Saturday, June 04, 2005
TOO LITTLE TOO LATE?
UN atlas uses satellite imagery to expose decades of environmental damage
NASA satellite photos taken 30 years apart and published by the United Nations Program for the Environment show the destruction of the rain forest in the national park of Iguazu on the Brazilian-Paraguayan border.(AFP/HO)
GENEVA (AFP) - An atlas of satellite photographs published by the UN environmental agency has exposed the physical damage wrought by the growing human population, including deforestation, retreating icecaps, dried seas, sprawling cities and pollution.
UNEP said the book, "One Planet, Many People", which is also aimed at policy makers, gives a clear illustration of major environmental changes that develop gradually over years without being immediately noticed on the ground.
The comparative photographs from space include the emergence of greenhouses for industrial scale farming in Almeria, southern Spain that have turned about 400 square kilometres (160 square miles) of fields and valleys dotted with villages into a solid grey and white patchwork between 1974 to 2004.
They also show the shrinkage of the Arctic icecap as well as glaciers in the Himalayas, European Alps, or South America's Andes, while a swathe of virgin Amazonian rainforest in Brazil turns from solid green in 1975 to stripes of white 25 years later due to logging.
"Most of these changes are very slow. But if you look over periods of five to 10 years you can see dramatic changes on the environment," Pascal Peduzzi of UNEP told journalists.
"The changes are just as impressive as a tsunami or a flood," he said.
Deposits and sediment carried by China's Yellow River have formed a new peninsula jutting into the sea since 1979, effectively making the river about 25 kilometres (15 miles) longer at its estuary.
The US city of Las Vegas expanded in the desert leaching scarce water supplies between 1973 and 2000, while the expansion of Mexico City from a city of nine million inhabitants in 1973 to over 20 million today is stripping forested mountainsides in the pictures.
"Cities pull in huge amounts of resources including water, food, timber, metals and people. They export huge amounts of wastes, including ... wastewater and the gases linked with global warming" said Klaus Toepfer, UNEP's executive director.
"Thus their impacts stretch beyond their physical borders affecting countries, regions and planets as a whole," he added.
Peduzzi underlined that the images also showed humanity's capacity to repair environmental damage.
The industrial city of Copsa Mica -- regarded by UNEP as "one of the sickliest in the world" -- and surrounding hills showed up as a black stain on the Romanian countryside in 1986.
Last year the countryside was green again and city buildings could be distinguished from outer space.
The pictures also illustrate the environmental impact of political strife and conflicts.
The Shatt Al-Arab waterway between Iran and Iraq once had one-fifth of the world's date palms until the 1970s, but the trees were stripped away by wars, pests and development for the oil industry.
Huge marshlands there were also dried up in Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's campaign against political opponents in southern Iraq. Imagery from last year shows renewed irrigation since Saddam was toppled.
Pristine forests in the Parrot's Beak region of Guinea were stripped to make way for tens of thousands of refugees from bloody civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s, and to provide them with fuel, shelter and crops.
The satellite imagery was donated by the US space agency NASA and the US geological survey.
The atlas was published to coincide with World Environment Day on Sunday.
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Failed cities to get yellow card on World Environment Day
PARIS (AFP) - World Environment Day on Sunday points a warning finger at cities, picking out suburban sprawl, shanty towns, pollution and the plundering of precious water resources as threats that mire people in poverty and have a global impact.
The annual event hopes to draw attention to the failed -- or failing -- mega-cities that stud the globe and to set a benchmark for an urban lifestyle that is not only good but prosperous and sustainable too.
"Cities pull in huge amounts of resources including water, food, timber, metals and people," says Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which sponsors World Environment Day.
"They export large amounts of wastes, including household and industrial wastes, wastewater and the gases linked with global warming. Thus their impacts stretch beyond their physical borders, affecting countries, regions and the planet as a whole."
In 1950, 30 percent of the world's population lived in urban areas, and New York was the only agglomeration whose population was more than 10 million.
By 1975, New York had been joined by Tokyo, Shanghai, Mexico City and Sao Paulo, Brazil. By 2000, there were 19 in this category, and New York was lying in fifth place. Scores more had populations of more than a million.
The vast majority of the behemoths are in developing countries, where rural migration and industrialisation has caused existing cities to expand massively and new ones to spring out of almost nothing -- Bangkok, Cairo, Johannesburg, Jakarta, Seoul, Lima, Metro Manila, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, to name just a few.
Few, though, are a success, says Michel Hamelin, of France's Agency for the Environment and Energy Control.
Most are blighted by laisser-faire policies that put little or no thought into zoning, basic infrastructure and public transport or even ensuring that the surrounding region can provide adequate supplies of food, sustain demands for water and cope with the city's waste.
And the outcome is not just traffic jams, foul air and other pollution -- it also creates nests of deep poverty and lawlessness. People live in crowded shanties where there is no electricity, mainline water or sewage and there is a long and exhausing trek to go to work or school.
"Urbanisation is usually not managed, it is just something that happens," Hamelin told AFP.
Yet the importance of planning is going to get even more acute.
On current trends, more than 60 percent of the world's population in 2030 will live in urban areas, compared with 48 percent in 2003 and less than a third in 1950, according to UN figures.
To cope with this traumatic challenge, developing countries need to do more to brake the rural exodus by encouraging development in villages and small towns so that young people can find a job locally, says Hamelin.
Another tactic is promote the education of women, a known factor in encouraging economic growth and smaller families.
In parallel, cities should gear for the arrival of migrants by setting down roads, railway links, parks, water and sewage mains and electricity lines.
In addition, zoning should encourage shops and businesses to develop close to homes, thus reducing the need for local people to make long trips to find work or buy their daily food.
World Environment Day will be crowned by a declaration in San Francisco where the mayors of 66 cities, including London, Shanghai and Calcutta will set down a blueprint for improving their local environment.
Among their targets will be to give a big boost to renewable energies, slash the volumes of rubbish that goes into landfill, recycle more water, cut commuting in single occupancy vehicles, ensure every resident lives within 500 metres (yards) of a public transport route and create "higher density" neighbourhoods that are bike-friendly.Friday, June 03, 2005
DUBYA, NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDERED
(The definition of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, as described by the DSM-IV, can be found here).
Bush, The Spoiled Man-Child
What causes the fall of empires? Why, stubborn leaders who speak like toddlers and never admit mistakes
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Know what real men do? They admit their mistakes. Know what real people do in times of great stress and strife and economic downturn? They seek help, understand they don't know all the answers, realize they might not've been asking the right questions in the first place.
Know what great leaders, great nations, do at times of war and fracture and massive bludgeoning debt? All of the above, all the time, with great intelligence and humility and grace and awareness and shared humanity. Or they die.
But not BushCo. This is the hilarious thing. This is the appalling thing, still. How can this man remain so blindly, staggeringly resolute? How can he be so appallingly ignorant of fact, of truth, of evidence, of deep thought? In short, what the hell is wrong with George W. Bush?
GWB publicly discloses his penis size
Here it is, another bumbling, barely articulate press conference by Dubya, one of the few he ever gives because he clearly hates the things and is deeply troubled by them, hates reporters who ask complicated questions and hates people who dare doubt his simple mind-set, his effectiveness, his policies, his lopsided myopic one-way black/white good/evil worldview.
Bush hates press conferences because he can't speak extemporaneously and can't form a complete sentence without mashing up the language like a 5-year-old on Ritalin and can't express a nuanced multifaceted idea to save his life and somewhere deep down in his bowels, he knows it, and he knows we know it, and it makes him mumble and stutter and secretly pray every moment to his angry righteous God he could be somewhere else, anywhere else, like sittin' on the back porch in Texas eatin' ribs and dreamin' 'bout baseball. Ahhh, there now. That's better.
But here he is, instead, stuck like a pinned bug in the Rose Garden, struggling to answer questions from the press about his low approval rating, his ultraviolent and botched war in Iraq, the huge bipartisan lack of support for his plan to gut Social Security, his inane assault on stem-cell research when the rest of the planet clearly supports it, how he has burned through any political capital he might've earned from the last election by being so utterly ineffectual and inept -- except, of course, when it comes to rigging the nation's courts and loading them with ultra-right-wing misogynist homophobes.
Go ahead, read the Q&A press conference, linked above. It's sort of staggering. It's also very impressive, in a soul-stabbing, nauseating way. Bush is, to be sure and in a word, unyielding. Determined. Immovable. Also, deeply confused. Myopic as hell. Frighteningly narrow minded. Weirdly random. Childish in a way that would make any good parent seriously question whether it might be time to get their child some intense psychological help.
Unlike you or me or any human anywhere who happens to be in possession of humility or subtlety of mind, Bush, to this day, admits zero mistakes. He refuses help, rejects suggestions that everything is not dandy and swell. He is confounded by questions that dare suggest he might be somewhat inept, or failing. And he absolutely insists that America exists in some sort of bizarre utopian vacuum, isolated and virtuous and towering like a mad hobbled king over our enemies and allies alike.
He is, in other words, our downfall.
Iraq? Going smoothly, Bush says, happy with the progress there, despite huge surges in insurgent violence and endless uptick of the U.S. death toll and the utter wasteland we've made of that poor, shredded nation.
Iran, North Korea and Egypt? Just dandy. No serious problems at all. Gotta talk more with that "North Korean" guy though, sort out the "nukuler" problem. Sneering thug John Bolton for U.N. ambassador? You betcha, still on track, a good man, despite what everybody -- and I do mean everybody -- says.
Overhaul Social Security, despite an enormous lack of support from Dems and Repubs and the vast majority of the American people? "Just a matter of time," Bush mutters, completely blinded to the fact that it's an enormous mistake. His deeply hypocritical stance on stem-cell research that kowtows to the deeply ignorant Christian Right? No real answer there. Doesn't compute. Just shrug that sucker right off.
Notice, when you read: There is no eloquent, deeply felt defense of ideas. There is no intellectual breakdown of opinion, no multifaceted explanation, no passionate clarification. And there is certainly no reference to outside ideas, a confession that we might need help, input, wisdom from our neighbors, from science, from the wise and the experienced.
It's a fact we've known all along but that keeps hammering at us like a drunk gorilla hammers at a dead mouse: Bush is able to speak only at one level, to one level. The level of a child. The level of a simpleton. The level of a sweet, bumbling, small-town mayor, addressing a PTA meeting, everyone in soft plaids and everyone drinking light beer and everyone wondering about just what the heck to do about the rusty swing sets and the busted stoplight.
Bush is, of course, not talking to you or me when he speaks at press conferences, or at his staged, prescreened, sycophant-rich "town hall" meetings, so full of plain, everyday folk hand selected for their blind love of Shrub and lack of ability to ask hard questions (read this transcript of a recent town hall on Social Security, and come away stupefied at the man's shocking ability to appear just exactly as uneducated as his questioners).
He is not speaking to conservative Democrats or moderate Republicans. He's not speaking to highly educated people who harbor a sincere curiosity about and tenuous understanding of the complexities of the world.
Bush is, of course, speaking to children. He is speaking to babies. It is a decidedly shallow and hollow and oddly deflated type of language that offers not a single nutritious or substantive thought to the political or cultural dialogue, other than to expand his staggering collection of embarrassing Bushisms.
It's all merely a crayon drawing, an intellectual wading pool, a big messy cartoon world populated by manly white good guys and fanged dark evil guys and we are good and They are evil and that's all there is to it so please stop asking weird tricky polysyllabic questions.
Maybe this is appropriate. Maybe this is as it should be. After all, we are, by and large, a nation that refuses to grow up, refuses to take responsibility for our gluttony and its global effects, refuses to see the world as it is now, a mad tangle of interconnected humanity, a global marketplace, a hodgepodge of variegated religions all stemming from the same source and that therefore all require a nimble and nuanced and deeply intelligent leadership to navigate. Qualities that our current leadership has, well, not at all.
The U.S. still behaves, when all is said and done, like a scared monkey, clinging desperately to a shiny spoon despite the trap closing in all around us, refusing to let go of this old, silly, faux-cowboy mentality of boom boom kill kill God is your daddy now sit down and shut up.
Bush embodies this. He is the very emblem of this childish, polarizing, sclerotic worldview. He literally cannot speak with any complexity, depth, resonance. He cannot function in a world of deep intellect, nuance, mature perspective. He is incapable of asking for help. He is unable to admit mistakes or discuss shortcomings or expand his mind-set to include the new and the possible.
What causes the downfall of empires? What causes the implosion of leadership, the slide of great nations into the deep muck of recession and war and mediocrity and numb irrelevance? That's easy. Stagnation. Refusal to change. Refusal to adapt, to progress. Refusal to grow the hell up, to take responsibility for our shortcomings and failures, as well as our successes.
Indeed, George W. Bush would make a great small-town mayor, somewhere deep in a dusty, forgotten part of Texas. His brand of personable, aww-shucks, none-too-bright simpleton talk is perfect for small town. It really is.
But for a major world power caught in the throes of a desperate need to change and grow and evolve, he is, of course, absolute death.
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Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. Subscribe to this column at sfgate.com/newsletters.Thursday, June 02, 2005
SNIFF THIS AND GIMME YOUR WALLET
Scientists Experiment With 'Trust' Hormone
By JOSEPH B. VERRENGIA, AP Science Writer
It sounds like the plot for another Batman sequel: The villain sprays Gotham City with a trust hormone and people rush to give him all their money. Banks, the stock market and even governments collapse.
Farfetched? Swiss and American scientists demonstrate in new experiments how a squirt of the hormone oxytocin stimulates trusting behavior in humans, and they acknowledge that the possibility of abuse can't be ignored.
"Of course, this finding could be misused," said Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich, the senior researcher in the study, which appears in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. "I don't think we currently have such abuses. However, in the future it could happen."
Other scientists say the new research raises important questions about oxytocin's potential as a therapy for conditions like autism, in which trust is diminished. Or, perhaps the hormone's activity could be reduced to treat more rare diseases, like Williams syndrome, in which children approach strangers fearlessly.
"Might their high level of trust be due to excessive oxytocin release?" asks University of Iowa neurologist Antonio Damasio, who reviewed the experiments for Nature. "Little is known about the neurobiology of trust, although the phenomenon is beginning to attract attention."
Oxytocin is secreted in brain tissue and synthesized by the hypothalamus. This small, but crucial feature located deep in the brain controls biological reactions like hunger, thirst and body temperature, as well as visceral fight-or-flight reactions associated with powerful, basic emotions like fear and anger.
For years oxytocin was considered to be a straightforward reproductive hormone found in both sexes. In both humans and animals, this chemical messenger stimulates uterine contractions in labor and induces milk production. In both women and men, oxytocin is released during sex, too.
Then, elevated concentrations of the hormone also were found in cerebrospinal fluid during and after birth, and experiments showed it was involved in the biochemistry of attachment. It's a sensible conclusion, given that babies require years of care and the body needs to motivate mothers for the demanding task of childrearing.
In recent years, scientists have wondered whether oxytocin also is generally involved with other aspects of bonding behavior — and specifically whether it stimulates trust.
Trust is the glue of society and human interactions. Erase it, and you compromise everything from love to trade and political order.
"I once likened trust to a love potion," Damasio writes in Nature. "Add trust to the mix, for without trust there is no love."
In the experiments, the researchers tried to manipulate people's trust by adding more oxytocin to their brains. They used a synthetic version in a nasal spray that was absorbed by mucous membranes and crossed the blood-brain barrier. Researchers say the dose was harmless and altered oxytocin levels only temporarily.
A total of 178 male students from universities in Zurich took part in a pair of experiments. All the volunteers were in their 20s. They got the oxytocin or a placebo.
In the first experiment, they played a game in which an "investor" could choose to hand over to a "trustee" up to 12 units of money that are each equal to .40 Swiss franc, or about 32 cents. The trustee triples the investor's money, then gets to decide how much of the proceeds to share.
Of 29 subjects who got oxytocin, 45 percent invested the maximum amount of 12 monetary units and, in the researchers' words, showed "maximal trust." Only 21 percent had a lower trust level in which they invested less than 8 monetary units.
In contrast, the placebo group's trust behavior was reversed. Only 21 percent of the placebo subjects invested the maximum, while 45 percent invested at low levels.
Overall, those who got oxytocin invested 17 percent more than investors who received a placebo.
In a second experiment, investors faced the same decision. But this time, the trustee was replaced by a computer program in an effort to see whether the hormone promoted social interaction or simply encouraged risk-taking.
With the computer, the oxytocin and placebo groups behaved similarly, with both groups investing an average of 7.5 monetary units.
"Oxytocin causes a substantial increase in trusting behavior," Fehr and his colleagues reported.
Researchers said they are performing a new round of experiments using brain imaging. "Now that we know that oxytocin has behavioral effects," Fehr said, "we want to know the brain circuits behind these effects."Tuesday, May 31, 2005
WHAT'S REALLY IMPORTANT ABOUT DANICA PATRICK'S INDY RUN
Girl, uninterrupted
Danica Patrick shattered several records Sunday at the storied Indianapolis 500. Even more lasting will be the point she made.
In a car hitting 226 miles an hour, Patrick, 23, was the first woman to hold the lead at any time in the race's 89-year history. Her fourth place finish was the best ever for a woman. She also proved a point that won't be in the record books, but should be: A woman with the right talent can succeed in a male-dominated sport such as auto racing when she's given the right backing from people who take her seriously.
Patrick's dad, T.J. Patrick, a championship snowmobile racer, did just that when Danica and her younger sister got into go-kart racing as kids. T.J. didn't treat them as girls.
Both parents supported Danica when she made another unconventional choice. She left high school at age 16 to go to England alone to drive cars at 200-plus mph in a ruthless schooling circuit for aspiring drivers.
Janet Guthrie, the first woman to race at Indy, in 1977, recalls in her memoirs being told by an auto executive that she would never win because "no one will ever give you a winning car because you are a woman." The dismal prediction proved accurate, she says.
Patrick's ride changed all that. Racing legend Bobby Rahal saw her potential and signed her in 2002 to join his top-flight team.
This year, Patrick almost took it all before the ultimate winner, Dan Wheldon, 26, passed her with seven laps to go. Asked whether he was focused on passing Patrick, Indy's big story all last week, Wheldon replied that he wasn't "looking at it like it was Danica Patrick. It was just another Rahal car."
Now that's real progress.Sunday, May 29, 2005
DEMON DUBYA
Sunday, May 29, 2005
AND THE BEAT GOES ON
BLACK AND WHITE AND FULL OF CRAP
By Ted Rall
Lies Run Big, Facts Small in U.S. Media
NEW YORK--One year ago the American media was pushing the Pat Tillman story with the heavy rotation normally reserved for living celebs like Michael Jackson. Tillman, the former NFL player who turned down a multi-million dollar football contract to fight in
Iraq and
Afghanistan, became a centerpiece of the right's Hamas-style death cult when he lost his life in the mountains of southeastern Afghanistan. To supporters of the wars and to many football fans, Tillman embodied ideals of self-sacrifice and post-9/11 butt-kicking in a hard-bodied shell of chisel-chinned masculinity on steroids.
Tillman's quintessential nobility, we were told, was borne out by the story of his death--a tale that earned him a posthumous Silver Star. Whether you were for or against Bush's wars, Americans were told, Tillman's valor showed why you should support the troops. Young men were encouraged to emulate his praiseworthy example.
Several thousand mourners gathered at Tillman's May 3, 2004 memorial service to hear marquee names including Arizona Senator John McCain called upon all Americans to "be worthy of the sacrifices made on our behalf." "Tillman died trying to save fellow members of the 75th Ranger Regiment caught in a crush of enemy fire," the Arizona Republic quoted a fellow soldier addressing the crowd. Tillman, said his friend and comrade-at-arms, had told his fellow soldiers "to seize the tactical high ground from the enemy" to draw enemy fire away from another U.S. platoon trapped in an ambush. "He directly saved their lives with those moves. Pat sacrificed his life so that others could live." It was, as the Washington Post wrote, a "storybook personal narrative"--one recounted on hundreds of front pages and network newscasts.
It was also a lie.
As sharp-eyed readers learned a few months ago from single-paragraph articles buried deep inside their newspapers, Pat Tillman died pointlessly, a hapless victim of "friendly fire" who never got the chance to choose between bravery and cowardice. As if that wasn't bad enough, the Washington Post now reports that
Pentagon and White House officials knew the truth "within days" after his April 22, 2004 shooting by fellow Army Rangers but "decided not to inform Tillman's family or the public until weeks after" the nationally televised martyr-a-thon.
It gets worse. So desperate were the military brass to carry off their propaganda coup that they lied to Tillman's brother, a fellow soldier who arrived on the scene shortly after the incident, about how he died. Writing in an army report, Brigadier General Gary Jones admits that the official cover-up even included "the destruction of evidence": the army burned Tillman's Ranger uniform and body armor to hide the fact that he had died in a hail of American bullets, fired by troops who had "lost situational awareness to the point they had no idea where they were."
"We didn't want the world finding out what actually happened," one soldier told Jones. A perfect summary of the war on terrorism.
The weapons of mass destruction turned out to be a figment of Donald Rumsfeld's imagination. The Thanksgiving turkey Bush presented to the troops turned out to be plastic, as much of a staged photo op as the gloriously iconic and phony toppling of Saddam's statue in Baghdad by jubilant Iraqi civilians--well, actually a few dozen marines and
CIA-financed operatives. So many of the Administration's "triumphs" have been exposed as frauds that one has to wonder whether that was really Saddam in the spider hole.
We shouldn't blame the White House for producing lies; that's what politicians do. But we expect better from the media who disseminate them.
Case study: the Washington Post's dutiful transcription of the Jessica Lynch hoax. Played up on page one and running on for thousands of words, the fanciful Pentagon version had the pilot from West Virginia emptying her clip before finally succumbing to a gunshot wound (and possible rape) by evil Iraqi ambushers, then freed from her tormentors at a heavily-guarded POW hospital.
Like the Pat Tillman story, it was pure fiction. Private Lynch, neither shot nor sexually violated, said she was injured when her vehicle crashed. She never got off a shot because her gun jammed. As she told reporters who were willing to listen, her Iraqi doctors and nurses had given her excellent care. She credited them for saving her life. In a weird sort of prequel to the shooting of an Italian journalist, they had even attempted to turn her over at a U.S. checkpoint but were forced to flee when American troops fired at them.
In all of these examples, editors and producers played corrective follow-up stories with far less fanfare than the original, incorrect ones. To paraphrase "X-Files" character Fox Mulder, the truth is in there--in the paper, on TV. It's just really, really hard to find.
Readers of the American press and viewers of American radio and television are likelier to see and believe loudly repeated lies over occasionally whispered truths told once or twice. As a result of the reverse imbalance between fact and fiction, the propaganda versions of the Tillman and Lynch stories, the staged Saddam statue footage, and the claim that Iraq had WMDs are all believed by a misled citizenry that votes accordingly.
For journalists supposedly dedicated to uncovering the truth and informing the public, this is exactly the opposite of how things ought to be. Corrections and exposés should always run bigger, longer and more often than initial, discredited stories.
FOLLOW-UP: Readers who contacted their elected representatives in response to my column two weeks ago about the two 16-year-old Muslim girls detained by Homeland Security because one wrote an essay about suicide bombings (she was against them) have gotten results. Such pressure has prompted the feds to release the girl from Guinea, who has returned to her high school in New York City. But Bush Administration officials have decided to orphan her by deporting her father. The other girl, from Bangladesh, is also being released from prison but HomeSec plans to deport her along with her entire family. While the two girls' release obviously belies the government's claims that they are "an imminent threat to the security of the United States," your letters and phone calls to your Congressperson and/or Senator could help reverse these continuing acts of injustice.