January 2008
Monthly Archive
January 12, 2008
Her smile has captivated the art world for centuries. And for centuries there has been endless speculation about who was the woman who posed for Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.”
Now a German expert claims to have found evidence that the model was Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Florentine cloth merchant named Francesco del Giocondo. From the Associated Press:
“Viet Probst, director of the Heidelberg University Library, said the university’s handwriting expert had discovered a reference to her identity in a document that belonged to the painting’s early owner.
The Mona Lisa was painted between 1503 and 1506 and now hangs in the Louvre in Paris.
The painting’s alternative title is La Gioconda, further linking it to Francesco del Giocondo and Lisa Gherardini.
January 12, 2008
Stephane Dion needs to come to grips with the tough issues if he’s going to show himself the leader Canada so badly needs.
In Afghanistan with Michael Ignatieff, Dion, according to the Associated Press, opined how Canada needs to find new non-combat roles in Afghanistan.
What I’m not hearing from Dion is the same thing I don’t ever expect to hear from Harper – how we pry the Canadian contingent out of the jaws of Kandahar province. It’s just plain silly to toss about fantasies of new, non-combat contributions when neither the US nor NATO has shown the slightest interest in producing forces to take the place of the Canadian combat group. Until then, we’re not going anywhere, certainly at least not until 2010 when we see if the Dutch will actually leave when they’ve announced they’re going.
Dion needs to address the validity of NATO and Canada’s role in it before indulging in fanciful debate over what comes next because, until we deal with the NATO issue, there is no “next.”
I know, I know – Dion supporters will be quick to point out that it would be political suicide to get embroiled in that before an election. I suppose the same thing goes for coming up with solutions to the Athabasca Tar Sands.
January 12, 2008
No doubt about it, the cutest reptile on our planet is the chameleon. And when it comes to US presidential candidates there are a lot of chameleons but none holds a candle to Hillary Obama, formerly known as Hillary Clinton. She decided she’d rather look more like Barak Obama than Bill Clinton after Barak Obama handed her an upset in the Iowa primaries.
Hillary Clinton’s narrative is muddled and confusing. She bobs and weaves, doing whatever she deems necessary to preserve her claim that she’s the best Demutante to take on the Repuglican champion in November. But an op-ed piece by former Democratic consultant Frances Wilkinson in the New York Times questions whether Hillary isn’t “Fighting to Lose”:
“For more than a year, Mrs. Clinton has based her campaign in large part on her ability to parry the kind of attack politics that Democrats feared from the Republican Party under its former chief strategist, Karl Rove. On the trail, Mrs. Clinton has assured voters that she is the only Democratic candidate who has been “vetted” and shown capable of withstanding the right-wing attack machine. But that machine has grown curiously quiet of late.
In the Republican races in Iowa and New Hampshire, the harsh partisan noise of the past two decades grew faint. Mrs. Clinton may be entrenched behind a political Maginot line, preparing to defeat an opponent who is contemplating a new, more daring maneuver for victory.
Republican candidates with a mean streak are fading fast. Mitt Romney, the only candidate to use the word “internship” in a political statement about Mrs. Clinton, is in trouble. Rudy Giuliani has embraced the most anti-Democratic rhetoric of any of the Republicans but has collected few votes.
By contrast, when Mike Huckabee mounted the stage in Des Moines to claim victory in the Iowa Republican caucuses, he offered no red meat. After securing victory by the votes of a bloc formerly known as the “religious right,” Mr. Huckabee demonized no Democrats or liberals or gays. Instead, he quoted G. K. Chesterton on love.
Then on Tuesday, John McCain seized victory in the Republican primary in New Hampshire after a campaign essentially devoid of attacks on Democrats. A signature moment was Mr. McCain’s lengthy, thoughtful and entirely civil discussion with a war protester at one of his campaign events.
Mr. McCain, an expert on military policy, didn’t make a cheap example of the civilian. Instead, he practically made a political convert. The exchange ended with the protester wishing Mr. McCain success in his race against Mitt Romney. On election night, the victorious Mr. McCain saluted the Democratic candidates as well as his Republican foes
If Mr. Huckabee and Mr. McCain continue to set the tone for the Republican side, Mrs. Clinton would find it hard to escape the partisan past she unwillingly symbolizes. Her negative poll ratings are consistently higher than those of any candidate running for president. They seem more unyielding as well.
Given that the Republican base has shrunk since 2004, it makes strategic sense for the party’s candidates to be campaigning in an expansive mood. This new Republican style is not a matter only for the general election, however. As partisan battle recedes, the role of the warrior in both parties is diminished. Thus, Democratic primary voters may find Mr. Obama’s claim to post-partisanship to be perceptive rather than naïve.
Republicans seem as exhausted by the Bush years as Democrats are. If this fragile moment endures, the next president will be the candidate whose person and politics make the sturdiest bridge across America’s political divide. Hillary Clinton is solid enough to bear the traffic. But how far can she stretch?
January 12, 2008
Sometimes irony is so much fun. For several months the US Army in Iraq has been equipping and funding Sunni resistance groups that are now turning on al-Qaeda fighters in their region. The Boston Globe has a story about how some of the tribal Sheiks who are receiving the money are skimming off the top:
“Current and former US officials privately estimate that some sheiks keep 20 percent or more of the money.
“Some sheiks do take some off the top,” Colonel Martin Stanton, chief of reconciliation and engagement with the multinational forces in Iraq, acknowledged in a telephone interview. “But that’s just their cultural model, and compared to the good its done and the chance that we have to go forward and bring peace, it’s been well worth it.”
But as US military forces draw down in the coming months and make plans to hand the program over to the Iraqi government, the funneling of money to Sunni sheiks has alarmed some US officials and members of the Shi’ite-led Iraqi government, who fear that the Sunnis could resume their attacks against either the government or Shi’ite militias if and when the cash dries up.
They say the United States needs to develop a longer-term strategy to ensure that the sheiks continue to support the Iraqi government when the US funds disappear.
“We’re not thinking through the impact of abetting further corruption and perpetuating tribal power,” said a senior US military adviser who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Skimming? Off the top? Twenty per cent? Isn’t that what American defence contractors in Iraq do every day? I thought that was called free enterprise or at least it is when the outfit hired goes by the name Halliburton or Blackwater.
January 11, 2008
The US greenback has plummeted about 40% against most world currencies. That was supposed to have relieved America’s massive balance of trade deficit by increasing demand for US made exports abroad and by reducing domestic demand for suddenly more expensive foreign goods.
The good news for the United States is that exports are indeed up, quite a bit in fact. The bad news is that so is the US trade deficit. The explanation lies in American dependence on foreign oil and recent increases in world oil prices. The latest figures, for November, show that exports rose 0.4% to $142-billion but imports rose a full 3% to $205-billion.
One thing that is working in America’s favour is that OPEC continues to price oil in American dollars. If that was to shift to stronger currencies, such as the Euro or Yen, the US deficit figures would swell enormously.
January 11, 2008
First Musharraf tells a Singapore paper that American troops had better stay out of Pakistan – or else – now Asia Times Online reports that Pakistan’s powers that be are thinking about turning neutral on the War on Terror:
“Following a meeting of the Pakistan corps commanders headed by the new chief of army staff, General Ashfaq Kiani, a press release said there would be a review of the situation in the tribal areas and, instead of citing any plans for military operations there against militants, the release said the military’s decisions would be based on “the wishes of the nation”.
Islamabad’s rethink has been prompted by the violence and political crisis resulting from the assassination of former premier Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi last month. In turn, this has fueled intense speculation in the Western media of the possibility of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of militants.
Most recently, Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the United Nations’ atomic watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, voiced concerns over the this possibility. “I fear chaos … an extremist regime could take root in that country, which has 30 to 40 warheads,” ElBaradei told the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat.
Such comments are viewed in Pakistan’s strategic quarters as deliberate mischief on the part of the West. On the one hand it insists that Islamabad come down hard on militancy, but when this is done, the militants react against the government. The West then points to the problem of rising extremism and projects the danger posed to Pakistan’s arsenal. “
Going neutral would mean giving up the military effort to confront the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the tribal lands adjacent to Afghanistan. That, in turn, would greatly complicate NATO’s efforts to curb the insurgency in southern Afghanistan.
January 11, 2008
Disgraced former three-time Olympic gold medallist, Marion Jones, has been sentenced to six months imprisonment for lying to investigators about using performance-enhancing drugs and a check fraud scam.
Jones won five medals in all at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, three gold and two bronze. Her performance made her, for a time, the world’s most famous female athlete.
An Olympic athlete goes to jail for lying. A household diva goes to jail for lying. Why then, does a guy who swears under oath that he only met another guy a few times for a cup of coffee and is later shown to have pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars from this guy instead, not raise so much as a prosecutor’s eyebrow?
January 11, 2008
The latest scam from the global warming denialists is to claim that global warming has actually stopped. It’s over they say, keep moving, nothing to see here. In fact, what they’re doing is exploiting what’s called weather “noise” to distract attention to actual climate change.
Weather noise is the term used to describe the unpredictable variations in the earth’s weather that, looked at in short periods, can lead to false conclusions about climate change. Look at the red lines in the graph above. If you narrow your focus from one peak to the following trough you might conclude that, yes, the world is actually cooling. That’s weather noise. But look at the overall 30-year chart and you see the actual global warming. From Reuters:
Climate change is still nudging up temperatures in the long term even though the warmest year was back in 1998 and 2008 has begun with unusual weather such as a cool Pacific and Baghdad’s first snow in memory, experts said.
“Global warming has not stopped,” said Amir Delju, senior scientific coordinator of the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) climate program.
Last year was among the six warmest years since records began in the 1850s and the British Met Office said last week that 2008 will be the coolest year since 2000, partly because of a La Nina event that cuts water temperatures in the Pacific.
“We are in a minor La Nina period which shows a little cooling in the Pacific Ocean,” Delju told Reuters. “The decade from 1998 to 2007 is the warmest on record and the whole trend is still continuing.”
This year has started with odd weather including the first snows in Baghdad in memory on Friday and a New Year cold snap in India that killed more than 20 people. Frost hit some areas of Florida last week but orange groves escaped mostly unscathed.
Delju said climate change, blamed mainly on human emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, would bring bigger swings in the weather alongside a warming trend that will mean more heatwaves, droughts, floods and rising seas.
“The more frequent occurrence of extreme events all over the world — floods in Australia, heavy snowfall in the Middle East — can also be signs of warming,” he said.
January 11, 2008
Experiments to cultivate drug-producing lettuce is generating a lot of resistance in California. The biotechnology industry is hoping to use plants, including common crops, to produce new, high-value drugs. From ENN:
“Scientists say there is no way to keep untested drugs produced in food crops out of the food supply. Even the editors of the pro-biotechnology science journal Nature Biotechnology warned:
‘Don’t use food plants for producing drugs,’ because of the health risks.
Consumers, including our children, who may unknowingly eat pharmed lettuce could get an uncontrolled dose of an untested, biologically active drug – with unknown consequences.
[Professor Henry Danielle, founder of “pharm crop” developer Chlorogen Inc.] claims that contamination would not be a concern because his drug-producing lettuce can’t cross with natural lettuce varieties.”
However, a previous experiment with drug-producing corn in the midwest by top pharm crop developer, Prodigene, wound up spreading the drug contamination into the soybean crop causing the government to order half a million bushels of Nebraska soybeans to be destroyed.
“But, ProdiGene’s corn did not cross-pollinate with soybeans: It contaminated soybeans with volunteer drug-corn from the previous season’s seed grown on the same land. The drug corn went undetected in the soybean field that was harvested the following season.
Cross-pollination is one of many potential routes of contamination. Other unapproved biotech crops have contaminated safe, natural varieties during every stage of production.
Contamination occurs through seed mix-ups, wind or animal seed dispersal, not thoroughly cleaned farm equipment and storage bins, improperly labeled seeds, and numerous other unpredictable ways, often from human error.
Danielle’s system for avoiding cross-pollination relies on the hope that genes inserted into a plant’s chloroplast cells will not be a contamination problem, since they are a part of the plant’s DNA that does not mix in pollination. But, a 2003 study found that genes can move between the chloroplast and nuclei of plants, and they did so more often than researchers expected. This means that Danielle’s untested drug plants could cross-pollinate with lettuce destined for our dinner tables.”
January 11, 2008
Beleaguered Pakistani strongman and notional president, Pervez Musharraf, told Singapore’s Straits Times, that American forces would be considered “invaders” if they entered Pakistan to hunt down al-Qaida militants.
“Pakistan is under growing U.S. pressure to crack down on militants in its tribal regions close to the Afghan border.
The rugged area has long been considered a likely hiding place for al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden as well as an operating ground for Taliban militants planning attacks on coalition forces in Afghanistan.
The New York Times reported last week that Washington was considering expanding the authority of the CIA and the military to launch covert operations within the tribal regions.
Several U.S. presidential candidates have also hinted they would support unilateral action in the area.
Musharraf told The Straits Times U.S. troops would “certainly” be considered invaders if they set foot in the tribal regions.
“If they come without our permission, that’s against the sovereignty of Pakistan. I challenge anybody coming into our mountains. They would regret that day,” he said in the interview. “
The US has suffered a great loss of support among the Pakistani people and it’s believed that any intrusion by American forces into Pakistan would only increase support for extremism and undercut Pakistan’s moderate political parties.
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