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Kofi annan:

Butterflies on the Brain

by Judi McLeod, Canadafreepress.com

august 25, 2004

Butterflies seem to be on the brain of United Nations Secretary-General Kofi annan, and butterflies were foremost on his mind in the wake of 9/11.

…"If today after the horror of 11 September, we see better, and we see further, we will realize that humanity is indivisible," annan was quoted by writer Philip Gourevitch, in a March, 2003 profile, entitled The Optimist in New Yorker magazine. "To illustrate his point, annan evoked an image from chaos theory. ‘Scientists tell us that the world of nature is so small and interdependent that a butterfly flapping its wings in the amazon rainforest can generate a violent storm on the other side of the earth. The principle is known as the Butterfly Effect. Today, we realize, perhaps more than ever, that the world of humans also has its own Butterfly Effect--for better or for worse.’"

"Reflecting on the terrorist attacks of September, 2001, he (annan) heard a wakeup call for his cause," Gourevitch wrote. "’Ladies and Gentlemen, we have entered the third millennium through a gate of fire,’ he said in Oslo on accepting the Nobel Peace Prize--awarded jointly to annan and the UN--in December of that year."

a year later, when Gourevitch made a return visit to annan at UN headquarters, "annan allowed that of late the human storms have been worse."

"The world is really a big mess," said annan. Where ever you turn you have problems.

"We have the global economic downturn, and of course you have the terrorist threats and the terrorist networks which are spread very far.

"Even without these things, I always maintain that we have a serious crisis of governance. To govern in this atmosphere and take optional and rational decisions, trying to deal with the hot issues while containing the others, is really a difficult thing. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning I don’t know where else a major crisis is going to break."

Obviously, not on the other side of the world if that's where a butterfly flapped its wings.

as one meteorologist remarked if the theory of the butterfly effect were correct, "one flap of a seagull’s wing would be enough the alter the course of the weather forever."

So where did the Butterfly Effect originate?

Not with Kofi annan.

Not even with ashton Kutcher Picture’s 2004 Butterfly Effect, the movie.

There was also the Butterfly Effect premise borrowed by Ray Bradbury’s world famous short story, a Sound of Thunder. It had already been dramatized as part of the Ray Bradbury Theatre TV stories, and the short story inspired a sextet of sequel novels by Stephen Leigh, published from 1992-1995.

So annan had lots of sources for the anecdote he related to Gourevitch.

as a theory, the Butterfly Effect, has been out there floating around (no pun intended since the 1960s).

The Butterfly Effect has been most commonly associated with the weather system as this is where the discovery of "non-linear" phenomenon began when Edward Lorenz found anomalies in computer models of the weather.

The garden-variety seagull was the original model for the chaos theory. By the time it was discussed at the December 1972 meting of the american association for the advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., the seagull had evolved into the more poetic butterfly.

If annan "doesn’t know where else a major crisis is going to break, he "didn’t sound alarmed," wrote Gourevitch. "His voice was as mellifluous as ever. He is, above all, an optimist, and he spoke with something of a weatherman’s confidence that even the most devastating tempests will pass."

Given their margin of error, many take the weathermen with a grain of salt.

as Ezra Levant wrote in Fight Kyoto, "If accurately predicting the local weather is challenging, how can climate scientists accurately predict the climate, for the entire world, for decades or even centuries in advance--with the absurd requirement of being precise to a tenth of a degree?

"The answer, of course, is that such predictions are impossible. all climate projections are merely computer models, into which scientists try to take into account as many variables as they can. With whatever mathematical formulas they believe apply."

Meanwhile, if Kofi annan still has butterflies on the brain, the rest of us should have butterflies in our stomachs.

Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com


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