RIP Lynn Margulis

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Sad news, everyone. Lynn Margulis passed away two days ago.

Important? Hell, yeah. Never met her in person. But she came up with one of the most fascinating scientific theories ever: the endosymbiotic theory. Remember, the stuff you are told from high school: mitochondria and plastids (such as chloroplasts) originated from free-living bacteria that were integrated in other cells. The whole system ended up being an eukaryotic cell, in other words what composes us.

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Bulgaria to Teach Tunisia How to “Do Democracy”

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[This post was first published on FutureChallenges.org.]

When Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire in the Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid in December 2010, nobody expected what was going to happen afterwards. Several observers and experts attempted to draw a parallel between events in Tunisia and the dramatic changes that took place in eastern European countries after the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago. This comparison was taken so seriously that Bulgarian government announced, after a meeting between the Bulgarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and his Tunisian interim counterpart, that Bulgaria was opening a special school to teach future Tunisian politicians how to succeed in democratic transition.

When I read about this in nearly all the Bulgarian newspapers, I thought it was some kind of bad joke. When Tunisians went down into the streets, they were protesting against corruption, despotism and joblessness. They were chanting for basic human rights, free speech, and an end to arbitrary repression.

What example could Bulgaria give in these matters after 20 years of democratic transition?

The EC report published in 2008 under the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) qualified the situation in Bulgaria as “grave” and highlighted the inadequacy of measures the government was employing to fight corruption. The very last such report, published on July 20 this year, pointed out that while efforts have been made to fight corruption and improve the judiciary, doubts still persist about the how serious the government really is about implementing actual reform.

 

Democracy in Bulgaria: the unexisting stool with 2.17 legs. Image adapted by the author (CC-by-SA)

Democracy in Bulgaria: the non-existant stool with 2.17 legs. Image adapted by the author (CC-by-SA)

In 2009, the Washington-based watchdog Freedom House ranked Bulgaria 76th out of a total of 196 countries, and indicated erosion of freedom of the press and freedom of speech 1. Moreover, a report from the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee (BHC) pointed out that – with the exception of children’s rights – basic human rights have been dramatically downgraded in 2010. This picturesque landscape is complimented by an “increase in the frequency of arbitrary use of special surveillance devices (SSD) by security services”, the BHC reports. The SSD Act and the Criminal Procedure Code do not provide sufficient safeguards against arbitrary surveillance and the secret monitoring of other forms of private communication.

Five centuries of Ottoman rule ended in 1878 with a liberating war and were followed by several decades of constitutional monarchy. Half-a-century of totalitarian “communism” came after which was another period of anything but a balanced political system. In 1989, Bulgaria was caught up in the events following the fall of the Berlin Wall: the end of the “communist” regime was above all the result of an external breakdown, not an internal uprising. The domino effect initiated in Central Europe eventually reached Bulgaria, of course, but it was the Communist Party that decided on the first changes. The “ex-communists” became socialists2 eager to maintain their influence in the face of an aggressive opposition from the solid body of “anti-communists” making up the United Democratic Forces3 who wanted to take over all the levers of power in the name of democracy. This binary division has resulted in a mafia-like “gray” economy – an inexhaustible source of fraudulent enrichment.

The Constitution (adopted in July 1991) and this rudimentary two party system are clear indicators of the tremendous difficulties involved in building a sane electoral baseline and highlighted the fact that we were simply not ready to make this famous transition to democracy. And this political set is here to stay: the constitution of the parliament such as it is after the most recent elections in 2009 (see figure below) clearly shows the 2 poles (center-left with BSP and the Turkish minority movement4 vs. all the others ranging from center-right to far-right5).

 

The make-up of Bulgarian Parliament since 2009. Image by the author (CC-by-SA)

The make-up of Bulgarian Parliament since 2009. Image by the author (CC-by-SA)

Nor do things look any better, economically speaking. Bulgaria is the poorest country in the EU. Even though the average salary is said to be  300€/month, the minimal salary remains ridiculously low (270 levs ~ 135€/month) and there are major disparities between the country’s regions. People have not forgotten the huge unemployment rate (18%) less than 10 years ago nor the galloping inflation (550% in 1997). In 2010, 10.2% of the population were unemployed, and the introduction of the euro to the country was postponed to 2015. Recently, the “gray economy” was estimated to make up as much as 40% of GDP. But I guess, we can always assure Tunisians that it is much better to have a “gray economy” than no economy at all, as the Bulgarian Minister of Finances and Transport Traycho Traychev put it a few months ago…

Against such a shabby and uncertain background, I honestly ask myself what kind of “How-To-Do Democracy” handbook Bulgarians can write for Tunisians. The infamous “Bulgarian umbrella” and our flourishing “gray economy” seem to be the only high-profile goods we can export…


[1] The report assigns a numerical ranking to each country based on legal, political, and economic factors; it considers regulations that restrict media content, editorial pressure by the government, intimidation of journalists, and the structure of media ownership.

[2] The socialists gather in the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP).

[3] SDS is Union of Democratic Forces (in Bulgarian: Съюз на демократичните сили, Sayuz na demokratichnite sili, СДС). For the parliamentary elections in 1997, an alliance named ODS for United Democratic Forces (Bulgarian: Обединени Демократични Сили, ОДС) was formed around SDS.

[4] The Rights and Freedom Movement (DPS; Bulgarian: Движение за права и свободи, Dvizhenie za prava i svobodi; Turkish: Hak ve Özgürlükler Hareketi) is the Turkish and Muslim minority party in Bulgaria.

[5] The current majority party GERB is classified as center-right; Ataka is the far-right movement, and all the other parties are in between these two.

Photo credits: Stool is originally by mrflip (licensed under CC-by-SA 2.0)

Unconcerned by 9/11? Think again!

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[This piece was first published on FutureChallenges.org.]

My skin is milk-white. I am from Eastern Europe. I am a successful student in Paris, France and I have nothing in common with a North-African girl with her lively French punctuated by Arabic words and her curly hair, often shyly hidden under a veil. I am anything but concerned by what happened on September 11.

Ain’t I?

Such individualities brutally coagulated into the solid, rigid block of “Muslims” – therefore potentially violent, thus probably jihadists – are everywhere around me. I meet them at the university, we buy the same cornflakes in the supermarket, we take the same noisy crowded train every day after work. A few are friends, it feels good having tea with them after an exhausting day of lectures. But the majority of them are just people I don’t know anything about. The fact is though that they have become “the enemy within”. Overnight people who were just living their lives have become terrorists.

But I see something else: myself and others of my age have spent 10 years of our young adult lives under various emergency laws and a regime of institutionalized racism, 10 years of carefully instilled fear of the Other, this cursed Muslim otherness, criminally justified by Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” Only one month after 9/11, Bush’s government voted the Patriot Act, that carte blanche for feds to commit any illegal acts in the name of security, for psychological pressure and unlimited custody based on simple suspicion.

In France, the “plan Vigipirate” has become permanent: armed soldiers patrolling among civilians in train stations have become a standard part of everyday life even though a state of emergency has never been proclaimed. Do you feel secure with these guys hanging around with loaded Famas guns? Do you find it normal that policemen in the streets stop North African people to check their IDs only because these people have dark skins? Even though I am a foreigner in France – and thus equally likely to be controlled – I have never been asked to show my ID. In the métro you are politely asked to report “any item that might seem suspicious” and a forgotten bag leads to the closure of a whole line.

In the sacred name of anti-terrorism, cops dissect phone bills, passports have become biometric and the newest French identity cards will soon contain a RFID chip with all your personal biometric data on it, ensuring that citizens are under total surveillance without knowing it. As stated in the related law, this data will be collected from 45 million “honest French people” and stored in a centralized national biometrical database. This new ID card may also include a second chip, a smart card with a “unique digital signature” that identifies you on e-commerce websites. The data from such commercial transactions will be collected by the Ministry of Interior. The citizen is now an integrally traceable alleged offender with no choice but to obey the panoptic control of CCTV cameras and “security” gates which beep so very often – even in the museums. Say Cheese! You are videoprotected…

You are concerned. Even if you think 9/11 is just a very high-level political conflict quite beyond your comprehension or just a local issue, you should wake up and begin working to counteract ordinary everyday state terrorism. “1984” was fiction, not a “how-to-do-it” manuel.

[Brevia] Gendered Innovations portal

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I got this through the eq-uni mailing-list, from Londa Schiebinger, Stanford University, Ineke Klinge, Maastricht University and Martina Schraudner, Fraunhofer & TU Berlin. It is about the Gendered Innovations In Science, Health & Medicine, and Engineering Project.

This project develops practical methods of sex and gender analysis for scientists and engineers, and provides case studies as concrete illustrations of how sex and gender analysis leads to innovation.

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[Brevia] Open Letter to the European Commission on Socio-economic Sciences & Humanities research

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In the proposal for next EC Framework Programme — Horizon 2020, — no funding for research in the social sciences and humanities is mentioned. If you support the idea of maintaining specific research funding for the social sciences and humanities (as it is the case under FP7), you are kindly invited to sign the open letter to the European Commission

Please forward this invitation to sign to others.