Author: Mick Hartley

In a review of “A Perfect Red“, an interesting-sounding book about dyes and cochineal and empire (with the added bonus that it’s not called “The Dye That Changed The World”), Diane Ackerman comes up with this:

Ironically, the reds we relish occur in the mind, not in the world. Apples are everything but red — when light hits them, only the red rays are reflected into our eyes and we think: Wow, that’s red!

That seems to me to be a perfect example of muddled philosophical thinking. No, apples are not, in some deeper sense, everything but red. They are, precisely, red. That’s what being red is….reflecting red rays.

There’s a whole world of confusion in there: that whole philosophical practice whereby there’s no problem until you start thinking about it, and then you get tied up in words and start doubting that there really is an external world, and if there is whether we can ever know anything about it. What Dr Johnson reacted against in Berkeley when he kicked that stone: “I refute him thus”.

sed food that will see fresh meat grown from animal cells without a single cow, sheep or pig being killed.

Researchers have published details in a biotechnology journal describing a new technique which they hailed as the answer to the world’s food shortage. Lumps of meat would be cultured in laboratory vats rather than carved from livestock reared on a farm.

Scientists have adapted the cutting-edge medical technique of tissue engineering, where individual cells are multiplied into whole tissues, and applied them to food production. “With a single cell, you could theoretically produce the world’s annual meat supply,” said Jason Matheny, an agricultural scientist at the University of Maryland.
According to researchers, meat grown in laboratories would be more environmentally friendly and could be tailored to be healthier than farm-reared meat by controlling its nutrient content and screening it for food-borne diseases.

Vegetarians might also be tempted because the cells needed to grow chunks of meat can be taken without harming the donor animal.

atheism is a respectable option.

Hey, it’s intelligent atheists vs. religious idiots! Somehow reading Dawkins nowadays makes me want to rush round to the nearest church and fall on my knees. The condescension in that last sentence….intelligent but not well educated.

I know, I agree, it is easy for me, living in Britain where religion has no power and it is religious people who feel the need to apologise (despite the paradoxical existence of an established church with the queen as its head).

Religion has no power in Britain?? Perhaps he hasn’t been following the news for the past month.

Karen Armstrong in the Guardian:

People do not robotically obey every single edict of their sacred texts. If they did, the world would be full of Christians who love their enemies and turn the other cheek when attacked. There are political reasons why a tiny minority of Muslims are turning to terrorism, which have nothing to do with Islam. But because of the way people read their scriptures these days, once a terrorist has decided to blow up a London bus, he can probably find scriptural texts that seem to endorse his action.

Right….the reasons why all these people turn to terrorism have nothing to do with Islam. There are, it seems, compelling political reasons for blowing people up in buses. Or tube trains. Or cafes, or clubs. Or for flying aircraft into tall buildings. These compelling reasons, by chance, only happen to apply to Muslims. And once they’ve decided to commit mass murder, they then look up the scriptural text for the justification.

And, from the author of “Islam: A Short History“, and, according to Amazon, “one of the world’s foremost commentators on religious affairs”, there’s no need, in an article about sacred texts, to point out that the Koran in Arabic is, unlike the Bible, believed to be the literal word of Allah.

Claudia Rosett on the Oil-for-Food scandal:

Mr. Volcker’s latest report, released Monday, documents bribes Mr. Sevan took from Saddam, via an Oil for Food contractor who happens to be a cousin of former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, as well as what appears to be more garden-variety graft collected by a Russian staffer in the U.N. procurement department, Alexander Yakovlev, who among other matters was involved in the U.N. Secretariat’s hiring of Oil for Food inspectors. These tales, dramatic though they are, only begin to dabble in the river of graft that flowed through U.N.-administered deals under Oil for Food.

For the moment, however, the two cases presented by Volcker are instructive. Following the denials, stonewalling and outrage with which not only Mr. Sevan but Secretary-General Kofi Annan greeted allegations of graft in the program, the first lesson ought to be that at the U.N., protestations of honesty and promises of virtue are cheap. We don’t need more words. We need to see what, exactly, the U.N. does with its money–or, for that matter, with anyone else’s money. The funds grafted out of Oil for Food never belonged to the U.N.; they were by rights the property of the people of Iraq. Any ill-gotten gains spent by Mr. Sevan on New York restaurants and his Hamptons home were swiped from the same Iraqi children the U.N. was entrusted to care for. […]

[The] report, after more than a year of investigation, is the first from his team to document actual bribes. It covers a grand total of $1.1 million in graft and runs to 130 pages, annexes included. If that ratio holds for the billions grafted, skimmed and smuggled out of Iraq relief funds under the U.N. cover of Oil for Food, we can expect that the final two reports, promised in September and October, will run to well over 1.5 million pages combined. No one is seriously expecting anything that massive, but it does give some idea of the scale of corruption with which the U.N. under Oil for Food became complicit. And it perhaps gives a hint of the scope of reform that will truly be required to clean up the U.N.

From news @ nature:

Chernobyl’s ecosystems seem to be bouncing back, 19 years after the region was blasted with radiation from the ill-fated reactor. Researchers who have surveyed the land around the old nuclear power plant in present-day Ukraine say that biodiversity is actually higher than before the disaster.

Some 100 species on the IUCN Red List of threatened species are now found in the evacuated zone, which covers more than 4,000 square kilometres in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, says Viktor Dolin, who studies the environmental effects of radioactivity at the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences in Kiev. Around 40 of these, including some species of bear and wolf, were not seen there before the accident….

How has this happened, given that radiation levels are still too high for humans to return safely? Morris thinks that many of the organisms mutated by the fallout have died, leaving behind those that have not suffered problems with growth and reproduction.

“It’s evolution on steroids. There are a lot of deleterious mutations in species but these seem to be very quickly weeded out,” Morris explains.

Those species of bear and wolf….um, were they seen anywhere before the accident?

eir militias were doing in Basra, 9 were supportive of on or both of the two parties, 3 denied the problem, 2 moderately discussed the subject and think that an agreement with the militias can be reached and 1 comment was irrelevant to the subject.

Especially interesting in the light of this.

Good post at Metafilter on collective nouns. Plus some advice on that tricky topic: whether to treat a collective noun as singular or plural.

They miss out on my favourite, though: a wunch of bankers.

ulation and its leaders have chosen that it should be so. They knew that if the US brought in democracy, then the Shia majority, suppressed by Saddam Hussein, would be in power. But the calm concealed the nastiness of the south’s problems. The violence with which Saddam suppressed Shias meant that the south was always going to want to express its version of Islam forcefully once he was gone.

The effects are very visible. Basra used to be a byword for tolerance. But across the south, women are now generally veiled and cloaked. Alcohol sellers have shut down. Pictures of clerics are everywhere.

ke it easier to dismiss the book as biased and therefore unreliable.

What’s also interesting in the interview is what they have to say about Stalin, which as far as I remember is never quite spelled out in the book. There were a number of times, going right back to the late Twenties, when Mao only survived because of Stalin’s intervention. Why?

“In 1932, when his colleagues tried to oust Mao, in effect, the Russians just said, ‘You cannot get rid of Mao, you have to put up with him.’ They would not let them dump Mao before the Long March.”

To the obvious but intriguing question of why Stalin chose Mao, who did not speak Russian and whose Communist credentials were lacking, Chang responds: “Stalin said it himself to the Yugoslavs that Mao was insubordinate, but a winner. Stalin spotted Mao as the most power-hungry, the most brutal one who would stop at nothing to pursue his power.”

“It is riveting,” continues Halliday, “because it is both gangster world and politics. It is the richest relationship between two dictators you could ever find, a sort of political mafioso world.

They’re also quite clear that China hasn’t even started to question Mao’s legacy. To do so would, of course, question the whole legitimacy of Communist power. For the moment that somewhere no one wants to go.