Thursday, January 8, 2009
Day 12 of Israeli War On Gaza
Death toll 710, injured 3200 and most of them Civilians
By Sameh A. Habeeb, A Photojournalist, Humanitarian & Peace Activist in Gaza Strip.
Deadly Outcomes of Israeli Ground Military Operation:
1-Air raid targeted a group of militants in Slaah El Din street east of Gaza City. No one was reported to be wounded.
2-Air raid targeted an open space and agrictultral fields in Al Nusairat Refugee Camp.
3-Air raid targeted a house in the northern areas of Gaza.
4-Two civilians wounded as a missile targeted house of Al Maqosui family in Bait
lahia town.
5-Israeli gunboats targeted many areas in Gaza City, Khan Yonis and the mid areas.
Five Palestinians wounded in the bombings.
6-Open spaces hit in Al Nusairat Refugee Camp.
7-Around 50 tunnels destroyed in Rafah City.
8-Heavy artillery shelling in Al Zaytoun quarter east of Gaza City.
9-Many militants hit by Israeli airforce in Al Shaikh ridwan area.
10-One Palestinian killed in Bait Lahia town as Israeli
11-Israeli army threatens Popilation of Rafah living beside the Egyptian borders to leave their houses immediately. It is expected that Israel will bomb the tunnels
area and this would destroy the houses.
12-A ceasefire by Israeli and Palestinian militants for three hours to allow some
aid.
13- Four people from Kahlout family killed in Bait Lahia town. The killed ones were
trying to get some bread but a drone targeted them to death. They were in their car
driven by their dad to get some bread.
Two Youths Murdered in Ni’ilin Village Protesting Attack on Gaza
Israel's most bloody assault on Gaza since 1967 — codenamed "Operation Cast Lead," Mivtza Oferet Yetzukah — began on the morning of 27 December, the 6th day of Hanukkah. The name "cast lead" is taken from a famous poem "To Hanukkah" by the Hebrew writer H. N. Bialik, referring to a gift of a "cast-lead top" as a traditional Hanukkah present for children, familiar as the text of a Hanukkah's children's song. It ravaged Gaza on December 29, in the Muslim calendar Muharram 1, the first day of the first lunar month, Muslim New Year 1430. Muharram is the most sacred Muslim month after Ramadan, and one in which fighting is traditionally prohibited. In its deadly spin, this "cast-lead top" had by 7 January claimed the lives of over 600, with nearly 3,000 injured, a large proportion of whom are civilians, and many children.
There has been massive protest among Palestinians everywhere, including the West Bank. Less reported in the mainstream media is the killing of demonstrators there by the Israeli Occupation Forces. On 28 December, Anarchists Against the Wall activists joined a demonstration in the village of Ni'ilin against Israel's war crimes in Gaza. Israeli forces opened fire on a number of youths, killing one protester and leaving another in critical condition, who died three days later on December 31 (see an AATW activist's description below).
Arafat Rateb Khawaja, 20 years old, was shot in the back with live ammunition, and died in Ramallah Hospital that same day.
(Photo: ActiveStills.org / Used With Permission)
He was buried on 29 December, which AATW described as an "extremely charged funeral in Ni'ilin, followed by a day of clashes with the army."
Al Franken Is the Right's New Punching Bag
He may take a Senate seat from the Republicans in Minnesota, but Al Franken is just the kind of Democratic pariah the GOP has been waiting for.
"Al Franken is a very tempting target because he is so outrageous," said Republican strategist Brad Blakeman. "It's similar to Joe Biden—we hope that Al Franken is the gift that keeps on giving."
Bill O'Reilly called Franken "a smear merchant and a rank liar unqualified for any elected office," and "a far left extremist" who "traffics in hate."
Franken's prominence comes at a time in which Republicans have struggled to find an easy Democratic bogeyman. Barack Obama is still overwhelmingly popular. Hillary Clinton, formerly the party's nemesis, earned a newfound respect among conservatives as the voice of moderation on withdrawal from Iraq. Rod Blagojevich is too local. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are a particular favorite of Matt Drudge, but relentless attacks on them failed to prevent heavy losses in 2006 and 2008. Ted Kennedy, suffering from brain cancer, is off limits.
So Franken provides an inviting target. His style of politics runs directly counter to the civility preached by the incoming president. Franken is author of the bestsellers Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations and Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, which trashed conservative talk hosts like Bill O'Reilly and baited some to respond with their own heated attacks.
Even while on the campaign trail, where Franken tried to project a senatorial gravitas, he found time to hit the right where it hurt. Politico reported that he was behind one of the most brutal Saturday Night Live sketches of the election, in which John McCain approves a series of increasingly horrifying attack ads against Obama ("Barack Obama has fathered two black children...in wedlock").
If Obama's strategy is to dial back the blue/red civil war to a detente, Franken's is to escalate it to World War III. Now Franken is poised to become that rare politician whose very existence is a wedge issue to be exploited.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-01-05/al-franken-is-a-big-fat-target/
Home Preparedness and the $50 Billion Straw
By Scott Burns
Having written a newspaper column for more than 30 years, I thought I was pretty tough-minded. But today, watching our dysfunctional institutions, I feel something like the shock and horror a parent must feel when he discovers that a beloved son or daughter is actually a serial killer. I don't understand the recklessness, the greed, the dishonesty. I don't fathom the unrelenting self-aggrandizement of the politicians, the executives, the lenders big and small, or the investment bankers. I'm quite sure you don't, either.
So here's the big question.
What can we do to feel safe again?
Should we push the politicians for fundamental reform?
No way. They simply aren't qualified to provide it. Neither party has shown any willingness to stop promising benefits that have to be paid for by our children and grandchildren. Their Ponzi scheme, more politely known as Social Security and Medicare, is far larger than the alleged fraud of Bernard Madoff.
The tough answer is that we have to change. The moment we ask the politicians, regardless of party, we're disempowering ourselves and empowering them.
That is the opposite of what we need to do.
We need to make the politicians and business leaders get concerned about what they can do to regain our trust, our vote, and our business. We need to operate from a position of strength and self-reliance, not weakness. We need to become the kind of citizens that Thomas Jefferson thought we were.
It won't be easy, but here are some of the basic steps. Think of them as resolutions for 2009 and later.
Go Cash. We can't pressure the politicians if we're as debt-strapped as they've made the country. We need to do whatever it takes to eliminate the menace of credit card debt. We should make it a goal to pay all of our bills in full monthly and build enough equity in our homes that we can self-finance most outsized expenses. That means the end of a debt-driven consumer society.
Our belt-tightening (read: lower standard of living) may last as long as five years.
The lending industry won't like this. We may owe them money, but we don't owe them any consideration. The bankers--- investment and lending--- should consider themselves fortunate not to be tarred, feathered and run out of town.
Happy 2009 from a futuristic point of view
by DALE MCFEATTERS
Contemplating our immediate future would seem to be a dispiriting and joyless task -- look what it's done to Al Gore -- but these futurists come across as a cheerful and optimistic bunch. Take this forecast:
"People will have more sex." The reason is that women's growing economic power around the world will give them more choices, and one of those choices apparently will be to have more sex.
Perhaps that has some bearing on another forecast: "Americans may turn away from antidepressants." According to the anthropologist who made this call, the 100-million antidepressant prescriptions Americans take "kill the sex drive" but many may quit taking them, one surmises, so they can participate in the general randiness of women having more economic power.
Even stuff that we lay people think is almost surely bad, the futurists view with equanimity like, "Everything you say and do may be recorded." Implanted nanodevices will allow all our conversations and activities to be recorded and recoverable, enabling you to relive junior high at will.
That's because digital storage capacity will grow so large that it will be measured in "yottabytes" -- 1 septillion bytes of data -- allowing "the ability to record and store every second of one's life on a computer (and no doubt post it on Facebook)." Woody Allen said that 90 percent of life is just showing up. Now you won't even have to do that.
This development will come too late for some of us. "Retirees will increasingly return to the work force." It would be nice to be able to send a replacement. This forecast didn't say the retirees were doing it out of boredom or necessity, but implies it's the latter. One-third of Americans who retire are back on the job two years later and -- here's something to look forward to -- "40 percent of seniors say they plan to continue working until they die, and two-thirds of Americans say they doubt that retirement is possible for the middle class."
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/394915_daleonline07.html
Clever and Creative Billboard Advertising
Creative uses of billboards in advertising campaigns by various companies.
Alien Billboard
A creepy billboard in Ann Arbor, MI. [link]
Formula Toothcare Billboard
Formula Toothcare "builds strong teeth." [link]
Heineken Billboard
This outdoor campaign from Heineken is an example of how an innovative idea can have a huge impact in a traditional approach. [link]
http://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2009/01/05/clever-and-creative-billboard-advertising/
The shape of things to come
A self-confessed 'pretty unlikely early adopter', the digital guru Clay Shirky still proved to be uncannily prescient about the impact of the web - which is why Tom Teodorczuk is getting his media forecast for 2009
Clay Shirky, with his bald head and composed manner, bears a resemblance to REM's frontman, Michael Stipe, and his prognosis for the future of the media industry could be encapsulated in the titles of two REM songs - Monster and Shiny Happy People. On the one hand, the leading web thinker and adjunct professor of New York University predicts further gloom for traditional media: "2009 is going to be a bloodbath." Yet he foresees that a recession may produce greater industry clarity by forcing radical action, which he explains as a boss saying to staff: "'Bonfire, this is Hail Mary time!', instead of: 'This year we made as much money as last year but we're still restructuring dramatically.'"
Much of the success of Shirky's recent book, Here Comes Everybody, about internet technologies and the effects of mass democratisation of the web, came from its simplicity and the absence of jargon. "As with the printing press, the loss of professional control will be bad for many of society's core institutions," he writes. In conversation he is just as plain-speaking, saying, for example, that "Management has a hard time destroying parts of its business unless the alternative, obvious to everyone, is that there is no choice." Based in the unlikely environs of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, a stone's throw from a fusty independent bookstore in downtown Manhattan, rather than Silicon Valley, Shirky, 44, is unburdened by traditional media ties. After Yale, he worked as a painter and theatre director before becoming ensnared by the web in the early 90s thanks to his mother, a research librarian. He has consulted at News International and lists the BBC as a current client. "The advantage I had over people in the traditional media industry is precisely what I didn't know," he says. "I was a pretty unlikely early adopter."
No one, of course, can know what a future media landscape will look like. But, given that Shirky was among the few to have forecast 15 years ago that classified advertising would be sold online rather than via a newspaper ad, his crystal ball is more estimable than most others. This is his forecast:
Newspapers
The great misfortune of newspapers in this era is that they were such a good idea for such a long time that people felt the newspaper business model was part of a deep truth about the world, rather than just the way things happened to be. It's like the fall of communism, where a lot of the eastern European satellite states had an easier time because there were still people alive who remembered life before the Soviet Union - nobody in Russia remembered it. Newspaper people are like Russians, in a way.
Jeff Jarvis said it beautifully: "If you can't imagine anyone linking to what you're about to write, don't write it." The things that the Huffington Post or the Daily Beast have are good storytelling and low costs. Newspapers are going to get more elitist and less elitist. The elitist argument is: "Be the Economist or New Yorker, a small, niche publication that says: 'We're only opening our mouths when what we say is demonstrably superior to anything else on the subject.'" The populist model is: "We're going to take all the news pieces we get and have an enormous amount of commentary. It's whatever readers want to talk about." Finding the working business model between them in that expanded range is the new challenge.
Why pay for it at all? The steady loss of advertising revenue, accelerated by the recession, has normalised the idea that it's acceptable to move to the web. Even if we have the shallowest recession and advertising comes back as it inevitably does, more of it will go to the web. I think that's it for newspapers. What we saw happen to the Christian Science Monitor [the international paper shifted its daily news operation online] is going to happen three or four dozen times (globally) in the next year. The 500-year-old accident of economics occasioned by the printing press - high upfront cost and filtering happening at the source of publication - is over. But will the New York Times still exist on paper? Of course, because people will hit the print button.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jan/05/clay-shirky-future-newspapers-digital-media
The Plot Curdles
By JULIAN GOUGH
Statement by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. following Congress's passage of today's rescue package:
As we all know, lax writing practices earlier this decade led to irresponsible writing and irresponsible reading. This simply put too many families into books they could not finish. We are seeing the impact on readers and neighborhoods, with five million Americans now behind on their reading. Some are just walking away from novels they should never have been reading in the first place. What began as a subprime reading problem has spread to other, less-risky readers and contributed to excess inventories.
These troubled novels are now parked, or frozen, on the shelves of libraries, bookstores and other reading institutions, preventing these institutions from financing readable novels. The normal buying and selling of nearly all types of literature has become challenged.
The role of the ratings agencies cannot be overlooked in creating this crisis. The Pulitzer, Booker and National Book Foundation committees continued to award top ratings to these novels, even as unread copies piled up all over America.
These unreadable novels are clogging up our literary system, and undermining the strength of our otherwise sound literary institutions. As a result, Americans' personal libraries are threatened, and the ability of readers to borrow, and of libraries to lend, has been disrupted.
To restore confidence in our book markets and our literary institutions, we must address the underlying problem —loss of confidence in our nation's writers. That collapse in confidence is choking the flow of ideas that is so vitally important to our literature. When the literary system works as it should, ideas flow to novelists and poets who create novels and poems, ensuring an uninterrupted flow of literature to households and businesses. But stresses in our leading writers have led to the current severe and systemic writer's block that threatens to undermine access to books for working Americans.
This bill contains a broad set of tools that can be deployed to strengthen writers, large and small, that serve businesses and families. Our writers are varied — from large novelists headquartered in New York, to regional novelists that serve multistate areas, to community poets and short story writers that are vital to the lives of our citizens and their towns and communities. The challenges our writers face are just as varied — from full-scale writer's block, to restructuring failed novels, to simply facing a crisis of confidence.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/weekinreview/04gough.html?_r=1
The Ponzi Scheme Presidency
By Tom Engelhardt
It may finally be 2009, but in some ways, given these last years, it might as well be 800 BCE.
From the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE, the palace walls of the kings who ruled the Assyrian Empire were decorated with vast stone friezes, filled with enough dead bodies to sate any video-game maker and often depicting -- in almost comic strip-style -- various bloody royal victories and conquests. At least one of them shows Assyrian soldiers lopping off the heads of defeated enemies and piling them into pyramids for an early version of what, in the VCE (Vietnam Common Era) of the 1960s, Americans came to know as the "body count."
So I learned recently by wandering through a traveling exhibit of ancient Assyrian art from the British Museum. On the audio tour accompanying the show, one expert pointed out that Assyrian scribes, part of an impressive imperial bureaucracy, carefully counted those heads and recorded the numbers for the greater glory of the king (as, in earlier centuries, Egyptian scribes had recorded counts of severed hands for victorious Pharaohs).
Hand it to art museums. Is there anything stranger than wandering through one and locking eyes with a Vermeer lady, a Van Eyck portrait, or one of Rembrandt's burghers staring out at you across the centuries? What a reminder of the common humanity we share with the distant past. In a darker sense, it's no less a reminder of our kinship across time to spot a little pyramid of heads on a frieze, imagine an Assyrian scribe making his count, and -- eerily enough -- feel at home. What a measure of just how few miles "the march of civilization" (as my parents' generation once called it) has actually covered.
Prejudiced Toward War
If you need an epitaph for the Bush administration, here's one to test out: They tried. They really tried. But they couldn't help it. They just had to count.
In a sense, George W. Bush did the Assyrians proud. With his secret prisons, his outsourced torture chambers, his officially approved kidnappings, the murders committed by his interrogators, the massacres committed by his troops and mercenaries, and the shock-and-awe slaughter he ordered from the air, it's easy enough to imagine what those Assyrian scribes would have counted, had they somehow been teleported into his world. True, his White House didn't have friezes of his victories (one problem being that there were none to glorify); all it had was Saddam Hussein's captured pistol proudly stored in a small study off the Oval Office. Almost 3,000 years later, however, Bush's "scribes," still traveling with the imperial forces, continued to count the bodies as they piled ever higher in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Pakistani borderlands, and elsewhere.
God's Unconditional Love Officially Terminated
Earth- Mass panic ensued among Christians last Sunday when God issued a formal statement from Heaven saying that His pure and sublime love, on which millions of people depend, will no longer be provided unconditionally.
"If you want my love you're going to have to earn it," said God, backed by a chorus of Seraphim who continuously sang His praise. "This generally involves being a good person, and making at least one genuine attempt to benefit humanity over the course of your painfully short lives."
The termination of His divine love came as a startling shock to the roughly 1.9 billion Christians around the world who have grown accustomed to waking up every morning to the warm and comforting embrace of an infallible, omnipotent being of indescribable power who cares about each and every one of them on a deeply personal level.
"I was always told that God was the only person who loved me more even more than I love myself, but I guess that's not the case anymore," said Luke Benet, 4th generation Christian. "This worries me because I think it means I'll have to actually take stock in myself, and maybe even start giving a damn."
Prior to the revocation, God's transcendent love was forcibly showered upon every person on Earth with no stipulations, costs, or behavioral expectations. This generous distribution format, referred to by God as the "Free Love" model, had been maintained by God for over 2,000 years. Now many who have taken His love for granted are pitifully looking for ways to earn it back.
"I've already sacrificed a few stray cats, but who knows if that's the sort of thing an omnipotent being would like," said Nate Rogers, church-goer and racquetball enthusiast. "If only He left us with a more concrete set of guidelines, or maybe some rules that we could follow in order to please Him, then maybe I wouldn't be caught whistling in the dark."
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
There wouldn't have been Gaza rockets without blockade
by DEBORAH ORR
Tony Blair, the Middle East envoy, reckons that a ceasefire in Gaza could be negotiated very soon, provided that the tunnels from Egypt that provide the territory with, among other things, smuggled weapons, are closed off. It's a shame that he did not express his ambitions in another way. Perhaps a ceasefire could be negotiated very soon if legitimate channels for the import of all goods except arms into Gaza were opened up.
Such a suggestion, however, might be seen as critical of Israel's own perceived position as a reluctant aggressor and defensive state. The international community has completely accepted Israel's justification for its attack on Gaza, so much so that all of its spokespeople are careful not to refer to any Israeli action that can be viewed as provocative, such as its suffocating 18-month long blockade on that tiny, overpopulated strip of land.
Supporters of Israel's action are fond of reiterating Israel's narrow justification for its action. Who else would put up with regular rocket attacks from a neighbor, it asks? No one suggests that they would be happy to. It is accepted that Israel has the right to defend itself, and so it should be. Yet few would acquiesce without protest to a two-year blockade by a neighbor either, though no Western leader ever seems seriously to ask that highly pertinent question.
On the contrary, Blair implies that in order to obtain a ceasefire, Gaza's Hamas leadership must prove itself willing to comply proactively with the blockade against it, as well as refraining from actually firing weapons.
Yet Hamas does not only import arms through Egypt's tunnels. It also imports everything from livestock to medical supplies -- about 90 percent of all goods entering the area.
Politically Hamas is popular not only because of its refusal to abandon armed struggle and accept the state of Israel, but also because it organizes social support more efficiently than other groups. Even during the siege it has found some ways to mitigate the effects of Israeli policy on Gazans. The blockade is viewed by many as "collective punishment," because it exists to discomfort ordinary citizens and thereby undermine the ability of Hamas to govern. The idea of the blockade was to turn Palestinians away from the group that it had democratically elected.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/394947_orronline07.html
The Sunshine Patriots
The GOP's champions of this war had a hard time finding their own way to the battlefield
by Tom Robbins
 |
President
Age 58
Born New Haven, Connecticut, July 6, 1946
Military service Texas Air National Guard 1968–1973 (Removed from flight status in 1972 for failing to take annual flight physical. Honorably discharged in 1973.)
Quote "I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes."
 |
Vice President
Age 63
Born Lincoln, Nebraska, January 30, 1941
Military service None
Reason Four student deferments and one deferment for married men with children.
Quote "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service."
 |
Senator, Tennessee; Majority leader
Age 52
Born Nashville, Tennessee, February 22, 1952
Military service None
Reason Student deferment (Princeton 1974).
Quote "We must stay the course, keep true to our principles, have faith in our armed forces, and know that history, in the end, will be on our side."
 |
Representative, Illinois; Speaker of the House
Age 62
Born Aurora, Illinois, January 2, 1942
Military service None
Reason Rejected from advanced ROTC at Wheaton College for bad shoulder stemming from sports injury. A college wrestler and coach, Hastert is in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.
Quote [Responding to ex-P.O.W. Senator John McCain's "Where's the sacrifice?" criticism of Bush's plan for wartime tax cuts.] "If you want to see the sacrifice, John McCain ought to visit our young men and women at Walter Reed and Bethesda [hospitals]. There's the sacrifice in this country."
 |
Senior White House Adviser
Age 53
Born Denver, Colorado, December 25, 1950
Military service None
Reason Student deferment (University of Utah; George Mason University—no degree).
Quote "We're fighting a different kind of war, and no negotiation can bring it to victory."
 |
Attorney General
Age 62
Born Chicago, Illinois, May 9, 1942
Military service None
Reason Six student deferments and one occupational deferment (teaching law at Southwest Missouri State).
Quote "I would have served if asked."
 |
Deputy Secretary of Defense
Age 60
Born Brooklyn, New York, December 22, 1943
Military service None
Reason Student deferments (Cornell University 1965; University of Chicago 1972).
Quote "I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq."
http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-08-17/news/the-sunshine-patriots/1
What to Expect from an Intelligent President
by Katheen Reardon
Barack Obama is what social scientists describe as "cognitively complex." He can accommodate within his views and values what others see as contradictions. He inhabits an abstract rather than concrete world. For the cognitively complex among us, the gray area is broad.
That's why he doesn't rush to a microphone to explain actions that generate controversy. He operates on this rule: "They won't remember you got it to them late so much as that you got it to them wrong."
He is more considered than cautious. If he were cautious, he wouldn't have invited Rick Warren to do the inauguration prayer. That decision likely came from a lengthy sorting out of the pros and cons. The same could be said of some of his cabinet appointments. He may have discredited experience during the election, but he has high regard for it now.
For a man intent on change, he relies heavily on the way he has made decisions for many years. He lines up the ducks. He looks past the obvious. He prioritizes. He contradicts in one sense in order to be consistent in another. That doesn't preclude change, it merely means the President-elect's avenue to it will not be newly paved.
He takes time to identify options likely to succeed in the long run or ones that serve his higher order goals. By necessity, therefore, some people are going to be disappointed early on in his presidency.
Even those people willing and able to entertain complexity on a host of issues are often unwilling and unable to do so regarding their passions. In other words, as Frank Rich has implied, Barack Obama may overestimate at times his ability to bridge differences, especially among people passionate about particular causes. They are likely to be very impatient if their issues are among the ones President Obama puts on the back burner.
As delighted as so many of us are to have Barack Obama's presidency right around the corner, we'll need to keep in mind the type of thinker he is. He may have begun his race for the presidency with the single concept of hope, but he will begin his presidency with considerably greater complexity. He may have captured us with his heart, but he will lead us largely with his mind.
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