I’ve been away for a while, mostly because I’m working about 55 hours/week in order to keep my business afloat. It will get worse as the holidays approach! My apologies for not posting in so long. Thanks to all for the occasional tap on the shoulder! 
October 5, 2009
Yet Another Abandoned WordPress Blog?
August 4, 2009
Bill Clinton Leaves North Korea with Detained U.S. Journalists
Now, how did Clinton manage to do that?
From Reuters:
SEOUL (Reuters) – Former U.S. President Bill Clinton left North Korea on Wednesday with two American journalists whose release he secured in a meeting with the hermit state’s leader, possibly opening the way to direct nuclear disarmament talks.
President Barack Obama called the families of Laura Ling and Euna Lee to express relief at their release, but a U.S. official said Pyongyang would face deeper isolation if it continued “provocative behavior” that has included recent nuclear and missile tests.
North Korea had agreed in advance that Clinton’s trip — which the White House called a private one — would not be linked to the nuclear issue, said the official, speaking in Washington.
Analysts said Washington faced a risky task of trying to convince Pyongyang to give up dreams of becoming a nuclear weapons power without being seen to reward it for repeated military acts or ignoring the demands of others in the region.
“President Clinton has safely left North Korea with Laura Ling and Euna Lee. They are en route to Los Angeles where Laura and Euna will be reunited with their families,” Clinton spokesman Matt McKenna said in a statement.
The two, who work for Current TV, an American TV outlet co-founded by Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, were arrested in March for illegally crossing into the North from China.
They were each sentenced to 12 years hard labor in June in what many analysts said was aimed largely at trying to give Pyongyang some leverage with Washington.
Television footage showed the two journalists wearing green and red shirts and carrying luggage, greeted by Clinton as they boarded a plane. Clinton put his hand over his heart and then gave a final salute to North Korean officials at the airport.
WHAT WAS DISCUSSED?
Financial markets in Tokyo and Seoul largely ignored the visit although some South Korean traders said it did add a more positive atmosphere to what has been a string of negative reports over the North in recent months.
Washington denied North Korea’s claim that Clinton had brought a message from Obama.
But there were questions about what Clinton had discussed with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il beyond the fate of the two reporters and what North Korea might expect in return for their pardon. The U.S. official said Clinton likely expressed his view on North Korean denuclearization in talks with Kim.
In North Korean media photographs of the meeting, Kim was smiling and looked in reasonable health after speculation he was seriously ill. Kim was suspected of suffering a stroke last year.
“Regardless of what the U.S. administration says, the Clinton and Kim meeting signals the start of direct bargaining … It’s a matter of time when U.S.-North bilateral talks begin,” South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo daily said in an editorial.
Nicholas Szechenyi, Northeast Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the biggest risk was that North Korea would demand a similar U.S. approach to the nuclear issue.
North Korea last year quit five years of on-and-off six-party negotiations with the United States, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea and has since suggested it will only talk with Washington.
“We’ve seen this pattern before and it could send a very bad signal to the region if the administration suddenly shifts to a bilateral approach,” said Szechenyi.
“That is a cause for concern in Seoul and Tokyo.”
South Korea and Japan both have politically sensitive concerns about citizens held in North Korea.
REGIONAL CONCERNS
“I think the U.S. should resolutely reject bilateral talks. They won’t be accepted by other East Asian countries,” said North Korea expert Zhang Liangui at the Central Party School in China.
“If these bilaterals touch on regional security issues, at the very least Japan and South Korea would be dissatisfied. If China is sidelined, it would also have an adverse reaction.”
Pyongyang, craving the recognition that direct negotiations with the Obama administration would bring, painted the meeting between Clinton and Kim as high-level talks.
“(The two) had candid and in-depth discussions on the pending issues between the DPRK (North Korea) and the U.S. in a sincere atmosphere and reached a consensus of views on seeking a negotiated settlement of (the two journalists),” the North’s KCNA news agency reported.
In comments that could well make U.S. officials wince, KCNA said: “Clinton expressed words of sincere apology to Kim Jong Il for the hostile acts committed by the two American journalists against the DPRK after illegally intruding into it.”
The U.S. official said Clinton did not offer any apology from Washington.
Clinton, husband of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was the highest-level American to visit the reclusive state since his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, went there in 2000.
June 30, 2009
The History of the Asian Fetish
From Slate Magazine:
The Birth, and Death, of the Asian Babe
The sordid history of the sexually exotic East.
Written by Johann Hari
The porn of the Western world is saturated with the belief that Eastern women are more sexy and sultry and slutty. The most googled brand in the porn world is “Asian Babes.” The very phrase evokes legions of solitary sweaty teenage boys in basements across America and Europe. But this stereotype did not emerge with the World Wide Web. It originated with worldwide empires. Suppressed beneath these casual flicks of the wrist, there are five centuries of colonial exploitation screaming to be heard.
In his strange new book about how two different sexual worlds met—and transformed each other in ways that continue to this day—veteran journalist Richard Bernstein distills decades’ worth of research into succinct stories. But only a hundred or so pages in, the scent of testosterone and spent semen soaked into its pages becomes bewildering.
The story is fascinating. In the 16th century, Portuguese seamen began leaving a Christian fundamentalist Europe to sail the seas in search of resources and spices to pillage. But as soon as they arrived in Goa, Malacca, Sumatra, and Japan, they also discovered an alternative sexual world where all their repressed longing could roam free. “On one side,” Bernstein writes, “was Christian monogamy in which sex was shrouded in religious meaning and prohibition, and regarded as sinful when enjoyed out of marriage. On the other side was an Eastern culture wherein sex was strictly organized, especially when it came to women, but where it was disassociated from both sin and love.”
Where the West tied sex to the marriage bed and felt ashamed when it broke free, the East unleashed its libido in the harem, the brothel, and a smorgasbord of sexual options.
“In the East,” as Bernstein puts it in gushing terms, “it was taken for granted there would always be a certain reserve of women, often supreme models of beauty, cultivation and charm, whose assigned role in life was to provide sexual pleasure for men.” The Asian babe as dream-object was born. Rudyard Kipling wrote one of the first rhapsodies to her: “I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!/ On the road to Mandalay.”
Since the 1970s—when Edward Said wrote his classic Orientalism, exposing the myriad ways in which the West had patronized and stereotyped the East—such fawning has been dismissed as exploitative, racist distortion.
Western merchants depicted the East as a den of sin and depravity, according to Said, in order to justify colonizing the land and taking whatever else suited them, from spices to resources to women. But Bernstein argues that “the eroticized vision of the East carries a hard kernel of truth, which the followers of Said are loath to acknowledge.”
In the East—a diffuse term that Bernstein uses to describe Africa, Asia, and the Middle East—Western colonists really did find a different sexual culture. Prostitution really was out in the open, stripped of the silence and shame that coated it in Europe. Political leaders really did have vast harems of young women to pluck from. Men really weren’t expected to be monogamous. While Westerners could be condescending and racist in their descriptions of this culture, they were seeing something real.
The white colonists reacted to this discovery in two conflicting ways. Half stripped off and joined in, and half reached for their Bibles and began to call down the Lord. Bernstein is better at describing the first group, in long swooping paragraphs; I could have lived without the endless references to “plum-sized breasts” and “tiny hips.” Europe became obsessed with the sultan’s harems of nubile young virgins, buying “exposes” of this “filth” by the shipload. When you read excerpts now, they are comic Freudian projections of Europe’s suppressed sexuality. Beneath the moral clucking, there is a frenzied longing in the descriptions of how teen virgins would turn to lesbianism as they waited for the sultan to pick them out. Europe indulged in a collective wet dream over free love in unfree lands.
Bernstein focuses on two examples of Western men who dived into this new freedom, believing it superior to the muffling back home: Gustave Flaubert, the extraordinary French novelist, and Richard Burton, the British explorer. They considered the East to be filled with sexual artists who had perfected one of life’s great pleasures. Flaubert enjoyed this new freedom in private, while Burton became an evangelist. He wrote home about whole new sexual practices, reporting with awe that a female partner “can sit astraddle upon a man and can provoke the venereal orgasm, not by wriggling or moving but by tightening and loosening the male member with the muscles of her privities.” Burton provided the British with the first English translation of the Kama Sutra and campaigned for sex education back home.
But Burton was unusual. Most of those who went east tried to keep their sexual exploration discreet—until, that is, the Americans joined in the European pastime as the 20th century approached. Their arrival was heralded in neon lights. The story of American penetration of the East was first captured—and stored—by Puccini in his opera Madame Butterfly. The story is stark. A typical American military officer named Pinkerton, stationed in Nagasaki in the late 19th century, arranges to buy the hand of Cio-Cio-San, a 15-year-old local girl. She gives birth to his child after he has left, and she pines for three terrible years. When he finally returns, his American wife at his side, he insists he will take his child. Cio-Cio-San cuts her own throat, leaving an American flag flapping silently in her baby’s hand.
A million Pinkertons flooded into Vietnam, and few bothered with sham marriages. They were plunged from the Puritan heartlands into a place where sex was guilt-free, and American culture was transformed forever. Half the U.S. servicemen in Nam lost their virginity there, and half a million mixed-race babies were left behind, treated as outcasts. In a strange twist of history, the advance of free love may have owed as much to LBJ and Nixon’s war as to the hippies and libertines.
Bernstein deserves credit for raising a tortured subject from which it is easy to avert our gaze. And yet, and yet … there is something deeply uncomfortable about a book that seems at times so complicit in the very exploitation it aims to scrutinize. It’s not just the tone, though Bernstein’s oblique confession to having his first sexual experiences in an Asian brothel is creepy. It is the fetid attitude toward women.
Bernstein’s view of the role of women in his story of cultural and sexual collision is nuanced to the point of being myopic. He is describing men who went to foreign places, toppled their leaders, stole their resources, and then tossed their women a few pennies to spread their legs. Yet he writes: “From the standpoint of the currently fashionable political morality, [this behavior] appears very bad, an illustration of the unfairness of colonial rule. … But let’s try to see the erotic history of the West and the East as part of a great human pageant, one in which the women, the girls and the boys involved were not necessarily passive.”
Wait, why should we try? Bernstein’s own attempts to claim that the women were involved in choosing their fate are extraordinarily feeble. He tells a story about an Arab queen choosing to have sex with a Western traveler, but how typical was she? He concedes that “much of the sexual opportunity presented by the East has always been, and still is, based on exploitation and injustice.” But he goes on to defend the men who took part in that exploitation. Of Burton and Flaubert, he says, “They used no force; they abused no children; they did what they were invited to.”
But this is not true, even on the evidence he offers. They could act as they did only because their governments had terrorized the population into acquiescence with massive violence. Flaubert talked about “the terror” that “everyone displays” in the presence of white men, and when a prepubescent boy offered him his mother “to fuck” for a fee, Flaubert assessed the situation as “excellent.” Burton described the sexual habits of slave girls, almost certainly from personal experience. How is having sex with slaves or people who are terrorized by your countrymen, or who are sunk in poverty created by a long colonial rape, simply doing “what they were invited to”? How could these women have said no?
This newfound sexual freedom was freedom for men alone. The women involved were often literally enslaved or imprisoned against their will in harems and brothels or kept down by systematic violence if they tried to reject their role as sex toys for men. When I reported on sex trafficking in Bangladesh, I went to one of the “harems” Bernstein turns moist and sweaty over. The brothel on the border with India was a mess of rusty tin huts with sticky mattresses. The women there had mostly been stolen from their families as young teenagers and imprisoned ever since, drugged, and forced to pleasure men for a pittance. The woman who is most deeply scarred onto my memory is Beauty, then a 34-year-old. Sold to the brothel at 13, she is still there now; she will die there.
It is hard to escape the feeling that Bernstein has written this book in part to stem a guilty conscience about his own past. Every admission that this system was built on suppressing women seems to be wrung out of him in passing; every experience of male liberation is described with approving ejaculations.
This is, in the end, a darker and bleaker story than the one Bernstein wants to tell. European and American men really did find sexual liberation in the East. Some returned home and helped to sexually liberate their own countries in ways we all benefit from today. But the freedom came at the cost of exploiting an extreme form of patriarchy in the countries they went to, and to imply that the beaten-down, deeply deprived women wanted it is revolting.
Bernstein’s story—and ours—ends with a strange irony. With the sole and ongoing exception of Southeast Asia, in this sexual conflict East and West have swapped sides—suddenly and definitively. “The very places where Western men in the past sought pleasures and excitements are today amongst the most sexually conservative places on the planet.” Burton saw the Arab Middle East as a font of sexual freedom; today, he would be beheaded there for acting as he did.
In most of the East—in Africa, China, India, and the Middle East—this flip happened very fast. In the mid-19th century, “most of the world still subscribed to the harem culture, and in only the few small countries of the West, the small peninsular domain of Christendom, did a different attitude prevail.” By the end of the century, it was the other way around.
How did this happen? Frustratingly, Bernstein doesn’t offer many convincing explanations, but he does note that the colonial East attracted more missionaries than Burtons in the end. In Somerset Maugham’s novel Rain, a missionary complains, “I think [it] was the most difficult part of my work, to instill in the natives a sense of sin.” But they did. They succeeded. They soaked the East in a Western sense of sin, and saw it freeze up into a new frigidity.
So the Whore of Babylon has long since hitched up her skirts and moved to Amsterdam. The long colonial dream of the Eastern girl who won’t—or can’t—say no is losing its remaining links to reality, one country at a time.
Somebody needs to tell the world’s masturbators: The days of the Asian babe splayed on the road to Mandalay are over.
June 22, 2009
Gays are Not “Godless Christian Bashers”
Religious study: Gays not “godless” “Christian bashers”
Written by Joe Garofoli, SF Gate Politics Blog
This breaking news in from The Barna Group — a chronicler of religious life and habits, particularly of the Christian variety: Gay folks’ attitudes about spirituality aren’t much different from straight folks. These and other “surprising insights” were in Barna’s spiritual profile of gays released Monday. In it was a bit of a political heeding for gay-bashers:
“People who portray gay adults as godless, hedonistic, Christian bashers are not working with the facts,” wrote George Barna Monday. “A substantial majority of gays cite their faith as a central facet of their life, consider themselves to be Christian, and claim to have some type of meaningful personal commitment to Jesus Christ active in their life today.”
“It is interesting to see that most homosexuals, who have some history within the Christian Church, have rejected orthodox biblical teachings and principles — but, in many cases, to nearly the same degree that the heterosexual Christian population has rejected those same teachings and principles,” Barna said. “Although there are clearly some substantial differences in the religious beliefs and practices of the straight and gay populations, there may be less of a spiritual gap between straights and gays than many Americans would assume.”
Now there will be some quibbling with a couple of Barna’s assumptions. Like how Barna pegs the LGBT population at about 3 percent of the adult population. No, he doesn’t believe in the 1-in-10 stat, but then again, LGBT population scholar Gary Gates says it’s more like 5 percent, depending how you count.
That aside, the Barnanians found that “out of the 20 faith-oriented attributes examined in the Barna study, there were just a few in which there were no significant differences between the heterosexual and homosexual populations.”
Hmm. “No significant differences between the heterosexual and homosexual”(s)? Does Donald Wildmon know about this?
One big diff, according to the study: “While seven out of every ten heterosexuals (71 percent) have an orthodox, biblical perception of God, just 43 percent of homosexuals do. In fact, an equal percentage possesses a pantheistic view about deity — i.e., that ‘God’ refers to any of a variety of perspectives, such as personally achieving a state of higher consciousness or maximized personal potential, or that there are multiple gods that exist, or even that everyone is god.”
Another diff: “Heterosexuals were twice as likely as homosexuals to strongly agree that the Bible is totally accurate in all of the principles it teaches.”
And in the timeliness is next to godliness (OK, and cleanliness) dept: On Monday a crew of organizations supporting same sex marriage are launching their Get Engaged Tour of California — a pump-priming tour of the state in advance of an expected 2010 ballot measure campaign expected later this year. We told you about it a while back. Faith leaders will be prominently featured on this tour, as opposed to last year’s anti-Proposition 8 campaign, when they were largely invisible.
“Our faith-based values require us to love our neighbor as ourselves,” said Pastor Samuel Chu, of California Faith for Equality. “Gay and lesbian people are our neighbors and they should be able to enjoy the dignity, respect and commitment that come with marriage.
