An inside look at the Palestinian West Bank

On February 17, 2009, Pamela Olson gave a riveting talk on the details of daily life in the Palestinian West Bank. She gave her talk at a recent session of "TechTalks," a series of talks sponsored by Google. Olson graduated from Stanford in 2002 with a major in physics. She lived in Ramallah, West Bank, for a year and a half beginning in the summer of 2004 and worked as a journalist for the Palestine Monitor. What is startling about this video are the many gorgeous scenes from the West Bank accompanying Olson's introduction to day-to-day life in the West Bank, something which Americans rarely learn of from the American media. The happiness and charm of the West Bank is covered in the first half of Olson's talk. But there is more to the West Bank, of course. Behind all of the charm:

looms the conflict, the occupation, and violence. Since September 2000, more than 5,500 Palestinians and 1,100 Israelis have been killed. A series of walls, fences, roadblocks, checkpoints, army bases, and settlements keep the Palestinians in the West Bank under an almost constant state of siege and strangle the economy of many towns and villages, including Bethlehem. Gaza has been turned into an open-air prison whose desperate inmates can only get vital supplies through smuggling tunnels -- which also transport weapons that Palestinian militants use to target Israeli civilians.

[Her story is] a fascinating world of beauty and terror, of hospitality and homicide, of the absurd and the sublime constantly together -- a microcosmic view of a little-understood human story with global implications.

Olson talks in detail about the numerous checkpoints, the wall and the Israeli settlements. She plainly explains that the occupation, the checkpoints, the wall and the settlements are indisputably illegal pursuant to international law. The wall now runs 70 km., cutting Palestinians off from each other. The wall is a "huge scar on the landscape." It keeps Palestinians from each other, keeps them from farming, keeps them from their own hospitals and keeps their children from getting to school. Even Palestinian politicians are prevented from having free access to their own people. Entire neighborhoods are being destroyed, to make way for more illegal Israeli settlements. The Palestinians are essentially being herded into an ever-smaller prison. Olson backs up her statements with extensive photography. Olson's vivid photos and her calm commentary makes the violence by Palestinians much more understandable. Watching this talk gave me more information than watching dozens of the simplistic stories told by the American Media. Perhaps this unrelenting stream of simplistic media stories is a major cause of America's unflinching support of Israeli's harsh policies toward the Palestinians. Sadly, it is a common Palestinian saying that "The silence of the West is worse than the bullets of the Israelis." Here is Olson's talk, which lasts 80 minutes: For more information on Pamela Olson, you can visit www.pamolson.org

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Comfort – Discomfort

Iconic anti-evolutionist Ray Comfort has come forward again. He's written a book entitled, "You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think: Answers to Questions from Angry Skeptics". Plenty of scathing reviews are available. F'rinstance:

His style of writing can barely be called argumentative. He posits no compelling evidence for his beliefs, makes blind assertions, and clearly does not understand natural forces such as evolution by natural selection and by writing a book which mischaracterizes science, is undermining observation, experimentation, rational thought and critical thinking.

or a 5-star review, presuming Poe:

Ray is the master of satire. While reading this fine book I could just picture him sitting around, getting wasted, and dreaming up all of these hilarious proofs. He is a genius!

The reviews discuss how every point made in the book had already been debunked thoroughly on or around Comfort's online publications (blogs, videos, etc). Why, they ask, does he keep shutting down blogs and popping up new ones? Who is this book going to reach that hasn't already made up their minds? Granted, one can also apply that last argument to pro-science books like The God Delusion or The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Meanwhile, Qualia Soup has produced a concise video clearly explaining what evolution is and isn't, in 10 minutes. It implicitly refutes every point we've seen Comfort make, without the discomfort of mentioning Comfort.

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Non-news Travels Fast

I was reading about a couple of meteors (bolides) spotted in the last couple of days. One point made by BadAstronomy is that misinformation spread much faster than fact. We discuss this sort of issue regularly, using terms like "counterknowledge" and "agnotology". In this case, last week's news about two satellites colliding gently about halfway out to geostationary orbit got muddled in with these meteor reports. Note: Gently in astronomical terms means a collision as if only one ton of TNT had been detonated in them. There may be pieces large enough to see if they eventually drift low enough to burn up at night. But not like the fireballs seen in the last couple of days. The entire satellites were not fast or large enough to glow like the recent events. But Twitter was apparently abuzz with discussion of the (non-happened) satellite re-entry. BA clearly explains why this is silly. But the rumor is still propagating. Unfortunately, several news outlets initially reported it as fact. It's like the virus warnings (hoaxes) that well-meaning acquaintances send me about once a month. Most of their dire "this is real!" warnings were documented at Snopes between 3 and 10 years ago! I usually politely respond with the link to the particular case at Snopes, and suggest they add Snopes to their Bookmarks/Favorites.

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Dangerous Intersection is still under construction

We're still tweaking things at Dangerous Intersection, adding new features, looking at them, and sometimes removing them. It reminds me of the quote by Oscar Wilde:

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

Instead of commas, though, I'm dealing with WordPress plugins. It's an adventure experimenting with these open-source tweaks. Sometimes they work brilliantly. Sometimes, they don't work at all. Sometimes they cause a "fatal error." The good news is that I have successfully installed WordPress 2.71, which allows lots of new features. I've also updated the design template I'm using (to WP-Vybe 1.1). This combination allows for nested comments. If you want to reply to a comment rather than to the post itself, you now have that option. Just look for "reply" attached to each comment. One of the newer features is "popular posts" (on the left sidebar). I did want to disclose that this list is computer generated based upon relatively recent page-views. I don't tweak that list at all. Regarding the comments sidebar (right site), I realize that it's looking a bit raggedy these days. I'm still working on that. One cool new feature, however, is that I have downloaded a plug-in that groups the recent comments by post. If you find one of the posts to be interesting, you can find all of the recent comments regarding that post grouped together (well, up to five of the most recent posts--I wanted to make sure that I left room for the recent comments of multiple posts, even if one of the posts draws an inordinate number of comments. I've heard quite a few comments that this site is often running slowly. I agree. We're going to make some technical adjustments to address that. I hope to see an improvement over the next couple of weeks.

Continue ReadingDangerous Intersection is still under construction