O que é este blog?

Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida;

Meu Twitter: https://twitter.com/PauloAlmeida53

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sábado, 5 de setembro de 2020

Dia da Amazônia: maior floresta tropical do mundo não tem o que comemorar

Dia da Amazônia: maior floresta tropical do mundo não tem o que comemorar

Levantamento do Inpe indica que desmatamento acumulado na Amazônia entre agosto de 2019 e julho de 2020 cresceu 34,49%. Dia da Amazônia é comemorado neste 5 de setembro

Por Tiemi Osato - iG Último Segundo | 05/09/2020 09:00 - Atualizada às 05/09/2020 12:00

Fonte: undefined - iG @ https://ultimosegundo.ig.com.br/ciencia/meioambiente/2020-09-05/dia-da-amazonia-maior-floresta-tropical-do-mundo-nao-tem-o-que-comemorar.html

Divulgação/Imazon
Nos últimos anos,a Amazônia tem enfrentado um cenário crítico.

The World Trump Made - Foreign Affairs

A capa da Foreign Affairs é bastante eloquente: Trump criou um mundo fragmentado, dividido, esfacelado. Essa é a sua herança. Se ele continuar mais quatro anos, o mundo estará irremediavelmente pior do que antes.
O mesmo ocorre no Brasil: se tivermos continuidade do atual desgoverno, o Brasil se atrasará por um delegando período de retrocessos.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

What’s Inside

After nearly four years of turbulence, the United States is increasingly isolated and prostrate—but there’s no going back.

Foreign Affairs, September/October 2020

How will historians judge President Donald Trump’s handling of American foreign policy? Not kindly, writes Margaret MacMillan in this issue’s lead package. After nearly four years of turbulence, the country’s enemies are stronger, its friends are weaker, and the United States itself is increasingly isolated and prostrate.

Richard Haass notes that “Trump inherited an imperfect but valuable system and tried to repeal it without offering a substitute.” The result, he claims, “is a United States and a world that are considerably worse off.” Dragging his party and the executive branch along, the president has reshaped national policy in his own image: focused on short-term advantage, obsessed with money, and uninterested in everything else.

His opponent has pledged to repudiate Trump’s approach if elected, embracing international cooperation and restoring American global leadership. But is that even possible now? Most of the world looks at Washington with horror and pity rather than admiration or respect, and the one thing many of Trump’s domestic supporters and critics agree on is there’s no going back.

“Washington cannot simply return to the comfortable assumptions of the past,” argues Nadia Schadlow, a former deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration. Great-power competition is inevitable, and multilateral cooperation is for suckers. Ben Rhodes, who also served as a deputy national security adviser, but in the Obama administration, agrees that the liberal international order is defunct. Rather than try to revive it, he wants Washington to shape a new and better one by checking its privilege, avoiding hypocrisy, and attacking global inequality.

From that perspective, the mass protests against racism that erupted this past spring after the police killings of George Floyd and other Black Americans represent not just a national reckoning but also a call to arms, as the issue’s second package explains. Keisha Blain shows that the struggle for civil rights in the United States has always been part of a global struggle for human dignity. Suzanne Mettler and Robert Lieberman observe that tense debates over national identity grow even more dangerous when played out against a backdrop of political polarization, economic inequality, and concentrated executive power. Fortunately, Laurence Ralph points out, at least in the case of police reform, there are good international models to follow—although little evidence yet that Americans are prepared to adopt them.

“America is not a lie; it is a disappointment,” the political scientist Samuel Huntington once wrote. “But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.” The challenge now is to keep that hope alive.

—Gideon Rose, Editor

Martin Luther King (1963): I Have a Dream: transcrição da primeira parte, menos citada

De fato, estamos acostumados a ler transcrições da segunda parte deste famoso discurso de Martin Luther, que começa justamente pelas famosas palavras, que já são cópia da Declaração de Independência:
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
Mas a primeira parte do discurso contém outras passagens igualmente memoráveis, que foram aqui transcritas por The Globalist, e que se referem às promessas não cumpridas dos Founding Fathers.
No caso do Brasil, as promessas não cumpridas foram as da Abolição, que ficaram sem escolas, sem reforma agrária, sem vida digna para os negros, que se refugiaram nos quilombos criados depois, ou nas favelas suburbanas e urbanas.
Mas o discurso também contém outras advertências aos negros, notadamente a de que eles se abstenham de violência, contra a violência da polícia, até hoje visível e evidente:
We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.
Sábias palavras, que precisam ser sempre relembradas.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

MLK’s “I Have a Dream” Speech: The Forgotten Half

The passage of time has only heightened the urgency of Martin Luther King’s sobering message. We present the parts almost never quoted.

By The Globalist, August 28, 2020

This Globalist Document is adapted from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 speech at the steps of the Abraham Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. It was later dubbed the “I Have a Dream” speech. The less-quoted first part of his speech, even 57 years later, is a powerful condemnation of the status quo, and bears revisiting.

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.

Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.

And so, we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.

Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.

1963 is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.

And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds.

Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.

Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells.

And some of you have come from areas where your quest — quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality.

You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

https://www.theglobalist.com/dream-forgotten-half/

Políticas racialistas são políticas racistas, ponto! - Demétrio Magnoli, Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Sempre me insurgi contra políticas racialistas, e isto desde FHC, ou seja, antes de Lula, e antes do STF. Concordo apenas em parte em que é preciso promover algumas chances de vida e a autoestima dos negros brasileiros, dando a eles as chances que não tiveram pela persistência do racismo, da desigualdade no acesso à escola, pela má qualidade da educação de que sempre sofreram ao longo de décadas.
Mas sempre julguei que isso deveria ser limitado, temporário, e de preferência ampliado a todos os carentes de chances, como os pobres em geral, com o que se atenderia a um número proporcionalmente maior de negros e pardos.
Eu sempre clamei contra a criação de um novo Apartheid, que essas políticas racialistas poderiam criar, que é a reação de brancos (que se tornam mais racistas, por se acharem prejudicados) e pela criação de uma cultura negra, artificial, separada da cultura mainstream, que deve ser a de um Brasil único em suas qualidades e deformações, mas sem separação racial.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Avanço da doutrina racialista para a representação política golpeia a soberania popular

Benedita da Silva e Luís Roberto Barroso tratam o acesso a cargos parlamentares como uma carreira

Folha de S. Paulo, 4 de setembro de 2020

"Estaremos do lado dos que querem escrever a história do Brasil com tintas de todas as cores." O ministro Luís Roberto Barroso anunciou, por essa frase capciosa, a pretensão dos altos tribunais de tutelar os partidos políticos e os eleitores, determinando uma distribuição racial dos fundos públicos eleitorais.
O inevitável avanço da doutrina racialista para a esfera da representação política golpeia o conceito de soberania popular, pilar da democracia.

A discussão jurídica nasceu de um pedido aos tribunais da deputada Benedita da Silva (PT-RJ), pelo estabelecimento de cota de 30% de "candidaturas negras" em cada partido. Barroso disse "não", argumentando que só o Congresso tem a prerrogativa de legislar.

Mas, como é de seu feitio, prontificou-se a legislar de outro jeito, no mesmo rumo racialista, gerenciando o caixa dos partidos com vistas a um "equilíbrio racial".

As leis de cotas raciais para ingresso nas universidades apoiam-se na justificativa da promoção social de grupos excluídos. As cotas raciais dividem os estudantes de escolas públicas segundo a cor da pele, alavancando ressentimentos que nutrem o racismo. O consenso partidário formado em torno delas destina-se a mascarar a ruína do ensino público, raiz da desigualdade de oportunidades no umbral das universidades. Quando a raça chega ao terreno do voto, o racialismo retira sua máscara, exibindo a face que precisava ocultar.

Benedita e Barroso tratam o acesso a cargos parlamentares como o ingresso na universidade —ou seja, como uma carreira. A política é definida, aí, como profissão: meio de ganhar a vida e produzir patrimônio.
"Escrever a história do Brasil com tintas de todas as cores" significa, para eles, alçar "negros" a empregos bem remunerados. O problema do raciocínio é que, no fim, a seleção desses "profissionais" depende dos eleitores. Que tal, então, dirigir a mão que digita o voto para o lugar "certo"?

Os programas pioneiros de cotas raciais nas universidades foram introduzidos em 2003. Seus defensores alegavam, à época, que o expediente seria provisório, esgotando-se no horizonte de dez ou, no máximo 20 anos. Hoje, quase duas décadas depois, não só esqueceram-se do prazo limítrofe como engajaram-se na introdução de cotas raciais na pós-graduação e na administração pública.

A fraude da vontade popular na esfera eleitoral também caminhará por etapas. A primeira, em curso, define a distribuição de fundos de campanha. Numa segunda, cotas "raciais" dentro dos partidos. A conclusiva, pelo estabelecimento de cotas raciais nos próprios órgãos legislativos. No Líbano, a representação parlamentar é repartida segundo linhas sectárias, com a divisão de cadeiras entre cristãos, sunitas e xiitas. No Brasil, a lógica racialista aponta para uma divisão entre as "raças oficiais" —isto é, basicamente, entre "brancos" e "negros", pois os autodeclarados "pardos" já foram administrativamente suprimidos do universo legal.

A "voz dos negros" deve ser ouvida —eis a tradução conceitual da frase de Barroso. Os "negros", porém, participam de diferentes partidos, exprimindo ideologias diversas. Quem é a "voz dos negros"? Benedita, que é uma "voz de Lula", ou Sérgio Camargo, uma "voz de Bolsonaro"?

A racialização dos órgãos legislativos nada tem a ver com a "voz dos negros". Expressa a voz das elites brasileiras que recobrem, com uma mão de tinta fresca, o racismo institucional praticado pelas polícias e a exclusão social de pobres de todas as cores.

A política é o campo dos valores, das visões de mundo —não das raças. A "voz dos negros" exigiria a constituição de um Partido Negro. Os arautos do racialismo não vão criá-lo, pois sabem que seriam rejeitados inclusive pelo eleitorado não branco. A estratégia deles é tutelar o voto por meio de leis restritivas da soberania popular.

Did bubonic plague really cause the Black Death? - Debora Mackenzie

Este artigo deve ser lido como complemento ao anterior, que já colocava em dúvida o fato de a Peste Negra ser devida à peste bubônica.
Aqui:
https://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-devastating-reality-of-black-plague.html

Did bubonic plague really cause the Black Death?

Everyone thinks the Black Death was caused

by bubonic plague. But they could be wrong –

and we need to find the real culprit before it strikes again

HEALTH

New Scientist, 24 November 2001

By Debora Mackenzie

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17223184-000-did-bubonic-plague-really-cause-the-black-death/

THE DISEASE that spread like wildfire through Europe between 1347 and 1351 is still the most violent epidemic in recorded history. It killed at least a third of the population, more than 25 million people. Victims first suffered pain, fever and boils, then swollen lymph nodes and blotches on the skin. After that they vomited blood and died within three days. The survivors called it the Great Pestilence. Victorian scientists dubbed it the Black Death.

As far as most people are concerned, the Black Death was bubonic plague, Yersinia pestis, a flea-borne bacterial disease of rodents that jumped to humans. But two epidemiologists from Liverpool University say we’ve got it all wrong. In Biology of Plagues, a book released earlier this year, they effectively demolish the bubonic plague theory. “If you look at how the Black Death spread,” says Susan Scott, one of the authors, “one of the least likely diseases to have caused it is bubonic plague.” If Scott and co-author Christopher Duncan are right, the world would do well to listen.

Whatever pathogen caused the Black Death appears to have ravaged Europe several times during the past two millennia, and it could resurface again. If we knew what it really was, we could prepare for it. “It’s always important to re-evaluate these questions so we are not taken by surprise,” says Steve Morse, an expert on emerging viral diseases at Columbia University in New York. Yet few experts in infectious diseases have even read the book, let alone taken its ideas seriously. New Scientist has, and it looks to us as though Scott and Duncan are on to something.

The idea that the Black Death was bubonic plague dates back to the late 19th century, when Alexandre Yersin, a French bacteriologist, unravelled the complex biology of bubonic plague. He noted that the disease shared a key feature with the Black Death: the bubo, a dark, painful, swollen lymph gland usually in the armpit or groin. Even though buboes also occur in other diseases, he decided the two were the same, even naming the bacterium pestis after the Great Pestilence.

But the theory is riddled with glaring flaws, say Scott and Duncan. First of all, bubonic plague is intimately associated with rodents and the fleas they carry. But the Black Death’s pattern of spread doesn’t fit a rat and flea-borne disease. It raced across the Alps and through northern Europe at temperatures too cold for fleas to hatch, and swept from Marseilles to Paris at four kilometres a day – -far faster than a rat could travel. Moreover, the rats necessary to spread the disease simply were not there. The only rat in Europe in the Middle Ages was the black rat, Rattus rattus, which stays close to human habitation. Yet the Black Death jumped across great tracts of open country-up to 300 kilometres between towns in France-in only a few days with no intermediate outbreaks. “Iceland had no rats at all,” notes Duncan, “but the Black Death was reported there too.”

In contrast, bubonic plague spreads, as rats do, slowly and sporadically. In 1907, the British Plague Commission in India reported an outbreak that took six months to move 300 feet. After bubonic plague arrived in South Africa in 1899, it moved inland at just 20 kilometres a year, even with steam trains to help.

The disease that caused the Black Death stayed in Europe until 1666. During its 300-year reign, Scott and Duncan have found records of outbreaks that occurred somewhere in France virtually every year. Every few years, these outbreaks spawned epidemics that ravaged the rest of Europe. For Yersinia to do this, it would have to become established in a population of rodents that are resistant to the disease. It couldn’t have been rats, because the plague bacterium kills them-along with all other European rodents. As a result, Europe, along with Australia and Antarctica, remain the only regions of the world where bubonic plague has never settled. So, once again, the Black Death behaved in a way plague simply cannot.

Nor is bubonic plague contagious enough to have been the Black Death. The Black Death killed at least a third of the population wherever it hit, sometimes more. But when bubonic plague hit India in the 19th century, fewer than 2 per cent of the people in affected towns died. And when plague invaded southern Africa, South America and the south-western US, it didn’t trigger a massive epidemic.

The most obvious problem with the plague theory is that, unlike bubonic plague, the Black Death obviously spread directly from person to person. People in the thick of the epidemic recognised this, and Scott and Duncan proved they were right by tracing the anatomy of outbreaks, person by person, using English burial records from the 16th century. These records, which detail all deaths from the pestilence by order of Elizabeth I, clearly show the disease spreading from one person to their neighbours and relatives, separated by an incubation period of 20 to 30 days.

The details tally perfectly with a disease that kills about 37 days after infection. For the first 10 to 12 days, you weren’t infectious. Then for 20 to 22 days, you were. You only knew you were infected when you fell ill, for the final five days or less-but by then you had been infecting people unknowingly for weeks. Europeans at the time clearly knew the disease had a long, infectious incubation period, because they rapidly imposed measures to isolate potential carriers. For example, they stopped anyone arriving on a ship from disembarking for 40 days, or quarantina in Italian – -the origin of the word quarantine.

Telltale timing

Epidemiologists know that diseases with a long incubation time create outbreaks that last months. From 14th-century ecclesiastical records, Scott and Duncan estimate that outbreaks of the Black Death in a given town or diocese typically lasted 8 or 9 months. That, plus the delay between waves of cases, is the fingerprint of the disease across Europe over seasons and centuries, they say. The pair found exactly the same pattern in 17th-century outbreaks in Florence, Milan and a dozen towns across England, including London, Colchester, Newcastle, Manchester and Eyam in Derbyshire. In 1665, the inhabitants of Eyam selflessly confined themselves to the village. A third of them died, but they kept the disease from reaching other towns. This would not have worked if the carriers were rats.

Despite the force of their argument, Scott and Duncan have yet to convince their colleagues. None of the experts that New Scientist spoke to had read their book, and a summary of its ideas provoked reactions that range from polite interest to outright dismissal. Some of Scott’s colleagues, for example, have scoffed that “everyone knows the Black Death was bubonic plague”.

“I doubt you can say plague was not involved in the Black Death, though there may have been other diseases too,” says Elisabeth Carniel, a bubonic plague expert at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. “But I haven’t had time to read the book.” Carniel suggests that fleas could have spread the Black Death directly between people. Human fleas can keep it in their guts for a few weeks, leading to a delay in spread. But this would be unlikely to have happened the same way every time.

Moreover, people with enough Yersinia in their blood for a flea to pick it up are already very sick. They would only be able to pass their infection on in this way for a very short time-and whoever the flea bit would also sicken within a week, the incubation time of Yersinia. This does not fit the pattern documented by Scott and Duncan. Neither would an extra-virulent Yersinia, which would still depend on rats.

There have been several other ingenious attempts to save the Yersinia theory as inconsistencies have emerged. Many fall back on pneumonic plague, a variant form of Yersinia infection. This can occur in the later stages of bubonic plague, when the bacteria sometimes proliferate in the lungs and can be coughed out, and inhaled by people nearby. Untreated pneumonic plague is invariably fatal and can spread directly from person to person.

But not far, and not for long-plague only becomes pneumonic when the patient is practically at death’s door. “It is simply impossible that people sick enough to have developed the pneumonic form of the disease could have travelled far,” says Scott. Yet the Black Death typically jumped between towns in the time a healthy human took to travel. Also, pneumonic plague kills quickly-within six days, usually less. With such a short infectious period, local outbreaks of pneumonic plague end much sooner than 8 or 9 months, notes Scott. Rats and fleas can restart them, but then the disease is back to spreading slowly and sporadically like flea-borne diseases. Moreover, pneumonic plague lacks the one thing that links Yersinia to the Black Death: buboes.

If the Black Death wasn’t bubonic plague, then what was it? Possibly-and ominously-it may have been a virus. The evidence comes from a mutant protein on the surface of certain white blood cells. The protein, CCR5, normally acts as a receptor for the immune signalling molecules called chemokines, which help control inflammation. The AIDS virus and the poxvirus that causes myxomatosis in rabbits also use CCR5 as a docking port to enter and kill immune cells.

In 1998, a team led by Stephen O’Brien of the US National Cancer Institute analysed a mutant form of CCR5 that gives some protection against HIV. From its pattern of occurrence in the population, they think it arose in north-eastern Europe some 2000 years ago-and around 700 years ago, something happened to boost its incidence from 1 in 40,000 Europeans to 1 in 5. “It had to have been a breathtaking selective pressure to jack it up that high,” says O’Brien. The only plausible explanation, he thinks, is that the mutation helped its carriers survive the Black Death. In fact, say Scott and Duncan, Europeans did seem to grow more resistant to the disease between the 14th and 17th centuries.

Yersinia, too, enters and kills immune cells when it causes disease. But when O’Brien’s team pitted Yersinia against blood cells from people with and without the mutation, they found no dramatic difference. “The results were equivocal,” says O’Brien. “We don’t know if the mutation protected or not.” Further experiments are under way. Similar mutations occur elsewhere in the world, but at nowhere near the high frequency of the European mutant. This suggests that pathogens such as smallpox exerted some selective force, but nothing like whatever happened in Europe, says O’Brien.

The association between CCR5 and viruses suggests that the Black Death was a virus too. Its sudden emergence, and equally sudden disappearance after the Great Plague of London in 1666, also argue for a viral cause. Like the deadly flu of 1918, viruses can sometimes mutate into killers, and then disappear.

But what sort of virus was the Black Death? Scott and Duncan suggest a haemorrhagic filovirus such as Ebola, since the one consistent symptom was bleeding. In fact they think “haemorrhagic plague” would be a good new name for the disease.

They are not the first to blame Ebola for an ancient plague. Scientists and classicists in San Diego reported in 1996 that the symptoms of the plague of Athens around 430 BC, described by Thucydides, are remarkably similar to Ebola, including a distinctive retching or hiccupping. Apart from that, many of the symptoms of that plague- – and one in Constantinople in AD 540 – -were similar to the Black Death.

Of course, the filoviruses we know about are relatively hard to catch, with an incubation period of a week or less, not three weeks or more. But there are other haemorrhagic viruses: Lassa fever in Africa is fairly contagious, and incubates for up to three weeks. Eurasian hantaviruses can incubate for up to 42 days, but are not usually directly contagious between people. Both can be as deadly as the Black Death.

Out of Africa

Perhaps we can narrow the search to Africa. Europeans first recorded the Black Death in Sicily in 1347. The Sicilians blamed it on Genoese galleys that arrived from Crimea just as the illness exploded. But the long incubation period means the infection must have arrived earlier. Scott suspects it initially came from Africa, just a short hop away from Sicily. That continent is historically the home of more human pathogens than any other, and the people who lived through the epidemics that wracked Athens and Constantinople said their disease came from there. The epidemic in Constantinople, for instance, seems to have come via trade routes from the Central African interior. “And I’m sure that disease was the same as the Black Death,” says O’Brien.

One way to solve the puzzle could be to look for the pathogen’s DNA in the plague pits of Europe. Didier Raoult and colleagues at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseilles examined three skeletons in a 14th-century mass grave in Montpellier last year (New Scientist, 11 November 2000, p 31). They searched the skeletons for fragments of DNA unique to several known pathogens-Yersinia, anthrax or typhus. They found one match: Yersinia. In their report they wrote: “We believe that we can end the controversy. Medieval Black Death was [bubonic] plague.”

Not so fast, says Scott. Southern France probably had bubonic plague at that time, even if it wasn’t the Black Death. Moreover, attempts by Alan Cooper, director of the Ancient Biomolecules Centre at Oxford University, and Raoult’s team to replicate the results have so far failed, says Cooper. Similar attempts to find Yersinia DNA at mass graves in London, Copenhagen and another burial in southern France have also failed.

It’s too early to conclude that the failure to find Yersinia DNA means the bacterium wasn’t there, though. The art of retrieving ancient DNA is still in its infancy, Cooper warns. Pathogen DNA – -especially that of fragile viruses – -is extremely difficult to reliably identify in remains that are centuries old. “The pathogen decays along with its victim,” he says. Scientists have had difficulty, for example, in retrieving the 1918 flu virus, even from bodies less than a century old and preserved by permafrost. And even if the technique for retrieving ancient DNA improves, you need to know what you’re searching for. There is no way now to search for an unknown haemorrhagic virus.

But the possibility that the Black Death could strike again should give scientists the incentive to keep trying. The similarity of the catastrophes in Athens, Constantinople and medieval Europe suggests that whatever the pathogen is, it comes out of hiding every few centuries. And the last outbreak was its fastest and most murderous. What would it do in the modern world? Maybe we should find it, before it finds us.

Further reading:Biology of plagues: Evidence from historical populationsby Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan, Cambridge University Press (2001)

sexta-feira, 4 de setembro de 2020

Afeganistão: da Rota da Seda aos conflitos contemporâneos - Carmen Lícia Palazzo

Afeganistão: da Rota da Seda aos conflitos contemporâneos

Carmen Licia Palazzo

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Asian Studies,

Islamic Studies

Muito antes do surgimento do Islã diversas religiões estiveram em contato na Ásia Central, entre elas o budismo, o zoroastrismo, o maniqueísmo e o cristianismo nestoriano. No século VII o monge chinês Xuanzang deixou um relato no qual fez referência à esplêndida vista do vale com as duas colossais estátuas dos budas esculpidos na montanha. O nomadismo sempre foi um fator que dificultou a formação de nacionalidades fortes e abrangentes e, de um modo geral, prevaleceu na região a organização tribal e a fidelidade clânica. De um modo geral toda a Ásia Central apresenta-se ainda hoje como um mosaico de tribos e o Afeganistão é um claro exemplo da diversidade étnica e linguística. Neste contexto analisamos, resumidamente, a atual situação em território afegão, cuja violência permanece mas não se fez presente em outras épocas.

https://www.academia.edu/36084947/Afeganist%C3%A3o_da_Rota_da_Seda_aos_conflitos_contempor%C3%A2neos?email_work_card=view-paper

Breve Perfil

Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Doutor em Ciências Sociais, com vocação acadêmica voltada para os temas de relações internacionais, de história diplomática do Brasil e para questões do desenvolvimento econômico. Profissionalmente, sou membro da carreira diplomática desde 1977. Minhas preocupações cidadãs voltam-se para os objetivos do desenvolvimento nacional, do progresso social e da inserção internacional do Brasil. Entendo que cinco das condições básicas para que tais objetivos sejam atingidos podem ser resumidas como segue: macroeconomia estável, microeconomia competitiva, boa governança, alta qualidade dos recursos humanos e abertura ao comércio internacional e aos investimentos estrangeiros. Este blog serve apenas de divertissement. Para meus trabalhos mais sérios, ou pelo menos de caráter acadêmico, ver o site http://www.pralmeida.org/.

Uma reflexão...

Recomendações aos cientistas, Karl Popper:
Extratos (adaptados) de Ciência: problemas, objetivos e responsabilidades (Popper falando a biólogos, em 1963, em plena Guerra Fria):
"A tarefa mais importante de um cientista é certamente contribuir para o avanço de sua área de conhecimento. A segunda tarefa mais importante é escapar da visão estreita de uma especialização excessiva, interessando-se ativamente por outros campos em busca do aperfeiçoamento pelo saber que é a missão cultural da ciência. A terceira tarefa é estender aos demais a compreensão de seus conhecimentos, reduzindo ao mínimo o jargão científico, do qual muitos de nós temos orgulho. Um orgulho desse tipo é compreensível. Mas ele é um erro. Deveria ser nosso orgulho ensinar a nós mesmos, da melhor forma possível, a sempre falar tão simplesmente, claramente e despretensiosamente quanto possível, evitando como uma praga a sugestão de que estamos de posse de um conhecimento que é muito profundo para ser expresso de maneira clara e simples.
Esta, é, eu acredito, uma das maiores e mais urgentes responsabilidades sociais dos cientistas. Talvez a maior. Porque esta tarefa está intimamente ligada à sobrevivência da sociedade aberta e da democracia.
Uma sociedade aberta (isto é, uma sociedade baseada na idéia de não apenas tolerar opiniões dissidentes mas de respeitá-las) e uma democracia (isto é, uma forma de governo devotado à proteção de uma sociedade aberta) não podem florescer se a ciência torna-se a propriedade exclusiva de um conjunto fechado de cientistas.
Eu acredito que o hábito de sempre declarar tão claramente quanto possível nosso problema, assim como o estado atual de discussão desse problema, faria muito em favor da tarefa importante de fazer a ciência -- isto é, as idéias científicas -- ser melhor e mais amplamente compreendida."

Karl R. Popper: The Myth of the Framework (in defence of science and rationality). Edited by M. A. Notturno. (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 109.

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