Hulleye Comes By!

In response to Assaf Kfoury’s July 12 ZNet article “Noam Chomsky in Beirut”, where Chomsky is quoted as saying ” I think Nasrallah [head of Hizbullah] has a reasoned and persuasive argument that the arms should be in the hands of Hizbullah as a deterrent to potential aggression, and there are plenty of background reasons for that . . . .”, a ZNet Sustainer asked Noam “Now, I know you dislike labels, but I’m pretty much feeling your ethics are Consequentalist, so I am wondering what are a number of the top consequences you expect (ed) from making this statement?”

Click here to read Chomsky’s response.

at least the man has a sense of humour.

From K5

Since the perspective of ordinary Lebanese on the current Lebanese-Israeli conflict doesn’t seem to be well represented in mainstream media, I’ve been looking for Lebanese bloggers to give at least some window into what some subset of the population thinks. I’ve tried to find a few of the more widely read blogs from multiple perspectives.

The following blogs are some of the more popular (from my research) in the English-language Lebanese blog community; most started in the turmoil last year that forced Syria to withdraw from Lebanon, either to support or oppose that withdrawal and/or to give opinions on what should happen next. A caveat is that these views mainly represent a cross-section of the better-educated and middle-class population of Lebanon.

Click here to read the rest of the entry and find the blog links.

The Homeland Security Department wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars last year on iPods, dog booties, beer-making equipment and designer jackets, congressional investigators have concluded.

Among the expenses that investigators described as abusive or otherwise questionable:

_More than 2,000 sets of dog booties, costing $68,442, that have sat unused in storage since emergency responders decided they were not suited for canines assisting in Gulf Coast recovery efforts.

_Three portable shower units for $71,170 from a contractor who investigators said overcharged the government. Customs and Border Protection agents could have gotten similar showers for nearly a third of the price _ and faster.

_12 Apple iPod Nanos and 42 iPod Shuffles, worth $7,000, for Secret Service “training and data storage.” Because the Shuffles cost less than $300, the Secret Service said they were not required to track them to ensure they were used properly.

37 black Helly Hansen designer rain jackets, costing nearly $2,500, for use in a firing range that the Customs and Border Protection purchaser later acknowledged shuts down when it’s raining.

_Conference and hotel rooms at a golf and tennis resort at St. Simons Island in Georgia, worth $2,395, for training 32 newly hired attorneys when they could have used a nearby federal law enforcement training center.

_A beer brewing kit and ingredients for more than $1,000 for a Coast Guard official to brew alcohol while on duty as a social organizer for the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. “The estimated price for a six-pack of USCG beer was $12,” the investigators noted, adding: “Given that the six-pack cost of most beers is far less than $12, it is difficult to demonstrate that the Academy is achieving cost savings by brewing its own beer.”

Investigators also noted that Customs and Border Protection wasted up to $464,586 by buying meals-ready-to-eat over the Internet instead of contracting through the Pentagon, as is standard procedure. And they found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency cannot locate 107 laptops, 22 printers and two GPS units worth $170,000. FEMA also cannot find 12 of 20 boats the agency bought for $208,000.

oh did i mention that all these expenses were for helping Hurricane Katrina victims. How fortunate the Americans must feel that their taxes are going to such noble causes.

The first plasma discharge from China’s experimental advanced superconducting research center — the so-called “artificial sun” — is set to occur next month.

The discharge, expected about Aug. 15, will be conducted at Science Island in Hefei, in east China’s Anhui Province, the Peoples Daily reported Monday.

Scientists told the newspaper a successful test will mean the world’s first nuclear fusion device of its kind will be ready to go into actual operation, the newspaper said.

The plasma discharge will draw international attention since some scientists are concerned with risks involved in such a process. But Chinese researchers involved in the project say any radiation will cease once the test is completed.

The experiment will take place in a structure made of reinforced concrete, with five-foot-thick walls and a three-foot-thick roof.

A perilous excursion into the distant past, starting seven whole weeks ago.

Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel: Everything You Need To Know

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

As the tv networks give unlimited airtime to Israel’s apologists, the message rolls out that no nation, least of all Israel, can permit bombardment or armed incursion across its borders without retaliation.

The guiding rule in this tsunami of drivel is that the viewers should be denied the slightest access to any historical context, or indeed to anything that happened prior to June 28, which was when the capture of an Israeli soldier and the killing of two others by Hamas hit the headlines, followed soon thereafter by an attack by a unit of Hezbollah’s fighters.

Memory is supposed to stop in its tracks at June 28, 2006.

Let’s go on a brief excursion into pre-history. I’m talking about June 20, 2006, when Israeli aircraft fired at least one missile at a car in an attempted extrajudicial assassination attempt on a road between Jabalya and Gaza City. The missile missed the car. Instead it killed three Palestinian children and wounded 15.

Back we go again to June 13, 2006. Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a van in another attempted extrajudicial assassination. The successive barrages killed nine innocent Palestinians.

Now we’re really in the dark ages, reaching far, far back to June 9, 2006, when Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing 8 civilians and injuring 32.

That’s just a brief trip down Memory Lane, and we trip over the bodies of twenty dead and forty-seven wounded, all of them Palestinians, most of them women and children.

Israel regrets… But no! Israel doesn’t regret in the least. Most of the time it doesn’t even bother to pretend to regret. It says, “We reserve the right to slaughter Palestinians whenever we want. We reserve the right to assassinate their leaders, crush their homes, steal their water, tear out their olive groves, and when they try to resist we call them terrorists intent on wrecking the ‘peace process’”.

Now Israel says it wants to wipe out Hezbollah. It wishes no harm to the people of Lebanon, just so long as they’re not supporters of Hezbollah, or standing anywhere in the neighborhood of a person or a house or a car or a truck or a road or a bus or a field, or a power station or a port that might, in the mind of an Israeli commander or pilot, have something to do with Hezbollah. In any of those eventualities all bets are off. You or your wife or your mother or your baby get fried.

Israel regrets… But no! As noted above, it doesn’t regret in the least. Neither does George Bush, nor Condoleezza Rice nor John Bolton who is the moral savage who brings shame on his country each day that he sits as America’s ambassador (unconfirmed) at the UN and who has just told the world that a dead Israel civilian is worth a whole more in terms of moral outrage than a Lebanese one.

None of them regrets. They say Hezbollah is a cancer in the body of Lebanon. Sometimes, to kill the cancer, you end up killing the body. Or bodies. Bodies of babies. Lots of them. Go to the website fromisraeltolebanon.info and take a look. Then sign the petition on the site calling on the governments of the world to stop this barbarity.

You can say that Israel brought Hezbollah into the world. You can prove it too, though this too involves another frightening excursion into history.

This time we have to go far, almost unimaginably far, back into history. Back to 1982, before the dinosaurs, before CNN, before Fox TV, before O’Reilly and Limbaugh. But not before the neo-cons who at that time had already crawled from the primal slime and were doing exactly what they are doing now: advising an American president to give Israel the green light to “solve its security problems” by destroying Lebanon.

In 1982 Israel had a problem. Yasir Arafat, headquartered in Beirut, was making ready to announce that the PLO was prepared to sit down with Israel and embark on peaceful, good faith negotiations towards a two-state solution.

Israel didn’t want a two-state solution, which meant — if UN resolutions were to be taken seriously — a Palestinian state right next door, with water, and contiguous territory. So Israel decided chase the PLO right out of Lebanon. It announced that the Palestinian fighters had broken the year-long cease-fire by lobbing some shells into northern Israel.

Palestinians had done nothing of the sort. I remember this very well, because Brian Urquhart, at that time assistant secretary general of the United Nations, in charge of UN observers on Israel’s northern border, invited me to his office on the 38th floor of the UN hq in mid-Manhattan and showed me all the current reports from the zone. For over a year there’d been no shelling from north of the border. Israel was lying.

With or without a pretext Israel wanted to invade Lebanon. So it did, and rolled up to Beirut. It shelled Lebanese towns and villages and bombed them from the air. Sharon’s forces killed maybe 20,000 people, and let Lebanese Christians slaughter hundreds of Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Chatilla.

The killing got so bad that even Ronald Reagan awoke from his slumbers and called Tel Aviv to tell Israel to stop. Sharon gave the White House the finger by bombing Beirut at the precise times — 2.42 and 3.38 — of two UN resolutions calling for a peaceful settlement on the matter of Palestine.

When the dust settled over the rubble, Israel bunkered down several miles inside Lebanese sovereign territory, which it illegally occupied, in defiance of all UN resolutions, for years, supervising a brutal local militia and running its own version of Abu Graibh, the torture center at the prison of Al-Khiam.

Occupy a country, torture its citizens and in the end you face resistance. In Israel’s case it was Hezbollah, and in the end Hezbollah ran Israel out of Lebanon, which is why a lot of Lebanese regard Hezbollah not as terrorists but as courageous liberators.

The years roll by and Israel does its successful best to destroy all possibility of a viable two-state solution. It builds illegal settlements. It chops up Palestine with Jews-only roads. It collars all the water. It cordons off Jerusalem. It steals even more land by bisecting Palestinian territory with its “fence”. Anyone trying to organize resistance gets jailed, tortured, or blown up.

Sick of their terrible trials, Palestinians elect Hamas, whose leaders make it perfectly clear that they are ready to deal on the basis of the old two-state solution, which of course is the one thing Israel cannot endure. Israel doesn’t want any “peaceful solution” that gives the Palestinians anything more than a few trashed out acres surrounded with barbed wire and tanks, between the Israeli settlements whose goons can murder them pretty much at will.

So here we are, 24 years after Sharon did his best to destroy Lebanon in 1982, and his heirs are doing it all over again. Since they can’t endure the idea of any just settlement for Palestinians, it’s the only thing they know how to do. Call Lebanon a terror-haven and bomb it back to the stone age. Call Gaza a terror-haven and bomb its power plant, first stop on the journey back to the stone age. Bomb Damascus. Bomb Teheran.

Of course they won’t destroy Hezbollah. Every time they kill another Lebanese family, they multiply hatred of Israel and support for Hezbollah. They’ve even unified the parliament in Baghdad, which just voted unanimously — Sunnis and Shi’ites and Kurds alike — to deplore Israel’s conduct and to call for a ceasefire.

I hope you’ve enjoyed these little excursions into history, even though history is dangerous, which is why the US press gives it a wide birth. But even without the benefit of historical instruction, a majority of Americans in CNN’s instant poll –- about 55 per cent out of 800,000 as of midday, July 19 — don’t like what Israel is up to.

Dislike is one thing, but at least in the short term it doesn’t help much. Israel’s 1982 attack on Lebanon grew unpopular in the US, after the first few days. But forcing the US to pressure Israel to settle the basic problem takes political courage, and virtually no US politician is prepared to buck the Israel lobby, however many families in Lebanon and Gaza may be sacrificed on the altar of such cowardice.

Below is a picture with Lord Macaulays short speech to Parliament dated 1835. Thanks F. Click on the image if it is unclear.

Sadly the truth of this philosophy still runs rampant in the world today.

one of the more popular pakistani islamic feminists known in the past couple of decades, farhat hashmi is being deported from canada back to pakistan. the story has been revealed in the fantastic magazine macleans.

A controversial Pakistani scholar living in Canada who, critics charge, teaches her female students a fundamentalist brand of Islam promoting polygamy and subservience to men, remains here illegally some nine months after immigration officials demanded she leave the country, federal court documents obtained by Maclean’s reveal.

Farhat Hashmi arrived in October 2004 on a visitor’s visa, and has twice been denied the work permit she sought to teach her interpretation of the Koran in Canada. But she has nevertheless established a school where she lectures to mostly young, middle-class women from mainstream Muslim families, not only from across the country but also from the U.S. and as far away as Australia.

keep reading. it gets better.

a site which attempts to index the history of karachi once again. it’s a very good attempt. the site itself is an extremely traditional static html website which made me lost interest after a few minutes unfortunately. good luck in growing your website and hopefully and you can fill it up with as much information as possible.

link via asifnama

every. episode. ever.

welcome to the new age of wireless my friends. things will become fairly seamless pretty soon.

A chip the size of a grain of rice that can store 100 pages of text and swaps data via wireless has been developed by Hewlett-Packard. The chip contains memory, modem, antenna and microprocessor. The tiny chip was small enough to embed in almost any object, said HP. The chip could be used to ensure drugs have not been counterfeited, on patient wristbands in hospitals or to add sounds or video to postcards, said HP.

here ladies and gentlemen, you will find the finest craftsmenship ever in the automobile industry. i present the world’s top 10 most expensive cars.

i believe the politically correct term lately is executive assistant.

blogspot and typepad and geocities are banned by the indian government as well. i guess they had to follow suit because the pakistan ban has been in place for quite a while now. as always, no explanation given by anyone whatsoever.

edited to add: it seems the ban is in place after the mumbai blasts. anyway, to circumvent you can go here, or as always you can use pkblogs.

ayn rand’s atlas shrugged, to be made into a movie. this should be rocking.

where all are you comfortable taking a dump? i realize this is a very personal question. a lot of people can go just about anywhere. other people require their own little private hole in their own home. it’s all about comfort levels. here is a picture of a public crapper in switzerland. i personally need my own washroom, and own lota. unless in dire straits, i won’t go anywhere else.

nice isn’t it. click here or the image above to find out what it looks like inside and THEN tell me whether you’d be able to take a dump in it or not.

of course you all remember my previous poll.

found on koolstuffs.net

great round up on 3qd of the world’s news.

The terrrible hotel that inspired Fawlty Towers, the funniest TV show ever made about bad hotels, has been remade as a four-star boutique hotel.

Under new ownership since February, the hotel’s luxury facelift has ushered in a new ground-floor swimming pool and al fresco dining area, a luxurious lounge and a conservatory. Ceilings have been raised and Italian chandeliers installed, while over 40 skip-loads of rubbish have been removed.

The character of Basil Fawlty was inspired by a former manager at the hotel; he gave John Cleese and the Monty Python team a frosty welcome when they booked in 1971. The ferocious host berated them for not holding their knives and forks correctly and threw one of their briefcases over a wall believing it could be a time bomb.

via BB

As seen by the Germans

As seen by the French

As seen by the Italians

As seen by the Americans

As seen in Hong Kong

People stopping to smell the roses can now take that sweet floral fragrance home with them or even send it to a faraway grandmother thanks to a new gadget in Japan that records and replicates the world’s odours.

The new device, developed by scientists at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, analyzes smells through 15 sensors, records the odour’s recipe in digital format and then reproduces the scent by mixing 96 chemicals and vapourizing the result. Creator Takamichi Nakamoto says the technology will have applications in food and fragrance industries where companies want to replicate odours.

But it could also be a boon for the digital world, allowing smells can be recorded in one place - by sensors in a mobile phone, for instance - and transmitted to appreciative noses halfway around the world…

From a very interesting NY Times article by Barry Bearak and Stephanie Sinclair:

The drought has since passed, but the poverty remains, as does the widespread custom of early marriage. Some Afghans readily use their daughters to settle debts and assuage disputes. Polygamy is practiced. A man named Mohammed Fazal, 45, told Sinclair that village elders had urged him to take his second wife, 13-year-old Majabin, in lieu of money owed him by the girl’s father. The two men had been gambling at cards while also ingesting opium and hashish. …

On the day she witnessed the engagement party of 11-year-old Ghulam Haider to 40-year-old Faiz Mohammed, Sinclair discreetly took the girl aside. “What are you feeling today?” the photographer asked. “Nothing,” the bewildered girl answered. “I do not know this man. What am I supposed to feel?”

star trek vs. star wars.

the latest trailer.

Found on boingboing

US political bloggers paid lots of attention to the Madrid 3/11 bombings and the London 7/7 bombings. Now Bombay is attacked by terrorists — similar methods, similar scale — and barely a mention.

Doesn’t this story have important ramifications for American foreign policy? If the attacks were mounted by a Pakistan based organization, it could move two nuclear countries closer to an armed confrontation. If it was mounted by Al-Qaeda, that would be significant as well. And no matter who was involved, another attack on public transportation is important for domestic debates about anti-terror funding.

Weren’t bloggers supposed to be way ahead of the MSM? In this case at least, they’re way behind.

Link to full text of his post on “South Asian diaspora” blog Sepia Mutiny.

Today’s New York Times reports on new developments in neuroprosthetics, implants enabling the control of technology like robotics and computers with your thoughts. From the NYT:

In separate experiments, the first person to receive the implant, Matthew Nagle, was able to move a cursor, open e-mail, play a simple video game called Pong and draw a crude circle on the screen. He could change the channel or volume of a television set, move a robot arm somewhat, and open and close a prosthetic hand.

Although his cursor control was sometimes wobbly, the basic movements were not hard to learn. “I pretty much had that mastered in four days,’’ Mr. Nagle, now 26, said in a telephone interview from the New England Sinai Hospital and Rehabilitation Center in Stoughton, Mass., where he lives. He said the implant did not cause any pain…

The sensor measures 4 millimeters — about one sixth of an inch — on a side and contains 100 tiny electrodes. The device was implanted in the area of Mr. Nagle’s motor cortex that is responsible for arm movement, and was connected to a pedestal that protruded from the top of his skull.

The results of the experiments, conducted by Brown University professor John Donoghue and his team, were published in this week’s issue of the scientific journal Nature. The magazine’s companion Web site has also published a free “Web Focus” that includes interviews, video of the experiments, and a collection of key papers in the field of brain-machine interfaces. Highly recommended browsing.

Link to Nature’s Web Focus, Link to 2005 article from Wired about Nagle and brain implants

Also, an earlier link on this blog about mental control over physical objects.

found via BB

sorry i’ve been pulling some disappearing acts lately. been a bit busy with social life and jazz. also been focusing a bit on my other blog at metroblogging. do check it out if you got time. anyway, let’s see what we got in stock. anyway, let’s see what we got in stock since the last time i posted.

• Berlin’s top World Cup official shot himself in the head just hours after the tournament ended and is now fighting for his life, police say. Juergen Kiessling, 65, was rushed to hospital from his house in Reinickendorf, a suburb of Berlin, after a neighbour heard the shot. The motive for the apparent suicide attempt is not yet clear. German media report that he left two suicide notes - one for his daughter alone, and one for his family…
• Syd Barrett, one of the original members of legendary rock group Pink Floyd, has died at the age of 60 from complications arising from diabetes. The guitarist was invited to join Pink Floyd by Waters in 1965 but left three years later after only one album with his mental state affected by drugs. “He died very peacefully a couple of days ago,” said the band’s spokeswoman. After he finally drifted out of the music scene, his whereabouts were unknown for two decades, until he turned out to be living with his mother…
• oh yeah, this happened too.

and you thought yo-yo’s were just for kids.

i’ve removed the embedded player. it sucked. this is the link.

finally. the damn car drives itself. about time the inventions caught up to the predictions.

some quotes that someone said about islam and now someone explain to me why almost half the population of a certain country still thinks that it’s warring against a certain religion.

here’s an indepth review of krrish. i don’t plan on watching it. my wife may convince me to. that will not be my fault.