Hezbollah, Childhood: The Joys of the Hezbollah Children's Museum

A Trip to the Hezbollah Children Museum



If culture is destiny, then happiness is not in the cards for today's children in Southern Lebanon.

Our Man in the Bay State, Boston Herald writer, Darren Garnick, has a revealing piece out, "The Hezbollah Children’s Museum — A Cross-Cultural Study". Revealing because it takes a look at one of the joys of childhood--and childhood lost.

As the parent of a boy equally enthralled by escalators and stegasauruses, I’ve never met a Children’s Museum that I didn’t like. I find these places to be especially friendly to candid photo-ops.

Garnick then lists--and includes some great pix of--his favorite child museums: THE MULTI-LEVEL GERBIL CAGE — BOSTON, MASS. (the picture at the top of this piece); THE GEAR WALL — DOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE; and, THE HUMAN BODY MAZE — BANGOR, MAINE.

Which would all make for a great feature--but then he goes further.

"This might shock you: The fun-spirited, light-hearted tone of these exhibits is sorely lacking at the new Hezbollah Children’s Museum in South Lebanon."

Unless readers frequent blogs which specialize in the arcane world of Hezbollah-bilia, they'd be generally unaware that terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah, even dabble in Children's Museums. Who has the time--what with delis to blow up, journalists to behead and rockets to launch?

Darren quotes the International Herald Tribune’s Robert F. Worth.

"...Worth offers a vivid glimpse of “Hezbollah’s most ambitious multimedia exhibit to date,” a tourist attraction devoted to their all-time terrorist superstar, Imad Mughniyeh. "

Mughniyeh was believed to be responsible for:

* The 1983 suicide attacks on the U.S. Embassy and Marines barracks (241 dead) in Beirut,
* A 1985 hijacking of a TWA jet, which ended with the dumping of Navy diver Robert Stethem’s body on the tarmac,
* The kidnapping, torture and murder of a CIA bureau chief,
* The kidnapping and imprisonment of the Associated Press chief Mideast correspondent for six years,
* The bombings of the Israeli Embassy and the Jewish community center in Argentina,
* The 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, and many other heinous killings.

Mughniyeh met a suspicious end--he was blown up at a time and date not of his own choosing, taking only a car along with him (perhaps by the Israelis, who've denied it).

Darren then cuts to a "Rocky-Hezbollah" analogy before coming back to the carefree joys of Hezbollah childhood.

AUTHENTIC TERRORIST MEMORABILIA: “The children crowd forward around the glass case, eager for a glimpse of the martyr’s bloodstained clothes. His belt is here, and the shoes he died in, scarred with shrapnel. The battered desk where he planned military operations still has his box of pencils on it, his in-box, his cellphone.”

MILITARY LASER SHOWS: Presumably a bit more somber than the Pink Floyd “The Wall” show that used to sell out at the Boston Museum of Science, this light extravaganza illuminates Hezbollah weaponry waiting to be used on the hapless Zionists. The IHT cites “overflow crowds” that have been keeping the exhibit open past 1 a.m.

THE MARTYR’S HEAVEN EXPERIENCE: “In the darkened room, a figure representing a dead Hezbollah fighter lies on his back on a large sloping bank of white flowers. A sound of exploding bombs gives way to patriotic anthems as a screen shows a brilliant sunset and a coffin being carried through a dark forest. Later, a laser show illuminates the darkness. Other videos braid together images from the 2006 war, including some showing Mugniyah, along with scenes of Hezbollah soldiers training in the green hills of southern Lebanon.”

Who’s showing up to Martyr’s Heaven? “On a recent afternoon, busloads of schoolchildren were arriving to see the exhibit, with a group of Boy Scouts.”

MOCKING THE WEAK ISRAELI MILITARY: “A fake skeleton stands upright in a torn uniform and helmet beneath the legend, “The invincible Israeli soldier.” There are captured Israeli tanks jutting up from the ground at odd angles, their hatches burned and broken. As visitors crowd from one display to another, a soundtrack blares overhead, mixing the sounds of bombs and machine-gun fire with mournful operatic voices and warlike speeches.”

The piece finishes with a flourish: three Garnick thoughts, of which the third is below:

3. The line between self-confident and just plain stupid is a razor thin one. Historians say that Israeli cockiness after their 1967 rout led to a gross underestimation of the Arabs’ true fighting power. Not fearing the Egyptians and Syrians enough in 1973 led to lax Israeli leadership and half-assed preparedness (not enough historians use the term ‘half-assed’). Egypt’s 6 October victory bridge might seem like a joke, but for a while it looked like Israel was finished.

There's two updates, including a link to the LA Times blogs, which does a room-by-room breakdown of what exactly is in the Hezbollah Children's Museum.

German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, published "Childhood" in 1902. It contained a collection of poems examining the "feelings of wonder and bafflement" and the child's efforts to "grapple with the puzzle of human existence."

Rilke's childhood--thankfully--did not include any trips to the Hezbollah Children's Museum.


by Mondoreb
images: Darren Garnick's Media Lab
Source: The Hezbollah Children’s Museum — A Cross-Cultural Study

Study: People More Risky When Drunk Than Sober

DOC OBVIOUS FINAL JEOPARDY for $20,000.

Answer: Drunk drivers, most victims of alligators and bar fights.

Question: Name three things that result from a reduced sense of fear brought on by drinking.

[WARNING: The following sentence has been determined to be obvious beyond belief.]
A new study--which no doubt cost thousands of dollars--has determined that drinking alcohol dulls the brain's ability to detect threats.

Duh.

U.S. researchers stated that the the study helps explain why drunk people get into bar fights and drive their cars recklessly. The researchers seemed excited that their study was the first to demonstrate alcohol's effect on the human brain as it responded to threats.

"You see this all the time. People get into confrontations when they are intoxicated that they probably wouldn't get into when they are sober," said Jodi Gilman of the National Institutes on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, whose study appears in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Ms Gilman studied 12 people who were given intravenous infusions of alcohol and then monitored their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging while they looked at pictures of frightened and neutral faces.

Her team did the same study on these people when they were given a simple saline infusion as a placebo.

As expected, when people were given the placebo, their brains responded to the fearful faces.

"Our brains respond more to fearful stimuli," Ms Gilman said.

"They signal to us that we are in threatening situations."

When these same people were given infusions of alcohol, however, this response was dulled, suggesting that while intoxicated, "our brain can't distinguish between the threatening and non-threatening stimuli".
[WARNING: The following two sentences have been determined to be obvious beyond belief.]
She said this impaired appreciation for threats could lead to a host of risky situations, including drunk driving. It also explained why alcohol was sometimes called a social lubricant.

"People have used alcohol for years to become euphoric and to decrease anxiety. Alcohol has been used in particular to increase sociability. How alcohol acts on the brain to produce these effects has not been well understood or studied," Ms Gilman said.

Study: Alligator, Too Much Beer Don't Mix well

This real study reminded us of another study announced two years ago in the prestigious Onion Medical Journal.

In a breakthrough study that contradicts decades of understanding about the nature of alligator–drunkard relations, Louisiana State University researchers have concluded that people's drunkenness does not impair the ancient reptiles' ability to inflict enormous physical harm.

That study also had some information to share on the alcohol/risk relationship (not) occuring in the drunk person's brain.

"In 10 out of 10 documented cases of violent alligator–drunkard encounters, the reptile was not influenced by the fact that the victim was 'just kidding' or 'just having some fun,'" said professor Ryder McCrory, chair of the Wildlife Taunting Department of LSU's prestigious Center For Bullying And Hazing Studies.

This study help explain why so many men and women, after a hard night's drinking, fearlessly leave the bar room with such scary partners.

by Mondoreb
image: RidesAPaleHorse
Sources:
*Drink a beer and lose the fear-study
* Study: Alligators Dangerous No Matter How Drunk You Are


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Study: British Immigration Has No Economic Benefits

"Preposterous" To Claim Otherwise



A British parlimentary committee of experts came to the conclusion that many British subjects had already reached: there is no justification for mass immigration into the U.K.

And, there's no benefits gained by the country from it.

The panel of experts' report, called a "landmark study--the most authoritative carried out by a parliamentary committee", demanded that a cap be instituted on new arrivals into the British Isles.

The report is sure to spread dismay among Euro-elites and multiculturalists worldwide. Among its blunt findings:

•Dismiss Ministers' "preposterous" assertion that migrants boost the economy by £6billion a year;

•Reject Government claims that foreigners will help to defuse the pensions timebomb;

•Demolish the "fundamentally flawed" Downing Street argument that migrants fill vacancies in the economy;

•And warn that migrants will force up house prices by 10 per cent in the next two decades.

The House of Lords committee didn't mince words.

The Lords economic affairs committee, which includes former Chancellors Nigel Lawson and Norman Lamont, economists and captains of industry, said immigration had "little or no positive impact" on the living standards of the existing population.

In fact, the big winners were the migrants themselves who earn higher wages than in their homeland and can also send money home.

Some British workers were even seeing their incomes fall, while up to 100,000 youngsters have been unable to find work.

And, by pushing up house prices, migrants will keep young families off the housing ladder, the committee found.

Britain has seen migration balloon its population by 190,00 per year and the Labour Party, like the Democrat Party and RINOs in the U.S., has been stressing the economic benefits of mass migration.

Euro-weenies like to cite the need to import workers to keep generous government pension systems financially solvent. But that argument, according to the peers, didn't "hold up to scrutiny" because the immigrants will grow older and claim pensions of their own one day.

The committee has among its ranks Labour and Liberal Democrat members with impeccable economic and business credentials. Many of them were the most trenchant in their remarks.

Downing Street's claim that migrants fill job vacancies in the economy was ruthlessly exposed.

The peers said that despite the influx of more than 700,000 workers from eastern Europe since May 2004, the number of vacancies has remained at between 600,000 and 700,000.

Allowing more and more migrants into the country created the need for ever more jobs because the new arrivals consume as well as provide services, the study found.

It called on the Government to set an "explicit target range" for immigration and set the rules to keep within that limit - effectively a cap.

A cap has been fought by the Labour Party Ministers who say it will harm the economy.

Sounds like the Ministers have either been reading the Wall Street Journal or the Democrat Party platform.

But committee member Lord Layard, a Labour peer and globally-respected economist, said the population would increase by around 190,000 a year for the next 50 years without a limit.

He warned: "We will have permanent pressure of people to move in our direction. Britain has an extra resource, which is the English language, for attracting people here.

"There is no doubt whatever that the pressure will remain for half a century or more.

"We are suggesting that the Government should set a target range for net immigration and then the rules should depend on the target range, rather than the numbers following from the rules as at pre-sent."

It's about time that a debate was started over the mindless shredding of borders. Instead of sensibly asking about the skills and background of immigrants, the "debate" has many times boiled down to a name-calling contest.

The discussion among the British political elites is the same one common British workingmen have been having for some time.

Better late than never.

by Mondoreb
images: daily mail
Sources:
* 'Preposterous' claims by Labour in favour of mass migration rubbished by experts
* British Study: Immigration Has No Benefits


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Study: Anti-depressants Don't Work

"Have a nice day" works just as well as Prozac?

The vast majority of patients get little or no good from prescribed anti-depressants, according to researchers.

Almost 50 clinical trials were reviewed by psychologists from the University of Hull who found that new-generation anti-depressants worked no better than a placebo – a dummy pill – for mildly depressed patients.

Even the trials that suggested some clinical benefit for the most severely depressed patients did not produce convincing evidence. Professor Irving Kirsch from the university’s pyschology department said: “The difference in improvement between patients taking placebos and patients taking anti-depressants is not very great.

“This means that depressed people can improve without chemical treatments. Given these results, there seems little reason to prescribe anti-depressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients.”

Speaking up in defense of anti-depressants was Dr Gary Bell, consultant psychiatrist at Capio Nightingale Hospitals, the provider of private psychiatry treatment, who contested the conclusions of the Hull research.

“Anti-depressants are one of the great breakthroughs in the treatment of depression in last 20 to 30 years,” he said.

“They do not always suit everybody but the results are often life-saving. People who do studies do not have the hands-on experience of using these medicines.”

While we're not sure about the effectiveness of anti-depressants, we do know one thing.

Most studies depress us.

by Mondoreb
idea/image: RidesAPaleHorse
image: funny t-shirts
Source: Study casts doubt on anti-depressants



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Scientists: Greenland's Superthaw Due to Superhot Magma not Global Warming

According to scientists the Greenland ice shelves may not be melting from global warming but from the recent discovery of super hot magma beneath a thin layer of the Earth's crust.

In recent years, Greenland’s ice has been melting more and flowing faster into the sea—a record amount of ice melted from the frozen mass this summer, according to recently released data—and Earth’s rising temperatures are suspected tobe the main culprit.

But clues to a new natural contribution to the melt arose when scientists discovered a thin spot in the Earth’s crust under the northeast corner of the Greenland IceSheet where heat from Earth’s insides could seep through, scientists will report here this week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

“The behavior of the great ice sheets is an important barometer of global climate change,” said lead scientist Ralph von Frese of Ohio State University. “However, to effectively separate and quantify human impacts on climate change, we must understand the natural impacts too.” [1]

Apparently this "hotspot" of hot magma sitting just beneath the northeast corner of Greenland is responsible for the record amount of ice melted. This is contrary to the "popular" Global Warming dogma where man and his "excesses" are the culprit.

Hotspots are responsible for more than just melting ice sheets.

Hawaii was created by a “hotspot” beneath the ocean floor. Hotspots form in areas where superheated magma in the Earth’s mantle breaks through the Earth’s crust. Over the course of millions of years, the Pacific Tectonic Plate has slowly moved over this hotspot to form the entire Hawaiian Island archipelago. [2]

Lead scientist Ralph von Frese:

“It could be that there’s a volcano down there,” he [lead scientist Ralph von Frese] said, “but we think it’s probably just the way the heat is being distributed by the rock topography at the base of the ice." [1]

A recent study found that there was a similar Greenland ice melt documented in the 1920's.

Professor Jason Box and undergraduate Adam Herrington, co-authors of the study, said their finding reinforces the belief that glaciers and other bodies of ice are exquisitely hyper-sensitive to climate change and bolsters the concern that rising temperatures will speed the demise of that island's ice fields, hastening sea level rise.They said their research might help discount criticism that the melting of Greenland 's glaciers is merely an isolated, regional event. [2]

No mention of the effects of the superthin mantle, hot magma or possibility of a volcano under Greenland's ice sheets just the "hand wringing" Global Warmist Alarmists.

Scientists studying the earth's core discovered that our Earth is the ultimate recycler of itself.

A huge slab of folded Earth that scientists think used to be part of the ocean floor has been detected near the planet's core.

The discovery supports the theory that Earth's crust is constantly recycled deep into the planet as molten material from below simultaneously pushes up to refresh the surface.

The structure is about 125 miles deep and at least 125 miles wide and 370 miles in the north-south direction. In consistency, it is more like a giant, folding mush of taffy, researchers said today. [3]

This recent discovery along with the one where it was determined mixing a thin crust with superhot magma makes ice melt faster is quite astounding in its simplicity. Both discoveries demonstrate that there is more to learn about this fascinating planet we live on.



That the "It's Global Warming, Stupid," crowd's frozen facts might be undergoing a little super magma melt of their own.


Science Journalism Tracker Extraordinaire C. Petit doubts LBG!
* LiveScience: Under Greenland, a thin stretch of crust may be helping the melt
* DBKP's Answer: The Effect of Magma and Ice: Science Trackers Still Skeptical
* Climate Change 30 Years Ago: Media, Scientists Pimped for Global Cooling

By LBG
Image 1 [fugly.com]
Image 2 [caglecartoons.com]
Source - 1 - LiveScience.com
Source - 2 - NASA - Visible Earth
Source - 3 - UPI - 1920s Greenland ice melt documented



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Feminists Make Better Mates Claim New Study by Feminist

At right: Noted feminist Andrea Dworkin

Feminists are passion powerhouses?

According to a study by a Rutger's professor, if it's lovin' you're craving: date a feminist, you'll be ravin'.

Or something like that. From the City of the Big Shoulders comes the following story about a big study: "Feminists Make Better Mates" in the Chicago Tribune.

Take a feminist out to dinner.

That's the advice of a social psychologist who concludes in a new study that feminists make better partners and have stronger romantic relationships.

Laurie Rudman of Rutgers University had found in earlier research that negative stereotypes of feminists--that they're unattractive, man-hating lesbians, in a nutshell--cause young adults to distance themselves from the "F-word" and tone down their demands for equality. A majority of college-age respondents agreed with such statements as "Most men would probably not want to date a feminist" and "Romance depends, in part, on men being allowed to be in charge."

So, the stereotype that feminists are unattractive is just so much bullhockey? It may be so, but if the study group includes feminists of the radical kind, we'd say there's reason to be skeptical of the study's findings.

That's leaving aside the fact that the study's author, Dr. Rudman, was alarmed by news that feminists were perceived to be unattractive. And forget the fact that there are no facts--the data itself is largely subjective. It's like proclaiming Howard Dean the president after looking at fund-raising and polling data from 2003.

Oh wait. There were those who actually did that.

Maybe they qualified for grant money for a study, too.

Back to the notion that feminists are unattractive man-haters. We picked out some photos of who's listed in Wikipedia under "Feminists". Those are the pictures you see accompanying this story. Are these famous feminists femme fatales?

We'll leave that for the reader to judge. But as stated before, Rudman was alarmed.

This was alarming to Rudman, who is old enough to remember the heyday of the women's rights movement in the 1970s. Continued efforts to achieve gender equality could be seriously hurt, she reasoned, if women (and men) think it comes at the expense of love.

The story goes on--and on and on.

Someone is alarmed that there's a stereotype that feminists are an unappealing lot, does a study where the "measurement" involves asking people what they think, then publishes the results.

Voila! Proof that feminists are really closet Paris Hiltons. This "proof" will be little consolation to the feminists who spend next Saturday night at home with a gallon of Haagen-Dazs reading Rudman's study.

Read the Tribune's story. If you are so inclined, find the study and read it. Maybe re-read this story. Then make up your own mind. That seems to be the fairest way. Besides, this story is at its end.

Looking for pictures of attractive feminists "proved" to be exhausting work.

by Mondoreb




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