While we in the UK wade through the tedium of the Labour conference in Brighton, politics in the US continues to excite. The mayor of East Cleveland, Ohio, has just been voted out of office. As the Cleveland Leader puts it, "East Cleveland voters must of not have liked what they saw from their Mayor late last week..."
What exactly must they of not have liked? This brief news item tells the story:
The Aztecs remind us that there is nothing uniquely European about the forward march of technical progress. As for European claims of moral advancement, never forget that gunpowder settled the clash of civilisations. Had things played out differently, Aztec museums might now allow us to marvel at scary savages who slaughtered their enemies by blasting fire out of the end of a tube.
Could the Guardian ever, conceivably, drop the moral relativism? The Aztec empire required constant warfare and conquests in order to meet the demand for more and more victims to march up to the top of their pyramids and have their hearts cut out. Admittedly the Spanish weren't quite the Sisters of Mercy, but, frankly, this was not a civilisation heading for liberal democracy, quantum physics, and Strictly Come Dancing.
And this is baffling:
The Aztecs are said to have chosen the spot for their capital by tossing a heart in the air...
How far can you throw a heart in the air? Even the biggest tosser could only make a difference of 20 yards or so one way or the other. I don't think they've quite thought this one through.
In this fascinating and learned theological disquisition, Syrian-born Saudi cleric Muhammad Al-Munajid, on Al-Majd TV, fills in some of the gaps in our understanding of paradise:
Allah said that the black-eyed virgins are beautiful white young women, with black pupils and very white retinas, whose skin is so delicate and bright that it causes confusion. Allah said that they are like hidden pearls. They have wide eyes, and they have not been touched by man or jinn. They are virgins, who yearn for their husbands. They are all the same age, morally and physically beautiful. They are like precious gems and pearls in their splendor, their clarity, their purity, and their whiteness. They are like hidden pearls – as pure as a pearl within a shell, untouched by man. Each one of them is so beautiful that you can see the bone-marrow through the delicate flesh on their legs.Such brilliant beauty does not exist in this world. Where can you find such beauty? Whereas the women of this world may suffer, for days and nights, from menstruation, from blood for 40 days after childbirth, from vaginal bleeding and from diseases – the women of Paradise are pure, unblemished, menstruation-free, free of feces, urine, phlegm, children....
A bit like the Playboy Mansion, then...
Moreover, Allah cleaned them of all impure and foul things, both in appearance and character. In character, they are not jealous, hateful, or angry. They are not greedy.....
They are restricted to tents, locked up for the husband. There is no such thing as going out. When he comes home – they are there. There is no such thing in Paradise as a man coming home and not finding his wife there. Allah described them as women who lower their gaze, and never look at anybody but their husband. As for deriving pleasure – the man is given the strength of....
The Prophet Muhammad says that in Paradise, a man gets the strength of 100 men when it comes to eating, drinking, passion, and sex....
...with Viagra on tap.
And you can go to the sweet shop every day, and the sweeties are all free, and they never do your teeth any harm, and they taste lots lots better than the sweeties you get here on earth, and they're all your very favourite flavour, but you don't ever get tired of them...
A Japanese magazine trains North Koreans in journalism, then sends them back to report, at the risk of their lives, from inside a country where foreign journalists can't get access:
Reporting from Seoul - Editor Jiro Ishimaru dimmed the lights and started the shaky video clip before a roomful of North Korea experts.
The footage, taken surreptitiously from a speeding motorcycle, was jarring: It showed the Soonchun Vinylon factory, which many defectors claim has been secretly used to produce lethal chemicals, including nerve gas. But the video showed a deserted complex slouching forlornly on a weed-strewn stretch of countryside.
The experts sat wide-eyed. They had heard rumors of the factory's fate, but this was their first real evidence.
The images will soon be featured in an issue of Rimjingang, a magazine published in Japan that offers a highly intimate look inside North Korea. What makes it all the more remarkable is that the quarterly publication consists of articles written not by outsiders, but by a few North Koreans, farmers and factory workers who risk their lives to provide poignant vignettes and hard-news accounts of life in their reclusive homeland.
The stakes are high. The reporters use pseudonyms because they know that if they are caught by North Korean authorities, they could be sent to prison or executed as spies....
Named by the magazine's reporters after a river that flows across the border from north to south, Rimjingang features everyday scenes of people's lives, from mammoth Pyongyang to the smallest villages. Since the magazine was launched in 2007, the tiny staff of reporters has delivered scoop after scoop.
Their cameras peek inside an illegal market where hungry children scavenge food from the ground. They offer images of a busy bus terminal patrolled by soldiers, a North Korean prison and a town where even children are put to work in a coal mine.
"I'm proud of these reporters," said Ishimaru, 37, editor of Rimjingang. "I'm committed to help them deliver a message to the world that they are risking their lives to report."
The magazine is published in Korean and Japanese, and editors will soon launch an English edition they hope will help think tanks and the Obama administration gain a better feel for life in North Korea.
Some mindless Monday morning robotics for your enjoyment. Behold, the ABB Flexpicker (via):
Watch those sausages being sorted!
You're advised to turn the sound off, or at least keep it low.
The days of women - it's usually women, wearing hairnets - leaning over endless conveyor belts of mass produced gloop, sorting and picking out the duff ones, are well and truly over. These suckers can stack pancakes at the rate of over 400 per minute.
Pancakes? Yes, here you go - an industrial film, with a retro-style commentary of the kind you thought had died out thirty years ago, takes a look at how ABB Robotics are helping Honeytop Speciality Foods Ltd (not forgetting its strategic partner RG Luma) to improve their pancake processing capability. Worth it (perhaps: it is Monday morning) for the sight of the Flexpicker in action at just past the minute mark, and the unfortunate use of the phrase "the final solution".
Only 7.5 miles long, it connected Lake Worth at Juno, to Jupiter Inlet, Florida. With intermediate stops at Venus and Mars, it was often called the Celestial Railroad.
No of course we don't have another....oh that one!...you mean that one?...ha ha!...oh yes, that one....yes...all perfectly above board!...here we are, we're declaring it now to the International Atomic Energy Agency...it's just, you know, all the paper work, it takes time....
