Author Archives: markdowe1

Britain, France, Government, Russia, Syria, United States

Lord Hague: We must act now to stop chemical warfare

SYRIA

Intro: Lord Hague, the former foreign secretary, says we must hold Assad to account with force to prevent future suffering

CHEMICAL weapons will become “legitimised” and used in future wars if the West fails to take military action against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. That’s the view of Lord Hague, the former foreign secretary, who says that he is in “little doubt” that if he were still in office today, he would recommend military intervention in Syria.

He also adds: “The world has succeeded for nearly a century in preventing the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield. Once we accept that it is just another aspect of war that is what it will become in the conflicts of coming decades, with an arms race in chemical agents steadily expanded and legitimised.”

Theresa May has suggested that Britain was prepared to join any action by the US and France, warning that the Syrian government “must be held to account” for the “barbaric” attack on eastern Ghouta.

It is understood that Cabinet ministers are urging the Prime Minister to avoid the potential “fiasco” of a Commons defeat on military action, such as that suffered by David Cameron in 2013, and instead take direct measures.

Mrs May has been warned that failure to join a coalition with the US and France could diminish Britain’s international standing.

President Donald Trump has said that he would come to a decision on the American response to the chemical weapons attacks within the “next 24 to 48 hours”. Mr Trump who has liaised with Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has pledged a “strong, joint response”.

Potential British action could involve cruise missiles being launched from the Mediterranean or sorties flown by RAF Tornado fighter jets.

Lord (William) Hague was foreign secretary when the government lost its vote for action in Syria, which is widely considered to have emboldened the Assad regime. Recalling the aftermath of the defeat, Lord Hague says the UK became “enfeebled spectators of one of the most destructive conflagrations of our time.”

“We were left with only words, and compared to other nations financing armies or sending forces, words count for very little… We should have learnt from the fiasco of 2013 that abdication of the responsibility and right to act doesn’t make war go away.”

 

AT LEAST 70 people were killed in the attack on the rebel-held town of Douma. A US navy destroyer appeared to be getting into position to attack in the eastern Mediterranean yesterday in what is being viewed as a sign of potential cruise missile strikes. Tensions have been further heightened by a reported Israeli attack on a Syrian air base.

UK ministers are particularly concerned that Jeremy Corbyn is likely to oppose any direct military intervention in a Commons vote. The Labour leader has been criticised by his MPs for failing to single out the Assad regime, instead condemning “all violence” and “all killings”.

Many on the Conservative benches will hold the view as to why would we want to open that Pandora’s box again? They will suggest, rightly, that there’s no need to go there, and that the Prime Minister should take direct action then go to Parliament afterwards. The Government has no obligation to call a Commons vote on military action, but in recent years it has become more of a convention in doing so.

One government minister said that the chemical weapons attack was “another consequence of blinking” in the 2013 vote, and warned: “We must stand up to Syria”.

In a warning to Syria and Russia, Mrs May said: “This is about the brutal actions of Assad and his regime, but it is also about the backers of that regime.”

 

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Arts, History, Science

Quantum Leaps: Charles Darwin

1809 – 1881

Darwin2

Darwin: ‘Man, with all his noble qualities, still bears the stamp of his lowly origin.’

THE spark for Darwin’s accomplishments was ignited with the 1831 HMS Beagle expedition, which was to chart coastlines in the South Americas and other areas of the Pacific. Darwin, supposedly studying religion at the time, had become increasingly absorbed with natural history and persuaded the Professor of Botany, John Henslow, to put him forward for the post of unpaid naturalist on the Beagle’s voyage. He thereby abandoned his university studies. His father, and initially the vessel’s Captain FitzRoy, resisted, but he eventually persuaded them to let him take part in the five-year expedition.

 

DURING the journey, Darwin made many geological and biological observations, but it was his time spent around the Galapagos Islands which would end up having the most significant impact on him. The ten islands are relatively isolated, even from each other, and as such act as a series of distinct observatories through which Darwin could draw comparisons. He noted that the islands shared many species of flora and fauna in common, but that each land mass often displayed distinct variations within the same group of organisms. For example, he famously noted fourteen different types of finch across the islands, notably with different shaped beaks. In each instance the particular beak seemed to best suit the capture of that bird’s prevalent food source, whether it be seeds, insects or fish.

Over the ensuing years, and upon his return to England, Darwin pondered on the reasons for the variations in the finches and other plants and animals. He soon surmised that the birds had descended from a single parent species, rather than each springing up independently. From this, he acknowledged the idea of evolution, a concept which had existed for some time but was not widely accepted. Darwin began looking for an explanation for this evolution. One text which had a particular impact on him was Thomas Malthus’s 1798 work An Essay on the Principle of Population which Darwin read in 1838. Malthus had been concerned with overpopulation resulting in famine, and the possible competition for food which would ensue. Darwin immediately saw that this could also be applied to the animal world too, where only those best adapted to food collection in their environments would survive. Those that could not compete would die out and the characteristics of the successful animals, which may have occurred in the first place by chance, would be passed onto future generations. As environments changed and animals moved about, success criteria would change, gradually resulting in variations within species, as had happened with the finches. Ultimately, new species would also be created.

 

UNFORTUNATELY, such a hypothesis would challenge the commonly held view of man as the lord of the earth, specifically created and placed upon the planet in God’s image – as described in Genesis in the Bible. Darwin was implicitly suggesting that man had evolved by chance over thousands of years. He correctly anticipated uproar and resistance to his ideas, particularly from religions leaders. Consequently, he kept his theories dark for twenty years while he gathered additional evidence to back up his case.

He finally published in 1858. He did this jointly with Alfred Russell Wallace (1823–1913), whose independent ideas were remarkably similar to Darwin’s. They agreed to a joint public declaration of their hypotheses by submission of a paper to the Linnean Society. Darwin followed this up with a more detailed account in 1859 containing evidence he had collected over the previous decades called On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

The predicted outcry ensued and a fierce debate followed, but Darwin already had a number of close associates, particularly Thomas Huxley, known as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, who would vigorously defend his ideas. This left Darwin free to follow through further implications of his hypothesis in other works, including the 1871 text The Descent of Man, which articulated the idea of the evolution of the human race from other creatures.

THE LEGACY OF DARWIN

Darwin’s ideas took a long time to become generally accepted (even today they are not embraced by everyone), challenging as they did all previous conceptions of what is meant to be human.

As has been the case with so many scientists, he encountered particularly fierce opposition from the Church, whose members preferred the safety of a sacred text to the uncertainties of observation and experiment.

The idea of evolution through natural selection is, however, at the heart of modern biology. The man who disappointed his father for lack of academic interest had eventually gone on to turn an entire branch of academia on its head.

CHRONOLOGY

. 1831–36 Darwin takes the job of unpaid naturalist aboard HMS Beagle

. 1859 Publishes The Origin of Species

. 1871 Publishes The Descent of Man

. 1881 Dies and is buried at Westminster Abbey

. See also Quantum Leaps: ‘Galileo Galilei’…

RELATED: THOMAS MALTHUS

Previously written by the site author and filed on November 23, 2007 on another domain:

The Concept of ‘Overpopulation’

In 500 BC, the Chinese philosopher Han Fei–Tzu wrote:

…“In ancient times, people were few but wealthy and without strife. People nowadays think that five sons are not too many. Each son has five sons too and before the grandfather dies there are already 25 descendants. Therefore, people are more and wealth is less; they work hard and receive little. The life of a nation depends on having enough food, not upon the number of people.”

 

THIS is the earliest known comment on birth rates and population growth, and the earliest statement of the concept of over-population.

They were ideas that would return again and again in antiquity. Aristotle emphasized the need for food production to keep pace with population growth:

“When there are too many farmers the excess will be of the best kind; when there are too many labourers and mechanics, it will be of the worst kind.”

The concerns of the philosophers were justified. The population of the world grew steadily from 3-million in 10,000 BC to 250-million by the time of Christ.

Malthus concluded that the poor-law system at the time in England, with its indiscriminate doles given to large families, was actually destructive rather than helpful. Saying so seemed, and to many still seems, heartless and illiberal but it was an honest inference logically arrived at. It was not surprising then that his book provoked a storm of controversy. Malthus offered readers the hope that the birth rate might be reduced by sexual abstinence and the use of birth control – and reducing the birth rate was the answer.

 

IN MODERN TIMES the person who did most to draw attention to the dangers of overpopulation was Thomas Malthus. In 1798, at the age of 32, he published his great work, ‘Essay on the Principle of Population.’ In this landmark book, Malthus maintained that optimistic views regarding population are groundless, and that population has a tendency to increase faster than the means of maintaining it. Food production increases at an arithmetic rate; population increases at a geometric rate. In other words, human population will go on increasing until there is no food left, or until there is some other check, such as pestilence or war, and then collapse through famine.

But was Malthus wrong? Writing at the end of the eighteenth century, he was unaware of the effects that improved transport in the form of steamships and railways would have. He was unaware that colonization of new regions would open up new areas to food production. As a result, the population collapse he predicted was long delayed. He may not have been wrong in the long term, of course – only wrong for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The ideas of Malthus also lay behind the scare-mongering that went on in the 1960s and 1970s, when many influential economists and ecologists argued that human population growth was running out of control – that starvation lay just round the corner. The simple Malthusian model may work well for organisms that depend on a narrow range of foods, but the human race is far more complicated than that. People have been able to develop new high-yield strains of wheat, rice and other key foods, so that the food supply is more elastic than once thought. The over-population scare campaigns of the 1960s and 70s nevertheless generated a great deal of interest in population control, and most countries now have more or less effective birth control programmes in place. Some countries, such as Singapore, have found that their attempts to reduce the birth rate were too effective and they now need to encourage people to have more children in order to meet all their labour needs.

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Arts, Drama

Lateral Thinking Drama: Highly Strung

 

Alfonzo the Magnificent bowed to the audience. He put his hands into the bowel of chalk and clapped them together. The band stopped playing and the drum-roll began. All the spotlights were fixed on Alfonzo as he began to climb the ladder up to the platform thirty feet in the air.

. You might also like Lateral Thinking Drama: ‘The Lost Idol’

Waiting for him at the top of the ladder was his beautiful assistant, Clara, dressed in a pink bodysuit and wearing a crown of white ostrich feathers. When he stepped onto the platform, she handed him the balancing pole. The drum-roll ceased, and a hush fell over the crowd. The air was hot and humid at the top of the circus tent, and Alfonzo gave Clara the signal to wipe his brow with a lace handkerchief. She then dangled the handkerchief in mid-air, at the end of her long, outstretched fingers and let it drop slowly to the ground. There was no safety net to catch the flimsy, white square as it floated down to the ring below, and people shifted nervously in their seats, craning to get a better look at the little man in the black tuxedo perched like a penguin in the sky.

The circus master tapped the end of his microphone and circled the ring, flicking the electrical cord like a whip. “Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, Alfonzo the Magnificent, tightrope walker extraordinaire, will perform a death-defying feat. There is no safety net to catch him if he falls, so I urge the audience to remain quiet throughout, and please refrain from taking any pictures as the flash might distract our performer. Good luck, Alfonzo. Now on with the show!”

Creative Writing

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Alfonzo looked straight ahead. He slid a slippered foot onto the wire and adjusted the pole in his hands. He slid his other foot out and steadied himself. He slowly raised his left foot and circled it around his right, then slid it forward. He heard a man cough in the darkness below him but continued to stare straight ahead. When Alfonzo reached the centre of the wire, he stopped. He raised himself onto the balls of his feet, threw his pole into the air and the crowd gasped. Alfonzo spun around, then caught the pole again. He teetered to one side, tottered to the other, while the audience below oohed and aahed. He managed to stabilise himself and continued on towards the other platform. When he reached it, there was an explosion of cheering and whistling. Sweat broke out on Alfonzo’s forehead as he raised his hand in the air and bowed again with a flourish.

After the performance, as Alfonzo was wiping his make-up off, his old rival, Guiseppe, burst into the dressing room.

“So, you think you are the best tightrope walker in the whole of Argentina?” Guiseppe said.

“Well, they don’t call me Alfonzo the Magnificent for nothing,” Alfonzo replied. “I know how to please a crowd. It is I they want, not some third-rate amateur like yourself.”

“I am not here for insults, Alfonzo. I came here to challenge you to the tightrope duel of your life. I dare you to meet me at the Plaza Maria on Thursday week, at midnight, where we will judge, once and for all, who is the best.”

“I am the best!” Alfonzo cried. “I am the best in Buenos Aires, the best in Argentina and perhaps even the best in the world!”

“Then prove it,” Guiseppe said, slamming the door on his way out.

Nine days later, Alfonzo looked at himself in the mirror and adjusted his bow tie. It was eleven o’clock on Thursday night, one hour before the duel. He picked up his pole and his bucket of chalk and headed for the door. He felt a slight foreboding but chose to ignore it.

As he approached the Plaza Maria, he could hear the crowd that had gathered to watch. He turned a corner and saw the plaza at the far end of the street. There were lights strung up between the buildings, and high above the square, Alfonzo saw the silver wire gleaming like a blade between the cathedral spire and the balcony of the Italian Embassy building. In the centre of the plaza, a man on a unicycle was juggling tenpins. As he got closer, he saw a woman with a snake wrapped around her shoulders.

When Guiseppe arrived, they tossed a coin to see who would go first. It landed heads up, and Alfonzo prepared himself to climb the ladder. He dusted his hands and looped the pole through his belt at the small of his back. He took one step and paused, then continued his ascent. The wire was a hundred feet up in the air and it took Alfonzo five and a half minutes to reach the top. When he stepped onto the slanted roof of the cathedral spire, he noticed a chill in the air. He could not hear the crowd for the wind in his ears.

From the ground, Guiseppe watched Alfonzo pull the pole out from under his belt and lay it across his hands. Alfonzo waited for a moment and then slid one foot out onto the wire. Just as he was about to lift his other foot, his body jerked, and the pole slid through his hands. He bent to retrieve it, but it was too late. It had started to slide down the roof. It slipped off the edge and fell down into the crowd. Alfonzo turned and started back down the ladder.

When he got to the bottom, Guiseppe was waiting for him.

“What on earth are you doing?” he screamed.

“I can’t go on like this,” Alfonzo said, pushing Guiseppe aside and striding off through the plaza and down a main street. Guiseppe set off after him.

Alfonzo stopped in front of the entrance to a bar and looked up at the sign. The bar belonged to a friend of his, and he opened the door and walked in. He walked over to the counter and ordered a glass of water. The bartender smiled knowingly at him, took a revolver out from under the bar and shot a bullet into the ceiling. After waiting a few moments, Alfonzo thanked his friend and they shook hands. He turned and left the bar without taking a sip of his water.

Why did the bartender shoot the ceiling, and why did Alfonzo thank him? 

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