Archive for September 2012
Hot posts this week (Sept. 30/2012)
Posted by: adonis49 on: September 30, 2012
- Hot posts this week (Sept. 30/2012)
- Of Peasants and Soldiers: Solitary life, myths, mystics, famine, wars…
- Is the US starting the inevitable retreat from the Middle East? And Israel reaction…
- A Guide To Recognizing 21st-Century Subcultural Tribes
- Ultra Fuzzy sunglasses: To ultra fussy Orthodox Jews in Israel
- Most common of errors…Apophenia? Patternicity? Pareidolia?
- Civilians hit by sanctions: Iran, Syria, and formerly Iraq
- Israel to bomb chemical weapons in Syria? Would the civilian casualties be forgotten as “collateral damages”?
- “I refuse to represent these 47% leeches…of non-tax paying Americans…”
- Slow and steady transfer policies of Palestinians in Israel: To where again?
Syria: Fundamental and pragmatic discussions during and after the Assad regime…
Posted by: adonis49 on: September 30, 2012
Syria: Fundamental and pragmatic discussions during and after the Assad regime…Part 1
The first part focuses on the fundamental social and geopolitical conditions of Syria and the Syrian people. The next article will approach pragmatically how the problems in Syria could be resolved, during and after the Assad regime…
1. Syria is Not determined by mountain chains and desert borders. Syria is its rivers: The Euphrates, Tigre, Al Assay, Litany, and the Jordan rivers. It is on the shores of these rivers and the Mediterranean Sea that the earliest known urban City-States (by the hundred) conglomerated and traded with one another and the outside world.
2. Syria is Arabic. Hundreds of tribes from the Arabic Peninsula settled Syria, many centuries before Islam was disseminated by prophet Muhammad. These tribes were mostly Christians, the kind of sects labelled “heretics” by the Orthodox Church of Byzantium. Many of these tribes were persecuted and they fled to high mountain chains, or retreated temporarily to the desert borders, and fled to the Persian empire (beyond the eastern shores of the Euphrates) in order to sustain their customs and traditions.
3. Those “Arabic/Syrian” tribes converted to Islam, an almost identical religion as theirs, and were the backbone of the “Arabic/Moslem” armies that vanquished Byzantium and swiftly expanded eastward to crush the Iranian Empire…
4. The two Arabic Empires of the Omayyad dynasty in Damascus and the western Arab empire located in Andalusia (Spain) confirmed the Arabic nature of Syria and spread the knowledge of sciences, medicine, cosmology and philosophy for over one thousand years, as the dominant civilization in the Mediterranean Sea basin and in Central Asia…
5. Arabic is not just the latest add-on to the Syrian civilization and identity: Arabic is what gave Syria its lasting and defining identity and sovereignty, and the Arabic language was “modernized”, made legible, and acquired its universal appeal thanks to the Syrian people. The current Arabic language is fundamentally Syrian, and its ancestor language is the Aramaic and later called Syriac…
6. Syria, including Lebanon and Palestine, is the hotbed of interactions among the three “monolithic” religions (Judaism, Christian and Islam). Without the presence of these 3 religions in Syria, Syria will be lost as a special entity in the Middle-East, an entity of the convergence of their very similar customs and traditions for thousands of years…
7. Most of the ancient myths, mentioned in Bibles and archaeological documents, originated from Syria, in this rich land of the earliest urban civilization…
8. Syria is the land where most of the persecuted religious sects, fleeing the oppression of the dominant religions of the periods, settled on the mountain chains and eked out a harsh living, raising goats and occasionally looting nearby urban centers… These minorities were ever ready to side with revolts against the pseudo central powers in Damascus, Baghdad, and occasionally Aleppo…Time to deal with minorities as essential in the fabric of the Syrian community
9. Almost all “Warrior Empires” originating in Central Asia, northern Iran, and northern Turkey…loosely occupied Syria, appointing military governors in the conquered provinces, just to collect the tax…The majority of the urban dwellers accommodated with the invaders, traded economically and culturally, and eventually transferred their culture to the warrior empires. It the Syrian people, craftsmen, architects, artisans, and skilled workers who built the temples, palaces, schools, the infrastructure…in the lands of the invaders. The archaeological findings in the warrior empires are the jobs of the Syrian people…
And Workers are no longer uprooted and strangers to their communities…?
Posted by: adonis49 on: September 29, 2012
And Workers are no longer uprooted and strangers to their communities…?
There is this line of thought (Simone Weil) that says:
“Fundamentally, when workers revolt it is subsequent to the recognition that, for those many years working at a particular factory, they are still casted out of the real community of men, a feeling of being uprooted and strangers to the community, not being admitted in the real existence…”
The shift from the condition of being exploited to feeling oppressed is due to the workers realizing that they had not been admitted in the community where they spent most of their healthy years among…
The more the Gravity of accumulated miseries and injustices degrades man’s quest for universal truths of fair appreciation and just acknowledgment of a job well done, the more the worker feels uprooted, legs flapping in the void…
This article is an attempt of offering conditions that may give the workers the full extent of their worth and self-confidence, and waking up happily ready to face up to a long day of work.
Suppose a worker:
1. Is trained to fabricate and assemble an entire object or product by himself, using all the facilities available in the factory, giving the worker this feeling of owning the product, a work of art, a very talented worker…
2. Is trained later to “find destination” (sell) his products by connecting and communicating with clients…
Basically, the worker is trained to be an independent “subcontractor” in the factory…
Suppose that 5 workers were trained identically, and working as subcontractor, using the same facilities.
Suppose that each one of these trained workers can produce a single object per day.
Do you think that the 5 workers will be able to generate 5 objects per day, trying to share the same equipments and machineries?
Suppose that the 5 workers are encouraged to work as a Team: meeting every day, discussing, scheduling their working day, managing their efforts…
Do you think that this team has the opportunity to produce more than 5 objects per day?
If not, then synergy is lacking in the team efforts, and the workers must be trained to cooperate and function as a team. Figuring out who is the most talented and skilled in producing parts of the product, finding out the bottlenecks in the entire operation…
The team may decide not to follow all the suggested idea of the training course: They are free to reflect on their own, pick and choose, and decide on what works and what would not work within their environment…
Suppose the team is extended enough budget to decide on updating equipments and replacing non-performing bottleneck machines, hiring assistant on part-time basis…
For example: The team has this option to re-design the product, make it safer, easier to use, requiring fewer parts, faster to manufacture certain parts…and they need the assistant of a designer to draw the object, an engineer to study the feasibility of the re-designed product, an experimental analyst to collect data on what the clients want, need, and prefer…
The team has the option to hire from inside the institution or selecting their assistants from outside the mother company…They are independent contractors…
Do you think that production will increase far beyond the initial single subcontractor situation?
The owner of the factory started the training program and extended the facilities for the worker to produce quality products, because the worker feels that he owns this product and any defect is his own responsibility and has to pay the price for a buckled product…
Do you think that this alternative beats the top-down systems where the worker has to obey and follows the planned, scheduled…work procedures? Obeying managers who never worked on the floor and are disconnected from the workers’ environment and state of mind?
There are many businesses trading in products that can be manufactured by trained workers, if training sessions are available, and do not need a masters or Ph.D level of knowledge…and the worker can feel an integral part of the community…
Suppose the team is to manufacture a refrigerator. The team knows the defects and malfunctioning of refrigerators, and can repair the object better than any other repairman: The team has the full facility and means to even fabricate a simple part not available in the market, and deliver a functioning repaired refrigerator with guarantees…
Would you agree that this team of 5 workers:
1. Would feel integrated in the community?
2. Feeling wholesome and worthy skilled workers of great utility to the community?
3. Will be waking up ready to go to work and feel of value to the community, and be valued by the community as a productive member, sharing the ups and downs of a community’s sustainable life?
Note: For clients, all the products are the same if they satisfy the purpose, and the price is right…But for the independent worker, ever product has its individuality, a piece of art: The worker can remember the particular difficulties, aches, and pains that this product generated within a particular mood environment…
Of Peasants and Soldiers: Solitary life, myths, mystics, famine, wars…
Posted by: adonis49 on: September 29, 2012
Of Peasants and Soldiers: Solitary life, myths, mystics, famine, wars…
I often stumble in literature on this regurgitated characterization of peasants and soldiers: such as “They are historically and psychologically similar groups, in deep affinity and congruence. I read that the trade of manipulating arms and the trade of cultivating the land are complementary, universal, and charged with representative values, myths, stories…”
So many romantic and general descriptions that refuse to account for the context, period, age range of the persons…
For example, you read on peasants:
1. They have a hard labor that leaves physical scars…
2. Their work schedule is not fixed…
3. They cannot enjoy vacation time…
4. They are mobilized at any moment notice…
5. They have strong corporate spirits…
6. They live under very constraining heritage…
7. Their job is psychologically solitary… and on
Do you think rice-paddy growers who work 360 days a year and have to wake up before sun up, can be classified as peasants compared to those who barely work a semester in total, just sawing and harvesting, and receiving lavish State subsidies?
You read on the soldiers:
1. They are poorly paid and ready to be sacrificed…
2. They come from the humblest of classes in remote rural regions…
3. They acquire a conscious of altruistic spirit…
4. They are mostly disinterested in society exotic pleasures…
Do you think a simple soldier who bear all the brunt of prosecuting a war is the same as an “Officer Soldier” who refuses to bear his responsibilities on errors he committed and keep putting the blame on subordinates, and never ceases to give orders, left and right…?
I find these descriptions originating from the logic of wild imaginations and too general to be of any value.
If these two trading groups were that similar, why history is charged with “warrior” Empires and urban setting civilizations? The poor people in warrior empires could hardly cultivate their arid and harsh lands, and they were easily hoarded into invading armies to loot the richer peasants and well-settled people…
These characterizations of similarity between the peasant life style and the soldier are wishful thinking: the modern States wanted the similarity to be true, for their vested capitalist interests… And there is nothing similar between the two trade historically.
For example, literature wants to demonstrate that an expanding nation or empire in antiquity reserved lands for their military officers after serving a number of years. The Romans inherited the tradition of Carthage by lavishing lands at the limits of conquered lands to officers who served 20 years, so that a kind of colony is established to protect the borders…
Is an officer a peasant? Is the officer a simple soldier to take as example? Officers were recruited from the elite and noble classes to lead the City-States, and “manage the slaves” to death…Officers were never raised to high grades if the soldier was of a poor peasant family…
It is in this 19th century colonial expansion by the western European nations that peasants were recruited and sent to the colonies, after serving a few years in the military, in order to execute the utopia plans and programs of the thinking bureaucrats in foreign “barbaric” lands: Geometric parcels, designed as modern spaces, irrigation facilities…
Do you think an “agricultural person” owning vast fertile lands is a peasant? Shouldn’t he be labelled as “harvester operator” for his professional trade? Shouldn’t he be classified as an upper Middle-Class person with all the subsidies he receives from Federal and State governments, in order for the State to keep its agricultural exporting monopoly in the developing nations and drive small peasants out of their lands and into the miseries of urban setting…?
Do you know of any soldier returning from the “war front” exhibiting a desire to return to rural regions, except if they are suffering from extreme trauma, and desiring to lick their wounds in isolation? Most of them returning or “released” soldiers prefer to sit on side walks in urban cities, beg for a livelihood, and build a “camouflaged” shack from leftover construction materials found in the neighborhood, to suit their military camouflage vest and pants and the environment…
The motto of youth is: “Give me the wide horizon or give me death“, and not many will stay and engage in working the land if the slightest opportunity materializes as a possibility. Many die before they ever had a glimpse of any horizon, and most of them delay the return to the farm after they fail in eking a living in urban centers…Why? I think it is their subconscious telling them: “Even your family will be disappointed if you gave up so easily and returned home so soon…It demonstrate a weak character…”
The modern States have harvested the sons of peasants in holocaust global wars, outside their frontiers, and relied profusely on the lower middle-class citizens to inflate the ranks for the body counts, fodder to preemptive imperialist war-machine, the “invisible” new citizens, too turbulent to control efficiently, and too many to be of any use to the capitalist structure…wars that never benefited the little people…
Note: Title of post and inspiration was inspired from a chapter n the French book “Les Sites Paysagers de la Memoire du Liban” by Raja Choueiri
Is the US starting the inevitable retreat from the Middle East? And Israel reaction…
Posted by: adonis49 on: September 28, 2012
Is the US starting the inevitable retreat from the Middle East? And Israel reaction…
THE murder of four Americans in Libya and mob assaults on the United States’ embassies across the Muslim world this month have reminded many of the year 1979, when radical Islamists seized the American mission in Tehran.
There, too, extremists running wild after the fall of a pro-American tyrant had found a cheap way of empowering themselves.
PANKAJ MISHRA published on September 23, 2012 under “America’s Inevitable Retreat From the Middle East”
“The obsession with radical Islam misses a more meaningful analogy for the current state of siege in the Middle East and Afghanistan: the helicopters hovering above the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon in 1975 as North Vietnamese tanks rolled into the city.
That hasty departure ended America’s long and costly involvement in Indochina, which, like the Middle East today, the United States had inherited from defunct European empires.
Southeast Asia had no natural resources to tempt the United States and no ally like Israel to defend. But it appeared to be at the front line of the worldwide battle against Communism, and American policy makers had unsuccessfully tried both proxy despots and military firepower to make the locals advance their strategic interests.
The violent protests provoked by the film “Innocence of Muslims” will soon subside, and American embassies will return to normal business. But the symbolic import of the violence, which included a Taliban assault on one of the most highly secured American bases in Afghanistan, is unmistakable.
The drama of waning American power is being re-enacted in the Middle East and South Asia after two futile wars and the collapse or weakening of pro-American regimes.
In Afghanistan, local soldiers and policemen have killed their Western trainers, and demonstrations have erupted there and also in Pakistan against American drone strikes and reported desecration of the Koran.
This surge in historically rooted hatred and distrust of powerful Western invaders, meddler and remote controllers has come yet again as a shock to many American policy makers and commentators, who have promptly retreated into a lazy “they hate our freedoms” narrative.
It is as though the United States, lulled by such ideological foils as Nazism and Communism into an exalted notion of its moral power and mission, missed the central event of the 20th century: the steady, and often violent, political awakening of people who had been exposed for decades to the sharp edges of Western power.
This strange oversight explains why American policy makers kept missing their chances for peaceful post-imperial settlements in Asia.
As early as 1919, Ho Chi Minh, dressed in a morning suit and armed with quotations from the Declaration of Independence, had tried to petition President Woodrow Wilson for an end to French rule over Indochina. Minh did not get anywhere with Wilson.
Indian, Egyptian, Iranian, Palestinian, Syrian, and Turkish nationalists hoping for the liberal internationalist president Wilson to promulgate a new “morality” in global affairs were similarly disappointed.
None of these anti-imperialists would have bothered if they had known that Wilson, a Southerner fond of jokes about “darkies,” believed in maintaining “white civilization and its domination over the world.” Franklin D. Roosevelt was only slightly more conciliatory when, in 1940, he proposed to mollify the dispossessed Palestinian Arabs with a “little baksheesh.”
Roosevelt changed his mind after meeting the Saudi leader Ibn Saud and learning of oil’s importance to the postwar American economy. But the cold war, and America’s obsession with the chimera of monolithic Communism, again obscured the unstoppable momentum of decolonization, which was fueled by an intense desire among humiliated people for equality and dignity in a world controlled by a small minority of white men.
Ho Chi Minh’s post-World War II appeals for assistance to another American president — Harry S. Truman — again went unanswered; and Ho, who had worked with American intelligence agents during the war, was ostracized as a dangerous Communist. But many people in Asia saw that it was only a matter of time before the Vietnamese ended foreign domination of their country.
For the world had entered a new “revolutionary age,” as the American critic Irving Howe wrote in 1954, in which the intense longing for change among millions of politicized people in Asia was the dominant force. Howe warned: “Whoever gains control of them, whether in legitimate or distorted forms, will triumph.”
This mass longing for political transformation was repressed longer by cold war despotism in the Arab world; it has now exploded, profoundly damaging America’s ability to dictate events there.
There is little doubt that years of disorder lie ahead in the Middle East as different factions try to gain control. The murder of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens in Libya, the one American success story of the Arab Spring, is an early sign of the chaos to come; it also points to the unpredictable consequences likely to follow any Western intervention in Syria — or Iran.
As in Southeast Asia in 1975, the limits of both American firepower and diplomacy have been exposed. Financial leverage, or baksheesh, can work only up to a point with leaders struggling to control the bewilderingly diverse and ferocious energies unleashed by the Arab Spring.
Although it’s politically unpalatable to mention it during an election campaign, the case for a strategic American retreat from the Middle East and Afghanistan has rarely been more compelling. It’s especially strong as growing energy independence reduces America’s burden for policing the region, and its supposed ally, Israel, shows alarming signs of turning into a loose cannon.
All will not be lost if America scales back its politically volatile presence in the Muslim world. It could one day return, as it has with its former enemy, Vietnam, to a relationship of mutually assured dignity. (Although the recent military buildup in the Pacific — part of the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” — hints at fresh overestimation of American power in that region.)
Republicans calling for President Obama to “grow” a “big stick” seem to think they live in the world of Teddy Roosevelt. Liberal internationalists arguing for even deeper American engagement with the Middle East inhabit a similar time warp; and both have an exaggerated idea of America’s financial clout after the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s.
It is the world’s newly ascendant nations and awakened people, which will increasingly shape events in the post-Western era, America’s retrenchment is inevitable. The only question is whether it will be as protracted and violent as Europe’s mid-20th century retreat from a newly assertive Asia and Africa.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on September 24, 2012, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: America’s Inevitable Retreat From the Middle-East
Note: I am convinced that all that aggressive fuss about Iran nuclear program by Israel is the realization that the US has started the disengagement process in this troubled and uncontrollable Middle-East region. Israel thinks that only the US deep involvement in this region will keep US yearly financial and economic support, updated weapons, subsidies, free grants, lavish donations…flowing into Israel to sustain the apartheid system.
Otherwise, Israel will have no choice but to consider policies as part of this region and deal with its people…
Oil is a commodity to be purchased in the global market and there is no need to secure its flow by military means…
In ‘Your Scene Sucks’, Dubi makes fun of ‘Apple Store Indie’, hipsters, rockers, emo, and hip hop kids, and ‘Popcore dorks’…
Are you one of these ‘scene’ kids?
The Bazaar is a online, global marketplace to buy and sell art and creative products.
Creatives can choose to use our print-and-ship service to sell art prints around the world, or choose to ship custom products directly to buyers.
Start to sell your creative works, or discover great works.
Note: got the link via Andrew Bossone
Ultra Fuzzy sunglasses: To ultra fussy Orthodox Jews in Israel
Posted by: adonis49 on: September 27, 2012
Ultra Fuzzy sunglasses: To ultra fussy Orthodox Jews in Israel
The “Decency Patrols” in Israel, similar to the one instituted in Saudi Arabia, are selling for $6 ultra fuzzy sunglasses to ultra fussy Orthodox Jews that blur visions when “indecent girls” cross their paths on the streets…
These ultra glasses, supposedly do not obstruct clear vision a few yards away, but sexy female genders won’t be seen but blurred coming from a little distance away: As the woman is that close, the chaste man won’t have time to react appropriately and experience a hard on, or feeling horny as the girl is progressing toward him…
To be impressed with impure inclinations and sensations forced the ultra orthodox Jews to separate between the sexes: Separate in public buses and transportation means, separate on side walks, separate in public meeting and celebrations…
Posters and notices are plastered on walls exhorting the female genders to wear long loose dresses, closed collar, long sleeves…(I am not sure of open sandals). Tight Jeans, bra-less chest, shorts, loose hairs…anything that is suggestive…of round behinds and large hips…is banned in certain quarters… Sex is for procreation, and experience of pleasures is not on the menu…
The “Decency Patrols” in Israel sell also visors that block peripheral vision, the worst kind of impure vision: permitting the imagination to run wild on what could have been the sexiest of physical parts… It is dawning on me why domesticated horses and mules wear visors (on the sides): Peripheral vision is pretty dangerous…
The next step is selling decent attires to outsider women, visiting these prehistoric historical sites and quarters..
I heard that the ultra orthodox Jews are planning to domesticate termites: Digging long underground tunnels to hide women from popping into the sun light and disturbing the peace…
A few religious sects have been uncovered in Russia where women and children didn’t see the natural light for 3 decades…A few old men ventured outside to cater for the survival needs…
I bet the ultra orthodox Jews and the Islamic Wahhabi sect of Saudi Arabia are the “happiest” of mankind: The less exposure to sexual excitements the less pain and suffering…
Most common of errors…Apophenia? Patternicity? Pareidolia?
Posted by: adonis49 on: September 27, 2012
Most common of errors…Apophenia? Patternicity? Pareidolia?
There are different types of mistakes and errors that people commit, like you and me, the little people, managers,“leaders” new and old”, scientists, researchers, politicians…
1. Mistakes “reserved” for management of people https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2012/09/24/13-mistakes-new-learders-makes-this-taboo-number-as-if-older-leaders-ever-diminish-this-number-of-mistakes/
2. Mistakes with complicated created “professional” terms attached to them (for this post)
3. Mistakes organized in taxonomies, or check lists…https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2008/10/04/whats-that-concept-of-human-factors-in-design/
4. Errors and mistakes in conducting controlled experiment, particularly on human subjects
5. Human and machines mistakes https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/whats-that-concept-of-human-factors-in-design-continue-21/
6. Mistakes never reminded of…and never accounted for…and never confronted with
Let’s read the second types of complicated mistakes. I think this list was posted by Graham Coghill on freshly pressed a while ago:
“Apophenia” leads you to believe, wrongly, that you have evidence to support a position when you don’t.
You believe you can continue to gamble because you’re on a winning streak, or that Mars is inhabited because some observers see canal-like patterns on its surface. It can lead you to ignore evidence that falsifies your position, or that supports a contrary position.
What to do when confronted by this tactic?
Since it’s usually wishful thinking that leads us to find non-existent patterns, we need to guard against it first. Look for the signs, and guard against the temptation to dismiss evidence that doesn’t support your wishes.
Beware of those who try to exploit your tendency for wishful thinking and discipline yourself to accept only conclusion that are supported by real-world evidence.
Variations and related tactics:
Michael Shermer calls this cognitive bias ‘patternicity‘. It comes in several forms:
- Pareidolia – finding shapes, such as faces, in things like clouds, geological features and slices of toast.
- The gambler’s fallacy – believing that past random events can influence the probability of future ones, for example, that a flipped coin is more likely to show heads after a run of tails.
- The clustering illusion – believing that the clusters that are always found in random data actually indicate something meaningful, for example, that a run of wins in a game of dice means you are on a winning streak.
In science, apophenia is related to what’s known as a Type I error, in which a test seems to show that two variables are related when, in fact, they are not.
It can also contribute to confirmation bias, in which an investigator deliberately looks for evidence which supports a favoured model and avoids evidence which refutes it.
Apophenia is also related to the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, in which a person zooms in on an apparent pattern in the midst of a sea of data, and claims that this is the key to a significant issue (as in the fable of the Texas sharpshooter who fires random shots at a wall, then draws the bullseye around the tightest cluster of bullet holes).
Examples:
- On the political side of the debate over climate change, many fall into the trap of using current weather patterns to support their positions – a cold spell, for instance, is quoted as evidence that the earth is not warming.
- Climate scientists are reluctant to claim that any particular event is due to global warming because they are aware of the dangers of the clustering illusion. Before any such pattern can be held up as real evidence, a convincing argument must be presented.
- James Hansen and colleagues have recently published an analysis (here and here) which, they claim, shows that recent weather events are consequences of global warming.
- Here’s how difficult it is to decide whether the clustering illusion is at work or not. In the early 200s, it became apparent that there was an unusually high occurrence of breast cancer among female employees at the ABC studios at Toowong in Queensland. In 2007, an expert panel found that the rate was 6 times higher than the rate of breast cancer in Queensland, and that there was only a 1 in 25 chance (estimated p value of 0.04) that this could have occurred by chance.
- It found a correlation between breast cancer occurrence and length of service at the studio, but could find no evidence that the cancer was due to any factor related to the site or to genetic or lifestyle factors of the employees.
- A 2009 study investigated breast cancer rates in ABC employees across Australia and found no increased rates in any other site. The ABC abandoned the Toowong studios and now operates from new facilities several kilometres away. Was the cancer cluster a statistical artefact or was there some yet unidentified cause?
- In the early 1900s, German meteorologist Alfred Wegener noticed a pattern in the earth’s continental shapes. The edges of the continents appeared to fit into each other, like pieces of a jigsaw. This led him to believe they had once been joined together and he proposed his model of continental drift.
- Although this model explained many observations, it was not accepted by earth scientists because Wegener was unable to come up with a mechanism that could account for continents moving. Discoveries in the 1950s and 1960s revealed a mechanism, and Wegener’s idea became incorporated into the Plate Tectonic model.
Note 1: Here is the link to Coghill’s post, at his polite request http://scienceornot.net/2012/08/14/perceiving-phoney-patterns-apophenia/.
Note 2: Fortunately, I don’t blog full-time or navigate the net to find out who have borrowed my ideas from the 3,100 articles that I posted: That would be a nightmare to keep track of and of no benefit, as far as I know. All that I am interested in is disseminate what is controversial and need to be discussed and reflected upon…
Civilians hit by sanctions: Iran, Syria, and formerly Iraq
Posted by: adonis49 on: September 27, 2012
Civilians hit by sanctions, (Friday 10 August 2012)
Iranian civilians bear the brunt of western-imposed sanctions in terms of medicine and food shortages, and money problems…
Iran’s Haemophilia Society recently blamed the sanctions for risking thousands of children’s lives due to a lack of proper drugs, the opposition website Rahesabz reported.
“For Fatemeh, the pill she takes twice a day in her home in Iran means the difference between life and death. Earlier this summer when she contacted her friend Mohammad in the US to say she was running out of the medicine due to a shortage, the obvious thing for her fellow Iranian to do was to order it from the chemist next door and have it shipped directly to Iran.
To the dismay of Fatemeh and Mohammad, the order was rejected because of US sanctions on trade with Iran.
This week, Standard Chartered bank was accused by US regulators of scheming with Iran to hide transactions, an accusation it denies. While the sanctions focus may currently be on big institutions, in the eyes of ordinary Iranians, it is they who bear the brunt.
Mohammad, who lives in Moorhead (Minnesota) says: “My friend suffers from Brugada syndrome [a heart condition] and has abnormal electrocardiogram and is at risk of sudden death. There is one drug that is very effective in regulating the electrocardiogram, and hence preventing cardiac arrest. It is called quinidine sulfate and is manufactured in the US.”
Mohammad ultimately circumvented the problem by having the medicine ordered to his home address and sent to Iran through friends. “By the time she got the pills, her own supply was finishing within four days, what if we couldn’t send them in time? Who would be responsible if anything had happened to her?” he asked.
With the latest embargo placed on the importing of Iranian oil, sanctions are now tighter than ever. Western officials argue that sanctions are aimed at punishing the Iranian regime in the hope of forcing it to comply with international rules over its disputed nuclear programme, but many Iranians see things differently.
“Sanctions are affecting the entire country, but it is the people who bear the brunt and have the least ability to protect themselves from this pressure,” said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council and the author of the book “A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran”.
Trita says: “What is most concerning is that it is now increasingly clear that the people are the target. That works in theory – in democracies. But in a non-democracy, such as Iran, the ability for people to pressure their government is limited. Many in Washington acknowledge that we are conducting economic warfare. That means the entire Iranian economy is the battlefield – and ordinary Iranians are [seen as] enemy combatants.”
According to Parsi, those advocating the punitive measures hope that pressure on the people will translate into pressure on the government…
As sanctions have started to take their toll, prices of fruit and sugar, among other staples, have soared – in some cases showing three and four-fold increases. The latest controversy surrounds long queues for discounted poultry, an essential ingredient of Persian food, which has seen its price double since last year, causing what has been dubbed a “chicken crisis” and prompting demonstrations.
Sanctions, too, are compounding the country’s economic woes, sending the national currency falling to a record low and making dollars hard to come by.
The Western States says sanctions are the only option left, other than war. But Parsi said:
“That is patently false. It is the pro-war elements that are propagating the idea that the choice is between war and sanctions. The type of patient and persistent diplomacy that has resolved issues like this in the past is yet to be fully explored.”
Measures imposed on Iran’s central bank, cutting it off from the world, have caused grave problems for ordinary Iranians as well as opposition activists because it is the only official channel for them to transfer money abroad.
“Those who carry on despite hardships inside the country are also feeling more and more isolated. Activists, like regular Iranians, cannot use banks to transfer funds for conference participation, hotel reservations and to attend training workshops abroad,” said Sussan Tahmasebi.
Sussan is a prominent Iranian women’s rights activist who worked on a recent report called “Killing Them Softly: The Stark Impact of Sanctions on the Lives of Ordinary Iranians”.
Sussan says: “As a result of these [western] policies, ordinary Iranians are finding themselves caught up in the sanctions mess. In effect, the banking sanctions are forcing Iranians to rely on a cash-based economy, making them dependent on black marketeers for the transfer of funds to cover legitimate expenses, such as educational and health costs.”
Activists say that, unlike ordinary people, the regime can find a way out of banking difficulties with help from its proxies.
Sanctions are also affecting Iranians outside the country. One Iranian who is a resident of the US said that her bank account was closed recently because of a “new policy forbidding the banks to work with countries that expose them to money laundering”.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, she said: “I am living in this country [US], working and paying tax like others. I believe this is a kind of discrimination.”
• A few names have been changed to protect people’s identities
Israel to bomb chemical weapons in Syria? Would the civilian casualties be forgotten as “collateral damages”?
Posted by: adonis49 on: September 26, 2012
Israel to bomb chemical weapons in Syria? Would the civilian casualties be forgotten as “collateral damages”?
The vast recent war maneuver of Israel in the Golan Heights (in occupied Syria territory since 1967), and the simultaneous and concomitant maneuvers in south Lebanon, demonstrates the decision in Israel to bomb the chemical weapons in Syria, for various reasons:
1. For two years now, Israel of Netanyahu PM has been disseminating the suffocating smokescreen that Iran is the nemesis, particularly its nuclear program. On the assumption that “Islamic Iran” intends to produce an atomic bomb and impose its theocratic regime in the region. The real objective of this propaganda was to forget the Palestinian problem and relegate it to the bottom of the list of priorities in the US Administration.
It is working and the Palestinians are feeling helpless and neglected and not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
But Israel is unable to bomb anything in Iran and the US is not ready to be carried away in a war project that the end results are at best inconclusive and blurred… The US knows that any military engagement in Iran has to be a full-fledged, wide scale confrontation…? Why?
Just “Bombing nuclear installations” will pressure Iran to actually produce the atomic bomb. And the closing of the Hermuz Straight is not that difficult at all, regardless of scores of “demining” ships in these water.
To bomb Iran, Israel has to cross the air spaces of many Arab States, and it is doubtful that the people in these Arab States are to believe that their governments were taken by surprise and didn’t give their approval…
Otherwise, Israel has to use US bases or US aircraft carriers to reach the Iranian airspace: A de fact US declaration of war…
In any case, the Israeli citizens and the military are not hot about these military projects and they voiced their opinions and refusal to this hazardous idea pretty bluntly…
2. Now that Israel is not capable of bombing Iran and the US is not ready to get engaged, Israel has to diffuse its military incapacity by bombing targets that can be reached. Like what? Syria supposed chemical installations. As Israel did by bombing Syria supposed nuclear installation in Deir al Zour in 2007, and the one in Iraq in 1980, without any perceptible political flaps internally and externally.
In the last two weeks, Israel and the western States have been spreading the possibility that the Assad regime is about to use chemical weapons on the armed insurgents, and relocating the weapons to various “unknown” location for the serious eventuality of being bombed by Israel…
Israel is under the previous assumption that, also this time around, the bombing of chemical installation will go unchecked in any serious reactions, since the western nations are in favor of such “local engagement” and does not disturb the flow of oil and gas…
Israel wish that this bombing will decide Iran to provide a “casus belli reason” for the western nations to get engaged militarily against Iran…Will not happen. And the probability is high that the reactions from the Assad regime and Hezbollah in Lebanon will drag the military confrontations to over a month, as it happened in 2006 during the preemptive war against Hezbollah and all Lebanon.
Netanyahu thinks that his government is cohesive enough to try this bombing project. The main difficulty is that the soldiers going to the front are not the ultra orthodox or the sons of liberal capitalists: They are these liberal citizens who are paying the taxes and the body count so that the ultra orthodox and liberal capitalist classes reap whatever advantages any preemptive war generates in the short-term.
It is no longer what the radical right-wing ultra capitalist governments in Israel wish in matter of military actions that will decide the army to obey: It is “Are the soldiers ready to go along with another foolish military excursion, with no tangible benefits to the economic situation and the welfare of the middle classes?”
Note: https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/how-serious-is-a-preemptive-military-attack-on-iran/
Adonis Diaries 