Far out, man

Someone had sent me an email with some photos and comments about how freely narcotics were available in times gone by. I tracked the source down to this Italian site. I thought the email was too good to stay buried in my mailbox, so here are the photos and comments (in English), with some comments by me.

Heroin

A bottle of Bayer's heroin.

Between 1890 and 1910, heroin was sold as a non-addictive substitute for morphine. It was also used to treat children who had a bad cough.

Having a cough may never have been so much fun.

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Coca wine

Metcalf's Coca Wine was one brand of many wines on the market which contained cocaine.

Everybody used to say that it would make you happy - and it might also have worked as a medicinal treatment too!

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Mariani wine

Mariani Wine (1875) was the most famous Coca wine of it's time.

Pope Leo XIII was reputed to insist on keeping one bottle with him at all times.

He awarded Angelo Mariani (the producer) with a Vatican gold medal. That's almost as prestigious as the British "By appointment to her majesty the Queen".

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Maltine

Maltine, produced by the Maltine Manufacturing Company of New York.
It was suggested that adults should take a full glass of this with or after every meal and children should take half a glass.
Delicious!

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A paperweight

This paperweight promoted the products of C.F. Boehringer and Soehne (Mannheim, Germany), who at the time were apparently the biggest producers of products containing Quinine and Cocaine in the world.

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Glyco-Heroin 

Here's an advertising brochure from Martin H. Smith Company, New York, whose product was good for the treatment of asthma and for use as a general-purpose analgesic.
They don't make such efficacious stuff nowadays.
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Opium for asthma

Yummy. People would probably have reached for this one at the first sign of difficulty in getting their breath - one can't be too careful, after all, can one? With 45% alcohol to help it go down, who could resist?
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Cocaine tablets (1900)

Apparently all stage actors, singers, teachers and preachers alike would use these lozenges to help their performance. They were reputed to "smooth" the voice - never mind smooth the brain-waves.
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Cocaine drops for toothache

This product was apparently very popular for children in 1885. Not only did the drops relieve the pain, they made the children happy!

Cute.
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Opium for new-borns

A bottle of Stickney and Poor's Paregoric. A paregoric or "paregoric elixir", was a camphorated (or formerly, ammoniated) tincture of opium flavoured with aniseed and benzoic acid, used to treat diarrhoea and coughing in children.
This stuff would have been an absolute necessity for mothers of new-borns that cried a lot at night. Just a few drops in their mouths and, "Whammo!" - the little dears would probably sleep like a rock all night long and to hell with wanting a feed! (Be careful though - not too much, or your darling might never wake up!)

Again, the 46% alcohol would help it slip down. I wonder how many mums and dad's used to take a quick swig too? Hey, if it's for babies, then it couldn't hurt, could it?

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So here we may have some convincing evidence as to why our grandparents had such fond memories of their childhood.

Let's face it - if you were smashed out of your skull half the time, who wouldn't have happy memories? The only surprise would be that they could recall anything at all!

Remember too the laudanum (opium and/or morphine) so favoured by genteel Victorian ladies, and, more recently, for the baby-boomers in the '60s, there was LSD and the famous cocaine soft drink, Coca-Cola ("Yummy Mummy! P-L-E-E-S-E can I have some more?") - and let's not forget Purple Hearts and amphetamines, as immortalised in the Rolling Stones' song "Mother's Little Helper". Here is an extract from the lyrics:

"And goes running for the shelter of a mother's little helper
And two help her on her way, get her through her busy day.
'Doctor please, some more of these.'
Outside the door, she took four more.
What a drag it is getting old."

The poor kids nowadays have nothing like that - they have to scramble their heads with "legal" drugs - mostly alcohol and toxic "party" pills. All the good stuff is highly illegal and probably prohibitively expensive for most teens anyway.

Who knows but that one day soon we might not at last be able to produce an adult generation who hadn't had their brains scrambled by age 21?

Long live plastic bottles!

Someone sent me a link to this item about the "Eco Bottle" - there is a picture of this 650ml bottle to the right. There was room for comments after the item, but it was limited to a max. of 400 words, and so I have posted my thoughts on the matter below.

Essentially, "Charlie's" brand has decided to sell water in a kind of plastic that is apparently made from plant matter as opposed to crude (fossil) oil. Greenies would lurve this, of course - you can almost feel the planet cooling - hence the post is on a website for something called "The sustainable greenlist directory". Everything has to be "sustainable" and "recyclable" nowadays it seems, except people of course - although that earliest of great recyclers, Adolf Hitler, apparently effectively demonstrated that even people did not need to be wasted and were recyclable by having his henchmen render the body fats from several millions of  innocent Jews to produce a kind of soap and used the ashes of their burned bodies to make road asphalt to build into roads. Some people have remarked that there is no limit to the fertile imagination of the mind of Man. I remember my mother telling me about this Hitler and what he had his German people do, as I listened to her in wonder as a child, and I recall years later the truth hitting home when I studied the history of the Nazi regime.

Anyway, as my old colleague Malcolm would say - did say, actually - "That's all water under the bridge now. Why can't we just forget about it? We must move on". Only trouble is, I can't move for all these historical corpses lying around and for knowing that there are currently an estimated 1.6 billion Muslims on the planet who are brought up to believe that they should start up again where Hitler left off and make a proper job of it this time.

But I digress. I would suggest that this "Eco bottle" could be a frivolous and cynical marketing exercise intended to make money out of gullible people. As the old saw puts it, "There's one born every minute". I shall avoid buying them at any rate, just as I avoid buying any drinks supplied in plastic bottles. "People want hydration on the go" indeed! The person who said that in the comments to the article may have believed it, but those of us who have worked in Marketing know that people who want that sort of thing have been taught to want it by the suppliers. It is a classic and cynical objective of marketing development strategy - the creation of a need where none existed before. Achieving this objective brings accolades from fellow Marketers - an ultimate honour. There's one born every minute, and I'm one of them too.

But enough of marketing BS and the rationalisation of our irrational beliefs and wants - let's examine plastic.
Plastic - polythene in particular - has come a long way from being just a gooey waste by-product of the production of naphtha where no-one knew what to do with it. Plastic bottles/containers are now ubiquitous in the market and reign supreme as a "preferred container of choice" primarily because:

• They are so very cheap to make (labour and materials).
• They are very light and easy to handle - e.g., in bottling processes, and by the consumer.
• They are easy to mould precisely into all manner of attractive and useful shapes.
• They can be mass-produced and are thus open to reducing marginal costs of production.
• They are very safe to handle - e.g., light and even flexible, not poisonous and do not have viciously sharp edges or break into sharp-edged shards when dropped or damaged.
• Some of them are almost indestructible - e.g., polycarbonate material.
• They are fit for purpose - i.e., they work well.
• They are thus so cost-effective, manufacturers have promoted and standardised on their supply and have progressively withdrawn less cost-effective alternatives (e.g., non-plastic - such as glass and waxed cardboard) from production.

Plastic in general has a dark side, however:

• Plastic products do not easily break down or decompose and thus they remain in the environment wherever they are disposed of, often becoming an environmental and sometimes deadly hazard to wildlife on land and in the sea. In fact even small bits can be a deadly choking hazard to humans and animals - e.g., those little rectangular clips that hold the neck of the transparent bags containing our sliced bread from the supermarket.
  
  
• Research is starting to indicate that the chemicals used in the manufacture of plastic and in the lubricating release agents used in the manufacture of moulded plastics are toxic or carcinogenic. They have been found to accumulate in the human body to the point where they could or actually have caused harm - e.g., as contributing to lowering fertility rates in human eggs/sperm. At normal ambient temperatures, these chemicals tend to leach out slowly, poisoning the food/liquid contained by the plastic, but they can be released from the plastic more rapidly when the plastic is heated, thus poisoning the food/liquid at a faster rate.

The "green" connection:

Common plastic bottles are synthesised from crude (fossil) oil, but - Oh dear! - that is a non-renewable resource, and for various reasons that is believed  by environmentalist fascists to be a "BAD THING", and they insist that we must not use them and that to do so is somehow immoral and an anti-social crime and lots of other bad and "unacceptable" things, no doubt. However, in reality, there is is nothing to prevent us typical humans from submitting (as we usually do) to the law of supply and demand and exploiting oil resources until oil starts to become scarce/costly, driving us to seek out and use a more cost-effective alternative. Whilst synthesising a new form of plastic from plants could be prohibitively expensive today - and so not economically viable and arguably not a good use of productive farmland either - that does not mean that it could not be a more economically viable alternative in the future - that's always assuming we will still have spare productive farmland to grow the source on.

Thus, from the above, I would suggest that so-called "Eco-bottles" are unlikely to depose common plastic from its throne, and also because:

• Clearly the majority of consumers would seem to not understand or care if or whether plastic continues to be made from non-renewable oil resources or if it makes for environmental hazards for wildlife. If they did, they would already boycott the use of plastic.
  
  
• Clearly the majority of consumers would seem to not understand or care if or whether plastic releases slowly accumulating and harmful toxins into the human system. If they did, they would already boycott the use of plastic. This is a bit like smokers who continue to smoke.

What about the contribution of plastics manufacture to global warming?

• Clearly the majority of consumers would seem to not understand or care if or whether plastics manufacture contributes to global warming, otherwise they would be demanding action from their state legislature, and corporations would be absolutely prohibited from environment pollution and made more accountable for their environmental footprint. QED.
  
  
• The subject is a vast mire - a market of alternative, contradictory ideology and beliefs, each with their corresponding organisation of high priests with arcane knowledge. It is not even a proven fact that global warming is man-made, and contradictory theories and theorists (priests) abound - all claiming to hold the "correct" view - thus illustrating the truth of just that point (it's not a fact).
  
  
• This huge debate is not helped by the gross distortion of truth and statistics used by the high priests promulgating their preferred ideologies/beliefs - e.g., the numbers used (and, more especially not used) in the film "An Inconvenient Truth". There is no absolute rational basis to believe any of it, yet we do believe it, one theory or the other - and why shouldn't we? We are, after all, irrational creatures. It's similar to the opposing theories of the creationists and the evolutionists. They can't both be right in truth, and clearly neither are, so it's probably advisable and reasonable to sit on the fence rather than settle for "belief".

"Magna est veritas et praevalebit" – Truth is powerful and will ultimately prevail.

Freedom of Information in NZ? Hmmm.

I stumbled upon this interesting post Freedom of Information on g.blog.

Here is a sample of the start of it:

"You know, being anti-pornography, against the exploitation of children, and being of the view that publishing explicit photos of a person without their explicit informed consent is a form of stealing someone’s right to their own identity, it’s not often I have a chance to defend the availability of child pornography. But here I go, for the first time ever. You can mark it on your calendar if you like."

In memoriam: Atefeh Rajabi - murdered by the Iranian judiciary

(Most of this is borrowed from the Telegraph article  Death and the maiden in Iran, July 2004.)
Atefeh Rajabi appears to have been a fairly normal 16-year-old, but with an unfortunately bad family background. She was probably sulky, disobedient, and eager to have sex. In London, those attributes could earn lectures from parents and teachers on the importance of acting responsibly and not being offensive.
In the city of Neka in Iran, where Atefeh Rajabi came from, they got her hauled up in front of a judge, where she was charged and found guilty of "acts incompatible with chastity". The judge in the Islamic Sharia court ruled that the appropriate penalty was death. Her sentence was confirmed by Iran's Supreme Court.
The justice machine of Iran having thus run its proper course, on 15th August, 2004, the girl was hung from a crane in the main square of Neka, in full public view, in order to keep "society safe from acts against public morality", and her young, insignificant life was snuffed out.

This was state-sponsored barbarism in action - based on a non-secular goverment, which is run according to the state's fascist religious ideology and dogma.
Sharia law, the Islamic code governing punishments in Iran, states that:

• Unmarried people who have sex should be punished with 100 lashes. That was the chastisement meted out to the single man with whom Atefeh was accused of "committing acts incompatible with chastity".
• Married women who have sexual relations with someone who is not their husband should, according to Sharia, be stoned to death - although Iran's chief justice, apparently revolted by the cruelty of pelting women with rocks, ruled two years ago that stonings should be abandoned.
  

Hanging is not prescribed for either category of transgressor. So what was the judge (one Haji Rezaie) doing sentencing an "unchaste" 16-year-old to hang? As justification, he said that she had "undressed in court" and had a "sharp tongue". However, it seems that all she had done was to take off her headscarf and insist that she was the victim of an older man's advances, and, in any event, even if she had stripped naked and called the judge a "fat ignorant bastard", those actions would hardly merit death, even under Islamic law. Nevertheless, the judge was so outraged that he decided he would personally put the noose round the child's neck.

That disgraceful and disgusting "punishment" excited a great deal of condemnation in Iran among reformists, but not produced little comment in the Western media. Amnesty International issued a statement expressing outrage at the execution (the tenth of a child in Iran since 1990) - but no British newspaper or television station reported it, and it received similarly little news reporting/comment here in New Zealand.

Why not? The two extremes of pro- and anti-Muslim sentiment in Britain and New Zealand are now united in not expecting even the most minimal ethical standards from Islamic countries such as Iran: the pros because they think that Islamic laws should not be criticised for fear of giving offence; the antis because they think all Muslims are just a bunch of irredeemable barbarians.

Those two extreme views seem to have infected media coverage. If it had happened in America - for example, imagine the response if a 16-year-old girl was executed for having sex in Texas - then it would be headline news, but this, because it happened in an Islamic state, was apparently too banal to count.

That attitude could guarantee that more children will suffer Atefeh's fate.

Of course, it suits Western governments - which are always pushing for greater trade links with God-forsaken places like Iran - just fine if people think that criticism of Islamic judges is inappropriate because standards are different. However, respecting Islam does not require accepting the judicial murder of 16-year-olds (or indeed anyone, of any age) for having sex. That is categorically wrong wherever it happens. We need Western governments, and a Western press and other news media, that say so.

Girl, Interrupted - in memory of Aqsa Parvez, plot #774

On December 10, 2007, a 16-year old girl Aqsa Parvez was murdered - by her Pakistani immigrant Muslim father, Muhammad Parvez, and her brother, Waqas Parvez, in what is euphemistically termed an Islamic "honour killing".  The cause of death was strangulation.

But this didn't happen in Pakistan, it happened in Mississauga, Toronto (Canada), where the population has tripled in the past 30 years - there are currently more than 700,000 people living in this, the country’s sixth largest city, and half of them are visible minorities.

Provocation for the father to murder his daughter must have been profound - he had sworn to kill her - because she had abandoned the use of her hijab (headscarf) - which is apparently a sin according to the Koran (and under Islamic Sharia law).

Sweet 16: more than 20 Facebook pages devoted to 

Aqsa Parvez were created within days of her death 

Image credit: Facebook

The details and the background to the murder of this child (she was aged 16) are adequately described in a factual and unemotional  4-page article by Toronto Life (click on link).


As if the murder wasn't bad enough, there is an article on 22 January, 2009 in Jihad Watch, that describes how Aqsa was buried without a headstone - she was laid in an unmarked grave, in plot #774 in Meadowvale Cemetery in Brampton, Ontario. One Pamela Geller took up a collection to raise funds for a headstone, and a group of infidels contributed sufficient to make it a goer. But there was a problem, according to Pamela Geller in the article:

The bottom line is that the family (her alleged murderers) has to "sign off" on it. We are still waiting for them to look at the headstone. Clearly they are the obstacle. We have tried to pursue purchasing a plot near, around or in the vicinity of her unmarked grave. The Islamic Society owns them all. *sigh*.

The Toronto Life article says:

Aqsa’s death got to the heart of a heated debate about women in Islam. Some progressive Muslims, such as Tarek Fatah and Farzana Hassan of the Muslim Canadian Congress, saw her murder as evidence of rising Islamic fundamentalism in Canada. The majority of Muslim leaders, however, insisted that Aqsa’s murder was not an honour killing. Mohamed Elmasry, who heads the Cana dian Islamic Congress, and Shahina Siddiqui, president of the Islamic Social Services Association, described the death as a teen issue and a case of domestic abuse.

The imam whom Applewood contacted to get help for Aqsa was Sheikh Alaa Elsayed, who presides over the Islamic Centre of Cana da. The centre is the largest mosque in the GTA, its impressive minaret visible from the QEW. Elsayed, a tall and good-looking man with a friendly smile and flowing white robes, came to Cana da from Egypt when he was 15. In his 20s, he lived in Bermuda, Saudi Arabia and Europe but eventually made his way back to Toronto. Before he found his religious calling, he was a district safety manager for Home Depot. Elsayed’s office reflects the hectic pace of his job. There are religious texts, pamphlets, counselling books and, the requisite prop of any skilled listener, a bowl of candy on his desk. As imam, he’s responsible for weddings, funerals, divorces, domestic disputes, spiritual counselling and, of course, leading prayers. After he heard from Applewood, he phoned the Parvez family twice, once speaking briefly with someone at the house and another time leaving a voice mail offering support and assistance. He never had the opportunity to help because no one in Aqsa’s family returned his calls.

The day after Aqsa’s murder, Elsayed went into damage control mode. Worried about a backlash against Muslims, he and another imam held a press conference where he read passages from the Koran to demonstrate how Islam condemns honour killings. Taking a life, he said, is an act against all humanity.

“The fact is, the Koran says to cover,” Elsayed tells me. “This is what God Almighty says. You want to adhere to it? Good for you. If you don’t want to adhere to it I cannot force you, but you will be held accountable on judgment day. There are so many Muslim women who are not covered now. Do we do anything? Do we shoot them? We do not.”

But you see, they do, and they did, and the murder has been tacitly sanctioned by them.

I just did a search on Facebook and found twenty (that's 20) groups that are in memoriam for Aqsa Parvez and which also variously relate to advocacy groups against Islamic honour killings, against the suppression of women in society, the abuse of women, etc. All of these groups are open for anyone to join, and, amazingly, one of them is called Support Toronto Life Magazine and its coverage of the Aqsa Parvez murder. Now, you, like me, might wonder - why on earth would they need a group like that? 

Well, the answer to that question would seem to lie in the last group in the search. It is a closed "by invitation only" group with 313 members, called Call to Action: Toronto Life’s Misrepresentation of Aqsa’s Parvez’s murder. If you read the basic info about the group, there is a long diatribe about how the coverage of Aqsa Parvez's murder "misrepresented" Islam with the premise that it is a religion associated with violence.

This would be laughable if it were not so serious. The facts of this case, and all the other cases of Islamic-initiated violence - of "honour killings" of women, stonings, horrific attacks, bombings, beheadings, dragging bodies through the streets, the Al Queda in the Swat valley in Pakistan, and other barbaric acts too numerous to mention here - not forgetting 911- would seem to support the premise, QED. 

But no, we are "misunderstanding" Islam or "offending" Islam, and we must not do that, otherwise we could be introduced to the most compelling argument - the same argument that was put by the Muslim protesters to the Dutch publishers of those infamous cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. This was more than just a strong protest.

The sound of a loaded gun being cocked behind your head has historically been a pretty compelling argument that has ended many a disagreement. 

"I just keep seeing Muslims killing people." as said Ann Coulter, American right-wing conservative, as reported in The Independent, August 20, 2004. 

So, why kill Aqsa Parvez? Because it is apparently in the Koran (as the imam is quoted above) - "Women must cover" - not forgetting that the punishment for deliberate disobedience of any of Allah's commands is death.

So, why bother to attempt to defend the crime and ameliorate the news reports with obfuscation about "misunderstanding" Islam? Because it is in the Koran as an acceptable approach (guile) when you are indending to dissemble to conceal your real motives of Islamic dominance - which dominance Allah directs all Muslims must strive towards. The next step would be the implementation of Shariah law, to progressively replace any other laws.

"Islam in America isn't to be equal to any other faith but to become dominant."
"The Koran should be the highest authority in America and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth."
- Omar Ahmad, Co-Founder of CAIR.

So, are Muslims violent, bad people? Decidedly not. With the exception of the relatively small criminal element that you would find in any society (arguably less in Muslim societies, because the deterrents are so severe - they can be stoned or get their hands, ears or feet chopped off as punishment for some crimes), the vast majority of Muslims are deeply religious, and the Koran forbids them to commit arbitrary acts of violence.

They are people like you and I, but the difference is that they have submitted to a religious ideology (Islam means "submit") where things such as Western democracy and freedoms are anathema to what Muslims are directed to do by Allah - they are blasphemies. However, violence towards blasphemers and infidels (non-Muslims) and in the interest of Islamic domination is acceptable - if not usually recommended - in the Koran (Allah's word). You must not argue with the absolute and infallible word of Allah.

So, what I would suggest at this point is that the Toronto Life actually did not do as thorough a journalistic job as it might have done. The journalistic view was taken using Western eyes. If you look with Western eyes, and using a Western paradigm, at Aqsa Parvez's Pakistani immigrant Muslim father, Muhammad Parvez, and her brother, Waqas Parvez, you see a senseless, brutal, premeditated murder of a child by a father and son - the people who should have protected her. Why would a father and son conspire to deliberately cut short a daughter's life full of potential?

To find an answer, you need to put yourself in the shoes of Muhammad Parvez, and try to understand what pressure he was under. His darling daughter (and I feel sure he would have loved her very much) was in her teens and probably in a rebellious "hormones-on-legs" stage. This is what you might expect of any adolescent - it would be normal. However, in Islam, she is a mature, marriagable woman (able to menstruate and bear children) and she commits an error - she breaks a law which must not be broken - it is an offence, and she is a blasphemer as a result.  She not only does not wear the hijab, she continues to not wear it. What to do - she has blasphemed, and to do nothing would be tantamount to compounding the blasphemy and thereby implicating the whole family - and they will all be held accountable for this on Judgement day.

There is only one way out.  She must be killed - and by the men in the family.  If this was not done, then, by turning a blind eye, they themselves would be in danger of being regarded as blasphemers - which can lead to death, or at least, excommunication in this life, and the certain fires of Hell in the afterlife.  Thus, this was not an "honour killing".  In Islam, this was a perfectly correct and appropriate sentence carried out by the father and son.  Failure to take action would have risked the family going to Hell in the afterlife, and risked losing the support of the local Islamic society (excommunication) in this life - it would have been a classic failure to submit to the Koran, the word of Allah.

Think how angy with the girl her father and brother must have been at being compelled by her stupid actions and under Allah's law to kill her, and how grief-stricken they must have been at being so obliged to kill their loved one.  Before you judge them, consider how you could have coped any differently had you been in their shoes. The trial of these two men under a Western law would have little meaning when they were subject to and obeying a much higher law - one that transcends the man-made laws of Canada. There is only one law - the law of Allah.

There was no failure of justice here, in either system of laws. If there was any failure, it was in the father not telling his daughter clearly and at an early stage (or maybe he did, and she did not believe him):

"Please, please, please put the hijab back on and keep it on like a good Islamic girl, otherwise - under Allah's law - I shall be forced to kill you, and it would break my heart to do that."

Whatever sentence the father and son receive as punishment, I cannot imagine that it would be worse than living daily in the knowledge and memory of having been obliged by Allah's law to kill their daughter/sister. This whole sorry affair is a tragedy that is being and will be repeated in one form or another across the world wherever Islam meets Western civilisation. If it were not for the blasphemous Western civilisation influencing Aqsa and children like her, encouraging them to disobey Allah's laws, then there would have been no need to kill the children. It is the blasphemous Western civilisation that needs fixing, and it will be fixed by implementing Islamic religious supremacy, according to Allah's word.

Take care when you are out cycling in Paris

"Angles Morts" in French literally menas "deadly angles", but "blind spots" is probably a more correct interpretation. The angles morts are the blind spots radiating out from cars and trucks. Cyclists are not visible if they are in these blind spots, and when vehicles are turning, cyclists run a very high risk of getting killed by the vehicle in question. That is why "Angles Morts" is the name of this 8-minute long YouTube video clip, which looks like it was composed of many takes of the dangers for cyclists on Parisian roads and especially the bicycle lanes. A fascinating vid, and in my opinion well worth a watch.

Thanks to the blog site Do You Vélo?

Confronting the unpleasant sight of what we are

Removing raw sewage by hand

Whilst archiving some old notes, I came across this BBC news item from 2006: "IT giant [HP] faces India legal action".

Reading this reminded me that the same hi-tech area in Bangalore as was mentioned in the article was also mentioned in another article about India from the BBC: "Bangalore's 'night soil' collectors". These "collectors" are from the absolute lowest Hindu cast - the Dalits (untouchables) - and have the primary job of manually moving shit out of cesspits, at night-time - presumably because at night-time there is nobody of a higher caste - and who probably made the shit in the first place - to see/smell and be offended by this activity.

The latter article not only provides a scatalogical angle, but also room for some serious thought by us.

If you read the latter article, you will see that, interestingly, they call it "night soil" - and apparently not because the shit collectors (Dalits) work on this unpleasant job only at night-time. For example, I read a separate report about Indian "ecological" public toilets, where they referred to the shit not as "shit", or "excrement", or "sewage", or even "waste", but as "night soil", so not only is it just a euphemism for shit, but it also suggests that the people that produce the shit only produce it at night-time. That would seem highly unlikely to me, as I would expect people to have to take a shit whenever they needed to, and it would be highly unrealistic to expect them to be able to hold it in all day and only evacuate their bowels at night-time. Having said that, some Fakirs have amazing control over their body's autonomic nervous system, so I suppose anything is possible for them.

I also find it amazing that, even though "the night soil system" was apparently banned by the Bangalore state government in 1973, it is still happening over 30 years later - thus displaying a responsible reluctance to be over-hasty in implementing new laws.
But, I have to ask: What sort of society would avoid implementing proper sewage systems - when they obviously have the capability to build such systems - and thus oblige some of their their citizens to manually remove shit from cesspits?

I think that the way a society conducts itself can tell us a lot about the people in that society. For example, leaving the subject of Indian excrement removal aside for the moment, take a look at the Egyptian government's rescinding of the ban on the practice of female genital mutilation (euphemistically called "female circumcision"), just after imposing a total ban on this barbaric practice in about 1997 - refer "Female genital mutilation 'must end'".

Now I know that it's easy to be judgemental, but it seems to me that, in this so-called "enlightened age", the people who sanction - even legislate - such things in these societies really do seem to be rather unenlightened and possibly somewhere near the bottom of the cultural evolutionary scale. We are probably lucky that they are not our immediate neighbours and we can hope that they don't immigrate to become our real neighbours.

But back to India: So, for much a lower cost, should HP and other computer/IT companies continue outsourcing their work to the people in India, putting their own more expensive labour force out of work at home? Hmmm.
Though this is labour arbitrage, isn't it also kinda like immigration by proxy? It seems to me that if HP and other IT companies do this, then the Dalits certainly won't be the ones to benefit. Carry this to its logical conclusion and Western countries could become nations of consumers, with no-one engaged in useful production. Would that be a recipe for national economic survival/growth? I could be wrong, of course, but I can't see that it would. So what exactly is it a recipe for?

Having said all this, one has to ask:

• Are these Indians in the shit?
• Are we maybe about to help pull them out of it?
• Or are we about to deliberately descend into the shit with them?
• And who's got the toilet roll?

What do you think? Is this "food for thought", or just a load of eliminated waste matter?

Burakumin - are the Japanese still uncivilised?

Mass graves of the Nanking massacre victims uncovered

I read this fascinating post in Slashdot today - Google Earth Raises Discrimination Issue In Japan

- which says:

"The Times (UK) reports that by allowing old maps to be overlaid on satellite images of Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto, Google has unwittingly created a visual tool that has prolonged an ancient discrimination, says a lobbying group established to protect the human rights of three million burakumin, members of the sub-class condemned by the old feudal system in Japan to unclean jobs associated with death and dirt. 'We tend to think of maps as factual, like a satellite picture, but maps are never neutral, they always have a certain point of view,' says David Rumsey, a US map collector. Some Japanese companies actively screen out burakumin-linked job seekers, and some families hire private investigators to dig into the ancestry of fiances to make sure there is no burakumin taint. Because there is nothing physical to differentiate burakumin from other Japanese and because there are no clues in their names or accent, the only way of establishing whether or not they are burakumin is by tracing their family. By publishing the locations of burakumin ghettos with the modern street maps, the quest to trace ancestry is made easier, says Toru Matsuoka, an opposition MP and member of the Buraku Liberation League. Under pressure to diffuse criticism, Google has asked the owners of the woodblock print maps to remove the legend that identifies the ghetto with an old term, extremely offensive in modern usage, that translates loosely as 'scum town.' 'We had not acknowledged the seriousness of the map, but we do take this matter seriously,' says Yoshito Funabashi, a Google spokesman." The ancient Japanese caste system was made illegal 150 years ago, but silent discrimination remains. The issue is complicated by allegations of mob connections in the burakumin anti-discrimination organizations."

This made me ponder on the Japanese. I never could figure out why the Japs sometimes seemed to have such an alien culture - civilisation for them sometimes seems to be just a thin superficial veneer. Take a look at a few points (following) picked out from Japan's modern history - surely no civilised race could do these things? Yet they categorically did, and today are even trying to deny and write some of these things out of their history books. Until they can confront their history, the Japanese, it seems, will remain unable to live with the reality of what horrors the Japanese were and are still capable of.

1. The Rape of Nanking (or The Nanking Massacre) - only 80 years ago

• The massacre of people of the Nanking (Nanjing) area seems to have been carried out in retribution for the Chinese having dared to resist invading Japanese forces. Between Dec. 1937 and Feb. 1938, an estimated 300,000 Chinese people - mostly civilians and including men, women and children - were variously raped, bayoneted or otherwise horrifically killed, individually and en masse., with their bodies often left rotting in the street for all to see. In an eerie anticipation of the German Nazi SS fascination for record-keeping of the Jews massacred during the Holocaust, the Japanese soldiers seemed to revel in having photos of themselves taken with their victims or their victims' corpses.
• The verdict of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East reads in part:

"Approximately 20,000 cases occurred within the city during the first month of the occupation...The total number of civilians and prisoners of war murdered in Nanking during the first six weeks was over 200,000. ... These figures do not take into account those persons whose bodies were destroyed by burning or by throwing into the Yangtze River or otherwise disposed by Japanese."

• The number of 200,000 was largely based on the records of several humanitarian and charity organisations that started burying bodies a week to four months after the massacre began. A summary of these records was published which demonstrated that six charity groups buried a total of 195,240 bodies between Dec. 1937 and Oct. 1938. (Detailed burial records are available.)

From the Tribunal's verdict, the number of 200,000:

• (a) did not include victims whose bodies were disposed of by the Japanese (as was common in the early stages of the massacre) or by individual Chinese - other than the charity groups;
• (b) did not include the number of those who were massacred after the first six weeks.

Therefore, the number 200,000 is probably a conservative number. Adding in estimates or known numbers of the people murdered in smaller scale killings and whose bodies had been buried by other people, then the estimate is that over 300,000 Chinese people were massacred in Nanjing.

2. World War II atrocities - only 70 years ago
(The following examples are by no means exhaustive, but you will get the general idea.)

Example #1 - The Death Railway: The building in 1943 of one of the railway bridges over the Mae Klong river.
From the CWGC (Commonwealth War Graves Commission)

"The notorious Burma-Siam railway, built by Commonwealth, Dutch and American prisoners of war, was a Japanese project driven by the need for improved communications to support the large Japanese army in Burma. During its construction, approximately 13,000 prisoners of war died and were buried along the railway. An estimated 80,000 to 100,000 civilians also died in the course of the project, chiefly forced labour brought from Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, or conscripted in Siam (Thailand) and Burma (Myanmar). Two labour forces, one based in Siam and the other in Burma worked from opposite ends of the line towards the centre."

Example #2 - Bamboo:

Japanese inventiveness brings new uses to bamboo - thin slivers are inserted under a torture victim's nails, thus causing excruciating agony.

Example #3 - Japanese "Comfort" women: (sex slaves for the Japanese troops)

In what is the largest recorded example of systematic rape in history, from about 1933 until the end of WWII, the Japanese military forcibly enslaved and conscripted an estimated 200,000 non-Japanese girls and women to work in "Comfort Stations" or brothels where Japanese soldiers could receive sex on demand. Frequently tricked or lured from their homes with promises of high-paying factory work, these women, most of whom came from countries like Korea and the Philippines (which were under Japanese rule at the time), were imprisoned in the comfort stations for as long as eight years, received no money for their services and suffered torture or even death if they refused to comply with the soldiers' demands. Because many of them were killed as the defeated Japanese troops vacated their encampments, and because those who survived were too traumatized and ashamed to speak of their experience, the history of the comfort women remained largely unknown until 1991, when one survivor spoke out and brought the attention of human rights activists to the women's plight. In the book Comfort Women Speak,the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues compiled an oral history comprised of interviews with 19 surviving comfort women, who describe their ordeals in harrowing detail. They were routinely underfed, maltreated, and forced to service up to 50 soldiers a day. While their responses to their experience range from anger to resignation, all feel that their lives were permanently blighted as a result. These testimonies made a powerful case for the apologies and reparations that the Japanese government has yet to grant.

Example #4 - Okinawa civilian suicides:

With the impending victory of American troops, civilians often committed mass suicide, urged on by the fanatical Japanese soldiers who told locals that victorious American soldiers would go on a rampage of killing and raping. Ryukyu Shimpo, one of the two major Okinawan newspapers, wrote in 2007:

"There are many Okinawans who have testified that the Japanese Army directed them to commit suicide. There are also people who have testified that they were handed grenades by Japanese soldiers (to blow themselves up)."

Some of the civilians, having been induced by Japanese propaganda to believe that U.S. soldiers were barbarians who committed horrible atrocities, killed their families and themselves to avoid capture. Some of them threw themselves and their family members from the cliffs where the Peace Museum now resides. Film footage taken by the American forces shows civilians coming out of hiding from a seaside cliff-top cave and hurling themselves off the cliff, with the American soldiers powerless to reach them and stop them.

Understanding:

So, with the Slashdot post, we can now perhaps begin to understand a little more about these "aliens" on our doorstep. The post seems to indicate that, for the Japanese, the concept of the development/improvement of the individual cannot operate across class/caste boundaries - a similar problem exists in the Indian culture and caste system (e.g., once a Dhalit, always a Dhalit).

It's not just that this is/was holding back the development and civilising of Japanese society. It seems that other things that were holding them back maybe still are. For example, the peace with Japan and the rest of the world might not have been so effective and long-lasting if the Americans had not identified and addressed two systemic causal problems in Japanese society - the Shinto religion and the emperor's state rites, both being embedded in the Japanese paradigm, along with "patriotism". The politicisation of Shinto was typified by a Japanese Ministry of Education ruling of 1932 which acknowledged that Shinto shrines were non-religious establishments for fostering patriotism. State Shinto became a mouthpiece for the militarist regime of the 1930s. After Japan's defeat in 1945 the American Occupation authorities decreed Shinto's disestablishment, ending State Shinto. The emperor's state rites were re-categorised as the private rites of the imperial family.

End of problem - apparently.

Wrong. The persistence (QED) in modern Japanese society of the old caste prejudice against burakumin would seem to indicate that the essential Japanese paradigm has remained little changed. It is rock solid. Until it does change, the effective civilising of the Japanese would arguably be impossible. History shows that where the lessons of history are not learned, then history will repeat.

For example, the Germans in their drive to world domination, had to be put down a second time, after they rose from the ashes of World War I, and it was only after a monumental effort and loss of human life that the Allies and the Russians managed to combine forces to subdue them and thus end World War II that the Germans had started.

If the Japanese similarly rise from the ashes of World War II, then what if the rest of the world does not have the resources or the willpower to collaborate and confront and put the Japs down again? Could this happen? Maybe - e.g., consider the Chamberlinesque appeasment attitudes of some country leaders towards the Islamic terrorist threat, post 9/11, which forced the US to more or less go it alone with relatively minimal help from its old Allies - except for the British and some old Commonwealth support. Maybe we are beginning to lose our collective human "bottle" for recognising and confronting resurrected recent and ancient evil.

Corruption in the House

On the same day as news reports are published disclosing further irregularities over British MPs' expenses rorts (e.g., Expenses row over MPs' second homes), there is this interesting news report about the restitution of ill-gotten gains - Crime boss's luxuries up for sale.

However, the news reports do not attempt to relate these items to each other or a third (the Damian Green fiasco) and a fourth item (the "Cash/loans for Honours" scandal) of past news. In case anyone does not see some some common threads here, I shall expand on this.

• The Damian Green fiasco. He is the MP whose parliamentary offices were searched - in breach of the law - by police of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command, who had been sent by someone in authority to find out how he had discovered that the police had got the main civil liberties campaigner - Shami Chakrabarti CBE - as a main focus for a "national security investigation". Labour party apologists claimed that it was necessary for the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command to be involved in this affair, simply because they had inherited the functions of the former Special Branch, and that they were used to dealing with complicated computer evidence etc.
  
• "Cash/loans for Honours" scandal: Somehow this (the need for police of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command to be involved) did not apply to the "Cash/loans for Honours" scandal investigation into the then Prime Minister Tony Blair and his cronies, even though the investigation included email evidence from No 10 Downing Street. This was left to a "normal" police investigation team led by Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Yates, who, by an irony of fate, has now replaced the disgraced Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick, who was in charge of the supposedly elite Counter Terrorism Command unit when these controversial arrests and searches were made.
• These above two points are discussed here on Spy Blog.
  
• The MPs' expense claims: After a disgraceful and strenuos effort to cover up and protect MPs' expense claims from being publicised, the staunchest defender of their secrecy - the speaker of the House of Commons, MP (Labour) Michael Martin - has resigned after calls to resign from MPs. Since being publicised, it has become quite apparent that MPs have been abusing the expenses system and using it as a rort (definition: a trick, a fraud, a dishonest practice) for many years.
  
• What Michael Martin was trying to do was to avoid the hard light of scrutiny being shone onto the subject of MPs' expense claims. In an award-winning essay on Ethics in Business in the Harvard Business Review by Sir Adrian Cadbury in the 1990s, he (Sir Adrian) gave a general rule of thumb: If a business process/practice can not stand the hard light of scrutiny, then there is probably something unethical about it.
• The common thread: corruption amongst lawmakers - all the above points involve unethical/illegal practices.
• So, if illegally-gotten gains can be recovered as in Crime boss's luxuries up for sale, then why not in the case of MPs' illegally-gotten gains for all those years?
  

That question does not yet seem to have been posed by the British news media.

However, what I find really interesting is closer to home: Whilst it may seem all to easy to go "tut-tut" or "we always knew they were rotten inside" over this about the corrupt practices (QED) of British lawmakers (MPs) and the related legal system, if we now turn the same hard light of scrutiny onto the New Zealand parliament and how it has managed the country, then what might we find there, and how might we recover the hundreds of millions of dollars of apparently ill-gotten gains involved? I refer here to rorts including:

• The apparently government-sanctioned financial raping of the New Zealand public with the BNZ in the late eighties (read Daylight robbery : the rise and fall of the "people’s bank" (2001), by Ian Wishart ISBN 0958205469).
  
• The huge tax rort by companies exposed in the Winebox affair, apparently largely controlled/managed by Fay Richwhite.
• NZ MP Winston Peters was really the only MP who ultimately called Michael Fay and David Richwhite to account for these things, and he was then pilloried.
• The question has already been asked: Was it because Richwhite helped bankroll the Labour Party that the then Labour government refused to prosecute anyone over the Winebox affair?
• Fay Richwhite have also been obliged to pay back millions because of their involvment in insider trading over the sale/purchase of TranzRail.

This is what Wikipedia has to say about Fay, Richwhite & Company:

• Fay, Richwhite & Company is the investment vehicle of Switzerland-based New Zealand merchant bankers Sir Michael Fay and David Richwhite.
• The firm was the prime focus of the "Winebox Inquiry" which dealt with, among other things, tax-avoidance arrangements in the Cook Islands. The publicity surrounding the inquiry generated considerable public ill-feeling towards Fay and Richwhite, and was one of the principal reasons for their emigration to Geneva. Fay, Richwhite were investors in the Bank of New Zealand, which was sold to National Australia Bank in 1992.
• Fay and Richwhite were also involved in a series of transactions between 1986 and 1993 involving their companies European Pacific; Capital Markets; Fay, Richwhite; the Bank of New Zealand; Tranz Rail; and Telecom New Zealand, transactions in which they personally gained over half a billion dollars - at the same time as their minority shareholders lost $277 million ^[1].
• Fay and Richwhite also pocketed $274 million from sales of Telecom New Zealand share options in September 1993 without having to put up any capital in advance^[1].
• Fay and Richwhite have lived in Geneva since the late 1990s.

This could seem to answer the question posed above: How might the NZ public recover the hundreds of millions of dollars of apparently ill-gotten gains involved? That is, the answer is that those culpable have been and will be allowed to get away with it, without restitution. There is no Robin Hood syndrome in Fay, Richwhite & Company.

Does this indicate that the gullible New Zealand public gets the government it deserves?

Enquiring minds need to know.

I visited the Sistene Chapel

Today I went and had a quick tour around the Sistene Chapel. I took this picture:

OK, it's not really a photo - it's actually a screenshot from a "virtual tour", via here.

What a beautiful thing to publish on the Internet! However, be warned - you might need to take care if you get dizzy easily. I rapidly got motion sickness by turning the viewpoint around whilst playing and looking at this.
About using this virtual tour:

• You can navigate and "move" your view around the chapel in various ways:
• (a) Clicking on the displayed bar of arrow keys; the + and - keys zoom in and out; the right hand side end button enlarges the image to full screen; the Esc key gets out of "Fullscreen" mode.
  
• (b) Double-clicking and dragging the view with your mouse; go slowly with the mouse - the computer may take a while to keep up with your commands, depending on your connect speed - it seems to work by downloading Flash view files/frames to your computer.
• (c) Using of the cursor keys, and the Shift and Ctrl keys; experiment by using them in combination with each other.
  
• You can see 360 degrees around, together with an variable vertical view.
• Go up and down and all around.
• Look into the various alcoves and aisles.
• Don't forget to look at the ceiling!