A recent episode of south park called "the snuke" draws heavily on contemporary internet culture, the interconnectedness of the web and its information networks as well as how common, widespread and readily available information has become. Every character in the episode, including Cartman, Kyle as well as members of various government institutions such as the CIA and Homeland Security make use of everyday information web sites to advance their investigations, which include Google Search, Google Maps, MySpace, Craigslist, MapQuest, YouTube, Realtor.com, WebCrawler, eBay, PayPal, AOL, AIM, Ask Jeeves, JDate, Blogs, Drudge Report, and eHarmony. Kyle uses the most up-to-date web sources, like Google and MySpace; government officials, by contrast, use outmoded sources, like AOL message boards and Ask Jeeves.
I recomend you watch it. It is less raunchy than usual south park's, and it is very entertaining.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Monday, February 26, 2007
Boom and Bust
Boom and Bust Israel's politics may be a mess, but the economy remains surprisingly strong. by Duncan Currie 02/21/2007 12:00:00 AM
JerusalemLAST MAY, just two months before Israel found itself embroiled in a war with Hezbollah, the world's most successful investor, Warren Buffett, purchased an 80 percent share in Iscar Metalworking, an Israeli toolmaker, for some $4 billion. Prior to closing the deal, Buffett had never visited the Iscar headquarters. Nor had he ever visited Israel. But that didn't deter him. "We are investing $4 billion in an amazing band of people from Israel," he told an Israeli financial newspaper. "If your readers know a company that resembles Iscar, even a little, have them call me immediately. I want to buy. Let them call me collect."
Then in late July, as war raged in Lebanon and Hezbollah rained rockets down on northern Israel, the Silicon Valley giant SanDisk, which purports to be "the world's largest supplier of flash memory data storage products," announced its purchase of an Israeli company for stock then valued at nearly $1.6 billion. Just a few days earlier, Hewlett-Packard had publicized its agreement to buy out the scandal-plagued firm Mercury Interactive for roughly $4.5 billion. In November HP announced that the former Mercury office in Yehud, Israel, would become its biggest research and development center in the world.
The SanDisk and HP deals were hardly anomalies. Despite war and domestic political turmoil, 2006 proved a banner year for Israel's high-tech boom. Consider the numbers on merger and acquisition activity. According to the Israel Venture Capital Research Center, "M&A activity involving Israeli companies that were either acquired or merged totaled $10.58 billion in 2006 in 76 deals. The total dollar volume was significantly higher than in previous years and was a third of the $35.8 billion for Israeli high-tech M&A deals since 2000." The IVC Research Center also reports that "in 2006, 20 Israeli companies raised $693 million through initial public offerings on U.S., European, Asian, and Israeli stock exchanges."
Indeed, though it garners relatively scant attention given the Palestinian problem and the broader Middle Eastern conflict, Israel's economy, stock market, and high-tech sector are all roaring. On January 15th the Bank of Israel announced that foreign investment in Israel had soared from $9.9 billion in 2005 to a record high of $21.1 billion in 2006. (In 2004 the figure stood at $7.2 billion.) Foreign direct investment jumped from $5.6 billion in 2005 to $13.2 billion in 2006.
Updated Bank of Israel figures on GDP growth, released in late December, estimated 4.8 percent growth in 2006 and 4.6 percent growth in 2007. (GDP growth was 5.2 percent in 2005.) Both numbers were larger than previous forecasts. "The Israeli economy is in good shape, and I am trying not to exaggerate," Bank of Israel governor Stanley Fischer told the Herzliya conference last month.
The Israeli political system, by contrast, remains mired in despondency and malaise. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is bogged down in a bank scandal. The president is facing rape charges. The finance minister is under suspicion in an embezzlement case. A former justice minister has been convicted of sexual misconduct. The army chief of staff resigned last month, and the defense minister is resisting calls for his own departure. Meanwhile the Iranians are hurrying to build nukes, and the lingering fallout from last summer's war with Hezbollah has many Israelis questioning the future of Zionism. All of this contributes to what Rabbi Daniel Gordis of the Mandel Foundation calls a "national funk."
YET IN A COUNTRY WHERE optimism often falls victim to harsh realities, Jonathan Medved seems positively ebullient--and with good reason. Medved (whose brother Michael achieved fame in the U.S. as a conservative talk-radio host and film critic) is one of Israel's most successful venture capitalists. Speaking to a visiting delegation of journalists sponsored by the pro-Israel American Israel Education Foundation (which supports the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), he boasts that the Israeli high-tech sector is "second only to Silicon Valley" when it comes to company creation and innovation. Israel now has several dozen firms listed on Nasdaq, placing it among the global leaders. "It's hard to find an American tech company who doesn't have a facility here or an activity here," says Medved, noting that such software behemoths as Intel, Cisco, and Microsoft all do huge amounts of business in Israel.
This may seem surprising, considering that Israel is roughly the size of New Jersey and that, according to the most recent estimate, its population is only about 7.1 million. Then there is the obvious specter of terrorism and war: Shouldn't that discourage foreign investors and foster a noxious business climate?
Yes, and it did during the height of the Palestinian intifada from 2001 to 2003. One cannot overstate how important it was for Israel to staunch the tide of suicide bombings in its urban hubs. This helped revive the tourism industry and assure outside investors of the durability of Israel's economy. But that's not the whole story.
"High tech is less about geopolitics than it is about culture," says Medved. "California and Israel are the beacons of informality." He adds that Israelis, like Americans, are notably risk-acceptant: "In this country," risk is a "very normal thing." Israeli businessmen also benefit from the social ties forged during their years of compulsory military service, and from the international networks brought by well-educated foreign immigrants. (The army, says Medved, often provides the basis for future employment.)
Another factor fueling the high-tech boom is Israel's sophisticated "incubator" system of aiding startups through government or private funding. More broadly, the Israeli economy has undergone a makeover in recent years, transitioning from decades of socialism toward greater competition and economic freedom. The sweeping reform of Israel's capital markets, enacted in 2005, was a watershed moment, helping to break up a monopolistic banking sector. So were the tax cuts championed by former Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu, an advocate of Reaganite-Thatcherite economics, who served as finance minister from 2003 to 2005.
Though he claims he doesn't share his brother's conservative politics, Jonathan Medved praises the current Likud leader for lowering taxes. When Netanyahu took office as finance minister in 2003, Israel was reeling from a stubborn recession, aggravated by the Palestinian intifada. "Before last fall," the New York Times reported in June 2001, "the Israeli economy was in the best shape of its history. Now, battered by eight months of violence and bludgeoned by Nasdaq, it is slowing to a crawl." Double-digit unemployment, rampant bankruptcy filings, and a severe tourism slump were three of the most glaring symptoms.
Netanyahu's free-market, pro-growth agenda helped reverse these trends, as did the decline in Palestinian suicide bombings and the global economic recovery. The Bank of Israel also pitched in by slashing interest rates. According to figures released in late December, the average Israeli unemployment rate for 2006 was roughly 8.5 percent, and expected to fall to 8.1 percent in 2007. These numbers, while still high by American standards, are decidedly lower than the 10-11 percent unemployment Israel experienced during the peak of the intifada.
TO BE SURE, government spending still swallows a hefty chunk of GDP. The 2007 Index of Economic Freedom, compiled by the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation, ranked Israel as "the world's 37th freest economy": behind El Salvador but ahead of France. "Israel enjoys high levels of trade freedom, monetary freedom, investment freedom, and labor freedom," says the report. However it remains "weak in business freedom and freedom from government." (For example: "Starting a business takes an average of 34 days, compared to the world average of 48 days.")
Whatever an Israeli's thoughts on his own economy--and the poverty that persists among Arabs, Ethiopians, and others--he can hardly be sanguine about the Palestinian situation. Thanks to disengagement from Gaza and the construction of the West Bank security barrier, the Israeli and Palestinian economies are increasingly isolated. The latter has become a dysfunctional basket-case, partly due to the separation from Israel, partly due to the aid cutoff following Hamas's election victory in January 2006, but also as a result of Arafat's kleptocratic legacy and internecine violence between Hamas and Fatah. Gaza in particular is a simmering cauldron of unemployed young men and abundant Qassam rockets.
Israelis know they can't merely ignore this. It's true that their economy weathered the Lebanon war this past summer. It's less clear how it would handle another wave of Palestinian suicide bombings, or a nuclear Iran.
Which brings us back to the "national funk" mentioned by Rabbi Gordis. Despite having "an economy chugging along quite nicely, even in the face of everything," writes Gordis, Israelis are terribly disillusioned. The Lebanon war and its aftermath created a new feeling of vulnerability. One frequently hears complaints that the political system is "broken." "The basic mood in our society is against politicians," says Matan Vilnai, a Labour member of parliament, who wryly questions whether even Israeli founding father David Ben-Gurion could last more than "ten minutes" as prime minister today. Warren Buffett may bring gobs of investment capital, but he cannot bring Israelis what they crave most: an enduring sense of normalcy and security.
Duncan Currie is a reporter at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
JerusalemLAST MAY, just two months before Israel found itself embroiled in a war with Hezbollah, the world's most successful investor, Warren Buffett, purchased an 80 percent share in Iscar Metalworking, an Israeli toolmaker, for some $4 billion. Prior to closing the deal, Buffett had never visited the Iscar headquarters. Nor had he ever visited Israel. But that didn't deter him. "We are investing $4 billion in an amazing band of people from Israel," he told an Israeli financial newspaper. "If your readers know a company that resembles Iscar, even a little, have them call me immediately. I want to buy. Let them call me collect."
Then in late July, as war raged in Lebanon and Hezbollah rained rockets down on northern Israel, the Silicon Valley giant SanDisk, which purports to be "the world's largest supplier of flash memory data storage products," announced its purchase of an Israeli company for stock then valued at nearly $1.6 billion. Just a few days earlier, Hewlett-Packard had publicized its agreement to buy out the scandal-plagued firm Mercury Interactive for roughly $4.5 billion. In November HP announced that the former Mercury office in Yehud, Israel, would become its biggest research and development center in the world.
The SanDisk and HP deals were hardly anomalies. Despite war and domestic political turmoil, 2006 proved a banner year for Israel's high-tech boom. Consider the numbers on merger and acquisition activity. According to the Israel Venture Capital Research Center, "M&A activity involving Israeli companies that were either acquired or merged totaled $10.58 billion in 2006 in 76 deals. The total dollar volume was significantly higher than in previous years and was a third of the $35.8 billion for Israeli high-tech M&A deals since 2000." The IVC Research Center also reports that "in 2006, 20 Israeli companies raised $693 million through initial public offerings on U.S., European, Asian, and Israeli stock exchanges."
Indeed, though it garners relatively scant attention given the Palestinian problem and the broader Middle Eastern conflict, Israel's economy, stock market, and high-tech sector are all roaring. On January 15th the Bank of Israel announced that foreign investment in Israel had soared from $9.9 billion in 2005 to a record high of $21.1 billion in 2006. (In 2004 the figure stood at $7.2 billion.) Foreign direct investment jumped from $5.6 billion in 2005 to $13.2 billion in 2006.
Updated Bank of Israel figures on GDP growth, released in late December, estimated 4.8 percent growth in 2006 and 4.6 percent growth in 2007. (GDP growth was 5.2 percent in 2005.) Both numbers were larger than previous forecasts. "The Israeli economy is in good shape, and I am trying not to exaggerate," Bank of Israel governor Stanley Fischer told the Herzliya conference last month.
The Israeli political system, by contrast, remains mired in despondency and malaise. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is bogged down in a bank scandal. The president is facing rape charges. The finance minister is under suspicion in an embezzlement case. A former justice minister has been convicted of sexual misconduct. The army chief of staff resigned last month, and the defense minister is resisting calls for his own departure. Meanwhile the Iranians are hurrying to build nukes, and the lingering fallout from last summer's war with Hezbollah has many Israelis questioning the future of Zionism. All of this contributes to what Rabbi Daniel Gordis of the Mandel Foundation calls a "national funk."
YET IN A COUNTRY WHERE optimism often falls victim to harsh realities, Jonathan Medved seems positively ebullient--and with good reason. Medved (whose brother Michael achieved fame in the U.S. as a conservative talk-radio host and film critic) is one of Israel's most successful venture capitalists. Speaking to a visiting delegation of journalists sponsored by the pro-Israel American Israel Education Foundation (which supports the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), he boasts that the Israeli high-tech sector is "second only to Silicon Valley" when it comes to company creation and innovation. Israel now has several dozen firms listed on Nasdaq, placing it among the global leaders. "It's hard to find an American tech company who doesn't have a facility here or an activity here," says Medved, noting that such software behemoths as Intel, Cisco, and Microsoft all do huge amounts of business in Israel.
This may seem surprising, considering that Israel is roughly the size of New Jersey and that, according to the most recent estimate, its population is only about 7.1 million. Then there is the obvious specter of terrorism and war: Shouldn't that discourage foreign investors and foster a noxious business climate?
Yes, and it did during the height of the Palestinian intifada from 2001 to 2003. One cannot overstate how important it was for Israel to staunch the tide of suicide bombings in its urban hubs. This helped revive the tourism industry and assure outside investors of the durability of Israel's economy. But that's not the whole story.
"High tech is less about geopolitics than it is about culture," says Medved. "California and Israel are the beacons of informality." He adds that Israelis, like Americans, are notably risk-acceptant: "In this country," risk is a "very normal thing." Israeli businessmen also benefit from the social ties forged during their years of compulsory military service, and from the international networks brought by well-educated foreign immigrants. (The army, says Medved, often provides the basis for future employment.)
Another factor fueling the high-tech boom is Israel's sophisticated "incubator" system of aiding startups through government or private funding. More broadly, the Israeli economy has undergone a makeover in recent years, transitioning from decades of socialism toward greater competition and economic freedom. The sweeping reform of Israel's capital markets, enacted in 2005, was a watershed moment, helping to break up a monopolistic banking sector. So were the tax cuts championed by former Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu, an advocate of Reaganite-Thatcherite economics, who served as finance minister from 2003 to 2005.
Though he claims he doesn't share his brother's conservative politics, Jonathan Medved praises the current Likud leader for lowering taxes. When Netanyahu took office as finance minister in 2003, Israel was reeling from a stubborn recession, aggravated by the Palestinian intifada. "Before last fall," the New York Times reported in June 2001, "the Israeli economy was in the best shape of its history. Now, battered by eight months of violence and bludgeoned by Nasdaq, it is slowing to a crawl." Double-digit unemployment, rampant bankruptcy filings, and a severe tourism slump were three of the most glaring symptoms.
Netanyahu's free-market, pro-growth agenda helped reverse these trends, as did the decline in Palestinian suicide bombings and the global economic recovery. The Bank of Israel also pitched in by slashing interest rates. According to figures released in late December, the average Israeli unemployment rate for 2006 was roughly 8.5 percent, and expected to fall to 8.1 percent in 2007. These numbers, while still high by American standards, are decidedly lower than the 10-11 percent unemployment Israel experienced during the peak of the intifada.
TO BE SURE, government spending still swallows a hefty chunk of GDP. The 2007 Index of Economic Freedom, compiled by the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation, ranked Israel as "the world's 37th freest economy": behind El Salvador but ahead of France. "Israel enjoys high levels of trade freedom, monetary freedom, investment freedom, and labor freedom," says the report. However it remains "weak in business freedom and freedom from government." (For example: "Starting a business takes an average of 34 days, compared to the world average of 48 days.")
Whatever an Israeli's thoughts on his own economy--and the poverty that persists among Arabs, Ethiopians, and others--he can hardly be sanguine about the Palestinian situation. Thanks to disengagement from Gaza and the construction of the West Bank security barrier, the Israeli and Palestinian economies are increasingly isolated. The latter has become a dysfunctional basket-case, partly due to the separation from Israel, partly due to the aid cutoff following Hamas's election victory in January 2006, but also as a result of Arafat's kleptocratic legacy and internecine violence between Hamas and Fatah. Gaza in particular is a simmering cauldron of unemployed young men and abundant Qassam rockets.
Israelis know they can't merely ignore this. It's true that their economy weathered the Lebanon war this past summer. It's less clear how it would handle another wave of Palestinian suicide bombings, or a nuclear Iran.
Which brings us back to the "national funk" mentioned by Rabbi Gordis. Despite having "an economy chugging along quite nicely, even in the face of everything," writes Gordis, Israelis are terribly disillusioned. The Lebanon war and its aftermath created a new feeling of vulnerability. One frequently hears complaints that the political system is "broken." "The basic mood in our society is against politicians," says Matan Vilnai, a Labour member of parliament, who wryly questions whether even Israeli founding father David Ben-Gurion could last more than "ten minutes" as prime minister today. Warren Buffett may bring gobs of investment capital, but he cannot bring Israelis what they crave most: an enduring sense of normalcy and security.
Duncan Currie is a reporter at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Israeli Defense Minister Inspects War Moves Through Capped Binoculars
Friday , February 23, 2007
Israel's beleaguered minister of defense was blinded by criticism over photos taken of him watching military maneuvers through binoculars with the lens caps still on.
Various newspapers published photos of the in-the-dark Amir Peretz peering through the dysfunctional binoculars during an inspection of Israeli troops in the Syria-bordering Golan Heights, the BBC reported.
Israeli Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi pointed out the war moves and explained them to Peretz, who looked through the capped device three times and nodded, according to the BBC, even though all he saw was black.
"The outlook is dark for Peretz," joked top-selling daily Yediot Aharonot.
Photographs splashed across Israel's two major newspapers on Thursday, showed Peretz, lips set in concentration, face tilted to the light and eyes glued to binoculars ... with their black lens caps still firmly on.
Alongside him, his right-hand man, Ashkenazi, kitted out in battle dress, expertly adjusts his own binoculars to watch troops going through their paces on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Peretz, a former trade union chief whose own military experience is limited to national service, has been vilified in Israel for his perceived mishandling of last year's war in Lebanon.
A vast majority of Israelis want him to resign from the defense ministry on the grounds of chronic incompetence and military inexperience.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Israel's beleaguered minister of defense was blinded by criticism over photos taken of him watching military maneuvers through binoculars with the lens caps still on.
Various newspapers published photos of the in-the-dark Amir Peretz peering through the dysfunctional binoculars during an inspection of Israeli troops in the Syria-bordering Golan Heights, the BBC reported.
Israeli Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi pointed out the war moves and explained them to Peretz, who looked through the capped device three times and nodded, according to the BBC, even though all he saw was black.
"The outlook is dark for Peretz," joked top-selling daily Yediot Aharonot.
Photographs splashed across Israel's two major newspapers on Thursday, showed Peretz, lips set in concentration, face tilted to the light and eyes glued to binoculars ... with their black lens caps still firmly on.
Alongside him, his right-hand man, Ashkenazi, kitted out in battle dress, expertly adjusts his own binoculars to watch troops going through their paces on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Peretz, a former trade union chief whose own military experience is limited to national service, has been vilified in Israel for his perceived mishandling of last year's war in Lebanon.
A vast majority of Israelis want him to resign from the defense ministry on the grounds of chronic incompetence and military inexperience.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
