Another New Year

catastrophe, loss, tears, fears, love, heartache and wonder

but somehow, please, may all be well

And all that jazz...

New posts are just below this "greeting card"...scroll a little, read a little and happy holidaze

(12/27/05)
Susanne Osthoff, a German national and Muslim convert who was kidnapped by Sunnis in Iraq, then rescued by the German government, is now planning to return to Iraq to continue her humanitarian work. She described her captors as "poor people" and said she "cannot blame them for kidnapping her, as they cannot enter (Baghdad's heavily fortified) Green Zone to kidnap Americans."

Berlin says they might not be inclined to rescue her if she were endangered again. It gets even more touchy with speculation that the early release of a Lebanese Hezbollah member who was serving a life sentence in Germany for the 1985 hijacking of a TWA jet and the murder of a US Navy Seal, which occurred around the same time as Osthoff's rescue, may have been some kind of hostage trade. This infuriated the U.S. State Department, who wanted him extradited.

Is Osthoff dedicated or nuts? A dupe, a martyr, international bait? You can read the rest of this tangled tale here --there's a bit more to it, of course, and make your own decision.

(12/28/05)
UPDATE
This woman's story gets stranger as the days tick by. She now claims she never said she's returning to Iraq, but nobody knows where she is, she hasn't even called her mother, according to a thorough roundup of news, opinions and coverage by Spiegel Online's English Site. Oh and she has either said or intimated that her kidnappers were associated with al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to a Reuters report via Red Orbit. It is hard to say whether there are translation problems clouding these extremely suspicious statements or whether she is being both leading and evasive. But there is definitely more going on here.

The Italians may have a perspective on international relations that has escaped less civilized nations.

ROME (Reuters) - Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi sent his Swedish counterpart 24 bottles of Italian wine on Tuesday, saying it was to help him recover from having to drink British wine at a European Union summit last week.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair hosted the summit in Brussels and offered Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson and his other guests Welsh white wine and English red wine.

"(Persson) was so aghast at the English wines at the summit that I promised to send him some of our wines," Berlusconi told a group of foreign journalists, adding that he had dispatched 24 bottles of cabernet sauvignon. [And here I thought cabernet was French. Mon dieu! ed.]

"Up to 24 bottles is fine. More than that is corruption," Berlusconi joked.

Now that I've taken my sneering little dig (previous post) at China's proclivity for cover-ups, let me vent about my homeland's, this shameful administration's current atrocities in this respect. Lest my own bilious prose obscure any sense I might accidentally make in my outrage, let me instead offer something I read today as an example of how elegantly and authoritatively this can be put forth:

...the painful truth is better than lies and illusions

so sayeth Bill Moyers in In the kingdom of the half-blind , his
20th anniversary address to the National Security Archive.

An excerpt:

It has to be said: there has been nothing in our time like the Bush Administration's obsession with secrecy. This may seem self-serving coming from someone who worked for two previous presidents who were no paragons of openness. But I am only one of legions who have reached this conclusion. See the recent pair of articles by the independent journalist, Michael Massing, in The New York Review of Books. He concludes,

"The Bush Administration has restricted access to public documents as no other before it."

And he backs this up with evidence. For example, a recent report on government secrecy by the watchdog group, OpenTheGovernment.org, says the Feds classified a record 15.6 million new documents in fiscal year 2004, an increase of 81% over the year before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. What's more, 64% of Federal Advisory Committee meetings in 2004 were completely closed to the public. No wonder the public knows so little about how this administration has deliberately ignored or distorted reputable scientific research to advance its political agenda and the wishes of its corporate patrons. I'm talking about the suppression of that EPA report questioning aspects of the White House Clear Skies Act; research censorship at the departments of health and human services, interior and agriculture; the elimination of qualified scientists from advisory committees on kids and lead poisoning, reproductive health, and drug abuse; the distortion of scientific knowledge on emergency contraception; the manipulation of the scientific process involving the Endangered Species Act; and the internal sabotage of government scientific reports on global warming.

It's an old story: the greater the secrecy, the deeper the corruption.

The entire speech is more than worth your while, if you care about the integrity and viability of the USA.

Thanks to Working For Change or publishing Moyers' speech; the National Security Archive's website is blocked from Mainland China.

Having learned that Hwang Woo Suk had fabricated results of his world-famous research into cloned stem cells, South Koreans were disconsolate and angry--at the TV station whose documentary exposed discrepancies and outright falsification in the former veterinarian's reports. (This is the same doctor that claimed to have cloned an Afghan dog earlier this year.)

"I feel like crying," said Park Mi Young, a 44-year-old office worker who was chatting with her equally glum friends at a subway entrance. "I can't bring myself to watch the television news."

Hwang not only enjoyed financial support from the government, he had a virtual cheering squad in 44 million South Koreans. On an Internet site called "I love Hwang Woo Suk," a fan wrote that not since the exploits of a 16th century military hero, Adm. Yi Sun Shin, had people been "so proud to be Korean."

Insoo Hyun, a bioethicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, worked with Hwang and his researchers in South Korea over the summer. "They're like the Beatles," he said. "If we would go to a restaurant, we'd get mobbed. [Hwang] would joke to me, 'I'm like the Korean president or the Korean Elvis.' "

Hwang and his work were a great source of national pride and though they knew the audience resented him being exposed, Song Weon Geun, director of international relations for [TV station] MBC said, "We felt that scientific truth should be placed ahead of nationalism. There will be some people who blame us for bringing down a national hero. But we think national credibility is improved because this was the work of Korean journalists and not from the outside."

With all the efforts to hide news to save face or to maintain confidence backfiring big time on one of So. Korea's neighbors lately (not naming names here) that'd be a good point for any government and journalistic establishment to note.

For story see Cloning Scandal Pains South Korea

from People's Daily:

Professional women skiing performers, in bikini,demonstrate skiing skills at a ski resort in Jinan, east China's Shandong Province December 17, 2005. The temperature then was 5 degrees centigrade below zero. The activity was organized by the ski resort to attract customers. These performers come from Harbin, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province.

Not exactly what I'd call a bikini, but definitely-ah-cool.

Norman Lear: Letter to God:

Dear Lord, please grant me strength, patience, wisdom, and humility. Help me always to search for the truth, but spare me the company of those who have found it. Amen.

Senate Rejects Extension of Patriot Act:

"We need to be more vigilant," agreed Sen. John Sununu, a Republican from New Hampshire, where the state motto is "Live Free or Die." He quoted Benjamin Franklin: "Those that would give up essential liberty in pursuit of a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security."

Why is Ahmadinejad baiting? Does outright ignorance somehow nourish his supporters or just make both him and them look stupid, bellicose and ultimately self-destructive? Perhaps in his world the more enemies you have the more powerful you seem but the end game of that is not usually successful.

This from, just for irony, a Deutsche Welle bulletin.

Iran once again calls Holocaust a myth

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has once again described the Holocaust as a "myth." He made the comments in a speech in the city of Zahedan that was broadcast live on state TV.

Ahmadinejad caused uproar recently when he made similar disparaging remarks about the Holocaust and said Israel should be moved to Europe. In a reaction to his latest outburst, Israel has urged the world to "open its eyes" to the Iranian regime.

Germany's Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has described Ahmadinejad's comments as "shocking and unacceptable" and said he'd summoned Iran's ambassador.

A -- can I say flashy? -- Beijing public interest lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, from a very humble background has been given a pretty steep penalty for his cases against the State on behalf of common people. Ostensibly, they're shutting down his law firm because he failed to file a change of address when he moved offices. Typical Chinese official boomerang shot. Let's see if they can make it stick. This guy has a pretty good advocate: himself.

This is a well crafted (as usual) Joseph Kahn story in the N.Y. Times and all the more impressive to be emerging from a nation struggling with the implementation of "rule of law."

It's cheap shot to say attorneys like this are a candle in the dark--from where I sit, he's more like a torch in the dawn. Here are some highlights, but read the whole thing, the man's work, words, life and especially this particular turn in his road are fascinating, ironic, unlikely and inspiring. Inspiration, these days, can be hard to come by.

Thanks to Marlene for bringing this to my attention.

Legal Gadfly Bites Hard, and Beijing Slaps Him

By JOSEPH KAHN
Published: December 13, 2005
BEIJING, Dec. 12 - One November morning, the Beijing Judicial Bureau convened a hearing on its decree that one of China's best-known law firms must shut down for a year because it failed to file a change of address form when it moved offices.

Bold, brusque and often roused to fiery indignation, Mr. Gao, 41, is one of a handful of self-proclaimed legal "rights defenders."

He travels the country filing lawsuits over corruption, land seizures, police abuses and religious freedom. His opponent is usually the same: the ruling Communist Party.

Now, the party has told him to cease and desist. The order to suspend his firm's operating license was expanded last week to include his personal permit to practice law. The authorities threatened to confiscate it by force if Mr. Gao fails to hand it over voluntarily by Wednesday.

"People across this country are awakening to their rights and seizing on the promise of the law," Mr. Gao says. "But you cannot be a rights lawyer in this country without becoming a rights case yourself."

Ordinary citizens in fact have embraced the law as eagerly as they have welcomed another Western-inspired import, capitalism. The number of civil cases heard last year hit 4.3 million, up 30 percent in five years, and lawyers have encouraged the notion that the courts can hold anyone, even party bosses, responsible for their actions.

Chinese leaders do not discourage such ideas, entirely. They need the law to check corruption and to persuade the outside world that China is not governed by the whims of party leaders.

But the officials draw the line at any fundamental challenge to their monopoly on power.

And their noses get truly out of joint when they're publicly dissed. This is a society where face is everything, so tweaked noses do not go down well.

"Most officials in China are basically mafia bosses who use extreme barbaric methods to terrorize the people and keep them from using the law to protect their rights," Mr. Gao wrote on one essay that circulated widely on the Web this fall.

[...snip] Mr. Gao was born in a cave. His family lived in a mud-walled home dug out of a hillside in the loess plateau in Shaanxi Province, in northwestern China. His father died at age 40. For years the boy climbed into bed at dusk because his family could not afford oil for its lamp, he recalled.

Nor could they pay for elementary school for Mr. Gao and his six siblings. But he said he listened outside the classroom window.

[...snip] "The leaders of China see no other purpose for the law but to protect and disguise their own power," Mr. Gao said. "As a lawyer, my goal is to turn their charade into a reality."

[...snip] This fall, he said, security agents have followed him constantly. He said his apartment courtyard has become a "plainclothes policeman's club," with up to 20 officers stationed outside. He and his wife bring them hot water on cold nights.

Do yourself a huge favor today. Take the time to go read the whole thing.

I got this by email today from Billy James, who became Dylan's publicist when Dylan signed with Columbia Records, who got it from Al Kooper.

Bob Dylan Signs on With XM Satellite Radio to Host Weekly Radio Music Show

Music Icon Becomes First-Time DJ to Spin Records, Interview Guests, Take Emails and Offer Commentary on Music and More

WASHINGTON, Dec. 13 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- XM Satellite Radio
(Nasdaq: XMSR), the nation's leading satellite radio service with more than 5 million subscribers, today announced that Bob Dylan will host a new music show exclusively for XM, marking the first time the music legend has hosted a radio show. The weekly hour-long music show will feature an eclectic mix of music hand-selected by Dylan. In addition, Dylan will offer regular commentary on music and other topics, host and interview special guests including other artists and will take emails from XM subscribers. The show will debut in March 2006 on XM's deep album rock channel Deep Tracks (XM channel 40).

"Songs and music have always inspired me. A lot of my own songs have been played on the radio, but this is the first time I've ever been on the other side of the mic," said Dylan. "It'll be as exciting for me as it is for XM."

Bob Dylan is one of music's most enduring performers. He has released more than 44 albums containing more than 600 songs that have been covered by more than 2,000 different artists ranging from The Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder and Guns N' Roses to Duke Ellington, Garth Brooks, Pearl Jam and Rage Against the Machine. His last two albums have been critical and popular successes with 1997's Time Out Of Mind garnering three GRAMMY(R) Awards, including Album Of The Year. In 2001, he won an Academy Award(R) and a Golden Globe(R) for the song "Things Have Changed." In 2004 his best selling memoir, Chronicles Volume 1, spent 19 weeks on the New York Times' Bestseller List. For the past eighteen years Mr. Dylan has been a mainstay on the concert stage performing over a hundred shows a year around the globe.

"Bob Dylan epitomizes the American music experience and his unflagging integrity and vision defines everything we hope for XM to be," said Lee Abrams, Chief Creative Officer, XM Satellite Radio. "It is an honor to count Bob Dylan among the members of the XM artist family, and is further testimony of XM's commitment to create original music programming that makes a difference."

Now if only I could figure out how to get a netcast of that.

I don't know that I have more to say than on my last post about this, which is here .

Imagine...

I have not been a very aggressive blogger and Crackpot Chronicles, a little over two years old, beyond having an XML feed and an Add To My Yahoo button, doesn't engage in much self-promotion, hammer on link exchanges, flame feuds (except for once when an unfortunate miscreant took a poke at my husband) or other calculated traffic building strategies. CC has never even been nominated for, much less won a blogging award. Among the small handful of blogs that link to CC are the ones I most admire and that came slowly. So, it's immensely gratifying to be on the "honorable mention" list of Danwei's Model Worker Awards. Danwei, a provocative, well-informed and irreverent look at Chinese media, spicily written and updated almost daily, is one of the China blogs I regularly read.

I also appreciate the company I'm in: The Longbow Papers (my husband Joseph Bosco's extroardinary blog), The Peking Duck, China Herald, Lawiseass, Image Thief, Bingfeng Teahouse and Simon World, to name a few.

If you really wanna know what's going on with expats in China, what we foreigners who live and experience today's China think about it, check out Danwei's award list and click through for some provocative reading. I deliberately declined to live-link most of the blogs in the previous paragraph to encourage you to visit Danwei's award post.

This is cool. Thanks, Danwei.

And like the spectral diffusion of a crystal...bending in colors over where it lands. All that with no noise or motion.

(Happy Birthday, Pearl)

Sylvia Plath - A Life

Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.
Here's yesterday, last year ---
Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast
Windless threadwork of a tapestry.

Flick the glass with your fingernail:
It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir
Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.
The inhabitants are light as cork,
Every one of them permanently busy.

At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file.
Never trespassing in bad temper:
Stalling in midair,
Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses.
Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy

As Victorian cushions. This family
Of valentine faces might please a collector:
They ring true, like good china.

Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.
The light falls without letup, blindingly.

A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle
About a bald hospital saucer.
It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper
And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.
She lives quietly

With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,
The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture
She has one too many dimensions to enter.
Grief and anger, exorcised,
Leave her alone now.

The future is a grey seagull
Tattling in its cat-voice of departure.
Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,
And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,
Crawls up out of the sea

I snagged this from The Japan Times.

Who woulda thunk it? Nice job, Mr. Pulvers! Surprised I haven't seen a lot more of his satire.

COUNTERPOINT

Read at your peril: Blair blasts Bush's al Jazeera 'joke'

By ROGER PULVERS
Special to The Japan Times

On November 22, the Daily Mirror newspaper in Britain published an exclusive article headlined "Bush Plot to Bomb his Ally." A subsidiary headline said: "President Bush planned to bomb Arab TV station al Jazeera in friendly Qatar, a 'Top Secret' No. 10 memo reveals."

According to the report that followed, it seems that British Prime Minister Tony Blair was able to convince the president that such an attack would provoke a backlash, leading to increased unrest in the region. Subsequently, an American government spokesperson assured Blair that the president had been "humorous, not serious" in what he said.

But, wrote the Daily Mirror, "another [official U.S.] source declared 'Bush was deadly serious.' "

[...snip...]

Actually, I happen to be privy to the secret details of this high-level tete-a-tete. I am happy to be able to report on these pages that, while I am not at liberty to divulge his name per se, a certain vice president in D.C. (no initials intended) has sent me a tape of the conversation.

Here is a transcript in part, published for the first, and probably the last, time.

Bush: "Hey, Tone, thought I'd let you know that, well, we're thinking of bombing al Jazeera headquarters in, uh, Qatar, it is."

Blair: "Is that a good idea?"

Bush: "How should I know? Why not do it? They're always reporting the other side of the story, not that there is another side."

Blair: "But if you bomb them, you might hit the American base. It's only 10 miles [16 km] away from them."

Bush: [laughter] "Tony, Tony. Listen, buddy, what do you think we got smart bombs for, eh? Two miles, sure. Five miles, OK. But 10? Worst that could happen would be they'd get a bit of depleted uranium dust up their nostrils. Heck, our soldiers are tougher than that. Do you realize that bin Laden has appeared on al Jazeera, and they've shown American atrocities, too -- I mean, 'so-called' American atrocities."

Blair: "But bin Laden has been on CNN too."

Bush: "He has?"

Blair: "And the New Yorker magazine has published articles about abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo."

Bush: " 'Abuses?' Funny to hear that coming from you."

Blair: "And our own BBC is often critical of the war in Iraq."

Bush: "How far are their headquarters from where you live, Tony?"

Blair: "Are you suggesting that you might try to destroy the BBC? If you are, George, forget about it. Margaret Thatcher did that already."

Bush: "Love her."

Blair: "Yeah, so do I, but mum's the word."

Bush: "Hey, Tone."

Blair: "Yeah?"

Bush: "Dick and I have made up a list of friendly and unfriendly countries, you know, based on whether they support us in absolutely everything."

Blair: "Well, I hope there's no ambiguity about where we stand, George. Britain and the U.S. haven't been this close since 1775."

Bush: "Sure, sure. Way to go. But as we get nearer to election time in 2008, we're gonna need some new enemies. Americans don't like the same old enemies, you know. Enemies get stale. Our policy has always been 'destroy and rebuild.' It's our way of securing markets in the future. Look what we did to Japan. You couldn't get a more loyal, lay-down-and-roll-over ally than that. No, we're gonna have to widen the war, to get the American people on side for the election. The al Jazeera thing is just the beginning. After that it's Syria, Iran, France . . . "

Blair: "Now, hold on a minute! [Here the PM's tone becomes quite irritable.] You can't just bomb countries one after another like that. I mean, France, well, maybe. But we should keep a dialogue open with Syria, Iran and . . . "

Bush: "Dialogue? What do you mean by that, buddy?! You can't 'have a dialogue' with the Devil. They have to be silenced, once and for all. We can't let folks hear what they have to say. It eventually gets back to the American people and they begin to have second thoughts. I don't have second thoughts, and, God knows, I hope you don't either, Tony."

[There is an eerie silence on the tape here.]

Bush: "Tony? Tone? You there? Well, no matter. It doesn't matter whether you're listening or not. In fact, it doesn't matter if anybody in the world is listening. What matters is not that the world listens, but that it speaks with one voice. And that voice is loud and unequivocal: All people, wherever they live, are entitled to our opinion. It is this openness and natural magnanimity that makes American democracy valid wherever we choose to install it. We never just 'decimate and run.' We always return to help you pick up the pieces afterward . . . "

The tape cuts off there, with those idealistic words from the president -- words which the people at al Jazeera will take heart from, knowing they will be able to kit themselves out with all new equipment after their old stuff is blown up. Not to mention that they'll be able to replace many of their staff as well.

And as for you, dear reader, I advise you not to tell anyone of what you have allegedly read here.

Last week Britain's attorney general threatened anyone "with the Official Secrets Act [if they] reveal the contents of the document allegedly relating to the dispute" between Blair and Bush.

In our brave new world, "I was only reading it" is no longer an excuse before the law.

The Japan Times: Dec. 4, 2005

No wonder dictators laugh at US demands for representative democracy. They can easily point to American democracy's big failing: allowing the well-monied to corrupt lawmakers by dictating government actions - either legally or illegally.

From A culture of bribery in Congress in the Christian Science Monitor.

I love Maine and miss it. I haven't been there in decades. Besides the fact that my soul brothers Bradley Williams and Charlie DuFour live there, Maine is known for two of my most favorite foods-- lobster (real Maine lobster, that is) and blueberries--that I can't get in China. It also is a place of pristine beauty, independent minds and the subject of some of my favorite Andrew Wyeth paintings. At some point in my life I want to spend a lot of time in Maine. In my heart of hearts, I already do.

I was cruising the news today, and came across a story on Alternet about how Maine is the third state to refuse federal subsidy for sex education, because the subsidies can only be spent on programs that focus exclusively on abstinence. Pennsylvania and California are the two other states that have declined these particular subsidies.

My empathy for this position stems not from any antipathy for the teaching of abstinence, which, let's face it, is the only 100% effective method of pregnancy prevention, but the indignity of federal funds being offered to promote a program as imperative as sex education that is biased on a religious concept.

There are quite a few Christian conservatives that I dearly love, members of my husband's family (with whom Joseph vehemently disagrees on many issues) particularly. I don't have intolerance for their values. What I can't tolerate is the legislative and financial enforcement of those values. It violates the fundamental separation of church and state that the U.S. Constitution mandates and it violates human intellect to the point of indecency. The story points out that:

Much of the debate over abstinence-only programs centers on their effectiveness or lack thereof. Groups opposed to the federal programs often cite a December 2004 study by the staff of U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) that found that 11 of 13 federally funded abstinence programs contained medically inaccurate information.

With it's own sex education programs, which teach contraception as well as abstinence, Maine's teen pregnancy rate has dropped 50% in 20 years so they really don't need the federal agenda as much as they, like any state, would like the $50 million. If you have a moment, surf to the story and have a read.

There's nothing quite like Maine-iacs. A tourist in a fine car was driving through the country roads of Maine and stopped one fine summer day at a remote roadside stand at the edge of a vast field that was selling cherries, lettuce, honey, summer squash, maple syrup from Vermont and local wood carvings. The tourist spent an hour picking out fruit, vegetables and souvenirs and finally, when he'd assembled a pile of produce and merchandise, he asked the local man how much the goods would cost. He was told $62.40. The tourist got his wallet out of his luxury car and fingered through his large wad of cash. He then asked the man from Maine if the roadside stand took credit cards. "Ay-yup," was his answer, "but we don't give 'em back."

Like good American roots music and quintessentially savvy unpretentious deejays? Listen online to WERU in Maine.

Do I really need to comment on this?

From Yahoo News

IS GEORGE BUSH THE WORST PRESIDENT -- EVER?

By Richard Reeves
[...snip]
The History News Network at George Mason University has just polled historians informally on the Bush record. Four hundred and fifteen, about a third of those contacted, answered -- maybe they were all crazed liberals -- making the project as unofficial as it was interesting. These were the results: 338 said they believed Bush was failing, while 77 said he was succeeding. Fifty said they thought he was the worst president ever. Worse than Buchanan.

This is what those historians said -- and it should be noted that some of the criticism about deficit spending and misuse of the military came from self-identified conservatives -- about the Bush record:

• He has taken the country into an unwinnable war and alienated friend and foe alike in the process;


• He is bankrupting the country with a combination of aggressive military spending and reduced taxation of the rich;


• He has deliberately and dangerously attacked separation of church and state;


• He has repeatedly "misled," to use a kind word, the American people on affairs domestic and foreign;


• He has proved to be incompetent in affairs domestic (New Orleans) and foreign (Iraq and the battle against al-Qaida);


• He has sacrificed American employment (including the toleration of pension and benefit elimination) to increase overall productivity;


• He is ignorantly hostile to science and technological progress;


• He has tolerated or ignored one of the republic's oldest problems, corporate cheating in supplying the military in wartime.

Quite an indictment. It is, of course, too early to evaluate a president. That, historically, takes decades, and views change over times as results and impact become more obvious. Besides, many of the historians note that however bad Bush seems, they have indeed since worse men around the White House. Some say Buchanan. Many say Vice President Dick Cheney.

(read the rest by clicking on the headline up top)