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Date 23/09/2011, 18:57 (Jerusalem)

Every year, we wonder what might be appropriate on this day, and we can never think of anything more appropriate than this piece, which Mr. Hodgman originally delivered at a literary reading shortly after September 11, 2001.

Good evening.

My name is John Hodgman. I am a former professional literary agent, which on a good day is a pretty small thing to be, and these days feels rather microscopic. Before I was a professional literary agent, I thought it would be a good idea to be a teacher of fiction in a college MFA program because it is easy and you are adored all the time and of course it pays a lot of money.

I used to have a lot of bright ideas.

I even had two lessons planned out, which by all accounts from MFA programs that I’ve heard, is one more than you need. The first would address the comfort of storytelling. I would explain to my adoring students that stories hold power because they convey the illusion that life has purpose and direction. Where God is absent from the lives of all but the most blessed, the writer, of all people, replaces that ordering principle. Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending.

Not a very original idea, but one that seemed more or less reasonable before something happened that showed us how perversely powerful stories can be when told into the ears of desperate and evil men, and showed as well how sadly challenged stories are in providing comfort now. What happened on Tuesday was enormous, sublime in the darkest sense of the word, so large as to overwhelm our ability to describe it, to sense it except in parts, and certainly to order it and make it make sense. In the immediate aftermath, we have only our very personal flash memories, but personalizing an event that has touched so many and so cruelly, announcing by byline our own survival, feels shamefully self-involved. To convert this experience into metaphor, into symbolic gesture feels almost offensive when we are still pressed by such an urgent reality that is ongoing and uncontainable by words.

I have heard a lot recently about the role of writing, song, music, painting, in the tragic blank space in our souls that this event has left behind. Of course, this preoccupation is largely a result of an unconscious bias of the media. If pig farmers had as much currency with NPR as literary novelists, we would be hearing just as much about the healing power of bacon. And knowing that power well, I can say that it is certainly comparable to the reading of a sensitive short story as far as comfort goes; and yet both fall far below the direct aid that is being passed from person to person, below Chambers Street, in our homes, on the phone with strangers, with a actual touch, in the actual, non-symbolic, un-annotated world of grief in which we live. The great temptation is to be silent, forever, in sympathy.

The second lesson plan that I had in those days was a very lazy assessment of storytelling’s function, beginning in the oral tradition, when it served a civic purpose aside from getting you invited to cocktail parties. As I would explain to my adoring students, storytelling served initially in every culture three purposes: to inform, as in relay news and record history, to instruct, as in pass down a set of moral guidelines, and to entertain. We are, as regards this event and its unfolding, all too well informed. And as for entertainment: when I thought this was a bright idea, it was when I was younger and war seemed so far away. But I realize now that those in history whose lives were short and mean and threatened by sword and disease gathered and told stories not as leisure, but as desperately needed distraction, and reassurance that they were not alone.

So if art cannot contain or describe this event, and if for now the suffering is too keen to be alleviated by parable… if stories are for the moment not as critically needed, as courage, as medicine, as blood, as bacon, they can at least revert to this social function. As time goes on, this will all pass away into memory, into a story with a beginning and a middle and finally an end. And that transition from the real into fable will bring its own kind of comfort and pain. Now, though, we may gather and distract one another, take comfort in our proximity, and know that we are, at this moment, safe.

Not many of my ideas seem bright anymore, and I am not a teacher. I am only humbled: to be here, to be alive.

That is all.

I first read about Tunisian comedian Hedi Ouled Baballah in an article Steve Coll wrote for the April 4 New Yorker. Coll’s article addressed Tunisia’s hopeful prospects for a transition to democracy, and the Casbah Square protests that forced the resignation of Tunisia’s first interim prime minister, Mohamed Ghannouchi, a holdover official from Ben Ali’s regime.

In one passage, Coll is spending the day in the interim governmental office created to record citizen complaints about corruption and human rights abuses, when Baballah wanders in and is recognized by the security guards. At their request, he throws back his shoulders and performs his impersonation of Ben Ali to convulsive laughter from the hallway crowd.

“There may be no wiser revolution than one with a laugh track,” Coll wrote.

“We have to meet this guy,” I said to Zied when we were discussing potential interview subjects over Skype.

We met Baballah at the office of his producer, Faiza Karoui, in the Lac District of Tunis, an upscale business district on the road to Carthage that runs east from downtown. Karoui’s office is located in a half-constructed and mostly vacant commercial office park. Like a lot of Tunisia, it seems to be waiting patiently for a new economy to bring it to life.

Hedi Baballah is a gentle man. His sentences slide into easy chuckles, and his lumpish physique, short black curly hair, bushy mustache, and ever-present sunglasses make him look a little bit like a cartoon. Karoui is a cheerful and classically beautiful woman who smiles when she describes the ideas behind Baballah’s one-man show, his jokes, and the multi-media features and lighting she helped Baballah design. The four of us settled in around a glass coffee table, Karoui brought out water in old-fashioned Coca-Cola glasses, and then she and Baballah told us one of the most heroic and insightful stories about the revolution I would hear during my time in Tunisia.

That story starts with Baballah’s unwitting violation of the first rule of political comedy: Never mock a repressive dictator in front of his family.

It was January 2008, and Baballah was performing at a private party at a luxury hotel in the coastal resort town of Monastir. Baballah was in the middle of his Ben Ali impersonation—which in those days he only occasionally performed—when he noticed several audience members shouting “She’s here!” and pointing to a woman who looked visibly distressed.

“What’s the matter?” Baballah asked the woman. “Why do you look so upset?”

“It’s OK,” she said, waving off his concern. “You can talk.”

I should note here that Baballah’s Ben Ali impression is hilarious. It’s a beautiful bit of physical comedy in which Baballah relaxes his shoulders, grumbles in a low voice, and takes on the appearance of a life-size Muppet parody of The Godfather.

Baballah’s material is also quick and sharp. One joke, for example, turns on the well-established reputation of Ben Ali’s wife’s family—the Trebelsis—as a corrupt gang of drug dealing arms merchants. Baballah’s Ben Ali brags about his and Leila’s son. “He has my eyes,” Ben Ali says, “my uncle’s nose, and my wife’s family’s hands.” Every Tunisian instantly gets the joke of a vain Ben Ali bragging that, thanks to his wife’s family, his son was born with the hands of a thief. As Baballah performed his Ben Ali impersonation for us, Zied laughed so hard he could barely translate Baballah’s jokes. I laughed twice, first at Baballah’s completely silly caricature, and again when the jokes came through in Zied’s translation.

The audience in Monastir that night in 2008 was laughing just as hard. Unfortuntely for Baballah, the distraught woman in the audience happened to be Ben Ali’s daughter Cyrine.

Baballah was arrested the next day as he drove back from the coast. The police politique swooped down on his car, stocking it with heroin, marijuana, and fake currency as Baballah stood nearby. When they were finished, the officer in charge invited to Baballah to “come over and have a look at what you have in your car.”

“I don’t need to look at it,” Baballah said. “It’s my stuff. I know what’s there.”

“No, look in the back,” the officer told him. “I added a few more things.”

“I know why you’re doing this,” Baballah told him. “It’s your job. Do what you want. I know what I’m facing.”

After a six-hour interrogation, the police took Baballah to his home at 2 a.m., where they staged a raid with five cars, 25 officers, and a team of police dogs. They planted drugs and fake currency throughout the house, which they then pretended to discover.

“It was pure theater,” Baballah said. “Completely fake. Wrong in every way.”

Baballah was charged with possession of drugs and counterfeit currency, fined 1,000 dinars, and sentenced to one year in prison.

In prison, Baballah became a determined political dissident. He refused to sign the police investigative report. He insisted his drug test be conducted by a Red Cross volunteer he knew personally, and trusted not to lie. When the test result came back negative, the police tried to change it. Baballah also began two hunger strikes. During the second, he was visited in the hospital by two members of the Swedish Red Cross, who publicized Baballah’s case and organized a campaign for his release.

When he wasn’t on hunger strike, Baballah performed his Ben Ali impersonation for his fellow prisoners. The prisoners played along with the joke, pampering Baballah and calling him “Zine” or “Mr President.”

“They loved it,” Baballah said. “No one had ever made them laugh in prison.”

Baballah also had an idea for a new show, in which he would enlist President Obama’s help in getting back an idea he had lost in prison. “Most wrongfully imprisoned citizens ask for money back,” Karoui explained. “In Hedi’s show, he’s trying to regain something cultural, something virtual.” Baballah began developing the show from his cell, writing material and trying it out on his audience of fellow inmates.

The Red Cross, meanwhile, with the help of an international campaign by fellow comedians, put sufficient public pressure on the regime to release Baballah. He was set free on March 20, the 60th anniversary of Tunisia’s independence from France.

“But you must have known you could never perform it,” I said.

“I knew it was a good idea,” Karoui said, smiling and nodding as if to acknowledge that anyone in her situation obviously would have made the same choice. “I just wanted to produce the show. I didn’t worry about whether we would ever be able to perform it,” she said.

She and Baballah had been working on the show for three years when the revolution arrived and liberated Baballah to perform the work.

“Thank God the revolution came on time,” Baballah said when I asked him about his prophetic determination and seemingly impossible luck.

The show, entitled Prisoner 3300, after Baballah’s assigned prison number, follows Baballah as he tries to get back the idea he lost in Ben Ali’s prison system. Along the way he mocks Ben Ali, and satirizes the interim government and the politics of the Middle East.

Baballah and Karoui enthusiastically repeated some of the jokes for us. Baballah plays Interim President Fouad Mebazaa, for example, as a man who cannot quite believe he is president. Whenever his aides address him as “Mr. President” he jumps in fright, thinking Ben Ali has returned from Saudi Arabia. He also sleeps in Ben Ali’s bed with the covers pulled up to his nose, in constant fear Ben Ali will return and find him there. In one scene that makes fun of the impressive proficiency of America’s espionage network, Baballah sits down to write to President Obama to ask for his help in recovering his lost idea, only to be interrupted by a phone call from the American President.

“I understand you are writing me a letter asking for my help!” a cheerful Obama tells him.

Karoui explained that the show celebrates the revolution, but also subtly—and without directly saying so—challenges the audience to think about whether Tunisia is undergoing a truly democratic revolution, or a process that might simply transform the country for the benefit of outside interests, or those loyal to the former regime.

It’s a perceptive critique. Before he resigned, Prime Minister Ghannouchi, who was well-regarded in some international circles, warned that forces loyal to the former regime were working to co-opt the revolution. Tunisia’s interim government has announced an October election for an assembly to draft a constitution, which may well be a step forward, but the election means no parliament or republican assembly can be elected until late 2012 at the earliest. The government has put Ben Ali on trial in absentia, but the proceedings seem more cathartic than legal, and a distraction from other more meaningful prosecutions the interim government might be pursuing, like those of former ruling-party and police politique officials who, unlike Ben Ali, remain in Tunisia.

I met a number of people in my two weeks in Tunisia who worried that the revolution might be drifting off course. “Why not have the parliamentary elections right away?” one former Interior Ministry official asked me. “Why make everyone wait until one or two years from now?” Others told me there would probably have to be more protests, to keep the interim government on track. Hedi Ouled Baballah’s show adds a satirical voice in this unsettled chorus.

Prisoner 3300 premiered at the historic Tunis Municipal Theater on Avenue Borguiba on April 30, 2011. Currently, Baballah and Karoui are taking the show around Tunisia. Later this summer, Baballah will perform the show at comedy festivals and on tour in Europe. In addition to everything else it may yet accomplish, the revolution seems likely to make him an international star.

After 90 minutes it was time to go. Karoui and Baballah shook our hands, handed us some promotional literature about the show, and led us out to the stairwell outside Karoui’s office door.

“You are welcome back in Tunisia any time,” Baballah told me as he shook my hand a second time. “I will put you up for four nights. But on the fifth night,” he added, laughing, “you’re on your own.”

“Do you have a Hollywood agent?” I asked. He and Karoui laughed. “No really,” I said. “I think you should find one.”

The day after our interview, as I waited for Zied in front of my hotel, I saw the black van that advertises Baballah’s show motor past on Borguiba Avenue. The painting on its side depicts Baballah, with his trademark bushy mustache and sunglasses, dressed in a crisp black-and-white striped prison uniform, pulling a gag away from his mouth to speak. The number of days of his confinement are scratched into his cell wall. Behind him, through the bars of his cell window, Avenue Borguiba’s landmark arabesque clock tower pokes up into the clouds, and a bright red Tunisian flag flutters in the wind.

First of all, let me say it wasn’t 100% my fault. Anybody could have mistaken the prefrontal lobe for the occipital lobe, especially after the night I had. But, having said that, how could that moron of an anesthesiologist have mixed up the “candy?” Oh, I know how. He went to one of those med schools in Grenada. As if that would be good enough. Well, he’s being sued through the keister, so you can rest assured all will be right in the world. Actually, sorry, that’s not quite right. All you’ll be doing from now on is resting. Which brings me back to my apology. Sorry. Really. But, on the upside, think of all the things you’ll be missing that totally suck.

And, truth be told, my med school instructors weren’t all that good either. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not getting down on them or anything. They tried hard, but they couldn’t really speak English that well—and I couldn’t speak Sanskrit or Pashtun or Norse or whatever language they were speaking. I mean, I got the broad strokes and everything. Big picture stuff. You can’t totally blame me for that one, under the circumstances, of course.

Having said that, brain surgery, so to speak, wasn’t really supposed to be my specialty. More dermatology. Just applying medically approved creams. And stuff like that. More like in Bloomingdales. Nevertheless.

To get back to the topic at hand. Or rather, at brain. (Sorry, I’ve always been something of a cut up, especially when it comes to puns. Cut up? Get it?) To get right to the heart of the matter (cranium), and here I’m getting serious—skulls are thick. And hard. It is not easy to get through one. Think about how you’d do it.

And then, assuming you find a way to get through the skull, imagine how hard it is to keep someone alive once you’ve done it. Go ahead, imagine it. Hint: not all the Band-Aids in like all the Duane Reade’s on like the entire Upper West Side and Upper East Side could do it.

Oh, sorry again; you can’t imagine anything anymore. Of course. Well, wink your eye about it. You get what I’m saying.

And, you really can’t fault a guy for trying, can you? And, what’s more, I promise promise promise that the open heart surgery I’m going to be performing on you tomorrow morning, you don’t have a worry in the world. I’m bringing the instructions with me into the operating room. And setting my alarm fifteen minutes early.

An Italian activist who was killed in Gaza early on Friday left behind an extensive online record of his activism.

News just broke that Juliano Mer Khamis, who has established and run the Freedom Theater in Jenin, has been assassinated by  masked gunmen in the refugee camp near the theatre.  Mer Khamis, son of a Palestinian father and a Jewish mother, has faced threats since forever: From conservatives in the camp who took a strong dislike to the theatre’s liberal repertoire and casting of both men and women, both boys and girls; from nationalists who saw him as an agent of the occupation, a promoter of normalization; and from just about every Israeli who commented on any news piece covering him and his activity.

There will be so much said and written about Juliano in the coming days. Friends and students will laud his tremendous bravery, his contempt for the walls and barriers – especially barriers of fear – that crisscross our country, his sense of stage, his talent. Enemies will pour mud on him, rejoicing in the death of one they see as a half-breed and a turncoat. Comrades will remember a complex and uneasy man, as famous for his rough temper as he was for his devotion to the cause.

There will be so much said. I would just like to share this memory. It’s seven years ago, 2004. The Student Coalition at Tel Aviv University, an organization I co-founded, is staging a massive teach-out on the university square, trying to disrupt the normalcy of dozy lectures as the streets were burning.

At the end of a long, long day with lectures and arguments and songs and chants, as darkness fell on plush northern Tel Aviv, we screened Juliano’s film, “Arna’s children” – still, to my mind, the best documentary ever done about the Occupation. We, some five hundred students, sat in the outdoor auditorium, stunned. Before us, the “Palestinian gunmen” of the newscasts we knew since childhood – these footnotes in the reports, usually afforded no visuals, just “three Palestinian gunmen were shot in the West Bank today, IDF spokesman said. In other news…” – were coming to life as human beings, speaking about their childhood dreams, their slain comrades, their hopes or lack of hope for a future; sometimes as children, sometimes as grown, gun-wielding men, with children just like they used to be clustered around their knees. After the credits rolled and passed, the plaza was completely silent. One girl, a moderate centre-leftist from the campus chapter of Meretz, raised her hand. Juliano called her out. She got up and asked: “What can we do to help?”

This was the most humanizing, wall-shattering moment of my life.

Surveys say hundreds of homes in West Bank have begun to be built since settlement freeze was lifted three weeks ago.

9 October 2010 | ISM Media

Beit Ummar, West Bank

Israeli repression of peaceful dissent continued this week, as a nonviolent demonstration in Beit Ummar was crushed in an explosion of violence and arrests.

Beit Ummar, a city near Hebron, hosts weekly nonviolent demonstrations against the Israeli occupation. The nearby settlement, Karmei Tzur, has confiscated much of the city’s land.

Palestinians and international activists gathered Saturday with the intention of walking towards the illegal settlement. The marchers were met by Israeli soldiers, who blocked off the demonstration route. Shortly after the marchers were obstructed, soldiers began throwing sound bombs. A 25-year-old Palestinian was arrested as the crowd began to disperse.

Soldiers then pointed to and began to arrest an Irish activist. A second international attempted to prevent his arrest, and both were pushed violently to the ground. An additional two international activists came to their side, and all four were pepper-sprayed. The debilitating effects of direct contact with pepper spray facilitated their arrests.

Shortly thereafter, three Palestinian youth (15, 16 and 17) were arrested by undercover Israeli police who had posed as Palestinian youth. Soldiers then dispersed the remaining crowd by firing barrages of tear gas. Journalists documenting this attack were threatened by the soldiers.

The arrested Palestinian youth were taken to the nearby police station, blindfolded, and forced to kneel. One teen’s head was pushed violently into a wall.

The four arrested internationals were also taken to the police station. One suffered extreme pain from the pepper spray and repeatedly requested for medical care, which was denied.

The internationals were then separated and interrogated. They are charged with violating a “Closed Military Zone” order, although soldiers didn’t produce any such order before the activists were arrested.

After ten hours, three of the international activists were released. The activists continue to suffer from the effects of direct contact with pepper spray, and one is covered in bruises.

The fourth international activist remains in prison and will face trial on October 10th.

Deaths reported after overnight military operation in West Bank town of Hebron.

Clip of an Israeli soldier dancing around a female prisoner called illustrative of "sick mentality of occupier".

Israelis and Palestinians are wondering what to make of speech by Israel's foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, which seemed to directly contradict the policy of peace talks his own government is engaged in.

An Israeli court has convicted two soldiers for using a child as a human shield during the deadly 2009 Gaza war.

Palestinians say Israeli settlers in the West Bank burnt prayer rugs and Quran copies in early morning attack.

Shared by Lo Lo Bird
I've never seen such a nice looking Koala before.

The kangaroo’s twisted marsupial family tree is now in order thanks to — you guessed it — jumping genes. Genetic evidence shows that a South American ancestor gave rise to all Australian marsupials, and that the South American opossums were the earliest group to branch off from the other six marsupial clans.

Distinctive for raising their live-born young in protective pouches, marsupials all trace back to a common ancestor that split off from the rest of the mammals about 130 million years ago. But fossil and genetic evidence conflict about which marsupial species evolved first, and where.

Jumping genes provide new clues for solving the puzzle. These “junk” bits of DNA make copies of themselves to reinsert randomly in the genome. Half of the marsupial genome consists of jumping genes, so researchers have plenty to work with. Gene-jumping is rare, and each jump is a unique event unlikely to happen again. So if two species share a jumping gene, scientists can deduce that they inherited it from a common ancestor.

Maria Nilsson and her colleagues at Westfälische Wilhelms Universität Münster in Germany looked at similarities and differences in jumping genes in the seven main branches of marsupials. In the July PLoS Biology, the team presents a new marsupial family tree with slightly different familial relationships than other research had predicted.

“It’s a different type of data, and it’s much cleaner [than fossil and genetic data],” says evolutionary biologist David Pollock of the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver, who was not involved with the research.

According to the new tree, all Australian marsupials arose from a single South American ancestor. In addition, their data puts the gray, short-tailed South American opossum on the earliest branch of the marsupial tree.

There’s always the potential for error in molecular studies, says mammologist Ines Horovitz of the University of California, Los Angeles. But she says the study “contributes new data, and that’s always important.”

Next, Nilsson says she wants to use jumping genes to probe the relationships among the Australian marsupials to see exactly how they’re related.

Image: Koala in Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary, Queensland, Australia./Flickr/Erik Veland.

See Also:

• Think Koalas Are Cute? Thank Eucalyptus and Evolution
• The Extreme Mammal Hall of Fame
• Opossum Provides Insight into Human Evolution

A massive simulation of soot’s climate effects finds that basic pollution controls could put a brake on global warming, erasing in a decade most of the last century’s temperature change.

Compared to the larger, longer term task of getting greenhouse-gas pollution under control, limiting soot wouldn’t be hard. Unlike new energy technology and profound changes in lifestyle, the tools — exhaust filters, clean-burning stoves — already exist.

“Soot has such a strong climate effect, but it has a lifetime in the atmosphere of just a few weeks. Carbon dioxide has a lifetime of 30 to 50 years. If you totally stop CO2 emissions today, the Arctic will still be totally melted,” said Stanford University climate scientist Mark Jacobson. If soot pollution is immediately curtailed, “the reductions start to occur pretty much right away. Within months, you’ll start seeing temperature differences.”

Jacobson’s simulation, currently in press at the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, is the latest in a line of studies showing a powerful climate role for fine soot, also known as black carbon. (That’s a somewhat misleading appellation, since some carbon is brown, and the pollution in soot contains a host of other compounds.)

Soot comes from the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels, and also from the burning of wood or dung for fuel. Crop residue and forest-burning are another major source. When aloft, the dark particles absorb sunlight, raising local temperatures and causing rain clouds to form, which in turn deprive other areas of moisture. When soot lands on snow or ice, its effects are magnified, because melts reveal fresh patches of heat-absorbing dark ground.

In 2003, a NASA simulation blamed soot for 25 percent of the past century’s observed warming. A study last year suggested that soot was responsible for almost half of a 3.4-degree Fahrenheit rise in average Arctic temperatures since 1890 — a greater rise than anywhere else on Earth.

Soot also appears to be a culprit in drastic melts of Himalayan glaciers which provide water to much of South Asia, and in disrupting the monsoon cycles on which the region’s farmers rely. The United Nations puts the soot-related death toll at 1.5 million people annually.

Jacobson’s simulation, the culmination of 20 years of research on the dynamics of soot and its interaction with local, regional and global climate dynamics, reinforces those findings. It also studies a question implicit in the earlier studies, but not yet modeled: What would happens if soot pollution stopped?

“If you just eliminate soot, you get a significant climate benefit, and you can do it on a short time period, because soot has a life of just a few weeks,” said Jacobson. “You don’t get the full response for a while, as there are deep ocean feedbacks that take a long time, but it’s a lot faster than controlling CO2.”

Jacobson simulated the effects of curtailing soot from fossil-fuel emissions, something that’s already possible with tailpipe and smokestack filters. He simulated the effects of replacing wood- and dung-burning cookfires with clean-burning stoves. And he simulated both advances simultaneously.

If soot disappeared overnight, average global temperatures would drop within 15 years by about 1 degree Fahrenheit, maybe a little more. That’s about half the net warming — total global warming, minus cooling from sun-reflecting aerosols — experienced since the beginning of the industrial age. The effect would be even larger in the Arctic, where sea ice and tundra could rapidly refreeze.

“It will take some decades to phase down fossil-fuel emissions, so reducing dirty aerosols [soot] while we are doing that may help retain Arctic sea ice,” said NASA climatologist James Hansen, one of the first researchers to study soot dynamics. But he emphasized that soot control is only a stopgap measure. “We should reduce soot for several reasons, especially its health effects, but it is only a modest help in controlling global warming,” he said.

Nevertheless, soot could ease the delay between controlling greenhouse gas emissions and cooling. It might also help “avoid tipping points — nonlinear, abrupt and potentially irreversible climate change, especially in the Arctic,” said Erika Rosenthal, a climate policy expert at the progressive nonprofit Earthjustice.

Soot-control policy, however, is scattered. According to Jacobson, climate policymakers have paid little attention to soot. Compared to well-studied greenhouse gases, its climate role is new and unfamiliar. “There are international efforts to limit greenhouse gases, but they completely ignore soot as something to control from a climate perspective,” said Jacobson.

The draft international climate treaty negotiated last year in Copenhagen doesn’t contain soot-specific provisions, but the United Nations Environmental Program is meeting in February to discuss policy options on soot. A relatively little-known U.N. effort called the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution has also established a black-carbon working group.

In the United States, a rare bipartisan environmental bill sponsored in 2009 by climate skeptic James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) and environmentalist Barbara Boxer (D-California) foundered after its inclusion in massive energy legislation that recently died in Congress. It would have required the EPA to study and possibly regulate black-carbon emissions.

In anticipation of these legislative difficulties, the EPA was charged this year with launching a black-carbon study. More immediately, Congress is now debating reauthorization of the Diesel Emissions Reduction Act, a federal program that pays for putting clean tailpipes on diesel-fuel–burning automobiles, a prime source of black carbon. According to Rosenthal, the program has been fantastically successful, with retrofit requests exceeding available funds by $2 billion.

Controlling crop and forest burns isn’t so easy, but clean stoves could be provided to the developing world for relatively little money. “We have the technology now. It’s a matter of implementing it,” said Rosenthal.

“It’s low-hanging fruit,” said Jacobsen. “It’s straightforward to address, and it can be addressed.”

Images: 1) Rennett Stowe/Flickr. 2) Average global air temperature decline following elimination of fossil-fuel–based soot (dotted line) and fossil-fuel– plus biofuel–based soot (solid line).

Citation: “Short-term effects of Controlling Fossil-Fuel Soot, Biofuel Soot and Gases, and Methane on Climate, Arctic Ice, and Air Pollution Health.” By Mark Jacobson. Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, in press.

Legislators question US president's Afghan war-strategy after Wikileak disclosures.

About 300 residents of a village in the Negev desert have lost homes and possessions.

What Gandhi had to say about a Jewish homeland in the Middle East.

A drunk man in Australia survives being bitten by a huge salt water crocodile after he climbed into its enclosure and tried to ride it.

The next Gaza flotilla may include a ship named The Audacity of Hope.

Also, quickupdates:

I haven’t had working internet at my house, so that’s why I haven’t been posting.

Lindsey, thanks for the blog design.  I like the rocket, and think that all blogs should include rockets.

I haven’t gotten a new job yet, so clearly zen-master-like hairdressers are a sham.  But I did apply to work for two awesome companies.  One of which immediately rejected me.  Damn.  I also had a phone interview on Halloween with the local library system.  I think I did fairly well, but this is just the second step in the six month long application process, so it’ll be a while.

Oh, and most importantly, I voted.

[edit: Lindsey, how do you imbed video on your blog?  I tried pasting in the html, but it didn't work!]
[edit again: YES! I fixed the video imbedding. Thanks Lindsey!]

Tock Tick

So, I got arrested at the demonstration in Beit Ummar yesterday. Beit Ummar is a village between Bethlehem and Hebron where Israeli Settlers have stolen a huge portion of the Palestinians land. This was the same village where two weeks ago a soldier threw me on the ground and stepped on my face. Yesterday it started off the same: we marched from the village through the olive grove and down toward the settlement to meet a line of soldiers blocking the path. Moussa of the popular committee said a few things about how it was their land and the settlers had no right to be there, the soldiers shot sound bombs at us, and a Palestinian man near the front got arrested. It all happened so quickly, within about two minutes probably, that I had no idea a Palestinian had already been arrested until they set me down next to him at the top of the hill. All I saw was my friend Marie on the ground shouting. Apparently she’d gone up to talk to the Palestinian man and the soldiers decided to arrest her too. I approached to take pictures but quickly decided I would be more help on the ground (maybe I’ll never be a real photographer… I prefer being a part of the action.)

I just went up to talk to her. Puppy piling hadn’t really occurred to me because she’s an Israeli and wouldn’t get it so bad anyway. But then they started trying to drag me away, and they shot Marie straight in the face with pepper spray, Ron and May who where there on the ground also got shot, and we all just grabbed onto each other for dear life. Marie started screaming at that point: she got it the worst of all of us, and was shaken up for the rest of the day (10 more hours before we were released). She begged for us to let her go, hoping the soldiers would take her to a medic, but of course they didn’t. At that point May and I (though May was more indisposed) realized we had a problem because our good friend Ron was stuck there with us, but he’d already been arrested twice, and had signed a form saying he wouldn’t come to Beit Ummar. Ron was holding on to my leg and offered to let me go, but I said I wanted to stay hoping we could prevent him from being arrested somehow. The people we’ve talked to since have said that it was extremely unusual for them to use pepper spray the way they did, and that they RARELY arrest so many people as they did yesterday. I don’t think it was a bad assumption to make that we could help him by staying.

Anyway, the soldiers dragged me out from under him and I went limp so they had to get about three people to pick me up and carry me.

I started screaming that they were hurting me (I got some nasty bruises on my arms and legs), and the soldier with the pepper spray canister came up to me and offered to share some if I didn’t stand up, so I reluctantly stood up. I only got a tiny bit of the spray on me before (up my nose, incidentally) and that was quite enough. So they brought me up to the settlement, forcing my head down at the gate so I wouldn’t look at the settlers (several of them just standing around, there for the show.) They set me down next to Marie who was writhing on the ground. She’d gotten pepper spray all over her body. Her face was still bright orange. I tried to help her, but there wasn’t much I could do at that point except give her tissues and let her squeeze my hand to the breaking point. Soon they brought up Ron and May, who were also writhing and blinded. The soldiers told us “it’s ok, the pain only lasts 20 minutes.” I was the only one not blinded so I tried negotiating, asking for something like milk to neutralize the acid. They just laughed and teased us. They did dump water on their heads to help, but we found that that only made it worse. The only things that helped were tissues and the breeze. After about 10 minutes Marie was still writhing and May was beginning to hyperventilate (Ron was badass, he got a faceful too but managed to stay composed). Marie asked me to tell her a story to take her mind off it, so I told her about the Rachel Corrie trial on Thursday. Then I ran out of things to say and started reciting Howl by Allen Ginsberg (I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness; starving, hysterical, naked…)

That’s when the soldiers decided to remove me from the group. They drove me and the Palestinian man to the army base inside the settlement, and had us kneel in front of a wall. The palestinian man was handcuffed and I wasn’t. He’d been blindfolded immediately and put in the back of the army truck; they put me in the front seat. I asked what he was charged with and they said throwing rocks, which I hadn’t seen. Even at that point I thought it was extremely unlikely. They asked what I was doing there, making trouble. I asked what they were doing there, protecting illegal settlements. They said I was naive, protecting terrorists. I said I’d never met a terrorist. All the Palestinians I have met are wonderful people. I quit talking to them. When they put us down at the wall, they told me I didn’t need to kneel if I didn’t want to– I could put my back to the wall– but I decided to just sit there the way they made him sit. I didn’t want to look at the soldiers anyway.

After a few minutes they brought three shebab with their hands tied and made them kneel by the wall too. One of them got his head banged into the wall while being pushed down. They were so young looking. Later we found out they were 15, 16, and 17. They looked like babies. I just wanted to hug them. It was so sickening to see them treated that way. Finally they blindfolded me too. After a few minutes they set another person down next to me. It was Marie, still shaking but a little better looking. A few minutes later they brought Ron and May. We sat there against the wall for a long time while the soldiers behind us chatted and made jokes in Hebrew.

Eventually they dragged us into another vehicle, still blindfolded, to drive us to Tel Rumeida prison. May started screaming and crying because her blindfold was tied so tight it rubbed more pepper spray into her eyes and she wanted to get it off. She begged them to take it off, reached up to tug at it and they handcuffed her. I think that was the point when one of the soldiers shouted, “welcome to Israel!”

I was sitting next to a shebab on the way there. I asked him if he was ok, and he said, “no. My hand.” I tried to ask what he meant, and if he’d been wounded. but he didn’t understand my english and I couldn’t understand arabic. When we arrived at the prison they put us all in the same room at a table and took our blind folds off. Then we saw that two of the shebab were nearly in tears because their hands had been tied so tightly. We implored that the soldiers untie them but the soldiers didn’t want to. We kept insisting until a higher level police officer came in and told them to cut the ties. Their hands were swollen and red.

The next 8 hours we mostly spent just sitting at that table listening to the soldiers make jokes at us and tell us to shut-up. When they caught palestinian talking, they’d push him in his chair to face the corner. The man and the oldest shebab spent most of the night in corners. Of course we didn’t get such harsh treatment. A few times the soldiers tried to converse with us about how naive we were for being activists. Ron called them all arse-holes and they didn’t know what that meant. At one point while they were trying to tell us all Palestinians are terrorists again, we mentioned the one-and-a-half-year-old Palestinian baby who was killed in Silwan by tear gas last week. A soldier said, “well that is bad.” Then laughed and added, “but now he’s up in heaven with his 72 virgins!”

One by one, they took us aside and interrogated us on audio tape. The interrogation itself wasn’t hard at all. In fact it was ridiculous. We obviously hadn’t done anything. We knew there was proof in video that we hadn’t done anything. The officer told us each that at the beginning of the demonstration, a soldier had come out to show everyone a paper and map saying we were on a closed military zone and that we had to leave, and that people had taken pictures of video of it so we obviously knew. Upon comparing stories later we found that all of us had just laughed at hearing that. Ridiculous. We were arrested within 5 minutes. There wasn’t even TIME for them to tell us we were on a closed military zone. The officer asked me what I was doing in Israel, and I said taking pictures of the occupation. He said there is no occupation because the west bank is in Israel and Palestine doesn’t exist. I displayed my palestinian flag wrist band and he pulled back like I’d splashed water in his face or something. What a whack-job.

Unfortunately, the first Palestinian arrested had a mental disability, and they persuaded him to sign a confession saying he had thrown rocks at the military. This is impossible. He was arrested before any of us, and long before any rocks were thrown. As far as I know he’s still in prison, but I’ll keep you updated if I hear more about his status.

They decided to let Marie, May, and I go after we signed papers saying we wouldn’t go to the Beit Ummar demonstration for 15 days. We got off EASY. Ron had to spend the night at the prison and go to court this morning because it was his third arrest. We think he won’t be deported, but might be banned from the west bank.

They said as we left that the two youngest shebab would probably be released that night, and that the older one might have to go to jail because there was video of him throwing rocks. Again, I’ll let you know when I hear more about their status.

I’m in Palestine for the next month-and-a-half volunteering with the ISM, and I’ve been here three weeks already. I’ve written a lot down, but not blogged it yet. The amount that’s happened and that I have to write is intimidating; I’ve filled up half a moleskin already.

My location for the most part will be in Al-Khalil, or Hebron. This morning in Hebron two Palestinians were killed in a raid. One of them, a 24-year-old named Mamoun Al-Natshe, had a cousin who I met on the bus today. He was very sweet and helped us find a taxi back home (we’re a little slow and can’t seem to remember the name of our neighborhood.)

This afternoon we were in Bil’in at the weekly demo. Hamde Abu snapped a lovely photo of me looking terrified at the teargas.

That’s the second demo I’ve gotten scared at (though we go to them twice a week). In Beit Ummar 2 weeks ago we had to de-arrest a palestinian, and in the struggle a soldier threw me on the ground and stepped on my face and arms. It was creepy the way he stepped on me: not like he’d just tripped, but rather like he wanted to display his dominance. If it had been accidental I’m sure it would have hurt, but he did it so gently and slowly it felt very conscious. Anyway, I fell in a pit of ash where the Shebabs had made a fire, so I was covered in ash for the rest of the day. Someone told me they started calling me something like cinderella in arabic.

On thursday we went to the trial for Rachel Corrie. It was all in Hebrew, of course, but Cindy Corrie was very sweet and told her translator to speak so that K and I could hear.

There were about 8 other internationals there. We assumed they were there in solidarity with the Corries, like us. We told a couple of them we were ISM, and gave them some personal information we later regretted when hours later we concluded one or more of them worked for the police. First oddness: the guy who’d been flirting with K handed a note over me to an older man that said “she’s with the ISM . . .” and some more I missed. Old guy wrote some notes back and was more careful that I didn’t see them, and flirty boy crumpled them immediately. At the break flirty boy started spouting some predictable Zionist garbage. About 5 other internationals joined them and bombarded us. They were just there studying journalism; only came because it was a significant case. None of them came back after the break. On the way back in, that sketchy note passing older guy said “Hi Xxxxxxx!!!” But I hadn’t told him my real name…? And afterward K mentioned that she’d noticed him using a concealed tape recorder. She thought he was just taping the trial but maybe he was recording our conversations? Maybe we’re just being paranoid, but Israeli Security has been known to use spies before. Weird, right?

The judge ruled that all of the significant witnesses will be interrogated behind screens so that no one, not even the family can see their faces. Cindy was insulted and upset to learn this. They won’t let her look into the faces of the men who killed her daughter.

Sometimes we’d look up at Cindy’s face and see that she was working hard at not crying. I wrote down, “It’s weird how detached we can get from what’s actually going on here. Now I’m crying too.” It was incredibly upsetting sometimes. The translation difficulties at least gave us something to concentrate on.

By tomorrow night we should be able to get a transcript. It’ll be in Hebrew, but I’m sure someone will translate it promptly. I can’t give much of a summary because I only caught about every other word, but with what I heard and what Cindy wrote in her notepad I was able to piece together some things. The first witness was the man in charge of the investigation. Very cocky and apathetic. Didn’t seem to think it was a problem that they hadn’t interviewed any Palestinian witnesses, or that they didn’t have ANY witness statements on video, despite the obvious value of such video. The second witness was the commander of the second bulldozer. There were two bulldozers at the scene, and this was the one that didn’t kill Rachel. Most of the time all he had to say was that he didn’t remember or couldn’t see anything (despite the fact that his JOB as commander was to be the eyes for the vehicle.) He couldn’t remember if she was standing or sitting, but otherwise had a vivid description of what she looked like under the rubble. He said apologetically that they didn’t know she was an american until later: if it had been a Palestinian there wouldn’t have been a problem, right? They played a recording of the radio communication between the bulldozers. The witness couldn’t/wouldn’t identify the speakers. Immediately after Rachel was hit someone said in arabic, “did you kill him?” and someone replied “God rest his soul.” Does that sound like an accident to you?

More has happened since I’ve been here, and much more will happen before I leave, so I’ll try to post frequently.

Salam,
London

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I always found Nietzsche rather funny, though, so perhaps I'm reading everything backwards.

There are some things you shouldn’t say in certain contexts…

There’s a little superstitious in everyone, right?

I like shortcuts, too!

Also a winner: when people leave really long messages and then speed-rattle off their phone number at the very end when you’re not expecting it, so you have to listen to the whole message again.

Sometimes those lifetime opportunities pass you by so unexpectedly.

Being ahead of schedule is great as long as you’re ahead of schedule uniformly. When one group is behind, you usually start to develop problems, like getting further and further out of sync, or cutting corners to catch up, or maybe the feature just ends up dying in a corner all alone…

“if medicine was like software development” with

DOC DEV and NURSE TEST

Now if only this meant I was having so much fun I lost track of the time…

These are important when dealing with customers. This is what success might look like:

If we haven’t heard any complaints, it must not be that bad, right?

(the beginning: We’ll Just Make That a Feature )

Now we just need an intern with the right sense of humor…