Foreign Policy
emjohnson | November 2, 2009As Jawaharlal Nehru wrote of his native land but as a stranger in the process of discovery, "India is a geographical and economic entity, a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by invisible threads." These invisible threads were the spiritual beliefs of the people, the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita and the Manu Smriti. The sacred Ganges was a symbol of India's life blood, as much for the Indian people as for the British colonialists, that, as Rudyard Kipling described in his story "The Bridge Builders," was a natural force that needed to be conquered if the…
emjohnson | October 29, 2009Last night Jon Stewart hosted the Israel/Palestine peace activists Anna Baltzer and Dr. Mustafa Barghouti. The angry response from the Pro-Israel crowd resulted in a backlash against the show for even having the discussion (including the show's first heckler in eleven years).
Baltzer, an American-Jewish author, has put out a public letter asking that people contact The Daily Show thanking them for hosting the discussion as a way to counter the angry response they've received so far.
Last night Dr. Barghouti and I were on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart talking about Palestine.
The show was…
emjohnson | October 28, 2009What happens when a Nobel Peace Prize winner breaks international law in the rules of war? The world may find out as increased attention is being focused on the use of unmanned military drones that are carrying out assassinations of suspected militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, stated today that the Predator drone operations approved by Obama and currently being carried out by the CIA may be a violation of international humanitarian law.
As reported by the BBC, Alston stated in a press conference that:
My…
emjohnson | October 9, 2009In Aztec cosmology, Venus was associated with the god Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli (Nahuatl for "Lord of the Dawn"). In the mythic tale Legend of the Suns, Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli attempted to shoot the sun with an arrow, but he missed and shot himself instead. The Aztecs had a sophisticated science of astronomy that focused on the movements of Venus and were among the first in the world to calculate that Earth's nearest neighbor orbited the Sun thirteen times every eight years.
Thirteen Venus cycles ago, then-President Bush shot his own arrow in the form of his Afghanistan invasion and it has now…
scientificactivist | September 17, 2009Members of the Obama Administration have mentioned using science for diplomatic purposes on various occasions, most notably when President Barack Obama himself included this idea in his address at Cairo University in June. Today, SEEDMAGAZINE.COM published an article by Harvard's Sheila Jasanoff on this subject, which you can read here. Seed has asked me to provide commentary on her article as this week's Featured Blogger, which you can read here.
The Jasanoff article focuses specifically on the appointment of science envoys, a central component of the Obama Administration's scientific…
emjohnson | August 20, 2009In a huge breaking story, The New York Times is reporting today that the CIA, with Bush administration authorization, used the private military firm Blackwater (who changed their name to Xe Services after controversy erupted when contractors killed Iraqi civilians) in a program intended to hunt down and assassinate suspected Al Qaeda militants. Congress was never notified nor was there authorization for the program.
The House Intelligence Committee is investigating why lawmakers were never told about the program. According to current and former government officials, former Vice President…
emjohnson | August 5, 2009Japanese artists' depiction of the horrors at Hiroshima.Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum
On August 6, 1945 the United States dropped "Little Boy," the first of only two nuclear bombs ever used in warfare, on the Japanese civilians at Hiroshima. In an instant flash of light an estimated 140,000 people were either incinerated or suffered an agonizing death that lasted several days. The standard mythology is that President Truman dropped the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (three days later on August 9) in order to avoid having to send half a million American soliders to their deaths in a…
emjohnson | August 4, 2009In 1996 Cornell astrophysicist and science popularizer Carl Sagan posed the question, "What are conservatives conserving?" It was not something he asked lightly. The question appeared in his final book following a prolonged battle with bone marrow disease. Faced with his own mortality, he wanted to understand the individuals whose actions, whether consciously or not, threatened the lives of so many others. Sagan was a passionate advocate for science but, first and foremost, he was an advocate for humanity itself.
A kindred spirit, someone representing the same passion for science and…
emjohnson | July 26, 2009
In the 1960s military strategists promoted the "domino theory" as a rationale for why the United States needed to intervene in what later turned out to be a Vietnamese civil war. The logic was that, as communist influence extended from Russian and China, every country that fell before the "Reds" would perpetuate yet another country going the same direction. However, as Secretary of Defense at the time, Robert McNamara, stated in his mea culpa documentary, The Fog of War, their logic was based on an erroneous foundation:
We saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War, not what they saw it as…
scientificactivist | April 19, 2009Arguably the biggest news story of the week was the release by the Obama Administration of four Justice Department memos from 2002 and 2005 that were used to justify CIA torture of detainees. An analysis by Jeffrey Smith in today's Washington Post tries to explain the context and the mindset that led to the twisted logic found in these memos:
The four Justice Department memos to the CIA's top lawyer that were released last week reflect an effort by Bush administration appointees to create finely tuned justifications for harsh interrogation techniques, all under a blanket of secrecy covering…
scientificactivist | April 2, 2009You see, this is why you want to fill your administration with smart, qualified, thoughtful, and innovative people--especially in the sciences. From The Times
A major investment in fighting tropical infections and chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes in poor countries would transform international perceptions of the US, according to Harold Varmus, who co-chairs the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology.
In an exclusive interview with The Times, Dr Varmus said that American diplomacy had undervalued the role of medicine and science in fostering friendly…
scientificactivist | June 1, 2008After a rapid media outcry, the US and Israel have come together to reinstate the Fulbright Scholarships initially revoked from several students from Gaza due to Israel-imposed travel restrictions. From The New York Times:
JERUSALEM -- The American State Department has reinstated seven Fulbright grants offered to Palestinians in Gaza for advanced study in the United States, reversing a decision to withdraw the scholarships because of Israel's ban on Palestinians' leaving Gaza for study abroad.
The American Consulate in Jerusalem sent e-mail messages on Sunday night to all seven telling them…
scientificactivist | May 31, 2008Something very unfortunate happened this week. The US had to revoke eight Fulbright Scholarships for students from Gaza to study in the US due to Israeli-imposed travel restrictions. From CNN:
The U.S. government has taken Fulbright scholarships away from eight students in the Palestinian territory of Gaza, citing Israeli travel restrictions imposed on the Hamas-ruled zone, a U.S. official said Friday.
The scholarships, which bring international students to the United States to study at American universities, will be given to students in the West Bank, said Stacey Barrios, a spokeswoman for…
scientificactivist | May 7, 2008You can file this one under "should have been done about twenty years ago." From the Mail & Guardian:
Lawmakers on Tuesday debated legislation to remove former South African president Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) from an apartheid-era United States terrorist blacklist.
Several members of the House of Representatives immediately expressed support for a Bill aimed at removing from any US databases "any notation that would characterise the ANC and its leaders as terrorists".
The House Bill is sponsored by Howard Berman, the California Democrat who chairs the…
scientificactivist | April 28, 2008Now that the Chinese ship An Yue Jiang--which was delivering arms from China to Zimbabwe--has been turned away for good, there are two significant aspects of this story upon which we should reflect. The first is that the true heroes of this tale are the unionized dockworkers, who catalyzed this turn of events by their initial refusal to unload the cargo. The second is that there are deep political ties between Zimbabwe and China, which make this picture much less black and white than it would appear to be on the surface.
It was reported on April 16 that a Chinese ship slated to dock in…
scientificactivist | September 11, 2007Last year, I recounted my personal experience on September 11, 2001, and I offered some commentary about what that day--and the events of the ensuing year--meant to me and to American politics in general. I've reposted my 9/11 story again this year, below.
(11 September 2006) When I was a freshman in college, at Texas A&M University, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings I had two classes back-to-back in the same lecture hall. Because of a weird scheduling fluke, these classes were about 45 minutes apart, though. During that break, sometimes I would go eat breakfast, other times I would do…
scientificactivist | August 21, 2007Although he took some flack for a similar stance in last month's CNN/YouTube Democratic Presidential Debate (see video at bottom of post), Barack Obama has an opinion piece published in The Miami Herald today in which he stresses the need for bilateral talks with Cuba and promises to "grant Cuban Americans unrestricted rights to visit family and send remittances to the island."
The primary means we have of encouraging positive change in Cuba today is to help the Cuban people become less dependent on the Castro regime in fundamental ways. U.S. policy must be built around empowering the Cuban…
scientificactivist | January 11, 2007From a news analysis by Sheryl Gay Stolberg in today's New York Times:
By stepping up the American military presence in Iraq, President Bush is not only inviting an epic clash with the Democrats who run Capitol Hill. He is ignoring the results of the November elections, rejecting the central thrust of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and flouting the advice of some of his own generals, as well as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq....
In a sense, it is a predictable path for Mr. Bush. This, after all, is the same president who lost the popular vote in 2000, was installed in the White…
scientificactivist | September 11, 2006When I was a freshman in college, at Texas A&M University, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings I had two classes back-to-back in the same lecture hall. Because of a weird scheduling fluke, these classes were about 45 minutes apart, though. During that break, sometimes I would go eat breakfast, other times I would do something else, and occasionally I would just stay in the room and study.
On this particular day, I had decided to catch up on some reading for class, and, as usual, there were a few other students in the room as well. A few minutes after the first class ended, maybe about 9:…
scientificactivist | September 7, 2006Robert Trivers was the first to describe the theory of reciprocal altruism and Noam Chomsky is... well... Noam Chomsky is the man (not to be confused with The Man). What happens when you bring together in one room the evolutionary theorist who changed the way we think about cooperation and social interactions with the intellectual who has probably done more to challenge entrenched power structures in our society than anyone else? A hell of an interesting conversation, that's what. From Seed magazine:
The full text of the discussion can be found here.
Chomsky and Trivers discuss the role…