Titan is ranting, is anyone listening?

Titan and  Pollyanna along with their alter egos YandA  wish all who celebrate Thanksgiving a very happy holiday.  This time Titan wants you to know what his home environment at Saturn sounds like.  This noise or music comes from his little neighbor Enceladus with a bit of human background.  These sounds were recorded by the Cassini spacecraft which has been in orbit around Saturn since December 2004. The clip was called to our attention  by our friend and colleague Abi Rymer from APL.  Thank you Abi.  We hope you like it. At the site there are other videos of sounds from space.



What is done is to record natural electromagnetic fluctuations, in this case, the plasma wave detector on board the spacecraft Cassini in orbit around Saturn and to convert them to the mechanical fluctuations in your loudspeaker.  Enjoy and listen to the great god Kronos.  For some more weirdness from Saturn, Titan refers you to Phil Plait whose  Bad Astronomy blog   link is to the right of each of our postings.

RANTING AKA TILTING AT WINDMILLS
 Having regaled you with that, Titan can get on with his normal business of ranting about what is wrong with the world.  This week there is much to rant about, as is the case almost every week.

EVIL IDIOCY
We will start with something in the US that makes our blood boil.  As is well known, the great beloved, 84 year old football coach of Penn State University was fired after 50 years for covering up child abuse by one of his assistants, a monster named Sandusky.  We have all fumed at the covering up of child abuse by the Catholic Church and indeed they eventually shaped up albeit late, in many cases far too late, and with insufficient strength.  We so far have not seen Jesuit seminary students rioting in support of a priest defrocked for raping the altar boys.  Here the president of the University not only fired the coach, but resigned himself, since it happened on his watch (Israeli generals please note).  The abuse and cover-up were bad enough, but what exacerbates the crime is the fact that 2,000 Penn State students rioted in support of their coach.

Can you imagine this?  Five percent of the student body of a major and respected academic institution rioted in support of child abuse.  The sports blogger Jon Fucile  lays it on the line well.  We saw idiots rioting in Vancouver over a hockey game loss and historically there have been sports riots going back to the sixth century, but nothing rivals the evil idiocy of the Penn State students.   The blogger Sara Whitman says it better than we could.  Andy Borowitz has a practical suggestion for Penn State.

HUMAN RIGHTS AROUND THE WORLD
We start with a student in Azerbaijan who is in jail for a Facebook posting.  Jabbar Savalan

 was jailed after calling for protests against the Azerbaijan government on Facebook. If there was ever a need for a "Dislike" button on Facebook, this is it!  Please read more and act.

We move on to China where the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng  and his family

Cheng Guangcheng with his wife and son

are being subjected to severe restriction on their freedom of movement and contacts.  In Tibet and China , we have seen two monks and nine nuns immolate themselves in the past six months, in protest against the repressive policies of the Chinese government.  Then we have Belarus where a past candidate for the presidency has been  jailed  for his political views and moved around to frustrate access to a lawyer. He is defined as an Amnesty Prisoner of Conscience.  

Back to the United States, presumably the world's greatest democracy, where  Idaho is gearing up for an execution and  police in New York are cracking down on the Occupy Wall Street movement.

 

This movement has spread around the world since September 17

Nonetheless the movement continues to spread and appears to be preparing for a long winter.  Indeed it may be ironically true that the police helped the movement to move on from physical occupation of space to political action that can have real long term and significant effects.


Next door to us in Syria the massacres continue and the opposition fights on.  King Abdullah of Jordan has called on President Assad to step down.  Turkey and France are making noises but  hypocrisy  continues to be the order of the day.  We are told that Russia will take steps  to prevent intervention such as took place in Libya.

In Italy the  clown has resigned  after 17 years of misrule and degradation  of a great European nation.  In Britain the scientific journal Nature  is facing a libel suit by an Egyptian scientist who took some criticism of his work as a journal editor in 2008.  We think that there is a real need for current libel laws to be reformed because  the existing system can be used to suppress robust scientific debate and discussion.  Europe, alas, is also not free of things for us to rant about, including ending with a preposition...

LABOR AROUND THE WORLD
As usual, there are labor issues around the world that require attention.   In New Zealand we have the usual flexing of management muscles as unfettered capitalism goes global.  Please click and send your protest.  In Manitoba, Canada, the Faculty Association of Brandon University has been on strike  since October 12 over wages.  As a former Board member of a Faculty Association I have full sympathy for them and I hope their solidarity holds, although the report is ominous.  At the Turkish-owned Mega Textile  plant in Egypt workers have been protesting ill-treatment at the hands of management  and are now on strike to protest arbitrary dismissals.  The company has had a history of bad labor relations since it was founded five years ago.

Workers from Mega Textiles and Shebin El-Kom in a protest mid October. (Photo: Yassin Gaber)

HOME SWEET HOME
Here at home, it is hard to decide where to begin our rants.  The right wing is chipping away at our democracy, bit by bit, law by law and there is nothing to stop them.  Gideon Levy likens our PM to a man riding on the back of a tiger.   As is well know, if you ride a tiger, you will end up inside, as the famous limerick tells us:

Well drawn by anon.

There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger.--variously attributed to Monkhouse, Nash and  Lear but most likely written by  the famous anon.  It certainly applies to the conservative democrats in Israel today.  This is all consistent with the history of fascism as pointed out by Paxton in his book The Anatomy of Fascism(Knopf, New York, 2004) who shows that fascist parties never achieve power on their own, but are aided by right wing democratic parties who either lose control or try unsuccessfully to exploit and manipulate them.  Paxton debunks the consoling fiction that Mussolini and Hitler seized power. Rather, conservative elites desperate to subdue leftist populist movements ''normalized'' the fascists by inviting them to share power. It was the mob that flocked to fascism, but the elites who elevated it. We are well on our way to becoming a second Iran, because the secular fascist wing has a theocratic ally and between them we are seeing our democracy collapse before our eyes.   The religious movement to isolate women, not to allow them to sing in public, to force them to ride in the back of the bus and to be silenced in the media is part and parcel of the fascist push in Israel.  Indeed politics makes strange bedfellows.    Yes, Mussolini made the trains run on time, but look at what happened to the Italian people.
The danger from a nuclear Iran pales before the real danger of the internal dissolution of our state and its values.  This is of course also connected to the Occupation of the West Bank and our evil actions as rulers of a victim nation.   Ilana Hammerman, who has long been on the front line of the struggle for our values, leaves no doubt about the hopelessness of our situation. and the depth of the moral pit into which we have fallen.  We go to our demonstrations ,

Pro-democracy demonstration in Tel Aviv

write letters to the editor of Haaretz, read  Ari Shavit on the op-ed page and, as pointed out by Yosefa, are reminded of  Cassandra.

RED RAG COLUMN
For some cogent comments on the occupation and its implications, we would like to refer you to a weekly column by Gideon Spiro   in the Occupation Magazine.  In particular, he relates to the case of Anat Kam, a young Israeli woman soldier who was convicted of leaking classified documents and given a stiff prison term. The fact that the documents revealed crimes committed by the military establishment was not a mitigating factor, alas. 

REFUGEES AND THEIR FATE
Our policy on refugees is far from enlightened and they are often thrown back into the Sinai desert where they are in the hands of Bedouin people smugglers.  In addition to taking huge fees from the people who desperately want to get to Israel, the smugglers have come upon an additional source of income, trafficking in their organs.
"Organs are not useful if they're dead. They drug them first and remove their organs, then leave them to die".-- Rights campaigner Hamdy Al-Azazy.
The Egyptian government has largely lost control of the Sinai Peninsula and it has become a no-man's-land of crime and corruption.  In general, refugees are treated badly, be it incarceration on Christmas Island by Australia, rebuffs at the border between Kenya and Somalia, Burmese trying to cross a river to Thailand or Darfurians trying to get to Chad or Israel or wherever they can be safe.  It is sad that so many signatories of the UN conventions on refugees are evading their responsibilities when it comes down to the real thing.

To end on a lighter note, here is a video of an Italian auction of a vase that sold in auction for a million euros.
A Chinese Ming vase is up for auction.   The bidding opens at a half-million Euros.   Bidding is brisk and each bidder is clearly identified as each raises the bid by 100,000 Euros.    Within seconds, the bid stalls at one million Euros, and the gasp from the crowd identifies the excitement that prevails in the room.   The successful bidder is the last one who bid one million, and the auctioneer counts down the bid,

"Going once, going twice, and sold to the gentleman sitting in front of me for one million Euros."

Now, you are going to have to see the video for yourself.   The auctioneer is exuberant.   The pace is fast.   The conclusion? Priceless.


MAHLER FLOW CHART
You are driving along the highway listening to your favorite classical music station.   Jim Sjveda or his colleague wherever you are  tells you "now we shall hear symphony number burst of static or enter underpass  by Gustav Mahler."  In order to identify the symphony, a kind soul in Michigan  sent the following flow chart to Yand which she is sharing with Titan and his readers.  For the record, #7 starts with a tenor horn solo and not a baritone horn, but that is a minor detail.

TITAN NEEDS IMPACT
We asked before if anyone was listening to us.  We have decided that we have to take matters into our own hands and XKCD shows us how to go about it.  Titan and I now realize what we are doing wrong in terms of having some impact.  We realize what we need to do to help  save the world as Ender is doing for us in outer space.

Locke and Demosthenes

Here comes Titan again

Two infrared views of a mountainous region on Titan, with snowy peaks

This week Titan is back with much to rant about, as is usual.  First, of course, a bit of Titanic self promotion as he does in every blog.  Last time he posed for the radar imagers, this time it is for the infra red cameras of our friend Bob Brown who runs the Visual & Infrared Mapping Spectrometer aka VIMS  on the Cassini orbiter.  Titan just wants to show off his high mountains that are best seen in the infrared.  Note the methane snow--why is it unsuitable for skiing?  Your answers in  comments please.

There is much to rant about this week and Titan also intends to bend your ear on what is wrong with governments all over the world.  First let us start with some nasty human rights violations.
MEXICO
Community activists and members of an indigenous community protesting against the construction of a wind farm in Oaxaca, southern Mexico, were attacked and injured on 28 October. Amnesty International is concerned that the death of a man at the scene of the protests may be used to  prosecute protestors unfairly and to deter future protests.  It is the usual story that we see too much of, big bucks and little people.  I am appending a link in English from Amnesty Belgium Francophone that calls for action and gives you addresses of functionaries to rant at.  You should be able to find the address and fax number of your local Mexican embassy without difficulty

LABOR ISSUES
This one from Turkey is hard to believe, but again it is the strong trampling the weak and vulnerable.  In this case it is a leather factory in Turkey where there is a dispute between the workers and the owners.  Now read this quote from Eric Lee's site:
"At one point the employer invited the workers to come to work in Istanbul, but refused to give them a day to find a place to live.  So workers stayed overnight in the factory.
Here's the amazing bit: the employer decided that this constituted an "occupation" of the factory and tried to call in the police.  When that didn't work, they sacked 36 workers. " .Please act. If the site comes up with my name etc. (Eric is making it too user-friendly), erase and put in your own and then please register for Eric's network that fights for the rights of working people around the world.

Nestle is a huge food company.  It is also a prime example of corporate greed overcoming ethics.  For decades it was the focus of a major controversy over marketing breast milk substitutes in developing countries, sometimes with lethal results.  Its corporate values also spill over into its labor relations.  Please join this campaign that comes in the wake of Nestlé sacking workers in both Indonesia and Pakistan for daring to organize themselves into trade unions.

In the past, we asked you to help striking Suzuki workers in India.  96 hours after the launch of the campaign, the company had reached agreement with the union and the strike was over.  Nestle is going to be a lot tougher. 
TIBET/CHINA
It is terrible to have to report on the  self immolation of another Tibetan,  the nun, Qiu Xiang, 35,  in southwest Sichuan Province.   This wave of fiery suicides is a direct result of the persecution and repression of the people of occupied Tibet by the Chinese authorities.

Exiled Tibetans in Dharamsala, India, on Thursday with pictures of a Buddhist nun who set herself on fire to protest Chinese rule.

JUSTICE THROUGH THE UN?
Some people might consider this an oxymoron.  There is a  global NGO Coalition for an Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) which is calling on all governments worldwide to ratify the Protocol. The Optional Protocol creates a new international mechanism that will enable people whose rights have been denied – and do not have a remedy in their own country – to seek justice through the UN.

As France holds the Presidency of the G20, the NGO Coalition for an Optional Protocol calls on President Sarkozy to seize this opportunity and show leadership in promoting and protecting economic, social and cultural rights for all, especially those living in poverty. We urge France to become party to the Optional Protocol to the ICESCR.  The G20 are meeting now in France, so  please sign the petition to President Sarkozy to get France and the rest of the G20 on board.

We have seen how the UN has failed in Darfur, Somalia, South Sudan and countless other places around the world.  I am appending a link to a speech by Simon Deng, a former slave from South Sudan, before  a conference of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, the Association for World Education, and the Association of World Citizens in Geneva.

Simon Deng: Credit Heather Robinson

 I also append another speech given at the Durban Watch Conference  in which he comes down hard on the Israel bashing that takes the place of pursuit of justice for oppressed peoples.  Make no mistake, the Palestinians are an oppressed people and Titan, Pollyanna and YandA hold no brief for the conduct of the occupation forces funded by our taxes.  What has happened, however,is that of all the oppressed peoples around the world, the aboriginal Canadians forced off their land by oil companies, the Dalits (Untouchables)  of  India,

A Dalit family

the  Copts in Egypt,  the victims of anti Christian prejudice in  Nigeria and Indonesia  and many others, the Palestinians have managed to take and hold center stage.  Simon Deng describes the suffering and oppression of the black Africans in Sudan at the hands of the Khartoum regime all in the name of Jihad and Islam.  Of course, the UN and the world community remain silent about that.  China is invested heavily in Sudanese oil and therefore the g word, for genocide, could not be included in a Security Council resolution because it would have triggered automatic sanctions.  China was having none of that.  The Palestinians have managed to become the poster child of the conscience of the world.  Let me quote Simon Deng in his Durban Watch speech:
"By exaggerating Palestinian suffering, and by blaming the Jews for it, the UN has muffled the cries of those who suffer on a far larger scale."
I think that this sentence is the key.  I hate to use the arguments of the Israeli right wing who consider all criticism of Israel and its policies to be a manifestation of antisemitism.  Yet, if I ask myself why the suffering of the Palestinians (and indeed they suffer) resonates more strongly with Western liberals than does the suffering of black people in Darfur and South Sudan or of low-caste people in India, I cannot avoid thinking that bashing Israel goes back to something embedded in the Western Christian DNA.  Indeed Pope John XXIII  and Vatican II absolved us of guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus, but blaming Jews for whatever is wrong is  almost Pavlovian.   Where religious prejudice is absent or insignificant you find the canards that Jews control the world economy etc. etc.  When antisemitic propaganda catches a ride on the back of legitimate criticism of Israel and its policies, the right wing finds it easier to discredit the criticism, which is a shame and harms the cause of justice for the Palestinians.  Israel exists because Jews were first exterminated and then expelled from Europe.  Europeans may well feel guilty towards the Palestinians because of  the role of Europe in the migration of the Jews.  The establishment of Israel  could have been done with much less injustice as pointed out by Chaim Gans in his book on a  just Zionism, but the exigencies of turbulent times exacted their cost.
I would like to point out that in his Durban Watch  speech, Deng paints a far too rosy picture of the reception granted to Sudanese refugees in Israel.  Instead of open arms they were met with closed detention camps and when possible turned back at the border into the tender mercies of the Egyptian army.  When people in a Tel Aviv salon talk about infiltrators coming through the border, I usually point out that a similar conversation most certainly took place in Spanish in Madrid circa1943 about Jews infiltrating through the Pyrenees.  It makes some(not all)  people uncomfortable.

SOCIAL PROTEST IN ISRAEL AND ELSEWHERE
We are seeing all around the world a protest movement against the excesses of laissez faire capitalism  In the USA, Wall Street and the economic centers of other cities are being occupied by people who have had enough.  In Israel a protest movement began in the summer and is putting pressure on the government to make radical changes in its priorities.  Of course, the oligarchy is not sitting still for this and their hired pundits are filling the press with sharp criticism of "naive Utopian fantasies" and other choice phrases.  Nonetheless, the protest continues.  Last Saturday night, tens of thousands of  people came out to Rabin Square in Tel Aviv to make it clear that business as usual is over and ended.  The question of how a movement like that can function without a formal leadership hierarchy is raised in the latest issue of the American weekly The Nation.  There are interesting articles there by  Melissa Harris-Perry, Benjamin Barber and others.  Locally  Stav Shaffi,

speaking before the demonstration, puts things in perspective very well and makes it very clear that this movement will not go away.  She was also interviewed by Time magazine and made some very good points.  In particular, her comment on the lack of hierarchy was very relevant: "As a movement that goes up against the most powerful force, if you act like an organization, like an institution, you lose. If you have one head, they know what to cut off. You have to be like water, to be everywhere, to be unpredictable. We work like an open code. Everybody should act their part. Everybody should act like a leader."
Titan thinks that this is in the spirit of the new politics in Europe, the Pirate Parties that have sprouted in Germany, Sweden and elsewhere.  The Berlin Pirates took 8.9% of the vote in the Berlin State elections and have taken 15 seats in the legislature.

We think a Pirate Party in Israel might do well, although there is a major political issue that could shoot it down.  So far the social protesters have remained apolitical and have not taken a stance on any noneconomic issue.  The question of the occupation, the peace process (such as it is) and foreign policy could be overly divisive for such a party in Israel.  Titan and Pollyanna both think it is not intellectually honest to strive for social justice on one side of the border and the movement will have to take a position.  Certainly change, if it is to come about, will have to come through the electoral process, although the Wall Street occupiers seem to have given up on that route.
POLITICAL MADNESS AT HOME
The press in Israel is full of a discussion over a possible attack by Israel on the nuclear facilities of Iran.  I find it hard to believe that adult and presumably intelligent people are actually considering such a suicidally crazy step.  The implications are  terrible, a ferocious retaliation by Iran's clients in Lebanon and Gaza that would cost the lives of tens of thousands of our citizens, total ostracizing by the civilized world and a break in relations with the United States that would be devastating.   One can only conclude that this is a political circus and that there is no serious intention to carry out such a folly.  For an analysis of this subject, we refer you to Uri Avnery who puts it much better than we could.
WELCOME TO UNESCO
UNESCO has just voted to admit Palestine as a member.  For some reason both the US and Israel have reacted in a totally paranoid manner.  The USA is punishing the organization  and Israel is punishing the PA. . Titan and I fail to understand what is so terrible about the PA joining UNESCO and why we have to steal their money to make a point that itself is silly.
BOOK REVIEW:
This week we have two new biographies of the famous movie critic Pauline Kael,

one of them with her collected works.   She was the authoritative voice on film during the 1970-1990 epoch.  The review  by Frank Rich appeared in the New York Times last week.  It is worth a read.

LET US WIND UP IN A LIGHTER VEIN.  
Gene Weingarten is in fact quite serious in his rant about what "branding" has done to the journalism profession.  Of course, people brand cattle, but now young journalism students are told to brand themselves.  I like Gene's response to a student who asked him how he branded himself: "The best way to build a brand is to take a three-foot length of malleable iron and get one end red-hot. Then, apply it vigorously to the buttocks of the instructor who gave you this question. You want a nice, meaty sizzle."  We invite you to enjoy the images attached to Gene's diatribe.

We also have some good commentary from Andy Borowitz on a famous bank and how it preys on its customers.
 
We all, wherever we live, can understand this because we all have banks.   Greg Greenberg of The Street, who lists the dumbest things done each week on Wall Street, managed to get his hands on the letter that Brian Moynihan's nice Jewish mother sent him:

1. Bank of America's (Symbol : BAC) Yiddishe Mama

Moy-vey Brian! Bank of America's (Symbol : BAC), so-called system "upgrade" is driving all your customers absolutely meshugenah!
As if CEO Brian Moynihan didn't have enough tsuris with a stock price now below $6, America's biggest bank -- which boasts 29 million online customers -- was struck with a new headache this week when its efforts to improve its online banking platform turned into a total mish-mash. For six days ending Wednesday, customers had problems accessing their accounts without a single word from BofA brass.
And as any yiddishe mama would say, 'Brian, bubbeleh, you don't call? You don't write? Why do you treat me this way?'
Of course, the timing could not be worse for BofA's money mavens. The computer glitches started at the same time the company announced it was sticking its customers with a $5 monthly debit card fee. And while that may be a bissell for a big shot like Brian, over the course of a year that's some serious gelt for consumers who need another expense like they need a loch in kop. So much so that an online petition at Change.org asking the bank to reconsider the farkakta fee had more than 132,500 signatures by Wednesday afternoon.
Things got so bad, in fact, that this whole mishegos reached all the way up to America's main macher, President Barack Obama, who said on Wednesday, "Well, you can stop the fee if you say to the banks, 'you don't have some inherent right just to, you know, get a certain amount of profit if your customers are being mistreated.'"
To which Moynihan replied, "Butt out you yenta! I'm no schlimazel!"
Actually, he didn't say that (although it would be hilarious if he did). But he did issue a retort to the president, saying "we have a right to make a profit."
And while we agree that's truly the emmes, and Brian's bank has a right to make money for its shareholders, we don't think it was the brightest move in the battle for public opinion to tell both his customers and the President of the United States to kish mir in tuchas.
Farshtayst? We bet you do.

For the record, BofA backed down on the $5 debit card fee when it became apparent that its customers would not put up with it.  What is missing from Mama's letter are the two words goyishe kop but that might have been considered an ethnic slur.  I once had my ATM card swallowed by a BofA machine and it took me six months of phone calls and emails to get it replaced.  I learned that the bank is very benevolent and hires the graduates of the best schools for retarded children.  Nice indeed.