by Laura Knight Jadczyk with Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Ph.D.
Pathocracy is a disease of great social movements followed by entire societies, nations, and empires. In the course of human history, it has affected social, political, and religious movements as well as the accompanying ideologies… and turned them into caricatures of themselves…. This occurred as a result of the … participation of pathological agents in a pathodynamically similar process. That explains why all the pathocracies of the world are, and have been, so similar in their essential properties. …
Identifying these phenomena through history and properly qualifying them according to their true nature and contents - not according to the ideology in question, which succumbed to the process of caricaturization - is a job for historians. […]
The actions of [pathocracy] affect an entire society, starting with the leaders and infiltrating every town, business, and institution. The pathological social structure gradually covers the entire country creating a “new class” within that nation. This privileged class feels permanently threatened by the “others”, i.e. by the majority of normal people. Neither do the pathocrats entertain any illusions about their personal fate should there be a return to the system of normal man. Link to full article
Ian Sample, science correspondent
Thursday November 17, 2005
The Guardian
The world's poorest countries face a dramatic rise in deaths from disease and malnutrition as a direct result of climate change driven by wealthier, more polluting countries, scientists say today.
The researchers reached the conclusion after constructing a map showing how climate change will affect different regions of the world by making infectious diseases more rampant and damaging local agriculture.
The picture that emerges shows the least wealthy countries with the lowest greenhouse gas emissions as the most vulnerable. They can expect a doubling of deaths from malaria, diarrhoeal diseases and malnutrition by 2030 as a result of climate change.
In a previous study, the World Health Organisation said climate change caused by industrial emissions already accounts for at least 5 million cases of illness and more than 150,000 deaths each year.
The scientists, whose research is published in Nature today, created the map by collating published studies linking disease and agriculture to temperature and weather variations.
One study showed that in certain South American countries, a 1C rise in temperature caused an 8% increase in diarrhoeal diseases. "The map shows that the health impact of climate change disproportionately affects poorer countries that in my view have no responsibility for global warming. It's completely unethical and it cannot be ignored," said Jonathan Patz, the study's lead scientist at the University of Wisconsin.
Regions at highest risk included the coastlines of the Pacific and Indian oceans and sub-Saharan Africa.
The report says more resources to combat disease in poor countries combined with long-term cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are needed to limit the effects on poorer countries. Climate change exacerbates problems poor countries face from disease, largely because bacteria spread more rapidly, causing greater contamination of food and water.
Forecasts of climate change also predict more erratic weather patterns for many countries, wreaking havoc with subsistence farming and adding to the burden of malnutrition. The report comes two weeks before signatories of the Kyoto protocol meet in Montreal for the first time since it was ratified in February. The US, which emits 24% of the world's greenhouse gases, making it the world's most polluting country, has refused to sign up to Kyoto on the grounds that it would hamper financial growth.
TOLL COULD DOUBLE BY 2030; ILLNESS FIGURES ALSO RISING
By Juliet Eilperin
THE WASHINGTON POST
Earth's warming climate is estimated to contribute to more than 150,000 deaths and 5 million illnesses each year, according to the World Health Organization, a toll that could double by 2030.
The data, published yesterday in the journal Nature, indicate that climate change is driving up rates of malaria, malnutrition and diarrhea worldwide.
Health and climate scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison -- who conducted one of the most comprehensive efforts yet to measure the effect of global warming on health -- said the WHO data also show that rising temperatures disproportionately affect poor countries. The scientists reached their conclusions after plugging data on climate-sensitive diseases into mapping software.
The regions most at risk from climate change include the Asian and South American Pacific coasts, as well as the Indian Ocean coast and sub-Saharan Africa. Large cities are also likely to experience more severe health problems because they produce what scientists refer to as urban "heat island" effect.
Just this week, WHO officials reported that warmer temperatures and heavy rains in South Asia have led to the worst outbreak of dengue fever there in years. The mosquito-borne illness, now beginning to taper off, has infected 120,000 South Asians this year and killed at least 1,000.
Senior U.S. and international officials said they now regard climate change as a major public health threat. Howard Frumkin, who directs the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called climate change "a significant global health challenge" in an interview this week.
Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, a WHO scientist, said initial estimates of global warming-related deaths are conservative in light of Europe's massive 2003 heat wave and new research linking climate change to greater hurricane activity.
"Climate change makes it even more important to combat diseases of the poor, many of which are highly climate-sensitive," said Campbell-Lendrum, who co-authored the Nature paper with Jonathan Patz, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "We already have good evidence that there are a series of significant risks to health, which makes it even more important to curb greenhouse gas emissions in a short period of time."
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
If emissions of heat-trapping gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere at the current rate, there may be many centuries of warming and a near-total loss of Arctic tundra, according to a new climate study.
Over all, the world would experience profound transformations, some potentially beneficial but many disruptive, and all at a pace rarely seen in nature, said the authors of the study, being published today in The Journal of Climate.
"The question is no longer whether we will need to address this problem, but when we will need to address the problem," said Kenneth Caldeira, an author of the study and a climate expert at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, based at Stanford University.
Link to full story
WPost Wed Nov 2, 2005 WASHINGTON (Reuters)
The CIA has been holding and interrogating al Qaeda captives at a secret facility in Eastern Europe, part of a covert prison system established after the September 11, 2001, attacks, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
The Soviet-era compound is part of a network that has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand and Afghanistan, the newspaper reported, citing U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.
The newspaper said the existence and locations of the facilities are known only to a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.
The CIA has not acknowledged the existence of a secret prison network, the Post said. A CIA spokesman did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
The prisons are referred to as "black sites" in classified U.S. documents and virtually nothing is known about who the detainees are, how they are interrogated or about decisions on how long they will be held, the report said. [...]
The secret detention system was conceived shortly after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, when the working assumption was that another strike was imminent, the report said. LINK
