Prince Harry returns from battle.
Prince Harry has returned to Great Britain from Afghanistan, where he was deployed with fellow soldiers as part of the NATO mission to stabilize that country and defeat Taliban guerillas.
The chicken-hawk argument is nakedly partisan. During the Kosovo war waged by Bill Clinton and supported by Democrats in 1999, a cry didn’t go up from the Left that no one could support the war unless they were willing to strap themselves into B-2 bombers for the 33-hour ride from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to Belgrade and back to degrade Serbian infrastructure.
By the same token, we could say to proponents of leaving Saddam Hussein in power: “That’s an illegitimate position unless you yourself are willing to move to Tikrit to live for the duration of Saddam’s regime.” Or to supporters of “containing” Saddam: “You’re a hypocrite until you go help patrol the no-fly zone.” Or to advocates of inspections: “You can’t support them unless you don a baby-blue cap and sniff around his suspected chemical-weapons sites yourself.”
Noblesse oblige literally translates to “nobility obligates.” It implies that with wealth, power and prestige come social responsibilities; it is a moral obligation to act with honor, kindliness and generosity.
For citizens of America, true noblesse oblige has nothing to do with high birth, power or prestige. True noblesse oblige is a responsibility for all of us who have been given the benefits of living in a free land, founded on the highest principles. If we, as a country, miss the mark, it is no reflection on the founding principles. It means we have the responsibility to use our energies and intelligence to return to basics and fix it.
We do not need to be wealthy, or powerful, or president to be a hero. We merely need to act, with honor, and with a loving and ethical heart.
Delta Burke has fought depression with the help of medication.
Antidepressant medications appear to help only very severely depressed people and the drugs work no better than placebos in many patients, British researchers said this week. The results shocked a generation of depression patients who have relied on antidepressants to help them overcome low times.
Are antidepressants a hoax? Or is there some other explanation for the study's results?
This is a great concern, particularly for parents. Over the last decade, the numbers of children with bipolar illness and ADHD have exploded--or, more precisely, the rates of diagnoses for these diseases have skyrocketed. Yet how many of these children truly have a disorder? How many are simply exuberant kids who find themselves pushed over a diagnostic threshold by reacting normally to deprivation and chaos in their homes? As with depressed adults, misdiagnosing normal kids as disordered means they are needlessly medicated while precious mental health resources are diverted from children with genuine clinical needs.
In the end, diagnosing a population is a balancing act. Setting a threshold too low makes sick people out of normal ones, but compensatory efforts to raise the bar threaten to exclude people who truly are ill.
What is not warranted is a rush to judgment that these drugs are no good: policymakers and doctors should have sharply in mind that the people most likely to say that pills are pointless are the people who most need them. Nor should it be concluded that the drug companies concerned, which submitted both sets of trial reports to the licensing authorities in this country and the US, pulled a fast one. Trials do not necessarily go unpublished because the results do not “fit” with the hopes of the drug developer; the common reason is that, if results are abnormal, it quite often indicates that the sample was flawed. A study conflating both sets may also be flawed.
The armoury against mental illness is still small. Each weapon in it contains the priceless salve of hope. The need is not to jettison what exists, but to intensify the search for better cures.
Sports fans won't be the only ones watching the world's athletes in Beijing this summer.
Human rights advocates won't be celebrating the summer Olympics in Beijing. China censors the press, cracks down on dissent, and supports genocidal regimes. But the Olympics is supposed to be about setting aside differences, not "wallowing" in politics. Besides, an effort to boycott the Beijing games never got anywhere. Now British Olympic officials are requiring athletes to sign a contract promising not to speak out about China's abusive behavior or face being banned from Beijing. Have Western governments lost their nerve? Should Human rights issues affect whether countries participate in the Olympic games? Is it too late to confront China on its human rights record
From this moment on, I will not write about the Beijing Olympics unless the subject at hand is censorship and repression in China. And -- unless the Chinese government changes its policies -- when the Olympics do come, I will not blog about them at all. I will take the opportunity to write as often as I can about the lack of Freedom of Speech on the Chinese Internet and on the suppression of bloggers and journalists in that country.
Let us lay to rest the argument that we should dispel politics from the Olympics. Politics underlie host governments' motivations, with China nothing less than the norm. If we allow the international community simply to accept the Beijing Games as the Chinese present it, we will concede a great, undeserving misperception. For, the true realization of "One World, One Dream" means the promotion of the human condition -- whether Chinese, Burmese, Sudanese, or American. And, in this event, China falls short of even the bronze medal.
Hugo Chavez is making noise. Again.
Hugo Chavez is threatening to take his ball and go home. In this case, though, the ball is oil -- 12 percent of all U.S. oil imports come from Venezuela. Chavez is angered because a British court has frozen $12 billion in Venezuelan assets as Exxon Mobil as it challenges the nationalization of a multibillion dollar oil project by Chavez's government.
Exxon Mobil, a $440 billion company with operations across the globe, has for decades dealt with crazy, corrupt governments. It routinely does business with the likes of Chad, Russia and Angola and knows all about them. But it's never run into a partner as outrageously bad as Venezuela. That's why its unprecedented move to take Venezuela all the way to international courts over Chavez's seizure of its assets is a big blow from the private sector against a dictatorship that otherwise seems to hold all the cards.
Exxon sends the message that playing within the rule of law is a far better means to succeed, win and play with the big boys than to break contracts, steal assets and violate internationally recognized norms, as exemplified in Chavez's Venezuela.
While the United States relies on Venezuelan oil, Venezuela is even more dependent on the American market. More than half of Venezuela’s oil exports head north toward the Gulf of Mexico—some 1.5 million barrels a day. Over the course of Chávez’s presidency, Venezuela has received billions of dollars from America in oil purchases.
Ultimately, not even a lover of Quixote dares invest too much hope (or cash) in preparing for a break with the American market. Nature has tied Chávez’s arms. Venezuelan crude comes from the earth in a particular viscous form that requires specialized refineries, the type that exists in Louisiana and Texas, not China or India. The country’s fleet of tankers is geared toward transporting this oil to the Gulf of Mexico, and can’t be reversioned for longer hauls. What’s more, Venezuela doesn’t just export its oil to the United States; it actually sells the stuff there in the 14,000 Citgo stations that the state oil company owns.
Have a heart: British hospitals implore reluctant organ donors not to opt out.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has thrown his weight behind a move to allow hospitals to take organs from dead patients without explicit consent. The proposals would mean consent for organ donation after death would be automatically presumed, unless individuals had opted out of the national register or family members objected.
But patients' groups said that they were "totally opposed" to Brown's plan, saying that it would take away patients' rights over their own bodies.
Organ donations save lives, of course. But transplant organizations also troll hospitals like "vultures," as one bio-ethicist told the Washington Post. The story centered around a doctor accused of hastening a patient's death so that his organs would still be useful by the time he died — the first time a surgeon has been thus charged in a transplant case. The widespread fear is that this kind of thing is happening all the time — the doctor in question may have been caught only because he made the mistake of joking about it.
Many European countries presume consent, but it is not the case that they have better donation records than the UK. Sweden has fewer organs available for donation than here because a large number of people register that they do not want to participate. Spain has what is called the "soft" opt-out system, where the views of relatives are sought and they can refuse consent. In other words, this is less about whether the deceased individual favoured organ donation while alive and more about the procedures for approaching and dealing with relatives after death.
