Cinnamon Tea and the 72 Vestal Virgins Who Await August 7, 2006March 4, 2017 YOUR CHOLESTEROL Monty Goolsby: ‘I don’t know why this information isn’t being screamed from the roof tops. My LDL bad cholesterol (which was not terrible) was reduced by 55% when I started taking 1/4 of a teaspoon of cinnamon twice a day. You can search on ‘cinnamon + LDL‘ and get lots of other articles. Even my doctor didn’t know this.’ ☞ One more reason to drink Gold Rush Cinnamon Honest Tea (of which I own a tiny sliver). THE LEBANON Michael Axelrod on the Christian Science Monitor piece I posted Friday: ‘I know you want to be balanced, but giving more exposure to that ridiculous bigoted article by Strindberg is perhaps going too far. Has this guy ever read any history? Does he know that after WWII, about the time the modern state of Israel began, the Allies (US, UK and USSR) went on an ethnic cleansing rampage in Europe. Over 16 million ethnic Germans were expelled from their homelands around Europe. The directive is right there in the Potsdam Agreement. About 2 million died. Does he know that over 600,000 Jews were driven out of their respective countries in the Middle East in 1948? Does he realize that if anyone ‘stole’ Palestinian land it was the Ottomans? Once again the revisionist historian Benny Morris is evoked. There are many responses to his revisionism. Moreover you should read what Morris says today!’ UNDERSTANDING SUICIDE BOMBERS One view from a guy who’s been there, coming soon to a theater near you. (Or, at least, one near me.) OHIO, HATE STATE Scary fundamentalism is not only the province of the Middle East. From Salon a couple of years ago: Patrick Johnston, a physician and vice chairman of the Ohio branch of the far-right Constitution Party . . . isn’t officially affiliated with Burress’ group, Citizens for Community Values, but the two men worked together collecting signatures to put Issue 1 on the ballot, and Johnston says they talk often. . . . . . . [According to Johnston], the decision to put gays to death is a matter best left up to the states. “If we ever had a nation sufficiently Christian” to make homosexuality illegal, he says, imposing capital punishment for homosexuality would be a subject for “an in-house debate. There were capital crimes in the Bible, and that would be something debated.” ☞ The initiative Burrress and Johnston sought to put on the ballot would not just have amended the Ohio Constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman . . . it would have forbidden the state from ‘creating or recognizing’ a legal status that would ‘approximate the design, qualities, significance or effect of marriage.’ Like civil unions. Burress and Johnston did manage to get it on the ’04 ballot, and, as some will recall, the people of Ohio passed it 62% to 38% (but have not yet had the ‘in-house debate’ on whether or not to kill gays).