NAFTA and the Food and Agricultural Industries
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect on January 1, 1994. Ethical controversies arising fromNAFTA policies, rules, and procedures reflect its character as more than a regional trade agreement designed to lower barriers to trade across US, Canadian, and Mexican borders. It offers far-reaching guarantees to the rights of foreign investors across NAFTA member state borders, including rigorous protection of intellectual property rights – exceedingWorld Trade Organization (WTO) standards. In particular, NAFTA prohibitions and sanctions against a variety of “nontariff barriers” have raised ethical concerns about a threat to national sovereignty and democratic control in promulgating and enforcing domestic health and environmental regulations, including food safety standards. Ethical concerns raised by NAFTA may best be framed as a failure of “moral imagination,” which Patricia Werhane (1999) defines as “the ability to perceive that a web of competing economic relationships is, at the same time a web of moral relationships” (p. 5). From this absence of moral imagination arises the all too common phenomenon of “moral amnesia,” which Werhane defines as “an inability to remember or learn from one’s own and others’ past mistakes and to transfer that knowledge when fresh challenges arise” (p. 7). As a consequence, “mental maps” or “cognitive scripts” that shape business decisions within the narrow confines of economic “rationality” tend to prompt a “setting aside of moral considerations in the pace of business activities” (p. 11).
Digesting the nineteenth century: Nietzsche and the stomach of modernity
This is a variation on a familiar theme of decadence, or decadent self-reflection – too much, but of that too little. Here, a plethora of forms leads to a lack of formation, the prestissimo of modernity paralyzes its subjects, sensory overload produces numbness. There’s too much to act on, and hence no action – the paradoxes of the anti-Hegelian anti-dialectic in which Aufhebung is no longer possible. But why all this under the sign of digestion? The theme pervades Nietzsche’s writing, and like many of Nietzsche’s important terms, it metamorphoses, accrues different implications, and serves various functions. The remainder of the fragment cited above – which recapitulates many themes that occur from Nietzsche’s early writings on – makes it clear that the stomach of modernity is an organ of the long nineteenth century, at least as Nietzsche perceives it: A sort of assimilation to this inundation of impressions occurs: man unlearns to act; he only reacts to external excitements. ... Deep weakening of spontaneity: the historian, the critic, the analyzer, the interpreter, the observer, the collector, the reader – all reactive talents: all science! Artificial arrangement of his nature into a mirror: interested, but quasi only epidermally interested [...] (XII, p. 464)
Mathematical Modeling of Scour and Deposition
Electronic computers are opening up the field of sedimentation engineering by permitting the analysis of problems which heretofore have required too much time and effort. Movable stream bed profiles are being calculated in addition to water surface profiles. The initial gradation of sediment material in the stream bed may be prescribed to facilitate the calculation of an armor layer. This gradation is continually changed by the computer program in response to sediment particles being deposited on the stream bed and material on the stream bed being removed to satisfy transport capacity. Hydraulic sorting of sediment by grain size is accomodated. The stream bed does not have to be represented by a single grain size. Retardance of motion because of armor layer is calculated.