Author: Brian Carnell

The Online Racing Championship Association

I ran across the web site of the Online Racing Championship Association while pursuing my current obsession with sports sims.

The ORCA is an organization that sponsors races that take place completely online. The interesting thing is they pay for real prize money — albeit relatively low stakes, in the $20/per race region — and they have a sponsor, Advance Auto Parts.

Individual cars also have their own sponsors, and this being autoracing combined with relatively customizable racing computer games, of course the virtual cars generally contain advertising for the sponsors just like real race cars.

ORCA has a nice page on its website outlining its Sponsorship and Advertising policies. Just $20 will let you sponsor a race, all the way up to a $500 buy-in to be a Series Sponsor.

That is just unbelievably cool. I’m just going to have to sponsor a car/driver and/or race at some point.

Novartis Puts Its Money Where Its Mouth Is

Just a couple weeks after suggesting that Great Britain’s failure to control animal rights extremism would deter Novartis from investing there, Novartis last week announced it will spend hundreds of million of dollars to build a state-of-the art research facility in Boston, Massachusetts.

Novartis will kick things off with a $250 million, 400 research center in an MIT-owned research park called Kendall Square.

From there Novartis expects to expand quickly. It is already in talks to lease another building in Kendall Square and is also reported to be looking for 2-3 other buildings in the area to lease.

Novartis joins Pfizer, Wyeth and Merck as companies that have chosen to invest significant research dollars in Cambridge, Mass.

The big loser in this, of course, is Europe. Europe used to be the hands-down winner in drug research, but it is quickly becoming an also-ran due to an unfriendly cultural and legal climate.

According to The Financial Times of London, of all research dollars spent in Europe and the United States, only about 41 percent of that money went to the United States. Today the figure is 58 percent. As a whole, European companies currently conduct 34 percent of their research in the United States, compared to only 26 percent in 1990.

Europe is far behind the United States when it comes to biotech, which is one of the reasons that attracted Novartis to the Kendall Square facility.

The upshot, of course, is that as the United States continues to receive the disproportionate amount of pharmaceutical investment, the animal rights movement’s focus could switch to the United States more than it has. On the other hand, the social climate is far more hostile to the animal rights movement in the United States.

After all, Great Britain’s left-liberal candidate used to brag that he would ban the hunting of foxes with dogs, while the U.S. left-liberal candidate in the last election bragged about how he had hunted as a boy in order to shore up his support in rural areas.

The recent defeats the animal rights movement suffered in the 2002 Farm Bill is a good example of just how little influence the animal rights movement has on national politics in the United States (one of the many benefits of not having a proportional representation system).

Source:

Seeking freedom in New England: The decision by Novartis to move research to Boston is the latest step away from Europe by a big pharmaceutical. Daniel Dombey and Victoria Griffith, The Financial Times (London), May 8, 2002.

Novartis coming to Cambridge. Scott van Voorhis, The Boston Herald, May 8, 2002.

The Other World Cup Meat Controversy

The controversy over dog meat in South Korea has garnered a fair bit of attention ahead of the start of the 2002 World Cup, but there is another meat controversy involving the other country that will host the Cup, Japan. In this case, it is animal rights activists trying to pressure British football players into signing a pledge not to eat any whale meat while they are in Japan.

Japan kills more than 600 whales annually for what it claims are research purposes, but most of the whales end up being served in Japanese restaurants (and Japan has made no secret of its desire to outright resume commercial whaling). In fact, although it still lacks the votes on the International WHaling Commission to push through a resumption of commercial whaling, Japan did recently announce that it will start hunting sei whales this year after a 26 year hiatus.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare recently issued a press release calling for British athletes not to eat whale meat while they are in Japan. In the press release, IFAW UK director Phyllis Campbell-McRae said,

We’re asking for their assurance that they won’t eat whale meat during their stay in Japan. Each player is invited to sign and return a form pledging ‘I won’t be eating whale at the World Cup’ in support of IFAW’s campaign against Japan’s killing of hundreds of whales each year.

Sources:

Nations Condemn Japan Whaling Plans. Associated Press, May 7, 2002.

England team urged to ‘stay on side’ for the whales during the 2002 FIFA World Cup. International Fund for Animal Welfare, Press Release, May 7, 2002.

More Details Emerge about Animal Rights Activist Who Allegedly Murdered Pim Fortuyn

Details emerging in the ongoing investigation of the murder of Netherlands politicians Pim Fortuyn are making the extent of his killer’s animal rights fanaticism more clear as well as suggesting possible links to other crimes.

The Sunday Times (London) reports that while in his teens, accused killer Volkert van der Graaf, 32, founded the Zeeland Animal Liberation Front which committed acts of vandalism that primarily targeted restaurants.

Van der Graaf was involved with anti-medical research and environmental groups until 1992 when he founded Environment Offensive which was opposed to all animal agriculture. Van der Graaf and others in Environment Offensive earned the enmity of farmers by relentlessly challenging applications to expand animal farms.

How Environment Offensive was funded is raising a lot of questions. It received 100,000 Pounds from the state lottery, but farmers claim that it also acted as a sort of shakedown scheme whereby farmers willing to pay enough money via a third party broker could buy off the group and avoid the legal hassles.

One such farmer, Pieter Van der Camp, claimed that he paid 20,000 pounds to just such a broker and had no more problems with Environment Offensive. The Sunday Times reported that the environmental group refused to comment on the allegations.

Van der Graaf is now a suspect in an earlier 1996 murder, and there is also evidence linking him to other animal rights-related crimes.

On December 22, 1996, somebody shot environmental officer Chris Van de Werken while he was out for a jog near his home. Van de Werken and van der Graaf had clashed before, with Van der Graaf believing that the environmental officer was far too accommodating to farmers in the area.

Moreover, the killing of Van de Werken closely resembles that of Fortuyn’s. Van de Werken was shot multiple times at very close range. The bullets police recovered from Van de Werken’s body were 9mm silver-tip hollow-point bullets — a type of ammunition that is rare in the Netherlands and just happens to be the same type of ammunition used in the Fortuyn killing.

Van der Graaf was apparently questioned about the murder at the time, but the case was closed as unsolved in 1997. It has now been reopened.

The Sunday Times also reported that documents and computer records seized from van der Graaf’s home also provide a possible link between van der Graaf and a 1999 arson attack on a plant that produced feed for mink and a series of 1995 incidents at a poultry farm.

Source:

Fortuyn killer linked to earlier death. Peter Conradi, Sunday Times (London), May 12, 2002.

A Sign of a Non-Competitive State? How It Treats Women

Radical feminists like to pretend that the only people who care about the rights of women are the socialist and Marxists that have dominated their movement for too long. But a 1998 article published in, of all places, the US Army War College Quarterly Parameters highlights the fact that in many ways how successfully societies integrate women into daily life — especially the workforce — is also a good marker as to how successful such societies will be.

Writer Ralph Peters insightful article, Spotting the Losers: Seven Signs of Non-Competitive States, looks at an issue of ongoing debate — what makes some countries and cultures succeed while relegating others to poverty and instability. The second factor on Peters’ list of things that hold back societies– closely behind the failure to inculcate the free flow of information — is the subjugation of women.

Peters attributes much of the success of the U.S. economy to the rising status of women thanks to the early feminist movement. Peters writes,

Vying with informational abilities as a key factor in the reinvigoration of the US economy has been the pervasive entry of American women into the educational process and the workplace. When the stock market soars, thank Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the suffragettes, not just their beneficiary, Alan Greenspan. After a century and a half of struggle by English and American women, the US economy now operates at a wartime level of human-resource commitment on a routine basis.

Ironically, as a number of critics of radical feminism have noted, it was sexual discrimination that at its heart was socialist in nature. Growing up I often remember hearing relatives and others complain that if feminism succeeded, then women would end up taking men’s jobs, as if individual men had some sort of lifetime right to a guarantee of a job free from competition from a woman.

Eliminating sexual discrimination, as Peters notes, has been a capitalist gold mine, allowing talented people to pursue their goals regardless of their sex and in the meantime enrich us all. As Peters notes,

The math isn’t hard. ANy country or culture that suppresses half its population, excluding them from economic contribution and wasting energy keeping them out of the school and workplace is not going to perform comfortably with us [the United States].

Peters then goes on to offer this advice, primarily directed at people considering investing money in foreign countries but equally applicable to all sorts of decisions,

The point isn’t really the fear that women will steal jobs in Country X. Rather, it’s a fundamental fear of women — or of a cultural caricature of women as incapable, stupid, and worrisomely sexual. If, when you get off the plane, you do not see men and women sitting together in the airport lounge, put your portfolio treat on the next flight home.

It is difficult for any human being to share power already possessed. Authority over their women is the only power many males will ever enjoy. From Greece to the Ganges, half the world is afraid of girls and gratified by their subjugation. It is a prescription for cultural mediocrity, economic failure — and inexpressible boredom. The value added by the training and utilization of our female capital is an American secret weapon.

Ironically, it is the radical feminists in the United States today who would most like to overturn this 20th century revolution by moving feminism away from its individualistic, equal opportunity roots and toward the sort of socialist, group think that so hampers Europe’s economy.

Source:

Spotting the Losers: Seven Signs of Non-Competitive States. Ralph Peters, Parameters, Spring 1998, pp.36-47.

Thanks to Andrew Hofer for bringing this article to my attention.

Public Effort Decodes Mouse Genome

In February 2001, Celera Genomics announced that it had completed sequencing the mouse genome. This week researchers at British and American universities announced they had finished their sequencing of the mouse genome which they promptly posted on the Internet for anyone to use.

Because mice are so similar to human beings, the freely available mouse genome will have far reaching impacts on research into human diseases. Sanger Institute researcher Tim Hubbard told The BBC,

The mouse is a key model organism for humans. Their genomes are so similar that you can just compare the two directly. If there are mouse genes we know something about, we can now find genes that look the same in humans.

In fact contrary to what was thought before the sequencing of animal genomes, both mice and humans have roughly the same number of genes. Of course mice are also quite different from human beings, but those differences also will give researchers important information. According to Hubbard,

The mouse has a fantastic sense of smell and you can already see that in the genes. It has a lot more genes than humans connected with olfactory receptors.

So, the animal has its specialties and even looking at those differences will help us understand those things which are critical to humans that mice don’t have. But the basic biology, the basic physiology, is very similar to humans, and having this new information is going to consolidate our understanding of what are the key parts for making a vertebrate.

Hubbard told New Scientist that progress in understanding such functions will improve even more once more mammalian species have their genomes sequenced. Hubbard said the rat genome should be sequenced by the end of this year.

Source:

Mouse code laid bare. The BBC, May 6, 2002.

Mouse’s genetic code made public. Andy Coghlan, NewScientist.Com, May 7, 2002.