Male macaque monkeys pay for sex by grooming females, according to a recent study that suggests the primates may treat sex as a commodity.
“In primate societies, grooming is the underlying fabric of it all,” Dr. Michael Gumert, a primatologist at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said in a telephone interview Saturday.
“It’s a sign of friendship and family, and it’s also something that can be exchanged for sexual services,” Gumert said.
Organized crime may have brought in more than $2 trillion in revenue last year, about twice all the military budgets in the world combined, according to the “2007 State of the Future” report, published by the Millennium Project of the World Federation of United Nations Associations, by Jerome C. Glenn and Theodore J. Gordon.
The report called organized crime one of the most pressing global issues that needs to be addressed in the next 10 years, along with global warming, terrorism, corruption, unemployment, and income disparities.
But the report noted success in tackling other issues, saying the world has made progress on ending poverty, improving access to education and settling conflicts. It also says the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Africa has begun to level off.
This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?
For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.
One of the most important bills for working Americans of the last 10 years is likely to go down in defeat, even though Democrats control Congress. The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) is an anti-union-busting measure that would restore the right to form unions, a right working people have enjoyed mostly on paper since the “Reagan revolution” stacked the deck against workers trying to organize. The House passed the bill last month, but it’s widely expected to be defeated in the Senate, and if it does survive, it will almost certainly fall to George Bush’s veto pen.
If EFCA is defeated, it will carry little or no political cost, largely because America’s corporatocracy has done a bang-up job of framing the debate. A coalition of big business groups conducted a wildly misleading poll, one that gave respondents the (false) idea that the bill will diminish rather than protect workers’ rights—specifically, their right to a fair vote about whether to unionize. They’ve taken that spin and synchronized it across the whole of the conservative communications infrastructure—from business-funded think tanks to right-wing blogs, to the Wall Street Journal editorial page to lawmakers walking the halls of Congress.
People taking part in a game designed to explore egalitarian impulses in human nature consistently robbed the rich players and gave money to the poor, scientists say.
Associate Professor James Fowler, from the University of California at San Diego, and his fellow researchers detected what they saw as a ‘Robin Hood impulse’ in people who took part in the experiment
“That’s the classic story we all know, where someone’s taking from the rich and giving to the poor, which is exactly what we’re seeing in this experiment,” Fowler says in a reference to the medieval English folk legend.
“In essence, what we found is that our taste for equality is one of the important reasons why we cooperate with each other, much more so than, say, other species of primates,” Fowler says.
The experiment, described today in the journal Nature, was carried out last year using 120 paid student volunteers at a computer lab on the campus of the University of California at Davis.
‘Many big ideas have struggled over the centuries to dominate the planet,’ begins the argument by Jonathon Porritt, government adviser and all-round environmental guru.
‘Fascism. Communism. Democracy. Religion. But only one has achieved total supremacy. Its compulsive attractions rob its followers of reason and good sense. It has created unsustainable inequalities and threatened to tear apart the very fabric of our society. More powerful than any cause or even religion, it has reached into every corner of the globe. It is consumerism.’
According to Porritt, the most senior adviser to the government on sustainability, we have become a generation of shopaholics. We are bombarded by advertising from every medium which persuades us that the more we consume, the better our lives will be. Shopping is equated with fun, fulfilment and self-identity. It is also, Porritt warns, killing the planet. He argues, in an interview with The Observer, that merely switching to ‘ethical’ shopping is not enough. We must shop less.
From pictures of Coleen McLoughlin weighed down with designer bags to branding endorsements by the likes of David Beckham, the image of consumerism as a universal aspiration is ubiquitous. Last week 3,000 people stormed Primark’s new flagship store on London’s Oxford Street before the official opening time, putting two staff in hospital and earning the description by BBC2’s Newsnight of ‘a plague of locusts’. There are, however, a growing number of dissenting voices such as the so-called ‘Froogles’, individuals who use the internet to seek a simpler lifestyle, and organisations and websites which urge people to kick the retail habit.
Porritt, chairman of the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, has concluded that consumerism is central to the threat facing the planet, cannibalising its natural resources and producing the carbon dioxide emissions which result in climate change.
The idea that poverty breeds terror appears obvious; how could it be otherwise? And people as different as the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Bush, Jacques Chirac and Pakistan’s leader, Pervez Musharraf, have also noted a link between poverty and terrorism.
In fact, there is now robust evidence that there is no such link. That does not mean, however, that economics is irrelevant.
First, to the question of poverty. Of the 50 poorest countries in the world (see list at right) only Afghanistan (and perhaps Bangladesh and Yemen) has much experience in terrorism, global or domestic.
But surely that is the wrong way to look at things. Aren’t the people who commit terrorist acts poor, even if they are from countries that are not? No. Remember, most of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were middle-class sons of Saudi Arabia and many were well-educated. And Osama bin Laden himself is from one of the richest families in the Middle East.
But it goes deeper than that.
Flagstaff, AZ—On Monday, March 12th the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued its ruling to protect a mountain held holy by more than 13 Native American Nations. The slopes of the San Francisco Peaks, located in Northern Arizona, have been at the center of a historical and lengthy battle that has pitted economic interests on public lands against environmental integrity, public health and cultural survival..A local ski resort planned to expand and use treated waste effluent to make snow.
Yesterday, a federal court appeals panel issued the unanimous decision written by Judge William A. Fletcher. “We reverse the decision of the district court in part. We hold that the Forest Service’s approval of the Snowbowl’s use of recycled sewage effluent to make artificial snow on the San Francisco Peaks violates [Religious Freedom Restoration Act] RFRA, and that in one respect the Final Environmental Impact Statement prepared in this case does not comply with NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act].”
More than 100 supporters gathered at an afternoon press conference near the base of the Sacred Peaks to celebrate. Tribal Leaders, Environmental Groups and representatives of the community based group the Save the Peaks Coalition spoke of the victory.
“This is a very important decision that sets great precedent for people who are concerned with Native American rights and religious freedom” said Howard Shanker, of the Shanker Law Firm, PLC, representing the Navajo Nation, the White Mountain Apache Tribe, the Yavapai-Apache Tribe, the Havasupai Tribe, Rex Tilousi, Dianna Uqualla, the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Flagstaff Activist Network.
“Because of this decision in the 9th circuit, other tribes throughout the nation could have the ability to rely on this case to help protect sites that are sacred to them and culturally and religiously important” Mr. Shanker said.
Switzerland’s Agriculture Ministry has called on the country’s farmers to stop feeding their cows cannabis. Farmers consider the cheap and easy to grow plant is good for their cows. The active ingredient in cannabis, THC, makes cows happy and produce more milk, but the Agriculture Ministry will start prosecuting farmers who disobey this law.
China is to abolish tuition and other fees for 150 million rural students, in a bid to narrow the gap between wealthy coastal provinces and poorer regions.
The students will be exempt from tuition fees over the course of their compulsory nine-year education.
The move would cost 15bn yuan ($1.9bn) a year, the China Daily said, or about 140 yuan ($18) a child.
But children of rural families who have migrated to China’s booming cities will not be included.
The new policy is “part of a major move to relieve the financial burden of farmers and to develop a new countryside,” the state-owned newspaper said.
In the first phase of the programme, which took effect this spring, more than 50m students living in western provinces – some of China’s poorest – were exempted.
A series of experiments have shown that merely thinking about or looking at money changes the way people behave, causing them to be more selfish and self-sufficient.
Kathleen Vohs and colleagues, who completed the research, said that because money allows people to achieve goals without help from others, tasks that reminded the participants of money led to feelings of self sufficiency, causing them to avoid dependency and to prefer that other people weren’t dependent on them.
For poor people, living in an affluent area can be a health hazard. That is the provocative conclusion of a study of the death records of more than 8000 people living in four US cities.
The ill effects of being poor or living in economically disadvantaged areas have been demonstrated before, but it is unusual to consider both factors in the same study. When Marilyn Winkleby and colleagues at Stanford University in California did so, they were surprised to find that death rates in four Californian cities were highest for poor people living in the richest neighbourhoods (American Journal of Public Health, DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2004.060970).
They offer two possible explanations: poor people living in rich areas may have to pay more for housing and other services, magnifying the effect of poverty; alternatively, their health may suffer from stress caused by continually being reminded that they are at the bottom of the economic pile. “I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive,” says team member Catherine Cubbin, now at the University of California, San Francisco.
by Neil p Corkeran
THE TERM ‘POSTMODERNISM,’ variously defined by different `representatives,’ has garnered the quality of a catch-all term describing new directions in architecture, art, literature, social science theory, critical philosophy and other disciplines that all seem to be cross-fertilizing, with often revolutionary effects. It is used to describe a socio-cultural condition of postmodernity growing out of the forces of late-Modernism, which is in turn inextricable intertwined with the expressed desires of late-Capitalism, as well as the interpretation and critique of that constructed condition.
With a (de)focus to ‘pluralism’ and a multitude of individual and community ‘voices,’ postmodernist thought can be seen as reacting to, and growing out of positivist aims and the universalist structural tendencies of Modernism. The ‘agenda’ of postmodernism (if only expressed unconsciously through the individual actions and contributions of its participants) can be seen ``to challenge monolithic elitism, to bridge…one discourse and interpretive community [with] another…so that different cultures acknowledge each other’s legitimacy. The motives are equally political and aesthetic.’’ The ``essential goal: [is] to further pluralism, to overcome the elitism inherent in the previous paradigm’’ (Jencks 12-13).
Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, has a secret ingredient for rescuing the suspended global trade talks – the renewable energy sources known as biofuels.
J G Ballard knows about selling. As a young man he briefly peddled children’s encyclopaedias, working the psychological relationship between the middle-class hawker and the punter bent on self-improvement. “Selling is like wooing a girl,” says Ballard. Ballard “believed in” The Waverley because he had read it as a boy. Whenever he was bored his mother had told him, ”’Go and read The Eight Volumes.’ That was her name for them,” he chuckles. “It was the nearest thing to television.”
Ballard’s new novel, Kingdom Come (Fourth Estate, £15.99), puts his usual Cassandra-like spin on the dangers of retail therapy. In Brooklands, a Thames Valley motorway town dominated by its domed shopping mall, the most taxing moral decision is which washing machine to buy. But even the sedated want sensation. At night, the shoppers who flock to the Metro-Centre reincarnate as mobs of sports fans, parading their St George T-shirts and attacking immigrants.
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