All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

يا ستي يا ختيارة…يا زينة كل الحارة

Bless them now

جدتي …..

 

يصادف هذا الشهر الذكرى الاربعين لوفاة جدي. كل هذه الذكريات التي احملها بين طيات عقلي وفي وجداني لهذا الرجل لا تتعدى الستة. كم كانت مفاجأة ، ادراكي لقصر السنوات التي قضاها جدي في حياتي. ومع هذا لم يفارقني. وفهمت لم لا تحمل ذكراه الكثير من المعاني بالنسبة لاخواتي ، فاذا ما كنت ابلغ من عمري الستة سنوات ، فكانت التالية من اخواتي ابنة الرابعة .

كان جدي ولا يزال يجسد معنى الرجل في ابهى صوره . الوقار، القوة، العطف والكثير من السطوة.تلك السطوة التي تربينا على اهميتها . تلك الاقرب الى ان تكون سطوة ربانية لا يقترب منها احد.






وبينما يذكرني والدي منذ اشهر باقتراب يوم وفاة والده ، والحاجة لكتابة رثاء ما في الذكرى الاربعين. كنت ابتسم بداخلي واقول ، ما الذي بقي من ذاكرة لرجل لم اعرفه الا ست سنوات من عمري البعيد ؟

وجدت نفسي طوعا امام جدتي ، تلك المرأة التي ترملت وكانت ربما في مثل عمري اليوم. الا انها كانت دائما كبيرة . لا اعرف كيف تتركب الشخصيات في عقولنا ، ولكن جدتي كانت دائما كبيرة . جدتي تشبه شجرة الزيتون العتيقة . منذ صغري وانا ارى في شجرة الزيتون تجسيدا لهذه المرأة. لم تكن اي شجرة. كان هناك شجرة في بيتنا على زاوية البستان التي كانت تعتني به وجعلت منه جنانا حقيقية . كنت اتأمل تلك الزيتونة واراها من خلالها . يدها تحمل الفأس تنبش التراب وتقص الاغصان . وتنادي علينا بأعلى صوتها لنساعدها ونهرب.

في هذه المناسبة ، قررت انه من الاجدى الكتابة عن الاحياء . لماذا ننتظر الموت لنكتشف اولئك القريبون منا ؟

وجدتي هذه الذي تحملت حياتها كما الزيتونة، تأقلمت ولم تكف عن العطاء بلا كلل . تحملت ولم يكن لسان حالها الا القوة والعنفوان .

لجدتي في ذاكرتي ما يفوق الاربعين عاما من الذكريات الحقيقية . عمر كامل كانت متواجدة به . ذكريات الملمها فتملأ خزائن ذاكرتي وتتبعثر في كل الارجاء.

تبدأ ذكرياتي مع جدتي منذ ايام ميلادي الاولى ، تلك التي كانت تدهن جسدي النحيل فيها بزيت الزيتون وتشدني بقماش ابيض لكي يشتد عودي. أقرأ لها اليوم كلماتي عن هذه الذكرى ، فتعيدها في كل مرة قائلة : ” كان سيدك ينادي علينا ويقولنا تعالوا خدوها قبل ما القطة تيجي تاكلها.”

لا يزال وقع اقدامها في الشارع من بيتنا بالرام على التلة الى الشارع الرئيسي يشكل هزة انيقة في الطريق . كعب عالي اسود وساقان ملفوفتان وقوام مشدود الى الاعلى . ماسك بيدي باحدى اليدين وشنطة سوداء محمولة بأناقة في اليد الاخرى ، ووشاح رأس يلتف بخفة على اطراف الشعر. كنا نذهب الى البلدة القديمة ، نمر ببيت العائلة القديم بباب حطة ، ،نقف عند بيت عائلتها المجاور . نتوقف للحديث مع الكثير من الناس بالطريق . ” هاي صاحبتي من ايام المدرسة” ، وتلك زوجة فلان ، وهذه جارة لا اعرف من . وهنا “عيادة الدكتور امين الخطيب جبناكي لما مرضتي مرة” . وقع اقدام جدتي بطريق الالام ، وبزقاق البلدة القديمة من باب حطة لحارة السعدية ولباحات الحرم ، سريعة متوازنة ويدي متلاحمة بيدها تتراكض خطواتي معها محاولة الا افقد توازن لم اكن افهم وجوده .

محفورة تلك الذكريات بوجداني ، تخرج الى متراقصة في كل مرة تطأ قدماي عتبات البلدة القديمة. اعود لاكون تلك الطفلة التي تمسك بيدها جدتها بذلك الكعب العالي الاسود اللميع (ربما).

كان مستوى قامتي يصل الى ساقيها . فتأملت ذلك الحذاء كثيرا ، كما تأملت ساقيها الطويلتين، ولا استطيع فهم حتى هذه اللحظة كيف كانت تمشي بهذه الخفة وذلك الحذاء بطرقات تبين لي عندما كبرت بأنها اقل ما يمكن وصفها بأنها صعبة،وعرة.

ايام الجمعة والصلاة بالحرم والجلوس مع النسوة بقبة الصخرة وتركي للصلاة مع النساء. طفلة تصلي مع جدتها المتفاخرة بها : ” هاي بنت عصام ” .

وفي البيت بين البيوت الكثيرة ذكريات كثيرة مع جدتي . الرام، اريحا، واد الجوز . في كل مكان لجدتي اثر لا يترك. وتراب يتحول الى جنان . لم تكن جدتي فلاحة ، ولكن يديها كغصن تلك الزيتونة تجعل من الحب المتراكم عليها زيتا ذهبيا.

زيت الزيتون الذي تشربه كل صباح كفنجان قهوة.ودخان سجائرها المتطاير من علبة “الفريد”.

حديقتنا كالمدرجات ، في الطابق العلوي كانت البطيخة واليقطينة والفقوس والخيار تتدلى حباتهم واوراقهم على الجدران وتمتد الى اطراف الحوض. بندورة ، كوسا ، فاصولياء ، نعنع . الازهار تتوسط باشكالها الاحواض المختلفة ، ورد بألوان شتى ، قرنفل، ياسمين، عبهرة، قرن الغزال، ومجنونة. شجرة التين، البرتقال، الليمون، التوت، والاسكي دنيا .

اعود بذاكرتي الى هناك وافكر ، كيف حولت بيتا عاديا الى جنة؟

كانت تعمل بيديها ، تحاول اغراءنا ببعض المزايا اذا ما ساعدناه بحفر الارض. الا اننا كنا نتسابق على اخذ مهمة الري، فكانت الاسهل والاكثر متعة.

جدتي الجبارة ، القوية ، لا تزال هكذا وقد تعدى عمرها الثمانين .تركت “الفريد” وصارت سيجارتها المفضلة مرلبورو احمر. لا تتنازل عن سيجارتها وفنجان قهوتها كثير السكر.  انحنى ظهرها ولم تعد قدماها تحملاها كما كانت. انهزمت للزمن واستسلمت كثيرا لاحزان لم تكن لتتركها تسيطر عليها في وقت سابق من عمرها . فقدانها لابنتها بعد ايام من زفافها . دمعة فراقها لم تجف ابدا من عينيها . حزنها رسم تجاعيد على وجهها الجميل في اول عمرها ، وقاومته بقوة عجيبة. صارت الام والاب لرجال واطفال في لحظات . تحولت من زوجة مطيعة لرجل جبار ، لتصبح الام الحاكمة المرشدة، الحماة ، كبيرة العائلة. “الله يرحمه” تقول عن جدي : ” كان يرجع من مصر ويخليني اعمله كرشات “. اداعبها قائلة : ” لربما وجدنا عريس لكلينا ” . تحمر وجنتيها للحظات وترفسني بيدها قائلة : ” اول بختك، كرسي تحتك..”

 

ستي …. تلك الختيارة ، خفيفة الظل ، سليطة اللسان ، اجمل ما في هذه الدنيا من ذكريات ، تجعلها حاضرة باقية، معمرة كشجرة الزيتون. دعواتها مرهم، وحضورها تأكيد على الوجود.   

US Senate narrowly passes Republican tax reform bill

All about party, those who paid for their elections and nothing about progress or fairness for 98% of Americans – those who die because of underfunding of people’s needs will be the final sorry end of their kind of non-leadership. The US Senate has voted 51-49 to pass a controversial tax reform bill put forward by the Republican party. The vote is a success for President Trump, but critics have said the bill benefits mostly the wealthy.

Former N.S.A. Employee Pleads Guilty to Taking Classified Information

Government officials, who would speak of the classified details of the case only on condition of anonymity, said that Mr. Pho took the classified documents home to help him rewrite his resume. But he had installed on his home computer antivirus software made by Kaspersky Lab, a top Russian software company, and Russian hackers are believed to have exploited the software to steal the documents, the officials said.

It is not clear whether anyone at Kaspersky Lab was aware of the document theft. The company has acknowledged finding N.S.A. hacking software on a customer’s computer and removing it, but says the material was subsequently destroyed. It has denied that it works with Russian intelligence. Nghia H. Pho, a software developer for the intelligence agency, admitted taking secrets that Russian hackers then stole from his home computer.

Say it with socks – fashion’s latest must-have accessory

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The bottom half of your leg has never been so fashionable – as the The Chain reveals, the once-humble sock is having a moment

Phoebe Collings-James has Motherf£ck£r ones. Charlie Casely-Hayford’s are red. Ashley Williams packed a green Balenciaga pair alongside some Camden market tie-dye ones in her suitcase. The Chain’s influencers play a strong sock game. How do yours compare? If you feel like you’re lagging behind them, this is the season to catch up.

Continue reading…

We Make Technology, Technology Makes Us

Via Flickr.

Medical imaging is responsible for some of the most powerful moments of our lives, from the first glimpse of a growing fetus to the discovery of a tumor. Since the invention of the x-ray in 1895, imaging has become a fundamental part of diagnosis and even how we understand our selfhood.

If we consider the results of imaging to be art, then philosopher Don Ihde, a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at New York’s Stony Brook University, would be one of their most prolific collectors. He is the author of over twenty books, including the 1976 Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound–the first and only phenomenological investigation of the experience of sound–and a follow-up, 2015’s Acoustic Technics.

As a phenomenologist, Ihde studies consciousness. He believes we can interpret our experiences through the confines of not only our brains, but also the audio and visual instruments that mediate them. His next book will focus on how technology and instruments are shaping the humans of the future, just as they have shaped our understanding of humans past. Over a root beer float on the Upper East Side, we talked about echolocation, Vermeer, and Lucy’s skeleton.

Daisy Alioto for Guernica

Guernica: I’m interested in how you started exploring medical imagery.

Don Ihde: A lot of the medical imagery has to do with [my own] biography. I had open heart surgery, I had knee replacements, I had a hiatal hernia, etc. Every time you go for surgery, you get a whole spectrum of imaging. Of course, I’ve been doing research in imaging technology across the board for close to twenty years. When you think about it, medical imaging is actually quite new. The first major medical image was the x-ray in 1895. That was the first time you got imaging of anything that’s in the bodily interior.

Guernica: Versus drawings.

Don Ihde: Yeah. Australian Aborigines have a style of x-ray painting. In the European tradition, you can find these images going back to the Renaissance when people started doing autopsies. But to peer inside a living body—x-rays are the earliest example of those images. Now of course, it’s absolutely amazing. I have probably a dozen CDs of my own imaging, and a couple of times I’ve used them in lectures. At Oxford, I did a presentation called “My Case.” What specialists try to do is get at least three imaging processes that are totally different from each other. Then you can run these through a computer program and make a composite image. In one scenario you suspect a brain tumor, so you image the brain tumor with PET scans, MRIs, and CT scans and create a 3D model. The doctor opens up the skull to excise the cancer, but they can’t see anything. Do you cut out what’s supposed to be in that spot or not? The current story is yes, you believe the images over what you see with your eyes.

Guernica: Is that an actual case, or is it a medical school scenario?

Don Ihde: It’s a sort of urban legend, but the notion is true.

Guernica: The trust in medical imaging is that great?

Don Ihde: Yes. There are several books on the history of diagnosis, and that’s very interesting because, gender-wise, it had long been prohibited in Asia and Europe for male doctors to touch females. So there are periods in history when they created dolls, and the woman would point to the part of the doll where the pain was. Later, post-Renaissance, that taboo disappeared. A lot of the probes were both tactile and acoustic. For example, a doctor might thump an abdomen to see if there was a tumor. You have a long history of changes in diagnosis, from no touching to touching, to assessing acoustics and visuals. But visual is a problem, because if you’re a living being you can’t see beyond the surface of the skin. Now you don’t have that problem. Laparoscopic surgery, inserting a camera into the body, is sometimes called “Nintendo surgery”—the best training for laparoscopic surgeries has actually been video games. A developing field is sonifying cancer. You can acoustically discriminate between healthy and cancerous cells by hearing them. Make the vibrations into sound, and anybody can learn to tell the difference.

Guernica: When you characterize the evolution in diagnosis from visual to tactile to acoustic and tactile, do you see imaging as a return to visual, or do you see it as hypervisual?

Don Ihde: In the eighteenth century, it was very common to think that each of the five senses was discrete and yielded very different data. That period is totally dead. A Jesuit priest named Lazzaro Spallanzani was the first to discover bat echolocation. He saw that bats could fly in the dark and catch a moth. He put wax over the bat’s eyes, but the bats could still catch the moth. If you put wax in the bat’s ears, the bats couldn’t catch anything. So I argue that science would be much richer if it were multisensory. The problem with instrumentation is that instruments, unlike our senses, can be monosensory. Since the discovery of the electromagnetic spectrum—which is really the discovery that all energy coming from something has a wave form—in theory we could image anything along that spectrum. In fact, we don’t, because only certain parts of the spectrum have been instrumentalized. But the new thing is computerization. You can take all the data, the measurement of the frequencies, and transform it into an image.

Guernica: Coming at it from the perspective of a collector or someone who appreciates art, do you foresee a scenario where people will begin to collect these images or audio samples, and they’ll be decontextualized from the medical field?

Don Ihde: When I give lectures on sonifying science, many times there will be artists in the audience who give me samples of stuff they’ve done. There are annual contests put on by some of the top science magazines for best science images. They range from regular photography to the phenomenon of the microphotography of cells. Twenty-first century imaging is largely using microscopic processes. So, for example, you can trap a single atom or a single proton. Two years ago, one of my colleagues was the fourth member of an atom trapping consortium. Unfortunately, Nobel Prizes can only be split by three, so he was the guy who was left out.

Guernica: You’ve kept all of the images from your own cases. Do you keep them because they’re useful to your work, or do you have an instinct to save them for other reasons?

Don Ihde: I originally kept them because I wanted to use them as examples in what I write. I do, a lot. It’s very interesting because we have no direct experience of our brain. I can’t experience my brain because I’m inside of it. If you’re imaging your brain, you can also find scary things. As one ages, your brain shrinks. And how much it shrinks, and where it shrinks, relates to conditions like Alzheimer’s and dementia.

Guernica: Do you think that having recordings and imagery that help us experience our own brains has a philosophical impact?

Don Ihde: It clearly has. My thesis with Philosophy of Technology: An Introduction is that we make technologies, and, in turn, technologies make us. There is a notion in design of designer intent. Why was the lead pencil invented? Well, the inventor of the lead pencil wanted it to be a marking machine. The dominant function of a pencil is writing, but I remember going to a one-room public school, where one of my bullying friends stabbed me with a lead pencil. I remember reading about a court case where a man tried to stab a judge with a pencil. There are Google pages full of similar instances around the world. It’s obvious that the pencil lends itself to precisely that kind of use. It’s not as lacking in dominance as you might think. I have an article on the fallacy of the designer intent because a lot of designers think they can design uses into technology. You can’t do that.  I use the pen, I make the mark, but the pen is also using me. The pen could be said to be allowing these kinds of marks. I can’t do just anything with the pen. That’s particularly true of imaging.

Guernica: Instruments play a big role in this.

Don Ihde:  The interrelationship is true from the simplest to the most complex. It doesn’t make any difference whether it’s art or science.

Guernica: There were artists who, even before computers, were creating their own coding systems to create analog works based on some ratio, or what we would call a program if it was in a machine. Computer art is really not that new–whether it was the Fibonacci sequence, or whatever other system.

Don Ihde: In the early 2000s, David Hockney produced a book with Charles Falco called Secret Knowledge. It’s about his discovery that many Renaissance painters used a camera obscura to construct paintings. Many in the art history community were outraged by this because they thought it cheapened the art. I happen to be a big Vermeer fan. There can be little doubt that he used a camera obscura. He’s only got something like thirty-nine paintings, and many of them show exactly the same room.

Guernica: So that’s why it was so funny to you, the uproar about the camera obscura.

Don Ihde: I never went into aesthetics. Aesthetics is what philosophers have to say about art, and a lot of them take an analytics position and raise the question, “What is an art object?” As soon as you fall into that trap, an artist is going to come along and say, “That isn’t art—it’s something else.” That’s a hopeless gig.

Guernica: But what about defining beauty? Is it harder to rewrite a definition of beauty?

Don Ihde: I don’t like definitions at all.

Guernica: So you couldn’t be a lawyer.

Don Ihde: Definitions get you into that time trap, and I’m very much more process-focused. Take Lucy, for example. Lucy is famous largely because she has almost a total skeleton. The more sophisticated we get with instruments, the more we can find out. Through CT scans of her skeleton, they now think she died falling out of a tree because of the way her bones are broken. If nineteenth and twentieth century technologies can retroactively transform our bodiment, what then do the technologies we now use do?

 

The post We Make Technology, Technology Makes Us appeared first on Guernica.

Russia trains Iran-sponsored Shia militias in Syria

Afghanistan Analysis

Iran’s intervention in Syria on behalf of Assad has brought a slew of Shia militia forces from around the world. While the Lebanese Hezabollah fighters receive the most attention, there are an estimated tens of thousands of Shia fighters from Afghanistan and Pakistan. And now evidence is emerging that they are training in Russia.

The Afghan militia, known as the Fatemiyoun Brigade, are mostly Shia refugees and immigrations living in Iran. Iran’s Qods Force — the foreign military operations wing of the Revolutionary Guards — uses a composite of monetary incentives, promises of residency and coercion to recruit. This has led to human rights violations, including recruitment of children as young as 14.

The Fatimyoun Brigade was upgraded from a regiment of roughly 2,000-5,000 fighters to a brigade, consisting of roughly 10,000-20,000 fighters. But as their numbers have grown over the years, so has the training regimen.

Former Fatemiyoun fighters…

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