Mick Hartley

The Nagakin Capsule Tower

Living in pods seemed like the future some 50 years ago - but, as with so many revolutionary architectural visions, it didn't quite work out:

An icon of Japanese Metabolism, the Nakagin Capsule Tower stood in the Ginza neighborhood of Tokyo from 1972 until it was demolished earlier this year. Conceived by the famed designer Kisho Kurokawa, the building featured two central concrete towers, with 140 individual pods slotted into the main structures. A circular window allowed light into the small modules, which were created with the intention that they could be removed and replaced as needed.

This flexibility was an essential component of Metabolist architecture, which fused the concept of megastructures with organic growth, meaning many of the designs of the period embraced prefabrication for its ability to “regenerate” every few decades. Unfortunately for the Nakagain Capsule Tower, though, structural issues prevented the pods from being easily swapped, and the building fell quickly into a state of disrepair.

Photographer Noritaka Minami visited in the last few years up to demolition:

[Images © Noritaka Minami]

Fighting with the Nazis

David Patrikarakos at UnHerd, on Putin's reservist mobilisation as a symptom of Russia's defeat:

“This [mobilisation] means the war is coming ever closer to ordinary Russians.” “Petya” is a Ukrainian soldier on the country’s southern front, and he’s weighing up what recent events mean for those on the front lines. “He recognised that he needed more troops, more people to reach his goals. Before this moment, for ordinary people in Russia, this war was something very far away but now, ordinary Russian people will feel what this war means in their personal life.”

This is important. Even in a dictatorship, which Russia emphatically is — no matter how many democratic veneers Putin tries to paste over his actions — you can’t enrage too many people too many times if you want to govern more or less unhindered. When I was last in Ukraine, over the summer, I lost count of how many people told me the USSR’s failed invasion of Afghanistan was the final nail in its coffin.

...Russians are unhappy. The most searched terms on the internet in Russia following the announcement were, according to one anonymous tweeter, “how to break your arm”; “how to leave Russia”; “foreign passport”; and then “how to avoid mobilisation”. There’s a great joke doing the rounds in Moscow right now, too. “As a reservist, you have been mobilised!” “Who are we fighting with?” “The Nazis.” “Yes, but against whom?”

On the levee

Arthur Rothstein - January 1942. "Memphis, Tennessee. Cars parked on Mississippi River levee."

[Photo: Shorpy/Arthur Rothstein for the Office of War Information]

Abbas at the UN

We last heard of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas a month ago when he horrified his Berlin hosts by blithely talking of the "50 holocausts" that Israel had committed against the Palestinians. On Friday he was speaking at the UN in New York, and continued the same tone-deaf bad faith approach, with his determination to vilify the Israelis at every opportunity.

David Horovitz in the Times of Israel - Abbas asked why there is no Palestinian state. The answers were in his speech:

He claimed to genuinely want peace with Israel, but in other passages of his address made clear that he rejects Israel’s very legitimacy: he denounced the Balfour Declaration; he described Israel as a colonizing power for 75 years — that is, since its historic rebirth in 1948; he airbrushed Judaism out of his “eternal” Jerusalem, in which there are only Muslim and Christian holy sites, under relentless, unjustified, daily Israeli attack.

In his narrative, there was no acknowledgment, no sign of internalization, of why Israel might hesitate to relinquish any more of the territory he has sought all these years for a Palestinian state.

His comments included powerful passages on the terrible deaths of children in Gaza, complete with a New York Times front page filled with the faces of young people killed in May 2021’s conflict. But there was no mention that Israel dismantled its settlements and withdrew all its soldiers from Gaza in 2005. No hint that Hamas took over, and has relentlessly provoked conflict with Israel ever since, using its civilian population as human shields for its indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israel, subverting all relevant resources for weaponry — and battering home the lesson to Israel that relinquishing the adjacent territory where Abbas demands sovereignty merely empowers the forces that seek our destruction.

In his depiction, last year’s 11-day war between Hamas and Israel was the latest of “50 massacres” carried out by Israel against the Palestinians since 1948; at least this time he refrained from calling them “holocausts.” ...

For three-quarters of an hour, the Palestinian Authority president fulminated against Israel’s refusal to grant the Palestinians full sovereignty on all the territory they seek, and condemned the international community, led by the United States, for failing to force Israel’s hand. He professed bitter indignation at Israel’s brutal intransigence and utter bafflement at the world’s complicity.

But his speech contained the explanations. Like his unlamented predecessor Yasser Arafat, he continues to resist the very fact of Israel’s legitimacy as the revived historic homeland of the Jews, encourages his people to believe that it is a colonizing presence that can be ejected, and incites and rewards murderous hostility toward it.

Lapid on Thursday offered Abbas a one-sentence formula for Palestinian independence: ‘Put down your weapons, and there will be peace.” But as ever, tragically for our people and for his, the Palestinian leader was not minded to listen.

Rebel women

Forcing women to wear the hijab isn't some eccentric by-product of the Iranian revolution, or of Islamic societies in general: it's a key feature.

Janice Turner in the Times:

You might wonder why the Iranian regime doesn’t bend to modernity, placate its critics and end enforced hijab. Even the Saudis have lately limited the powers of their own morality police to harass women in the street. But Masih Alinejad, the Iranian journalist who eight years ago began My Stealthy Freedom, where Iranian women photographed themselves daringly without headscarves, tells me: “This is not a piece of cloth — it is the Berlin Wall”. Control of women’s dress isn’t a by-product of Islamic rule but its foundation: if hijab falls, so does the regime. Each rebel woman, therefore, is another loose brick.

When the Iranian revolution overthrew the Shah, it imposed the veil on every female over seven years old. This was not just to signify to the world, and its own people, that Iran was under new anti-western management, but as a method of societal control. Among the slogans of 1979 were “Wear a veil, or we will punch your head” and “Death to the unveiled”.

In her extraordinary graphic novel Persepolis Marjane Satrapi recalls the sudden horror when her childhood freedom ended and she had to don a black shroud to attend school. The veil was neither a Persian tradition nor a practice that, as in Indonesia or Pakistan, grew with the ascendancy of conservative Islam. It was enforced wholesale overnight upon women who previously were free to choose.

What a boon for a tyranny to create laws where you can harass or imprison half the population just for how they look. If letting your scarf slip on the bus was punishable with 74 lashes or 60 days in prison, you’d stay watchful, respectful, obedient. Moreover it gives licence for others to harass women in the street: for clerics or older men casually to slap a “western whore” across the face, for conservative busybodies to chide, for parents to keep their daughters close and young men to scare pretty girls.

By enforcing hijab, the government inveigles itself into your bedroom, it watches you put on make-up, it judges your selfies on Instagram, insinuates itself into your most private places and closest relationships. The Iranian regime’s whole legitimacy is predicated upon this intimate control, so no wonder it has doubled down, with the security services last year accosting 3.6 million women and impounding 14,000 of their cars.

As the Iranian economy has tanked, Raisi has grown ever more obsessed with hijab, spending huge sums on TV programmes and online campaigns to promote compliance, and in February recalling his ambassador to London because an unveiled female violinist played at the embassy. This week he demanded CNN’s Christiane Amanpour wear a headscarf when she interview him at the UN and cancelled when — unlike lesser journalists — she refused.

Hijab law is a means to keep Iran frightened and divided, buttressing Raisi’s withering power. So Alinejad, now exiled in New York, is enraged that western democracies fall in line. She rails against female politicians such as France’s Ségolène Royal or Sweden’s Ann Linde for covering their heads on government visits. She says their excuses, that forced hijab is part of Iranian culture or a minor domestic issue compared with other Middle East problems, are mere cover. They prefer to junk women’s rights rather than sacrifice trade deals or risk accusations of Islamophobia from Muslims at home.

Now Iran’s women need the world’s wholehearted support so that protests do not collapse as they did after state killings in 2019. The mullahs cannot keep a cultured, sophisticated, historically outward-looking country enslaved for ever. Sixty per cent of its 86 million people are under 30 years old and two thirds of recent graduates are female.

But Islam has always fought its battles over the bodies of women: judging national piety by their invisibility. In Turkey, allowing the hijab into colleges and government buildings augured the end of Ataturk’s secular state. In 1958, the Muslim Brotherhood’s first demand of Nasser was veiling all Egyptian women. (He laughed.) In Afghanistan, the returning Taliban’s first act was to shroud every girl.

Now, like the women liberated from Isis territory who threw down their black chadors in disgust, Iranians are shaking their hair free. Their new movement’s slogan is “Women, life, freedom”: because until every Mahsa Amini is liberated, everyone remains enslaved.

Petty's Drive Inn

Arthur Rothstein - January 1942. "Roadside stand -- U.S. Highway 80, Texas, between Dallas and Fort Worth." Only 10 cents for a 13 inch hot dog.

[Photo: Shorpy/Arthur Rothstein for the Office of War Information]

Britain Is Responsible For All The World's Crises

Palestinian Islamic scholar Issam Amira doesn't like us:

"Britain is the mother of all crimes and disasters. It was Britain that sent the world into world wars that claimed the lives of millions. It was Britain that caused the Palestinian nakba, and the disgrace, shame, and humiliation we experience today. It was Britain that ignited the crises in the ancient world, the middle ages, and the modern world. I had the chance to visit Britain, and I was astonished by the infrastructure there. I asked: Such magnificent infrastructure — what is Britain's economy based upon? I discovered that its economy is based on stealing the money of the world's nations. Then I had the chance to go into the so-called 'British Museum," as a tourist who wants to learn about different cultures. I visited the different wings, in search for the wing of British history. However, I could not find anything British in this 'British' Museum. What I did find was an Islamic wing, a Greek wing, and Pharaonic wing, and so on. Even their museum is based on stealing other nations' treasures and cultures.

"May Allah curse Britain that caused slavery in the world, stole the wealth of other nations, and caused disasters. This is the Britain that our leaders are so proud of being loyal to. They make haste to send condolences to the British on the death of their queen, and to congratulate them on the crowning of their new king. One free and distinguished Muslim scholar said about Britain: Nurture in your children the hatred of Britain, like mothers breastfeed babies with milk that grows flesh and bone."

Jolly unfair if you ask me.

A revolution of men against women

In Iran, again:

The essence of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 15 seconds. “Although the 1979 revolution in Iran is often called an Islamic revolution, it can actually be said to be a revolution of men against women." -Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi pic.twitter.com/gVN1QsO4cv

— Karim Sadjadpour (@ksadjadpour) September 20, 2022

Gas and Glamour

The golden age of California's car culture, as documented by architectural photographer Ashok Sinha in his Gas and Glamour series:

McDonald's, Los Angeles, Year of Completion: 1953

Hawthorne, Los Angeles

Pann's Coffee Shop, Los Angeles, Year of Completion: 1958

Norms Coffee Shop, Los Angeles, Year of Completion: 1957

Saga Motor Hotel, Los Angeles, Year of Completion: 1959

George's 50s Diner, Los Angeles, Year of Completion: 1950

Fleetwood Center, Los Angeles, Year of Completion: 1987

Driftwood Dairy, Los Angeles, Year of Completion: 1961

Jet Car Wash, Los Angeles, Year of Completion: 1961

Randy's Donuts, Los Angeles, Year of Completion: 1953

Bob's Big Boy Broiler, Los Angeles, Year of Completion: 1958

Wigwam Motel #7, Los Angeles, Year of Completion: 1950

Der Wienerschnitzel, Los Angeles, Year of Completion: 1968

Bob's Big Boy Burgers, Los Angeles, Year of Completion: 1949

Ritz Motel, Los Angeles, Year of Completion: 1962

Gas and Glamour: Roadside Architecture in Los Angeles is available as a hardback.

Scottish rugby

In Scotland they do things differently:

Scottish rugby chiefs have been accused of putting women and girls in danger after the country became the only part of the UK to allow male-bodied transgender players to compete against females in full-contact matches.

Tonia Antoniazzi, a Labour MP and former women's rugby player who won nine caps for Wales, claimed that female players were being left exposed to serious and potentially life-changing brain injuries and called for the policy to be scrapped.

Rugby’s governing bodies in England, Wales and Ireland have recently changed their transgender policies to state that only people born as women can play in women’s matches, after peer-reviewed evidence showed male-born athletes retained significant physical advantages.

However, the rules in Scotland, which have been under review for the past year, still allows trans women to play against women with a decision over a potential change to the guidelines not expected for months.

The Telegraph understands that there were two trans women players “actively involved” within Scottish clubs last season. Scottish Rugby has refused to say whether or not they played in competitive matches.

Existing rules state that female players must not be told they will be competing against a male-bodied opponent, denying them the chance to opt out of matches if they have safety concerns. Clubs face disciplinary action if they break the strict confidentiality rule.

A double whammy. Not only do women rugby players run the risk of serious injury by competing against bigger stronger tougher opponents, but they're not even allowed to know in advance. It's like it's deliberately planned to cause maximum offence - and damage.

Ms Antoniazzi, a shadow minister, said the situation was even more concerning in light of emerging evidence about the severe risk of concussions resulting from high-impact collisions in rugby.

“We’re talking about a high impact sport, with full blooded games,” she said. “You cannot just apply the mantra of 'being kind' or that trans women are women to rugby - it has to be sex segregated.

“The fact that there are trans women in Scotland playing women’s rugby I find absolutely appalling. It should not be happening. There are already enough risks."

Scottish Rugby is believed to be consulting with the two trans players about the impact of any change, but has left the door open to continuing to allow trans women to compete in female matches.

Ms Antoniazzi, who represents Gower in South Wales, added: "Governing bodies, which are mainly led by men, want to be seen to do the right thing and could be easily led by the way the Scottish Government and others are looking at these issues.

"But they need to come to a decision - based on fairness and safety of women and girls in sport - and soon."

The current policy states that trans women and girls can be cleared to participate in full-contact games, provided testosterone levels have been below a certain threshold for 12 months.

But, as we know, testosterone levels are the least of it: we're talking about an inbuilt advantage from male puberty in bone size and muscle strength. Men are simply bigger and stronger no matter their testosterone level.

On the subject of rugby - nothing to do with trans players - here's Jonathan Meades. Rugger’s buggered:

As a spectacle, rugby union has vastly diminished. Where does a ruck end? When is a maul a brawl? The debt to American football is massive and debilitating. The late Alan Watkins, a writer not given to hyperbole, observed that rugby union is “no longer a game for normal members of the human race”. It had become an attritional mud bath for men who had “bulked up … not always a pretty sight”. They turned with the speed of a liner. That was almost 20 years ago.

Today is worse...essentially 75 minutes of thuggery and five minutes of ballet....

The more money that has come in to football the better spectacle the game has become. Pitches are no longer ploughed. Players have, mostly, not had individuality bullied out of them by sergeant majors whose limited command of English marks them as English. Tactics are generally fluid....

The more money that has come into rugby, the more dismal the spectacle of the game has become....

I played rugger at school. I didn't like it, but at least I understood what was going on. Not any more. On the very few occasions when I watch now, I rarely have any idea why the referee's blown the whistle - which he does a lot - or what the offence was supposed to be, and the part of the game that makes it an exciting spectacle - the runs and passing by the three-quarters - now constitutes less than 5% of the playing time. 

The Jewish "fantasy"

Remember Bristol University's David Miller, the fanatical anti-Zionist who claimed that members of the Bristol University Jewish Society were tools of the Zionist state? 

Miller saying antisemitism is a 'fantasy' on the state broadcaster of a country whose President this week questioned whether the Holocaust happened, and whose Supreme Leader has said Israel is a 'cancerous tumor' that will be destroyed. https://t.co/W8yleJxfga

— Dave Rich (@daverich1) September 21, 2022

Iranian women making history

Iran now:

To the world who still don’t know that in Iran #WalkingUnveiled is a punishable crime. Yes these
women who removed their hijab can get jailed, beaten & kicked out from job. But like the women's suffrage movement, Iranian women making history.#مهسا_امینی pic.twitter.com/pu3uUA1teM

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) September 19, 2022

The trans surgery gravy train

A further insight into the American medical establishment's push for trans surgeries, from Debbie Hayton at UnHerd:

Healthcare in the United States is big business, and that includes gender clinics. For all their faults — I reported on them recently — NHS Gender identity Clinics are free at point of use. Not so in the US. The patient (or their insurance company) pays.

The Clinic for Transgender Health at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee got on the gravy train in November 2018. Assistant Professor Dr. Shane Taylor explained that “these surgeries make a lot of money” and charged “female to male chest reconstruction” at $40,000, while a patient “just on routine hormone treatment that we’re only seeing a few times a year could bring in several thousand dollars”.

According to Taylor, gender reassignment surgeries — “huge money makers” — could support an entire clinic. “These surgeries are labour intensive,” she said, requiring “a lot of follow up time and they make money for the hospital”. Up to $100,000 each was her estimate.

What is the target market? According to an archive copy of Vanderbilt’s website, Taylor’s “areas of expertise” include Adolescent LGBT Health Pediatric General Practice.

A cursory inspection of Vanderbilt’s website gives no indication of their services for under-18s. In fact the clinic’s web pages are currently unavailable following recent media scrutiny in the United States. Archived copies, however, provide a chilling insight into what might have been going on. The Pediatric Transgender Clinic at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital has been offering ‘gender affirming hormone therapy’ and pubertal blocking. A video clip that emerged this week appeared to suggest that Vanderbilt clinicians would perform “top surgery”, i.e., mastectomy, on teenage girls who had not reached the age of “majority”.

The row in the US is intense and further developments are likely now that Republican politicians are on the case. Congressman John Rose could not be clearer as he called for an investigation: “Children are being permanently, physically altered for financial gain – it is inexcusable.”

But this is an issue that is split down political lines, and more so than in the UK. Randal Cooper, Democratic Party challenger for Rose’s district in Tennessee, retorted: “Here’s my opponent, playing to the extreme right wing by attacking children and healthcare workers.”

It's always the "extreme right" that's cited as the origin of any gender-critical commentary by those who like to consider themselves progressive. What, Nazis? Fascists? [Well yes for Judith Butler: "The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times".]

Never before have doctors administered cross-sex hormones to young people who were unhappy with their sexed bodies, nor have they removed healthy organs from them. Rose is right, and Cooper is wrong: this is not about Right-wing or the Left-wing issue; this is about children and Vanderbilt needs to be prepared to answer for their actions.

The debate may be more split down political lines in the US than it is here, but still the Tories are the only party that isn't currently embracing trans ideology.

The Detransition Diaries

Jo Bartosch on a new American documentary on confused young women thrown into a brutal one-way medical machine:

The young women in Jennifer Lahl’s latest film Detransition Diaries will never be able to run away from the mistakes they made in their youth; they are fated to carry them on their bodies and sound them in their voices for the rest of their lives. But by sharing their stories and talking about the harm done to them, the three young detransitioned women featured, Helena, Cat and Grace, might save others from believing the lie that they can change sex. And perhaps surprisingly, the tone of Lahl’s documentary is hopeful; the interviewees are presented not simply as victims, but as survivors....

Helena powerfully articulates how the social justice movement she was a part of left her feeling invisible and “guilty” about being a “cis, white female.” Her fear of being perceived as privileged is palpable; would you want to grow up to be a “Karen”? Yet not one of the adults who should’ve protected her told her that it was okay to simply be herself.

Arguably this is because supporting a trans person on a journey to become their “authentic self” offers more kudos than helping a vulnerable girl through her growing pains. And each of the young women were desperately seeking answers, ignored as girls, they believed that “transition” would solve their distress. Instead, they were used as props in the social justice posturing of others....

Lahl’s film exposes an astounding dereliction of duty on the part of medical professionals. Those outside the US may be shocked to discover that Planned Parenthood, the main provider of birth control services in North America, also prescribe cross-sex hormones to youngsters who identify as trans. Cat recalls that she called them to obtain a letter of permission to have a double mastectomy, euphemistically referred to by the community as “top surgery.” This was arranged over the telephone without an in-person assessment. Each of the women described how they were blindly affirmed by clinicians and counselors at every stage. It seems once a patient declares themselves “trans,” any safeguarding or scrutiny is waved away....

What is perhaps most shocking about Detransition Diaries, is the realization of just how young the victims of the transgender industry are. In around 2015, at a time when women in the UK were beginning to mobilize against proposals that would’ve seen gender self-identification introduced in our country, Helena, Cat and Grace were each lost in their delusion that they were the opposite sex. And yet, in the intervening years, each of them subsequently made the decision to detransition. In Cat’s case this was after seeing a video of British women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen.

As a middle-aged woman, it is obvious that the very same feelings that led Helena, Cat and Grace to undergo harmful medical procedures are those that in earlier generations were channeled into dodgy piercings, black clothes or at the very worst, regrettable tattoos. The price of youthful distress and experimentation for these women is high; today they are all living with the consequences of their adolescent identity confusion.

It's heart-breaking to realize that Helena, Cat and Grace did the responsible thing when they felt distress in their bodies; they turned to healthcare professionals, to those who promise to “first do no harm.” Yet either through ignorance or cowardice, the therapists, doctors and surgeons in whose hands their bodies rested, fed them into a brutal medical machine. Lahl’s film is brave, necessary and principled. She invites the wider world to listen to the stories of the survivors of the transition industry and to realize that, despite the harm perpetrated against them, those who detransition can learn to thrive.

A trailer:

Infected by anti-socialism and non-socialism

We heard yesterday about the glories of North Korean socialism under the leadership of the great Kim Jong Un. But, alas, there are those who don't share the vision:

Six ringleaders and about 20 accomplices were recently stood before a public struggle session in Yangdok County, South Pyongan Province, for importing and distributing “impure recordings.” 

A source in South Pyongan Province told Daily NK on Tuesday that the six ringleaders — guides at Yangdok Hot Spring Resort — were put under emergency arrest after they were busted distributing “anti-socialist and non-socialist” recordings to “ordinary people” that they had brought into the town using the Pyongsong-Yangdok Hot Springs bus.

According to the source, soon after the six employees of Yangok Hot Spring Resort were arrested late last month on charges of importing and distributing impure recordings, the authorities arrested another 20 or so accomplices. Then the matter was reported to Pyongyang.

Afterwards, the provincial branch of the unified command on non-socialist and anti-socialist behavior (below: “unified command”) convened a struggle session for those arrested in downtown Yangdok County on Sept. 1. At the session, agents from the unified command read aloud a special order from Pyongyang and then proceeded to “publicly arrest” the accused.

The unified command said the accused had formed a network to engage in anti-socialist and non-socialist behavior, with separate teams to acquire, transport and sell the impure recordings. Unified command officials said all of Yangdok County had been “infected by anti-socialism and non-socialism.”

The officials warned that crimes in Yangok like drug use, gambling, fraud and “superstitious behavior” took place after locals became “imbued with anti-socialist and non-socialist thought” from watching South Korean films and the like, and warned that it would conduct an extensive investigation “not limited to any target.”

In fact, the unified command expressed regret that the problem was discovered at Yangdok Hot Spring Resort, a state-run facility. The officials said the six ringleaders face heavy punishments in accordance with Pyongyang’s order that their misdeeds be treated as political crimes.

Well, that's what happens when you deviate from pure socialism by watching South Korean films and the like: drug use, gambling, fraud and “superstitious behavior”. Like night follows day.