Tag Archives | research

Scientifically Proven – We’re Not Descendants of The Phoenicians!

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A group of scientists from the University of Otago and the Lebanese American University have recently succeeded at sequencing and analyzing the DNA obtained from the remaining of a 2500-year-old Phoenician called “The Young Man of Byrsa”. Their work is of good importance because we know less information about the Phoenicians than other populations, and this analysis will help uncover more about their culture and origins.

You can check the research details along with the results the scientists obtained here. What caught my attention the most though was the conclusion that modern Lebanese (47 of them to be precise) are not related to the Phoenicians! It is quite weird to be honest given how we pride ourselves with the Phoenicians being our ancestors, and the fact that they’re thought to have originated from here and expanded to the west.

I hope some other research soon reveals we also have no relation with the Arab world so we can dissociate ourselves from all the chaos around us!

photo via Modern Readers

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Boobs, Botox and the Babes of Beirut

… that was actually the title of a recent article at the Huffington Post by David J Constable.

I visited a nightclub one evening to witness the dolls and their dates myself. In Taïga Sky, a rooftop nightclub in Batroun (30 miles from Beirut) everyone is smoking, bouncing on the spot and eyeing each other up, not in a complimentary way but diamond gazes of fierce competitorship. The top trump card here is a tan and a good set of pins, and in that respect it’s no different from the techno cattle clubs in the UK, however in Lebanon the women look like Cleopatra, with a dark natural beauty beyond anything Max Factor can supply and into the billion dollar industry of plastic surgery. Their partners are a mixture of bodybuilders in Lycra t-shirts or fat, pony-tailed Arabic mafiosi. It’s as captivating as it is frightening.

Back in Beirut, in the VIP corner of Le Capitole, another five-star rooftop bar, I see the wives and girlfriends of artists. They must be the better-halves of surgeons as surely no one can afford to spend that much of their own cash on reconstructive surgery and blow-me-up operations. There are benefits to marrying/dating/having sex with a plastic surgeon, as these well-ironed and unwrinkled faces suggest to me that they don’t reach the age limit of nightclub entry, such is their youthful appearance, bronzed with potions and powders.

You can read the rest of the article here.

It’s amazing how some foreign journalists are willing to judge the whole Lebanese society based on a few visits to some of the country’s posh bars and clubs!

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Lebanon is not a happy place!

Lebanon is not a happy place, that’s at least according to the new economics foundation (aka NEF).

Using the “Happy Planet Index” (HPI), NEF measured how happy are 143 researched countries, and Lebanon came in the 110th place!

Per their findings, we in Lebanon have a life expectency of 71.5 years, of which we live 33.7 years happily. Ya3neh we spend 37.8 years in misery (slow internet, no electricity, wars, explosions, Naser Qandil, etc…).

In addition, we scored 4.7/10 for Life satisfaction (though fi 3anna Skybar!!!), and we have an ecological footprint of 3.1.

You may download the full report containing the classification of all the researched countries in PDF from here, or in Excel from here.

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