issues in science 3

GM foods are meeting the same sort of resistance here as in Europe, with the name Monsanto often treated as synonymous with the devil, so that company’s plans to release a new GM low-fat soybean is expected to meet with much resistance. Oil from these beans doesn’t form trans-fatty acids or saturated fats thought ti increase the risk of heart disease. Strangely the reduced linolenic acid, key to the low-fat effect, wasn’t achieved through genetic modification but through conventional breeding. The GM component is for pest resistance. So, critics are asking, why bring this product out in a GM form only?

With many beginning to believe that the days of broad-spectrum antibiotic solutions to diseases are numbered, serum therapy, much improved since its heyday early in the twentieth century, is making a comeback. Serum therapy, which often involved large dosages with serious side effects, was sidelined by the rapid advance of antibiotics in the forties and fifties, but with the breakthrough in producing monoclonal antibodies (the mass production of one particular antibody) in the seventies, and their use in cancer treatments, antibody treatment is on the increase, though it is still comparatively costly.

Recently in the US, the first full skeleton of a Neanderthal was reconstructed. Neanderthals died out nearly 30,000 years ago. The skeleton was reconstructed from casts taken from a number of sites around the world, most notably La Ferrassie in France. The skeleton reveals a larger-than human chest capacity and pelvis, and less of a waist. Meanwhile the oldest fossilised primate protein ever sequenced, taken from a Neanderthal, has been found to be identical to its human equivalent.

From New Scientist, March 19

AIDS in Africa - scratching the surface

The various comments that I and others have been making over at Online Opinion, in response to an essay criticising the Catholic church’s pronouncements against condoms, have generated some heat from the opposition, but there’s one issue they’ve raised that’s worth investigating more fully, and that is the claim that those countries which have practised abstinence according to the Catholic church’s dictates have been far more successful in reducing AIDS than those which have emphasised condom use. Here are some of the claims in the critics’ own words:

Before condemning the catholic position on contraception, how about checking the AIDS facts with the catholic countries in Africa. the countries with the lowest AIDS rates are the ones that use the ABC method advocating abstinence before marriage and faithfulness after.
These countries have high percentage of catholics and low rates of AIDS. The highest AIDS countries are the ones with low catholic numbers and high condom use (condoms aren't 100 per cent effective).
I am not a catholic (or christian of any denomination) and happily use condoms but for people who are and live in Africa - abstinence and monogamy are obviously the safest option.
the usual suspect

Atheists grossly overestimate the importance of the popes utterances in the Lives of most practicing Catholics.
I must be a bit simpleminded but why the hell would a African rooting around give a brass razoo about what the pope thinks about contraception. The man/woman who has premarital sex, commits adultery, has multiple sexual partners is not suddenly going to say I have broken most of the Catholic sexual commandments but I will keep the one about not putting a rubber on. Its this type of thinking that gives atheists a bad name. Sharpen up.
slumlord

And Luigi, have a look at the individual countries in Africa.
Not all African nations are largely Catholic.
The countries which have advocated abstinence (like Uganda) have cut their AIDs rate by up to 500 per cent, while those where there are millions of condoms distributed have seen their rates increase.
I think the Catholic Church has done some pretty horrible things in the past but they have also done good.
Abstinence before marriage and faithfulness in it is the most effective way to reduce AIDS in those countries and it has worked. ABC even promotes the use of condoms as a last resort but many people are willing to abstain. Muslim leaders are also heavily promoting abstinence because they say condom use only promotes promiscuity and they are not 100 per cent safe.
There is an article in last December's Lancet medical journal showing the benefits of the ABC approach - I hope it is a prestigious enough publication for you to not immediately dismiss.
the usual suspect

I’m probably coming across as a pompous wanker. I don’t want to imply that all the Catholics working on the ground in Africa are meddlesome fools, though if they’re of the clergy they’d have to toe the line and condemn the use of ‘murderous’ condoms. Nor do I wish to deny the claim that promoting abstinence is very effective. I’m sure that when AIDS was rife among homosexuals in the West, the immediate response would have been a general reduction in sexual activity, and especially in sex with multiple partners, and it makes sense to encourage this as a short term measure in Africa. I’m all for saving lives first and foremost. There’s a difficulty though when those who would preach abstinence as a good in itself, for religious reasons, are able to point to the efficacy of their religious stand. It really does muddy the waters, and can lead to claims that God is punishing promiscuity, homosexuality, etc, and that their view is the correct one and should be imposed on all.
The situation in Uganda has it seems been widely touted as a success story, though there are a few complicating factors. According to this site, the government claims a reduction in the prevalence of AIDS from above 30% in the early nineties to 4.3% in 2001. The UN has said that only 4.1% had the virus at the end of 2003. However, these figures have been disputed of late. A non-governmental organisation released a study last year which found that the prevalence was more like 17%. This study has in turn been disputed, though many observers believe that the government’s figures are inaccurate. However, there’s no doubt that the prevalence rate is decreasing, against the trend elsewhere in Africa. The ABC method (Abstinence, Be faithful, use a Condom) is a three-pronged attack which is yielding positive results. Most experts on the ground agree that it’s the Be faithful message, spruiked by the nation’s President in tours of the country, that is biting hardest.
Apparently, Uganda has received huge financial support from the Bush administration, funds channelled through faith-based organisations. My concern is that, with this assistance, such Bush-backed organisations will be keen to spread certain moral and religious views along with medical assistance and advice. AIDS is a medical health problem and only secondarily a moral problem. Of course the immorality comes in when someone knowingly exposes others to risks. If on the other hand people are infecting others unknowingly, the responsibility falls on those whose duty it should be to inform the population fully of those risks. It’s about providing full information about preventive measures (and the ABC approach sounds fine to me, as long as it saves lives), the best possible treatment, and if necessary, the enacting of laws to punish those who deliberately put others at risk.
The OLO article, though, deals with the culpability of the Catholic hierarchy and the new pope in being willing to sacrifice lives by thundering against the use of 'abortifacient' condoms and the 'holocaust' they're responsible for.
The philosopher A C Grayling puts Ratzinger's moral equivalence into perspective:

.. the prospect of alleviating suffering is too intrinsically good to be sacrificed to the mistaken view that a cluster of cells... is the moral equivalent of a baby in a crib. The argument that the two are equivalent because the former could in the right circumstances become the latter fails on the grounds that this makes any arbitrarily chosen pair of a single sperm (say in a testicle in Toronto) and ovum (say in a pelvis in Prague) morally equivalent to a baby, for they too in the right circumstances could become one.
Of course, a line has to be drawn. But to draw it at the moment a zygote is formed rather than at the point where a fetus becomes independently viable – from where something really can be ‘become a baby’ – is to ignore the fact that nature itself is profligate with the zygote, the morula, the blastocyst, the embryo, the fetus, voiding itself of any it is not satisfied with, in numbers unimaginable to the moral sentimentalist for whom the mere existence of life rather than its value – its quantity, not quality – is what matters most.

From New Scientist, April 9, p17.

words

A lot of new words to catch up on, like these for example:
I had no sooner unfurled the genoa… (Jonathan Raban); in full, genoa jib – a large jib or foresail used esp in racing yachts (COD).
… a madrona clinging by its toes to a ridge (ibid); also madrono, an evergreen tree, Arbatus menziesii, of western N America, with white flowers, red berries, and glossy leaves (COD).
…charabancs, narrow gauge railways, and pleasure steamers (James Joyce); an early form of motor coach (COD).

weighty matters 11

That’s an eleven, not a two. I haven’t posted all my journal entries regarding my obstacle race to fitness for fear of losing my voluminous readership ho ho. Today in a public lav I caught sight of my overhang and vowed yet again to fight the good fight. I haven’t jogged for three days, and my daily pedo readings are wildly oscillant – I hope that’s a neologism – but generally lower than they should be. I have fantasies of trekking the whole of the Heysen trail, but they remain just that. My weight is 77.4, stable over the past three days, but fractionally above my average over the past eight days of measurement (77.15). I’ve been chided for measuring myself daily, as there are too many fluctuations over a twenty-four hour period that can’t be sheeted home directly to food intake or exercise, but I need to take these measures for motivational purposes. I might also, for similar reasons, post about this more frequently, though minimally at the same time – eg weight, amount of exercise done, amount and type of food ingested. A line or two.

Maher Arar encore

I’ve just read a detailed account of the Maher Arar story, with a heavy heart and a huge sense of outrage. I know this is not the only case of this kind (well, in a sense it is, but it’s not the only case of an innocent being tortured by or at the behest of the USA in recent times), but its awfulness, and the ease with which this young man’s life was completely trashed, make it an object lesson for anyone concerned about civil liberties during the soi-disant war on terror.
The story’s in the Canadian news at present, with an inquiry there being headed up by Justice Dennis O’Connor. The inquiry resumes public hearings on May 9. In fact the inquiry was called back in January 2004, though it didn’t begin until June. Arar also launched a lawsuit against the US government in January 2004. Interestingly but unsurprisingly the US administration has already refused to co-operate with the Canadian inquiry, no doubt claiming that ‘classified information’ is involved. Having read a number of online articles, I’ve gathered that the Mounties, the RCMP, were murkily involved in events leading to Arar’s ‘apprehension’ and deportation to Syria, a country Arar left in his youth, and a country he was loath to return to, as his family had fallen foul of the government there. Of course now everybody with any responsibility, at least on the Canadian side of the border, is ducking for cover. When documents are released, huge portions of them are blacked out, again with the usual excuse.
There was never any evidence produced against Arar, except that he knew someone who knew someone who was suspected of being a terrorist. He was accused of training in Afghanistan or at least of visiting the country, but this has been denied, and again there's no evidence. He was released through popular pressure, a campaign in which his wife Monia Mazigh was heavily involved. During his imprisonment, she stood unsuccessfully as an MP in Canada.
Apart from the obvious civil liberties issues this case raises, there’s the major question of accountability. Will there ever be any consequences for the powers whose decisions have devastated so many innocent people like Arar? If ‘honest mistakes’ are made, they should be corrected immediately, and those who are responsible for trying to cover them up should also be brought to justice, as they are knowingly destroying lives in the process.

Barista probe

The Barista blog really intrigues me. Who writes it? One guy – I presume it’s a guy? How does he find the time? A man of leisure, taking an early retirement? I mean, there are posts every day, or more than once a day, many of them of inordinate length, all well-written, grammatically correct, effortlessly researched, and above all constantly thought-provoking. He has about 500 time more links than myself. I mean, this guy gives me the fucking shits….

that old issue again

A comment to the saint in a straight-jacket who writes about a school counsellor in the US who created a stink by altering a school pledge speech from ‘our nation under God to ‘our nation under your belief system’:

Trying to work out what I would say if I was thrust into counsellor Lucero's position. As an unbeliever, and a proselytising atheist, I would never be able to say 'under God'. Never never never. As a kid, being forced to repeat some chant with God in it (or some cliché about our Wonderful Nation for that matter) would leave me fuming with resentment for days. So I would never want to subject anyone else to that sort of stuff - even if there was only one mini-me out there among a thousand.
If there was no way of getting round it though, I'd just drop the 'under God' phrase and hope the kids didn't notice, whereas 'under your belief system' is so clunky, and it seems, so deliberately designed to draw attention to itself, that it could hardly fail to do just that. And I wouldn't delete the offending (to me) phrase because I wanted to be more inclusive, but for the far more selfish reason that if I said it I wou
ldn't be able to look myself in the mirror afterwards.

issues in science 2

Cosmology and space-time mysteria are at the pointy end of science with all that mathematical-physics stuff, but they’re also fuelled by the weirdest speculations. Dark energy, vacuum decay, supersymmetry, the collapsar model, branes – it sometimes seems to a lay person that anything goes. Now a controversial new conceptualisation of the universe as full of bubbles has made its appearance. I’m not going to make any serious attempt to explain this, but it has to do with how gamma-ray bursts and their afterglows might be explained. There are competing theories, and competitors are awaiting the results from NASA’s new Swift gamma-ray observatory over the next couple of years. It’s expected to clear up much in the currently hazy field of gamma-ray burst research.

The concept of altruism has always been slippery as well as fraught. Many just assume that what seems like altruism is really self-interested behaviour cleverly disguised. Yet the evidence, from analysis of the prisoner’s dilemma game among others, increasingly supports the claim that in some circumstances we really do behave in an altruistic way. Given higher order complexities, it’s always arguable whether this flies in the face of evolutionary theory, but adaptive or not it’s something charitable organisations are already looking to take advantage of (adaptive things that they are).

Computed tomography screening is apparently enjoying something of a vogue among wealthy members of the ‘worried well’ set. However, many medicos are claiming that CT scans could quite possibly do more harm than good. These scans involve powerful x-ray beams which are fed through a computer to produce richly detailed cross-sectional images of a patient’s body. The process has been heavily and controversially advertised. There is a small danger from radiation from multiple full-body scans, but the main concern is that unnecessary scans will pick up ‘problems’ not previously known about, with costly follow-up, the tying up of resources and so forth.

soulsearching stuff

Today I enjoyed a wide-ranging conversation on religion and Catholicism with a Polish Catholic friend, who, when I mentioned that the human soul’s existence was hypothetical to say the least, brought up the story of a little weight loss just after death, the soul’s flight from the body. I tried not to chortle, but I pointed out – having a go in passing at the appalling Christian belief that only humans have souls – that this would be more convincing if it could be proved that a similar or corresponding weight loss didn’t occur among dumb soulless animals. She was insistent that no such thing happened among our beasty brethren, so….
The 21grams legend is dealt with effectively by Karl Kruszelnicki here. To summarise, the idea grew from experiments done in 1907 by a Dr MacDougall, given much publicity by the NY Times.
They were drawn from six subjects, an absurdly small sample. Of these, two had to be excluded because of ‘technical difficulties’, one had a weight loss of only about ten grams (subsequently regained), and two suffered an initial weight loss followed by a second a few minutes later. Only one of the six showed a sudden, non-reversible weight loss of around twenty-one grams. Hardly scientific proof. Dr Karl points out some of the difficulties of any experiment of this kind:
Even today, with all of our sophisticated technology, it is still sometimes very difficult to determine the precise moment of death. And which death did he mean - cellular death, brain death, physical death, heart death, legal death, etc? How could Dr. Duncan MacDougall be so precise back in 1907? And anyhow, how accurate and precise were his scales back in 1907?
This is probably enough for me, but it won’t convince the true believers. After all, they might argue that different people’s souls have different weights (this would even be more logical than assuming all souls weigh the same), and regardless of the exact point of death, if it could be proved that, in the hour, say, after physical death is confirmed, humans weigh measurably less, and non-human animals don’t, the soulsearchers might be on to something.
Meanwhile I should direct you to this urban legends page for a more detailed account of MacDougall’s experiments and their flawed nature.
My guess though is that with the number of variables you’d have to account for, it’d be impossible to get accurate readings to put this one to bed once and for all. I haven’t found anything on recent experiments to prove or disprove the theory of weighty souls. Nobody seems to take the idea seriously enough to test it.

picked some olives

I do feel much better today, a little more determined for the time being. For the first time in several days I didn’t weigh myself, and I actually did some barbell work and sit ups, and intend to go latenightstrolling after these few words. Want to discard some things in my life to improve my focus. Much of the day was spent among friends at Peterhead, near Port Adelaide, harvesting olives from their large tree, some seven bucketfuls, and at least that again left on the tree, not yet ripe. Brought a bucketful home to have another go at curing. The last lot, two seasons ago, were semi-successful only. I left them hanging about too long before starting up the process. They tasted bland, and were too mushy. The colour wasn’t too appealing either, they looked like the fresh droppings of some mutant bunny.
It was a glorious day for bashing trees and bibbing sauvignon blanc. I took a H2 blocker before setting out, as my acid levels have been bothersome again. There was desultory talk of the fall of the USA and the rise of China, as well as much advice and wonder about troubled and troublesome teenage children. It amuses me the way I can talk about these things as if I’m a father.
Occasionally too the subject of elderly parents came up. Curmudgeonly lonely old salts. My mother wasn’t mentioned, but she was thought of, only a few days ago she was asked after, and how long has it been, two years? More? How could this be allowed to happen? Don’t leave it too late, I’m sorry to bring such a subject up but don’t leave it too late. I’ve thought of writing to her, I said. You could, you should, that’s your preferred mode of communication…
I know she doesn’t trust me, but I have to act as if that doesn’t matter.

vale Saul Bellow

Got this fun thing from a v literate yank blog.
“I’ll tell you a story,” says Bellow. “A wise man is asked the difference between ignorance and indifference. He answers, ‘I don’t know and I don’t care.’”

something about carnivals

I saw ‘Carnival of Souls’, but perhaps not all of it, as a child, and its creepy atmosphere lodged itself in my memory for the term of me natural.
A real one-off, this film, and one of the things that’s most impressive about it, apart from a really fine performance from the totally convincing lead (Candace Hilligloss), is its low-key, no-nonsense way of transforming the screen into an all-enclosing and somehow profoundly unnerving otherworld. The plot’s simple enough – a young woman emerges from a river, sole survivor of a bridge accident, and we follow her as she moves from her home town, immediately after the accident, to another town to take up the position of church organist. She has a series of experiences, is revealed as an intriguing loner, who is haunted by visions, and drawn to an abandoned fairground outside of town. She also has periods or bouts in which nobody is aware of her existence. Finally we find that she didn’t survive the accident at all.
There’s no real coherence to this, but it doesn’t matter, the plot’s not the thing, it’s kind of existential, but above all it’s about atmosphere and mood. There’s an intensity of focus on one person, her own perspective sometimes offset by those of others looking in on her - the doctor who wants to help her, the priest who puzzles over her lack of spirit (irony of ironies), the drunkard neighbour who wants to fuck her - and the mood is beautifully enhanced or created by the music of that most other-worldly instrument, the organ, as well as by some subtle cinematography, and of course the fairground setting, used quite sparingly but obviously to great effect as it’s that image which has (mildly) haunted me since the first viewing.

can't live on bread alone

This morning I weighed myself for the first time in a while, and I’m 77.6 kilos and rising. I’m not getting the discipline together re eating more fruit and less bread. Bought a big pack of dried fruit and nuts, and what with muesli too I’m sure getting enough fibre, but I just scoff the stuff between meals, which mainly consist of bread.

issues in science 1

Here’s the first in a perhaps endless series of snippety bits on what’s hot in science, mainly from New Scientist. First I’ll cover the March mags.

A special report on the science of the teenager was useful to me as a carer of same. An interesting fact; humans take twice as long to reach maturity as our nearest primate relatives. This growth, though, is not spread evenly through our pre-adult lives. After birth, the growth is fast, but it decelerates to the age of three, after which it is gradual and slow up until adolescence (a vaguely defined point, as the onset of puberty varies enormously, age-wise, between individuals). Over the approximately three years of adolescence, there’s an average 15% overall growth, and this spurt is apparently unique to humans.
There’s a lot of debate about why this is, and no clear answers, but one of the ways to understand some of the weirdities of adolescence is to note the continual development of the brain through this period. The prefrontal cortex, involved in high-level executive processes, undergoes rapid pre-pubertal development followed by a dramatic slowing. Teenagers are no doubt trying to cope with the contradictory impulses this leads to as they try to protect links to childhood while investigating new ways of thinking. Apparently the best way to cope with this is to listen to Eminem, Limp Biskit and Fifty Cent over and over again, while experimenting with ring tones. Other brain areas affected include the pineal gland (hormones), the corpus callosum (left-right linkages, language), the cerebellum (balance) and the right ventral striatum (risks and rewards).

Other features included a scathing review of Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, a novel about global warming and environmentalism which comes down heavily on the sceptics’ side. Recent letters, though, have been in turn scathing about the review, so there’s no avoiding the hard work of fact-checking.

Also a new rechargeable battery has been developed in Nevada. It can be recharged in just six minutes, lasts ten times as long as current versions, and, in bursts, can be three times more powerful. Can’t see much use for it myself.

some currents

Now that it’s all sadly over, I must say I didn’t much follow the Schiavo case, except to note that the religious right in the US were falling over each other to express indignation and outrage because some poor woman who’d been on life support for fifteen years, in a state of enormously reduced capacity, from which she could never recover, was going to have the plug pulled on her. I didn’t share their moral outrage, and though I recognised that central to the case was the uncertainty about what in fact would have been the wishes of this woman had she the ability to express them, one of my first thoughts on it was – who’s paying for fifteen years of life support to a person in this hopeless state? In how many nations would there be the kind of technology and money around for this to ever be an issue? And with the technology growing ever more sophisticated, and the sanctity-of-life attitude growing ever more prevalent (or at least ever more strident), why not keep everyone alive for as long as possible? I mean, does anyone have to die? Consider after all that nobody really dies of old age, we die because some part of us stops functioning, and that part could be fixed, and isn’t it incumbent on us to do everything in our power to prolong life, and who’s to say that a 125 year-old woman with an artificial heart and kidneys, bionic hips and silicon tits has such a reduced quality of life as to be a candidate for euthanasia? I’m no murderer.

Anyway, Larvatus Prodeo has a view on the case which reads like what I would think if I thought about it more – and researched it more. An excellent place to start.

The pope’s death – I must say the huge numbers and the outpourings have unnerved my anti-catholic self. I’ve no doubt that he was a great bloke, with many endearing qualities, and far more generous to his friends and his enemies than I’ve ever been, as well as something of an intellectual heavyweight in his way, but I can’t really think of anything positive to say about Catholicism. So I’ll say nothing more.

A couple of important visits to Oz. I think this is more than symbolic, and I sense in particular a new era of much improved relations with Indonesia. The future of that particular relationship has never looked better in my lifetime, and it’s happened in such a low-key way, really. The Bali bombing, and the tsunami and this more recent quake, have been the main events to bring us together, clouds and silver linings and all.

A new President, a Kurd no less, has emerged in Iraq, but don’t get too excited, it’s the Prime Minister who’ll have the real power, and there’s still no sign of who that’s going to be and meanwhile the nation’s still in a mess. Quiggin has a thought-provoking piece on whether it was all worth it, with the usual array of comments, of which Andrew Bartlett’s is particularly sensible. No sense squabbling over past decisions, the issue is how do we improve things from here?

a gun, a car, a blonde, a problem

Speaking of private dicks, I mean of the investigative kind, I found another character fantasising about being one in A gun, a car, a blonde, a film of a few years ago that I picked up on DVD at Market Bazaar. Jim Metzler plays Richard Spraggins, a wheelchair-bound victim of spinal cancer, formerly active, athletic and successful, now reduced to being preyed on by a shiftless and ditzy younger sister (Kay Lenz), who’s ostensibly his ‘primary caregiver’, as Garfield would say. However, since Richard was in his former life an effortlessly wealthy businessman, he has others, staff and/or friends, to help him out, including a black and probably gay personal assistant, a housekeeper probably from south of the border, and a new age old mate (John Ritter). Richard slips into despair fuelled by alcohol, much to the concern of his supporters, and starts developing a fantasy around a sexy new neighbour (Andrea Thompson). In the film noir fantasy world he becomes P I Richard Stone, the neighbour becomes his client, and his various other associates play police or underworld figures. They include Billy Bob Thornton, who in the ‘real world’ plays Syd, the sister’s slumming boyfriend.
Of course, Stone is as capable and confident as Spraggins now isn’t, and the dull Syd is transformed into a larger than life villain, and there are some fine wisecracks and amusing references from one world to the other, and I suppose it affirms the positive power of fantasy as release, but it was all spoiled for me by some typically yank middle-class attitudes. We’re asked to believe that Spraggins, whose multi-tiered, open plan home is tastefully decorated in low-key culture vulture style, was in his pre-cancerian existence the owner-manager of a tyre factory turning a handsome profit (Richard always had a golden touch, claims his sis, which of course is meant to indicate her ‘view’ that it’s all just a matter of good and bad luck). Further, this effortless and unlikely capitalist writes a will which hands the factory over to its workers. A bit communistic, says his lawyer. A bit vague and unconvincing, say I. The equation of capitalism with deserved wealth and generosity of spirit is hard to ignore, especially when you look at the nasty sister, self-absorbed and parasitic – ah, sigh, the poor will always be with us. The struggling Syd is also painted as a loser, and a user. The good guys are the housekeeper (illegal immigrant – oppressed minority) and his friend/personal assistant (black, possibly gay – doubly oppressed minority). It’s a kind of complacent apologetic, reinforcing the assumption that the poor largely deserve their place and must be put up with stoically or avoided. You might want to help them in an abstract way (the factory workers), but best to keep them off-stage. Oppressed minorities are okay as long as they’re not looked into too closely, or as long as they’re quasi middle-class themselves. God knows a lot of poor and struggling people are bad news in one’s personal life, bitter experience teaches that, but they’re never entirely the authors of their own misfortune or of their own unfortunate characters, it’s way more complex than that. This isn’t remotely touched on in the film – and why is Richard such a vastly different character from his sister anyway? We never find out, indeed the question is never posed.
So, by a kind of omission, a lot of yank claptrap about winners and losers and being self-made is inferred, and it lingers unpleasantly on the palate.

a reckoning in a small room

It’s always been a fave daydream of mine, of waking up and finding myself in a small room with one other person, and no escape. A smaller and more claustrophobic version of the Big Brother house. Of course in my younger days that other would be some woman I had the hots for, who would only notice me if there was nobody else to notice, but it would also quite often be someone I was in dispute with, someone I wanted to have it out with to the bitter end. Who would be the strongest, intellectually, emotionally and all the rest?
Today it’s George Pell, arch-conservative archbishop in the cult of Catholicism here in Oz. He’s been getting TV time lately, not surprisingly, and George Negus today said to him – ‘You know John Paul 11 was such a charismatic, larger-than-life figure, don’t you think the Catholic Church might need to take the path of reform in order to maintain its popularity now that he’s gone?’
Pell’s response was something like, ‘Oh no, because the Church will never be able to abandon the gospels…’
I switched off then, being insufficiently interested in Pell’s idea of the gospels or of revealed truth or whatever, and having no confidence that Negus would be able to put him on the spot, but Pell’s smug response bothered me, and the idea of being locked in a room with the wanker began to exert its appeal.
Moi: You believe that any reforming of the church will entail abandoning the gospels?
Georgie: There’s a chance of that, yes. The church is built upon the gospel of our lord, and that’s a strong foundation indeed. That foundation must be kept intact at all costs. We’re not about to water down holy writ in a bid for converts.
Moi: I understand, but the difficulty I have is that I hear theologists and religious thinkers of all persuasions, from the most conservative to the most liberal, all claiming that their view of their church (whether catholic or lutheran or whatever) is backed up to the hilt by scripture, by the gospels. Now, I’m no bible scholar, but since these debates have been going on in the various churches for centuries, it seems reasonable to assume that the gospels are open to a wide range of interpretations, no?
Georgie: No that isn’t so, the gospels are quite clear on virtually all issues of moral significance…
Moi: Yes, that’s what they all say, but it seems to me that these clear and well lit paths to virtue and salvation are leading many of the faithful in quite opposed directions. Are you saying that your interpretation of the gospel is right and everyone else is wrong?
Georgie: What I’m saying is that the church’s understanding of the gospels – and I say understanding rather than interpretation, which is a loose word – the catholic church’s understanding of the gospels is pretty well spot on. If I didn’t think that I wouldn’t be a catholic, much less an archbishop.
Moi: So you must presumably think that the other christian denominations are wrong in their interpretation of, or understanding of, scripture?
Georgie: Well, not necessarily, but I can’t speak for other denominations. I can only speak for the catholic church.
Moi: The true church?
Georgie: My church.
Moi: And why is the catholic church your church? Did you choose it rationally out of all the available denominations, out of all the various religions indeed, or was it a matter of the peculiar circumstances and influences in your life?
Georgie: I’ve been a lifelong catholic.
Moi: You were educated in catholic schools, weren’t you?
Georgie: I was
Moi: So you never got much chance to think differently. It was quite literally a cloistered upbringing…
Georgie: No it wasn’t cloistered at all, I was given a very good all-round classical education, not just a religious education, and I’m very grateful for that. I wouldn’t have gotten where I am today without that start in life.
And so on. It’s bit hard putting words into the mouth of a real person, especially one whose views you so strongly disagree with. You want to expose him, but you want to be true to the character, and he’s capable enough of putting his own words in his mouth. So I suppose I should leave him be. Still, I wonder, what would happen in that small room, with him no longer shored up by institutional power, just an ordinary guy whose views are no more sacred than anyone else’s. I’d just love to have a go.

John Paul 11: another RWDB?

We’ve all been inundated with information and opinion on the late pope over the past few days, almost all of it tending towards hagiography. The greatest pope in centuries, bestriding the world like a colossus, single-handedly bringing down the Berlin wall and the whole of European communism, repairing relations with Judaism and other religions, an inspiration to the poor and downtrodden everywhere, the great stabiliser of the catholic faith in degenerating times, a man of enormous personal courage, magnetism, complexity, simplicity, indefatigability, indomitability, humility, compassion, humanity, warmth and love.
I have to admit that this great tide of positivity did have an eroding effect for a while on my usual timid and beleaguered independence of judgement, and I clung gratefully to the scraps of criticism here and there re his uncompromising attitude towards homosexuality, women, abortion, religious radicalism. I noted with relief too that the adulators tripped over themselves badly in following their approving comments on J P’s insistence that the Church should not be meddling with politics in Latin America and elsewhere, with more approving comments regarding his decidedly political stand against the communists of Europe. However, this morning’s ‘Religion Report’ on Radio National has helped to crystallise my more critical position as well as bringing a lot of new evidence to bear.
The program aired an interview with Peter Hebblethwaite, a renowned Vatican watcher and historian, just before his death back in 1994, who presented another side to John Paul 11, an authoritarian conservative side as displayed in his encyclical letter of 1993, Veritatis Splendor (which basically, through the philosophical and ‘spiritual’ waffle, preaches obedience, presumably to the Church, which has the ‘burden’ of ‘recalling always and to everyone the demands of morality’, morality meaning of course Church doctrine). Hebblethwaite pointed out the biased nature of J P’s political interventions, undermining supposedly ‘left-wing’ dictatorships as in Poland, but refusing to countenance uprisings against right-wing dictators as in Nicaragua, not so much because he had sympathy for such dictators but because the Marxist rhetoric of some of the rebels in Latin America was beyond the pale for him. His hatred and fear of godless Marxism over-rode his concern for the downtrodden. Perhaps this can be forgiven, considering his personal history and his dogmatic faith, but another commentator, William Johnston, is even more critical, particularly in his analysis of J P’s dictatorial methods of enforcing obedience, which, he claims, were methods taken from the very oppressors J P struggled against throughout so much of his life. Publicly humiliating key dissenters so as to frighten others into submission, stacking the inner circle with dutiful yes men, increasing the use of loyalty tests, narrowing his vision of the righteous life more and more as he grew older, J P, in Johnston’s view, became increasingly the kind of controlling and intrusive bureaucratic presence that blighted the lives of Eastern Europeans for decades. And this conservative throttling of the Church will continue for some time yet, due to J P’s painstaking weeding out of liberal elements within the Vatican. Of course, I personally don’t give a flying fuck about the political machinations or indeed the underlying dogmas of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, but it exerts an undue influence over millions of poor people, and I’d hate to see their lives blighted by the pontificating pronouncements of a bunch of misogynistic male superannuated cross-dressers in their archetypical ivory tower.
Congrats anyway to Radio National for sailing courageously against the wind, even before the old fella’s been laid to rest.

if the hat fits

I spent much of the 1970s trying not to buy a lava lamp – coloured chaos in a bottle. A prisoner of my insecure good taste, I feared the snobbish derision of friends if one were suddenly to appear in my sitting room. The lamps became fixtures in English pubs, and I consoled myself by perching on a bar stool and furtively communing with those iridescent, endlessly mutating lemon-yellow, green and puce globules as they rolled tumescently behind glass. ‘Obscene’ was the usual adjective, but I found them beautiful; an addiction I kept under my hat.
Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau

Written in the old familiar spirit of timid and beleaguered independence.

blue notes on physique

Late afternoon early evening, I'm sorry I allowed myself to conk out, I should push through the barrier of tiredness, with something lightly physical, even a walk, I know when I'm in those states I'm no good for reading or mental work, but at least I managed many of the tasks I set for myself today - paid the fine, deposited the money order, obtained the bank signatory papers, collected the computer, sat in on an Anglicare meeting. Still a few things to do, and I'll do them. Yet still I feel in crisis. Bushwalked yesterday at Morialta, which was all to the good, but did it, as with everything, alone. Comparing myself with other physical specimens, wow look at that one, he must work out regularly, god I’m glad I don’t have a gut like that one, or do I? No no of course not, but my arms are so weak... A woman walks in front of me carrying a writhing toddler at her hip, and I know how hot n heavy that is, and my arms are soft as butter.

favourite jobs of all time - today, at least

Here are my top five favourite jobs in no particular order.

1. Book reviewer for New Scientist (or any popular science mag)
Job description: I’d be employed as your average intelligent layperson (so I wouldn’t have to deal with anything too specialised or over-burdened with mathematical physics or statistics), I’d have half a dozen books to peruse per month, and I’d have to actually read them or get sacked.
Performance: I reckon I could do a good job if I was hired from tomorrow.

2. Porn star/male stripper/sex performer
Job description: I’d work freelance with the most beautiful and wanton women in the business, and I’d also work once a week in one of those male stripper troupes, with tipsy wild women of all sorts throwing themselves at us.
Performance: Okay I’d have to shed twenty years and a few kilos, stretch about 15cms, and start on a big fitness and muscular development routine, oh and I’d be squizzing hard at those PE emails… Sure it would only last for say five to ten years, then on to one of the other jobs…

3. Foreign correspondent
Job description: I’d be working for some cosmopolitan, pluralistic paper with a light editorial touch, I’d move continents every two years or so, and my brief would be to mix it with the people, relaying to my people how they respond to the big issues in their part of the world.
Performance: I’d have to brush up a bit on my social skills for making contacts, but my curiosity and my language skills would see me though.

4. Private detective
Job description: Having been bequeathed millions by a rich benefactor on the condition that I use it to run a detective agency, I would specialise in missing persons, unresolved homicides/suicides and the like. I’d have a wise-cracking blonde sidekick playing cat and mouse with me to a dizzyingly distracting degree, but I’d plough on in my usual stoic and understated way.
Performance: Covered already, but I’d have to brush up on my boofhead-biffing techniques. Also all that boy scout stuff on tying and untying knots.

5. Rambler
Job description: Something like blogging only being paid for it. I believe ‘The Rambler’ was the title of Samuel Johnson’s regular column in The Spectator, in which he reflected on anything that took his fancy. Other famous examples are of course Montaigne’s Essais, Rousseau’s Reveries of a solitary walker, and Orwell’s ‘As I please’ column in The Observer.
Performance: Of course if I was being paid I’d pay more attention to the readership and be less self-indulgent, I hope. Brighten and tighten the style, sustain the analysis a bit more.

fellow name of Maher Arar

Just read, via Quiggin, the story of Maher Arar, a Canadian of middle eastern origin treated like a lump of shite by the US administration in 2002 and ready to claim restitution. A matter of kidnapping and rendition, a term for deportation for interrogation overseas. He was grabbed while changing planes in NY and flown to Syria. Bashings, incarceration in a grave, the usual stuff, and the Yanks doing everything they can to suppress the issue for security excuses. But, very good luck to him, Arar’s a smart and determined man, and that’s an absolute prerequisite for beating such a corrupt system, in which the treatment of suspected terrorists mirrors the brutal treatment of so many of the disadvantaged and abused who fall into the hands of the law, and who suffer and go down in proportion to their cluelessness and inability to fight that system. I don’t expect he’ll get the justice he deserves, but fuck I hope he manages to kick some ass, and for that he’ll need all the help he can get.

I don’t know why

Not sure what’s going on with my brain, writing all this stuff, but it’s interesting I suppose to trace the mindworkings – first I read an article on Online Opinion written by a sceptic on the theme of science one day being able to explain religion, a theme guaranteed of course to get up the noses of the godbotherers, and while trawling through the voluminous comments (and adding two or three of my own) I come upon references to the supposed conversion of Anthony Flew, which I first read about in Philosophy Now. So (short sentences please) I do a spot of surfing to see what gives with Flew. I read his interview with Habermas. I visit some critical bulletin boards. This issue about evolution and the origin of life gets me hooked. I agree with the critics that it doesn’t seem much of a reason to overturn the thinking of a near lifelong atheist. I’m amazed for example that, though his principal reason for embracing deism is that he can’t see any explanation for life apart from a god, he’s not up at all on the latest work concerning life’s origins. Sounds chumpy to me. Back to short sentences. So, while waiting for Flew to provide a fuller formulation of his position (I’m not holding my breath), I’ve decided to check out the latest myself. Which explains my last post.

Meanwhile I await with dread the outcome of my job application. I hand over the co-op’s cheque book and requisition forms to the new assistant treasurer, explaining to him what needs to be done. I watch my colchicums coming spectacularly up in the front garden. I urge my charge to clean his teeth and all the rest. I jog around the oval in the evenings. I stare with true awe at the female form on the internet. I read a flurry of disconnected and occasionally incomprehensible science articles. I attend job search training with great reluctance, and afterwards wander around great fantasybarn shopping centres. I watch Jekyll and Hyde once more, and Russian Ark and A gun, a car, a blonde (which I find more or less fatally flawed by a typically American take on the rich and the poor, the successful and the unsuccessful).

abiogenesis: a goer?

Abiogenesis was a term coined by T H Huxley in the nineteenth century. He wrote an essay, ‘Biogenesis and Abiogenesis’, first published 1870. In the essay he imagined himself on the planet eons ago, ‘a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from non-living matter’. Of course we have no such witnesses, and so we can only speculate, and experiment, and search the universe for other life forms, or conditions supportive of life (as we know it, or maybe not as we know it). Creationists are generally convinced that the principle of abiogenesis is undiscoverable, that there is no other life, that it cannot be created by humans etc, but hey let’s leave those guys on the sidelines for a while (they really are scary). There’s a fair literature on the subject, e.g. The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup, by Christopher Wills and Jeffrey Bada (excellent, apparently, as a general overview), and The Molecular Origins of Life: assembling pieces of the puzzle, by Andri Black (for the more technical, scientifically educated reader). Other writers on this subject include Christian De Duve, Thomas Gold, John Maynard Smith, Robert Shapiro and Lynn Margulis.
The abiogenesis idea (and that of exobiology – life elsewhere) received something of a boost from the experiments of Stanley Miller back in 1953. Sending an electric current through a mixture of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water, he was able, apparently, to ‘create’ organic compounds such as amino acids. There’s a very interesting 1996 interview with Miller here. I’ll summarise some of the data from that interview. The Earth is quite reliably dated as 4.55 billion years old. The earliest known life forms on Earth date back some 3.8 billion years. We don’t know what the pre-biotic Earth’s atmosphere was like precisely, but it is generally assumed, but that might be putting it too strongly, that the Earth had a reducing atmosphere, one that contained ammonia, methane, hydrogen and water. Such an atmosphere is found in all the outer planets of our solar system. Some speculate that some enabling molecular compound was introduced from outer space, on comets or meteors, though nobody has yet suggested what precisely this compound might be. There’s also a panspermia theory which we won’t dwell on here – it’s about life being everywhere, and having no beginning except in the sense that the universe had a beginning. Problems there, obviously. Whether life arrived here from elsewhere, or originated here, the origin problem is basically the same. It seems more likely though that life began on Earth, and independently elsewhere.
As to the spontaneous generation of life, Pasteur’s experiments in the mid-nineteenth century refuted the popular notion that life could sprout and teem from a bundle of lifeless rags. This did not necessarily refute the idea of abiogenesis, as some wish to argue, it merely shows that organisms do not spring from non-living material as a matter of course, all the time. The origin of life on Earth is a one-off, which is one of the reasons scientific investigators have such difficulties with it. Science is more often about discovering general principles to explain more or less common events.
The idea of the reducing atmosphere was first posited by the Russian scientist Oparin, who kicked off modern explorations of the origin of life in 1924. His first important idea was the heterotrophic hypothesis, the idea that the first organisms were heterotrophic, obtaining organic material from outside themselves. He also suggested that it is easier to form organisms where there is less biosynthesis (I don’t really understand what this means). His idea of the reducing atmosphere was independently arrived at by Harold Urey, under whom Stanley Miller conducted his famous experiments. Interestingly and importantly, a meteorite that landed near Murcheson in Australia some years later was found to contain many of the same amino acids in roughly the same proportions as developed in Miller’s work.
Reflections on the nature of the first replicated molecule led Miller, and others, to consider RNA and pre-RNA. We start getting into complicated chemistry here, in dealing with racemic mixtures, D and L amino acids, asymmetric carbon and peptide nucleic acid (PNA). Anyway, Miller speculates on the role of amino acids, the prebiotic conditions for life (drying lagoons and ocean borders are likely candidates, and temperature is v important) and the evidence from Mars. It’d be interesting to get an update on some of this stuff, as the field of abiogenesis has burgeoned in the ten years since this interview. More on that later.