Saturday, February 27, 2010
Create Your Own Kaleidoscopoe, online
A very nice free site from zefrank.com. And please check out http://www.lumosity.com/: scientifically-designed games and activities, to improve your brain. :)
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Poetry Bits - Matthew Arnold
'Dover Beach"
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Hubble Space Telescope Photographs Result of Asteroid Collision?
Asteroid collisions are energetic, with an average impact speed of more than 11,000 miles per hour, or five times faster than a rifle bullet. The comet-like object imaged by Hubble, called P/2010 A2, was first discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research, or LINEAR, program sky survey on Jan. 6. New Hubble images taken on Jan. 25 and 29 show a complex X-pattern of filamentary structures near the nucleus.
"This is quite different from the smooth dust envelopes of normal comets," said principal investigator David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles. "The filaments are made of dust and gravel, presumably recently thrown out of the nucleus. Some are swept back by radiation pressure from sunlight to create straight dust streaks. Embedded in the filaments are co-moving blobs of dust that likely originated from tiny unseen parent bodies."
Hubble shows the main nucleus of P/2010 A2 lies outside its own halo of dust. This has never been seen before in a comet-like object. The nucleus is estimated to be 460 feet in diameter.
Normal comets fall into the inner regions of the solar system from icy reservoirs in the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud. As comets near the sun and warm up, ice near the surface vaporizes and ejects material from the solid comet nucleus via jets. But P/2010 A2 may have a different origin. It orbits in the warm, inner regions of the asteroid belt where its nearest neighbors are dry rocky bodies lacking volatile materials.
This leaves open the possibility that the complex debris tail is the result of an impact between two bodies, rather than ice simply melting from a parent body.
"If this interpretation is correct, two small and previously unknown asteroids recently collided, creating a shower of debris that is being swept back into a tail from the collision site by the pressure of sunlight," Jewitt said.
The main nucleus of P/2010 A2 would be the surviving remnant of this so-called hypervelocity collision.
The filamentary appearance of P/2010 A2 is different from anything seen in Hubble images of normal comets, consistent with the action of a different process," Jewitt said. An impact origin also would be consistent with the absence of gas in spectra recorded using ground-based telescopes.
The asteroid belt contains abundant evidence of ancient collisions that have shattered precursor bodies into fragments. The orbit of P/2010 A2 is consistent with membership in the Flora asteroid family, produced by collisional shattering more than 100 million years ago. One fragment of that ancient smashup may have struck Earth 65 million years ago, triggering a mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs. But, until now, no such asteroid-asteroid collision has been caught "in the act."
At the time of the Hubble observations, the object was approximately 180 million miles from the sun and 90 million miles from Earth. The Hubble images were recorded with the new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3).
Paul Krugman's Blog in the NYT
Check the link and read it. We may really be doomed, if Obama & Company are as clueless as they appear/
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Iran and nuclear enrichment politics
This is complicated, politically and technically, but nevertheless it pains me to see the Obama Administration through the State Dept. spokesman Hillary Clinton be so simplistic and likely intentionally untruthful about many of these issues, and basically ignore their duties to bring out the verifiable facts to the public. Of couse, if we had a popular press which would do this duty, this would be unnecessary, but as we do not we seem to have one, we are left in a factual vacuum, where people need to depend on themselves and their own (largely technological) resources to enforce any sort of sanity-based view on the world. Here are a few verifiable items -- not personal opinions, and you can find the freely-available sources online and elsewhere to verify the statements:
Sunday, Feb. 7 President Mahmoud Ahmadinjed announced that Iran would proceed on its plans toward enriching uranium to the 19.75% needed to produce medical isotopes.Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, represented the announcement as a way for Iran to put pressure on the West to provide the low enriched uranium for its medical reactor on Iran's terms. Note: the particular isotope Iran is interested in is Molybdenum 99, which is essential for multiple medical diagnostic uses -- but unfortunately has a relatively short half-life, meaning that obtaining, shipping, receiving and putting it into use is difficult since by the time all this happens most of what you'd paid for has decayed -- , making local production of the isotope much more desirable, as is commonly known throughout the scientific community in the West.
Meanwhile, the intransigence of Robert Gates -- the US Secretary of Defense -- and with Hillary Clinton, the State Department's spokesman, seems to want to present this entire issue as "IRAN WANTS TO MAKE A BOMB".
The US Intelligence Agencies themselves have gone on record on the Voice Of America to say they do not believe this is the case.
http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/middle-east/US-Defense-Spy-Chief-Iran-Undecided-on-Nuclear-Bomb-81256887.html
"...there is no evidence that Iran has made a final decision to build nuclear weapons."
Iran does have a nuclear enrichment program -- to which it is entitled- like all other signatories to the Non-Proliferation Agreement. Although it's not as transparent as the UN would like, Iran is completely in compliance with the international treaties, and allows 24-hour surveillance of all its nuclear facilities and allows visits by by UN inspectors.
Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, has specifically said that Iran is open to the 'fuel swap' concerpt (the West would supply Iran with its fuel needs and accept the nuclear waste/fuel rods in return) but the West are finding reason after unreasonable reason why not to accept a deal. This appears to be a political decision. (It should be reiterated that under Iran's system of government, President Mahmoud Ahmadinjed has limited powers, and is not in the chain-of-command for Iran's military forces.)
Also, previously Iran used to buy the Mb99 isotope from Argentina -- a lovely country known for its military dictatorship, the disappearance of thousands of opponents, etc -- but the USA found this perfectly OK and never objected. Of course, now that Argentina is no longer producing this and Iran actually want to produce this medically-necessary material for itself, this is a big fscking problem. The ghosts of Paul Wolfowtiz, Richard Perle, Daniel Pipes and all the rest of the neocons come out of the woodwork like cockroaches. I had thought that we as a country had dropped the huge telephone book upon them and then stomped on it, multiple times; certainly not hoping that the Obama Administration would even think about going down that path, even for political expediency.
Other things of note:
1) Iran is a signitory of the International NonProliferation Agreements
2) Iran allows all listed surveillance and inspection items listed in that Agreement, including 24-hour electoniuc and personal inspections by UN inspectors.
3) The previous IAEA inspector and Nobel Peace Prize Winner Dr. Mohamned ElBaradei has personally visited and inspected the supposed 'nuclear weapons construction site' at Qom, and has stated publicly that there was nothing there. "It's a hole in a mountain." he stated, saying the site was indeed as Iran said, a backup enrichment site in case the Natanz facility was attacked by Israel or the US.
A quote from Juan Cole's site:
The list of other countries capable of producing LEU of 19.75% includes Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Holland, North Korea, South Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. There would be nothing extraordinary about Iran joining this list, and none of the others on it except N. Korea is being sanctioned-- and that is for constructing a bomb, which Iran is not doing. Argentina was sanctioned neither for enriching to 19.75% nor for selling that stock of LEU to Iran! And South Korea was never sanctioned for secretly enriching to 77%, near bomb grade, something Iran has never been accused of.
3) In addition, no one in the US government is willing to talk on record and in public to the Israelis -- who are not a signatory to any international treaties and refuse all international access to any of their nuclear facilities -- and who possess approximately 200 actual nuclear weapons, according to defectors from their own country with professional knowledge of these matters. As if they and their possession of these weapons make no difference, and do not constitute a major political and strategic element in all negotiations concerning Middle-Eastern affairs.
Complicating all this is the anniversary of the February revolution, so the US would really best be served by the old motto, STFU and at least not parrot and repeat the appalling mistakes of previous administrations.
PS: Barack and Hillary -- I expected better of you. You're smarter than this -- get with it.
Sunday, Feb. 7 President Mahmoud Ahmadinjed announced that Iran would proceed on its plans toward enriching uranium to the 19.75% needed to produce medical isotopes.Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, represented the announcement as a way for Iran to put pressure on the West to provide the low enriched uranium for its medical reactor on Iran's terms. Note: the particular isotope Iran is interested in is Molybdenum 99, which is essential for multiple medical diagnostic uses -- but unfortunately has a relatively short half-life, meaning that obtaining, shipping, receiving and putting it into use is difficult since by the time all this happens most of what you'd paid for has decayed -- , making local production of the isotope much more desirable, as is commonly known throughout the scientific community in the West.
Meanwhile, the intransigence of Robert Gates -- the US Secretary of Defense -- and with Hillary Clinton, the State Department's spokesman, seems to want to present this entire issue as "IRAN WANTS TO MAKE A BOMB".
The US Intelligence Agencies themselves have gone on record on the Voice Of America to say they do not believe this is the case.
http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/middle-east/US-Defense-Spy-Chief-Iran-Undecided-on-Nuclear-Bomb-81256887.html
"...there is no evidence that Iran has made a final decision to build nuclear weapons."
Iran does have a nuclear enrichment program -- to which it is entitled- like all other signatories to the Non-Proliferation Agreement. Although it's not as transparent as the UN would like, Iran is completely in compliance with the international treaties, and allows 24-hour surveillance of all its nuclear facilities and allows visits by by UN inspectors.
Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, has specifically said that Iran is open to the 'fuel swap' concerpt (the West would supply Iran with its fuel needs and accept the nuclear waste/fuel rods in return) but the West are finding reason after unreasonable reason why not to accept a deal. This appears to be a political decision. (It should be reiterated that under Iran's system of government, President Mahmoud Ahmadinjed has limited powers, and is not in the chain-of-command for Iran's military forces.)
Also, previously Iran used to buy the Mb99 isotope from Argentina -- a lovely country known for its military dictatorship, the disappearance of thousands of opponents, etc -- but the USA found this perfectly OK and never objected. Of course, now that Argentina is no longer producing this and Iran actually want to produce this medically-necessary material for itself, this is a big fscking problem. The ghosts of Paul Wolfowtiz, Richard Perle, Daniel Pipes and all the rest of the neocons come out of the woodwork like cockroaches. I had thought that we as a country had dropped the huge telephone book upon them and then stomped on it, multiple times; certainly not hoping that the Obama Administration would even think about going down that path, even for political expediency.
Other things of note:
1) Iran is a signitory of the International NonProliferation Agreements
2) Iran allows all listed surveillance and inspection items listed in that Agreement, including 24-hour electoniuc and personal inspections by UN inspectors.
3) The previous IAEA inspector and Nobel Peace Prize Winner Dr. Mohamned ElBaradei has personally visited and inspected the supposed 'nuclear weapons construction site' at Qom, and has stated publicly that there was nothing there. "It's a hole in a mountain." he stated, saying the site was indeed as Iran said, a backup enrichment site in case the Natanz facility was attacked by Israel or the US.
A quote from Juan Cole's site:
The list of other countries capable of producing LEU of 19.75% includes Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Holland, North Korea, South Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. There would be nothing extraordinary about Iran joining this list, and none of the others on it except N. Korea is being sanctioned-- and that is for constructing a bomb, which Iran is not doing. Argentina was sanctioned neither for enriching to 19.75% nor for selling that stock of LEU to Iran! And South Korea was never sanctioned for secretly enriching to 77%, near bomb grade, something Iran has never been accused of.
3) In addition, no one in the US government is willing to talk on record and in public to the Israelis -- who are not a signatory to any international treaties and refuse all international access to any of their nuclear facilities -- and who possess approximately 200 actual nuclear weapons, according to defectors from their own country with professional knowledge of these matters. As if they and their possession of these weapons make no difference, and do not constitute a major political and strategic element in all negotiations concerning Middle-Eastern affairs.
Complicating all this is the anniversary of the February revolution, so the US would really best be served by the old motto, STFU and at least not parrot and repeat the appalling mistakes of previous administrations.
PS: Barack and Hillary -- I expected better of you. You're smarter than this -- get with it.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Poetry Bits - W. H Auden
The Shield of Achilles
by W. H. Auden
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
by W. H. Auden
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
Poetry Bits - Yeats
The gyres! the gyres! Old Rocky Face, look forth;
Things thought too long can be no longer thought,
For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth,
And ancient lineaments are blotted out.
Irrational streams of blood are staining earth;
Empedocles has thrown all things about;
Hector is dead and there's a light in Troy;
We that look on but laugh in tragic joy.
What matter though numb nightmare ride on top,
And blood and mire the sensitive body stain?
What matter? Heave no sigh, let no tear drop,
A-greater, a more gracious time has gone;
For painted forms or boxes of make-up
In ancient tombs I sighed, but not again;
What matter? Out of cavern comes a voice,
And all it knows is that one word "Rejoice!'
Conduct and work grow coarse, and coarse the soul,
What matter? Those that Rocky Face holds dear,
Lovers of horses and of women, shall,
From marble of a broken sepulchre,
Or dark betwixt the polecat and the owl,
Or any rich, dark nothing disinter
The workman, noble and saint, and all things run
On that unfashionable gyre again.
Things thought too long can be no longer thought,
For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth,
And ancient lineaments are blotted out.
Irrational streams of blood are staining earth;
Empedocles has thrown all things about;
Hector is dead and there's a light in Troy;
We that look on but laugh in tragic joy.
What matter though numb nightmare ride on top,
And blood and mire the sensitive body stain?
What matter? Heave no sigh, let no tear drop,
A-greater, a more gracious time has gone;
For painted forms or boxes of make-up
In ancient tombs I sighed, but not again;
What matter? Out of cavern comes a voice,
And all it knows is that one word "Rejoice!'
Conduct and work grow coarse, and coarse the soul,
What matter? Those that Rocky Face holds dear,
Lovers of horses and of women, shall,
From marble of a broken sepulchre,
Or dark betwixt the polecat and the owl,
Or any rich, dark nothing disinter
The workman, noble and saint, and all things run
On that unfashionable gyre again.
Monday, February 1, 2010
The first and last Americans on the moon
This appears to be 'it.' There is no money in Obama's just-announced budget for the Ares I program, the heavy-lifter Ares V system, or the entire Constellation program. There will be no moon bases, no lunar landers, nothing.
Well, not quite true, and a fight is certainly expected. Funding is included to extend the International Space Station Mission to 2020 as was hoped, but: the Space Shuttle program has ended, and 7,000 jobs have already been cut at Kennedy Space Center. Shortly, only the Russians will have any means of getting there. The US intends to offer 'incentives' to private companies to develop the capability of shuttling humans and cargo to the ISS. Yeah, well...
It's quite possible that we have seen both the first -- and the last --Americans to set foot on the moon, all in one generation.
Well, not quite true, and a fight is certainly expected. Funding is included to extend the International Space Station Mission to 2020 as was hoped, but: the Space Shuttle program has ended, and 7,000 jobs have already been cut at Kennedy Space Center. Shortly, only the Russians will have any means of getting there. The US intends to offer 'incentives' to private companies to develop the capability of shuttling humans and cargo to the ISS. Yeah, well...
It's quite possible that we have seen both the first -- and the last --Americans to set foot on the moon, all in one generation.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Rohrbaugh R9s
I admire it, use it and carry it almost all the time.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Well, they did take our Kodachrome away but..
Here's some old macro photo, taken with a Nikkormat in 1968, with a 50mm macro lens, using Kodachrome 25 slide film, intentionally underexposed about half-a-stop to increase color saturation.
Poetry Bits
W. B. Yeats:
"The Old Stone Cross" - I.
A STATESMAN is an easy man,
He tells his lies by rote;
A journalist makes up his lies
And takes you by the throat;
So stay at home and drink your beer
And let the neighbours vote,
Said the man in the golden breastplate
Under the old stone Cross.
"The Old Stone Cross" - I.
A STATESMAN is an easy man,
He tells his lies by rote;
A journalist makes up his lies
And takes you by the throat;
So stay at home and drink your beer
And let the neighbours vote,
Said the man in the golden breastplate
Under the old stone Cross.
Haiti and other disasters -- natural and manmade
Thursday, January 21, 2010
World Health Agencies Condemn Israeli Blockade of Gaza (Again); Obama's Biggest Mideast Failure
When a relief plane for the Physicians without Borders isn't allowed to land by US military authorities at the airport in Port-au-Prince, there is an outcry.
But Israeli military authorities will not allow any relief planes at all to land in the Gaza Strip (the Israelis destroyed Gaza's airport in 2001).
We cheer when a Haitian child is rescued from the rubble, but ignore the thousands of Gazan children who are suffering malnutrition and being buried by Israeli policy, a policy that is a war crime. I am of course not the only to be struck by this contrast: see also Phil Weiss and others quoted at his essential site.
On Wednesday, 80 international aid groups called upon Israel to change its policy of blockading civilians in Gaza, because it is having severe negative effects on the health of Gazans.
Admittedly, the situation in Gaza is not as dire as that in Haiti. But it is very, very bad, and it is man-made. The Israeli government imposed a blockade on the Gaza strip in 2007 and has maintained it ever since. It limits the import of fuel and staples, and punishes the whole population. Since half of the 1.5 million Gazans are children, the Israeli siege of the little territory is among the more massive ongoing cases of child abuse in the world. There is a virtual news blackout on this atrocity in the US mass media, and attempts of two sets of activists to get humanitarian aid to Gaza in recent weeks were largely ignored by them.
Nor is the Gaza blockade a mere preoccupation of utopian human rights activists. It has become an element of regional geo-politics. It is part of the reason for significant tensions between Israel and one of its few allies in the Middle East, Turkey. As Turkey has democratized and Muslim sentiments have become more important in its politics, and as it has increasingly emerged as a new Middle Eastern power (some speak of neo-Ottomanism), its concern with issues such as Gaza has become more central. The horrible condition of the Gazans is often the lead story on Arab satellite news channels such as Aljazeera, and public anger about it (expressed as much toward the US and the Egyptian regime as toward Israel) is at a boiling point. That anger feeds into terrorism against the West. The Gaza blockade is isolating Israel and fuelling a widespread boycott movement in Europe, Canada and South Africa. And, of course, the blockade makes even the virulently anti-Shiite Sunni fundamentalists of Hamas willing to take aid from Iran, bestowing a toehold in the Levant on Tehran. The French statesman Talleyrand once observed of Napoleon I's murder of the Duc d'Enghien that "It is worse than a crime; it is a blunder." The same could be said of the Gaza blockade from the point of view of any realistic Israeli and US foreign policy.
Last year UNICEF found that about one in ten children in Gaza is severely malnourished, to the point of stunting. The Israeli blockade is deeply implicated in this semi-starvation of tens of thousands of children, as is the Gaza War launched by Israel a little over a year ago, which wrecked nearly one-fifth of farms and deeply hurt agriculture in general. Gaza once flourished agriculturally, but it was cut off by Israel from its natural markets in the Levant, and the US and Egypt have been induced to support the blockade.
The World Health Organization fact sheet on Gaza's plight, issued yesterday, reads like a post-apocalyptic Hollywood film. WHO says:
' The closure of Gaza since mid-2007 and the last Israeli military strike between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009 have led to on-going deterioration in the social, economic and environmental determinants of health.
Many specialized treatments, for example for complex heart surgery and certain types of cancer, are not available in Gaza and patients are therefore referred for treatment to hospitals outside Gaza. But many patients have had their applications for exit permits denied or delayed by the Israeli Authorities and have missed their appointments. Some have died while waiting for referral. . .
Supplies of drugs and disposables have generally been allowed into Gaza. However, there are often shortages on the ground mainly because of shortfalls in deliveries . . . Delays of up to 2-3 months occur on the importation of certain types of medical equipment, such as x-ray machines and electronic devices. Clinical staff frequently lack the medical equipment they need. Medical devices are often broken, missing spare parts or out of date. . .
- Health professionals in Gaza have been cut off from the outside world. Since 2000, very few doctors, nurses or technicians have been able to leave the Strip for training eg to update their clinical skills or to learn about new medical technology. This is severely undermining their ability to provide quality health care. . . .
GAZA'S ECONOMY IN COLLAPSE
Rising unemployment (41.5 percent of Gaza's workforce in the first quarter of 2009) and poverty (in May 2008, 70 percent of the families were living on an income of less than one dollar a day per person) is likely to have long term adverse effects on the physical and mental health of the population [the unemployment is a direct result of the Israeli blockade]. . .
OPERATION "CAST LEAD" -- IMPACT ON HEALTH FACILITIES AND STAFF [I.e. the Israeli war on Gaza in winter 2008-2009]
- 16 health workers killed and 25 injured on duty
- Damaged health services infrastructure:
+ 15 of 27 Gaza's hospitals
+ 43 of its 110 Primary Health Care services
+ 29 of its 148 ambulances
- The lack of building materials is affecting essential health facilities: the new surgical wing in Gaza?fs main Shifa hospital has remained unfinished since 2006. Hospitals and primary care facilities, damaged during operation ?Cast Lead?, have not been rebuilt because construction materials are not allowed into Gaza.'
The UN complained that while Israel has a fair record of allowing treatment of Gazans in Israeli hospitals, and that record has improved, some 300-400 requests a month are met with substantial delays or turned down. This issue was foregrounded by a lot of the wire services who picked up the story, but it seems to me not the most important problem. The blockade is the problem.
The Israeli blockade is aimed at weakening Hamas, a fundamentalist party-militia that won power in the Palestine Authority in the elections of January 2006. (Ironically, the Israelis had supported Hamas the late 1980s in hopes of splitting the Palestinians) When the Bush administration and Israel successfully induced the Palestine Liberation Organization of Mahmoud Abbas to make a coup in the West Bank and dislodge the elected Hamas government there, Hamas managed to hang on to power in Gaza, in part because of strong public support. Hamas has committed terrorism against Israeli civilians, and launched small rockets at nearby Israeli towns. It had however made a truce with Israel in 2008, which it observed until Israel broke it, and no Israelis had been killed by Hamas rockets in the lead-up to Israel's war on the small territory.
Collectively punishing 1.5 million Gazans in order to weaken Hamas is in any case strictly illegal in international law and is a war crime. According to Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949:
'Article 33. No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.
Pillage is prohibited.
Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.'
Not only is today's ongoing blockade a war crime, but it follows on and continues destructive policies of the Israeli military during the Gaza War, as the Goldstone Report for the United Nations concluded. The Boston Globe reported Goldstone's defense of his findings at Brandeis University (h/t Mondoweiss.
' Goldstone said his central criticism of Israel is that its strategy intentionally applied disproportionate force in Gaza to inflict widespread damage on the civilian population. His report found that the Israeli air and ground attacks destroyed 5,000 homes; put 200 factories out of operation, including the only flour factory in the country; systematically destroyed egg-producing chicken farms; and bombed sewage and water systems. “If that isn’t collective punishment, what is?’’ Goldstone asked.'
Very little of this destruction deliberately visited on civilians has been repaired, in large part because the Israelis won't allow the materiel in necessary for rebuilding.
Until President Obama does something to end the Gaza siege and its attendant horrors, his Mideast policy will remain an abject failure.
World Health Agencies Condemn Israeli Blockade of Gaza (Again); Obama's Biggest Mideast Failure
When a relief plane for the Physicians without Borders isn't allowed to land by US military authorities at the airport in Port-au-Prince, there is an outcry.
But Israeli military authorities will not allow any relief planes at all to land in the Gaza Strip (the Israelis destroyed Gaza's airport in 2001).
We cheer when a Haitian child is rescued from the rubble, but ignore the thousands of Gazan children who are suffering malnutrition and being buried by Israeli policy, a policy that is a war crime. I am of course not the only to be struck by this contrast: see also Phil Weiss and others quoted at his essential site.
On Wednesday, 80 international aid groups called upon Israel to change its policy of blockading civilians in Gaza, because it is having severe negative effects on the health of Gazans.
Admittedly, the situation in Gaza is not as dire as that in Haiti. But it is very, very bad, and it is man-made. The Israeli government imposed a blockade on the Gaza strip in 2007 and has maintained it ever since. It limits the import of fuel and staples, and punishes the whole population. Since half of the 1.5 million Gazans are children, the Israeli siege of the little territory is among the more massive ongoing cases of child abuse in the world. There is a virtual news blackout on this atrocity in the US mass media, and attempts of two sets of activists to get humanitarian aid to Gaza in recent weeks were largely ignored by them.
Nor is the Gaza blockade a mere preoccupation of utopian human rights activists. It has become an element of regional geo-politics. It is part of the reason for significant tensions between Israel and one of its few allies in the Middle East, Turkey. As Turkey has democratized and Muslim sentiments have become more important in its politics, and as it has increasingly emerged as a new Middle Eastern power (some speak of neo-Ottomanism), its concern with issues such as Gaza has become more central. The horrible condition of the Gazans is often the lead story on Arab satellite news channels such as Aljazeera, and public anger about it (expressed as much toward the US and the Egyptian regime as toward Israel) is at a boiling point. That anger feeds into terrorism against the West. The Gaza blockade is isolating Israel and fuelling a widespread boycott movement in Europe, Canada and South Africa. And, of course, the blockade makes even the virulently anti-Shiite Sunni fundamentalists of Hamas willing to take aid from Iran, bestowing a toehold in the Levant on Tehran. The French statesman Talleyrand once observed of Napoleon I's murder of the Duc d'Enghien that "It is worse than a crime; it is a blunder." The same could be said of the Gaza blockade from the point of view of any realistic Israeli and US foreign policy.
Last year UNICEF found that about one in ten children in Gaza is severely malnourished, to the point of stunting. The Israeli blockade is deeply implicated in this semi-starvation of tens of thousands of children, as is the Gaza War launched by Israel a little over a year ago, which wrecked nearly one-fifth of farms and deeply hurt agriculture in general. Gaza once flourished agriculturally, but it was cut off by Israel from its natural markets in the Levant, and the US and Egypt have been induced to support the blockade.
The World Health Organization fact sheet on Gaza's plight, issued yesterday, reads like a post-apocalyptic Hollywood film. WHO says:
' The closure of Gaza since mid-2007 and the last Israeli military strike between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009 have led to on-going deterioration in the social, economic and environmental determinants of health.
Many specialized treatments, for example for complex heart surgery and certain types of cancer, are not available in Gaza and patients are therefore referred for treatment to hospitals outside Gaza. But many patients have had their applications for exit permits denied or delayed by the Israeli Authorities and have missed their appointments. Some have died while waiting for referral. . .
Supplies of drugs and disposables have generally been allowed into Gaza. However, there are often shortages on the ground mainly because of shortfalls in deliveries . . . Delays of up to 2-3 months occur on the importation of certain types of medical equipment, such as x-ray machines and electronic devices. Clinical staff frequently lack the medical equipment they need. Medical devices are often broken, missing spare parts or out of date. . .
- Health professionals in Gaza have been cut off from the outside world. Since 2000, very few doctors, nurses or technicians have been able to leave the Strip for training eg to update their clinical skills or to learn about new medical technology. This is severely undermining their ability to provide quality health care. . . .
GAZA'S ECONOMY IN COLLAPSE
Rising unemployment (41.5 percent of Gaza's workforce in the first quarter of 2009) and poverty (in May 2008, 70 percent of the families were living on an income of less than one dollar a day per person) is likely to have long term adverse effects on the physical and mental health of the population [the unemployment is a direct result of the Israeli blockade]. . .
OPERATION "CAST LEAD" -- IMPACT ON HEALTH FACILITIES AND STAFF [I.e. the Israeli war on Gaza in winter 2008-2009]
- 16 health workers killed and 25 injured on duty
- Damaged health services infrastructure:
+ 15 of 27 Gaza's hospitals
+ 43 of its 110 Primary Health Care services
+ 29 of its 148 ambulances
- The lack of building materials is affecting essential health facilities: the new surgical wing in Gaza?fs main Shifa hospital has remained unfinished since 2006. Hospitals and primary care facilities, damaged during operation ?Cast Lead?, have not been rebuilt because construction materials are not allowed into Gaza.'
The UN complained that while Israel has a fair record of allowing treatment of Gazans in Israeli hospitals, and that record has improved, some 300-400 requests a month are met with substantial delays or turned down. This issue was foregrounded by a lot of the wire services who picked up the story, but it seems to me not the most important problem. The blockade is the problem.
The Israeli blockade is aimed at weakening Hamas, a fundamentalist party-militia that won power in the Palestine Authority in the elections of January 2006. (Ironically, the Israelis had supported Hamas the late 1980s in hopes of splitting the Palestinians) When the Bush administration and Israel successfully induced the Palestine Liberation Organization of Mahmoud Abbas to make a coup in the West Bank and dislodge the elected Hamas government there, Hamas managed to hang on to power in Gaza, in part because of strong public support. Hamas has committed terrorism against Israeli civilians, and launched small rockets at nearby Israeli towns. It had however made a truce with Israel in 2008, which it observed until Israel broke it, and no Israelis had been killed by Hamas rockets in the lead-up to Israel's war on the small territory.
Collectively punishing 1.5 million Gazans in order to weaken Hamas is in any case strictly illegal in international law and is a war crime. According to Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949:
'Article 33. No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.
Pillage is prohibited.
Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.'
Not only is today's ongoing blockade a war crime, but it follows on and continues destructive policies of the Israeli military during the Gaza War, as the Goldstone Report for the United Nations concluded. The Boston Globe reported Goldstone's defense of his findings at Brandeis University (h/t Mondoweiss.
' Goldstone said his central criticism of Israel is that its strategy intentionally applied disproportionate force in Gaza to inflict widespread damage on the civilian population. His report found that the Israeli air and ground attacks destroyed 5,000 homes; put 200 factories out of operation, including the only flour factory in the country; systematically destroyed egg-producing chicken farms; and bombed sewage and water systems. “If that isn’t collective punishment, what is?’’ Goldstone asked.'
Very little of this destruction deliberately visited on civilians has been repaired, in large part because the Israelis won't allow the materiel in necessary for rebuilding.
Until President Obama does something to end the Gaza siege and its attendant horrors, his Mideast policy will remain an abject failure.
Poetry Bits - T.S. Eliot
From "The Four Quartets"
IV. "Little Gidding"
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
IV. "Little Gidding"
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Poetry Bits - Yeats
Short excerpts.
W. B. Yeats, the greatest poet to write in the English language.
A short bit - "There"
There all the barrel-hoops are knit,
There all the serpent-tails are bit,
There all the gyres converge in one,
There all the planets drop in the sun.
and another, from "The Circus Animal's Desertion"
III
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
W. B. Yeats, the greatest poet to write in the English language.
A short bit - "There"
There all the barrel-hoops are knit,
There all the serpent-tails are bit,
There all the gyres converge in one,
There all the planets drop in the sun.
and another, from "The Circus Animal's Desertion"
III
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
What is this?
I intend to just post things that I find of more than passing interest, may be too obscure or controversial to just throw out there on Facebook, etc. and thus too allow people to more easily 'change the channel or just not tune in' if not interested.
I apologize in advance for any grammatical or spelling errors: I'll try my best, but sometimes I'm not my own best proofreader.
Feel free to contact me at bill.krog@gmail.com with comments, observations, jokes, very-formed and grammatically-correct abuse, little-used profanities, witticisms, blathering, etc.
All are welcome, and the laws of thermodynamics, information and entropy clearly indicate that at sometime, these leavings will all be "one with Nineveh and Tyre."
I apologize in advance for any grammatical or spelling errors: I'll try my best, but sometimes I'm not my own best proofreader.
Feel free to contact me at bill.krog@gmail.com with comments, observations, jokes, very-formed and grammatically-correct abuse, little-used profanities, witticisms, blathering, etc.
All are welcome, and the laws of thermodynamics, information and entropy clearly indicate that at sometime, these leavings will all be "one with Nineveh and Tyre."
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Hello and welcome
Thank you for visiting, even though there is likely little or no reason for you to do so.
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