Blog

donesian island of Sulawesi. Even local people were unaware of the cave sites’ existence until their discovery in 2017 by Adam Brumm at Griffith University, Australia, and his team.

“I was struck dumb,” says Brumm. “It’s one of the most spectacular and well-preserved figurative animal paintings known from the whole region and it just immediately blew me away.”

Sulawesi is known to contain some of the world’s oldest cave art, but the new paintings may predate all other examples so far discovered on the island.

Brumm and his colleagues used a technique called uranium-series dating to analyse a mineral formation that overlapped part of the image, and that must have formed after the cave art was produced. The mineral formation is at least 45,500 years old, suggesting the artwork itself could be much older.

“It adds to the evidence that the first modern human cave art traditions did not arise in ice age Europe, as long assumed, but at an earlier point in the human journey,” says Brumm.

Each of the three pigs is more than a metre long. The images were all painted using a red ochre pigment. They appear to be Sulawesi warty pigs (Sus celebensis), a short-legged wild boar that is endemic to the island and is characterised by its distinctive facial warts. “This species was of great importance to early hunter-gatherers in Sulawesi,” says Brumm.

These pigs appear in younger cave art across the region, and archaeological digs show that they were the most commonly hunted game species on Sulawesi for thousands of years. “The frequent portrayal of these wild pigs in art offers hints at a long-term human interest in the behavioural ecology of this local species, and perhaps its spiritual values in the hunting culture,” says Brumm.

I don't know why they're always so keen to talk about spiritual values, these archaeologists. Perhaps because we like to think art is one of the highest human faculties, and so we assume the paintings must have served some sublime higher purpose. My own theory, yet to be confirmed or indeed postulated till now, is that this is like that Pompeii fast food joint they unearthed recently: it's a very early hog roast site. "Get your warty pig steaks here!" type of thing. "Tenderest in all Sulawesi! Melts in the mouth or your glittery beads back!"

00d8143200d-pi” style=”display: inline”>

[Images: Tim Smith]

Bhangra, if you didn't know, is a traditional dance from the Punjab that's adapted and thrived wherever immigrants from the Punjab have settled. Like Yorkshire, for instance. I'm no expert, but this seems typical.

ople who have been in a cult. By cult, I mean a group of people living out an imaginary world view created by a charismatic leader. These things sometimes end with the guru hopping on a private plane to escape the authorities; others end in mass suicide; still others go up in literal smoke, as David Koresh did, or sometimes they collapse in a welter of claims of abuse and corruption. But when the cult is political, and when the guru is the sitting president of the United States, it all gets a little messier.

That’s what the core of the Trump movement is. Not all Trump voters, by any means. But the core: a cult. And these lost souls will believe anything and everything the leader says. Trump is currently denying there was anything in his speech that could be understood as incitement. But this is what he told them, just before they stormed the Capitol: ‘We beat them four years ago. We surprised them. We took them by surprise and this year, they rigged an election. They rigged it like they’ve never rigged an election before… We will never give up. We will never concede, it doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it any more and that’s what this is all about. To use a favourite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal.’

So the one thing you cannot say about that mob that stormed the US Capitol last week is that they were crazy. From their point of view — a rigged election, fomented by Democrats and weak Republicans, suppressed by Fake News in league with Big Tech — they were being perfectly rational. If it were true, after all, that a vast left-wing conspiracy had used specially constructed voting machines to rig the election so that Trump’s landslide victory was erased, why would you not storm the Capitol? It would, indeed, be obligatory for a patriotic American to fight in such a case of treason.

The centre of the most powerful democracy in the world, invaded by members of a cult whose leader is….the President himself! Did Hollywood ever come up with anything quite that weird?

The other day, a friend asked if I would be leaving DC for a while. He was taking himself and his husband to the Delaware coast until the risk of violence subsided. Others are packing their bags. Walking the streets of my neighbourhood, I’m beginning to see the shop fronts being boarded up, as they were last summer. We’re told there are multiple pro-Trump marches on state capitals looming, and a big crowd in DC expected on 17 January as well as 20 January, the day Biden is supposed to be sworn in. A briefing for Democrats from the FBI about the plans for far-right attacks has left them aghast, we are told. Anti-fascist groups will organise a response: they created mayhem during the Trump inaugural. Just imagine if they confront a mob of Proud Boys and far-right militias next week. It’s getting very Weimar-y.

A water tower in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, transformed by artists Darren and Emmelene Mate, aka DabsMyla. 

Titled “Magical Unity,” the circular mural features plants native to the region, along with a fuzzy bumblebee mid-pollination, all rendered in the duo’s playful style.

Cheerful, yes. Blending in with its surroundings, not so much.

[Photo © Justkids]

Website and Instagram.

y far the worst human rights transgressor in the region, and giving the cold shoulder to Israel, the sole democracy in the region.

Israel and the Gulf states particularly loathed the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and that Obama administration officials held secret preliminary talks with Iran without informing them. The talks, in Oman, were led by William Burns, then the deputy secretary of state, and a young state department official, Jake Sullivan.

Mr Burns has been named as Mr Biden’s CIA director. Mr Sullivan is to be his national security adviser.

The face of the talks when they began in the open was Wendy Sherman, the state department undersecretary. She later described the pain, as Jewish herself, of becoming an object of attack for right-wing, pro-Netanyahu Jewish activists in the US. She will become deputy secretary of state in Mr Biden’s administration.

The appointments are said to have alarmed aides to Mr Netanyahu, whose relations with Mr Obama, never good, reached rock bottom after the deal.

Mr Biden’s stated intention of rejoining the deal is a direct challenge to Mr Netanyahu and the Gulf states. That he is also threatening to stop arms sales to Saudi Arabia over its role in the war in Yemen will also alienate Riyadh.

No mention in the article of the Abraham Accords that now align Israel with the majority of Arab countries in the region. That historic triumph, which Trump helped broker, rather contradicts the message here that Biden is returning to Obama sanity-land after the appalling Trump and his love of "strongman leaders". So no, if this is any guide it looks like nothing has been learned and it'll soon be back to the old JCPOA days.

At least the mullahs will be pleased.

A powerful article by Kathleen Stock in the Spectator today takes on those academic philosophers who – as noted earlier – have decided to take up arms against her supposedly transphobic views with their nasty little open letter.

The sinister attempts to silence gender critical academics:

The spectacle of paid thinkers, whose entire training emphasises the importance of sober argumentation, signing a document which wouldn’t look out of place in the Salem Witch Trial archive, makes one question particularly pertinent: what’s actually going on here?

How can these academics look at the parts of the gender identity debate that concern me – for instance, vulnerable female prisoners being housed with male sex offenders; young lesbian women like Keira Bell regretting the effects of puberty blockers and voluntary mastectomies by the time they are 20; a loss of academic data about sex-associated patterns of discrimination, and so on – and conclude that I’m not only wrong, but that I should be publicly shamed?

Though many of the signatories of the open letter against me were based overseas, 11 of the founder signatories were at UK universities. UK universities are at the forefront of trans activism in at least two ways. One is that relatively many students – otherwise known these days as paying customers – are trans activists, and this alone will tend to affect weaker-minded academic faculty. It also makes it harder for dissenting academics to push back firmly against the latest pronouncement from Student Unions about the existence of 100 genders, or about how objecting to larger male-bodied athletes in women’s sport amounts to ‘body-shaming women’. This lack of obvious dissent encourages zealots.

The second point is that universities themselves, via enthusiastic participation in Stonewall schemes like the Diversity Champions scheme and the Top 100 Employers Index are now, effectively, trans activist organisations at a managerial level, with Stonewall-sponsored policies to match.

See for example the list of gender definitions and trans policies currently in place at UK universities which Stock herself helpfully put together a couple of weeks back.

The costs of this intimidation of academics sceptical about gender orthodoxies – whether via savage open letters or managerial policies controlling speech and thought – are high. Knowledge is lost and public understanding diminished. In my view, there’s a pressing need for academics to take a cold hard look at the havoc wreaked by pretending, on a national scale, that gender identity is more important than sex in nearly every context. This includes a need for philosophers: for a lot of current trans orthodoxy has very particular philosophical underpinnings, seeming to give it intellectual credibility where, in my view, there is little….

A world in which philosophers could have freely and aggressively interrogated these decadent abstractions and public policies which involve vulnerable women would surely have been a better one for detransitioners like Keira Bell or the victims of Karen White. Unfortunately, far too many academic philosophers are more concerned about silencing their colleagues for woke points than having any meaningful, evidence-based debate.

Obama's team:

“Of all the problems the administration faces globally … This is the epicenter,” President Obama’s National Security Adviser, Jim Jones, declared in 2010. “If God had appeared in front of the President and said he could do one thing on the planet it would be the two-state solution.” Six years later, Secretary of State John Kerry insisted that “There will be no … Separate peace with the Arab world without … Palestinian peace. That is a hard reality.”

Like the Arab-Israeli linkage concept, the reduced Israeli-Palestinian version was disproved by the Abraham Accords and the agreement between Israel and Morocco. Though the Arab signatories continued to pledge fealty to the Palestinian cause, they effectively sidestepped the issue and even hinted that the Palestinians themselves were to blame. After rejecting three offers of statehood in the West Bank and Gaza—in 2000, 2001, and 2008—and then failing to take advantage of the eight years of Barack Obama’s highly sympathetic presidency, the Palestinians could no longer wield a veto power over peace. Eager to access Israeli technology and to ally with Israeli military strength, many Arabs states were ready to move on.

Now Kerry is due to take his place in Biden's team – admittedly as "special climate envoy", rather than someone with any responsibility for Middle Eastern affairs. Still, with the Biden team bearing no little resemblance to the return of Obama, it'll be interesting to see if they'll take up their old positions, or if they'll realise that the world has changed, and the Middle East is now defined not so much by the old Arab-Israeli conflict but by the even older Sunni-Shia divide.

ople as in Heaven.

He clarified the main idea and the main spirit of the congress and specially stressed the need for the whole Party to deeply cherish again and uphold the three ideas – "believing in people as in Heaven", "single-minded unity" and "self-reliance."

Saying that we should be ready for more difficult offensive for making a breakthrough head-on to win a fresh victory and make a brilliant progress in accomplishing the cause of socialism, he ardently appealed to everyone to make a more dynamic struggle for successful fulfillment of the struggle programme advanced at the 8th Congress of the Party, for the development of the glorious WPK and victorious advance of the revolutionary cause of Juche and for our great people.

As soon as he finished his conclusion, all the participants broke into enthusiastic cheers and applauses, expressing their absolute support for his important conclusion.

You can read the full text of the Supreme Leader's closing address here. And you can read the full text of the Supreme Leader's concluding speech here. [Or perhaps we should now call him the General Secretary.] I'm not sure which came first and which came last, but they're both quite long.

On Finsbury Park's Oxford Road bridge:

been replaced with pictures of President Xi Jinping and national flags, and Communist officials selecting church leaders, the report says.

In India, the Hindu nationalist government has fostered a climate in which attacks and harassment of Christians and Muslims have increased. Foreign funding of Christian-run hospitals, schools and church organisations has been blocked.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, Christians have faced 30% higher levels of violence than last year at the hands of Islamist militant groups who took advantage of lockdowns and governments weakened by the crisis, the report says. In Nigeria, the number of Christians killed has nearly tripled to 3,800 recorded deaths.

Among positive developments were Sudan’s new constitution guaranteeing freedom of religion and no longer specifying Islam as the state religion; and in northern Iraq, Muslim volunteers have been repairing destroyed churches and homes to encourage Christians to return to the area.

The Open Doors report is here.