Alex Kaminski’s posterous

This article (published on Haaretz) is frightening and reminds me of pre-1934 German thinking.

What are people thinking?

Poll: 31% of Europeans blame Jews for global financial crisis

_{By Natasha Mozgavaya, Haaretz Correspsondents and Haaretz Service}

A recent survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League found that anti-Semitic attitudes in seven European countries have worsened due to the global financial crisis and Israel's military actions against the Palestinians.

Some 31 percent of adults polled blame Jews in the financial industry for the economic meltdown, while 58 percent of respondents admitted that their opinion of Jews has worsened due to their criticism of Israel.

The ADL, a Jewish-American organization polled 3,500 adults - 500 each in Austria, France, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom - between December 1, 2008 and January 13, 2009.

According to the survey, 40 percent of polled Europeans believe that Jews have an over-abundance of power in the business world. More than half of the respondents in Hungary, Spain and Poland agreed with this statement. These numbers were 7 percent higher in Hungary, 6 percent higher in Poland and 5 percent higher in France than those recorded in the ADL's 2007 survey.

Nearly half of the respondents in each of the countries said that Jews were more loyal to Israel than to their home country. Twenty-three percent said that their opinion of Jews was influenced by Israel's military and political activities.

Another 44 percent of respondents said it was "probably true" that Jews reference the Holocaust too much, while 23% said that they still blame Jews for the death of Jesus.

"This poll confirms that anti-Semitism remains alive and well in the minds of many Europeans," said Abe Foxman, the National Director of Anti-Defamation League. "In the wake of the global financial crisis, the strong belief of excessive Jewish influence on business and finance is especially worrisome."

Late last year, the ADL reported a major upsurge in the number of anti-Semitic postings on the Internet relating to the financial crisis engulfing the United States.

The Jewish-American organization cited hundreds of posts regarding the bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers and other institutions affected by the subprime mortgage crisis.

The messages railed against Jews in general, with some charging that Jews control the U.S. government and finance as part of a "Jew world order" and therefore are to blame for the economic turmoil.

The arrest of Wall Street financier Bernard Madoff, who allegedly swindled $50 billion from investors, prompted an outpouring of anti-Semitic comments on mainstream and extremist Web sites, according to the ADL.

The ADL said some of the posts on the highly trafficked sites spread conspiracy theories about Jews stealing money to benefit Israel and suggest that, "Only Jews could perpetrate a fraud on such a scale."

These and other anti-Jewish tropes about Jews and money have appeared on popular blogs devoted to finance, in comment sections of mainstream news outlets and in banter among users of Internet discussion groups, according to the ADL.

"Jews are always a convenient scapegoat in times of crisis, but the Madoff scandal and the fact that so many of the defrauded investors are Jewish has created a perfect storm for the anti-Semites," Foxman said last year, following news of the Internet hate messages.

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A Saudi Arabia columnist, in a rare expression of a pro-Israel view, wrote in the London-based Arabic-language daily newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat that Arabs have wasted time and money trying to destroy the Jewish State.

Mash'al Al-Sudairi's column, translated by The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), stated that although the "Jewish 'occupation of a part of Palestine constitutes great oppression,'" the Arabs have a history of self-inflicted blows" resulting from opposition to the re-establishment of the Jewish State of Israel.

"When, in the early 1930s, we were offered 80 percent of Palestine, while the Jews were offered 20 percent, we rejected the offer. In the late 1940s, we were offered 49 percent of Palestine, and the Jews 51 percent, and we rejected that [offer]," al-Sudairi wrote.

He criticized the Arab world for exhausting all of its resources over the issue of "Palestine" and wasting money and time. I am positive, [and am willing] to bet and even to swear by Allah, that if only 10 percent of the money that the Arab countries invested in arming their forces during the futile fighting [with Israel] had been invested in what was left of Palestine and its people, the West Bank and Gaza would now be enjoying a living standard higher than that of Singapore," he added.

Sudairi also commented on Iran's occupation of three Persian Gulf islands. "With all the turmoil over the Palestinian issue, we have completely forgotten that other Arab countries have been robbed of parts of their territories, in broad daylight, and we never uttered a word of protest," the Saudi columnist noted.

(Source: Arutz 7 News, Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu)

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Scientists at Penn State are leaders of a team that is the first to report the genome-wide sequence of an extinct animal, according to Webb Miller, professor of biology and of computer science and engineering and one of the project's two leaders. The scientists sequenced the genome of the woolly mammoth, an extinct species of elephant that was adapted to living in the cold environment of the northern hemisphere. They sequenced four billion DNA bases using next-generation DNA-sequencing instruments and a novel approach that reads ancient DNA highly efficiently. "Previous studies on extinct organisms have generated only small amounts of data," said Stephan C. Schuster, Penn State professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and the project's other leader. "Our dataset is 100 times more extensive than any other published dataset for an extinct species, demonstrating that ancient DNA studies can be brought up to the same level as modern genome projects."

Source: e! Science News.

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So it looks like Google's voice recognition app uses the accelerometer and proximity sensor to detect when the phone is next to your ear and thus when you have started speaking. It then knows that you are done speaking by detecting if its next to your ear again. This is a great feature and I wish all iPhone developers had access to it.

Unfortunately, this is an undocumented feature (and as far as I know a "private" one). That means that Apple gave preferential treatment to Google and gave them access to a private method that is not available to other iPhone developers. Giving special treatment to big companies is not the way to treat its developers. After all, the iPhone is such a success in no small part to the App Store and all the hard work of the iPhone developers.

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Moshe Ya'alon, a former IDF Chief of Staff who this week joined the Likud party, declared Wednesday morning that the "land for peace" policy he once backed has proven that giving up Jewish land to Arabs brings war.

He once stated that Israel could defend itself without the Golan Heights, which outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has proposed giving to Syria. Ya'alon told Yaron Dekel, host of the It's All Talk Show on Voice of Israel government radio, "I was a believer in land for peace, but I have learned the past 15 years... it deteriorates our security."

Ya'alon was Chief of Staff during the government of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who made the unprecedented move of not extending his term of office because of Ya'alon's doubts about the plan to destroy all Jewish presence in the Gaza region and withdraw all IDF troops.

He said that the expulsion and the withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, now Defense Minister, left Israel with Kassam and Grad attacks on the south and the Second Lebanon War in the north.

Ya'alon, who lives on a Kibbutz, explained that the values he grew up with no longer are represented in political parties he once identified with.

Referring to Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, Ya'alon said that if he were alive today, he "would not choose Labor, Meretz or Kadima."

The new Likud member admitted that the decision to move into politics was not easy. "My heart said 'no' and my head said 'yes", he told reporters Tuesday. "The head won."

He explained Wednesday morning that he and his family will pay a heavy price for his entering politics, a path that is strewn with booby traps for the values he holds. "We need leadership in the face of the security, education and economic crises," he explained.

Asked if he wants to be Prime Minister, Ya'alon replied, "It is not an obsession. I did not even want to be an Army officer. I know people who wanted to be Prime Minister from the day they were born, but I am not one of them."

Source Haaretz.

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Mogees seems like a really interesting service. It gives you an SDK that you can integrate in your iPhone/Blackberry/Android app so that users can buy your app from inside your app bypassing the appstore or android marketplace. Mogees then processes the payment and unlicks the app for the user.

I wonder if this breaks any of Apple's terms of service. I can't imagine they would permit this type of app once they were aware of it. Does anyone have any experince with it?

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Andy Finnell writes that iPhone app developers must abandon the $0.99 price that many apps are selling for these days.

Andy calculates that a developer who wants to make a living off an iPhone app (at $40k/year) must sell 196 apps per day to do that. He also calculates that at $9.99 per app, you'd need to sell 16 apps per day to do that.

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International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohammed ElBaradei confirmed for the first time on Monday that samples taken from a Syrian site bombed by Israel last year, suspected to have been a nuclear facility, contained traces of uranium.

ElBaradei said that the UN nuclear watchdog needs more transparency from Syria and other nations to determine whether traces of uranium found at the site indicate Damascus was building a nuclear reactor there.

See here.

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