Month: August 2002

Where’s Dowd’s Enron Follow-up?

Back in February, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a column that was widely discussed due to its analysis of the sexual politics of the Enron fiasco. Dowd offered up a warmed-over version of women as moral arbiter for civilization by noting that all of the whistle blowers in the Enron fiasco were women and all of the corrupt executives, of course, were men.

Dowd wrote,

What does this gender schism mean? That men care more about inflating their assets? That women are more caring about colleagues getting shafted?

It is men’s worst fear, personally and professionally, that women will pin the sin on them, come “out of the night like a missile and destroy a man,” as Alan Simpson said during the Hill-Thomas hearings.

. . .

At Enron, it was men who came up with complex scams. And it was women who raised the simple question, “Why?”

So where’s the follow-up? In the intervening months we’ve seen Martha Stewart in all the papers and broadcast news accused of insider trading. A female Colorado firefighter intentionally started a massive forest fire that threatened Denver earlier this summer. And, of course, celebrity publicist Lizzie Grubman got drunk and intentionally backed her car into a crowd of people.

Following Dowd’s usual script, any day now we should being seeing some hackneyed op-ed explaining how these three incidents are not isolated acts related to those individuals, but rather carry some important lesson about men and women which only Dowd can properly distill. I can hardly wait.

Kenneth Adelman Takes Down Yet Another Pointless UN Summit

Former UN Ambassador Kenneth Adelman wrote a searing attack on the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. Adelman finds it a bit obscene for the UN to spend $55 million to talk about poverty while several million people are on the verge of starving due to said poverty (apparently the United Nations believes if it holds enough conferences it can talk poverty to death).

But the best part of the columns is Adelman’s observation that the United Nations wants to deal with poverty but only if it can keep it at arm’s length,

Since Rio, there have been four U.N. preparatory conferences — PrepComs, in the vernacular, which are U.N. conferences to prepare for this jumbo U.N. conference. The last “PrepCom” was in Bali, with some of the finest beaches in the world.

The other dirty little secret of United Nations conferences on poverty is that they never meet where there’s much poverty. Hence, Bali rather than Jakarta, and Johannesburg rather than Soweto.

Adelman also notes that among other expenses the delegates will ring up this week are literally hundreds of dollars spent per page to translate every speech into English, French, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese. Just the money from a single page could mean the difference between life and death for a family in Zimbabwe. Much better, though, to make sure that documents that will never be read again are at least unread in multiple languages.

Source:

A Summit Hard to Stomach. Kenneth Adelman, FoxNews.Com, August 28, 2002.

Cost of Johannesburg Summit

In an op-ed for Fox News, former United Nations Ambassador Kenneth Adelman highlights the bizarre way that the United Nations goes about solving poverty.

At the same time that the World Food Program and other agencies are having difficulties obtaining food aid for starving millions in sub-Saharan Africa, the United Nations is sponsoring the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development which will cost a rather unsustainable $55 million mainly to provide a stage for world leaders to make promises and pledges that will never be followed through.

Adelman writes,

It’s another massive waste of money. Another diversion from the real needs of the poor. Another boondoggle for the rich to jet somewhere exotic to gush over their concern for the poor.

Apparently the United Nations’ theory is that if they get enough blowhard politicians on a single stage they can talk world poverty to death.

Source:

A Summit Hard to Stomach. Kenneth Adelman, FoxNews.Com, August 28, 2002.

Organization of African Unity or African Union — Still Same Old Dictators Club

Back in July, African countries made news by dissolving the old Organization of African Unity and creating a new organization, modeled on the European Union, called the African Union. Despite the public relations nonsense that this would bring more accountability, etc. etc. to Africa, the African Union is the same old dictators club.

The most poignant example of that in the organization’s two month history came when the African Union turned to discussing who would represent Africa to chair the United Nations Human Rights Commission next year. The chair rotates, and in 2003 it is Africa’s turn to fill that role. And who would an organization like the African Union pick? Why, Libya of course.

No formal appointment will be made before the commission meets in 2003, but at its inaugural meeting the African Union nominated Libya to the chair of the human rights commission. That’s the same Libya that’s been run by a brutal dictator for decades, where there is no independent press and where human rights know little respect.

Well in some respect, perhaps the choice makes sense as Libya perhaps does accurately represent the African Union’s approach to human rights. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Source:

Libyan human rights role worries US. The BBC, August 21, 2002.

British Advertising Standards Authority Forces Vegetarian Group to Rewrite Ad

The British Advising Standards Authority ordered Vegetarians International Voice for Animals! to rewrite a leaflet it published after the ASA found that the group’s claims were alarmist and not supported by the evidence.

The leaflet claimed that, “Eating animals is one of the main reasons why heart disease, clogged arteries, high blood pressure and strokes are at epidemic proportions . . . Vegetarians, on the other hand, are much less likely to develop these killer diseases and face the prospect of living longer than meat eaters — largely because of the protective effect of vital nutrients found only in fruit and vegetables.”

VIVA! submitted studies that it said backed up its claim, but the ASA ruled that, “The advertisers had not supplied adequate evidence to show that eating animals caused the listed diseases or that vegetarians were much less likely to develop the listed diseases. The Authority considered that the claims exaggerated the likelihood of eating meat in a balanced diet causing the listed diseases.”

The bottom line is that vegetarian and vegan activists have yet to find any convincing evidence that a diet low in fat, and high in fruits and vegetables that also includes lean meat is inferior to a vegetarian diet. So far, the sort of studies that VIVA! cites merely demonstrate that diets high in fat and low in fruits and vegetables are inferior to diets low in fat and high in fruits and vegetables.

Source:

Vegetarian shock tactics slammed. The BBC, August 14, 2002.

Treating Congestive Heart Failure in Hamsters (And Maybe Humans)

In July, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine published a study detailing their efforts to create a gene therapy treatment for congestive heart failure.

The research involved hamsters who have a naturally occurring genetic defect that leads to eventual heart failure in much the same way that congestive heart failure does in human beings. In congestive heart failure, the heart’s ability to pump blood gradually declines. The scientists wondered if there might be a way to restore the heart’s vitality using gene therapy.

Using a virus they delivered a genetic mutation to the hearts of the hamsters that corrected a defect in the gene that regulates the way calcium is cycled through the heart. This sort of problem has been linked to heart failure in human beings. With the mutated gene in place, the hamsters showed a dramatic improvement in the ability of their hearts to pump blood throughout the seven month long experiment.

Having proved the concept in hamsters, the UCSD researchers are now conducting similar experiments on pigs, with human trials likely in the next 12-18 months assuming that the findings in the pigs are as positive as were the results in the hamsters.

Source:

Congestive heart failure: Treatment shows success in animal model. Heart Disease Weekly, August 25, 2002.