romunov’s blog et al

This story reminded me of a man in my area who was homeless. As you can imagine, he had to sleep outside or in unheated quarters if he found any. To circumvent this, he just took a picture of Josip Broz - Tito, went into a public place and ripped it into pieces. Needless to say, he had a warm, 3 meals/day quarters arranged for the winter.

Timothy Wade Pinkston threatened to go to Washington and shoot Bush in August while he was committed to the psychiatric unit of St. Joseph’s Hospital. According to an affidavit, he repeated the threat to Secret Service agents, saying he didn’t like the president’s foreign policy or his handling of the war in Iraq.

 Mentally ill or not, the man still has a point, ay?

Upon my return I find out that one of the best comedians, George Carlin, had died in LA at age 71. A very open minded, critical and funny person (see his American dream). To me, he wasn’t as much as a comedian as a preacher (similar to Chris Rock). He was one of the top 3 people I wanted to meet in my life time. I seat just cleared and Kevin Costner made the list. He will be missed.

This is a bit long read (for some). I’ve highlighted (in italics) the parts I find interesting. It’s an example of a previous generation facing hard times.

After the war, while the Joe Louis story was turning into a bitter tragedy as he was relentlessly hounded by the IRS, Max Schmeling became wealthy as the German face of the Coca-Cola company when he was tapped by an executive who was a former New York boxing commissioner. Coca-Cola, based in Atlanta, had never approached Joe Louis for promotional purposes, despite his supposed role as American Icon; his own soda, Joe Louis Punch, was a financial disaster. Eventually running forty bottling facilities in Germany, the German boxer used his fortune to establish the Max Schmeling Foundation for the provision of aid to the poor and elderly. He helped his old rival Joe Louis with both medical bills and funeral expenses. Cultural historian David Margolick wrote, "The man who was malleable enough to fit into Weimar Germany and the Third Reich with equal ease now became an examplar of West Germany, of its economic miracle and its fledgling democracy."

Shortly before his death, Schmeling said, "The time of the Nazis was unimaginably horrible. Everything must be done to ensure that nothing sympathetic about that regime is ever said. Because there was nothing good about it." Before we can judge Max Schmeling, each one of us must ask ourselves, "What would I do if I lived in a time where the country of my birth made a wrong turn? What if my fellow citizens quietly went along with a government I knew to be corrupt? What if my government was making political decisions in collusion with business leaders? What if my government was tampering with the votes of its citizens to remain in power, and disenfranchising some segments of the population? What if my government had a national news media outlet that promulgated its political policies as fact? What if my government was suborning due process, habeas corpus, and privacy rights in order to defend the country from a shadowy, racialized enemy?

What if my government created a place to gather individuals who they considered enemies of the state? What if these individuals were members of a minority religion? What if these individuals were held for extended periods without legal rights in the camps where they were concentrated? Would I have the courage to go against my own government, against my friends and neighbors, against my entire nation? Would I flee the place of my birth, knowing that there would be retaliation against any family or friends I left behind? Would I have the strength of character to give up my home, my career, and everything in my life to risk imprisonment or death?" These are some of the questions faced by Max Schmeling over the course of his career, and the way in which he answered them makes him neither a villain nor a hero, but simply a human being struggling with difficult choices in a difficult time.

Palestinians in the occupied territories have been facing waves of violence from IDF as well as the Israeli settlers that moved in. Usually, these acts would go left unnoticed (while you would hear a Palestinian spit at an Israeli on CNN), but the times are slowly changing. The organization credit for arming Palestinians is called B’Tselem, and they have distributed 100 ornaments (aka cameras) to Palestinians who can document their daily lives.

Here are some excerpt from the article I find interesting:

"We know from experience what happens as soon as settler move into the heart of Palestinian areas," explains Issa Amro, the B’Tselem official responsible for the volatile Hebron sector in the southern West Bank

"They (the settlers) make the life of the Palestinians impossible. But if their neighbours film them, they think twice before harrassing them," he adds.

"The cameras have above all a deterrent effect; they protect Palestinians. They also enable the public to see incidents which otherwise are invisible and whose veracity can always be challenged," he added.

Last Tuesday, two settlers were arrested after being filmed beating up two Palestinian shepherds, an elderly man and his wife, near Hebron. The incident was made public the previous week when the British BBC broadcast video showing young masked settlers apparently attacking the couple with clubs.

"The settlers gave us a 10-minute warning to clear off from the land," Thamam al-Nawaja, 58, told the BBC after spending three days in hospital following the attack.

And of course:

The spokesman for the Jewish community in Hebron insists the images provided by B’Tselem don’t prove anything.

"Today it’s very easy to manipulate pictures," claims David Wilber. "The videos don’t show what happened a few minutes earlier. Perhaps what was filmed was in response to provocation."

 Sure, all you need is a lot of fast computers, expensive software and skilled people to manipulate the video. But other than that, it’s like drawing stars in the sand.

Link.

What I love about field work is that you get to encounter a bunch of animals. After running into a cow calf that has escaped from the pasture, this was just behind the curve. Can you imagine what he/she’s thinking? "I smell something funny…".

As soon as the weather cleans up, I’m off hunting for Euphydryas maturna, a species protected by Natura 2000. I’ll be trying to enumerate how many individuals is occuring in a certain area (transect method).

This is preparation in progress - know thy terrain.

I understand that some people will call me anti-Israeli, rasism or even an infidel, but I just have to post these two stories.

Israel is often cited as the "only" democracy in the Middle East. It may be true that they have Knesset, elections… but so does Zimbabwe. As some of you might know, Israel is in conflict with Palestine. They have not been going along for about 50 years now. The conflict has engulfed a few generations on both sides, which only perpetuates the suffering, predominantly on the Palestinian side. Due to construction of the wall and military check-points, Palestine became the biggest ghetto in recorded human history, counting more than a million inhabitants. If my memory serves me correct, the second largest was Warsaw with about 400.000 people.

As one can imagine, due to the longevity of the conflict, hot blood can be present on both sides. While the Palestinian terror acts (often cover ops by Mossad) are well recorded, even by the Western media, Israeli rasism goes unnoticed. In lieu of this fact, I’m copy pasting just two stories demonstrating rasism in Israel. Think of it what you will…

After an Israeli human rights group handed out small video cameras to Palestinians in the West bank, those cameras have been used to capture a number of attacks that would otherwise have gone unreported. In the latest example, an attack by a group of Israeli settlers on a Palestinian farming family Sunday was filmed, and the video released on the internet.

Read more about Israeli "KKK" here.

The village told media sources in Bethlehem that the settlers threatened to send the Israeli army to get Melissa out using force, which was done today. Witnesses said that the army surrounded the couple’s home and then kidnapped the two, and took them to an unknown location.

Read more how IDF controls who gets married to whom here.