The Cinematic State of Things
By A. O. SCOTT - Published: December 16, 2010
IN any given year, if you see enough movies — out of habit, ardor or obligation — you will start to notice patterns and clusters. By December the temptation will be nearly overwhelming to generalize from this data, to turn coincidences into trends and trends into matters of world-historical significance. The ad hoc, arbitrary, week-in-week-out sampling of stories and pictures must add up to something, right? Otherwise why bother?
One reason you do bother, of course, is precisely to find experiences that defy expectations and break patterns: movies that challenge your assumptions or alter your habits of perception. How often does that happen? Just enough. (At the end of this article you’ll find 30 examples — 10 best and 20 runners-up — selected from more than 600 movies reviewed in The New York Times in 2010.)
The ritual of year-end list making is a way of sifting through scattered, memorable moments and forcing them briefly into focus. A handful of movies from 2010 will still be interesting in the future, in which case the date of their first appearance will be little more than the answer to a trivia question. Was it a good year for movies? A great year? Hard to say, and finally, who cares? The movies — good and bad alike — shed a blinking, blurry light on the times, illuminating our collective fears, fantasies and failures of will. An attempt at synthesis can only fail, so in lieu of a comprehensive theory of Cinema Now, I offer a handful of postulates on the Cinematic State of Things. I trust they will stimulate sober discussion and principled argument as well as outright ridicule.
1. We are all figments of Leonardo DiCaprio’s imagination. Or Natalie Portman’s. Or Mark Zuckerberg’s. Or Banksy’s. The lines between reality and appearance, reason and madness, truth and fiction have always been blurry, but this was an especially fertile year for dreams, hoaxes and puzzles, many of them playing with fundamental questions of identity. Was Mr. DiCaprio, in “Shutter Island,” a duly appointed federal marshal or loony-bin resident? Awake or asleep in “Inception?” Was “Exit Through the Gift Shop” an elaborate conceptual-art prank by Banksy or an exposé of art-world fraud? And what about “Catfish”? Do our real selves live on Facebook? Or just our real friends?
2. It’s all mom’s fault. 2010 was a very good year for female directors, and for actresses, but also a bad year for mothers. In the maternal monster category — surely Mo’Nique, who broke the mold in “Precious,” should present this award — Melissa Leo from “The Fighter” and Barbara Hershey in “Black Swan” will face stiff competition from the cartoon villainess Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy) in “Tangled” and Jacki Weaver’s criminal matriarch in the Australian film “Animal Kingdom.”
3. But mom is miserable. There was plenty of maternal suffering to counteract such demonization. Rodrigo García’s “Mother and Child” was about nothing else, with Annette Bening, Kerry Washington and Naomi Watts acting out a braided melodrama of longing and loss. But no one suffered as grandly as Tilda Swinton in the operatic “I Am Love,” or as pathetically as Paprika Steen in the unsparing “Applause.”
4. Still, the kids are all right. The daughters in particular. It was a year of brave, tough, adventurous and sometimes reckless girls and young women, including the fearless Rapunzel in “Tangled,” who was also a pretty good singer (thanks to the voice of Mandy Moore and the songs of Alan Menken), and both Fanning sisters: Dakota in Floria Sigismondi’s underrated “Runaways,” and Elle in Sofia Coppola’s haunting, clear-sighted “Somewhere.” Not to mention Jennifer Lawrence’s fearless Ozark teenager in “Winter’s Bone,” Hailee Steinfeld’s plucky Old West avenger in “True Grit” and Chloë Grace Moretz’s lonely vampire in “Let Me In.” Perhaps the bravest of all was the sullen, chain-smoking Lisbeth Salander, incarnated (in the Swedish film versions of Stieg Larsson’s best sellers) by Noomi Rapace.
5. And the kids grow up. Not just Harry Potter. Yes, the general wallowing in male arrested development continued, with the usual comic suspects (Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Zach Galifianakis) appearing in the usual puerile comedies (one of them called “Grown Ups”). But at least two films — “Somewhere” and “Greenberg” — took a tough-love attitude toward their immature male protagonists, reckoning the emotional costs of delayed maturity and extended adolescence. (The same might be said of “The Social Network.”) And the experience of sending a child off to college, hardly a common theme in movies before now, seems to have become a touchstone. Or at least an official three-film, cross-genre trend, thanks to “Toy Story 3,” “The Kids Are All Right” and “The Kids Grow Up”: a cartoon, a comedy and a documentary. (Meanwhile the drift and ambivalence of the mid- and post-collegiate young was minutely captured in “The Exploding Girl” and “Tiny Furniture.”)
6. Superheroes take a break. Yes, there was “Iron Man 2,” but even that offered a respite from the glowering, pretentious action allegories that have dominated screens for most of the past decade. The battle between good and evil rages on in some quarters, but mostly in self-conscious, self-parodic form. In the strangely similar animated kiddie comedies “Despicable Me” and “Megamind” the heroes and villains are self-conscious role players, and the villains are actually nice as well as more interesting than their occasional square-jawed nemeses. This may reflect genre exhaustion (though another round of superhero blockbusters is already on the horizon), or a measure of real-world cynicism. The investigative documentaries that proliferated this year ("Inside Job," “Client 9,” “Casino Jack and “The United States of Money”) suggest that corruption and criminality exist virtually beyond the reach of justice.
7. The Bush era is not over. “Green Zone,” “Fair Game,” “Casino Jack” (both the documentary version and the Kevin Spacey comeback vehicle), “Inside Job,” “Client 9,” “The Ghost Writer.” So many scores left to settle.
8. But can’t the ’90s come back, or the ’80s, or some era more appealing than the one we’re in? “Love and Other Drugs,” “Greenberg,” “Hot Tub Time Machine,” “The Runaways,” “Howl,” any music documentary you can name.
9. Only a great director can make a great movie, but a good actor can make a bad or mediocre or not-quite-great movie much better. For instance: Helen Mirren in “The Tempest,” Ms. Mirren in “RED,” Paul Giamatti in “Barney’s Version,” Mr. Spacey in “Casino Jack,” Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal in “Love and Other Drugs,” Javier Bardem in “Biutiful,” everyone in “True Grit,” Vanessa Redgrave in “Letters to Juliet,” Liam Neeson in anything he was in, Rachel McAdams in “Morning Glory,” Anthony Mackie in “Night Catches Us.”
10. The discussion of movies is frequently more interesting than the movies themselves. It was more fun to read the impassioned, geeky arguments about “Inception” than to endure a second viewing of that film. Early arguments about the accuracy of “The Social Network” and whether that even mattered gave way to a series of reviews, essays and debates about Facebook, digital entrepreneurship, friendship, business, meritocracy and the Ivy League far richer and more relevant to contemporary life than Aaron Sorkin’s glib script or David Fincher’s elegant atmospherics. And as intellectually lazy and emotionally manipulative as it was, Davis Guggenheim’s “Waiting for Superman” nonetheless focused serious polemical attention on the problems facing American education.
The 10 Best Movies of 2010
1. INSIDE JOB (Charles Ferguson) The crisis of finance capitalism as a great crime story.
2. TOY STORY 3 (Lee Unkrich) The triumph of consumer capitalism as an epic love story.
3. CARLOS (Olivier Assayas) The failure of global revolution as farce, melodrama, erotic thriller and music video.
4. SOMEWHERE (Sofia Coppola) An eccentric, perfect poem about fame, loneliness and cross-generational need.
5. THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT (Lisa Cholodenko) An eccentric, perfect comedy about love, betrayal and cross-generational confusion.
6. GREENBERG (Noah Baumbach) A deliberately imperfect comedy about an eccentric fleeing from love, running from betrayal and wallowing in cross-generational confusion.
7. 127 HOURS (Danny Boyle) It’s all fun until someone loses an arm. And then, strangely enough, it’s even more fun.
8. LAST TRAIN HOME (Lixin Fan) The future of global capitalism, in China and elsewhere: a family tragedy in the form of a documentary, as full of anger, dignity and pathos as a play by Arthur Miller.
9. SECRET SUNSHINE (Lee Chang-dong) A family tragedy from South Korea, in the form of a melodramatic crime story. As dense and gripping as a great novel.
10. EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP (Banksy) All of the above. None of the above. Everything and nothing. An elaborate art-world stunt in the form of a documentary. Or vice versa.
RUNNERS-UP “And Everything Is Going Fine,” “Another Year,” “Black Swan,” “Boxing Gym,” “The Father of My Children,” “The Fighter,” “A Film Unfinished,” “Fish Tank,” “Four Lions,” “The Ghost Writer,” “Howl,” “I Am Love,” “Let Me In,” “Please Give,” “Solitary Man,” “Tangled,” “Tiny Furniture,” “Vincere,; “White Material,” “Winter’s Bone.”
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
AT&T Video Shows Texting and Driving Don’t Mix - An Excerpt
December 27, 2010, 7:00 am AT&T Video Shows Texting and Driving Don’t Mix
By MATT RICHTEL
“Where u at”
That was the last text message by Mariah West, who died at 18 when she skidded in traffic and flipped into the oncoming lane. She was texting at the time.
She is among the people who appear in a nearly 11-minute documentary developed by AT&T to warn young people about the dangers of texting and driving.
The wireless company planned to release the video today, before New Year’s Eve. The timing is aimed, the company says, at showing that texting and driving deserves to be considered as dangerous as drunken driving. The documentary includes intense, sometimes disturbing, images, including that of Ms. West, as she spent her last minutes alive on a breathing tube.
“Our goal is to help make texting while driving as socially unacceptable as drinking and driving,” said Gail Torreano, a senior vice president with AT&T. “We want this to be in every school in the country and for teenagers to know a text message is not worth a life.”
Research from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute shows that motorists who text face a 23 times greater risk of crash or near crash. Other wireless carriers, like Verizon Wireless, in the last year have increased efforts to warn about the risks of texting and driving.
AT&T says it plans to distribute the documentary to schools, safety organizations and government agencies, and is urging people to take a pledge on its Facebook page not to text and drive.
David Teater, senior director of transportation initiatives at the National Safety Council, a nonprofit safety advocacy organization, said AT&T deserved credit. At the same time, he says, texting can be so hard to resist that teenagers aren’t likely to stop just by hearing such a message.
“The activity is too compelling,” he said, describing texting as having addicting properties. “What they need to do is start deploying technology that will prevent people from being able to text while driving.”
Still, he said: “The wireless industry is very sincere about getting kids to stop texting and driving. I applaud what they’re doing.”
By MATT RICHTEL
“Where u at”
That was the last text message by Mariah West, who died at 18 when she skidded in traffic and flipped into the oncoming lane. She was texting at the time.
She is among the people who appear in a nearly 11-minute documentary developed by AT&T to warn young people about the dangers of texting and driving.
The wireless company planned to release the video today, before New Year’s Eve. The timing is aimed, the company says, at showing that texting and driving deserves to be considered as dangerous as drunken driving. The documentary includes intense, sometimes disturbing, images, including that of Ms. West, as she spent her last minutes alive on a breathing tube.
“Our goal is to help make texting while driving as socially unacceptable as drinking and driving,” said Gail Torreano, a senior vice president with AT&T. “We want this to be in every school in the country and for teenagers to know a text message is not worth a life.”
Research from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute shows that motorists who text face a 23 times greater risk of crash or near crash. Other wireless carriers, like Verizon Wireless, in the last year have increased efforts to warn about the risks of texting and driving.
AT&T says it plans to distribute the documentary to schools, safety organizations and government agencies, and is urging people to take a pledge on its Facebook page not to text and drive.
David Teater, senior director of transportation initiatives at the National Safety Council, a nonprofit safety advocacy organization, said AT&T deserved credit. At the same time, he says, texting can be so hard to resist that teenagers aren’t likely to stop just by hearing such a message.
“The activity is too compelling,” he said, describing texting as having addicting properties. “What they need to do is start deploying technology that will prevent people from being able to text while driving.”
Still, he said: “The wireless industry is very sincere about getting kids to stop texting and driving. I applaud what they’re doing.”
Frequent Flier My Anxiety in Flight, After Free Fall in an Elevator - an excerpt
Frequent Flier
My Anxiety in Flight, After Free Fall in an Elevator
Published: December 27, 2010
Quote : I’LL be the first one to admit that I’m not a great frequent flier. It’s not just the delays and cancellations; it’s actually the process of flying.
Craig Woerz is a founder and managing partner of Media Storm.
Q. How often do you fly?
A. About three to six flights per month, all domestic.
Q. What’s your least favorite airport?
A. I don’t like any of them since I don’t like to fly. But if I had to pick one, it would be O’Hare.
Q. Of all the places you’ve been, what’s the best?
A. With all the domestic travel I do, I hadn’t ventured overseas. But two years ago, I went to Florence and all through northern Italy. It was amazing.
Q. What’s your secret airport vice?
A. I love my family and miss them when I travel, so instead of using airport or airplane Wi-Fi signals for work, I love to iChat with my kids. I know that’s not a vice, but maybe it is a guilty pleasure.
I used to be O.K. with it and even now, you’d never know I was a little fearful. But I am, although I know that flying is safer than other modes of transport.
About 10 years ago, I experienced free fall in an elevator. Everybody always talks about what they would do if they were in an elevator and it started dropping. Let me tell you, you do nothing. It all happens very quickly.
I was meeting my prospective client on the 37th floor. The elevator was crowded, but by the time we got close to my floor, I was the last person on. I had a weird feeling. Then the lights went out and the thing started dropping. The elevator stopped after it went down about 10 floors, and the doors opened and I got out.
People were milling around and I was told there was a malfunction. No kidding. Apparently, a fire alarm was triggered, and that was supposed to send the elevators down at a slow pace. This one just happened to drop more quickly.
I got back on the elevator, believe it or not, and went to my appointment to make my presentation. I didn’t tell the prospective client what happened, but he could tell something was wrong. I eventually did get his business. Ironically, he wound up being an employee a few years later.
So the elevator incident convinced me that heights and enclosed spaces really can be a bad combination.
To take the edge off of flying, I have a routine. I usually fly out of the same airports, which means I can go to the same coffee shops, clubs and often see the same ticket agents. Once on board, I’ll log on to Wi-Fi, if it’s available, and distract myself.
Still, weird things happen.
I was on a very turbulent flight last year. All of a sudden, the oxygen masks dropped down and the attendants flung themselves into their seats. I was a little freaked, but I put the oxygen mask on. I was a little more freaked when it didn’t fill up. I hit the wrong button. I wasn’t the only one.
After what seemed like an hour, but was really only a minute or two, the pilot came over the speaker system and told us that he had unintentionally hit the wrong control button while trying to send cooling air into the main cabin.
People who are relaxed on planes really have it made. But there is a point where you can be too relaxed. I was sitting next to a woman who actually took off her shoes and stockings and gave herself a little pedicure. That wasn’t fun.
Then there was a time a guy literally laid down in the aisle. I thought something horrible was happening. But then I was told he thought it would be “fun” if someone checked his blood pressure. I didn’t know you had to lie down for that, but I’m sure his was fine.
Good thing they didn’t check mine.
By Craig Woerz, as told to Joan Raymond. E-mail: joan.raymond@nytimes.com.
My Anxiety in Flight, After Free Fall in an Elevator
Published: December 27, 2010
Quote : I’LL be the first one to admit that I’m not a great frequent flier. It’s not just the delays and cancellations; it’s actually the process of flying.
Craig Woerz is a founder and managing partner of Media Storm.
Q. How often do you fly?
A. About three to six flights per month, all domestic.
Q. What’s your least favorite airport?
A. I don’t like any of them since I don’t like to fly. But if I had to pick one, it would be O’Hare.
Q. Of all the places you’ve been, what’s the best?
A. With all the domestic travel I do, I hadn’t ventured overseas. But two years ago, I went to Florence and all through northern Italy. It was amazing.
Q. What’s your secret airport vice?
A. I love my family and miss them when I travel, so instead of using airport or airplane Wi-Fi signals for work, I love to iChat with my kids. I know that’s not a vice, but maybe it is a guilty pleasure.
I used to be O.K. with it and even now, you’d never know I was a little fearful. But I am, although I know that flying is safer than other modes of transport.
About 10 years ago, I experienced free fall in an elevator. Everybody always talks about what they would do if they were in an elevator and it started dropping. Let me tell you, you do nothing. It all happens very quickly.
I was meeting my prospective client on the 37th floor. The elevator was crowded, but by the time we got close to my floor, I was the last person on. I had a weird feeling. Then the lights went out and the thing started dropping. The elevator stopped after it went down about 10 floors, and the doors opened and I got out.
People were milling around and I was told there was a malfunction. No kidding. Apparently, a fire alarm was triggered, and that was supposed to send the elevators down at a slow pace. This one just happened to drop more quickly.
I got back on the elevator, believe it or not, and went to my appointment to make my presentation. I didn’t tell the prospective client what happened, but he could tell something was wrong. I eventually did get his business. Ironically, he wound up being an employee a few years later.
So the elevator incident convinced me that heights and enclosed spaces really can be a bad combination.
To take the edge off of flying, I have a routine. I usually fly out of the same airports, which means I can go to the same coffee shops, clubs and often see the same ticket agents. Once on board, I’ll log on to Wi-Fi, if it’s available, and distract myself.
Still, weird things happen.
I was on a very turbulent flight last year. All of a sudden, the oxygen masks dropped down and the attendants flung themselves into their seats. I was a little freaked, but I put the oxygen mask on. I was a little more freaked when it didn’t fill up. I hit the wrong button. I wasn’t the only one.
After what seemed like an hour, but was really only a minute or two, the pilot came over the speaker system and told us that he had unintentionally hit the wrong control button while trying to send cooling air into the main cabin.
People who are relaxed on planes really have it made. But there is a point where you can be too relaxed. I was sitting next to a woman who actually took off her shoes and stockings and gave herself a little pedicure. That wasn’t fun.
Then there was a time a guy literally laid down in the aisle. I thought something horrible was happening. But then I was told he thought it would be “fun” if someone checked his blood pressure. I didn’t know you had to lie down for that, but I’m sure his was fine.
Good thing they didn’t check mine.
By Craig Woerz, as told to Joan Raymond. E-mail: joan.raymond@nytimes.com.
How Superstars’ Pay Stifles Everyone Else - An Excerpt
How Superstars’ Pay Stifles Everyone ElsePublished: December 25, 2010
This article was adapted from “The Price of Everything: Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do,” by Eduardo Porter, an editorial writer for The New York Times. The book, to be published on Jan. 4 by Portfolio, examines how pricing affects all of our choices.
Associated Press
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Glass-Steagall law in the 1930s to separate commercial banking from investment banking. Standing from left are Senator Carter Glass, Senator Duncan Fletcher, Henry Morgenthau Jr. of the Treasury, Jesse Jones and Representative Henry Steagall.
IN 1990, the Kansas City Royals had the heftiest payroll in Major League Baseball: almost $24 million. A typical player for the New York Yankees, which had some of the most expensive players in the game at the time, earned less than $450,000.
Last season, the Yankees spent $206 million on players, more than five times the payroll of the Royals 20 years ago, even after accounting for inflation. The Yankees’ median salary was $5.5 million, seven times the 1990 figure, inflation-adjusted.
What is most striking is how the Yankees have outstripped the rest of the league. Two decades ago. the Royals’ payroll was about three times as big as that of the Chicago White Sox, the cheapest major-league team at the time. Last season, the Yankees spent about six times as much as the Pittsburgh Pirates, who had the most inexpensive roster.
Baseball aficionados might conclude that all of this points to some pernicious new trend in the market for top players. But this is not specific to baseball, or even to sport. Consider the market for pop music. In 1982, the top 1 percent of pop stars, in terms of pay, raked in 26 percent of concert ticket revenue. In 2003, that top percentage of stars — names like Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera or 50 Cent — was taking 56 percent of the concert pie.
The phenomenon is not even specific to the United States. Pelé, from Brazil, the greatest soccer player of all time, made his World Cup debut in Sweden in 1958, when he was only 17. He became an instant star, coveted by every team on the planet. By 1960, his team, Santos, reportedly paid him $150,000 a year — about $1.1 million in today’s money. But these days, that would amount to middling pay. The top-paid player of the 2009-10 season, the Portuguese forward Cristiano Ronaldo, made $17 million playing for the Spanish team Real Madrid.
Of course, the inflated rewards of performers at the very top have to do with specific changes in the underlying economics of entertainment. People have more disposable income to spend on entertainment. Corporate sponsorships, virtually non-existent in the age of Pelé, account today for a large share of performers’ income. In 2009, the highest-earning soccer player was the English midfielder David Beckham, who made $33 million from endorsements on top of a $7 million salary from the Los Angeles Galaxy and AC Milan.
But broader forces are also at play. Nearly 30 years ago, Sherwin Rosen, an economist from the University of Chicago, proposed an elegant theory to explain the general pattern. In an article entitled “The Economics of Superstars,” he argued that technological changes would allow the best performers in a given field to serve a bigger market and thus reap a greater share of its revenue. But this would also reduce the spoils available to the less gifted in the business.
The reasoning fits smoothly into the income dynamics of the music industry, which has been shaken by many technological disruptions since the 1980s. First, MTV put music on television. Then Napster took it to the Internet. Apple allowed fans to buy single songs and take them with them. Each of these breakthroughs allowed the very top acts to reach a larger fan base, and thus command a larger audience and a bigger share of concert revenue.
Superstar effects apply, too, to European soccer, which is beamed around the world on cable and satellite TV. In 2009, the top 20 soccer teams reaped revenue of 3.9 billion euros, more than 25 percent of the combined revenue of all the teams in European leagues.
Pelé was not held back by the quality of his game, but by his relatively small revenue base. He might be the greatest of all time, but few people could pay to experience his greatness. In 1958, there were about 350,000 television sets in Brazil. The first television satellite, Telstar I, wasn’t launched until July 1962, too late for his World Cup debut.
By contrast, the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, in which Ronaldo played for Portugal, was broadcast in more than 200 countries, to an aggregate audience of over 25 billion. Some 700 million people watched the final alone. Ronaldo is not better then Pelé. He makes more money because his talent is broadcast to more people.
IF one loosens slightly the role played by technological progress, Dr. Rosen’s framework also does a pretty good job explaining the evolution of executive pay. In 1977, an elite chief executive working at one of America’s top 100 companies earned about 50 times the wage of its average worker. Three decades later, the nation’s best-paid C.E.O.’s made about 1,100 times the pay of a worker on the production line.
This has separated the megarich from the merely very rich. A study of pay in the 1970s found that executives in the top 10 percent made about twice as much as those in the middle of the pack. By the early 2000s, the top suits made more than four times the pay of the executives in the middle.
Top C.E.O.’s are not pop stars. But the pay for the most sought-after executives has risen for similar reasons. As corporations have increased in size, management decisions at the top have become that much more important, measured in terms of profits or losses. Top American companies have much higher sales and profits than they did 20 years ago. Banks and funds have more assets.
With so much more at stake, it has become that much more important for companies to put at the helm the “best” executive or banker or fund manager they can find. This has set off furious competition for top managerial talent, pushing the prices of top-rated managers way above the pay of those in the tier just below them. Two economists at New York University, Xavier Gabaix and Augustin Landier, published a study in 2006 estimating that the sixfold rise in the pay of chief executives in the United States over the last quarter century or so was attributable entirely to the sixfold rise in the market size of large American companies.
And therein lies a big problem for American capitalism.
CAPITALISM relies on inequality. Like differences in other prices, pay disparities steer resources — in this case, people — to where they would be most productively employed.
Despite the great danger and cost of crossing the border illegally into the United States, hundreds of thousands of the hardest-working Mexicans are drawn by the relative prosperity they can achieve north of the border — where the average income of a Mexican-American household is more than $33,000, almost five times that of a family in Mexico.
In poor economies, fast economic growth increases inequality as some workers profit from new opportunities and others do not. The share of national income accruing to the top 1 percent of the Chinese population more than doubled from 1986 to 2003. Inequality spurs economic growth by providing incentives for people to accumulate human capital and become more productive. It pulls the best and brightest into the most lucrative lines of work, where the most profitable companies hire them.
Yet the increasingly outsize rewards accruing to the nation’s elite clutch of superstars threaten to gum up this incentive mechanism. If only a very lucky few can aspire to a big reward, most workers are likely to conclude that it is not worth the effort to try. The odds aren’t on their side.
Inequality has been found to turn people off. A recent experiment conducted with workers at the University of California found that those who earned less than the typical wage for their pay unit and occupation became measurably less satisfied with their jobs, and more likely to look for another one if they found out the pay of their peers. Other experiments have found that winner-take-all games tend to elicit much less player effort — and more cheating — than those in which rewards are distributed more smoothly according to performance.
Ultimately, the question is this: How much inequality is necessary? It is true that the nation grew quite fast as inequality soared over the last three decades. Since 1980, the country’s gross domestic product per person has increased about 69 percent, even as the share of income accruing to the richest 1 percent of the population jumped to 36 percent from 22 percent. But the economy grew even faster — 83 percent per capita — from 1951 to 1980, when inequality declined when measured as the share of national income going to the very top of the population.
One study concluded that each percentage-point increase in the share of national income channeled to the top 10 percent of Americans since 1960 led to an increase of 0.12 percentage points in the annual rate of economic growth — hardly an enormous boost. The cost for this tonic seems to be a drastic decline in Americans’ economic mobility. Since 1980, the weekly wage of the average worker on the factory floor has increased little more than 3 percent, after inflation.
The United States is the rich country with the most skewed income distribution. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average earnings of the richest 10 percent of Americans are 16 times those for the 10 percent at the bottom of the pile. That compares with a multiple of 8 in Britain and 5 in Sweden.
Not coincidentally, Americans are less economically mobile than people in other developed countries. There is a 42 percent chance that the son of an American man in the bottom fifth of the income distribution will be stuck in the same economic slot. The equivalent odds for a British man are 30 percent, and 25 percent for a Swede.
NONE of this even begins to account for the damage caused by the superstar dynamics that shape the pay of American bankers.
Remember the ’80s? Gordon Gekko first sashayed across the silver screen. Ivan Boesky was jailed for insider trading. Michael Milken peddled junk bonds. In 1987, financial firms amassed a little less than a fifth of the profits of all American corporations. Wall Street bonuses totaled $2.6 billion — about $15,600 for each man and woman working there.
Yet by current standards, this era of legendary greed appears like a moment of uncommon restraint. In 2007, as the financial bubble built upon the American housing market reached its peak, financial companies accounted for a full third of the profits of the nation’s private sector. Wall Street bonuses hit a record $32.9 billion, or $177,000 a worker.
Just as technology gave pop stars a bigger fan base that could buy their CDs, download their singles and snap up their concert tickets, the combination of information technology and deregulation gave bankers an unprecedented opportunity to reap huge rewards. Investors piled into the top-rated funds that generated the highest returns. Rewards flowed in abundance to the most “productive” financiers, those that took the bigger risks and generated the biggest profits.
Finance wasn’t always so richly paid. Financiers had a great time in the early decades of the 20th century: from 1909 to the mid-1930s, they typically made about 50 percent to 60 percent more than workers in other industries. But the stock market collapse of 1929 and the Great Depression changed all that. In 1934, corporate profits in the financial sector shrank to $236 million, one-eighth what they were five years earlier. Wages followed. From 1950 through about 1980, bankers and insurers made only 10 percent more than workers outside of finance, on average.
This ebb and flow of compensation mimics the waxing and waning of restrictions governing finance. A century ago, there were virtually no regulations to restrain banks’ creativity and speculative urges. They could invest where they wanted, deploy depositors’ money as they saw fit. But after the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt set up a plethora of restrictions to avoid a repeat of the financial bubble that burst in 1929.
Interstate banking had been limited since 1927. In 1933, the Glass-Steagall Act forbade commercial banks and investment banks from getting into each other’s business — separating deposit taking and lending from playing the markets. Interest-rate ceilings were also imposed that year. The move to regulate bankers continued in 1959 under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who forbade mixing banks with insurance companies.
Barred from applying the full extent of their wits toward maximizing their incomes, many of the nation’s best and brightest who had flocked to make money in banking left for other industries.
Then, in the 1980s, the Reagan administration unleashed a surge of deregulation. By 1999, the Glass-Steagall Act lay repealed. Banks could commingle with insurance companies at will. Ceilings on interest rates vanished. Banks could open branches anywhere. Unsurprisingly, the most highly educated returned to banking and finance. By 2005, the share of workers in the finance industry with a college education exceeded that of other industries by nearly 20 percentage points. By 2006, pay in the financial sector was again 70 percent higher than wages elsewhere in the private sector. A third of the 2009 Princeton graduates who got jobs after graduation went into finance; 6.3 percent took jobs in government.
Then the financial industry blew up, taking out a good chunk of the world economy.
Finance will not be tamed by tweaking the way bankers are paid. But bankers’ pay could be structured to discourage wanton risk taking. Similarly, superstar effects are not the sole cause of the stagnant incomes of regular Joes. But the piling of rewards on our superstars is encouraging a race to the top that, if left unabated, could leave very little to strive for in its wake.
This article was adapted from “The Price of Everything: Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do,” by Eduardo Porter, an editorial writer for The New York Times. The book, to be published on Jan. 4 by Portfolio, examines how pricing affects all of our choices.
Associated Press
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Glass-Steagall law in the 1930s to separate commercial banking from investment banking. Standing from left are Senator Carter Glass, Senator Duncan Fletcher, Henry Morgenthau Jr. of the Treasury, Jesse Jones and Representative Henry Steagall.
IN 1990, the Kansas City Royals had the heftiest payroll in Major League Baseball: almost $24 million. A typical player for the New York Yankees, which had some of the most expensive players in the game at the time, earned less than $450,000.
Last season, the Yankees spent $206 million on players, more than five times the payroll of the Royals 20 years ago, even after accounting for inflation. The Yankees’ median salary was $5.5 million, seven times the 1990 figure, inflation-adjusted.
What is most striking is how the Yankees have outstripped the rest of the league. Two decades ago. the Royals’ payroll was about three times as big as that of the Chicago White Sox, the cheapest major-league team at the time. Last season, the Yankees spent about six times as much as the Pittsburgh Pirates, who had the most inexpensive roster.
Baseball aficionados might conclude that all of this points to some pernicious new trend in the market for top players. But this is not specific to baseball, or even to sport. Consider the market for pop music. In 1982, the top 1 percent of pop stars, in terms of pay, raked in 26 percent of concert ticket revenue. In 2003, that top percentage of stars — names like Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera or 50 Cent — was taking 56 percent of the concert pie.
The phenomenon is not even specific to the United States. Pelé, from Brazil, the greatest soccer player of all time, made his World Cup debut in Sweden in 1958, when he was only 17. He became an instant star, coveted by every team on the planet. By 1960, his team, Santos, reportedly paid him $150,000 a year — about $1.1 million in today’s money. But these days, that would amount to middling pay. The top-paid player of the 2009-10 season, the Portuguese forward Cristiano Ronaldo, made $17 million playing for the Spanish team Real Madrid.
Of course, the inflated rewards of performers at the very top have to do with specific changes in the underlying economics of entertainment. People have more disposable income to spend on entertainment. Corporate sponsorships, virtually non-existent in the age of Pelé, account today for a large share of performers’ income. In 2009, the highest-earning soccer player was the English midfielder David Beckham, who made $33 million from endorsements on top of a $7 million salary from the Los Angeles Galaxy and AC Milan.
But broader forces are also at play. Nearly 30 years ago, Sherwin Rosen, an economist from the University of Chicago, proposed an elegant theory to explain the general pattern. In an article entitled “The Economics of Superstars,” he argued that technological changes would allow the best performers in a given field to serve a bigger market and thus reap a greater share of its revenue. But this would also reduce the spoils available to the less gifted in the business.
The reasoning fits smoothly into the income dynamics of the music industry, which has been shaken by many technological disruptions since the 1980s. First, MTV put music on television. Then Napster took it to the Internet. Apple allowed fans to buy single songs and take them with them. Each of these breakthroughs allowed the very top acts to reach a larger fan base, and thus command a larger audience and a bigger share of concert revenue.
Superstar effects apply, too, to European soccer, which is beamed around the world on cable and satellite TV. In 2009, the top 20 soccer teams reaped revenue of 3.9 billion euros, more than 25 percent of the combined revenue of all the teams in European leagues.
Pelé was not held back by the quality of his game, but by his relatively small revenue base. He might be the greatest of all time, but few people could pay to experience his greatness. In 1958, there were about 350,000 television sets in Brazil. The first television satellite, Telstar I, wasn’t launched until July 1962, too late for his World Cup debut.
By contrast, the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, in which Ronaldo played for Portugal, was broadcast in more than 200 countries, to an aggregate audience of over 25 billion. Some 700 million people watched the final alone. Ronaldo is not better then Pelé. He makes more money because his talent is broadcast to more people.
IF one loosens slightly the role played by technological progress, Dr. Rosen’s framework also does a pretty good job explaining the evolution of executive pay. In 1977, an elite chief executive working at one of America’s top 100 companies earned about 50 times the wage of its average worker. Three decades later, the nation’s best-paid C.E.O.’s made about 1,100 times the pay of a worker on the production line.
This has separated the megarich from the merely very rich. A study of pay in the 1970s found that executives in the top 10 percent made about twice as much as those in the middle of the pack. By the early 2000s, the top suits made more than four times the pay of the executives in the middle.
Top C.E.O.’s are not pop stars. But the pay for the most sought-after executives has risen for similar reasons. As corporations have increased in size, management decisions at the top have become that much more important, measured in terms of profits or losses. Top American companies have much higher sales and profits than they did 20 years ago. Banks and funds have more assets.
With so much more at stake, it has become that much more important for companies to put at the helm the “best” executive or banker or fund manager they can find. This has set off furious competition for top managerial talent, pushing the prices of top-rated managers way above the pay of those in the tier just below them. Two economists at New York University, Xavier Gabaix and Augustin Landier, published a study in 2006 estimating that the sixfold rise in the pay of chief executives in the United States over the last quarter century or so was attributable entirely to the sixfold rise in the market size of large American companies.
And therein lies a big problem for American capitalism.
CAPITALISM relies on inequality. Like differences in other prices, pay disparities steer resources — in this case, people — to where they would be most productively employed.
Despite the great danger and cost of crossing the border illegally into the United States, hundreds of thousands of the hardest-working Mexicans are drawn by the relative prosperity they can achieve north of the border — where the average income of a Mexican-American household is more than $33,000, almost five times that of a family in Mexico.
In poor economies, fast economic growth increases inequality as some workers profit from new opportunities and others do not. The share of national income accruing to the top 1 percent of the Chinese population more than doubled from 1986 to 2003. Inequality spurs economic growth by providing incentives for people to accumulate human capital and become more productive. It pulls the best and brightest into the most lucrative lines of work, where the most profitable companies hire them.
Yet the increasingly outsize rewards accruing to the nation’s elite clutch of superstars threaten to gum up this incentive mechanism. If only a very lucky few can aspire to a big reward, most workers are likely to conclude that it is not worth the effort to try. The odds aren’t on their side.
Inequality has been found to turn people off. A recent experiment conducted with workers at the University of California found that those who earned less than the typical wage for their pay unit and occupation became measurably less satisfied with their jobs, and more likely to look for another one if they found out the pay of their peers. Other experiments have found that winner-take-all games tend to elicit much less player effort — and more cheating — than those in which rewards are distributed more smoothly according to performance.
Ultimately, the question is this: How much inequality is necessary? It is true that the nation grew quite fast as inequality soared over the last three decades. Since 1980, the country’s gross domestic product per person has increased about 69 percent, even as the share of income accruing to the richest 1 percent of the population jumped to 36 percent from 22 percent. But the economy grew even faster — 83 percent per capita — from 1951 to 1980, when inequality declined when measured as the share of national income going to the very top of the population.
One study concluded that each percentage-point increase in the share of national income channeled to the top 10 percent of Americans since 1960 led to an increase of 0.12 percentage points in the annual rate of economic growth — hardly an enormous boost. The cost for this tonic seems to be a drastic decline in Americans’ economic mobility. Since 1980, the weekly wage of the average worker on the factory floor has increased little more than 3 percent, after inflation.
The United States is the rich country with the most skewed income distribution. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average earnings of the richest 10 percent of Americans are 16 times those for the 10 percent at the bottom of the pile. That compares with a multiple of 8 in Britain and 5 in Sweden.
Not coincidentally, Americans are less economically mobile than people in other developed countries. There is a 42 percent chance that the son of an American man in the bottom fifth of the income distribution will be stuck in the same economic slot. The equivalent odds for a British man are 30 percent, and 25 percent for a Swede.
NONE of this even begins to account for the damage caused by the superstar dynamics that shape the pay of American bankers.
Remember the ’80s? Gordon Gekko first sashayed across the silver screen. Ivan Boesky was jailed for insider trading. Michael Milken peddled junk bonds. In 1987, financial firms amassed a little less than a fifth of the profits of all American corporations. Wall Street bonuses totaled $2.6 billion — about $15,600 for each man and woman working there.
Yet by current standards, this era of legendary greed appears like a moment of uncommon restraint. In 2007, as the financial bubble built upon the American housing market reached its peak, financial companies accounted for a full third of the profits of the nation’s private sector. Wall Street bonuses hit a record $32.9 billion, or $177,000 a worker.
Just as technology gave pop stars a bigger fan base that could buy their CDs, download their singles and snap up their concert tickets, the combination of information technology and deregulation gave bankers an unprecedented opportunity to reap huge rewards. Investors piled into the top-rated funds that generated the highest returns. Rewards flowed in abundance to the most “productive” financiers, those that took the bigger risks and generated the biggest profits.
Finance wasn’t always so richly paid. Financiers had a great time in the early decades of the 20th century: from 1909 to the mid-1930s, they typically made about 50 percent to 60 percent more than workers in other industries. But the stock market collapse of 1929 and the Great Depression changed all that. In 1934, corporate profits in the financial sector shrank to $236 million, one-eighth what they were five years earlier. Wages followed. From 1950 through about 1980, bankers and insurers made only 10 percent more than workers outside of finance, on average.
This ebb and flow of compensation mimics the waxing and waning of restrictions governing finance. A century ago, there were virtually no regulations to restrain banks’ creativity and speculative urges. They could invest where they wanted, deploy depositors’ money as they saw fit. But after the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt set up a plethora of restrictions to avoid a repeat of the financial bubble that burst in 1929.
Interstate banking had been limited since 1927. In 1933, the Glass-Steagall Act forbade commercial banks and investment banks from getting into each other’s business — separating deposit taking and lending from playing the markets. Interest-rate ceilings were also imposed that year. The move to regulate bankers continued in 1959 under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who forbade mixing banks with insurance companies.
Barred from applying the full extent of their wits toward maximizing their incomes, many of the nation’s best and brightest who had flocked to make money in banking left for other industries.
Then, in the 1980s, the Reagan administration unleashed a surge of deregulation. By 1999, the Glass-Steagall Act lay repealed. Banks could commingle with insurance companies at will. Ceilings on interest rates vanished. Banks could open branches anywhere. Unsurprisingly, the most highly educated returned to banking and finance. By 2005, the share of workers in the finance industry with a college education exceeded that of other industries by nearly 20 percentage points. By 2006, pay in the financial sector was again 70 percent higher than wages elsewhere in the private sector. A third of the 2009 Princeton graduates who got jobs after graduation went into finance; 6.3 percent took jobs in government.
Then the financial industry blew up, taking out a good chunk of the world economy.
Finance will not be tamed by tweaking the way bankers are paid. But bankers’ pay could be structured to discourage wanton risk taking. Similarly, superstar effects are not the sole cause of the stagnant incomes of regular Joes. But the piling of rewards on our superstars is encouraging a race to the top that, if left unabated, could leave very little to strive for in its wake.
Disney Tackles Major Theme Park Problem: Lines - An Excerpt
Disney Tackles Major Theme Park Problem: Lines
Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel
By BROOKS BARNES
Published: December 27, 2010
Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel, via Associated Press
Crowds line the way to Cinderella Castle at the Magic Kingdom.
To handle over 30 million annual visitors — many of them during this busiest time of year for the megaresort — Disney World long ago turned the art of crowd control into a science. But the putative Happiest Place on Earth has decided it must figure out how to quicken the pace even more. A cultural shift toward impatience — fed by video games and smartphones — is demanding it, park managers say. To stay relevant to the entertain-me-right-this-second generation, Disney must evolve.
And so it has spent the last year outfitting an underground, nerve center to address that most low-tech of problems, the wait. Located under Cinderella Castle, the new center uses video cameras, computer programs, digital park maps and other whiz-bang tools to spot gridlock before it forms and deploy countermeasures in real time.
In one corner, employees watch flat-screen televisions that depict various attractions in green, yellow and red outlines, with the colors representing wait-time gradations.
If Pirates of the Caribbean, the ride that sends people on a spirited voyage through the Spanish Main, suddenly blinks from green to yellow, the center might respond by alerting managers to launch more boats.
Another option involves dispatching Captain Jack Sparrow or Goofy or one of their pals to the queue to entertain people as they wait. “It’s about being nimble and quickly noticing that, ‘Hey, let’s make sure there is some relief out there for those people,’ ” said Phil Holmes, vice president of the Magic Kingdom, the flagship Disney World park.
What if Fantasyland is swamped with people but adjacent Tomorrowland has plenty of elbow room? The operations center can route a miniparade called “Move it! Shake it! Celebrate It!” into the less-populated pocket to siphon guests in that direction. Other technicians in the command center monitor restaurants, perhaps spotting that additional registers need to be opened or dispatching greeters to hand out menus to people waiting to order.
“These moments add up until they collectively help the entire park,” Mr. Holmes said.
In recent years, according to Disney research, the average Magic Kingdom visitor has had time for only nine rides — out of more than 40 — because of lengthy waits and crowded walkways and restaurants. In the last few months, however, the operations center has managed to make enough nips and tucks to lift that average to 10.
“Control is Disney’s middle name, so they have always been on the cutting edge of this kind of thing,” said Bob Sehlinger, co-author of “The Unofficial Guide: Walt Disney World 2011” and a writer on Disney for Frommers.com. Mr. Sehlinger added, “The challenge is that you only have so many options once the bathtub is full.”
Disney, which is periodically criticized for overreaching in the name of cultural dominance (and profits), does not see any of this monitoring as the slightest bit invasive. Rather, the company regards it as just another part of its efforts to pull every possible lever in the name of a better guest experience.
The primary goal of the command center, as stated by Disney, is to make guests happier — because to increase revenue in its $10.7 billion theme park business, which includes resorts in Paris and Hong Kong, Disney needs its current customers to return more often. “Giving our guests faster and better access to the fun,” said Thomas O. Staggs, chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, “is at the heart of our investment in technology.”
Disney also wants to raise per-capita spending. “If we can also increase the average number of shop or restaurant visits, that’s a huge win for us,” Mr. Holmes said.
Disney has long been a leader in technological innovation, whether that means inventing cameras to make animated films or creating the audio animatronic robots for the attraction It’s a Small World.
Behind-the-scenes systems — typically kept top secret by the company as it strives to create an environment where things happen as if by magic — are also highly computerized. Ride capacity is determined in part by analyzing hotel reservations, flight bookings and historic attendance data. Satellites provide minute-by-minute weather analysis. A system called FastPass allows people to skip lines for popular rides like the Jungle Cruise.
But the command center reflects how Disney is deepening its reliance on technology as it thinks about adapting decades-old parks, which are primarily built around nostalgia for an America gone by, for 21st century expectations. “It’s not about us needing to keep pace with technological change,” Mr. Staggs said. “We need to set the pace for that kind of change.”
For instance, Disney has been experimenting with smartphones to help guide people more efficiently. Mobile Magic, a $1.99 app, allows visitors to type in “Sleeping Beauty” and receive directions to where that princess (or at least a costumed stand-in) is signing autographs. In the future, typing in “hamburger” might reveal the nearest restaurant with the shortest wait.
Disney has also been adding video games to wait areas. At Space Mountain, 87 game stations now line the queue to keep visitors entertained. (Games, about 90 seconds in length, involve simple things like clearing runways of asteroids). Gaming has also been added to the queue for Soarin’, an Epcot ride that simulates a hang glider flight.
Blogs that watch Disney’s parks have speculated that engineers (“imagineers,” in the company’s parlance) are also looking at bigger ideas, like wristbands that contain information like your name, credit card number and favorite Disney characters. While Disney is keeping a tight lid on specifics, these devices would enable simple transactions like the purchase of souvenirs — just pay by swiping your wristband — as well as more complicated attractions that interact with guests.
“Picture a day where there is memory built into these characters — they will know that they’ve seen you four or five times before and that your name is Bobby,” said Bruce E. Vaughn, chief creative executive at Walt Disney Imagineering. “Those are the kinds of limits that are dissolving so quickly that we can see being able to implement them in the meaningfully near future.”
Dreaming about the future was not something on Mr. Holmes’s mind as he gave a reporter a rare peek behind the Disney operations veil. He had a park to run, and the command center had spotted trouble at the tea cups.
After running smoothly all morning, the spinning Mad Tea Party abruptly stopped meeting precalculated ridership goals. A few minutes later, Mr. Holmes had his answer: a new employee had taken over the ride and was leaving tea cups unloaded.
“In the theme park business these days,” he said, “patience is not always a virtue.”
Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel
By BROOKS BARNES
Published: December 27, 2010
Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel, via Associated Press
Crowds line the way to Cinderella Castle at the Magic Kingdom.
To handle over 30 million annual visitors — many of them during this busiest time of year for the megaresort — Disney World long ago turned the art of crowd control into a science. But the putative Happiest Place on Earth has decided it must figure out how to quicken the pace even more. A cultural shift toward impatience — fed by video games and smartphones — is demanding it, park managers say. To stay relevant to the entertain-me-right-this-second generation, Disney must evolve.
And so it has spent the last year outfitting an underground, nerve center to address that most low-tech of problems, the wait. Located under Cinderella Castle, the new center uses video cameras, computer programs, digital park maps and other whiz-bang tools to spot gridlock before it forms and deploy countermeasures in real time.
In one corner, employees watch flat-screen televisions that depict various attractions in green, yellow and red outlines, with the colors representing wait-time gradations.
If Pirates of the Caribbean, the ride that sends people on a spirited voyage through the Spanish Main, suddenly blinks from green to yellow, the center might respond by alerting managers to launch more boats.
Another option involves dispatching Captain Jack Sparrow or Goofy or one of their pals to the queue to entertain people as they wait. “It’s about being nimble and quickly noticing that, ‘Hey, let’s make sure there is some relief out there for those people,’ ” said Phil Holmes, vice president of the Magic Kingdom, the flagship Disney World park.
What if Fantasyland is swamped with people but adjacent Tomorrowland has plenty of elbow room? The operations center can route a miniparade called “Move it! Shake it! Celebrate It!” into the less-populated pocket to siphon guests in that direction. Other technicians in the command center monitor restaurants, perhaps spotting that additional registers need to be opened or dispatching greeters to hand out menus to people waiting to order.
“These moments add up until they collectively help the entire park,” Mr. Holmes said.
In recent years, according to Disney research, the average Magic Kingdom visitor has had time for only nine rides — out of more than 40 — because of lengthy waits and crowded walkways and restaurants. In the last few months, however, the operations center has managed to make enough nips and tucks to lift that average to 10.
“Control is Disney’s middle name, so they have always been on the cutting edge of this kind of thing,” said Bob Sehlinger, co-author of “The Unofficial Guide: Walt Disney World 2011” and a writer on Disney for Frommers.com. Mr. Sehlinger added, “The challenge is that you only have so many options once the bathtub is full.”
Disney, which is periodically criticized for overreaching in the name of cultural dominance (and profits), does not see any of this monitoring as the slightest bit invasive. Rather, the company regards it as just another part of its efforts to pull every possible lever in the name of a better guest experience.
The primary goal of the command center, as stated by Disney, is to make guests happier — because to increase revenue in its $10.7 billion theme park business, which includes resorts in Paris and Hong Kong, Disney needs its current customers to return more often. “Giving our guests faster and better access to the fun,” said Thomas O. Staggs, chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, “is at the heart of our investment in technology.”
Disney also wants to raise per-capita spending. “If we can also increase the average number of shop or restaurant visits, that’s a huge win for us,” Mr. Holmes said.
Disney has long been a leader in technological innovation, whether that means inventing cameras to make animated films or creating the audio animatronic robots for the attraction It’s a Small World.
Behind-the-scenes systems — typically kept top secret by the company as it strives to create an environment where things happen as if by magic — are also highly computerized. Ride capacity is determined in part by analyzing hotel reservations, flight bookings and historic attendance data. Satellites provide minute-by-minute weather analysis. A system called FastPass allows people to skip lines for popular rides like the Jungle Cruise.
But the command center reflects how Disney is deepening its reliance on technology as it thinks about adapting decades-old parks, which are primarily built around nostalgia for an America gone by, for 21st century expectations. “It’s not about us needing to keep pace with technological change,” Mr. Staggs said. “We need to set the pace for that kind of change.”
For instance, Disney has been experimenting with smartphones to help guide people more efficiently. Mobile Magic, a $1.99 app, allows visitors to type in “Sleeping Beauty” and receive directions to where that princess (or at least a costumed stand-in) is signing autographs. In the future, typing in “hamburger” might reveal the nearest restaurant with the shortest wait.
Disney has also been adding video games to wait areas. At Space Mountain, 87 game stations now line the queue to keep visitors entertained. (Games, about 90 seconds in length, involve simple things like clearing runways of asteroids). Gaming has also been added to the queue for Soarin’, an Epcot ride that simulates a hang glider flight.
Blogs that watch Disney’s parks have speculated that engineers (“imagineers,” in the company’s parlance) are also looking at bigger ideas, like wristbands that contain information like your name, credit card number and favorite Disney characters. While Disney is keeping a tight lid on specifics, these devices would enable simple transactions like the purchase of souvenirs — just pay by swiping your wristband — as well as more complicated attractions that interact with guests.
“Picture a day where there is memory built into these characters — they will know that they’ve seen you four or five times before and that your name is Bobby,” said Bruce E. Vaughn, chief creative executive at Walt Disney Imagineering. “Those are the kinds of limits that are dissolving so quickly that we can see being able to implement them in the meaningfully near future.”
Dreaming about the future was not something on Mr. Holmes’s mind as he gave a reporter a rare peek behind the Disney operations veil. He had a park to run, and the command center had spotted trouble at the tea cups.
After running smoothly all morning, the spinning Mad Tea Party abruptly stopped meeting precalculated ridership goals. A few minutes later, Mr. Holmes had his answer: a new employee had taken over the ride and was leaving tea cups unloaded.
“In the theme park business these days,” he said, “patience is not always a virtue.”
Teena Marie, 1980s R&B Hitmaker, Dies at 54 - An Excerpt
Teena Marie, 1980s R&B Hitmaker, Dies at 54By BEN SISARIO
Published: December 27, 2010
Teena Marie, a singer whose funky hits in the 1980s, like “Lovergirl” and “Square Biz,” made her one of the few white performers to consistently find success on the rhythm-and-blues charts, died on Sunday at her home in Pasadena, Calif. She was 54.
.The cause was not immediately known, but The Associated Press reported that the authorities said she appeared to have died of natural causes.
Born Mary Christine Brockert in Santa Monica, Calif., on March 5, 1956, she grew up in a predominantly black area of nearby Venice, Calif., and began singing and acting while still a child. At age 8, she tap-danced for Jed Clampett on an episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies,” under the name Tina Marie Brockert.
After graduating from high school and briefly attending Santa Monica College, she signed with Motown Records and became of protégée of Rick James, then one of the label’s biggest new stars. Teena Marie’s first album, “Wild and Peaceful,” with James as a producer and the chief songwriter — and his Stone City Band backing her up — was released on Motown’s Gordy imprint in 1979.
“I’m Just a Sucker for Your Love,” her duet with James from that album, went to No. 8 on the R&B singles chart. The two began a tempestuous love affair. Another duet, “Fire and Desire,” appeared on James’s hit album from 1981, “Street Songs.” James died in 2004.
Through the 1980s, Teena Marie developed a style that folded bits of rap (as on the 1981 hit “Square Biz”) and rock (“You So Heavy,” from 1986, has a scorching guitar solo by Stevie Ray Vaughan) into danceable, funk-driven pop.
From the start, race was ambiguous in her music. She was not pictured on the cover of “Wild and Peaceful,” which was promoted to black radio stations. With an earthy voice that pierced with power in its high registers, she was highly credible as an R&B singer, and many listeners learned that she was white only when they saw her portrait on the cover of her second album, “Lady T,” in 1980.
“I still have people coming up to me 26 years later and looking at me and all of a sudden going, ‘I didn’t know you were white!’ ” she said in an interview on National Public Radio in 2006.
But she was embraced by the R&B audience, and some of her songs have become ingrained in black musical culture. Her 1988 song “Ooo La La La” was sampled and reconfigured by the Fugees as “Fu-Gee-La” in 1996 on their debut album, “The Score.”
For many of her fellow musicians, Teena Marie’s biggest accomplishment was made offstage. Her lawsuit against Motown in the early 1980s, for nonpayment of royalties, resulted in a clarification of California law — known in the music industry as the Brockert Initiative or the Teena Marie Law — that made it much more difficult for record companies to keep an act under an exclusive contract. After leaving Motown, she signed with Epic and reached her commercial peak. Her 1984 song “Lovergirl” — featuring her impassioned squeal in the chorus, “I just want to be your lover girl/I just want to rock your world” — went to No. 4 on Billboard’s pop chart and became her biggest seller.
In the 1990s, Teena Marie’s career slowed as she raised a daughter, Alia Rose, who survives her. But she continued to release music. She was nominated for a 2005 Grammy Award for best female R&B vocal performance, for her song “I’m Still in Love” — she lost to Alicia Keys — and released her most recent album, “Congo Square,” on the revived Stax label in 2009.
Although Teena Marie’s race was hidden from the public at the very beginning of her career, she was always forthright about the black influences in her music. In an interview with Essence.com last year, she suggested that the content of the music mattered more than the singer’s color.
“Over all my race hasn’t been a problem,” she said. “I’m a black artist with white skin. At the end of the day you have to sing what’s in your own soul.”
Published: December 27, 2010
Teena Marie, a singer whose funky hits in the 1980s, like “Lovergirl” and “Square Biz,” made her one of the few white performers to consistently find success on the rhythm-and-blues charts, died on Sunday at her home in Pasadena, Calif. She was 54.
.The cause was not immediately known, but The Associated Press reported that the authorities said she appeared to have died of natural causes.
Born Mary Christine Brockert in Santa Monica, Calif., on March 5, 1956, she grew up in a predominantly black area of nearby Venice, Calif., and began singing and acting while still a child. At age 8, she tap-danced for Jed Clampett on an episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies,” under the name Tina Marie Brockert.
After graduating from high school and briefly attending Santa Monica College, she signed with Motown Records and became of protégée of Rick James, then one of the label’s biggest new stars. Teena Marie’s first album, “Wild and Peaceful,” with James as a producer and the chief songwriter — and his Stone City Band backing her up — was released on Motown’s Gordy imprint in 1979.
“I’m Just a Sucker for Your Love,” her duet with James from that album, went to No. 8 on the R&B singles chart. The two began a tempestuous love affair. Another duet, “Fire and Desire,” appeared on James’s hit album from 1981, “Street Songs.” James died in 2004.
Through the 1980s, Teena Marie developed a style that folded bits of rap (as on the 1981 hit “Square Biz”) and rock (“You So Heavy,” from 1986, has a scorching guitar solo by Stevie Ray Vaughan) into danceable, funk-driven pop.
From the start, race was ambiguous in her music. She was not pictured on the cover of “Wild and Peaceful,” which was promoted to black radio stations. With an earthy voice that pierced with power in its high registers, she was highly credible as an R&B singer, and many listeners learned that she was white only when they saw her portrait on the cover of her second album, “Lady T,” in 1980.
“I still have people coming up to me 26 years later and looking at me and all of a sudden going, ‘I didn’t know you were white!’ ” she said in an interview on National Public Radio in 2006.
But she was embraced by the R&B audience, and some of her songs have become ingrained in black musical culture. Her 1988 song “Ooo La La La” was sampled and reconfigured by the Fugees as “Fu-Gee-La” in 1996 on their debut album, “The Score.”
For many of her fellow musicians, Teena Marie’s biggest accomplishment was made offstage. Her lawsuit against Motown in the early 1980s, for nonpayment of royalties, resulted in a clarification of California law — known in the music industry as the Brockert Initiative or the Teena Marie Law — that made it much more difficult for record companies to keep an act under an exclusive contract. After leaving Motown, she signed with Epic and reached her commercial peak. Her 1984 song “Lovergirl” — featuring her impassioned squeal in the chorus, “I just want to be your lover girl/I just want to rock your world” — went to No. 4 on Billboard’s pop chart and became her biggest seller.
In the 1990s, Teena Marie’s career slowed as she raised a daughter, Alia Rose, who survives her. But she continued to release music. She was nominated for a 2005 Grammy Award for best female R&B vocal performance, for her song “I’m Still in Love” — she lost to Alicia Keys — and released her most recent album, “Congo Square,” on the revived Stax label in 2009.
Although Teena Marie’s race was hidden from the public at the very beginning of her career, she was always forthright about the black influences in her music. In an interview with Essence.com last year, she suggested that the content of the music mattered more than the singer’s color.
“Over all my race hasn’t been a problem,” she said. “I’m a black artist with white skin. At the end of the day you have to sing what’s in your own soul.”
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
COMMENTARY: Singapore's disdain exposed - an excerpt
COMMENTARY: Singapore's disdain exposed
ANN - Tuesday, December 14
Kuala Lumpur (The Star/ANN) - Singapore's most senior Foreign Ministry official Bilahari Kausikan is heading for Kuala Lumpur on Dec 22 as a leader of a delegation to discuss KTM Berhad's land swap deal in Singapore agreed in May by the Prime Ministers of the two countries.
This is the fifth round and possibly the last meeting of the Malaysia-Singapore Joint Implementation Team (MSJIT) between officials of both countries, each side with about 20 people representing various ministries and agencies.
After the last meeting two weeks ago, a short one-paragraph joint statement was issued describing the meeting as one held in a cordial atmosphere.
Come Dec 22, the atmosphere will definitely be awkward, at least to some officials.
Simple analogy -- imagine sitting with someone that you know who has been bad-mouthing you to others. How would you feel?
Now, how about sitting down to a meeting with the very man who claimed, among others, that Malaysia was "confused and dangerous, fuelled by the distinct possibility of racial conflict"?
Not only that, Kausikan said back in September 2008 that "a lack of competent leadership is a real problem for Malaysia".
Courtesy of WikiLeaks and not exactly denied by his boss, Foreign Minister George Yeo, Kausikan's remarks are riling up officials in Malaysia.
"His remarks are crude and smack of arrogance. It is not just what he has said but how he said it. It shows his sentiment for us.
"Every time there is an MSJIT meeting, the host country will host lunch and dinner. It is going to be an awkward situation for us," said one government official.
Kausikan's predecessor Peter Ho has also made damaging remarks on Malaysia, along with the ministry's ambassador-at-large Tommy Koh whose views of Japan and India were damaging.
"Fat losers, stupid, bad leadership" are some adjectives that had been used by Singaporean diplomats to describe their neighbours.
Yeo, in an immediate attempt to play down reports, defended his officials, saying their comments were taken out of context and were interpretations of views reflected by American officials.
The comments, which Yeo described as "cocktail talk", were confidential and should not have been released.
Yeo said his ministry would not check the veracity of the remarks, nor comment on what could have gone on in an informal and confidential setting.
It is normal for diplomats to get information from others during cocktails. What is surprising, though, is that the information gathered from the Singaporeans merit attention from the Americans.
"I am sure how it was said by the Singapore diplomats and the sentiment that it merits attention," said an official.
For those who have dealt with Singapore, nothing has changed.
The general feeling among officials is that their Singapore counterparts do have condescending traits.
WikiLeaks exposes in the past weeks have caused embarrassment to diplomats and government officials around the world.
This week, it is Singapore's turn. There are thousands of documents yet to be made public by WikiLeaks and who knows if Malaysia would be next, as we are never short of politicians who may not be able to keep their mouths shut.
As Yeo said, he did not think relations with the countries will be affected.
True, but as the closest neighbour with supposedly warm ties, Singapore would do well to show some kind of regret over the remarks made by its officials.
If it had been Singapore at the end of the stick, they would not stop until they get what they want. No doubt, Malaysia will now need to be more alert when dealing with Singapore.
During next week's meeting, officials will need to remain professional when they meet Kausikan.
They have to stick to the agenda as there are objectives to be met since the leaders have given officials until end of the year to iron out details of the KTM land swap deal and other related projects.
The days of being emotional are long gone. It is time to think strategically for the long term and best interest of Malaysia.
ANN - Tuesday, December 14
Kuala Lumpur (The Star/ANN) - Singapore's most senior Foreign Ministry official Bilahari Kausikan is heading for Kuala Lumpur on Dec 22 as a leader of a delegation to discuss KTM Berhad's land swap deal in Singapore agreed in May by the Prime Ministers of the two countries.
This is the fifth round and possibly the last meeting of the Malaysia-Singapore Joint Implementation Team (MSJIT) between officials of both countries, each side with about 20 people representing various ministries and agencies.
After the last meeting two weeks ago, a short one-paragraph joint statement was issued describing the meeting as one held in a cordial atmosphere.
Come Dec 22, the atmosphere will definitely be awkward, at least to some officials.
Simple analogy -- imagine sitting with someone that you know who has been bad-mouthing you to others. How would you feel?
Now, how about sitting down to a meeting with the very man who claimed, among others, that Malaysia was "confused and dangerous, fuelled by the distinct possibility of racial conflict"?
Not only that, Kausikan said back in September 2008 that "a lack of competent leadership is a real problem for Malaysia".
Courtesy of WikiLeaks and not exactly denied by his boss, Foreign Minister George Yeo, Kausikan's remarks are riling up officials in Malaysia.
"His remarks are crude and smack of arrogance. It is not just what he has said but how he said it. It shows his sentiment for us.
"Every time there is an MSJIT meeting, the host country will host lunch and dinner. It is going to be an awkward situation for us," said one government official.
Kausikan's predecessor Peter Ho has also made damaging remarks on Malaysia, along with the ministry's ambassador-at-large Tommy Koh whose views of Japan and India were damaging.
"Fat losers, stupid, bad leadership" are some adjectives that had been used by Singaporean diplomats to describe their neighbours.
Yeo, in an immediate attempt to play down reports, defended his officials, saying their comments were taken out of context and were interpretations of views reflected by American officials.
The comments, which Yeo described as "cocktail talk", were confidential and should not have been released.
Yeo said his ministry would not check the veracity of the remarks, nor comment on what could have gone on in an informal and confidential setting.
It is normal for diplomats to get information from others during cocktails. What is surprising, though, is that the information gathered from the Singaporeans merit attention from the Americans.
"I am sure how it was said by the Singapore diplomats and the sentiment that it merits attention," said an official.
For those who have dealt with Singapore, nothing has changed.
The general feeling among officials is that their Singapore counterparts do have condescending traits.
WikiLeaks exposes in the past weeks have caused embarrassment to diplomats and government officials around the world.
This week, it is Singapore's turn. There are thousands of documents yet to be made public by WikiLeaks and who knows if Malaysia would be next, as we are never short of politicians who may not be able to keep their mouths shut.
As Yeo said, he did not think relations with the countries will be affected.
True, but as the closest neighbour with supposedly warm ties, Singapore would do well to show some kind of regret over the remarks made by its officials.
If it had been Singapore at the end of the stick, they would not stop until they get what they want. No doubt, Malaysia will now need to be more alert when dealing with Singapore.
During next week's meeting, officials will need to remain professional when they meet Kausikan.
They have to stick to the agenda as there are objectives to be met since the leaders have given officials until end of the year to iron out details of the KTM land swap deal and other related projects.
The days of being emotional are long gone. It is time to think strategically for the long term and best interest of Malaysia.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
If an island state vanishes, is it still a nation? - An Excerpt
If an island state vanishes, is it still a nation? - AP
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent Charles J. Hanley, Ap Special Correspondent – Mon Dec 6, 2:27 pm ET
CANCUN, Mexico – Encroaching seas in the far Pacific are raising the salt level in the wells of the Marshall Islands. Waves threaten to cut one sliver of an island in two. "It's getting worse," says Kaminaga Kaminaga, the tiny nation's climate change coordinator.
The rising ocean raises questions, too: What happens if the 61,000 Marshallese must abandon their low-lying atolls? Would they still be a nation? With a U.N. seat? With control of their old fisheries and their undersea minerals? Where would they live, and how would they make a living? Who, precisely, would they and their children become?
For years global negotiations to act on climate change have dragged on, with little to show. Parties to the 193-nation U.N. climate treaty are meeting again in this Caribbean resort, but no one expects decisive action to roll back the industrial, agricultural and transport emissions blamed for global warming — and consequently for swelling seas.
From 7,000 miles (11,000 kilometers) away, the people of the Marshalls — and of Kiribati, Tuvalu and other atoll nations beyond — can only wonder how many more years they'll be able to cope.
"People who built their homes close to shore, all they can do is get more rocks to rebuild the seawall in front day by day," said Kaminaga, who is in Cancun with the Marshallese delegation to the U.N. talks.
The Marshallese government is looking beyond today, however, to those ultimate questions of nationhood, displacement and rights.
"We're facing a set of issues unique in the history of the system of nation-states," Dean Bialek, a New York-based adviser to the Republic of the Marshall Islands who is also in Cancun, told The Associated Press. "We're confronting existential issues associated with climate impacts that are not adequately addressed in the international legal framework."
The Marshallese government took a first step to confront these issues by asking for advice from the Center for Climate Change Law at New York's Columbia University. The center's director, Michael B. Gerrard, in turn has asked legal scholars worldwide to assemble at Columbia next May to begin to piece together answers.
Nations have faded into history through secession — recently with the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, for example — or through conquest or ceding their territory to other countries.
But "no country has ever physically disappeared, and it's a real void in the law," Gerrard said during an interview in New York.
The U.N. network of climate scientists projects that seas, expanding from heat and from the runoff of melting land ice, may rise by up to 1.94 feet (0.59 meters) by 2100, swamping much of the scarce land of coral atolls.
But the islands may become uninhabitable long before waves wash over them, because of the saline contamination of water supplies and ruining of crops, and because warming is expected to produce more threatening tropical storms.
"If a country like Tuvalu or Kiribati were to become uninhabitable, would the people be stateless? What's their position in international law?" asked Australian legal scholar Jane McAdam. "The short answer is, it depends. It's complicated."
McAdam, of the University of New South Wales, has traveled in the atoll nations and studied the legal history.
As far as islanders keeping their citizenship and sovereignty if they abandon their homelands, she said by telephone from Sydney, "it's unclear when a state would end because of climate change. It would come down to what the international community was prepared to tolerate" — that is, whether the U.N. General Assembly would move to take a seat away from a displaced people.
The 1951 global treaty on refugees, mandating that nations shelter those fleeing because of persecution, does not cover the looming situation of those displaced by climate change. Some advocate negotiating a new international pact obliging similar treatment for environmental refugees.
In the case of the Marshallese, the picture is murkier. Under a compact with Washington, citizens of the former U.S. trusteeship territory have the right to freely enter the U.S. for study or work, but their right to permanent residency must be clarified, government advisers say.
The islanders worry, too, about their long-term economic rights. The wide scattering of the Marshalls' 29 atolls, 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) southwest of Hawaii, give them an exclusive economic zone of 800,000 square miles (2 million square kilometers) of ocean, an area the size of Mexico.
The tuna coursing through those waters are the Marshalls' chief resource, exploited by selling licenses to foreign fishing fleets. "If their islands go underwater, what becomes of their fishing rights?" Gerrard asked. Potentially just as important: revenues from magnesium and other sea-floor minerals that geologists have been exploring in recent years.
While lawyers at next May's New York conference begin to sort out the puzzle of disappeared nations, the Marshallese will grapple with the growing problems.
The "top priority," Kaminaga said, is to save the isthmus linking the Marshalls' Jaluit island to its airport, a link now swept by high tides.
Meantime, a lingering drought this year led islanders to tap deeper into their wells, finding salty water requiring them to deploy emergency desalination units. And "parts of the islands are eroding away," Kaminaga said, as undermined lines of coconut palms topple into the sea.
This week in Cancun and in the months to come, the Marshalls' representatives will seek international aid for climate adaptation. They envision such projects as a Jaluit causeway, replanting of protective vegetation on shorelines, and a 3-mile-long (5-kilometer-long) seawall protecting their capital, Majuro, from the Pacific's rising tides.
Islanders' hopes are fading, however, for quick, decisive action to slash global emissions and save their remote spits of land for the next century.
"If all these financial and diplomatic tools don't work, I think some countries are looking at some kind of legal measures," said Dessima Williams, Grenada's U.N. ambassador and chair of a group of small island-nations. Those measures might include appeals to the International Court of Justice or other forums for compensation, a difficult route at best.
In the end, islanders wonder, too, what will happen to their culture, their history, their identity with a homeland — even to their ancestors — if they must leave.
"Cemeteries along the coastline are being eroded. Gravesites are falling into the sea," Kaminaga said. "Even in death we're affected."
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent Charles J. Hanley, Ap Special Correspondent – Mon Dec 6, 2:27 pm ET
CANCUN, Mexico – Encroaching seas in the far Pacific are raising the salt level in the wells of the Marshall Islands. Waves threaten to cut one sliver of an island in two. "It's getting worse," says Kaminaga Kaminaga, the tiny nation's climate change coordinator.
The rising ocean raises questions, too: What happens if the 61,000 Marshallese must abandon their low-lying atolls? Would they still be a nation? With a U.N. seat? With control of their old fisheries and their undersea minerals? Where would they live, and how would they make a living? Who, precisely, would they and their children become?
For years global negotiations to act on climate change have dragged on, with little to show. Parties to the 193-nation U.N. climate treaty are meeting again in this Caribbean resort, but no one expects decisive action to roll back the industrial, agricultural and transport emissions blamed for global warming — and consequently for swelling seas.
From 7,000 miles (11,000 kilometers) away, the people of the Marshalls — and of Kiribati, Tuvalu and other atoll nations beyond — can only wonder how many more years they'll be able to cope.
"People who built their homes close to shore, all they can do is get more rocks to rebuild the seawall in front day by day," said Kaminaga, who is in Cancun with the Marshallese delegation to the U.N. talks.
The Marshallese government is looking beyond today, however, to those ultimate questions of nationhood, displacement and rights.
"We're facing a set of issues unique in the history of the system of nation-states," Dean Bialek, a New York-based adviser to the Republic of the Marshall Islands who is also in Cancun, told The Associated Press. "We're confronting existential issues associated with climate impacts that are not adequately addressed in the international legal framework."
The Marshallese government took a first step to confront these issues by asking for advice from the Center for Climate Change Law at New York's Columbia University. The center's director, Michael B. Gerrard, in turn has asked legal scholars worldwide to assemble at Columbia next May to begin to piece together answers.
Nations have faded into history through secession — recently with the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, for example — or through conquest or ceding their territory to other countries.
But "no country has ever physically disappeared, and it's a real void in the law," Gerrard said during an interview in New York.
The U.N. network of climate scientists projects that seas, expanding from heat and from the runoff of melting land ice, may rise by up to 1.94 feet (0.59 meters) by 2100, swamping much of the scarce land of coral atolls.
But the islands may become uninhabitable long before waves wash over them, because of the saline contamination of water supplies and ruining of crops, and because warming is expected to produce more threatening tropical storms.
"If a country like Tuvalu or Kiribati were to become uninhabitable, would the people be stateless? What's their position in international law?" asked Australian legal scholar Jane McAdam. "The short answer is, it depends. It's complicated."
McAdam, of the University of New South Wales, has traveled in the atoll nations and studied the legal history.
As far as islanders keeping their citizenship and sovereignty if they abandon their homelands, she said by telephone from Sydney, "it's unclear when a state would end because of climate change. It would come down to what the international community was prepared to tolerate" — that is, whether the U.N. General Assembly would move to take a seat away from a displaced people.
The 1951 global treaty on refugees, mandating that nations shelter those fleeing because of persecution, does not cover the looming situation of those displaced by climate change. Some advocate negotiating a new international pact obliging similar treatment for environmental refugees.
In the case of the Marshallese, the picture is murkier. Under a compact with Washington, citizens of the former U.S. trusteeship territory have the right to freely enter the U.S. for study or work, but their right to permanent residency must be clarified, government advisers say.
The islanders worry, too, about their long-term economic rights. The wide scattering of the Marshalls' 29 atolls, 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) southwest of Hawaii, give them an exclusive economic zone of 800,000 square miles (2 million square kilometers) of ocean, an area the size of Mexico.
The tuna coursing through those waters are the Marshalls' chief resource, exploited by selling licenses to foreign fishing fleets. "If their islands go underwater, what becomes of their fishing rights?" Gerrard asked. Potentially just as important: revenues from magnesium and other sea-floor minerals that geologists have been exploring in recent years.
While lawyers at next May's New York conference begin to sort out the puzzle of disappeared nations, the Marshallese will grapple with the growing problems.
The "top priority," Kaminaga said, is to save the isthmus linking the Marshalls' Jaluit island to its airport, a link now swept by high tides.
Meantime, a lingering drought this year led islanders to tap deeper into their wells, finding salty water requiring them to deploy emergency desalination units. And "parts of the islands are eroding away," Kaminaga said, as undermined lines of coconut palms topple into the sea.
This week in Cancun and in the months to come, the Marshalls' representatives will seek international aid for climate adaptation. They envision such projects as a Jaluit causeway, replanting of protective vegetation on shorelines, and a 3-mile-long (5-kilometer-long) seawall protecting their capital, Majuro, from the Pacific's rising tides.
Islanders' hopes are fading, however, for quick, decisive action to slash global emissions and save their remote spits of land for the next century.
"If all these financial and diplomatic tools don't work, I think some countries are looking at some kind of legal measures," said Dessima Williams, Grenada's U.N. ambassador and chair of a group of small island-nations. Those measures might include appeals to the International Court of Justice or other forums for compensation, a difficult route at best.
In the end, islanders wonder, too, what will happen to their culture, their history, their identity with a homeland — even to their ancestors — if they must leave.
"Cemeteries along the coastline are being eroded. Gravesites are falling into the sea," Kaminaga said. "Even in death we're affected."
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Singapore in tough environmental balancing act - An Excerpt
By Agence France-Presse, Updated: 12/3/2010
Singapore in tough environmental balancing act
Singapore prides itself on being a clean and green city but a booming economy and a high-consumption lifestyle have made it one of the world's biggest carbon polluters per person.
As a major United Nations summit is being held in Mexico to find ways of curbing the carbon emissions blamed for global warming, Singapore's environmental balancing act poses challenging questions for the rest of Asia and the world.
Singapore's green credentials are in many ways very strong and it is establishing itself as a regional renewable energy hub.
Yet, if all Asians emulated Singaporeans' modern and often luxurious lifestyles, greenhouse gas emissions would spike alarmingly.
"If everyone in the world enjoyed the same level of consumption as the average Singaporean, we would need three planets to meet the demands placed on our resources," World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) spokesman Chris Chaplin said.
Singapore was last month listed by the British global risk advisory firm Maplecroft as the world's seventh largest carbon dioxide (CO2) emitter relative to its population size.
Ahead of it were only the United Arab Emirates, Australia, the United States, Canada, the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia.
Maplecroft's index was calculated by evaluating annual CO2 emissions from energy use, emissions per capita and cumulative emissions of a country over more than a century -- 1900 to 2006.
"The lack of 'clean' energy sources coupled with the growth in Singapores economy and the increasing use of cars as well as electronic appliances such as air-conditioners contribute to Singapore's emissions," Maplecroft said in a statement to AFP.
Despite a punishing auto levy and road charges, the number of motor vehicles on its roads reached 925,518 in 2009, up more than 27 percent in five years, with private cars making up 60 percent of the total, official figures show.
In a separate list, the WWF ranked Singapore 21st in the world in terms of ecological footprint, or the demand for resources per person, ahead of such countries as Germany, France and Britain.
WWF's calculation covered not only emissions -- the biggest component of humanity's carbon footprint -- but also demand placed by people on arable land, fishing grounds, forest and grazing land worldwide.
Singapore authorities insist, however, that that the country has had no choice but to rely on imported fossil fuel to power its rapid industrialisation.
The trade-reliant economy, valued at 200 billion US dollars in 2009, is tipped to expand by a massive 15 percent this year.
With a land area smaller than that of New York City, Singapore has no space among its five million citizens for wind farms, while it is devoid of hydro and geothermal power sources.
"We are dependent on fossil fuels because our small size severely limits our ability to switch to alternative energies," the National Environment Agency (NEA) said in a statement to AFP.
It said Maplecroft's index neither reflected Singapore's efforts to reduce its carbon emissions nor took into account its unique circumstances.
"As a small city-state, the use of per capita emissions inflates our carbon emissions," it said, noting that overall, Singapore accounts for less than 0.2 percent of global emissions.
Nevertheless, the government said it was committed to the fight against climate change and was taking steps to reduce the growth of its emissions, including switching from oil to natural gas to produce electricity.
Singapore is investing heavily in clean energy technologies -- it has allocated 770 million dollars to develop innovative energy solutions -- and is building a liquefied natural gas terminal that will be ready by 2013.
This will allow access to gas sources beyond neighbouring Indonesia and Malaysia.
It is also pushing its people to do more recycling, doubling its already expansive rail network by 2020 and testing electric vehicles for commercial use.
In another positive move, Singapore has offered itself as a "living laboratory" where global energy firms can develop and test new technologies before mass production.
Norway's Renewable Energy Corp (REC) opened one of the world's biggest solar technology manufacturing facilities in Singapore in November, a project costing nearly two billion dollars.
Vestas, a Danish manufacturer of wind turbines, already has a global research and development centre in the city-state.
"Singapore has been very wise in the way they are approaching this," REC's chief executive Ole Enger said. "They have made Singapore a global hub for renewable energy."
Singapore in tough environmental balancing act
Singapore prides itself on being a clean and green city but a booming economy and a high-consumption lifestyle have made it one of the world's biggest carbon polluters per person.
As a major United Nations summit is being held in Mexico to find ways of curbing the carbon emissions blamed for global warming, Singapore's environmental balancing act poses challenging questions for the rest of Asia and the world.
Singapore's green credentials are in many ways very strong and it is establishing itself as a regional renewable energy hub.
Yet, if all Asians emulated Singaporeans' modern and often luxurious lifestyles, greenhouse gas emissions would spike alarmingly.
"If everyone in the world enjoyed the same level of consumption as the average Singaporean, we would need three planets to meet the demands placed on our resources," World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) spokesman Chris Chaplin said.
Singapore was last month listed by the British global risk advisory firm Maplecroft as the world's seventh largest carbon dioxide (CO2) emitter relative to its population size.
Ahead of it were only the United Arab Emirates, Australia, the United States, Canada, the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia.
Maplecroft's index was calculated by evaluating annual CO2 emissions from energy use, emissions per capita and cumulative emissions of a country over more than a century -- 1900 to 2006.
"The lack of 'clean' energy sources coupled with the growth in Singapores economy and the increasing use of cars as well as electronic appliances such as air-conditioners contribute to Singapore's emissions," Maplecroft said in a statement to AFP.
Despite a punishing auto levy and road charges, the number of motor vehicles on its roads reached 925,518 in 2009, up more than 27 percent in five years, with private cars making up 60 percent of the total, official figures show.
In a separate list, the WWF ranked Singapore 21st in the world in terms of ecological footprint, or the demand for resources per person, ahead of such countries as Germany, France and Britain.
WWF's calculation covered not only emissions -- the biggest component of humanity's carbon footprint -- but also demand placed by people on arable land, fishing grounds, forest and grazing land worldwide.
Singapore authorities insist, however, that that the country has had no choice but to rely on imported fossil fuel to power its rapid industrialisation.
The trade-reliant economy, valued at 200 billion US dollars in 2009, is tipped to expand by a massive 15 percent this year.
With a land area smaller than that of New York City, Singapore has no space among its five million citizens for wind farms, while it is devoid of hydro and geothermal power sources.
"We are dependent on fossil fuels because our small size severely limits our ability to switch to alternative energies," the National Environment Agency (NEA) said in a statement to AFP.
It said Maplecroft's index neither reflected Singapore's efforts to reduce its carbon emissions nor took into account its unique circumstances.
"As a small city-state, the use of per capita emissions inflates our carbon emissions," it said, noting that overall, Singapore accounts for less than 0.2 percent of global emissions.
Nevertheless, the government said it was committed to the fight against climate change and was taking steps to reduce the growth of its emissions, including switching from oil to natural gas to produce electricity.
Singapore is investing heavily in clean energy technologies -- it has allocated 770 million dollars to develop innovative energy solutions -- and is building a liquefied natural gas terminal that will be ready by 2013.
This will allow access to gas sources beyond neighbouring Indonesia and Malaysia.
It is also pushing its people to do more recycling, doubling its already expansive rail network by 2020 and testing electric vehicles for commercial use.
In another positive move, Singapore has offered itself as a "living laboratory" where global energy firms can develop and test new technologies before mass production.
Norway's Renewable Energy Corp (REC) opened one of the world's biggest solar technology manufacturing facilities in Singapore in November, a project costing nearly two billion dollars.
Vestas, a Danish manufacturer of wind turbines, already has a global research and development centre in the city-state.
"Singapore has been very wise in the way they are approaching this," REC's chief executive Ole Enger said. "They have made Singapore a global hub for renewable energy."
Monday, November 22, 2010
Experts try to convey danger of Merapi volcano - An Excerpt
Experts try to convey danger of Indonesian volcano
By SARAH DiLORENZO
The Associated Press
Monday, November 22, 2010; 12:00 AM
MOUNT MERAPI, Indonesia -- The threat from more than 100 volcanos that dot Indonesia is impossible to predict with any precision.
But that's not the hardest part of the job, says Surono, the head of the country's monitoring agency. The hardest part is getting the message out.
In the days before Indonesia's most volatile volcano awakened from four years of dormancy last month, Surono, who, like many Indonesians, uses only one name, said he saw indications that Mount Merapi had more energy pent up in it than he had ever seen before.
But it was not forming its typical lava dome, a glowing red cap that can be seen for miles (kilometers) as magma builds at the summit. In other words, from the villages that cling to its slopes, Merapi didn't look like it was going to blow.
On Oct. 26, a day after Surono put it on its highest alert, Merapi erupted. Ten days later, it expanded its reach, unleashing a surge of gas, rock and other debris totaling 1.7 billion cubic feet (50 million cubic meters), the largest explosion in a century. More than 270 people were killed.
If Surono knew that the biggest eruption in recent memory was imminent, why did the Nov. 5 blast catch many off guard, cutting people down with searing gases as they tried to flee, charring them in their sleep and destroying whole villages?
The fault seems to lie less in failures of prediction than in failures of communication. Villagers who have lived on the volcano all their lives, whose parents lived on the volcano, too, feel they know it.
And they are, in fact, gifted at reading visual changes in the mountain, a technique also used by scientists, said Radan Sukhyar, head of the Geology Agency and Surono's boss. For example, they may take volcanic rock littering a village to mean a blast is coming, and an influx of monkeys and deer from their homes at the peak to mean the area is safe.
But the villagers also believe in something more ephemeral, a sixth sense that may lull them into believing the mountain can be understood and tamed. Surono calls this feeling "voodoo," a mix of animism and the Hindu beliefs that existed before the rise of Islam in Indonesia. He says the job was much more straightforward when he spoke to people living around Mount Sinabung, a volcano that erupted in September on Sumatra island.
"With Merapi, I must talk about nature and culture," he said. "This is not easy."
Sedyo Wiyono, for instance, blamed the latest eruption on human failing and suggested that coexistence with the mountain may no longer be possible.
"I think Mount Merapi is no longer friendly to those of us who were born and raised at its foot. Maybe it was our sins that made the volcano so angry," said the 62-year-old, whose son was killed in one of the blasts.
Communicating is key for any geologist, according to Peter Frenzen, who works for the Forest Service at Mount St. Helens, whose 1980 eruption was the deadliest in U.S. history. In the U.S., he said, scientists fret about sounding an alarm too often or too high because it can make their warnings background noise.
But scientists in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest mostly deal with the evacuation of visitor centers or monitoring posts. In Indonesia, by contrast, people live on volcanos, where thousands of years of eruptions have fertilized the slopes, making the soil some of the richest in a country packed with people to feed and a paucity of land with which to do it.
Since Merapi began its latest series of eruptions, more than 300,000 have been driven from their homes, living in cramped evacuation centers at the foot of the volcano.
As a result, Surono and his team need to make fine distinctions: 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the crater is too close, but 13 miles (21 kilometers) is safe. They want to keep everyone out of harm's way, but they also have to keep as many people in their homes as possible.
And the longer they keep people from their homes without an eruption, the more their credibility is called into question, the more their forecasts become background noise.
"I try to speak with people. I try to touch their hearts. I try to touch their heads - with logical thinking," Surono said.
He tries to explain as simply as possible why he thinks the volcano is dangerous. The night he raised Merapi's alert to its highest level, he called all the chiefs of the nearby villages and begged them to get their residents out when the evacuation order came.
But Surono is not the only one talking.
For instance, there is Maridjan, the sultan-appointed keeper of Merapi's spirits, who frequently refused to evacuate his home when ordered and whose followers sometimes stayed behind with him. He died, at 83, in the first of the latest series of blasts from Merapi. A dozen bodies were found with his, five miles (eight kilometers) from the summit.
Then there are the neighbors. Saminah, who lived with her husband, Sudarjo, and his mother in a village on the slopes, was assured by a neighbor before the Nov. 5 eruption that there was plenty of time to run away if anything happened.
There was indeed time for Saminah and her husband to flee, but when Sudarjo went back for his mother, the gases racing down the mountain seared 60 percent of his body, landing him in a burn ward, covered from head to toe with bandages, barely breathing on a ventilator.
Another self-appointed expert is Sri Hariyanto, whom anyone tuned to radio Merapi Balerante will hear giving recommendations to evacuate and descriptions of the state of the volcano. Hariyanto is not a volcanologist but runs a community outreach program to educate people on the danger of volcanos.
During the current crisis, he took to trying to predict the mountain's moves himself. He speaks with so much authority, it takes time to realize he has no more training in reading volcano behavior than the villagers who gazed out at Merapi on Oct. 25 and didn't believe it was about to erupt.
Surono said he is happy to have local groups disseminate information about Merapi, but he wants them to disseminate the scientists' information. Hariyanto, on the other hand, believes 30 years lived in the mountain's shadow gives him a special connection to Merapi.
"Everyone has intuition; I use it," he said.
Surono tries to outline the risks as best he can and plead with people to listen. But his boss wonders if more drastic action might be taken. Sukhyar said experts are considering recommending that some villages not be rebuilt at all.
"Every volcano has places where people live, but we have to admit that we live in places with the potential for danger," he said. "We must admit that, at some volcanos, the threat is quite open-ended."
---
Associated Press writer Slamet Riyadi contributed to this report.
By SARAH DiLORENZO
The Associated Press
Monday, November 22, 2010; 12:00 AM
MOUNT MERAPI, Indonesia -- The threat from more than 100 volcanos that dot Indonesia is impossible to predict with any precision.
But that's not the hardest part of the job, says Surono, the head of the country's monitoring agency. The hardest part is getting the message out.
In the days before Indonesia's most volatile volcano awakened from four years of dormancy last month, Surono, who, like many Indonesians, uses only one name, said he saw indications that Mount Merapi had more energy pent up in it than he had ever seen before.
But it was not forming its typical lava dome, a glowing red cap that can be seen for miles (kilometers) as magma builds at the summit. In other words, from the villages that cling to its slopes, Merapi didn't look like it was going to blow.
On Oct. 26, a day after Surono put it on its highest alert, Merapi erupted. Ten days later, it expanded its reach, unleashing a surge of gas, rock and other debris totaling 1.7 billion cubic feet (50 million cubic meters), the largest explosion in a century. More than 270 people were killed.
If Surono knew that the biggest eruption in recent memory was imminent, why did the Nov. 5 blast catch many off guard, cutting people down with searing gases as they tried to flee, charring them in their sleep and destroying whole villages?
The fault seems to lie less in failures of prediction than in failures of communication. Villagers who have lived on the volcano all their lives, whose parents lived on the volcano, too, feel they know it.
And they are, in fact, gifted at reading visual changes in the mountain, a technique also used by scientists, said Radan Sukhyar, head of the Geology Agency and Surono's boss. For example, they may take volcanic rock littering a village to mean a blast is coming, and an influx of monkeys and deer from their homes at the peak to mean the area is safe.
But the villagers also believe in something more ephemeral, a sixth sense that may lull them into believing the mountain can be understood and tamed. Surono calls this feeling "voodoo," a mix of animism and the Hindu beliefs that existed before the rise of Islam in Indonesia. He says the job was much more straightforward when he spoke to people living around Mount Sinabung, a volcano that erupted in September on Sumatra island.
"With Merapi, I must talk about nature and culture," he said. "This is not easy."
Sedyo Wiyono, for instance, blamed the latest eruption on human failing and suggested that coexistence with the mountain may no longer be possible.
"I think Mount Merapi is no longer friendly to those of us who were born and raised at its foot. Maybe it was our sins that made the volcano so angry," said the 62-year-old, whose son was killed in one of the blasts.
Communicating is key for any geologist, according to Peter Frenzen, who works for the Forest Service at Mount St. Helens, whose 1980 eruption was the deadliest in U.S. history. In the U.S., he said, scientists fret about sounding an alarm too often or too high because it can make their warnings background noise.
But scientists in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest mostly deal with the evacuation of visitor centers or monitoring posts. In Indonesia, by contrast, people live on volcanos, where thousands of years of eruptions have fertilized the slopes, making the soil some of the richest in a country packed with people to feed and a paucity of land with which to do it.
Since Merapi began its latest series of eruptions, more than 300,000 have been driven from their homes, living in cramped evacuation centers at the foot of the volcano.
As a result, Surono and his team need to make fine distinctions: 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the crater is too close, but 13 miles (21 kilometers) is safe. They want to keep everyone out of harm's way, but they also have to keep as many people in their homes as possible.
And the longer they keep people from their homes without an eruption, the more their credibility is called into question, the more their forecasts become background noise.
"I try to speak with people. I try to touch their hearts. I try to touch their heads - with logical thinking," Surono said.
He tries to explain as simply as possible why he thinks the volcano is dangerous. The night he raised Merapi's alert to its highest level, he called all the chiefs of the nearby villages and begged them to get their residents out when the evacuation order came.
But Surono is not the only one talking.
For instance, there is Maridjan, the sultan-appointed keeper of Merapi's spirits, who frequently refused to evacuate his home when ordered and whose followers sometimes stayed behind with him. He died, at 83, in the first of the latest series of blasts from Merapi. A dozen bodies were found with his, five miles (eight kilometers) from the summit.
Then there are the neighbors. Saminah, who lived with her husband, Sudarjo, and his mother in a village on the slopes, was assured by a neighbor before the Nov. 5 eruption that there was plenty of time to run away if anything happened.
There was indeed time for Saminah and her husband to flee, but when Sudarjo went back for his mother, the gases racing down the mountain seared 60 percent of his body, landing him in a burn ward, covered from head to toe with bandages, barely breathing on a ventilator.
Another self-appointed expert is Sri Hariyanto, whom anyone tuned to radio Merapi Balerante will hear giving recommendations to evacuate and descriptions of the state of the volcano. Hariyanto is not a volcanologist but runs a community outreach program to educate people on the danger of volcanos.
During the current crisis, he took to trying to predict the mountain's moves himself. He speaks with so much authority, it takes time to realize he has no more training in reading volcano behavior than the villagers who gazed out at Merapi on Oct. 25 and didn't believe it was about to erupt.
Surono said he is happy to have local groups disseminate information about Merapi, but he wants them to disseminate the scientists' information. Hariyanto, on the other hand, believes 30 years lived in the mountain's shadow gives him a special connection to Merapi.
"Everyone has intuition; I use it," he said.
Surono tries to outline the risks as best he can and plead with people to listen. But his boss wonders if more drastic action might be taken. Sukhyar said experts are considering recommending that some villages not be rebuilt at all.
"Every volcano has places where people live, but we have to admit that we live in places with the potential for danger," he said. "We must admit that, at some volcanos, the threat is quite open-ended."
---
Associated Press writer Slamet Riyadi contributed to this report.
Malaysia's Richest Men 2010
Malaysia Richest Men 2010
Top list biodata listing profile of richest people in Malaysia.
Malaysian Richest Men Ranking List: ~
1. Robert Kuok Hock Nien
2. Ananda Krishnan
3. Lee Shin Cheng
4. Lee Kim Hua
5. Quek Leng Chan
6. Teh Hong Piow
7. Yeoh Tiong Lay
8. Syed Mokhtar AlBukhary
9. Vincent Tan
10. Tiong Hiew King
11. Azman Hashim
12. Lee Oi Hian & Lee Hau Hian
13. Yaw Teck Seng & Yaw Chee Ming
14. Lim Wee Chai
15. William H. J. Cheng
16. Goh Peng Ooi
17. Lim Kok Thay
18. Jeffrey Cheah
19. Anthony Fernandes
20. G. Gnanalingam
21. Kamarudin Meranun
22. Chan Fong Ann
23. Shahril & Shahriman Shamsuddin
24. A.K. Nathan
25. Chong Chook Yew
26. Mokhzani Mahathir
27. Ahmayuddin bin Ahmad
28. Lau Cho Kun
29. Chen Lip Keong
30. Lee Swee Eng
31. Liew Kee Sin
32. Nazir Razak
33. Eleena Azlan Shah
34. Ong Leong Huat
35. Rozali Ismail
36. Kua Sian Kooi
37. Lin Yun Ling
38. David Law Tien Seng
39. Abdul Hamed Sepawi
40. Syed Mohd Yusof Tun Syed Nasir
Top list biodata listing profile of richest people in Malaysia.
Malaysian Richest Men Ranking List: ~
1. Robert Kuok Hock Nien
2. Ananda Krishnan
3. Lee Shin Cheng
4. Lee Kim Hua
5. Quek Leng Chan
6. Teh Hong Piow
7. Yeoh Tiong Lay
8. Syed Mokhtar AlBukhary
9. Vincent Tan
10. Tiong Hiew King
11. Azman Hashim
12. Lee Oi Hian & Lee Hau Hian
13. Yaw Teck Seng & Yaw Chee Ming
14. Lim Wee Chai
15. William H. J. Cheng
16. Goh Peng Ooi
17. Lim Kok Thay
18. Jeffrey Cheah
19. Anthony Fernandes
20. G. Gnanalingam
21. Kamarudin Meranun
22. Chan Fong Ann
23. Shahril & Shahriman Shamsuddin
24. A.K. Nathan
25. Chong Chook Yew
26. Mokhzani Mahathir
27. Ahmayuddin bin Ahmad
28. Lau Cho Kun
29. Chen Lip Keong
30. Lee Swee Eng
31. Liew Kee Sin
32. Nazir Razak
33. Eleena Azlan Shah
34. Ong Leong Huat
35. Rozali Ismail
36. Kua Sian Kooi
37. Lin Yun Ling
38. David Law Tien Seng
39. Abdul Hamed Sepawi
40. Syed Mohd Yusof Tun Syed Nasir
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Profile of Osama bin Laden - An Excerpt
Profile: Osama bin Laden
From Amy Zalman, Ph.D.,
Name:
Osama bin Laden, also spelled Usama bin Ladin.
His full name is Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden. ("bin" means "son" in Arabic, so his name also tells his genealogy. Osama is the son of Muhammad, who was the son of Awad, and so forth).
Family Background:
Bin Laden was born in 1957 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia's capitol. He was the 17th of over 50 children born to his Yemeni father, Muhammad, a self-created billionaire whose fortune came from building contracting. He died in a helicopter accident when Osama was 11 years old.
Osama's Syrian born mother, born Alia Ghanem, married Muhammad when she was twenty-two. She remarried following divorce from Muhammad, and Osama grew up with his mother and stepfather, and their three other children.
Childhood:
Bin Laden was schooled in the Saudi port city, Jedda. His family's wealth gave him access to the elite Al Thagher Model School, which he attended from 1968-1976. The school combined British style secular education with daily Islamic worship.
Bin Laden's introduction to Islam as the basis for political, and potentially violent—activism, was throughinformal sessions run by the Al Thagher's teachers, as New Yorker writer Steve Coll has reported.
Early Adulthood:
In the mid-1970s, bin Laden was married to his first cousin (a normal convention among traditional Muslims), a Syrian woman from his mother's family. He later married three other women, as permitted by Islamic law. It has been reported that he has from 12-24 children.
He attended King Abd Al Aziz University, where he studied civil engineering, business administration, economics and public administration. He is remembered as enthusiastic about religious debates and activities while there.
Key Influences:
Bin Laden's first influences were the Al Thagher teachers who offered extra-curricular Islam lessons. They were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist political group begun in Egypt which, at that time, promoted violent means to achieve Islamic governance.
Another key influence was Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian-born professor at King Abd Al Aziz University, and a founder of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group. After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Azzam solicited bin Laden to raise money and recruit Arabs to help the Muslims repel the Soviets, and he played an instrumental role in the early establishment of al-Qaeda.
Later, Ayman Al Zawahiri, the leader of Islamic Jihad in the 1980s, would play a significant part in the development of bin Laden's organization, Al Qaeda.
Organizational Affiliations:
In the early 1980s, bin Laden worked with the mujahideen, guerrillas fighting a self-proclaimed holy war to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan. From 1986-1988, he himself fought.
In 1988, bin Laden formed Al Qaeda (the Base), a militant transnational network whose original backbone was Arab Mujahideen who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Ten years later, bin Laden forged the Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders, a coalition of terrorist groups intending to wage war against Americans and battle their Middle Eastern military presence.
Objectives:
Bin Laden has expressed his ideological goals in both action and words, with his periodically videotaped public statements.
Since founding Al Qaeda, his objectives have always been the related goals of eliminating the Western presence in the Islamic/Arab Middle East, which includes battling American ally, Israel, and overthrowing local allies of the Americans (such as the Saudis), and establishing Islamic regimes.
From Amy Zalman, Ph.D.,
Name:
Osama bin Laden, also spelled Usama bin Ladin.
His full name is Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden. ("bin" means "son" in Arabic, so his name also tells his genealogy. Osama is the son of Muhammad, who was the son of Awad, and so forth).
Family Background:
Bin Laden was born in 1957 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia's capitol. He was the 17th of over 50 children born to his Yemeni father, Muhammad, a self-created billionaire whose fortune came from building contracting. He died in a helicopter accident when Osama was 11 years old.
Osama's Syrian born mother, born Alia Ghanem, married Muhammad when she was twenty-two. She remarried following divorce from Muhammad, and Osama grew up with his mother and stepfather, and their three other children.
Childhood:
Bin Laden was schooled in the Saudi port city, Jedda. His family's wealth gave him access to the elite Al Thagher Model School, which he attended from 1968-1976. The school combined British style secular education with daily Islamic worship.
Bin Laden's introduction to Islam as the basis for political, and potentially violent—activism, was throughinformal sessions run by the Al Thagher's teachers, as New Yorker writer Steve Coll has reported.
Early Adulthood:
In the mid-1970s, bin Laden was married to his first cousin (a normal convention among traditional Muslims), a Syrian woman from his mother's family. He later married three other women, as permitted by Islamic law. It has been reported that he has from 12-24 children.
He attended King Abd Al Aziz University, where he studied civil engineering, business administration, economics and public administration. He is remembered as enthusiastic about religious debates and activities while there.
Key Influences:
Bin Laden's first influences were the Al Thagher teachers who offered extra-curricular Islam lessons. They were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist political group begun in Egypt which, at that time, promoted violent means to achieve Islamic governance.
Another key influence was Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian-born professor at King Abd Al Aziz University, and a founder of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group. After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Azzam solicited bin Laden to raise money and recruit Arabs to help the Muslims repel the Soviets, and he played an instrumental role in the early establishment of al-Qaeda.
Later, Ayman Al Zawahiri, the leader of Islamic Jihad in the 1980s, would play a significant part in the development of bin Laden's organization, Al Qaeda.
Organizational Affiliations:
In the early 1980s, bin Laden worked with the mujahideen, guerrillas fighting a self-proclaimed holy war to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan. From 1986-1988, he himself fought.
In 1988, bin Laden formed Al Qaeda (the Base), a militant transnational network whose original backbone was Arab Mujahideen who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Ten years later, bin Laden forged the Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders, a coalition of terrorist groups intending to wage war against Americans and battle their Middle Eastern military presence.
Objectives:
Bin Laden has expressed his ideological goals in both action and words, with his periodically videotaped public statements.
Since founding Al Qaeda, his objectives have always been the related goals of eliminating the Western presence in the Islamic/Arab Middle East, which includes battling American ally, Israel, and overthrowing local allies of the Americans (such as the Saudis), and establishing Islamic regimes.
'Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?' - An Excerpt
'Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?'
Interview with Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock
From Fred Topel
April 17, 2008 - Morgan Spurlock follows up his critically acclaimed documentary Super Size Me with something completely different – the search for Osama Bin Laden. Spurlock began the documentary process believing he could actually find the terrorist and personally visited some of the most dangerous places in the world. “That was the plan in the beginning,” explained Spurlock. “The plan was, ‘Come on, we've got as good a shot as anybody else. Why not?’” Of course, Bin Laden hasn’t been found which means that as of now Spurlock’s question has yet to be answered.
Morgan Spurlock Interview
Where did the idea come from?
“It was 2005 when we first started talking about what my next movie would be. We'd just finished shooting the first season of 30 Days. Supersize Me did something that none of us anticipated, which was play in about 75 countries around the world. It kind of went so beyond our borders. It was something I didn't anticipate, and the way that it did that made me realize that my next movie I wanted to be something that dealt with something that was much more of a global issue, on a global scale and wasn't just an American issue, of which this was.
I live in New York City so this question is constantly out there. I was there on 9/11 so this is something that's brought up consistently. Bush had just been elected to his second term and Osama had released a tape and suddenly the tape was everywhere. It was on every news channel, every radio station, people were talking about him again. He was completely ubiquitous. Newscasters were like, ‘Where is Osama? Where is he? Why haven't we found him? Why haven't we brought this man to justice? Where in the world is Osama Bin Laden?’ And I said, ‘That's a great question. I'd like to know that as well.’
We started just formulating how would we even make a movie like this. How would we start going about trying to find those answers or tackle this topic? We raised a little bit of money to do some preproduction on the movie from a guy named Adam Dell. I was out one night and he said, ‘I just met with your lawyer about a movie that I'd like to make. I'd like to try and go find Osama Bin Laden.’ I said, ‘You and I should sit down and talk immediately.’ So he helped us raise the first bit of seed money, just to even formulate an idea around this film. About two months into that process was when we found out [my wife] Alex was pregnant. At that point, the film took a real shift for me personally. It really went away from just being where in the world is Osama Bin Laden and what kind of world creates an Osama Bin Laden, to also, what kind of world am I about to bring a kid into? I think that kind of shift made it much more personal for me. And I think ultimately made the journey that we went on and the people that we went to talk to in addition to politicians and people in the military, ultimately made the film better.”
How much of an eye opener was it to see how America is perceived?
“I think they don't like America's foreign policy as much as they used to. I think people still have a tremendous amount of hope in what America means and what America is. America is a dream and an ideology and a hope that things can always be better. That's how a lot of people see the United States still. I think that a lot of that has been shattered over the course of, for some people it's been five years, some it's been 10-15 years, but as you heard consistently and we spoke to people consistently, it was, ‘We don't hate the American people but we hate what's happened to the American government and what's transpired.’
I think we're still taught that people hate us and it's this they hate us, them, those people and everybody's grouped into this one thing. Islam is a monolithic thing. Those people are a monolithic thing and that's just not the case. We like things to be very simple and in a little package and I think it's much more broad than that. I think over the course of the film, even when I go in my travels, you see that from different places where we go, from all the countries we go to, there's a much more diverse, even brand of Islam in all of these countries and how it's practiced.
For me, I personally also thought that I was going to be met with a lot more hostility, a lot more resentment, that people weren't going to want to talk to me because I was an American. They weren't going to want to sit down and open up. It was completely the opposite. People really were eager to sit down and share their feelings and share their outlooks and share their opinions. These are people who don't get to speak in a lot of these countries. These people live in countries where if you speak out, you'll go to jail. That's terrible, so I think for them to be able to sit down with somebody from what they see as the Western media and actually being able to express their thoughts, knowing it could potentially reach people back in America, is very brave.”
So where is Osama Bin Laden?
“He's up in my hotel room. He's just hanging out getting room service. I think he's still in the mountains of Waziristan or somewhere in that area. When we got to the end of our trip, when we were in Pakistan, people were pointing to a direction up in those mountains that I think, by the time we got to the border, was probably about 50-75 miles away - guestimating. Whether he's still there or has moved on to somewhere else, because I think he's mobile within that area personally, who knows? I think he's still there, somewhere.”
Did you have an ending for the film if you'd caught him?
“Where if we caught him, we had a big party and I get a big $25 million Tiger Woods golf check? We talked about it, [cinematographer] Danny Marracino and myself, what would happen if we actually would get to find him or get to speak to him. A lot of people have asked what would you have said to him or what would you have asked him. I think the biggest thing for me would have been, I would have liked to have heard from him, ‘How does it end? How does this stop? How can the killing of innocent people end? How can all the hatred end? How can it just get to the point where there's peace and security for everybody?’ And maybe gotten a real answer. Maybe something real would have come out of that, with actual steps. Or, we might have just gotten a whole lot of crazy. Who knows? We would have gotten an answer. That would have been interesting.”
Were you worried he'd be found before you finished postproduction?
“They Found Osama Bin Laden. We Found Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden. No, that was a concern while we were making the film was would this guy be caught. And great. If he was caught, fantastic. That’s an awesome, wonderful thing. You can't be upset about that. Would it have completely ruined the film that we were making at the time? Possibly. It would have thrown a gigantic wrench into the plans, but we would have figured that out somehow. Even if they would have found him, I think a lot of the things people talk about over the course of the movie would remain the same because what you start to see over the course of the movie is, as much as Osama Bin Laden isn't in Egypt or Morocco or Saudi Arabia or the Palestinian territories or Afghanistan or Pakistan, he is in all of those places. The spirit of Osama Bin Laden, his ideology, the way that he thinks has infiltrated these countries, especially people who are in that minority of people that get all the airtime here in the United States.
I think what the film does a really good job of doing is starting to give a voice to that silent majority, the people that I think we don't give enough airtime to in America. I think the film does a great job of getting out of the two minute sound bites that we get on the news and painting a much different portrait of what life is like in the Middle East for a lot of these people on a daily basis.”
Was there a point that you knew nobody was close to finding Osama, you didn't have to worry?
“Yeah, personally I figured it had been so long and they hadn't found him and hadn't caught him that the chances of them finding him before we finished the film, odds were in our favor. It was the calculated risk that we took. As I said, had they found him, it would have been fantastic, but they didn't and hopefully they do.”
Interview with Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock
From Fred Topel
April 17, 2008 - Morgan Spurlock follows up his critically acclaimed documentary Super Size Me with something completely different – the search for Osama Bin Laden. Spurlock began the documentary process believing he could actually find the terrorist and personally visited some of the most dangerous places in the world. “That was the plan in the beginning,” explained Spurlock. “The plan was, ‘Come on, we've got as good a shot as anybody else. Why not?’” Of course, Bin Laden hasn’t been found which means that as of now Spurlock’s question has yet to be answered.
Morgan Spurlock Interview
Where did the idea come from?
“It was 2005 when we first started talking about what my next movie would be. We'd just finished shooting the first season of 30 Days. Supersize Me did something that none of us anticipated, which was play in about 75 countries around the world. It kind of went so beyond our borders. It was something I didn't anticipate, and the way that it did that made me realize that my next movie I wanted to be something that dealt with something that was much more of a global issue, on a global scale and wasn't just an American issue, of which this was.
I live in New York City so this question is constantly out there. I was there on 9/11 so this is something that's brought up consistently. Bush had just been elected to his second term and Osama had released a tape and suddenly the tape was everywhere. It was on every news channel, every radio station, people were talking about him again. He was completely ubiquitous. Newscasters were like, ‘Where is Osama? Where is he? Why haven't we found him? Why haven't we brought this man to justice? Where in the world is Osama Bin Laden?’ And I said, ‘That's a great question. I'd like to know that as well.’
We started just formulating how would we even make a movie like this. How would we start going about trying to find those answers or tackle this topic? We raised a little bit of money to do some preproduction on the movie from a guy named Adam Dell. I was out one night and he said, ‘I just met with your lawyer about a movie that I'd like to make. I'd like to try and go find Osama Bin Laden.’ I said, ‘You and I should sit down and talk immediately.’ So he helped us raise the first bit of seed money, just to even formulate an idea around this film. About two months into that process was when we found out [my wife] Alex was pregnant. At that point, the film took a real shift for me personally. It really went away from just being where in the world is Osama Bin Laden and what kind of world creates an Osama Bin Laden, to also, what kind of world am I about to bring a kid into? I think that kind of shift made it much more personal for me. And I think ultimately made the journey that we went on and the people that we went to talk to in addition to politicians and people in the military, ultimately made the film better.”
How much of an eye opener was it to see how America is perceived?
“I think they don't like America's foreign policy as much as they used to. I think people still have a tremendous amount of hope in what America means and what America is. America is a dream and an ideology and a hope that things can always be better. That's how a lot of people see the United States still. I think that a lot of that has been shattered over the course of, for some people it's been five years, some it's been 10-15 years, but as you heard consistently and we spoke to people consistently, it was, ‘We don't hate the American people but we hate what's happened to the American government and what's transpired.’
I think we're still taught that people hate us and it's this they hate us, them, those people and everybody's grouped into this one thing. Islam is a monolithic thing. Those people are a monolithic thing and that's just not the case. We like things to be very simple and in a little package and I think it's much more broad than that. I think over the course of the film, even when I go in my travels, you see that from different places where we go, from all the countries we go to, there's a much more diverse, even brand of Islam in all of these countries and how it's practiced.
For me, I personally also thought that I was going to be met with a lot more hostility, a lot more resentment, that people weren't going to want to talk to me because I was an American. They weren't going to want to sit down and open up. It was completely the opposite. People really were eager to sit down and share their feelings and share their outlooks and share their opinions. These are people who don't get to speak in a lot of these countries. These people live in countries where if you speak out, you'll go to jail. That's terrible, so I think for them to be able to sit down with somebody from what they see as the Western media and actually being able to express their thoughts, knowing it could potentially reach people back in America, is very brave.”
So where is Osama Bin Laden?
“He's up in my hotel room. He's just hanging out getting room service. I think he's still in the mountains of Waziristan or somewhere in that area. When we got to the end of our trip, when we were in Pakistan, people were pointing to a direction up in those mountains that I think, by the time we got to the border, was probably about 50-75 miles away - guestimating. Whether he's still there or has moved on to somewhere else, because I think he's mobile within that area personally, who knows? I think he's still there, somewhere.”
Did you have an ending for the film if you'd caught him?
“Where if we caught him, we had a big party and I get a big $25 million Tiger Woods golf check? We talked about it, [cinematographer] Danny Marracino and myself, what would happen if we actually would get to find him or get to speak to him. A lot of people have asked what would you have said to him or what would you have asked him. I think the biggest thing for me would have been, I would have liked to have heard from him, ‘How does it end? How does this stop? How can the killing of innocent people end? How can all the hatred end? How can it just get to the point where there's peace and security for everybody?’ And maybe gotten a real answer. Maybe something real would have come out of that, with actual steps. Or, we might have just gotten a whole lot of crazy. Who knows? We would have gotten an answer. That would have been interesting.”
Were you worried he'd be found before you finished postproduction?
“They Found Osama Bin Laden. We Found Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden. No, that was a concern while we were making the film was would this guy be caught. And great. If he was caught, fantastic. That’s an awesome, wonderful thing. You can't be upset about that. Would it have completely ruined the film that we were making at the time? Possibly. It would have thrown a gigantic wrench into the plans, but we would have figured that out somehow. Even if they would have found him, I think a lot of the things people talk about over the course of the movie would remain the same because what you start to see over the course of the movie is, as much as Osama Bin Laden isn't in Egypt or Morocco or Saudi Arabia or the Palestinian territories or Afghanistan or Pakistan, he is in all of those places. The spirit of Osama Bin Laden, his ideology, the way that he thinks has infiltrated these countries, especially people who are in that minority of people that get all the airtime here in the United States.
I think what the film does a really good job of doing is starting to give a voice to that silent majority, the people that I think we don't give enough airtime to in America. I think the film does a great job of getting out of the two minute sound bites that we get on the news and painting a much different portrait of what life is like in the Middle East for a lot of these people on a daily basis.”
Was there a point that you knew nobody was close to finding Osama, you didn't have to worry?
“Yeah, personally I figured it had been so long and they hadn't found him and hadn't caught him that the chances of them finding him before we finished the film, odds were in our favor. It was the calculated risk that we took. As I said, had they found him, it would have been fantastic, but they didn't and hopefully they do.”
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Being a Chinese-Indonesian - An Excerpt
Being a Chinese-Indonesia
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Tue, 06/13/2006 1:42 PM
Wijanto Hadipuro, Jakarta
Once I happened to meet a Chinese-American lawyer. When she found out I had married a ""native"" Javanese woman, she asked me, ""Has that made your life easier?"" Her question really made me realize some things about my position.
I remember what happened when I went to get my marriage certificate. I went to the office alone, without my wife. The woman who waited on me picked up a big book and tried to find my name. She looked two or three times but could not find it.
She looked at me several times before asking me whether my wife was a ""native"". When I nodded, she was angry and asked me why I didn't tell her in the first place. She then picked up another book.
I do not care what kind of book they use to register my marriage. What I care about is her expression when she found out my wife was ""native"".
Marrying a woman from another ethnicity and religion has not actually made my life easier. I have to think things over for a long time before I bring my wife and my daughter to visit my family, because most of my relatives cannot accept my wife's background.
My wife has also had bitter experiences. We got married according to my religion. We both believed in Jesus Christ, but we had different religions. She was told by her religious leader that she did not belong to the faithful anymore because she got married outside her religion.
I have a Chinese-Indonesian friend who is Muslim. He married a ""native"" woman. During the riots of in May 1998, I told him he was lucky that he could go anywhere safely, because he had successfully assimilated with the Indonesian majority. His answer surprised me: ""Nobody will ask about my religion or my wife,"" he said. ""People will look at my face and because I look like a Chinese, my religion and my wife will not save me from harm.""
When I visited Atlanta, I was accompanied by a black officer from the Public Works Office.
""Charles,"" I said, ""there are so many black people living in Atlanta, and you can work at government offices. I think it is good that there is not any discrimination against black people here.""
His answer, too, was a surprise. ""Government rules can't make discrimination disappear from my social life."" he said. ""Not all white people want to interact socially with black people like me.""
A place without social discrimination would be utopia. Charles' remark reveals another fact we must accept: that government regulations can't abolish social discrimination.
My wife was discriminated against in terms of her salary. She earned less than her Chinese-Indonesian friend, just because they worked at a company owned by a Chinese-Indonesian businessman. My wife with more than five years' experience at the company got only half the salary of her Chinese-Indonesian friend, who had worked for just a month at the same managerial level.
Once I read an article about indicators of social tolerance. According to the article, there are three degrees of social tolerance. The worst is when somebody does not tolerate the existence of anyone from outside his group. Such a person will try to banish ""different"" people if it's not possible to make them the same as him- or herself.
In the case of religion, for example, somebody from a certain religion might say someone from another belief system will go to hell. Another, less extreme example is when somebody does not tolerate other people's religious activities.
A better level of social tolerance is when someone accepts the existence of ""different"" people. He or she may work together and cooperate with them, but cannot accept the ""different"" person becoming a family member, for example, through marriage.
The most tolerant people are those who not only accept ""different"" people, but can welcome them as family members. This group of people is the smallest. There are only a few people who can do that, and my experience shows that people like this are marginalized both by their own groups and their spouse's groups. If you belong to this group, believe me, your life is more complicated than the lives of the other two groups.
We are born with differences. That is true. But some differences are significant for certain people, and some are not. We have to accept that. It is no use to claim equality among all those inherited differences, even by way of the law.
My experience proves that if you are not strong enough, you should keep your group identity as strong as possible. Assimilation and regulations cannot remove social discrimination from every corner of the world.
I have never regretted my decision to marry a Javanese woman, and I will not claim equal rights to citizenship. I am happy with that as long as everybody can accept my existence. If you are Chinese-Indonesian you will be better off going to a school where there are a lot of Chinese-Indonesians and working for a company owned by a Chinese-Indonesian. It will help you avoid a lot of discrimination.
The writer is a Chinese-Indonesian who married a pribumi (native) woman.
__________________________________________________
I am a Chinese-Indonesian
Aimee Dawis, Jakarta | Wed, 02/06/2008 2:16 PMIn December last year, I attended a seminar in Singapore. I was welcomed by the seminar representative at the Changi Airport.
After shaking hand, he asked me, "Are you ethnic Chinese? Your name is not Chinese, but you look Chinese." I told him that I am Chinese and he was taken aback. "I couldn't tell from your name that you're Chinese," he said.
The puzzlement around my name and my identity as an ethnic Chinese from Indonesia continued throughout the one-day seminar.
As a writer and researcher on the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, I was invited to present my paper on China and the Cultural Identity of the Chinese in Indonesia.
Hoping to dispel the confusion arising from my name, I decided to begin my presentation by explaining my name and the historical implications and significance of naming among the Chinese in Indonesia.
In 1966, the Indonesian government issued a policy which strongly recommended Indonesian citizens of Chinese descent change their names into Indonesian ones to prove their loyalty to Indonesia.
This policy was released in the wake of the Soeharto regime's closures of Chinese schools, bans on public expressions of Chinese culture and language and widespread government suspicion regarding the Chinese community's role in the PKI's (The Indonesian Communist Party's) uprising in 1965.
Being a heterogeneous and diverse community, the Chinese in Indonesia responded to the name-changing policy in distinct ways. My father chose to change his name to Didi Dawis from Djie Ie Ling.
His other six siblings chose different names for themselves. One of his siblings who chose to keep his Chinese name.
While the names chosen by my father's family (except for his youngest brother) have been Indonesianized to the extent most people cannot tell that they are Chinese, there are other Indonesian names chosen by the Chinese in Indonesia that implicitly indicate that they are still Chinese.
For example, those with the Chinese surnames of Tan, Ong and Wee chose Indonesianized surnames such as Tanuwijaya, Ongggara and Wijaya.
These names show a desire to retain a sense of Chineseness while at the same time complying with the government's policy.
When Abdurrahman Wahid served as the President of Indonesia between November 1999 and August 2001, he abolished the Presidential Instruction Number 14, signed in 1967 by Soeharto, which restricted the practice of Chinese customs and religions to private domain.
Following this abolition, he signed the Presidential Instruction Number 6, stipulated in the year 2000, which allows the public celebration of the Chinese New Year.
Megawati took a step further by declaring Chinese New Year has been a national holiday in 2003.
Other than the official celebration of Chinese New Year, the revival of Chinese culture may be seen in the establishment of schools offering Mandarin as a mode of instruction and a proliferation of Chinese-language newspapers in Indonesia.
In 1999, a television channel that broadcasts news in Chinese (Metro TV) and a radio station (Cakrawala) have joined the growing number of Chinese-language newspapers to form a media climate that is more open to Chinese language and culture.
The dazzling array of choices and opportunities arising from the acceptance and embrace of Chinese language and culture in today's Indonesia does not mean the process of identity process and maintenance among the Indonesian Chinese is less complex than in the Soeharto era by any means.
The meaning of Chineseness is always shifting through time and place, and is dependent on the discursive tug-of-war between self-positioning and being positioned by others.
With the available options, the Indonesian Chinese are now presented with various means to (re)negotiate their own sense of Chineseness. From the moment their babies are born, Indonesian Chinese parents are no longer pressured to name their offspring with Indonesian names. In my observations, some parents have chosen to meld not two, but three cultures together by giving their newborns names such as Adrian Wijaya Ng, Louisa Kartadinata Liu; the first names being Western (because the parents have been educated overseas), the middle names being Indonesian, while the last names are Chinese. Yet there are many other parents who still prefer to name their babies with Indonesian names such as Hendra Suryajaya or Dewi Kurniadi.
The differences in attitudes and expectations in the Indonesian Chinese community with regards to naming reveal the polyphonic nature of identity issues. As Indonesia erases the discriminatory regulations against the Indonesian Chinese, members of this community are presented with different sources of Chinese cultural expressions that begin with their names and formal Chinese language education and continue with Chinese media, Chinese organizations and cultural performances.
Depending on their distinct socio-cultural backgrounds and the choices they make, the next generation of Indonesian Chinese and their parents may uncover new channels and avenues in their continuing process of being Chinese in Indonesia.
The writer teaches in the graduate programs of the University of Indonesia School of Social and Political Sciences, Department of Communications, and the Letters Department at the School of Humanities. She can be reached at canting@hotmail.com.
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Tue, 06/13/2006 1:42 PM
Wijanto Hadipuro, Jakarta
Once I happened to meet a Chinese-American lawyer. When she found out I had married a ""native"" Javanese woman, she asked me, ""Has that made your life easier?"" Her question really made me realize some things about my position.
I remember what happened when I went to get my marriage certificate. I went to the office alone, without my wife. The woman who waited on me picked up a big book and tried to find my name. She looked two or three times but could not find it.
She looked at me several times before asking me whether my wife was a ""native"". When I nodded, she was angry and asked me why I didn't tell her in the first place. She then picked up another book.
I do not care what kind of book they use to register my marriage. What I care about is her expression when she found out my wife was ""native"".
Marrying a woman from another ethnicity and religion has not actually made my life easier. I have to think things over for a long time before I bring my wife and my daughter to visit my family, because most of my relatives cannot accept my wife's background.
My wife has also had bitter experiences. We got married according to my religion. We both believed in Jesus Christ, but we had different religions. She was told by her religious leader that she did not belong to the faithful anymore because she got married outside her religion.
I have a Chinese-Indonesian friend who is Muslim. He married a ""native"" woman. During the riots of in May 1998, I told him he was lucky that he could go anywhere safely, because he had successfully assimilated with the Indonesian majority. His answer surprised me: ""Nobody will ask about my religion or my wife,"" he said. ""People will look at my face and because I look like a Chinese, my religion and my wife will not save me from harm.""
When I visited Atlanta, I was accompanied by a black officer from the Public Works Office.
""Charles,"" I said, ""there are so many black people living in Atlanta, and you can work at government offices. I think it is good that there is not any discrimination against black people here.""
His answer, too, was a surprise. ""Government rules can't make discrimination disappear from my social life."" he said. ""Not all white people want to interact socially with black people like me.""
A place without social discrimination would be utopia. Charles' remark reveals another fact we must accept: that government regulations can't abolish social discrimination.
My wife was discriminated against in terms of her salary. She earned less than her Chinese-Indonesian friend, just because they worked at a company owned by a Chinese-Indonesian businessman. My wife with more than five years' experience at the company got only half the salary of her Chinese-Indonesian friend, who had worked for just a month at the same managerial level.
Once I read an article about indicators of social tolerance. According to the article, there are three degrees of social tolerance. The worst is when somebody does not tolerate the existence of anyone from outside his group. Such a person will try to banish ""different"" people if it's not possible to make them the same as him- or herself.
In the case of religion, for example, somebody from a certain religion might say someone from another belief system will go to hell. Another, less extreme example is when somebody does not tolerate other people's religious activities.
A better level of social tolerance is when someone accepts the existence of ""different"" people. He or she may work together and cooperate with them, but cannot accept the ""different"" person becoming a family member, for example, through marriage.
The most tolerant people are those who not only accept ""different"" people, but can welcome them as family members. This group of people is the smallest. There are only a few people who can do that, and my experience shows that people like this are marginalized both by their own groups and their spouse's groups. If you belong to this group, believe me, your life is more complicated than the lives of the other two groups.
We are born with differences. That is true. But some differences are significant for certain people, and some are not. We have to accept that. It is no use to claim equality among all those inherited differences, even by way of the law.
My experience proves that if you are not strong enough, you should keep your group identity as strong as possible. Assimilation and regulations cannot remove social discrimination from every corner of the world.
I have never regretted my decision to marry a Javanese woman, and I will not claim equal rights to citizenship. I am happy with that as long as everybody can accept my existence. If you are Chinese-Indonesian you will be better off going to a school where there are a lot of Chinese-Indonesians and working for a company owned by a Chinese-Indonesian. It will help you avoid a lot of discrimination.
The writer is a Chinese-Indonesian who married a pribumi (native) woman.
__________________________________________________
I am a Chinese-Indonesian
Aimee Dawis, Jakarta | Wed, 02/06/2008 2:16 PMIn December last year, I attended a seminar in Singapore. I was welcomed by the seminar representative at the Changi Airport.
After shaking hand, he asked me, "Are you ethnic Chinese? Your name is not Chinese, but you look Chinese." I told him that I am Chinese and he was taken aback. "I couldn't tell from your name that you're Chinese," he said.
The puzzlement around my name and my identity as an ethnic Chinese from Indonesia continued throughout the one-day seminar.
As a writer and researcher on the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, I was invited to present my paper on China and the Cultural Identity of the Chinese in Indonesia.
Hoping to dispel the confusion arising from my name, I decided to begin my presentation by explaining my name and the historical implications and significance of naming among the Chinese in Indonesia.
In 1966, the Indonesian government issued a policy which strongly recommended Indonesian citizens of Chinese descent change their names into Indonesian ones to prove their loyalty to Indonesia.
This policy was released in the wake of the Soeharto regime's closures of Chinese schools, bans on public expressions of Chinese culture and language and widespread government suspicion regarding the Chinese community's role in the PKI's (The Indonesian Communist Party's) uprising in 1965.
Being a heterogeneous and diverse community, the Chinese in Indonesia responded to the name-changing policy in distinct ways. My father chose to change his name to Didi Dawis from Djie Ie Ling.
His other six siblings chose different names for themselves. One of his siblings who chose to keep his Chinese name.
While the names chosen by my father's family (except for his youngest brother) have been Indonesianized to the extent most people cannot tell that they are Chinese, there are other Indonesian names chosen by the Chinese in Indonesia that implicitly indicate that they are still Chinese.
For example, those with the Chinese surnames of Tan, Ong and Wee chose Indonesianized surnames such as Tanuwijaya, Ongggara and Wijaya.
These names show a desire to retain a sense of Chineseness while at the same time complying with the government's policy.
When Abdurrahman Wahid served as the President of Indonesia between November 1999 and August 2001, he abolished the Presidential Instruction Number 14, signed in 1967 by Soeharto, which restricted the practice of Chinese customs and religions to private domain.
Following this abolition, he signed the Presidential Instruction Number 6, stipulated in the year 2000, which allows the public celebration of the Chinese New Year.
Megawati took a step further by declaring Chinese New Year has been a national holiday in 2003.
Other than the official celebration of Chinese New Year, the revival of Chinese culture may be seen in the establishment of schools offering Mandarin as a mode of instruction and a proliferation of Chinese-language newspapers in Indonesia.
In 1999, a television channel that broadcasts news in Chinese (Metro TV) and a radio station (Cakrawala) have joined the growing number of Chinese-language newspapers to form a media climate that is more open to Chinese language and culture.
The dazzling array of choices and opportunities arising from the acceptance and embrace of Chinese language and culture in today's Indonesia does not mean the process of identity process and maintenance among the Indonesian Chinese is less complex than in the Soeharto era by any means.
The meaning of Chineseness is always shifting through time and place, and is dependent on the discursive tug-of-war between self-positioning and being positioned by others.
With the available options, the Indonesian Chinese are now presented with various means to (re)negotiate their own sense of Chineseness. From the moment their babies are born, Indonesian Chinese parents are no longer pressured to name their offspring with Indonesian names. In my observations, some parents have chosen to meld not two, but three cultures together by giving their newborns names such as Adrian Wijaya Ng, Louisa Kartadinata Liu; the first names being Western (because the parents have been educated overseas), the middle names being Indonesian, while the last names are Chinese. Yet there are many other parents who still prefer to name their babies with Indonesian names such as Hendra Suryajaya or Dewi Kurniadi.
The differences in attitudes and expectations in the Indonesian Chinese community with regards to naming reveal the polyphonic nature of identity issues. As Indonesia erases the discriminatory regulations against the Indonesian Chinese, members of this community are presented with different sources of Chinese cultural expressions that begin with their names and formal Chinese language education and continue with Chinese media, Chinese organizations and cultural performances.
Depending on their distinct socio-cultural backgrounds and the choices they make, the next generation of Indonesian Chinese and their parents may uncover new channels and avenues in their continuing process of being Chinese in Indonesia.
The writer teaches in the graduate programs of the University of Indonesia School of Social and Political Sciences, Department of Communications, and the Letters Department at the School of Humanities. She can be reached at canting@hotmail.com.
Church Failing to Reach One-Fourth of the World - An Excerpt
Fri, Oct. 22 2010 06:26 AM EDT
Missionaries: Church Failing to Reach One-Fourth of the World
By Michelle A. Vu
CAPE TOWN, South Africa – More than 25 percent of the ethnic groups (unreached people groups) in the world, or about two billion people, are not represented at the Lausanne Conference.
An unreached people group means that cross-cultural mission is necessary for a person in the group to hear the Gospel because they cannot find people within their ethnic group to share with them the good news.
Mission leaders on Wednesday said the hardest obstacle to overcome in reaching unreached people groups is the obedience of the church. They spoke at the Lausanne multiplex session titled “M*ss*ng People: The Unserved One-Fourth World.”
A video shown at the beginning of the session highlighted that despite the fact that 86 percent of Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists do not personally know a Christ follower, 90 percent of missionaries go to “Christianized” regions, according to the World Christian Database.
“In my 14 years working with Muslims, mobilizing churches in Korea, I came to realized that Muslims haven’t been missing people to God, but to God’s people,” said Henry Lee, a mission leader based in Seoul, South Korea, and part of Ethne to Ethne (Greek for people to people), a global mission network focused on getting the gospel to unreached people groups.
Kent Park, president of U.S.-based Mission to Unreached Peoples, explained why churches do not share the Gospel with people groups that need to hear it.
“The Indonesian church, by its own confession, said we have ignored them (difficult unreached people groups in Indonesia) because we didn’t want to pay the price, we were afraid, we didn’t think it would work, we didn’t think they would change. That’s what it means to be unreached.”
Arychiluhm Beyene, who has worked in the mission field for the last 15 years, including six years with the most difficult people in Somalia, told a touching story of a “scary” looking Somali man who converted to Christianity from Islam.
After the Somali man converted, he told Beyene, “When you look at us from outside with the long beard, with the cap, and jalabiya (traditional loose fitting clothes worn by some Somali men), we look scary. But I just want to give you assurance, don’t stop telling the good news. Although we look scary from the outside, our inside is looking for the truth.”
During the missing people session, an African mission leader also spoke to the disconnect he sees between what African Christians are taught and how they live their lives.
Although Africa currently has the highest Christian growth rate in the world, it also has the highest levels of HIV, conflict, poverty, and corruption, said Peter Tarantal, the South Africa regional director of Ethne to Ethne.
In 1900, there were 8 million Christians in Africa. Today, there are 500 million Christians in Africa and in some countries 90 percent or more of the population is Christian.
“The challenge before us is despite as a church having grown so much, we need to teach people what it means to live as people of God,” said Tarantal.
The Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, also known as Cape Town2010, has drawn more than 4,000 Christian leaders representing over 190 nations to Cape Town, South Africa.The conference was founded by American evangelist Billy Graham in 1974 in Lausanne, Switzerland,to bring together the global body of Christ for world evangelization.
Missionaries: Church Failing to Reach One-Fourth of the World
By Michelle A. Vu
CAPE TOWN, South Africa – More than 25 percent of the ethnic groups (unreached people groups) in the world, or about two billion people, are not represented at the Lausanne Conference.
An unreached people group means that cross-cultural mission is necessary for a person in the group to hear the Gospel because they cannot find people within their ethnic group to share with them the good news.
Mission leaders on Wednesday said the hardest obstacle to overcome in reaching unreached people groups is the obedience of the church. They spoke at the Lausanne multiplex session titled “M*ss*ng People: The Unserved One-Fourth World.”
A video shown at the beginning of the session highlighted that despite the fact that 86 percent of Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists do not personally know a Christ follower, 90 percent of missionaries go to “Christianized” regions, according to the World Christian Database.
“In my 14 years working with Muslims, mobilizing churches in Korea, I came to realized that Muslims haven’t been missing people to God, but to God’s people,” said Henry Lee, a mission leader based in Seoul, South Korea, and part of Ethne to Ethne (Greek for people to people), a global mission network focused on getting the gospel to unreached people groups.
Kent Park, president of U.S.-based Mission to Unreached Peoples, explained why churches do not share the Gospel with people groups that need to hear it.
“The Indonesian church, by its own confession, said we have ignored them (difficult unreached people groups in Indonesia) because we didn’t want to pay the price, we were afraid, we didn’t think it would work, we didn’t think they would change. That’s what it means to be unreached.”
Arychiluhm Beyene, who has worked in the mission field for the last 15 years, including six years with the most difficult people in Somalia, told a touching story of a “scary” looking Somali man who converted to Christianity from Islam.
After the Somali man converted, he told Beyene, “When you look at us from outside with the long beard, with the cap, and jalabiya (traditional loose fitting clothes worn by some Somali men), we look scary. But I just want to give you assurance, don’t stop telling the good news. Although we look scary from the outside, our inside is looking for the truth.”
During the missing people session, an African mission leader also spoke to the disconnect he sees between what African Christians are taught and how they live their lives.
Although Africa currently has the highest Christian growth rate in the world, it also has the highest levels of HIV, conflict, poverty, and corruption, said Peter Tarantal, the South Africa regional director of Ethne to Ethne.
In 1900, there were 8 million Christians in Africa. Today, there are 500 million Christians in Africa and in some countries 90 percent or more of the population is Christian.
“The challenge before us is despite as a church having grown so much, we need to teach people what it means to live as people of God,” said Tarantal.
The Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, also known as Cape Town2010, has drawn more than 4,000 Christian leaders representing over 190 nations to Cape Town, South Africa.The conference was founded by American evangelist Billy Graham in 1974 in Lausanne, Switzerland,to bring together the global body of Christ for world evangelization.
Civilian Deaths in Iraq - An Excerpt
A Grim Portrait of Civilian Deaths in Iraq
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and ANDREW W. LEHREN
Published: October 22, 2010
The reports in the archive disclosed by WikiLeaks offer an incomplete, yet startlingly graphic portrait of one of the most contentious issues in the Iraq war — how many Iraqi civilians have been killed and by whom.
The reports make it clear that most civilians, by far, were killed by other Iraqis. Two of the worst days of the war came on Aug. 31, 2005, when a stampede on a bridge in Baghdad killed more than 950 people after several earlier attacks panicked a huge crowd, and on Aug. 14, 2007, when truck bombs killed more than 500 people in a rural area near the border with Syria.
But it was systematic sectarian cleansing that drove the killing to its most frenzied point, making December 2006 the worst month of the war, according to the reports, with about 3,800 civilians killed, roughly equal to the past seven years of murders in New York City. A total of about 1,300 police officers, insurgents and coalition soldiers were also killed in that month.
The documents also reveal many previously unreported instances in which American soldiers killed civilians — at checkpoints, from helicopters, in operations. Such killings are a central reason Iraqis turned against the American presence in their country, a situation that is now being repeated in Afghanistan.
The archive contains reports on at least four cases of lethal shootings from helicopters. In the bloodiest, on July 16, 2007, as many as 26 Iraqis were killed, about half of them civilians. However, the tally was called in by two different people, and it is possible that the deaths were counted twice. Read the Document »
In another case, in February 2007, an Apache helicopter shot and killed two Iraqi men believed to have been firing mortars, even though they made surrendering motions, because, according to a military lawyer cited in the report, “they cannot surrender to aircraft, and are still valid targets.” Read the Document »
The shooting was unusual. In at least three other instances reported in the archive, Iraqis surrendered to helicopter crews without being shot. The Pentagon did not respond to questions from The Times about the rules of engagement for the helicopter strike.
The pace of civilian deaths served as a kind of pulse, whose steady beat told of the success, or failure, of America’s war effort. Americans on both sides of the war debate argued bitterly over facts that grew hazier as the war deepened.
The archive does not put that argument to rest by giving a precise count. As a 2008 report to Congress on the topic makes clear, the figures serve as “guideposts,’ not hard totals. But it does seem to suggest numbers that are roughly in line with those compiled by several sources, including Iraq Body Count, an organization that tracked civilian deaths using press reports, a method the Bush administration repeatedly derided as unreliable and producing inflated numbers. In all, the five-year archive lists more than 100,000 dead from 2004 to 2009, though some deaths are reported more than once, and some reports have inconsistent casualty figures. A 2008 Congressional report warned that record keeping in the war had been so problematic that such statistics should be looked at only as “guideposts.”
In a statement on Friday, Iraq Body Count, which did a preliminary analysis of the archive, estimated that it listed 15,000 deaths that had not been previously disclosed anywhere.
The archive tells thousands of individual stories of loss whose consequences are still being felt in Iraqi families today.
Misunderstandings at checkpoints were often lethal. At one Marine checkpoint, sunlight glinting off a windshield of a car that did not slow down led to the shooting death of a mother and the wounding of three of her daughters and her husband. Hand signals flashed to stop vehicles were often not understood, and soldiers and Marines, who without interpreters were unable to speak to the survivors, were left to wonder why. Read the Document »
According to one particularly painful entry from 2006, an Iraqi wearing a tracksuit was killed by an American sniper who later discovered that the victim was the platoon’s interpreter. Read the Document »
The archive’s data is incomplete. The documents were compiled with an emphasis on speed rather than accuracy; the goal was to spread information as quickly as possible among units. American soldiers did not respond to every incident.
And even when Americans were at the center of the action, as in the western city of Falluja in 2004, none of the Iraqis they killed were categorized as civilians. In the early years of the war, the Pentagon maintained that it did not track Iraqi civilian deaths, but it began releasing rough counts in 2005, after members of Congress demanded a more detailed accounting on the state of the war. In one instance in 2008, the Pentagon used reports similar to the newly released documents to tabulate the war dead.
This month, The Associated Press reported that the Pentagon in July had quietly posted its fullest tally of the death toll of Iraqi civilians and security forces ever, numbers that were first requested in 2005 through the Freedom of Information Act. It was not clear why the total — 76,939 Iraqi civilians and members of the security forces killed between January 2004 and August 2008 — was significantly less than the sum of the archive’s death count.
The archive does not have a category for the main causes of Iraqi deaths inflicted by Americans. Compared with the situation in Afghanistan, in Iraq aerial bombings seemed to be less frequently a cause of civilian deaths, after the initial invasion. The reports were only as good as the soldiers calling them in. One of the most infamous episodes of killings by American soldiers, the shootings of at least 15 Iraqi civilians, including women and children in the western city of Haditha, is misrepresented in the archives. The report stated that the civilians were killed by militants in a bomb attack, the same false version of the episode that was given to the news media.
Civilians have borne the brunt of modern warfare, with 10 civilians dying for every soldier in wars fought since the mid-20th century, compared with 9 soldiers killed for every civilian in World War I, according to a 2001 study by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and ANDREW W. LEHREN
Published: October 22, 2010
The reports in the archive disclosed by WikiLeaks offer an incomplete, yet startlingly graphic portrait of one of the most contentious issues in the Iraq war — how many Iraqi civilians have been killed and by whom.
The reports make it clear that most civilians, by far, were killed by other Iraqis. Two of the worst days of the war came on Aug. 31, 2005, when a stampede on a bridge in Baghdad killed more than 950 people after several earlier attacks panicked a huge crowd, and on Aug. 14, 2007, when truck bombs killed more than 500 people in a rural area near the border with Syria.
But it was systematic sectarian cleansing that drove the killing to its most frenzied point, making December 2006 the worst month of the war, according to the reports, with about 3,800 civilians killed, roughly equal to the past seven years of murders in New York City. A total of about 1,300 police officers, insurgents and coalition soldiers were also killed in that month.
The documents also reveal many previously unreported instances in which American soldiers killed civilians — at checkpoints, from helicopters, in operations. Such killings are a central reason Iraqis turned against the American presence in their country, a situation that is now being repeated in Afghanistan.
The archive contains reports on at least four cases of lethal shootings from helicopters. In the bloodiest, on July 16, 2007, as many as 26 Iraqis were killed, about half of them civilians. However, the tally was called in by two different people, and it is possible that the deaths were counted twice. Read the Document »
In another case, in February 2007, an Apache helicopter shot and killed two Iraqi men believed to have been firing mortars, even though they made surrendering motions, because, according to a military lawyer cited in the report, “they cannot surrender to aircraft, and are still valid targets.” Read the Document »
The shooting was unusual. In at least three other instances reported in the archive, Iraqis surrendered to helicopter crews without being shot. The Pentagon did not respond to questions from The Times about the rules of engagement for the helicopter strike.
The pace of civilian deaths served as a kind of pulse, whose steady beat told of the success, or failure, of America’s war effort. Americans on both sides of the war debate argued bitterly over facts that grew hazier as the war deepened.
The archive does not put that argument to rest by giving a precise count. As a 2008 report to Congress on the topic makes clear, the figures serve as “guideposts,’ not hard totals. But it does seem to suggest numbers that are roughly in line with those compiled by several sources, including Iraq Body Count, an organization that tracked civilian deaths using press reports, a method the Bush administration repeatedly derided as unreliable and producing inflated numbers. In all, the five-year archive lists more than 100,000 dead from 2004 to 2009, though some deaths are reported more than once, and some reports have inconsistent casualty figures. A 2008 Congressional report warned that record keeping in the war had been so problematic that such statistics should be looked at only as “guideposts.”
In a statement on Friday, Iraq Body Count, which did a preliminary analysis of the archive, estimated that it listed 15,000 deaths that had not been previously disclosed anywhere.
The archive tells thousands of individual stories of loss whose consequences are still being felt in Iraqi families today.
Misunderstandings at checkpoints were often lethal. At one Marine checkpoint, sunlight glinting off a windshield of a car that did not slow down led to the shooting death of a mother and the wounding of three of her daughters and her husband. Hand signals flashed to stop vehicles were often not understood, and soldiers and Marines, who without interpreters were unable to speak to the survivors, were left to wonder why. Read the Document »
According to one particularly painful entry from 2006, an Iraqi wearing a tracksuit was killed by an American sniper who later discovered that the victim was the platoon’s interpreter. Read the Document »
The archive’s data is incomplete. The documents were compiled with an emphasis on speed rather than accuracy; the goal was to spread information as quickly as possible among units. American soldiers did not respond to every incident.
And even when Americans were at the center of the action, as in the western city of Falluja in 2004, none of the Iraqis they killed were categorized as civilians. In the early years of the war, the Pentagon maintained that it did not track Iraqi civilian deaths, but it began releasing rough counts in 2005, after members of Congress demanded a more detailed accounting on the state of the war. In one instance in 2008, the Pentagon used reports similar to the newly released documents to tabulate the war dead.
This month, The Associated Press reported that the Pentagon in July had quietly posted its fullest tally of the death toll of Iraqi civilians and security forces ever, numbers that were first requested in 2005 through the Freedom of Information Act. It was not clear why the total — 76,939 Iraqi civilians and members of the security forces killed between January 2004 and August 2008 — was significantly less than the sum of the archive’s death count.
The archive does not have a category for the main causes of Iraqi deaths inflicted by Americans. Compared with the situation in Afghanistan, in Iraq aerial bombings seemed to be less frequently a cause of civilian deaths, after the initial invasion. The reports were only as good as the soldiers calling them in. One of the most infamous episodes of killings by American soldiers, the shootings of at least 15 Iraqi civilians, including women and children in the western city of Haditha, is misrepresented in the archives. The report stated that the civilians were killed by militants in a bomb attack, the same false version of the episode that was given to the news media.
Civilians have borne the brunt of modern warfare, with 10 civilians dying for every soldier in wars fought since the mid-20th century, compared with 9 soldiers killed for every civilian in World War I, according to a 2001 study by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
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