THE OLD, OLD STORY

From: Trees and crops reclaim desert in Niger (Lydia Polgreen, International Herald Tribune, February 10th, 2007)

In this dust-choked region, long seen as an increasingly barren wasteland decaying into desert, millions of trees are flourishing, thanks in part to poor farmers whose simple methods cost little or nothing at all.

Better conservation and improved rainfall have led to at least 3 million newly tree-covered hectares, or 7.4 million acres, in Niger, researchers have found. And this has been achieved largely without relying on the large- scale planting of trees or other expensive methods often advocated by African politicians and aid groups for halting desertification, the process by which soil loses its fertility.

Recent studies of vegetation patterns, based on detailed satellite images and on-the-ground inventories of trees, have found that Niger, a place of persistent hunger and deprivation, has recently added millions of new trees and is now far greener than it was 30 years ago.

These gains, moreover, have come at a time when the population of Niger has exploded, confounding the conventional wisdom that population growth leads to the loss of trees and accelerates land degradation, scientists studying Niger say. The vegetation is densest, researchers have found, in some of the most densely populated regions of the country.

Absent: Population control, foreign aid, state planning, NGO’s, mega-projects, high-tech.

Present: Community cohesion, self-reliance, private property.

OF COURSE, THE GERMANS THINK PIE-THROWING IS IRONIC

From: What are you laughing at? (Simon Pegg, The Guardian, February 10th, 2007)

You could spend a lot of time exploring the differences between British and American comedy only to reach the conclusion that, ironically, they're pretty much the same. Back when director Edgar Wright and myself were writing our debut feature, Shaun Of The Dead, we were certainly banking on a comic universality in the story of a suburban waster battling the living dead. We had every confidence that the humour would translate. Indeed, we made only one subtle dialogue adjustment during the writing process, changing the word "pissed" to "drunk", so as to avoid any confusion between the conditions of being munted and mardy. The film went on to enjoy surprising success in the US, suggesting that surmounting the supposed gulf between our respective senses of humour requires nothing more than a light skip.

When it comes to humour, however, there is one cultural myth that just won't die. You hear it all the time from self-appointed social commentators sat astride high horses, dressed as knights who say, "Ni". They don't get it. They never had it. They don't know what it is and, ironically, they don't want it anyway. That's right: "Americans don't do irony." This isn't strictly true. Although it is true that we British do use irony a little more often than our special friends in the US. It's like the kettle to us: it's always on, whistling slyly in the corner of our daily interactions. To Americans, however, it's more like a nice teapot, something to be used when the occasion demands it.

Which lead to the obvious question: is it the ultimate irony that a Brit who goes on incessantly about how North Americans don’t get irony really doesn’t understand irony?

WE WILL NOW PASS THE COLLECTION PLATE

From: The green fervour (Joseph Brean, National Post, February 10th, 2007)

In his new book Apollo’’s Arrow, ambitiously subtitled The Science of Prediction and the Future of Everything, Vancouver-based author and mathematician David Orrell set out to explain why the mathematical models scientists use to predict the weather, the climate and the economy are not getting any better, just more refined in their uncertainty.

What he discovered, in trying to sketch the first principles of prophecy, was the religious nature of modern environmentalism.

That’s ok, we believe strongly in freedom of religion, but we draw the line at compulsory tithing.

YOU SHOULD SEE THE SON ET LUMIERE WHEN THEY INTEND TO DIVIDE

From: Scientists becoming mind-readers (Roger Highfield, The Telegraph, February 9th, 2007)

Scientists have edged closer to mind-reading by using brain scanners to measure changes in blood flow that signal a person's intent to do something.

Every day numerous actions are planned, such as returning a book to a friend, shopping or making an appointment.

But how and where the brain stores these intentions has been revealed thanks to a study that unveils the intentions in the brain.

The work is remarkable because it has never before been possible to deduce from brain activity how a person has decided to act in the future.

The feat is reported today in the journal Current Biology by Prof John-Dylan Haynes from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, working in co-operation with Prof Richard Passingham from University of Oxford, Prof Geraint Rees, Sam Gilbert, and Prof Chris Frith of University College London and Prof Katsayuki Sakai from Tokyo.

The scientists let subjects choose freely and covertly between two tasks, either to add or subtract two numbers. The subjects were then asked to hold in mind their intention for a few seconds until the relevant numbers were presented on a screen.

Using a brain scan method called functional magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers were able to recognise the subjects' intentions with 70 per cent accuracy based on their brain activity alone, even before the participants had seen the numbers and had started to perform the calculation.

OK, we’ll stick our necks out and indulge in a little blind, uninformed second-guessing here:

A) Given a choice between adding and subtracting two unknown numbers, isn’t it a fair bet that most folks–maybe as many as 70%–would choose to add? Might not most folks be just a tiny bit more stressed or pumped by the prospect of subtraction?

B) Note that by the third paragraph, intentions appear to have become animate objects independent of us that are “stored” somewhere. What happens if they are unfulfilled or we change our minds? Do they rot?

C) How is this mind-reading when the choice was ordained and it was a condition of the experiment that nobody change their minds?

In other words, does this experiment indicate anything more than that different mental processes may have different physical manifestations in the brain, and what exactly is so novel or surprising about that?

Before we leave you cleverer chaps to ponder all this and help us out, we simply have to note that this report earns our award for most creative trumping of ethical concerns by the promise of future medical benefits. In the face of sombre fears about how all this may herald a dark age marked by the total destruction of personal privacy and rampant Big Brother totalitarianism, we are asked to balance such mundane matters against this important upside:

The understanding could find use in mind-reading methods under development to enable tetraplegics to move prosthetic limbs and operate computers.

HONOUR TO THEM, ALL THE REST OF THEIR DAYS

From: Military makeover (Andrew Duffy, The Ottawa Citizen, February 9th, 2007)

When the Canadian War Museum opens a new exhibit today that promises "a glimpse of war" in Afghanistan, the rebranding of the Canadian soldier as a creature of combat will take another giant leap forward.

The exhibit, designed to convey the human experience of Canadian soldiers and Afghan civilians, features wreckage from a Canadian military vehicle destroyed by a roadside bomb and Canadian Press photos of soldiers in combat.

It's one of the only times the museum has mounted an exhibit of an ongoing war.

"This exhibition," museum director Joe Geurts has said, "will offer a glimpse of a current conflict, one involving Canadians in the type of heavy combat we have not seen since the Korean War."

The groundbreaking exhibit also promises to accelerate the image makeover of the Canadian soldier from peacekeeper to combatant.

Historian Jack Granatstein, author of a new book, "Whose War Is It? How Canada Can Survive in the Post 9/11 World," said the rebranding is overdue.

During the past two decades, he said, Canadian troops have faced combat situations in Croatia, Kosovo and Somalia, but the "pernicious" idea of the soldier as peacekeeper has been difficult to displace.

"It seems to me it has taken Afghanistan, and what is clearly combat against an irregular force, to bring the combat soldiers back into the Canadian consciousness," Mr. Granatstein said in an interview.

"The peacekeeping mythology has been a terrible drag on us."

A gentleman was once defined as one who thinks his wife is the most beautiful woman in the world, but doesn’t talk about it. That seems to describe the near-unspoken pride more and more Canadians are taking in their long-patronized and marginalized Forces.

Despite marshaling herculean efforts in the world wars and doing its full share in Korea, Canada really has no tradition of a military ethos outside of historical garrison towns like Halifax. This is especially true of the urban well-to-do, for whom any connection to the military through friends or family is rare. For most of us, soldiers and sailors are high school grads from small towns one might occasionally come across in a bus station if one were the sort of person who frequented bus stations.

Beginning in the ‘60s, the military complement and budget were slashed repeatedly to ultimately laughable levels. The Forces became the politically impotent plaything of left-liberal tranzi impulses that even Conservative governments were prey to, and they were subjected not only to repeated financial squeezes, but also to wave after wave of spirit-destroying “rational” reorganizations, bureaucratic corruption, political correctness and open careerism in the officer ranks, all the while being forced to make do with near welfare-level pay and equipment older than they were. The warrior impulse was disdained as an un-Canadian anachronism and statues of peacekeepers (for some reason always looking afar through binoculars) started to pop up to overshadow memorials to the dead of past struggles. There was no political constituency to challenge all this. How the rank and file kept up any morale at all is a mystery, but they did.

In the panic following 9/11, the Forces were ordered not to wear their uniforms in public to avoid attracting terrorists. The response was the closest thing to a general mutiny in Canadian history and the order was rescinded within two days. In late 2001, the navy was sent off to Asia by a leftist Governor-General who told them they were going to fight for peace, which earned her silent stares and a lot of flak in the media. The Liberals famously passed on Iraq, but budgets started to climb and in 2005 a tough-talking new Commander took over and began using language nobody had heard for generations. Many of us held our breaths waiting for him to be sacrificed to political correctness by the many powerful defenders of four decades of leftist transnationalism, but not a word was said. Suddenly and for the first time in living memory, everybody sensed the troops were being prepared for inevitable death.

Since last year, 45 Canadians have been killed in Afghanistan, inconsequential by American standards, but the West's third highest sacrifice in the war on terror. Morale has never been higher and recruitment applications have soared. A couple of leftist parliamentarians tried to do Cindy Sheehans over early casualties and were publically put down by bereaved, but proud families. No one has tried that for some time. Recently, several NHL games have featured Armed Forces Appreciation Days, which would have been unthinkable and embarrassing a few years ago. Although fairly subdued affairs, the cameras pan huge crowds applauding reservedly but endlessly in open respect and even awe of the troops gathered in combat fatigues on the ice. Until a few years ago, recruitment ads for the Forces were feel-good films of young folks having a ball visiting exciting places and getting a free education in gender-balanced harmony. “There’s no life like it” was the title of the accompanying jingle. They are gone and instead middle Canada is now being sobered by this ad (Click "Fight Fear") between contestants on American Idol.

What this all means for the war is hard to say. Polls show the country is split and it isn’t easy to see how Afghanistan can keep on indefinitely when the U.S. is more and more openly looking for an exit from Iraq. Even in the face of spectacular successes in battle, there is still plenty of the fussy equivocation and self-righteousness we’re famous for. But even among many liberals and progressives, one senses a confused new-found admiration for the uniform that transcends politics and that one hopes will finally erase past humiliations and restore the well-earned stature of the brave men and women of the Canadian Forces.

BUT WE HAVE SHARPLY REDUCED OUR HOT AIR EMISSIONS

From: Emissions report card puts Canada last (Martin Mittelstaedt, Globe and Mail, February 8th, 2007)

Canada ranks dead last among members of the G8 industrialized countries when it comes to keeping a pledge made last year to fight climate change by reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, according to a report prepared by researchers at the University of Toronto.

Canada was the only Group of Eight country deemed to have posted a complete lack of compliance with the greenhouse-gas reduction goal set at last summer's G8 summit in St. Petersburg.

Canada has "no plan" to cut its emissions in the short or long term, and could have rising output of the gases blamed for global warming under the Conservatives' Clean Air Act because the legislation doesn't cap releases, the report said.

Ottawa has announced that Canada will reduce greenhouse emissions by 45 per cent -- to 65 per cent -- by 2050, but the report noted that as of Dec. 31, the date at which it conducted the country comparisons, "Canada had not taken significant steps to curb GHG emissions, nor did it have a plan in place to move forward on meeting its Kyoto-mandated targets nor the ambitious 2050 targets."[...]

Canada's record was particularly weak against countries, such as Germany and the U.K., that have exceeded their greenhouse-gas emission reduction targets, he said.

Russia and Italy also had weak records, although their performance exceeded Canada's.

Russia has met some of its obligations under Kyoto, but hasn't taken new steps to mitigate its emissions. Italy isn't close to meeting its Kyoto reduction target.

Although the United States has backed out of Kyoto, the report said it is working hard to reduce its emissions, including funding of $3.9-billion (U.S.) for technologies used to fight climate change.

This really is embarassing. For years we Canadians have been in the forefront of the battle to combat climate change by blaming everything on the U.S. and especially George W. Bush. We now obviously need a Plan B and we think we’ve found just the man to craft it for us. That’s it, you rapacious Yankee traders! You have boasted about that prosperity of yours one too many times. Until we have the average disposable income, per capita SUV rates and air travel figures you do, we’re declaring ourselves to be an “emerging economy” and we’re not doing a thing 'cause Al says we don't have to.

(BTW, giving Al the benefit of the doubt for at least average intelligence, does this not indicate either he is an instinctively self-blaming American or doesn’t for a moment believe the threat is nearly as serious or imminent as he claims?)

JUST IN TIME FOR VALENTINE’S DAY

From: Web site verifies disease-free sex partners (Katie Rook, National Post, February 8th, 2007)

In what may be the new frontier of online social networking, a Web site is being launched that purports to help online daters verify the sexual health of prospective partners.

Checktonight.com will issue a digital stamp of approval to site subscribers who have tested free of any of five sexually transmitted diseases, a level of disclosure that is seen by some as a predictable innovation in Internet use and by others as a move that is potentially troubling from the perspective of personal privacy, sexual behaviour and possibly the privacy of health records.

"We're talking about this because it's kind of like a new frontier -- it's saying look at how sexual health is coalescing with a Web service that allows people to verify their sexual test records," says Jesse Hirsh, a Toronto-based Internet analyst.

"Last year was You Tube and My Space, people started using the Internet the way it should be used.... Now people are using [the Internet] in a much more interactive way."

We suppose that’s one way of putting it.

AIN’T WE GOT FUN?

From: Cool clouds turn light to matter (BBC, February 8th, 2007)

A fleeting pulse of light has been captured and then made to reappear in a different location by US physicists.

The quantum sleight of hand exploits the properties of super-cooled matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate.

The emerging pulse was slightly weaker than the high-speed beam that entered the experimental setup, but was identical in all other respects.

The work, published in the journal Nature, could one day lead to advances in computing and optical communication.

"Instead of light shining through optical fibres into boxes full of wires and semiconductor chips, intact data, messages, and images will be read directly from the light," said Professor Lene Vestergaard Hau of Harvard University and one of the authors of the paper.

The Harvard team rose to prominence in the late 1990s when they slowed light from its constant 299,792km/s (186,282mps) to a leisurely 61km/h (38mph).

They applied the brakes by shining light into a cloud of sodium atoms trapped in a vacuum and cooled to just above absolute zero (-273 Celsius), the theoretical state of zero heat.

We at Diversely We Sail would like to offer our heartfelt congratulations to the scientists involved in this exciting development and only wish we had the slightest notion of what they are talking about. But even ignoramus' like we know that this is really cool. We're a little worried about our headlights going 38mph while we're going 60, but these guys are sure a lot more fun than those old climate farts.

THE ONE TRUE FAITH

Beware the Taleban of Tolerance (Carla Powell, The Spectator, February 10th, 2007)

How is it that when it comes to gay adoption and Catholic charities, ‘being Catholic’ is a conflict of interest but ‘being gay’ is not? A notable journalistic exception was Matthew Parris, usually a critic of Catholicism, who pointed out the sheer lack of proportionality from the opponents of the Church’s position and asked how much of a problem this would really have presented in the first place. How many gay couples would want to approach a Catholic adoption agency in any event?

So much for the way the debate was conducted, but what was it actually about? Not, primarily, homosexuality, nor fundamental human rights. At heart, this debate was about conscience.

After all, Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, the Anglican Archbishops of Canterbury and York and the Muslim Council have not been calling for a ban on gay adoptions. What they have said is, ‘You do what you want as a society. That’s part of the democratic process. But we are not able to do this for reasons of conscience. Since this is so, we ask for a space for people who cannot in conscience participate. Why do we need this space? Because we are part of this society, and we want to continue providing what everyone sees as a first-class service for society’s most deprived children — something we have done with distinction for over a century.’ That’s what the Cardinal and others have been arguing. And we have found, in the last few weeks, that this is something the anti-discrimination fundamentalists cannot contemplate. It has been amazing to observe the intolerance of those who have been so loudly crying for tolerance.

You may say that this doesn’t affect you. But it does. There are very serious issues here. The democratic process is being by-passed and legitimate views marginalised. Where will our society end up when compromise is not even discussed?

The question is simple: is any politician who is Christian, Muslim or Jewish — or indeed of any faith —to be vilified for believing their faith’s teaching? The answer from the fundamentalists is ‘Yes’. It’’s happened already with Ruth Kelly. And it’’s happened in Europe. Three years ago Rocco Butiglione —— renowned as one of the most thoughtful politicians in Italy —— was vetoed as Italian European commissioner by a militant alliance of gay activists and pro-abortion advocates because he held mainstream Christian views on family life. What if your Christian, Muslim or Jewish sons and daughters want to take part in the political life of their country or of Europe? Are they to be told effectively to hang their religion and conscience at the door or abandon any hope of advancement?

Let’s be more practical. What about Catholic doctors who will not refer women for abortions? What about the surgeons who will not perform them? At present there is a conscience clause, but many within the NHS wish to remove it. They would like medical students to agree in advance to ‘deliver the full range of services pro-vided by the NHS’. This means, of course, performing abortions and a range of other morally problematic procedures. Catholics and others who cannot in conscience perform them will be told to leave their religious views at the door, or give up their places at medical school.

They’ll be lucky to be even given the choice. A minor poet saw through this fiction of secular tolerance battling religious intolerance over forty years ago.

THE ALLIANCE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME

From: The English-speaking century (Keith Windshuttle, The New Criterion, February, 2007)

World hegemony, however, has many costs. Like the Romans, the English-speaking peoples would be envied and hated by others. They would sometimes find, Roberts argues, that the greatest danger to their continued imperium came not from their declared enemies without, but from vociferous critics within. One of the constants of their common culture’s freedom of expression has been its propensity to harbor a degree of internal censure that among many other peoples would probably prove fatal.

As early as 1901, British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury was complaining: “England is, I believe, the only country in which, during a great war, eminent men write and speak as if they belonged to the enemy.” He wrote this about the critics of his policy on the Boer War, an encounter which Roberts demonstrates has ever since been perversely and unfairly blamed entirely on Britain. Winston Churchill was later to remark in a similar vein: “I think I can save the British Empire from anything—except the British.”

The Anglosphere is a little bit like the British Constitution in that it is unwritten, irrational and by all logic unable to withstand one good riot. It is characterized as much by incessant bickering and suspicion as by any natural affinities its peoples can recognize. The Americans have a very long and popular history of anti-English policies and sentiments, the Aussies are adolescent in their chippy hang-ups about “Poms”, Canadians are eternally paranoid the Americans will suck out their precious bodily fluids and the British are too divided and confused about Europe these days to even focus on why they don’t like the rest of us.

Moreover, there is nothing like a public pledge of fidelity to the fellow members of the Anglosphere to get a politician in any of its members in big trouble fast. In Canada, everybody will cheer a call for improving relations with France, China or God-knows-where, but a government that tries that with the States will get hammered. Canadians or Americans who wax poetically at noon about historical ties with England will be pilloried as racist apologists for every Imperial sin on the evening news. The British are so sensitive to the charge that they are lackeys of the “cousins” that anti-Americanism comes in both left-wing and right-wing flavours.

Yet slowly, quietly, we drive the world’s economy and are the only peoples in the world to come together more or less dependably to stand up to worldwide threats like Nazism, communism and now Islamicism. Sometimes we do so enthusiastically, while in other cases we’re dragged in kicking and screaming (and whining) after waiting far too long or spending years headed in the wrong direction. Frequently we do so in the face of bitter, near-seditious opposition from our intellectual classes who ape all the intellectual pretensions of feckless, self-destructive Europe. Yet by some mysterious alchemy we just keep on truckin’ as one when we should have destroyed one another years ago. After all, we tried hard enough.

So the question is, if Roberts is right that the 20th century belonged to the English-speaking peoples, will the key to keeping it that way through the 21st lie in never touting the Anglosphere publically? Are we well-advised to be like the Masons and hand down truth and loyalty privately from parent to child while denying any particular affinity in public? Should we stay mute when our beautiful people keep talking like Europeans, knowing that although we can’t publically defend the irrational, we will always line up (whining)with the Americans when push comes to shove and others cower. Are we history’s first counterintuitive world order?