Category: Uncategorized

The Original Human Diet — Meat and Lots of It

Despite the abundant evidence presented by the human body itself, some animal rights activists maintain that homo sapiens evolved as a primarily |vegetarian| species and that meat did not make up a large proportion of the human diet until the development of settled agriculture. Unfortunately for this view, research into the diet of the earliest human beings is revealing just the opposite — the first humans ate far more meat than even present day Americans do.

A number of anthropologists, paleontologists and others around the world are beginning to synthesize what they’ve learned about the “evolutionary diet” that human beings ate in the Paleolithic era that extends back several hundred thousand years and ends with the rise of agriculture about 10,000 years ago.

Although there are still some unanswered questions, it is clear that meat formed the single largest source of food for paleolithic human beings. Professor Loren Cordain, among the world leading experts on the this topic, believes the paleolithic diet was likely close to the diet of the few remaining groups of hunters and gatherers. Whereas the average American receives about 38 percent of daily calories from animal products, the typical hunter and gather obtains 65 percent of his calories from animal products.

Ironically, although the typical American eats less than half the amount of meat their paleolithic ancestors did, they consume 50 percent more fat — much of it coming from sources that were unavailable to Paleolithic humans such as diary products and oils. Similarly, the paleolithic diet was much higher in carbohydrates than contemporary Western diets, paleolithic humans obtained carbohydrates from low-sugar and high fiber foods. People in Western countries get most of their carbohydrates from high sugar, low fiber foods.

As John Macgregor sums up the implications of the paleolithic diet for today’s nutrition and diet debates,

The ancestral record does not support the SAD (standard Australian diet) — but neither does it add credence to diets seen as “natural” by vegetarians, fruitarians, natural hygienists, macrobiotic followers and their countless splinter groups.

Just what mainstream dietary experts have long been recommending — people should eat a balanced diet that is low in fat and combine that with regular exercise rather than try to emphasize one food or food group to excess over any other.

Source:

First, catch your cow. John MacGregor, SMH.Com.Au, February 20, 2001.

Lesbians for Bush

Beth Elliott recently wrote a wonderfully provocative column for FrontPageMag.Com about lesbian and gay men supporting George W. Bush for president. Exit polls showed that 25 percent of voters who identified themselves as gay or lesbian voted for Bush.

The libertarian Elliott doesn’t find that result as odd at all. She writes,

One obvious explanation, one that runs counter to the assumptions of both left and right, is that many of us place higher importance on issues like the benefits of constitutional government over statism, or America’s safety in the world, or restoring honor and dignity to our highest institutions, than our particular parochial issues.

Moreover, Elliott contends that gay and lesbian activists need to be more consistent in the way they approach the state,

Ultimately, there is also the matter of following through on positions and applying them not just to ourselves but to others as well. Because we have decried government interference in our lives, and the harmful effects of derogatory stereotypes, it behooves us to be sensitive to similar legitimate complaints from religious conservatives.

Of course Elliott realizes there probably isn’t a lot of room for common ground with social conservatives who, in their own way, are every bit as statist as the Leftists Elliott deplores. Still, she writes, “Even an uneasy peace between conservatives and freedom-loving gay men and lesbians could tip the scales away from statism. We can certainly agree that would make our country a better and freer place for all of us.”

Source:

How gays and conservatives can work together. Beth Elliott, FrontPageMagazine.Com, February 12, 2001.

Moving Forward with Xenotransplantation

There has been a lot of debate back and forth in recent years over the safety and efficacy of Xenotransplantation. Massachusetts-based BioTransplant says its time to move on to actually doing such transplants and hopes that within three years it will gain FDA approval to begin clinical trials in human beings.

The main safety concern with xenotransplants is the risk of viruses passing from animals to human beings through such transplantations. The risk was confirmed in 1997 when researchers demonstrated that porcine endogenous retrovirus (PERV) could jump from pig cells to human cells.

BioTransplant hopes to meet this risk head on with a two-pronged strategy. First, it recently licensed the genetic map for PERV. Dr. Jay Fishman, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, managed to sequence and patent the genetic map of PERV. BioTransplant licensed the sequences so they can keep the virus out of any pig transplant organs. BioTransplant’s Elliot Lebowitz told Wired,

What’s important is once you know the code in terms of the alphabet that makes up this virus, you could detect the virus if it were in a pig or human patient, and also you could develop the ability to delete the virus.

BioTransplant has also been working on breeding a subspecies of pigs that cannot pass along PERV to human beings. It has developed an inbred strain of miniature swine that is larger than pigs, making their organs more suitable for human-sized bodies, and according to BioTransplant the swine are PERV-free.

BioTransplant will, of course, have to back up its optimism with solid animal data before the FDA will allow it to go forward with human testing.

Still, if everything works out, it might turn out that animal to human transplants could be far safer than human to human organ transplants. Fishman presented a paper at last year’s meeting of the American Society for Microbiology that made just this argument. If the PERV problem can be eliminated, Fishman wrote,

Due to the species differences between the host (human) and donor (non-human species), the risk of infection of the transplanted organ … may actually be decreased. This includes common pathogens such as cytomegalovirus, Epstein-Barr virus, human herpes virus 6, 7 and 8, hepatitis B and C, and possibly human immunodeficiency viruses, and even HIV 1 and 2.

Source:

Organ transplant: men are pigs? Kristen Philipkoski, Wired, February 27, 2001.

Free Speech and Public Schools

The Detroit News’ Bill Johnson wrote an excellent defense of the First Amendment rights of students. The event that sparked his column was a controversy at the Plymouth-Salem High School newspaper. Student Chris Mackinder wrote a column for the newspaper criticizing Black History Month.

I have not read Mackinder’s column, but as Johnson summarizes it, Mackinder essentially argued that having a separate history month for Blacks only encourages racial divisions. After the column came out, Mackinder apologized as did the teacher, Mary Lou Nagy, who allowed the column to be published. Nagy was also subjected to some undisclosed disciplinary action. The school issued guidelines for future columns saying that essentially they have to be toned down so as not to offend anyone.

But as Johnson notes,

Mackinder was bold enough to say essentially what others may be thinking and lack the courage to say.

Which is not to say that Johnson necessarily agrees with Mackinder, but pretending that such views don’t exist doesn’t help anyone.

The scary thing is that Americans seem more and more willing to censor such views. Johnson reports on a recent poll by the Freedom Forum which asked people if public statements that were considered racially offensive should be censored. Two-thirds of those surveyed said that such views should not be tolerated in American society.

Few people these days seem to agree with Johnson who writes that,

The First Amendment doesn’t discriminate against those who would communicate bigoted and reprehensible expressions. Enduring offensive speech is a small price to pay to preserve the larger body of freedoms that we all enjoy. Like what Mackinder said or not, his right to express unpopular opinions is the cornerstone of our democracy.

Source:

Free speech meets political correctness in Canton. Bill Johnson, The Detroit News, March 9, 2001.

The Double Jeopardy Principle in Danger in Great Britain

The ancient principle of double jeopardy — that the state may not try a person twice for the same crime — is under relentless attack in a number of Western countries and may fall victim to public outrage at violent crime. A proposal by Great Britain’s Law Commission Kingdom is moving to formally abolish double jeopardy protection for some violent crimes.

Several years ago, a proposal was floated in Great Britain to abolish double jeopardy protection for any crime that resulted in a jail term of more than 3 years. After several years of study, the current proposal by the Law Commission would allow the state to retry a person acquitted of murder if there is “compelling” new evidence that becomes available after the acquittal.

There have been a number of prominent murder cases in Great Britain that have pushed this bill forward. Three men were recently acquitted of the murder of a young black teenager. The sentiment seems to be that the young men were in fact guilty but that the prosecutors botched their own case so badly that an acquittal resulted (akin to the OJ Simpson case, where prosecutorial failure rather than a compelling case by the defense seemed to tip the scales in favor of acquittal — which is as it should be in a nation where the burden of proof is on the state).

In another case, Ronnie Knight was acquitted of the gangland murder of a man, only to later write a book admitting that he had in fact hired a hit man to carry out the murder. In a documentary aired last year, Freddie Foreman, who had been acquitted of two murders, admitted that he had in fact committed those murders (Foreman did serve 16 years in jail for helping dispose of the body of another victim killed by his associates).

The current recommendation by the Law Commission would expose each of these men to possible prosecution since it would apply retroactively, allowing prosecutors to retry KNight and Foreman using their public admission of guilt as evidence in new trials. The Home Office’s National Crime Faculty estimates there are at least 35 cases where defendants have been acquitted but enough new evidence has been accumulated to make a second trial worthwhile if it were an option.

The proposal by the Law Commission actually has the gall to claim that eliminating double jeopardy protection for murder would still maintain “proper regard to the principle that it is not legitimate for the state to continue to pursue a person who has been found not guilty after due process.”

Give me a break. The entire point of such protections in Western legal systems is that protecting the human rights of citizens is more important than ensuring that the state always manage to convict the person it thinks is responsible for a crime. Part of the price paid for that is the fact that sometimes guilty people go free, but better to live with that than the possibility of multiple trials of acquitted persons leading to more innocent people being convicted. Great Britain with this proposal and with a recent proposal to dispense with jury trials for some criminal offenses seems to be heading in the wrong direction.

Sources:

Double jeopardy rule may be axed. Joshua Rozenberg, The Daily Telegraph (UK), March 6, 2001.

Is Perl Code Free Speech?

MIT student Keith Winstein and MIT alum Marc Horowitz wrote and posted this very short Perl script that decrypts and plays DVD movies (though you’d need an extremely fast computer to watch a DVD movie in real time using Perl):

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# 531-byte qrpff-fast, Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz <[email protected]>
# MPEG 2 PS VOB file on stdin -> descrambled output on stdout
# arguments: title key bytes in least to most-significant order
$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$c=142;if((@a=unx"C*",$_)[20]&48){$h=5;
$_=unxb24,join"",@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[--$h+84])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$d=
unxV,xb25,$_;$b=73;$e=256|(ord$b[4])<<9|ord$b[3];$d=$d>>8^($f=($t=255)&($d
>>12^$d>>4^$d^$d/8))<<17,$e=$e>>8^($t&($g=($q=$e>>14&7^$e)^$q*8^$q<<6))<<9 ,$_=(map{$_%16or$t^=$c^=($m=(11,10,116,100,11,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])&110;$t ^=(72,@z=(64,72,$a^=12*($_%16-2?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?12:0,@z)[$_%8]}(16..271)) [$_]^(($h>>=8)+=$f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}print+x"C*",@a}';s/x/pack+/g;eval

In doing so, have they committed a crime?

The authors of the program claim it doesn’t violate the DMCA in the same way that DeCSS does since it requires the user to provide the necessary title key in order to work. In a sense they are arguing that computer programs don’t decrypt DVDs, people decrypt DVDs.

I doubt this will fly legally, but this is yet another example of just how futile such copy protection schemes are.