Tom Englehardt writes: In fact, one of the strangest things about the American empire has
been this: Between 1945 and George W. Bush’s second term, the U.S.
economy, American corporations, and the dollar have held remarkable
sway over much of the rest of the world. New York City has been the
planet’s financial capital and Washington its war capital. (Moscow,
even at the height of the Cold War, always came in a provincial
second.)

In the same period, the U.S. military effectively garrisoned
much of the globe from the Horn of Africa to Greenland, from South
Korea to Qatar, while its Navy controlled the seven seas, its Air Force
dominated the global skies, its nuclear command stood ready to unleash
the powers of planetary death, and its space command watched the
heavens. In the wake of the Cold War, its various military commands
(including Northcom, set up by the Bush administration in 2002, and Africom,
set up in 2007) divided the greater part of the planet into what were
essentially military satrapies. And yet, the U.S. military, post-1945,
simply could not win the wars that mattered.

Because the neocons of the Bush administration brushed aside this
counterintuitive fact, they believed themselves faced in 2000 with an
unparalleled opportunity (whose frenetic exploitation would be
triggered by the attacks of 9/11, the “Pearl Harbor” of the new century). With the highest-tech military on the planet, funded at levels no other set of nations could cumulatively
match, the United States, they were convinced, was uniquely situated to
give the phrase “sole superpower” historically unprecedented meaning.
Even the Assyrians at their height, the Romans in their Pax Romana centuries, the British in the endless decades when the sun could never set on its empire, would prove pikers by comparison.

In this sense, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice,
and the various neocons in the administration were fundamentalist
idolaters — and what they worshipped was the staggering power of the
U.S. military. They were believers in a church whose first tenet was
the efficacy of force above all else. Though few of them had the slightest military experience, they gave real meaning to the word bellicose. They were prejudiced towards war.

With awesome military power at their command, they were also convinced
that they could go it alone as the dominating force on the planet. As
with true believers everywhere, they had only contempt for those they
couldn’t convert to their worldview. That contempt made “unilateralism”their strategy of choice, and a global Pax Americana their goal (along with, of course, a Pax Republicana at home). …

Of course, both the Pax Americana and the Pax Republicana
would prove will-o’-the-wisps. As it turned out, the Bush
administration, blind to the actual world it faced, disastrously
miscalculated the nature of American power — especially military power
– and what it was capable of doing. And yet, had they taken a
clear-eyed look at what American military power had actually achieved
in action since 1945, they might have been sobered. In the major wars
(and even some minor actions) the U.S. military fought in those
decades, it had been massively destructive but never victorious, nor
even particularly successful. In many ways, in the classic phrase of
Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong, it had been a “paper tiger.” …

If all roads once led to Rome, all acts of the Bush administration have
led to destruction, and remarkably regularly to piles of dead or
tortured bodies, counted or not. In fact, it’s reasonable to say that
every Bush administration foreign policy dream, including its first
term fantasy about a pacified “Greater Middle East” and its late second
term vision of a facilitated “peace process” between the Israelis and
Palestinians, has ended in piles of bodies and in failure. Consider this a count all its own.

Looked at another way, the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror
and its subsidiary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have, in effect, been a
giant Ponzi scheme. At a cost of nearly one trillion taxpayer dollars to date (but sure to be in the multi-trillions when all is said and done), Bush’s mad “global war” simply sucked needed money out of our world at levels that made Bernie Madoff seem like a small fry.

Madoff, by his own accounting, squandered perhaps $50 billion of other
people’s money. The Bush administration took a trillion dollars of ours
and handed it out to its crony corporate buddies
and to the Pentagon as down payments on disaster — and that’s without
even figuring into the mix the staggering sums still needed to care for
American soldiers maimed, impaired, or nearly destroyed by Bush’s wars.

With Bush’s “commander-in-chief” presidency only days from its end, the
price tag on his “war” continues to soar as dollars grow scarce, new
investors refuse to pay in, and the scheme crumbles. (01/06/09)
more…

BBC Medical Science — Females are less physically active at both ends of life than their male counterparts, two studies suggest. Researchers studied activity levels in school children and the over 70s - and in both cases found males tended to be more active.

The studies are being presented at the UK Society for Behavioural Medicine annual conference. Liverpool John Moores University found girls take part in 6% less vigorous playtime activity than boys. The researchers, who focused on 10 and 11 year-old children in the school playground, found that boys and girls tend to play differently.

Girls tended to spend time in smaller groups and engage in verbal games, conversation and socialising. Most boys, however, played in larger groups, which lend themselves more to physically active games, such as football.

Researcher Dr Nicky Ridgers said: “It is a concern that girls’ activity levels are lower than boys and, although it is just one piece in a complex picture, this could be contributing to girls being overweight and obese. Schools should be aware of the differences between the way girls and boys behave in the playground and the fact that girls tend to favour small group activities. They could then consider the availability of equipment and provision of playtime activities that would encourage girls to take part in more vigorously active play.”

The gender difference was mirrored in a second study, led by the University of Bristol, which looked at activity levels among the over-70s. In general, levels of physical activity were very low among most people of both sexes aged over 70. More than 70% of the people who took part in the study walked for fewer than 5,000 steps a day. However, women were more likely to be less active than men. (01/06/09)

more…

BBC Earth Politics – The US is to establish what it calls “the largest area of protected sea in the world” around its Pacific islands. Commercial fishing and mining will be banned in the protected zones which include the Marianas Trench, the deepest area of ocean on the planet. The area totals 500,000 sq km (190,000 sq miles) of sea and sea floor.

While welcoming the protection package, environmental activists said that without curbing climate change, the other measures would be meaningless.

President George W Bush will formally announce the measure during an address on Tuesday evening in Washington. Briefing journalists in advance, his environmental advisor James Connaughton said the move meant the US was “setting the mark for the world with respect to effective marine management”.

“The conservation action is going to benefit the public and future generations through enhanced science, knowledge and awareness, and just good old-fashioned inspiration, because these places are exceptionally dynamic when it comes to the marine environment,” said the chairman of the White House council on environmental quality.

The areas covered include some of the islands most remote from the world’s large populations centres, which have not so far encountered the intense fishing present across much of the oceans. They also encompass some of the most biologically diverse places on the planet, undersea volcanoes and hot seafloor vents, and submarine pools of sulphur thought to be unique on Earth. (01/06/09)
more…

BBC Astronomy Science – Our galaxy is much bigger than once thought, according to research presented at a major astronomy meeting this week. The results suggest the Milky Way is roughly the same size as Andromeda, the largest galaxy in our local group. What is more, it is moving 15% faster than earlier predictions.

The greater mass means that future collisions with nearby galaxies could happen sooner than thought, according to the researchers.

Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, US, and his colleagues made use of the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) to deduce the Milky Way’s size and speed. Dr Reid was speaking at the 213th American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Long Beach, California. The VLBA is a system of 10 radio telescopes scattered across and around North America that together allow unprecedented resolution in astronomy measurements.

This resolution, according to the CfA, is equivalent to being able to read a newspaper in Cairo from an armchair in Edinburgh.

By using the VLBA to measure the apparent shift of far-flung star-forming regions when the Earth is on opposite sides of the Sun, the researchers were able to measure the distance to those regions using fewer assumptions than prior efforts.

“These measurements use the traditional surveyor’s method of triangulation and do not depend on any assumptions based on other properties, such as brightness, unlike earlier studies,” said team member Karl Menten of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany. The results show that the Milky Way is about 15% wider than previously thought.

Tiny shifts in the frequency of the radio emission that arise because the regions are moving gave the researchers an estimate of how quickly the Milky Way rotates around its centre. They estimate this to be about 914,000km per hour, significantly higher than the widely accepted value of 792,000km per hour. That speed, in turn, allowed the astronomers to calculate the total amount of dark matter in the Milky Way - the invisible component that makes up the majority of the galaxy’s mass.

The researchers estimate that the Milky Way contains about 50% more mass than earlier predictions - putting it on a par with the Andromeda galaxy, previously thought to be our much bigger neighbour and the largest in our Local Group of galaxies. (01/06/09)
more…