Skeptical About ‘The message From The Streets Of Tehran’
Nazenin Ansati and Jonathan Paris claim that “many in the [Iranian] Green Movement [...] would like to see the international community exert pressure on the regime through a progressive set of smart, vigorous and targeted sanctions and more forceful advocacy of human rights” (“The message from the streets of Tehran“, IHT, Nov 7).
But haven’t “targeted sanctions” against the Iranian regime and a seemingly perennial “advocacy of human rights” been in place for decades? And what would any Iranian internal opposition movement ever gain from associating itself with foreign Powers, given the anti-Western-Governments paranoia widespread among the ruling classes, and the evidence of History suggesting that foreign intervention in Iran has invariably been for the worst?
Not Much Hope For Journalism Standards Worldwide
I was already disappointed enough after learning a few details about British journalism in Nick Davies’ “Flat Earth News”. And I better reserve my comments about Italian journalism. Could it have gotten any worse?
It could. And it did. Here’s a story from Randy Cassingham’s (unmissable) “This is True” (28 June 2009):
PICTURE THIS: The magazine Paris Match announced its annual prize for student photojournalism. The winners, Guillaume Chauvin and Remi Hubert from the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts, were handed their prize: a check for 5,000 euros (US$7,050), for their investigative report on student poverty. The magazine published the photos, showing how students had to resort to prostitution, or digging in the trash for food, to survive. “We pushed the cliches to the limit,” Chauvin and Hubert said. “We thought the whole thing was so hackneyed that it could never win.” The real subject of their project, they announced at the award ceremony, was to use staged photos “to call into question the inner workings of the attitude of the kind of media which portrays human distress with complacency and voyeurism.” The “crestfallen” judges still managed to applaud, reporters say — but Paris Match stopped payment on the prize check. “There was nothing in the rules of the competition to say that rigged photos were banned,” Hubert told a reporter. (London Independent) …No worries: the project should easily qualify to win the 10,000-euro Striking the Match Prize.
©2009 Randy Cassingham, excerpted from This is True with the author’s permission
Yes, there is a very good point in blogging!!
Unimpressed By Ares 1-X
What about the Ares 1-X launch? What we have seen is the 480M$ demonstration that a Space Shuttle’s Solid Rocket Booster can fly on its own. A step towards a Moon mission dream? Methinks not.
It’d be vastly cheaper to develop just a capsule to launch on top of the Ariane-5. Or better yet, order 200+ Soyuz flights from Russia.
What is missing is a really heavy launcher, not yet another reinventing of the manned rocket.
Media And Democracy In Italy – What Freedom? And Whose Freedom?
PANEL DISCUSSION IN OXFORD, 21 OCTOBER 5PM
MEDIA AND DEMOCRACY IN ITALY – WHAT FREEDOM? and WHOSE FREEDOM?
Berlusconi and the case of La Repubblica’s ten questions
Taylorian Institute, Room 2
Wednesday 21st October – 5 pm
A panel discussion organised by
Italian Studies at Oxford and the Axess Programme on Journalism and Democracy
In collaboration with the Oxford Italian Society
Chair: John Lloyd
Director of the Axess Programme, Contributing Editor of the Financial
Times and Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
Enrico Franceschini
London Correspondent and London Bureau Chief, La Repubblica
Dr. Daniele Albertazzi
Senior Lecturer in European Media, University of Birmingham
Maurizio Morabito
Press Secretary, Freedom Party (PdL), London Circle
Prof. Andrea Biondi
Secretary, Democratic Party (PD) London Circle
for more information, please contact: italianstudies@area.ox.ac.uk
(Legally) Bombing The Moon
Still not much out of the LCROSS team, victims of “HYPErspace” to say the least. Let’s entertain ourselves in the intervening time with a Forbes.com article “Bombing the Moon“. And for those in a hurry:
The LCROSS mission is an important and expensive scientific experiment. Nonetheless, comments on Web sites such as Scientific American and Nature indicate that quite a few people thought the whole venture to be some sort of outer-space vandalism. Some even wondered whether NASA might have acted illegally or violated an international law or treaty by setting out to “bomb the Moon.”
The answer is no. But while many might be surprised–dismayed, even–to hear that there is such a thing as “space law,” there are treaties governing activities in outer space, including the Moon.
Newsweek Explains Berlusconi
Eye-opening article by William Ward in Newsweek (of all places!) explaining the “miracle” called Silvio Berlusconi:
[...] As strange as this preference seems to outsiders, there are several very Italian reasons for Berlusconi’s ongoing hold on politics at home [...]
Italian voters have, in three general elections, chosen the devil they know over his dull and plodding opponents on the left. It’s not just for his showmanship; Italians also appreciate his hard work as a retail politician and electoral strategist [...]
he attempts to muzzle his opponents and highlight his achievements through the media [...] But in this he is merely following a well-trodden Italian tradition [...]
his frequent complaints that Italy’s magistrates (a highly politicized and overwhelmingly leftist bunch) have it in for him are not entirely unreasonable [...]
Sincerity Reaches Horoscopes
As mentioned in the BBC’s Radio4’s Friday Night Comedy show The News Quiz on Oct 9, 2009 (25m47s): this text has been published in free newspaper “Metro”’s horoscope section (Virgo):
You’ve been held back by too many what-if’s and and maybe’s, Virgo. You can’t foretell what’s going to happen tomorrow, next week or next year, so…why waste your time wondering?
Novel Peace Prize 2009
Oslo, October 9 (MNN) – U.S. President Barack Obama incessant mentioning of the word “peace” has been rewarded with this year’s Novel Peace Prize. “No, it’s not a mistake by a person hitting the wrong key at his laptop on a Friday night,” said an anonymous source. “The Committee simply decided it was time to reward the possible future, as it looks so much better than the actual past“.
In other news: bloggers all around the world are rejoicing. Now they know, all it takes to bag over a million dollars, is to talk about nice things.
First Law of Planetary Building
First Law of Planetary Building: no two planets will ever be alike.
Corollary #1: if two planets are almost identical, then at least one of them will have at least one outrageously peculiar feature.
Corollary #2: Universes made of perfectly identical planets are not allowed.
The First Law is manifest in the fact that each planet in the Solar System and elsewhere appears to be a unique, very specific experiment with peculiar conditions that are never repeated elsewhere. Even single satellites are all very different from one another. And if you want to top strangeness, how about Corot-7b with its clouds of minerals?
Mineral clouds
One objection could be raised about Venus and Earth, or Uranus and Neptune, as both couples look like made of identical twins. However, Venus’s hellish atmosphere and very slow, retrograde rotation are truly outrageously peculiar features; and Uranus basically lies to one side (hence corollary #1).
Corollary #2 is necessary otherwise the First Law is invalidated. It seems plausible, since the number of universes is large but not infinite.
The Mind That Is Catholic
A truly extraordinary interview to Jesuit Father James Schall on the Vatican’s Zenit, about his book “The Mind That Is Catholic: Philosophical and Political Essays“, that “explores the habits of being that allow one to use the tools of faith and reason to explore all things seen and unseen“.
Somehow, there’s lots of me in that interview. A few extracts follow:
ZENIT: What does it mean to have a mind that is Catholic? What are its key elements?
Father Schall: The mind that is Catholic is open to all sources of information, including what comes from Revelation [...] It is characteristic of the Catholic mind to insist that all that is knowable is available and considered by us in our reflections on reality.[...] We think, in the end, that what is peculiar in Catholicism is not opposed to reason but rather constitutes a completion of it. It was Aristotle who warned us that the reason we do not accept the truth even when it is presented to us is because we do not really want to know it. Knowing it would force us to change our ways. If we do not want to change our ways, we will invent a “theory” whereby we can live without the truth. The “primary” source of the Catholic mind is reality itself, including the reality of revelation.
[...] Why do these and many other thinkers “embody a mind that is Catholic?” I think it is because they take everything into account. What is peculiar to Catholicism, I have always thought, is its refusal to leave anything out. In my short book, “The Regensburg Lecture,” I was constantly astonished at the enormous range of the mind of the present Holy Father. There is simply no mind in any university or public office that can match his. He is a humble man, in fact. It is embarrassing to the world, and often to Catholic “intellectuals,” to find that its most intelligent mind is on the Chair of Peter. I have always considered this papal intellectual profundity to be God’s little joke to the modern mind.
[...] Catholicism knows that all sorts and sources of knowledge flow into its mind, one of which — the primary one that makes it unique — is revelation. But it is a revelation, in its own terms, addressed to active reason. That too is the mind that is Catholic.
Michael Moore’s Love Story…With Capitalism
Who could have thought…
from Forbes:
The bars were sponsored by liquor companies, the kitchen by Lufthansa. One room had marble walls, another, cashmere. Hundreds of guests plucked hors d’oeuvres from Plexiglas trays, but when I reached for a passing tray of pigs in blankets, the waitress tried to stop me. “These are for Michael,” she said.
That would be Michael Moore, filmmaker, who was enthroned nearby on a crowded sofa nibbling from a skewer, which did seem less in harmony with his everyman sneakers and populist persona than a sausage wrapped in fried bread. The Monday night party in Manhattan, which spread over two luxurious penthouse suites, was sponsored by Esquire and tricked out with the magazine’s advertisers’ products. The guests were there to celebrate Moore’s latest movie [Capitalism, A Love Story], which had just had its New York premier uptown.
Are The BBC Blogs In A State Of Confusion?
I have just started to realise how many blogs there actually are at the BBC, even if most of them are extremely hard to find unless one takes a look at the “BBC News blogs” area somewhere in the rightmost column of some blogs.
For example I knew already of Richard Black’s blog, and there is a link to it in the BBC Science News page, but no trace at all in the “BBC blog network“. Or perhaps I am not looking hard enough.
Today I “discovered” Tom Feilden’s blog…only because Tom has sent a link to it to me. Nothing about it in the “blog network” either. In there, there is instead a link to the Climate Change “Bloom” blog, mysteriously abandoned since 29 July (hopefully the people over there have not been sent to a re-education camp 
)
If one goes to what might have been the “home” page for the BBC reporters’ blogs there appears a sad page that has been dead for three years (a terrible thing for a news organization, if you ask me).
And where people would actually look, the left column of every page, no link to any blog at all. Is the Corporation as such singularly uninterested in blogs of all things, one wonders?
New Details About Charles Morabito
A few step forward in my search for details about Charles Morabito, PoW 25084 at the Berga slave camp in Nazi Germany. Charles was very unfortunate, part of what might have been the very last group of American prisoners of war tortured/neglected and ultimately killed by the Nazis. As reported by the PBS, he was one of the few American victims of “Vernichtung durch Arbeit — the Nazi policy of physical destruction through labor“.
As of now, I believe Charles Morabito was killed while trying to escape, sometimes in March 1945.
=====================
(1) I have now found this article in the New York Times: “CAPTIVE U.S. TROOPS BEATEN WITH PICKS; Survivor of German Camp Tells How He Put In Long Hours as Slave Laborer” from June 13, 1945. It contains the results of an interview with 20-year-old Daniel D .Steckler, survivor of Berga. He speaks of slave labor under appalling conditions, and of a total of around 350 dead between Feb 28 and Apr 18, 1945.
The article says the Americans had belonged to the 28th Division, fighting in Luxembourg.
(2) There is a Wikipedia entry for the U.S. 28th Infantry Division, but no mention of Berga in the World War II section. Also, that entry includes the 109th, 110th, 111th, and 112th Infantry Regiments for the 28th Division, whilst other sources indicate the 106th Regiment.
(3) Via the Jewish Virtual Library one can find the following 1994 book: “Forgotten Victims: Abandonment of Americans in Hitler’s Camps” by Mitchell G. Bard (Author). Interestingly, the Amazon UK site brings up next to that book, a work by Flint Whitlock entitled “Given Up for Dead: American GI’s in the Nazi Concentration Camp at Berga“.
I will try to source both books at my local library.
(4) Whitlock’s book is described with these words, providing more about the background of the whole Berga camp story:
This is the extraordinary and little-known story of American GIs taken prisoners at the Battle of the Bulge and forced into unspeakable slavery in the Nazi concentration camp at Berga. When thousands of American soldiers were captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, most were marched off to prisoner-of-war camps where they were relatively well-treated. A few hundred others, mainly Jewish, were marched off to the Nazi slave-labor camp at Berga-an-der-Elster, where many met an unspeakable fate. This is their story. For over three months, the soldiers worked under brutal, inhuman conditions, building tunnels in a mountainside for the German munitions industry. Many of them died. The others struggled to survive in a living nightmare. Strangely, when the war was over, many of the Americans who had survived Berga were required to sign a ’security certificate’ which forbade them from ever disclosing the details of their imprisonment at Berga. Until recent years, what had happened to the American soldiers at Berga has been a closely guarded secret.
(5) Via “Look Inside“, it is possible to find references to “Morabido, Charles” for pages 156-159 (it is a misspelling…check out “Morabito” as written on Charles’ tomb’s cross; and his name in the prisoners’ list):
1. on Page 159:
” … escape was tied to Morabido’s “plundering” at the farm, and he explained the predicament to Bokanic. A German noncom “badgered Bokanic about knowing and escaping with Morabido”
2. on Page 158:
” … Bokanic dashed from the storeroom, out the gate, and ran for cover to wait for Morabido. Five minutes passed and then a shot rang out from the direction … “
3. on Page 157:
“asked Bokanic where Morabido was and he said that Morabido went to milk a cow. Believe it! Soon, we heard the noise of cows mooing, then … “
4. on Page 156:
” … known of the plan and, once Mark was at work in the tunnel, two GIs, Charles Morabido and another whose last name was Bokanic, approached him and said they … “
5. from Index:
“xv, 25, 28 Morabido, Charles: 156-159 Moselle River, France: 68 Munk, Honzo: 140,176-177,179-180 Nabburg, Germany : 189 Nachtmandersheid, Luxembourg: 41 … “
(6) Those pages speak of an escape attempt, and Charles is described by fellow prisoner Joe Mark as a “devil-may-care soldier“, together with his friend ??? Bokanic, very much interested in having finally something to eat. For some reason he decided to milk a cow at a nearby farmhouse. At page 158 the book says Charles might have been shot by the farmer.
It was March 1945.
(7) It is very unfortunate that none of the four original documents displayed in the PBS site about Berga contains the entry about Charles Morabito. There is plenty of information in that site though. For now I have extracted the following map:
Five Recommendations For American Presidents
From Robert B Reich’s review of “The Heart of Power – Health and Politics in the Oval Office“ By David Blumenthal and James A. Morone:
- a new president must move quickly, before opponents have time to stoke public fears
- a president must set broad health reform goals and allow legislators to fill in the details, but be ready to knock heads together to forge a consensus
- “The only way to deal with Congress is continuously, incessantly and without interruption” (L. Johnson)
- disregard or overrule [the] economic advisers
- there is an art to losing, too — in a way that can tee up the issue for future presidents
Is This The Silliest Idea Ever To Grace The Royal Society?
They have an entire Universe to display, and still they came up with a selection of portraits…of themselves??
Exhibition: Portraits of Astronomers
Thursday 1 to Friday 30 October 2009
Event Type:
Location: Marble Hall, The Royal Society
To celebrate the International Year of Astronomy, photographer Lucinda Douglas Menzies has created a series of portraits of contemporary British astronomers. Each photograph is accompanied by the astronomer’s explanation of what led him or her to enter the field, giving a fascinating insight into the inspiration behind their great achievements.
A selection of the portraits will be on display at the Royal Society’s building during the month of October. The exhibition is open to the public, but we ask you to register in advance of your visit by contacting the Royal Society Library on 020 7451 2606 or library@royalsociety.org.
The Secret Of Berlusconi’s Success
“The Secret Of Berlusconi’s Success“
Silvio Berlusconi’s opponents cannot admit that his success may be due not to sinister trickery, but to his greater popularity – an article by Filippo Facci available on The Guardian’s website.
Feeling Sorry For Douglas Bailey…
Mr Bailey wishes publishers would abandon “comment forums at the end of articles on newspaper Web sites“, because those are “insidiously contributing to the devaluation of journalism, blurring the truth, confusing the issues and diminishing serious discourse beyond even talk radio’s worst examples“. Can’t Mr Bailey simply avoid reading comment forums, one wonders? Or has he been ordered to do so by the doctor? (if that’s the case, it’s time for a second opinion!)
How thin can the skin of journalists be, and how soft-bodied their stories if all it takes to “tear down” one of their articles is for “some agenda-driven bonehead” to publish a comment? And what should worry us most…allowing people to freely express and exchange their ideas, or the unremitting deluge of scaried-up, sexed-up, hyped-up invariably “breaking” news pieces that has been befalling upon us since the invention of news business and especially after the advent of 24/7 news?
All in all, what I am really, really sorry about is to see a person like Mr Bailey approach the internet by renouncing critical thinking, and believing instead that writing a note in a web site grants “an aura of legitimacy from the association with the host’s brand“. Yeah, right…with such an attitude, I wish good luck to Mr Bailey’s business.
Going Back To the Moon: The Simplest Argument
It’s going to be far simpler to explore the Solar System with humans (and with robots) by starting from the Moon.
What is in fact at present the minimum requirement to reach orbit?
On Earth: Atlas LV-3B / Mercury (the one used in the John Glenn’s launch below)
Total Mass: 116,100 kg (255,900 lb)
Diameter: 3.05 m (10.00 ft)
Length: 25.00 m (82.00 ft)
On the Moon: Apollo Lunar Module Ascent Stage
Mass: 4,670 kg (10,300 lb)
Diameter: 4.2 m (13.78 ft)
Length: 3.76 m (12.34 ft)
Case closed.
Four (New) Faces Of Buzz Aldrin
from the Sueddeutsche Zeitung's weekly magazine. Picture quality deliberately reduced.
Here’s four sides of Buzz Aldrin one seldom sees in the news:
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- If people don’t believe anybody has landed on the Moon
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- the face behind the visor, during the actual moonwalks
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- Moonwalking, the Michael Jackson’s way
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- Does Buzz believe in intelligent alien life?
