Sometime around World War II, synthetics exploded into our everyday lives. By some estimates, these materials—plasticizers, dyes, pesticides—have increased by a shocking 8,200 percent in the last quarter century. The upshot of that, of course, has been improved agriculture, economic wealth, and an abundance of cheap materials like Tupperware and Gore-Tex. The downside? According to McKay Jenkins, author ofWhat's Gotten Into Us?: Staying Healthy in a Toxic World (Random House; $26), it's scarier than you think.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Consider me the choir!
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
From Al-Qaeda's Inspire Magazine (Spring 2011):
"Another line that is being pushed by Western leaders
is that because the protests in Egypt and Tunisia
were peaceful, they proved al Qaeda – which calls
for armed struggle – to be wrong. That is another
fallacy. Al Qaeda is not against regime changes
through protests but it is against the idea that the
change should be only through peaceful means
to the exclusion of the use of force. In fact Shaykh
Ayman al-Zawahiri spoke in support of the protests
that swept Egypt back in 2007 and he alluded to
the fact that even if the protests were peaceful,
the people need to prepare themselves militarily.
The accuracy of this view is proven by the turn of
events in Libya. If the protesters in Libya did not
have the flexibility to use force when needed, the
uprising would have been crushed."