Michael Totten is in Fallujah. “Nobody was shot last night in Fallujah. No American has been shot anywhere in Fallujah since the 3rd Battalion 5th Marine Regiment rotated into the city two months ago. There have been no rocket or mortar attacks since the summer. Not a single of the 3/5 Marines has even been wounded.”
(Source: PoliticalBetting.com. Based on a poll for the Political Studies Association of 300 politics academics in UK universities.)
Oh, you thought intelligence and political conviction were necessary in order to be a good Prime Minister? That’s so cute.
While we’re thinking about infectious disease: how I love the complexity theory boffins at the Santa Fe Institute. This month they’ve been thinking about the role played by fear in how infectious diseases spread, under the glorious title of “Coupled Contagion Dynamics of Fear and Disease“. Here’s the abstract:
We model two interacting contagion processes: one of disease and one of fear of the disease. Individuals can “contract” fear through contact with individuals who are infected with the disease (the sick), infected with fear only (the scared), and infected with both fear and disease (the sick and scared). Scared individuals–whether sick or not–may remove themselves from circulation with some probability, which affects the contact of individuals and thus the disease epidemic proper. If we allow individuals to recover from fear and return to circulation, the coupled dynamics become quite rich, and include multiple waves of infection, such as occurred in the 1918 flu pandemic. We also study flight as a behavioral response. In a spatially extended setting, even relatively small levels of fear-inspired flight can have a dramatic impact on spatio-temporal epidemic dynamics.
In short: freaking out can be a highly constructive component of resilience strategies.
It should probably set alarm bells ringing automatically when you read stories that begin like this:
A mysterious fever has killed 14 people and infected 37 others in western Uganda over the last three months, a Health Ministry official said on Friday.
as this Reuters story did on November 16th. It’s now clear that the illness is a new strain of Ebola – that kills victims of fever, rather than hemorrhagic bleeding. The BBC says Kenya has set up screening stations on the border. Ebola’s fatal in 80 per cent of cases, and there’s no cure. The Avian Flu Diary blog has a hair-raising photo that shows the weaknesses in the local public health system: the nurse has no gloves, no goggles, and an inadequate surgical mask.
The UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC) have just launched a major three year programme to work with religions on climate change. Details:
The UN Development Programme (UNDP) and ARC will manage the programme which involves major traditions in eleven of the world’s faiths drawing up seven-year plans of action to be launched in early 2009 at Windsor Castle, and to run through to 2016.
Baha’i, Buddhist, Christian, Daoist, Hindu, Jain, Jewish, Muslim, Shinto, Sikh and Zoroastrian leaders will each be invited to commit their faith and their followers to projects and programmes that will address climate change and the protection of the natural environment in practical ways – from forestry conservation to organic farming schemes to introducing, promoting and financing alternative energy sources.
“This is an extremely exciting development which will have a real and long lasting impact on the health of the environment and on people’s lives,” said ARC’s secretary general Martin Palmer, who is working as a co-chair on this programme with the UNDP’s deputy director Olav Kjorven.
Interesting factoid: religious faiths own more than 7% of habitable land on the planet (so ARC say, at least).
