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August 28, 2005
Sputnik Child's Sunday
Today brings a trio of movies right up Sputnik Child's alley,
First, at 2 pm EDT, is "Failure is not an Option", based on the memoir by former NASA flight director Gene Kranz. Next, at 6 pm, "Apollo 13", the Ron Howard-Tom Hanks effort that received 9 Academy Award nominations. ("Houston, we have a problem.") Finally, "Not an Option 2: Beyond the Moon", also based on Gene Kranz' memoirs, dealing with NASA's efforts from the 1973 launch of SkyLab through the Discovery tragedy.
Stay tuned. Sputnik Child will be glued to her set.
August 23, 2005
Why do we make things so hard?
July 4, 1989. Our bus moved slowly and carefully through the steep, narrow streets of the village. It was summer, and small children ran ahead of us, laughing and chasing goats out of our way, their bare feet raising clouds of dust that glittered in the brilliant sunlight. The houses around us were mostly one-storied stucco'd rectangles, and many of them had grape arbors on the roofs.
Shefar'am is a little village in the northwest of Israel, near Haifa and the Lebanese border, and most of its residents are Palestinians, some Christian, some Muslim. Almost no one outside of Israel had ever heard of Shefar'am then. Two weeks ago, though, the whole world heard about it; a deserter from the Israeli Defense Forces went to Shefar'am and killed four residents who were riding on a bus, injuring twelve others. That this should happen in Shefar'am is a painful irony.
We went to Shefar'am to visit "The House of Hope", a center of The Community of the Cross of Nails (CCN). CCN is an organization founded in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral during WWII. They believe that "Truth + Forgiveness = Reconciliation". The House of Hope was run at the time by a man named Elias Jabor, a Palestinian Maronnite Catholic whose family has lived in the region practically since the days of Ur. His mission, in his words, was "to bring Palestinian teenagers and Israeli Jewish teenagers together and let them scream at each other until they get tired enough to listen to each other." Elias' family and staff welcomed us with the boundless hospitality that represents Middle Eastern culture at its best, presenting us with a sheet cake decorated with the U. S. flag, in honor of "America's birthday".
The highlight of the trip, though, was a visit to the synagogue. There are no Jews living in Shefar'am. During the days of Turkish occupation, before WWI, Jews were not allowed to live in Haifa, and there were Jews in Shefar'am. When Britain kicked the Turks out of Palestine, the ban was lifted and virtually all of the Jews in Shefar'am moved to Haifa. The last Jews who left Shefar'am gave the keys of the synagogue to the Muslim family that lived next door, and for more than 90 years, that family has handed down the keys to synagogue -- and the responsibility for maintaining it -- from generation to generation.
The synagogue is beautifully kept: the stucco was freshly whitewashed; inside was swept and dusted; the Torah was properly and respectfully stored in the Ark. The Muslim family considered themselves honor-bound to maintain the building in the condition in which it was turned over to them. And every year, on the High Holy Days, the descendants of the Jews who left Shefar'am return and get the keys to the synagogue from the Muslim family, confident that all will be as it should be.
The powerful reality here, is that in 1915, the Jews who moved to Haifa knew that they could trust and rely on the Muslims of Shefar'am to honor and maintain the synagogue. As that realization dawned on us, we all just started to cry. It's all so simple. For thousands of years, Jews and Muslims and Christians had lived together in Palestine, and it had all been so simple. Why do we make things so hard?
1989 was in the middle of the first intifada, and even then, this town was a model of what all of the Middle East could be (and more or less had been for centuries). And this was the town where, in his rage, 19-year old Natan Eden Zada chose to go to kill Arabs.
This morning, Miles O'Brien on CNN was speaking with an Iraqi diplomat, a Sunni, about the development of the Iraqi Constitution. Showing a map of Iraq, O'Brien pointed out the boundaries drawn by the British when Iraq was created, designating areas of control for Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds. The Ambassador commented that these boundaries were really rather arbitrary: "We have all been living here together for hundreds of years."
It used to be very simple. Now, people whose grandparents lived as neighbors now hate each other, just because of who they are and where they are, even though neither of these things has changed. We've made it very hard.
August 22, 2005
Not just ignorance
I've become increasingly impatient with the way major media ignore situations in Africa until someone makes them fashionable. I wrote earlier about the silence of most electronic journalists on the famine in Niger and it's apparent relative lack of importance compared with Tom Cruise's romantic plans and medical pronouncements. Now I have data to support my perceptions, courtesy of BeAWitness:
Each year, the nightly newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC devote a total of roughly 24,900 minutes to news. That is based on an average of 20 minutes of news in each of these newscasts every night -- the rest of the half-hour is commercials. In 2004 the ABC, CBS, and NBC network nightly newscasts aired a total of only 26 minutes on genocide and fighting in Sudan. ABC devoted 18 minutes to Darfur coverage, NBC five and CBS only three. By contrast, Martha Stewart's woes received 130 minutes of nightly news coverage. Stated differently, only about 1 in every 950 minutes of news coverage in 2004 covered the genocide in Sudan.
See the Tyndall Report at http://www.tyndallreport.com/yearinreview.php3 and American Journalism Review, "Déjà vu", Feb./March 2005 at http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3813
Data specific to June 2005 shows that
A quantitative monitoring of all news segments aired in the month of June 2005 on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FoxNews, and MSNBC shows that coverage of the genocide in Sudan was overwhelmed by stories of far less consequence including the "runaway bride," the Michael Jackson trial, and Tom Cruise's new movie and relationship with actress Katie Holmes. During a month when new fighting and aerial attacks erupted in Sudan, Americans learned almost nothing about these developments from major television news media.
- During the entire month of June 2005, the major network and cable news station -- broadcasting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week -- aired only 126 segments on Sudan.
- In contrast, these same stations aired a combined 8303 segments on the "runaway bride", the Michael Jackson trial, and Tom Cruise.
- Major news media aired 65 times as many segments on these trivial matters as it did on the fighting and genocide in Sudan.
Overview of Research and Methodology
This, by itself is inexcusable, but the networks have gone further. NBC, CBS, NBC-4, CBS-9, and Gannett (the parent corporation of CBS-9) have refused to air a commercial prepared by BeAWitness, purchased by the American Progress Action Fund and the Genocide Intervention Fund. The networks haven't given a reason for the refusal. Please add your voice to the request for a reason and a reconsideration of the decision.
August 21, 2005
Agribusiness Bites
[I originally posted this on my Serene Chef blog, but decided that it should be here as well.]
No one who is passionate about food can ignore the issues arising from the way food is produced in this country. We produce huge quantities of food -- which, undeniably, allows us to help feed people beyond our own borders -- but the cost of that is abused animals in factory farms, irradiated and genetically engineered foods, hormone-ridden beef, antibiotic resistant bacteria and, certainly not least, tasteless food.
PBS is preparing a series on American agriculture called American Heartland. This would be interesting in itself, but, surprisingly, the Union of Concerned Scientists has reason to believe that the program "will portray an entirely positive portrait of U.S. agriculture . . . Despite an in-depth approach spanning 20 episodes, the series producers appear unwilling to give time to any concerns about agribusiness, from the impact of pesticides on human health, to pollution and foodborne illness caused by industrialized meat production, to the debate over genetically engineered crops". That the series is sponsored by Monsanto and the Farm Bureau lends support to their concern. UCS is asking that viewers urge PBS to ensure that American Heartland presents a fair and complete (thought I was going to say "balanced, didn't you?) picture of the state of American Agriculture.
I urge you to join UCS in urging PBS to tell the full story.
August 18, 2005
When governments make promises they can't keep . . .
individual people suffer.
It has always difficult to watch the situation in the Middle East detachedly; the suffering of the people is universal and apolitical. And it is difficult to write or speak about the situation without stepping on the deeply-held beliefs of sincere people. But as I watch the forced evacuations of Israeli Jews from the Gaza Strip, and trying to consider it in an historic context, I am struck by how short-sighted nationalist leaders can be, and how long the mistakes of government rulers outlive them, and cause suffering well into the second and third and fourth generations (and beyond)
I used to think about this a lot when I was much younger, when the Arab states still believed they could "push Israel into the Sea." It always seemed to me that, just as the roots of WWII can be found in the Treaty of Versailles that ended WWI, the last 60 years of pain and death in the Middle East flow directly from decisions made by those in power at the end of the 1948. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, between 520,000 and 900,000 Palestinians became refugees, some expelled, some leaving the newly created State of Israel voluntarily, expecting that, in short order, the combined Arab nations would overcome the fledgling Israel Defenses Forces, and they could return home. (In fact, Field Marshall Montgomery, the British hero of El Alamein) predicted that Israel would be defeated within two weeks.) They were wrong. The War dragged on and ultimately, the Arab States had to accept that they had failed to destroy Israel. Ralph Bunche negotiated the 1949 Armistice Agreements, officially ending a War that actually continues to this day.
During the Lausanne Conferences which led to that Armistice:
Israel proposed to allow 100,000 refugees to return, this number including an alleged 25,000 who had returned already surreptitiously and 10,000 projected family-reunion cases. The offer was conditional on a full peace treaty that allowed Israel to keep all the territory it had captured and on the Arab states agreeing to absorb the remaining refugees. The offer was rejected by the Arab states. Wikipedia, "The Palestinian Exodus"
These people -- and their decendants -- have remained refugees for more than 50 years, because, with the exception of Jordan, the Arab states refused to absorbed them, convinced that Israel could be forced to accept them, even after the Six Day War which was really the last time it was viable for an Arab leader to pretend that Israel could be destroyed.
That's half the equation. The other half is the belief of Israeli leaders that Israel could truly become the home for all the world's Jews, and once more occupy and control "Eretz Israel" -- the geographic biblical homeland of the Jews. As pointed out in this article in last week's New York Times Week in Review, Why 'Greater Israel' Never Came to Be, (free registration required) similar unfulfilled assumptions about the likelihood that Israel would become the center of the world's Jewish population have led to the suffering we see on the news today.
David Kimche, who was director general of Israel's foreign ministry in the 1980's, noted: "The old Zionist nationalists' anthem was a state on 'the two banks of the River Jordan.' When that became impractical, we talked about 'greater Israel,' from the Jordan to the sea. But people now realize that this, too, is something we won't be able to achieve."
The failure has two main sources. First, contrary to the expectations of the early Zionists, . . . most of the world's Jews have not joined their brethren to live in Israel. Of the world's 13 million to 14 million Jews, a minority - 5.26 million - make their home in Israel, and immigration has largely dried up. Last year, a record low 21,000 Jews immigrated to Israel.
Old dreams die hard, and the cost is paid in the misery and pain of individual people's lies. For more than 50 years, Palestinians have lived in camps, because the Arab leaders led them to believe that Israel would vanish and they could go home in triumph. Today, Israel settlers are losing their homes, being carried onto buses by Israel settlers, because Israeli leaders encouraged them to settle in occupied areas.
And (with due respect to Spider Robinson) "God is an iron, which is why irony is the ruling principle of the Universe": It is not Shimon Peres, or some other Labour Party liberal who orders the evacuations. It is unwavering hawk Ariel Sharon. It may be that this is part of a bid to keep more of the West Bank (part of Eretz Israel) by giving up Gaza (which is not). BeliefNet presents an interesting discussion of this perspective by "an Orthodox Jew, [who believes] God gave [the Jews] the land of Israel" and says, "That's why I know we must pull out of the occupied territories."
Still, it was sobering to hear an Israeli woman saying that Sharon's actions will be written into the lamentations of Tisha Bav, the three weeks during which Jews mourn the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the "resultant physical and spiritual displacement" of the Jewish people.
[Wikipedia is a good starting point for reading more on the history of the conflict in the Middle East, with references to external sources reflecting varying views.]
An interesting read
This February 7, 2003, memo, received by the George Washington University National Security Archive, pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request continues to strip the facade from "Operation Infinite Justice" (oops, now "Operation Infinite Freedom"!).
Sent to Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky by senior State Dept. officials, the memo
noted CENTCOM's "focus on its primary military objectives and its reluctance to take on 'policing' roles," but warned that "a failure to address short-term public security and humanitarian assistance concerns could result in serious human rights abuses which would undermine an otherwise successful military campaign, and our reputation internationally." The memo adds "We have raised these issues with top CENTCOM officials." National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 163, posted 17 August 2005
We all know how much attention was paid to those warning. The GWU report reviews this and other relevant memoranda in more detail.
Missing the Point
This morning, a CNN report showed a reporter Dana Bash asking Cindy Sheehan if she thought there was any hope of Bush speaking with her. Ms. Sheehan said, "Nothing's impossible," and went on to talk about the growth of "the movement".
In fact, I think the sun will turn purple before Bush speaks with her. Even if he did, we all know that nothing he says to her will begin to resemble what we now know that is the truth about the War in Iraq. That's not the point (or I think the real goal). His refusal to speak with her, his inability to face a bereaved mother and risk be asked pointed questions about the War, is the real point here.
August 17, 2005
I guess they still don't get the 1st Amendment
I didn't think I would ever again hear the kind of garbage that came out of the mouth of a McLennan County (TX) official on CNN this morning, as he explained that "traffic safety concerns" that were the basis of residents' complaints about Cindy Sheehan's Vigil outside George W. Bush's ranch. According to this man, the nature of the vigil -- Sheehan's demand for an explanation of her the reason her son was sent to Iraq to die -- has absolutely nothing to do with the complaints. He is certain that if the demonstration was in support of the President's policies, the neighbors would still be upset; there's nothing political about this. The fact that a man fired a shotgun into the air near the encampment and said he was getting ready for "dove season", and that another man drove his truck over dozens of crosses memorializing men and women who have died in Iraq did not have an impact on the county's concerns.
I say I am surprised to hear this nonsense "again" is because it sounds just like the nonsense people like Bull Connors used to say about Civil Rights demonstrations in the 60's. And, I admit, the man's southern accent made me wonder if I was having a nasty flashback. No such luck. As Mark Twain might say, this country will never run out of flatheads.
August 09, 2005
August 08, 2005
When the Tech Gods Frown . . .
Sputnik Child trembles. The pride of my possessions, my 2.0GHz PowerMac G5 went belly up last week, its disk drive morphing into a small paperweight. It took 48 hours for the service technician to arrive with the replacement, during which I buried my troubles in a marathon game of MOOII on a beat-up iBook. It's taken until this evening to get it back to the way I want it -- I had a back up, but when Version Tracker says you have a 180 programs to update, it's a bit daunting. And I did lose a lot of email, so I need to collect my registration information, etc.
But my problems are just fallout from the Tech Gods main tantrum.
If you've been living in an underground cavern, perhaps you don't know that the Shuttle Discovery has been plagued by the same crumbling insulating foam that led to Columbia's destruction and the death of seven astronauts. The only answer to the frustration I feel is that it must pale before that of the people who work at NASA. Two years of work were fruitless; the Discovery astronauts may (we fervently pray) be saved the fate of their predecessors only by the fact that the insulation on Discovery broke loose a few seconds later in its launch sequence than on Columbia's, and that we were watching for the problem, and could try to repair the damage. The live footage of Stephen Robinson's extravehicular repairs to the Discovery was stunning. Now we just wait with our hearts in our mouths for the re-entry, already delayed for 24 hours.
I think it's time for NASA to face facts and retire the shuttle fleet. They've been in service for more than 20 years. We have new technologies, and we need a new approach. Infinite reusablity may not be the best design objective for spacecraft.
Reusability was a response to people's complaints that the Space Program cost money that could be better used on Earth. My response is that that view blinks the kinds of advances in science and technology that are a direct result of the Space Program. Medical advances, technology to assist the disabled, diagnostic technology have all been boosted by knowledge gained through the Space Program.
Money will always be an issue, of course. There will never be so much money that there won't be people who want more for their projects and less for yours. Unfortunately, we now have to measure the cost of the Shuttle Program in lives as well as dollars, and that calculus is not attractive.
What we need now is some sensible Space Advocacy. For some excellent ideas, try this article from ad Astra, the magazine of the National Space Society
R.I.P. Peter Jennings
These days, the loss of any journalist worth respect is a cause for dismay. The death of Peter Jennings, one of the last journalists who think the news is more important than their egos is heart-breaking.
More on Peter Jennings (free registration required)
August 01, 2005
It's 2003UB313! No, it's Xena!
It brings a smile to Sputnik Child's face! Astronomer Michael Brown has announced the discovery of "2003UB313", an object bigger than Pluto, which has been nicknamed &mdash to my delight &mdash "Xena". Astronomers are arguing about whether this is a "planet" or not, and if so, is it the 10th or the 11th planet (remember "Sedna" &mdash sorry, 2003VB12 &mdash discovered by the same astronomers, incidentally), because we have no really good definition of "planet", but based on the suggested definitions discussed at Michael Brown's CalTech website, Xena is probably a planet.
