Where are we going? And why are we in this handbasket?

The trouble with billionaires

2010-03-22T01:28:00.004-04:00

Wes and I this past Thursday night got to see Linda McQuaig speaking at Fanshawe College about “The Trouble with Billionaires.” Her talk was based upon an upcoming book on the same topic, which I can't wait to read. I've previously read two of her books. First, All You Can Eat exposed the current ways capitalism operates in our current world, with a particular focus on its shortcomings and alternatives to its current operation. In particular, the book is an excellent exposition of Karl Polanyi, an anthropological, sociological, and historical economist who focused on the ways that markets are always embedded in civil society. “Laissez-faire was planned,” Polanyi argued, echoing the research of Karl Marx finding that capitalism was born through violence and oppression. Second, It's the Crude, Dude looked at oil reserves as a major precipitating cause of the Iraq War. Especially enlightening in the book is her consideration of gas efficiency standards and the associated loopholes created for SUVs when they first arrived on the market.

While her talk was not as engaging as a previous one Wes and I had saw for It's the Crude, Dude, she nonetheless brought forth some very interesting ideas. First is the idea of the income parade, which she borrows from Dutch economist Jan Pen. The idea is simple: each person has a height based on their income, with mean heights representing a person with a mean income, and each person having heights taller or shorter respectively. (Make twice the mean income and you're twice as tall; half and you're a shorty.) Each person in the society is ordered by height/income and marches in a parade that lasts one hour. The idea behind the income parade is to give clear images to make comparisons and to imagine unfathomable amounts of money – for instance, we can compare how many minutes it takes to get to the mean income; how short the earliest (that is, poorest) people are; and even how far into outer space the richest person's head goes.

The second intriguing idea McQuaig had concerns the argument for income distribution. My own thoughts on this topic have been essentially as follows. First, wealth tends to exhibit a Matthew effect. The Matthew effect was coined by the eminent functionalist sociologist Robert K. Merton to describe the ways that well-known researchers tend to receive more credit for their work than lesser known academics, even where the quality and topic of their work is held constant. Merton takes this from a Bible quotation; in the New International Version of the Bible (the Bible favoured by many fundamendalist churches!), it reads as follows: For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away (Matthew 25:29). People with money often make more money for doing nothing. People with only small amounts of capital (such as machinery worked by the owner of a company) or none at all tend to have to earn income by working; those with more can simply invest it and watch more money come in.

Second, wealth tends to exhibit what I would call an “elephant effect,” by which I mean that the wealthy (the elephant), by dint of their influence, “crash” around civil society and use their money in ways that do not make the rest of us better off. A good example of this would be the use of money to purchase media outlets and production, which results (at least potentially) in the reduction in the number of viewpoints necessary to sustain liberalism and democracy. The United States demonstrates this effect all the time with the amount of money that is poured into elections and buying off government officials.

Third, those with money tend to rely on a greater share of societal resources in order to sustain that wealth. More money requires more use of roads, more need for protection in the legal/police system, more to lose in case of invasion (hence more need for defense), more benefit from healthy employees who work to sustain the wealth, and so on. McQuaig's second intriguing point is a variant of this third argument. In essence, however, she argues that the wealthy more often do not only rely on such government provided public goods for the basis of their wealth, but also upon the cultural inheritance that comes before them. Her example (which in my mind is unfortunate) is that of Bill Gates, who relied on every technical improvement from the wheel to language in order to create DOS and later Windows. Although he deserves to be compensated (and perhaps quite handsomely) for these innovations, she argued that these represent at best piecemeal improvements over previous technologies. Moreover, because they rely on materials that are not “his” – public goods and “common goods”[1] – he deserves not to be permitted to gain benefits from the public and common goods that form the basis of his work. Moreover, redistribution of income and wealth makes possible the very creation of public and common goods that lead to more wealth.

One interesting point raised by Matt Ferrell, a professor at Fanshawe who teaches political science, concerns the “after effect” of such innovations. Bill Gates's innovations, he argued, obviously improve (or perhaps could be argued to have improved!) our ability to teach, to design courses, to communicate with each other and students; so, what, then, is the amount of compensation he should be rewarded for this? McQuaig's arguments really did not hold much water here, as she simply continued to assert that redistribution of income is fair given that most individuals rely on public and common goods to generate their wealth in the first place. But Wes pointed to a far more simple argument: none of us rightly makes claims to wealth generated from our activities, except as they pertain to the direct rewards of the activity themselves. A taxicab driver has no claim to the winnings from a lottery player who takes a ride to collect their winnings; a Tim Horton's employee has no claim to the wages made from an officer worker's increased productivity because of caffeine; a construction company has no claim to the profits of a multinational corporation when they build their head office. Therefore, I don't think that Bill Gates deserves to get to hold onto his money because he has continued to make our lives . . . let's say “different,” because I would feel uncomforable with asserting that he's made them “better.” Especially considering that I am typing this with Open Office 3.2 (A free Microsoft Office rival) on the aforementioned Linux.

[1] I am not well versed in economics to know if there is a term that is covered by what I mean by common goods. I use it to represent human inheritance patterns – culture – that are either too diffuse or too remote in origin (language is a good example of this, as are many inventions) to specifically locate in the work of one person, or even of a bounded group of individuals. Inventions which originate with such individuals can become common goods through diffusion and further application. Although evolutionary theory as we know it first emerges with Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin, the “body” of knowledge since gained about evolution would be hard to pin down on any individual scientist(s), unless we focus on only very specific areas of work. Non-rivalrous (from economics) captures some of this distinction as common goods are generally infinitely shareable with others, and limited only by the capacity of our media and educational systems to disseminate such goods.

The Politics of Food, 1.2

2009-06-12T18:39:00.002-04:00

Lest we forget food is fundamentally about you and me, I share with everyone a paraphrased conversation at the supermarket.

Generic college-aged white guy: Dude, you ever have Sauce n’ Cake? It’s a cake you make in the microwave.

Generic college-aged East-Indian guy: In the microwave? Does it taste good?

Generic college-aged white guy: Oh yeah, it will blow your mind. I was eating like a box of it a day when I was trying to get bigger. [laughs]

So there you have it: if you’re trying to build mass, spurn the protein, go for an artificially flavoured pudding mix you can make in the microwave. The conversation was even funnier to overhear because I used to love Sauce n’ cake myself as a kid.

What to Eat Part 1.1

2009-02-24T11:22:00.001-05:00

I found a good review of Pollan’s book over on Briarpatch magazine’s website. It’s a good mag, one that I’ve read on and off, and I’ve recently become a subscriber. It also reviews Paul Roberts’s The End of Food (which I’ve also read) and the No Nonsense Guide to World Food (which I haven’t but may pick up).

There’s also an interesting article on whey protein and how it came into being. It’s not very pretty for a lot of reasons. I won’t give away all the surprises, but suffice to say that we weren’t eating the stuff 25 years ago…

What to Eat: Part 1

2009-02-23T17:23:00.001-05:00

I have been reading a lot of books on food lately. Most of this stems from my dissertation topic: I’ve chosen to examine the narrative and moral structure of what I’ve termed ‘weight loss reality TV.’ There are quite a few shows in this genre, including perhaps the best well-known (and most widely distributed and cross marketed), The Biggest Loser. I’ve entitled this part one because there are other books I’ll likely discuss in my blog in the upcoming days or weeks.

A while ago I picked up a copy of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Readers of his earlier food book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, will see a little of his old book given a different spin, including his critical take on industrial agriculture. But he also considers the science and ideology behind nutritional science, and he emerges very skeptical of the advice given by the experts.

He explodes many sacred cows in his book. Fat in our diets is not really the enemy. Breaking down foods into their constituent nutrients (or antioxidants, or whatever) is not a good way to conduct science or to ensure health. And perhaps what is going to be the most maddening to most people is that we eat too many animals. Far, far too many. And too many animal products. This last part might not seem that explosive in terms of what nutritionists have been telling us about saturated fats and cholesterol, but Pollan’s point is a double swipe at what he calls “nutritionism,” which is that food can be reduced to constituent parts (fibre, vitamins/minerals, macronutrients, etc). First, this ignores the problem that farming animals causes in the first place. Too much meat not only means more health problems; it also means higher chances of environmental degradation, for instance. Second, this ignores that many cultures without boneless, skinless chicken breasts have done fine without too many animal products. Many people do just fine incorporating them into their diets as once or twice a week luxury items, and a variety of other cultures across the globe have lower rates of chronic illnesses than do our own. [1]

So what does Pollan recommend? In some ways you could be saved the trouble of reading the book, as the cover picture summarizes his approach: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. By this, he means simply that we should eat things that are not overly processed or intended for convenience, that we should eat less, and that our diet should lean towards vegetables, fruits, and grains, rather than animal products. It might even seem to be a “diet,” summarized this way, but it’s not really intended to be. It’s intended to be a slogan that connects the various strands of his book. Not only is that diet likely to be good for our health, but it is also likely good for our environment, it is more sound than most of the nutrition science, and it defeats efforts from those who hawk foods and fad diets. But Pollan’s showing why this slogan is a good one to follow is engaging. Although written to the non-expert, I would also be tempted to assign it in a sociology of food course because it would provoke a great deal of discussion.

[1] Although Pollan’s book comes across as somewhat Amerocentric, his arguments apply to all to the degree that they adhere to a “Western” diet: those in North America, Europe, Australia, and those who are eating like people in those areas. Even here, though, there are clearly wide variations.

The Cigarette Century

2008-09-07T15:59:00.003-04:00

Discussed in this posting:

Brandt, Allan M. 2007. The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America. New York: Basic Books. 600pp.

Brandt's book is an illuminating look at the many facets of the cigarette, a story he starts in the later part of the 19th century. The book is divided into five broad sections, dealing with the culture, science, politics, law, and globalization of this consumer good. In the process, Brandt reveals much more than the cigarette itself; rather, tracking them is in large measure a tracking of many modern developments that we now take for granted.

Among the topics that are touched on by the cigarette are the evolution of manufacturing processes, the sometimes arcane realm of tort and civil law, the rise and refinement of public relations and advertising, and the insuation of corporate and moneyed interests into politics. Thus, this book is both a comprehensive history of the cigarette, and in many ways a case study through which these various social processes can be seen to have changed throughout the 20th century up to the current day.

In large measure, the book tells of an industry which wanted to make itself immune to all sorts of regulations in many ways. First, by cloaking itself in controversy by maintaining, long after the science had lead to a preponderance of evidence suggesting smoking cased cancer, they had evaded successfully medical and governmental regulation. Second, by cloaking themselves in the language of "rights" and "emancipation" and "feminism", they helped lead the charge to spread smoking to women, to protect it under the guise of allowing smokers a "right to choose," and to force other countries to open their borders to these products despite any health consequences.

While the book is interesting and comprehensive throughout, the writing and story becomes most compelling in the section entitled "Law," where the access to the corporations' archives displays in full brutality the cynical manipulation and arguments that these business players wished to propagate on the American public. Here I read the book aghast and shocked, wondering with each legal argument that a member of the prosecuting team put forward the justification executives would retort with in court.

The book, while comprehensive, does not tell every story that would be of interest. Because it is a story of cigarettes and not tobacco, other aspects of "cigarette history" (or "prehistory"), such as tobacco and slavery, do not receive much attention in the book. It is also short on comparative history of tobacco in other nations, containing scattered references to the British companies throughout, but not coalescing into a full-blown review of differences in similarities across societies. Some of this is also encountered in the last section of globalization, but mostly from an Americentric point of view. This isn't necessarily a fault, however, as Brandt's book makes it clear that these companies have been among the most powerful in lobbying to have trade barriers knocked down for their product.

This book will likely not be the last written on American cigarettes, as the archives made available by litigation and brave whistleblowers is dauntingly huge. Nonetheless, Brandt succeeds in reviewing a history that is both quite specific, and at the same time, quite broad. It is history and sociology at its most powerful, making something mundane and ordinary into something strange, a mystery to be unravelled, explained, and above all, demystified.

"Immune to Reason"

2008-08-28T12:13:00.003-04:00

The title is taken from a Mother Jones article discussing parents who choose not to have themselves and their children vaccinated (Allen 2008). The article points out that studies that have attempted to find links between vaccines and different conditions - most notably, autism - have failed to show that there is any population based link between vaccination and the conditions it has been putatively linked to. This means that, as a population, we aren't seeing increased rates of autism or other diseases because of vaccination.

Yet this hasn't stopped some people from opting out of the process altogether. A key point to make about the vaccination-autism link is that evidence has stacked up against it only at a population level. This means that in individual cases this might have been a cause of the problem. At the same time, as Collins and Pinch (2006) discuss as they review this facet of medicine through the lens of the sociology of science, we don't know what the potential "masked markers" that determine if vaccination will cause autism are yet (or even that such markers even exist). Another problem is that when enough people fail to get vaccinated, there is a loss of what is called "herd immunity" - if enough people get vaccinated, it will protect everyone, even those who aren't vaccinated. Vaccination can never be at 100% because of various issues (for instance, some people will be too young; some will be allergic to vaccinations; some will mistakenly believe they are vaccinated when they are not for some reason; people may immigrate from other places where vaccination wasn't undertaken; and so on), but the problem is that every single person who chooses not to be vaccinated makes it more likely that others who aren't vaccinated for whatever reason will also fall prey to the disease.

Both discussions of "herd mentality" interestingly miss a key point of what might motivate vaccination skeptics to not become vaccinated. Ironically, it is located in the very successes of medicine and nutrition. Because these two factors have eliminated the incidence of previous diseases which were deadly or debilitating (e.g., polio, whooping cough, etc.) people are now in a historically significant position where the risk of these diseases appears lower than highly visible and publicized conditions such as autism. The success of medicine has created the ironic possibility of more doubt of medicine. But as Collins and Pinch (2006) point out, despite the low profile of these diseases in most western nations, the risk of developing them is probably much higher than autism - particularly if one chooses not to vaccinate.

I am not suggesting that we ignore any potential vaccine-autism (or vaccine-other condition) link; indeed, testing new vaccines in the future will demand that they are tested to monitor for such conditions, to establish that the new medicines are doing much more good than harm. Hypothesized "markers" may even be found so that doctors will be able to recommend to parents that their particular child has a good reason to not be vaccinated. But under current conditions, we are all "blind" to what those markers might be. As terrible as autism might be, we should not forget that other terrible conditions can more easily infect the non-vaccinated. In such conditions, we would all be advised to take a scientific leap of faith and roll up our arm cuffs.

References:

Allen, Arthur. 2008. "Immune to Reason." Mother Jones, October, pp. 91-2.

Collins, Harry and Trevor Pinch. 2006. Dr. Golem: How to Think about Medicine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Miro

2008-08-15T09:28:00.004-04:00

I've just found a new program online that I've been enjoying for the past couple of days called Miro. It's a totally free media program that can handle everything from RSS feeds to music and movie files (of many varieties), as well as acting as a Bittorrent client for those of you wanting to download files this way. All of these features would be great alone, but the program also includes an integrated "channel search" that allows you to find media from a wide variety of providers, much in the way of a video blog, but with a prettier interface. For example, one of my favourite online news programs Democracy Now! is available this way. I've also found channels that link to Bill Moyers' Journal (PBS program by the populist journalist), The Onion News (incredibly funny satire), as well as some stuff from Discovery Channel (I have an inner science geek that I haven't adequately nurtured since I left middle school).

The footprint of the program seems to be relatively small, using about 112-130K of RAM on my computer when I've checked, which is another bonus as many of the other media programs as hogs in this way. (It's also a bonus if you consider how much memory separate programs would use collectively if you were running them at the same time.) There is a version for all of the major platforms (Mac, Linux, Windows), although the Windows version apparently includes some issues with the firewall. I haven't run into them yet, but the page includes a helpful workaround if this happens to you.

So far I'm in love.

Non-violence and Jesus

2008-07-16T17:35:00.005-04:00

I'm reading The Impossible Will Take a While, a collection of political writings designed to inspire hope in activists. One of the essays caught my attention because it offered a radical interpretation of several of Jesus's parables, and what it means to be a good Christian. The essay, entitled "Jesus and Alinksky" by Walter Wink, suggests that while Jesus never recommended violence, he was also not committed to passivity either.

The three stories that Wink analyzes - to turn the other cheek, to go two miles with someone who asks you to go for one, and to give someone your cloak if you are sued for it in court and that is all you have - suggest that Christians should accept their fate of the world around them in light of great evil. But what Wink suggests is that Jesus was suggesting that 1) one should not allow violent actions to rob one of dignity (turn the other cheek); 2) to stand firm with strong opponents (go two miles); and 3) allow ridicule to expose others who stand against you (give away your cloak even if it leaves you naked). Wink's essay, in essence, suggests that Jesus counseled non-violent resistance. This kind of reading is of course in the minority; with many people waiting for the rapture as followers of Christianity, the passivity route seems to be very popular with many.

Although Wink doesn't discuss it, the issue of Christ's divinity also plays into this creation of passivity. If we accept that Jesus "died for our sins," and that his actions stemmed from the fact that he was the "son of God," there is little we can or need to do in light of the great evil in the world. Religion, in this way, only becomes opium (to gloss Marx) because a great many of us accept that someone else is ultimately responsible for our salvation. Although the analogy is crude, Christ's divinity allows us to pass the buck to Jesus.

Bad Samaritans

2008-07-15T14:36:00.004-04:00

Reviewed:

Chang, Ha-Joon. 2008. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. New York: Bloomsbury.

Chang's book is a bucket of water on the mythical fire of the benefits of unfettered free trade. Taking the real world and its history as his starting point, rather than an abstract mathematical models, Chang convincingly demolishes the idea that free trade is the best of all possible worlds at all times for the world's economies. Instead, he portrays rich countries as themselves being propped up by massive government intervention, controls, tariffs, and all manner of unfreetradeslike programs in order to grow their own economies. It was only then that the rich began to tutor and heckle their governments for the power of free trade. In this, they were taking a lesson from Friedrich List, who in 1841 suggested the following:

"Any nation which . . . has raised her manufacturing power and her navigation to such a degree of development that no other nation can sustain free competition with her, can do nothing wiser than to throw away these ladders of her greatness, to preach to ther nations the benefits of free trade, and to declare in penitent tones that she has hitherto succeeded in discovering the truth" (Chang 2008: 224n8)

In other words, free trade should be used as an ideological bludgeon against potential competitors so that they can never develop to the level to compete as equals with the user of the ladder. A great deal of Chang's book is to precisely lay dynamite all around the ideas of free trade history as they have been preached by their disciples, to show that no country ever relied on free trade as its primary means to secure development and wealth. Even today the market is not free in those nations that profess to its doctrines; the United States sustains one of the most heavily subsidized agricultural sectors in the world, and the effect of this has been to flood other markets with cheap food, to destroy nascent business farming in those countries and to drive the poor and jobless farmers off their land.

It's also worthwhile to think about the growing subprime mortgage debacle in the United States as an another example of "bad samaritanism," because one of the cornerstones of modern conservative economic theory is that government can do no good in the free market. Hudson's article suggests that ordinary Americans are going to be on the hook for building another golden ladder by bailing out the many banks who took on bad debt by accepting people who could not afford (and perhaps did not understand) variable rate mortgages when they were signing the papers. In an economic system of limited resources, this means increasing the taxes on the 90% at the bottom (the rich will never pay for their own bailout, as they have many more ways to hide their money in tax shelters, compared to the poor), or else diverting it from other services. This cry for government intervention is characterized as "socialism for the rich" (privatize the profits, but put the costs of bad business on everyone), or perhaps "Bad faith Keynesianism" (government intervention allowed only to save the markets of the wealthy). This points to another glaring omission of the idea of free trade as well, one that I would guess would be sustained by a reading of world economic history: the wealthier nations never truly kick away their ladders, they simply hide them in the shed, waiting for signs of trouble to call for it. But they would never see this as a contradiction: after all, isn't government intervention only to save the self-regulating market from itself? What self-respecting conservative or neoliberal could disagree with that?

Chang's book is filled with other demolishions of free trade principles, such as the notion that culture plays into development, that copyright and other property rights are necessary to secure economic growth, and that government control over any industrial is necessarily inferior to private control. Lest this sounds very abstract, Chang illustrates most of these ideas with key examples and readings from specific history. One of the most interesting examples and disheartening examples are the case of HIV/AIDS drugs in Africa: with most people not being able to afford the drugs, with people dying, with drug companies being unwilling to lower the price, and with legal precident for "breaking patent" in such cases, such countries would be best to produce cheap generics of the drug. But instead, drug companies are pushing for enforcement of patents that will in any case benefit them little in this instance, ignoring of course that they are inflicting death upon the continent and practicing bad faith (as much of their patented research was subsidized by taxpayers; without basic biology and chemistry, there would have been no drugs). The result of this is to further kick the ladder away from African countries, because of course development depends on having healthy people to climb the ladder in the first place.

If there was one lesson to take from the book, it would be this: whenever you hear the words "free trade," you should poke around the yard a little. Somewhere, there is evidence of a ladder that has been recently used, or that is being used to climb the house of wealth away from the eyes of the public.

The Hummer Limousine

2008-05-08T15:52:00.005-04:00

Accused stands forth for committing the following crimes:

- Maintaining an atrocious fuel efficiency rating, which probably comes as no surprise to anyone. Note that the Wikipedia link suggests the fuel ratings of an ordinary Hummer (H2), so applying these estimates to the "Hummersine" may be conservative.

- Contributing to invidious social comparisons and heightening consumer reliance on "false needs." Even if your prom was on a mountain, the length of this sucker would probably prevent you from climbing the peak at the 70 degree angle that you require.

The only good thing about this vehicle is that the first time that I saw one this past weekend it gave me a good laugh.

Is this not better than the awful lottery of judgment?

2008-04-19T00:39:00.006-04:00

Oh look. A new entry right after I said I'd do one. But don't get too excited. I'm mostly going to let someone else do the talking: George Monbiot, a political and environmental writer that I admire greatly.

I have just finished reading Bring on The Apocalypse, which consisted of selected essays from what I believe were his editorials originally published in The Guardian. The selections are fairly wide ranging, bringing together his views on the post-9/11 world, politics from around the world, the environment (for which he is particularly well known for, especially after publishing Heat; it's another book which I highly recommend for its thorough and unflinching look at what changes will be necessary to prevent global warming), and religion. This particular quote is taken from an essay on intelligent design in the United States, which contained a piece of spiritual insight which particularly moved me:

"Darwinian evolution tells us that we are incipient compost: assemblages of complex molecules that, for no greater purpose than to secure sources of energy against competing claims, have developed the ability to speculate. After a few score years, the molecules disaggregate and return whence they came. Period.

As a gardener and ecologist, I find this oddly comforting. I like the idea of literal reincarnation: that the molecules of which I am composed will, once I have rotted, be incorporated into other organisms. Bits of me will be pushing through the growing tips of trees, will creep over them as caterpillars, with hunt those caterpillars are birds. When I die, I would like to be buried in a fashion that ensures that no part of me is wasted. Then I can claim to have been of some use after all.

Is this not better than the awful lottery of judgment? Is a future we can predict not more comforting than one committed to the whims of inscrutable authority? Is eternal death not a happier prospect than eternal life? The atoms of which we are composed, which we have borrowed momentarily from the ecosphere, will be recycled until the universe collapses. This is our continuity, our eternity? Why should anyone want more?" (Monbiot, 2008 [2005]: 20; my emphasis)

I suppose Monbiot might be faulted simply for recycling the myth of "the cycle of life" into a more poetic version, but I think he succeeds in removing the necessity of anchoring such an idea into a diety while retaining both the profoundity of the natural world and what it means to be human and a part of that world. The line "Is eternal death not a happier prospect than eternal life?" initially puzzled me. If reversed ("Is not eternal life not a happier prospect than eternal death?"), it would likely be emphatic rhetoric to suggest that his version of living forever is preferable to a Christian hell. But in its current form, I think Monbiot is attempting to hold the idea of an afterlife accountable. If we would accept death, we would not be willing to kill for "life". Hence, I think Monbiot alludes to the idea of religious terrorism here.

I would also encourage anyone who might be interested in following Monbiot's work to visit his blog at www.monbiot.com. So far as I can tell, he has kept all of his articles alive there, and also offers some rather interesting, unorthodox, and inspiring careers advice particularly pertinent to would-be journalists.

References:

Monbiot, George. (2008). Bring on the Apocalypse: Essays on Self-Destruction. Mississauga, ON: Random House.

Monbiot, George. (2008 [2005]). "Life with no purpose." In Monbiot (2008).

Blogtimism

2008-04-19T00:33:00.001-04:00

So I hoped at the onset of my blog that I would aim for weekly updates.

Yeah, that sure as hell didn't happen.

Look for a new entry soon.

Better living through very basic chemistry

2008-01-10T20:35:00.000-05:00

I recently picked up a copy of the book Green Clean by Linda Mason Hunter and Mikki Halpin. Not surprisingly, a lot of the stuff that is in our cleaning supplies now is at best questionable, and at worst quite toxic. I had started looking around for different ways to clean since the past few times I've used bleach (and yes, I do know to dilute it), I felt nauseated for several hours afterward because of being overwhelmed from the smell.

There's not very much to the plan at all, really: Borax, lemons, club soda, baking soda, and vinegar are the mainstays; the only difficult thing to find was Castile soap, which I finally located at the health food store. (It's pricey, but fortunately, you need very little of it in almost every recipe that uses it.) Since my bathroom was in need of a clean, I decided to give the book its inaugural run: Baking soda and vinegar for the toilet bowl; water, vinegar, and essential oil for the sink and outside of the toilet; club soda for the mirror; and baking soda for the tub.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, exactly, but I was surprised when vinegar and baking soda actually got the toilet clean. The great thing about being ad-washed by cleaning chemical companies is that it didn't really take much convincing that I don't need to use anything more than incredibly cheap, dirt common supplies. Goodbye Comet.

The only thing I have to watch out for is the essential oil. I think I used too much of it in the recipe and now my bathroom smells like mint patch. At least it's not making me nauseated like the bleach did.

I'd like to save your life, but I'm gay.

2008-01-09T23:28:00.001-05:00

According to new regulations passed by Health Canada, many groups including any gay man who has been sexually active in the past 5 years will no longer be able to to donate their organs for transplant. In the words of the story, "Transplant programs have been screening potential donors, but in some cases use organs from people in high-risk groups if they've tested negative for diseases. The new legislation means that the practice must stop."

I have to admit that I'm a bit perplexed by the move to ban certain groups from donating beforehand especially if they're testing organs in any case. I'm not convinced that the emphasis on "risky behaviour" is necessarily sufficient either, for the same reason. If the organs are getting tested, but this isn't enough to keep Health Canada from banning outright certain groups from the organ donation process entirely, what the hell is wrong with the tests? I do know about the HIV/AIDS latency period, which has no doubt lead to the blanket ban, but as far as I know, it doesn't take 5 years for it to become detectable by standard tests (when I've gotten the tests done, I thought it was 6 months, but the nurse had informed me that the tests had recently gotten better and could detect most in 3 months). If nothing else, could they not reduce that period between risky action and organ acceptability?

I am also astounded that Health Canada would be so naive to think that they can easily catch all members of the groups they identify through "interviewing" people as well: people lead secret lives all the time, and the whole idea behind "secret lives" is to engage in dangerous, questionable, immoral, unacceptable, etc. actions that you don't want other people to know. The interviewing process is not going to catch people like this. They're also not even going to be able to soundly estimate this population: I just hope that they have contingency plans in place for those kind of wrinkles.

Here's another thought: given that there's already a severe shortage of organs for donation in the health care system, and given that this will potentially knock off 7% of donors as estimated by the story, we need to retain as many organs as we can. Here's my suggestion: you give the family the full history of what's known about the donor to recipient (or whoever is responsible for making the decision), as well as what medical tests have shown, and then allow them to make an informed decision to accept or reject the organ based on what's known about the donor. I would have thought this is standard practice in surgery anyway: allow the patient to know the risks and choose from options, including to refuse all treatment.

Psychology of the Cell Phone

2008-01-07T17:32:00.000-05:00

Here's an anecdote that pretty much sums up my major issues with a cell phone.

I stood in line of a Tim Horton's close to my apartment. I go up to the first cashier and place my order, and then go to the middle of a long island to wait for her to deliver my food. Cell phone guy gets called to the far counter by one of the cashiers, and she's rather loud because of the distance to the line. No response from him. She calls again. Then he notices that he's being called, and continues to talk on his phone. Does he put it down or hang up when he's ordering? No. He pulls it away from his face for about 2 seconds and then goes right back to talking on his cell phone [1]. The server puts his coffee on the counter, and then he starts to walk away, apparently forgetting that, yes, even cell phone owners and users are expected to pay for their goods and services in our economy.

The next time I hear somebody say that we can't possibly ban cell phone use in driving cars, or someone who claims that they among all people really are good at driving while talking, I'll give them this anecdote and see what they think. A $1.39 transaction seems a bit easier than driving down a multilane highway in a car with other drivers around you, but that didn't keep cell phone dude [2] from screwing it up.

[1] Because cell phone dude [see note 2] was not speaking English (I think he was speaking French), I couldn't evaluate the Theorem of Conversational Importance. Stated mathematically, the theorem suggests that the importance of a cell phone conversation is in inverse proportion to the product of the amount of time spent talking and the appropriateness of having the conversation at that moment. In symbols, that is

I=(1/TA)

That is, people who talk on their cell phones while driving or waiting for coffee in Tim Horton's, or who speak for hours at a time on it (and this includes texting) are unlikely to have anything meaningful to say on their phone.

[2] "Dude" is like "winner" is for other people: seldom used positively despite the possibility of those connotations, but instead used almost always derisively.

Dissection of a healthy meal

2007-12-21T23:13:00.001-05:00

I had read Roland Barthes's book Mythologies quite some time ago and found it an interesting, although somewhat enigmatic book. In each of his short essays, Barthes takes a piece of French culture - toys, steak and chips, wrestling, and so on - and dissects it for what it means. Although I found most of the essays interesting, the significance was mostly lost because of the specific topics he discussed (and this was circa France in the 50s and 60s) and because I wasn't sure how to apply the "method," such as it were, to anything I had experienced. But I think now I have.

In Barthes work, mythology means something both less grand and more profound than the original meaning. Rather than simple moral tales, he uses this term to connote meanings that have become naturalized or taken for granted and thus susceptible to be glossed over, dismissed, or accepted at face value. He also does not use this term to stand merely for 'stories,' but takes nearly any aspect of culture and submits it for analysis. This use of the everyday as data would be pioneered, sometimes with interesting and sometimes banal results, in the field now commonly known as "cultural studies."

The "text" for analysis I obtained at the vegetarian restaurant Bridges, on McMaster's campus. I had just come back from the doctor with some vague symptoms, and although I wasn't able to be tested immediately, she suggested that what I was experiencing might be treated with "more fibre." So I was on the lookout for something healthy. So I got a lentil curry with basmati rice. I carried it back to the sociology department, my school home, and ate it in the lounge there.

As I ate, I stared at the container and realized what I had done. I had fallen prey to what I called in my other blog "the dearth of ecological thinking." I described this problem of thought as the tendency to prioritize what is near to one's own body, experience, and place as necessary for inspection in order to protect one's health, environment, and so on, at the expense of neglecting that it is all interconnected. I used the example of Wes's recent experience in his co-operative: one of the members published information (in the co-operative's newsletter) on compact flourescent light bulbs, showing that they have a small amount of mercury in them. This was enough to convince the writer that she thought they were dangerous; clearly she wanted to convince others of this too. This ignores, however, that under conditions where we obtain a sizeable amount of power from coal, and that given coal contains a certain amount of mercury as part of its impurities, and that given this is thrown out into the atmosphere (and later the environment) as part of the combustion process, that using an ordinary lightbulb derived from conventional power consisting of a great amount of coal power (as it is in Ontario) will ultimately leave more mercury that she will have to worry about in the future.

What relevance is this to my take out? It was the container: my healthy meal was housed in a plastic sarcophagus, number 6 polystyrene plastic, that God only knows how long will take to break down once it was carted off to the landfill. (I assume, perhaps falsely, that even when these plastics are recycled, as they can be in Hamilton, that most of it doesn't end up recycled, as I found out in Heather Rodger's book Gone Tomorrow: The Secret Life of Garbage, where she reveals that in the American case only about 5% of plastic is ever recycled once it is put in a blue box.) That plastic is hardly going to have a benign impact on the environment, and ultimately my health - or anyone else's.

Readers of my blog may protest that, yes, the plastic isn't great but it doesn't have a lot to do with my particular health issue of having too little fibre. And indeed it doesn't. The point is that I focused on a very narrow conception of health (my symptoms and the problems that might underlie it) while ignoring the much more comprehensive issue of the environment (and what I put into it) that also affects my health. These kind of issues surround other problems as well: how good is it for our health and the environment to truck organics everywhere? Would it be better to buy local, but pesticide treated, produce? And so on.

The Secret History of the War on Cancer

2007-12-18T00:39:00.001-05:00

I just finished reading Devra Davis's book (which is the title of today's entry). She starts with observations that, even given epidemiologists' controls taking into account better detection and an aging population, the cancer burden of nearly all countries in the world is going up. The rest of the book is essentially answering why.

The answers she comes up with are not pretty. First, there is quite a long history of not doing anything about the problem despite knowing a lot about it: for instance, though occupational hazards associated with cancer were described in the 16th century (that's not a typo), many of the practices continue to this day (one example being asbestos mining, a material which has been banned from most European countries but which is still actively mined and turned into consumer goods for export in Canada and the United States). Second, often times scientists ignored what others had learned: the hazards of cigarette smoking, as one example, were well known because Nazi scientists had done extensive research on the practices. (One plausible explanation of this, that scientists would have found anything that Nazis had researched repugnant, fails to hold up, as many of the advances they had made in other areas, such as rocketry, were quickly incorporated into mainstream scientific research.) Third, fingerprints of industrial influence and even outright deception and fraud are all over the record of cancer research. Davis points out that one of the ambiguous legacies left to us by cancer research is that a great deal of what we know has been funded by industry, so at the same time it made possible what we know, it also provided strong incentives for findings to be suppressed or distorted. Scientists in the area also routinely failed to reveal their financial interests, often being employed by the companies whose potential carcinogens were being called into question.

The book contains some rather useful and interesting - as well as shocking - miniature histories of individual carcinogens, places, and researchers. For instance, the history of American companies, with the cooperation of Congress, spent years attempting to make a "safe cigarette" was eye-opening. Davis's other fascinating excavations are numerous - some of the most memorable in my reading include the following. For some time, asbestos was used to filter cigarettes; Sarnia, despite having no asbestos mines, has an incredible burden of mesothelioma (lung cancers associated with asbestos exposure); entire towns picked up to move as their lands became uninhabitable from industrial pollution; many research laboratories failed to install even rudimentary means of protecting workers from exposure (something on which, Davis tells us, the communist Russians had bested Americans); common medical procedures greatly increase cancer risks; any many other stories aside.

The book is also peppered with anecdote, interviews, and discussions Davis has had over the years in her capacity as a cancer researcher. She does not allow their stories, emotional as they are, to detract from her careful histories and powerful statistics that she uses to indict those who think that cancer is well under control. The result is that while the processes and numbers she talks about do not remain abstracted the book does not denigrate into either a polemical biography nor a merely sentimental plea for justice of the few discussed in her book, but rather point to the need for comprehensive change.

First entry - and hopefully not the last

2007-12-16T23:26:00.000-05:00

I've been something of a slacker when it comes to blogging. For a while I've had one on MSN's "spaces" but added very little to it. It's not that I've had nothing to say; but I tended to let my PhD work take precedence over everything else. (Doctorate students who are reading this will understand this, as will practically anyone who works or has kids or access to high quality television programming: reading for pleasure becomes a distant memory, the gym seems far away although in reality it's 5 blocks down the street, and blogging - well, that's nothing but a decadent hobby.)

I'm hoping to revive those glory days by once again making the most important thing in cyberspace - my opinion - freely available to everyone out there. In reality I'm quite joking about the importance of my opinion. It's more of a "scratch pad" for ideas, and in the process, hopefully somewhere my writing can improve a little bit. When you've got a 200-300 page dissertation to put away in a few years, anything that might improve your writing can't be too bad. Keep your eye on this space for rants, opinions, polemics, observations, and (much less frequently) insights. And, good God willing, an update at least weekly.