As a followup to our previous coverage of the SARS outbreak, three schools in Hong Kong have been closed, and they’ve figured out that a professor visiting Hong Kong from the Chinese mainland was the source of the hotel outbreak, which sickened the first batch of six in Hong Kong. Worldwide, there are 350 cases and six deaths. The good news: vigorous treatment seems to help. Many of the hospitalized patients in Hong Kong are being sent home.
While no cause has been found, the WHO has sent a team to the Guangdong province in China, which borders Hong Kong, to determine a link between SARS and the atypical pneumonia outbreak there last year.
“I have sinned in my heart.”MotherJones has a great piece on the “Blood for Oil” story, with a short history of American policy in the Gulf. It starts sounding an awful lot like alarmist petro-conspiracy nonsense, but there’s enough useful information there to make it worth reading. It undermines the antiwar “Blood for Oil” argument, and replaces it with a more far-fetched and creepy argument against American aspirations of global domination.
The article describes U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf after the Oil Crisis of the 1970s. Suddenly concerned with its access to oil, the United States diversified its oil vendors and began a deliberate campaign to assert influence over the oil-producing states in the Gulf. This was either a result of, or was closely harmonized with, some hawkish global dominance thinking and the influence of Kissinger.
The strategy proposed by the conservative think-tanks (and Kissinger, apparently) was not about getting oil but rather controlling access to oil. If the U.S. can reduce its own dependence on Gulf oil, and can prevent others from getting that same oil, they will “control the spigot” and extend its reach to every oil-consuming country in the world. One struggles to imagine President Carter in a black nehru jacket, petting a white persian kitten.
Continue reading... (464 words, 1 image, estimated 1:51 mins reading time)
Like us, you’re probably preoccupied with the War and the ominous news of Turkish and Iranian involvement. While all this is happening, though, our Congress is hard at work. The House passed the President’s tax cuts. The Senate debated the measure today. It looks as though ANWR drilling is out, to the relief of Democrats. A coalition of moderate Republicans and Democrats seeking to scale the tax cuts back from $726 billion to $350 billion was led by Senator John Breaux (D-LA), of all people. They failed, and it looks as though the Bush Administration will get most of what they wanted, except for $100 billion which Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) rescued for a special war reserve.
|
SKY news is reporting that the CIA is hunting six Iraqi agents in Mexico. Voice of America isn’t so sure. 200 Iraqis in New York were rounded up by the FBI. Germany is holding five suspects. French police found ricin in the Metro, but it’s apparently non-letal. Well, thank god for that. The French say that it may have instead been destined for Chechnya. Wha?
Wednesday, March 19, 2003
Orange alert hasn’t really changed how you live. There are more police, maybe. You have to show your ID to get into a government building, maybe. Red alert, which appears likely when the attack on Iraq begins, is another thing altogether.
The Homeland Security Department describes it this way:
- Increasing or redirecting personnel to address critical emergency needs;
- Assigning emergency response personnel and pre-positioning and mobilizing specially trained teams or resources;
- Monitoring, redirecting, or constraining transportation systems; and
- Closing public and government facilities.
Individual state and county agencies are given a great deal of leeway in how they interpret these alerts. Sid Caspersen, the Director of the New Jersey Office of Counter-Terrorism, is pretty specific:
“Red means all noncritical functions cease… Noncritical would be almost all businesses, except health-related.
“The state police and the emergency management people would take control over the highways…
“You literally are staying home, is what happens, unless you are required to be out. No different than if you had a state of emergency with a snowstorm.”
…well, a little different.
Continue reading... (195 words, estimated 47 secs reading time)
We’re deluged with email from MoveOn and other activist groups encouraging us to rally when the war starts. It’s hard to imagine a bigger waste of time. Any war protest right now is a waste of good human captial.
A much more pressing issue, one worth protesting, is how Iraq will be treated after the United States takes stewardship of the country. It will be a long process, and we have never been very good at projects like these. The media gets bored, and our attention will inevitably turn back to domestic issues.
Remember Afghanistan? They just finished a round of fundraising for their government, which is just over a year old. They shouldn’t have to beg after the pledges and support they received from the West. Not the case, of course. They’re desperate for US$234 million, about half the budget for the entire country. Without it, they’re bankrupt. On top of that, they need US$1.7 billion in aid for reconstruction. Unless they receive immediate aid, they say, Afghanistan will return to being the largest exporter of heroin in the world — how else will farmers pay the bills?
Continue reading... (308 words, estimated 1:14 mins reading time)
CNN is reporting that Bush will give an address at 8pm tonight, demanding that Saddam Hussein abdicate to avoid a war. Put that alongside this Kuwaiti press report, via talkingpointsmemo.com, that Saddam has named his son Qusay to succeed him, and arrested those who wouldn’t swear allegiance.
So President Hussein steps down, and his son succeeds him. Is that progress? Isn’t that exactly the kind of sneaky thing Hussein would do to prolong this un-war? Why would the Administration give him this opportunity?
Update Mon Mar 17 20:32:30 EST 2003
Less of an issue now that he’s included Hussein’s two sons in the ultimatum. Surely this is a concern: all three leave town, and install some puppet. If I were an incorrigible despot, I’d be giving that some thought.
It’s being called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, and it’s spreading. The Beeb has provided a map of confirmed infections. They’ve also provided a handy FAQ. It’s being transmitted by air travel, of course. The experts interviewed are not very concerned. Pay attention to how many new cases have been found since we last mentioned this, and keep in mind that there’s a two-day incubation period before symptoms arrive. According to this CDC press call, cases may have appeared in Georgia and New York. At the time of this writing, Reuters is reporting Britain’s first case.
OnePeople is also delighted to see that the BBC has also picked up on the Spanish Flu meme, advanced in these pages, and also by New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark. The Beeb jauntily claims that it’s not as bad as the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, since it isn’t a flu, and hasn’t yet killed 40 million. A cold comfort.
For the real alarmists: everyone has issued travel warnings, and they’re sanitizing airplanes. Says one expert: “There’s no much you can do to avoid this, unless you go and live as a hermit.”
After a week of interviews, you’d think there would be fewer factual errors, but I can’t look a gift horse in the mouth. There’s a story in this Sunday’s New York Times City section on my own beloved dog run.
“Trust me, Jenny. Democracies love you.”
If Saddam Hussein is removed, the U.S. has pledged to encourage an Iraqi democracy that will be a model for democratic government in the Middle East. The hope is that the Arab Street is secretly hoping for democracy, and that new democracies in the Middle East would be naturally more sympathetic to the United States.
The State Department popped that balloon with a report to top-level government officials which casts serious doubt on the ability of an Iraqi democracy to encourage democracy elsewhere. “Iraq, the Middle East and Change: No Dominoes” asserts that democracies are unlikely to develop before more pressing social and economic issues are resolved. Even if new democracies develop, the report warns that anti-American sentiment is likely to create more Islamic governments hostile to the United States.
This flies in the face of the “Democracy Domino” camp, led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz. The idea that an Iraqi democracy will encourage the development of democracy elsewhere in the Middle East is central to the Bush Administration’s case for regime change. Thanks to the L.A. Times, we know that even Bush’s own State Department doesn’t believe him.
I'm the Chief Technology Strategist for the Red Hat US Public Sector group, an open source and free culture advocate, a picky drinker, an amateur aesthete, and a dog enthusiast.
