Matt Taibbi

But the state still gets between 10 and 20 e-mails seeking verification of Obama’s birth each week, most of them from outside Hawaii, Kim said Tuesday. (Via Hawaii considering law to ignore Obama ‘birthers’ – Yahoo! News.)

I was tempted to laugh at this story about the Birthers still asking for Barack Obama’s birth information — the state of Hawaii is considering passing a law allowing them to ignore these requests — but then it occurred to me that at least those people are actually doing their homework.

On the other hand, I get pestered at least once a day by some lunatic who a) hasn’t noticed that I actually oppose the health care bill, and b) has fallen for the reams of robo-emails floating around the internet making extravagant claims about what’s in the Obama Health Bill. One of the most popular is something written by a Texas County Judge named David Kithil – I have no idea if he actually exists or not — who purports to have combed through HR 3200 and found evidence of all sorts of fiendishness.

More »

Stephen Lendman

A December 2009 Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network "Monitoring Report on Freedom of Association in the Euro-Mediterranean Region" assessed it in EU and Middle East countries, including Israel and Occupied Palestine, the topic of this article.

Freedom of Association in Israel

Instead of improving in 2009, it deteriorated even though Israel's Supreme Court recognizes it as a fundamental human right. However, three statutory law types restrict it, the first includes the 1980 Law of Associations that regulates the formation and operation of NGOs, corporations, and cooperative associations, and the 1999 Companies Law.

The second involves criminal laws, including the 1948 Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance, the 1994 Law Implementing the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and 2005 Law on the Prohibition of Terror Funding.

The third involves direct or indirect freedom restrictions to form professional associations, requiring certain professionals belong to one to practice. For example, the Bar Association for lawyers.

More »

Bob Carter

[This is the essay Australia's ABC tried to ban. See story here...]

Is Hansenism more dangerous than Lysenkoism?

On June 23, 1988, a young and previously unknown NASA computer modeller, James Hansen, appeared before a United States Congressional hearing on climate change. On that occasion, Dr. Hansen used a graph to convince his listeners that late 20th century warming was taking place at an accelerated rate, which, it being a scorching summer's day in Washington, a glance out of the window appeared to confirm. He wrote later in justification, in the Washington Post (February 11, 1989), that

"the evidence for an increasing greenhouse effect is now sufficiently strong that it would have been irresponsible if I had not attempted to alert political leaders".

Hansen's testimony was taken up as a lead news story, and within days the great majority of the American public believed that a climate apocalypse was at hand, and the global warming hare was off and running. Thereby, Dr. Hansen became transformed into the climate media star who is shortly going to wow the ingenues in the Adelaide Festival audience.

Fifteen years later, in the Scientific American in March, 2004, Hansen came to write that

"Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue. Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic".

This conversion to honesty came too late, however, for in the intervening years thousands of other climate scientists had meanwhile climbed onto the Hansenist funding gravy-train. Currently, global warming alarmism is fuelled by an estimated worldwide expenditure on related research and greenhouse bureaucracy of more than US$10 billion annually.

More »

Jennifer van Bergen

[Note: This is the sixth part in a seven-part series.]

PART SIX: International High School Writing Programs

This part of my series on the Ancient Skill of Arkhelogy will discuss the international educational system standards. The next and final part of the series will consider the possibility and efficacy of adopting the archetypes approach in place of current writing curricula, in addition to it, as an elective writing class, or as a the basis of a new understanding of writing and of education. To start with, let us take a look at two international schools and their writing programs.

The UNIS Curriculum

The United Nations International School (UNIS) web site offers a short, useful description of its curriculum goals for English:

UNIS students love to write. Writing is at the heart of the English program in the Junior, Middle and High Schools. All students write almost every day, in school and at home, in script and with the computer, in draft and for publication. Students shape their experiences, imagination and reading into literary responses of stories, poems, plays, memoirs and series. They learn to write with clarity, grace and accuracy by practicing, reading, listening and editing. They study grammar throughout the process.

Reading fine literature inspires fine writing. Students at all grade levels are exposed to classic and contemporary literature by women and men from different countries and cultures. The curriculum includes works by North American, European, Australasian, African, Asian, Latin American, Caribbean and Native American authors (UNIS, 2008, English).(Full citations are included at the end of part seven.)

More »