Global Health Nexus

Cry Pakistan (2)

Hitch:

And now the two main legacies of Bhutto rule—the nukes and the empowered Islamists—have moved measurably closer together.

This is what makes her murder such a disaster. There is at least some reason to think that she had truly changed her mind, at least on the Taliban and al-Qaida, and was willing to help lead a battle against them. She had, according to some reports, severed the connection with her rather questionable husband. She was attempting to make the connection between lack of democracy in Pakistan and the rise of mullah-manipulated fanaticism. Of those preparing to contest the highly dubious upcoming elections, she was the only candidate with anything approaching a mass appeal to set against the siren calls of the fundamentalists. And, right to the end, she carried on without the fetish of "security" and with lofty disregard for her own safety. This courage could sometimes have been worthy of a finer cause, and many of the problems she claimed to solve were partly of her own making. Nonetheless, she perhaps did have a hint of destiny about her.

Tariq Ali:

Pakistan's turbulent history, a result of continuous military rule and unpopular global alliances, confronts the ruling elite now with serious choices. They appear to have no positive aims. The overwhelming majority of the country disapproves of the government's foreign policy. They are angered by its lack of a serious domestic policy except for further enriching a callous and greedy elite that includes a swollen, parasitic military. Now they watch helplessly as politicians are shot dead in front of them.

It is difficult to imagine any good coming out of this tragedy, but there is one possibility. Pakistan desperately needs a political party that can speak for the social needs of a bulk of the people. The People's party founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was built by the activists of the only popular mass movement the country has known: students, peasants and workers who fought for three months in 1968-69 to topple the country's first military dictator. They saw it as their party, and that feeling persists in some parts of the country to this day, despite everything.

Cry Pakistan

Obviously this a massive and profoundly sad story with enormous implications for the future of the region and the world.

Benazir Bhutto was a leader with her own history and flaws. It was under her leadership after all in the early 1990's when the Taliban first began to gain prominence with the direct support of both the Pakistani military and government - though her supporters I am sure would say that these are the inevitable consequences of power in Pakistan. And Pakistan is a very complicated and conflicted country with staggering rates of poverty and deprivation - rates which only seemed to increase under her leadership which in turn probably more than anything accounted for the PPP's huge losses in the Parliamentary elections of 1997 to Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League.

But still, this probably isn't the time.

One can't help but admire her bravery for going back to Pakistan into a situation that she most definitely knew was extremely dangerous. Watching the television footage today it seems stunning just how open and available she was to her throngs of adoring supporters, and how sparse and limited seemed the security. I'm not sure of the exact number, but Pakistan has endured an unprecedented number of suicide attacks this year (more here, and here). And though she was convinced that she knew who was trying to kill her, I have no idea. But you can't help but wonder the degree to which this rise is directly related to the Military's raid on the Red Mosque back in July.

She had already survived one attack that killed 140 people. The current Pakistani President Pervez Musharaff has survived three attempts on his life. And Afghan President Hamid Karzai has also survived three. The extremely popular Baluch tribal leader Nawab Akbar Bugti was killed by Pakistani security forces on August 26, 2006. (Big problems for the Pakistani government in Baluchistan.)

And into this growing, deeply violent culture of suicide and martyrdom she waded. So open. Her head held high. Almost like she knew it was going to happen.

Her father was hanged at age 51.

She was 54.

FURTHERMORE:

The Dawn is the leading English language newspaper in Pakistan.

In the near future check in here for any articles from the great Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid.

Her long time friend Victoria Schofield in remembrance.

Year One After James Brown - (1 A.J.B.)

If even the good people over at Rapture Ready can't agree that Jesus was actually born on December 25th, and if there is plenty of argument to be made and historical evidence to back up the fact that our reasons for celebration at this time of year basically extend from our ancient pagan traditions, then it seems to me that the actual justification that we use and place over this sacred winter festival can be as arbitrary as anything else.

And that is why I hereby propose that from here on in the day of December 25th be recognized as the Anniversary of the Death of James Brown. The Godfather of Soul. Who died on this day - Christmas Day - last year. December 25, 2006.

Beginning this year. Yes indeed. That's right.

Year One A.J.B. Year One. After James Brown.

The dawning of a whole new era. The beginning of New Time. Maybe even a new calender.

So who's with me?

Well, um ... ahem, anyway, we the Editorial Staff here at Global Health Nexus plan to do our small part to mark this monumental shift in the space-time continuum by introducing a whole new category:

The Weekly Musical Guest!

That's right. Pretty exciting. It's basically an idea that we have stolen from Crooks and Liars and their Late Night Music Club, but such is the nature of the web. We hope they take it in the spirit that it is offered. It also give us the opportunity to mine the musical goldmine that has evolved over at Youtube, instead of just sending cool videos to our friends who may or not really want to see them.

And you may also notice that the subtitle up on the marquee has now changed to include - Culture. That's right. Global Health, Politics, and Culture. Look out. 'Cause now we've got it covered. We figured since that not that many people were reading this blog to start with, beyond of course our beloved, bold, brilliant, deeply cherished, intrepid happy few, that we might as well go ahead and write whatever we want, on whatever we want. We're just trying to spice things up around here, as we continue the search our sea legs, and our real blogging voice.

We hope its okay. And we assure you that our global health and politics will not suffer, but will only be inspired to go further and deeper.

And rest assured that this is no sop to the youth. Nor no bullshit E-talk Daily type thing. Our cultural coverage will be only the most vital. The most necessary. Of that you have our word.

Culture and Civilization.

And thus we begin tonight with our first Weekly Musical Guest. Which will be, of course, who else?

Ladies and gentlemen, (quite possibly the best video on all of Youtube), the Godfather of Soul himself,

MISTER JAAAAAMEEES BROOOOOOWWWWN!!!:

And oh what the hell, Merry Christmas.

Have a good one.

Cheers.

UPDATE:

Upon further reflection we noticed that one year has actually passed since James Brown died, so thus that would actually make this the beginning of year two.

2 A.J.B.

Year one just seemed so cool, and we were so excited about the weekly musical guest thing we neglected proper math. Don't let this happen to you.

FURTHER UPDATE:

Though perhaps not. Did 1 A.D. begin right when Christ died, or did it begin a year later. I don't really know. In light of this confusion, let's go back to

1 A.J.B.

It's just cooler.

Sorry for the mix up.

The day when tropical disease comes to Europe

From today's NYT:

As Earth Warms, Virus from Tropics Moves to Italy:

After a month of investigation, Italian public health officials discovered that the people of Castiglione di Cervia were, in fact, suffering from a tropical disease, chikungunya, a relative of dengue fever normally found in the Indian Ocean region. But the immigrants spreading the disease were not humans but insects: tiger mosquitoes, who can thrive in a warming Europe.

Aided by global warming and globalization, Castiglione di Cervia has the dubious distinction of playing host to the first outbreak in modern Europe of a disease that had previously been seen only in the tropics.

“By the time we got back the name and surname of the virus, our outbreak was over,” said Dr. Rafaella Angelini, director of the regional public health department in Ravenna. “When they told us it was chikungunya, it was not a problem for Ravenna any more. But I thought: this is a big problem for Europe.”

The epidemic proved that tropical viruses are now able to spread in new areas, far north of their previous range. The tiger mosquito, which first arrived in Ravenna three years ago, is thriving across southern Europe and even in France and Switzerland.

And if chikungunya can spread to Castiglione — “a place not special in any way,” Dr. Angelini said — there is no reason why it cannot go to other Italian villages. There is no reason why dengue, an even more debilitating tropical disease, cannot as well.

“THIS IS THE FIRST CASE OF AN EPIDEMIC OF A TROPICAL DISEASE IN A DEVELOPED, EUROPEAN COUNTRY,” said Dr. Roberto Bertollini, director of the World Health Organization’s Health and Environment program. “Climate change creates conditions that make it easier for this mosquito to survive and it opens the door to diseases that didn’t exist here previously. This is a real issue. Now, today. It is not something a crazy environmentalist is warning about.”

But we are safe here in Tibet - no?

Oceans away.

The American Left - "Sophisticated people who have money" (?)

Via Andrew Sullivan:

Yes, conservative name calling of so-called 'liberals' as 'elitists' is tiresome and more often than not incredibly contrived and calculating. But it still bears looking into.

Found this article - The American Left's Silly Victim Complex - by the great Matt Taibbi (probably the best political writer of my generation that I know of, with maybe at times a post No Logo Naomi Klein coming in second) - from the May-June 2007 issue of Adbusters magazine:

The sad truth is that if the FBI really is following anyone on the American left, it is engaging in a huge waste of time and personnel. No matter what it claims for a self-image, in reality it’s the saddest collection of cowering, ineffectual ninnies ever assembled under one banner on God’s green earth. And its ugly little secret is that it really doesn’t mind being in the position it’s in – politically irrelevant and permanently relegated to the sidelines, tucked into its cozy little cottage industry of polysyllabic, ivory tower criticism. When you get right down to it, the American left is basically just a noisy Upper West side cocktail party for the college-graduate class.

And we all know it. The question is, when will we finally admit it?

Here’s the real problem with American liberalism: there is no such thing, not really. What we call American liberalism is really a kind of genetic mutant, a Frankenstein’s monster of incongruous parts – a fat, affluent, overeducated New York/Washington head crudely screwed onto the withering corpse of the vanishing middle-American manufacturing class. These days the Roosevelt stratum of rich East Coasters are still liberals, but the industrial middle class that the New Deal helped create is almost all gone. In 1965, manufacturing jobs still made up 53 percent of the US economy; that number was down to nine percent in 2004, and no one has stepped up to talk to the 30 million working poor who struggle to get by on low-wage, part-time jobs.

(Is this What's the Matter with Kansas?)

And are things any different in Canada?

Though we can also suffer from aspects of this deeply uninspiring malaise, I would say on the surface of it (without exploring it too deeply at the moment) that there are differences; some quite profound. Much smaller population coupled with a larger resource base. The history and the breadth of the NDP as a national party. And I honestly think that despite all of its problems and flaws that the public health care system creates a level of personal security for low income people in Canada that is deeply cherished and which gives them a larger stake in the political process, and that is just absent in the States. But one of the biggest differences has to be the cumulative, combined influence of money - in all its forms - in the respective political systems, and the consequences of this.

In Canada things really changed with the passing of Bill C-24 in 2003.

And in the States?

Taibbi has this to say:

Sanders (that would be Bernie Sanders, Socialist U.S Senator of Vermont) agrees, saying that “where the money comes from” is definitely one of the reasons that the so-called liberals in Washington – i.e. the Democrats – tend not to get too heavily into financial issues that affect ordinary people. This basically regressive electoral formula has been a staple of the Democratic Party ever since the Walter Mondale fiasco in the mid-eighties prompted a few shrewd Washington insiders to create the notorious “pro-business” political formula of the Democratic Leadership Council, which sought to end the party’s dependence upon labor money by announcing a new willingness to sell out on financial issues in exchange for support from Wall Street. Once the DLC’s financial strategy helped get Bill Clinton elected, no one in Washington ever again bothered to question the wisdom of the political compromises it required.

Within a decade, the process was automatic – Citibank gives money to Tom Daschle, Tom Daschle crafts the hideous Bankruptcy Bill, and suddenly the Midwestern union member who was laid off in the wake of Democrat-passed NAFTA can’t even declare bankruptcy to get out from the credit card debt he incurred in his unemployment. He will now probably suck eggs for the rest of his life, paying off credit card debt year after year at a snail’s pace while working as a non-union butcher in a Wal-Mart in Butte. Royally screwed twice by the Democratic Party he voted for, he will almost certainly decide to vote Republican the first time he opens up the door to find four pimply college students wearing I READ BANNED BOOKS t-shirts taking up a collection to agitate for dolphin-safe tuna.

Although Taibbi insists that culture still has more to do with it than money.

A good read. Anything by him is a good read.

So when is it "About the oil"?

Seeing the above map (go ahead and click on it) linked in both Matthew Yglesius and Andrew Sullivan today reminded me of the Jim Holt article from October's London Review of Books: It's the Oil :

Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years. ‘The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,’ the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the draft law was leaked. ‘They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.’ As negotiations over the oil law stalled in September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close political ally of President Bush.

If the US had managed to create a strong, democratic government in an Iraq effectively secured by its own army and police force, and had then departed, what would have stopped that government from taking control of its own oil, like every other regime in the Middle East? On the assumption that the Bush-Cheney strategy is oil-centred, the tactics – dissolving the army, de-Baathification, a final ‘surge’ that has hastened internal migration – could scarcely have been more effective. The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success.

Still, there is reason to be sceptical of the picture I have drawn: it implies that a secret and highly ambitious plan turned out just the way its devisers foresaw, and that almost never happens.

I have actually had this argument with a couple of people - that the chaos in Iraq was actually The Plan. And I have to admit that I've never been able to fully go there. But one look at the above map and the reasons for our collective obsession with the Middle East can seem pretty obvious.

And where is Canada on this map? I think I labour under the assumption that Canada is a bigger player on the world oil scene than it actually is. I have read a couple of times that Canada is the "second biggest oil-exporter to the United States", and I think I have even read that it is the biggest. But in actuality neither of these statements are apparently true.

Watched a piece on the CBC last night all about the Tar Sands. Hope to try and blog on that in the future.

Mysterious Khat Consumption Amongst Somali Combatants

From a Plos Medical Journal Pick of the Week:

The Consumption of Khat and Other Drugs in Somali Combatants: A Cross-Sectional Study -

Comes some adventures in methodology:

Our data raise some important methodological questions concerning the assessment of drug use in Somalia. According to our experiences in a preparatory study [63], answer tendencies play a major role in the self-reported khat use. The wording of the questions has a marked effect on the respective answers; for instance, when asked directly whether a respondent would chew khat, almost 100% of respondents answered “no,” even though this was obviously in strong contrast to our daily observation of the respondents. An indirect style of questioning, such as employed in this study, however, produced answers with more face validity. Still, we believe that this method of self-report produces underestimates of real figures. We observed that many respondents answered that they had stopped chewing khat one week or one month before and thus failed to report khat use in the week preceding the interview. Many respondents obviously had a strong wish to discontinue their own khat consumption, which was contrasted by frequent relapses. On the other hand, we cannot rule out that social desirability played an important role in under-reporting, especially because of the respondents' fear that they would be denied access to http: DDR programs if they admitted their drug use. In particular, self-reported khat use might have been affected by under-reporting or nonreporting due to social desirability, in contrast to the perceived use by unit members.

FURTHERMORE:

The 2005 Want AD for A Chief Technical Advisor to the Coordinator of the Somali Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Program.

There's a job for you.

on the late Ike Turner

What do you think? You think Ike Turner gets to Rest in Peace?

Injured Iraqi girl

Via The Globe and Mail:

I don't whose mortars they were, but this picture of an Iraqi girl injured by mortar fire being treated by U.S. medics taken by Maya Alleruzzo from the Associated Press is definitely haunting my day.

Say it ain't so Captain

Michael Grange nails it as to why Steve Nash can no longer Captain our beloved Canadians on the international stage:

But there is one statistic worth mentioning that might tip the balance for those somehow aggrieved at the fact he’s no longer spending his summers ‘serving’ his country. Or at least conflicted about it.

In his first five NBA seasons, when Nash was still a regular with the national team program, he missed an average of 20 games a year due to injury. In his next five NBA seasons, when he played only one summer of international basketball, he’s missed just 20 games total.

A player who Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban wouldn’t re-sign in part because he was concerned about Nash’s durability has become a virtual ironman while at the same time playing the very best basketball of his career and earning wide recognition as one of the best point guards of all time

... sigh ... :(