Did anybody hear about this? I completely missed this - Isn't this a huge deal?? I guess I've been too busy dealing with the aftermath of the ice dams in our gutters for the past few months.Israelis have always lamented that Moses led the ancient Israelites to the one patch of land in the Middle East bereft of energy resources. It turns out the sea offered more promise. At the end of December, a huge natural gas discovery was confirmed in the Eastern Mediterranean inside Israel’s territorial waters. ......The Leviathan field, discovered by a consortium led by Houston-based Noble Energy, is the world’s largest offshore gas find in the past decade and vaults Israel into the ranks of the largest gas reserve holders in the world. (There are some indications that Leviathan might contain a world-scale oil deposit as well.)
Despite some drawbacks and more details to be worked out, there’s no mistaking the fact that the Leviathan find represents a landmark event in the history of the state of Israel. Perhaps after all, on the matter of energy, Moses deserves greater navigational credit.
oh Weekly WEAKLY STANDARD...
Let's check in at PRAVDA... Why is the Leviathan Deposit Referred to as "Israeli"?
Friday, March 4, 2011
"Sounds like the groundwork is being laid for some huge war"
Rodney King and the Rise of the Citizen Photojournalist
Dan Gillmor writes in Mediactive:
... an old-fashioned movie camera captured the most famous pictures in the citizen-media genre: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. Abraham Zapruder, the man pointing the camera that day in Dealey Plaza, sold the film to Life Magazine for $150,000— over a million dollars in today’s currency.
In Dealey Plaza that day, one man happened to capture a motion picture—somewhat blurred but utterly gruesome nonetheless—of those terrible events. Zapruder’s work, by any standard we can imagine, was an act of citizen journalism.
But the Rodney King video was a turning point. By 1991, home video gear was becoming common, heading toward today’s near-ubiquity. When people saw that video, they realized a number of things, not least of which was the possibility that average citizens could hold powerful people — the police in this instance — somewhat more accountable for wrongdoing they committed in public places. Witnessing was being transformed into action, we all understood.
Today, many of us carry around still and video cameras that are part of our phones. In the U.S. and around the world, people are capturing events, routine and horrific, that mark our times. The mobile-phone video of Neda Soltani’s death by gunshot in the aftermath of Iran’s rigged 2009 election became a rallying point for opposition to the regime. ...
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Mohawk Nation News: Confederacy of Indigenous Arab Nations
By Mohawk Nation News
Are there similarities between us and the Arabs? Bankers crave the resources of the Indigenous people worldwide. They fear we may once again govern ourselves.
In Libya Gaddafi and his small tribe became the super band/tribal councils governing everything. The oil resource is the legacy of all the people. He placed his family in all the important positions. He was careful not to use excessive force against his people. His private paramilitary forces include foreign mercenaries to control and kill for him.
These traditional tribal affiliations could decide the outcome of current protests. Gadaffi’s crackdown prompted many to unite. Who, if anyone, those protesters are answering to is unknown. Indigenous people answer to themselves as the power is in the people. Divide and rule of Indigenous tribes is governed by outside power and money.
This strategy is familiar. When the French and English washed up on our shores, they immediately tried to figure out and take over our power structure. It was based on friendship and alliances between hundreds of Indigenous nations. We agreed to live peacefully. If one member deviated from the great peace, sanctions followed. There were no leaders, just the people.
Beat poet helped create early hippie movement
By Adrian Chamberlain, Times Colonist:
One of his multitudinous claims to fame is having been one of five poets who read at the San Francisco's Six Gallery in October of 1955. This reading is regarded as seminal in the launch of the Beat literary movement.
That night, Allen Ginsberg delivered an excerpt from his new (and immediately notorious) poem, Howl. McClure read For the Death of 100 Whales, inspired by a report of American soldiers who, feeling bored, shot an entire pod of killer whales while stationed in Iceland.
The Gallery Six event was McClure's first public reading. He recalls it as a foggy fall night in San Francisco. The audience was diverse: an elderly college prof, young anarchists, conscientious objectors, avantgarde painters, poets.
"Jack Kerouac was yelling 'Go, go go!' in the audience," McClure said. "He was running out to get gallons of wine from a winemaker who made it in his garage, two blocks away."
The boho Beat writers were, among other things, precursors to the hippie movement. In the name of art and joie de vivre, they gleefully smashed through the restrictive Ozzie and Harriet conventions of the 1950s. Upstanding citizens were scandalized; obscenity trials abounded.
I always wonder whether participants in such history-making events instantly realize their significance. McClure says, in the case of the Gallery Six reading, he did.
"We had all decided to put our toe on the line and stand for it. We knew that something had happened. There was no doubt."
When it comes to hip happenings of the 1950s and beyond, McClure's seeming omnipresence rivals that of Forrest Gump. He wrote the song Mercedes Benz, made famous by Janis Joplin. He became a key figure in San Francisco's 1960s counterculture. He was buddies with Kerouac, Dennis Hopper, Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan (Dylan gave McClure the autoharp he used to compose Mercedes Benz). He was at Ken Kesey's famous party with the Hell's Angels, later written about by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In fact, McClure helped a Hell's Angel -Freewheelin' Frank -write a book about his life. In the 1978 concert film The Last Waltz, McClure is on stage reciting Chaucer. ...
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Flying blind: US foreign policy's lack of expertise
Summary
American spy technologies gather intelligence in vast quantities, yet US foreign policy is rife with unqualified pseudo-experts. To know or not to know? This is the great conundrum of empire.
By Manan Ahmed, The National
... Both Stewart and Mortenson illustrate one particular configuration of the relationship between knowledge and the American empire - the "non-expert" insider who can traverse that unknown terrain and, hence, become an "expert".
Even a cursory examination of the archive dealing with the American efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan demonstrates that there has been no related growth in specific scholarly knowledge about those sites of conflict. The knowledge of Arabic, Urdu or Pashto remains at extremely low levels in official corridors. There is, one can surmise simply from reading the back and forth sway of military and political policy in Afghanistan, very little advancement in understanding of either the text or context of that nation.
In America's imperial theatre, Stewart and Mortenson exemplify a singular notion of "expert". We can build, based on the profiles of other specimens - Robert D Kaplan, Fareed Zakaria, Robert Kagan - a picture of what the ideal type looks like from the official point of view. Such an "expert" is usually one who has not studied the region, and especially not in any academic capacity. As a result, they do not possess any significant knowledge of its languages, histories or cultures. They are often vetted by the market, having produced a bestselling book or secured a job as a journalist with a major newspaper. They are not necessarily tied to the "official" narratives or understandings, and can even be portrayed as being "a critic" of the official policy. In other words, this profile fits one who doesn't know enough.
At the same time there are greater claims, and greater efforts, towards satellite cameras and listening devices; drones which can hover for days; databases which can track all good Taliban and all bad Taliban. Yet who can decipher this data? When one considers the rise of "experts" such as Stewart or Mortenson against the growth of digitised data which remains elusive and overwhelming, one is left with a rather stark observation - that the American war effort prefers its human knowledge circumspect or circumscribed and its technical knowledge crudely totalised. ...
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Humans on Verge of Causing 6th Great Mass Extinction
By Stephanie Pappas, Live Science
Are humans causing a mass extinction on the magnitude of the one that killed the dinosaurs?
The answer is yes, according to a new analysis — but we still have some time to stop it.
Mass extinctions include events in which 75 percent of the species on Earth disappear within a geologically short time period, usually on the order of a few hundred thousand to a couple million years. It's happened only five times before in the past 540 million years of multicellular life on Earth. (The last great extinction occurred 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs were wiped out.) At current rates of extinction, the study found, Earth will enter its sixth mass extinction within the next 300 to 2,000 years.
"It's bittersweet, because we're showing that we have this crisis," study co-author Elizabeth Ferrer, a graduate student in biology at the University of California, Berkeley, told LiveScience. "But we still have time to fix this."
Others aren't so optimistic that humans will actually do anything to stop the looming disaster, saying that politics is successfully working against saving species and the planet.
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image from http://www.spitting-image.net
