Tag: 3rd World

Small nations have learned from the Tet Offensive — while the White House hasn’t

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❝ The attacks erupted before dawn on Jan. 30, 1968 and escalated to new levels of ferocity the next day. It turned out that tens of thousands of communist soldiers had begun a coordinated series of surprise attacks on more than 100 cities and U.S. bases in South Vietnam, taking the Americans and their local allies by surprise on the lunar new year of Tet.

North Vietnamese Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap had planned the offensive to break the will of the United States and South Vietnam and end a long stalemate in the struggle by the North to reunite with the South under communist rule. And while Giap’s forces were eventually pushed back with huge losses, he did accomplish his wider objective of undermining American and South Vietnamese confidence in the war effort…

❝ The attacks erupted before dawn on Jan. 30, 1968 and escalated to new levels of ferocity the next day. It turned out that tens of thousands of communist soldiers had begun a coordinated series of surprise attacks on more than 100 cities and U.S. bases in South Vietnam, taking the Americans and their local allies by surprise on the lunar new year of Tet.

The lessons of Tet still resonate. “Tet shaped the world within which we live today: In an era when Americans still don’t fully trust government officials to tell them the truth about situations overseas, and don’t have confidence that leaders, for all their bluster, will do the right thing,” writes Princeton historian Julian Zelizer in the current issue of The Atlantic. “Tet is an important reminder that for liberals and conservatives sometimes a little distrust is a good thing. Particularly at a time when we have a president who traffics heavily in falsehoods, Tet showed that blind confidence in leaders can easily lead down dangerous paths.”

Say it again, Julian. Trust in a pathological liar isn’t likely to turn out well.

Flying Eye Hospital

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Click to enlarge

The Flying Eye Hospital, currently parked on Moffett Field in Mountain View, is a mobile ophthalmological hospital, technological marvel, and surely one of the most extraordinary vehicles on the planet. It is a converted MD-10 wide-body airliner that flies all around the world — it just got back from Bangladesh — performing eye surgeries on needy patients in developing nations while also helping to train their doctors, nurses, and medical technicians.

…One of the most technically amazing things about the Flying Eye is that it is an entirely self-contained hospital: its systems, which run purely on jet-fuel-powered generators, include its own medical gases, its own clean room, its own water purifiers, its surgical equipment, etc., including extremely sensitive equipment (again, this is eye surgery we’re talking about) which has to be stowed such that can survive serious turbulence or bumpy landings on difficult runways without requiring major maintenance…

The Flying Eye is a largely volunteer organization (and part/most of the charity Orbis International.) They have 400 volunteer faculty, including many of the best of the ophthalmological world, many of whom come back every year to work on the Flying Eye for a week or two unpaid. The pilots are also volunteers…

I wonder if the pilots have to worry about being shot down by one of our Free World cowboys [as much as ISIS] when they’re somewhere out of direct sight of journalists?

Life in a banana republic-state

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image

“When an Albuquerque couple caught a man burglarizing their garage, they asked him to stop.

“When that didn’t work, they pulled out a rifle and a handgun, and held him at gunpoint until police officers arrived…”

“Upon arrival, I observed an older male … pointing some type of rifle at a male suspect on his knees,” an officer wrote in a criminal complaint filed in Metropolitan Court.

“Lujan, while being handcuffed, told police that he had recently been released from the county jail. Jail and court records show he got out Wednesday after posting bail in a July drug case.”

“Homeowner George Kennedy, 70, told officers that he was in his garage when he noticed a man loading items into a sport utility vehicle nearby. Kennedy saw that some of the items the man was loading – including a generator and a cooler – were his…

“He went over to the man, later identified as Lujan, and asked him to stop, but Lujan continued loading the items, according to the complaint. Kennedy went inside and got his wife, Rebecca Kennedy, 66, and they armed themselves.

“They held Lujan until officers arrived…”

“When police searched Lujan, they found keys belonging to Rebecca Kennedy in his pocket. Police also discovered that the SUV Lujan was loading the stolen items into was stolen…”

“Lujan was arrested, charged with residential burglary and booked back into jail.”

BUT – this is New Mexico. Even a former governor admitted life here is more like living in the 3rd World than a modern nation. We have a judicial system that is a perfect example of that. There are no standards. Care and concern for ordinary citizens does not exist.

Lujan was taken back to jail. Remember he just violated his bail from a drug case. No worry. Going before a judge on the burglary charges, he was released on his own recognizance. No need for bail, then, you see.

Back on the streets.

Karzai assured of sufficient cash by CIA delivery boy

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“I don’t care if Bush said he’d let you plant this to poppies…Michelle won’t allow it.”

The C.I.A.’s station chief here met with President Hamid Karzai on Saturday, and the Afghan leader said he had been assured that the agency would continue dropping off stacks of cash at his office despite a storm of criticism that has erupted since the payments were disclosed.

The C.I.A. money, Mr. Karzai told reporters, was “an easy source of petty cash,” and some of it was used to pay off members of the political elite, a group dominated by warlords.

The use of the C.I.A. cash for payoffs has prompted criticism from many Afghans and some American and European officials, who complain that the agency, in its quest to maintain access and influence at the presidential palace, financed what is essentially a presidential slush fund. The practice, the officials say, effectively undercut a pillar of the American war strategy: the building of a clean and credible Afghan government to wean popular support from the Taliban.

Instead, corruption at the highest levels seems to have only worsened. The International Monetary Fund recently warned diplomats in Kabul that the Afghan government faced a potentially severe budget shortfall partly because of the increasing theft of customs duties and officially abetted tax evasion…

…Mr. Karzai, in offering his most detailed accounting to date of how the money had been used, probably raised as many questions as he answered…Formal aid, for instance, is publicly accounted for and audited. The C.I.A.’s cash is not, though Mr. Karzai did say the Americans were given receipts for the money they dropped off at the presidential palace.

Asked why money that was used for what would appear to be justifiable governing and charitable expenses was handed over secretly by the C.I.A. and not routed publicly through the State Department, Mr. Karzai replied: “This is cash. It is the choice of the U.S. government.”

He added, “If tomorrow the State Department decides to give us such cash, I’d welcome that, too.”

Mr. Karzai declined to specify how much cash his office received each month, or how much it had been given by the C.I.A. so far. At his meeting with the station chief, it was made clear to him that “we are not allowed to disclose” the amount, he said…

The American Embassy in Kabul, which handles queries for the C.I.A., declined to comment.

Heartwarming to note that American foreign policy hasn’t especially changed since the days of John Foster Dulles and Dean Rusk. Corruption is closer akin to the White House and Congress than anything offered by sovereign democracy.

Iron in new maize strains absorbed readily, easily

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Raymond Glahn and Elan Tako – and broiler chicks

Researchers at Cornell have developed a strain of maize with a high iron bioavailability, meaning more of the iron that is present naturally in these maize lines can be absorbed.

The researchers, all from the U.S. Department of Agriculture – Agricultural Research Service’s Robert Holley Center on the Cornell campus, tested more than 100 maize strains for differences in iron bioavailability. They did this by introducing simulated digestions of the individual maize strains to cultured human intestinal cells and measuring the iron bioavailability. Using a technique known as quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping, they correlated this measure with areas of the maize genome, which helped guide the maize breeding.

Iron deficiency is the most prevalent nutritional deficiency and cause of anemia in the world. Although boosting the nutritional quality of iron in staple food crops can help, increasing iron concentrations in the crop does not guarantee increased iron absorption.

“We had two options: to increase the concentration or to increase the bioavailability. Our maize breeder, Dr. Owen Hoekenga [a Cornell molecular biologist], chose to select for iron bioavailability as these regions appeared more easy to isolate,” said food scientist Elad Tako, lead author of the study…published in the January issue of Nutrition Journal…

As part of the study, the researchers developed techniques to test the results of the cell culture assay in a live animal — in this case, the broiler chicken. Such a model is “cost-effective, easy to handle, sensitive to dietary mineral deficiencies, including iron, and could consume the broad range of staple crops that we plan to test,” said Tako.

In the future, the researchers hope to identify QTLs that govern the availability of other vital nutrients in crops. “We have done a lot with beans, lentils, sorghum, wheat — looking into factors that can affect the bioavailability of iron, but we are also interested in zinc bioavailability,” said Tako.

“Biofortification of grains with iron and zinc not only gives better nutrition for the consumers but it’s also an incentive for the farmers because they promote crop yield. Without that feature, the farmers wouldn’t adopt it,” said Glahn.

The World Health Organization reports that almost a quarter of the world’s population is anemic, with prevalence rates at almost 70 percent in African countries, where maize is an integral part of the diet. “The ultimate game is to take this to an area where the population is iron-deficient,” said Glahn, in hopes of curbing anemia.

Cornell students will get to volunteer for the necessary human studies in the near-term. A worthwhile endeavor if there ever was one.

I always count the volunteer work I did as a human guinea pig in medical studies as advancing the life of my species as much as the decades of activism. And without the risk of being clubbed over the head by some enthusiastic right-wing cretin.

Another Bill Gates prizewinner — solar toilets to improve sanitation

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Reinvent the Toilet
Click on the graphic to see it all

Bill Gates is, in a manner of speaking, flushing his money down the toilet…His charitable organisation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is looking for future loos that can improve sanitation around the world.

At the Reinvent the Toilet fair, hosted at its Seattle campus this week, designs included a lavatory that used microwave energy to turn poo into electricity…Another turned excrement into charcoal, while a third used urine for flushing.

In total 28 designs were shown off at the fair and the winner was a team from the California Institute of Technology…Led by Prof Michael Hoffman, the toilet they designed was solar-powered and generated hydrogen gas and electricity. They won a $100,000 prize.

The project challenged inventors to come up with a toilet that operated without running water, electricity or a septic system. It needed to operate at a cost of no more than five cents (3p) a day and would ideally capture energy or other resources…

Traditional flush toilets waste tons of drinking water and are often impractical in many areas of the developing world.

The UN estimates that disease caused by unsafe sanitation is responsible for half of the hospitalisations in the developing world. About 1.5 million children die each year from diarrhoeal disease…

Bravo! Chalk up another positive step by the Gates Foundation. Imagine how many important tasks like this would move towards reality, functional aid to the poor of the world – as an alternative to the devotion to death and destruction so well-funded in the United States, UK, Russia and in other “modern” nations?

Maternal death rate could diminish by a third with open access to contraception

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Republican panel on birth control – no one who could possibly get pregnant!

A new study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University shows that fulfilling unmet contraception demand by women in developing countries could reduce global maternal mortality by nearly a third, a potentially great improvement for one of the world’s most vulnerable populations.

The study…comes ahead of a major family planning conference in London organized by the British government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that is an attempt to refocus attention on the issue…

The issue of family planning is fraught in the United States, where government assistance often gets caught up in political battles. Contraception has again become controversial this political season, though the United States remains a major donor…

This is only controversial in the minds of the mindless, backwards religious and rightwing nutballs — and cowards afeared of confronting them..

Maternal deaths have declined dramatically since 1990, down by a third, according to the World Health Organization…But about 16 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where fertility is still more than four children per woman, Mr. May said. The numbers of people are expected to more than triple in these places during this century, an issue that is urgent not only for their economies and environment, but also for the women themselves, who women’s rights advocates argue would benefit from more power to decide about bearing children…

Birth control reduces health risks, the researchers said, by delaying first pregnancies, which carry higher risks in very young women; cutting down on unsafe abortions, which account for 13 percent of all maternal deaths in developing countries; and controlling dangers associated with pregnancies that are too closely spaced.

Reactionaries hate and fear independent women, women who govern and guide their own lives – almost as much as they fear the liberty they prattle about in the dim halls of phony debate.

Politicians who chair hearings on why women should obey priests and pundits – without inviting a single female voice – are the signal example of what this discussion is about. Foolish men trying to hold onto a past when they believe silent and obedient citizens were the happiest in history.

As climate change takes hold, range of extreme weather expands

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Heavier rainfall, fiercer storms and intensifying droughts are likely to strike the world in the coming decades as climate change takes effect, the world’s leading climate scientists said on Friday.

Rising sea levels will increase the vulnerability of coastal areas, and the increase in “extreme weather events” will wipe billions off national economies and destroy lives, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the body of the world’s leading climate scientists convened by the United Nations.

Scientists have warned of these effects for years, but yesterday’s report – the “special report on extreme weather” compiled over two years by 220 scientists – is the first comprehensive examination of scientific knowledge on the subject, in an attempt to produce a definitive judgment. The report contained stark warnings for developing countries in particular, which are likely to be worst afflicted in part because of their geography, but also because they are less well prepared for extreme weather in their infrastructure and have less economic resilience than developed nations. But the developed world will not be unscathed – heavier bursts of rainfall, heatwaves and droughts are all likely to take their toll.

Chris Field, co-chair of the IPCC working group that produced the report, said the message was clear – extreme weather events were more likely. “Some important extremes have changed and will change more in the future. There is clear and solid evidence [of this]. We also know much more about the causes of disaster losses.”

He urged governments to take note – many of the economic and human impacts of disasters can be avoided if prompt action is taken: “We are losing way too many lives and economic assets in disasters.”

There is a range of caveats in the report – of course – since scientists by definition don’t care to offer anything more than conservative estimates of results from their studies. Something the average politician or know-nothing, what passes for a 21st Century conservative has little or no comprehension of. Scientists traditionally posit results on honest evaluation and conservative conclusions.

RTFA – there’s a great deal of useful and general information.

Living in a country where we can’t even convince Congressional conservatives to dedicate effort or funds to repair and maintain our crumbling infrastructure – Americans have nothing but disasters to look forward to. Penny-wise and pound-foolish beancounters combined with the admixture of nutballs and paranoids that constitute America’s right-wing will do everything in their power to deny and defeat any planning for weather extremes.