Just when we thought we’d seen the back of one axis of evil, up pops another one to give us all sleepless nights.

The original axis of evil, as defined by President George W Bush in his State of the Union address in January 2002, consisted of Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

In fact, this axis was always an unlikely amalgam, conjured from the imagination of David Frum, the President’s chief speechwriter at the time, who was casting around for a suitably demonic phrase to capture the gravity of the threat America was said to face from its combined enemies in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

The phrase made great headlines, but the reality was that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had no meaningful ties to Pyongyang or Teheran, other than a shared hatred of American military supremacy.

This summer it appeared …

Die Eisbären in der Arktis bekommen den Klimawandel besonders drastisch zu spüren. Denn das Abschmelzen des arktischen Eises als Folge der Erderwärmung führt einer US-Studie zufolge zu einem dramatischen Rückgang ihrer Population.
--AFP, 8 September 2007

Climate change is not hurting polar bear populations in the Davis Strait area of Nunavut, according to Dr. Mitch Taylor, manager of wildlife research and a polar bear biologist with the GN’s Department of Environment.

In fact, polar bear populations along the Davis Strait are healthy and their numbers increasing, an ongoing study is indicating.

Reports in national and international press have projected that two-thirds of the world’s polar bear populations will be lost within 50 years due to the loss of sea ice.

Canada has two thirds of the world’s polar bears. Nunavut is home to 12 of Canada’s 13 polar bear populations, …

A major challenge in developing appropriate responses to legitimate problems is that alarmism catches people’s attention and draws them in. Alarmism is given more weight than it deserves, as policy makers attempt to appease their constituency and the media. It polarizes the debaters into groups of “believers” and “skeptics,” so that reasoned, fact-based compromise is difficult to achieve. Neither of these aspects of alarmism is healthy for the development of appropriate policy.
--Amy Kaleita and Gregory R. Forbes, Hysteria’s History

SAN FRANCISCO – Environmental hysteria leads to poor and self-contradictory policy-making according to Hysteria’s History: Environmental Alarmism in Context, a new report released today by the Pacific Research Institute (PRI). In Hysteria’s History, author Amy Kaleita, policy fellow in Environmental Studies at PRI, charts the progression of hysteria starting with Rachel Carson’s influential book Silent Spring up to the current global warming controversy.

“A …

Then the Secretary General laid it out for us: “We need you, Greenpeace, to mobilize public opinion and enable politicians to do the right thing.” Putting the ball squarely in our court and that of our supporters. Strong leadership is only half of the equation; public pressure is the other half.
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/ban_ki-moon_leipold070920

Many have accused the photo of young Mohammed Al Dura’s father shielding him from Israeli bullets of being a fake, but the original videotape from which this photo was drawn was hidden from view by France 2. Yesterday a French judge finally ordered the channel to produce it. PJM’s Nidra Poller was one of the few journalists witnessing this stunning turning point.
http://www.pajamasmedia.com/2007/09/dam_bursts_at_al_dura_trial.php

Gestern schickte mir ein befreundeter Astronom aus den USA ein lustiges e-mail zu den Spekulationen über einen angeblichen Meteoriteneinschlag in Peru:

“I’m waiting for the first mainstream media or BBC report that it’s all Bush’s fault. ;^) Whatever this Peruvian crater turns out to be, the hoopla has been pretty fun so far.”

Guess what? Es ist tatsächlich alles Bushs Schuld! Zumindest behauptet das heute die Pravda ("Wahrheit" in russisch) :

Russian Military Intelligence Analysts are reporting today that one of the United States most secretive spy satellites, the KH-13, targeting Iran was ‘destroyed in its orbit’ with its main power generator powered by the radioactive isotope Pu-238 surviving re-entry and crashing in a remote region of the South American Nation of Peru, and where hundreds are reported to be ill from radiation poisoning.

Western media reports are stating that the US …

Sechs Tage vor der geplanten Präsidentenwahl im Libanon sind bei einem Bombenanschlag der anti-syrische Abgeordnete Antoine Ghanem und mindestens sieben weitere Menschen ums Leben gekommen. Mindestens 30 Personen wurden bei der Explosion einer Autobombe am Mittwoch in einem christlichen Viertel der Hauptstadt Beirut verletzt. Der christliche Politiker Ghanem gehörte der Regierungskoalition an, die von Syrien unterstützte Gruppen bekämpfen.
http://www.welt.de/politik/article1198281/Autobombe_toetet_anti-syrischen_Politiker.html?play=true

According to As-Safir, a statistical study on the demographics of the electorate by researcher Kamil Feghali reveals the following:

In the early 1900s the demographic situation was largely in favor of Christians. On the basis of the number of eligible voters born starting 1910, the study reveals that 68.8 percent of the electorate was Christian, 29.2 percent Muslims, and the rest Jews.

Based on the number of eligible voters born starting 1930, the Christian electorate constituted 52.4 percent of the total voter …

Like seemingly ever other magazine these days, Parenting is going green, with an essay contest in which parents describe changes they’ve made at home to be more environmentally friendly. Maybe the editors didn’t get the memo, but when it comes to environmental problems, children themselves are public enemy number one. Daniel Engber, writing for Slate, recently detailed the accelerating push to link population control with global warming:

“Our other green lifestyle choices can’t even begin to offset the cost of adding a brand-new CO2-emitter to the population. When I ran my own numbers through Al Gore’s carbon calculator, I discovered that a switch to 100 percent wind and solar power would reduce my emissions by just 1.3 tons per year. That’s not even enough to account for one quarter of today’s average American. Meanwhile, I’d have to do quite a bit of driving around in a Hummer H3 …