Swimming or Sinking in Annapolis?

The Israeli and Palestinian leaders committed themselves to negotiate a peace treaty by the end of 2008. Will it happen? My guess is that it will be difficult and it may tie in quite directly with who is in, or appears to be in, the White House.

The most optimistic aspect of the negotiation is that the peace process is revived from the past seven years of dormancy.

The key issues:

*the dismantling of Israeli settlements in the West Bank

*the borders of a Palestinian state

+the status of Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees who left, or were forced to leave, their homes in Israel.

It remains to be seen if Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, can settle their differences while the regional struggle against extremism seems to be raging in the Middle East.

Interesting, the conclave brought about the highest-level official contacts yet between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which do not have diplomatic relations. Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, vowed that he would not shake Mr. Olmert’s hand.

According to news reports, Olmert looked directly at Prince Saud and said that Israel aspired to “normalization” with the Arab world.

Olmert stated:

you know that religious fanaticism and national extremism are a perfect recipe for domestic instability and violence, for bitterness and ultimately for the disintegration of the very foundations of coexistence based on tolerance and mutual acceptance.

Prince Saud was less diplomatic in response as he stated: "the time has come for Israel to put its trust in peace after it has gambled on war for decades without success.” He asked that Israel withdraw from the West Bank.

Bush waved his magic wand and stated that this was an opportunity to advance democracy in a region torn by conflict, not to mention filled now with United States troops. Bush said: “And when liberty takes root in the rocky soil of the West Bank and Gaza, it will inspire millions across the Middle East who want their societies built on freedom and peace and hope.”

If only that were true. It is more likely that any voting in most of the Middle East would be a vote against liberty.

Where Should Americans Be Shopping During the Holidays

Sears Responds to the Needs of Deployed Associates
Sears has once again extended the time period for its military pay differential and benefits continuation policy.

Sears salaried and full-time associates who have been called to active duty since September 11, 2001, are now eligible for continuing pay and benefits for up to 60 months, an increase from the previous 36-month policy.

Under the policy, Sears pays the difference between the associate’s Sears pay and military pay. Sears military absentees can continue to participate in the company’s life insurance, medical and dental programs for themselves and their dependents for up to five years. While deployed, associates are also eligible for annual merit increases, incentive pay and stock options. The company also will hold a comparable position for up to five years.

As an employer, Sears has been recognized for its generous military leave policy. By law, companies are required to provide deployed employees access to 18 months of continued medical coverage at the employee’s expense. Sears’ policy goes well beyond the law’s requirements and is part of its long-time historical support of the military. As far back as 1917, Sears records reflect that associates were paid their normal wages when they were absent on military duty during certain military engagements.

Cf. Sears Policy

I recently became aware of Sears policy from a friend's email. By shopping at this establishment Americans can practically, and helpfully, support service personnel which sounds like a great idea to me.

The Chinese Burden in Africa

When the West was colonizing Africa the world agrees that this is indicative of their imperial, jingoistic misadventures.

So, what if China creates a misadventure?

Catumbela, in Angola, is the abandoned site of a group of Chinese railway engineers and laborers. The team attempted to build a railroad but without success. The $2 billion project washed out like so many African roads hampered by flash floods, mud, and land mines.

About the Chinese, one Angolan soldier guarding the abandoned site stated: "They're gone. . . . I don't know when they're coming back—they ate their dogs and left."

The railroad stalled in a high-level dispute between the Angolan and Chinese governments, along with a $2 billion contract to build an oil refinery. The American Embassy reports that the project will most likely be awarded to American company, Bechtel.

However, China's has had a good run in Africa. To wit,

*oil from the Sudan

*timber from Guinea

*mining copper and zinc from the Congo

*a major stake in South Africa's Standard Bank

*the Chinese are far out pacing their Western rivals. China has opened more embassies in Africa than the United States

*in 2006, trade between Africa and China topped $50 billion. By 2010 it's projected to reach $100 billion.

On the negative side though China has had kidnappings, killings, and death threats that plague its workers. 17 Chinese oil workers were slaughtered last year. Angola is China's biggest supplier of crude oil, but the land is a hazardous, corrupt country as well.

There is no fraternization between Chinese and Angolans. If a worker becomes romantically or sexually involved with a local, he's on a slow boat to Shanghai.

Racism is common, both sides refer to the other as monkeys or pigs.

Beijing may express an interest in Angola, but that move may only attract rivals. American firms Bechtel, KBR, ExxonMobil, and Chevron have moved in as well.

Other nations are making their presence felt. The Brazilian firm Odebrecht competes with the railroad as they are building a highway. South African companies are repairing the electrical grid, and the Portuguese are involved in construction projects.

The Chinese are finding a Chinese Burden all of their own.

Its Not Just the Money

Cyber Monday is not just about the money but consider the investment of time that working people devote to buying online, and at work.

This year, U.S. online sales could top $700 Million.

This is a new record for online spending, according to comScore Inc.

If comScore's prediction proves correct, the figure for Cyber Monday would be a 15% increase over last year's sales of $608 million.

ComScore said the hottest product category was video games, consoles and accessories, which was up 134% from last year.

Internet performance analysis company Keynote Systems Inc. said that one-third of the 30 major brick and mortar retail sites it monitors for its holiday retail index showed significant slowdowns. Site outages caused purchasers at sites such as The Buy.com and Lowe's Home Improvement to abandon their purchases. The extensive day long outages of years past, such as when I managed online sites in the '90s and into '01 seem to be passe.

The conclusion seems to be that people are more loyal to their purchases and that they wait to use their faster online experience at work to buy.

Ian Hunter Slide Show

Anti-Insurgent Graphic Creations

The anti-insurgent sentiment in the U.S. has spawned graphic creations as a response.

 

 

 

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, An Excerpt

 

The central theme of this book is that culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilization identities, are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War world. The five parts of this book elaborate corollaries to this main proposition.

Part I: For the first time in history global politics is both multipolar and multicivilizational; modernization is distinct from Westernization and is producing neither a universal civilization in any meaningful sense nor the Westernization of non-Western societies.

Part II: The balance of power among civilizations is shifting: the West is declining in relative influence; Asian civilizations are expanding their economic, military, and political strength; Islam is exploding demographically with destabilizing consequences for Muslim countries and their neighbors; and non-Western civilizations generally are reaffirming the value of their own cultures.

Part III: A civilization-based world order is emerging: societies sharing cultural affinities cooperate with each other; efforts to shift societies from one civilization to another are unsuccessful; and countries group themselves around the lead or core states of their civilization.

Part IV: The West's universalist pretensions increasingly bring it into conflict with other civilizations, most seriously with Islam and China; at the local level fault line wars, largely between Muslims and non-Muslims, generate "kin-country rallying," the threat of broader escalation, and hence efforts by core states to halt these wars.

Part V: The survival of the West depends on Americans reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies. Avoidance of a global war of civilizations depends on world leaders accepting and cooperating to maintain the multicivilizational character of global politics.

Not a Politically Correct Music Site

This is not politically correct music but Age of Liberty portrays itself as an alternative to the usual Hollywood and left-leaning entertainment industry.

"Stupid in America," a Report by John Stossel

A report by John Stossel entitled "Stupid in America" is sobering, and scary.

About This Video

20-20 investigation by John Stossel entitled "Stupid in America" highlighting some of the flaws with the education system in the United States.

The story started out when identical tests were given to high school students in New Jersey and in Belgium. The Belgian kids cleaned the American kids' clocks. The Belgian kids called the American students "stupid", which gave the piece its name.

Jay Greene, author of "Education Myths," points out that "If money were the solution, the problem would already be solved. We've doubled per pupil spending, adjusting for inflation, over the last 30 years, and yet schools aren't better."

Lebanon in Chaos

In a development straight out of how not to elect a leader the Lebanese presidency ends in chaos. President Emile Lahoud leaves office refusing to recognize the Prime Minister's government.

There is now no elected successor and a bitter dispute looms over who is in power.

The pro-Syrian and anti-Western Lahoud left the presidential palace and he issued an order that the army should take over control.

However, pro-Western Prime Minister Fouad Siniora rejected the move and says that under the constitution he and his cabinet are in temporary power.

The president is elected by parliament, but a vote was scuttled by the pro-Syrian opposition who did not allow the necessary quorum to be achieved.

The election of a president requires a two-thirds majority, which means that the pro-Western ruling bloc--with only a slim majority--could not force its preferred candidate through parliament.

The streets reflected the chaotic mood with the army deployed in force and schools closed.

The US, Russia, Syria and Iran have all been intensely involved.

Russia should provide regional leadership and the U.S. should take a step back.

New Far Rightist Party Gains Ground in Germany

 

The National Democratic Party (NPD) is a neo-Nazi German entity that is gaining ground.

According to some Social Democrats, the Party is anti-Semitic and racist. It opposes a multi-party system and is undemocratic.

The NPD is prone to weekend demonstrations involving radical, violence-prone neo-Nazis.

In fact, the NPD was created in West Germany more than 40 years ago, mainly by Nazi war veterans. It lost members and direction until German reunification in 1990. As unemployment and unhappiness increased in the old east, the NPD gained ground.

Maybe the Party should look up how that whole unemployment and ill-will thing worked out in 1930s Germany.

American Students: As Good As Slovakia and Estonia

Students in Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan significantly outperform American students on math and science tests.

The study's author is Gary Phillips, chief scientist at the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit independent scientific research firm.

Eighth-grade students were compared with peers in 45 countries.

American students trailed the top students and were comparable to pupils in Slovakia and Estonia, but they were well above those in countries like Egypt, Chile, and Saudi Arabia.

The highest-performing state in math was Massachusetts; in science, it was North Dakota. The new study shows that average math achievement in Massachusetts was lower than in the leading Asian nations and Belgium.

Mississippi was the lowest-performing state in both math and science.

Is this really where the U.S. should be?

There Must Be 50 Ways . . . To Tell a Story With Web 2.0 Tools

There are so many more possibilities to tell a story; and, Web 2.0 Web 2.0 tools have increased the promise of the Web to relate stories in an effective manner.

Excellent Free Cleaner

An excellent and helpful (did I mention free!) tool is linked here.

Paul Berman Biography, Terror and Liberalism

Paul Berman is an American author and journalist who writes on politics and literature. His articles have been published in The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review and Slate, and he is the author of several books, including A Tale of Two Utopias and Terror and Liberalism.

Berman received his undergraduate education from Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1971. He has reported on Nicaragua's civil wars, Mexico's elections, and the Czech Republic's Velvet Revolution. Currently he is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, a professor of journalism and distinguished writer in residence at New York University, and a member of the editorial board of Dissent.

Totalitarianism and Islamic Fundamentalism

In Terror and Liberalism, Berman suggests that the appeal of totalitarian movements emanated from liberalism's apparent failure in the aftermath of the First World War. Movements like Fascism, Nazism, Falangism, and Communism all share, according to Berman, two essential similarities. Firstly, they envision themselves as a force being attacked by barbarians who can only be defended by the internal purification of the movement. Berman sees the Communist striving for ideological purity, the Falangist pursuit of religious purity, and the Nazi pursuit of racial purity as being related efforts in this regard. Together with this purifying impulse, Berman argues that these totalitarian movements share a similar nihilist strand.

Berman then tries to trace these commonalities between the various totalitarian ideologies into the modern Islamic world. He splits Islamic thought into two broad categories: Pan-Arabism and Islamic fundamentalism. Pan-Arabist movements like the Ba'ath Party, he suggests, was influenced by traditional European totalitarian thought. In the Islamic fundamentalist movement, Berman sees the re-emergence of the nihilist strand in the form of suicide bombings and the celebration of martyrdom.

History of the 1968 Generation

Berman's A Tale of Two Utopias and Power and the Idealists are the first two parts of a history of the so-called Generation of 1968 (of which he was a member). He argues that packaged together with the liberal ideals in this movement were decidedly disturbing elements. Joschka Fischer, for example, the 1968 activist who would later become the leader of the German Green Party and Foreign Minister, decided that there was in fact the presence of anti-Semitic impulses in this movement when he saw a fellow activist participate in the Entebbe hijacking. The hijackers split the passengers by religion, with Jews on the one side and non-Jews on the other, with the intention to kill all of the former. Similarly, Berman tracks major figures like Bernard Kouchner - the later founder of Doctors Without Borders - a member of the 1968 Generation who would later marry active improvement of human rights to established political goals.

At the close of the book, Berman considers the effect of the war in Iraq on these graduates of '68. He suggests that the war split the movement greatly, with many now deeply aware of the dramatic excesses of the regime of Sadaam Hussein, as well as the potential negative consequences if such a dictator remained in power. Nonetheless, they were deeply concerned by the arguments offered by the Bush Administration. Though his fellow activists were split, Berman argues that the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and 2003 invasion of Iraq were justified by the doctrine of "liberal interventionism" - intervention to safeguard and promote liberal democratic freedoms. Some have grouped Berman with neo-conservatives for these positions. Others believe he is more closely aligned with traditional liberal internationalism because of his disdain for the neo-conservative policies of George W. Bush.

Are Palestinian Kids Really Suffering Most From Outsiders?

If a recent report is to be believed, 93% of Palestinian kids suffer domestic violence and this would indicate that outsiders are the least of their problems.

New Family, a pro-family rights organization, reported these disturbing statistics in its annual 2007 report.

Their sources included the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion (PCPO). According to these sources, 93.3% of Palestinian children have experienced domestic violence. Only 52.2% of Palestinian families feel they can provide a safe environment for their children.

Undernourishment causes 10% of these Palestinian children to suffer impaired development. These people are poor; I'm not sure you can blame all this on Israel. The leading cause of infant deaths in Gaza is low body weight. The infant mortality rate is three times greater than that of Israel, and also higher than the rate in the Western world.

The study revealed that 95.1% of Palestinian girls spend the majority of their free time at home, in contrast to 80.5% of Palestinian boys, making the home the only place where female children suffer more violence than males. Because of family poverty, 73.4% of these children work for their families without pay.

Palestinian suffering sparks conflict and Israel opens a window into Middle Eastern Islam, abusive and poor.

Iranian Censors At It Again

The Iranians are out to get the latest damaging reading, this time a novel by Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Marquez almost got away with the dastardly deed--until censors actually translated its title for what it is.

The actual title is: Memories of My Melancholy Whores but this initially slipped by the censors and thus was published in Farsi as Memories of My Melancholy Sweethearts which is a horse of a different color.

The uncensored first edition of 5,000 had sold out before the authorities corrected their mistake and banned the work.

Violent Oppression of Women in Islam

The violent oppression of women according to the dictates of Islam has no correspondence in the West.

UK Preachers from Saudi Arabia and the UAE: Undercover Report

The deception is real because numerous of these groups are praised for their inter-faith efforts. However, British journalists went undercover to report the actual radical preaching done by Saudi and UAE imams.

On Janet Murray's work Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace

Janet Murray's work Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, asks whether the computer can provide the basis for an expressive narrative form, just as print technology supported the development of the novel and film technology supported the evolution of movies. I don't believe it can.

In fact, I think the future of the computer is impossible to predict due to the innovative uses the computer is being used for. Murray, on the other hand, provides an optimistic answer. Murray’s analysis rests on an understanding of the computer as a medium of representation with a distinct set of properties. I don't think it does.

The computer is not procedural, as she argues, but dispersive. The computer is often participatory, as she argues, but it is also just as easily isolating. One of the most interesting points of the work is the connection between research and artificial intelligence (AI) with cultural forms such as games, movies, literature, and television. The most promising of her connections is that between AI and games.

Nonetheless, Murray’s main point is that the new computer formats expand the possibilities of expression available for storytelling which has not been proven true as indicated by the failure of any major computer work to gain literary acceptance. Indeed, one of the major literary contributions of the computer age is one that for all intents and purposes predated computers. In 1984, William Gibson contributed Neuromancer which depicted the developing human-machine interface created by the widespread use of computers and computer network.