This week’s visit by Richard Holbrooke and joint chiefs chairman Mike Mullen to Pakistanhas been a reminder of the weirdness and dysfunctionality of the government there and our relationship with it. For instance, the Times reports today that the chief of Pakistan’s intelligence agency refused a meeting with the American envoys (though he sat in one one that included Pakistani military officials). I’m guessing he was fuming over recent leaks about the ISI’s Taliban ties. But this is really not someone we can afford to have as an antagonist.
Meanwhile, Dawn says president Zardari is graciously offering to take out the militants himself if we give him a bunch of our drones and tell him where to shoot:
We would much prefer that the US share its intelligence and give us the drones and missiles that will allow us to take care of this problem on our own.
Uh, thanks but no thanks: The Pakistanis–or at least some elements of their government, i.e. the ISI–are notorious for tipping off radicals just before big raids. Plus, with Robert Gates looking to ramp up drone production to meet a fast-growing need, it’s not like we’re itching to give the things away. Not gonna happen.
Meanwhile, Mullen and Holbrooke are now in India, where the latter stressed the need for Pakistan-India cooperation–but said the US won’t be mediating. “We cannot negotiate between the two countries,” Holbrooke said, delighting the local media.
Photo: Richard Holbrooke stands to introduce journalists to Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi (sitting-R) as US military commander Admiral Mike Mullen looks on prior to starting a meeting at the Foreign Ministry in Islamabad on April 7, 2009.

–Michael Crowley

Read More
(Submitted by a reader)

By Cynthia Peters

At a public bath in Morocco, I watched a young adolescent bathe her grandmother. She picked up each limb, moved her breasts this way and that, and shifted her belly about to reach every crevice. She stood over her, squatted next to her, and sat alongside her as she put a fair amount of muscle into scrubbing her grandmother clean. The black soap made from olive oil oozed from the coarse cloth she used to slough off the dead skin and dirt. The grandmother lolled on the tiled floor in a reverie.
Nearby, two middle-aged women took turns scrubbing each other. One lay on the floor while the other worked over every inch of her body – attentively, gently, and thoroughly. Afterwards, the recipient of all the attention pulled herself up and kissed her friend as if to say thank you. Then they switched roles, the scrubber moving into a prone position on the floor and the ritual was reversed.
Through the steam, you could see dozens of? women, some wearing underpants and some not, sitting in pairs or small groups – all very matter-of-factly but tenderly cleaning each other. For these Moroccan women, a visit to the hammam is a weekly ritual that allows not only for deep cleaning but for socializing as well. For me, a westerner accustomed to private showers and no public nudity, the hammam was a revelation. If it’s impolite to stare under regular circumstances, it must be even more so when everyone around you is naked, but still it was difficult not to let my eyes linger. I have never seen so much female flesh.
It made me realize that the only female bodies I am really familiar with are my own and the billboard version, and since the billboard version offers only one type of female body (young, tall, and impossibly thin), that means I have a pretty limited awareness of what’s going on under women’s clothes.
I was trying to explain this to a friend of mine, and she scoffed, “You don’t hang around at the gym too much, do you?”
Well, the fact of the matter is, I don’t go to a gym, but I get her point. There are some opportunities to see your sisters in the flesh. But stepping past each other in the locker room as you head into your private shower provides a much shallower and more furtive experience of what we’re really like under our clothes. “So what?” you might ask.
As a problem, it doesn’t rank up there with the Iraq war and the systemic economic crisis, but participating in a culture that constantly promotes one type of body – the billboard body – and requires privacy and discretion about every other type of body is not good for women. In the hammam, women and girls get to see their past, present, and future all laid out in a completely unremarkable way. Each woman can locate herself in timeline of aging. The 40-year olds absorb their transition from the 20-year old and 30-year old body to their current state and have coming decades mapped out in all their variety.
How many of us women remember the adolescent version of ourselves? I had completely forgotten until I saw numerous girls in various stages of puberty hanging out at the hammam. Why remember and why care? I think it might simply because in our culture, we are mystified by adolescence. Our young girls are hyper-sexualized by corporate media, which appropriates the transformative stage they are in and uses it as fertile marketing territory. As parents, we are coached to worry and fret about what they will “get into” at this age or how they might “rebel.” What if we got a chance to simply be with them and be in the presence of their transformation – all the while treating it like it was the normal, everyday, unremarkable thing that it actually is. What if adolescent transformation was something we were able to fully acknowledge and simultaneously ignore (similar to how we notice the seasons change)?
And for the young girls, they get to see women of all shapes and sizes, completely at ease in their own bodies and around the bodies of others. This is no small gift. Compare that to our culture where women age in the privacy of the dressing room, where we turn this way and that to see how well the “slimming technology” of the new bathing suit works or scrutinize whether the push-up bra adequately disguises the sagging breast.
(It would have to be the subject of another commentary to more fully explore how it is that a culture — like Morocco’s — that requires women to be all covered up in public also manages to have space for women to be congenial and intimate in private. And how a culture — like ours in the U.S. — encourages women to show all in public, but fosters atomization and competition with each other in private.)
The weekly visit to the hammam gives women a completely unselfconscious visual of other women’s bodies, something that at a minimum normalizes the variety in our shapes and sizes and lays out the aging process in full detail. More than that, though, it must be a relief to not constantly see yourself in comparison to the billboard body. Instead, you see yourself in the mix of a great assortment of bodies, and (I’m only guessing here, but it seems a reasonable guess) so you see yourself as *belonging* in that great assortment. Unlike those of us in the great western world who never belong because the familiar and publicized versions of the female body are literally unattainable for most of us.
The visual contact in the hammam is only part of it, however. There is also the incredible luxury of physical contact – safe, intimate, platonic, unselfconscious, full-body contact. Even as I write that, I wonder if I’m making it up. It sounds … utopian. The women in the culture that I am a part of do not often get together and *tend* to each other – so lovingly and so thoroughly.
We do our best, though. We talk about our bodies. Some fix each other’s hair or do each other’s nails. We probably do more platonic touching among ourselves than men do among themselves. We hang out at websites like http://thebellyproject.wordpress.com/ or http://theshapeofamother.com/ that display anonymous pictures of bellies, submitted by women who are trying to come to grips with their post-partum bodies. These cyber-delivered images remind us that we are not alone, that stretch marks are normal, and that flat stomachs are extremely rare among regular people. Women reply to the anonymous images with anonymous words of support. “You look great!” and “You’ll be hot again in no time.”
The pictures are anonymous. And it’s just me and my computer monitor. So it’s okay to stare. And I could always log on and add my words of encouragement. But I’d rather step into the steamy public bath, where it’s possible to get really clean, really relaxed, and really at home with your body.
Cynthia Peters can be reached at cyn.peters@gmail.com.
Read More

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet

As U.S. jets blow up some former “Sons of Iraq.”

Let’s review the ever-changing labels we apply to Sunni fighters in Iraq.
They began as “Ba’athist dead-enders.” Soon, they became “terrorists” — the “worst of the worst.” Well after the U.S. occupation began, many joined a domestic insurgency group called “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” which was soon shortened in most media accounts to “Al Qaeda.”
Then, at the same time as the Bush administration sent a number of additional troops to Iraq that was universally regarded as insufficient to the task of establishing security in the war-torn country, we cut deals with several Sunni elders — not all of of whom survived — and started paying 100,000 of their fighters $300 bucks per month. They became “Sunni Awakening Councils,” or the “Sons of Iraq,” and were lauded by the gullible as “heroes who helped bring security and peace to Iraq.” Supposedly, they had had a revelation, and “joined forces” with our occupying troops to “defeat al Qaeda.”

Remember, many were the same people who had been members of al Qaeda in Iraq, and whom we’d called “the worst of the worst.” But $300 multiplied by 100,000 is $30 million per month, and, you know, there’s a recession and the Iraqi government we installed has a budget surplus, so, as the Washington Post reports today, “the U.S. military recently stopped paying the Sons of Iraq, many of whom are former insurgents who were put on the American payroll in 2007 in a high-stakes strategy to quell the insurgency.”
A good idea in theory, perhaps, but problematic in its execution. The relationship between the Iraqi government and the “Awakening” groups has always been fraught, and the former apparently has some problems with HR. WaPo:
Under heavy pressure from the U.S. military, the Shiite-led Iraqi government agreed to assume responsibility for the payments to the predominantly Sunni armed groups and absorb some of them into its security forces.
But in recent weeks, several Sons of Iraq groups have disintegrated and some members have rejoined the insurgency, saying the government has failed to pay them on time and has been slow to admit them into police academies.
The result, I suppose, was predictable.
An American military aircraft opened fire Thursday night on Sons of Iraq members who were allegedly spotted placing a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said Friday.
Update: I’m bringing this, from AlterNetter “janten,” up from the comments …
In September 2008, UCLA announced the results of a study based on satellite images of the night lighting in Baghdad that indicates that it wasn’t the surge the help settle things down there.
“Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning,” said lead author John Agnew, a UCLA professor of geography and authority on ethnic conflict. “By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left.”
“The surge really seems to have been a case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted,” Agnew said.
“The U.S. military was sealing off neighborhoods that were no longer really active ribbons of violence, largely because the Shiites were victorious in killing large numbers of Sunnis or driving them out of the city all together,” Agnew said. “The large portion of the refugees from Iraq who went during this period to Jordan and Syria are from these neighborhoods.”
Here’s a tiny link to a news announcement which also offers a link to download the full report (PDF).
Thanks, Janten. And beneath the fold, a reprise of a post from last year on the failed “surge” ….
The idea that the “surge” — Bush’s troop escalation — is working is almost universally-embraced these days. But it’s not supported by the evidence — it’s a testament to the power of American propaganda. As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi put it, “You can run any shit up the flag pole, and these reporters will salute it.”
That the troop escalation has been anything but a success is not an ideological claim, as supporters of the occupation charge, but numerical and chronological. The surge began last February, and there was something approaching a consensus at the time that the addition of about 20,000 combat troops — the rest were support personnel — would be a drop in the bucket in a country of 25 million people. Retired four-star General Barry McCaffrey said at the time: “I personally think the surge of five U.S. Army brigades and a few Marine battalions dribbled out over five months is a fool’s errand.” But the troop build-up continued in March, April and May.
The period that followed was a bloodbath — last June and July were the most violent summer months of any year of the occupation. August was one of the bloodiest months, period. Then, that month, the powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his Mehdi Army to stand down. The number of Iraqi civilian deaths fell by about 50 percent the next month and decreased again in October and November. The militia is estimated to be 100,000 strong and is arguably the most powerful ground force in Iraq after the U.S. military. While the change can’t be wholly ascribed to any single factor — the violence has also decreased as a result of communities that have been fully “cleansed” of one or another ethnic or sectarian group — it’s clear that al-Sadr’s order, not Bush’s “surge,” was responsible for most of whatever “success” there may have been.
Finally, there is the masterpiece of propaganda known as the “Sunni Awakening.” Spun as a sign of success, the reality is that the U.S. military turned over some of the areas where they’d encountered the most violent resistance to local Sunni authorities — many of whom they had condemned as “terrorists” previously — and started paying their fighters to stop shooting at U.S. troops. In other words, the U.S. was defeated and surrendered territory to the “enemy,” effectively paying reparations to local populations and suffering fewer casualties as a result. There are many ways to define success, but defeat and surrender are not among them. Yet, in perfectly Orwellian fashion, after four years of saying that Iraq was mostly stable aside from a few local areas and the Sunni “Triangle of Death,” the administration simply stopped using the phrase and replaced it with talk of a “Sunni Awakening.”
We’ve always been at war with Eurasia.
Read More

(Submitted by Shahabuddin Haji)

Solving a longstanding mystery, scientists have found that the human heart continues to generate new cardiac cells throughout the life span, although the rate of new cell production slows with age.
The finding, published in the April 3 issue of Science, could open a new path for the treatment of heart diseases such as heart failure and heart attack, experts say.

“We find that the beating cells in the heart, cardiomyocytes, are renewed,” said lead researcher Dr. Jonas Frisen, a professor of stem cell research at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. “It has previously not been known whether we were limited to the cardiomyocytes we are born with or if they could be renewed,” he said.

The process of renewing these cells changes over time, Frisen added. In a 20-year-old, about 1 percent of cardiomyocytes are exchanged each year, but the turnover rate decreases with age to only 0.45 percent by age 75.

“If we can understand how the generation of new cardiomyocytes is regulated, it may be potentially be possible to develop pharmaceuticals that promote this process to stimulate regeneration after, for example, a heart attack,” Frisen said.

That could lead to treatment that helps restore damaged hearts.

“A lot of people suffer from chronic heart failure,” noted co-author Dr. Ratan Bhardwaj, also from the Karolinska Institute. “Chronic heart failure arises from heart cells dying,” he said.

With this finding, scientists are “opening the door to potential therapies to having ourselves heal ourselves,” Bhardwaj said. “Maybe one could devise a pharmaceutical agent that would make heart cells make new and more cells to overcome the problem they are facing.”

But roadblocks remain. According to Bhardwaj, scientists do not yet know how to increase heart cell production to a rate that would replace cells faster than they are dying off, especially in older patients with heart failure. In addition, the number of new cells the heart produces was estimated using healthy hearts — whether the rate of cell turnover in diseased hearts is the same remains unknown.

To find out the rate at which new heart cells are generated, the researchers used carbon-14 dating to estimate exactly when in the life span the cells were created. They found that less than 50 percent of cardiomyocytes are exchanged during a normal human life span.

Levels of carbon-14 can be used to date the cells, because levels of this isotope rose during the era of above-ground nuclear bomb tests, back in the 1950s. This also increased the levels of carbon-14 in the cells of all people and animals on Earth at the time. However, the levels of carbon-14 in our DNA has been dropping since above-ground testing was banned. So, pinpointing the levels of carbon-14 at various times in particular cells let the researchers date when each cell was born.

Dr. Gregg C. Fonarow, a professor of cardiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that for any cell-replacement therapy to be clinically useful, the rate of cell regeneration would have to dramatically increase.

“It was previously believed that the cardiomyocytes are terminally differentiated and cannot regenerate when the heart is damaged,” Fonarow said. “Recent studies have suggested that cardiomyocytes can regenerate, but there has been substantial controversy as to the rate of cellular turnover,” he said.

This new study, using carbon dating, suggests that cardiomyocyte regeneration can occur, but to a very limited degree, Fonarow said.

“Whether there will be medical or gene therapies that can safely and effectively allow for higher rates of myocardial regeneration will require further study,” he said.

In a related development, scientists reporting in the April 3 issue of Cell Stem Cell found that they could use stem cells to promote the creation of new blood vessels in mouse hearts.

The team from Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, used a dual therapy. On one side, they slowed the degradation of SDF-1, the main chemical that guides stem cells to damaged heart tissue. They also treated the mouse hearts with granulocyte colony stimulating factor, a drug that mobilizes stem cells from various places such as the bone marrow and blood. This two-pronged approach led to the generation of new blood vessels and improved cardiac function following a heart attack, the team said.
Read More

Conference Press Release
25 March 2009
Delegates of the International Conference on Indigenous Peoples’ and Extractive Industries are set to submit on Saturday to officials of the United Nations, multi-lateral financial agencies and governments their position paper on how to address the plight of the Indigenous Peoples worldwide, including other measures that would mitigate the problems of climate change brought about by the indiscriminate extraction of natural resources.
In the three-day conference attended by 85 representatives from 37 countries, they are one in saying that the manner by which transnational mining companies undertake the extraction of oil, gas, gold and other mineral resources often tramples their basic human rights viz-a-viz the seemingly relaxed regulations imposed on them by the states.
“The faces of violence, the persecution of IPs, and the manner of incursion in our lands are the same worldwide, — from the continents of Africa to Asia as far as extractive industries are concerned, not to mention the environmental destructions they caused,” the world indigenous peoples said.
UN representatives, including those from the World Bank and other multi-lateral financial institutions are also expected to arrive tomorrow for a separate expert workshop, which also caps the three-day affair of the IP delegates. Government representatives from Bolivia, the Philippines, Ecuador and Norway are also expected to participate.
Conference organizer Tebtebba, said they expect a positive response from these institutions, expressing hopes that future endeavors to address these problems will be in accordance to the highest standard set forth under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and on corporate accountability. The UNDRIP is the latest international agreement adopted by the UN General Assembly and signed by 143 countries in September 13, 2007.
They said that while they admit that extractive industries play a vital role in pumping up the economy of the world, this should be done under strict regulations and international standards to protect the environment, propel sustainable development, alleviate poverty and respect and preserve the rights and cultural legacy of the IPs.
“We hold our rights to be inherent and indivisible and seek recognition not only of our full social, cultural and economic rights but also our civil and political rights. We condemn all doctrines, policies and practices based on the presumed superiority of certain peoples and worldviews,” they said.
In the Philippines, the Mines and Geosciences Bureau of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources continues to harp the bright opportunities for the mining industry as an estimated $3 Trillion of untapped mineral resources has been opened up for extraction with interested foreign investors. Thus, it is more likely that further dislocations of the local indigenous peoples and environmental degradation will take place unless there is a strong and effective mechanism that will govern the conduct of the mining companies.
Just yesterday, Intex Resources Philippines Inc., a unit of Intex Resources ASA of Norway, signed a $2.95-billion agreement with the Philippines to develop a nickel reserve on an area straddling Occidental and Oriental Mindoro provinces.
This comes at a time when the country also hosts the second international conference in an effort to send a strong message to world and financial leaders to halt future schemes by both the mining companies and governments that go beyond the bounds of the laws and regulations protecting the environment and the rights of the indigenous peoples.
For inquiries, please contact:
Jo Villanueva
Mobile: 09194111660
Email: jomvillanueva@gmail.com

Each April in Kawasaki the Kanamara Festival takes place at the Wakamiya Hachimangu Shrine in Kawasaki, about thirty minutes by train south of Tokyo. It’s an unusual festival and one that may cause you to shake your head and look twice at some of the mikoshi (portable shrines) being paraded through town.

“Huge pink and black phalluses were paraded down the streets of this Japanese town in an annual fertility festival, as some 30,000 worshippers asked for blessings and protection from sexually transmitted diseases.”

Source: Reuters, Phallic festival celebrates fertility in Japan
The Kanamara Festival dates back over three hundred years when prostitutes came to the shrine to ask for protection from syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases. Today, prayers are for fertility and protection from AIDS and the penis is the symbol of the festival. Volunteers carve daikon (Japanese radishes) in the the shape of the male and female sexual organs and offer them to the gods.
Popular souvenirs from the event are phallus shaped candies and the area surrounding the shrine is decorated with images of the penis in all shapes and sizes!

This years festival will be help on April 5th and starts with a fire ceremony and the opening rites performed by a Shinto priestess. After which a giant pink phallus will be loaded onto a mikoshi (portable shrine) and costumed participants will proudly and boisterously parade it through the streets. This event goes on all day and long into the night.

It’s not your usual festival and certainly not one for the prudish!
Read More

More pictures

by Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai

first, she lays down the heartbeat
the flat hand on the drum
advancing into the battlecry of love

next comes the handclap
shake the evil spirits from the air,
send them scrambling to their corners,
wave and wiggle and wriggle them
from sticking on our skins

on top of that is the shakera
like a ratchet,
tweaking, tightening, fastening
us to the song

the strain of piano is the rare bird
picking at concrete outside a brooklyn
bodega or the green leaf, lush and veiny
that falls on a chicago project bench, the real
light when most hope is gone, not
sugar saccharine fake sickly sweet stuff

on top of that, is the scratch
lest we forget that we are in mistress
missy’s house that she controls
the time and stop. the love. and stop.
our hearts and stop. what

did the record labels know what
to do with her? put her in shiny
plastic suits and bug-eyed glasses
like a hundred-sided die tumbling
against the rain on her window

an alien cartoon sent to us from the future
to push enough units without tits and
ass under plastic shrinkwrap –

no thighs exposed, she had her divas
for that: aaliyah, tweet, ciara, jazmine sullivan,
some say her girls, these fine little young things,
sexy and rare and strong, she mentored them,
cooed them, coaxed them into melody

i can’t help but find two women tangled in the
pretzel of love in the studio 3 AM laying their hearts down
on the track, crooning and conjuring waveforms for some man
who never was and never will be there.

he just as much an illusion as the booties
backed up in the video.

missy’s hand on her girl’s fit waist, pulling her close
in the booth by the top of her low-rise jeans, the
golden boil of the song welling hot in her girl’s belly
and throat.

i can’t help but imagine two women’s
bodies finding each other
between these sheets of sound

while tom cruise jumps from oprah’s
couch screaming his love for his second
mechanical wife, latifah bashfully answers the
interviewer, saying “set it off” was her favorite
role, progress held by the pristine rings on Ellen
and Portia’s fingers, lindsay lohan’s lesbianism
just a naughty bleached blonde trend following
alcoholism and rehab, katy perry’s exploratory girl-kissing

no match for two women traversing love,
locked in the studio 3 AM, ripping apart
and resurrecting the bones of each song.

Her website www.yellowgurl.com

A request from Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai:

So it’s always been my dream to be on a 30 under 30 list, and time is quickly evaporating, ha! So yes, NOMINATE KELLY FOR ANGRY ASIAN MAN’S 30 UNDER 30 MOST INFLUENTIAL ASIAN AMERICANS. Just send 100 words or less on why you think I should be on his 30 Under 30 List. Details here: http://www.angryasianman.com/2009/03/who-are-30-most-influential-asian.html-YAY!