Hasta La Gadget!

SEOUL (Reuters) – The U.S. military started moving parts of an anti-missile defense system to a deployment site in South Korea on Wednesday, triggering protests from villagers and criticism from China, amid tension over North Korea’s weapons development.

The earlier-than-expected steps to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system was also denounced by the frontrunner in South Korea’s presidential election on May 9.

South Korea’s defense ministry said elements of THAAD were moved to the deployment site, on what had been a golf course, about 250 km (155 miles) south of the capital, Seoul.

“South Korea and the United States have been working to secure an early operational capability of the THAAD system in response to North Korea’s advancing nuclear and missile threat,” the ministry said in a statement.

The battery was expected to be operational by the end of the year, it said.

The United States and South Korea agreed last year to deploy the THAAD to counter the threat of missile launches by North Korea. They say it is solely aimed at defending against North Korea.

But China says the system’s advanced radar can penetrate deep into its territory and undermine its security, while it will do little to deter the North, and is adamant in its opposition.

“China strongly urges the United States and South Korea to stop actions that worsen regional tensions and harm China’s strategic security interests and cancel the deployment of the THAAD system and withdraw the equipment,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a briefing.

“China will resolutely take necessary steps to defend its interests,” Geng said, without elaborating.

China is North Korea’s sole major ally and is seen as crucial to U.S.-led efforts to rein in its bellicose, isolated neighbor.

The United States began moving the first elements of the system to South Korea in March after the North tested four ballistic missiles.

South Korea has accused China of discriminating against some South Korean companies operating in China because of the deployment.

The liberal politician expected to win South Korea’s election, Moon Jae-in, has called for a delay in the deployment, saying the new administration should make a decision after gathering public opinion and more talks with Washington.

A spokesman for Moon said moving the parts to the site “ignored public opinion and due process” and demanded it be suspended.

Television footage showed military trailers carrying equipment, including what appeared to be launch canisters, to the battery site.

Protesters shouted and hurled water bottles at the vehicles over lines of police holding them back.

The Pentagon said the system was critical to defend South Korea and its allies against North Korean missiles and deployment would be completed “as soon as feasible”.

‘WE WILL FIGHT’

More than 10 protesters were injured, some of them with fractures, in clashes with police, Kim Jong-kyung, a leader of villagers opposing the deployment, told Reuters.

Kim said about 200 protesters rallied overnight and they would keep up their opposition.

“There’s still time for THAAD to be actually up and running so we will fight until equipment is withdrawn from the site and ask South Korea’s new government to reconsider,” Kim told Reuters by telephone.

A police official in the nearby town of Seongju said police had withdrawn from the area and were not aware of any injuries.

The United States and North Korea have been stepping up warnings to each other in recent weeks over North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons and missiles in defiance of U.N. resolutions.

North Korea’s nuclear and missile threat is perhaps the most serious security challenge confronting U.S. President Donald Trump. He has vowed to prevent North Korea from being able to hit the United States with a nuclear missile.

North Korea says it needs the weapons to defend itself and has vowed to strike the United States and its Asian allies at the first sign of any attack on it.

The United States is sending the USS Carl Vinson carrier strike group to waters off the Korean peninsula, where it will join the USS Michigan, a nuclear submarine that docked in South Koreaon Tuesday. South Korea’s navy has said it will hold drills with the U.S. strike group.

North Korea’s foreign ministry denounced a scheduled U.N. Security Council meeting on Friday, chaired by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, saying the United States was “not morally entitled” to force members states to impose sanctions on it.

“It is a wild dream for the U.S. to think of depriving the DPRK of its nuclear deterrent through military threat and sanctions. It is just like sweeping the sea with a broom,” the North’s KCNA cited a foreign ministry spokesman as saying.

DPRK stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the North’s official name.

China’s envoy on North Korea, Wu Dawei, met his Japanese counterpart, Kenji Kanasugi, for talks in Tokyo and they agreed that they would “respond firmly” to any further North Korean provocation, Japan’s foreign ministry said.

“We are against anything that might lead to war or chaos,” Wu said.

KCNA said earlier leader Kim Jong Un had supervised the country’s “largest-ever” live-fire drill to mark Tuesday’s 85th founding anniversary of its military, with more than 300 large-caliber, self-propelled artillery pieces on its east coast.

“The brave artillerymen mercilessly and satisfactorily hit the targets and the gunshots were very correct, he said, adding that they showed well the volley of gunfire of our a-match-for-a-hundred artillery force giving merciless punishment to the hostile forces,” KCNA cited Kim as saying.

There had been fears North Korea would mark the anniversary with its sixth nuclear test or a long-range missile launch.

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Of all the chilling moments in Jason Fagone’s recent piece, “What Bullets Do to Bodies,” there is one that particularly hits home. Dr. Amy Goldberg, a surgeon and trauma chief at Temple University in Philadelphia, remarks about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary and the sheer amount of devastation that took place in just five minutes.

Dr. Goldberg mentions that while 20 students and six educators were shot and killed, not one was able to be transported to a hospital. She says, “The fact that not a single one of those kids was able to be transported to a hospital, tells me that they were not just dead, but really really really really dead.” Their bodies were so riddled with bullets that there was no hope of treating or reviving them. Even our best medical treatment would be no match for the military-grade weapons and high-capacity magazines that the shooter was able to obtain.

It’s not often that Members of Congress are brought in close to the trauma of gun violence. We don’t have to stand in the emergency room as gunshot victims are rushed in. We don’t have to wake up in the middle of the night reliving the painful aftermath of a mass shooting. Far too many of my colleagues believe that tweeting out our thoughts and prayers is sufficient.

It’s been four years this month since the Senate failed to pass the Manchin-Toomey bill that would have strengthened background checks and implemented a variety of other commonsense reforms. In that time, more than 400,000 people in the United States have suffered from gunshot wounds. In the face of these acts of gun violence, our inaction has made us complicit. Whether it occurs in idyllic small towns like Newtown or in cities like Hartford, Bridgeport, Chicago and Philadelphia – we have accepted gun violence as the status quo.

In the four and a half years since Sandy Hook, Congress hasn’t passed a single measure that would make the next mass shooting or the next murder of kids in this country less likely. The American public has made up its mind that they want a background check system that isn’t full of holes. They want to make sure that everybody who buys a gun through a commercial sale has to prove that they’re not a criminal before they buy it. They want to crack down on illegal gun purchases and on the military-style weapons and ammunition that facilitate the murder of dozens of innocent people in a matter of minutes. Congress has responded with total, unconscionable deafening silence.

Maybe my colleagues fail to act because they haven’t seen what Dr. Goldberg sees in her hospital day in and day out. They don’t see how a gunshot wound can damage a person or rip through an entire community. This doesn’t have to happen, but this epidemic will continue without end if Congress continues to sit on its hands and do nothing.

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Lidia Yuknavitch’s latest novel, The Book of Joan, pays homage to a figure who’s inspired the author since her Catholic upbringing: a woman and a martyr, Joan of Arc. In an interview with The Rumpus, Yuknavitch explained how the historic idol allowed her to turn her suffering into “something more like girl power,” and her novel makes that personal connection clear.

Honoring the story of 1400s Joan, Yuknavitch’s book follows another Joan on a near-future expedition. As a girl, she learns that she’s intimately connected with Earth, down to her anatomy, which includes a blue light that emits from her forehead, coinciding, it seems, with the planet’s pain. As war happens ― suddenly and everywhere ― child soldiers are enlisted, and Joan’s oneness with the natural world is used as a weapon. She also discovers she has the power to bring the dead back to life, for a short time.

These skills turn her into a symbol of hope, one the tyrannical Jean de Men aims to destroy. The dictator reins over CIEL, a space home inhabited by humans whose skin has lost its pigmentation and whose genitals have become shriveled and useless. In this new society, there are no books, only stories branded onto skin through a process called grafting.

One expert grafter, Christine (after Christine de Pizan, a medieval writer who criticized poet Jean de Meun’s work about courtly love), wears Joan’s story and believes that, although Joan was burned alive, she’s still living and thriving somewhere down on Earth. She hopes to lead a coup against Jean de Men, who’s working to restore human genitalia not for pleasure, but for reproduction.

Meanwhile, Joan roams Earth with Leone ― her closest friend ― exploring deep caves where life thrives in the form of worms and bugs. Yuknavitch’s stellar prose is most alive here, when she’s lovingly describing the natural world ― its beauty and brutality.

As a story, The Book of Joan is something new altogether. The characters moralize. They give speeches, they lay out their philosophical views, and they seldom act in ways that contradict their beliefs. So, the effect is like that of reading a comic book ― or medieval text ― infused with lines of perfect poetry. There are heroes and villains. The heroes act heroically, and the villains, corrupted by power, enact evil deeds without remorse. Jean de Men’s “gross train of flesh [is] splayed out on the floor.” His voice is “reptilian.” “He aims his words with measured venom.”

This is not a conventional approach to contemporary literature or science fiction; both genres aim to create characters who are as morally complex as most humans. (Individuals are large, remember? They contain multitudes.) But, Yuknavitch isn’t a conventional writer, and has, in fact, devoted her career to rethinking conventions.

She runs a writing workshop called Corporeal Writing, where budding authors’ intuitions are valued and where politically engaged work is encouraged. In the description for one of the courses, the program’s site reads, “A cohesive narrative can happen any number of ways.  It can be an accumulation of fragments, it can be kaleidoscopic, it can by lyric, braided, circular, vertical, visual, it can be arranged as a palimpsest.”

Kaleidoscopic, lyric ― these words nicely fit Yuknavitch’s style, which is especially suited to the passages wherein Christine is telling the story of Joan, who, to her, is a symbol of hope.

But, aside from her descriptions of her heroes, her fantasies, and her beliefs, we’re not given access to Christine’s life on CIEL. This book will appeal less to readers interested in worldbuilding and in individuals navigating future social systems ― a la Ursula K. Le Guin, more anthropologist than philosopher. It is, instead, an homage to an idol, an ode to a way of life, and a warning about mistreating the earth and each other. All of that’s wrapped up in a voice that’s uniquely Yuknavitch’s, which is worth reading for alone.  

The bottom line:

More poetic creed than conventional story, The Book of Joan shows off Yuknavitch’s imagination and her gift for crafting sonorous sentences.

Who wrote it:

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of The Chronology of Water and The Small Backs of Children, which we named one of HuffPost’s Best Books of 2015.

Who will read it:

Anyone interested in fiction that grapples with gender, climate change or near-future scenarios.

What other reviewers think:

The New York Times: “Telling the truth with precision and rage and a visionary’s eye, using both realism and fabulism, is one way to break through the white noise of a consumerist culture that tries to commodify post-apocalyptic fiction, to render it safe.”

LARB: “Perhaps it is only ‘natural’ that in a book that brings together so many different strains of history, literature, theory, and even science, some parts are bound to contradict others.”

NPR: “Yuknavitch is a bold and ecstatic writer, wallowing in sex and filth and decay and violence and nature and love with equal relish.”

Opening lines:

“Burning is an art.”

Notable passage:

“Leone, whose small heart had a defect at birth, who carried a heart that started out in a pig. Xenotransplantation and Leone had become Joan’s favorite words. Xenotransplantation represented a change in the distance between people and animals in a way she loved. Leone represented Leone, just Leone, Leone.”

The Book of Joan
Lidia Yuknavitch
HarperCollins, $26.99
Published April 18, 2017

The Bottom Line is a weekly review combining plot description and analysis with fun tidbits about the book.

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You know the old saying credited to W.C. Fields to never work with kids or animals? You can add robots to the list.

Watch amazing robots upstage host Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday’s “Tonight Show.”

Don’t be seduced by their entertainment value, Jimmy! Sure, one makes a charming snake … 

 … and a humanoid one plays a heckuva game of “rock, paper, scissors” … 

But after her victory, she ominously proclaims, “This is a good beginning with my plan to dominate the human race.”

We got our eye on you, girl.

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Like a magnificently aged wine, Jeff Goldblum is still a fantastic human decades after we first met him. He continues to win us over, and he’s currently doing so with sausages.

After the recent announcement that Goldblum will be returning to the “Jurassic Park” franchise in “Jurassic World 2,” he appeared inside a food truck in Sydney, Australia, on Wednesday. From said food truck, Goldblum was apparently handing out FREE sausages!

We know, we know ― Dr. Ian Malcolm is returning to the big screen. That is INSANELY marvelous. But also: FREE SAUSAGES FROM JEFF GOLDBLUM.

Is this heaven? Are we still alive?

“Chef Goldblum’s” truck began its afternoon trip at Wynyard Station before wandering into the Circular Quay area of Sydney.

The photos from fans on social media have been truly iconic:

This fan summed up our thoughts most succinctly:

Jeff Goldblum, never stop being you.

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