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 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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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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