Lettre 13

I recently came upon OpenDNS listening to the following podcast.

Technometria, Remaking DNS, ITConversations (MP3)

Basically, you use their DNS instead of the DNS provided by your ISP to get a faster resolving DNS service (i.e. your web pages will load faster). You are not obliged to create an account to use their service. But, if you do get an account, you will get some features like anti-phishing, typo correction in the domain names, filtering of adult sites, and stats. All these options are opt-in.

After using the DNS from OpenDNS, I have the feeling that my web pages load faster. Where clearly OpenDNS makes a tremendous difference is with SafariMobile on my iPod Touch when I’m home and using my wireless network.

OpenDNS use a very interesting business plan to makes money. Listen to the podcast to see how. They have Ray Ozzie as their principal investor, which is not a bad reference. They are already profitable.

I strongly recommend that you try the DNS provided by OpenDNS. It’s free, and if you just want to use their DNS, you are not obliged to sign for an account. What more can you ask for?

After a couple of months of hiatus, the Open Source podcast with Christopher Lydon is back at their new home at the Watson Institute. That’s way cool! This is one of the best podcast that you can get on a range of subjects covering culture, politics and art.

Here’s two very interesting podcasts where you can hear from people who where there and running either the war to occupy Iraq, or the country at the beginning of the occupation.

First an interview of Charles Ferguson (with some excerpts from the movie) which is the director and Producer of No End in Sight: The American Occupation of Iraq.

It seems that for almost two years, the President Bush was completely disengaged from Iraq and the whole show was run by a very small group composed of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bremer and Wolfowitz. Some decisions where made without consulting the US military, and against their will (like the disbanding of the Iraq army). One of the theory that emerges is that the US lost the peace at the beginning of the occupation when the US army let the looting out of control.

No End in Sight, On Point, guest host Jane Clayson.

The second podcast involve peoples that were in charge of the invasion. General Richard Myers seems less dumb that what I though. But doesn’t really come clean. The others, General William Wallace and General Jack Keane are more interesting. What is fascinating is how the BBC journalist, Owen Bennett-Jones, can ask direct questions, without spinning and reverence to these generals. I wish it could be possible to have such an interview in the US.

The Generals Debate Iraq, Documentary Archive , BBC World Service (mp3)

This is a way cool podcast. Amit Singh, of kernelthread.com fame, manager of Macintosh Engineering at Google, author of MacFuse (which let you mount a remote directory via sshfs), talk about its last book, Mac OS X Internals. He debate about the misuse of Unix to characterize OS X, the way MacFuse use nfs locally to mount remote directory via sshfs and many other interesting topics. Amit Singh is very open-minded, far from OS sectarianism and provide an all around conversation on the basics of OS X.

Technometria: Mac OS X Internals, ITConversations.com (mp3)

If you install MacFuse, you should get MacFusion, which is a nice front end GUI for MacFuse. [via Infinite Loop]

You must listen to this if you don’t know or never heard of the theremin, one of the strangest musical instrument in existence. It’s the only musical instrument that you don’t touch to play it.

Leon Theremin [Vincinnati / Flickr]

Open Source with Christopher Lydon, Passion: The Theremin (mp3)

Somber assessment on Iraq by Thomas Ricks, the Washington Post correspondent in Iraq. He thinks the American have no control on the events, and that they will be there for two decades. And last, but not least, there is no easy solution for this fiasco, and that’s why he thinks that Iraq is a tragedy.

On Point with Tom Ashbrook, Thomas Ricks on Iraq Today (mp3)

Fascinating interview with Seymour Hersh on Open Source with Christopher Lydon following its piece The Redirection (New Yorker). What is scary is that you get the feeling that the White House is playing with fire while being delusional and ignorant of the history/culture of the Middle-East. The fact of the matter for Sy Hersh is that the White House is a major contributing factor in pitching whole religious/ethnic groups against themselves, pursuing interests that maybe make sense in the short-term, but will bring more instability in the Middle-East in the long-term.

I must say that sometimes I find Sy Hersh sounding too much like if he was revealing a plot with black helicopters hovering over it, that his analysis are too much based on individuals but, overall, he presents solid arguments on how the US administration is misguided and improvising regarding its Middle-East policies.

Open Source, Making the Rounds with Seymour Hersh (mp3)

A very good round-up by Zvi Bar’el of Haaretz about what the Palestinians are enduring in Iraq.

This is not the nation’s largest minority, but it is apparently the most persecuted. Testimony by Palestinian refugees to journalists and human rights organizations paints a very grave picture: Iraqi gangs break into Palestinian homes at night and demand the residents leave within 24 hours. In isolated cases, Palestinians have been kidnapped on the street or at work, and their bodies have been found several days later, in ditches or garbage cans.

Unlike the 2 million Iraqi refugees who have left their homeland, Palestinians usually carry no documents bearing witness to their Iraqi citizenship, or anything that would permit them entry into neighboring Arab states, like Jordan or Syria.

Zvi Bar’el, Refugees, twice over, Haaretz.com

Palestinians are also part of a larger trend as Patrick Cockburn shows in The Independent:

Iraq’s minorities, some of the oldest communities in the world, are being driven from the country by a wave of violence against them because they are identified with the occupation and easy targets for kidnappers and death squads. A “huge exodus” is now taking place, according to a report by Minority Rights Group International.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees says 30 per cent of the 1.8 million Iraqis who have fled to Jordan, Syria and elsewhere come from the minorities.

Patrick Cockburn, ‘Exodus’ of Iraq’s ancient minorities, The Independent

Meanwhile, Rami G. Khouri is predicting that the Arab world is at a historic crossroad and that the current modern Arab state order that was created by the Europeans in circa 1920 has started to break down, in what we might perhaps call the Great Arab Unraveling. He adds that the way the US is pursuing its policy in the Midlle-East produce a murky picture.

The pervasive incoherence of this bizarre picture makes it perfectly routine for Arab monarchies to support Salafist terrorists, for Western democracies to ignore the results of Arab free elections, for Iranians and Arabs, and Shiites and Sunnis, to work hand in hand while also fighting bitter wars, for Islamists and secular Arabs to join forces, for freedom lovers in London and Washington to support seasoned Arab autocrats, for Western and Arab rule-of-law advocates to sponsor militias, and for Israel and the US to perpetuate Israeli policies that exacerbate rather than calm security threats and vulnerabilities in the region.

Rami G. Khouri, Prepare for the Great Arab Unraveling, The Daily Star

There’s an excellent introduction on Shiism by Mike Shuster of NPR available as a podcast.

Mike Shuster, The Partisans of Ali: A Series Overview, NPR (mp3)

See also the reading list.

Zvi Bar’el, one of my favorite political analyst have a somber evaluation of the situation one year after the election of Hamas.

(…) even if Haniyeh starts wearing a skullcap and Khaled Meshal begins humming Hatikva, and even if Abbas makes it mandatory to teach the heroic story of Masada in Palestinian schools, Israel does not want and is unable to propose a diplomatic alternative that would lead to the establishment of an independent and democratic Palestinian state. It does not want to - because any such proposal would mean a withdrawal from most of the territories and the dismantling of most of the settlements. It is unable to - because there is no government of Israel. After all, even when it appeared that there was a government in Israel, not a single measly illegal outpost was removed; this is a non-government that has transformed the disengagement from Gaza from a national trauma to a housing trauma; and in Hebron, or in Mount Hebron to be more precise, the sovereign provides free protection to a bunch of hooligans.

Zvi Bar’el, As long as we impose sanctions, Haaretz.com

It seems to me that the Palestinians are hostage of their political representatives notwithstanding the Israel intransigence and the completely stupid response from the Quartet to the election of Hamas.

It is the first time in history, according to the UN’s John Duggard, that an occupied people have been subject to international sanctions, especially sanctions of this magnitude and rigor.

And then there’s that other story: the one about a people forgotten in all of this. Who will relay their narrative?

Laila El-Haddad, Hamas in power: one year on, Raising Yousuf: a diary of a mother under occupation

See also Laila El-Haddad’s interview that narrate the social dislocation in Gaza. (mp3)

Jimmy Carter still amazes me. He gave a conference about his last book (Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid) at an American nondenominational Jewish university and received a standing ovation.

Nathaniel Popper, Carter Wins Over Student Crowd at Brandeis, Receives Ovation, Forward.com

See also Jimmy Carter defends new book on Middle East for the podcast of this conference (mp3)

SyriaComment.com: What is New about Bush’s New Strategy?

Sacrificing political stability in Somalia for three al-Qaida operatives is terrible math. Even more troubling is the continued escalation toward Iran. Beefing up Gulf defenses by sending additional battle ships to the region, leaked Israeli plans to use nuclear bunker busters against Iran’s facilities, and promises to provide Patriot missiles to the Arab Gulf states all suggest that Bush is expanding the battle field in the hope that US fortunes in Iraq will be reversed if Washington can claim victory elsewhere. The problem with this strategy is that it builds on the erroneous presumption that the US is in a war against “evil.” Rather than disaggregating struggles in Palestine, the Horn of Africa, Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq in order to deal with each separately, Washington is stubbornly gluing them together in one super war on radical Islam. We are pretending they are all directed by al-Qaida and a nebulous enemy of freedom and liberty. This is not the enemy that exists. There is no command central. Moreover, we cannot destroy an idea with firepower. By pursuing this false war with greater determination, the US is ensuring failure with greater determination.

This an excellent recapitulation on all the battle fronts the White House is opening in the Middle-East (Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine) and the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia/Somalia). It’s quite scary. You have the feeling that there’s no check and balance from the Congress, and that Bush/Cheney will be able to do as they like.

The drums of war are even more beating here if you believe Zbigniew Brzezinski:

…this is what really worries me. There are hints in the president’s speech and in Rice’s testimony today about the possibility of escalation, not necessarily in the number of troops, but in the range of the military operations, namely perhaps against Syria or Iran.

And the incident with the Iranian consulate, the rhetoric about Iran, the increasing temptation to blame our failure on the Iranians and the Syrians could push us in that direction. And there are a lot of people still around here, particularly the neocons, who would like us to have a crack at Iran.

and

I think it reflects, on the one hand, desperation, on the other hand, a kind of fanatical commitment which I think is detached from reality.
Jim Lehrer: From the United States?
Zbigniew Brzezinski: Of the United States and of presidential leadership. And don’t forget that, even the existing policy, short of the widened war with Iran and Syria, does not have the support of the three still-living former presidents, and one who recently died, who went public on record as opposing the current policy.

And that means a total exclusion of any rational regional effort to get a political process going of the kind that the Baker-Hamilton commission spoke and which I think very rightly advocated.

Online NewsHours: Plan to Increase Troop Numbers Comes Under Broad Scrutiny (mp3)