Tuesday, January 04, 2011
Australian Floods: A Disaster
Al Jazeera: Torrential floods have hit Australia's northeast coast in what one official called a disaster of biblical proportions. But what is really behind this devastating rain?
Foundation 001
In this series premiere of Foundation, Kevin Rose interviews Jack Dorsey, the creator, co-founder and chairman of Twitter and the CEO of Square. The conversation talks of entrepreneurship, decision making, trial and error, and the path Jack took that lead to the creation of Twitter and Square.
Demo Squared at Leweb
Sunday, January 02, 2011
Douglas Reed Cutting is an advocate and creator of open-source search technology
Douglas Reed Cutting is an advocate and creator of open-source search technology. He originated Lucene and, with Mike Cafarella, Nutch, both open-source search technology projects which are now managed through the Apache Software Foundation. Prior to developing Lucene, Doug held search technology positions at Excite, Apple Inc. and Xerox PARC. Lucene, a search indexer, and Nutch, a spider or crawler, are the two key components of an open-source general search platform, which first crawls the Web for content, and then structures it into a searchable index. Cutting's leadership of these two projects extended the concepts and capabilities of general open-source software projects such as Linux and MySQL into the important vertical domain of search. While it is difficult to track the total number of installations of these platforms, public announcements of the use of Lucene and its direct descendant Solr by various venture-backed startups indicate a significant level of adoption. Perhaps the most significant deployment of Lucene is Wikipedia, where it powers search for the entire site.[1]
In December 2004, Google Labs published a paper on the MapReduce algorithm, which allows very large scale computations to be trivially parallelized across large clusters of servers. Cutting, realizing the importance of this paper to extending Lucene into the realm of extremely large (web-scale) search problems, created the open-source Hadoop framework that allows applications based on the MapReduce paradigm to be run on large clusters of commodity hardware. Cutting was an employee of Yahoo!, where he led the Hadoop project full-time, he has since moved on to Cloudera.[2].
In July 2009, Doug Cutting was elected to the board of directors of the Apache Software Foundation.
Doug Cutting
Doug's Blog
Doug Cutting has been working in the field of information retrieval for over fifteen years.
Beginning in 1988, he spent five years at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) developing novel approaches to information access. These included a high-performance retrieval engine, several innovative search paradigms, advanced linguistic analysis methods, and high-quality text summarization algorithms. This work resulted in seven publications and six issued patents. Some of these technologies are now marketed by Inxight.
In 1993 he moved to Apple's Advanced Technology Group (ATG). There he developed a state-of-the-art retrieval engine code-named V-Twin. This engine was to be a part of the Copland operating system, automatically indexing the content of all files as they are created so that the the entire file system could be efficiently searched at any time. Copland was cancelled, but V-Twin has been used in several other Apple products.
In April of 1996, Doug left Apple and joined Excite where he took over development of the core search technology. This included growing Excite's web index from two million to fifty million pages; substantially optimizing Excite's search performance; adding phrase-searching capabilities; and creating a thesaurus-like feature which suggests related terms to add to queries.
In the fall of 1997 he reduced his commitment at Excite to part-time so that he could write Lucene, an efficient, full-featured text search engine written in Java. In early 1998 he returned to Excite full-time for two more years. Lucene sat on the shelf for much of that time, and was made open-source in the spring of 2000.
Doug now works as chief architect and president of Nutch, a nascent effort to implement an open-source web search engine, which aims to provide a transparent alternative to commercial web search engines. The specific purposes for which this corporation is organized are scientific and educational in nature: namely, to promote public access to search technology without commercial bias by:
* Providing free high-quality search software and its source code to the public; and
* Facilitating ongoing research and development of search technology in a public forum.
Doug also serves on Nutch's board of directors, together with Mitch Kapor, Tim O'Reilly, Peter Savich ( Overture Research), Raymie Stata (UCSC), and Graham Spencer ( Digital Consumer).
Saturday, January 01, 2011
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
I Shall Not Hate
I Shall Not Hate
Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish tells the story of the death of his daughters during the Israeli attack on Gaza
Bio
Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish is a Palestinian medical doctor who was born and raised in the Jabalia refugee Camp. Dr. Izzeldin has written a book called “I Shall Not Hate†published in April 2010 about his three daughters who were killed during the Gaza tragedy of January 2009. Having been trained and worked in Israeli hospitals, and in honor of their memory, Dr. Izzeldin has created Daughters for Life, a foundation dedicated to providing education and health services for women and girls in Gaza and the Middle East. Dr. Izzeldin, who was a nominee for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, is currently an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University Of Toronto.
Transcript
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Toronto. On January 16, 2009, Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish was at home during the Israeli attack on Gaza. Just two days before the attack ended, a bomb hit his house. He walked into one of his rooms and found three of his daughters dead, his niece dead, and two other daughters badly injured. One year after the bombing, Dr. Abuelaish wrote a book called I Shall Not Hate. In the book he describes his experiences. The Israeli justification for the attack on Gaza was rockets being fired by various groups from Gaza on some of the southern Israeli cities. Not many people were actually killed by these rockets, but the Israelis said it created fear that they wouldn't put up with, and that became the justification for the bombing of Gaza. Here's an excerpt from the book. "The rockets--homemade, most often missing their targets--spoke the language of desperation. They invited overreaction by the Israeli army and retaliatory rocket attacks from helicopter gunships that rained down death and destruction on Palestinians, often defenceless children. That in turn set the stage for more Qassam rockets--and the cycle kept repeating itself. Everything is denied to us in Gaza. The response to each of our desires and needs is, "No." No gas, no electricity, no exit visa. No to your children, no to life. Even the well-educated can't cope; there are more postgraduates and university graduates per capita here in Gaza than in most places on earth, but their socio-economic life doesn't match their education level because of poverty, closed borders, unemployment and substandard housing. People cannot survive, cannot live a normal life, and as a result extremism has been on the rise. It is psychologically natural to seek revenge in the face of relentless suffering." Now joining us is Dr. Abuelaish. Thanks for joining us.
DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH, OB/GYN, AUTHOR: Thank you.
JAY: You write here that seeking revenge is natural, but your book's called I Shall Not Hate. If anyone would've had reason to seek revenge and hate, it would be you after the death of much of your family. Talk about what led to writing the book.
ABUELAISH: I was supposed to write the book a few years ago about my experience, about my life experience as a Palestinian refugee, as a child who suffered, that never tasted his childhood, but succeeded to challenge those man-made challenges, as many millions still in this world, children, who are suffering, and then as a Palestinian doctor who practiced medicine in Israel. So there is something that I can tell people. I thought of it three years ago. But as a believer, as a Muslim, everything has its time, and the time to write this book came after awful, terrible tragedy.
JAY: You write the book. There's a difference between anger and hate.
ABUELAISH: You know, anger, we need to be angry. Anger is acute, it's transient, and after some time it subsides. But hate is chronic. It's a chronic disease. Once we are injected with it, we can't recover, but we can manage it from time to time. And we need to be angry, in a positive way, to feel outraged, of not accepting what is happening in this world. You feel angry about your son when he is doing something wrong, your friend, your colleague. Don't do that, because you care about him. And that's--what do we want, all of us? To feel angry, not to accept, and to act, not just by words or by passion, by emotions. It's good to show emotions, to show feelings. But as a medical doctor of the patient doesn't need wars, the patient needs treatment, to be cured, to be freed from the disease.
JAY: During the actual attack in late December and in January, when the Israelis were bombing the city and Israeli troops were there and, we know from the Goldstone Report, committed what according to Justice Goldstone were essentially war crimes. You were actually reporting or being interviewed live on--is--was it Israeli radio or television? Talk a bit about that. And how was that heard by Israelis? 'Cause you actually were describing what was happening to your house as it happened, if I understand it correctly.
ABUELAISH: During this craziness of the three weeks, the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza, because--the majority of whom are children. Fifty percent of the Gazans are children below the age of 15. It's human. And no one in this world was listening or watching what is happening there. It was a secret. And I felt we need to transmit, to open the eyes, and to speak loudly. We need someone to speak to know that there is injustice and prejudice, innocent children are killed and suffering, not to watch, to open our eyes about that, and to stop it, because it's a human life. The most holy thing in the universe is the human being and freedom.
JAY: So talk about--you were live on Israeli--was it Israeli television or radio?
ABUELAISH: I was supposed to be interviewed live at 4:30, and they were waiting in the studio there to interview me. So then my house was shelled. So I called them, I called my friend Shlomi [Eldar], who was always when--he was responding to my help. And luckily--and it was for good, this tragedy--he was in the studio. I called him expecting him to be at his house. So he was there, and to open the eyes of the Israeli public, the international community, the Arabs, the Palestinians, what are we going [sic], and to disclose the secret that this is useless. We are killing innocent children, mothers, old people, and this is not the right way. Military approaches and violence are useless and futile.
JAY: When you were live on--. This is Israeli television?
ABUELAISH: Yes.
JAY: And you were on the phone. This was just after the bomb had hit the house?
ABUELAISH: Immediate.
JAY: As the bomb hits, you're on the phone?
ABUELAISH: After the hit, I started to see my daughters, who were severely wounded. I don't want anyone to see what have I seen--those lovely, beautiful daughters when they became parts, drowning in the pool of her blood, their parts spread everywhere. Started to look at Miyar. Where is Miyar? I can't recognize Miyar.
JAY: Miyar is one of your daughters.
ABUELAISH: She was 15 years old, with decapitated head. Miyar is the one that I was happy for, that she planned to follow my path, to be a medical doctor. She was the president of the students parliament to be the voice of others. That's [how] my daughters were raised, to be human, to be full of passion, and to give, not to take.
JAY: And you described this scene live on Israeli TV.
ABUELAISH: So I called, asking for help, 'cause I know what will happen to my daughter, Shada, when I saw her eye and her cheek. My niece--for three weeks, Gaza health system can't cope with the number of casualties and the siege for three years. Any developed health system can cope with the number of severely wounded in Gaza, 5,500. What will happen to my daughter, Shada? Her eye will be taken out; her fingers will be amputated. At that moment I started to think, what can I do for her to save her eye? And I was ready to sacrifice her life to be with her daughters. But I don't want to see her blind or disabled. So I asked for help where health can't and doesn't discriminate (we treat patients as a human being): without name, transferred her to the hospital where I used to work.
JAY: In Israel.
ABUELAISH: In Israel. So I called--.
JAY: [inaudible] Israeli authorities allowed her to come in.
ABUELAISH: And then it took time, till we evacuated them to the Palestinian hospital, to coordinate their transfer to the Israeli hospital.
JAY: What was the effect of the radio broadcast? What kind of reaction did you get from Israelis?
ABUELAISH: It opened the eyes of the Israeli public to show them the truth, that they are fighting against innocent civilians, and that military ways is useless. And it made me satisfied, as you said, all of the Israeli officials, the Israeli public leaders, to see it. And it was the reason behind the ceasefire the other day.
JAY: It helped [inaudible] yeah, the ceasefire comes two days after this.
ABUELAISH: So it saved others' lives. And this satisfied me, that the blood and the souls of those holy girls wasn't useless. It made a difference in others' lives.
JAY: I was in the Middle East a few months ago, including Israel. The conditions there for Palestinians inside Israel are getting worse. The level of rhetoric is terrible. You have the foreign minister of Israel talking about even expelling Israeli citizens who are Palestinians. Conditions in the West Bank are bad, and, of course, Gaza far worse. And even the attack on Gaza, most Israelis seem to be okay with all of this. How do you explain this? Or how do you understand it?
ABUELAISH: I understand the fear of the Israelis, but I want to ask them to dig deeper and not to be superficial. They have to open their eyes, not to see things from one side. The coin has two sides. There is a Palestinian nation and there is an Israeli nation. Their safety, security, and life is linked to the safety, security, life, and the future of the Palestinian people. There will never be a good or just peace for one side. They can't create peace with themselves. They have to search and to translate peace into action with the Palestinian people. And that's what they have to realize and to understand. And it's our responsibility to show them, to get rid, to help them to get rid of their fears, to be honest with themselves, and to say the truth: all of us, with honesty, with openness, we can reach a long-lasting solution. Peace can't be forced. We can accept it's by choice.
JAY: To what extent do you think this is driven deliberately? What I mean by that is that there are people on the Israeli side [inaudible] forces, and perhaps on the Palestinian side, too, who are okay with the status quo. For example, in Israel there's--you know, apparently there's 18 families in the Israeli elite that, we've been told, control as much as 60 percent of the capitalization of Israel. The status quo's okay for them. And perhaps even on the Palestinian side there are people that do quite alright with this negotiation business or in the peace industry. How much is this the real obstacle?
ABUELAISH: It's--as you said, this is the minority. But we have to ask: what makes this minority to dominate and to shape our future and to decide for us is? What's the role of the majority who are sitting there, silent? It's their future, and they have to speak louder and to act and to feel angry and outraged about what is happening. We are, the minority and the majority, Palestinians and Israelis, living and riding the same boat.
JAY: Now, a lot of the Israeli Jews, as opposed to Israeli Palestinians, many of them believe that the hatred for Jews amongst the Palestinians is so profound that they'll never get over it. That's--they believe it to be true.
ABUELAISH: They want to believe it. And even if someone hates me or doesn't accept me, I have to ask myself why he doesn't accept me, and to search what can I do to let him accept me or to like me, not to blame--he is bad; he hates me. And that's the responsibility (it's mutual), not to blame (blaming will never lead to any way), but to be honest, to have the moral courage to take the change within yourself, to admit that and then take responsibility and ask others. The change doesn't come from outside; it comes from inside, from within us first. I don't ask my son to change unless I change myself.
JAY: To what extent is your voice or voices like yours heard in Gaza? Like, when people see the imagery of Gaza, it's all--like, in newspapers and the media, it's always people wearing masks with guns, and it's always the rockets, the militant side of Gaza, Hamas's army versus Hamas politicians. To what extent do you get heard? For example, to what extent will Hamas listen to a voice like yours?
ABUELAISH: I can say to you, if you believe in something--when I came to you here, I came during the day, during the light. If you believe in something, go to that to the end. The same message, what I said here, I said it in Gaza, in the West Bank, and anyplace I go, because I believe in it. But also what did you say? The people they see, those with masks, how many of them--because those who want to show, they are selective. As I said to you, Gazans, more than 50 percent are children, and about 25 percent of them are women. So the majority are women and children. It's a human issue. We don't want to be biased, we don't want to be ignorant, and to transmit the right message and to spread it.
JAY: What are the conditions now in Gaza? After the last flotilla, when there was the people that were killed in that flotilla coming from Turkey, Israel said they were going to allow foodstuffs and other things into Gaza. There's sort of the impression that it's not so bad in Gaza as it was. What are the conditions like now?
ABUELAISH: I'm sad to say that [inaudible] repeating it. Human being is not dependent on food. The Gazans are hungry not for food. They are hungry for freedom, they are hungry for dignity, for respect, to feel they are valued and they are respected, to express their potential. Life is not food. Human being is not food. It's more than that. And that's what do we need, not to be deceived by that. What is the value if I was in a palace with all the needs deprived of the freedom? I don't want that.
JAY: So what would freedom for Gaza look like?
ABUELAISH: Freedom.
JAY: What does it mean, concretely, politically?
ABUELAISH: Freedom of movement, freedom of life, freedom of opportunities, to feel, the Palestinian people, they have their dignity as others in this world. And it's the responsibility of all to fight for the Palestinians' freedom, and the Israelis' freedom of fear, and then to see how the Palestinian people can make a difference in this world with their potential, show them something their life is worth to live.
JAY: In the next segment of the interview, let's talk about your thinking about the current situation and how the Middle East people might achieve that freedom. Please join us for this next segment of our interview on The Real News Network.
Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish tells the story of the death of his daughters during the Israeli attack on Gaza
Bio
Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish is a Palestinian medical doctor who was born and raised in the Jabalia refugee Camp. Dr. Izzeldin has written a book called “I Shall Not Hate†published in April 2010 about his three daughters who were killed during the Gaza tragedy of January 2009. Having been trained and worked in Israeli hospitals, and in honor of their memory, Dr. Izzeldin has created Daughters for Life, a foundation dedicated to providing education and health services for women and girls in Gaza and the Middle East. Dr. Izzeldin, who was a nominee for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, is currently an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University Of Toronto.
Transcript
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Toronto. On January 16, 2009, Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish was at home during the Israeli attack on Gaza. Just two days before the attack ended, a bomb hit his house. He walked into one of his rooms and found three of his daughters dead, his niece dead, and two other daughters badly injured. One year after the bombing, Dr. Abuelaish wrote a book called I Shall Not Hate. In the book he describes his experiences. The Israeli justification for the attack on Gaza was rockets being fired by various groups from Gaza on some of the southern Israeli cities. Not many people were actually killed by these rockets, but the Israelis said it created fear that they wouldn't put up with, and that became the justification for the bombing of Gaza. Here's an excerpt from the book. "The rockets--homemade, most often missing their targets--spoke the language of desperation. They invited overreaction by the Israeli army and retaliatory rocket attacks from helicopter gunships that rained down death and destruction on Palestinians, often defenceless children. That in turn set the stage for more Qassam rockets--and the cycle kept repeating itself. Everything is denied to us in Gaza. The response to each of our desires and needs is, "No." No gas, no electricity, no exit visa. No to your children, no to life. Even the well-educated can't cope; there are more postgraduates and university graduates per capita here in Gaza than in most places on earth, but their socio-economic life doesn't match their education level because of poverty, closed borders, unemployment and substandard housing. People cannot survive, cannot live a normal life, and as a result extremism has been on the rise. It is psychologically natural to seek revenge in the face of relentless suffering." Now joining us is Dr. Abuelaish. Thanks for joining us.
DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH, OB/GYN, AUTHOR: Thank you.
JAY: You write here that seeking revenge is natural, but your book's called I Shall Not Hate. If anyone would've had reason to seek revenge and hate, it would be you after the death of much of your family. Talk about what led to writing the book.
ABUELAISH: I was supposed to write the book a few years ago about my experience, about my life experience as a Palestinian refugee, as a child who suffered, that never tasted his childhood, but succeeded to challenge those man-made challenges, as many millions still in this world, children, who are suffering, and then as a Palestinian doctor who practiced medicine in Israel. So there is something that I can tell people. I thought of it three years ago. But as a believer, as a Muslim, everything has its time, and the time to write this book came after awful, terrible tragedy.
JAY: You write the book. There's a difference between anger and hate.
ABUELAISH: You know, anger, we need to be angry. Anger is acute, it's transient, and after some time it subsides. But hate is chronic. It's a chronic disease. Once we are injected with it, we can't recover, but we can manage it from time to time. And we need to be angry, in a positive way, to feel outraged, of not accepting what is happening in this world. You feel angry about your son when he is doing something wrong, your friend, your colleague. Don't do that, because you care about him. And that's--what do we want, all of us? To feel angry, not to accept, and to act, not just by words or by passion, by emotions. It's good to show emotions, to show feelings. But as a medical doctor of the patient doesn't need wars, the patient needs treatment, to be cured, to be freed from the disease.
JAY: During the actual attack in late December and in January, when the Israelis were bombing the city and Israeli troops were there and, we know from the Goldstone Report, committed what according to Justice Goldstone were essentially war crimes. You were actually reporting or being interviewed live on--is--was it Israeli radio or television? Talk a bit about that. And how was that heard by Israelis? 'Cause you actually were describing what was happening to your house as it happened, if I understand it correctly.
ABUELAISH: During this craziness of the three weeks, the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza, because--the majority of whom are children. Fifty percent of the Gazans are children below the age of 15. It's human. And no one in this world was listening or watching what is happening there. It was a secret. And I felt we need to transmit, to open the eyes, and to speak loudly. We need someone to speak to know that there is injustice and prejudice, innocent children are killed and suffering, not to watch, to open our eyes about that, and to stop it, because it's a human life. The most holy thing in the universe is the human being and freedom.
JAY: So talk about--you were live on Israeli--was it Israeli television or radio?
ABUELAISH: I was supposed to be interviewed live at 4:30, and they were waiting in the studio there to interview me. So then my house was shelled. So I called them, I called my friend Shlomi [Eldar], who was always when--he was responding to my help. And luckily--and it was for good, this tragedy--he was in the studio. I called him expecting him to be at his house. So he was there, and to open the eyes of the Israeli public, the international community, the Arabs, the Palestinians, what are we going [sic], and to disclose the secret that this is useless. We are killing innocent children, mothers, old people, and this is not the right way. Military approaches and violence are useless and futile.
JAY: When you were live on--. This is Israeli television?
ABUELAISH: Yes.
JAY: And you were on the phone. This was just after the bomb had hit the house?
ABUELAISH: Immediate.
JAY: As the bomb hits, you're on the phone?
ABUELAISH: After the hit, I started to see my daughters, who were severely wounded. I don't want anyone to see what have I seen--those lovely, beautiful daughters when they became parts, drowning in the pool of her blood, their parts spread everywhere. Started to look at Miyar. Where is Miyar? I can't recognize Miyar.
JAY: Miyar is one of your daughters.
ABUELAISH: She was 15 years old, with decapitated head. Miyar is the one that I was happy for, that she planned to follow my path, to be a medical doctor. She was the president of the students parliament to be the voice of others. That's [how] my daughters were raised, to be human, to be full of passion, and to give, not to take.
JAY: And you described this scene live on Israeli TV.
ABUELAISH: So I called, asking for help, 'cause I know what will happen to my daughter, Shada, when I saw her eye and her cheek. My niece--for three weeks, Gaza health system can't cope with the number of casualties and the siege for three years. Any developed health system can cope with the number of severely wounded in Gaza, 5,500. What will happen to my daughter, Shada? Her eye will be taken out; her fingers will be amputated. At that moment I started to think, what can I do for her to save her eye? And I was ready to sacrifice her life to be with her daughters. But I don't want to see her blind or disabled. So I asked for help where health can't and doesn't discriminate (we treat patients as a human being): without name, transferred her to the hospital where I used to work.
JAY: In Israel.
ABUELAISH: In Israel. So I called--.
JAY: [inaudible] Israeli authorities allowed her to come in.
ABUELAISH: And then it took time, till we evacuated them to the Palestinian hospital, to coordinate their transfer to the Israeli hospital.
JAY: What was the effect of the radio broadcast? What kind of reaction did you get from Israelis?
ABUELAISH: It opened the eyes of the Israeli public to show them the truth, that they are fighting against innocent civilians, and that military ways is useless. And it made me satisfied, as you said, all of the Israeli officials, the Israeli public leaders, to see it. And it was the reason behind the ceasefire the other day.
JAY: It helped [inaudible] yeah, the ceasefire comes two days after this.
ABUELAISH: So it saved others' lives. And this satisfied me, that the blood and the souls of those holy girls wasn't useless. It made a difference in others' lives.
JAY: I was in the Middle East a few months ago, including Israel. The conditions there for Palestinians inside Israel are getting worse. The level of rhetoric is terrible. You have the foreign minister of Israel talking about even expelling Israeli citizens who are Palestinians. Conditions in the West Bank are bad, and, of course, Gaza far worse. And even the attack on Gaza, most Israelis seem to be okay with all of this. How do you explain this? Or how do you understand it?
ABUELAISH: I understand the fear of the Israelis, but I want to ask them to dig deeper and not to be superficial. They have to open their eyes, not to see things from one side. The coin has two sides. There is a Palestinian nation and there is an Israeli nation. Their safety, security, and life is linked to the safety, security, life, and the future of the Palestinian people. There will never be a good or just peace for one side. They can't create peace with themselves. They have to search and to translate peace into action with the Palestinian people. And that's what they have to realize and to understand. And it's our responsibility to show them, to get rid, to help them to get rid of their fears, to be honest with themselves, and to say the truth: all of us, with honesty, with openness, we can reach a long-lasting solution. Peace can't be forced. We can accept it's by choice.
JAY: To what extent do you think this is driven deliberately? What I mean by that is that there are people on the Israeli side [inaudible] forces, and perhaps on the Palestinian side, too, who are okay with the status quo. For example, in Israel there's--you know, apparently there's 18 families in the Israeli elite that, we've been told, control as much as 60 percent of the capitalization of Israel. The status quo's okay for them. And perhaps even on the Palestinian side there are people that do quite alright with this negotiation business or in the peace industry. How much is this the real obstacle?
ABUELAISH: It's--as you said, this is the minority. But we have to ask: what makes this minority to dominate and to shape our future and to decide for us is? What's the role of the majority who are sitting there, silent? It's their future, and they have to speak louder and to act and to feel angry and outraged about what is happening. We are, the minority and the majority, Palestinians and Israelis, living and riding the same boat.
JAY: Now, a lot of the Israeli Jews, as opposed to Israeli Palestinians, many of them believe that the hatred for Jews amongst the Palestinians is so profound that they'll never get over it. That's--they believe it to be true.
ABUELAISH: They want to believe it. And even if someone hates me or doesn't accept me, I have to ask myself why he doesn't accept me, and to search what can I do to let him accept me or to like me, not to blame--he is bad; he hates me. And that's the responsibility (it's mutual), not to blame (blaming will never lead to any way), but to be honest, to have the moral courage to take the change within yourself, to admit that and then take responsibility and ask others. The change doesn't come from outside; it comes from inside, from within us first. I don't ask my son to change unless I change myself.
JAY: To what extent is your voice or voices like yours heard in Gaza? Like, when people see the imagery of Gaza, it's all--like, in newspapers and the media, it's always people wearing masks with guns, and it's always the rockets, the militant side of Gaza, Hamas's army versus Hamas politicians. To what extent do you get heard? For example, to what extent will Hamas listen to a voice like yours?
ABUELAISH: I can say to you, if you believe in something--when I came to you here, I came during the day, during the light. If you believe in something, go to that to the end. The same message, what I said here, I said it in Gaza, in the West Bank, and anyplace I go, because I believe in it. But also what did you say? The people they see, those with masks, how many of them--because those who want to show, they are selective. As I said to you, Gazans, more than 50 percent are children, and about 25 percent of them are women. So the majority are women and children. It's a human issue. We don't want to be biased, we don't want to be ignorant, and to transmit the right message and to spread it.
JAY: What are the conditions now in Gaza? After the last flotilla, when there was the people that were killed in that flotilla coming from Turkey, Israel said they were going to allow foodstuffs and other things into Gaza. There's sort of the impression that it's not so bad in Gaza as it was. What are the conditions like now?
ABUELAISH: I'm sad to say that [inaudible] repeating it. Human being is not dependent on food. The Gazans are hungry not for food. They are hungry for freedom, they are hungry for dignity, for respect, to feel they are valued and they are respected, to express their potential. Life is not food. Human being is not food. It's more than that. And that's what do we need, not to be deceived by that. What is the value if I was in a palace with all the needs deprived of the freedom? I don't want that.
JAY: So what would freedom for Gaza look like?
ABUELAISH: Freedom.
JAY: What does it mean, concretely, politically?
ABUELAISH: Freedom of movement, freedom of life, freedom of opportunities, to feel, the Palestinian people, they have their dignity as others in this world. And it's the responsibility of all to fight for the Palestinians' freedom, and the Israelis' freedom of fear, and then to see how the Palestinian people can make a difference in this world with their potential, show them something their life is worth to live.
JAY: In the next segment of the interview, let's talk about your thinking about the current situation and how the Middle East people might achieve that freedom. Please join us for this next segment of our interview on The Real News Network.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Kinect Hacked to Play Full-Body World of Warcraft
Can you imagine some of the technology world's best game play being combined with the immersive experience of a motion-controlled full-body interface? Nathan Olivarez-Giles posted the video above, from Christmas day, on the LA Times tech blog today, showing USC researchers playing the wildly popular game World of Warcraft with their bodies, using a hacked Microsoft Kinect interface and their own software. That software, called the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit (FAAST), is freely available for anyone to download and train.
It's crude software so far, but the research team says they'll be making it more sophisticated with time. It looks pretty cool already.
The researchers say at the end of the video that they don't intend this hack to become a primary method of gameplay, but rather an additional option that will appeal to kids told to go outside or who are in physical therapy. I don't know - I think a whole lot of people want to see full, natural control over WoW come to the Kinect.
After a long snowstorm kept my wife and I locked in the house several years ago, with nothing to do but play World of Warcraft together, I still have muscle memories of my feet pattering through ravines, down hills and along roads. They return to me every time I visit the park with my dogs.
That mixing of the real and the virtual is only going to become harder to separate when we can control all our virtual activities with our full physical bodies. And some people are going to love it. Others will no doubt raise concerns about the dissolving of the line between the body and the avatar, the self and news feed, etc. Like most tools, such technology will likely raise possibilities both banal and devine.
Monday, December 27, 2010
World Tired of Paying Bill for US Military
World Tired of Paying Bill for US Military
Michael Hudson: Major countries looking for alternatives to US dollar
Bio
Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1968 & 2003), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971). ISLET engages in research regarding domestic and international finance, national income and balance-sheet accounting with regard to real estate, and the economic history of the ancient Near East. Michael acts as an economic advisor to governments worldwide including Iceland, Latvia and China on finance and tax law.
Transcript
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay and we're in New York City. Joining us again now is Michael Hudson. He's a former Wall Street economist, a distinguished research professor at the University of Missouri - Kansas City, and the author of Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire and Trade, Development, and Foreign Debt. Thanks for joining us again.
MICHAEL HUDSON, RESEARCH PROFESSOR, UMKC: Thank you.
JAY: So, first of all, tell us a little bit of background of you, in terms of your work on Wall Street.
HUDSON: Well, I was Chase Manhattan's balance of payments economist during the 1960s, and that was at a time when the balance of payments became very important, because during the '60s and '70s the entire US balance of payments deficit was military. The private sector was exactly in balance, and government foreign aid actually made a surplus because all we gave was tied aid and other countries had to pay us interest. But the entire deficit was military in character. So today when people talk about the declining dollar--.
JAY: So by that you mean the cost of the Vietnam War.
HUDSON: The Vietnam War and other spending in Asia and Europe. Right now America has over 850 military bases abroad. All of these military bases have huge spending. In Afghanistan and in Iraq, they're sending hundred dollars bills by the cartload, literally, to give away. So there's a huge deficit for military spending.
JAY: Let's dig into that a bit, because I know while it gets positioned rhetorically as defense of American safety and against foreign threats and terrorism and all the rest, and perhaps there's some element of that, certainly there's a big piece of that that this helps, this military footprint helps to protect or advance American commercial interest. So even though it may be a big cause of debt, does it have such a plus side in terms of commercial endeavor?
HUDSON: Well, as you know, in 1971, President Nixon had to take the dollar off gold. So it was the Vietnam War that forced the dollar off gold and ended its role as a monetary standard as good as gold. I've just got back from a tour of Asia and Brazil, and these countries are saying, because the dollar is being used so much to fund the military deficit, when we run a balance of payments surplus with America, we get dollars, we export, the dollars are turned over to the central bank. There's nothing central banks can do with dollars but buy US Treasury bonds. And we've been financing, with our Treasury bond purchases, the military spending that's responsible for the US federal deficit, for our encirclement. So by keeping the dollar, we're keeping ourselves encircled. We don't want any more dollars. That's what I'm told--Brazil, China, even Australia.
JAY: Yet everybody's buying American Treasury bonds.
HUDSON: That's because they're still making exports to the United States. They--in the last year you've had the BRIC countries--Brazil, Russia, India, and China--saying, we're trying to avoid using the dollar anymore so that we don't have to buy Treasury bills. And when they say, we don't want to hold dollars, they mean, we don't want to finance our military encirclement, which is what the dollar standard has financed. So two weeks ago, China and Russia made a deal to transact all of their mutual trade and investment in their own currencies, rubles and RMB, not dollars. The president, Hu, of China had just got back from Turkey and negotiated a similar swap agreement there. So China and other countries--Brazil, Venezuela, the oil-producing countries--are all now shunning the US dollar. That means that the whole world economy is fragmenting into a dollar bloc, meaning--.
JAY: You can't say--they haven't shunned the dollar. They may be trying to wean off a little bit, but, I mean, the dollar is still the dominant reserve currency.
HUDSON: They have made a policy decision not only to avoid holding the dollar but to decouple their economies from the dollar area. Now, that's not good for the American economy.
JAY: Now, this has to be a very long--like, for China, a very long-term issue. They hold trillions of American dollars.
HUDSON: Yes. These things usually happen fairly rapidly, much more rapidly than people think. China holds $4 trillion of foreign exchange reserves now.
JAY: Mostly American.
HUDSON: About two point--about half of that is in American dollars [snip] euros and others. China has said, we don't want to make any more foreign exchange reserve of any paper currency, because all the paper currencies are government debt currencies. So what are they going to do? The way you avoid getting foreign currency is to export less. They've made a policy decision in China: now that we have got in place productive power, we're going to use our factories and our productive power to begin raising living standards, we're going to raise wages, we're going to raise living standards and consume our own output, rather than exporting them for paper dollars or electronic dollars [inaudible]
JAY: That's a 15-, 20-year plan. And not only that, let's see if they can actually accomplish it, because a lot of the big Chinese capitalists may not be so happy to go along with that.
HUDSON: The Chinese capitalists see that they're able to make more money in China than they are here, just like the American capitalists. American, European, and Latin American capitalists are putting their money into Asia because that's where the growth is, because Asia is the only part of the world left with a mixed economy, government and private, public and private. And the way America got rich was by a government acting as a subsidizer, building internal improvements, supplying the infrastructure, supplying the subsidy to industry. That's how America got rich in the 19th and 20th century. It's how England got rich in the 18th and 19th century. You need a mixed economy in order to get rich. But if in the process of fighting labor you say, oh, it's socialism to have government, then you're not going to have the government able to help industry as well as able to help labor, and the economy's going to shrink. So you have a kind of junk economics that's in the mind of the policymakers today that by cutting away government, they prevent the infrastructure from essentially enabling this economy to lower its costs.
JAY: Now, let's go back to the issue of the military budget and the reason for 800-plus bases, and maybe a trillion-dollar military budget if you throw everything in. It was pretty clear, you know, in the older days of American Empire, and you go back to Latin America in--say, in the 1930s, you know, we want this country--we want this country's bananas; we will have the government we want so we can get this country's bananas. But has anything really changed, in the sense--does the US elite not see that even if this is a big cause of American debt, for the purpose of commercial advantage this dominant role the US is able to play because of this military is worth it?
HUDSON: What's changed is the technology of military strategy. In the 1930s, when a country was a military power, they were talking of sending in the Marines, sending in the gunboats, and sending in people. America is musclebound, which is why Mao called it a paper tiger. There's only one kind of war that a democracy can afford: atomic war. A democracy can only afford hydrogen bombs. It can't afford fighting with real bullets. In Vietnam, every soldier in Vietnam used one ton of copper per year. You'd think they were fighting each other with ingots over there. There's not enough copper to produce the bullets. You don't have a draft anymore. That's different from the 1930s. You don't have a population that's willing to go to war. So the American war in the Middle East is basically an air war. You can bomb people, but you can't occupy them, you can't fight them, you can't do what was realized in the 19th and 20th century, you can't have an army that actually fights. It's an eating army or a bribing army or a military-industrial complex without the ability to fight a war,--
JAY: Why?
HUDSON: --what America has. We can't invade a country like Ecuador. I made a list of countries that America could invade. Grenada was one of the top of the lists, and I met with the State Department and they agreed and they invaded Grenada. That's about what America can do--old-time army. But you have to realize how the Grenadian revolution occurred. The revolutionaries sent a trumpeter outside of the police station at four in the morning, blew the "come out and stand at attention"; they all came out and stood at attention and were arrested. You needed 10 people for a revolution. That's the kind of revolution that America, with maybe 20 or 30 people [inaudible]
JAY: So then what's the point of the 800 bases, then? I mean, when Britain was in a somewhat analogous situation with these colonies costing so much, they said, well, let's get rid of the colonies 'cause they're like boat anchors.
HUDSON: That's right.
JAY: Well--but you don't hear that in the United States very--I mean, you hear it from very few people saying, let's get rid of 800-plus military bases 'cause they're boat anchors.
HUDSON: The reason you don't is, in the past, all of the money that the military spent abroad would be spent on foreign economies, and then they'd siphon up into the central banks. And the central banks would have nothing to do with these dollars but to keep their currency stable by recycling the dollars into US Treasury bills. If it weren't for the military deficit, America would have had to finance its own domestic budget deficit. It's been foreigners that are financing the budget deficit. Now that foreigners are essentially saying, we don't want any more dollars, we're not going to fund your deficit, all of a sudden they think: who's going to fund the deficit if not foreign central banks? The answer is: American labor, the American middle class and working families are going to fund it, not the military.
JAY: Thanks for joining us. Thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
Michael Hudson: Major countries looking for alternatives to US dollar
Bio
Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1968 & 2003), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971). ISLET engages in research regarding domestic and international finance, national income and balance-sheet accounting with regard to real estate, and the economic history of the ancient Near East. Michael acts as an economic advisor to governments worldwide including Iceland, Latvia and China on finance and tax law.
Transcript
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay and we're in New York City. Joining us again now is Michael Hudson. He's a former Wall Street economist, a distinguished research professor at the University of Missouri - Kansas City, and the author of Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire and Trade, Development, and Foreign Debt. Thanks for joining us again.
MICHAEL HUDSON, RESEARCH PROFESSOR, UMKC: Thank you.
JAY: So, first of all, tell us a little bit of background of you, in terms of your work on Wall Street.
HUDSON: Well, I was Chase Manhattan's balance of payments economist during the 1960s, and that was at a time when the balance of payments became very important, because during the '60s and '70s the entire US balance of payments deficit was military. The private sector was exactly in balance, and government foreign aid actually made a surplus because all we gave was tied aid and other countries had to pay us interest. But the entire deficit was military in character. So today when people talk about the declining dollar--.
JAY: So by that you mean the cost of the Vietnam War.
HUDSON: The Vietnam War and other spending in Asia and Europe. Right now America has over 850 military bases abroad. All of these military bases have huge spending. In Afghanistan and in Iraq, they're sending hundred dollars bills by the cartload, literally, to give away. So there's a huge deficit for military spending.
JAY: Let's dig into that a bit, because I know while it gets positioned rhetorically as defense of American safety and against foreign threats and terrorism and all the rest, and perhaps there's some element of that, certainly there's a big piece of that that this helps, this military footprint helps to protect or advance American commercial interest. So even though it may be a big cause of debt, does it have such a plus side in terms of commercial endeavor?
HUDSON: Well, as you know, in 1971, President Nixon had to take the dollar off gold. So it was the Vietnam War that forced the dollar off gold and ended its role as a monetary standard as good as gold. I've just got back from a tour of Asia and Brazil, and these countries are saying, because the dollar is being used so much to fund the military deficit, when we run a balance of payments surplus with America, we get dollars, we export, the dollars are turned over to the central bank. There's nothing central banks can do with dollars but buy US Treasury bonds. And we've been financing, with our Treasury bond purchases, the military spending that's responsible for the US federal deficit, for our encirclement. So by keeping the dollar, we're keeping ourselves encircled. We don't want any more dollars. That's what I'm told--Brazil, China, even Australia.
JAY: Yet everybody's buying American Treasury bonds.
HUDSON: That's because they're still making exports to the United States. They--in the last year you've had the BRIC countries--Brazil, Russia, India, and China--saying, we're trying to avoid using the dollar anymore so that we don't have to buy Treasury bills. And when they say, we don't want to hold dollars, they mean, we don't want to finance our military encirclement, which is what the dollar standard has financed. So two weeks ago, China and Russia made a deal to transact all of their mutual trade and investment in their own currencies, rubles and RMB, not dollars. The president, Hu, of China had just got back from Turkey and negotiated a similar swap agreement there. So China and other countries--Brazil, Venezuela, the oil-producing countries--are all now shunning the US dollar. That means that the whole world economy is fragmenting into a dollar bloc, meaning--.
JAY: You can't say--they haven't shunned the dollar. They may be trying to wean off a little bit, but, I mean, the dollar is still the dominant reserve currency.
HUDSON: They have made a policy decision not only to avoid holding the dollar but to decouple their economies from the dollar area. Now, that's not good for the American economy.
JAY: Now, this has to be a very long--like, for China, a very long-term issue. They hold trillions of American dollars.
HUDSON: Yes. These things usually happen fairly rapidly, much more rapidly than people think. China holds $4 trillion of foreign exchange reserves now.
JAY: Mostly American.
HUDSON: About two point--about half of that is in American dollars [snip] euros and others. China has said, we don't want to make any more foreign exchange reserve of any paper currency, because all the paper currencies are government debt currencies. So what are they going to do? The way you avoid getting foreign currency is to export less. They've made a policy decision in China: now that we have got in place productive power, we're going to use our factories and our productive power to begin raising living standards, we're going to raise wages, we're going to raise living standards and consume our own output, rather than exporting them for paper dollars or electronic dollars [inaudible]
JAY: That's a 15-, 20-year plan. And not only that, let's see if they can actually accomplish it, because a lot of the big Chinese capitalists may not be so happy to go along with that.
HUDSON: The Chinese capitalists see that they're able to make more money in China than they are here, just like the American capitalists. American, European, and Latin American capitalists are putting their money into Asia because that's where the growth is, because Asia is the only part of the world left with a mixed economy, government and private, public and private. And the way America got rich was by a government acting as a subsidizer, building internal improvements, supplying the infrastructure, supplying the subsidy to industry. That's how America got rich in the 19th and 20th century. It's how England got rich in the 18th and 19th century. You need a mixed economy in order to get rich. But if in the process of fighting labor you say, oh, it's socialism to have government, then you're not going to have the government able to help industry as well as able to help labor, and the economy's going to shrink. So you have a kind of junk economics that's in the mind of the policymakers today that by cutting away government, they prevent the infrastructure from essentially enabling this economy to lower its costs.
JAY: Now, let's go back to the issue of the military budget and the reason for 800-plus bases, and maybe a trillion-dollar military budget if you throw everything in. It was pretty clear, you know, in the older days of American Empire, and you go back to Latin America in--say, in the 1930s, you know, we want this country--we want this country's bananas; we will have the government we want so we can get this country's bananas. But has anything really changed, in the sense--does the US elite not see that even if this is a big cause of American debt, for the purpose of commercial advantage this dominant role the US is able to play because of this military is worth it?
HUDSON: What's changed is the technology of military strategy. In the 1930s, when a country was a military power, they were talking of sending in the Marines, sending in the gunboats, and sending in people. America is musclebound, which is why Mao called it a paper tiger. There's only one kind of war that a democracy can afford: atomic war. A democracy can only afford hydrogen bombs. It can't afford fighting with real bullets. In Vietnam, every soldier in Vietnam used one ton of copper per year. You'd think they were fighting each other with ingots over there. There's not enough copper to produce the bullets. You don't have a draft anymore. That's different from the 1930s. You don't have a population that's willing to go to war. So the American war in the Middle East is basically an air war. You can bomb people, but you can't occupy them, you can't fight them, you can't do what was realized in the 19th and 20th century, you can't have an army that actually fights. It's an eating army or a bribing army or a military-industrial complex without the ability to fight a war,--
JAY: Why?
HUDSON: --what America has. We can't invade a country like Ecuador. I made a list of countries that America could invade. Grenada was one of the top of the lists, and I met with the State Department and they agreed and they invaded Grenada. That's about what America can do--old-time army. But you have to realize how the Grenadian revolution occurred. The revolutionaries sent a trumpeter outside of the police station at four in the morning, blew the "come out and stand at attention"; they all came out and stood at attention and were arrested. You needed 10 people for a revolution. That's the kind of revolution that America, with maybe 20 or 30 people [inaudible]
JAY: So then what's the point of the 800 bases, then? I mean, when Britain was in a somewhat analogous situation with these colonies costing so much, they said, well, let's get rid of the colonies 'cause they're like boat anchors.
HUDSON: That's right.
JAY: Well--but you don't hear that in the United States very--I mean, you hear it from very few people saying, let's get rid of 800-plus military bases 'cause they're boat anchors.
HUDSON: The reason you don't is, in the past, all of the money that the military spent abroad would be spent on foreign economies, and then they'd siphon up into the central banks. And the central banks would have nothing to do with these dollars but to keep their currency stable by recycling the dollars into US Treasury bills. If it weren't for the military deficit, America would have had to finance its own domestic budget deficit. It's been foreigners that are financing the budget deficit. Now that foreigners are essentially saying, we don't want any more dollars, we're not going to fund your deficit, all of a sudden they think: who's going to fund the deficit if not foreign central banks? The answer is: American labor, the American middle class and working families are going to fund it, not the military.
JAY: Thanks for joining us. Thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
2010 A Look back
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| A Look Back - May 2010 | ||||
| ||||
Hanukkah & Christmas
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| A Colbert Christmas: Jon Stewart | ||||
| ||||
Guilin China Cormorant fishing, video capture by panasonic gf1
This is a video i took in Guilin China using panasonic gf1, the video shows china bird fishing also known as Cormorant fishing.
Armstrong & Miller Perform Morecambe Wise's Breakfast Sketch - Happy Birthday Bafta
Brilliant comedy duo, Alexander Armstrong & Ben Miller recreate our of Morecambe & Wise's most famous & most loved routines on Happy Birthday Bafta!
I think they did an AMAZING job [& How cute does Ben look in his dressing gown? haha!] & I love both Armstrong & Miller & Morecambe & Wise to pieces. I think they'd have been proud to see it if they were here today...
AND I don't want any of "those" comments...i.e "they're think they're Morecame & Wise" rubbish. They love Morecambe & Wise & are simply paying a tribute...nothing more. Any comments like this will be deleted straight away. You've been warned! ;)
Enjoy!
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Keiser Report №102: Markets! Finance! Gold & Silver!
This time Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, talk about Americas most dangerous banker being sued by trustees for aiding and abetting the Madoff ponzi scheme and about the U.S. administration suffers from the Stockholm Syndrome. In the second half of the show, Max Keiser talks to Dr. Kiriakos Tobras about his campaign to stop financial terrorists attacking the Greek economy, stopspeculators.gr.
Keiser Report №103: Markets, Finance FUBAR!
This time, Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, examine Jamie Dimon's sore spots and the Department of Justice's PR stunts and ask whether or not Americans are plunging deeper into debt. In the second half of the show, Max Keiser talks to Michael W. Hudson, author of The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America -- and Spawned a Global Crisis."
Keiser Report: JP Morgue (E105)
Keiser Report: JP Morgue (E105)
This time Max and Stacy talk about the rise of financial activism and about Janet Tavakoli's presentation and repairing the damage of fraud as a business model. In the second half Max talks to Nicole Foss about the unpopped bubble in Canada.
You're not exaggerating.
This time Max and Stacy talk about the rise of financial activism and about Janet Tavakoli's presentation and repairing the damage of fraud as a business model. In the second half Max talks to Nicole Foss about the unpopped bubble in Canada.
You're not exaggerating.
Blackadder's Christmas Carols.
An all-time favorite Christmas specials: Blackadder's Christmas Carols.
http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/PkEcx1lPYrE/
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