Quotulatiousness

December 21, 2010

This goes far beyond accepting the end of “DADT”

Filed under: Asia, Health, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:40

As I posted back in January, one of the problems western troops have in dealing with Pashtuns in Afghanistan is the radically different sexual culture, including barely concealed pedophilia:

The vast gulf between U.S. and Afghan attitudes about homosexuality and pedophilia has generated concern among U.S. advisers in Afghanistan since the American presence there began to expand.

In late 2009, U.S. and British forces ordered a study of Pashtun male sexuality. They were worried that homosexuality and pedophilia among Afghan security forces and tribes could create cultural misunderstanding with allied troops, according to a copy of the report obtained by The Washington Examiner.

[. . .]

“I know Marines and soldiers who have refused to work with Afghan military or police,” said one U.S. military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It’s not about homosexuality as much as it is about the young boys. Some of them like to show pictures on their cell phone — that should be illegal. Some of the Afghans have their own young boys they use for sexual purposes and we can’t do anything about it.”

[. . .]

“Homosexuality is strictly prohibited in Islam, but cultural interpretations of Islamic teaching prevalent in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan tacitly condone it in comparison to heterosexual relationships,” the study states.

For a male to have sex with a boy is considered a “foible,” the report said. By contrast, having sex with an “ineligible woman” would set up “issues of revenge and honor killings.”

Years of living under that cultural construct have greatly altered sexual attitudes, the study said. “One of the country’s favorite sayings is ‘women are for children, boys are for pleasure,” the report noted.

‘Tis the season to hate the senders of boastful holiday letters

Filed under: Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:17

Gregg Easterbrook receives the perfect, perfect holiday letter:

Don’t you hate boastful holidays letters about other people’s fascinating lives and perfect children? Below is one Nan and I received last week.

Dear Friends,

What a lucky break the CEO sent his personal jet to pick me up from Istanbul; there’s plenty of room, since I have the entire aircraft to myself, to take out the laptop and write our annual holiday letter. Just let me ask the attendant for a better vintage of champagne, and I’ll begin.

It’s been another utterly hectic year for Chad and I and our remarkable children, yet nurturing and horizon-expanding. It’s hard to know where the time goes. Well, a lot of it is spent in the car.

Rachel is in her senior year at Pinnacle-Upon-Hilltop Academy, and it seems just yesterday she was being pushed around in the stroller by our British nanny. Rachel placed first this fall in the state operatic arias competition. Chad was skeptical when I proposed hiring a live-in voice tutor on leave from the Lyric Opera, but it sure paid off! Rachel’s girls’ volleyball team lost in the semifinals owing to totally unfair officiating, but as I have told her, she must learn to overcome incredible hardship in life.

Now the Big Decision looms — whether to take the early admission offer from Harvard or spend a year at Julliard. Plus the whole back of her Mercedes is full of dance-company brochures as she tries to decide about the summer.

Nicholas is his same old self, juggling the karate lessons plus basketball, soccer, French horn, debate club, archeology field trips, poetry-writing classes and his volunteer work. He just got the Yondan belt, which usually requires nine years of training after the Shodan belt, but prodigies can do it faster, especially if (not that I really believe this!) they are reincarnated deities.

Modeling for Gap cuts into Nick’s schoolwork, but how could I deprive others of the chance to see him? His summer with Outward Bound in the Andes was a big thrill, especially when all the expert guides became disoriented and he had to lead the party out. But you probably read about that in the newspapers.

What can I say regarding our Emily? She’s just been reclassified as EVVSUG&T — “Extremely Very Very Super Ultra Gifted and Talented.” The preschool retained a full-time teacher solely for her, to keep her challenged. Educational institutions are not allowed to discriminate against the gifted anymore, not like when I was young.

Yesterday Rachel sold her first still-life. It was shown at one of the leading galleries without the age of the artist disclosed. The buyers were thrilled when they learned!

Then there was the arrival of our purebred owczarek nizinny puppy. He’s the little furry guy in the enclosed family holiday portrait by Annie Leibovitz. Because our family mission statement lists cultural diversity as a core value, we named him Mandela.

Chad continues to prosper and blossom. He works a few hours a day and spends the rest of the time supervising restoration of the house — National Trust for Historic Preservation rules are quite strict. Corporate denial consulting is a perfect career niche for Chad. Fortune 500 companies call him all the time. There’s a lot to deny, and Chad is good at it.

Me? Oh, I do this and that. I feel myself growing and flowering as a change agent. I yearn to empower the stakeholders. This year I was promoted to COO and invited to the White House twice, but honestly, beading in the evening means just as much to me. I was sorry I had to let Carmen go on the same day I brought home my $14.6 million bonus, but she had broken a Flora Danica platter and I caught her making a personal call.

Chad and I got away for a week for a celebration of my promotion. We rented this quaint five-star villa on the Corsican coast. Just to ourselves — we bought out all 40 rooms so it would be quiet and contemplative and we could ponder rising above materialism.

Our family looks to the New Year for rejuvenation and enrichment. Chad and I will be taking the children to Steamboat Springs over spring break, then in June I take the girls to Paris, Rome and Seville while Chad and Nicholas accompany Richard Gere to Tibet.

Then the kids are off to camps in Maine, and before we know it, we will be packing two cars to drive Rachel’s things to college. And of course I don’t count Davos or Sundance or all the routine excursions.

I hope your year has been as interesting as ours.

Love,
Jennifer, Chad, Rachel, Nicholas & Emily

(The above is inspired by a satirical Christmas letter I did for The New Republic a decade ago. I figure it’s OK to recycle a joke once every 10 years.)

Reason TV: Detroit’s Train to Nowhere

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Politics, Railways, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:56

Do not attempt to change planes in Bombay

Filed under: Bureaucracy, India — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:45

India is a rising economic power in the world, but it still has lots and lots of problems. Sean had to change planes in Bombay. It wasn’t a pleasant experience:

It wasn’t just one person who’d fucked up. This was no single, lone fuck-up cascading through the nooks and crannies of a complex system, like a butterfly causes a hurricane; everybody who touched my life that day, apart from, thankfully, the pilot and the airframe maintenance crew and my rickshaw driver, was busy fucking up in one way or another, sometimes spectacularly so. The guy who had all that time to anticipate the Diwali crush and thousands of rebookings fucked up. The guy who’d arranged the airport signs fucked up. So did the guy who cleaned the floors. The women representing Air India and India Air were a pair of fucknuts; the baggage handlers were probably already pretty fucked up before they even got to work, which of course fucked things up even worse. And the guy who designed the airport had, at some point well in the past, fucked up pretty royally. Even my taxi driver was a complete fuckup. The president of Air India? That guy’s totally fucked in the head. What was most remarkable about it, though, is that despite things being so thoroughly fucked, I did eventually get where I was going. With my western eye, all I could see was disaster, chaos, and impossibility; what I couldn’t see, until a good samaritan made it clear, is that there was in fact a solution. I’d been told that this is a common thing in India, that life there can be a series of 11th-hour miracles.

And all this, at the freakin’ airport. If there was going to be more of the same in India, I’d better get used to it — and learn to navigate it better — before I tried to ride my scooter from one end of the country to the other.

H/T to Damian Penny for the link.

EMALs successfully launches aircraft

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

In what must be welcome news for naval aviators, the next-generation catapult for launching aircraft from carriers was successful in a land-based test:

The US Navy says it has successfully launched a jet fighter into flight using a radical new electromagnetically powered catapult. The feat is important for the Americans, whose next supercarrier will be a disastrous botch without the new tech: it is even more critical for the future of the Royal Navy.

The US Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) announced the test success of its Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) last night, saying that the shore-based trials catapult at Lakehurst, New Jersey, successfully launched a Navy F/A-18E Super Hornet on Saturday.

“I thought the launch went great,” said Lieutenant Daniel Radocaj, the test pilot who flew the Hornet off the electric mass-driver. “I got excited once I was on the catapult but I went through the same procedures as on a steam catapult. The catapult stroke felt similar to a steam catapult and EMALS met all of the expectations I had.”

The timing of the test is crucial for the US Navy’s next big warship:

The next US fleet carrier — CVN 78, aka USS Gerald R Ford — is now at an advanced stage of build, and was designed around the EMALS. If EMALS couldn’t be made to work, the US Navy would have found itself in possession of the world’s biggest helicopter carrier. There will be much celebration at NAVAIR following Saturday’s success.

The next step in robotics: combat casualty recovery bots

Filed under: Military, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:16

It’s not ready to be used in the field yet, but the next military robot may be a stretcher bearer:

Killing a soldier removes one enemy from the fray. Wounding him removes three: the victim and the two who have to carry him from the field of battle. That cynical calculation lies behind the design of many weapons that are intended to incapacitate rather than annihilate. But robotics may change the equation.

The Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot, BEAR for short, is, in the words of Gary Gilbert of the American Army’s Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Centre (TATRC), “a highly agile and powerful mobile robot capable of lifting and carrying a combat casualty from a hazardous area across uneven terrain.” On top of that, when it is not saving lives, it can perform difficult, heavy and repetitive tasks, such as the loading and unloading of ammunition.

The current prototype BEAR is a small, tracked vehicle with two hydraulic arms and a set of video cameras that provide a view of its surroundings to its operator across a wireless link. It has been developed by TATRC in collaboration with Vecna Technologies, a company based in Maryland that invented the robot.

Bears beat Vikings to claim NFC North division title

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

The last time the Vikings gave up this many points was a previous game against the Bears, but at least that one was close (48-41 in 2008). This game wasn’t close at all:

Vikings executives spent last week working diligently to make sure Monday night’s game was played in front of their home fans in part because it was meant to serve as a celebration of the franchise’s 50th season in Minnesota.

That was their first mistake.

Given the team’s performance in its 40-14, five-turnover loss to Chicago at TCF Bank Stadium, those execs might have done their fans a greater service by having shifted this game as far away from snowy Minnesota as possible. That way, many in the announced crowd of 40,504 wouldn’t have had to witness a second consecutive listless performance from a team that might have played in the elements but mentally appeared to be in Maui.

The game was supposed to be rookie Joe Webb’s first NFL start, but mirabile dictu the status for Brett Favre was upgraded from “out” to “questionable”, and he somehow managed to get healthy enough to start. It didn’t last too long, though:

Favre’s NFL record consecutive-starts streak had ended at 321 the previous Monday against the Giants because of an injury to his throwing arm and at that point it appeared his career might be finished. But Favre, who has said numerous times this will be his final season, wanted to give playing another shot.

It proved to be a poor idea.

Favre was left lying motionless on the field after taking a crushing hit from defensive end Corey Wootton in the second quarter. He suffered a concussion and was replaced by rookie Joe Webb, who had been scheduled to start in the first place.


Photo from Viking Update.

Webb completed 15 of 26 passes for 129 yards with two interceptions and a 38.8 passer rating and also scrambled six times for 38 yards, including a 13-yard touchdown. But it mattered little against a team that completed a season sweep of the Vikings.

Jim Souhan sent a couple of Twitter updates during the fourth quarter saying that fans were pelting the Vikings bench with snowballs. The quarterbacks were throwing them back, but the Bears players kept intercepting them.

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