紙を復刊させても、まだいたの？という（失礼！）印象しか持たなかったのですが、久しぶりにカバーストーリを読みました。The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.（悪魔も自分勝手な目的のために聖書を引く）な状態になっている、アメリカのキリスト教原理主義批判が主な目的ですが、もともとの聖書がどんなものだったのか、英語にどのように翻訳されたのか、初期のキリスト教の歴史がどうだったのか、丁寧に説明してくれている記事になっています。８０００語を超える長いものですが、聖書が歴史的にどういったものかよくわかるのでオススメです。
Words checked = [8669] Words in Oxford 3000™ = [81%]
They wave their Bibles at passersby, screaming their condemnations of homosexuals. They fall on their knees, worshipping at the base of granite monuments to the Ten Commandments while demanding prayer in school. They appeal to God to save America from their political opponents, mostly Democrats. They gather in football stadiums by the thousands to pray for the country’s salvation.
They are God’s frauds, cafeteria Christians who pick and choose which Bible verses they heed with less care than they exercise in selecting side orders for lunch. They are joined by religious rationalizers — fundamentalists who, unable to find Scripture supporting their biases and beliefs, twist phrases and modify translations to prove they are honoring the Bible’s words.
This is no longer a matter of personal or private faith. With politicians, social leaders and even some clergy invoking a book they seem to have never read and whose phrases they don’t understand, America is being besieged by Biblical illiteracy. Climate change is said to be impossible because of promises God made to Noah; Mosaic law from the Old Testament directs American government; creationism should be taught in schools; helping Syrians resist chemical weapons attacks is a sign of the end times—all of these arguments have been advanced by modern evangelical politicians and their brethren, yet none of them are supported in the Scriptures as they were originally written.
英語への翻訳について触れているところです。
Translation Transubstantiation Then comes the problem of accurate translation. Many words in New Testament Greek don’t have clear English equivalents. Sentence structure, idioms, stylistic differences—all of these are challenges when converting versions of the New Testament books into English. And this can’t be solved with a Berlitz course: Koiné is ancient Greek and not spoken anymore. This is why English translations differ, with many having been revised to reflect the views and guesses of the modern translators.
The gold standard of English Bibles is the King James Version, completed in 1611, but that was not a translation of the original Greek. Instead, a Church of England committee relied primarily on Latin manuscripts translated from Greek. According to Jason David BeDuhn, a professor of religious studies at Northern Arizona University and author of Truth in Translation, it was often very hard for the committee to find the correct English words. The committee sometimes compared Latin translations with the earlier Greek copies, found discrepancies and decided that the Latin version—the later version—was correct and the earlier Greek manuscripts were wrong.
The goal of the translators was to create a Bible that was a gorgeous work that was very accurate in its translation and clear in its meaning, but that didn’t happen. “The King James Bible is a beautiful piece of English literature,’’ says BeDuhn. “In terms of the other two goals, however, this translation falls short.”
Some of the contradictions are conflicts between what evangelicals consider absolute and what Jesus actually said. For example, evangelicals are always talking about family values. But to Jesus, family was an impediment to reaching God. In the Gospel of Matthew, he states, “And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.”
The Bible is a very human book. It was written, assembled, copied and translated by people. That explains the flaws, the contradictions, and the theological disagreements in its pages. Once that is understood, it is possible to find out which parts of the Bible were not in the earliest Greek manuscripts, which are the bad translations, and what one book says in comparison to another, and then try to discern the message for yourself.
And embrace what modern Bible experts know to be the true sections of the New Testament. Jesus said, Don’t judge. He condemned those who pointed out the faults of others while ignoring their own. And he proclaimed, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.”
In 2011, Mam sat down with Sandberg at Fortune magazine’s Most Powerful Women summit and told the hushed audience what had motivated her to become a crusader against sexual slavery. “I have been sold in the brothel by the man who come and tell me that he’s my grandfather,” she said. “I stayed in the brothel nearly then 10 years. The brothel owner bring us all together, we all sit on the ground, and he tell us we have to do what he ask us to do. But one girl…she refused to do what he asked to do so he take a gun and kill her, so that is the day that I have been escaped from the brothel.”
Lost Innocence Interviews with Mam’s childhood acquaintances, teachers and local officials in the village where she grew up contradict important, lurid details in her autobiography. Many of the villagers in Thloc Chhroy say they never met or even saw Mam’s cruel “Grandfather,” the rich Chinese merchant who allegedly raped her or the violent soldier she says she was forced to marry.
Orn Hok, a former commune chief, remembers well the day Mam arrived in the village, noting, “Somaly came here with her parents. She is a daughter of Mam Khon and Pen Navy.”
Pen Chhun Heng, now in her 70s, says she is a cousin of Mam’s mother and rejects the notion that Mam was adopted or that she was raised (or kept) by “Grandfather.”
Sam Nareth, a childhood friend of Mam’s, says Mam first attended school in the village in 1981 and remained there until she got her high school diploma. “She finished secondary school in 1987, and Somaly and I went to sit the teachers exam in Kompong Cham together.”
これ以外にも、説明がコロコロ変わっている点や自身以外でも嘘の話も作り上げているようです。
Not even Mam can keep the story straight. In February 2012, while speaking at the White House, she said she was sold into slavery at age 9 or 10 and spent a decade inside a brothel. On The Tyra Banks Show, she said it was four or five years in the brothel. Her book says she was trafficked when she was “about 16 years old.”
Mam’s confusion isn’t limited to her book, or the backstory for some of “her girls.” In 2012, she admitted—after being confronted with some of my early reporting—that she had made false claims in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly in which she said eight girls she had rescued from the sex industry were killed by the Cambodian army after a raid on her shelter in 2004.
記事では外と内の態度の違いも取り上げています。
But those who have worked with Mam in Cambodia say there is a vast difference between the image she puts forward in the media spotlight and the one she shows in Phnom Penh. “[With donors], she’s very polished and very on and very charming…exceedingly charming,” says Candace Blase, who worked as a volunteer psychologist for AFESIP in 2011. “And when people are not there, she can be tyrannical; she’s moody, she’s erratic, she’s entitled.” Blase adds that she saw Mam ordering the girls she looks after to carry out personal chores for her.
Thomas Steinfatt, a professor of statistics at the University of Miami, has done several reports on sex trafficking for the U.N.’s Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking. In a 2008 study, for which he spent months conducting surveys in all corners of Cambodia, he estimated there were no more than 1,058 victims of trafficking in Cambodia and has said the situation has improved markedly since then.
The number of children, both those observed as sex workers and those mentioned by management or by sex workers in the 2008 data, was 127, with 11 of the children verifiably under age 15 and six under age 13. The high-end estimate for the number of children likely involved in sex work in Cambodia in 2008 was 310 children.
In response to a newspaper story about victim stories allegedly fabricated by Mam, Sébastien Marot, the executive director of Friends International, an organization that helps train and educate children in precarious situations, posted a response on the organization’s website: “A large number of organizations get sucked into using children to raise funds: making them talk about the abuse they survived in front of a camera, having their picture in a pitiful situation published for everyone to see. In worst cases, the truth is distorted or the stories invented to attract more compassion and money. The impact on the lives of these children is terrible: If they come from an abusive situation, such a process re-traumatizes them and in any case it stigmatizes them forever.”
THINK! Pity Charity – why it’s actually abusive to children… BY FRIENDS-INTERNATIONAL · OCTOBER 21, 2013 This thought-provoking piece comes from the Executive Director of Friends-International, Sebastien Marot. ‘Over the last week two separate shocking stories emerged from Cambodia: A globally renowned organization was again accused of faking stories used in international TV and other international media to raise funds and awareness about the organization; A local “orphanage” organized an auction of photos of children and had the children present their own photos while their life-story was made public to the audience in order to increase pity (and sales). These separate events are a direct consequence of the interconnected actions of the child protection organizations, the media, the donors and the general public; all wanting the best for these children, but instead turning them into victims.
It has been an incredibly difficult few months for all of us at the Foundation, and for all of our supporters.
In March, the Foundation retained the law firm Goodwin Procter LLP to conduct an independent, third party investigation into allegations concerning the personal history of Somaly Mam and Somana (Long Pros). The Foundation provided Goodwin Procter unfettered access to our information, documents, and staff, and, for the past two months, a team of Goodwin Procter legal professionals based out of Boston, San Francisco, and Hong Kong conducted an extensive investigation.
As a result of Goodwin Procter’s efforts, we have accepted Somaly’s resignation effective immediately. In addition, we are permanently removing Ms. Pros from any affiliation with the organization or our grant partner, but will help her to transition into the next phase of her life. While we are extremely saddened by this news, we remain grateful to Somaly’s work over the past two decades and for helping to build a foundation that has served thousands of women and girls, and has raised critical awareness of the nearly 21 million individuals who are currently enslaved today.
Despite our heartfelt disappointment, the work of the Foundation and our grant partners must and will carry on. We have touched the lives of over 100,000 women and girls. We have treated nearly 6,000 individuals at a free medical clinic in Phnom Penh’s red light district and engaged nearly 6,400 students in anti-trafficking activism.
We look forward to moving past these events and focusing all of our energies on this vital work, ensuring that the hundreds of women and girls that are currently being served in our grant partner AFESIP’s three centers for recovery and rehabilitation, receive the care that they so desperately need, and that we safeguard their identities and privacy to every extent possible.
Our work changes lives and we remain dedicated to it. Over the coming weeks, we will outline a plan that will be made available as to the revised course for the Foundation.
We don't expect this transition to be simple, but we ask that you stand with us in the face of these serious challenges and help us to honor all victims and survivors, and the millions of women and girls who are enslaved across the globe.
In solidarity,
Gina Reiss-Wilchins Executive Director Somaly Mam Foundation
Friends Internationalの先のサイトであった言葉です。 It’s an essential move that needs to be led by the general public and donors: say no to sensationalism, look at what is really happening and the complexity of issues involved, be interested and not just emotionally driven… this is a very difficult change in behavior. In many ways the ball is in the donor’s (big and small) court: they should be the ones leading so that organizations do not feel compelled to distort truth to receive funding （一般市民や支援者に率先して取り組んでもらう必要があります。センセーショナリズムにノーと言うこと、実際に起こっていることや問題の複雑性に目を向けること、関心を持つこと、単に感情に駆り立てられるのではなく。このような態度の変更は容易ではありません。いろいろな面で（大小の）支援者の手に委ねられているのです。支援者にこそ導いて欲しいのです。そうすれば団体は資金を集めるために事実を歪曲する必要に迫られないでしょう）
Say no to sensationalismとは何か事が起きる度に言われる事ですが、やはりその度に肝に銘じるべきことなんでしょう。
Michael Kinsley: So I understand Newsweek scooped me. They had you on the cover, with an article by Lloyd Grove. I didn’t even know there was a Newsweek. Jill Abramson: Me neither. Or a cover. MK: Or a Lloyd Grove for that matter. JA: Well, I knew there was a Lloyd Grove.
（ウィキペディア） ハンフォード・サイト（英語: the Hanford Site）は米国ワシントン州東南部にある場所で、原子爆弾作成のマンハッタン計画でプルトニウムの精製が行われた所。その後の冷戦期間にも精製作業は続けられ、現在はこの作業は行われていないが、米国で最大級の核廃棄物の問題を残しており、その処理が継続されている。
The reactor on these desiccated steppes converted uranium-238 into plutonium-239, the fissionable stuff inside the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. The ensuing Cold War escalation was a boon for the engineers and workers at Hanford, with eight more reactors built throughout the subsequent two decades. Only one of them - completed in 1963 and visited by John F. Kennedy two months before his assassination - was ever harnessed to produce energy. The rest worked solely to enrich nuclear materiel for rockets intended to fend off a Soviet assault that never materialized.
The last of those nine reactors was decommissioned in 1987, inaugurating an era that would prove even more lucrative for those who sought to make Hanford their livelihood: cleaning up the waste left behind from four decades of making nuclear weapons. The Atomic Energy Commission had by now become the Department of Energy, and it presented a daunting challenge to contractors: 177 underground storage tanks (the bucolically named "Tank Farms") holding 56 million gallons of waste that included radionuclides like strontium-90 and cesium-137.
The risks of a Fukushima-type disaster are incredibly slight, and those who make the comparison caution against a literal interpretation of their warnings. Yet the consequences of such a mishap would be so catastrophic that it cannot be allowed to happen. The Tokyo Electric Power Company was not worried about an earthquake causing a tsunami, and that tsunami in turn flooding and disabling a nuclear power plant on the eastern coast of the island of Honshu. Much later, a panel would find "collusion" between the Fukushima Daiichi plant operators and government regulators, as well as "ignorance and arrogance" and a "disregard for public safety."
Tamosaitis calls Hanford an example of "corporate welfare," in which Bechtel is stringing along the federal government as it moves completion dates further and further into the future, all for the supposed sake of the very safety issues it has repeatedly ignored. As long as nothing horrific happens, he says, the money will flow. Tamosaitis sums up Bechtel's strategy as "delay, delay, delay, deny."
Nobody really knows if Hanford has made people sick. Locals refer to the "Hanford necklace" - "a thyroidectomy scar that distinguishes many of the downwinders whose diseased thyroid glands were removed," as the Associated Press once described it. Yet the Hanford Thyroid Disease Study did not find an association between the release of iodine-131 during the 1940s and 1950s and an increase in cancers of the thyroid gland, thus discounting a major illness related with radiation exposure.
That is only one cancer dismissed, however, and maladies from the past aren't the most pressing concern here anyway. It's what remains in the ground that worries the likes of Carpenter, the Seattle watchdog. He says of Hanford: "We've opened a Pandora's box that we can't put the lid back on." Behind him, the city settles comfortably into dusk.
And he was. On July 2, Tamosaitis was told that he was being transferred to URS headquarters in downtown Richland. URS tells Newsweek that his "reassignment had been discussed with him for several months prior to June 2010, as his work scope on the project was coming to an end," a position seconded by Bechtel, which says he had been offered a job at Sellafield in England.
Tamosaitis says the transfer was retaliation. "They wanted to send a signal" to other potential whistle-blowers: "Don't do what that guy did."
Tamosaitis was buried in a basement office with two copiers, one of which was "used to compile large documents," he told Congress. "I brought in a pair of earmuffs to dampen the sound when it was running." One time, with a snowstorm approaching, everyone else left the building without bothering to tell him. He jokes that when he emerged from the basement into a silent office in the middle of the afternoon, he thought the rapture had come.
“the situation is under control.”というのは簡単ですが、予定通り着実に実行する事は大変難しいのだなと実感できるものでした。記事の本筋とは関係ありませんが地元の高校のフットボールチームがRichland Bombersという名前であり、原爆製造とゆかりがあり、それを誇らしく思っていたという心情が読み取れるエピソードがさりげなく紹介されていました。動画だとよく分かりませんが、ヘルメットにはきのこ雲が書かれています。
The Richland High School football team at practice. In the fall of 1945, after an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, students changed the team's mascot to a mushroom cloud and called themselves the 'Bombers'. Credit: Stuart Isett
A recent polio outbreak in Syria, coupled with reports of polio virus found in Israeli sewers, is causing anxiety in Europe. As Syrians flee the chaos of civil war and seek refuge on the continent, German scientists warn that an epidemic could occur.
Not all of Europe is at risk; a few countries have been singled out as potential polio hotbeds. According to the new report published in The Lancet, Austria, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and the Ukraine all have insufficient “community immunity” from polio, and should be on high alert.
*****
The Lancet study highlights one reason polio is so dangerous. It’s an insidious disease, spreading quickly but often silently: Only one in every 200 infections shows any recognizable symptoms. In other words, hundreds of Europeans could be silent carriers of the virus. In fact, scientists say polio could be circulating in Europe for nearly a year before an outbreak is detected.
That’s troubling news for Europe, which has been officially polio-free since 2011. Compounding those worries is the fact that in February WHO reported wild poliovirus type 1 had spread to Israel. Soon after, Israeli authorities detected the virus in West Bank and Gaza Strip sewage systems. In August, Israel began a vaccination program for children under the age of 9, and no cases of paralytic polio have been reported there.
*****
As of November 6, public health officials have reported 328 cases of polio worldwide, compared with 181 cases confirmed at this date last year. Just 25 years ago, the disease was endemic in 125 countries and nearly 350,000 people, mainly children under the age of 5, were paralyzed each year due to polio. In 1988, the World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of WHO, established the goal of eradicating polio and since then, the number of polio cases dropped more than 99 percent, while the number of endemic countries dwindled to just three--Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan. When India was declared polio-free in 2012, many believed the end of polio was near. Its recent emergence in non-endemic countries suggests the hard work accomplished over a period of decades is in jeopardy, but not everyone is ringing alarm bells. “The Global Polio Eradication Initiative has dealt with countless outbreaks since [its] launching in 1988,” Dr. Walter Orenstein, associate director of the Emory Vaccine Center, Emory University, said in a letter to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “As a result, the program is wiser and better equipped than ever to handle them, even under complicated and dangerous circumstances like those in Syria. Strategies…are already being implemented in Syria and will be aggressively pursued until the outbreak is stopped.”
Words checked = [1198] Words in Oxford 3000™ = [73%]
確かに今週のニューヨーカーもBig Brother is watching you.がモチーフでUncle Sam is listening.のイラストでした。
The idea that Orwell’s super weapon applies to Obama’s America is ubiquitous and bipartisan. Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who likely wouldn’t know Winston Smith from Winston Churchill, told an audience that “now more than ever it just seems so Orwellian” in Washington, D.C. On the cover of its latest issue, The New Yorker depicts Uncle Sam peering into American bedrooms; the artist told the magazine that “George Orwell’s ghost is shaking his head saying, ‘I told you so.’” Al Jazeera asked if “Obama [is] going beyond Orwellian,” which, a reader of 1984 might note, would necessitate the establishment of a Khmer Rouge–like state in America.
挿入写真のキャプションにAre we a nation of Winton Smiths?とありますが、Winton Smithsは１９８４の主人公です。ウィキペディアは項目をたててくれています
（ウィキペディア） Winston Smith is a fictional character and the protagonist of George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The character was employed by Orwell as an everyman in the setting of the novel, a "central eye ... [the reader] can readily identify with"
The rule here is simple: If you are invoking 1984 in a country in which 1984 is available for purchase and can be freely deployed as a rhetorical device, you likely don’t understand the point of 1984.
Indeed, 1984 is a book not only about surveillance but also the full-spectrum dominance of Stalinist totalitarianism, from the government-directed corruption of language (“WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”) to absolute control of information and historical inquiry. Such states exist, like the truly Orwellian slave state of North Korea, where all apartments are fitted with radios offering a single government station and no off switch, but they bear little resemblance to contemporary America.
このような騒動で1984を引き合いにだすことは、オーウェルの1984の無理解ではないかと疑念をていしています。 But Orwell’s complexity evaporates in the political struggle for ownership of his soul; his work endlessly adduced in service of various liberal, libertarian, and conservative causes. The promiscuous use of 1984 comparisons, Kremlinologist Robert Conquest once noted, demonstrated an ignorance of both Orwell’s intentions and worldview: “To apply Orwell’s highly specific totalitarian terror-falsification concepts to assorted Western notions is to dilute, indeed to stultify, Orwell’s point ... Above all, this sort of thing distorts Orwell’s view of the totalist terror state as something distinct and different from our own imperfect societies—indeed, something to be resisted at all costs.”
まあ、オーウェルの1984での本当のメッセージというよりも、Big Brother is watching you.がキャッチーだから使っているだけかもしれませんね。「本当は…」というパターンって結構ありますから。。。
