George Habash, Heath Ledger, Bad Beef

George Habash
-Born in Lyd, Palestine, on August 1, 1925 to a Christian family
--In 1944 enrolled at the medical school at the American University Beirut (AUB)
-In 1948, shocked by the 1947 United Nations partition plan, returned to Jaffa and started a small business.
--Witnessed the fall of Palestinian towns under Jewish control as he volunteered at an emergency centre to help the wounded.
--He went back to Beirut to resume his studies and became a political activist and joined a small group of pan-Arab nationalists.
--He graduated in 1951 and was made a professor at the AUB but was forced to resign after his political activities came to light. He then moved to Jordan and opened a medical practice.
--In 1953 he co-founded the Arab National Movement.
--In 1964 he met and formed a friendship with the late Egyptian President Jamal Abdul Nasser and advocated armed struggle.
--On December 11, 1967 he founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
--In 1968 a group led by Nayef Hawatmeh broke away f
rom the PFLP and founded the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
--Steps down from the leadership of the PFLP in 2000 for health reasons and settles down in Amman, Jordan.
--Dies on January 26, 2008 in an Amman hospital at the age of 82.

He argued that the Palestinians should not be begging for the acceptance of their enemies, that the Palestinians over-eagerness to be included would come at a very high price in the form of gradual compromise of their national rights.

His words resonated in the hall and beyond. People rose to their feet. Habash expressed their dream, but the majority that day voted for what they saw as a new "era of pragmatism" that required new strategy.

The PLO leaders, however, vowed that diplomacy would not preclude armed struggle against Israel

Habash did not relent. He remained a critical and foreboding voice, eventually opposing the 1993 Oslo accords between the PLO and Israel.

When in 1988 the Palestine National Council (PNC), the Palestinian parliament in exile, endorsed the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, Habash did not join the celebration.

A PLO leader, jubilant at the time about what he believed was a historic step towards independence
CEO, later told me that the pain that he saw in Habash’s eyes reflected a lingering pain in his own heart. The leader, who became one of the fiercest advocates of the Oslo negotiating process with Israel, like Habash himself, was from a family expelled from their home in Palestine in 1948.

Over the years I saw and interviewed Habash in Algeria, Syria and Jordan: He repeatedly said that no Palestinian leader had the right to kill the hope of the coming generations to realise the dream.

The Oslo accord and especially the events that followed only served to reinforce Habash’s belief that Palestinians were being led to submission...


aljazeera

____________________________________________________
Heath Ledger
Whom I get confused with Sydney boy Hugh Jackman (Wolverine) to the extent that I was startled to hear that Wolverine IV was commencing filming in Otago, since I believed Wolverine was dead.

Odd how Ed Hillary had a bad body image as a boy, this the toughest guy of the century. I recall my own bad body image, objectively I'm not so odd looking, the problem is decidedly one of poor socialisation, (as one of my school buddies put it ... we were an over-read bunch of 15yearolds ...) but it was body image that lead me to tape salt moistened tin-can segments soldered to mains wire, to my wrists, put a nail in the fuse box, and place my hand on the switch ...
I carried Potassium Cyanide capsules for some years, until life got so interesting with Aceh Ganga that I threw them away.
I was chuffed to hear that Ed Hillary drove his family around in a mini-cooper van. I used to do the honey run to Wilderlands in my minivan (the original 848cc (!) albeit with freeflow manifold, and twin SU carbs[which one tuned by listening until each gave an equal hissing sound - I understand that carburetors no longer occur at all]

Ambien ... zolpidem .. Stilnox..Stilnoct, Hypnogen, Zolt, Zolfresh, Nimadorm, Sanval, Myslee.. hard to kill yourself on that stuff...
_________________________________________________________
27 Club
Kurt Cobain ( might be murder)

Jimi Hendrix (not deliberate... an evil fan fed him barbs?)
Jim Morrison ( mystery, no autopsy?).
Janis Joplin ... within one ten-month span...

Brian Jones .. murdered by pool boy?
Chris Bell ... Big Star
D. Boon ... the Minutemen
Pete Ham ... Badfinger
Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, of the Grateful Dead;
bluesman Robert Johnson;
Johnny Kidd, of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates;
Les Harvey, of Stone the Crows;
Raymond "Freaky Tah" Rogers, of Lost Boyz;
Gary Thain, of Uriah Heep;
Alan Wilson, of Canned Heat;
Jeremy Ward, of Mars Volta;
Dave Alexander, of The Stooges;
Seattle:
Kristen Pfaff, of Hole
Mia Zapata, who was murdered in 1993
__________________________________________________





August 1956, Wellington. A procession of "floats" through Lambton Quay . I guess it was before the 2nd test with the Boks at Athletic Park. The floats were merely trucks with rather crude assemblages on top -i seem to recall one with a figure head down a toilet ( a Bok?) ... and one with "Skinner for Dinner" ... calling for the return of my great-uncle Kevin? captain of the 52 Blacks, NZ heavyweight boxer 1947... The 2nd test lost to the Boks, Kevin was called out of retirement into the front line, and the last 2 tests were won (the final having famously one try)
Our house in Thorndon was near the railway station, male rellies in heavy damp gabardine raincoats would turn up unannounced before a test, get Bluff oysters and Crayfish on Friday night, - working class Catholic food in the 50's.

__________________________________________________
Bad Beef
30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is involved in livestock... a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.
1kg beef = CO2 average European car 155 miles,...100-watt bulb for 20 days.
48 kWh 17 E7 Joules ??
__________________________________________________
Good Google Kites
pbs
To my knowledge this idea of using a tethered kite to generate power was first put forth back in 2003 by Pete Lynn, a mechanical engineer and second-generation kite designer from New Zealand
__________________________________________________
Biofuels a bad idea:
“When you calculate how much of the sun’s energy is stored in the plants, it’s below one percent,” he said at a forum at the Philippine International Convention Center in Pasay City on Wednesday.
inquirer
__________________________________________________
theoildrum
But fields of grain are needed to supply enough calories to support the energy needs of a person, which is about 850,000 calories per year. And the grains need to be grown in areas that are beyond the scope of urban gardens. For example, in an intensively managed garden setting one might yield 10 lbs of grain per 100 sq ft. A person might need 300 lbs of grains per year at 1600 calories per pound to yield nearly 500,000 calories, but this would require 30 x 100 sq ft = 3000 sq ft per person, or six times the veggie area.

With heroic assumptions, including great soil, plenty of water, inputs of fertilizer, and highly skilled labor, it might be reasonable to grow enough food for a person in ca. 6000 sq ft, when paths between beds are included. That's about 1/7 th of an acre. A household would need 1/2 an acre.
mannlib
wheat yearbook[in the future we'll be fighting over shit, literally. I recall early morning urban disputes over the milk-cart horse's droppings. In medieval China, 5 people could pay the rent on a room with the sale of their night-soil]


__________________________________________________
from poneke:
"Canterbury University’s erudite philosophy professor Denis Dutton, who founded the wonderful Arts & Letters Daily ... "
OK now I know where the PRN (Professional Red Neck) Arts & Letters Daily came from
How quaint that it's a NZ scheme... and how quaint that Dutton is a CCD (Climate Chaos denier) which makes NZ home to 2 of the grandest CCD poobahs.

it appears that
"SciTech Daily, the latter the labour of Dutton’s fellow Christchurch skeptic, Vicki Hide"
now I love SciTech Daily, and I havn't detected a CCD bias there, but A&L daily definitely has that PRN bias (hippies were dirty, welfare is cruelty, etc etc)
I never dreamt that both were Mainland offspring...
__________________________________________________
newstatesman
American Prometheus, Kai Bird and Martin Sherman
"A man who in 1926 apparently attempted to murder the Nobel Prize-winning British physicist Patrick Blackett with a poisoned apple."
What??? see:
newyorker
__________________________________________________
nps
Coyote alert
see 33 endangered species around Golden Gate


ggnrabigyear
__________________________________________________
_____
aboutmyplanet
Paris electic cars for rent:
the electric vehicles, called Voiturelib’s, will be available to the residents and tourists for a small subscription charge but without the need to book ahead. Also, users will be able to pick them up from any EV station in the city, but will be able to leave them anywhere in Paris,
_____
The Solatube Daylighting System captures sunlight on the rooftop and redirects it down a reflective tube into interior spaces.
The tubing will fit between rafters and will install easily with no structural modification. At the ceiling level, an attractive diffuser spreads the light evenly throughout the room. The small tube provides and incredible amount of light – even more than with skylights that are many times larger and unlike other daylighting systems,

__________________________________________________

_____
nucleusinc
Medical Animations?
__________________________________________________


George Habash, Heath Ledger, Bad Beef