A migratory bird that visits us between late August and early April. Its mating and nesting season is in the eastern United States and it winters in a range from the southern USA to northern South America and the Antilles. These are usually found alone, but unlike other warblers in Panama, will sometimes flock with birds of other species. They are found in secondary forests and at the edges of older growth forests, most frequently at lower elevations. They are found on both sides of the isthmus and in the Perlas Archipelago.
Ave migratoria que nos visita entre finales de agosto y principios de abril. Su temporada de apareamiento y anidación es en el este de Estados Unidos y pasa el invierno en un rango desde el sur de Estados Unidos hasta el norte de Sudamérica y las Antillas. Por lo general, se encuentran solos, pero a diferencia de otras reinitas en Panamá, a veces se juntan con aves de otras especies. Se encuentran en bosques secundarios y en los bordes de bosques de crecimiento más antiguo, con mayor frecuencia en elevaciones más bajas. Se encuentran a ambos lados del istmo y en el Archipiélago de Perlas.
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Before March of this year, few probably thought disease could be a significant driver of human history.
Not so anymore. People are beginning to understand that the little changes COVID-19 has already ushered in or accelerated – telemedicine, remote work, social distancing, the death of the handshake, online shopping, the virtual disappearance of cash and so on – have begun to change their way of life. They may not be sure whether these changes will outlive the pandemic. And they may be uncertain whether these changes are for good or ill.
Three previous plagues could yield some clues about the way COVID-19 might bend the arc of history. As I teach in my course “Plagues, Pandemics and Politics,” pandemics tend to shape human affairs in three ways.
First, they can profoundly alter a society’s fundamental worldview. Second, they can upend core economic structures. And, finally, they can sway power struggles among nations.
While staggering, the number of deaths tells only part of the story. This also triggered a profound transformation in the religious culture of the Roman Empire.
On the eve of the Antonine plague, the empire was pagan. The vast majority of the population worshipped multiple gods and spirits and believed that rivers, trees, fields and buildings each had their own spirit.
Christianity, a monotheistic religion that had little in common with paganism, had only 40,000 adherents, no more than 0.07% of the empire’s population.
Yet within a generation of the end of the Cyprian plague, Christianity had become the dominant religion in the empire.
How did these twin pandemics effect this profound religious transformation?
Rodney Stark, in his seminal work “The Rise of Christianity,” argues that these two pandemics made Christianity a much more attractive belief system.
While the disease was effectively incurable, rudimentary palliative care – the provision of food and water, for example – could spur recovery of those too weak to care for themselves. Motivated by Christian charity and an ethic of care for the sick – and enabled by the thick social and charitable networks around which the early church was organized – the empire’s Christian communities were willing and able to provide this sort of care.
Pagan Romans, on the other hand, opted instead either to flee outbreaks of the plague or to self-isolate in the hope of being spared infection.
This had two effects.
First, Christians survived the ravages of these plagues at higher rates than their pagan neighbors and developed higher levels of immunity more quickly. Seeing that many more of their Christian compatriots were surviving the plague – and attributing this either to divine favor or the benefits of the care being provided by Christians – many pagans were drawn to the Christian community and the belief system that underpinned it. At the same time, tending to sick pagans afforded Christians unprecedented opportunities to evangelize.
Second, Stark argues that, because these two plagues disproportionately affected young and pregnant women, the lower mortality rate among Christians translated into a higher birth rate.
The net effect of all this was that, in roughly the span of a century, an essentially pagan empire found itself well on its way to becoming a majority Christian one.
The plague of Justinian and the fall of Rome
The plague of Justinian, named after the Roman emperor who reigned from A.S. 527 to 565, arrived in the Roman Empire in A.D. 542 and didn’t disappear until A.D. 755. During its two centuries of recurrence, it killed an estimated 25% to 50% of the population – anywhere from 25 million to 100 million people.
This massive loss of lives crippled the economy, triggering a financial crisis that exhausted the state’s coffers and hobbled the empire’s once mighty military.
In the east, Rome’s principal geopolitical rival, Sassanid Persia, was also devastated by the plague and was therefore in no position to exploit the Roman Empire’s weakness. But the forces of the Islamic Rashidun Caliphate in Arabia – which had long been contained by the Romans and Sasanians – were largely unaffected by the plague. The reasons for this are not well understood, but they probably have to do with the caliphate’s relative isolation from major urban centers.
Caliph Abu Bakr didn’t let the opportunity go to waste. Seizing the moment, his forces swiftly conquered the entire Sasanian Empire while stripping the weakened Roman Empire of its territories in the Levant, the Caucasus, Egypt and North Africa.
Muslim forces of the Rashidun Caliphate captured the Levant – a region of the Middle East – from the Byzantine Empire in A.D. 636. Wikimedia Commons
Pre-pandemic, the Mediterranean world had been relatively unified by commerce, politics, religion and culture. What emerged was a fractured trio of civilizations jockeying for power and influence: an Islamic one in the eastern and southern Mediterranean basin; a Greek one in the northeastern Mediterranean; and a European one between the western Mediterranean and the North Sea.
This last civilization – what we now call medieval Europe – was defined by a new, distinctive economic system.
Before the plague, the European economy had been based on slavery. After the plague, the significantly diminished supply of slaves forced landowners to begin granting plots to nominally “free” laborers – serfs who worked the lord’s fields and, in return, received military protection and certain legal rights from the lord.
The seeds of feudalism were planted.
The Black Death of the Middle Ages
The Black Death broke out in Europe in 1347 and subsequently killed between one-third and one-half of the total European population of 80 million people. But it killed more than people. By the time the pandemic had burned out by the early 1350s, a distinctly modern world emerged – one defined by free labor, technological innovation and a growing middle class.
But the loss of so much life shook up an ossified society.
Labor shortages gave peasants more bargaining power. In the agrarian economy, they also encouraged the widespread adoption of new and existing technologies – the iron plow, the three-field crop rotation system and fertilization with manure, all of which significantly increased productivity. Beyond the countryside, it resulted in the invention of time and labor-saving devices such as the printing press, water pumps for draining mines and gunpowder weapons.
The Plague in Florence, 1348.
In turn, freedom from feudal obligations and a desire to move up the social ladder encouraged many peasants to move to towns and engage in crafts and trades. The more successful ones became wealthier and constituted a new middle class. They could now afford more of the luxury goods that could be obtained only from beyond Europe’s frontiers, and this stimulated both long-distance trade and the more efficient three-masted ships needed to engage in that trade.
The new middle class’s increasing wealth also stimulated patronage of the arts, science, literature and philosophy. The result was an explosion of cultural and intellectual creativity – what we now call the Renaissance.
Our present future
None of this is to argue that the still-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic will have similarly earth-shattering outcomes. The mortality rate of COVID-19 is nothing like that of the plagues discussed above, and therefore the consequences may not be as seismic.
But there are some indications that they could be.
Will the bumbling efforts of the open societies of the West to come to grips with the virus shattering already-wavering faith in liberal democracy, creating a space for other ideologies to evolve and metastasize?
In a similar fashion, COVID-19 may be accelerating an already ongoing geopolitical shift in the balance of power between the United States and China. During the pandemic, China has taken the global lead in providing medical assistance to other countries as part of its “Health Silk Road” initiative. Some argue that the combination of America’s failure to lead and China’s relative success at picking up the slack may well be turbocharging China’s rise to a position of global leadership.
Finally, COVID-19 seems to be accelerating the unraveling of long-established patterns and practices of work, with repercussions that could affet the future of office towers, big cities and mass transit, to name just a few. The implications of this and related economic developments may prove as profoundly transformative as those triggered by the Black Death in 1347.
Ultimately, the longer-term consequences of this pandemic – like all previous pandemics – are simply unknowable to those who must endure them. But just as past plagues made the world we currently inhabit, so too will this plague likely remake the one populated by our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
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Within hours after Guna Yala authorities banned the wearing of masks, the Banco Nacional decided that it would not subject its people to the health hazards caused by irresponsible politicians. It did not sue over whether the comarca has the right to do this, it just withdrew in the face of the threat.
They could, so they did?
Panama’s indigenous nations have been hard pressed since Spaniards came here more than 500 years ago, looking to get rich. People have fought and died for such limited self-government as the original nations have been able to win. Let’s not hear any racism or any talk about nations unable to govern themselves, especially from citizens of nations that are also misruled.
Could the local Guna Yala authorities prohibit the wearing of masks? There are legal and political battles to come, but it seems that they have.
It’s a deadly, foolish decision. The first to raise the alarm were Guna teachers. Within hours the state-owned Banco Nacional de Panama closed its doors in Guna Yala. We can expect travel and trade restriction to and from the comarca so long as the extremist anti-mask rule is in effect.
Just because people with a bit of power CAN do something does not mean that they SHOULD do it. Legal rights and powers do not trump natural consequences. Self-determination for an indigenous nation does not mean that the nation won’t pay for bad decisions made on its behalf.
https://youtu.be/km4BmuUFqRQ
Chileans celebrate after it was announced that they had voted more than three-to-one to scrap the former dictatorship’s constitution and convene an elected assembly to draft a proposed new one.
A new era takes hold, not just in Chile
You taught us this just as well That the rich man’s heaven is the poor man’s hell
Burial, by Peter Tosh & Neville Livingston
Chileans, weary of economic dogmas and police brutality enshrined in the 1980 constitution imposed by then dictator Augusto Pinochet have voted overwhelmingly to rescind that document and to begin a democratic process for its replacement. In the same plebiscite Chile also voted by a large majority to exclude current politicians and their institutions from participating in the formulation of a proposed new constitution.
No doubt there will be candidates for delegate to the constituent assembly who will assert all the rejected notions. Chileans will again hear the arguments about “free markets” and how privatization makes things more efficient. They will again be told about how it’s the natural order of things that life has winners and losers, and police and courts to protect those on top from those on the bottom.
All that “Chicago Boys” stuff, which became the “Washington Consensus” about the time that it was written into the Chilean constitution, has been tried and found wanting in Chile.
Elsewhere, too.
The US-prompted coup that installed the Pinochet dictatorship left the strongman in power for more than 15 years and his constitution in effect for more than 30 years after he left office. The US-prompted coup in neighboring Bolivia installed a dictator with similar economic ideas plus overlays of racism and religious fanaticism, but that regime has been voted out after less than one year.
No matter the shape or orientation of any given Latin American or Caribbean government, hard times are here and will be with us for some time. The old rules and built-in inequalities are likely to sooner or later be rejected in most places.
So does Panama want to make its plans based on the old free trade rules with Chile? Does the United States, no matter who wins the upcoming elections?
We don’t know what is to come, but it’s a good foreign policy estimate for any country that the world will not go back to what it was.
All principles are not out the window, nor should they be. Governments everywhere, however, will need to adjust their calculations to a changed situation in our region and in the world.
It is better to be the widow of a hero than the wife of a coward.
Dolores Ibárruri
Bear in mind…
A good manager is best when people barely know that he exists. Not so good when people obey and acclaim him. Worse when they despise him.
Lao-Tzu
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
Voltaire
If we are going to teach creation science as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction.
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A Chilean citizen casts his vote at Chile’s embassy in Panama City. It’s in a referendum about whether to replace the 1980 constitution imposed by the country’s military dictatorship of that time, and by which means a proposed new constitution should be drafted. Photo from the voter’s Twitter feed.
Everyday scams
by Miguel Antonio Bernal
The current administration, very early on, chose to abandon the classic routes of corruption to take the road of daily scams.
More people than they should have wanted – with a sui generis masochism – to deceive themselves into believing that the joint criminal enterprise that presented itself as a collection of political cherubs was going to lead the country to better places. However, reality has forced them to open their eyes, even when there are any number of members of the local population who remain prostrate before the governmental fallacy and their day-to-day thug populism.
There are still those who insist that the public money that the administration uses for their personal enrichment does not belong to anyone. But it’s ours and not theirs. And, that public money that they cheat us on a daily basis, denatures the purposes for which it exists. Citizens must force the administration to use the public treasury with with absolute transparency and permanent accountability.
However, it’s not like that. Every day we see how existing inequalities keep increasing. The quality of life rapidly declines, while public goods and services have become veritable mirages. Our social, political and economic rights are mocked by the daily practices of a lumpen-presidentialism desperate to make us believe that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector, that the banking system should be supported and not health, education and public safety.
Now that they have begun with their vaunted “dialogue” – to unveil their true purposes with respect to the Social Security Fund and the IDAAN water and sewer utility. Let´s see how gladly the party leaders, business establishment and corrupted union bureaucrats pull off robbery, embezzlement and other acts of piracy against the citizens..
During the first half of the 19th century, the wealthiest French business owners had as their slogan “Enrichissez vous” (“Get rich”). Under those watchwords they imposed a moral mechanism that opened the doors to widespread corruption that eroded society. The ghost of the corruption scandal of the Universal Canal Company, is reborn again today in Panama. Our archives of scams, fraud, embezzlement, perversions of justice, etc. are tales of high-ranking officials, untouchable ministers, deputies’ ghost employees, compromised judges, magistrates and prosecutors, unethical attorneys, comptrollers who look the other way and others united in a joint criminal enterprise. They have seized the treasury for their personal purposes.
We citizens must put a stop to this maelstrom of daily scams. We must defend our right to dignity. We must repudiate the lax attitudes toward those who misgovern us. Only an originating constitutional convention that they don’s control will be able to allow us to devise the necessary controls to stop the irrational exercises that we have seen from our political powers that be.
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Aproximación hipotética de un murciélago de labios de flecos, Trachops cirrhosus hacia un jacobino de cuello blanco dormido, Florisuga mellivora. Ilustración de Amy Koehler.
ADN en el excremento de murciélago de labios con flecos revela hábitos alimenticios inesperados
por STRI
El excremento está lleno de secretos. Para los científicos, indagar en las heces brinda información sobre las dietas de los animales y es muy útil para comprender a las especies nocturnas o raras. Cuando los animales comen, el ADN de su presa viaja a lo largo de su tracto digestivo hasta que vuelve a salir. El excremento contiene información muy precisa sobre las especies de presas que consumen. En el Instituto Smithsonian de Investigaciones Tropicales (STRI), un equipo exploró los hábitos alimenticios del murciélago de labios con flecos (Trachops cirrhosus) a través de su excremento.
Los murciélagos cazan de noche. Esto hace más difícil observar sus comportamientos de forrajeo. El análisis del ADN presente en el guano de murciélago ofrece una forma más precisa de explorar cómo se alimentan en la naturaleza y de estudiar cómo cambia el comportamiento de los murciélagos según sus hábitos alimenticios.
“Debido a que los murciélagos se alimentan de noche en el bosque denso, no se puede observar lo que comen de la misma manera que se puede con un ave o mamífero diurno”, comentó Patricia Jones, ex becaria de STRI, profesora asistente de biología en Bowdoin College y autora principal del estudio. “Es trascendental, por lo tanto, echar un vistazo a la dieta de esta especie de la que pensábamos que sabíamos tanto y descubrir que están comiendo presas que no teníamos idea que formaban parte de su alimentación”.
El murciélago de labios con flecos, también conocido como murciélago come ranas, está bien adaptado para cazar ranas. Su audición está adaptada a los llamados de apareamiento de las ranas, y se cree que sus glándulas salivales pueden neutralizar las toxinas en su piel. Estos murciélagos también se alimentan de insectos, pequeños reptiles o aves y otros murciélagos. Los investigadores ya sabían que estos murciélagos a menudo encuentran a sus presas espiando en sus llamados de apareamiento, pero se desconocía si podían detectar presas silenciosas.
Como era de esperar, la mayor parte del ADN recuperado de las muestras de excremento en el estudio pertenecía a especies de ranas y muchas lagartijas, pero los investigadores también encontraron evidencia de que los murciélagos se estaban comiendo a otros murciélagos e incluso a un colibrí. En experimentos adicionales, los murciélagos de labios con flecos capturados en la naturaleza, expuestos a grabaciones de sonidos de presas y modelos de presas estáticas pudieron detectar presas silenciosas e inmóviles, así como presas que emitían sonidos.
Esto llevó a los investigadores a concluir que este murciélago es más capaz de localizar presas por ecolocalización de lo que se pensaba.
“Esto es interesante porque no sabíamos que estos murciélagos eran capaces de detectar presas silenciosas y quietas”, comentó May Dixon, becaria de STRI, estudiante de doctorado en la Universidad de Texas en Austin y coautora del estudio. “Se cree que la detección de presas silenciosas y quietas en la espesa jungla es una tarea realmente difícil para la ecolocalización. Esto se debe a que cuando los murciélagos utilizan la ecolocalización en la jungla, los ecos de todas las hojas y ramas rebotan junto con los ecos de sus presas, y ‘esconden’ a la presa”.
Estos resultados pueden abrir una nueva línea de investigación sobre las habilidades sensoriales y la ecología de forrajeo de T. cirrhosus. También se suma a un creciente cuerpo de trabajo que sugiere que, en los trópicos, los murciélagos pueden ser importantes depredadores nocturnos de animales dormidos como las aves. El equipo también encontró especies de ranas inesperadas entre sus presas comunes.
“Descubrimos que T. cirrhosus a menudo se alimentaba de ranas del género Pristimantis”, comentó Jones. “Creo que esto abrirá nuevas vías de investigación con T. cirrhosus, porque Pristimantis llama desde el dosel y sus llamados son difíciles de localizar, por lo que si T. cirrhosus los está consumiendo, significa que se alimentan de manera diferente de lo que solíamos creer”.
En el futuro, esta nueva combinación de análisis de ADN dietético con experimentos de comportamiento puede ser utilizada por otros ecólogos interesados en los comportamientos de forrajeo de una amplia gama de especies animales.
“Es realmente emocionante ver las puertas que se abren cuando el comportamiento animal se combina con el metabarcoding”, comentó Rachel Page, científica de STRI. “Aunque hemos estudiado al Trachops intensamente durante décadas, en realidad sabemos muy poco sobre su comportamiento en la naturaleza. Fue completamente sorprendente ver aparecer presas que nunca anticipamos en su dieta, como especies de ranas cuyos llamados de apareamiento parecían carecer de los parámetros acústicos necesarios para la localización y, lo que es más sorprendente, presas que parece que los murciélagos deben haber detectado solo por ecolocalización, como colibríes. Este trabajo nos hace repensar los mecanismos sensoriales que subyacen en el comportamiento de forrajeo de este murciélago y abre todo tipo de nuevas puertas para futuras interrogantes”.
Los miembros del equipo de investigación están afiliados a STRI, Bowdoin College, SWCA Environmental Consultants y la Universidad de Texas en Austin. La investigación fue financiada por el Smithsonian, la Fundación Nacional de Ciencias DDIG # 1210655 y un Premio académico P.E.O.
Jones, P., Divoll, T., Dixon, M.M., Aparicio, D., Cohen, G., Mueller, U., Ryan, M.J., Page, R. (2020). Sensory ecology of the frog-eating bat, Trachops cirrhosus, from DNA metabarcoding and behavior. Behavioral Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/araa100
El murciélago de labios de flecos (Trachops cirrhosus), también conocido como murciélago come ranas, está bien adaptado para la caza de ranas. Foto por Marcos Guerra.
Las becarias de STRI Patricia Jones (arriba) y May Dixon (debajo) se sorprendieron al encontrar especies de ranas inesperadas entre las presas de Trachops cirrhosus y al descubrir su capacidad para detectar presas silenciosas y quietas en la espesa jungla. Fotos por Rachel Page y Sean Mattson.
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To fend off hackers, organized trolls and other online vandalism, our website comments feature is switched off. Instead, come to our Facebook page to join in the discussion.
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To fend off hackers, organized trolls and other online vandalism, our website comments feature is switched off. Instead, come to our Facebook page to join in the discussion.
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From a Panamanian Public Ministry graphic. They would lead you to believe that it’s a Brazilian problem, not a Panamanian one.
From Odebrecht to Panabrecht
by Miguel Antonio Bernal
Throughout his tenure, Varela and his Public Ministry, through the attorney general, tried to make us believe that Odebrecht only bribed Martinelli and his children. The Cortizo admionistration and its Public Ministry, hand in hand with the Supreme Court, have gone much further in their cohabitation with impunity for corruption.
Based on the confessions of Marcelo Odebrecht himself and of more than 150 executives of the criminal mega-company, not to mention from investigationd by the Brazilian, American, Swiss, Colombian, Dominican, Guatemalan, Mexican, Peruvian, Venezuelan, Ecuadorian, etc. authorities, there is no room left for doubt about the scope of the crimes perpetrated via the surcharges, bribes, percentages, kickbacks and extortion by those who paid and those who received bribes.
The number of presidents, ministers, deputies, senators, mayors and other officials investigated, prosecuted and jailed in many countries leaves no doubt that the mega criminal enterprise. Nor that its tentacles extended beyond the construction company.
Meanwhile in Panama, the inept governmental and, especially the judiciary (the problems of which are unceasingly covered up by exclusion of all citizen participation), are debased. By all means available, the corrupt continue doing what they feel like doing. The complicity with this criminal enterprise is an example.
Over the past seven years, the “Odebrecht corruption orgy,” as Brazilian prosecutors described it, has dominated all the branches of the Panamanian government. It has managed to strike down the puny public institutions with its stab of death. Contracts and addenda are the buttons that they push.
In the Panama version of the Odebrecht case prosecutors, attorneys general, judges, magistrates, ministers, deputies, mayors, comptrollers and four presidents have zealously sown and harvested disbelief and mistrust, both from the governed towards those who govern, and among the governed against each other.
What credibility can the Public Ministry, the Supreme Court of Justice, the Comptroller General, the Court of Accounts, etc. have today? The chain of failures in the prosecution of crimes has no parallel throughout our history as a republic. They have become a matrix the cradles of corruption and sponsors of impunity. It’s not only in the Odebrecht case, but also in public contracting, legislators’ circuit funds, the representantes’ juntas comunales, ventilators, hospitals, Seguro Social, the universities, to mention just a few examples of this sorry show.
The mega-corruption promoted by the administrations from 2006 to date are living proof of an ongoing affront to our dignity. They mock us with lies and deceit. The main achievement has been to poison the roots of the tree of our national identity.
Those administrations are responsible for this mega-scandal, in which Panama has ceased to mean an abundance of fish, trees and butterflies, and instead to mean an abundance of corruption, impunity, extortion and ineptitude. That is, Panabrecht.
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