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Sunday, January 19, 2003
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Ted Trainer writes: Our industrial-affluent-consumer society is extremely unjust and ecologically unsustainable. Almost all social and economic problems are getting worse. The argument below is that these problems cannot be solved in a society that is driven by obsession with high rates of production and consumption, affluent living standards, market forces, the profit motive and economic growth. Problems of .ecological destruction, Third World poverty, resource depletion, conflict and social breakdown are caused by consumer-capitalist society and cannot be solved unless we move to the simpler lifestyles, more self-sufficient and cooperative ways, and a very different economy. (01/20/03) | |
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Chris Floyd writes: It was at a Pentagon press briefing -- the usual assured performance, with the relaxed defense chief holding forth and cracking wise before a roomful of awed, sycophantic reporters. He parried softball questions about Iraq and Korea, announced a few changes to the command structure of "Special Operations" (the significance of which was almost totally ignored by the big-time media players at the scene; more on this below), then answered a question about recent proposals to reinstate military conscription. ... Bush still has a couple of million bodies to fling on his foreign fires before he need think about conscripting new ones. So Rumsfeld swatted the question away -- but it was perhaps the very ease of the parry that undid him. Ever the corporate pedant, Rumsfeld couldn't simply dismiss the notion of a draft; he had to explain why it was such a bad idea. His reason? Because the biological material "sucked" into the last draft, during the Vietnam War, was of such "inferior" quality. Here the contempt finally broke through the avuncular rictus. Rumsfeld explained that your quality types -- college boys, married guys, teachers and others -- took advantage of "all kinds of exemptions" to skip out on combat. "And what was left" -- not even "who," just "what" -- "was sucked into the intake, trained for a few months, then went out, adding no value, no advantage, really, to the United States armed services." Think about that. "No value." More than 58,000 of these "intake suckers" were left dead on the battlefield; hundreds of thousands more were maimed, scarred, tormented, brutalized, broken -- but they had "no value" to the "United States armed services." No value -- just meaningless biological material to be chewed up in geopolitical games. (01/20/03) | |
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Arthur Noll writes: There are several related principles of sustainable food production, but probably the most central, is not to use resources faster than they renew. A common example I’ve used is that if you want to cut one 50-year-old tree a year, you need to have 50 trees growing of that kind, from seedling to 49 years old. As long as you have all these trees growing, you can cut one 50-year-old tree a year indefinitely, and sustain the forest in its present size. ... With the land resources that we can use sustainably, we will get water resources, and the combination of land and water food resources gives us the population that can be sustained. Looking at this from more long term perspectives, we understand that the world changes dramatically at times, and we shouldn’t run our own population at the limits of food production, but maintain a factor of safety. This gives a cushion of resources, in case of climate change either warmer or colder, drier or wetter, and all that might go with this. So we have three principles here so far. 1) Use resources no faster than they renew. 2) Treat ecosystems as ecosystems, and don’t break them up. And, 3) maintain a factor of safety in population, below that of the maximum theoretical. (01/20/03) | |
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The Moscow Times -- The government boosted 2003 military spending by a third Thursday, approving $3.25 billion for arms procurement and the development of new equipment. ... Some 60 percent of the 109.8 billion rubles earmarked for the military this year will go for buying weapons and repairs, Deputy Economic Development and Trade Minister Vladislav Putilin told reporters after the government meeting. The rest will be spent on researching and developing more than 3,000 projects, he said. More than 200 new weapons units are expected to be completed and ready for military use. The military budget includes a 30 percent boost in funds for the procurement of equipment for anti-terrorist operations, Putilin said. The military will buy 11,000 apartments, while financing for food, uniforms and fuel will be kept at minimum levels. The federal space program will get 7.3 billion rubles ($230 million), of which 1.5 billion rubles will go for the GLONASS global navigation system. (01/20/03) | |
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New York Times: Health -- Pollutants in the air in Upper Manhattan and the South Bronx have been linked to lower birth weights and smaller skulls in African-American babies, according to a long-term study on the unusually high rate of childhood asthma in those areas. In a paper to be published next month in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health found that African-American women exposed to high levels of everyday pollutants in automobile exhaust, cigarette smoke and incinerators in the third trimester of pregnancy tended to have smaller babies with smaller than average skulls. Dr. Frederica Perera, director of the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health, said the study's findings were particularly troubling because low birth weight and smaller skulls had been found to correspond with poor health and mental problems later in life. (01/20/03) | |
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New York Times -- The Bush administration today proposed opening up part of the nation's largest remaining block of unprotected public land to oil and gas development. The proposal affects nearly nine million acres of the Alaska North Slope in the government's National Petroleum Reserve. Home to distinctive wildlife and tundra, the land is near the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which the administration still hopes to win the necessary Congressional approval to open up to oil drilling. Today's draft proposal was released by the Bureau of Land Management, which offered four alternatives — including doing nothing — for the area, which was set aside in the 1920's for possible energy development. Environmental organizations said they had long expected most of this land to be leased, but noted that the proposal would constitute the largest single on-shore offering to industry in the history of the American Arctic. (01/20/03) | |
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New York Times: Interview -- How did your TV commercials connecting S.U.V.'s to terrorism get started? After watching the drug-war ads equating taking drugs to terrorism, I wrote a column making a link between driving gas-guzzling cars like S.U.V.'s and supporting countries that fund terrorists. And at the end of this column I had what I considered a rhetorical question: would anyone be willing to pay for a people's ad campaign to jolt our leaders into reality? The next morning I woke up to a flood of over 5,000 e-mails. So I called two great friends of mine who are sort of activists in their own ways. One is Laurie David, who is an environmental activist and married to Larry David, who put the first hybrid cars on his show, ''Curb Your Enthusiasm.'' (01/20/03) | |
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New York Times -- A three-inch-long endangered fish is standing between this city and its plans for a well-watered future. The fish, the silvery minnow, native to the Rio Grande, has been the subject of years of court battles. But now a federal appeals court is about to decide whether, to save the fish, Albuquerque must give up drinking water it has set aside behind a federal dam for the years ahead. The case poses the most direct confrontation yet between the Endangered Species Act, which ranks the protection of threatened animals and plants above human needs, and the water rights held by cities like Albuquerque in Western states where water is becoming increasingly scarce. (01/20/03) | |
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New York Times -- A television ad campaign orchestrated by the columnist Arianna Huffington that suggests that drivers of gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles are in cahoots with terrorists. After the ads appeared, The New York Post, ever vigilant for liberal hypocrisy, denounced several "avid supporters" of environmental activism in Hollywood for either owning S.U.V.'s themselves or otherwise being energy hogs who enjoy limos, private jets and "oversized Beverly Hills mansions." Among the green-leaning miscreants: Gwyneth Paltrow, said to park her S.U.V. near her New York apartment; Mr. and Mrs. Chevy Chase, seen "cruising around" in an S.U.V.; and Barbra Streisand and her husband, James Brolin, said by The Post to own hers-and-his S.U.V.'s. Roughly one out of every four new cars sold is an S.U.V., and the auto industry was quick to side with S.U.V.-lovers outraged at getting lectures from conspicuous consumers in the Hollywood Hills. S.U.V.'s are a cherished American "lifestyle issue," John Devine, the chief financial officer of General Motors, told Fox News. But in Hollywood, celebrities are lining up to demonstrate "their commitment to the environment" by buying fuel-saving cars like the Toyota Prius, according to a company news release, which said Leonardo DiCaprio and Larry David, the co-creator of "Seinfeld," have each bought two of Toyota's new hybrid gas-and-electric models. (01/20/03) | |
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CNN News -- In Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, California, at the two largest peace rallies, the crowds were urged on by international peace activists, religious leaders, members of Congress, actors and musicians. At least tens of thousands of people rallied on the Mall in Washington, and a similar-size group crowded downtown San Francisco. The group in Washington followed the rally with a march through the streets of the capital. (01/19/03) | |
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Dee Hock writes: Where did all this superior, inferior nonsense come from? By what method could one possibly know — by what possible measurement and what standards could one judge the value of climbing a ladder of power, wealth, and fame, other than the pronouncements of those who lust after them? Could such desires amount to no more than a basement of trash? Isn't all life a seamless blending of all opposites? If so, why do we think to separate one thing from another and elevate it to the status of a deity? On and on the questions whirled and swirled as time lost all dimension. ... No matter how we try to suppress our problems with Industrial Age techniques, they reemerge in different dress or form, more complex and virulent than ever. Something is deeply, fundamentally wrong. No matter how many technological miracles we perform, no matter how sophisticated the virtual worlds we create, no matter how many atoms we crack, no matter how much genetic code we splice, no matter how many space probes we launch, things will get progressively worse until we discern and deal with that fundamental institutional problem. In truth, there are no problems "out there." And there are no experts "out there" who could solve them if there were. The problem is "in here," in the consciousness of writer and reader, of you and me. It is in the depths of the collective consciousness of the species. (01/19/03) | |
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Yulia Latynina writes: Russian generals have been coming up against a new problem: Their soldiers are deserting en masse. ... Most recently on New Year's Eve, 24 conscripts deserted unit 01375 in the village of Kamenka near St. Petersburg. ... And now that a new form of protest is spreading like the flu through military barracks, the prosecutors have to choose either to pin some completely ridiculous charges on the soldiers, or to watch the entire army disintegrate. And what if following the unorganized shootings and the organized desertions we start to see soldiers revolting? This form of protest was extremely common in ancient societies. But what would happen if this ancient form of social protest were to take place at a missile base, whose warheads could take out the Kremlin or, say, Washington? Who would take such a country seriously? And what if the revolt were to occur at an ordinary military base, but was then supported by the local population? (01/19/03) | |
10:53:36 PM 
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© TrustMark
2003
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
2/2/2003; 7:50:39 AM.
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