Catherine's Cancer Karma

Actress Catherine Zeta-Jones has recently declared in interviews that she is furious with her husband Michael Douglas's doctors for not detecting his throat cancer earlier. And well she may be, but perhaps she should be turning her fury in a different direction. Zeta-Jones has often been quoted as a vocal advocate of the so-called right to smoke - and has even been reported to travel by private plane so that she and her husband can smoke during their journeys.

It is well known that smoking is the most common cause of throat cancer. If you spend your time defending and indulging in dangerous behaviour, perhaps you should look in the mirror when it comes back to bite you - or your loved ones - in the throat.

P.S To be fair to the Douglases, after posting this I read that they have been trying to quit smoking in recent years - with what degree of success, I have no idea. Anyway, this is not meant to be a personal attack - I have enjoyed both their movies over the years, and wish Michael a speedy recovery.

Open Letter to a Hollywood Heartthrob

"I'm not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don't think anyone should be unkind to anyone else. And then this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and then I thought, is that karma? When you're not nice that the bad things happen to you?"

--Sharon Stone

Dear Ms Stone,

I am sure you mean well, and I'm not happy about China's treatment of Tibet either, but are you aware of the following facts:

• > The mountainous western part of Sichuan, where the earthquake struck, was historically part of Tibet before China annexed it.
• > Many, perhaps the majority, of the people in this region are ethnic Tibetans.
• > China is not a democracy.

So are you saying that Tibetans are being karmically punished for the way a government they did not choose and have no control over treats their ountry? And is it "kind" to tell five million people who have lost their homes, their possessions, their jobs and in many cases their children that it's their own fault for having the misfortune to live in a dictatorship?

How do you apply your theory to the events in Burma? Already suffering the karmic burden of having to live in a country controlled by a corrupt clique of crooks, many of them are now suffering a double dose of bad karma from the recent destructive cyclone.

Furthermore, if people's misfortune can be seen as a karmic payback for the evil done by their government, how do you view 9/11? After all, a succesion of elected American governments has done a lot of questionable things in various countries around the world.

In fact, do you even know what you are saying? Or should you do a little more research and analysis and thinking things through before making political statements in future?

Regards,
Private Beach

Leeches and Vampires

I received my first fake Burma cyclone relief email yesterday, headed RECOVERY FUND NOTIFICATION, and purporting to be an appeal for the Burma cyclone victims - it doesn't take these leeches and vampires long before they scent blood to suck.

The usual email scams are bad enough, but taking advantage of disasters to divert well-intentioned help away from people who have lost everything already is unspeakably sick. I hope these scammers rot in hell where they belong.

If you want to help in Burma (or China), make sure the help really gets to those who need it. World Vision, for example, has aid workers on the ground in both countries getting help to the needy.

Making It Better:
World Vision Hong Kong

Private Beach's "People of the Year" Award

Time Magazine has named Russia's president, the "steely and determined" ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin, as its Person of the Year for "imposing stability on a nation that has rarely known it" (didn't some guy named Adolf get praised for doing the same thing in Germany back in the 1930s?)

Time is at pains to point out that its designation is a reflection of Putin's historical significance, not an endorsement of his placing "stability before freedom". Here at Private Beach we have a different approach - it is not enough to change the world, our person of the year must reflect this blog's values as well.


Private Beach's first annual "People of the Year" award this year therefore goes to the courageous monks of Burma for doing the exact opposite of Putin: putting freedom before stability, even at the cost of their own lives. Their brave nonviolent stand against one of the world's ugliest regimes - a military dictatorship that has maintained "stability" for decades through repression, murder, torture, forced labour, rape and genocide - is in the finest traditions of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and though unsuccessful in the short term, has reawakened world awareness of their country's woes and placed Burma's rulers on the defensive. One day the country's people will be free.

[Picture by "Forest of Orchids", found on Flickr; I hope he/she doesn't mind me using it in a good cause.]

Author, Heal Thyself

The publication of a book on parenting by Lynne Spears, mother of role model Britney Spears, has been postponed indefinitely after it was announced that Britney's younger sister, 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears, is pregnant.

However, other new books expected soon will appear as planned, including:
- Staying Sober by Amy Winehouse
- Monogamy by Elizabeth Taylor
- Peacemaking by George W. Bush
- How to Be Nice to Everyone by Simon Cowell
- The Fast Road to Democracy by Donald Tsang

What goes around comes around

In his new book Day of Reckoning, right-wing nutcase and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan declares that "The greatest invasion in history, from the Third World, is swamping the ethno-cultural core of the [USA], leading to Balkanization and the loss of the Southwest to Mexico".

Not entirely inappropriate, considering that the young country effectively stole the Southwest from Mexico in the first place in 1848, following what later US President Ulysses S. Grant described as "one of the most unjust [wars] ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation". Looking at Iraq today, it seems America's treatment of weaker nations hasn't changed much in 159 years.

How to start a riot

"You Must be From Away" has an entertaining account of the policing of the Republican Party convention in Mainz (that's Germany's far right nutters, not the far right nutters in the American White House).

No fireworks there, but where riots do occur at such events, my view is that the authorities often create problems for themselves by over-zealous security measures. Protesters want to be seen and heard by those they are protesting against, to make their anger felt. So long as they can achieve this, most of them will be content to shout their slogans and wave their banners peacefully.

However, politicians are so paranoid today (not surprisingly when you consider how heavily their guilty consciences must weigh on them) that they invariably seek - as at most recent WTO conferences, for example - to have protests swept away out of sight and hearing (if not banned altogether, as in London this past Monday) to a remote "designated protest zone" miles away from the action, so they will not have to be reminded of their own culpability. Deprived of the opportunity to get their message across to the delegates and/or the public, some of the protesters will inevitably try to break through police cordons to get closer to the meeting, leading to clashes and sometimes full scale rioting. So whose fault is that?