Japan could shoot down N. Korean “satellite”

A small item at CNN.

Grass-mud horse: China’s answer to censorship

I generally avoid linking to the New York Times, but this article should be an exception. From the Times:

The grass-mud horse is an example of something that, in China’s authoritarian system, passes as subversive behavior. Conceived as an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surely done that.

It has also raised real questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information over the Internet — a project on which the Chinese government already has expended untold riches, and written countless software algorithms to weed deviant thought from the world’s largest cyber-community.

This Times piece also highlights the tiresome anachronism of avoiding obscenity in print. It’s grimly ironic that the Times can’t tell us why the grass-mud  horse is so subversive because of self-censorship. In Chinese, grass-mud horse (草泥马) is a string of homonyms that could also mean “Fuck your mother.”

While that could be roughly guessed at, so could a number of bawdy expressions. The Times only tells us that it’s a “vile obscenity,” “a foul named little horse,” “double entendres with inarguably dirty second meanings” (a bumbling tautology), “a nasty curse” etc. It’s astounding the hoops the Times jumps through to convey what they could best convey by simply printing the damn phrase.

In any case, here’s another link and a video:

Chas Freeman bows out

As Glenn Greenwald noted yesterday in this post, Chas Freeman, who Obama nominated to head up the National Intelligence Council, was a difficult man to find if you were only scanning mainstream media sources. Now that Freeman has withdrawn his nomination, a conversation is brewing about exactly how orthodox one has to be to serve the government when dealing with issues vis-a-vis Israel.

It’s clear that most of the pressure against Freeman’s nomination came from the Israel lobby, specifically Steve Rosen, a former AIPAC official who is currently under indictment on espionage charges. Rosen led the charge as a number of politicians and pundits piled on: Representative Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), The New Republic’s Marty Peretz, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg and Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer.

Freeman was ardently defended in a number of quarters, and most such accounts tell of a nuanced, feisty, and fearless thinker. David J. Rothkopf at Foreign Policy has a good post on why Freeman’s withdrawal is a foreign-policy establishment loss. To get an idea of the tenor of these arguments, look no further than the comments on Rothkopf’s post.

Also, Max Blumenthal has a more thourough rundown in his piece over at The Daily Beast.

Russia chooses Miss Atom 2009

Wired has been following the Miss Atom beauty contest for several weeks now. In case you haven’t guessed, it’s a contest for the most attractive woman working in Russia’s nuclear power industry. At least for this year, the contest is over. Here’s the winner. If you’d like to read more, check out this post.

Chinese Navy Neglects Full Monty

This article seems to be getting decent traffic over at The Guardian.

Done

For this round at least, Kamsky’s done, having lost his match with Veselin Topalov with a score of 2.5 to 4.5. Topalov goes on to play reigning world champion Viswanathan Anand.