Topic: Nepal

It is generally in times of stress and trouble that people turn to messiahs, but the Nepali "Buddha boy" is something stranger still: a messiah who will submit to scientific verification.

The 15-year-old has been sitting under a peepal tree for six months, supposedly without eating or drinking. He has also been bitten by a snake — twice. Not surprisingly, he's become an object of pilgrimage (and attendant donations and commerce), and some have come to believe he's the reincarnation of the historical Buddha. Now local leaders are going to allow scientists to study the boy, though without touching him. If nothing else, they can watch to verify whether he indeed remains in meditation all night.

It's stories like these that remind me just how different and alien Asia was when I lived there. It made me remember an incident on our visit to Patan (scroll down to "Is It Real?"), in the Kathmandu Valley:

A boy in the square pointed us toward a monumental carved doorway into the courtyard of an adjacent palace. "Come see! Ritual!" he shouted. Inside the courtyard we discovered a mostly Nepali group of spectators ringing a troupe of masked dancers who shivered and twitched to the rhythms as several young men played bell cymbals and an older man drummed and crooned a strange wordless chant. In the center, one dancer paid elaborate homage to the bloody severed head of a buffalo, next to which an assistant held a butter torch. Eventually the dancers were all given swords covered in tikka (colored powder used for rituals), and they began a slow, whirling group dance.

I can make guesses as to what the ceremony was about, but what stands out is its very strangeness — the wild, matted hair of the masks; the old men underneath dressed as tribal women with earings and bracelets and necklaces; the hypnotic clang of the cymbals and the ragged line of the old man's wordless singing; the raw power of the sacrificed head still trickling blood.

It was moments like that, or being told matter-of-factly about reincarnations and miracles at Kopan Monastery, that made us realize we had stepped into a different world that seemed to function by different rules than the ones we knew and accepted.

I didn't believe in miracles, and I still don't, but it was also ridiculous to imagine that all these earnest monks were simply lying. So what was going on? I don't know. Indeed, if you're looking to not-know, I strongly recommend a visit to the Indian subcontinent. There is value in discovering the limits of your own explanations for things. Ideally, instead of lunging for some new set of explanations, one can learn to accept a level of ambiguity, complexity and obscurity. The more I learn, the more I realize I don't know.

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Topic: United Nations

Slate has an article about the conflict over top-level domain names on the Internet. It's an abstruse subject, but essentially it comes down to this: there's a group called ICANN that administers top-level domain names (that is, the URLs we type to go to web addresses, including .com, .org, .net, .edu, .gov, and country codes such as .us, .cn, .kr, and so on). ICANN is a California-based nonprofit, and this is what makes the rest of the world nervous. Countries like Iran and China worry that leaving the top-level domain system under US control puts them at risk of having their web traffic meddled with, and they would like to have greater control of that traffic themselves.

The latest round of chatter on this subject has been generated by a recent summit in Tunis, at which the idea was floated that the UN should take over ICANN's job. Enthusiasm for this notion was reportedly low.

There are two interesting concepts in the Slate article, and I would love to hear from readers who know more about this subject than me whether either one makes sense.

The first is that top-level domains could be administered by some kind of distributed peer-to-peer system like BitTorrent:

Countries that choose to house Torrent servers would receive a random piece of the DNS pie over a closed P2P network, with mirrors set up to correct data by consensus in the case of corruption or unauthorized modification. No one country would actually physically host the entire database.

Is this actually plausible?

Secondly, the article argues that top-level domains are headed for eventual obsolescence. How realistic is this idea? Will other modes of communication make .com irrelevant? If so, how soon will this happen?

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Topic: Islam

In the December 1 New York Review of Books, William Dalrymple takes an illuminating look inside the madrasas. Just as Peter J. Boyer's New Yorker article a few months back drew important distinctions between Christian fundamentalists and Evangelicals (see this earlier post), Dalrymple points out that few of the al Qaeda terrorists who have mounted attacks on targets in the West are products of the notorious madrasa system, which some have labeled as terrorist training camps.

In fact, the madrasas vary widely, as one would expect. Even the most militant, however, tend only to produce foot-soldiers in regional conflicts — Kashmir, Iraq, Afghanistan — while the terrorists that attack the West tend to be sophisticated, Western-educated and anything but poor:

It is now becoming very clear ... that producing cannon fodder for the Taliban and educating local sectarian thugs is not at all the same as producing the kind of technically literate al-Qaeda terrorist who carried out the horrifyingly sophisticated attacks on the USS Cole, the US embassies in East Africa, the World Trade Center, and the London Underground. Indeed, a number of recent studies have emphasized that there is a fundamental distinction to be made between madrasa graduates — who tend to be pious villagers from impoverished economic backgrounds, possessing little technical sophistication — and the sort of middle-class, politically literate global Salafi jihadis who plan al-Qaeda operations around the world. Most of these turn out to have secular and technical backgrounds. Neither bin Laden nor any of the men who carried out the Islamist assaults on America or Britain were trained in a madrasa or was a qualified alim, or cleric. (Emphasis added.)

Dalrymple goes on to explain that bin Laden and his gang are in fact impatient with the kind of nitpicky Islam promoted by the Taliban.

Understanding these distinctions is increasingly important, and Dalrymple's article is a useful read for anyone who hopes to get past stereotypes and truisms and gain a realistic picture of what is, and what is not, part of the terrorist threat that America faces.

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Topic: United Nations

Demonstrating his fine leadership skills, John Bolton is once again charging in to declare that everyone else's work is totally worthless. Wonkette has a little rant about his latest shenanigans.

I suppose that bullying and browbeating have worked so well on Iraq, Iran, North Korea and the Security Council that the Bush administration couldn't possibly choose a different tactic for the UN, where there's an opportunity to browbeat the entire world at once. Too bad you can't browbeat hurricanes, though.

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Topic: United Nations

Secretary-General Kofi Annan is asking for $1.6 billion for renovations to the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan. According to the Daily News, this will involve building a temporary conference center (or centre, in UN-speak) on the North Lawn.

The current price tag is 55 percent higher than the original estimate because lawmakers in Albany are pissed off about the Oil-for-Food scandal, so they've been sitting on permit applications for a cheaper renovation. Considering that the United States provides 22 percent of the UN's regular budget, Albany's delaying tactics will ultimately cost the American taxpayers more money while doing nothing for New York City or State except spreading the word that we're less hospitable than we could be.

Meanwhile, it seems like the rumored temporary relocation of the United Nations to Brooklyn is not a going concern.

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Topic: Iraq

But South Korea is.

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Topic: United Nations

Yesterday I took our new speechwriter over to the UN cafeteria and was happily waylaid by an international food fair being held in the lobby of the Secretariat Building, which featured dishes from all over the world: Carribean pastries, Ukranian dumplings, Chinese mixed platters, ANZAC cookies from New Zealand. The Iranian pulao platters were selling like the proverbial hotcakes, but what caught my eye was the Nepali delegation's chafing dish full of momo (dumplings).

I asked how much for just the momos, and the woman said she'd give me three for $2, a mix of veg and chicken momos. Deal. "This will bring back happy memories of my visits to Kathmandu," I said.

"Oh, you have been?"

"Yes, I've visited Nepal twice and I loved it."

"Here, let me give you some more vegetable momo, this one has different taste."

Your intrepid reporter did not refuse. Hot sauce was also proffered, and it was good — almost as good as the hot sauce at the now-defunct Tibet Shambala.

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Topic: Korean Culture

WARNING: ADULT CONTENT

I don't usually post this sort of thing, but this is just so bizarre and fascinating that I have to: a couple of blog entries (1, 2), with lots of pictures, about Loveland, an erotic theme park on the Korean resort island of Jeju-do, which is a popular honeymoon spot. (Via Fleshbot. Loveland has an official site, in Korean, and their gallery is astonishing.)

Korea, unlike Japan, is not a country where pornography is ubiquitous. In fact, it's a relatively prudish society. Though one can find plenty of porn in video rental shops, and we even knew of one actual porn theater that was across the street from the E-Mart megastore, it was all rather tame: nothing much kinky, and certainly no hint of homosexuality, male or female. Korea has no equivalent to Japanese octopus smut.

On the other hand, the Koreans seemed to have a sense of humor about sexuality. Their romantic comedies often feel less like When Harry Met Sally and more like The Three Stooges, and the pornographic movies all have to have plots, presumably to get past some censorship law, so many of them are pretty funny (on purpose). (I didn't watch a lot, but I did watch a few. For cultural research, of course.) And then there was the banned ad, which is also pretty funny.

Still, I'm startled to learn of Loveland, and all those pics of statue-love may be the kinkiest thing I've ever seen out of Korea.

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Topic: United Nations

So the UN simultaneous translation system was designed by Brähler ICS, a German firm, as you can see here, and was installed by Conference Systems, Inc. Knowing this will help you ... um ... er ... Okay, I admit, it's just full-on UN geeky.

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Topic: Politics

The New York Times today calls it ugly. The lede:

George W. Bush has been in the White House for 248 weeks, through a terrorist attack, two wars and a bruising re-election. But it seems safe to say that he has never had a worse political week than this one — and it is not over yet.

And it gets worse from there.

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