"Seventy-Five
years ago, on the fifth day of Iyar on the Hebrew lunar calendar, which
falls on April 26 this year, on the eve of Great Britain pulling out of
Palestine, the region's Jewish community declared 'the establishment of
a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel'."
"The
Zionist movement was formed to re-establish the ancient Jewish homeland
in Judaea, as a refuge for a people who faced centuries of persecution.
At the end of the 19th century, the World Zionist Organization began
building the institutions that would form the basis of an eventual
state."
"Following
the Holocaust, Zionism came to be seen not just as a dream, but as an
existential imperative for a people who had barely escaped total
annihilation."
From ubiquitous carbonated water to drip
irrigation for growing crops in the desert, the USB key and anti-missile
systems, Israel has a talent for creating things the world wants.
Modern-day
Israel has distinguished itself as a innovative hub of human
creativity, a vast beehive of technological advances as well as an
agricultural focus on the art of the possible. In an arid landscape
where water is always in short supply, its lack through normal means and
natural resources has been rectified by coercing nature to cooperate
with enterprising methods in resupply to huge advantage not only to
Israel but in sharing its remedies to the rest of the water-scarce
world.
Ranking
highest in the world for per-capita startups, Israel's rate of tech
investment has registered as much as 28 times greater than the United
States. In the 1980s, the USB stick was invented in Israel. Israeli
agricultural scientists popularized the cherry tomato. Smartphones with
Waze operate with Israeli code. The brilliant inventive power of Israeli
scientists has led to all manner of inventions uniquely Israeli which
become technologies with global spread.
Translation
machines represent a particular Israeli tech inspiration possibly
reflective of the many langues aside from the country's national Hebrew,
being spoken. Babylon, one of the first software programs offering
instantaneous translation of documents and web pages was the work of an
Israeli company in 1997. In the 1990s Wizcom Technologies debuted pens
able to scan words and translate them to an LCD screen. OrCam Read, a
hand-held device, can scan printed pages and read them aloud.
One
of the country's first major technical challenges to face Israeli
scientists was how to maximize scarce water resources. Israeli geography
is largely desert; almost all sources of surface water arrive through
neighbouring territories hostile to Israel. Israel now produces 20
percent more water than required internally, with three major
initiatives.
Huge
desalination plants to repurpose sea water into potable water; a
centralized water management system repurposing wastewater, replenishes
aquifers and moves awater through a complex system of canals, pipes and
reservoirs. Irrigation, the third, a method of agriculture developed in
the 1950s where water crops use targeted drips instead of sprinklers.
The Pillcam ESO is used to photograph a patient’s esophagus.
Rewalk,
a robotic exoskeleton enabling paraplegics to walk, grabbed world
attention to gawk at Israeli medical technology. Israeli researchers
invented tiny cameras and sensors to be introduced into the human body;
disposable 'cameras'-in-a-pill, the PillCam that can be swallowed to
allow doctors to view the state of a body's internal organs. An off
shoot of Israel's security tech sector. Surveillance cameras, drones and
spy cameras, part of Israeli defence technology.
ENvizion
Medical based in Tel Aviv created a "smart" feeding tube to help chart
its path down the esophagus, meant to prevent health-care providers from
accidentally sending the tube into the lungs. Another, a flexible and
high-resolution Aer-O-Scope colonoscope sends a tube to scope around the
human colon.
Israel's
never-ending concern over hostile neighbours scheming to destroy it by
incremental attacks and lethal violence required technology capable of
destroying incoming missiles. The country's military poses an advanced
catalogue of technologies designed to shoot down missiles; Iron Dome the
most famous among them. About 90 percent of incoming rockets and
artillery shells are blocked from landing through the latticework of
sensors and interceptor missiles along Israel's border.
Israel has an advanced catalogue of technologies designed to shoot down missiles from hostile neighbours.
A qick reaction missile -- Arrow 3 -- "designed to intercept and destroy the newest, longer-range threats, especially those carrying weapons of mass destruction"
has been developed. A tiny anti-missile system to be attached to tanks
and armoured vehicles is the Trophy countermeasure system, designed to
detect an incoming anti-tank missile and disarm it at the last second
with a burst of small projectiles.
"China
became the world's top solar power producer last year; it produces 78
gigawatts of solar power annually, compared to 40.3 gigawatts in the
U.S.. [The U.S. ranks fourth, after Japan and Germany]."
"The
China Daily has billed the road as 'the first photovoltaic highway in
the world', though it's not the first road to collect solar energy. The
French village of Tourouvre-au-Perche unveiled a similar-looking 'solar
panel road' in 2016, intended to power streetlights in the village of
3,400 people. The Netherlands built a solar panel-embedded bike path in
2014, despite public concerns about cost-effectiveness."
"The
Jinan highway is the largest project of its type; its solar panels
cover 63,200 square feet, about twice the area of France's road."
"China has also built a 500 foot-long solar road
— not quite a highway — in the eastern province Zhejiang, designed to
transfer solar energy into electromagnetic waves which can wirelessly
charge electric vehicles." Jonathan Kaiman, Los Angeles Times
The solar road in Jinan, China. Getty Images
China has long-range plans to be first among competing countries in renewal energy, already producing three quarters of the solar panels on the international market. It has turned its attention to solar roads imbedded with modified solar panels installed instead of traditional asphalt; admittedly at a much greater cost. The clear purpose is to generate electricity directly from streets, foregoing the older model of setting up solar panels in fields and deserts since a lot more energy could be produced and the land itself conserved for agriculture.
The idea is that the electricity generated could be used close to where it is generated; no power lost in transmission, a more efficient and effective sourcing of energy. Roads are installed everywhere to begin with, it's simply a matter of changing the way they are constructed, substituting solar panels for asphalt. Electric heating strips are envisaged as a way to melt snow falling on highways while light-emitting diodes embedded in the surface of the road provides illuminated signage directing drivers to exits, alerting to construction, and allied traffic hazards.
An integrated, all-in-one approach to be obtained as well in building roads capable of wirelessly recharging electric cars running along them. Roads such as these are becoming increasingly viable and less expensive to build as prices fall in response to soaring production in China where a solar panel now costs a tenth of what it did a decade earlier. Two companies leading in solar road development are at work in Jinan, China; Pavenergy and Qilu Transportation; the former producing panels the latter, owned by the state, operating the highway.
According to Zhang Hongchao, an engineering professor at Tongji University in Shanghai who helped develop the panel surfaces, they are constructed of a complex polymer resembling plastic, with a slightly greater friction capability than a conventional road surface. The road was selected in view of its proximity to an electricity substation, a logical enough choice. Colas, a French road building giant, represents the Western rival to this Chinese innovation in road building.
Colas has developed experimental solar roads and parking lots in France, Canada, Japan and the United States, twenty-four in all, the largest of the sites a country road in Normandy with half the surface area of the new solar highway in Jinan. Solar panels on a road are installed so they lie flat. However, intermittently covered with vehicles driving on them, they produce roughly half the power that rooftop panels tilted to the sun can produce.
Additionally, highway panels are costly, far more than asphalt; about $120 a square meter to resurface and repair an asphalt road every ten years, while Pavenergy and Colas aspire to reducing the cost of a solar road to $310 to $460 a square meter. On the other hand, solar panels installed on highways are likelier requir4ed to be replaced less frequently than asphalt, according to Professor Zhang, even while solar roads can produce roughly $15 a year's worth of electricity from each square meter of solar panels.
If so, they could pay for themselves within fifteen years. Judging whether the panels could withstand millions of tires pounding on them every year for over a decade is another matter; including whether the panels might be stolen. The latter has already occurred, where roads have been damaged when some of the solar panels installed on them have been extracted, defeating the very purpose for which they were installed until repairs could be effected.
"America has been dreaming of becoming a cashless society. But China is already there." "[It has] leapfrogged the rest of the world [and now proceeds on its mobile course in every manner of venture]." Ya-Qin Zhang, president, Baidu (search engine)
"Just two weeks go I brought in about a dozen green energy start-up companies from Massachusetts [to expose them to potential opportunities in China]." Walter Fang, executive, iSoftStone
"I slide across the Chinese countryside at 300 kilometers per hour from Beijing to Shanghai. There are nearly 60 trains going from Beijing to Shanghai every day, typically with 16 cars able to carry nearly 1,300 people." "We glide past endless brand-new factories and immaculate apartment buildings in practically every city along the way, with many more still under construction." Chinese trade expert
Zhang Peng | LightRocket | Getty Images
The innovative Chinese digital advertising market is the second largest in the world after the U.S.
When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, gaining preferential access to global markets, China was recognized as a "developing economy", and thus was granted the right to continue protecting portions of its market on the understanding that as the giant country reformed and as its economy strengthened, its trade barriers along with government support of Chinese companies would be diminished.
Unfortunately for the rest of the world that's not exactly what happened. China's capability of producing cheaper consumer goods reflecting its lower-paid workers and state subsidies grew its markets abroad while at the same time having the effect of closing down manufacturing in other countries when it was realized their prices couldn't compete on the world market with China's. And so China's trade grew and so did the imbalance.
China: Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope - FAST TechWorld
China, now a production giant with trade tentacles and investments worldwide, still protects its own producers from foreign competition by limiting access to Chinese markets or insisting that foreign companies form a partnership with the Chinese, transferring their intellectual property to China as the price for access to that mammoth market. When Chinese companies became sufficiently substantial they entered the foreign market.
China: Floating Solar Power Plant - TechWorld
"Made in China 2025" is an ambitious effort on China's part to see itself as the world leader in electric vehicles, new materials, artificial intelligence, semiconductors, bio-pharmacy, 5G mobile communications and other similar industries. The understanding that China would open its markets seems to have collapsed in the face of reality.
Alibaba can set up its cloud server in the United States, but Amazon or Microsoft are unable to do the same thing in China. Chinese domestic financial services dominate the Chinese market to the extent that foreign companies eager to find the opportunity to invest and grow in the Chinese marketplace find themselves jostling over the dregs.
China: Transit Elevated Bus -- TechWorld
The German company Kuka Robotics, a world leader in industrial robots, was bought by Chinese company Midea. A Chinese mobile website, Meituan.com employs 300,000 people on electric bicycles whose job it is to deliver takeout food and groceries to ten million Chinese mobile Internet users on a daily basis: "We are the largest food delivery company in the world", boasts its founder, Wang Xing.
In China, 700 million people engage in so many daily transactions on the mobile Internet that the country is gathering massive amounts of information to be harvested in the identification of trends to spur new artificial intelligence applications. "Software and new energy" job openings are proliferating in China as it dedicates itself to pulling out of coal. Jobs are available for engineers for electric cars, solar and wind.
China: Schenzen East-to-West Energy Plant - TechWorld
The rate at which a country once known for adapting other nations' blueprint discoveries as its own and thought incapable of original design breakthroughs in new technologies now dominates the mobile Internet. Everyone pays for everything with a mobile cellphone; Chinese newspapers report that beggars living in major cities place a printout of a QR code in their begging bowls enabling passersby to scan it and with the use of mobile payment apps make a handy charitable donation.
"I am afraid that violent economic centrifuge is operating on human beings who are already very far from equal in raw ability, if not spiritual worth. Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16% of our species have an IQ below 85, while about 2% have an IQ above 130,. The harder you shake the pack, the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top." "And for one reason or another -- boardroom greed or, as I am assured, the natural and God-given talent of boardroom inhabitants -- the income gap between the top cornflakes and the bottom cornflakes is getting wider than ever. I stress: I don't believe that economic equality is possible; indeed, some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity." Boris Johnson, Mayor, London, England
The truth is, simply put, the morally elevating statement raised to the pinnacle of devotion to equality and in referred to hallowed in hushed tones as an "immortal declaration: that "all men are created equal" is all too often misunderstood. The American Declaration of Independence is a lovely document of high-minded assurance, but it is one that states simply that all men are equal under the law of the land and that they are free to engage in their pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, but there are no assurances that any of these aspirations will be achieved.
Nor does it mean that all of humankind is created with an equal endowment of genetic traits that would result in an even distribution of intelligence and capability among all persons. It is undeniable that within any society there are dullards incapable of grasping simple concepts, and there is the large middling group of individuals able to fend for themselves adequately, while beyond them exist those endowed with what might be considered more than their share of grey matter, enabling them to rise to the top of any society through their sense of curiosity, inventiveness and competence.
That rise does not necessarily result in people who assume power and more than their share of the goods of the world being outstanding citizens as human beings; many obviously are not, but they were capable of achieving office and riches by whatever means they employed, using their superior capabilities to attain what they set out to do. But to admit in polite company that we have more than our share of village dolts, and too few individuals interested in the world around them is to risk being labelled as indulging in "unpleasant elitism".
Mr. Johnson's speech which he addressed to the British Centre for Policy Studies as part of the Margaret Thatcher Lecture series, was as much and perhaps more, a cheering chorus for a free market economy and capitalism opening up the global economy to benefit as wide a range of populations as possible. Socialism and Communism were contrary ideologies attempting to counter capitalism and the end result was failure.
Individuals with disparate levels of intelligence and capabilities were to be treated as equal in the workforce, and they received, whether they were successful or failed at their enterprises, equal recompense. A kind of one-for-all and all-for-one. It didn't work. It is engrained in human nature that one is rewarded for the level of effort put into an economic-deriving activity. Those who were rewarded despite their lack of effort were complacently accepting, those who saw scant reward for prodigious effort were demoralized and stopped making the effort.
And lecturing them all, encouraging them on to perform and prove the thesis behind Marxism were the party faithful who used their hypocritical cunning -- in fact typical human behaviour -- to live in a manner nowhere near resembling that of the uncompetitive, unrewarding, dismal life of toil and scant self-respect they imposed on the great unwashed. To pave the way and ensure that no nuisance protests upset the apple cart as it was pulling into the town square, the intellectuals, the wealthy and the professionals were simply expunged from the scene.
There are two telling results from the experiment that took millions of lives and failed so spectacularly, an experiment in human and market manipulation that went gratingly against the grain that has been instilled in human nature from time immemorial. The Soviet Union eventually imploded. In North Korea, the old Marxist system prevails, the result being a grim police state, a shuttered kingdom as it were, an enforced misery of unfulfilled lives and malnutrition being the hallmarks, along with nuclear belligerence.
In China, North Korea's mentor-state, the elite were somewhat more discerning, but then they also had the burden of brutally manipulating infinitely greater numbers of people. The Chinese bureaucracy of Marxist ideology experimented just as the Soviet Union did, exhorting and exploiting their human capital and despite the deaths of millions of disposable people, who understood they must adore their tyrants or risk even greater numbers of people sacrificed to the prickly demands of their tormentors, finally surrendered to reality.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union led the remaining leadership to understand the depth of their dictatorial failure in a wholesale human-nature-manipulation experiment. Which hasn't stopped the current leadership from exerting a brutal autocracy that might be recognized as a kissing cousin to the former totalitarian rule; bullying and threatening and generally endearing itself to its former satellites who shudder uncontrollably at the very idea of having to resume that old union, frantically aligning themselves toward the West to fend off Eastern overtures.
China has recognized, just as Russia has, the advances to be made in the financial sphere through the relaxation of the old Communist ideals and the embrace of global capitalism. Their version is capitalism no matter the cause; unfettered and regulated only by the urge to grow itself into a giant of greedy entitlement, little different in fact from what is practised where the capitalist template was invented. And they have succeeded, perhaps beyond their wildest expectations. Hungering for even greater control of world trade.
Black Friday is becoming a universal event, to be celebrated not merely annually; but far more frequently. Capitalism makes a small percentage of those whose responding to its higher orders exemplifying success, rogues of immense wealth, social standing and power. Among them all or at least most of them there is a niggling sense of embarrassment at their own success. And this is the wretched little emotion that breeds philanthropy.
Apart from governments exerting the power of the state to exact a toll on such untold wealth in the manner of taxes so that a certain amount of those winnings can be redistributed at the state's will as it sees fit, grudging respect, as Mr. Johnson would have it, should be spared for the wealthy and no small amount of admiration at their success; they have earned it, in essence. By their determination, their enterprise, their capability, their intelligent manoeuvring.
"When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, they faced a top marginal tax rate of 98%, and the top 1% of earners contributed 11% of the government's total revenues from income tax. Today, when taxes have been cut substantially, the top 1% contributes almost 30% of income tax, and indeed the top 0.1% -- just 29,000 people -- contribute fully 14% of all taxation." "That is an awful lot of schools and roads and hospitals that are being paid for by the super-rich. So why, I asked, innocently, are they so despicable in the eyes of all decent British people? Surely they should be hailed, like the Stakhanovites of Stalin's Russia, who half-killed themselves, in the name of the people, by mining record tonnages of coal?"
Envy, jealousy, two of the nastier emotions that humans are given to expressing when confronted by the good fortune of those who have managed to advance their aspirations into reality by sheer intent to succeed. But of course Mr. Johnson, a highly intelligent man and an accomplished one as well, knows that very well. Mr. Johnson is more than capable of not only describing and understanding a situation, and pointing out to others how that situation arose and why it should be accepted. But he also -- a rarity -- is able to offer a solution to those who begrudge others their earnings.
"It seems to me therefore that though it would be wrong to persecute the rich, and madness to try and stifle wealth creation, and futile to try to stamp out inequality, that we should only tolerate this wealth gap on two conditions: one, that we help those who genuinely cannot compete; and two, that we provide opportunity for those who can."
One doesn't think of a sermon coming from a Pope as symbolizing fire and brimstone. Yet how else to consider Pope Francis's sermon against corruption delivered on Monday in which he quoted a Biblical passage of the New Testament where Jesus is said to have claimed some sinners deserved to be weighted down and thrown into the sea. Jesus said that? Oh my, oh my. Pope Francis most certainly did. My, oh my.
Like the Christ figure, Pope Francis is a humble man of peerless devotion to the core tenets of his faith. He has embarked, like the son of God whom he worships on the emulation of the act of cleansing the moneylenders from the Temple. Ejecting vice, avarice and Mammon, to make full unobstructed room for the sacredness of the Omniscient Spirit and the injunction to be just and holy in one's treatment of others.
It's enough to make a non-believer weep in gratitude.
"Jesus says: It would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea", quoted the Pope from the Gospel of St. Luke. People, he railed, who led "a double life", giving money to the Roman Catholic Church that they had stolen from the state or from others were undoubtedly sinners, deserving the wrathful punishment of just desserts.
People involved in corrupt acts were "white-washed tombs", he thundered; "they appear beautiful from the outside, but inside they are full of dead bones and putrefaction." Corruption produces a life that equates with "varnished putrefaction". Can't get much clearer in his purple-prose condemnation of hypocrisy and vice than that, can he?
The man who has chosen personally to bypass all vestiges of grandeur and sumptuous display in his role as Pope has chastised members of his own gatherings for their pride and their inability to be honest brokers. Those who, while professing goodness as priests but whose acts belie their profession have obviously caused him anguish and pain, and it is his intention, it seems, to remove them from authority.
His passion is to give succour to the needy, the impoverished, to welcome into the comfort of the church all those without hope. He represents an amazing contrast to his predecessors. He has emerged as a living, breathing embodiment of all that the writings of the church, quoting Jesus Christ, profess is important; no amount of cautious praise can fully capture the elemental goodness and decency of the man.
Speaking forthrightly of the deficits in human nature and the failures of the institution he represents, he is admirable in his passion. Can he possibly clean up the church he now heads? His lecture to the Church said it all:
"Poverty in the world is a scandal. In a world where there is so much wealth, so many resources to feed everyone, it is unfathomable that there are so many hungry children, that there are so many children without an education, so many poor persons. Poverty today is a cry. We all have to think if we can become a little poorer, all of us have to do this. How can I become a little poorer in order to be more like Jesus, who was the poor Teacher? First of all I want to tell you something, tell all you young persons: don't let yourselves be robbed of hope. Please, don't let it be stolen from you. The worldly spirit, wealth, the spirit of vanity, arrogance, and pride ... all these things steal hope. Where do I find hope? In the poor Jesus, Jesus who made himself poor for us. And you spoke of poverty. Poverty calls us to sow hope. ..."
L'Osservatore Romano / AP
Hercules cleaned the Aegean stables, as one of the immense tasks that challenged that super-human character of Greek fable. Pope Francis faces the Herculean task of clearing out the stables of the Vatican and the long reach of the holy Roman Catholic Church and its fallible priests.
Perhaps 'bounty' is too extravagant a description. Bounteous harvests will never materialize in the far North of Canada's vast Northwest Territories, not all that far, in fact, from the Arctic circle. Living in the North is expensive. Fresh food hard to come by; what is trucked in on winter ice roads or flown in has come a long way and vegetables and fruits become the worse for wear by the time they reach a retail market source in the Northwest Territories.
But in Inuvik, which really is the frozen North, an old hockey rink has been converted to a local community greenhouse. And it is flourishing. People are able to tend their garden plots and grow, unbelievably, watermelons, tomatoes, apples and cherries, even corn, although most peoples' aspirations are likely confined to more modest garden vegetable produce. The greenhouse is open 24 hours a day.
In Norman Wells, N.W.T. the average high temperature is about 13-degrees C. three months out of the year. There, Doug Whiteman amended whatever soil there was available to his gardening efforts with compost, fertilizer and vegetable matter to add nutrients that would allow him to grow the aforesaid vegetables and fruits.
"Some places have permafrost, some don't, and other places you're just going to have large pieces of ice in the ground", he explains.
"You can do this here?" is a question asked of Andrew Cassidy, executive director of the Territorial Farmers Association. "In the Northwest territories, we probably have about 20 commercial producers. It's a small number but I would probably say ten years ago, we might have had half a dozen."
And Gene Hachey, agricultural consultant for the Government of the Northwest Territories lauds all attempts to grow food in such an agronomy-hostile environment. "There's something cool about having 'a cob' at the end of the year. And you take it off and you hold it like a diamond."
A family formerly from New Brunswick keeps goats and chickens and rabbits on their Boreal Barn farm. They were aided with $10,000 in government funding to help improve and expand their family farm. Where their animals are free to roam in spring and summer, but temperatures plunge to -40C in the winter, and the sun doesn't shine for months.
"We have the lights set up so that they're on 14 hours a day so they have a kind of daytime in their barn." Their hens produce about 72 eggs each day, which the farmers sell to their neighbours. But there is never enough to satisfy demand.
That kind of determination and self-sufficiency is nothing short of amazing, given the obvious climate constraints and the difficulties in coping with permafrost, extreme winter cold, and long months without the sun.
Inuvik's 24-hour-operational greenhouse where a hundred community members look after their 74 plots is made possible with the aid of joint federal and territorial programs.
This represents a general opinion site for its author. It also offers a space for the author to record her experiences and perceptions,both personal and public. This is rendered obvious by the content contained in the blog, but the space is here inviting me to write. And so I do.
