Thursday, August 31, 2006

State of the World - 31August-06

The world ever engaged with itself, in terror and in civility, in flux and completely static. We are doomed to repeat our mistakes over and over and over again. Man is a learning animal, has the potential to learn from his errors but unfortunately is all too fallible, falling prey to his own ungovernable emotions, forgetting the utility of brain power, creative thinking, and irreproachable acts of logic. We continue to learn things about ourselves but we never learn to learn about what we learn, and that's a pity.

Here, then, are news nuggets gleaned from the print media on this day, the last of the month of August, 2006 starting with the helpfully innocuous but vastly useful, and then on to rehash what utter fools we be:
  • It's long been known that folic acid cuts the risk of neural tube defects - defects of the brain and spine, including spina bifida. Researchers from Toronto and London, Canada, have found folic-acid fortified multivitamin supplements provide "consistent protection" against other congenital anomalies, including cardiovascular defects such as "holes in the heart", limb defects, cleft palate and hydrocephalus - water buildup on the brain that can lead to brain damage, as reported this week in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology of Canada. (Take those supplements pre-planning pregnancy.)
  • Religion is a "feeding ground" for obesity, claims a U.S. sociologist who has studied the relationship between fat and religion since the early 1990s. Those who practise religion through "media practise"; that is by reading, watching services on television or listening to them on the radio, were likely to be obese. The study, published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion analyzed the religious practises and body-mass index of more than 2,500 people from 1986 to 1994. Baptists most likely to be obese, with 24% obesity at the study start and 30% at its completion; fundamentalist Protestants (Pentecostals) had 18% of the group obese at the study start and 22% at the completion; a fairly high percentage of Catholics and pietistic Protestants (Methodists) were also obese, with Catholics stable at 17%, the others at 19%; those with no religious affiliations hovered around 6% obesity, and the lowest levels of obesity found among Jews and non-traditionalists such as Mormons and Christian Scientists. (Accurate to what percentile point of idiocy?)
  • Pinocchio, Tom Sawyer and other novelistic fictive characters have been converted to Islam, in new versions of 100 classic stories on the Turkish school curriculum. "Give me some bread, for Allah's sake", Pinocchio says to Gepetto his maker, in a book stamped with the crest of the Ministry of Education. "Thanks be to Allah,", the puppet later says. Heidi, the Swiss orphan, is told that praying to Allah will help her to relax. (In case Muslim children are not already sufficiently confused.)
  • A leading cardinal said the Vatican will excommunicate the doctors who performed Colombia's first legal abortion on an 11-year-old girl who was raped by her stepfather. "Every Christian Catholic who submits to an abortion, whether it be directly or indirectly, will be excommunicated", stated Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family. (Let that be a lesson to those coy Lolitas of the Catholic world; transgress by victimization and pay the penalty; the cost of piety in a Catholic world is suffering and more suffering.)
  • The head of the U.S. House Middle East subcommittee yesterday protested the Bush administration's decision to let former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami visit the United States for speeches and conferences at the United Nations, where he is scheduled to attend in New York to promote dialogue, and to speak on religion's role in promoting peace at the Washington National Cathedral on September 7. (I've got a splitting headache. More proof that the left hand is never certain when the right hand plans to deliver a hard, sharp slap.)
  • Thousands of prisoners have been shaving their heads and chests to donate hair to help mop up the Philippines' worst oil spill, officials said yesterday. The collection was in response to a nationwide drive by the government to amass tonnes of hair and feathers to absorb more than 200,00 litres of industrial fuel that leaked from a tanker when it sank off the central island of Guimaras on
    August 11. (Low tech works?! Avast ye murderers on death row, all 1,000 of ye, repent and become shorn of your many locks; hope for a pardon.)
  • Bombers killed more than 60 Iraqis yesterday, mostly in Baghdad. But the top U.S. commander said a security drive in the capital was making progress and Iraqi forces could largely be running the country within 12 to 18 months. (Which calls to mind a story earlier in the week reporting that hours after the British turned over a military base to Iraqi control, looters picked it clean, driving up in trucks and making off with roofing, windows and plumbing after clashing with outnumbered Iraqi solders. Yes, one can certainly see into the near future, that stability will result and all will be well.)
  • Hurricane John grew into a dangerous Category 4 storm just off Mexico's Pacific coast yesterday threatening beach resorts with heavy rain and searing winds blowing down trees in Acapulco, home to about one million people, with sea surges of up to three metres. (Don't forget the Gulf of Mexico for plenty of excitement this hurricane season, folks.)
  • The ozone layer, the atmospheric shield that protects life on Earth from harmful ultraviolet rays, is on the mend after decades of decline tied to pollution, according to a September 9 study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. "Not only has the depletion stopped but, surprisingly, the level of ozone is rising slightly," said Ross Salawitch, co-author of the study, and an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. (Guess all we fearful citizens can break out the champagne and forget about Global Warming and the potential for WWIII. Get out there and get yourself a good (newly-protected) tan, guys!)
  • Seventeen aid workers who were murdered in eastern Sri Lanka this month were killed by government security forces, international peace monitors said yesterday. The allegation, rejected as "baseless" by the Sri Lankan government, will further strain already difficult relations between the Swedish-led ceasefire monitors and the island's government. (And here we thought the Tamil Tigers were the bad guys; on the other hand, doesn't the story smack familiar - over to the Middle East now.)
  • Kofi Annan left Jerusalem empty-handed last night after Israel refused his request to end its sea and air blockade of Lebanon. In a setback for the United Nations Secretary-General's efforts to stabilize the ceasefire, the Israelis demanded the return of the two soldiers seized by Hezbollah last month as the price for implementing a UN Security Council resolution ending the war with the Shi'ite militia. (As memory serves, correctly, it was the abduction of the two IDF soldiers and the killing of eight more which initiated the conflict to begin with - so let's get down to basics; you do this first, then we'll take the politely worded request under due consideration.)
  • Hugh Chavez, the Venezuelan President, hailed in Syria as a hero to the Arabs, began his first visit yesterday saying both countries reject American "imperialism and hegemony". "We have the same political vision: We are two countries and two peoples resisting and facing imperialist aggression." (How about that; an Islamofascist-Communist love-in!)
  • Major powers will begin discussing an Iran sanctions resolution at a meeting in Europe next week if Tehran continues to defy a UN Security Council demand to halt uranium enrichment. Iran was not expected to comply with UN demands, so U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns and top officials from Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany would meet early next week. (And, accomplish precisely nothing, given the past inability of these great powers always at loggerheads with one another, to agree on anything too specific, too injurious to the subject-nation under review, too usefully capable of sending an unequivocal message substantiating Western fears of a nuclear-powered Islamofascist state.)
Enough already. You get the picture, the sublime to the ridiculous, the outright fearsome to the utterly useless, the hysterically nonsensical to the reality of world instability forevermore.

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, August 31, 2006

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