Rich and Strange Aeons

signal amp: Goldwater vs. GOP

Fri, 16 May 2008 13:47:15 GMT

monty00 goes to a lecture by Barry Goldwater Jr. on his father's politics and the difference between conservatism and the Republican party.

genetic slaves or master race?

Thu, 15 May 2008 17:18:00 GMT

We can't allow genetic engineering because that will objectify the engineered!

We can't allow genetic engineering because the rich will become a genetically divergent master race!

Wait, which is it?

In defense of food review, part 2

Thu, 15 May 2008 06:00:01 GMT

As mentioned at the end of part one, Pollan goes on to tackle what we do eat, starting with Kerin O'Dea's experiment in sending ten overweight and diabetic Aborigines, who'd retained hunting knowledge, into the bush. In their coastal location they mostly ate seafood, plus birds, kangaroo, and witchetty grubs. "Hoping to find more plant foods" the group went inland, gettigh fish and shellfish, turtle, crocodile, birds, kangaroo, yams, figs, adn bush honey. (Doesn't seem like a lot of plants.) This vs. their urban diet of flour, sugar, rice, soft drinks, beer and port, powdered milk, cheap fatty meat, potatoes, onions, and "variable contributions of other fresh fruits and vegetables." After 7 weeks of eating like this (and presumably getting a lot more exercise) they'd lost an average of 17.9 pounds, dropped blood pressure and triglycerides, increased blood omega-3s, and improved their glucose tolerance, sometimes to normal levels.

Walter Willet said only 3.1% of the Nurses's Health Study (one of the few big population studies) followed a healthy diet, defined by him as non-smoker, BMI<25, 30 minutes of exercise a day, low trans fat, high poly to sat fat ratio, high whole-grain intake; two fish servings a week; RDA of folic acid and at least five grams of alcohol a day. Based on 14 years of study, he calcualted that if the cohort adopted these behaviors, 70-90% of heart disease/diabetes/colon cancers could have been prevented.

Western diet gets defined as "lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything except fruits, vegetables, and whole grains." He then talks about how in the early 1900s many professionals noted the almost complete absence of common Western chronic diseases in "native" populations. Little to know heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity, hypertension, or stroke; no appendicitis (!), diverticulitis, tooth decay, varicose veins, ulcers, or hemorrhoids. Such diseases appeared "among natives living more and more after the manner of the whites" as Albert Schweitzer put it. Counter-arguments were genetics (refuted by similar problems faced by blacks and whites in America, or among immigrants) and demographics, but apparently age-adjust rates of diabetes and cancer are a lot higher. (Heart disease data is sketchy.)

Weston A. Price, a dentist, became consumed with the question of why people needed so much dental care. He suspected nutrition, not hygiene and went looking for control groups (now hard to find) from the mountains of Switzerland and Peru to the lowlands of Africa and the Everglades of Florida, summing up his findings in his Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. He smacks of crackpottery (article: "Dentistry and Race Destiny") and a monomaniac on diet. But he supposedly found a near absence of tooth decay among his populations, and that they were eating an average of 10 times the vitamin A and D of Americans, partly because processing robs foods of vitamins. A good way to preserve food is to take the nutrients out; calories are easier to transport than nutrients.

That connects with a couple of things in my life. One is my old edition of The Joy of Cooking, where the authors mention some unsourced study where rats, given a surfeit of grains, ate the germ and left the rest; with white bread we leave the germ and eat the rest. And when I started making bread with more and more whole wheat flour, or buying whole wheat instead of normal pita (neither with any preservatives) from Trader Joe's, I found how much more quickly the whole wheat breads went moldy (unrefrigerated). White pita could last a week in San Francisco, whole wheat three days. I don't remember times for my own breads, but 100% whole wheat bread definitely couldn't be kept around nearly as long as bread flour bread.

Price didn't identify any ideal diet; his subjects ranged all over, including the meat blood and dairy diet of the Masai. Wild animal flesh seemed healthier than cereals. Many prized organ meats, and almost everyone valued seafood, trading for dried fish eggs if they had to. He also looked at the health of animals, e.g. the vitamin content of milk from spring pastured cows and those eating winter forage. He and Sir Albert Howard saw problems with the new modern agriculture, where plants were drowned in simple artificial fertilizers (rich in the elements N, P, and K, like trying to feed people with fat, protein, and carbohydrate) and the wastes of the cities were not returned to the soils that produced their food. Pollan will later talk about the superior nutritional value of organic produce, from both superior soils and the fact that plants not spared all insect assault produce more of the phytochemicals we find healthy.

Changes in our foods:
* from whole to refined (white flour was more prestigious -- I remember that from Heidi; lasted longer; and tastes sweeter given a lack of fiber and finer grinding.) Modern steel grinding is finer than stone grinding, and can remove the germ, not just crush it and make it go rancid. And there's refined sugar, something of unnatural purity and lack of nutrients.

* complexity to simplicity (simple fertilizers; monocropping; domination of our diet by just a few plants, wheat corn and soy, and animals fed corn and soy.)

* quality to quantity: you'd have to eat three apples to get the iron provided by one 1940 apples, and several more slices of bread to get your RDA of zinc. Even our whole foods are as good as they used to be. Another reason is genetics, that we've been breeding plants for fast growth and high yield, which goes against nutritional density. (Easier to make more sugar or starch than to absorb more zinc, even easier for a fruit to bloat up with water.) Bruce Ames thinks that subtle micronutrient deficiencies lead to cancer, and that obesity may be related to people keeping on eating, unconsciously desperate for sufficient nutrient, in a futile but profitable cycle.

* leaves to seeds: our staple crops are grains and the legume soy, rich in macronutrients and stable, but poorer in phytochemicals and omega-3 oils. Omega-3s spoil more readily, so there's been an unconscious bias against them in plant breeding, and of course in food processing. He talks at length about the benefits of Omega-3 (acknowledging that some researchers make it sound like the Key to Everything), and quotes Susan Allport as noting that O-3s increase metabolism, possibly reducing obesity but also increasing hunger, perhaps explaining why populations migrate away from O-3s into things like the Western diet

* food culture to food science, from cooking taught by our mothers to food processed according to the needs of industry and the latest nutritionist fads, and medical intervention to sort out the problems. (Also see the antibiotics given cattle in grain feedlots, to counteract the bacterial bloating the grass-adapted ruminants otherwise suffer.)

Part III of the book looks at what to do. He notes that many of the offered explanations seem to conflict: lipid vs. carbohydrate hypotheses, Omega-3 deficiencies vs. refined carbohydrate excess. But we don't have to know what's mechanistically wrong with the Western diet to see that something is wrong with the Western diet -- though the food industry (odd phrase!) would love to have theories by which to advertise new, further processed, and profit-marked-up products.

Supposedly Americans spend 10% of their income on food, while French, Spanish, and Italians spend 15-17%. Of course, Americans have higher average income, especially on a PPP basis. Still, we can compare to %income (or rather, %GDP) spent on health care -- 15% in the US, 10% or less in most of the First World. Food+medicine comes to 25% in both cases... surely spending more on food and needing less health care -- they live longer -- is more pleasant?

* Eat Food: avoid foods your grandmother wouldn't recognize as food (yogurt in a tube? with more ingredients than milk and bacteria?) Perhaps avoid food incapable of rotting, though of course some preservation has been traditional. Avoid food processed to hit your evolutionary buttons -- added fats and sugars. Shop from the edges of the supermarket, not the aisles (produce, dairy, and fresh meats such as they are tend to be at the edges.) One thing he mentions is that in 1973 the FDA became much looser in labelling; before then, much of our yogurt or bread would have been "imitation" food, given all the additives.

And there's stuff about eating mostly plants, and the possible benefits of antioxidants in a food context, and following a traditional cuisine, and eating meals more slowly and avoiding snacks. But it's 2am and time for bed, and there probably won't be a part 3 of this.

Alleywalking in defense of food

Wed, 14 May 2008 22:45:55 GMT

Bloomington has SF/English weather right now, light overcast, occasional spritz of rain, grey over green, a combination I've always loved. And maybe the winter really got to me, but right now it seems *really* green around here, as in I'll look down a street and see the trees in leaf and be surprised at how the view is blocked. Many of the blocks here are criss-crossed with alleys, vs. blocks in Chicago that just had a long block going down them, or ones in San Francisco with no alleys and trash pickup is out front. (Out front here too, despite the alleys.) Today I was diverting myself down alleys, and discovering the central spaces, standing on gravel under clouds and trees, the cars somewhat distant and muffled by houses and leaves, birds chirping in the trees above me. Chicago wouldn't have that feeling, I think, partly from there being fewer trees in that location, and largely because of the feeling of being in a crossroads, and looking out in four directions, vs. being trapped in the middle of a long alley. I think *that's* related to Jane Jacobs's observations about short vs. long city blocks, and how much more pedestrian (and business) friendly the former were. Also related to my brief couple of weeks working at Knowledge Adventure, in some office block around LA, in the middle of an inhumanly long block, of course sans any green or softening features. My friends Glenn&Sarah lived in blocks half a mile long, but at least all those 3/4 acre lots softened the view, plus G&S were close to one end.

But that all isn't what I meant to be writing about. I recently read In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan, an author you may remember from such books as The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma, as well as LJ posts such as this review and a brief thread on nutritionism. That last links through to his essay which in fact was the original seed of this book, and the basic message hasn't changed: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Approach food and diet as a whole, not in terms of what nutrients are present, especially if they've been added; science may eventually figure out all the details of how food and eating work, but it hasn't yet, and you're better off with a traditional diet that's been not-killing people for centuries or millennia than with the killer Western diet patched up with incomplete nutritional science.

The book expands that frame, starting with the evolution of 'foods' to 'nutrients'. This covers the growth of supermarket foods with allegedly healthy additives (oat bran! low-carb! Omega-3!) in, of course, processed and marked up foods with labels that can carry health claims (thus his advice about avoiding food that makes health claims), the stages of nutritional science (food consists of fats, protein, and carbohydrates! It is solved! Oops, vitamins too. And anti-oxidants. And some fats are better than others. Fiber's good. Oh wait, there are types of good fat, you need the right ratio...) the story of the short-lived Senate recommendation for dealing with rising rates of heart disease ("reduce consumption of meat", based on comparison with both other countries and the US under wartime rationing, quickly lobbied into "Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake." conflating three rather different species, and focusing on one nutrient in them), and the possible disaster of the lipid hypothesis (that fats increased heart disease and cancer rates, for which the evidence isn't that good, apart from trans fats, which people ate lots more of (as margarine, and in processed foods) because they'd been told to avoid butter and lard (though I don't know if the food industry thought it was being healthy or if hydrogenated vegetable oils were cheaper than butter and lard) and of course Americans got even fatter on their low-fat diets).

He also talks about the social aspects: America's latent Puritanism, suspicious of sensual pleasure such as enjoying your food; fear of the odd foods of immigrants; John Kellogg's (yes, the co-inventor of corn flakes and advocate of hourly yogurt enemas, 10-pounds-of-grapes diets, and chewing your food 100 times before swalloing) belief that animal protein led to masturbation. And Pollan looks at what science does say, and its problems: yes, fats have more calories per gram than carbohydrates, but there's theory that refined carbohydrates interfere with insulin mechanisms and contribute to weight gain. (In admirable consistency, Pollan criticizes Gary Taubes for jumping on the "carbohydrate hypothesis" as the answer to the lipid hypothesis, an act Pollan sees as the same sort of premature reductionism. He doesn't mention it here, but it would more in keeping with his whole-diet stance to note that when we want to fatten up hogs and cattle, we feed them grains.) Heart disease mortality has dropped, but allegedly more from improved treatment, not from equally reduced rates of heart disease. He talks about why scientists are understandably inclined to analyze the effects of one nutrient at a time, but notes how often a promising chemical in the test tube seems to have little effect as a supplement, and lists the 35 (if I counted right) anti-oxidants identified in thyme. And he notes the difficulty in doing controlled experiments on single substances: cut the saturated fat, and you've cut the calories, or replaced them with something else, so you're comparing the effects of fat qua fat vs. difference in calories or the effects of other foods. The gold-standard in nutrition science has been large-scale intervention studies... which look at minor differences in the Western diet, focused on nutrients (such as eating less fat, which could mean eating more plants or eating leaner meats or...) with low rates of compliance and terribly picky and biasing questionnaires.

Quick question: imagine you're stuck on a desert island for a year, and can eat only one food, plus water: which will best support your health, out of bananas, corn, alfalfa sprouts, spinach, hot dogs, chocolate milk, and peaches?

Well, all that has covered a third of the book! Part II talks about the Western diet and the evidence against it, starting with diabetic aborigines who went back to the bush for seven weeks, and showed dramatic weight loss and improvements in their health. We've known for a century that overweight, diabetes, hypertension and other problems swarm a population newly come to the Western diet; we hadn't known the effects could be so quickly reversed. "Western diseases" aren't more common just because of age, as they're more common among old people than they were in 1900.

...and it's time for a break. But I'll throw in this article about claims that fetal exposure to common chemicals may predispose to obesity later.

Wait, head transplants were real?

Wed, 14 May 2008 20:44:33 GMT

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/technology/technology.html?in_article_id=426765
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Top/ecomments/4747/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_transplant
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1263758.stm
http://www.mymultiplesclerosis.co.uk/stranger-than-fiction/head-transplant.html

http://www.indiana.edu/~pietsch/head-transplant.html

links

Wed, 14 May 2008 20:06:16 GMT

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080514/pl_nm/usa_politics_dc_74

"Exit polls in West Virginia showed two of every 10 white voters said race was a factor in their decision and only a third of those said they would support Obama against McCain."

http://optimussven.livejournal.com/313014.html
"al-nakba" or "al-naqba"? Reflects accurate Arabic vs. misguided Hebrew, and people picking up the same.

http://a-steep-hill.livejournal.com/180217.html
cap and dividend

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/09/plant_dignity/
gotta protect the dignity of plants, you know

http://forum.rpg.net/showpost.php?p=8871948&postcount=36
Tolkien claimed Middle-Earth was the prehistory of Europe... allegedly from
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

Shopping, hrmph

Tue, 13 May 2008 23:48:05 GMT

A while back my fitted sheet started coming apart somehow; I dug out leftovers (from my 1st-year roommate?) but it's not really long enough. I finally went to Target to replace it properly. Few colors or patterns I wanted, especially at the 600 thread count 100% cotton level. I kept looking and dithering, and noticing the smell rising from the plastic containers, or maybe the sheets inside the bags. Then I noticed organic cotton sheets, claiming no or minimal chemicals. Colors weren't great, only 250 thread count, but still felt decent, and avoiding toxic smells started seeming good. Only, all they had in stock were twin and king sizes, and I've got a double/full bed. I went away frustrated, thinking of the Internet.

My backpack, which is pretty nice, and I got for I don't remember how much in my neighborhood in Chicago, but probably under $30, has a hole in the bottom. I've been thinking of taking it to the A Stich In Time for repairs, but haven't, and Anime Central is this weekend and I might go to it. So I checked out the backpacks section as well... $50-60 everywhere, and the air reeked of plastic fumes. Didn't get anything, and I'm thinking fondly of my old leather backpack, which I finally gave up; probably left it behind as trash in Chicago. The padded straps on my current one are more comfortable, really.

God the Ineffable

Tue, 13 May 2008 17:24:27 GMT

http://www.jesusandmo.net/2008/05/13/stop/

"New" (little-known) Einstein letter on religion

Tue, 13 May 2008 09:33:37 GMT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/may/12/peopleinscience.religion

"The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.

For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people."

Saudi culture

Mon, 12 May 2008 16:09:10 GMT

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/world/middleeast/12saudi.html

edit: part 2: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/world/middleeast/13girls.html

Speaking of filk

Sun, 11 May 2008 06:11:08 GMT

Cat Faber, author of the filk song The Word of God (mp3, simpler music), which I've memorized, has a great analogy about Creationist "controversies of evolution."

Speaking of tastes

Sun, 11 May 2008 05:15:28 GMT

I reserve the right to edit this post in the indefinite future, as I think of new things, it's basically a crystallization (well, spew) of musings I've had for a while. I suppose a web page would be more logical.

Life-defining tastes I don't have to share: Douglas Adams, Pratchett, science fiction/fantasy in general, Buffy, Firefly, Lem's Cyberiad, Feynman's autobiographies. Not that all my friends are into all of them, but they're pretty common. Babylon-5 was defining back at Caltech, but seems rarer now, not sure if that's age or B-5 not being all that good in retrospect. OTOH anime in a general sense is very common in my local circles and probably scarce among my older Tech friends, except Fanw's been watching Cowboy Bebop and maybe Miyazaki?

Tastes I've had and shared, or tried to, or had shared with me: P. C. Hodgell (from roommate, spread as much as I could), followed by McKinley's Sunshine (Barbara put me onto McKinley, I've been spreading Sunshine). Fanw roped me into Buffy, I roped Liz. mlc23 got me into weightlifting, and one of us got the other into Andrew Tobias's The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need. Michael Pollan's going around, though I don't remember the causal links; he might even be in the first category.

Tastes that seem to be just me, or one other person: Tech-Sarah introduced me to filk, and fanw accidentally re-introduced me by singing the Horse-Tamer's Daughter, but the latter was a one-off and I'm mostly unique among my friends. Except I think saganhawk may have some too, an issue never deeply probed. Honestly, I'm used to being all alone in my musical tastes. Grew up with parental classical, latched onto Steeleye Span, which Lisa had as well but she's gone, I got into Celtic in general which Caitlin shared, but she's far away. Friends like John knew about my filk interest but nothing really got shared, and I don't even try... but maybe someone here would appreciate Meg Davis.

Parents gave me Calvin Trillin, and I didn't even think to try to share it for a long time, though now akashiver got given the Tummy Trilogy and lyceum's borrowed Uncivil Liberties. It's a big part of the shared family humor. The Taste of America by John and Karen Hess, was another parental one -- a book on the degradation of the American palate over the centuries. I got Blake, the food snob/gourmet in our San Fran circle, to get it, but that's it. Sarah and I shared C. J. Cherryh, and later Lois Bujold, I think both passing from her to me like the filk. We both liked the children's book The Griffin and the Minor Canon -- I used my knowledge of that to make her pay attention to me as a real person, not just another freshman bugging the junior. :) My parents gave me Oscar Williams's collection of English verse, which I lent to her, then had to buy a replacement for because she wouldn't let it go. I think she introduced me to Griffin and Sabine, or John did both of us? and I used that as gifts to my mother for a while. anima latched onto Lud-in-the-Mist, which I knew only from the SF library at Caltech. John and I shared Amber and Books of Swords interests, though he kept not branching out to Empire of the East. Shared Doom as well, including mastering odd weapons in it (him, the shotgun; me the chainsaw, or the rocket launcher with the ammo cheat), and Star Control II. ("Frungy, the sport of kings!") No one close played nethack, though some newer people have, as did my girlfriend here.

Then there's all the popular music, movies, and computer game interests that other people have and I don't. :) I still haven't seen Real Genius, official movie of Caltech...

Birthday stuff

Sun, 11 May 2008 03:05:25 GMT

If life was the Illuminati or CryptNet, I would now be of the highest degree.

Got the usual call from John (he always remembers), and a surprise one from mrs_feltner. Didn't do much else yesterday, but had a small dinner tonight at Bombay House. Out of coffee and tandoori lamb, but the chai and tan. chicken was good, and afterwards people were in my place for the first time since July, perhaps. (Place is a lot more crowded after bringing boxes back from the house.) All the books lying around were good for starting little conversations, though, and lyceum borrowed Uncivil Liberties -- Calvin Trillin being a parental taste I haven't spread around my friends enough, along with Taste of America, and boco's got my Juuni Kokki.

I stayed up to 6am working on the wikip Transhumanism page,so today was pretty much dead between then and dinner time.

Unrelated: the state of the US electrical grid

Dubai construction craziness. I figure crappy outdoors + oil == build lots of indoors. An RPG.net thread discusses how much of that is underpaid near-slave labor.

Steven Pinker on "The Stupidity of Dignity"

Sat, 10 May 2008 07:42:20 GMT

http://www.tnr.com/story.html?id=d8731cf4-e87b-4d88-b7e7-f5059cd0bfbd

Long essay, but good, on bio-conservatives/theocons, Leon Kass et al, and the bankrupt idea of "human dignity".

Of course, institutional affiliation does not entail partiality, but, with three-quarters of the invited contributors having religious entanglements, one gets a sense that the fix is in. A deeper look confirms it.

Conspicuous by their absence are several fields of expertise that one might have thought would have something to offer any discussion of dignity and biomedicine. None of the contributors is a life scientist--or a psychologist, an anthropologist, a sociologist, or a historian.

Despite these exclusions, the volume finds room for seven essays that align their arguments with Judeo-Christian doctrine. We read passages that assume the divine authorship of the Bible, that accept the literal truth of the miracles narrated in Genesis (such as the notion that the biblical patriarchs lived up to 900 years),

[Kass] came to prominence in the 1970s with his moralistic condemnation of in vitro fertilization, then popularly known as "test-tube babies." As soon as the procedure became feasible, the country swiftly left Kass behind, and, for most people today, it is an ethical no-brainer. That did not stop Kass from subsequently assailing a broad swath of other medical practices as ethically troubling, including organ transplants, autopsies, contraception, antidepressants, even the dissection of cadavers.

"Would professional tennis players really enjoy playing 25 percent more games of tennis?" And, as empirical evidence that "mortality makes life matter," he notes that the Greek gods lived "shallow and frivolous lives"--an example of his disconcerting habit of treating fiction as fact. (Kass cites Brave New World five times in his Dignity essay.)

Kass has a problem not just with longevity and health but with the modern conception of freedom. There is a "mortal danger," he writes, in the notion "that a person has a right over his body, a right that allows him to do whatever he wants to do with it." He is troubled by cosmetic surgery, by gender reassignment, and by women who postpone motherhood or choose to remain single in their twenties.

For two decades, a group of intellectual activists, many of whom had jumped from the radical left to the radical right, has urged that we rethink the Enlightenment roots of the American social order. The recognition of a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and the mandate of government to secure these rights are too tepid, they argue, for a morally worthy society.

That's what's advising President Bush on bioethics issues... hey Jordan, ever have qualms about supporting the Republicans and trusting them to guard our values?

edit: In updating the Wikipedia page on transhumanism, I found linkies. The Ruth Macklin essay Pinker mentions, and the Human Dignity report. The first link also has lots of responses to her essay, most indignant, a few noting the disconnect between medical practice respecting the dignity of a particular patient and banning various techniques like cloning or IVF because they "affront human dignity" in some nebulous sense, with Macklin having had the latter in mind and the comment defending the former.

edit the second: discussion of commission members and contributors

On the Palestinians

Fri, 09 May 2008 07:00:07 GMT

http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/1484716.html

links to an Economist article on the conditions of the 10 million Palestinians in the world, plus some Wikipedia articles on the diaspora and its expulsion from Israel.

God's Army

Sat, 03 May 2008 22:17:48 GMT

Religion and the US military

Fox History -- fair and balanced

Fri, 02 May 2008 05:19:17 GMT

http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/1245077.html

In particular see comment #2, with the image.

O'Reilly guide to home made chemistry sets

Fri, 02 May 2008 05:14:21 GMT

since apparently the commercial ones are nerfed.

From montyy0

"Egg and Sperm"

Thu, 01 May 2008 03:12:36 GMT

There's a guy out there really worried, not about same-sex marriage but same-sex procreation or conception.
http://www.eggandsperm.org/

"Equal protections, but no genetically engineered conceptions." In other words, we would federally recognize same-sex civil unions that do not grant conception rights, and prohibit all forms of conception that do not join a man and a woman's sperm and egg.

Note that this isn't just a matter of concern about near-term safety of genetic engineering or artificial gametes; he's into a total ban on anything like this. "All children should be created ~~randomly~~ equal."

On the other side is http://www.samesexprocreation.com/

Original source: http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2008/04/transhumanism-still-at-crossroads.html

War on terror

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:47:46 GMT

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080428/pl_nm/guantanamo_hearings_dc_4

I'd missed this. The chief prosecutor of the Guantanmo war crimes tribunals quit last year in protest at the tainted process.

Defense lawyers said Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, the legal adviser who was supposed to provide impartial advice to the trials' overseer, had effectively joined the prosecution team.

Davis has alleged Hartmann pushed prosecutors to file cases before they were ready and wanted "sexy" cases that "had blood on them," such as one where an Afghan prisoner was accused of throwing a grenade that injured two U.S. soldiers.

Davis said Hartmann tried to dictate which lawyer would try cases and overrode Davis' ban on filing charges that relied on evidence obtained through the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The Pentagon plans to try as many as 80 of the 280 prisoners in Guantanamo on war crimes charges, and 14 cases are currently pending. Since the United States began sending foreign captives to Guantanamo in 2002, only one case has been resolved, that of Australian former prisoner David Hicks.

Mmm, fair and speedy trials, untainted by torture. Wait, that's un-American.

John McCain gets health care wrong; hobbled EPA

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:43:21 GMT

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080428/pl_nm/usa_politics_mccain_dc_4

The Arizona senator criticized national government-run health plans in some European countries.

"I'm not going to do like the Europeans have and have expensive health care systems that are neither efficient or, frankly, the quality we have here in America," he said.

"Expensive" apparently means half the cost of the US while living longer.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080428/ap_on_go_ot/epa_chemical_risks_2

GAO says the White House lets various agencies and non-scientists interfere with the EPA's assessment of chemical risks.

But remember, we have to vote Republican, or the terrorists will win!

Cloning and liberal societies

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 01:06:34 GMT

Russell Blackford on what it means to be a liberal society, and how the response to the prospect of human cloning shows how fragile ours are.

Greatest nation in the world

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:32:39 GMT

American life-expectancy dropping.

Well, more like the poorest -- also Southern -- Americans. And female ones.

Peak Oil now!

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 02:07:27 GMT

http://www.evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=1436

Foot and mouth disease

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 20:37:38 GMT

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080411/ap_on_go_pr_wh/animal_disease_5

The US has a research facility on Plum Island, away from livestock, reachable only by helicopter or ferry. Homeland Security wants a new lab, quite possibly located near livestock herds.

"there are financial concerns about operating from a location accessible only by ferry or helicopter."

"An epidemic of the disease, foot and mouth, which only affects animals, could devastate the livestock industry."

"the simulation's National Guardsmen were ordered to kill tens of millions of farm animals, so many that troops ran out of bullets. In the exercise, the government said it would have been forced to dig a ditch in Kansas 25 miles long to bury carcasses. In the simulation, protests broke out in some cities amid food shortages."

This seems like classic penny-wise, pound-foolish. Not to mention something to file under "is there anything this administration won't try to screw up?"