Day: August 4, 2002

Vegitan's Unite!

Over at VegSource.com, the debate among the “I’m more vegan than you are” crowd has become so intense that Jeff and Sabrina Nelson saw fit to try to coin a new term — vegitan. According to the Nelsons,

A vegan diet is always a vegitan diet, but a vegitan diet may not always be vegan, because a vegitan diet may or may not include honey.

Just when watching these folks debate back and forth over eating honey was getting so fascinating, the Nelsons go and try to change the terms of the debate. The new terminology is also supposed to be free of the political implications that supposedly come with “vegan”,

The key is that the word “vegitan” in and of itself connotes no political, ideological or philosophical ideals. It’s simply a word that describes a diet.

. . . Vegitan simply refers to what you eat, and does not signify any “whys” which may motivate someone to eat meat.”

And why would anyone possibly want to escape the political implications of “vegan”? Again, according to the Nelsons,

In our years of experience with running the largest and most popular vegetarian/vegan website in the world, we have seen some in the vegan community who resent another person calling herself “vegan” when she eats a “vegan diet” but does not embrace all the values, philosophies and precepts of veganism.

Vegans who are vocally intolerant of the dietary choices of others? Say it ain’t so, Jeff and Sabrina. That’s just really hard for this writer to image.

With the creation of the word “vegitan,” vegans no longer need be uncomfortable as such individuals can now refer to their “vegitan diet” and be totally clear what they mean.

Oh yeah, they really cleared that up. That will certainly placate the vegan food police.

Source:

Introducing the Vegitan Diet. Jeff and Sabrina Nelson, VegSource.Com, July 29, 2002.

Virginia First State to Apologize for Eugenics

Back in May, Virginia became the first state to apologize for its eugenics programs which included mandatory sterilization of “genetically inferior” individuals.

Virginia carried out such sterilizations beginning in 1924 and didn’t actually formally abolish such programs until 1979. In that 55 year period, it sterilized about 8,300 people, most of them individuals who were institutionalized due to mental retardation.

It doesn’t surprise me that Virginia created such a program in the 1920s — after all the idea of perfecting humanity was a prominent feature of both right and left wing ideologues of the time. This created fertile ground for the eugenics movement, and its ill-informed reading of evolution and natural selection.

It is shocking that any of these programs remained in force after the revelations of Nazi atrocities.

Source:

Virginia apologises for eugenics policy. The BBC, May 3, 2002.

Ridiculous Spin from Rep. Coble’s Staff

Rep. Howard Coble (R-NC) recently co-sponsored a bill that would provide a safe harbor for media companies to prevent people from distributing files of copyrighted materials such as music and movies.

Some people have claimed the bill would allow the music industry to create viruses, even though that sort of action is specifically rendered illegal by the bill. Rather the bill provides a safe harbor only to the extent that a company’s actions would interdict copyrighted files and only copyrighted files.

Frankly, reading the bill it is difficult to see what copyright holder see in this bill since it essentially says they can prevent file trading but then places so many restrictions and hoops for copyright holders to jump through, that its hard to imagine this having any net effect on file trading. In fact the language is a perfect example of just how difficult it is to selectively prevent copyright violations on the Internet while simultaneously not disrupting other communications.

Anyway, Dave Winer linked to this column which includes some terrific spinning efforts by one of Coble’s aids,

Ed McDonald admits that his 71-year-old boss is no expert on the Internet. “He wouldn’t even know how to turn on the computer,” says McDonald. But McDonald says that Coble turns that ignorance into a virtue. “He doesn’t bring a bias, although he does lean toward the protection of copyright. He is fair to all sides.”

That’s a bit like saying that someone who is illiterate has a unique, objective perspective on the book publishing industry.

Ignorance is not a synonym for fairness.

Source:

Coble wrong about Hollywood hackers . Edward Cone, News & Record (North Carolina), August 4, 2002.

Can Cthulhu Be Far Behind?

A few weeks ago, Australian researchers announced that a giant squid that washed up on an Australian beach might be a new, distinct species of squid. A BBC story on the find had this to say about the 550 pound squid,

Experts found several characteristics which they say they have never encountered before — including long, thin flaps of muscle attached to each of the squid’s eight arms.

The tentacles on this animals were about 50 feet long. Can Cthulhu be far behind? (Lets hope so).

Source:

‘New species’ of giant squid found. The BBC, July 22, 2002.

The Corruption/Famine Chart

Glenn Reynolds has an observation about Swaziland’s purchase of a $55 million jet . . . at the same time the UN is appealing for foreign aid to prevent famine in Swaziland. Here’s a handy chart of countries in Africa currently experiencing “food insecurity” along with a brief highlight of corruption in each country. For the continent as a whole, estimates of money lost annually to corruption in Africa are typically in excess of US $100 billion.

Country

Corruption

Food Insecurity Problems
Angola US $1 billion in 2001 oil revenues “missing”(FAO appeals for $5.2 million
aid) 		1.4 million people need “urgent assistance” (FAO)
Malawi Corrupt government officials sold 160,000 tons of grain last Fall; $8 million
in European Union aid diverted — EU demanded return of the money in July
2002 (FAO appeals for $1.6 million aid)		 168,000 families at risk (FAO)
Swaziland $2 million aid diverted for down payment on $55 million presidential jet (FAO
appeals for $1.4 million aid)		 21,000 families at risk (FAO)
Zambia Ranked as one of the most corrupt countries in the world by Transparency
International; hundreds of millions stolen in the 1990s (FAO appeals for
$2.6 million aid)		 62,000 families at risk (FAO)
Zimbabwe President orders seizure of white-owned farms, causing food crisis; millions $ US aid money missing (FAO appeals for $16 million
aid)		 600,000 families at risk (FAO)

The First Successful Anti-Cancer Vaccine

Has the world already seen the first successful anti-cancer vaccine? Probably, and all thanks to animal research.

The Daily Telegraph ran an interesting article on a luncheon to honor Prof. Baruch Lumberg. Lumberg was instrumental in the creation of a vaccine to fight Hepatitis B. In fact, Lumberg won the 1976 Nobel Prize for medicine and has recently written a book, Hepatitis B: The Hunt for a Killer Virus, about his efforts to find a vaccine for the disease.

But the Hepatitis B vaccine should be — and apparently is — an anti-cancer vaccine as well. Hepatitis B plays a major role in causing liver cancer. As many as 85 percent of liver cancer cases are believed to be caused by the virus.

So widespread use of the Hepatitis B vaccine should result in declining liver cancer incidence. And in places where Hepatitis B was a major problem, that in fact has happened. In Taiwan, for example, the incidence of liver cancer has declined by half since the introduction of the Hepatitis B vaccine.

Lumberg first isolated the Hepatitis B virus in 1967 with epidemiological studies in human beings, but it was animal research that relied largely on guinea pigs and non-human primates that led to the development and approval of a vaccine for the disease in the early 1980s.

Source:

The world’s first cancer vaccine. Roger Highfield, The Daily Telegraph (London), June 26, 2002.