Basic Facts on Clothing and Murder for American Bigots

Posted on 03/26/2012 by Juan

Dear American bigots:

Basic Fact: Wearing a veil, as Iraqi-American Shaima al-Awady did before she was brutally murdered in her home as part of a hate crime, does not make a person a terrorist. You don’t mind it when pious Roman Catholic women wear a nun’s habit, and you recognize that dress as a sign of dedication to God. You don’t blame all the violence ever committed by Roman Catholics, or events like the Inquisition, on a nun in your neighborhood. Be as tolerant to pious Muslim women.

Basic Fact: Wearing a hoodie is not an invitation to murder, as Geraldo Rivera suggested it was in the case of Trayvon Martin. In fact, if you think about it, St. Francis of Assisi wore a hood, as did many other saints and monks. In the United States, we don’t kill people for how they dress, but how dressing like St. Francis is a crime is a special mystery.

Basic Fact: And, by the way, there is nothing worse than being both a bigot and a f*ck-up. So for God’s sake leave the poor Sikhs alone. Few Muslim men wear turbans, so if you see someone with a turban and a beard, he is likely from Indian Punjab and not a Muslim. I mean, you shouldn’t be bothering Muslims either, but your sad ass is definitely going to clown hell if you shoot down a Sikh because you mistook him for a Muslim.

Basic Fact: And by the way, all this emphasis on clothing as a motive for murder is just a smokescreen for sidestepping the real issue, which is that bigots shouldn’t be allowed to have hand guns. In fact, since you can’t hunt deer with a hand gun and most owners of a hand gun are not reservists in the National Guard of their state, it is unclear why the US tolerates so many hand guns. In countries like Britain, which do not, the murder rate by gun is vanishingly small compared to the annual carnage in the US.

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Faster than Expected Climate Change means drought, war, famine for Middle East, Africa

Posted on 03/26/2012 by Juan

A new study just published in Nature Geoscience has found it plausible for the first time that the world’s average surface temperature could rise by as much as 5 degrees Fahrenheit (3 C.) by 2050, only 38 years from now.

In February, the United Nations warned that the world only has a few years to substantially reduce its dependence on hydrocarbons, if it was to avoid the disasters facing the earth with a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees C. The likelihood that such a rise in temperature can be avoided is now low (emissions were up 6% in 2011).

The study took advantage of extra computing power donated by individuals via Climateprediction.net.

The likely impact of temperature rise on North America will be much hotter summers and more extreme weather events. But it is Africa that will likely be struck by catastrophe, and within only a decade if we go on like we are. Projections suggest that in:

“Africa: By 2020, between 75 and 250 million people are projected to be exposed to increased water stress; yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent in some regions by 2020; agricultural production, including access to food, may be severely compromised.”

Increased drought and reduced crop yields and malnutrition are also expected in the Middle East over the next few decades as a result of climate change, including in Israel, and the new findings will accelerate the time scale over which these developments will occur. US foresees water wars in the Middle East.

There is also increased likelihood of flooding in parts of Asia, which we perhaps have already started seeing in Pakistan.

Another study, just published in Nature Climate Change, concluded that there is already a strong link between rising temperatures and extreme weather. In 1951-1980, it was only at most 0.2 percent of the globe’s land area that you had extremely hot summers. Now it is ten percent of global land area. And the change will be costly, even in North America. In 2011, the US was struck by 14 extreme weather events that caused more than $1 billion each in damages. That just isn’t normal, the paper argues.

Weather, as opposed to climate, is affected by cyclical things such as the el Nino. But those cycles now act out against a backdrop of discernible climate change, so that their effects can be amplified with calamitous results.

Thus, the 7,000 temperature records set or equaled in the United States during this March can probably not be explained only by weather (cyclical or one-time factors), but rather show the amplification effect of climate change (long term trends) caused by human beings dumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The advent of spring in the US has already moved up 3 days, and 5 days in some states. The longer warm weather season has increased pollen and allergies, with the potential for increased childhood asthma.

NOAA on atmospheric CO2, 2008-Feb. 2012

From NOAA

The past decade, 2001-2010, is the warmest on record. 2011 should have been cooler because of a La Nina, but the warming trend owing to climate change was so powerful that it produced another record-breaking hot year.

With their unsustainable addiction to oil and gas to power a consumer society, human beings are carrying out a cosmic experiment with life on earth, one that could easily blow up in their faces. Human beings as we now know them are fairly recent, perhaps 120,000 to 200,000 years old, and their entire development has taken place in a relatively cold era. It is not clear whether they can survive a 10 degree Fahrenheit temperature rise over the next century and all the changes it will wreak on animal and plant life, on fresh water availability, and on the health costs of outdoor activity.

Consumers in the US are going to have to sue Big Oil and Gas if we are to get any serious change. As with cigarette smoking causing cancer, there is a tort here that juries and judges can eventually be persuaded to recognize.

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Omar Khayyam (78)

Posted on 03/26/2012 by Juan

You ignoramus!  
This bodily form is nothing.
and this speckled dome 
of the nine heavens
is nothing.
Be happy that in the realm
of being and corruption
we are dependent 
on a single breath;
and that, too, is nothing.

Translated by Juan Cole
from [pdf] Whinfield 78

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Israeli Peace Marchers Protest Iran War Talk in Tel Aviv

Posted on 03/25/2012 by Juan

Haaretz reports that hundreds of Israeli peace activists marched in Tel Aviv on Saturday to protest all the talk of striking Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. Their placards demanded “No to War with Iran,” and “Talks, not Bombs.”

The boldness of this march, given the rightwing political atmosphere in Israel, should not be underestimated. Devastated at the polls and quiescent for years, the Israeli left has in the past year begun finding its voice. The J14 movement of street protests for affordable housing and education brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets last summer and fall. It is well known that many of the protesters skewed left politically and privately oppose the concerted settlement of Palestinian land in the West Bank.

The peace activists and the social justice organizers are offering a new discourse about the good society that differs perceptibly from the old, Labor left. For instance, Uri Savir, President of the Peres Center for Peace, argues for a two-fold strategy. He admits that the Arab Spring makes it more important than ever for Tel Aviv to give up the dream of “Greater Israel” and to draw back from the West Bank, since Israel’s Arab neighbors will never accept that millions of Palestinians should continue to live under occupation. But he takes a harder line against Iran, urging a close American alliance, sanctions, and a military strike as “a last resort.” In essence, he is reversing the policy of the Likud government of PM Binyamin Netanyahu, which routinely risks strained relations with the executive in Washington, sees a strike on Iran as an urgent priority and not a last resort, and is redoubling efforts to colonize the Palestinian West Bank with Israeli squatters.

As welcome as Savir’s common sense is (and it seems to represent Israeli President Shimon Peres’s own thinking), he seems strangely tone deaf to the dangers that ‘crippling’ sanctions on Iran will lead to war, and strangely detached from reality in thinking it is still plausible that Israeli squatters in the West Bank can be removed or that there is enough of it left to form a basis for a Palestinian state. The UN is now reporting that the Israeli state is actively helping West Bank Israeli squatters to steal water resources and springs that belong to the Palestinians, depriving the latter of water and turning the springs into revenue sources and even tourist sites. Colonialism is theft.

In a context where Savir’s position is so far left that probably only a handful of members of the Israeli parliament would publicly sign on to it at this point, the Iran peace march in Tel Aviv is a breath of fresh air.

The dead end of conventional Israeli politics is well summarized by journalist Stav Shaffir of J14, who pointed out to Jweekly that the electorate seems to vote on security issues rather than social issues: “People vote like tomorrow there’s a war and they choose the best general. While doing that, we get a government that abandons all responsibilities. Society isn’t better when you build a better airplane, but when you [offer] a better education.”

Although unconnected to the peace march, another project of Israeli doves is a Facebook page set up by husband-wife team Ronny Edry and Michal Tamir to promote people-to-people positive relations between Israelis and Iranians.

The world-wide trend to big money dominating conventional politics has also affected Israel, where the country’s burgeoning prosperity is increasingly poorly distributed. This problem of creeping plutocracy is not only an issue for young people who can no longer afford apartment rent. It is the same plutocrats who own munitions factories and benefit from war, and who can buy parliamentarians to serve as their ventriloquist dummies. But when conventional politics is seized by gridlock, the people invent new forms of politics. We may be seeing glimmerings of a new Israeli politics of peace.

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Western Intelligence Analysts Worry that Iran Sanctions are Hurting West: IRGC

Posted on 03/25/2012 by Juan

The USG Open Source Center translates an article from Javan, an organ of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC: Iran’s National Guard), analyzing alleged Western intelligence summits that question the effectiveness of sanctions on Iran. The article should be taken with a grain of salt, but it makes some good points. Iran has used saber-rattling to raise the price of petroleum by alarming investors and speculators, thus increasing its income in the past quarter by $3 billion, rather than suffering a shortfall. At the same time, it has inflicted pain at the pump on fragile Western economies in danger of slipping back into recession. It is plausible that there is severe doubt among intelligence analysts about the impact of and likely success of sanctions in changing regime behavior.

‘ Iran: Report Describes Western Intelligence Services’ Perspectives on Iran
Report entitled: “Behind the Scenes Look at Five Intelligence Services’ Meeting on Iran”
Javan online
Thursday, March 22, 2012 …
Document Type: OSC Translated Text…

Javan online

20 March 2012

Report Describes Western Intelligence Services Perspectives on Iran

Javan online: Informed sources say the wave of intelligence reports in the West that say the oil sanctions have ended to Iran’s great advantage have caused much confusion among the men of government in Europe and America.

An informed source who works in the area of the economy and tracks intelligence reports about Iran reported that in the last month more than three intelligence reports produced by European and American intelligence services classified confidential and above, have all concluded that for numerous reasons Iran has been the big winner in the oil sanctions and that in a completely smart way these sanctions have increased Iran’s revenues while the average revenues of the nations of the world are decreasing because of the economic crisis.

Nuclear Iran writes that an informed source said: “In Stockholm, teams from the CIA (America), Mossad (Israel), MI6 (England), BND (Germany) and DGSE (France) are now discussing one of the main areas of focus in these reports, which is that instead of reducing Iran’s revenue, in the last three months the oil sanctions have increased Iran’s revenues by more than $3 billion.”

This source added: “Western services who want to express views about the content of their findings believe by cleverly intensifying the verbal clashes with America and Israel Iran has caused constant shocks to the price of oil without any oil sanctions being effectively applied against it.”

According to this informed official the Western services and especially the German service believe Iran has made good use of the existing crisis in the world economy and has presented the West with a choice between weakening its economy by intensifying the sanctions against Iran or sharply reducing the sanctions.

This source continued: “The Stockholm meeting has effectively become a trial of America and Israel. The European nations believe Iran in coordination with Russia and China has used the main weakness of the Western nations, meaning the extreme sensitivity of public opinion in these nations to fuel price increases, and it has created conditions where the chance of the political survival of the people currently governing these nations has been greatly reduced, especially since almost all of these nations including America and France are about to hold elections. Accordingly the probability exists that insisting on putting restrictions on Iran’s oil sector will lead to internal crisis in the Western nations.”

This source, who emphasized the many limitations on providing intelligence about this, also added that the Western services believe the 12 Esfand (2 March) elections showed that the government of Iran has succeeded in stopping the project of “transferring pressure to the people” and has effectively not allowed foreign pressures to have an impact on ordinary life in Iran.

According to this source the intelligence evaluation of the five Western sources is that the people of Iran believe existing inflation is due to a domestic process and that there is no relationship between this inflation and the pressures of the West.

On this basis those at the meeting have decided the BBC Persian Service under MI6 oversight must produce a new propaganda package about the relationship between sanctions and inflation.

The existing intelligence shows that this meeting was a preliminary for a more essential meeting to be held in the month of May and at that meeting the European nations will examine the possibility or impossibility of applying oil sanctions against Iran in June 2012.

Existing intelligence shows that these services have still warned that insisting on oil sanctions against Iran will further damage relations with Russia, China and India.

This intelligence source said: “There is the sense that the European and American intelligence community regard the sanctions option, like the war option, as being ineffective in influencing Iran’s calculations.”

(Description of Source: Tehran Javan online in Persian Website of hardline conservative daily affiliated with the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC); ) ‘

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