Published on Tuesday, December 27, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
by Brian Moench
Taking inspiration from the Occupy Movement, last week a group of doctors and environmental groups in Salt Lake City, Utah announced a law suit against the third largest mining corporation in the world, Rio Tinto, for violating the Clean Air Act in Utah. This is likely the first time ever that physicians have sued industry for harming public health.
Air pollution causes between 1,000 and 2,000 premature deaths every year in Utah. Moreover, medical research in the last ten years has firmly established that air pollution causes the same broad array of diseases well known to result from first and second hand cigarette smoke–strokes, heart attacks, high blood pressure, virtually every kind of lung disease, neurologic diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, loss of intelligence, chromosomal damage, higher rates of diabetes, obesity, adverse birth outcomes and various cancers such as lung cancer, breast cancer and leukemia.
Published on Tuesday, December 27, 2011 by Postmedia News
‘Secret’ Environment Canada Presentation Warns of Oilsands’ Impact on Habitat
by Mike De Souza
Published on Monday, December 26, 2011 by WhoWhatWhy.com Justifying War with Iranby Russ Baker
A growing body of evidence points to a concerted campaign to prepare Americans and the world for war against Iran. This is not idle speculation. It fits a pattern that repeatedly preceded previous hostilities.
Monday, December 26, 2011 by OtherWords Resolve to Keep Science Experiments off Your Dinner Table in 2012Engineered crops have steadily increased over the past 15 years, despite the lack of independent research on their long-term effects on human health and the environment.
by Wenonah Hauter
By GALACTOR
Updated: Saturday, 24 December 2011 at 10:01 AM
I read an article in today’s (24th December) issue of the Volkskrant with much interest. It concerns the Dutch dominee (reverend) who doesn’t believe god exists but preaches as a member of the Dutch Protestant Church. I have translated the article and am interested in what opinions there are of it.
The article can be found only behind a paywall of the Volkskrant’s website.
Interview atheist reverend klaas hendrikse
‘Without people, god is nowhere’
The atheist reverend Klaas Hendrikse wrote the book ‘God bestaat niet en Jezus is zijn zoon’ (God doesn’t exist and Jesus is his son’.
Middelburg: Reverend Klaas Hendrikse (64) from Middelburg contines to torment his employer, the Protestante Kerk in Nederland (PKN, the Protestant Church of the Netherlands). He recently published a follow-up to his besteller ‘Geloven in een God die niet bestaat’ (2007, Belief in a god that doesn’t exist): ‘God bestaat niet en Jezus is zijn zoon’ (God doesn’t exist and Jesus is his son). He remains, remarkably, a Protestant reverend who preaches in liberal communities in Middelburg and Zierikzee and drily maintains that God doesn’t exist. His first book has sold 35 thousand copies. Many readers were also intrigued as to his vision of Jesus, the son of a non-existent god. Hendrikse decided to dedicate a book to a man that, according to Christian teachings, was born 2011 years ago in a stall in Bethlehem.
You believe in God, but you don’t believe he exists. Can you explain that in a few sentences?
“I don’t believe in a God as a being that exists anywhere. The idea of a God existing, albeit without beard, has stronger pagan writings than biblical ones. God, for me, is a word for human experience. That’s why I prefer to say ‘God happens’ rather than God exists. There are things that can happen between people that you call God. I see people quit [the church] because they can no longer believe in a distant god which they don’t experience. Belief is only tenable if it is based on what you yourself experience. And we don’t undergo experiences alone – there are always others involved. Go, and I will go with you; God goes with people who are on their way. Without people, God is nowhere.”
Do you believe in Jesus? Or did Jesus not exist either?
“Undoubtedly there existed an impressive person named Jesus. Otherwise they wouldn’t have written about him. But what the evangelists have written about him has no historical foundation. Who Jesus really was, has disappeared behind what they [the evangelists] have made of him. When the New Testament was written, early Christianity was gaining a place for itself amongst the accessible religions of the time. To make Jesus more believable than his competitors, he had, at least, to be able to do what they could. So, he could walk on water, multiply bread, turn water into wine and, the biggest miracle – rise from the dead. In the bible there is not a single miracle not also attributed to a pagan god or that was not erected by an Old Testament prophet. The question of whether Jesus performed miracles is not important. But because they are attributed to him, he is significant.
Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus at Christmas. What do you celebrate and what do you preach at Christmas?
Christmas is a nice opportunity to contemplate the meaning of Jesus. His birth isn’t the most important thing. Of course, the Christmas story is at the forefront but in my opinion it concerns what Jesus did as an adult. In him, I see a person who turned no-one away, who tried to remain in touch with the source of life which he called ‘his father’ and who helped people to their feet. It’s not at all unique but it is exceptional.
Do you consider yourself an atheist?
No, but I feel connected to that [atheism]. Many people who claim to believe that ‘something exists’ avoid using the word God because there are so many religious connotations bound up to it. I suspect that the religious convictions of atheists and christians hardly differ at all. Who can tell me the difference between ‘I have experienced something’ and ‘I have experienced God’? I try to stay close to atheists in my choice of words and as far away as possible to the jargon of the church.
You could leave the PKN and start your own religious community.
I have never considered doing so. I would rather remain as a louse in the fur of the PKN and work for change. That doesn’t take away my impending departure: this coming 1st September I will be 65 and then I am finished with work.
Christianity has become the first major religion to update its literature to suit modern, busy lives. ‘Bible On: Just Try to be Nice’ is expected to top the best-seller list, and has been hailed by critics for its ‘no-nonsense, less preachy approach’.
Vicars have often struggled to convince people with even a basic understanding of how the planet works that the current Bible is still relevant. ‘The old testament in particular has been hard to read aloud without someone sniggering, I’m pleased to see they’ve done away with that bit completely’, admitted David Parsonage, an experienced vicar of two. ‘All that smiting, vengeance and impossible levels of rainfall just distract from our core message: ‘try not to be too much of a dick’.’
Controversially, the new edition of the book has updated the names of some characters, and Jesus has been removed completely. ‘He’s been a bit hard to relate to since the ‘70s, if I’m honest’, explained co-author Ken Flowers. ‘If a kid is faced by a bearded man in sandals claiming that if they follow him they will experience endless love, they’re probably going to report him to Childline. That’s why we’ve replaced him with a talking bear called Nigel, who looks sad if you drop litter, or knock something over.’
Interesting discussion of academia. But the OWS movement should bench a demand for universal free college education, and not look back. The current attempts to privatize academic university study are disturbing to read, and the phenomenon should be stopped in its tracks with a revolutionary new equalization of college attainment. That process would/does have its obvious problems and dread logistics, but the time has come to chance the passage and make it a revolutionary demand.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jan/12/do-classics-have-future/?pagination=false: Do Classics Have a Future? Quick answer, the same future as that of the study of Sumerian, a vital zone of academic/university studies….but not exactly mainstream.
I recall walking through a major university library (Columbia) where the study rooms still had endless copies of well-used classics texts, often the old Loeb classical editions next to annoted texts of various masterwokrs, shelf after shelf, once used by a majority of liberal arts students in general degree study. Then a few years later they all disappeared in a makeover of the facilities. Many university students used to study little else, then find a place in life on that basis. But now studying classics is a risky business.
Having been a classic major myself I can refuse to answer the question on the grounds that the truth of the matter is alarming, and too painful to discuss: the joke about the penniless student of Greek isnt’ too funny when taken literally. You walk out the door with a degree and noone, in the university, or out, wants anything to do with you. Still, the experience taught me to be an outsider, most ironically, not the classic outcome for establishment classicists. Highly trained, but no place whatever anywhere in the business (or academic) world, you become a rebel against reality. At least you can look down on science grunts preening their feathers, they are especially nauseating. Guaranteed employment, they become insufferable prigs, without realizing it. And proud of their ignorance beyond their specialization. Better to be trained in something that has no purpose. Employers literally choking at the Greek/Latin major, overqualified, bye! But that is a new and transient phenomenon: the final dissolution of classics must have started just after my time, in the seventies, when a real nosedive began.
But my experience was not at all standard. I am a special kind of idiot, and majored in a vacuum. I in fact lost interest in classics the first week of my freshman year, having been a high school classics whiz, and coasted to a degree in three years, to the alarm of my professors, and they handed me my degree as fast as they could before I puked in their face and forgot what I knew in high school. What can I say, it was the best education you can get. The only way to escape utilitarian mind control in the career circuit is training to be a beggar. Next stop, a crash course in hitech beggary, the panhandler. Actually, I took a course in calculus my senior year, and found it refreshing. Thence embarking on a study of mathematics, which revived my spirits, but didn’t land me a job.
Meanwhile, Greek, like Sumerian, will always be studied. But not so much in the common rooms of the Ivy League study halls. A new technology is needed to create a new venue of fast-learning on computers that can accelerate learning, and surveying. Or else simple study in translation. Reading Homer in the original isn’t all that hard, and a computerized course on a Greek Tragedy text to save time on the scholarly sidetracks could revive the subject as form of recreation.
The passing of the classics, like the passing of all Axial Age traditions is a timed mechanism, strangely, and I think my generation in college was the last of the old-fashioned classics crowd. Now the situation is approaching the scientitic/archaeological study of greater world history, as culture moves to create a new classics tradition, in the future ‘old english’ of the modern, soon ancient, world as students in 3000 AD pore over Shakespearian texts, wondering about the death of the classics.
‘Speaking of Nietzsche’ today, the link leads to a review of a new book on Nietzsche. The paradox of the American Nietzsche is condiserable. As the review explains Walter Kauffman is responsible for the figment of Nietzsche now current. But Nietzche has a darker side, and the frequent exhonerations from fascist/Nazi association are a bit of a whitewash.
Here’s a text out of the mainstream academic take on Nietzsche. Nietzsche, Prophet of Nazism: The Cult of the Superman–Unveiling the Nazi Secret Doctrine
Beware of Nietzsche, he would not respect his American followers: his strategy with the ‘last men’ was to make them his groupies using great literary style and then poison them with ideas he knew to be false, but good doses of mental fatality the groupies would quaff to the last draught, groving on his genius. This strategy manufactured not a few ‘neo-cons’, some of them, like Leo Strauss, very smart, and some, on the left, like Fukuyama’s mentor, cynical trashers of leftist idealism in the name of that ideaism.
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/12/26/a-new-definition-of-scientism/
Coyne discusses a new essay on scientism at the Pigliucci blog. I find the essay and Coyne’s commentary both to be useless.
Anyone associated with Darwinism trying to preach to us about scientism is, to me, peddling a sick joke. The essay cited on the other hand goes off on a series of tangents.
I use the term a lot here with reference to the Darwin debate, but I don’t ‘own’ the term so my usage is merely fuzzy/useful on the grounds of ‘topical reference’. That is, the definition of the term is left a big vague as a gateway to a particular discussion showing some relevant issues. Like Darwinism in the context of scientism.
So, to get one’s bearings, go to Amazon (or Google) and type ‘scientism’ in the search box, and scroll down for some of the histories. Then type ‘iron cage’ and ‘positivism’ in the same search spots. There are good histories of these subjects starting in the nineteenth century. But the issues are treacherous. Nietzsche has a nasty strain of scientism, and the way he ‘denatures’ his guru Schopenhauer to play to the gallery of his groupies to come is the most sinister brand of them all. But, technically, he is a far cry from the category in the typical usage of the term. Speaking of Schopenhauer, his distinctions of phenomenal and noumenal (or thing in itself, he does use Kant’s term ‘noumenon’) suggest how the restriction to the phenomenon in science creates scientism. Note how in Nietzsche the ‘Will’ in nature from Schopenhauer becomes, to make it compatible with an anti-metaphysical reductionism, the ‘naturalistic’ will to power. Treacherous shift in meanings.
My usage is not entirely standard, but then again academic scholars will wreck this term if they try to use/define it. My usage reflects the crystallization of reductionism in science despite the warnings of classic figures, from Rousseau to Kant and the Romantics, plus others. You could adopt a Kantian usage: scientism arises when a particular metaphysics in reverse arises, eliminating key sources of discourse, as not ‘science’: e.g. the issue of free will in relation to Newtonian physics, or the ethical basis of human morality, beyond the dogmas of reductionists.
So note how those trapped in scientism are going to be discussing it and claiming authority to define it. They will define themselves out of it, and continue merrily down the Darwinian garden path, none the wiser. All you can do is change to new terms and move on. But the term scientism still has some life in it.
Again, not all would agree with my usage, but I think that it is appropriate: for example, to leave the sci/acad idiots nettled, let us call the use of population genetics to explain morality in theories of kin/group selection ‘rank scientism’. The free agent of ethical behavior has been reduced to a ‘scientistic’ mechanization theory (garbage, really) operating via natural selection. That to me is scientism. So be wary of the pomposity of discussions here Coyne to Pigliucci et al: they are all dopey zombies in the scientism quagmire.
Night of the living dead all over again.
The fact is, there is no brilliance in mechanism and reductionism any more. Mechanists and reductionists just bypass the hard math questions and award themselves a prize, cheered on by their equally tenured fellows, and increasingly irrelevant to what happens.
Link Between Earthquakes and Tropical Cyclones: New Study May Help Scientists Identify Regions at High Risk for Earthquakes
ScienceDaily (Dec. 8, 2011) — A groundbreaking study led by University of Miami (UM) scientist Shimon Wdowinski shows that earthquakes, including the recent 2010 temblors in Haiti and Taiwan, may be triggered by tropical cyclones (hurricanes and typhoons), according to a presentation of the findings at the 2011 AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
How Bacteria Build Homes Inside Healthy CellsScienceDaily (Dec. 20, 2011) — Bacteria are able to build camouflaged homes for themselves inside healthy cells — and cause disease — by manipulating a natural cellular process.
Bradley Manning: Hero or Traitor?
by MARJORIE COHN
When he announced that the last U.S. troops would leave Iraq by year’s end, President Barack Obama declared the nine-year war a “success” and “an extraordinary achievement.” He failed to mention why he opposed the Iraq war from the beginning. He didn’t say that it was built on lies about mushroom clouds and non-existent ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Obama didn’t cite the Bush administration’s “Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq,” drawn up months before 9/11, about which Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill reported that actual plans “were already being discussed to take over Iraq and occupy it – complete with disposition of oil fields, peacekeeping forces, and war crimes tribunals – carrying forward an unspoken doctrine of preemptive war.”
Published on Monday, December 26, 2011 by Miami Herald
by Fred Grimm
Compared to modern school kids, I was a downright worthless student.
I don’t mean worthless as a pejorative. (My father would have used a more colorful term to characterize my scholarly pursuits.) But worthless as a commodity. Us kids at Montrose Elementary School weren’t making anyone rich. Not like today’s pupils, particularly those in Florida, who’ve become valuable cogs in a burgeoning industry.
Published on Monday, December 26, 2011 by The Seattle Times
No Virginia, there is no war on Christmas, writes David Sirota. As the year winds down, Sirota looks at the fake outrage that surfaced during the holiday season
by David Sirota
The vast majority of Americans still believe in angels
I am sorry to disappoint the grouch Coyne on Xmas, but the belief in ‘spirits’ is an endemic human ‘evolutionary psychology’. It begins with a sense of contact with the ‘ghosts’ of ancestors in most cultures, and expands with 70% imagination added to a full blown pantheon of spritely hallucinations. You cannot really succeed in calling this superstition. Man’s emergence into homo sapiens mentality was also a crossing of a threshold into the ‘spirit’ sense, whatever is to be made of that. You can’t eliminate that without going back to homo erectus. The real meaning of this, I admit, is not clear.
The question of spirits, and belief in such later became polytheism which became monotheism plus angels, various entities no longer fitting into the scheme as independent deities. The concept of angels seems to have solved the problem.
The problem here is that people once had experiences of the angelic (beside which is the alternate realm of Aleister Crowley’s magical invocations of Holy Guardian Angels shows that such a realm can be entered as an aspect of depth psychology). Nothing much can be made of this, I admit.
The point is that if souls exist then science skepticism fails, and the deductions proceed in merry fashion from ghostly souls to theistic spirit bodies. If you negate this as superstition you end in superstition.
As safer approach is double skepticism. And a healthy agnosticism. And some way to make soul-belief less phatasmagorical.
It seems unfair: you can have no knowledge of something about something you can’t eliminate via skepticism. As Kant made clear, that is the human condition. We can have no real knowledge of spirits. But if we eliminate belief as superstition we make a worse error.
The trick is to manage ‘sanity’ here as a stiff upper lip grasp of the really real reality we inhabit, hoping that some future evolutionary man might actually cross the threshold man has bridged.
Far be it for me to second the muddle of Xtian superstition (beside the muddle of superstitions in ‘scientists’ like Coyne) but the question of ‘spiritual entities’ within the sheme of nature in some sense won’t go away. It won’t ever go away, short of a totalitarian system of mind control, of the kind Coyne et al in the science dummny club envision.
A better approach would be a combined Kantian skepticism with an avowal that metaphysical entities beyond knowledge may well have some kind of reality but are unknowable in standard terms. That’s the hard luck reality of man as he is, between two worlds.
Every generation of man has expressed belief here in some form, and every such generation has been confused about it. Including the arch stupidoes, the science popes in the Coyne peanut gallery.
Meanwhile, I grant that Santa Claus is a fictitious belief…. As to spirits and ghosts, Alfred Wallace, the founder of Darwinism, saw the handwriting on the wall, and became a table-rapper, briefly, hoping for a science of ghosts.
But he realized finally that the spirit dimension of man could never be explained by his (not Darwin’s) theory of natural selection. Over and out. Toss out the theory, OK!
December 24, 2011 at 3:24 am · Do scientists really know what a gene is? The answer is NO!!!
http://www.cogs.indiana.edu/pdf/nature.pdf
And what about genes and causation? From the abstract of Denis Noble’s paper:
The metaphors that served us well during the molecular biological phase of recent decades have limited or even misleading impacts in the multilevel world of systems biology.
New paradigms are needed if we are to succeed in unravelling multifactorial genetic causation at higher levels of physiological function and so to explain the phenomena that genetics was originally about. Because it can solve the ‘genetic differential effect problem’, modelling of biological function has an essential role to play in unraveling genetic causation.
Irish Examiner December 24, 2011
By Daniel Harding, New York
A US judge has signed a default judgment finding Iran, the Taliban and
al-Qaida liable for the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Judge George Daniels in Manhattan signed the judgement a week after hearing
evidence in the 10-year-old case.
The signed ruling came in a $100 billion lawsuit brought by victims’
families.
He directed a magistrate judge to preside over remaining issues, including
fixing compensatory and punitive damages.
Judge Daniels signed findings of fact saying the plaintiffs had established
that the attacks were caused by the support the defendants provided to
al-Qaida.
It also said Iran continued to provide material support and resources to
al-Qaida by providing a safe haven for al-Qaida leadership and
rank-and-file members.
During last week’s hearing, September 11 victims’ families sat through a
four-hour presentation from lawyers who cited evidence supporting their
claims that Iran actively assisted the hijackers of planes that crashed
into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a field in
Pennsylvania.
Former members of the September 11 Commission and three Iranian defectors
also spoke.
It would be near impossible to collect any damages, especially from the
Taliban or al-Qaida.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly denied any Iranian connection
in the September 11 attacks or with al-Qaida.
Mondoweiss December 23, 2011
Israeli university gaining a toehold in Manhattan specializes in weapons
development
* by Allison Deger *
[image: hermes 450]
The IDF used a Rafael weaponized variation of this Hermes 450 drone in
Operation Cast Lead. Both Elbit and Rafael have partnerships with Technion.
(Photo: AFP/Getty Images)
On Monday, December 19, New York City and Cornell University announced a
“historic” partnership with Technion -
Israel Institute of Technology, where the two universities will build an
applied sciences campus on Roosevelt Island, supported by a $100 million
capital gift from New York City. The project was also funded by a $350
million gift from an anonymous donor (now revealed to be philanthropist
Charles Feeney
).
Following the city’s decision, Israeli Consul General Ido Aharoni spoke
with *The Jewish Week* about the engineering campus project, stating, “this
is of strategic importance in terms of positioning Israel not only in
America, but all over the world, as a bastion of creativity and
innovation.” Technion
is a major educator in the field of science–the university produces
approximately half of the leadership of Israeli NASDAQ companies. But what
was not discussed in the bid run-off, is Technion’s entrenchment in systems
of militarism and discrimination. These systems of violence and
discrimination in education, practiced in the occupied Palestinian
territories and Israel, respectively, raise ethical and legal questions for
New York City in entering a contract with Technion.
An April 2011 report by Tadamon, a Montreal-based activist
organizationtitled
*Structures of Oppression: Why McGill and Concordia Universities* *must
sever their links with the Technion-Israel Institute of
Technology*,
investigates these issues: Technion’s links to Elbit Systems
Ltd.(an Israeli
military security and surveillance company) and Rafael Advanced
Systems Ltd. (founded in 1948 as part of the Israeli Ministry of
Defense),
the technologies developed at Technion, and the school’s discrimination
towards Palestinian students–by way of institutionalized preferential
treatment towards active duty and reservist IDF students.
[image: elbit]
Elbit’s computer vision, eye tracking device developed with Technion.
(Photo: Elbit Systems Ltd.)
*Elbit Systems Ltd.*
A multi-billion dollar company that provides security equipment to the IDF,
including “unmanned aerial and ground vehicles,” Elbit’s current
partnership with Technion is a joint-venture since 2008, the Visions
Systems Research
Initiative,
which according to Elbit, designs “an advanced eye tracking laboratory that
enables real-time measurement of gaze and eye movement.” WhoProfits.org reported:
The company supplied UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) to the Israeli army,
which are in operational use in during combat in the West Bank and Gaza.
The cameras in these UAV are manufactured by Controp Precision Tehnologies.
The security contractor previously has lost contracts with the Norwegian
Finance Ministry and Danske Bank because of Elbit’s work with the IDF in
the West Bank occupation. WhoProfits.org researched Elbit’s security
contracts with the Jerusalem section of the wall, where Elbit provides
“surveillance
cameras in the Ariel section and for the A-ram
wall,”which
constitutes a violation
of international law.
*Rafael Advanced Systems Ltd.*
An Israeli government-owned weapons
producer and major Israeli employer, Rafael Advanced Systems Ltd., has
provided the IDF with security services since the 1970s, and is partnered
with Technion through a specialized degree program. Tadamon chronicles the
academic/weapons producer partnership:
The company has maintained a research and project-based relationship with
Technion for many years. In 2001, Technion announced a three-year in-house
MBA program tailored specifically for Rafael managers. In partnership with
Rafael, students and faculty members of the Technion’s Faculty of Aerospace
Engineering launched a ‘two-stage research rocket’ in May 2006. The Ramtech
rocket took five years to build, and was completed by approximately 20
different students under the supervision of Technion Professor Alon 21 Gany
and Yitzhak Greenberg from Rafael (also a Technion graduate).
Rafael produces medium range missiles that outfit Elbit drones, used during
the 2008-9 Israeli assault on Gaza. The unmanned aerial vehicles,
weaponized by Rafael, were used in cases of indiscriminate violence on
civilians and internationals, including 87 deaths in Operation Cast
Lead,
as reported by Human Rights Watch.
From the 2009 Human Rights Watch report:
Israel’s primary armed drones are the Hermes, produced by the Israeli
company Elbit Systems Ltd., and the Heron, produced by Israeli Aerospace
Industries. The Hermes can stay aloft for up to 24 hours at altitudes of up
to 18,000 feet and has an array of optical, infrared, and laser sensors
that allow the operator to identify and track targets as well as to guide
munitions in flight. The Hermes carries two Spike-MR (medium range)
missiles, sometimes called the ‘Gil’ in Israel, produced by the Israeli
firm Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. The Heron drone, which can fly
for up to 40 hours at 30,000 feet, has similar optics to the Hermes and can
carry four Spike missiles. In Gaza, Israel used both the Hermes and Heron
drones armed with the Spike, though it may have also used other missiles.
*Technion Develops Weapons*
Technion, through the Technion Autonomous Systems
Programdeveloped
Rafan, a small helicopter, weighing approximately 1 kilogram,
used for surveillance, and unmanned bulldozers. This program has the
support of three different academic centers whose focus is creating weapons
to support various branches of military.
*Discrimination against Palestinians*
Tadamon details IDF programs with Technion, in which active-duty and
reservist students are privileged over Palestinian students, through
academic incentives and programs. As Palestinian citizens of Israel are
exempt from military service, these programs are effectively exclusively
for Israeli-Jewish students. Tadamon reviews the two programs,
Atidimand
Brakim :
The Technion is a partner in the Brakim academic reserve program, ‘the
latest in a series of joint Israel Defense Forces (IDF)/Technion academic
initiatives.’ Taking place in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, the
Brakim program allows 15 students to complete both their Bachelor’s and
Master’s in Science degrees in four years. ‘Like other students in the
Atuda (academic reserve program), Brakim participants will complete their
undergraduate degrees and apply their education during their military
service,’ as stated in the publication Technion Focus. According to a
brochure released by the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, the, ‘Brakim
program [was] initiated to meet the request of the IDF to create an elite
group of mechanical engineers to become the future R&D leaders in IDF.’
Also, in 2009, the university exhibited a double standard toward dissent by
Palestinian students and Jewish-Israeli students. A Palestinian protest was
criminalized. Tadamon notes, when two protests were held in 2009, one
protest “ended with the arrest of 10 Palestinian students, although the
Zionist right-wing counter protest was much larger and unapproved.”
The Tadamon report recommends the universities sever ties with Technion,
based on the partnerships with “the Israeli military, the Israeli
military-industrial complex, and Israel’s grave violations of international
law and Palestinian rights.” Furthermore, Tadamon charges Technion has
“full knowledge” of the development of weapons specifically used for
violations of international law, and asks other universities to not
normalize these abuses to law and human life.
With human rights organizations calling for universities to sever ties with
Technion, New York City’s and Cornell’s decision to build a partnership
with the school on Roosevelt Island should be closely scrutinized.
About Allison Deger Allison Deger is the Assitant Editor of
Mondoweiss.net. Follow her on twitter at
@allissoncd.
While Paying Its Workers Twice as Much
by Frederick E Allen, Forbes Staff
Forbes (December 21 2011)
In 2010, Germany produced more than 5.5 million automobiles; the US
produced 2.7 million. At the same time, the average auto worker in
Germany made $67.14 per hour in salary and benefits; the average one in
the US made $33.77 per hour. Yet Germany’s big three car companies -
BMW, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), and Volkswagen – are very profitable. Read the rest of this entry »