… formerly known as “EARTH” … The good folks at the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment project took the extremely utilitarian definition of the Earth’s relationship to the human race as a “Provider of Ecosystem Services” and analyzed this relationship painstakingly in their report, which is presented on www.greenfacts.org:

2.1 Ecosystem services are the multiple benefits provided by ecosystems to humans.
2.2 Human use of all ecosystem services is increasing:

• The use of resources such as food, water, and timber has increased rapidly, and continues to grow, sometimes unsustainably.
• Human interventions have led to changes in the regulation of climate, disease, and other ecosystem processes.
• The use of ecosystems for recreation, spiritual enrichment, and other cultural purposes is growing. However, the capacity of ecosystems to provide these services has declined significantly.

For us treehuggers, this report is a goldmine of well-presented scientific evidence that our beautiful planet is going to hell. The focus on the human dependence on “Ecosystem Services” gives me pause, though. It sounds very much like college kids arguing that maintaining a good relationship with their “Parenting Service Providers” is essential to clean clothes and adequate cash for keg parties.

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Since this morning, Canadian sealers slaughtered an estimated 4200 baby seals, as the annual seal hunt on Canada’s Atlantic coast began. By the end of the this year’s hunting season, sealers will have clubbed and skinned 300,000 seal pups. According to the US Humane Society, this is the largest commercial slaughter of marine mammals on earth. And it needs to stop. In order to put pressure on the Canadian fishing industry, sign the Humane Society’s pledge to boycott Canadian seafood.

Why boycott Canadian seafood?
Seal hunting is an off-season activity conducted by fishers from Canada’s East Coast. They earn a small fraction of their incomes from sealing and the rest from commercial fisheries. Canadian seafood exports to the United States contribute $3 billion annually to the Canadian economy–dwarfing the few million dollars provided by the seal hunt. The connection between the commercial fishing industry and the seal hunt in Canada gives consumers all over the world the power to end this cruel and brutal slaughter. — The Humane Society of the United States.

Download your own How-to-Boycott Canadian Seafood wallet card (PDF).

The U.S. Navy is the world’s largest user of diesel equipment. Now they are making a commitment to using biodiesel:

Beginning June 1, 2005 all U.S. Navy and Marine non-tactical diesel vehicles will be required to operate on a B20 (20 percent) biodiesel blend as part of the military’s efforts to increase their use of domestic and clean fuels.

They also have plans to use portable biodiesel processing units during overseas missions. So does that mean that soy beans are going to become critical to national security? And when are they going to retire those nuclear subs?

The Kingdom of Bhutan posted a PDF of its draft constitution on the web. The constitutional commission solemnly enshrined in Article 9, section 2, promoting “those circumstances that will enable the successful pursuit of Gross National Happiness” as a principle of State Policy. In fact, the draft mentions “happiness” four times, including once in the Preamble and once in the National Anthem. My favorite feature, though, is the constitutional Right to Rest and Leisure (Article 9, Section 13). (via BoingBoing)

I am a big fan of the US Constitution but I do note that it does not mention “happiness” or “leisure” (neither do any of the amendments). Of course the Declaration of Independence of the “thirteen united States of America” famously pronounces that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Since 1776, this thought has been echoed in many a seminal document, but I think that Bhutan has contributed a truly novel adaptation of Jefferson’s famous words.

The BBC reports that the demonstrators were demanding a delay of the April 24 presidential election. According to LeTogolais, the demonstrators demanded transparent and fair elections. The article quotes representatives of the opposition as saying that the way the preparations are going and with the short time until the elections, there is no way the elections are going to be free and fair in any way:

“D’abord le délai est court et la manière dont les choses se déroulent, ne pourra jamais aboutir à une élection transparente et libre et cela nous inquiète”, a expliqué un de ces responsables. L’opposition radicale a demandé mardi à une mission de parlementaires ouest-africains, venus à Lomé s’enquérir de l’organisation de cette élection, un “réaménagement” du calendrier du scrutin.

So the opposition wants to “adjust the schedule” for the election, but “Baby Eyadema’s” RPT is still in charge of running the election. and has no interest in giving the opposition more time to get organized on the ground. I wish I knew more about what the opposition is doing to reach their voters in the towns and villages. I think suitcase radios would be a great tool in an election campaign in rural Africa.

NC State reseacher Mary Schweitzer went to Montana on a dig, cracked a dino bone and found “fresh” dino meat:

Schweitzer found the tissue in the thigh bone of a well-preserved T. rex that her former graduate school adviser excavated from a remote area of northeastern Montana along the Missouri River. The bone was broken to fit into a helicopter for the trip to Montana State University’s Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman.

Schweitzer thought she observed something unusual in the bone right away. After Schweitzer and her technician applied acid to break it down in Raleigh, a blob of transparent, deep red stuff, possibly tissue, emerged.

When she studied the blob under a microscope, Schweitzer found structures that look like the blood vessels and cells that help renew bones. She also found reddish circles that resemble the blood cells found in modern-day birds.

With this discovery, the idea of possibly recovering some dino DNA has moved from the realm of pure Hollywood fiction into the arena of science.

It strikes me as a cruel irony, this public spectacle of sobbing Christians clinging to the artificially prolonged metabolic activity of the body of one woman on the eve of Good Friday.

Not so ironic, however, and rather cruel and cynical, are the policial games that some members of congress, namely DeLay and Frist, are playing with this family’s tragedy.

Togo’s exiled opposition leader Gilchrist Olympio returned to Lomé Saturday, after eight years in exile. He was greeted by thousands of cheering Togolese who want to see an end to the 38-year bloody military rule of the family of the late Gnassingbe Eyadema.

“This is the only man that can save the country,” people said during the celebration. Olympio, who fled the country in 1997 after a series of assassination attempts, has made only occasional visits back.

“I am happy to be back,” Olympio declared.

On Saturday, he called for reconciliation with the military.

“Not all soldiers are enemies of change,” he said at a news conference and political rally held later. “The armed forces will help us in the reconstruction effort of the new Togo.”

Olympio’s father and Togo’s first democratically elected leader, Sylvanus Olympio, was assassinated in a 1963 coup led by Gnassingbe Eyadema, who openly took power four years later. Eyadema died Feb. 5 and the military installed his son, Faure Gnassingbe, but protests and international outcry forced him to step down. – Exiled Opposition Leader Returns to Togo, AP, March 20, 2005

Olympio’s support for opposition candidate Bob Akitani is very important. Only a united opposition has any chance of overcoming the obstacles the RPT and Gnassingbe’s supporters are going to erect to get “Baby Eyadema” back into daddy’s office.

These guys stop at nothing, as LeTogolais documents in a gruesome list of the 140 victims of the short reign of the Faure Gnassingbe- Abbas Bonfoh regime. The list ws compiled and presented by the Ligue togolaise des droits de l’Homme (Togolese Human Rights League).

The last couple of days I was up to my armpits in stuff. Last weekend I started cleaning out the basement. Then I read a DailyKos diary about “stuff” and I started to think a bit more about stuff, and how we spend so much time accumulating stuff, then managing our stuff, dealing with our stuff. Mrsbrown1 quoted George Carlin

That’s all your house is-a place to keep your stuff. If you didn’t have so much stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. You could just walk around all the time. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it, and when you leave your house, you’ve got to lock it up. You wouldn’t want to somebody to come by and take some of your stuff. That’s what your house is-a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff. Sometimes you’ve got to move-got to get a bigger house. Why? No room for your stuff anymore.” George Carlin, A Place for My Stuff 1981

Yes, but who would want to just walk around all the time? We live in a stuff-based society. We love stuff. We use stuff to project social and economic status. Stuff makes us sexy. Stuff comforts us, protects us. Who am I to argue with Madison Avenue? Or with my stuff?

So, I stood in our basement, surrounded by the stuff we gathered in the last ten years. However, none of this stuff did any of these things for me. Piles of kids clothes, a purple crib, toddler shoes, a high-chair. All this projects is PARENT and PACKRAT. The old sleeper-sofa, the dot-matrix printer, the old laser printer and two gutted 486 computers are neither comforting nor particularly protecting. There’s more, let’s see: five cans of old paint, an old NordicTrack, a pile of well-used suitcases, the purple, old futon, a couple of ShopVacs, several plastic bins full of clutter, a rat’s nest of power adapters and power cords, and so on … nope – no sex appeal associated with that either. So I started two piles: Goodwill and recycling/trash.

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Yeah – poor OPEC. These guys are hard at work trying to control the price for their precious black gold, so that people in Minnesota can afford to heat their homes. Yet, it’s out of their hands. sorry! They are pumping like mad, there is nothing else they can do, Reuters.com reports:

With its output already near a 25-year high, OPEC is stretched to meet rapidly rising demand, leaving investors betting that oil’s bull run has further to go.

“It’s not in our hands, prices are determined by the market,” said UAE Oil Minister Mohamed al-Hamli.

I guess they are going to have to buy bigger money trucks…

In the meantime, I really need to get serious about building a biodiesel reactor and making homebrew biodiesel for my Jetta TDI.

The six Togolese opposition parties came together and nominated Bob Akitani as their single candidate to run against “Baby Eyadema” Faure Gnassingbe in the April presidential election. The 74-year-old retired mining engineer is vice-president of Olympio’s UFC and is well-known from his last presidential run in 2003.

It took the six parties a while to figure it out, but, alas, they pulled it off! Olivier Bocco at LeTogolais reminds us that the opposition in Togo is a rather diverse group, and getting them all to agree on a single candidate is no small feat:

Il s’agissait, en effet, de choisir un candidat représentatif non seulement d’une famille politique, mais de toutes les luttes, de tous les sacrifices, de toutes les aspirations du plus grand nombre de citoyens togolais au cours de ces quarante dernières années. Il s’agissait de choisir un candidat qui incarne les valeurs fondamentales de la démocratie et des droits de l’Homme et qui aura à assumer des responsabilités éminentes et historiques, au quotidien, dans la pratique, au plus haut niveau de l’Etat, dans un pays qui a passé des décennies dans les ténèbres de l’autocratie et de l’obscurantisme. Il s’agissait, enfin, de désigner un candidat qui rassure au plan moral, sachant les énormes défis à relever à ce niveau. Nous aurons l’occasion de revenir sur l’enjeu majeur que constituent les questions éthiques dans notre pays où la décadence morale a atteint, sous l’impulsion du pouvoir, des proportions réellement tragiques pour l’avenir du pays de nos aïeux.

As important as it is, however, that the candidate is able to “represent the struggles and hopes of the majority of Togolese over the last decades” he also needs to be sharp enough to take on the RTP juggernaut and the clique of generals behind it. These guys don’t play nice. And they have a track record of successfully screwing with elections to keep their man (Eyadema and now Faure) in power.

The AU now has to keep the heat on and hold the RTP’s feet to the fire if there is ANY funny business with the elections. Hopefully the Carter Center and the EU will send observers. This election in tiny Togo is an important example of a people pulling itself by the bootstraps out of the morass of a bloody 38-year dictatorship. No invasions needed (we hope). Just attention and support for the democratic forces that finally may have a chance to give Togo a fresh start.

This is a funny story turning weird: yesterday I chuckled, when I read the report that the president of Malawi, Bingu wa Mutharika, had abandoned his 300-room residence because he was worried about “rodent ghosts” haunting the place. These things happen; many Africans are very worried about supernatural phenomena. Ancestral spirits are an integral part of life in many African cultures. Imagining the president of Malawi fretting over “rodent ghosts” is funny in a very African way.

Now, the BBC reports that the reporter who filed the story has been arrested:

The journalists, including BBC reporter Raphael Tenthani, have been charged with publishing false news likely to cause public alarm and fear.

Mr Mutharika angrily denied the reports and suggested they were part of a feud with his predecessor, Bakili Muluzi.

On Tuesday, 25 journalists staged a protest to support their colleagues.

They delivered food to Mr Tenthani, Reuters reporter Mabvuto Banda and the personal assistant to the vice president, Horace Nyaka. Mr Tenthani, who also writes for the AP news agency, says he is standing by his story.

Clearly, they are harassing the reporters over an embarrassing story. But coming down hard on the reporters just makes it worse, because now the story is all over the place.

With pomp and circumstance Togo held the funeral for Gnassingbe Eyadema on Sunday.

A giant portrait of Eyadema, with the words “I will always be with you”, overlooked Lome’s marbled Palais des Congres building where dignitaries had gathered to receive the coffin.

Yes, he’ll remain with us as an example of the bad old times in post-colonial Africa. Good riddance to the scourge of Togo.

Eyadema treated Togo like his personal property. He and his French buddies sucked the country dry in his 38-year rule. He murdered Sylvanus Olympio, the first elected President of Togo, in the first coup in 1963. Over the years, Eyadema’s military regime imprisoned, tortured and “disappeared” hundreds of opposition activists (see AI reports).

Now there is hope that Togo can start joining many other African countries, like Ghana, Benin, Botswana, South Africa, on the path of democracy, human and civil rights, and ultimately stability and a broad and fair distribution of the country’s wealth. To be sure, getting there won’t be easy. There’s still the RTP and the generals – and Baby Eyadema – to deal with. But here is clearly an opportunity for the Togolese opposition to put them on the defensive.

The BBC reports Korean researchers think they may have discovered a cure for Avian Influenza: “Scientists at Seoul National University say they fed an extract of kimchi to 13 infected chickens – and a week later 11 of them had started recovering.” Cabbage against a killer disease? That makes even a Krautheimer like me wonder. Has anyone checked if that study was funded by the Korean Cabbage Council?

The report does not specify which strain of bird flu the chicken were infected with. But H5N2 can cause up to 90% mortality in chicken (WHO avian influenza factsheet) . The current H5N1 outbreak in Vietnam has so far killed 13 of the 24 infected humans. The high mortality rate, plus the incredible adaptability of these virii are the main reasons why the WHO (and everyone else) is so worried about an impending avian flu pandemic (see WHO factsheet) .

When I listened to the Malcolm McLaren monologues on WPS1 for the first time, his voice opened up all these memory banks from a past life, when I was 16 or 17. One evening, I went to see the movie “The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle” at a small “program” movie theater in Stuttgart with my first American girlfriend. The movie was anythinig but new, then, and Punk was not dead, I guess, but a pretty much Billy-Idol-ed out.

It was the voice of Malcolm McLaren that stayed with me from this movie, more than Johnny, Sid and all the other Pistol Nuts:”This is Malcolm McLaren. I have brought you many things in my life …” I can still remember his voice, just taking credit, brazenly, for inventing punk rock, god, and the internal combustion engine!

Over the years he would pop (literally) up out of nowhere sometimes (remember vogueing?) claiming credit for a fad. Well, now he is back with a piece from the soundtrack of Kill Bill and

“bastard blues,” “chip music,” “post-karaoke,” and “rock and roll Gameboy music,” as well as”mash-ups” (tracks formed by layering pre-existing songs, as exemplified by the fusion of Captain and Tenille’s “Love Will Bring Us Together” and New Order’s ” Love Will Tear Us Apart.” – WPS1

“His” stuff is fun and some of it is really good. But Malcolm-Himself is still the centerpiece of the show. And perhaps his monologues are truly his original art.

The Pew Internet Project published a new survey that documents the rise of the Internet as a source for political information.

A post-election, nationwide survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the Pew Research Center for The People & The Press shows that the online political news consumer population grew dramatically from 18% of the U.S. population in 2000 to 29% in 2004. There was also a striking increase in the number who cited the internet as one of their primary sources of news about the presidential campaign: 11% of registered voters said the internet was a primary source of political news in 2000 and 18% said that in 2004.

This survey also spells doom for daily newspapers, as Editor & Publisher observes, at least as a source for political news.

In 1996, only 3% of those surveyed called the Web one of their two leading sources of campaign news. In 2004, the figure was 18%. Reliance on TV rose slightly from 72% to 78% but prime use of newspapers plunged from 60% to 39%.

Funny thing is, as Agenda Bender notes, a quick news google on that story reveals that the websites of the major daily newspapers are ignoring this story. So the websites of major news organizations (=the winners) are ignoring a story that points out how their paper-based owners/affiliates (=losers) are becoming obsolete. Hardly surprising, though, as they have been missing stories all along.

A table I find quite interesting in the report is titled “The political and media landscape in 2004” (p.13) and especially the bottom half. Rush Limbaugh and John Stewart (Daily Show on the Comedy Channel) get similar percentages (Regularly 5%; sometimes 10/11%; hardly ever 83/84%) and they are just slighly ahead of print and online magazines. Amazingly, the major polit-blogs Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo and Instapundit follow closely: use regularly 2%; sometimes 3%, which mans that 5 percent of Americans used blog sites for political information during the last election. This documents the incredible rise of the polit blogs, which basically did not exist a few years ago.

Presidential elections in Togo are set for next month with Faure Gnassingbe as the candidate of the ruling RPT (aka Eyadema’s party). Gilchrist Olympio, the leader of the opposition UFC, can not legally contest the polls, since he was forced to live in exile after an assassination attempt in 1992. Hopefully the opposition in Togo can unite behind a single candidate.

Olympio would be the logical choice, as he is the son of Sylvanus Olympio, the first elected President of Togo, who was murdered by Eyadema in his first coup in 1963. The RTP changed the constitution for the 2003 elections to require that a candidate must have resided in Togo for the 12 months prior to the election. That move excluded then many of Togo’s prominent opposition leaders, who were forced to live in exile under the Eyadema regime.
(sources: BBC Togo Timeline and Wikipedia)

The Grande Dame of African music, Miriam Makeba, celebrates her birthday today. She lent her gorgeous voice many times to the people, as she spoke out against apartheid and for ciivil rights, and was heard in Carnegie Hall as well as at the United Nations.

More about Mriam Makeba:
music.org.za
miriammakeba.co.za
leopardmannen.no
wikipedia.org

In Salina, Kansas, at 2:49 pm ET Steve Fossett made aviation history when he touched down in his Global Flyer after a 25,000-mile (40,234 kilometer) around-the-globe voyage that took 67 hours and two minutes.

The 2005 edition of Africa’s most important film festival, the FESPACO in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, is under way (Feb. 26 – March 5). Twenty films compete for the grand prize: The Stallion of Yennenga.

FESPACO 2005 is celebrating 50 years of African Cinema. The first truly African film – a film made by Africans about Africans – apparently was the 1955 film Afrique sur Seine, by Soumanou Vieyra.

BBC: FESPACO News
FESPACO website