Herndon Monument Climb 2014,  a few and worthy posts

Penaii now and again

Your most distant ancestors -- those of us whose ancestry is in the West -- liked penaii (my personal spelling of the plural of "penis".)

  After a while, the world continued on its merry, ma dinging way, and penaii were severely hidden.

Leonardo da Vinci and friends brought it again into the light, as gloriously as the ancients, and in fact patterned after them.

Leonardo da Vinci summed up the Renaissance mood like this:

"[The phallus] confers with the human intelligence and sometimes has intelligence of itself, and although the will of the man desires to stimulate it it remains obstinate and takes his own course, and moving sometimes of itself without license or thought by the man, whether he be sleeping or waking, it does what it desires; and often the man is asleep and it is awake, and many times the man is awake and it is asleep; many times the man wishes it to practice and it does not wish it; many times it wishes and the man forbids it.  It seems therefore that this creature often has a life and intelligence separate from the man, and it would appear that the man is in the wrong in being ashamed to give it a name or exhibit it, seeking rather constantly to cover and conceal what he ought to adorn and display with ceremony as a ministrant."

                                           Quoted in Leonardo da Vinci by Sherwin B. Nuland

Quite right. 

And Leonardo's view prevailed for a while  " . . . man is in the wrong in being ashamed to give it a name or exhibit it, seeking rather constantly to cover and conceal what he ought to adorn and display with ceremony as a ministrant."

In fact, Leonardo is quoted as suggesting hat Michelangelo 's David -- the most famous penis in the Western world -- be gilded.

Consider Cellin's Perseus. . .

. . . and Peter Paul Rubens . . .

. . . and the sexual Caravaggio.

A photograph by By Ästhetikfoto

Folks who like shame and remorse (or, more kindly, folks who are modest and who like color and texture) prevailed again, though Picasso did a nice penis . . .

. . . as did Degas

By the time I was a young man in the early 1950s, the West was so repressed that this scene from From Here to Eternity caused a stir because it was thought to be too explicitly sexual.

To see where that lead, consult the Web for any sort of sexual image that interests you.

Pakistan's centrality in the US-China Great Game

There are about seven billion ways of looking a the World, since there are some seven billion human animals, all with the capacity of forming independent views of what passes as reality.

One way to look at the World is to see World Events not a struggle of nation-states for supremacy, but as a struggle among several forms of concentrated Capital to expand and secure market control over lines of commerce in as many areas of the world as possible.

Looked at the World this way, news outlets available on the web give a clear-enough picture of the struggle between Western neoliberal Capitalism and Chinese Socialist Capitalism (not, I think, a non sequester), especially in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.  See, for example, "Into Africa: China’s Wild Rush", The New York Times, May 16, 2014.

The chart understates China and Saudi Arabia, since it only counts wealth of individuals, and in both countries wealth is concentrated in countries which are controlled by individuals or a small group of individuals.

See, e.g., Forbes, The 147 Companies That Control Everything (an interesting study and list of companies, though it does not include entities  such as the World Bank, nor those whose wealth is controlled by states, such as in China and Saudi Arabia.

The Times pictures China as a blundering new colonialist, making mistakes that Western colonialists learned to avoid decades ago.

The Nation, a Pakistani Punjabi-oriented English-language newspaper,   sees the Chinese as shrewd, single-minded, intense, and determined one way or another to get Middle East oil in a way that cannot be blocked by the U S. Fifth Fleet, which now controls all oil coming out of the Persian Gulf.  The U.S. is making multiple mistakes, primarily with its drone strikes and its policy of blocking Iranian petrochemical exports.

The Nation's article is printed after the jump.  Here are some sentences that stood out. [All images are added my me; comments in italics are mine.]

Although drone attacks have ceased for the moment, the conditions in Afghanistan require a post-US Afghanistan strategy soon. It can be argued that a number of commitments, reassurances and promises were made at the conclusions of these foreign visits, especially with regional partners, China and Turkey. On the other, the visit to the United States could not bring any breakthrough in an already existing relationship of mistrust.

The first foreign visit took Nawaz Sharif to China, in July 2013, resulting in various agreements, ranging from building dams and the generation of electricity through coal. Furthermore, Pakistan’s largest civil nuclear power plant with Chinese assistance, in Karachi, is expected to be completed within 72 months.

  

Baloch Society of North America (BSO-NA) 

However, the most prominent understanding was on the construction of a 2000 km stretch of road linking Gwadar with Kashgar in Northwestern China.

pakistan-map

[The Gwadar deep-water port is, next to the Iranian border and within reach of an undersea pipeline from Oman.The port is guarded by Chinese soldiers and police, uses Chinese workers, and flies a Chinese flag].
adar:

Gwadar, Balochistan Province, Pakistan (گوادر، صوبہ بلوچستان، پاکستان), in restive Baloch territory

Kashgar, Xinjiang province,China (喀什，新疆，中國), in restive Uighur territory (維吾爾族領土)

The completion of this port is expected to enable Pakistan to provide a useful road and rail link, between the Central Asian Republic and China, along with the rest of the world. In this way, Pakistan would be provided with adequate opportunity for economic advancement. It was agreed that at a later stage, a rail and gas pipeline would also link the two cities. Furthermore, China promised to provide 85 per cent of the financing for the three-year $44 million project budget for a fiber- optic cable, stretching from China to Rawalpindi. Such an embedded involvement of China in the Gwadar Port project with Pakistan has raised serious concerns for India and the US, as it can affect the American naval monopoly in the Gulf and Arabian Sea region.

Portion of U.S. Fifth Fleet, stationed in Bahrain, Persian Gulf, through which much oil is shipped

The third foreign visit was to the US. A joint communiqué was signed which revealed the divergent policy positions of the two leaders. Although PM Sharif carried an agenda including the drone attacks in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA); economic cooperation through trade, and the release of Pakistani citizen Dr. Affia Siddique, no commitment to address these concerns were made by the US President. Nawaz failed to take advantage of the release of the US based Amnesty International Report on the matters of drones, which revealed facts relating to the killing of thousands of Pakistani civilians in FATA and pronounced this act a gross violation of human rights.

See, e.g., for one of thousands if incidents in many countries, A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in Yemen

Secondly, just a day before the Oval meeting, the US released the suspended military and economic assistance of $1.6 billion to Pakistan, which was considered by the Pakistani government spokesperson as a sign of development between the two “strategic partners” (though some analysts believe that the released amount is nothing more than rent for the services by the Pakistani government facilitating the logistics for NATO and US forces in Afghanistan). The reality is that there is a serious trust deficit between the two countries. There are misperceptions and divergent national interests on both sides. The exit of the US and NATO troops from Afghanistan in 2014 might ease tensions between the two countries by providing them an opportunity for better understanding in other fields of cooperation, especially economically.

The Prime Minister needs to understand that his third term in office is considerably different from his last two, because the international scenario has over-whelmingly transformed. The US is not as “super” a superpower as it used to be, thus giving way to the rise of regional powers, especially in terms of financial potential.

Herndon Monument Climb 2014, first look

From Zimbao, recommended.

Air Force Times

KMOV.com St. Louis

For a good video of the Climb, se ABC2News.com

Kazakh audaryspak; Kyrgyz oodarsyh : Hore Wrestling in Central Asia 2014

Don't know when the audaryspak event takes place, probably in August.  Preliminary images of the audaryspak festival in Kazakhstan.   Full report comes later.

The Ground Never Misses: 

Ethnic Wrestling of African and Kazakh Cultures

Recommended

Pinterest

Oodarsyh is a festival in Kyrgyzstan featuring horse wrestling.  The event takes place this year from 19 July to 22 August 2014 The blog post, below, is not clear when thees picture were taken.

Festivals in Kyrgyzstan - 2014

The main Kirkpinar (Turkish Oil Wrestling) takes place at Edirne, Turkey, from 29 June to 5 July, this year.

Here is a website in English that describes the rules and history of the competition and has a video showing young wrestlers getting ready, for you who may be unfamiliar with the competition.

Here are some images from the website:

Can anyone control the post-superpower capitalist world order?

A provocative article in yesterday's Guardian raises an intriguing question:

Who can control the post-superpower capitalist world order?In a divided and dangerous world, we need to teach the new powers some manners

From the article:

The "American century" is over, and we have entered a period in which multiple centres of global capitalism have been forming. In the US, Europe, China and maybe Latin America, too, capitalist systems have developed with specific twists: the US stands for neoliberal capitalism, Europe for what remains of the welfare state, China for authoritarian capitalism, Latin America for populist capitalism. After the attempt by the US to impose itself as the sole superpower – the universal policeman – failed, there is now the need to establish the rules of interaction between these local centres as regards their conflicting interests.

For now I leave it to each of you to ascribe meaning to the terms used to define each of the four kinds of Capitalism used in the article.  For folks in Argentina , Chile, Bolivia, and elsewhere with whom I have sympathy, "neoliberal capitalism" may raise images of torture, the disappeared, dictatorship, misery for the many, increased wealth for the few.  

Google will tell you who the author is, and will give  bewilderingly different  definitions of  the various kinds of Capitalism.

• Slavoj Žižek

• The Guardian, Tuesday 6 May 2014 16.02 EDT

Presidents Putin and Obama.   'Today, the old and new superpowers are testing each other, trying to impose their own version of global rules.' Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters

To know a society is not only to know its explicit rules. One must also know how to apply them: when to use them, when to violate them, when to turn down a choice that is offered, and when we are effectively obliged to do something but have to pretend we are doing it as a free choice. Consider the paradox, for instance, of offers-meant-to-be-refused. When I am invited to a restaurant by a rich uncle, we both know he will cover the bill, but I nonetheless have to lightly insist we share it – imagine my surprise if my uncle were simply to say: "OK, then, you pay it!" 

There was a similar problem during the chaotic post-Soviet years of Yeltsin's rule in Russia. Although the legal rules were known, and were largely the same as under the Soviet Union, the complex network of implicit, unwritten rules, which sustained the entire social edifice, disintegrated. In the Soviet Union, if you wanted better hospital treatment, say, or a new apartment, if you had a complaint against the authorities, were summoned to court or wanted your child to be accepted at a top school, you knew the implicit rules. You understood whom to address or bribe, and what you could or couldn't do. After the collapse of Soviet power, one of the most frustrating aspects of daily life for ordinary people was that these unwritten rules became seriously blurred. People simply did not know how to react, how to relate to explicit legal regulations, what could be ignored, and where bribery worked. (One of the functions of organised crime was to provide a kind of ersatz legality. If you owned a small business and a customer owed you money, you turned to your mafia protector, who dealt with the problem, since the state legal system was inefficient.) The stabilisation of society under the Putin reign is largely because of the newly established transparency of these unwritten rules. 

Now, once again, people mostly understand the complex cobweb of social interactions. 

In international politics, we have not yet reached this stage. Back in the 1990s, a silent pact regulated the relationship between the great western powers and Russia. Western states treated Russia as a great power on the condition that Russia didn't act as one. But what if the person to whom the offer-to-be-rejected is made actually accepts it? What if Russia starts to act as a great power? A situation like this is properly catastrophic, threatening the entire existing fabric of relations – as happened five years ago in Georgia. Tired of only being treated as a superpower, Russia actually acted as one. 

How did it come to this? The "American century" is over, and we have entered a period in which multiple centres of global capitalism have been forming. In the US, Europe, China and maybe Latin America, too, capitalist systems have developed with specific twists: the US stands for neoliberal capitalism, Europe for what remains of the welfare state, China for authoritarian capitalism, Latin America for populist capitalism. After the attempt by the US to impose itself as the sole superpower – the universal policeman – failed, there is now the need to establish the rules of interaction between these local centres as regards their conflicting interests. 

This is why our times are potentially more dangerous than they may appear. During the cold war, the rules of international behaviour were clear, guaranteed by the Mad-ness – mutually assured destruction – of the superpowers. When the Soviet Union violated these unwritten rules by invading Afghanistan, it paid dearly for this infringement. The war in Afghanistan was the beginning of its end.  

Today, the old and new superpowers are testing each other, trying to impose their own version of global rules, experimenting with them through proxies – which are, of course, other, small nations and states. 

Karl Popper once praised the scientific testing of hypotheses, saying that, in this way, we allow our hypotheses to die instead of us. In today's testing, small nations get hurt and wounded instead of the big ones – first Georgia, now Ukraine. Although the official arguments are highly moral, revolving around human rights and freedoms, the nature of the game is clear. The events in Ukraine seem something like the crisis in Georgia, part two – the next stage of a geopolitical struggle for control in a nonregulated, multicentred world. 

It is definitely time to teach the superpowers, old and new, some manners, but who will do it? Obviously, only a transnational entity can manage it – more than 200 years ago, Immanuel Kant saw the need for a transnational legal order grounded in the rise of the global society. In his project for perpetual peace, he wrote: "Since the narrower or wider community of the peoples of the earth has developed so far that a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world, the idea of a law of world citizenship is no high-flown or exaggerated notion." 

This, however, brings us to what is arguably the "principal contradiction" of the new world order (if we may use this old Maoist term): the impossibility of creating a global political order that would correspond to the global capitalist economy.
What if, for structural reasons, and not only due to empirical limitations, there cannot be a worldwide democracy or a representative world government? What if the global market economy cannot be directly organised as a global liberal democracy with worldwide elections?

Today, in our era of globalisation, we are paying the price for this "principal contradiction." In politics, age-old fixations, and particular, substantial ethnic, religious and cultural identities, have returned with a vengeance. Our predicament today is defined by this tension: the global free circulation of commodities is accompanied by growing separations in the social sphere. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the global market, new walls have begun emerging everywhere, separating peoples and their cultures. Perhaps the very survival of humanity depends on resolving this tension.

[Hawaii residents may be interested in billionaires' goings-on on the Big Island.  See here. ]