Submited by sharnelle!
What is your take on the use of social media in the workplace or its potential benefits to businesses???
Social Media gaining popularity with corporate travel professionals Friday, July 23, 2010 New research by American Express Business Travel found that corporate travel professionals are increasingly using social media to communicate with travelers and to stay on top of latest travel industry information. Respondents also reported high expectations regarding their companies’ future social media usage plan, reporting that within the next year forums, webcasts, and online video are the most likely to be implemented by businesses.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Monday, July 19, 2010
Blood diamonds are forever...
To what extent do you know of or think people still support the
unethical trade of blood diamonds, dirty gold and rubies from Burma?
How aware are you of the ethics around buyin jewels with
certification? Naomi's possible receit of a blood diamond opens our
eyes to the fact that unethical jewels are still traded and accepted.
_______________________________________________________
Submitted by Margie
Naomi Campbell and blood diamond: the whole picture
Naomi Campbell is preparing to appear before a war crimes tribunal in The Hague over allegations that she received a blood diamond from Liberian warlord Charles Taylor.
By Harriet Alexander, Foreign Affairs Reporter
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/liberia/7896581/Naomi-Campbell-and-blood-diamond-the-whole-picture.html
When a supermodel, a warlord and an actress gathered to dine at Nelson Mandela's historic residence on the slopes of Table Mountain, it was always set to be a memorable evening. Yet as Naomi Campbell slipped into her long white dress and fastened the straps of her gold sandals, it is certain that even she could not have predicted quite how memorable the night would be.
Thirteen years after the dinner, Miss Campbell, 40, is now preparing to appear before a war-crimes tribunal to discuss the events of that evening. American actress Mia Farrow has claimed that Miss Campbell received a rough-cut diamond in the hours after the dinner, delivered in the dead of night by men working for Liberia's then-President Charles Taylor. Miss Campbell has consistently denied receiving diamonds from Taylor, despite Miss Farrow's insistence to the contrary.
"You don't forget when a girlfriend tells you she received a huge diamond in the
middle of the night," Miss Farrow, 65, said, reflecting on the morning after the dinner.
The man allegedly behind the dazzling gift, Charles Taylor, is currently on trial in The Hague, accused of funding years of atrocities in neighbouring Sierra Leone in return for "blood diamonds". He denies 11 counts of war crimes, and claims that he never possessed any diamonds beyond his own jewellery.
Yet the prosecution argues that Miss Campbell's testimony is highly relevant and can directly tie Charles Taylor to the trade in diamonds for arms.
"Her anticipated evidence supports the prosecution allegations that the accused used rough diamonds for personal enrichment and arms purchases for Sierra Leone," said Brenda Hollis, chief prosecutor.
"Furthermore, her anticipated evidence rebuts the accused's testimony that he never possessed rough diamonds."
A revealing photograph taken at Mr Mandela's official Cape Town residence, Genadendal, a sprawling mansion on the Groote Schuur estate, gives a flavour of the unusual gathering that night.
The picture, published here for the first time in its entirety, shows the eclectic array of guests he had assembled, looking relaxed and happy in each other's company.
Miss Campbell had been invited to South Africa as a guest of Mr Mandela – a man she refers to as "my grandfather" – for the charity inauguration of the Blue Train, South Africa's answer to the Orient Express. Following the celebratory train journey she and others gathered for dinner in his colonial-style house with large window
boasting magnificent views of the surrounding mountains and the estate's impressive gardens.
The photograph shows Jemima and Imran Khan, the music producer Quincy Jones, the Chinese actor Tony Leung, and Frank Sinatra's ex wife Mia Farrow, standing in the drawing room of the elegant mansion Also present was Charles Taylor – who a month earlier had been elected as president of Liberia. Mr Mandela's soon-to-be wife Graca Machel was reportedly concerned by the presence of Taylor – a controversial figure even then, who had famously campaigned on the slogan "He killed my Ma, he killed my Pa, but I will vote for him."
Yet Miss Campbell was unfazed by his presence, standing shoulder to shoulder with the warlord as the group posed for a photo, and sitting next to him at dinner.
Mr Taylor, in turn, was said to be smitten with the beautiful British model by his side.
According to documents presented to the court in The Hague, the conversation at dinner turned to diamonds. Carole White, Miss Campbell's former agent, was present at the dinner and has since told the court in a written statement that she "heard Mr Taylor say he was going to give Ms Campbell diamonds".
"It came up over dinner," Miss White said in an interview. "I was there. I heard it. Charles Taylor was there and Naomi was seated next to him."
After the dinner, once the guests had retired for the night, Miss White claims that men working for Taylor carried a present to Miss Campbell's room.
"I was dealing with everything – how was she going to get them, because Taylor didn't have them in his possession? "I was asked by Charles Taylor and Naomi and his minister of defence to organise letting his people, who were going to bring the diamonds from Johannesburg to Cape Town, into the guest compound where we were
staying.
"The diamonds came that night. Everyone was asleep."
Miss White's version of events is corroborated by Mia Farrow's memories. "The next morning when the other guests, my children and I met for breakfast, Naomi Campbell was there and had an unforgettable story," she told the court in a written statement.
"She told us the (sic) she had been awakened in the night by knocking at her door. She opened the door to find two or three men – I do not recall how many – who presented her with a large diamond which they said was from Charles Taylor."
And yet beyond the intoxicating story of diamonds, dining with supermodels and mingling with powerful African leaders lies a court case which, since Mr Taylor's indictment in 2003, has attempted to seek justice for the hundreds of thousands of victims of a vicious civil war in Sierra Leone.
The civil war that erupted in 1991 festered for 11 years, claiming tens of thousands of lives, largely because of the blood diamond phenomenon.
Rebels, mostly from the Revolutionary United Front, seized the alluvial diamond fields in the east of the former British colony and forced thousands of unarmed civilians to scrabble through riverbeds with their fingers in conditions of medieval brutality.
Diamonds were smuggled out through neighbouring Liberia, then in the hands of Charles Taylor, who sold them for a profit, spending much of the earnings of weapons which were then passed on to the RUF.
Taylor was ousted in 2003, and fled to Nigeria before being detained. Crucially, the charges do not apply to his actions in Liberia but his involvement in alleged atrocities in Sierra Leone, many linked to diamonds.
At the centre of the case are his alleged links to the RUF, a motley band of thugs whose hallmark was to often hack off civilian prisoners arms – "short sleeves" in the cruel rebel euphemism – or hands ("long sleeves").
Taylor stands accused of terrorising civilians, cannibalism, recruiting child soldiers, rape, murder and looting.
The trial has heard evidence of mayonnaise jars crammed with Sierra Leonean rough diamonds being smuggled across the jungle border into Liberia and on to Taylor's lair in the capital, Monrovia.
Taylor has repeatedly denied all claims. Sitting in the refined environment of The Hague courtroom, where he was transferred in 2006 after it was decided that his trial was too inflammatory to be held in Sierra Leone, he cuts a dapper figure in his smartly-cut suits and neat cufflinks.
He has listened intently to the years of evidence, taking detailed notes and defending himself passionately. "I'm supposed to be such a scumbag that people are bringing me diamonds in mayonnaise jars? How much more can you demonise me?" he
said.
Miss Campbell has consistently refused to discuss the matter, declining to talk to The Sunday Telegraph and resisting calls to appear before the court. None of the other guests contacted by The Sunday Telegraph was willing to share their recollections of the evening.
When ABC News took the opportunity to ask the model about receiving a diamond, during a backstage interview at a charity catwalk show, she stormed off, punching a camera as she went. Oprah Winfrey tried again in May during a special show on Miss Campbell's life and career, but was told: "I don't want to be involved in this man's case. He has done some terrible things and I don't want to put my family in danger."
But prosecutors argue that Miss Campbell's testimony will be of great importance to the trial. If she tells the court that she did receive a rough cut diamond – one which could not have come from a shop – then it counters Mr Taylor's claim that he never possessed diamonds.
The Mandela dinner also fits in with the prosecution's timeline of diamond deals and arms shipments. Prosecutors claim the Mr Taylor travelled to South Africa with an assortment of diamonds (one of which was given to Miss Campbell) before returning to Liberia via Burkina Faso and Libya. Shortly after his return, a large shipment of arms arrived in Sierra Leone – via Burkina Faso and Libya.
Mr Taylor's defence claim the impending appearance of Miss Campbell, Mia Farrow and Carole White is "a circus". All three are likely to appear before a judge early next month, after Miss Campbell's representatives told the court on Friday that she was unable to be present on July 29 as requested.
Courtenay Griffiths QC, defending Mr Taylor, told The Sunday Telegraph: "There is no substance to it whatsoever. It is third-hand hearsay. "We have a situation where the prosecution has obtained a subpoena for a witness that they know has publicly stated on a couple of occasions that their allegations about her are false. So they are calling her in effect to treat her as a hostile witness, and cross-examine her. They
know she will not be giving any evidence in support of their case as she has publicly denied this.
"The fact of the matter is: no one has really been taking any notice of the Taylor trial in the three years its been running, and all of a sudden because a supermodel is turning up, the whole world is interested now in the trial. It's a complete distraction."
unethical trade of blood diamonds, dirty gold and rubies from Burma?
How aware are you of the ethics around buyin jewels with
certification? Naomi's possible receit of a blood diamond opens our
eyes to the fact that unethical jewels are still traded and accepted.
_______________________________________________________
Submitted by Margie
Naomi Campbell and blood diamond: the whole picture
Naomi Campbell is preparing to appear before a war crimes tribunal in The Hague over allegations that she received a blood diamond from Liberian warlord Charles Taylor.
By Harriet Alexander, Foreign Affairs Reporter
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/liberia/7896581/Naomi-Campbell-and-blood-diamond-the-whole-picture.html
When a supermodel, a warlord and an actress gathered to dine at Nelson Mandela's historic residence on the slopes of Table Mountain, it was always set to be a memorable evening. Yet as Naomi Campbell slipped into her long white dress and fastened the straps of her gold sandals, it is certain that even she could not have predicted quite how memorable the night would be.
Thirteen years after the dinner, Miss Campbell, 40, is now preparing to appear before a war-crimes tribunal to discuss the events of that evening. American actress Mia Farrow has claimed that Miss Campbell received a rough-cut diamond in the hours after the dinner, delivered in the dead of night by men working for Liberia's then-President Charles Taylor. Miss Campbell has consistently denied receiving diamonds from Taylor, despite Miss Farrow's insistence to the contrary.
"You don't forget when a girlfriend tells you she received a huge diamond in the
middle of the night," Miss Farrow, 65, said, reflecting on the morning after the dinner.
The man allegedly behind the dazzling gift, Charles Taylor, is currently on trial in The Hague, accused of funding years of atrocities in neighbouring Sierra Leone in return for "blood diamonds". He denies 11 counts of war crimes, and claims that he never possessed any diamonds beyond his own jewellery.
Yet the prosecution argues that Miss Campbell's testimony is highly relevant and can directly tie Charles Taylor to the trade in diamonds for arms.
"Her anticipated evidence supports the prosecution allegations that the accused used rough diamonds for personal enrichment and arms purchases for Sierra Leone," said Brenda Hollis, chief prosecutor.
"Furthermore, her anticipated evidence rebuts the accused's testimony that he never possessed rough diamonds."
A revealing photograph taken at Mr Mandela's official Cape Town residence, Genadendal, a sprawling mansion on the Groote Schuur estate, gives a flavour of the unusual gathering that night.
The picture, published here for the first time in its entirety, shows the eclectic array of guests he had assembled, looking relaxed and happy in each other's company.
Miss Campbell had been invited to South Africa as a guest of Mr Mandela – a man she refers to as "my grandfather" – for the charity inauguration of the Blue Train, South Africa's answer to the Orient Express. Following the celebratory train journey she and others gathered for dinner in his colonial-style house with large window
boasting magnificent views of the surrounding mountains and the estate's impressive gardens.
The photograph shows Jemima and Imran Khan, the music producer Quincy Jones, the Chinese actor Tony Leung, and Frank Sinatra's ex wife Mia Farrow, standing in the drawing room of the elegant mansion Also present was Charles Taylor – who a month earlier had been elected as president of Liberia. Mr Mandela's soon-to-be wife Graca Machel was reportedly concerned by the presence of Taylor – a controversial figure even then, who had famously campaigned on the slogan "He killed my Ma, he killed my Pa, but I will vote for him."
Yet Miss Campbell was unfazed by his presence, standing shoulder to shoulder with the warlord as the group posed for a photo, and sitting next to him at dinner.
Mr Taylor, in turn, was said to be smitten with the beautiful British model by his side.
According to documents presented to the court in The Hague, the conversation at dinner turned to diamonds. Carole White, Miss Campbell's former agent, was present at the dinner and has since told the court in a written statement that she "heard Mr Taylor say he was going to give Ms Campbell diamonds".
"It came up over dinner," Miss White said in an interview. "I was there. I heard it. Charles Taylor was there and Naomi was seated next to him."
After the dinner, once the guests had retired for the night, Miss White claims that men working for Taylor carried a present to Miss Campbell's room.
"I was dealing with everything – how was she going to get them, because Taylor didn't have them in his possession? "I was asked by Charles Taylor and Naomi and his minister of defence to organise letting his people, who were going to bring the diamonds from Johannesburg to Cape Town, into the guest compound where we were
staying.
"The diamonds came that night. Everyone was asleep."
Miss White's version of events is corroborated by Mia Farrow's memories. "The next morning when the other guests, my children and I met for breakfast, Naomi Campbell was there and had an unforgettable story," she told the court in a written statement.
"She told us the (sic) she had been awakened in the night by knocking at her door. She opened the door to find two or three men – I do not recall how many – who presented her with a large diamond which they said was from Charles Taylor."
And yet beyond the intoxicating story of diamonds, dining with supermodels and mingling with powerful African leaders lies a court case which, since Mr Taylor's indictment in 2003, has attempted to seek justice for the hundreds of thousands of victims of a vicious civil war in Sierra Leone.
The civil war that erupted in 1991 festered for 11 years, claiming tens of thousands of lives, largely because of the blood diamond phenomenon.
Rebels, mostly from the Revolutionary United Front, seized the alluvial diamond fields in the east of the former British colony and forced thousands of unarmed civilians to scrabble through riverbeds with their fingers in conditions of medieval brutality.
Diamonds were smuggled out through neighbouring Liberia, then in the hands of Charles Taylor, who sold them for a profit, spending much of the earnings of weapons which were then passed on to the RUF.
Taylor was ousted in 2003, and fled to Nigeria before being detained. Crucially, the charges do not apply to his actions in Liberia but his involvement in alleged atrocities in Sierra Leone, many linked to diamonds.
At the centre of the case are his alleged links to the RUF, a motley band of thugs whose hallmark was to often hack off civilian prisoners arms – "short sleeves" in the cruel rebel euphemism – or hands ("long sleeves").
Taylor stands accused of terrorising civilians, cannibalism, recruiting child soldiers, rape, murder and looting.
The trial has heard evidence of mayonnaise jars crammed with Sierra Leonean rough diamonds being smuggled across the jungle border into Liberia and on to Taylor's lair in the capital, Monrovia.
Taylor has repeatedly denied all claims. Sitting in the refined environment of The Hague courtroom, where he was transferred in 2006 after it was decided that his trial was too inflammatory to be held in Sierra Leone, he cuts a dapper figure in his smartly-cut suits and neat cufflinks.
He has listened intently to the years of evidence, taking detailed notes and defending himself passionately. "I'm supposed to be such a scumbag that people are bringing me diamonds in mayonnaise jars? How much more can you demonise me?" he
said.
Miss Campbell has consistently refused to discuss the matter, declining to talk to The Sunday Telegraph and resisting calls to appear before the court. None of the other guests contacted by The Sunday Telegraph was willing to share their recollections of the evening.
When ABC News took the opportunity to ask the model about receiving a diamond, during a backstage interview at a charity catwalk show, she stormed off, punching a camera as she went. Oprah Winfrey tried again in May during a special show on Miss Campbell's life and career, but was told: "I don't want to be involved in this man's case. He has done some terrible things and I don't want to put my family in danger."
But prosecutors argue that Miss Campbell's testimony will be of great importance to the trial. If she tells the court that she did receive a rough cut diamond – one which could not have come from a shop – then it counters Mr Taylor's claim that he never possessed diamonds.
The Mandela dinner also fits in with the prosecution's timeline of diamond deals and arms shipments. Prosecutors claim the Mr Taylor travelled to South Africa with an assortment of diamonds (one of which was given to Miss Campbell) before returning to Liberia via Burkina Faso and Libya. Shortly after his return, a large shipment of arms arrived in Sierra Leone – via Burkina Faso and Libya.
Mr Taylor's defence claim the impending appearance of Miss Campbell, Mia Farrow and Carole White is "a circus". All three are likely to appear before a judge early next month, after Miss Campbell's representatives told the court on Friday that she was unable to be present on July 29 as requested.
Courtenay Griffiths QC, defending Mr Taylor, told The Sunday Telegraph: "There is no substance to it whatsoever. It is third-hand hearsay. "We have a situation where the prosecution has obtained a subpoena for a witness that they know has publicly stated on a couple of occasions that their allegations about her are false. So they are calling her in effect to treat her as a hostile witness, and cross-examine her. They
know she will not be giving any evidence in support of their case as she has publicly denied this.
"The fact of the matter is: no one has really been taking any notice of the Taylor trial in the three years its been running, and all of a sudden because a supermodel is turning up, the whole world is interested now in the trial. It's a complete distraction."
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Post-world cup effects in South Africa
Submitted by Jerusha
Apart from now not knowing what to do with ourselves without soccer...what is your opinion on post-World cup effects on South Africa? What happens to all the people who's income was reliant on the WC, what happens to all our stadia, crime etc?
South Africa's World Cup defies odds
South Africa is flying high at the tournament's end. But time will tell if its wave of positivity can be sustained.
By Robyn Dixon
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2012327974_safsoccer11.html?prmid=obinsite
JOHANNESBURG — They would never finish the stadiums on time. Transportation would be a fiasco. Tourists who weren't shot, stabbed or killed in car smashes would get food poisoning. And if that didn't ruin the soccer World Cup, the bad South African service would.
It wasn't just the British tabloids that predicted South Africa could never pull off the World Cup tournament successfully. There were plenty of skeptics in South Africa.
But the tournament that ends with the Netherlands-Spain final Sunday may bury the stereotype of South Africa as a violent place where nothing really works, incapable of staging a global showcase.
Yes, there were transport mix-ups and armed robberies — some vicious. And the cost of staging the event blew out from an estimated $329 million to between $4 billion and $5.5 billion.
But the faults weren't enough to overshadow the event's vibrancy and enthusiasm, and its ebullient African style. Mega-events such as the World Cup and Olympics are often defined by the people who host them. If the first World Cup on African soil wasn't perfect, at least it was real.
"We have had an image makeover for South Africa and the continent of Africa. We have succeeded in re-branding and repositioning this country," said local organizing-committee boss Danny Jordaan.
"What we cannot quantify is the generation of pride in South Africa as a nation, the unity, the sharing of a single vision. We have seen black and white side by side at fan parks and stadiums, when for many years these people were prohibited by law to sit together," he said, referring to South Africa's apartheid era, when the races were classified and segregated.
South Africa's World Cup was a four-week people's festival, which saw the normally insular car-addicted middle classes abandoning their vehicles, walking, taking buses and trains, celebrating in the streets at night or visiting Soweto township for the first time.
Surpassing expectations
Since Nelson Mandela's Rainbow Nation dream began to fade with the rise of corruption and persistent inequality, South Africa has become a navel-gazing insecure nation.
The country fretted that violence would affirm South Africa's image as a killing field. Would President Jacob Zuma, with his children born out of wedlock and sex scandals, embarrass the country? Would logistical problems and transport chaos reaffirm stereotypes of Africa as the hopeless continent?
From the outset, when South Africa was chosen in 2004 to host the event, the government has burdened the World Cup with heavy expectations.
"We want to ensure that one day, historians will reflect upon the 2010 World Cup as a moment when Africa stood tall and resolutely and turned the tide of centuries of poverty and conflict," then-South Africa president Thabo Mbeki said at the time.
But South Africa surprised even itself with the tournament's success. Zuma played the jovial host, and people started blowing vuvuzela horns from Johannesburg to Amsterdam. The country's six stunning new or rebuilt stadiums, like the calabash-shaped Soccer City in Soweto, flashed around the globe on TwitPic, and no one worried about criticisms they'd be white elephants afterward.
"We won most of all because we could finally say 'we.' Something shifted during the World Cup: With a team to support and half a million guests to take care of, we found ourselves all on the same side," wrote analyst and author Mark Gevisser. "The festive buzz of a million vuvuzelas came to override the habitual sounds of urban anxiety: the gunfire; the helicopters chasing stolen cars; the aggressive minibus taxis.
"South Africans were waving flags and supporting their team out of a sense of joy and belonging, rather than the deficit-driven pride that has fueled both Afrikaner and African nationalism for so long."
The country was suddenly brimming with confidence: "Nobody could have done it better than us," said an editorial in The Star newspaper, as South Africa planned to stage a bid for the Olympics.
Olympics chief Jacques Rogge praised South Africa's World Cup on Saturday after a meeting with Zuma: "It is something that will be remembered for a very long time."
Finding solutions
There were problems: Ticket sales were lower than expected at first, and prices had to be slashed to get South Africans to buy them. Hundreds of fans missed the Durban semifinal between Spain and Germany because VIP planes clogged Durban's new airport.
The South African government saturated the country with more than 40,000 extra police over the tournament. Special courts, dedicated solely to FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) matters, operated late into the night, meting out swift — and often harsh — sentences, in contrast to South Africa's usually glacial pace of justice. A cellphone thief was jailed for five years, and hotel employees were jailed for three years for stealing.
The deterrent worked. South African private-security firm ADT estimated the crime rate had fallen by 60 percent to 70 percent around Johannesburg.
The steep cost of keeping police and courts operating at extended hours means the anti-crime operation cannot be sustained long term.
And the fact remains that all of the half-million visitors who were expected to arrive in the country specifically because of the World Cup didn't materialize, largely due to security fears and high prices. The number of visitors during the tournament was about a million, 200,000 higher than the same period last year.
But those who came fell in love with Cape Town and gazed into Mandela's old prison cell on Robben Island. They queued for soccer transport, sat in restaurants while waiters took their time or made mistakes, and met the Bunny Chow, an eccentric South African dish consisting of a hollowed loaf of soft white bread filled with baked beans and curry.
Will changes last?
Many South Africans wonder whether the cup could be a force for permanent change.
And could the country sustain the joyful pan-Africanism that saw South Africans painting themselves in Ghana's colors after their own team was eliminated?
Difficult issues remain, yet the remarkable thing about what happened during the World Cup, wrote the analyst, Gevisser, was that white and black South Africans began talking to each other "like normal people" in service stations and supermarkets.
"The main reason we were talking to each other as never before was because we were occupying public space and using public transport in a way that city dwellers do the world over, but that is utterly foreign to South Africa due to apartheid planning and the fear of crime."
The question left for South Africans at the end was how to make it all last.
Apart from now not knowing what to do with ourselves without soccer...what is your opinion on post-World cup effects on South Africa? What happens to all the people who's income was reliant on the WC, what happens to all our stadia, crime etc?
South Africa's World Cup defies odds
South Africa is flying high at the tournament's end. But time will tell if its wave of positivity can be sustained.
By Robyn Dixon
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2012327974_safsoccer11.html?prmid=obinsite
JOHANNESBURG — They would never finish the stadiums on time. Transportation would be a fiasco. Tourists who weren't shot, stabbed or killed in car smashes would get food poisoning. And if that didn't ruin the soccer World Cup, the bad South African service would.
It wasn't just the British tabloids that predicted South Africa could never pull off the World Cup tournament successfully. There were plenty of skeptics in South Africa.
But the tournament that ends with the Netherlands-Spain final Sunday may bury the stereotype of South Africa as a violent place where nothing really works, incapable of staging a global showcase.
Yes, there were transport mix-ups and armed robberies — some vicious. And the cost of staging the event blew out from an estimated $329 million to between $4 billion and $5.5 billion.
But the faults weren't enough to overshadow the event's vibrancy and enthusiasm, and its ebullient African style. Mega-events such as the World Cup and Olympics are often defined by the people who host them. If the first World Cup on African soil wasn't perfect, at least it was real.
"We have had an image makeover for South Africa and the continent of Africa. We have succeeded in re-branding and repositioning this country," said local organizing-committee boss Danny Jordaan.
"What we cannot quantify is the generation of pride in South Africa as a nation, the unity, the sharing of a single vision. We have seen black and white side by side at fan parks and stadiums, when for many years these people were prohibited by law to sit together," he said, referring to South Africa's apartheid era, when the races were classified and segregated.
South Africa's World Cup was a four-week people's festival, which saw the normally insular car-addicted middle classes abandoning their vehicles, walking, taking buses and trains, celebrating in the streets at night or visiting Soweto township for the first time.
Surpassing expectations
Since Nelson Mandela's Rainbow Nation dream began to fade with the rise of corruption and persistent inequality, South Africa has become a navel-gazing insecure nation.
The country fretted that violence would affirm South Africa's image as a killing field. Would President Jacob Zuma, with his children born out of wedlock and sex scandals, embarrass the country? Would logistical problems and transport chaos reaffirm stereotypes of Africa as the hopeless continent?
From the outset, when South Africa was chosen in 2004 to host the event, the government has burdened the World Cup with heavy expectations.
"We want to ensure that one day, historians will reflect upon the 2010 World Cup as a moment when Africa stood tall and resolutely and turned the tide of centuries of poverty and conflict," then-South Africa president Thabo Mbeki said at the time.
But South Africa surprised even itself with the tournament's success. Zuma played the jovial host, and people started blowing vuvuzela horns from Johannesburg to Amsterdam. The country's six stunning new or rebuilt stadiums, like the calabash-shaped Soccer City in Soweto, flashed around the globe on TwitPic, and no one worried about criticisms they'd be white elephants afterward.
"We won most of all because we could finally say 'we.' Something shifted during the World Cup: With a team to support and half a million guests to take care of, we found ourselves all on the same side," wrote analyst and author Mark Gevisser. "The festive buzz of a million vuvuzelas came to override the habitual sounds of urban anxiety: the gunfire; the helicopters chasing stolen cars; the aggressive minibus taxis.
"South Africans were waving flags and supporting their team out of a sense of joy and belonging, rather than the deficit-driven pride that has fueled both Afrikaner and African nationalism for so long."
The country was suddenly brimming with confidence: "Nobody could have done it better than us," said an editorial in The Star newspaper, as South Africa planned to stage a bid for the Olympics.
Olympics chief Jacques Rogge praised South Africa's World Cup on Saturday after a meeting with Zuma: "It is something that will be remembered for a very long time."
Finding solutions
There were problems: Ticket sales were lower than expected at first, and prices had to be slashed to get South Africans to buy them. Hundreds of fans missed the Durban semifinal between Spain and Germany because VIP planes clogged Durban's new airport.
The South African government saturated the country with more than 40,000 extra police over the tournament. Special courts, dedicated solely to FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) matters, operated late into the night, meting out swift — and often harsh — sentences, in contrast to South Africa's usually glacial pace of justice. A cellphone thief was jailed for five years, and hotel employees were jailed for three years for stealing.
The deterrent worked. South African private-security firm ADT estimated the crime rate had fallen by 60 percent to 70 percent around Johannesburg.
The steep cost of keeping police and courts operating at extended hours means the anti-crime operation cannot be sustained long term.
And the fact remains that all of the half-million visitors who were expected to arrive in the country specifically because of the World Cup didn't materialize, largely due to security fears and high prices. The number of visitors during the tournament was about a million, 200,000 higher than the same period last year.
But those who came fell in love with Cape Town and gazed into Mandela's old prison cell on Robben Island. They queued for soccer transport, sat in restaurants while waiters took their time or made mistakes, and met the Bunny Chow, an eccentric South African dish consisting of a hollowed loaf of soft white bread filled with baked beans and curry.
Will changes last?
Many South Africans wonder whether the cup could be a force for permanent change.
And could the country sustain the joyful pan-Africanism that saw South Africans painting themselves in Ghana's colors after their own team was eliminated?
Difficult issues remain, yet the remarkable thing about what happened during the World Cup, wrote the analyst, Gevisser, was that white and black South Africans began talking to each other "like normal people" in service stations and supermarkets.
"The main reason we were talking to each other as never before was because we were occupying public space and using public transport in a way that city dwellers do the world over, but that is utterly foreign to South Africa due to apartheid planning and the fear of crime."
The question left for South Africans at the end was how to make it all last.
Monday, July 5, 2010
Digital Books vs Physical Books
Submitted by Majda...
A sturdy bookshelf used to be the staple of a great home office. Where else were you going to keep your industry texts and files of paperwork? But now that we've fast-forward to July 2010 (really, it's July?!?), we can enjoy the spoils of paperless billing, scanning everything to your hard drive and even reading an entire library of books - everything from fiction to references via libraries and ibook apps.
Personally, although I'm an avid reader (on and off), I haven't yet splurged on a Kindle or iPad. The only ebook reading I've done has been downloading pdfs to my computer and reading through them when I have a chance. I must admit I do forget about them sometimes. As a result, I still have a bookshelf full of my favorite reads sitting in my room.
But even if I did move my humble library over to the Kindle or iPad, I think I'd still want to keep my favorite titles (there's a lot of them) on a shelf.
How about you? Would you ever choose e-copies over hard copy books? Has your library already made the move over to digital? Or are you like me and want to have the best of both worlds?
Supplimentary reading:
* Digital Books Start A New Chapter
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_09/b3973111.htm
* Reading speeds on iPad, Kindle and printed books compared
http://www.techradar.com/news/portable-devices/reading-speeds-on-ipad-kindle-and-printed-books-compared-700962
A sturdy bookshelf used to be the staple of a great home office. Where else were you going to keep your industry texts and files of paperwork? But now that we've fast-forward to July 2010 (really, it's July?!?), we can enjoy the spoils of paperless billing, scanning everything to your hard drive and even reading an entire library of books - everything from fiction to references via libraries and ibook apps.
Personally, although I'm an avid reader (on and off), I haven't yet splurged on a Kindle or iPad. The only ebook reading I've done has been downloading pdfs to my computer and reading through them when I have a chance. I must admit I do forget about them sometimes. As a result, I still have a bookshelf full of my favorite reads sitting in my room.
But even if I did move my humble library over to the Kindle or iPad, I think I'd still want to keep my favorite titles (there's a lot of them) on a shelf.
How about you? Would you ever choose e-copies over hard copy books? Has your library already made the move over to digital? Or are you like me and want to have the best of both worlds?
Supplimentary reading:
* Digital Books Start A New Chapter
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_09/b3973111.htm
* Reading speeds on iPad, Kindle and printed books compared
http://www.techradar.com/news/portable-devices/reading-speeds-on-ipad-kindle-and-printed-books-compared-700962
Monday, June 28, 2010
Who gets to decide for the human race?
Submitted by Thabang
If people are interested in reading more about what this man Michael Tellinger has to say they can go on his website etc...for me the question are rather simple, well in my mind..whether gene therapy or stem cells it does not matter to me but i ask WHO GETS TO DECIDE FOR THE HUMAN RACE?? this question i suppose also links in with some of the discussion posed earlier...issues of morality etc...me i guess what i am calling for in a re - definition of everything as we currently know it...for example do people know about the large hadron collider experiments being conducted in europe??? scientists are trying there to recreate conditions as they were AT THE BIG BANG, depending on what your belief systems are we are talking about 16 odd billion years ago.....now WHO DECIDED THAT THESE EXPERIMENTS CAN BE CONDUCTED??? experiments whose results may end life on earth as we know it, thats the reality, because nobody actually knows what may or may not happen.....so in the same breath how are world, global matters decided on and who gets to participate and if an alien extra terrestrial race should make themselves known to us, who will be earth's ambassador?
so to talk about - WHO GETS TO DECIDE THINGS FOR ALL OR US??? because so far it seems this privilege belongs to rich nations..
see article below
.....................................................................................
Stem Cells – Stepping stones to immortality? Or a waste of time?
(by Michael Tellinger, July 2006, Also see: www.slavespecies.com www.akomati.com and www.zuluplanet.com)
Before we crack the DNA code – lot's of fun to be had with the miracle of Stem Cells.
This week I'd like to shine the spotlight on the tussle between stem cell research and gene therapy. Recently a reader mailed and asked me to investigate the DNA and genetic sequence of Dolphins. Sad to say, that so far there seems to be very little information available and I am not even sure if there is a group mapping the Dolphin genome at present. My guess is that as soon as they have some tangible results it will be posted on the various genome project websites, as it is with the other species being mapped. The results will certainly be fascinating to study and compare to the apes and human genome with specific attention being focused on the number of active genes and introns.
But while we are wrestling with the intricacies of our DNA in an attempt to understand the blueprint for human life, another group of medical scientists are making great strides in the art of manipulating our bodies, with the miraculous abilities of stem cells. And you can rest assured that it will not be in the too distant future that hospitals will become much more than a place for the treatment of sick people. It is quite easy to speculate that hospitals and laboratories will rapidly evolve into organ and body-part factories.
The futuristic view of cloning movies of some years ago is now truly upon us. The scientific media has been reporting that not only can scientists now grow brand new organs from stem cells as ordered by patients or CLIENTS, but surgeons can also re-grow damaged organs like hearts, crippled spines, livers, kidneys and any other problem organs in your body. Stem cell therapy can also reverse the damage caused by Parkinson's disease, diabetes and others. The most encouraging aspect of this procedure, is that it overcomes the problem of transplanted organs being rejected by the auto-immune system of our bodies, which has in the past caused many transplants to fail miserably causing their recipients great anguish.
But when these synthetically grown organs and body parts will actually be unleashed on the human populace is not known. My guess is, not until the pharmaceutical giants have ensured that they have wrapped up the commercial benefits of these procedures tightly enough, and ensured that new legislation has been passed that protects their commercial exploitation of this new area of science.
For those who are still a little fuzzy on the subject of stem cells: The most sought-after stem cells are known as Embryonic stem cells. They are the first cells that are created when an embryo is formed after fertilization. There stem cells have the remarkable potential to develop into all of the different cells that make up the body. It is a true miracle of life. In a sense they can also serve as a sort of repair system for the body, while they can theoretically divide without limit to replenish other damaged cells as long as the person or animal is still alive. When a stem cell divides, each new cell has the potential to either remain a stem cell or become another type of cell with a more specialized function, such as a muscle cell, a red blood cell, or a brain cell.
So how do we get stem cells to use for our medical treatments? This is where the moral and ethical argument begins.
For years, doctors have been transplanting adult stem cells or blood stem cells obtained from bone marrow, when performing bone marrow transplants. But in 1998 the first embryonic stem cells were isolated and started the moral dilemma. Is it ethical and humane to keep human embryos alive in a laboratory to harvest the purest form of stem cells from such embryos? Those with life threatening diseases usually answer yes. While those who believe that they are the custodians of human dignity and morality will voice a definite no.
And so, while strong opposition in the USA to stem cell research and cloning is forcing the US giants to set up operations in emerging economies like South Africa, once again we need to come to terms with the fact that no matter how many organs we successfully grow or transplant from stem cells, we are once again practicing reactionary medicine. We are simply treating the cause but not the symptom. Because the source of all our disease and organ failure and physical deformity is not found in stem cells, but rather in the defects of our DNA.
I would therefore not be too concerned about the stem cell area of medical science but on the progress of gene replacement therapy. When we come to master this area of medicine, we will truly be knocking on the door of the Holy Grail that harbours all secrets of life. Our biggest concerns will then become the philosophy of world religions and the concept of immortality.
Because once we have mastered gene therapy, we will be very close to understanding immortality in our species. What effect will this have on our human behaviour? How will we treat the poor backward nations of the world? Do we have the mental and spiritual ability to deal with immortality? Not by a long shot.
In 'Slave Species of god' I briefly deal with this subject but as we make new discoveries in genetic science I find myself conflicted by all this. And it raises some horrific possibilities. Because if our genome was manipulated and cloned to produce a primitive species, it is quite possible that we have managed to evolve and reactivate certain parts of our DNA but not other crucial parts that would normally evolve in tandem. All this could lead to tragic behavioral results by humankind, not really ready for such high levels of scientific knowledge, while our spiritual side has been stagnating, enslaved by the dogma of world religion and the royal political elite, over the past 13,000 years.
If people are interested in reading more about what this man Michael Tellinger has to say they can go on his website etc...for me the question are rather simple, well in my mind..whether gene therapy or stem cells it does not matter to me but i ask WHO GETS TO DECIDE FOR THE HUMAN RACE?? this question i suppose also links in with some of the discussion posed earlier...issues of morality etc...me i guess what i am calling for in a re - definition of everything as we currently know it...for example do people know about the large hadron collider experiments being conducted in europe??? scientists are trying there to recreate conditions as they were AT THE BIG BANG, depending on what your belief systems are we are talking about 16 odd billion years ago.....now WHO DECIDED THAT THESE EXPERIMENTS CAN BE CONDUCTED??? experiments whose results may end life on earth as we know it, thats the reality, because nobody actually knows what may or may not happen.....so in the same breath how are world, global matters decided on and who gets to participate and if an alien extra terrestrial race should make themselves known to us, who will be earth's ambassador?
so to talk about - WHO GETS TO DECIDE THINGS FOR ALL OR US??? because so far it seems this privilege belongs to rich nations..
see article below
.....................................................................................
Stem Cells – Stepping stones to immortality? Or a waste of time?
(by Michael Tellinger, July 2006, Also see: www.slavespecies.com www.akomati.com and www.zuluplanet.com)
Before we crack the DNA code – lot's of fun to be had with the miracle of Stem Cells.
This week I'd like to shine the spotlight on the tussle between stem cell research and gene therapy. Recently a reader mailed and asked me to investigate the DNA and genetic sequence of Dolphins. Sad to say, that so far there seems to be very little information available and I am not even sure if there is a group mapping the Dolphin genome at present. My guess is that as soon as they have some tangible results it will be posted on the various genome project websites, as it is with the other species being mapped. The results will certainly be fascinating to study and compare to the apes and human genome with specific attention being focused on the number of active genes and introns.
But while we are wrestling with the intricacies of our DNA in an attempt to understand the blueprint for human life, another group of medical scientists are making great strides in the art of manipulating our bodies, with the miraculous abilities of stem cells. And you can rest assured that it will not be in the too distant future that hospitals will become much more than a place for the treatment of sick people. It is quite easy to speculate that hospitals and laboratories will rapidly evolve into organ and body-part factories.
The futuristic view of cloning movies of some years ago is now truly upon us. The scientific media has been reporting that not only can scientists now grow brand new organs from stem cells as ordered by patients or CLIENTS, but surgeons can also re-grow damaged organs like hearts, crippled spines, livers, kidneys and any other problem organs in your body. Stem cell therapy can also reverse the damage caused by Parkinson's disease, diabetes and others. The most encouraging aspect of this procedure, is that it overcomes the problem of transplanted organs being rejected by the auto-immune system of our bodies, which has in the past caused many transplants to fail miserably causing their recipients great anguish.
But when these synthetically grown organs and body parts will actually be unleashed on the human populace is not known. My guess is, not until the pharmaceutical giants have ensured that they have wrapped up the commercial benefits of these procedures tightly enough, and ensured that new legislation has been passed that protects their commercial exploitation of this new area of science.
For those who are still a little fuzzy on the subject of stem cells: The most sought-after stem cells are known as Embryonic stem cells. They are the first cells that are created when an embryo is formed after fertilization. There stem cells have the remarkable potential to develop into all of the different cells that make up the body. It is a true miracle of life. In a sense they can also serve as a sort of repair system for the body, while they can theoretically divide without limit to replenish other damaged cells as long as the person or animal is still alive. When a stem cell divides, each new cell has the potential to either remain a stem cell or become another type of cell with a more specialized function, such as a muscle cell, a red blood cell, or a brain cell.
So how do we get stem cells to use for our medical treatments? This is where the moral and ethical argument begins.
For years, doctors have been transplanting adult stem cells or blood stem cells obtained from bone marrow, when performing bone marrow transplants. But in 1998 the first embryonic stem cells were isolated and started the moral dilemma. Is it ethical and humane to keep human embryos alive in a laboratory to harvest the purest form of stem cells from such embryos? Those with life threatening diseases usually answer yes. While those who believe that they are the custodians of human dignity and morality will voice a definite no.
And so, while strong opposition in the USA to stem cell research and cloning is forcing the US giants to set up operations in emerging economies like South Africa, once again we need to come to terms with the fact that no matter how many organs we successfully grow or transplant from stem cells, we are once again practicing reactionary medicine. We are simply treating the cause but not the symptom. Because the source of all our disease and organ failure and physical deformity is not found in stem cells, but rather in the defects of our DNA.
I would therefore not be too concerned about the stem cell area of medical science but on the progress of gene replacement therapy. When we come to master this area of medicine, we will truly be knocking on the door of the Holy Grail that harbours all secrets of life. Our biggest concerns will then become the philosophy of world religions and the concept of immortality.
Because once we have mastered gene therapy, we will be very close to understanding immortality in our species. What effect will this have on our human behaviour? How will we treat the poor backward nations of the world? Do we have the mental and spiritual ability to deal with immortality? Not by a long shot.
In 'Slave Species of god' I briefly deal with this subject but as we make new discoveries in genetic science I find myself conflicted by all this. And it raises some horrific possibilities. Because if our genome was manipulated and cloned to produce a primitive species, it is quite possible that we have managed to evolve and reactivate certain parts of our DNA but not other crucial parts that would normally evolve in tandem. All this could lead to tragic behavioral results by humankind, not really ready for such high levels of scientific knowledge, while our spiritual side has been stagnating, enslaved by the dogma of world religion and the royal political elite, over the past 13,000 years.
Monday, June 21, 2010
The Biology of Promiscuity
Submitted by Prideel
(Source: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/promiscuity.html)
Why do human beings screw around when it complicates our lives so much? Why do we preach fidelity at each other and then, so often, practice adultery? The cheap and obvious answer, "because it feels too good to stop" isn't a good one, as it turns out.
Evolutionary biology teaches us that humans being, like other animals, are adaptive machines; "feels good" is simply instinct's way to steer us towards behaviors that were on average successful for our ancestors. So that answer simply sets up another question: why has our species history favored behavior that is (as the agony columns, bitter ballads, tragic plays and veneral-disease statistics inform us) often destructive to all parties involved?
This question has extra point for humans because human sex and childbirth are risky business compared to that of most of our near relatives. Human infants have huge heads, enough to make giving birth a chancy matter -- and even so, the period during which they remain dependent on nurturing is astonishingly long and requires a lot of parental investment.
If we were redesigning humans to cope with the high investment requirement, one obvious way would be to rewire our instincts such that we pair-bond exclusively for life. It's certainly possible to imagine an evolved variant of humanity in which "infidelity" is never an issue because mated pairs imprint on each other so specifically that nobody else is sexually interesting. Some birds are like this. So why aren't we like this? Why haven't promiscuity and adultery been selected out? What adaptive function do they serve that balances out the risk to offspring from unstable matings?
The route to an answer lies in remembering that evolutionary selection is not a benign planner that tries to maximize group survival but rather a blind competition between individual genetic lines. We need to look more closely at the conflicting strategies used by competing players in the reproduction game.
Male promiscuity has always been relatively easy to understand. While total parental investment needs to be pretty intense, men have a dramatically lower minimum energy and risk investment in children than women do; one index of the difference is that women not infrequently died in childbirth under pre-modern conditions. This means genetic lines propagating through us hairy male types have an optimum strategy that tilts us a little more towards "have lots of offspring and don't nurture much", while women tilt towards "have few offspring, work hard at making sure they survive to breed".
This also explains why cultures that have not developed an explicit ideology of sexual equality invariably take female adultery much more seriously than male adultery. A man who fails to take a grave view of his mate's "unfaithfulness" is risking a much larger fraction of his reproductive potential than a woman who ignores her husband's philandering.
Indeed, there is a sense in which a man who is always "faithful" is under-serving his genes -- and the behavioral tendency to do that will be selected against. His optimal strategy is to be promiscuous enough to pick up opportunities to have his reproductive freight partly paid by other men, while not being so "faithless" that potential mates will consider him a bad risk (e.g. for running off with another woman and abandoning the kids).
What nobody had a good theory for until the mid-1990s was why women cooperate in this behavior. Early sociobiological models of human sexual strategy predicted that women should grab the best provider they could attract and then bend heaven and earth to keep him faithful, because if he screwed around some of his effort would be likely to be directed towards providing for children by other women. In these theories, female abstinence before marriage and fidelity during it was modeled as a trade offered men to keep them faithful in turn; an easy trade, because nobody had noticed any evolutionary incentives for women to cheat on the contract.
In retrospect, the resemblence of the female behavior predicted by these models to conventional moral prescriptions should have raised suspicions about the models themselves -- because they failed to predict the actual pervasiveness of female promiscuity and adultery even in observable behavior, let alone concealed.
Start with a simple one: If the trade-your-fidelity-for-his strategy were really a selective optimum, singles bars wouldn't exist, because genotypes producing women with singles-bar behavior would have been selected out long ago. But there's an even bigger whammy...
Actual paternity/maternity-marker studies in urban populations done under guarantees that one's spouse and others won't see the results have found that the percentage of adulterous children born to married women with ready access to other men can be startlingly high, often in the 25% to 45% range. In most cases, the father has no idea and the mother, in the nature of things, was unsure before the assay.
These statistics cry out for explanation -- and it turns out women do have an evolutionary incentive to screw around. The light began to dawn during studies of chimpanzee populations. Female chimps who spurn low-status bachelor males from their own band are much more willing to have sex with low-status bachelor males from other bands.
That turned out to be the critical clue. There may be other incentives we don't understand, but it turns out that women genetically "want" both to keep an alpha male faithful and to capture maximum genetic variation in their offspring. Maximum genetic variation increases the chance that some offspring will survive the vicissitudes of rapidly-changing environmental stresses, of which a notably important one is co-evolving parasites and pathogens.
Assume Jane can keep Tarzan around and raise four children. Her best strategy isn't to have all four by Tarzan -- it's to have three by Tarzan and one by some romantic stranger, a bachelor male from another pack. As long as Tarzan doesn't catch them at it, the genes conditioning Jane's sexual strategy get 50% of the reproductive payoff regardless of who the biological father is. If the stranger is a fitter male than the best mate she could keep faithful, so much the better. Her kids will win.
And this isn't just a human strategy either. Similar behavior has been observed in other species with high parental investment, notably among birds.
So. The variation effect predicts that mated women should have a fairly strong genetic incentive to sneak off into the bushes with romantic strangers -- that is, other men who are (a) from outside their local breeding population, and (b) are physically attractive or talented or intelligent, or (c) show other, socially-mediated signs of high fitness (such as wealth or fame).
It may also explain why polyamorism is only now emerging as a social movement, after women's liberation, and why its most energetic partisans tend to be women. Our instincts don't know about contraceptive intervention; from our genes' point of view sexual access is equivalent to reproductive use. As our instincts see it, polyamory (the ideology of open marriage) enables married women to have children with bachelor males without risking losing their husband's providership for any children. Men gain less from the change, because they trade away a claim on exclusive use of their wives' scarce reproductive capacity for what may be only a marginal increase in access to other women (relative to the traditional system combining closed marriage and high rates of covert adultery).
This model may not please prudes and Victorians very much, but at least it explains her cheatin' heart as well as his.
So? Are we genetically programmed to cheat, Or is this a moral choice? Instinct VS intellect? And please can we have more than 3 people give an opinion. I'm sure we ALL have some experience with this subject, whether you were cheated on or did the cheating.
(Source: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/promiscuity.html)
Why do human beings screw around when it complicates our lives so much? Why do we preach fidelity at each other and then, so often, practice adultery? The cheap and obvious answer, "because it feels too good to stop" isn't a good one, as it turns out.
Evolutionary biology teaches us that humans being, like other animals, are adaptive machines; "feels good" is simply instinct's way to steer us towards behaviors that were on average successful for our ancestors. So that answer simply sets up another question: why has our species history favored behavior that is (as the agony columns, bitter ballads, tragic plays and veneral-disease statistics inform us) often destructive to all parties involved?
This question has extra point for humans because human sex and childbirth are risky business compared to that of most of our near relatives. Human infants have huge heads, enough to make giving birth a chancy matter -- and even so, the period during which they remain dependent on nurturing is astonishingly long and requires a lot of parental investment.
If we were redesigning humans to cope with the high investment requirement, one obvious way would be to rewire our instincts such that we pair-bond exclusively for life. It's certainly possible to imagine an evolved variant of humanity in which "infidelity" is never an issue because mated pairs imprint on each other so specifically that nobody else is sexually interesting. Some birds are like this. So why aren't we like this? Why haven't promiscuity and adultery been selected out? What adaptive function do they serve that balances out the risk to offspring from unstable matings?
The route to an answer lies in remembering that evolutionary selection is not a benign planner that tries to maximize group survival but rather a blind competition between individual genetic lines. We need to look more closely at the conflicting strategies used by competing players in the reproduction game.
Male promiscuity has always been relatively easy to understand. While total parental investment needs to be pretty intense, men have a dramatically lower minimum energy and risk investment in children than women do; one index of the difference is that women not infrequently died in childbirth under pre-modern conditions. This means genetic lines propagating through us hairy male types have an optimum strategy that tilts us a little more towards "have lots of offspring and don't nurture much", while women tilt towards "have few offspring, work hard at making sure they survive to breed".
This also explains why cultures that have not developed an explicit ideology of sexual equality invariably take female adultery much more seriously than male adultery. A man who fails to take a grave view of his mate's "unfaithfulness" is risking a much larger fraction of his reproductive potential than a woman who ignores her husband's philandering.
Indeed, there is a sense in which a man who is always "faithful" is under-serving his genes -- and the behavioral tendency to do that will be selected against. His optimal strategy is to be promiscuous enough to pick up opportunities to have his reproductive freight partly paid by other men, while not being so "faithless" that potential mates will consider him a bad risk (e.g. for running off with another woman and abandoning the kids).
What nobody had a good theory for until the mid-1990s was why women cooperate in this behavior. Early sociobiological models of human sexual strategy predicted that women should grab the best provider they could attract and then bend heaven and earth to keep him faithful, because if he screwed around some of his effort would be likely to be directed towards providing for children by other women. In these theories, female abstinence before marriage and fidelity during it was modeled as a trade offered men to keep them faithful in turn; an easy trade, because nobody had noticed any evolutionary incentives for women to cheat on the contract.
In retrospect, the resemblence of the female behavior predicted by these models to conventional moral prescriptions should have raised suspicions about the models themselves -- because they failed to predict the actual pervasiveness of female promiscuity and adultery even in observable behavior, let alone concealed.
Start with a simple one: If the trade-your-fidelity-for-his strategy were really a selective optimum, singles bars wouldn't exist, because genotypes producing women with singles-bar behavior would have been selected out long ago. But there's an even bigger whammy...
Actual paternity/maternity-marker studies in urban populations done under guarantees that one's spouse and others won't see the results have found that the percentage of adulterous children born to married women with ready access to other men can be startlingly high, often in the 25% to 45% range. In most cases, the father has no idea and the mother, in the nature of things, was unsure before the assay.
These statistics cry out for explanation -- and it turns out women do have an evolutionary incentive to screw around. The light began to dawn during studies of chimpanzee populations. Female chimps who spurn low-status bachelor males from their own band are much more willing to have sex with low-status bachelor males from other bands.
That turned out to be the critical clue. There may be other incentives we don't understand, but it turns out that women genetically "want" both to keep an alpha male faithful and to capture maximum genetic variation in their offspring. Maximum genetic variation increases the chance that some offspring will survive the vicissitudes of rapidly-changing environmental stresses, of which a notably important one is co-evolving parasites and pathogens.
Assume Jane can keep Tarzan around and raise four children. Her best strategy isn't to have all four by Tarzan -- it's to have three by Tarzan and one by some romantic stranger, a bachelor male from another pack. As long as Tarzan doesn't catch them at it, the genes conditioning Jane's sexual strategy get 50% of the reproductive payoff regardless of who the biological father is. If the stranger is a fitter male than the best mate she could keep faithful, so much the better. Her kids will win.
And this isn't just a human strategy either. Similar behavior has been observed in other species with high parental investment, notably among birds.
So. The variation effect predicts that mated women should have a fairly strong genetic incentive to sneak off into the bushes with romantic strangers -- that is, other men who are (a) from outside their local breeding population, and (b) are physically attractive or talented or intelligent, or (c) show other, socially-mediated signs of high fitness (such as wealth or fame).
It may also explain why polyamorism is only now emerging as a social movement, after women's liberation, and why its most energetic partisans tend to be women. Our instincts don't know about contraceptive intervention; from our genes' point of view sexual access is equivalent to reproductive use. As our instincts see it, polyamory (the ideology of open marriage) enables married women to have children with bachelor males without risking losing their husband's providership for any children. Men gain less from the change, because they trade away a claim on exclusive use of their wives' scarce reproductive capacity for what may be only a marginal increase in access to other women (relative to the traditional system combining closed marriage and high rates of covert adultery).
This model may not please prudes and Victorians very much, but at least it explains her cheatin' heart as well as his.
So? Are we genetically programmed to cheat, Or is this a moral choice? Instinct VS intellect? And please can we have more than 3 people give an opinion. I'm sure we ALL have some experience with this subject, whether you were cheated on or did the cheating.
Monday, June 14, 2010
The legacy of those who fought for South Africa's freedom....
Submitted by Sandisile
“During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against White domination, and I have fought against Black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal, which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
– Nelson Mandela, Rivonia Trial, 1964
“The struggle must go on – the struggle to make the opportunity for the building to begin. The struggle will go on. I speak humbly and without levity when I say that, God giving me strength and courage enough, I shall die, if need be, for this cause. But I do not want to die until I have seen the building begun. Mayibuye iAfrika! Come, Africa, come!”
– Albert Luthuli, Let My People Go, 1962
Is the present generation of South Africans too self absorbed and concerned with instant gratification to continue the legacy of those who secured the country?
Is there anything worth dying for in South Africa?
Have the efforts of those who fought for freedom been wasted by the youth?
“During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against White domination, and I have fought against Black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal, which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
– Nelson Mandela, Rivonia Trial, 1964
“The struggle must go on – the struggle to make the opportunity for the building to begin. The struggle will go on. I speak humbly and without levity when I say that, God giving me strength and courage enough, I shall die, if need be, for this cause. But I do not want to die until I have seen the building begun. Mayibuye iAfrika! Come, Africa, come!”
– Albert Luthuli, Let My People Go, 1962
Is the present generation of South Africans too self absorbed and concerned with instant gratification to continue the legacy of those who secured the country?
Is there anything worth dying for in South Africa?
Have the efforts of those who fought for freedom been wasted by the youth?
Monday, June 7, 2010
Should This Be the Last Generation?
Submitted by Jerusha
(Article by PETER SINGER,
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.
Have you ever thought about whether to have a child? If so, what factors entered into your decision? Was it whether having children would be good for you, your partner and others close to the possible child, such as children you may already have, or perhaps your parents? For most people contemplating reproduction, those are the dominant questions. Some may also think about the desirability of adding to the strain that the nearly seven billion people already here are putting on our planet’s environment. But very few ask whether coming into existence is a good thing for the child itself. Most of those who consider that question probably do so because they have some reason to fear that the child’s life would be especially difficult — for example, if they have a family history of a devastating illness, physical or mental, that cannot yet be detected prenatally.
All this suggests that we think it is wrong to bring into the world a child whose prospects for a happy, healthy life are poor, but we don’t usually think the fact that a child is likely to have a happy, healthy life is a reason for bringing the child into existence. This has come to be known among philosophers as “the asymmetry” and it is not easy to justify. But rather than go into the explanations usually proffered — and why they fail — I want to raise a related problem. How good does life have to be, to make it reasonable to bring a child into the world? Is the standard of life experienced by most people in developed nations today good enough to make this decision unproblematic, in the absence of specific knowledge that the child will have a severe genetic disease or other problem?
If there were to be no future generations, there would be nothing for us to feel to guilty about. Is there anything wrong with this scenario?
The 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer held that even the best life possible for humans is one in which we strive for ends that, once achieved, bring only fleeting satisfaction. New desires then lead us on to further futile struggle and the cycle repeats itself.
Schopenhauer’s pessimism has had few defenders over the past two centuries, but one has recently emerged, in the South African philosopher David Benatar, author of a fine book with an arresting title: “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence.” One of Benatar’s arguments trades on something like the asymmetry noted earlier. To bring into existence someone who will suffer is, Benatar argues, to harm that person, but to bring into existence someone who will have a good life is not to benefit him or her. Few of us would think it right to inflict severe suffering on an innocent child, even if that were the only way in which we could bring many other children into the world. Yet everyone will suffer to some extent, and if our species continues to reproduce, we can be sure that some future children will suffer severely. Hence continued reproduction will harm some children severely, and benefit none.
Erin Schell Benatar also argues that human lives are, in general, much less good than we think they are. We spend most of our lives with unfulfilled desires, and the occasional satisfactions that are all most of us can achieve are insufficient to outweigh these prolonged negative states. If we think that this is a tolerable state of affairs it is because we are, in Benatar’s view, victims of the illusion of pollyannaism. This illusion may have evolved because it helped our ancestors survive, but it is an illusion nonetheless. If we could see our lives objectively, we would see that they are not something we should inflict on anyone.
Here is a thought experiment to test our attitudes to this view. Most thoughtful people are extremely concerned about climate change. Some stop eating meat, or flying abroad on vacation, in order to reduce their carbon footprint. But the people who will be most severely harmed by climate change have not yet been conceived. If there were to be no future generations, there would be much less for us to feel to guilty about.
So why don’t we make ourselves the last generation on earth? If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required — we could party our way into extinction!
Of course, it would be impossible to get agreement on universal sterilization, but just imagine that we could. Then is there anything wrong with this scenario? Even if we take a less pessimistic view of human existence than Benatar, we could still defend it, because it makes us better off — for one thing, we can get rid of all that guilt about what we are doing to future generations — and it doesn’t make anyone worse off, because there won’t be anyone else to be worse off.
Is a world with people in it better than one without? Put aside what we do to other species — that’s a different issue. Let’s assume that the choice is between a world like ours and one with no sentient beings in it at all. And assume, too — here we have to get fictitious, as philosophers often do — that if we choose to bring about the world with no sentient beings at all, everyone will agree to do that. No one’s rights will be violated — at least, not the rights of any existing people. Can non-existent people have a right to come into existence?
I do think it would be wrong to choose the non-sentient universe. In my judgment, for most people, life is worth living. Even if that is not yet the case, I am enough of an optimist to believe that, should humans survive for another century or two, we will learn from our past mistakes and bring about a world in which there is far less suffering than there is now. But justifying that choice forces us to reconsider the deep issues with which I began. Is life worth living? Are the interests of a future child a reason for bringing that child into existence? And is the continuance of our species justifiable in the face of our knowledge that it will certainly bring suffering to innocent future human beings?
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