Petras: HEMOS VISTO EL AUMENTO DEL MILITARISMO BAJO OBAMA Y EL FIN DE LA ILUSIÓN OBAMA QUE PARA MUCHA GENTE LIBERAL PROGRESISTA, CENTRO IZQUIERDA, MUJIQUISTAS, TENÍAN MUCHA ILUSIÓN SOBRE LO QUE SIGNIFICABA LA ELECCIÓN DE OBAMA

Comentarios para CX36 Radio Centenario de Uruguay, del sociólogo norteamericano, Prof. James Petras desde Estados Unidos. Lunes 28 de diciembre de 2009. “El más grande peligro es esta postura militarista de Estados Unidos. Ese es el gran peligro para todo el continente. La profundidad y amplitud de esta política es una amenaza a corto plazo, no es cosa de pensar en los años venideros” www.radio36.com.uy

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Rachel Shabi

Murad al Khofash, from the West Bank village of Marda,
attended the climate change talks in Copenhagen to argue
on behalf of the Palestinian Territories. Daniel Bar On for
The National

As a means to counter the creeping expansion of illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, a permaculture farm might not seem like the obvious approach. But for Murad al Khofash, who runs Marda farm in the northern West Bank, it is the natural choice.

Squashed between some of the largest and most powerful settlements, Mr al Khofash’s three-year-old eco-friendly farm is a Palestinian template of how to grow-your-own resistance, from the roots upwards.

“There are many ways to resist the occupation,” explained Mr al Khofash, who has just returned from the climate change summit in Copenhagen where he demanded the international community put the Palestinian Territories on the environmental map.

“Some resist with weapons and violence, others choose the path of negotiation. My way is to encourage Palestinians to grow trees, and to encourage them not to leave their land.”

Permaculture – an organic, holistic and sustainable system of working the land – is Mr al Khofash’s preferred weapon at a time when swathes of Palestinian land and water resources have long been appropriated or contaminated by Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which are illegal under international law.

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Ayman Quader

The harrowing experience of the siege prevents the children of the Gaza Strip from having any kind of normal childhood. Children become more acquainted with the names of the dead rather than the names of games.

One year has passed since Israel’s cruel 23-day war on the 1.5 million people of the Gaza. 1,400 people were brutally killed and tens of thousands were seriously wounded. It was 23 days that violated Palestinian human rights and put justice further out of reach. It was a war that utilized ‘state of the art’ phosphorous missiles to achieve levels of suffering and destruction that had not been seen in a generation. Tens of thousands of Gazans were made homeless and schools and hospitals were directly targeted.

The horrific 23-day bombardment of Gaza finished last January. However, the siege of Gaza and the suffering of its people continue. While UN and NGO reports describe the bombardment of Gaza and its aftermath in the abstract, talking to Gaza’s children provides an important reminder of the human side of the pain inflicted by Israel.

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Stephen Lendman

On February 1, 2009, the International Solidarity Movement reported that Israel continues its E 1 area homes and infrastructure work that includes linking its Ma'ale Adummim settlement with East Jerusalem and other settlements around it. It said Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, while in office, promised to expand E 1 development - the land northeast of Jerusalem, west of Ma'ale Adummim comprising about 12 square kilometers, all of it illegally annexed.

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Stephen Lendman

For decades, Israel has met peaceful Palestinian protesters disruptively with violence, arrests and at times unprovoked killings. It's no surprise that targeting them and their leaders is now common practice in cities and villages like Jayyous and Bil'in.

On August 3, 200 Israeli soldiers raided five Bel'in homes at 3AM arresting eight Palestinians, including Mohammad Khatib, a leader of the Bel'in Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements. It's part of Israel's repressive routine - late night arrests and imprisonment without charges for indefinite periods. Khatib faces trial, but was released on August 17 on condition he report to a police station with a monitor each Friday until 5PM for its duration. He told supporters:

"The Israeli authorities are worried that the model of popular nonviolent resistance is spreading. They are targeting the popular committees to try to crush (them) but they cannot destroy the spirit of the demonstrations in Bil'in with the arrests of individuals. The whole village is part of the nonviolent resistance and the military would have to arrest (everyone) to stop us from protesting against the Occupation and the theft of our land. Even then, when we all come out of jail, we would continue our struggle."

On September 22, Jayyous resident Mohammad Othman was arrested because of his "Stop the Wall Campaign" activism and efforts on behalf of dispossessed farmers. He's now administratively detained without charge after a military court rejected the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association's appeal on his behalf, citing "secret evidence" that he's a "security threat in the area."

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Paul Craig Roberts

On Christmas eve when Christians were celebrating the Prince of Peace, the New York Times delivered forth a call for war. “There’s only one way to stop Iran,” declared Alan J. Kuperman, and that is “military air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.” [There’s Only One Way to Stop Iran, December 23, 2009 ]

Kuperman is described as the “director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program at the University of Texas at Austin,” but his Christmas eve call to war relies on disinformation and contradiction, not on objective scholarly analysis.

For example, Kuperman contradicts the unanimous report of America’s 16 intelligence agencies, the reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Russian intelligence with his claim that Iran has a nuclear weapon program. Astonishingly, it does not occur to Kuperman that readers might wonder how an academic bureaucrat in Austin, Texas, has better information than these authorities.

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Sharon Jayson

The moral compass of some public figures clearly went awry in 2009. Now new research better explains why some in the public eye don't think like the rest of us.

Power increases "moral hypocrisy," says Adam Galinsky, a behavioral psychologist at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and co-author of a study published today in the journal Psychological Science.

NARCISSISM: It can make politicians leaders ... and cheaters

Power does indeed go to your head, making those in the limelight such as celebrities, politicians, CEOs and athletes more prone to a double standard: They're stricter in their moral judgment of others but are more lenient about their own behavior, the study suggests.

"We gave people the opportunity to cheat, and those in a position of power were more likely to cheat," says Galinsky, who conducted the study with researchers from Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

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Stephen Lendman

A December 2009 report prepared by Oxfam International, Amnesty International UK, United Civilians for Peace, Christian Aid, and a dozen other international NGOs (called NGOs below) titled, "Failing Gaza: No rebuilding, no recovery, no more excuses" is hard-hitting and to the point.

It says a year after Operation Cast Lead, extensive damage hasn't been repaired and thousands "are being prevented from rebuilding their shattered society." It's not from a lack of commitment or enough resources with over $4 billion in pledged aid. It's because Israel blocks goods and equipment from entering Gaza. The world community and Arab world do nothing to stop them, so much of the Strip still lies in ruins.

Following Hamas' January 2006 electoral victory, all outside aid was cut off. Sanctions and an economic embargo were imposed, and the democratically elected government was falsely designated a terrorist organization and isolated. Stepped up repression followed as well as regular IFD attacks, killings, targeted assassinations, property destruction, and more. Gazans have been imprisoned ever since.

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Stephen Lendman

[In 1967, the Israeli Army occupied Imwas without resistance. In spite of that, they immediately started evacuating the village forcing its inhabitants to leave to the city of Ramalla under gunpoint. The late Israeli prime minister, Rabin, confessed that he had personally given the order to destroy Imwas (this is documented in a video tape). Ozi Narcis, the commander of the middle region then, also boasted that he had offered for the destruction of Imwas. Imwas, alongside with the rest of latrun villages, yalu and Beit Nuba, were demolished to shorten the distance between Jerusalem and the Coast. Imwas is in the heart of its people generation after generation. It will never go into oblivion as the Israeli leaders dream. THE CRIME OF DESTROYING IMWAS]

On June 6, 1967, when Israeli forces invaded Gaza and the West Bank, on the second day of the so-called Six-Day War (June 5 - 10, 1967), they entered three Palestinian villages in the Latroun salient - Imwas, Yalo and Beit Nouba, forcibly expelling the residents, numbering over 10,000 at the time. By the next day, most were gone while Israel began razing village lands and erasing their memory in an area well-known for its water resources and fertility, located northwest of Jerusalem along the Green Line. One soldier at the time explained that they:

"were told to take up positions around the approaches to the villages in order to prevent those villagers - who had heard the Israeli assurances over the radio that they could return to their homes in peace - from returning to their homes. The order was - shoot over their heads and tell them there is no access to the village," even though Fourth Geneva's Article 49 states:

"Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive." Doing so is a "grave breach," and those responsible are criminally liable.

Forty-two years later, their former homes gone and land expropriated, the survivors remain displaced, unable to return in violation of international law and Article 11 of UN Resolution 194:

"Resolv(ing) that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live in peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible." Israel never complied even though its admission to the UN was conditional on accepting this and other relevant UN resolutions.

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Eric S. Margolis

Washington is finally getting some of the democracy it has long been calling for in Pakistan. The result is a disaster for US “Afpak” policy.

The Obama administration is fast discovering that its man in Islamabad, President Asif Ali Zardari, may be an even bigger ethical and managerial liability than its overseer in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai.

Over the years, I’ve met every Pakistani leader save the current one, President Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto. But I’ve written for decades about corruption charges that relentlessly dog him. At one point, I was threatened with having acid thrown in my face if I kept writing about the Bhutto-Zardari’s financial scandals.

Asif Ali Zardari became known to one and all as “Mr 10%” from the time when he was a minister in his wife’s government, in charge of approving government contracts. Critics say the 10% and other brazen kickbacks produced millions for the Zardari-Bhutto family.

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Saleh Al-Naami

A Palestinian woman walks past buildings destroyed during Israel’s 22-day offensive in Gaza which was launched
on 27 December. On the anniversary of the tragic slaughter of Palestinians by Israelis, the world remembers that no
less than 30,000 Palestinian homes were destroyed during the Israeli onslaught, which killed more than 1,400 people

On the first anniversary of Israel’s war on Gaza, shocking revelations are appearing on the methods and reasoning behind the war, writes Saleh Al-Naami.

Mahmoud Hussein tries to hold back his tears as he looks at his 30-year-old brother Ahmed who suffers from colon cancer. The family is impatiently waiting for the Gaza border to open so Ahmed can travel abroad for treatment, since in light of the Israeli imposed siege, medical facilities in Gaza cannot treat his condition. Ahmed, who lives in Gabalya, north of Gaza, is not the only Palestinian who developed cancer at a relatively young age.

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Stuart Littlewood

Stuart Littlewood argues that time is running out for Egyptian President Husni Mubarak to prove that he is not an Israeli stooge and allow the Viva Palestina international humanitarian aid convoy to reach the besieged Gaza Strip in time for the first anniversary of Israel’s mass slaughter of Gazans.

”The convoy’s request for easy passage was Mubarak's big chance to show that he was not, after all, the cruel and unprincipled Zionist stooge that civilized people across the world had already consigned to the dustbin of history. It is not too late to make amends. But if he doesn’t act quickly he’ll blow it for everyone, including himself.”

Gee, thanks President Mubarak. Thanks for ruining Christmas for so many.

But that’s par for the course in the cesspit of treachery that is the Middle East.

The human tragedy of Gaza just gets worse and worse. Nobody seriously believed the Viva Palestina convoy would get through unmolested; and so it came to pass. It is stranded at Aqaba, and its precious cargo is spoiling in the heat, because Mubarak’s henchmen will not allow it to enter Egypt through the port of Nuweiba.

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Peter Smith

Tainted science and Al Gore don’t justify the benefit of the doubt

“A majority of voters are prepared to give the planet the benefit of the doubt and they want something done about global warming”; so ran part of a recent editorial in the Australian newspaper. Nothing unique about this, you can find the same kind of sentiment most places you care to look. It has two substantive parts: the opinion of voters and giving the planet the benefit of the doubt.

The opinion of voters on global warming; what does that amount to? Knowledge, according to Samuel Johnson, is of two kinds: “We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can get information upon it.” What do voters know about the science of global warming? Of course, on the whole, they know nothing at all. Most voters could not get to first base in explaining why CO2 emissions might cause warming. Would they know where to find the knowledge? They certainly have access to opinions but on the whole not to the scientific research which underlies those opinions. More to the point, if they located the scientific research they would be unable to understand it. In the normal course, their opinion on arcane scientific theory would not be sought. For example, we would not ask voters about the feasibility of generating power through cold fusion because we know that their opinion would be worthless. This is all a long way of saying that the opinion of voters on global warming adds nothing to the debate. Voters can have worthwhile opinions on issues which are within their experience or competence or ability to understand; e.g., the republic versus the monarchy, interest rates, government expenditure; the need for a bill of rights and so on; but on issues like global warming their opinion becomes the plaything of opinion leaders. The plaything of Al Gore? Well, there is no accounting for taste.

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Lori Price

Bogosity reaches critical mass!

In 2008, the ACLU estimated the US 'No Fly List' to have grown to over 1,000,000 names --heck, even Cat Stevens and the late Senator Ted Kennedy was on it -- and it continues to expand. But, suspected terrorist Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was curiously able to obtain military-grade high explosives -- 80 grams of PETN (gee, where'd he get that?) -- managed to escape airport security and detonate his underwear bomb!

In April 2009, American authorities reportedly refused an Air France flight from Paris to Mexico entry into US airspace because a left-wing journalist writing a book on the CIA was on board. Hernando Calvo Ospina, who works for Le Monde Diplomatique and has written on revolutionary movements in Cuba and Colombia, figured on the US authorities' 'no-fly list.' Air France said the April 18 flight was forced to divert to the French Caribbean island of Martinique before continuing its journey (telegraph.co.uk). Got it? Write a book critical of the CIA --you cannot fly. Carry explosives on board when the US is trolling for an excuse to invade and occupy Yemen for its oil --yes you can!

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Bill Steigerwald

[A writer friend of mine, Bill Steigerwald, has created an interesting serial story, a Christmasy “docu-fable” as he calls it. I’ll be running this over the next 12 days. Here’s the foreword on it. While I’ve had a bit of a detour today on Christmasy type things, tomorrow we’ll see our regular science features resume. – Anthony Watts]

George Orwell used satire and talking pigs in “Animal Farm.” Now, just in time for the Copenhagen climate conference, ClimateGate and the coming ice age, veteran libertarian journalist Bill Steigerwald shamelessly steals Orwell’s idea and uses talking polar bears to poke fun at global warming alarmists and their fellow travelers in Washington and the media.

Twisting the title of director Frank Capra’s movie masterpiece to his own ends, Steigerwald and his son Joe have created “G.P. Bear Goes to Washington: The True Story of a Freedom-Loving Carnivore.”

A 12-part serialized “docu-fable,” “G.P. Bear Goes to Washington” features real issues and real people. It stars Grandpa, a magical, media-savvy and proudly skeptical polar bear who understands his species is in far greater danger from the interventions of the federal government, Barbara Boxer, Al Gore, Leonard DiCaprio and overzealous wildlife scientists than from anthropogenic climate change.

This version includes the final two episodes, Parts 11 and 12. For our newspaper clients, our suggestion is to start the serial in print in your opinion section (Part 1 or Parts 1 & 2) and then jump it to your Web edition and serialize it there until completion (while cross-promoting it from the print side). The serial is timed to end Christmas Day and can easily be broken into six, four or three parts, if you wish, which would allow you to wait until closer to Christmas to begin running it.

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William Dalrymple

Globalisation has been good for gods in the Indian subcontinent. As the region has remade itself, it has grown more devout, and its religions are becoming ever more entangled with politics.

On a foggy winter's night in November 1998, Om Singh, a young landowner from Rajasthan, was riding his Enfield Bullet back home after winning a local election near Jodhpur, when he misjudged a turning and hit a tree. He was killed instantly. As a memorial, his father fixed the motorbike to a stand, raised on a concrete plinth under the shelter of a small canopy, near the site of the crash.

“We were a little surprised when people started reporting miracles near the bike," Om's uncle Shaitan Singh told me on my last visit. "Om was no saint, and people say he had had a drink or two before his crash. In fact, there was no indication whatsoever during his life that he was a deity. He just loved his horses and his motorbike. But since his death a lot of people have had their wishes fulfilled here - particularly women who want children. For them, he has become very powerful. They sit on the bike, make offerings to Om Singh-ji, and it is said that flowers drop into their laps. Nine months later they have sons. Every day people see him. He comes to many people in their dreams."

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Stuart Littlewood

[Stuart Littlewood welcomes Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams's belated decision to visit the Gaza Strip – more than what “that expensively frocked individual”, the Pope, is prepared to contemplate – but wonders what steps the archbishop will take when he returns to publicize the plight of the besieged Gazans.]

”When Archbishop Rowan gets home from his historic visit, what will he do? He and 25 of his colleagues sit in the British parliament's House of Lords. They have clout. But in a quick search through theyworkforyou.com I could find no recent record of these ‘super-clerics’ raising questions about Israel's murderous onslaught, the unending persecution of the Christian and Muslim communities and the unlawful restrictions imposed on the Holy Land generally. No criticism of the British government’s inaction either.”

Dignitaries, emissaries, human rights delegations, fact-finding trippers – they come and go, but Gaza's suffering continues and day by day gets worse, thanks to the corrupted leadership of the international community who are the scandal of our age.

But here's a spot of Christmas cheer for the starving, desolated Palestinians imprisoned in the tiny coastal enclave.

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S. Frederick Starr

It was once the “land of a thousand cities” and home to some of the world’s most renowned scientists, poets, and philosophers. Today it is seen mostly as a harsh backwater. To imagine Central Asia’s future, we must journey into its remarkable past.

In AD 998, two young men living nearly 200 miles apart, in present-day Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, entered into a correspondence. With verbal jousting that would not sound out of place in a 21st-century laboratory, they debated 18 questions, several of which resonate strongly even today.

Are there other solar systems out among the stars, they asked, or are we alone in the universe? In Europe, this question was to remain open for another 500 years, but to these two men it seemed clear that we are not alone. They also asked if the earth had been created whole and complete, or if it had evolved over time. Time, they agreed, is a continuum with no beginning or end. In other words, they rejected creationism and anticipated evolutionary geology and even Darwinism by nearly a millennium. This was all as heretical to the Muslim faith they professed as it was to medieval Christianity.

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Ellen Brown

Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, is quoted as warning two centuries ago:

“Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an underground dictatorship. . . . The Constitution of this republic should make special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom."

That time seems to have come, but the dictatorship we are facing is not the sort that Dr. Rush was apparently envisioning. It is not a dictatorship by medical doctors, who are as distressed by the proposed legislation as the squeezed middle class is. (For a withering analysis by an outraged M.D. of the nearly 2000 - page House bill, see here.) The new dictatorship is not by doctors but by Wall Street -- the FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) sector that now claims 40% of corporate profits.

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Aleksandr Shustov

The launch of a new gas pipe on December 14 to connect Turkmenistan and China became one of the key moments in a geopolitical game aimed to win new routes of exporting Central Asian oil and gas resources. The launching ceremony for the gas pipe took place at the Samandep field in Turkmenistan and was attended by Presidents Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, Islam Karimov (Uzbekistan) and Nursultan Nazarbayev (Kazakhstan). The new gas pipe will be the first route to deliver the Turkmen gas (up to 40 bln cubic meters per year) to external markets bypassing Russia. Until recently Russia has purchased the lion's share of Turkmen gas but now it plans to buy four times less.

The new pipe is expected to supply to China 150 million cubic meters of gas, but it will reach full capacity by 2012. It will pump gas mainly from the gas fields located on the left bank of the Amu Darya River, while the lacking amounts of gas will be taken from the Bagtyyarlyk gas-rich territory on contract basis. The pipeline is about 7 km long, with 184,5 km being on the Turkmen soil, and 490 km, 1300 km and 4500 km in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and China respectively.

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Nicole Belle

That beautiful, sunny, smiling face belongs to Jessica Bucher, a twelve year old middle school student in Northern California.

At a time when most parents are worried about their twelve year old's grades, or first forays with the opposite sex, or cell phone usage, Jessica's parents have a much more urgent goal: keeping Jessica alive and pain-free.

Jessica Bucher was diagnosed with a rare disease that is almost always fatal: juvenile onset Sandhoff Disease. Thankfully, Jessica has responded well to an experimental umbillical cord stem cell treatment, but not without saddling her parents with astronomic health care bills. Those bills are now threatening their home to foreclosure. It's every parent's Faustian nightmare: save your child and lose your home or save your home and watch your child die. Jessica's classmates have opted to run regular fundraisers to help offset these medical costs because we as a country offer no such safety net to the Buchers.

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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 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 rkm'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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Paul Craig Roberts

Obama’s dwindling band of true believers has taken heart that their man has finally delivered on one of his many promises–the closing of the Guantanamo prison. But the prison is not being closed. It is being moved to Illinois, if the Republicans permit.

In truth, Obama has handed his supporters another defeat. Closing Guantanamo meant ceasing to hold people in violation of our legal principles of habeas corpus and due process and ceasing to torture them in violation of US and international laws.

All Obama would be doing would be moving 100 people, against whom the US government is unable to bring a case, from the prison in Guantanamo to a prison in Thomson, Illinois.

Are the residents of Thomson despondent that the US government has chosen their town as the site on which to continue its blatant violation of US legal principles? No, the residents are happy. It means jobs.

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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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Najwa Sheikh Ahmed

At the age of 80 my father passed away, after a long journey of suffering, and working hard to obtain a decent life for his children, a life that better than the one he had. As many refugees my fathers’ life was neither normal nor easy. He had to work harder than everyone else to change a reality that he could do nothing about, the reality of losing his home, the land, the reality of being a refugee. This meant the loss of all his rights as a human being, the rights to having a home, and living in dignity and respect.

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Ellen Hodgson Brown, J.D

Europe’s small, debt-strapped countries could follow the lead of Argentina and simply walk away from their debts. That would shift the burden to the creditor countries, which could solve the problem merely by a change in accounting rules.

Total financial collapse, once a problem only for developing countries, has now come to Europe. The International Monetary Fund is imposing its “austerity measures” on the outer circle of the European Union, with Greece, Iceland and Latvia the hardest hit. But these are not your ordinary third world debtor supplicants. Historically, the Vikings of Iceland successfully invaded Britain; Latvian tribes repulsed the Vikings; and the Greeks conquered the whole Persian empire. If anyone can stand up to the IMF, these stalwart European warriors can.

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From The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley in Copenhagen

In the Grand Ceremonial Hall of the University of Copenhagen, a splendid Nordic classical space overlooking the Church of our Lady in the heart of the old city, rows of repellent, blue plastic chairs surrounded the podium from which no less a personage than Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, was to speak.

I had arrived in good time to take my seat among the dignitaries in the front row. Rapidly, the room filled with enthusiastic Greenies and enviro-zombs waiting to hear the latest from ye Holy Bookes of Ipecac, yea verily.

The official party shambled in and perched on the blue plastic chairs next to me. Pachauri was just a couple of seats away, so I gave him a letter from me and Senator Fielding of Australia, pointing out that the headline graph in the IPCC’s 2007 report, purporting to show that the rate of warming over the past 150 years had itself accelerated, was fraudulent.

Would he use the bogus graph in his lecture? I had seen him do so when he received an honorary doctorate from the University of New South Wales. I watched and waited.

Sure enough, he used the bogus graph. I decided to wait until he had finished, and ask a question then.

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by His Beatitude Michel Sabbah, His Grace Bishop Dr. Munib Younan, His Eminence Archbishop Atallah Hanna, Rev. Dr. Jamal Khader, Rev. Dr. Rafiq Khoury, Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb, Rev. Dr. Naim Ateek, Rev. Dr. Yohana Katanacho , Rev. Fadi Diab , Geries S. Khoury, Cedar Duaybis, Nora Kort, Lucy Thaljieh, Nidal Abu El Zuluf, Yusef Daher, Rifat Kassis

A group of religious leaders representing the principal Christian denominations, with the exception of the Anglo-Saxon Evangelical Churches, are appealing to theologians not to legitimize the injustices inflicted on the Palestinians. They evoke the duty of the faithful to resist evil, entreating them to take part in the boycott of Israeli products. Moreover, they denounce the definition of Israel as a Jewish state and demand respect for the rights of all peoples.

A moment of truth: A word of faith, hope and love from the heart of Palestinian suffering

We, a group of Christian Palestinians, after prayer, reflection and an exchange of opinion, cry out from within the suffering in our country, under the Israeli occupation, with a cry of hope in the absence of all hope, a cry full of prayer and faith in a God ever vigilant, in God’s divine providence for all the inhabitants of this land. Inspired by the mystery of God’s love for all, the mystery of God’s divine presence in the history of all peoples and, in a particular way, in the history of our country, we proclaim our word based on our Christian faith and our sense of Palestinian belonging – a word of faith, hope and love.

Why now? Because today we have reached a dead end in the tragedy of the Palestinian people. The decision-makers content themselves with managing the crisis rather than committing themselves to the serious task of finding a way to resolve it. The hearts of the faithful are filled with pain and with questioning: What is the international community doing? What are the political leaders in Palestine, in Israel and in the Arab world doing? What is the Church doing? The problem is not just a political one. It is a policy in which human beings are destroyed, and this must be of concern to the Church.

We address ourselves to our brothers and sisters, members of our Churches in this land. We call out as Christians and as Palestinians to our religious and political leaders, to our Palestinian society and to the Israeli society, to the international community, and to our Christian brothers and sisters in the Churches around the world.

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Marco Villa

All you wanted to know about the racist land distribution and housing police in Israel, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Jerusalem has been eloquently put together in this Israeli documentary. It is a very small minority, but there is still an honest and noble core in Israel. Every minute of this is worth watching.

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F. William Engdahl

The man with the nickname “Dr Flu”, Professor Albert Osterhaus, of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam Holland has been named by Dutch media researchers as the person at the center of the worldwide Swine Flu H1N1 Influenza A 2009 pandemic hysteria. Not only is Osterhaus the connecting person in an international network that has been described as the Pharma Mafia, he is THE key advisor to WHO on influenza and is intimately positioned to personally profit from the billions of euros in vaccines allegedly aimed at H1N1.

Earlier this year the Second Chamber of the Netherlands Parliament undertook an investigation into alleged conflicts of interest and financial improprieties of the well-known Dr. Osterhaus. Outside of Holland and the Dutch media, the only note of the sensational investigation into Osterhaus’ business affairs came in a tiny note in the respected British magazine, Science.

Osterhaus's credentials and expertise in his field were not in question. What is in question, according to a short report published by the journal Science, are his links to corporate interests that stand to potentially profit from the swine flu pandemic.

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James Corbett

Carbon hysteria reaches its logical conclusion.

The Optimum Population Trust (OPT), a UK-based "think tank" and registered charity, has launched a new initiative urging wealthy members of the developed world to participate in carbon offsets that fund programs for curbing the population of developing nations. The scheme is being promoted as a more cost-effective way to reduce CO2 emissions than investing in alternative energy sources and offers a way for elitist racists to feel ethical in their quest to exterminate the third world masses.

A BBC News article on the proposal dutifully reports the OPT's proposal and their justifications for proposing it. They note that the program is designed to fund "contraception" programs in poor nations, a term that helpfully obscures the fact that such programs—including those run by FPA, one of the agencies listed as a supporting organization of this new program—have used bribes to get poor men and women to volunteer for sterilization. The article does, however, allow space for a detractor of the proposal to point out that even if one does accept that limiting carbon emissions is necessary (which it is not), the focus on limiting emissions of people in Least Developed Countries (LDCs) is in itself nonsensical: "Carbon emissions from people in much of sub-Saharan Africa are so low that they can barely be counted."

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Eileen Fleming

Im not a traitor. Im a man with a conscience who did what he did out of a deep belief after much thought and many doubts. I knew I had to do it, I had no choice. Somebody had to do it. I contributed my share by making public what the public ought to know & they shut my mouth behind the prison walls. -Mordechai Vanunu

Mordechai Vanunu was released from Ashkelon prison to open air captivity in east Jerusalem on April 21, 2004 after 18 years-most all in solitary — on April 21, 2004.

In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu was clubbed, drugged, bound and kidnapped from Rome by the Mossad because he told the truth and provided the photographic proof of their clandestine 7-story underground WMD facility in the Negev.

In the case of Mordechai Vanunu, Americans need to know that the restrictions that have held him captive in Jerusalem come from the Emergency Defense Regulations which were implemented by Britain against Palestinians and Jews after World War II.

After WW II, Attorney Yaccov Shapiro, who later became Israel’s Minister Of Justice, described the Emergency Defense Regulations as “unparalleled in any civilized country: there were no such laws in Nazi Germany.”

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