Endless war is the basis for the abrogation of our civil liberties, the suspension our legal guarantees, and the assault on journalism. It is the cancer that is destroying our democracy, and our passivity is what makes it possible.
We are in the endless war because of the stupidity of American foreign policy beginning with the Reagan Administration, which was notably inept. And, thanks to Dick Cheney and the Neocons, we have transformed what was once a deep affection for Americans in the Arab world, which I experienced in the two years I lived in Egypt in the 70s, into! a deep and abiding hatred which will endure for generations.
They Hate Us, They Really Hate Us MARC LYNCH, Associate Professor of Political science and International Affairs at George Washington University – Foreign Policy
What’s the number one reason we riot? The plausible, justifiable motivations of trampled-upon humanfolk to fight back are many—poverty, oppression, disenfranchisement, etc—but the big one is more primal than any of the above. It’s hunger, plain and simple. If there’s a single factor that reliably sparks social unrest, it’s food becoming too scarce or too expensive. So argues a group of complex systems theorists in Cambridge, and it makes sense.
In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest.
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The MIT Technology Review explains how CSI’s model works: “The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause.” Plot the data, and it looks like this:
Pretty simple. Black dots are the food prices, red lines are the riots. In other words, whenever the UN’s food price index, which measures the monthly change in the price of a basket of food commodities, climbs above 210, the conditions ripen for social unrest around the world. CSI doesn’t claim that any breach of 210 immediately leads to riots, obviously; just that the probability that riots will erupt grows much greater. For billions of people around the world, food comprises up to 80% of routine expenses (for rich-world people like you and I, it’s like 15%). When prices jump, people can’t afford anything else; or even food itself. And if you can’t eat—or worse, your family can’t eat—you fight.
(Reuters) – The H7N9 virus appears to have been brought under control in China largely due to restrictions at bird markets, but caused some $6.5 billion in losses to the economy, U.N. experts said on Tuesday.
Health authorities worldwide must be on the lookout to detect the virus, the experts said, which could still develop the ability to spread easily among humans and cause a deadly influenza pandemic.
The new bird flu virus is known to have infected 130 people in mainland China since emerging in March, including 36 who died, but no cases have been detected since early May, Health Minister Li Bin told a meeting of the World Health Organization. One case was found in Taiwan in April, making a total of 131.
“The immediate outbreak has been controlled, but it is also unlikely that virus has simply disappeared. We believe we need go another autumn/winter/spring season to know,” said Keiji Fukuda, WHO assistant director-general for health security.
The attack on science by the Theocratic Right and the corporate interests destroying the earth have done great damage, but finally science is pushing back. We'll see.
The latest avian influenzavirus strain added to the list of agents causing “bird flu” is called avian influenza A(H7N9) virus – a colourfully exciting reference to its key surface proteins (see influenza background). H7N9 is considered a low pathogenic avian influenza virus (LPAIV)…at least in its feathered hosts. Avian influenza A(H7N9) virus (which I may shorten to H7N9 to save my fingers) was once considered a relatively rare cause of infection although how extensively and routinely it was looked for in the past is unclear. Avian influenza A(H7N9) virus is similar to its closer cousins, H7N2, H7N3 and H7N7 and its more distant cousin H5N1 in that they are all IFAVs and they usually infect birds. However, they are each quite distinct and made up of different genes
Researchers use an algorithm to diagnose infectious disease a continent away.
EXTRACT
“Real world information is often vague, minimal, and at times contradictory, so the challenge is to find ways to make good inferences (disease identifications) from such limited data,” says epidemiologist Stephen Morse of Columbia University, one of the paper’s co-authors and creator of the ProMED-mail site.
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But the potential to detect outbreaks much faster through the use of statistical models applied to field reports is clear. These tools will find their greatest value in places where deadly pathogens are numerous, diagnostic equipment is hard to find, and time is short.
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The network of diagnosed outbreaks of diseases with the potential to cause encephalitis (colored) and outbreaks of encephalitis where the cause was removed (white). The inner network describes the strength and relationship of individual outbreaks to each other. The outer ring gives the composition of the 7 communities of disease that were found by the detection algorithm. Each circle represents one outbreak report. Lines connecting two nodes indicate shared traits between two reports.
We Are Now One Year Away From Global Riots, Complex Systems Theorists Say
