Month: March 2010

by CARL ZIMMER

Can the bacteria in our bodies control our behavior in the same way a puppetmaster pulls the strings of a marionette? I tremble to report that this wonderfully creepy possibility may be true.

The human body is, to some extent, just a luxury cruise liner for microbes. They board the SS Homo sapiens when we’re born and settle into their assigned quarters–the skin, the tongue, the nostrils, the throat, the stomach, the genitals, the gut–and then we carry them wherever we go. Some of microbes deboard when we shed our skin or use the restroom; others board at new ports when we shake someone’s hand or down a spoonful of yogurt. Just as on a luxury cruise liner, our passengers eat well. They feed on the food we eat, or on the compounds we produce. While the biggest luxury lines may be able to carry a few thousand people, we can handle many more passengers. Although the total mass of our microbes is just a few pounds, the tiny size of their cells means that we each carry about 100 trillion microbes–outnumbering our own cells by more than ten to one.

Discover for more

Human rights watch on Sunday demanded Israel to put an immediate end to the arbitrary detention of Palestinian activists who participate in peaceful anti-wall marches in occupied West Bank villages.

In a report, the human rights watch noted that Israel is building most of its segregation wall inside the West Bank rather than along the green line, in violation of international humanitarian law.

According to the report, the Israeli occupation forces in recent months have arbitrarily arrested and denied due process rights to several dozen Palestinian anti-wall protesters.

Israel detained Palestinians who advocate non-violent protests against the segregation wall and charged them based on questionable evidence including confessions taken under coercion.

Israel also denied detainees from villages that have staged protests against the wall, including children, access to lawyers and family members. Many of the protests have been in villages that lost substantial areas of land when the wall was built.

“Israel arrests people for peacefully protesting a barrier built illegally on their lands that harms their livelihoods,” Sarah Whitson, the HRW Middle East director said.

Al-Manar TV for more

(Submitted by Ingrid B. Mork)

Obscurantism and obfuscation on national television

by MICHAEL SHERMER

Have you ever died and come back to life? Me neither. No one has. But plenty of people say that they have, and their experiences were the subject of an episode of Larry King Live last December on which I appeared as the token skeptic among a tableful of believers, including CNN’s medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, New Age author Deepak Chopra, a football referee who “died” on the playing field, and an 11-year-old boy named James Leininger who believes he is the reincarnation of a World War II fighter pilot.

Dr. Gupta started us off by recalling that when he was in medical school the residents were taught to mark the time of death to the minute, when death can often take anywhere from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours to occur, depending on the conditions. As Gupta noted, people who have fallen into freezing lakes and “died” were not quite dead, and their core body temperatures dropped so rapidly that their vital tissues were preserved long enough for subsequent resusci­tation. In other words, people who have near-death experiences (NDEs) are not actually dead!

Scientific American for more

via 3 Quarks Daily

Islamabad – The country is going to mark March 8 (today) as International Women’s Day but it is really pathetic that 9,670 women have been killed only in Punjab for honour killings and property disputes for the last five years.

A recent report by Human Rights Commission on the eve of International Women’s Day, Sunday, carries some horrific statistics about women rights violations throughout Pakistan. Out of 9,670 women, immediate relatives including husbands, brothers, fathers and others killed 1,638 ladies. About 8,041 women were killed due to property and other such issues. About 3,379 women were killed for not bringing dowry with them and asking for their rights.

They were either killed by setting them on fire or by acid throwing, while hundreds of women who are facing Karokari, other such honour killings and infamous Hudood Ordinance charges in the jails of the country are still to be heard, Press United to Serve Humanity (PUSH), a Pakistan-based non-profit, non-governmental and non-sectarian consortium of journalists working for freedom of Press and protection of human rights, has quoted in the Human Rights Commission Report in a statement.
March 8 is designated to celebrate the economic, social and political achievements of women throughout the world. The day is celebrated the world over including Pakistan vowing to strive for the protection of women rights and applaud women’s efforts and achievements in this regards.

The Nation for more

(Submitted by Abdul Hamid Bashani Khan)

by MARK MAGNIER

The nation’s hijra community — mostly eunuchs and hermaphrodites — has long lived on the margins in the Muslim nation, barely tolerated and more often abused. A new ruling gives its members some rights.

Reporting from Rawalpindi, Pakistan – Wearing a red knit bonnet, matching lipstick and a shawl over her large shoulders and muscular forearms, Nanni gently sought to clear up some confusion as the call to prayer sounded from a nearby mosque.

“I’m a ‘she-male,’ ” said Nanni, a kind of den mother for a dozen or so fellow hijra, or transgender people, in a rundown neighborhood of Rawalpindi. “We all are.”

Sharing two small rooms halfway along a dark dirt alley and up a steep flight of steps, Nanni’s family is one made, not born: a community of outcasts forced together after their families abandoned them, their indeterminate sex unnerving this patriarchal society — especially the ascendant Pakistani Taliban.

“We are God’s creatures,” Nanni said. “Even if many people don’t accept us, we feel the same here in the den as if we are of the same blood. We do everything to take care of one another.”

Dominating one room was a rough-hewn double bed that the dozen or so hijra, some more than 6 feet tall, use in shifts. The walls were covered with pictures of hijra beauties of the Mughal era that ended more than a century ago, a time when transgender people were not only accepted but also enjoyed significant power and prestige.

Asked whether the hijra family members were all congenital eunuchs and hermaphrodites, Nanni, 35, insisted that they were all born that way. To prove the point, she ordered Akri, a hermaphrodite whose broad face was softened by mascara and a scarf, to drop her traditional outfit and show her private parts.

Los Angeles Times for more

by SONIA SHAH

Doesn’t Nathan Myhrvold get enough attention? The guy is the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, a multimillionaire, a gourmet chef, a prize-winning photographer and keeper of multiple higher degrees from prestigious institutions. As the CEO and founder of Intellectual Ventures, a private outfit that invests in “pure inventions,” he frequently finds himself in the news.

Mosquito Death Ray in action at TED

And yet, at the annual techno-hip TED conference in February, Myhrvold decided to up the ante, tapping into the misery of millions of rural African women and their families to wrap his business in a cloak of moral urgency. “Every 43 seconds a child dies of malaria,” he told the crowd. And current anti-malaria interventions, many of which target the rural African women and children who are malaria’s main victims, don’t work that well, he said. Insecticides can be environmentally dangerous and some people use anti-mosquito bednets to catch fish instead.
Continue reading “TED lecturer exploits African women + children”

by ANDREW BROWN

An anthropological study of charismatic Christians reveals a belief system at once childish and sophisticated

I went last night to a marvellous talk by an American anthropologist who has been studying Californian charismatic Christians. Tanya Luhrmann’s enquiry into how these people construct their idea of God will result in a book eventually, but in the meantime her talk on her work with the Vineyard churches was full of insight, sympathy, and deadpan humour.

The Vineyard churches are a loose international network of mostly white, mostly middle class, very charismatic churches. They aren’t exactly fundamentalist but they see the Holy Spirit everywhere and talk to God every day. They were the source of the “Toronto Blessing” – a craze which swept through the English charismatic network in the 90s where people fell on the floor and made animal noises. Luhrmann is interested in how you get to talk to God like this. After all, most churches for most of history, haven’t done anything like that.

Her answer is that you need a certain kind of temperament, one which makes you good at make-believe, and then you need to work at it. The personality traits which make it easiest to talk to God are those measured on the Tellegen absorption scale, which she summarises as the ability to focus attention on a non-instrumental subject: in other words, some thought interesting for its own sake, whether or not it is obviously useful. It’s the facility you need to construct compelling daydreams.

If you have this talent, or temperament, in the first place, these churches will nourish it. By treating God as real, you come to detect his presence more easily; and the God for whom the are searching is one just like another person. “People learn about God by mapping onto Him what they know about persons; then they map back what they suppose about God onto the world around them.”

Guardian for more

by SISWO PRAMONO

Mengkubuwono, an old Javanese expression, means assuming a role as guardian of the world. We once decolonized the world through the Afro-Asian Conference and mitigated the global Cold War through the Non-Aligned Movement. Our global orientation revived as we were invited to become a member of the prestigious G20. Should ASEAN remain the cornerstone (soko-guru) of our foreign policy?

If mythology and history matter, the making of Indonesia’s concentric circle of diplomacy was influenced by the feeling of insecurity linked to the susceptibility of our vast archipelago.

The invasions of Java by Emperor Kubilai Khan in the 13th century (during the Singasari/Majapahit era) and then by Emperor Hirohito in mid-20th century (during Indonesia’s revolution era), show the vulnerability of our Northern periphery.

Thus, the naval expeditions Pamalayu, by Singasari in 1275, and Sabrang Lor, by Demak in 1521, were in fact examples of gunboat diplomacy to correct these weaknesses.

Thus, our concentric circle of diplomacy is about defense. Indeed, K.J. Holsti (1992) maintains that diplomacy is about “defending” national interests by “communicating” with those whose actions we wish to deter.

Since the writing of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War (3rd century BC) or Vyasa’s Mahabharata (4th century BC), scholars have learned how defense strategy can be adapted into diplomacy, or vice-versa.

As Mpu Sedah and Panuluh adapted Mahabharata into Kakawin in 1157, Javanese elites learned about the concentric circle of defense, called Chakravyuha. Negarakertagama (1365) reveals the implementation of Chakravyuha by Majapahit in its diplomatic relations with vassal kingdoms throughout the Indonesian archipelago and beyond.

The Jakarta Post for more

by VIJAY PRASHAD

Construction projects on Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai have come to a virtual standstill. Financial agents in the region can’t wait to offload the real estate deals that burden the books of the Emirates and its banks, not to mention the international banks whose chambers in London and New York shudder with any mention of more real estate failures. A fire sale has begun, with construction firms like Arabtec now being offered for a song, and as Dubai’s own sheikhs bend their knees to Abu Dhabi to help with the $150 billion debt (the IMF says $109 billion, EFG-Hermes pushes it upward). The Sultans of Arabia are displeased. Oil profits sail in, but these are magically converted into petro-dollars that then boomerang to Wall Street, where they are welcomed by Goldman Sachs and its élèves who, these days, lock them up in their vaults, afraid to lend to anyone despite the blandishments of Obama and Bernanke. Petro-dollars are no salve to Dubai’s ailments.

Riyadh’s first family looks at the margins of their peninsula with concern. The financial turbulence of Dubai is one indication. Another is the rising insurgency in southern Yemen, compounded with the restive radical Islamists, whether in or out of al-Qaeda. The Carter Doctrine (1980) protects U. S. interests in the Persian Gulf, toward which the U. S. created the Central Command to organize this defense. Till now, those interests have included the protection of the House of Saud, whose current king, Abdullah, has effectively governed since 1995. The huge U. S. troop presence in Saudi Arabia since August 1990 served as a barrier against Iraq, but also as a fire-starter for domestic Islamists who were outraged at the presence of U. S. troops in the land of Mecca and Medina (it is this that turned Osama Bin Laden from an anti-communist militant to an anti-American one). Drone attacks in Yemen continue the policy of preserving the petrified Saud family, whose king is now personally worth about $22 billion (he is the third richest royal, after Rama IX of Thailand and Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates). The U. S. is effectively pledged to protect all these billionaire blue bloods against the grievances and aspirations of their own peoples.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia recognized after 9/11 that the status quo is not permanent. U. S. wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, and Israeli wars against Lebanon and Gaza, as well as U. S. posturing against Iran have inflamed the Arab population and put the Sultans of Arabia in a box. They cannot be seen to be puppets of Washington, but nor can they alienate their principle benefactors. Anti-Saudi sentiment in the U. S. alarmed the royals (in 2002, a RAND expert told the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, without rebuttal, that Saudi Arabia is a “kernel of evil”; even the ever-pliant Prince Bandar, Saudi Ambassador to the Bush Family, was disheartened). In 2003, the U. S. government relocated much of its forces from their Saudi bases to Qatar. The U. S. then delivered Baghdad to the Shi’a political parties, who have a special relationship with Iran. On the political front, the Saudi royals no longer felt the warm embrace of Washington.

Counterpunch for more

by JAMES PETRAS

In the face of world-wide governmental condemnation (except from the Zionist-occupied White House and US Congress), the PMAJO slavishly backs any brutal murder committed by the Israeli secret police anywhere in the world and at anytime. The recent assassination of Hamas leader, Mahmoud Mabhouh, in Dubai is a case in point. The PMAJO has defended all of Mossad’s criminal actions leading up to the murder, including extensive identity theft and the stealing or falsification of passports and official documents from several European countries, presumably allied to the Zionist state. Among the Mossad agents who entered Dubai to kill Mabhouh, twelve agents used stolen or forged British passports, three Australian, three French, one German and six Irish. These agents assumed the identity of European citizens in order to commit murder in a sovereign nation.

Once again the PMAJO demonstrate that its first loyalty is to the Israeli secret police, even when they violate the sovereignty of major US allies. No doubt the PMAJO would readily support the Israeli Mossad, even if it were shown to have used U.S. documents to assassinate Mabhouh. In fact, two of the 26 Israeli assassins, carrying fake Irish and fake British passports, are known to have entered the United States after the killing and may still be here.

The position adopted by the Daily Alert and the PMAJO in defense of Israel’s international terrorist act followed several lines of attack, which will be discussed below. These include: (1) blaming the victim, (2) claiming that extra-judicial, extra territorial murders are legal, (3) minimizing the murder of ‘one’ individual, (4) deflecting attention from the Zionists by blaming ‘other Arab’s, (5) favorably comparing Mossad assassinations to US killings in Afghanistan, (6) trivializing and relativizing world condemnation, (7) citing “self-defense”, (8) praising the high tech ‘operational details’ of the assassination and (9) discrediting the Dubai police investigators rather than the Israeli perpetrators.

Abridged articles, cited in the Daily Alert, have appeared in the op-ed pages of several US, UK, Canadian and Israeli newspapers, as well as in rightwing magazines like Forbes and Commentary. The mainline Zionist propaganda technique is to avoid any discussion of Israel’s egregious crimes against sovereignty, due process, international law and the personal security of individuals. In doing so, the Daily Alert adopts the propaganda techniques common to all totalitarian regimes practicing state terrorism.

Counter Currents for more