Cockfighting Ban Added to Oklahoma Ballot

Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating this week signed an executive order placing an initiative to ban cockfighting on the ballot for the Nov. 5 general election.

Oklahoma, Louisiana and New Mexico are the only states left where cockfighting is legal.

Keating endorses the cockfighting ban saying,

Cockfighting is cruel, it promotes illegal gambling and it is simply embarrassing to Oklahoma to be seen as one of only a tiny handful of locations outside of the third world where this activity is legal. I will vote yes for State Question 687, and I encourage all Oklahomans to do the same.

Keating’s act resolves a long-fought battle by anti-cockfighting forces that began back in 2000 when they collected 100,000 signatures in the Fall of 1999 to place the initiative on the November 2000 ballot. Signatures on that ballot were challenged in court by cockfighting supporters, however, which led to the two-year delay in the initiative being added to the ballot.

Also appearing on the 2002 ballot is an another initiative that was a reaction to the cockfighting initiative. State Question 698 would, if passed, require initiative backers to obtain signatures from registered voters equal to 15 percent of the total number of voters in the previous election. Currently, the requirement is only 8 percent.

Source:

Cockfighting issue on ballot. John Greiner, The Oklahoman, August 20, 2002.

VegSource.Com's Idea of Sound Health Advice

VegSource.Com maintains that it provides advice for living a healthy vegan lifestyle but more often than not it simply promotes the same old lame quack health advice that has been debunked over and over again but never fails to find adherents alternative health circles. Exhibit A is a bizarre article by Roopa Chari, M.D., “The Key to Longevity: Cleansing the Colon.”

To get a firm idea of the quackery involved in Chari’s article it is necessary to start reading in the middle with these two sentences,

 

Many people’s colons are packed with a lifetime of old, hardened feces leading to toxemia or the accumulation of poisons. Dr. Tilden said that diseases were crises of toxemia.

The first sentence is a claim that was long ago disproven through analysis of the colons of people undergoing surgical procedures and autopsies (although simply disproving a hypothesis is never enough for the true believers).

But Dr. Tilden is the real focus of interest. She is referring to Dr. J. H. Tilden, a world-class quack who became moderately famous in the early part of the 20th century for his view that, as Chari gleefully repeats, all disease was caused by “toxemia.” What did this mean in practice?

Tilden rejected the germ theory of disease, arguing instead that all diseases were caused by toxins that were normally evacuated from the body but that which, in diseased persons, were retained in the body and polluted the blood. In fact, Tilden rejected the idea that there were different diseases. In his view, everything from cancer to the common cold to syphilis was but the outward manifestation of a single phenomenon — toxemia.

Consider a disease such as diptheria. Tilden dismissed the idea that diptheria was a bacterial infection and advised against vaccination. Rather, Tilden believed that diptheria was caused when children were overfed and that the only sensible treatment was washing out the bowels 2-3 times per day “using as large enemas as can be put into the bowels.”

VegSource.Com gives Chari a platform for warmed-over Tilden-style views. According to Chari,

 

Often the main cause behind sickness and disease is the retention and reabsorption of this toxic waste. A major benefit of a good cleansing program is that you digest food better, eat less and smaller quantities of food are more satisfying. A pot belly and bloating is another indication of an expanded and inflated colon that is full of fecal matter.

 

Chari also repeatedly cites Dr. Richard Schulze and recommends his herbal methods of bowel cleansing. Schulze, like Tilden, maintains that just about every disease known to man can be cured with such methods. He claims, for example, to have had patients reverse their Alzheimer’s by taking his herbs. Schulze has even gone so far as to claim that AIDS can be cured by a regimen of juice and enemas.

Perhaps Nelson should change VegSource.Com’s tagline from “All are welcome” to “All types of quacks and frauds are welcome.” That would certainly be more accurate if Nelson is going to continue to publish nonsense like this.

Source:

The Key to Longevity: Cleansing the Colon. Roopa Chari, M.D., VegSource.Com, August 2002.

Zimbabwe, Genocide and AIDS

Glenn Reynolds links to an article speculating that Zimbabwe might be on the verge of heading down the same path that Idi Amin’s Uganda took. But the scary thing is that even without that sort of problem, the long term result of Robert Mugabe’s tyranny is going to be unbelievably high numbers of deaths in Zimbabwe due to something that’s been a bit overlooked — the AIDS crisis.

Yes, millions of people in Zimbabwe are at risk of starvation and political violence is likely to rise, but even if those two outcomes are averted, Zimbabwe is headed toward an HIV Holocaust.

In July the United Nations released a report on AIDS in Africa claiming that by 2020, more than 68 million people in Africa will likely die from AIDS. And Zimbabwe is the poster child for the epidemic.

In 1997, an estimated 25 percent of all adults in Zimbabwe were HIV positive. While Mugabe fiddled about with seizing white farms and jailing opposition parties and journalists, that figure jumped to an estimated 33 percent of all adults in Zimbabwe being HIV positive.

Other countries, such as Botswana, have larger estimated rates of infection, and certainly places like South Africa have dragged their feet at dealing with the epidemic, but at the moment Zimbabwe seems the leading candidate for the nightmare scenario where AIDS all but wipes out a large nation. If Mugabe is able to hold on to power like Mobutu did in Zaire and Amin did in Uganda, by the end of the decade Zimbabwe will likely be looking at HIV infection rates in excess of 50 percent of the adult population and with no end or solution in sight.

UN: AIDS Epidemic Still Growing

UNAIDS released a report in July claiming that the AIDS epidemic is still in its initial phases, and that the total deaths to AIDS in the developing world will grow to horrific heights over the next few decades.

In the 45 countries where HIV prevalence is the highest, UNAIDS estimates that as many as 68 million people will die from AIDS-related causes between 2000 and 2020. From 1980 to 2000, roughly 13 million people died from AIDS-related causes in those countries.

There was some hope that AIDS prevalence rates might begin to stabilize, but in many of the hardest hit countries they show no such signs. In Zimbabwe, for example, HIV rates jumped from 25 percent in 1997 to 33 percent in 2001. In Botswana, HIV prevalence jumped from 36 percent in 1999 to 39 percent in 2001 — and, as a result, life expectancy in that country is below 40 years for the first time since 1950.

UNAIDS executive director Peter Piot told Reuters, “We haven’t reached the peak of the AIDS epidemic yet. It’s an unprecedented epidemic in human history.”

While Africa will be the main focal point of the deaths, with an estimated 55 million dead, Asia will also suffer major losses of more than 10 million AIDS-related deaths. The main fear is that Asia’s HIV epidemic may explode like Africa’s has. UN AIDS expert Sandra Calvani told NewScientist,

The trend [in Asia] looks like the same as the beginning of the epidemic in Africa. One million infections [in 2001] means 3,000 per day, or 120 per hour. These are shocking figures.

Sources:

UN: AIDS will claim 70 million by 2022. Reuters, July 2, 2002.

Global AIDS epidemic “in early phase”. Emma Young, NewScientist.Com, July 2, 2002.

Is Nature More Profitable Than Development?

A group of U.S. and U.K. researchers recently published a study in Science making claiming that conserving wild places is 100 times more profitable than developing them. How did they arrive at these conclusions? Easy — they made them up.

On the face of it, the claim is absurd. Humanity’s ability to manipulate and alter its environment has been responsible for all human progress. Those parts of the world that are the most developed are also the wealthiest and have the best measurable outcomes on factors such as life expectancy or infant mortality, while areas where development has been minimal suffer in poverty, disease and relatively horrific outcomes on life expectancy, infant mortality and other measures.

Here’s how the BBC describes how the researchers reached their odd conclusion that pristine nature is more valuable than human development (emphasis added),

The authors say an ecosystem’s economic value can be measured in terms of the goods and services it provides — climate regulation, for example, water filtration, soil formation, and sustainably harvested plants and animals.

Pricing them is difficult, since many of the goods and services are not bought and sold in the conventional economy.

So economists assign values to these “non-marketed services” in different ways, perhaps according to the cost of replacing them or assessing how much people would be willing to pay for them.

In other words, they make up the values. How much is climate regulation worth? Whatever you want it to be.

According to the study authors, half of the total value of an ecosystem is lost when it is developed, which begs the question as to why some of the most developed places in the world such as New York City or Hong Kong are not mired in poverty rather than among two of the wealthiest cities in world history.

Source:

Nature ‘pays biggest dividends’. The BBC, August 8, 2002.

British Animal Rights Activist Sentenced for E-Mail Death Threats

British animal rights activist Robert Moaby, 33, was sentenced this week to four and a half years in jail for e-mailing death threats to executives at companies that did business with Huntingdon Life Sciences. Moaby also received almost 3 years for possessing child pornography which was discovered on a computer seized from his home.

In May 2001, Moaby sent an e-mail to a vice-president of the Bank of New York that said, “We are going to kill you.” In June 2001, Moaby sent another threatening e-mail to the CEO of AIM Fund Management. In both e-mails, Moaby cited the businesses links to Huntingdon Life Sciences.

At the sentencing hearing, Judge Peter Fingret told Moaby,

These were not idle threats. They must be seen in the context of a violent campaign against Huntingdon Life Sciences and its associated companies. You must have known they would instill fear to the people they were addressed and their families. Justifiably, they were taken so seriously by your victims that they had security arranged for them.

British newspapers The Daily Telegraph (London) and This is London both identified Moaby as a member of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty. SHAC spokesman Greg Avery told This is London, however, that Moaby was not known to SHAC and they did not endorse his actions.

Which is a bit odd, considering that Moaby’s actions were completely consistent with both SHAC’s rhetoric and the actions of its leaders such as Avery. Avery himself plead guilty to waging a campaign of harassment against investors in Huntingdon Life Sciences, including distributing newsletters containing the addresses of those affiliated with HLS telling readers, “Lets smash them.”

Sources:

Animal activist jailed over death threats. The Daily Telegraph (London), August 20, 2002.

Animal rights man jailed over email. Patrick McGowan, ThisIsLondon.Com, August 20, 2002.