Friday, November 26th, 2010
EDEN NABY, JAMSHEED K. CHOKSY, - Foreign Policy
Stephan: This is a very good assessment of what is really going on in Iran, being distinct from most of the bloviation on and about Iran.
Eden Naby is a cultural historian of the Middle East. She has taught at the University of Wisconsin and Harvard University. Her book on Assyrian Christians will be published in 2011.
Jamsheed K. Choksy is professor of Iranian and international studies at Indiana University and a member of the National Council on the Humanities.
Screaming ‘kill, kill, kill,’ suicide bombers belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq, a militant organization connected to al Qaeda in Iraq, stormed a Chaldean church in Baghdad on Sunday. A spokesman for the group subsequently claimed they did so ‘to light the fuse of a campaign against Iraqi Christians.’ The assailants’ more immediate grievance seems related to a demand that two Muslim women, allegedly held against their will in Egyptian Coptic monasteries, be released. When Iraqi government forces attempted to free approximately 120 parishioners who had been taken hostage, the terrorists — who had already shot dead some of the churchgoers — detonated their suicide vests and grenades, slaughtering at least half the congregation.
But the massacre in Baghdad is only the most spectacular example of mounting discrimination and persecution of the native Christian communities of Iraq and Iran, which are now in the middle of a massive exodus unprecedented in modern times as they confront a rising tide of Islamic militancy and religious chauvinism sweeping the region.
Christians are the largest non-Muslim religious minority in both Iraq and Iran, with roots in the Middle East that date back to the earliest days of the faith. Some follow the Apostolic Orthodox […]
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Thursday, November 25th, 2010
René Schoemaker, - RC World
Stephan: Very little thought is given to the amount of em radiation we are subjected to just in the course of ordinary daily life. This study suggests we need to pay much more attention to this issue.
Thanks to Rick Ingrasci, MD
Radiation from Wi-Fi networks is harmful to trees, causing significant variations in growth, as well as bleeding and fissures in the bark, according to a recent study in the Netherlands.
All deciduous trees in the Western world are affected, according to the study by Wageningen University. The city of Alphen aan den Rijn ordered the study five years ago after officials found unexplained abnormalities on trees that couldn’t be ascribed to a virus or bacterial infection.
Additional testing found the disease to occur throughout the Western world. In the Netherlands, about 70 percent of all trees in urban areas show the same symptoms, compared with only 10 percent five years ago. Trees in densely forested areas are hardly affected.
Besides the electromagnetic fields created by mobile-phone networks and wireless LANs, ultrafine particles emitted by cars and trucks may also be to blame. These particles are so small they are able to enter the organisms.
The study exposed 20 ash trees to various radiation sources for a period of three months. Trees placed closest to the Wi-Fi radio demonstrated a ‘lead-like shine’ on their leaves that was caused by the dying of the upper and lower epidermis of the leaves. This would eventually result in […]
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Thursday, November 25th, 2010
ERIC W. DOLAN, - The Raw Story
Stephan: The constant with the climate deniers is their willful ignorance and their casual attitude about simple things like ethics. Climate denial in my view, at this point, is right up there with flat earthism, and creationism. Only it is much more dangerous, because Deniers are stopping us from making a proper response to this oncoming crisis. It reminds me of a certain class of Englishman who, throughout the 1930s, thought the rise of National Socialism in Germany was good for Europe, and could not be dissuaded from that willful ignorance until the bombs started falling on London. Perhaps you remember the movie, Remains of the Day, which touched on this.
A congressional report used by Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) to question the validity of the science behind global warming in a 2006 hearing was highly plagiarized, according to experts who reviewed it.
‘The report was integral to congressional hearings about climate scientists,’ Aaron Huertas of the Union of Concerned Scientists explained. ‘And it preceded a lot of conspiratorial thinking polluting the public debate today about climate scientists.’
The report was requested by Barton in 2005, when he was the head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, a position he is currently trying to reclaim. In 2006, he said that global warming science is ‘pretty weak stuff.’
Plagiarism experts told USA Today that the report, which was authored by George Mason University statistician Edward Wegman, copied material from textbooks, Wikipedia, and other sources.
John Mashey, a retired computer scientist, conducted a year-long analysis of the Wegman report and found that 35 of the report’s 91 pages ‘are mostly plagiarized text, but often injected with errors, bias and changes of meaning.’
The Wegman report was highly critical of the ‘hockey stick graph,’ a chart of temperature variation over the last 1,000 years that showed a sharp increase during the last 100 years. That graph was first […]
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Thursday, November 25th, 2010
Stephan: Here's some more evidence that the Illness Profit model of healthcare is a failure. It is so transparently obvious that only those bedazzled by ideology can fail to see it. By every marker one chooses American healthcare is a mess. Yet politicians are still droning on about how we have 'the best health care in the world.' Are they stupid or simply duplicitous? Or, perhaps, they just think you're too stupid to notice.
Some hospitals are no safer today than they were 10 years ago, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In 1999, an Institute of Medicine (IOM) report revealed that medical errors cause as many as 98,000 deaths and more than 1 million injuries per year. Researchers have found that despite efforts to ensure patient safety in the years since the report was published, those rates have remained largely unchanged.
‘We were disappointed but not very surprised [by the results],
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Thursday, November 25th, 2010
ROBERT WRIGHT, - The New York Times
Stephan: This is an excellent analysis, and further evidence of the failure of the neocons to correctly understand the world. My own view, as regular readers know, is that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz and several others ought all to have been tried for war crimes.
‘We did the Cole and we wanted the United States to react. And if they reacted, they are going to invade Afghanistan and that’s what we want
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