Marco Villa

A new joint report by the United Nations Development Programme and the Arab League - issued ahead of the September 2010 international gathering to mark the tenth anniversary of the Millennium [poverty-reduction] Goals - does not reflect well on the Arab world.

The region is singled out for the incredibly high degree of poverty between the 25 Arab countries and Palestinian occupied territories. In an Arab world of 358million, 140million live in poverty. That’s 40% of Arabs.

Poverty levels vary from one nation to the next, but even oil-rich countries like Saudi Arabia have high percentages of their population living below the poverty line. Egypt, the most Arab populous country with 80million people, records a poverty level of 40% - defined as living on less than $2 a day.

More depressingly, the report noted that “there has been no decrease in the rates of poverty in the Arab region over the past 20 years.” Caveat: the face of poverty has changed in the region. Extreme forms of poverty has been greatly reduced in many nations. Nonetheless, the percentage has not changed, but this is in larger measure due to the high level of population growth. Many people move out of poverty, but many are also born into poverty as birth rates remain high in the region. Either way, the statics are unfortunate.

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Richard K. Moore

In questions of science, the authority
of a thousand is not worth the humble
reasoning of a single individual.
– Galileo Galilei

Whenever you find that you are on the
side of the majority, it is time to pause
and reflect.
– Mark Twain

You've all heard of Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation is to be preferred. I have my own Occam's Razor: whatever the regime is selling is based on lies. I was quite concerned about co2 emissions for years, right up until the time Gore took up the cause. Then I said, Whoa! Time to reconsider.

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Stephen Lendman

Obama Year One: Betrayal and Failure (Part I)

Part II concludes an account of Obama's betrayal, not promised change. Obamacare Plans to Ration Healthcare and Enrich Big Providers

After House passage in November, the Senate is now about to pass a stealth scheme to ration care and enrich insurers, the drug cartel, and large hospital chains, the way Washington always works.

It plans market-based solutions, featuring cost-containing measures, mostly affecting working Americans, the poor, elderly, and chronically ill to make a dysfunctional system worse, under the guise of reform, the most dangerous and deceptive word in the language to take cover from when announced.

Besides enriching providers, Obamacare will force millions to pay more, get less, with millions still uninsured and left out. Employers will be able to opt out of providing coverage, but since insurance for most will be mandated, those without it will have to buy it or face hundreds of dollars in penalties, whether or not they can afford it. Even with a public option, looking less likely, insurers will get to skim off the cream, charge what they wish, profit handsomely at low risk, and leave Washington stuck with ones industry doesn't want. For providers, it's a win-win under any version being considered.

Most disturbing are planned Medicare cuts, around $400 - $570 billion, depending on which numbers are most accurate, and these are for starters, a foot in the door if enacted, toward the long-term aim ending Medicare, then Medicaid and Social Security because, at $106 trillion in unfunded liabilities, budget constraints can't sustain them.

The Congressional Budget Office's June 2009 "Long-Term Budget Outlook" suggests a nation in decline, eventual hyperinflation, possible bankruptcy because of a greater national debt than during the Great Depression and near-surpassing WW II. The administration's solution - end entitlements over 100 million Americans rely on, but it still may be too little, too late given an overstretched budget, a weakening dollar, and foreign investors looking for safer returns on their capital, so are less willing to fund Washington's excesses.

In Obama's America, the least advantaged will carry the load, not privileged elites, but don't expect congressional opposition to stop him or news reports to explain it.

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David Walsh

“I hate a cinema that’s been taken over by special effects. I’ve given up going to almost all of the contemporary action movies. I still enjoy action movies, I like exciting films, but I don’t find the contemporary ones exciting. They’re just boring.” —Film critic Robin Wood (died December 18, 2009), in an interview with the WSWS, September 2000

In March 1998, filmmaker James Cameron received the Academy Award for “Achievement in directing” thanks to his work on the immensely successful Titanic, released the previous year. Over the better part of the next decade, Cameron directed several documentaries, a television special, and an episode of a television series, prior to working directly on Avatar, his newest film, which took some four years to put together.

In other words, after accepting the film industry’s highest official honor for feature film directing, Cameron turned his back on the activity, primarily devoting himself instead to the development of various film technologies. This seems entirely fitting.

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David Calleja

Kyaw Zaw Lwin (left), Khin Ohmar (middle) from The
Forum for Democracy in Burma and Tate Naing, Secretary
of the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners
(Burma). Photo: PRI's The World, courtesy of Wa Wa
Kyaw

There are growing fears for the health of Kyaw Zaw Lwin, a Burmese-born American democracy activist on hunger strike since December 4.

The concerns for his plight coincide with a letter from the U.S. Congress addressed to the leader of Burma’s military regime, Senior-General Than Shwe “urging in the strongest possible terms” for Zaw Lwin’s immediate unconditional release to fly back to the United States.

The letter, signed by a delegation of 53 members of the House of Representatives says that Kyaw Zaw Lwin’s imprisonment is a breach of Burmese and international law. The letters warns the Burmese military regime that “the detention of an American citizen raise serious doubts about your government’s willingness to improve relations with the United States.”

It comes more than one week after Senator Jim Webb, who successfully lobbied for John William Yettaw’s release on an unofficial visit to Burma in August, released a statement on December 11 calling for the Burmese regime to allow regular U.S. consular visits and “guarantee [Kyaw Zaw Lwin] full rights under international law.”

The case is a major test of the Obama administration’s policy of direct engagement with Burma’s military regime.

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S. Fred Singer

The following is adapted from a lecture delivered on the Hillsdale College campus on June 30, 2007, during a seminar entitled “Economics and the Environment,” sponsored by the Charles R. and Kathleen K. Hoogland Center for Teacher Excellence.

In the past few years there has been increasing concern about global climate change on the part of the media, politicians, and the public. It has been stimulated by the idea that human activities may influence global climate adversely and that therefore corrective action is required on the part of governments. Recent evidence suggests that this concern is misplaced. Human activities are not influencing the global climate in a perceptible way. Climate will continue to change, as it always has in the past, warming and cooling on different time scales and for different reasons, regardless of human action. I would also argue that—should it occur—a modest warming would be on the whole beneficial.

This is not to say that we don’t face a serious problem. But the problem is political. Because of the mistaken idea that governments can and must do something about climate, pressures are building that have the potential of distorting energy policies in a way that will severely damage national economies, decrease standards of living, and increase poverty. This misdi-rection of resources will adversely affect human health and welfare in industrialized nations, and even more in developing nations. Thus it could well lead to increased social tensions within nations and conflict between them.

If not for this economic and political damage, one might consider the present concern about climate change nothing more than just another environmentalist fad, like the Alar apple scare or the global cooling fears of the 1970s. Given that so much is at stake, how-ever, it is essential that people better understand the issue.

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Frank Furedi

Frank Furedi recalls being educated through fear in Stalinist Hungary, and is disturbed that the same tactics are now used by environmentalists.

There is a long and sordid tradition of trying to socialise children by scaring them. The aim of such socialisation-through-fear is twofold: firstly, to get children to conform to the scaremongers’ values; secondly, to use children to influence, or at least to contain, their parents’ behaviour.

When I was a schoolchild in Stalinist Hungary, we were frequently warned about the numerous threats facing our glorious regime. I also recall that we were encouraged to lecture our errant parents about the new wonderful values being promoted by our brave, wise leaders. The Big Brothers of the 1940s saw children as tools of moral blackmail and social control. Today, in the twenty-first century, scaremongers see children in much the same way, exploiting their natural concern with the wonders of life to promote a message of shrill climate alarmism.

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Terence Corcoran

The scientists seem to have become captive of the IPCC’s objectives

Now that the Copenhagen political games are out of the way, marked as a failure by any realistic standard, it may be time to move on to the science games. To get the post-Copenhagen science review underway, the world has a fine document at hand: The Climategate Papers.

On Nov. 17, three weeks before the Copenhagen talks began, a massive cache of climate science emails landed on a Russian server, reportedly after having been laundered through Saudi Arabia. Where they came from, nobody yet knows. Described as having been hacked or leaked from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, the emails have been the focus of thousands of media and blog reports. Since their release, all the attention has been dedicated to a few choice bits of what seem like incriminating evidence of trickery and scientific repression. Some call it fraud.

Email fragments instantly began flying through the blogosphere. Perhaps the most sensational came from a Nov. 16, 1999, email from Phil Jones, head of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), in which he referred to having “completed Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline” in temperature.

These words, now famous around the world as the core of Climategate, are in fact the grossest possible oversimplification of what the emails contain. The Phil Jones email and other choice email fragments are really just microscopic particles taken from a massive collection of material that will, in time, come to be seen as the greatest and most dramatic science policy epic in history.

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Stephen Lendman

Obama Year One: Betrayal and Failure (Part II)

Promising change after eight George Bush and Republican dominated years, Barack Obama won the most sweeping non-incumbent victory in over 50 years along with congressional Democrats gaining large House and Senate majorities. In addition, at 56.8%, voter turnout was the highest since Richard Nixon's "secret plan" to end the Vietnam war and his "Southern" and "law and order" strategies beat Hubert Humphrey and independent George Wallace in 1968.

On election night, the mood celebrated hope for progressive change, an end to imperial wars, and a new day for America. When word came around 10PM, expectant thousands in Chicago's Grant Park erupted with chants of "yes we can," hoping Obama would make a difference at a time of deepening economic duress.

In its November 4, 2008 editorial titled, "The Next President," The New York Times called it "one of those moments in history when it is worth pausing to reflect on the basic facts," then listed some:

-- for the first time, Americans elected a black president;

-- his triumph was "decisive and sweeping, because he saw what is wrong with this country, (and will change direction) to regulate the economy fairly, keep the air clean and the food safe, ensure that the sick have access to health care, and educate children to compete in a globalized world;"

-- he "committed to ending a bloody and pointless (Afghan) war (and) restore Americans' civil liberties and (the nation's) reputation around the world;"

-- he must now "prevent an economic collapse fed by greed and an orgy of speculation (by) impos(ing) control, coherence, transparency and fairness," in contrast to George Bush; and

-- he "now needs the support of all Americans (to help him deal with the) many other urgent problems that must be addressed."

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Thunder Horse

Have you ever wondered how animals know when a natural disaster is coming? Why don’t people take these signs into consideration throughout their lives? These are a few questions I have often wondered about. Nature has a way of communicating through its own language. It is up to us to interpret these signs and use them to our advantage. Nature always works in harmony.

When the first European people came to North America, they saw the American Indian praying to animals, plants, rivers, lakes, the sun, the moon, the wind, the lightening, the thunder, and even the birds. They called the Indians heathens and savages. For some strange reason they developed the idea that the Indian did not believe in God, although in many different tribal languages there were references to a Great Spirit, the Great Creator, the Maker, the Great Mystery, or the Great Invisible One. The truth is that not only did the American Indians worship God, but they also respected and communicated with that which God had created.

Despite the forces of assimilation, traditional American Indians and the holy men/women still understand the sacredness of nature. They see the life giving force of the Great Spirit flowering through all things in the universe. Because of ancient beliefs, teachings, and spiritual practices, they feel and maintain a direct kinship with all creations. In the traditional American Indian belief system, everything is a source of power, and as a result it should be revered. The traditional American Indian believes that each living thing in nature has a spirit of its own, in addition to being connected to and part of the Great Mystery. This is why they pray and give thanks to the sun, moon, stars, rain, wind waters, and all those that walk, crawl, fly, and swim, both seen and unseen. We realize we cannot survive or live without our relations. We also realize that they cannot live without us; that’s why there is a reciprocal relationship.

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Chris Floyd

While we were all out doing our Christmas shopping, the highest court in the land quietly put the kibosh on a few more of the remaining shards of human liberty.

It happened earlier this week, in a discreet ruling that attracted almost no notice and took little time. In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.

Here's how the bad deal went down. After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president's fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a "suspected enemy combatant" by the president or his designated minions is no longer a "person." They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever -- save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

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Muhammad Sahimi

He was not willing to sell his soul to stay in power.

Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, the spiritual leader of the Iran's democratic movement, and one of two top ayatollahs in Shia Islam (Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq is the other), passed away in his sleep on Saturday.

Grand Ayatollah Montazeri was born in 1922 in Najafabad, a town in the province of Isfahan in central Iran. His father Ali was a farmer who also taught reading and interpretation of the Quran to the townspeople. The young Montazeri entered the seminary at Isfahan at the age of twelve. After finishing his preliminary studies in 1941, he moved to the holy city of Qom and began his theological studies. He was a student of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the future leader of the 1979 Revolution. Years after the 1979 Revolution toppled the regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Ayatollah Khomeini referred to Grand Ayatollah Montazeri as "the fruit of my life."

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Rachel Roth

Over the past year, incarcerated women and their allies have achieved a remarkable string of victories against inhumane treatment. First, they persuaded the Bureau of Prisons to issue a new policy in October 2008 limiting the use of restraints on women who are in labor, giving birth or recovering after childbirth; the Marshals Service, which transports people in federal custody, followed suit. Next, they won legislation in the spring and summer of 2009 restricting the use of restraints on pregnant women in New Mexico, Texas and New York. Finally, they successfully petitioned the US Court of Appeals Eighth Circuit for a rehearing of the full court in a case from Arkansas, which resulted in a ruling in October that shackling women in labor is unconstitutional.

These developments send a strong signal to the rest of the country to stop subjecting women to this dangerous and degrading practice. But what happens to pregnant women in prison before they wind up in chains at a hospital?

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Mick Greenhough

In his presentations on global warming Al Gore likes to use a graph similar to the one below from Vostok, Antarctica, ice cores to show apparent correlations between temperature and carbon dioxide. When pressed about cause and effect, Gore says the relationship is “complex.”

The scientists working on the Vostok ice core report that temperature changes PRECEDE changes in CO2 concentration by about 800- to 1,300 years. This should not be surprising because temperature has great influence on CO2 solubility in the ocean. Notice that the temperature cycles occur in approximately 100,000 (±20,000)-year intervals. This coincides with the variation in the precession of the Earth’s elliptical orbit around the Sun. Can you think of anything that would make CO2 cycle this way if it were the driver rather than temperature? And what would stop the rise of CO2 if it were the controlling variable?

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Merv Bendle

The postmodern politics of climate change

In the realm of disinformation, the prize must go to Al Gore who appeared in front of video images of a collapsing glacier to declare that the South Pole will be ice-free within five years. Such deliberate misrepresentations are linked to a further feature of this type of postmodern politics: the assertion of a militant and intransigent stance and violent denunciation of all compromise. All of this is then cloaked with the trappings of high moralism and the attribution and acceptance of guilt and shame, especially by the leadership of Western countries, which specializes in self-laceration.

Whatever the ultimate effects of the Copenhagen Conference may be, it was an excellent example of the postmodern mode of politics that increasingly dominates contemporary societies.

Postmodernism has various characteristics, but the relevant one here is the assumption that there is no ‘real’ world and that what we take for ‘reality’ is a text, narrative, or stream of images which lack any underlying referent. Politically, this attitude manifests itself in a disconnection between the symbolism and substance of an issue accompanied by an obsessive concern with that symbolism and an ultimate disregard for the substance. Central to this literally unreal and increasingly sinister situation are the state’s efforts to deal with the omnipresent media. The latter operate on a 24 hour news cycle and myriad government agencies have been set up to manage the sort of politics this creates, in what is increasingly referred to as a ‘PR State’. Much of Australia’s extraordinarily large 114 person delegation to Copenhagen consisted of people associated with such tasks.

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Paul Driessen

As frigid Copenhagen holds its Climate Armageddon confab, a predictable barrage of hothouse horrors has been unleashed, to advance proposals to slash hydrocarbon use and carbon dioxide emissions, restrict agriculture and economic growth, and implement global governance and taxation.

CO2 has reached a new high (0.0385% of the atmosphere), we’re told, because of cars and “coal-fired factories of death.” Rising seas are forcing families to “flee their homes.” Oceans are becoming “toxic.” Climate change is driving Philippine women into prostitution. Higher temperatures will “increase the likelihood of civil war in Sub-Saharan Africa” and “bring human civilization to a screeching halt.” The Associated Press, BBC and other “mainstream” media dutifully regurgitate every press release.

However, the planet and science are not cooperating with the fear-mongering. There has been no statistically significant global warming for over a decade, despite steadily increasing CO2 levels – and for several years average annual global temperatures have actually declined.

Carbon dioxide plays only a minor role, many scientists say, and our climate is still controlled by periodic variations in the same natural forces that caused previous climate changes: ocean currents and jet streams, water vapor and cloud cover, evaporation and precipitation, planetary alignments and the shape of the Earth’s orbit, the tilt and wobble of Earth’s axis, cosmic ray levels and especially solar energy output.

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Ramesh Kumar

In Hindu religion, the corpse is cremated by burning them on funeral pyre (Wood heaped for burning a dead body as a funeral rite). This practice is prevailing since centuries along with the religious rituals and beliefs. There are several places/grounds particularly for cremation and it takes around 300-400kg of wood to burn the corpse. This tradition or practice needs to be stopped in the view of the environment degradation and deforestation. The Govt. came out with an eco-friendly solution known as - ELECTRIC CREMATOR, but it is been rarely used by the people, because of their religious beliefs do not allow them to follow so. There are many harmful effects of cremating the corpse, as they are burnt in the open area and there is no way to control the gases released from the burning corpse. As a result these gases flow into the air and pollutes the environment creates health issues, if the cremation place is near any residential area. Due to congestion in the cities most of the crematorium can be found surrounded by the residential areas. Same is the case with Christian n Islamic practice to bury the corpse under the land. This requires a lot of space and as the corpse is placed into a wooden box and then they make it to bury under, so again the boxes are wood produce and this leads to deforestation. So instead of cremating or burring the corpse, adopting electric cremation is totally an eco-friendly way, while simultaneously following the other rituals and dignity of one’s religion. And the same can be done by following Electric cremation.

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William A. Cook

"The white civilized man (is) the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth." (Herman Melville, 1840s)

In 1841, Melville sailed aboard the Acushnet, a whaling vessel, on a three year trip to the South Seas. By July of 1842, Melville and a shipmate, Toby Greene, jumped ship revolting against the tyrannical powers that brutalized the crew by oppressing these men of many races. Having witnessed American warships firing their guns at naked islanders in the Marquesas, Tahiti, and Hawaii and watched "rapacious hordes of enlightened individuals" seizing the "depopulated land" from the natives, reducing them to starving "interlopers" in their own country, he realized that the superior white Christian civilization epitomized absolute savagery and that cannibals treated others with more humanity than these self-identified enlightened men. That understanding of the civilized white man struck me with its absoluteness, its certainty, its expressive force the moment I opened my file of little four year old Kaukab Al Dayah, whose tender face rests on top of the rubble of her home, an unsuspecting victim of white Zionist brutality that delivered her family a missile as a Christmas gift just over a year ago. (See Salaman, "The true Jew is the European Ashkenazi … of whitish appearance," in Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People). (To see the picture of Kaukab Al Dayah, google her name. Two sites have photos: Getty Images and Laweranceofcyberia).

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Dr Titine Kriesi

About the historical situation with the EU Reform Treaty taking effect

Recent events demonstrated once more to the world how European Union executives would like their citizens to behave. Many people witnessed how entire nations and personalities were abused if lobbyists had reason to suspect dissent regarding the EU treaty and a voting result other than the desired one. Defamation and the pressure imposed were unprecedented. Was that not in contradiction to the statement of the German Constitutional Court which named the European Union member states – not the Brussels officials! – the “Sovereigns of the treaty”? The court also attested both institutional and structural deficits in democracy to the treaty. After all that should not come as a surprise considering that this treaty is the final outcome of a sinister concept pursued for 50 years aiming from the start for power to control Europe in America`s interest. And democracy never had a place in this concept. It fits the plan that the functionaries would love to apply the treaty to Switzerland straightaway, although they know well that a majority of the Swiss say, No, we do not want that. The EU style sham democracy procedures, in which political positions and institutions are only too often more important than people will make sure that citizens with a true feeling for self-rule and independence will realize only after some time where the democracy deficits are after the treaty takes effect.

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David Kerans

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed…. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people…. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. –President Dwight Eisenhower

Eisenhower’s warnings regarding the insidious influence of the military are some of the best known of all reflections on American society, owing to their prescience. Diligent observers have kept a close watch on the manner in which the swelling military-industrial complex has been shaping the country’s economy and affecting its foreign policy, such that a significant portion of the public is at least somewhat aware of the relevant issues. Much less well known, however, are the ways in which the long hegemony of the military-industrial complex has allowed it both to expand its influence and to rot. As we shall see, the last decade of military adventurism has revealed alarming new processes at work, raising problems which not even Eisenhower anticipated.

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