Regional partners with Myanmar are getting nervous about the sudden and unwelcome attention of Western citizens and government to their corner of Asia. Ahead of the Association of South East Asian Nations that convened Monday in Singapore, Laos and Cambodia called for the member states to stay out of each other’s internal affairs.

Lest their own activities enter the spotlight.

From Reuters:

Laos, a poor and landlocked communist state of 6.5 million people, has close political and economic ties with Myanmar. It was the first country Myanmar Prime Minister Thein Sein visited after his appointment last month.

“Economy sanctions are no good. They will not make the leaders of Myanmar die, but will lead to disaster for the civilian population. They are counter-productive,” Hun Sen said in reply to questions at a business forum.

Solid evidence, I think, that the sanctions are having an effect.

The United States expanded its sanctions against Myanmar’s rulers in October, when it added 11 more Myanmar military leaders to a list already facing sanctions, and tightened U.S. export controls to the country.

On Friday, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to urge ASEAN to suspend Myanmar until the regime shows respect for human rights.

Now, if the Senate would just show equal backbone as regards Iraq.

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is Are Private High Schools Better Academically…?

This afternoon I read a post by Andrew Sullivan in which he points to and quotes from an argument by Norm Geras that left-liberals can’t be against torture if they’re not willing to be equally against terrorism. What Geras doesn’t understand is that we are. Just not in the way I understand that he’d like to parse the meaning.

We are against the willful — intentional or not — targeting in time of war of children, women and non-combatants by all forces.

This is what Sullivan quoted:

Torture is an indefensible practice; but so is the random murder of innocents. The absence of pleas for understanding in the former case, set beside the rich presence of pleas for understanding in the latter case, tells either of a wildly imbalanced distribution of sociological curiosity with respect to the two or of a much greater predisposition on the British liberal-left to condone terrorism than to excuse torture.

And Sullivan responds:

It seems to me that both cross a profound moral line; and the most depressing fact of our time is that the right seems unable to refute torture without qualifications and the left seems unable to refute terrorism without qualifications. The key to civilization’s endurance, it seems to me, is a refusal to tolerate either.

On the face of his statement. I’m with him. But I doubt that he is willing to terrorism as I described it above.

Since sullivan doesn’t allow comments on the Daily Dish, I wrote him this email.

Shalom Andrew,

Jeff Hess

Also:

Burma brutality to haunt talks
Suu Kyi taken to state guesthouse
UN envoy says Burma has not reached “point of no return”

Combat Doc: I have recently abandoned my blog to drift through cyberspace until Google goes out of business or Skynet takes control, and have received many e-mails and requests asking to both restart and answer why. Well, here it is. Back in 2004 when Colby Buzzell and I started our blogs it was for one thing and one thing only, to get out the news…

Part of being a good citizen of the blogosphere is visiting, reading and, most importantly, taking the time to leave a comment on other’s blogs. It’s all about the conversation. In the interest of setting an example I’ve decided to link to those blog posts that have compelled me to leave a comment.

0905 When school districts sue parents over blog posts
0659 Journalists and Bloggers

There is a longish section in The Israel Lobby subtitled The Powellizing of Condoleezza Rice. The section is worth the read, but the gist is that the State Department has been reduced to a second-rate cabinet department. And Rice rendered powerless by an executive focused on the Department of Defense as its instrument of foreign policy.

Jill has been following this story for some time and wrote an update yesterday, but I fear that the news this morning from the Washington Post supports my thesis.

A few days after Thanksgiving, President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice plan to open a meeting in Annapolis to launch the first round of substantive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks during Bush’s presidency.

But no conference date has been set. No invitations have been issued. And no one really agrees on what the participants will actually talk about once they arrive at the Naval Academy for the meeting, which is intended to relaunch Bush’s stillborn “road map” plan to create a Palestinian state.

No date. Invitations. No agenda. There’s a recipe for success.

“No one seems to know what is happening,” one senior Arab envoy said last week, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid appearing out of the loop. “I am completely lost.”

The envoy recounted the calls he made in recent days to dig up information and said he had reserved rooms for his country’s foreign minister and other officials. He added with exasperation: “It is a very peculiar thing.”

Do you suppose our Secretary of State knows what is happening; or perhaps more to the point, what is happening to her?

Even a senior administration official deeply involved in the preparations confided, before speaking off the record about his expectations: “I can’t connect the dots myself because it is still a work in progress.”

Uh. I guess not.

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

A contestant on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” had reached the final plateau. If she answered the next question correctly, she would win $1,000,000. If she answered incorrectly, she would pocket only the $32,000 milestone money. As she suspected it would be, the million-dollar question was no pushover.

“Oh, come on!” said the blonde. “Everybody knows that Cuckoos don’t build nests. They live in clocks.”

What used to be the sole dominion of the most secret of government agencies — high resolution satellite photography — has become the treasure trove of non-governmental organizations seeking to prove the displace- ment or elimination of native peoples. The generals can secure their borders, but they can’t block their space above.

From the BBC:

A satellite photographs a cluster of homes in the Burmese jungle. Seven months later, the village is gone.

These high-resolution pictures can be used to track patterns of destruction and relocation, new construction and military expansion.

The technique is so effective, the AAAS has created its own human rights department.

Lars Bromley, director of the project, told a UN audience this week: “Over the past year, we have tracked 25 sites of interest, including 18 possibly removed villages.”

“What we mainly see are rooftops disappearing,” said Mr Bromley. “We are right at the edge of what the technology can do.”

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the border between science and spirituality by John Horgan.

“If you want to see a cell nucleus, look down this microscope. If you want to see the moons of Jupiter, look through a telescope. On the spiritual side, if you want to see your Buddha nature, if you want to see Christ consciousness, if you want to see the religious side of the equation, fold your legs, sit down each day for two hours, count your breath from one to ten. Do that for five years and get back to me.” p. 71

Today, as I go about my tasks, I’ll think about: Six Time Power Procedures: change routine, cultivate observation, make your motions faster, think with a pencil in your hand, make comparisons, use the spontaneous goal (ask what is the purpose of your action, pulling yourself into focus on what is relevant, on the vital issues).

Dirty bricks are negative reinforcers like putdowns, blaming, threatening, criticizing, ordering, labeling, preaching and ignoring. p. 118

On its face this news report from China indicates dissension in the ranks of those seeking democracy in Myanmar, but give the primary source, the New Dim Light Of Myanmar, I wouldn’t bet the mortgage on a rat’s borough on its accuracy. The paper reminds me of the journalistic endeavors of an earlier dictatorship.

During the reign of Communism in the Soviet Union, there were two principle newspapers: Pravda (Truth), published by the Communist Party and Izvestia (Truth) published by the government. This led citizens to lament that there was no Pravda in Izvestia and no Izvestia in Pravda.

You get the idea.

But anyway, here’s what the generals are claiming through their official paper.

More ethnic peace groups in Myanmar are expressing disagreement over a recent statement by opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, while appreciating the recent liaison between the government and the detained political party leader.

They said Aung San Suu Kyi, general secretary of the National League for Democracy (NLD), has implied that she and her party will represent the political parties and ethnic groups. They turned down her offer as she did not seek the organizations’ opinions.

The generals demonstrate that they have learned their lessons well from their Communist masters in Beijing by establishing puppet groups that pretend to represent what naturally are opposition groups.

And there there’s this neat little bit of fluff.

These organizations, which attended the constitutional national convention that ended on Sept. 3, expressed support in their announcements for the setting up of a constitution drafting commission for the move based on the detailed basic principles already adopted in the national convention and pledged their continued participation in the implementation of the state’s seven-step roadmap.

Can you say prepare for a great leap forward comrades?

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is The Wet Riffs Gallery (NSFW).

Old Blue: I had to bring the team to Bagram for a day or so to take care of some critical maintenance issues with a vehicle. While here, I ran into CPT Mike Keilty, who is a member of the original team I trained with at Ft Riley. CPT Keilty is a West Pointer who did a tour in Iraq before coming off of active duty. He is a bronze star recipient. He was pulled from the IRR…

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

Most people have a pleasant image of Singapore, but it is a multi-culturual city-state whose peace is maintained by near draconian laws swiftly enforced by a police force that is more military than civic. It is no surprise then that no outdoor protests will be premitted during the Association of South East Asian Nations summit that begins on Monday.

From Reuters:

Singapore has banned all outdoor protest at a summit of Southeast Asian nations and rejected an opposition party’s request to stage a Myanmar pro-democracy protest, police and activists said on Saturday.

Leaders of the 10-member Association of South East Asian Nations are set to sign a common charter that would turn the 40-year-old group into a legal entity. Myanmar prime minister Thein Sein is expected to come, which would mark the first appearance of a top junta member at an international forum since the regime’s bloody crackdown on protesters in September.

Before the delegates have the chance to even sit down to sign the charter, opposition groups are calling the document an empty promise.

The opposition Singapore Democratic Party said on its Web site the government had rejected its application for a protest to “call on ASEAN member states to take concrete measures to promote democracy in the region rather than just make empty promises”.

“The Charter states that ASEAN would promote and protect human rights and fundamental freedoms of the people in the region. How does ASEAN intend to do this if its chair bans outright any form of political activity?” the SDP said.

How indeed? Through goals without deadlines: wishes?

The charter — to be signed on Tuesday — will give the 40-year-old grouping legal status and spells out lofty goals for democracy and human rights.

“Myanmar has not fought to take out words like ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’. They are not against putting these down as an aspiration, but they ask for more time,” [ASEAN secretary-general Ong Keng Yong] said.

Time? Weeks? Months? Years? Generations?

Or just until after the 2008 Summer Olympics?

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the border between science and spirituality by John Horgan.

Solving The Nirvana Paradox: “If Nirvana is so great, why does God create?” p. 69