Nato woos Russia on Afghanistan

Irony, irony, irony. This life is full of it but it is more fun to see it in major events. Twenty years after the Soviet Union pulled out of Afghanistan Nato wants to involve Russia in its own doomed campaign there.

Why would it, you might ask. After all, it seems quite successful: helping triple Afganistan opium production is no mean feat. Here in London it has reportedly brought the street price of cocaine low enough for everyone to weather out the economy collapse in the best jolly mood.

Ex oriente lux

Who could have ever thought, say 20 years ago that one day all major Western economies would be abating their breath waiting for the news on the Chinese government's next move in the hope of their own economic recovery.

How very ironic: a Communist-led planned economy is yanking capitalism out of its self-created mess.

Tata Nano As A Harbinger Of Global Doom

The 2000-Euro zero-frills Tata Nano is about to hit the market. Millions of Indians will become more mobile, the living standard goes up. Definitely, a cause for celebration.

Until you think of the price that it comes with. Not the 2000-Euro price tag, but the hackneyed environmental impact. Despite the wee size and motorcycle-style engine, the Nano's fuel consumption is worse than of the Toyota Prius, and let's not even get started on the 2-stroke engine's gas emissions.

It's a very difficult dilemma: it's surely nice to wish people in the developing countries have better lives, but the day every family in China achieves the Western life standard, this world will probably explode, literally.

The problem is double-edge. On one hand, the so-called Western life standard promoted as the most desirable is barely sustainable even now. The paragon of that consumerist dream, the US of A, sucks 40% of world's energy to maintain it. On the other hand, the overpopulation in the developing world has never been addressed in any meaningful, non-PR way, which would be nation-wide birth control education programmes and free supply of condoms for every family.

I remember an interview with an Ethiopian woman in Cooking In The Danger Zone. All her 6 or 7 children have been brought up almost solely on foreign food aid. When Stefan Gates asked her why she had so many children if she had no means to feed them, she answered that in those days she did not know better, nobody told her and now nothing can be reversed.

The only long-term solution would be cutting down on the excesses of the First World and keeping in check the population growth in the Third World.

Strangely enough, the now defunct Second World was approaching that balance, if not always intentionally: the former Socialist countries were chronically underpopulated (the trend is still continuing) while the consumption was kept next to bare basics. And that was exactly what brought the system down: the American Dream looked so sweet from behind the Iron Curtain that everyone was relieved when Communism collapsed. Blatant consumerism proved irresistible.

Now we live in the world where a personal car, a wide-screen TV and flying on vacations abroad are the Aspiration, the Salvation and the Redemption of every specimen of middle-class office plankton worth his annual salary growth. The world vision initiated, among others, by Ford and General Motors in the 30s buying out and dismantling whole rail and trolleybus networks throughout America, so that everyone would need to buy a car.

It all could even be cute and laughed away, were there a few times fewer of us on this planet. As it is, it is not the case. Our appetite for resources is becoming more and more voracious and there will hardly be any major shifts in the mass conscious towards desire for more sustainable lifestyles. So let's wait and see until the last litre of gas disappears in the fuel tank of a Tata Nano. That will be our first call for change.

Pro-Democracy Protests In Bangkok

You can't report all the news in the world but at least a major news agency should have enough sense and logical judgement to separate the wheat from the chaff.

My previous post was about the factoid pseudo-news scum that takes over the BBC headlines. TV news in UK is bound by law to be impartial and the BBC website is the internet outlet of the TV service.

It is easy to understand why China news gets more coverage than reports from smaller Asian countries, but one thing that makes me furious is that when a Tibetan mob went on vandalizing shop windows, the worldwide hoopla went sky-high praising them but when thousands of Thai people in Bangkok keep protesting against an illegal constitution change that would allow the former Prime Minister get away scot-free with embezzled billions - that barely merits a mention (after I wrote an angry letter to the editors, but I don't really know if it actually had any effect, I like to hope it did). And even then, reports on a peaceful pro-democracy protest by concerned politically aware citizens get buried in heaps of stuff like Kiwi hedgehog assault or Indonesian flighty cash-drop.

Ironically enough, the Thai military turns out to be the only defender of justice these days, while the US threatens to withdraw its aid (a miserly 32 million a year, more spent on luxury items in Bangkok alone on any given week!) if their puppets of corrupt politicians are not restored to power. The Empire of Evil has now a firmly established capital in Washington, D.C.

Sa Dingding - The Chinese Wonder

This kind of Chinesey New Age music style is nothing new, Oliver Shanti has been doing it since the 80s but Sa Dingding's (薩頂頂) music is nevertheless lovely. Coupled with her striking looks and memorable imagery of her videos it makes a nice package. She is poised to be heavily promoted in the West in advance of the Olympics in Beijing. I am looking forward to her success here.



For those interested, here're the lyrics:

嗡, 班炸薩多沙嘛雅 嘛奴巴拉耶
別炸薩多爹奴巴的叉司左咩巴哇
蘇多卡欲咩巴哇 蘇浦卡玉咩巴哇
阿奴囉多咩巴哇 沙爾哇司地咩渣也叉

沙爾哇 噶爾麻 蘇渣咩即打司哩任
古魯吽 哈哈哈哈 呵巴噶問
沙爾哇 打他噶打 班炸嘛咩母渣
班至巴哇 嘛哈沙媽耶 薩多啊
吽呸。

It's the Mandarin transliteration of a Sanskrit mantra, a sort of Buddhist prayer.

Heian - My Favourite Historical Period

Back in the olden days my teacher of Old Japanese wouldn't make us memorise ancient verses or multi-level tables of verbs conjugation. Instead, she could make us feel as if we lived in the period.

She was a zany bohemian divorced from a renown Buddhist priest, addicted to sake and short strong cigarettes. Her deliciously dilapidated wooden house in Nara, Japan's original capital, was exposed to all the world's winds - just the way it was supposed to be to satisfy traditional aesthetics. Every day she would travell 3 hours one way to come to tell us about the beauty of Japanese black lacquerware, the advantages of eating with chopsticks over Western cutlery, or her clandestine (and imaginary of course) affair with the author of Tsurezuregusa. She would back up her views with citations from ancient poets while puffing away smelly Gauloises.

* * *

Heian aristocracy chose the colours of their clothing according to the season, travelled around in bull carts, believed in free marriage and 10 thousands gods and didn't form families. Bisexuality was a norm (among the elite, at any rate) and Heian criteria of female beauty were long hair and verse-writing skills. Women took steam baths and blackened their teeth with pine tar. To keep their elaborate hairdos intact they would sleep on a wooden chip as a pillow. The Japanese character for pillow still has the "wood"radical in it.

After a night of love, it was customary to exchange self-written poems dealing with the the encounter as the theme. The poems were evaluated on the style, content and calligraphy. There had to be an allusion to the season and an allegorical reference to the encounter itself, all expressed in a strictly defined number of syllables. Not a mean feat after a night of steamy love-making. Clumsy poets stood lesser chance to get laid afterwards.


There was hardly any furniture in their minimalist palaces and no animal meat on their tables - recently converted Buddhists they were careful about not spoiling their karma for future re-births. First Japanese literature classics - Makura No Soushi, Tsurezuregusa and Kagero Nikki - date back from that period as well as the most recognizable classic Japanese graphic concept - yamato-e. Heian emperors were continuously engaged in fighting for living space with the mysterious Emishi people - the indigenous pre-Japanese inhabitants of the islands.

Yes, and they had no idea about Europe, which at the time was dragging a miserable existence through the Dark Ages.

International Afghanistan Mission Success - Opium Output Triples

Now we know that all the billions poured into the "peace-making" Afghanistan campaign have not been wasted - there will be more and cheaper cocaine and heroine for street consumption in the First World. To quote the BBC, 'The growth in Afghanistan's opium crop began in earnest after the overthrow of the Taleban by US-led and Afghan forces in 2001.'



The "international community" can gleefully rub their hands together and go shopping for designer snorting and injecting paraphernalia. Considered the volume of trade - about 4 billion Euros a year in raw opiates only, which is surely worth tens of times more by the time it reaches retail dealers in the West, next thing we know the likes of Prada and Louis Vuitton will be coming up with patent leather and mahogany snorting kits.

Our boys in Afghanistan can be sure of the middle-class weekend cocaine users' support!