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Monday, March 17, 2003
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Harvey Wasserman writes: One could argue the US has been marking time because it's not quite ready, with deployments and other technical needs not yet met. But all that is now far more difficult with an astounding rejection by Turkey, which shares a strategic border with Iraq. Turkish opposition to war is running a fierce 80-90%. Major arm-twisting (and a $26 billion bribe) has not bought permission to use Turkish land and air space. Meanwhile, the "no" votes of China, Russia, France and Germany represent the official opinion of some 2 billion people. They are irrelevant to the mechanics of armed conquest. But the four nay-sayers represent enormous political and economic power. So do scores of other nations whose nervous millions now march for peace. "Never before in the history of the world has there been a global, visible, public, viable, open dialogue and conversation about the very legitimacy of war," says Robert Muller, a long-time UN guiding light who views this global resistance as virtually miraculous. ... Meanwhile, worldwide demonstrations are growing bigger and more focused. In Britain one wonders if the next march might shut down London or the entire country. Massive civil disobedience is inevitable at dozens of US embassies. Consumer boycotts are likely to erupt with staggering force. Within the US, the fiercest opposition may well be coming from Wall Street. ... Through the internet, the nonviolent movement is linked by billions of e-mails and forwarded articles meant to surround and circumvent the corporate media. They warn the blood shed in this proposed war would be unconscionable. That its ecological costs would be unsustainable. That civil rights and liberties are being trashed. And that the multiplier effects of such devastating chaos cannot be predicted. (03/17/03) | |
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Peter A. Corning writes: A biological approach to social justice enables us to move beyond the one-sided assumptions of capitalism and socialism - and the ideological standoff between them. The premises of an evolutionary/bioeconomic paradigm -- as well as the accumulating evidence about human evolution (the "state of nature") and the complexities of "human nature" -- provide the basis for a new political ideology that accords more closely with the reality of the human condition. I call this new, biologically-grounded ideology "fair shares," and I propose a normative framework that supports three complementary principles: (1) goods and services should be distributed to each according to his/her basic needs; (2)"surpluses" beyond the provision for our basic needs should be distributed according to merit; (3) in return, each of us is obliged to contribute to the collective survival enterprise in accordance with his/her ability. ... Fairness is the golden thread that binds a viable society together. And when that thread breaks, the social fabric unravels. The response to the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's contemptuous claim that "there is no such thing as society" is that a society exists when people believe it does and act accordingly (or vice versa)! But fairness is not an all-purpose formula or recipe. It is a general principle that recognizes the merit of competing interests and directs us to find "equitable" compromises. In this paradigm, "compromise" is not (automatically) a "sell-out" to political expediency but may well be (and often is) adherence to a superordinate principle with a higher moral claim - because it recognizes and accommodates "legitimate" competing claims. However, the evidence is all around us that fairness is often a matter of perspective; it can be very difficult to call. That is why we have a formal "justice" system, and mediators, and family counselors, and contract negotiations, and markets. Indeed, every society has a panoply of informal customs and practices for approximating fairness - from "equal shares" to "first come, first served," "drawing straws," and "handicapping" (like senior citizen discounts and allowing children to go free). (03/17/03) | |
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Center for Disease Control -- In response to reports of increasing numbers of cases of an atypical pneumonia that the World Health Organization (WHO) has called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today announced several steps to alert US health authorities at local and state levels. CDC activated its emergency operations center on Friday, March 14, upon learning of several cases reported in Canada among travelers recently returned from Southeast Asia and their family members. (03/17/03) | |
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Scence Daily -- Sleep: Don't be too sure you're getting enough of it. Those who believe they can function well on six or fewer hours of sleep every night may be accumulating a "sleep debt" that cuts into their normal cognitive abilities, according to research conducted at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. What's more, the research indicates, those people may be too sleep-deprived to know it. The study, published in the March 15 issue of the journal Sleep, found that chronically sleep-deprived individuals reported feeling "only slightly sleepy" even when their performance was at its worst during standard psychological testing. The results provide scientific insight into the daily challenges that confront military personnel, residents and on-call doctors and surgeons, shift workers, parents of young children, and others who routinely get fewer than six hours of sleep each night. (03/17/03) | |
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Science Daily -- Global warming and the partial melting of polar ice sheets can dramatically affect not only sea levels but also Earth's climate, in ways that may be complex, rapid and difficult to adjust to, scientists say in a new study to be published Friday in the journal Science. ... The research was done by scientists at the University of Victoria, Oregon State University, and the University of Toronto. It revealed changes in global temperature, sea level and ocean currents that can occur with surprising rapidity. "With the advent of global warming, we're trying to identify the climatic surprises that may be in store for us, the events that we really aren't expecting," said Peter Clark, a professor of geosciences at OSU and a co-author of the study. "The more we look at this, the more it appears there have been large and abrupt changes in climate and sea level that are interconnected. If these changes were to happen in the future, they could cause huge societal disruptions." (03/17/03) | |
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BBC Science -- Climate change was largely to blame for the collapse of the Mayan civilisation in Central America more than 1,000 years ago, research suggests. By the middle of the 8th Century there were up to 13 million people in the Mayan population but within 200 years their cities lay abandoned. The Mayans built complex systems of canals and reservoirs to collect rainwater for drinking in the hot, dry summers. Despite this there has long been speculation that the whole population was wiped out by drought, but there has not been enough evidence to support this theory. Now research published in the journal Science suggests that climate change was indeed a major factor. (03/17/03) | |
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BBC Science -- The third World Water Forum has brought together about 10,000 delegates from 150 countries to debate solutions to the crisis facing more than one billion people without access to clean water. Inevitably overshadowed by the Iraq crisis, the organisers of this conference say its discussions over the next week will have far more impact on mankind for the 21st Century than current events in the Middle East. Japan's Crown Prince Naruhito opened the week-long forum with a warning that the world faced a water crisis, with shortages, pollution and floods spreading all over the world. (03/17/03) | |
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The Independent -- A generation of young clubbers is risking long-term brain damage by taking the drug ecstasy, according to new research published yesterday. Academics are now warning that taking only one or two pills can lead to lasting depression. A two-year research study carried out by psychologists from London Metropolitan University found that people who had tried ecstasy on only a few occasions had depression levels four times higher than those who had taken a range of other drugs but not ecstasy. The findings presented to the British Psychological Society's annual conference in Bournemouth yesterday suggested that taking ecstasy left users susceptible to major problems triggered by stress or emotional turbulence. The results were based on studying 519 volunteers, including current and past ecstasy users, and others who had either never used drugs or had used a number of drugs other than ecstasy, including alcohol and cannabis. (03/16/03) | |
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Newsweek Magazine -- America’s unprecedented power scares the world, and the Bush administration has only made it worse. ... Most Americans have never felt more vulnerable. September 11 was not only the first attack on the American mainland in 150 years, but it was also sudden and unexpected. Three thousand civilians were brutally killed without any warning. ... Yet after 9-11, the rest of the world saw something quite different. They saw a country that was hit by terrorism, as some of them had been, but that was able to respond on a scale that was almost unimaginable. Suddenly terrorism was the world's chief priority, and every country had to reorient its foreign policy accordingly. Pakistan had actively supported the Taliban for years; within months it became that regime's sworn enemy. Washington announced that it would increase its defense budget by almost $50 billion, a sum greater than the total annual defense budget of Britain or Germany. A few months later it toppled a regime 6,000 miles away--almost entirely from the air--in Afghanistan, a country where the British and Soviet empires were bogged down at the peak of their power. It is now clear that the current era can really have only one name, the unipolar world--an age with only one global power. America's position today is unprecedented. A hundred years ago, Britain was a superpower, ruling a quarter of the globe's population. But it was still only the second or third richest country in the world and one among many strong military powers. The crucial measure of military might in the early 20th century was naval power, and Britain ruled the waves with a fleet as large as the next two navies put together. By contrast, the United States will spend as much next year on defense as the rest of the world put together (yes, all 191 countries). And it will do so devoting 4 percent of its GDP, a low level by postwar standards. (03/17/03) | |
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Washington Post -- President Bush ended an hour-long summit in the Azores today by giving the United Nations a deadline of 24 hours to act on a resolution authorizing war with Iraq, marking an abrupt end to six months of feverish but failing diplomacy. ... "We concluded that tomorrow is a moment of truth for the world," Bush said, joined by the summit's three other participants at an afternoon news conference at a Portuguese air base. "Tomorrow's the day that we will determine whether or not diplomacy can work." (03/16/03) | |
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Timothy Wilken, MD writes: Did you watch the opening ceremony for 2002 Winter Olymics? It was beautiful. We sure put on a good show for the rest of the world. We honor and cherish the first humans to inhabit North America — the Native Americans. We respect and protect the native animals of America — the Buffalo, Coyote, and Eagle. And, did you see the beautiful paper puppets? Wasn't the one of the giant American Bison cool with the all the little buffalos running inside of it? Of course, our show for the rest of the world wasn't really the truth. It was only a picture of the world as it "ought to be". An "ideal" picture of early America. This is the way our Amercian history "ought to have been". In the "real" world — in the world of "is", those arriving from Europe would kill or imprison most of the Native Americans, use the Chinese and African immigrants as slave labor, and kill all but 800 of the millions of mighty Buffalo that ran on the American plains. This was the number of living Buffalo at the end of the 19th century. Our American history "could have been different". But it wasn't. (03/16/03) | |
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Terence R. Wilken of the RWWNL writes: The markets have spoken. Thursday the markets told us that all is OK in the world. Dow UP. Nasdaq UP. S&P UP. Dollar UP. Gold Down. Oil Down. The War must be over. All the talking heads have been telling us the only reason the markets have been going down is because of the Iraq pending War. When the War has begun and is over which will be very quickly, the markets will return to their normal upward trend. Did you not hear that once the War begins, that the Iraq military would all surrender? We have completed our work behind the scenes. (03/16/03) | |
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The Washington Post -- Global health authorities were on the alert on Sunday for a severe type of pneumonia that has killed at least nine people, infected more than 100 and sparked a warning from the World Health Organization (WHO). The spread of the disease has alarmed travelers. In Hong Kong's international airport, many people arriving from Taiwan, Singapore and elsewhere were wearing surgical masks. "There's nothing we can do about it, so we have to take precautions," one visitor told Hong Kong's Cable TV. Cathay Pacific airline said it had ordered staff not to check in passengers showing symptoms of illness and to refer them for medical assessment. A spokesman for the Geneva-based WHO said there were reports two people from the same family had died in Canada, taking the death toll to nine worldwide since the first outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), an atypical pneumonia whose cause is not yet known, was detected in China in February. (03/16/03) | |
5:57:19 AM 
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© TrustMark
2003
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
4/1/2003; 5:17:00 AM.
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