Dave Neiwert of the indispensible Orcinus blog, and author of Strawberry Days, about the internement of Japanese Americans, has a moving summary of the brave woman at the Jewish Federation of Seattle who slowed down the gunman last week, and the strong, meaningful community response by Muslim and Jewish alike to the gunning down of 6 women by (apparently) an deranged Muslim (Christian convert recently.)
Archive for July, 2006
Hate: Defusing It
Monday, July 31st, 2006Environment: Oil Bug
Monday, July 31st, 2006There isn’t much good to talk about these days so this little article about oil-eating bacteria is at least a dim light in the darkness. I have my concerns about human manipulation of the genome — of anything. The law of unintended consequences seems especially likely to whack us ( make sure the tweaking doesn’t give these bacteria a taste for oils on the skin for example!) But enhancing natural processes to remediate disaster seems a good way to go. I have heard speculation about similar ideas to deal with nuclear waste.
Scientists in Europe have sequenced the genome for an oil-eating bacterium, a move that could pave the way for faster and more efficient ways to clean up oil spills.
Lebanon: Jesus Weeping
Sunday, July 30th, 2006Qana
30 July 2006
55 Civilians massacred including 27 children in a shelter (Early reports)
Qana is the place where, according to the Fourth Gospel, Jesus performed his first miracle, the turning of a large quantity of water into wine at a wedding feast (John 2:1-11)
You may not want to click here. The photos are almost impossible to bear. You could send the link to the White House. comments@whitehouse.gov Or call, or write. It is not an act of friendship to replace the weapons that did this.
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National Security: Who Are the Experts?
Friday, July 28th, 2006Glen Greenwald, How Would a Patriot Act, is one of the bloggers I turn to regularly. This post is worth putting up in its entirety. In it he helps us remember how RIGHT Howard Dean was in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq — and how he was mocked, vilified and made sport of. (Dean among others of us.) Who, asks Greenwald, was really more knowledgeable about national security? And why, even after they have been shown to be wrong — and some of them admitting it– are they still being sought after for national security advice?
I would add that the same is now proving true in Israel. Not that there were warnings before the invasion of Lebanon; no time for discussion there. But the mavens of national security whose only tool is massive mechanized attack are being shown to be wrong. It is increasingly clear that Hezbollah is winning — if only by showing, as the Iraqis are showing the U.S. — that Superman is vulnerable. More on this later. Meanwhile, here is Greenwald’s piece. It’s worth using as a springboard in your education of others. The lesson is not “ha ha you were wrong!” The lesson is our national security is being threatened by the people, and the attitudes they hold, and who are now in power, and many who are positioning themselves to run for power.
“Thursday, July 27, 2006
Why is being right or wrong on Iraq so irrelevant?
With more and more prominent administration supporters now admitting that our invasion of Iraq has turned out to be a disaster, and acknowledging that a vicious and tragic religious civil war is rapidly unfolding, it is worth recalling what Howard Dean was saying prior to the invasion about why he thought it was ill-advised based on the evidence that we knew then.
Dean was pilloried by virtually all Republicans, by many Democrats and by the national media — not only for his opposition to the war but also for the rationale on which he predicated that opposition. As a result of his belief that we ought to at least wait until we knew for sure if Saddam had WMDs before we started a war, Dean was relentlessly depicted as a fringe, irresponsible, appeasing lunatic who knew nothing about foreign policy or the grave dangers we face in the world.
Here are excerpts from a speech Dean gave on February 17, 2003 — just over a month before we invaded — at Drake University:
(more…)
Blame England
Wednesday, July 26th, 2006Some claim that Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris had managed to secure a peculiar hold over the otherwise domineering, intrusive Churchill, for although on various occassions the Prime Minister expressed certain scruples about the horrifying bombardment of defenseless cities he consoled himself — obviously under the influence of Harris and his dismissal of any arguments against his policy — with the idea that there was now, as he put it, a higher poetic justice at work and “that those who have loosed these horrors upon mankind will now in their homes and persons feel the shattering strokes of just retribution.” In fact there is much to suggest that in Harris a man had risen to the head of Bomber Command who, according to Solly Zuckerman, liked destruction for its own sake, and was thus in perfect sympathy with the innermost principle of every war, which is to aim for as wholesale an annihilation of the enemy with his dwellings, his history, and his natural environment as can possibly be achieved. Elias Canetti has linked the fascination of power in its purest form to the growing number of accumulated victims. In line with this idea, Sir Arthur’s position was unassailable because of his unlimited interest in destruction . His plan for successive devastating strikes, which he followed uncompromisingly to the end, was overwhelmingly simple in its logic, and by comparison any real strategic alternatives such as disabling the fuel supply were bound to look like mere diversionary tactics. The war in the air was war pure and undisguised. Its continuation in the face of all reason suggests that, as Elaine Scarry has put it in her extremely perspicacious book The Body in Pain, the victims of war are not sacrifices made as the means to an an end of any kind, but in the most precise sense are both the means and the end in themselves.
From W.G. Sebald “On the Natural History of Destruction.” [Translated by Anthea Bell ]
Ethanol - Not THE Answer
Wednesday, July 26th, 2006In other than war news there is Energy news. Energy news of course is intimately connected to war news; they might even be conjoined (fraternal) twins. War goes up: energy prices go up. War goes up higher: people learn the virtues of living with no transported goods — which is to say, in America, nothing of almost everything. On the other hand, when energy availability goes down, war does not similarly go down. Oh no, war goes up. Diminishing amounts of energy, increasing amounts of war. Solution: More Energy! Energy Independence = No more foreign wars. (Well… yes and no, but that’s a different essay.) Thus: Ethanol –energy derived from vegetation; solar energy that is processed by plants.
So it is that ethanol has been hitting the big noise making fan for the past several months. Folks of many political persuasions — except those who think God makes gas and will make more — have pointed to ethanol, particularly as an additive to gasoline in a product called E85, as an energy-independence miracle. Subsidies are called for; cheery charts are power-pointed.
Not so fast says Robert Rapier at the OilDrum. It’s a piece of the puzzle but certain high-flying influentials should re-do their homework. Read on.
Ralph Nader Speaks — (I Want to Scream)
Tuesday, July 25th, 2006The most famous Lebanese American you know sends a letter to President Bush, the man he helped put in office, and says: talk to your daddy. [Excuse me. I am spittin' mad. Thanks Ralph.]
AMY GOODMAN: “Tell us what you wrote to President Bush.”
RALPH NADER: “I wrote him a letter that basically described the need for him to get advice from his father and Brent Scowcroft and James Baker about how he should deal with this Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which of course violates a whole range of international treaties and Geneva Conventions, to which the United States has been a longtime signatory. And the first priority that Bush should adopt is to recognize that the U.S.’s indiscriminate support of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Lebanon — ports and hospital and roads and wheat silos and residential areas — puts a responsibility on the President, who is shipping a lot of tax dollars to Israel, as well as a lot of weapons, to put a stop to this through a ceasefire and to take a stronger initiative in resolving the core problem, which is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”
Man, if this isn’t Greek Lebanese tragedy I don’t know what is. America’s hero, Ralph Nader, parents born in Lebanon, runs as a third party candidate against Al Gore and George Bush. The race is very very tight. Almost all of Nader’s friends ask him to bow out, to ask his supporters to vote for Gore. Nader: negative. Bush and Gore so close you couldn’ta shimmed an opening between them. Right Wing court decides in favor of Bush. Bush aids, abets war addicts: does no thing for 5 years about Israel Palestine. Israel says it is planning to blow up Hizbollah. Bush says nap time. Lebanon goes up in flames. 35,000 Americans in Lebanon flee for their lives. Lebanese flee for their lives, only without US help. They can’t get over the bombed out bridges. Many die. Lebanese democracy shrapneled to death, maybe even burned alive by posphorous bombs. Ralph Nader writes Bush a letter. Tragic.
Mexico - How to Contest An Election
Tuesday, July 25th, 2006
Just in case the Mexican election had slipped off your radar — and why wouldn’t it?– this is a reminder of what a free people does when it feels that termites have eaten away at the structure of free elections. (Of course it helps when the candidate himself cares.)
Another demonstration has been called for Sunday, July 30. The aim is to get 2,000,000 folks into the Zocalo. Watch for it NOT to be covered in the U.S. — unless you get Spanish Language stations…
Optimist - Pessimist
Monday, July 24th, 2006Contrary to what most of my friends think, including my number one suporter, my wife, I am not truly a pessimist. Given what the world brings us in fact I am quite optimistic. I believe that, and have acted as if, we can do something about the murderous chaos we live in, after all.
On most days I remember how to smile. John Prine speaks for me when he he sings, “The scientific nature of an ordinary man is to go on out and do the best he can.”
I do have my days though.
Contrary to the received wisdom, people do not think and then act. They act and then rationalize. New data from the environment is routinely plugged into existing mental hardware (like entering a number into a spreadsheet), which is then followed by an appropriate thought. Since people have no wiring for “peak in oil and gas production”, news of the present energy crisis cannot generate the appropriate thought. Only prolonged reflection can grow the required mental hardware to place this critical piece of news in perspective. Unfortunately, only a few people can invest the thousands-and-thousands of hours necessary to see both the energy and evolutionary aspects of the human condition clearly.
Each passing year tells me how true the first two sentences are.
This snippet is from a longer “farewell” piece [read down a screen or two] written by Jay Hanson to the readers of his website dieoff.org when he went on to other things in early 2003. Read it. The piece above is on the sweet side of things. Essentially, he argues, there is no saving us. We are programmed by our genetics to lie, cheat and steal — whatever it takes to give our genetic template advantage over others. The only respite — that is, peace– is when expansion of energy use is possible.
[By the way, this belief is built into the American founding. I've been re-reading William Appleman Williams "The Tragedy of American Diplomacy," and it is true in spades. The Panic of 1893 (500 banks, 15,000 business failed, 4,000,000 unemployed) was solved by a nationwide agitation for over-seas expansion: hence, Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, the beginning of all we have today. Labor and Business, Dem, Repub and even many radicals believed that without expansion the nation would collapse. ]
Since expansion of energy use is NOT possible as stored up energy has generally reached it’s peak exploitation, and since alternative energy sources CAN NOT replace fossil fuels (the math doesn’t work) the future — in Hanson’s view — is terrible, ongoing war until population and energy use reach equilibrium with energy availability.
He’s still around and growling about not being understood. You can catch up with him at the oildrum after he pays a visit to one of the contributors there, thelastsasquatch. You can search through his postings from time to time if you are interested and I haven’t posted the latest.
Lebanon: Human Chum
Monday, July 24th, 2006Anthony Shadid, one of the best writing about Iraq for the Washington Post, is of Lebanese descent. He is now in Lebanon - dateline Tyre.
“Where’s my father? Where’s my father?” asked Mahmoud Srour, an 8-year-old whose face was burned beyond recognition after an Israeli missile struck the family’s car Sunday. His mother, Nouhad, lurched toward his hospital bed, her eyes welling with tears.
“Is he coming?” he asked her.
“Don’t worry about your father,” she said, her words broken by sobs.
Barely conscious, bewildered, he lay with his eyes almost swollen shut. His head lolled toward her. A whisper followed.
“Don’t cry, mother,” he told her.
There’s more. You couldn’t get closer with a hidden camera.
Civilian Toll Mounts in Lebanon Conflict
Minivans, taxis, cars on the road fleeing, having been told by the Israelis to get out; some of them waving white flags. Israeli helicopter gunships overhead, attacking, attacking. What is in the heads of these young men and women? What are they thinking as they see the vehicles below them, reaching unsafe speeds on the highway, swerving around smoking hulks of cars that went before? Are they acting on some secret information, some whisper from God, that the white minivan has Hezbollah gunmen inside? Are they watching the car stop and load two wounded bodies into the trunk of the car and thinking “those are terrorists, they shall not survive?” Or are they simply, instinctually, excited by blood all around them and pulling the triggers, celebrating the smoke and the flames? Do the people running fearfully far below them seem like insects scattering in a panic of fear? Oh, Israel, what has become of you?
I am not a believer but I wish I were. My God would have a waiting period for those entering into His gardens. All the corpses created by each supplicant’s actions whould show off their wounds — until understanding came. After washing the wounds, rejoining the arms to the torsos, molding the flesh on the faces back to the original laughter and hope they would be allowed to walk in the garden, though perhaps never in the sweetest spots — where the canyon wren sing and the hummingbirds sip side by side in the glens.
Meanwhile, Condelezza Rice is grinning and mugging for the cameras in a stop over to Beirut. The headlines shouting about her bid for an urgent ceasefire even while the U.S. is sending post haste replacements for the weapons and ammunition so murderously used.
I don’t think English has words enough for the 24o kinds of disgust churning in the human heart at such activity.
Climate Change: Research
Sunday, July 23rd, 2006I remember, as a 10 year old in a new library, thinking it was possible to read all the books on the shelves. I even started — in Science Fiction with Asimov I believe. By the time I got to Stapleton I knew my reading eyes were bigger than my reading stomach; I would never get to say, the section on Gardening.
Now, instead of small community libraries, we have the world wide web for pete’s sake! The hope isn’t to read even 1% of what is out there but to try to find and hold on to the sites and authors who can help us make sense of the world around us.
Naturally, these days, Global Warming — at the micro level (it was 101 on my balcony yesterday) and the macro level — is all about us. Our attention turns, we hope not too late, to understanding what is going on and how we might add, or subtract, our efforts. Here are a couple of blogs for you to consider.
RealClimate.Org is devoted to climate science itself, not the politics or economics related.
The Discovery of Global Warming (linked from RealClimate.org) is a long set of links describing how climate change research became recognized in the scientific community, and later amongst the public.
Lebanon: Mass Graves
Saturday, July 22nd, 2006BBC, reporting from south Lebanon, says that villages are “being hit and paying the price” as Israel tries to destroy Hezbollah with “sheer firepower”.
Normally, the bodies of the dead are taken home for burial. Without power and refrigeration, decomposing bodies must be quickly buried in mass graves. In one scene, a bulldozer covers 80 bodies with loads of dirt as loved ones look on.
Lebanon: Forgotten By God
Saturday, July 22nd, 2006
These are among the most difficult photos you will ever look at. And of course they are only photos - not the actual bodies…in your arms…
Lebanon: Blog in time of War
Monday, July 17th, 2006
Lebanon
Saturday, July 15th, 2006The indomitable Christopher Allbritton reports from Beirut.
BEIRUT — It’s 2:35 a.m. here and I’m running on little sleep. The Israelis bombed the ports of Beirut, Jounieh and Tripoli tonight. I live near the port, in Ein el-Mreisse, so the bombs sounded like they landed on my neighbor’s house, they were so loud…
Speaking to people from Bourj al-Barajai, a southern neighborhood, revealed a defiance that masked whatever apprehension they might feel. I found a make-shift bomb shelter and spoke with the people inside, who remained defiant.
“Those soldiers will not go back to their home until our people come home,” said Ghassam Abduallah, referring to the Lebanese prisoners still held despite Israeli’s 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon after 18 years of occupation.
DefenseTech.org has it’s own post, and links to another, which say what Allbritton says, that Israel’s strategy is to isolate Hezbollah in the south of Lebanon, make it impossible for supplies or re-inforcements to get in, and then take it on. For their part, the Hezbollah cadres seem ready and willing to fight — to the last man.
Larry Johnson, ex spook and caustic critic of BushAdmin, thinks –unlike Defense Tech– that Israel has no strategic plan.
Apparently not content to let the U.S. do a self-immolation act in the Middle East by itself, Israel decided to set itself on fire by invading Lebanon. Burn baby burn? Like George Bush, Israel’s Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, never served in a combat unit and launched military operations without thinking the matter through. In fact, Olmert reportedly never even served in the military. I raise this because there is one simple question Israel cannot answer about the current operations–what is their strategic military objective.
Glenn Greenwald takes note of William Kristol’s celebration of the events in Lebanon: the neo conservatives are trumpeting that Israel’s war is Our war. Oh, fuck.
He also provides links to analysis at Whiskey Bar and Obsidian Wings, both worth reading.
Foreign Interlopers
Saturday, July 15th, 2006The Spanish believed in the early 1600s that they had a foreigners problem: the Moriscos. Granted, many of them had lived in Spain for centuries, but culturally they were foreign, and suspect. Though they declared themselves to be Catholic they had once been Muslims, or their parents had been, or they still were - traitorously hiding beneath their false Catholicism. Who knew?
Additionally, the Moriscos worked hard — in their own fields, in the fields of great land owners, as tradesmen and shop keepers. They did work the Spanish would not do, poor or not. Why would a Spaniard work as hard as a slave or a Moor? As hidden Muslims they did not drink their share of wine or eat their share of meat — and so the burden of taxes paid on these consumables fell unfairly on the Spanish. The people demanded action: deport them all!
Able to stand such abuse no longer the Archbisop of Valencia, against the admonitions of the Pope, and causing great unhappiness amongst the landowning classes, ordered the Moriscos of Valencia to be expelled. In three days in 1609 they were herded to the harbor, harassed on the way, plundered and abused. They boarded the ships with only what they could carry, and sent back to Africa. When they arrived in a land few of them knew many were slaughtered as Christians, or starved to death in a strange land.
More banishment followed until some 400,000 productive inhabitants of three major areas of Spain were gone. Their land was scooped up by the Spanish but with no one to work it, it fell into disuse. The economy staggered and collapsed. The government grew more corrupt and the population, so proud of their newly enforced purity, was reduced to destitution, beggary, and theft.
But that wouldn’t happen here….
[source is Durant's Story of Civilization, vol VII, The Age of Reason Begins ]
Fuel not Fossils
Saturday, July 15th, 2006The debate is finally taking hold. Few are arguing that fossil — carbon releasing — fuel is all we have to think about, and stake our future on. Much conversation is heard now about alternative fuels (somewhat different than alternative energy. All fuel is energy; not all energy is fuel. Fuel has to be transportable in small amounts in the vehicle itself. ) The loudest trumpets have been for ethanol — mainly due to the big US corn lobbies and pre-eminently Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). There is more to the story than that. This Alexei Barrionuevo NYT’s article is a quick little primer.
Biodiesel produced from soybeans produces more usable energy and reduces greenhouse gases more than corn-based ethanol, making it more deserving of subsidies..
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English and Irish: Arab and Jew
Saturday, July 15th, 2006Today the Israelis are mercilessly bombing Lebanon, after, they say, the Shiia Hezbollah. Hezbollah is launching small rockets across the border into northern Israel. Hamas, elected by the Palestinians to govern them, is allowing, encouraging or unable to stop its own armed wing from attacking Israel across the plantation borders.
For my part, I am reading English history.
The Statute of Kilkenny (1366) “forbade intermarriage, fosterage, or other intimate relations between the English and the Irish in Ireland, and any use, by the English, of Irish speech, customs, or dress, on pain of imprisonment and forfeiture of property. No Irishman was henceforth to be received into any English religious organization; and no Irish bards or storytellers were to enter English homes.” (from Durant’s Story of Civilization, VI, The Reformation.)
The Irish, of course, won their independence from Great Britain only in 1922 after decades of hard fought struggles, including civil-war on the island between home rulers and British loyalists.
As late as 1972 when I was hitchhiking in western Ireland and got picked up by an English driver ethnic disgust persisted. She thought the Irish to be dirty, lazy, over-sexed (too many children), loud, lying drunks.
The lesson here need not be thus are humans and thus they shall be for ever, though that springs to mind. It certainly has been true that enmity built over years of dominance & submission, the control of one people by another, takes years to take down; not equal time but in human terms, a long time.
It is also true that however cruel the British were, and they were, they did not have fighter-bombers and 500 pound bombs. The Irish had pitch forks, fire and in the last centuries of the struggle, flint-locks. In the last decades both sides had semi-automatic weapons and, for then, large scale explosives. The IRA could not reach Liverpool, however with Kaytusha rockets.
The great Armitsar massacre in 1919, by British and Indian troops of Indian civilians — mostly Sikh — was done with merely .303 inch rifle shot, several thousand rounds, killing one thousand (officially, only 390). There were no tanks, howitzers, rocket propelled grenades or IEDs.
As with humans and the environment so with humans and humans: technology is a force multiplier so great that what once were local tragedies and terrors now explode on the world stage over night.
All I see today is imminent peril. The Jews and Arabs do not have 800 years to work out their differences as the English and Irish have mostly done. The long term solution of making murderous behavior as unthinkable as cannibalism may not have time to run. What to do today, tomorrow? If only it were as easy as saying to all parties: Shut up and go back to your rooms!
Catholic murdered Protestant murdered Catholic in Ireland in the 1640s; barbarously. Since the end result is living in modest harmony in the same places, why not skip the ugly parts?
If only we had men and women of stature and strength of character at the national level; a President who could say to Israel: yes I am your friend. As your friend I am telling you, your behvior is endangering your own citizens; it is endangering mine — to no discernable end. The destruction of all of Lebanon, the re-annexation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and a diaspora of all Palestinians will not make Israel more secure. The adrenline rush of revenge will not protect your children.
If only the great Imams of Islam could issue fatwa to follow fatwa that the murderous behavior of too many, must cease.
The operative belief of all those with weapons that punishment will change behavior is only true for some of the people, some of the time, though the belief persists through the centuries and increases as power grows.
In Henry VIII’s England a young woman, Anne Askew, insisted to her inquisitors that God could not be a small round piece of bread. “Let it lie in a box for three months, and it will be moldy,” she told them. And she was tortured until nearly dead. She did not recant her heresy and went to her death “as merry as one that is bound toward heaven,” according to one contemporary report.
Neither will bombings of children by belted-killers on buses or bombings of children from airplanes under cover of national self-defense change behavior — except perhaps to accept more and participate in more muder.
We don’t have much time, it seems to me, to understand ourselves and the other, to throw off the shackles of ignorance and denial, to let light up the mirror neurons of empathy and common purpose. Life for those we know and love means letting live those we do not know but can imagine.
Woody Guthrie
Friday, July 14th, 2006I don’t have a lot of heros. Woody Guthrie is right at the top. For years I picked and sang his songs. Knew a whole lot of them. I learned a lot of American history too, tracking down the songs and all they were about: the dust bowl, the union organizing, the deaths of the poor and trodden on.
PBS has a good American Masters documentary on him. Check it out.
Failed States
Thursday, July 13th, 2006Very grim, and lucid post at Whiskey Bar
He who fights terrorists for any period of time is likely to become one himself.
Israeli historian Martin van Creveld