Speeding in a city of speeders

This morning I heard a news report stating only 12% of ACT drivers surveyed say they never speed.

At the time this news aired I was in a taxi travelling at 85kph in a 50 zone!

Not quite irony, but still highly amusing at 5.30am.

Writing for a living...

While writing a PhD is not the same as writing a novel, it still involves pumping out around 100,000 words and it still forces you to confront many similar issues, including the self-doubt, the isolation and the incredibly low pay.

Anyway, because of this, I really enjoyed this article in The Guardian. It is basically a collection of quotes from novelists about what they enjoy and/or hate about writing for a living.

My favourite one was from Hari Kunzru:

I get great pleasure from writing, but not always, or even usually. Writing a novel is largely an exercise in psychological discipline – trying to balance your project on your chin while negotiating a minefield of depression and freak-out. Beginning is daunting; being in the middle makes you feel like Sisyphus; ending sometimes comes with the disappointment that this finite collection of words is all that remains of your infinitely rich idea. Along the way, there are the pitfalls of self-disgust, boredom, disorientation and a lingering sense of inadequacy, occasionally alternating with episodes of hysterical self-congratulation as you fleetingly believe you've nailed that particular sentence and are surely destined to join the ranks of the immortals, only to be confronted the next morning with an appalling farrago of clichés that no sane human could read without vomiting. But when you're in the zone, spinning words like plates, there's a deep sense of satisfaction and, yes, enjoyment…

I can relate to this SO MUCH right now (except the part of about being "surely destined to join the ranks of the immortals" - I have never ever written anything that has made me think such a thought - not even for a fleeting second!). At the moment, I am even enjoying the occasional moment of being 'in the zone' and it is actually really quite fun.

[On a slight tangent: I am also currently obsessed with successful community-driven sanitation projects in large informal settlements - slums - and their potential to change so many lives and empower so many people... It is incredible how significant a toilet can be to people's quality of life.]

What you can do

If you are feeling as horrified and helpless as I am in the face of such horrible events, then may I suggest that you donate some money to the Red Cross?

Many people already are, which is great, but I am sure that more is needed. My understanding is that cash rather than things are needed at the moment, because there simply aren't enough people available to sort through the mountains of donated stuff already received for the time being.

Another option would be to donate some art or craft to this fundraising auction - or to encourage another artist that you know to do so.

Finally, Coles are donating all of their profits on Friday 13 February to the bushfire relief. While this is clearly a PR exercise of sorts, it may also raise a considerable amount of money and so you could consider doing your shopping at Coles on Friday too (if you live in Australia).

UPDATE: More options for helping out include donating to help the wildlife affected by the fires; offering a bed to people made homeless by the fires; and bidding on some handmade goodness (with proceeds going to the Red Cross) or making something of your own to auction off for the cause.

Words fail me

This is just so horrific. It makes me want to scream and cry. How could they?

This report (pdf) is pretty awful too. I think that I am going to use it an a case study in my thesis.

Congratulations Grandpa

Some people in your family you will never live up to, but they will always serve as a wonderful source of inspiration.

Times Online

If I'd known that I was going to be quoted in the Times Online I would have put a little more thought into what I wrote...

Ah well, life's like that sometimes.

Zimbabwe holds it's breath

Maybe, just maybe this time will be different to Burma, Kenya, Tiananmen Square...

Image courtesy of The Guardian (John Moore/Getty Images)

Cloned meat is safe for consumers, say US officials

And pigs, it seems, may well fly...

Next: Europe will legislate a ban.

And then, the US will submit a challenge in the WTO.

And win.

And then, Europe will submit.

And then, it'll be our turn.

Vegan anyone?

Peak Oil?

Looks like it's all happening. Oil hit US$100 a barrel last night for the first time in the history of the trade.

I read Sonia Shah's Crude: The Story of Oil over the xmas/new year break and while it was a little light on it really illuminated the insidiousness of the industry for me.

You can preview exercpts on Amazon and actually watch the associated documentary on the ABC website. We've got it sitting on the hard drive at home (from when the ABC showed it about 6 months ago). C has watched it but I haven't gotten to it yet. The first 5 minutes looked pretty good though, and perhaps better than the book.

Musharraf puts Bhutto under house?

I get this nifty ABC news headline email twice a day and it's usually very informative and just about the only way I stay remotely up to date on goings on.

This afternoon's just arrived and the headline story was this:

Bhutto under house arrest: reports
Pakistan's main opposition leader Benazir Bhutto has been placed under house, according to Government officials.

Placed under house!

I hope they don't mean that literally.

Oh darn, now I've got all these Wicked Witch of the East images in my head...

“Either they were going to give it to me sometime before I popped off or not at all”

A while ago I subscribed to the New York Times' "News Alert" service. Apparently nothing worth alerting me to happened for a good while. Burmese Monks protesting the ongoing human rights abuses of the junta didn't rate a mention. The UN Security Council finally deciding to send peacekeepers into Dafur wasn't worth mentioning. Pakistan's dodgy elections not a peep.

And then, suddenly, a flurry of emails alerting me to US baseball results? Seriously!

I was somewhat annoyed and decided to unsubscribe, but didn't quite get around to it. And then this morning I received an alert that went some way to redeeming the NY Times for its former "baseball is the only issue worth alerting the world about" attitude.

Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - finally.

The NY Times article also carried this wonderfully evocative photo:



Perhaps I'll keep that subscription open for a little longer and see if anything else worth knowing comes through.

"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of robots"

But how we wish they were.

Apparently several Japanese Civil Servants were busted spending hours editing Wikipedia entries "rather than attending to beef quotas and rice prices."

I know what I'd rather be doing...

Funny, Japanese Civil Servants get reprimanded for playing on Wikipedia during work hours, while Australian Public Servants get paid to do so.

I wonder how many people at Prime Minister and Cabinet would rather edit entries on Manga than on our esteemed PM?

Cigarettes more important than health care - Bush

This is just typical.

Interestingly though, it seems that this might be the last straw for Republican control in the US. Apparently the majority of Republicans in Congress approved of the bill, as did (and get this) insurance companies.

So, while W said he vetoed the bill because:

"This legislation would move health care in this country in the wrong direction," Mr Bush said today. "Under this bill government coverage would displace private health insurance for many children."

[Read: "I don't want people to think they can have something for free, and my pals in the insurance industry can't really mean it when they say they support the bill. My friends in the tabacco industry told me it would hurt their profits, and we can't have big business being hurt by crazy communist ideas like universal health insurance - even if it is just for poor children. Do we even have poor children in America? I don't know any...]

UK's foot in mouth

Link

Tell me again why people eat meat?

Man chops off own hand in offering to Hindu goddess - man is clearly crazy, but I blame religion

Umm, I know that some people take their religion very seriously. And being an atheist, I have to be careful not to be overly dismissive of other people's beliefs – each to their own and all that. But I draw the line at this.

Seriously. Chopping off ones own hand as an offering to a goddess(even one as scary as Kali) is totally insane. I'm not blaming Hinduism. It is a wacky religion, but then aren't they all?

One would imagine that the particular man involved (and it's pretty much always men, isn't it) would have done the same thing for Christ, or Yahweh, or Allah, or Tirthankara, or Zarathustra, or Amaterasu, or possibly even the Buddha or Lao Tzu.

It just gets to me that people harm themselves (and worse still others) in the name of religion.

Right. Enough out of me this morning.

Stop it or you'll... get a longer sentence?

The former Pope may have thought masturbation would make you go blind, which, while idiotic, at least has the benefit of being humourous.

This on the other hand, is just plain cruel and inhuman.

I can understand having a sentence lengthened for committing rape, murder or other crimes while in prison, but an extra 60 days for getting caught masturbating!
I guess we'll just add that the the litany of things wrong with America.

Haneef charge dropped

After a review by the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions the charges against Mr Haneef have been dropped. Despite this the AFP are standing by the advice that they gave to the Minister for Immigration which led to Mr Haneef's visa being revoked.

There is something seriously wrong with this country.

Mr Haneef gave his old sim card to his cousin before leaving England for Australia.
As far as we know, for this action alone the poor guy has spent the last 4 weeks in jail and will now be deported.

I have 18 cousins. If I was leaving Australia and any one of them wanted to use my sim card, I would have given it to them. Had this action then landed me in jail, and then subsequently deported at my own expense, I would have been pretty appalled. I would have also considered the justice system of my new country of residence to be pretty flawed.

John Howard declared today that he believed that Mr Hannef had at all times been treated fairly by the Austrlian authorities.

John Howard is a moron.

Death by Ignorance

Yesterday was World Environment Day, but I am not going to write about that. Instead I am going to vent about this ridiculous, deceitful op-ed in the New York Times by Nina Planck - "Death by Veganism".

Ms Planck's central claim is that "Children fed only plants will not get the precious things they need to live and grow." She chooses to prove this point by linking a vegan diet to the case of two vegan parents who were convicted of murder in the States because they fed their 6 week old infant a diet of only soy milk and apple juice.

I hope that you are beginning to see a problem with this argument. Clearly veganism has absolutely nothing to do with neglect - a child fed on apple juice and cow's milk would also suffer from malnutrition.


After starting with the outrageous, Ms Planck settles down somewhat into the more familiar myths about vegan diets. She claims that only animal proteins "contain all the essential amino acids needed for life in the right ratio" and that plant proteins "are inferior in quantity and quality." This concept was what gave rise to the idea that vegetarians needed to combine their foods (grains with pulses, etc) in order to create a "whole protein" because only animal proteins contain the full range of amino acids (an idea made popular through the book 'Diet for a Small Planet').

Ms Planck acknowledges that this nutritional 'wisdom' is out of date:

Nutritionists used to speak of proteins as “first class” (from meat, fish, eggs and milk) and “second class” (from plants), but today this is considered denigrating to vegetarians.

However, she doesn't acknowledge that the reason that this is no longer the case is because more up-to-date research has shown that the human body (like the body of so many other animals who eat a plant-based diet) is perfectly capable of converting all plant-based proteins into whole proteins. You see, the original research was done on rats, and we are not rats.

She goes on to claim

A vegan diet may lack vitamin B12, found only in animal foods; usable vitamins A and D, found in meat, fish, eggs and butter; and necessary minerals like calcium and zinc.

OK, let's start with the ridiculous claims first.

Vitamin D comes from the sun. In the USA they tend to add Vitamin D to meat and dairy products. This does not make them an essential source of Vitamin D.

Vitamin A is produced in the human body when you consume any foods containing beta carotene - this would include carrots, sweet potatoes, spinach, mango, kale, apricots, oatmeal, tomatoes, capsicum, peas, peaches and papaya.

Calcium is contained in abundance in many plant-based foods, including sesame seeds, tofu, tahini, soybeans, almonds, white beans, flax seed, kidney beans, french beans, seaweed, collards, figs, and soy milk (particularly when fortified). Animal sources of calcium may be more easily absorbed by the body, but they have a particularly nasty side-effect - they actually leach calcium from your bones. You see the vast majority of calcium in your bones is not sourced from your diet and osteoporosis tends to be caused by the leaching of calcium from your bones (caused by an excess of animal protein in your diet), rather than a shortage of calcium in your diet. This is why osteoporosis rates are so much higher in Western countries and why they rise when other countries start to adopt a Western diet that is high in animal protein.

While it is not as easily absorbed as animal-based zinc, zinc is also found in a wide variety of plant-based foods such as beans, chickpeas, wholegrains, cashews, pecans, peanuts, walnuts, almonds, peas, and oatmeal.

I will acknowledge that there is a small amount of truth in Ms Planck's claim that it is difficult to obtain enough B12 on a vegan diet. This might well be true if it was not for the wide variety of vegan foods that are fortified with B12 - such as breakfast cereals, soy milks and other soy products. However, as Stephen Walsh, PhD perfectly sums up:

Our need for B12 has nothing to do with a need for meat but is shared by most other primates who get B12 from dirt, insects and faeces containing B12 from bacteria. In our modern sanitised but polluted world B12 extracted from bacteria provides the most convenient and reliable source.

Finally, Ms Planck claims that a vegan diet is deficient in "docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, the omega-3 fat found in fatty fish." Once again she fails to mention that Omega-3 can also be found in plant-based foods, including vegetable oils (canola, soybean, flaxseed/linseed & olive), walnuts, green leafy vegetables, and sesame seeds. These foods contain ALA’s (alpha-linolenic acid) which is converted by the body into DHA. Once again, Ms Planck is either ignorant of the capacity of the human body, or is willfully misleading her readers. She also conveniently ignores the fact that fish contains such high levels of mercury (from pollution) (not to mention all the hormones that are pumped into farmed salmon) that it would be extremely irresponsible to feed it to young children or to eat it while pregnant or breastfeeding.

In summary, Ms Planck's article is an outrageous attack on veganism that is not only packed with false information, but presents that information in a deliberately misleading manner.

If anyone wants to question me about the way that I choose to raise my child, they better bloody well have their facts straight AND they better have already gone and harassed all of those parents who are raising their children to a life of obesity, diabetes and heart disease when they feed them food that is heavily processed, and full of saturated fat, salt, sugar and chemicals.

For more justified ranting, see these other posts:
I'd say I have a bone to pick, but I'm a vegetarian...
Spicy Grapefruit Coleslaw
John McDougall, MD - Letter to the Editor - NY Times
A Response to "Death By Veganism"
Nina Planck Stirs the Pot; Vegans Get Steamed: Film At Eleven
Op-Ed in the NYT - Death by Ignorance
Response to The New York Times' trashing of vegans

Growing genetically modified crops is our duty as a global citizen...

Trade Minister, Warren Truss, yesterday called for states to drop their ban on the growing of genetically modified crops, not because it would be good for the economy (though there is a certain subtext here...) BUT because "Australia needs the technology to help feed the growing Indian and Chinese populations".

Wow, that's very altruistic of us.

Couldn't have anything to do with transnational agri-business and the US putting pressure on the federal government to allow them to move into the Australian market and grow GM crops, could it?

Yes, GM crops do have tend to have higher yields, but there have been no long term studies to help us understand their affects on the human body.

And, really, it's not like the world doesn't grow way more food than could be consumed by 6 billion people already. We don't need to grow more food; we need to distribute it more equitably.

Oh, and one last shot before I go and do some work. It takes about 7 kilograms of grain to produce one kilogram of pork, and about 3,000 litres of water to produce one kilogram of beef.

Surely nobody could possibly think this is a clever use of resources.

*The quote above is from an article, Farmers, Minister urge GM in today's West Australian. Can't find it in the online edition, sorry.

Democracy and climate change, an interesting week

Perusing the Economist this morning (as I sometimes do, despite often disagreeing with the vast majority of their opinions) I saw a few things that spiked my interest.

The first was about democracy – its reluctant birth and flailing death.


The reluctant birth, or a trail run at least, happened in Bhutan, where, at the behest of King Wangchuck, mock elections were held as a trial run for the real democracy that the King wants to see implemented before his reign ends. Well, technically, his reign has already ended, as he, The Economist tells me, passed his throne to one of his sons late last year. It seems the people still adore him in general and would prefer him back in his place. It seems the majority of Bhutanese are quite happy under the yolk of absolute monarchy. And why wouldn’t they be?

At his accession, the average Bhutanese died at 40 after a life of uneased toil. Continuing a modernisation begun by his father, and underwritten by foreign aid, the king oversaw a transformation. Life expectancy for the 700,000 Bhutanese is now 64 years. The economy grew by 12% last year; GDP per person is reckoned to be $1,400—twice that of India.

Added to that is Wangchuck’s introduction of Gross National Happiness as the primary measure of development success over the more familiar Gross National Product. The Economist defines it thusly:

a policy most constructively defined as favouring sustainable development over growth at any cost.

Still, democracy is coming, like it or not. This, I’d hope, might be a good thing for all those Bhutanese languishing in refugee camps in Nepal – excluded from society for speaking Nepali and worshiping the wrong god(s).

On the flailing death side, Nigeria held "elections" guaranteed to return the People's Democratic Party – a dictatorship by any other name...

The other story that caught my eye was this one. It seems China is set to become the world’s biggest polluter in the very near future. I wonder if the US will redouble its efforts in response. Surely they can’t let China beat them at something as serious as this!

We, it turns out, aren’t much better. Our latest report card says we’re heading to miss our Kyoto targets (i.e. we’re going to increase emissions more than we were allowed to). But, wait. It doesn’t matter anyway because we never signed the protocol. Well, now I see the cleverness of the current Government.

Don’t sign Kyoto.

Tell the world that the protocol is fundamentally flawed.

Tell the world that we will meet and exceed the targets we would have been set under Kyoto.

Tell the world that we are doing so much better than them, even without Kyoto.

Repeat.

Repeat again.

And again.

Eventually, in the distant future of 2012, exceed our Kyoto targets.

Tell the world it doesn’t matter because we didn’t sign the stupid protocol anyway. And besides, we have AP6 – technology will save us.

Still, there's no way we'll reach the dizzying heights of the US and China. It's just not fair. If we had half the population of China we'd be so much better at polluting than they are.