarious animation called The Moon Song. Listen to it all the way through, and you'll hear the name of a certain popular Koreablogger mentioned, along with a gallery of objects, foods, and animals we like.

Wanna start a Caucasian Club? I don't think I'll be following this too closely, but it sure as hell raises all the usual interesting questions.

Glenn posts on LA superficiality, tits, and fat rolls. He also hates LA's "driving fucktards," and other SoCal problems.

Grrrrrrr.

One of my favorite actors (uh, we won't talk about his rap career) gets sued.

Want a more uplifting monk tale? Here's one from Salon: a Japanese Buddhist priest of the Tendai (Chn. "T'ien T'ai") sect recently completed a near-25,000-mile devotional trek (it involved going around and around a lot)--

...an ancient running ritual in the remote Japanese mountains that took seven years and covered a distance equivalent to a trip round the globe, wearing only a flowing white robe and flimsy straw sandals.

Worthy of a Hindu saint, that. Interestingly, the monk said this:

"I entrusted everything to God. I am satisfied."

One reason why I beat my head against the wall about certain Beliefnet Buddhists (and, by extension, the Western Buddhist converts in America whom they represent) is the BBs' stubborn contention that "Buddhism doesn't talk about God." I fully realize that this monk, Genshin Fujinami, probably has a thoroughly Buddhist understanding of ultimate reality and therefore isn't referring to the Judeo-Christian deity, or to any deity, per se. But this doesn't preclude him from using God-language. The BB contention, completely unjustified if you know anything about how Buddhism is lived and practiced in Asia, is that "Buddhism isn't theistic" or "Buddhism admits no God"-- the direct implication being that any Buddhist who resorts to God-language needs to have his head checked. "Real" Buddhists just don't talk like that. This contention is ridiculous on its surface; it gets more ridiculous as you look into the matter.

The UN urges North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Wanna bet on what NK's response will be, and which finger will be extended in the replying gesture?

Some Korean officials are upbeat about Typhoon Maemi's damage.

On the other hand...

An editorial about the Millennium Democratic Party's breakup has a passage that gets my vote as Hilarious Understatement of the Year:

It certainly is better for them to part with each other than to scuffle in public as they often did in the past. How could they exchange abusive words and blows when they were supposed to represent their constituencies in doing the vaunted lawmaking job?

Now that they have finally decided to split up, they are advised to bury the hatchet, seek a peaceful divorce and compete against each other in goodwill. That will be the least they can do for damage control.

For shame, boys, for shame!

Were the pilots defecting to North Korea? Heh.

A JoongAng Ilbo article on the burdens of education.

Korea still has a long way to go if tattoos are "frowned upon."

The Middle East Times has an article about Egyptian fence-sitting.

Also in the ME Times: "Arafat Must Live." Interesting quote:

The decision legitimizing Arafat's assassination is in itself a far-reaching political act. It is intended to get the Israeli and international public accustomed to the idea. What used to sound like a crazy plot by extreme fanatics now has the air of a legitimate political process, with only the time and mode of implementation still open.

Anyone familiar with Ariel Sharon can see how things will develop from now on. He will wait for his opportunity. It may come any minute, or after a week, a month, or even a year. He is patient. When he decides to do something, he is ready to wait. But rest assured – he won't deviate from his goal.

So when will the planned assassination be carried out? When some big suicide attack will take place in Israel, one so big that an extreme reaction will be understood by the Americans, too. Or when something happens somewhere to divert world attention. Or when some dramatic event, something comparable to the destruction of the Twin Towers, makes Bush furious.

The apocalyptic prediction:

The Palestinian Authority will disappear. Israel will take over all the Palestinian territories, with all the economic and human stress involved. The occupation – which allowed Israel a free hand in the territories with the world paying the bills - will be over.

Violence will reign supreme. It will be the sole language of both peoples. In Jerusalem and Ramallah, Haifa and Hebron, Tulkarem and Tel Aviv, fear will stalk the streets. Every mother who sends her children to school will be consumed by worry until they come back. Terror on this side and on that side, an ever-widening spiral of violence, automatic and incessant escalation.

The earthquake will not be limited to the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. The whole Arab world will erupt. Arafat the shahid, the martyr, the symbol, will become an all-Arab, all-Muslim mythological figure. His name will become a battle cry for all revolutionaries from Indonesia to Morocco, a slogan for all religious and nationalist underground organizations.

The earth will tremble under the feet of all the Arab regimes. Compared to Arafat – the ultimate hero - all the kings, emirs and presidents will look like traitors and mercenaries. When one falls, the domino effect will go into action.

But we're not done!

And the people of Israel? The poor, brainwashed, despairing and apathetic people do not intervene. The silent, bleeding majority behave as if all this does not concern them and their children. They are following Sharon as the children followed the Pied Piper, right into the river.

This thundering silence is disastrous. In order to prevent the disaster, it is Israelis' duty to break it.

Perhaps most significantly, re: the piece's author:

Uri Avnery is an Israeli journalist and peace activist.

And here's a sinister ME Times article claiming that the Shiites are simply (and patiently) playing a waiting game with American forces. Watch out, Chief Wiggles. Those smiling brown people might not be as nice as you think.

Sigh...

I think I'll be adding the Jerusalem Post to my blogroll in the next few minutes. Are they any good, Mike?

A couple Koreabloggers have claimed to get hard-ons about totalitarian art. Well, wank away, gentlemen, because Saddam is for sale.

From the Scotsman: "Calls are being made for a full inquiry into how a 29-year-old man was able to commit suicide by setting himself alight in a crowded hospital foyer." Worthy of an "ER" episode.

The incredible blind Scottish golf champion!

Even the Iraqi tigers hate us. Therefore they must die. (Scotsman)

L'Express offers an article on MODERATE MUSLIMS IN FRANCE. First, let me translate the article's boldface subtitle. It says:

Under repeated assault from Islamists, republican principles are in retreat-- in school as well as in public life. In this debate, which divides both government and the opposition, one hears only the voices of the most radical Muslims who are, however, fewer in number than the moderates. It's to these last that L'Express yields the floor...

The article's title is "La laïcité face à l'islam," or "Secularity vis-a-vis Islam."

Two paragraphs worth your attention (if you read French, I recommend the whole thing):

[with regard to a 1905 French law separating church and state]

No religion has easily accepted being relegated to the private sphere, especially not the Catholic Church, which has enjoyed a tradition of political control. It took decades to admit the principle of separation, which views common law as the fruits of a human debate: free for anyone to participate in it while being internally guided by his own religion. This freedom of conscience represented progress, including progress for religious thought, as Catholic lay intellectuals like Marc Sangnier, Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier recognized later on; Mounier even rejected the notion of a "Christian democracy."

Nothing better expresses the retreat of a secularist sensibility than the neverending polemics about the veil [Hominid's note: this has been a huge controversy in France for years: can Muslim students wear their veils in public school? (etc.)] that refer to this or that verse of the Koran to affirm or deny its obligatory character: this is done precisely to force into public discussion theological arguments it [normally] doesn't consider. Just as, nowadays, we no longer grant any public authority to papal encyclicals to legislate matters like contraception, abortion, or the opening of shops on Sunday.

Allez, lisez!

If you get past the ego-wanking, Ken Mondschein of Corporate Motherfucker has an interesting (if relatively low-content) article on martial arts. Best thing about it is a link to FightingArts.com, which I think I'll be sticking on the blogroll. But Ken's got a point about self-discipline. I've been skirting the edge of plunging back into the martial arts world for years; a recent visit to a hapkidojang near where I live has got me pondering whether I should take the leap now, or wait until I've lost more weight & gotten more fit overall. My Korean friends say, "Do it now."

A challenge to the Maximum Leader (and/or other conservatives who may be reading this): this is a link to a post called "Defeat the Right in Three Minutes." It makes some interesting points in a very clear, Bill Whittle-like manner, even providing a new moniker for conservatives, "a moniker they will never shake, and never live down." I'd love to see a concise response to this that actually addresses the points made in the post (i.e., "This dreck doesn't even deserve a response" is not acceptable). Anyone up to the challenge?

Apparently this article pissed off some prominent blogosphere Republicans, including the infamous Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler. A fisking of the Rottweiler's response is featured here. You might want to read this so you don't make the Rottweiler's mistakes in crafting your own response. Or maybe you'll feel the Rottweiler made no mistakes. I don't know if that's good policy.

And that's it for this evening, now that it's after 4AM (4:10, by my watch; the time stamp refers to when I initially hit "post" before actually publishing the blog).
_