All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

Santa Muerte Shrine To Open in Lebanon

A Separate State of Mind | A Blog by Elie Fares

Following the outrage of some Lebanese that other Lebanese were outraged at a possible shirtgate involving demonizing a Virgin Mary icon are not aware of well-rooted Mexican folklore, the Mexican embassy, in collaboration with the Lebanese government, will be building a Santa Muerte shrine in the village of DeirBella.

Issuing a brief statement on the matter, the Mexican embassy noted the “overwhelming support” their not-recognized saint has gotten over the past few hours in Lebanon. They were “absolutely dumbfounded” by the well-rooted knowledge of Santa Muerte among the Lebanese populace whereby everyone seems to be quite the expert. “We didn’t know Santa Muerte had so many fans in Lebanon,” they said, “this makes us quite excited about possible culture fusion between the countries.” The embassy was also quite “enthusiastic” about the culture fusion prospect in Lebanese society, à la St. Patrick’s Day and Thanksgiving.

“It shouldn’t be exclusive to the…

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Bershka Lebanon Insulting The Virgin Mary

The style takes it’s inspiration from a combination of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico and their Day of the Dead All Hallows Eve celebration during which they visit the grave or the relatives – The skull is not meant to mock. Good design and tee!

A Separate State of Mind | A Blog by Elie Fares

A friend of mine just sent my way the following shirt being sold by Bershka Lebanon for 49,000:

Bershka Shirt Lebanon Christianity - 1Bershka Shirt Lebanon Christianity - 2

The shirt called Lady of Skulls features a Virgin Mary-esque image that cannot, even with the most out-of-the-box approaches, not be considered as a distortion of many Christians icons of Mary

I am not the most sensitive person when it comes to religious jabs. In fact, I think we need some of them more often so people can light off a little. Caricatures or comedic approaches to some religious symbols might be acceptable – they are to me – but demonizing religious holy figures for the sake of having fun such as in this case is, quite frankly, unacceptable. I find it revolting and offensive.

 

It’s not about freedom of expression or freedom to wear whatever you want. This isn’t a book I’m saying you should not be reading or…

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Egyptian Aak: Week 14

I am sure that many wish their land would awake from what now seems to many as a bad dream That will only happen if you raise your voices loud enough to wake even the deepest sleeper!

Nervana

Coptic death (Coffins of dead Copts following Saturday sectarian clashes – Twitter  via @auscma)

Main Headlines

Monday

Tuesday

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Mark Knopfler Is a True Friend of the Russian People

Mark is true to the “Walk of Life!”

chtodelat news

This is what everyone who is in Mark Knopfler’s position should do. Not “try and talk some sense” into fascist homophobes like Vitaly Milonov, as the otherwise admirable Stephen Fry recently did. Or “stand in solidarity” with political prisoners Pussy Riot on a Moscow concert stage, as Madonna did, all the while raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in concert fees. The first tack violates the old anti-fascist “no platform” rule, while the second does that, too, while also generating tons of buzz for the Milonovites. More important, it rewards the relatively well-off strata of the Russian urban populace, the people who can afford tickets to Madonna and Knopfler concerts and the like, who are in fact the real bulwark of Putinism (rather than some imaginary post-Soviet “conservative” provincial “grassroots” post-proletariat), at least (but only at least) insofar as these people have been mostly absent from the fight against Putinism or any of its manifestations…

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Starving Sea Lion Pups Still Washing Up by the Hundreds in California | Wired Science | Wired.com

Miller doesn’t think fish populations have relocated. He thinks they’ve disappeared.

“Over the last forty years, we’ve seen a pretty stark decline in the coastal fish populations,” Miller said. The number of fish collected between 1999 and 2010 is just 22 percent of the total collected between 1972 and 1984, Miller said. And in addition to overall population declines, “we are seeing a lot of strange things,” he said.

Miller has been studying fish populations along the Southern California coast using a dataset spanning 40 years. The data come from seven coastal power plants, located between Ventura and San Onofre, north of San Diego. These plants use seawater to cool the steam produced while generating power, seawater from just offshore.

Periodically, that water is monitored for the fish that come in with it, producing a dataset that now includes about 2,000 data points describing millions of fish belonging to about 150 species.

via Starving Sea Lion Pups Still Washing Up by the Hundreds in California | Wired Science | Wired.com.

Korean Food, Land and Democracy A Conversation with Anders Riel Müller | Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy

Korea’s food sovereignty movement emerged from the anti-WTO movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s. By 2007, however, the KWPA and Korean Peasants League (KPL), sought an alternative to protesting the government’s domestic policies and international policies. They began setting up alternatives and introducing food sovereignty as a policy. The KWPA and KPL and several consumer-producer cooperatives are promoting food sovereignty as national policy.

Food sovereignty operates on two levels. It operates at the grassroots level where farmers set up cooperatives and develop local food systems by making direct connections to consumers in cities. It also operates at the political level where farmers are pushing at the national, provincial and city levels. They have succeeded at the provincial level, but have been virtually ignored at the national level by the ministry of agriculture. This grassroots food movement is interesting because it is the farmers who are driving the movement, not consumers. It’s what makes the Korean food movement distinct from many U.S. or European food movements and so interesting.

via Korean Food, Land and Democracy A Conversation with Anders Riel Müller | Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy.

The New Bird Flu, And How To Read The News About It | Wired Science | Wired.com

who are trusted sources? Here is my short list: people or organizations who understand flu, have excellent sources of information, and can be relied on not to over-hype.

Reporters: Helen Branswell of the Canadian Press; Declan Butler of Nature; Martin Enserink of Science; my former colleagues Lisa Schnirring and Robert Roos at CIDRAP. (Also Mara Hvistendahl of Science, if she covers this, as she is based in Shanghai.)

Bloggers/aggregators: Crawford Kilian (@crof) ; Mike Coston (@Fla_Medic).

Crowdsourced data: HealthMap, a huge Harvard- and Google-backed effort that combines Web-scraping with human review (also on Twitter, as is their blog editor Anna Tomasulo and their founder John Brownstein); FluTrackers, a volunteer, civilian effort that has been going since the H5N1 days.

Media on the ground: Xinhua; China Daily; South China Morning Post, in Hong Kong, somewhat more free to report.

Official sources: WHO; China CDC; European CDC and its journal, EuroSurveilance; US CDC; OIE.

via The New Bird Flu, And How To Read The News About It | Wired Science | Wired.com.