George Monbiot writes: In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis tells the story of
the famines that sucked the guts out of India in the 1870s. The hunger
began when a drought, caused by El Nino, killed the crops on the Deccan
plateau. As starvation bit, the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the
export to England of a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. While
Lytton lived in imperial splendour and commissioned, among other
extravangances, “the most colossal and expensive meal in world
history”, between 12 and 29 million people died. Only Stalin
manufactured a comparable hunger.

Now a new Lord Lytton is seeking to engineer another brutal food
grab. As Tony Blair’s favoured courtier, Peter Mandelson often created
the impression that he would do anything to please his master. Today he
is the European trade commissioner. From his sumptuous offices in
Brussels and Strasbourg, he hopes to impose a treaty which will permit
Europe to snatch food from the mouths of some of the world’s poorest
people.

Seventy per cent of the protein eaten by the people of Senegal comes
from fish. Traditionally cheaper than other animal products, it
sustains a population which ranks close to the bottom of the human
development index. One in six of the working population is employed in
the fishing industry; some two-thirds of these workers are women.
Over the past three decades, their means of subsistence has started to
collapse as other nations have plundered Senegal’s stocks.

The European Union has two big fish problems. One is that, partly as
a result of its failure to manage them properly, its own fisheries can
no longer meet European demand. The other is that its governments won’t
confront their fishing lobbies and decommission all the surplus boats.
The EU has tried to solve both problems by sending its fishermen to
West Africa. Since 1979 it has struck agreements with the government of
Senegal, granting our fleets access to its waters. As a result,
Senegal’s marine ecosystem has started to go the same way as ours.
Between 1994 and 2005, the weight of fish taken from the country’s
waters fell from 95,000 tons to 45,000 tons. Muscled out by European
trawlers, the indigenous fishery is crumpling: the number of boats run
by local people has fallen by 48% since 1997.

In a recent report on this pillage, ActionAid shows that fishing
families which once ate three times a day are now eating only once or
twice. As the price of fish rises, their customers also go hungry. The
same thing has happened in all the west African countries with which
the EU has maintained fisheries agreements. In return for wretched
amounts of foreign exchange, their primary source of protein has been
looted. (08/27/08)
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James Howard Kunstler writes: As the political conventions descend like the soggy forces of
nature they have become — the tropical depressions of politics — the
Republican party will be seen, with growing clarity, as the party that wrecked America.
So many shoes are about to drop, and so many dominoes lined up to fall
‘out there’ on the financial landscape that the thump and clatter of
crashing institutions will sound like the percussion section of the
renowned USC marching band as the nation tramps toward the general
election.

In a classic calm-before-the-storm moment, last
week’s momentous Jackson Hole monetary conference played out like
Sherlock Holmes’s “dog that didn’t
bark in the night.” The poobahs of global banking turned out in the
Grand Tetons to compare Gulfstream jets and show off their concho
belts, and that was about it. For all the massive turmoil in the
banking system, almost no real news leaked out of the conference, and
one was inclined to come to the unsettling conclusion that nothing came
out because absolutely nothing happened there — because absolutely
nothing can be done about the gathering calamity of capital.

At the moment, two of the biggest elephants in the room, so to speak,
are going tits-up with X’s where their eyes used to be. These would be
the “affordable housing” enablers Fannie and Freddie, who managed
during the past decade to make housing virtually unaffordable for any
normal, responsible person unwilling to game the system — with the
additional consequence that not only the housing market but the general
credit-and-lending apparatus of the US has entered a state of morbid
failure. These two corporations are now dead, incurring a legacy of
obligation that will add five trillion dollars to the national debt at
one stroke. Nobody knows what the exact results of this debacle may be
– and the current silence about it is deafening — but odds are the
effect will range somewhere between destroying the currency and
bankrupting the United States altogether. (08/27/08)
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BBC Anthropological Science – Early stone tools developed by our species Homo sapiens were no more sophisticated than those used by our extinct relatives the Neanderthals. That is the conclusion of researchers who recreated and compared tools used by these ancient human groups. The findings cast doubt on suggestions that more advanced stone technologies gave modern humans a competitive edge over the Neanderthals.

The work by a US-British team appears in the Journal of Human Evolution. The researchers recreated wide stone tools called “flakes”, which were used by both Neanderthals and early modern humans. They also reconstructed “blades” - a narrower stone tool later adopted by Homo sapiens.

Some archaeologists often use the development of stone blades and their assumed efficiency as evidence for the superior intellect of our species.

The team analysed the data to compare the number of tools produced, how much cutting edge was created, the efficiency in consuming raw material and how long tools lasted. They found no statistical difference in the efficiency of the two stone technologies. In some respects, the flakes favoured by Neanderthals were even more efficient than the blades adopted by modern humans. …

Professor Stringer, who was not connected with the study, added: “We know that the Neanderthals were very capable technicians, and that their tools would have been excellent for activities such as butchery, working skins or wood. However, the blade tools manufactured by early modern humans in Europe were often modified for specialisation as piercers, chisels or engravers, and as parts of composite tools, such as harpoons. With modern humans we not only find a greater variety of tools, but also much greater working of difficult materials like bone, antler and ivory.” (08/27/08)
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