First leaves
Winter Weather Advisory
Hopefully, we won't get any hailstones, like this one that fell in north central Texas today:
URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE...CORRECTED NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE ANCHORAGE AK 410 PM AKDT THU MAY 16 2013 ...LATE WINTER STORM TO AFFECT AREAS SOUTHEAST OF THE ALASKA RANGE FRIDAY EVENING THROUGH EARLY SATURDAY AFTERNOON... COLD AIR FROM THE NORTH AND PLENTY OF MOISTURE FROM THE GULF OF ALASKA WILL COMBINE OVER SOUTH CENTRAL ALASKA ON FRIDAY. THE RESULT WILL BE WEATHER MORE TYPICAL OF WINTER...WITH SIGNIFICANT SNOWFALL NEVER BEFORE SEEN THIS LATE IN THE SEASON. AKZ111-171330- /X.NEW.PAFC.WW.Y.0035.130518T0300Z-130518T2100Z/ MATANUSKA VALLEY- INCLUDING THE CITIES OF...PALMER...WASILLA...SUTTON...CHICKALOON 410 PM AKDT THU MAY 16 2013 ...WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY FOR SNOW IN EFFECT FROM 7 PM FRIDAY TO 1 PM AKDT SATURDAY... THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN ANCHORAGE HAS ISSUED A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY FOR SNOW...WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM 7 PM FRIDAY TO 1 PM AKDT SATURDAY. * SNOW...4 TO 8 INCHES WITH GREATEST AMOUNTS THROUGH HATCHER PASS. * TIMING...SNOW WILL BEGIN TO ACCUMULATE AFTER 7 PM FRIDAY AND TAPER OFF TO RAIN AND SNOW SHOWERS EARLY SATURDAY AFTERNOON. * IMPACTS...TRAVEL WILL BE DIFFICULT. VISIBILITIES MAY BE LIMITED IN HEAVY SNOWFALL. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY FOR SNOW MEANS THAT PERIODS OF SNOW WILL CAUSE PRIMARILY TRAVEL DIFFICULTIES. BE PREPARED FOR SNOW COVERED ROADS AND LIMITED VISIBILITIES...AND USE CAUTION WHILE DRIVING.
I have received a number of emails from Palestinian academics. They are unanimous that I should respect the boycott. In view of this, I must withdraw from the conference. Had I attended I would have stated my opinion that the policy of the present Israeli government is likely to lead to disaster.The most shocking aspect of the backlash against Hawking coming out of Israel and Israeli apologists to me, from the very beginning, were the claims that if it weren't for the genius, pluck and ingenuity of Israeli scientists, he wouldn't even be able to communicate:
if one decides to Boycott Israel, then one must be consistent, if Mr. Hawking decides to boycott us he should also refrain from using his means of communications as he is using products that were invented and produced in Israel. it is very interesting though that we continue to hear him isn’t it.This inaccurate meme was repeated again and again, in articles published in Israel, the USA and elsewhere. To be more specific, the claim was somewhat along these lines:
Hawking’s decision to join the boycott of Israel is quite hypocritical for an individual who prides himself on his own intellectual accomplishment. His whole computer-based communication system runs on a chip designed by Israel’s Intel team. I suggest that if he truly wants to pull out of Israel he should also pull out his Intel Core i7 from his tablet” – this according to Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, director of Shurat HaDin – Israel Law Center.Darshin-Leitner's claim, inaccurate as it was, was also very questionable morally. After all, the Germans perfected the jet turbine during the height of the 3rd Reich, using slave labor, some of which was comprised of Jewish and other slave laborers. Don't get me started.
The i7 was designed by Intel's architecture design team in Hillsboro Oregon. The claims the i7 was designed in Israel are also lies.
For the i7 in particular, the Sr. Principal Engineer's name is Ronak Singhal. He is an Indian. The design team does not consist of Israelis and is not located in Israel.
Hawking's sentence construction software, EZ Keys, was designed and built by an american company, Words Plus, which was based in Palmdale, California. Hawkings speech synthesizer, NeoSpeech, is produced by a company based in Fremont, California and backed by Voiceware Co of Korea. It has nothing to do with Israel either.
Hawking's laptop which ran the software used AMD chips. This was an embarrassment to Intel. Intel's CEO at the time Gordon Moore (now retired) personally negotiated with Prof. Hawking to participate in a marketing arrangement where Hawking would use Intel provided off-the-shelf laptops.i7 microprocessors have no more to do with Israel than do many such items developed by increasingly multinational scientific teams. Intel's facilities in Israel are increasingly important to the firm, but less so than their operations in one county in Oregon. They could pull out next month with little or no adverse impact to the high tech giant's global footprint.
Professor Noam Chomsky, an American linguist and left-wing activist, was denied entry into Israel and the West Bank on Sunday.
No reason was initially given for the decision, but the Interior Ministry later said immigration officials at the Allenby Bridge border crossing from Jordan had misunderstood Chomsky's intentions thinking initially he was also due to visit Israel.
Chomsky, who is on a speaking tour in the region, was scheduled to speak at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank on Monday.
Interior Ministry spokeswoman Sabine Haddad said officials were now trying to get clearance from the Israel Defense Forces, which controls access to the West Bank to allow Chomsky to enter that territory.As I've written here since January, 2013 is going to be a watershed year in the ability of honest critics of militant expansionist Zionist policies to gain traction in the voicing of their views in the media.
Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state's possession of nuclear weapons.
The "top secret" minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa's defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel's defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them "in three sizes". The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that "the very existence of this agreement" was to remain secret.Whether or not Hawking took that event from 38 years ago into account matters less than what is happening right now.
I have received a number of emails from Palestinian academics. They are unanimous that I should respect the boycott. In view of this, I must withdraw from the conference. Had I attended I would have stated my opinion that the policy of the present Israeli government is likely to lead to disaster.The story of his cancellation broke Wednesday morning in the Guardian:
Professor Stephen Hawking is backing the academic boycott of Israel by pulling out of a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in Jerusalem as a protest at Israel's treatment of Palestinians.
Hawking, 71, the world-renowned theoretical physicist and former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, had accepted an invitation to headline the fifth annual president's conference, Facing Tomorrow, in June, which features major international personalities, attracts thousands of participants and this year will celebrate Peres's 90th birthday.
Hawking is in very poor health, but last week he wrote a brief letter to the Israeli president to say he had changed his mind. He has not announced his decision publicly, but a statement published by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine with Hawking's approval described it as "his independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there".
Hawking's decision marks another victory in the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions targeting Israeli academic institutions.Although the Guardian article appeared to be authoritative when it was published, it was soon questioned, based on a statement emanating from the communication office of his employer, Cambridge University:
Tim Holt, media director at the University of Cambridge spokesman, said Hawking's decision was based strictly on health concerns.
"For health reasons, his doctors said he should not be flying at the moment so he's decided not to attend," said Holt. "He is 71-years-old. He's fine, but he has to be sensible about what he can do."
A University of Cambridge statement released earlier Wednesday cited "personal reasons" for his decision. Hawking, who has ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, cannot move his body and uses a wheelchair. He communicates through a computerized voice system.The story of Hawking's cancellation, carried by the Guardian had little traction Wednesday morning, but the story of the Guardian having blown the real reason for Hawking's backing out got it up into major news aggregators, such as memeorandum. Throughout Wednesday morning, there was confusion. Hawking was attacked severely on facebook and elsewhere, savaged for being ungrateful to Israelis for creating technology that helps him continue to communicate, and for not being that good of a scientist:
if one decides to Boycott Israel, then one must be consistent, if Mr. Hawking decides to boycott us he should also refrain from using his means of communications as he is using products that were invented and produced in Israel. it is very interesting though that we continue to hear him isn't it.and (I like this one):
Who cares? He hasn't been coherent since he wrote that the universe was capable of creating itself. His kind of "reason" fits neither science nor sociology...but it's perfectly suited to politics.and:
Given that much of his work is based on Israeli scientists' work. I guess it was fine to use Jacob Bekenstein's research to further his own fame (after previously deriding his ideas), but heavens forbid he visit the man's homeland! Why, that would just be WRONG!and:
An Israeli company made a medicine that cures ALS, so go ahead Mr. Genius Idiot, Boycott Israel.When the contrary statement from Cambridge claiming health reasons as being the real motivator came out Wednesday morning, some pro-Zionist blogs strutted Cambridge communicator Holt's obfuscation out as proof of the Guardian's anti-Israel agenda:
The Guardian, which broke the story late last night, claimed that Hawking was due to boycott Israel after receiving an erroneous statement from the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP), apparently with Hawking's approval.
The statement said that the move was "his independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there".
However, a Cambridge university spokesperson has confirmed to The Commentator that there was a "misunderstanding" this past weekend, and that Prof. Hawking had pulled out of the conference for medical reasons.In comments to the feuding articles, inevitable comparisons between Hawking and Albert Einstein were made. Soon after the formation of Israel, the great physicist was invited to go to Israel to become President. He declined:
When [Israeli] President Chaim Weizmann died in 1952, Einstein was asked to be Israel's second president, but he declined, stating that he had "neither the natural ability nor the experience to deal with human beings." He wrote: "I am deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel, and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it."Carefully chosen words. Four years ago, I compiled the most authoritative web version I know of Einstein's April 17th, 1938 Commodore Hotel speech. All others leave out the last two sentences, which I here emphasize:
I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish State. Apart from practical considerations, my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish State, with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain – especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish State. We are no longer the Jews of the Maccabee period.
A return to a nation in the political sense of the word, would be equivalent to turning away from the spiritualization of our community which we owe to the genius of our prophets.Einstein uttered this profound declaration before the horrors of World War II, which left over 60 million dead, 10% of them Jewish. After the war, and during the very early years of Israeli existence, he could be conflicted regarding his support for the new Levantine crusader state, created largely by colonists from north central Europe.
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| Danish King Christian X, during World War II |
The deporation followed a series of steps to discriminate, persecute, and disenfranchise Jews in Norway. Jewish individuals were at first arrested, Jewish property was confiscated, Jews were ordered to report to local police stations and have their identification cards stamped with a "J" and fill in a lengthy form about their profession, holdings, and family. Based on the lists the police compiled, most Jewish adult men were arrested and detained in October 1942, and by November 26, women and children were also arrested for deportation.
This is the only time in Norwegian history that Norwegian police had been ordered to arrest children.Of the 775 of Norway's 2,200 Jews the Nazis managed to deport, only about 30 survived the war. The late 1942 actions in Norway gave warning to the Danes that should they want to save their Jewish citizens, action might have to soon be taken.
During World War II King Christian X became the hero of a number of myths about his defense of the Danish Jews. The story which became best known says that the king showed his support for the Jews by carrying the star of David when riding in the streets of Copenhagen.
This myth dates back to the wartime but gained a second youth in 1952 with its retelling in Leon Uris novel Exodus. In this last version the king orders the whole population to follow his example - and everybody then wore the star to force the Germans to abandon their anti-Jewish policy. The story is told in a few lines and in a very realistic style. It was repeated in the film Exodus. However, it was not invented by Leon Uris, but during the war and probably by a person hired by a Danish-American club in New York. This has been shown by the Icelandic historian Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson in The King and the Star. Myths created during the Occupation of Denmark. The myth has been read as a metaphor for the general warm relation that existed between Danes and the Danish Jews, which resulted in the Rescue of the Danish Jews in 1943.The truth, however, is more powerful:
Although the majority of the Danish Jews were in hiding, they would eventually have been caught if safe passage to Sweden could not be secured. Sweden had earlier turned away the Norwegian Jews to their certain deaths and they were determined to do the same to the Danish Jews.
Fortunately, Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist, made a determined stand for his fellow countrymen. He was spirited off to Sweden, whose government was under strict orders to get him to the United States without delay to work on the then top-secret Manhattan Project. When Bohr reached the shores of Sweden they told him he had to board a plane immediately for the United States. Bohr refused. He told the Swedish officials, and eventually the king, that until they announced over their air waves and through their press that their borders would be open to receive the Danish Jews, he wasn't going anywhere. Bohr wrote of these events himself. As related by the historian Richard Rhodes, on 30 September 1943 Bohr persuaded King Gustaf of Sweden to make public Sweden’s willingness to provide asylum, and on 2 October 1943 Swedish radio broadcast that Sweden was ready to offer asylum. Historians Richard Rhodes and others interpret Bohr’s actions in Sweden as being a necessary precursor without which that mass rescue could not have occurred. Whether or not the mass rescue of the Danish Jews could have happened without Bohr’s political activity in Sweden, there is no doubt that he did all that he could for his countrymen.
The Jews were smuggled out of Denmark over the Øresund strait from Zealand to Sweden—a passage of varying time depending on the specific route and the weather, but averaging under an hour on the choppy winter sea, as noted by Preben Munch-Nielsen in an interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Some were transported in large fishing boats of up to 20 tons, but others were carried to freedom in rowboats or kayaks. The ketch Albatros was one of the ships used to smuggle Jews to Sweden. Some refugees were smuggled inside freight cars on the regular ferries between Denmark and Sweden, this route being suited for the very young or old who were too weak to endure a rough sea passage. The underground had broken into empty freight cars sealed by the Germans after inspection, helped refugees onto the cars, and then resealed the cars with forged or stolen German seals to forestall further inspection.The collective efforts of Danes to support their Jewish citizens, protect and save their lives, was honored by postwar Israel, declaring Danes "Righteous among Nations." Last Friday, Denmark and Finland jointly announced they were joining Sweden, which had granted Palestine embassy status. The formal announcement was Monday, at a Scandinavian ministerial conference. Here's Friday's statement:
It is with satisfaction that we announce our joint intention to work with the Palestinians to be able to upgrade the status of the Palestinian Missions in Copenhagen and Helsinki. After this process all Nordic countries will be offering the same working conditions for official Palestinian representatives as is the case for accredited diplomats serving in an embassy of a recognized state.
Palestine is in a phase of state-building, and many challenges remain for President Abbas to handle before we can recognize Palestine formally as a state. But it is important to keep focused on the aim of Palestine becoming a fully recognized state and as such claim its rightful place as part of the international community of states. Denmark and Finland took, together with the majority of EU member states and all Nordic countries, an essential step by voting in favour of the upgraded status of Palestine in the UN on 29 November 2012.
We hope that the intention to give, for all practical purposes, the Palestinian Missions in our capitals conditions for work identical to those of an embassy will encourage President Abbas to engage with determination in the necessary negotiations with the Israeli government on a two-state solution. The present efforts undertaken from the US and strongly supported by the EU deserve the support of the Palestinian and the Israeli governments.As yet, Israeli reaction has been muted. All the Nordic States now recognize Palestine. The efforts during World War II by Scandinavian diplomats, most notably Swedes, to rescue Jews and other war prisoners in the debacle consuming the shards of Hitler's 1,000-year Reich were remarkable. They evolved into support by those same countries after the war for the most humanitarian aspects of the United Nations, and international humanitarian agencies. This recognition of Palestine and Palestinian aspirations by these countries is part of that.
Deputy Foreign Minister Zeev Elkin wrote to Google CEO Larry Page on Sunday urging the company to rescind its decision to refer to the Palestinian territories as “Palestine” on all its products. Elkin claimed this decision was liable to have a negative impact on efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
“By so doing,” Elkin wrote, “Google is in essence recognizing the existence of a Palestinian state. Such a decision, is in my opinion, not only mistaken but could also negatively impinge on the efforts of my government to bring about direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
“ … I would be grateful were you to reconsider this decision since it entrenches the Palestinians in their view that they can further their political aims through one-side actions rather than through negotiating and mutual agreement.”
Elkin concluded by proposing that Israeli representatives meet with representatives of Google to discuss the issue.Where does Elkin propose they meet?
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| The breakfast deck this morning - image by Judy Youngquist |
I started giving finals at the University of Alaska Anchorage last Thursday, and conclude today. As part of their final, students in both my classes, Fundamentals of Music (MUS 112), and Music Theory IV, are expected write, produce and perform a simple composition. Over 20 students created, rehearsed and performed art that didn't exist weeks, or even days ago. 