h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

That would make sense, on both counts.

Sense? Really? I'm, sorry, but it makes absolutely no sense to me. To me it all sounds like superstition. Except the word 'ethnicity'. Which sounds even worse.

Tell you what, Pierce. I never argue with other people about their food taboos. They are entitled.

You are of course entitled not to do so, Dmitri. I don't argue much either, I just speak my mind - like I am entitled to

Of course it's superstition, Pierce. Even if you believe the Bible is the living word of God (which I do not), over the centuries the rules there have been interpreted and re-interpreted, and in many cases various 'safeguards' have been added to them. Nowadays they are bloated beyond recognition. And the case of meat and dairy is perhaps the best example for this:

In the Bible, the rule that is given is to not cook a kid (as in, baby goat, not baby human; Hebrew has distinct words, there) in its mother's milk. Fairly straightforward. Modern researchers believe that eating a dish like that might have been part of the pagan worship in the area, perhaps signifying the circle of life or something, and that's why it was so important for the upcoming monotheistic religion to forbid it (it actually appears three times in the Bible, which seems to show it really was rather important).
At some later point, this very specific ban on a very specific dish was widened to 'do not cook any meat with any milk', then an extra safeguard was added and meat and dairy were required to be cooked and eaten in separate dishes, and later even washed in separate sinks, lest anything makes contact. Then you got the waiting gap, to really make sure that you can't mix them in any way. It just gets bigger and bigger.
[I should probably point out that I don't know for certain the order in which these 'safeguards' were added, and am basically guessing, but the main point still stands.]

Yeah, it's called 'building a fence around the Torah', I believe. And then, of course, it requires pilpul, or close arguing, to find the loopholes in an emergency...

Jesus kind of fussed about that, which meant he was an active participant in Jewish reasoning.

What that tells us, I think, is something about the way the human mind works - how people accrue traditions, forget where they came from, then worry about them to the extent of reductio ad absurdam.

Sort of the anorak approach to religion.

The view of this that people had when I was growing up can be illustrated by this story:

A woman baked a ham in the oven. First, she cut off one end of the ham and placed it beside the ham in the roasting pan.

Observing this ritual, her husband asked, 'Why do you always do this?'

His wife looked puzzled. 'I don't know. Mom always does it this way.'

So she asked her mother. 'Why do you always cut off the end of the ham and place it on one side in the pan?'

Her mother shrugged. 'Because your grandma does it that way.'

So they asked grandma, who laughed. 'I do that because my pan is too short for the ham.'

Good one, Dmitri! Old but good - and indeed very illustrative

A baby goat is called a kid in Danish and pronounced keeth - short and fast

I used to believe (probably learned it in school) that a pig is unclean in the Middle East for very good reasons: The heat will make trichinae develop fast. I later learned that this is not necessarily so. But there may still have been a very good reason way back in time for declaring it unfit for people to eat

I've eaten it all my life and still enjoy a good Eisbein mit Sauerkraut

Which brings us back to North Korea, where a variation of Sauerkraut is called Kimchi

I have extensive experience in living with kinchi. I am prejudiced against this foodstuff.

One year, we lived in a student dormitory in Cologne. Our international crowd included people from the US, Germany, Iran, Bosnia, and Russia. It was the Korean young lady who made our shared kitchen unpleasant.

Kimchi on the windowsill and a live octopus in a bucket do not make for harmonious relations.

One reason for opposing pig farming is the environmental damage they can do, I believe - at least, that's what I think Prof Marvin Harris said in 'Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches'.

I have to admit kimchi on the windowsill and a live octopus in a bucket does sound like bad feng shui

Pig farming is a huge industry in Denmark - and very controversial. Many animals never see the light of day and many get their tails cut off in order to prevent their fellows to bite them off (which could lead to infections and cost the farmer money...)

Luckily it is possible to buy ecologically raised pigs (and other animals, eggs and so on)

I'd go for that.

From some where around post 82, reminds me ofSamuel Clemens story from his Virginia City Days, working as a struggling newspaperman, about "...the very thin soup made by means boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death...".

oh dear

Not for the faint-hearted:

The story about how and why a North Korean boy sent his own mother and elder brother to their deaths:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/born-in-the-gulag-why-a-north-korean-boy-sent-his-own-mother-to-her-death/255110/

An old classmate of mine from my first year in school of journalism, Flemming Ytsen, just published a very interesting analysis of the situation in North Korea.

(Needless to say Flemming is a lot smarter and also more comitted than I ever was. He has travelled the Far East intensively for decades and w*rked out there as a correspondant for many years).

Flemming calls his column "The Key to North Korean behaviour: The mobilization of mass psychosis"

He writes: "The rhetoric of the Kim klan has historical and psychological roots in extreme nationalism and the wish for ethnic purity."

He goes on to tell how both North and South Koreans have a deep longing for independency and ethnic purity since the end of Japan's colonization of the Korean peninsula in 1945.

North Korea claims that they are far closer to this goal than South Korea, since SK is "in the pocket" of USA.

What NK does not tell is of course, that SK is extremely high evolved technologically and economically while NK is the extreme opposite after having spent nearly all possible money on military. NK is without doubt the most militarized nation on the planet.

"The North Korean generals are with great skill playing on the reality that the USA neither have the bravery nor the will to involve in a military confrontation worth mentioning. American bombing raids close to the Chinese and Russian borders? Not likely, right? Better to enforce dikes around NK.

Popular rebellions against the power elite as seen in other 'communist' regimes (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968 and Poland 1980-81) are unknown in NK.

The explanation is, that the psychological warfare agianst the 'brother-enemy' in the south and the USA go both ways: It is also effective inwardly. The messages are all about saving the Korean race and culture from foreign 'polluion'.

Something we've seen before? Oh yes. The discipline, the will to sacrifice, the fanaticism, the nationalism, the almost psychotic obdience to the imperial authority: These were also the ingredients in the scarily effective organization, that drove the Japanese warfare and colonization of the Korean peninsula in the first half of the 20th century.

SK, the USA and the Chinese are well aware of the kind of opponent they are facing. They would rather live with psychological warfare than fight a real war."

NK according to Flemming. Sounds about right to me

That is the most horrible story I have ever read. And I've read a lot of them.

I hope everybody WILL read that story. That's why I can't understand why we keep making jokes about North Korea. Those people are suffering in ways that no human being should ever have to suffer.

and the world chess game starts

we've moved our big rocket to the east coast - click
mmm! ok, we'll move batteries of big rocket shooter-downers to an island base - click

Of course I agree completely, Dmitri, who wouldnt?

In school (back in the 1960's) we were forced to look at a whole bunch of photographs of thousands of bodies found by the allied forces in the German concentration camps. We also read and heard about the unbelievable horrors committed in the camps and elsewhere in the Reich.

The idea was that the German people should learn about what it had been responsible for - in order to avoid any repetitions.

And now this. And before that the lynch mobs in the south, the concentration camps in ex-Jugoslavia, the genocide in Rwanda and...and...and...

Lock a lot of people up and tell the guards a lot of lies about them and encourage these guards to "take revenge" - and this is what you get...




PS: I went to a school belonging to the Danish minority in northern Germany, and Denmark had absolutely nothing to do with the crimes in the German camps (apart from hundreds of Danes ending up there...) but since we were under German law (that was dictated by the allied forces) even we were forced to watch these pictures. We were appalled, I tell you. Making US responsible for THIS? We were still living in a part of Denmark occupied by the Germans (since 1864). Well, that's the way we saw it.
These days I can understand why even we had to learn about these things. And even if a lot of us cried tears of shock and rage back then I believe every school child needs to learn about atrocities like this. I am sorry, but I believe it is necessary. Even if it seems like it has no effect in the long run...

If you ever need lesson plans, write to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. I believe they will still send out the resource book and lesson plans for free, as they used to when I was teaching.

And yeah. People have to learn.

Oh, I hardly have to go that far if need should be. The Frihedsmuseet (Liberty Museum) in Copenhagen would only be too happy to provide.

By the way, any comments on posting 134? Ater all it tries to answer the questions that started this thread.

I've been reading recentlt from "Oracle Bones", by Peter Hessler, a retrospective by an American journalist working out of the PRC.

At one point he writes of trip to the NK border and the blackout conditions and complete absence of night time lighting in the urbanized area on the NK side of the border, compared with the Chinese side.