Is it Healthy to be a Vegetarian?

Posted on May 13, 2011 by Control

One thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is the incidence of vegetarianism in countries like the United States. Culturally we are led to believe that:

Vegetarianism = good health

I agree with this attitude in certain respects, although I think there is much more to health than just not eating meat. My own opinion is more concerned with the other side of the equation:

Lack of vegetables in our diet = poor health

A survey that appeared in TIME magazine in 2002 reports that around 4% of Americans consider themselves to be vegetarians. Is this a good thing? I’m not really sure. My gut instinct tells me that it is not so much the lack of meat which is beneficial but rather, higher consumption of fruits and vegetables which provides positive health benefits.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) tells us to:

Consume a sufficient amount of fruits and vegetables while staying within energy needs. Two cups of fruit and 2½ cups of vegetables per day are recommended for a reference 2,000-calorie intake, with higher or lower amounts depending on the calorie level.

The definition provided by the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control is:

One cup refers to a common measuring cup (the kind used in recipes). In general, 1 cup of raw or cooked vegetables or 100% vegetable juice, or 2 cups of raw leafy greens can be considered as 1 cup from the vegetable group. One cup of fruit or 100% fruit juice, or ½ cup of dried fruit can be considered as 1 cup from the fruit group.

The Harvard School of Public Health states:

There is compelling evidence that a diet rich in fruits and vegetables can lower the risk of heart disease and stroke.

So we know from the research and government advice as well as our own experience that consuming fruits and vegetables is good for us. The question is, why are so many Americans today not eating enough of these foods?

I believe that the idea that we have to become a vegetarian to be healthy is wrong and is in some ways counter productive. Having the attitude that “I’m not going to be a vegetarian so why should I even bother having any fruits and vegetables?” is very dangerous.

A study in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association found that:

non-Hispanic African-American children and adolescents consumed significantly more dark-green vegetables and fewer mean deep-yellow vegetables than Mexican-American and non-Hispanic white children and adolescents.

This is not to suggest that the children eating more vegetables are vegetarians, simply that they eat more dark green vegetables. The point is that, we are looking in the wrong direction when we focus on avoiding meat consumption. Instead we should really be thinking about increasing the quantities of fruits and vegetables in our own as well as our children’s diets.

When we look towards Asian countries like Japan and Korea, we can see that meat and fish is a huge part of their diets. But at every meal, they also eat vegetables. The Japanese eat greens on a daily basis and in Korea, kimchi is eaten at most meals. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the percentage of vegetarians in these countries is much lower than in the U.S. but actual fruit and vegetable consumption, much higher.

There’s a story in here somewhere. Hopefully we can interview one of our Asian friends in the future so we can learn more about diets and vegetarianism in the Far East.

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The Politics of Sustainability

Posted on May 21, 2011 by Trippy Traveller

Sustainability is a concept that everyone can understand? it means being able to continue some action for an indefinite time. There is no net loss thus there is no danger of running out of a resource and causing a cessation. Sustainability is a word that neatly captures a concept that is very attractive.

The attraction for the word and concept has lead to sustainable lifestyles, sustainable enterprises, sustainable buildings, sustainable design and sustainable flooring. The list could go on. It is a word that appeals to the heart strings, the humanity in us. It is an appeal from future generations that they inherit an earth with an intact eco system complete with plenty of biodiversity, rain forests and marine life.

It is interesting to note how the traditional notions of the left have changed in many quarters to adapt to the power of the dream of sustainability. In the old days a socialist revolution would be followed by an intense period of industrialization in order to share the means of production and create wealth for all and a better standard of life. Such was the promise of the Russian Revolution, and eerily such was the promise, that is being fulfilled, of the Chinese socialist revolution. What Mao couldn’t do the present communist bureaucracy has been able to do by embracing free enterprise (while denying civil liberties and rights).

Now the left in European countries and certain parts of America, Canada and Australasia have moved away from this heavy industry, carbon heavy vision of utopia to a greener view of equality in society. This new green socialism is hazy on how they are going to create enough wealth to make everyman a king, but the same compassion and outrage that was once generated by the reality of poverty has now been diluted and altered by a compassion for the perilous state of the eco-sphere.

Of course, rich North European countries can afford to outsource all their polluting factories to Asia, Africa and South America. Norway has struck it rich on black gold and so doesn’t even need the factories in poor countries: their bottom line grows by the fact they have a small population and large amounts of oil.

The Northern European model of socialism has evolved into high taxation, great public services and a reliance on carbon tiny service industry. The most carbon tiny industry (since they ditched the gold standard) has got to be the financial services sector that can jiggle enough algorithms to produce rates of hypothetical growth for hypothetical money that is all stored digitally. It’s a system that works great until a global financial crisis causes everyone to cash in their poker chips for hard currency. The irony is that this form of socialism? carbon free? is just as utopian as trying to change a country from impoverished farmers to happy factory workers in a generation.

The right also has been affected by the idea of sustainability. Arnold S as California governor has introduced some of the most radical green interior design civic regulations in the world. The richest state is keen to conserve water, reduce carbon emissions and cut energy consumption. Interiors and exteriors are being changed to meet the new regulations. Old air-con units are being replaced with Energy Star approved units. The use of programmable thermostats, CFLs and better thermal insulation is being mandated. What is going on? Does the right now care about the health of the people and the planet?

Far from it. It is simply that energy and water efficiency make good financial sense. Both fossil fuels and fresh water are two (and too) limited resources that are continually going up in price. It is all about scale. Economies of scale. If you can save 0.1 cent per day over a million units you save $100,000 a day. That is a bottom line that is worth investing in. The profit motive is important in the drive for sustainable housing, sustainable offices and sustainable public buildings. The Triple Bottom line of “people, planet, profit” is a brilliant marketing strategy by the green movement to persuade right-wing think tanks, lobbyists and politicians in America that sustainable makes great sense.

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Politics and Beaches

Posted on January 28, 2013 by Trippy Traveller

Thong Tapan Resort key
It is one of the great ironies of Western culture and its most pervasive arm, globalization that it has created a massive tourist industry that has altered traditional land pricing systems in many places in the world. Where once beach land was considered as useless for agriculture and as a communal resource, it is now some of the most valuable real estate.

Beach land in Thailand was traditionally given to daughters and second sons in inheritance. For many communities in South Asia and the South Pacific beach land was the entry point to the sea and so open to all. It wasn’t considered that foreigners would want to stay in air-con luxury rooms next to beaches and hang around a swimming pool during the day, and that they would pay hundreds of dollars a night to do so.

In the Indian Ocean the luxury resorts are basically just wooden bungalows over the sea, but the level of service is such that famous celebrities stay.

In the United States only 17% of land is by the sea, but 53% of the population lives in coastal regions. This is obviously depopulating the interior of the country. The center of which is being turned into massive agri-business projects, the food from which is damaging the national diet as well as the environment.

Another important general point that needs to be made about beaches and politics is that they are strategic resources. They are near marine resources and they often mark the ‘end’ of countries. Security requires the military presence in many coastal regions. In places like Guantanamo Bay a coastal region becomes a protected colony outside international and national laws.

Tangiers, Shanghai and other coastal cities have become ‘international zones’ and havens during times of conflict. It is the case that sometimes foreign policy is best served by placing a special status on a coastal area.

In terms of globalization the most common result to beaches is that they ‘develop’. This means that the land next to the beach gets bought or leased to developers who create luxury resorts. The demographic visiting such beaches as Thong Nai Pan in Koh Phangan, White Sands in Koh Chang (Thailand), Sihanoukville (Cambodia), Bali and countless other beautiful beaches in the tropics changes dramatically and so does the revenue the beach generates. The result is that human numbers increase and place more of a strain on the environment, especially in the early stages of development when sanitation systems are still basic.

Trees are chopped down, rocks moved and natural habitat removed to make room for housing and services. Often what is not seen is the mass of staff housing that is needed to sustain luxury resorts, not to mention roads, power plants, airports and public transport.

For people used to living in communities where resources are shared the transition from going from farmers and fishermen to employees of big ‘outside’ firms with uniforms and lists of rules is a hard one to make. It can also feel like a demeaning transition despite the promise of a higher ‘income’.

There is also a cultural aspect to the development of beaches. Languages and traditions are lost as many locals move away and the demographic shifts in favor of tourists and brought in ‘outside’ staff.  The Moken or Sea Gypsies of Thailand are being confined and their culture threatened by the creation of mass tourism in their traditional waters.

It is the case that beaches will become more valuable as resources (and especially economic resources) as time goes on; the same as other important resources such as water, oil and food. As the world population continues to explode all such important resources will be the focus of violent foreign policies. Dominating resources will be the road to power in a world that can no longer sustain its human population.

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The Politics of Natural Resources

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Trippy Traveller

Malthus was the first economist to point out the widening gap that occurs over time between population number and agricultural resources. He was convinced that there would be a time in the future where human numbers would place an unbearable burden on agriculture and mass famine would occur.

This is an idea that was expanded in the 1960s by Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 book The Population Bomb. He was the man who coined the term ‘population explosion’. Following Malthus he pointed out that population was growing exponentially but that agricultural was growing only in a linear fashion. At some point a crisis would be reached.

Ehrlich was proved partly wrong – we have already passed the point at which in 1968 he thought there would be a break down in civil society. In 1980 he made a famous bet with the economist Julian L. Simon that the price (inflation adjusted) for tin, tungsten, nickel, chromium and copper would increase over 10 years due to scarcity. Simon felt that human ingenuity was limitless and that it would find a way around problems of supply.

Simon was right. In 1990 the prices for the 5 commodities were actually less than in 1980. The world demand for copper had shrunk considerably since fiber optics replaced the metal in most communication systems. Moreover, the improvement in plastics also reduced the need for the other metals and alloys in the list.

Ehrlich felt slightly cheated by the loss of the wager and challenged Simon to another bet. He wanted to bet that the amount of pollution in the air, water and soil would increase in 10 years. Simon refused to take the bet.

In this sense Paul Ehrlich was at the vanguard of a new understanding of natural resources. It is not simply a matter of how many mineral deposits are available or how much oil there is in the ground. It is also essential to count a lower carbon count in the atmosphere as a natural resource, a low mercury count in seas and rivers as a natural resource.

It is imperative that economists find ways to place a monetary value on these natural resources that are determined by lack of pollution and carbon count. Moreover, natural disasters such as the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004 that wiped out holiday destinations such as Khao Lak in Thailand take out physical property but also the reputation of a place. This loss of reputation as a place of natural beauty is another variable in calculating real value.

It is interesting to note that multi-national companies dealing in such things as tea, coffee and bananas are paying only for land rental, produce, fertilizer inputs etc. They are not being made to pay a levy for draining soil nutrition and underground water supplies. Tobacco companies are not having to pay for loss of natural habitat or agricultural land that could produce more essential food.

Simon’s cornucopia ideas are attractive as there are continual technological improvements and innovations that allow us to use natural resources more efficiently, and to use renewable natural resources such as solar energy. World leaders, however, seem to fall more in the Ehrlich camp as much of foreign policy in the late Twentieth and early Twenty-first Centuries has been about securing access to natural resources – especially fossil fuels. It seems entirely feasible that future wars will be waged over more basic natural resources like trees and fresh water.

Moreover, countries (in particular Japan and China) are using their financial might to buy up the rights to natural resources such as hardwood and minerals around the world. Since the wave of deregulation and privatization around the world that started in the 1980s governments have sold public utility companies and thus lost control of their own vital natural resources.

The environmentalists have been ineffective in their call to stop the use of natural resources. There message is wrong. Sustainability is important, but just as important is the idea that natural resources should be laid aside for future generations. They do not all belong to the present population. Some things do not and should not have a price because they should not be up for sale.

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Prostitution in Thailand

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Trippy Traveller

Anyone who has spent even the smallest amount of time in Thailand will have noticed that it is a country with a prostitution problem. All countries, even those with the most sanctimonious records, have the skin trade. Many of these countries have a strong connection between prostitution and organized crime.

While organized crime has its fingers in many pies in Thailand it is remarkable to discover how many women work free lance. They might be attached to a bar, but once the punter or John has paid what is commonly called a ‘bar fine’ the women are free to set up their own price. Many of them will in fact refuse payment. This is not because they necessarily like or love the man, but because they are looking at the long con. This is such an obvious trick, but where emotions are involved it is one that has proved very successful for many years. In essence the woman persuades the client that she loves him and that she is with him only for this reason. She might adamantly refuse money on such grounds.

Naturally when the foreigner returns home the begging emails and letters will start arriving saying that a relative needs an operation or that she needs an allowance to keep her off the streets. It is remarkable how successful this ploy is. A woman can keep several such long distance remittance arrangements going and still take casual customers.

It is thus not surprising that many young women who originally came from poor rural areas such as Isaan in the north under duress from poverty and family pressure and moved to Bangkok, Pattaya and Koh Samui and other hot spots for prostitution end up opting to stay on as prostitutes rather than taking normal paid work. The money a prostitute is able to make in Thailand is much higher than the wages of say a factory worker, even someone working in a Japanese factory.

Fees for a woman vary from 500 Thai Baht for a go to 2,000 THB. In comparison a teacher makes just 16,000 THB a month (source: http://www.worldsalaries.org/thailand.shtml). Considering more than one client can be handled per night it is easy to see how the income of a prostitute makes the profession an attractive one. And of course there are no taxes to be paid, and often no ‘protection money’ deductions are necessary.

Naturally, a Thai woman or man (for that matter) working primarily for a Thai constituency does not make as much. You can often go to the proverbial middle of nowhere in Thailand where agriculture is the main economic pursuit and you will find a small shack selling cigarettes, bottled petrol and cold drinks. Next door will be a karaoke bar with one or two females of the night plying their trade.

Thailand is a very traditional and conservative country with strong Buddhist beliefs, but at the same time they will tolerate open prostitution and the outrageous flaunting of sexual ambivalence shown by lady boys. It is a country which is not exactly permissive like places in the West but they do have a live and let live philosophy that can be hard for outsiders to understand.

Many people mistakenly think that it is tourism that created the massive prostitution business in Thailand. They are wrong. It was actually the Chinese that introduced the idea centuries before Sukhimvit, Pattaya and Chaweng became popular with foreign sex tourists. The notion of official marriage is still very much an urban phenomenon. Thais are reluctant to pay taxes and wish to declare as little as possible to the authorities. People are thus free to move from one relationship to the next without having to trouble about child benefit payments for example. It is not to say that Thais are more promiscuous than other nations, but it is to say that the situation is normally not hampered by any legal frame work or for that matter societal condemnation.

In such a situation it is easy to see how prostitution can thrive in Thailand. To some this might not seem like a bad thing, especially if the contract is consensual and both parties benefit. However, there is a dark side to prostitution in Thailand.

The most obvious facet of this is child prostitution. NGOs and foreign governments have continually pressured successive Thai governments and juntas to do something about the large amount of under-age sex workers in Thailand. The government is reluctant to intervene and many suspect it is incapable of intervening. At times the army runs Bangkok with an iron hand but that hand does not stretch so authoritatively to other parts of the Kingdom. For example in the southern provinces they have been fighting a decades long war with muslin insurgents with few visible successes. Corruption has weakened the will of the authorities to take any action on child prostitution.

The Thaksin and the recent pro-Thaksin government have made few noises on this issue, but they have identified yaba or methamphetamine as a major area of concern in Thai society that needs to be tackled. Sadly, the last Thaksin government dealt with the problem by allowing a number of extra-judicial slayings by the police that have still gone unpunished.

Yaba is one of the pitfalls for sex workers in Thailand. Originally invented by the Japanese during the last World War, methamphetamines have spread like an epidemic across Thailand. Construction workers, taxi drivers and sex workers have found that they can stay up for several days at a time with little food and double their incomes by using the drug. It is cheap and readily available. Much of it is made on the Thai and Myanmar border that is controlled as much by warlords as it is by the junta in Rangoon. No doubt many well placed officials in both countries are seeing massive financial rewards from the methamphetamine trade in Thailand.

In the case of sex workers, methamphetamines are causing addiction, risk taking and long term physical and psychological problems. It does nothing to help curb the ever-present threat of massive HIV infection.

Finally, the drug addiction just compounds the other dark side of prostitution in Thailand, and that is paranoia, schizophrenia and other forms of mental illness. As Carson McCullers pointed out, ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’ and playing the game of pretend love over and over again has often a devastating impact on the sensibilities especially combined with the warped perspective provided by methamphetamines.

So think carefully before you sit down in a bar in Soi Cowboy, Pattaya or Chaweng. That beautiful and smiling young woman that will inevitably come and sit down next to you might seem full of joie de vie, but the chances are that she is heading down a road that will make her a casualty of a laissez faire economy, and you in your own small way by paying for sex will be an accomplish in her tragedy.

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Exposing Hucksters and Keeping it Real

Posted on August 24, 2011 by Control

Health is a topic that we all feel we are experts in even when it is obvious just by looking at us that we’re not! Fatties might think they know it all when it comes to weight loss. But knowing what to do is certainly not the same as applying that knowledge. I’m not just knocking fatties. People with eating disorders that make them dangerously underweight are definitely not healthy either. So why do we now have so many health issues in society today?

We have to remember that it’s not just a question of weight either. Heart disease, chronic fatigue, bad skin, alergies and so on are rife in society today. Perhaps the main factor that we have to look at is SAD. What I’m talking about here is the Standard American Diet.

The Center for Disease Control tells us:

About one-third of U.S. adults (33.8%) are obese. Approximately 17% (or 12.5 million) of children and adolescents aged 2—19 years are obese.

This is an outrageous proportion of the U.S. population who have serious weight issues. Obese doesn’t mean just a little bit overweight. According to Wikipedia:

Obesity is a medical condition in which excess body fat has accumulated to the extent that it may have an adverse effect on health, leading to reduced life expectancy and/or increased health problems.

Anyone with a BMI (Body Mass Index) score greater than 30 is considered obese. To find out your own BMI, you just have to input your height and weight into the CDC BMI Calculator.

There is no doubt in my mind that the greater incidence of obesity in the modern age is closely related to poor diet. The amount of fatty foods and nutritionally barren processed meals that pass as food is staggering. Not only is the food that many of us eat by choice no good for our bodies, there are now a bunch of drugs and food supplements that we are being told can help us.

But wouldn’t a better idea be to stop feeding ourselves junk food and actually start feeding our bodies the nutrition that they are begging us for? When we get a craving for sugar, this is our body’s way of telling us we need more carbs. This is when we should be reaching for a bunch of bananas, not a bowl of ice cream.

It’s funny that lots of fat people say they want to avoid high calorie foods. But just by looking at them, we know that this is obviously not the case. Sure, some fruits do have a decent number of calories. But we’re talking good calories! A banana for instance is about 100 calories and is packed full of quality minerals and enzymes that power our bodies. Compare this to a couple of cookies which really offer our bodies nothing but a quick sugar hit.

Perhaps the easiest way to start working on your own health is to check out some juicer reviews and try and find one that you’ll be able to use daily. This is a great habit to get into. Juicing lets us get a great vitamin and mineral hit and best of all, we can have our 5 a Day in just one glass. The fact of the matter is that if we really want to enjoy peak health then 5 servings of fruit and vegetables per day is just scratching the surface.

The bottom line is that we are the masters of our own domain and it is up to us to take responsibility for our own lives. Forget drugs that are supposed to let us get away with eating poorly. Just eat more fruit. You might find that you like it!

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Politics of Abortion

Posted on August 24, 2011 by Trippy Traveller

The right of a woman to seek an abortion for an unwanted pregnancy is pregnant with politics. In 1973 the ground breaking case of Roe vs. Wade in the USA legalized abortion in federal law. 5 States in America including California and New York legalized abortion prior to the case of Roe vs. Wade in 1970. The rest of America legalized abortion after 1973 in line with the Supreme Court decision.

For watchers of American politics, especially for Europeans living in liberal democracies, it never ceases to amaze how much of a fuss the American people seem to make over this issue. It is one of the founding principles of democracy that state and church should be separated. One of the reasons for American politicians’ abhorrence of such regimes as that set up by the Taliban (prior to the American occupation in 2001) is that they run a country along theocratic lines – namely the law is decided by the law as stated in a religious text and the arbiters of the law are those who interpret the essential religious documents. As a result the Taliban declared music to be bad and that women should not work or receive an education. This might seem barbaric to Americans but it is the same logic as that applied by Americans who are against abortion and who want to repeal the case of Roe vs. Wade.

Indeed George W. in his 2 terms in office seemed hell bent on declaring war on Muslim countries that didn’t respect human rights while at the same time doing his best to use his executive powers to change the composition of the Supreme Court in such a way as to overturn Roe vs. Wade. The irony is not missed by liberals who see religion as a personal matter and not as basis for political action.

Abortion is an issue that is impossible for groups with opposing opinions to find a compromise over. This is because the issue clearly demonstrates two ways of looking at ethics. These two ways of considering what is good and bad are diametrically opposed so people arguing from these points of view are not even on the same page and will never come to any type of agreement.

Ethical philosophy states there are 2 ways of deciding on the morality of a particular action. The first way is called the ontological response. This response states that some action is inherently wrong or right. There is no regard for consequences. So for example, killing is wrong in itself. It doesn’t make any difference if you kill Hitler in 1939 or you perform a mercy killing on a person dying of an incurable disease or you kill an unwanted fetus. Killing is killing and it is always wrong. It is a fundamental principle not contingent on any circumstance. Those in the Bible Belt of America who Bush so cleverly aligned himself with hold an ontological view of abortion – it is morally wrong because the Bible says so; it is wrong of itself and there can be no exceptions to the rule. It is nearly impossible to argue with people who hold ontological ethical beliefs. They do not require evidence and they give none. A meta-argument like the one pursued in this post will also have no impact on the average person who holds an ontological view about the wrongness of abortion.

The second type of moral belief is very different; it is the consequential approach to morals; often called the teleological approach. According to this way of looking at morality if an act produces positive and desirable results it is good and if it produces negative and unwanted results it is bad. It is a pragmatic and relative position compared to the absolutism of the ontological moral approach. Thus, although most people who follow a teleological approach to morality find killing abhorrent under normal circumstances they would usually agree that killing Hitler in 1939 would be morally justified because it would have prevented the Holocaust and the death of 6 million Jews.

This is a compelling argument for many. Sometimes the ends justify the means when it comes to ethics. It is from a consequential approach that certain people believe that abortion is necessary for a healthy society. One strong teleological argument for abortion was made in the paper “The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime” printed in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2001. It was a paper written by the rogue economists John Donohue of Yale University and Steven Levitt of University of Chicago. The paper along with other studies became the subject of the best-selling book and movie called Freakonomics. The basis of the argument takes the country wide drop in crime rates in America in the 1990s. During the 1980s crime rates escalated in the USA and many commentators feared that the 1990s would see a break down in society if the crime rates continued to increase along similar lines as they had in the 1980s.

Donohue and Levitt argue that the drop in crime rates in the 1990s was 50% down to the consequences of the Roe vs. Wade ruling in 1973. They argued that ‘unwanted’ children were the most likely to feel dissociated from society and were the most likely to turn to drugs and anti-social behaviors. The fact that mothers could avoid having unwanted babies meant that 20 years down the road the pool of abused and maladjusted youth that crime feeds upon was greatly reduced. In support of this hypothesis Donohue and Levitt cite the fact that those 5 states that legalized abortion prior to Roe vs. Wade were the first places to see a drop in crime rates. They also point out that crime rates for those over 30 in the 1990s remained almost the same as in previous decades.

When the essential point that the unloved and the abused are those most vulnerable to being sucked into criminal activities is considered the Donohue and Levitt theory makes a lot of sense. It also makes a compelling teleological argument for abortion.

It is thus no surprise that the media and academia in the States have been quick to respond to “The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime” with a long series of counter arguments and queries over data and analysis. This is the teleological battlefield over abortion.

The right in America is very keen to dissociate environment from explanations of society and human behavior. It is similar to those who still seek to find a ‘violence gene’ that will explain why some people are murderers. It is much more convenient to fix the gene than it is to re-distribute wealth or radically change the dog-eat-dog ethos that governs free market economies.

As a final point on this look at the ontological and teleological arguments for and against abortion it is instructive to look at the Catholic Church. This is an ancient organization that is firmly in the ontological camp and equally as firmly opposed to abortion. Abortion is wrong because it is wrong. They also say that divorce is wrong by definition. What most Catholics fail to appreciate is that they bring the consequential approach secretly into play when the Pope gives special dispensations to break Catholic law. The new formula becomes that divorce is always wrong and wrong in itself unless the Pope decides that the marriage is untenable and that to continue it would be dangerous to one or more of the parties involved.

In a similar way those who usually use teleological arguments also slip into ontological terminology. For example abortion is necessary for many practical reasons (consequences) and it is also a human right to decide (ontology).

By clearly understanding the meta-dynamics of ethical arguments we are in a much better position to understand important issues and societal responses to those issues.

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The Politics of Food

Posted on June 27, 2011 by Trippy Traveller

Food is nourishment for all living things and yet when it comes to our food we generally discount the notion that we are not the only animals with expectations of nourishment and sustenance. The food chain contains the ultimate political dictum of the bigger, the stronger and, since our arrival, the smartest get to be at the top of the food chain. Might is right is what some political scientists have made of Darwin.

Food is also money. In America it is unbelievable amounts of money. The average supermarket stocks over 40,000 products. This is only the illusion of choice: the medium of consumer society has made people believe that they are getting a right to vote with their consumption choices. Sadly, most of the food in any typical supermarket in America is made by 4 companies. They are Nestle, Tyson, Kraft and PepsiCo. These companies and MacDonald’s (who is the biggest purchaser of beef in the USA) have wrested control of the way the vast majority of food is grown in the States. (www.foodprocessing.com)

These companies are of course not above promoting their cause by lobbying and throwing their immense importance around. In 2000 the food industry made $900 billion. (www.foodpolitics.com). You might not be surprised that Google search is not very forthcoming about how much money is in food; just as few places mention how much the arms industry in America makes and how much of the tax dollar the military complex spends.

One of the consequences of this food cartel system in America is that margins are everything. Companies are dealing with such vast amounts of raw ingredients that any action that reduces the time for an operation by just a second or any 0.1% saving at any point in the process of getting the food on the shelves results in massive savings. Over the years food has been turned into a factory product. Workers typically do one job over and over. Everything is mechanized and standardized. Tomatoes are picked green and ripened using gas, chickens are ‘grown’ rather than raised. The workforce are brutalized with monotony and low pay. Suppliers or ‘growers’ of chickens are normally in debt to the tune of $50,000 or more – such is the power of the contract. In short using immigrant labor, treating animals as less than animals, under paying the workforce and cutting every corner imaginable makes staggering amounts of money. This money buys power.

Not surprisingly there is very little government over-sight of the food companies controlling America’s food. If a company is found complicit in injury or death to any of its customers through one of its products money is handed out but the law is blushingly reluctant to remove a license or revoke a right to business. One woman whose son died of e-coli from a hamburger is struggling to put ‘Kevin’s Law’ on the statute books. Her law is simple: any company that repeatedly poisons a customer must have its license taken away.

There are many who believe that the free and unregulated market is good and that the market has its own natural wisdom, but do they want to eat food that this philosophy produces. In the slaughter of cows the process is done so quickly that a certain percentage of the last feces of the cow before death ends up in the final ‘beef’.

Organic food is almost by definition better than processed foods, fast foods as well as vegetables, fruits and meats. The organic food industry is also mostly dominated by big companies that ‘manufacture’ food. Much organic food is grown hydroponically and with grow lights. It might be ‘organic’ but it doesn’t mean it’s natural.

Natural is a good word to describe how food should be and its antonym unnatural is the best way to describe most of the 40,000 choices that supermarket shoppers get. One word – corn. 2% of land in America is dedicated to growing corn. Corn grain is used to make food for humans and food for the animals that are ‘grown’. It is also used for silage, for high oil corn for feed to animals so their metabolism slows down and they become (chronically sometimes) obese. Corn is also used as the basis for many synthetic ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup that can be found in a vast array of processed foods. There seems no end to the usefulness and profitability of corn. It can also be used to make ethanol for the auto industry. Corn is good but it has obvious limitations. (www.epa.gov)

Monoculture agriculture is making the soil and the crops weak. Pesticides that poison the earth cannot be made toxic enough to keep up with the Darwinian determination of bugs to get at our food. Genetically modified food is the natural consequence of monoculture in agriculture. Bringing biology on board and doing some genetic tampering can produce marvelous results – bigger, more colorful and damn near indestructible while growing food stuffs that bear only a passing resemblance to ‘natural’ food. Tampering has of course the unintended consequence of being fed back into the original gene matrix when GM crops are introduced to an area. Genetically engineered food is altering the program and we have no backup copy if the experiment goes wrong.

It might therefore not come as a surprise that people in developing countries with more ‘natural’ agriculture tend to eat much healthier food (if they can find the money to feed themselves) because the food is grown in a better way. Cancer, obesity and diabetes are problems that are major killers in the ‘West’ but only minor killers in the rest of the world. Eating rice, fufu, noodles, bread, ugali, bananas, gnocci, bulgur, nuts, rye, sago, quinoa etc. as a staple occasionally instead of corn might explain along with shit in the meat why so many people die of cancer and heart disease in the USA.

Many communities in South Asia and Polynesia have the saturated fat coconut oil and coconut milk every day. They are not having coronary thrombosis; nor are they obese. Studies have been done to show how some islands were much healthier places before polyunsaturated fats (made from corn and soy) were introduced into the food supply.
(www.coconutoilbenefits.biz).

Coconut oil is just one of the many examples of healthy foods that are sometimes referred to as functional food. Coconut water is an exact match with blood plasma and used for emergency IV. It also contains more electrolytes than sports drinks. Coconut oil and milk contain lauric acid (that is also found in mother’s milk) that is an antimicrobial agent. And coconut oil stimulates thyroid activity and hence improves the immunity system and metabolism.

The science of functional foods and the agriculture to make these foods naturally in a way that is not polluting and in way that is sustainable is the true politics of food.

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Oil, Politics and the Arab Spring

Posted on June 8, 2011 by Trippy Traveller

Oil is the resource that produces the most politics. It breeds ugly and two-faced things called foreign policy and covert operations. It is oil that starts wars often under the guise of religion or democracy. The 2005 film Syriana captures the cynical nature of oil politics brilliantly. Things, however, with the Arab Spring seem to have moved on. It is too soon to tell what the recent events mean for oil, the Middle East and American hegemony.

Syriana is written and directed by Stephen Gaghan and loosely based on the memoirs of Robert Baer, a CIA operative for 21 years, called ‘See No Evil’. The book and the movie are startling in that they show how cynically the CIA seeks to influence politics in the Middle East through covert operations. Baer famously said in 2004 to the New Statesman (British newspaper) regarding terrorism suspects, “If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear—never to see them again—you send them to Egypt.” (Wikipedia)

Recently, Baer made a statement on Amazon about John Perkin’s book Hoodwinked:

“What got us into the mess we’re in today, the worst recession since the Great Depression, is the same grotesque capitalism cum corruption we shoved down the throat of the Third World since the end of World War II. (Yes, the Third World’s elites were cheerfully corrupted.) We, and the rest of the West, learned the trick of selling unneeded infrastructure, services, over-sophisticated weapons–stuff that could never benefit anyone other than the people who lined their pockets. And yes, Perkins is right, the international economists and press were handmaidens to the thievery. It was all fairly routine until 9/11, when the real gorging started. Tell the people their roof is on fire and they’ll give you whatever you ask for. Between 2001 and 2009 the Department of Defense budget increased 74 percent, and that is not to mention the hundreds of billions of dollars in related contracts.” (Facebook)

Perkins in his book Hoodwinked concludes that the answer to the present malaise is openness in government, an end to human rights abuses and most importantly a new energy policy by America based upon sustainability. Baer is more cynical he doesn’t believe CFLs, bamboo flooring, programmable thermostats, solar panels etc. can save the West from inevitable decline.

Syriana the movie tells a complex interwoven tale. The main premise is that a prince of one of the Emirates gives a lucrative contract to a Chinese firm rather than an American oil company. The CIA acts on behalf of American oil interests and assassinates the pro-reform prince to put his pro-American brother in charge of the oil rich country. As the film progresses the corruption in Washington and the violence in the Middle East leave a nasty taste. The final scene is of two Pakistani itinerant workers recruited to terrorism by an Egyptian cleric with a weapon they stole from the CIA blowing up an oil tanker.

The film is fictional but the methods employed by the CIA, the ruling elite of the Middle East and terror inciting clerics seem very real. After all it is based on the work of a CIA operative.

The game, however, has moved on since 2005. Where once America sought to influence succession in Emirate Royal families and do their best to sell pointless infrastructure and weapons to the Middle East in return for the oil, now they might well have to contend with democracy. It is much easier to buy one man off (or kill him) than it is to buy entire countries off (or kill them).

Excepting Colonel Gadaffi, who made himself too morally repugnant after the Lockerbie bombing, America has buddied up with all the despots of the Middle East whose positions seem more tenuous by the week. First was Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, then President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. Bahrain, Syria and Yemen are now in the throes of revolution. Protests have sprung up in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco and Oman. It looks like all the yes men that America has placed are losing power. Since December 2010 North Africa and the Middle East has found its voice and they are saying no to American involvement in the region. It is a movement seeking the return of sovereignty to the people.

The Obama administration was at first very timid to condone the uprisings now dubbed the Arab Spring. Their early silence speak volumes for the not so hidden secret agenda of long term planners in Washington to strike a series of alliances within the Arab world to keep the oil and lucrative contracts flowing. Forced by events to put up a show of support Obama eventually made statements to the effect that the uprisings were legitimate and that the tyrants should step down.

The American elite had little choice because millions are daily taking to the streets. These are the poor who live in a region with the greatest resource ever known to mankind – elephant oil fields. The governments of the Middle East and North Africa have done nothing other than buy weapons and consolidate their power with the billions of dollars of oil taken from the ground. The people are protesting about torture and murder of those who previously sought to oppose the rulers. They want democracy and human rights.

Those such as Rumsfeld and Cheney and companies such as Exxon Mobil must be very annoyed. Invading democracies that happen to favor policies not in American interests could be very hard to sell to the UN and the American public.

What the fledgling Arab and African democracies do with their newly found sovereignty (and the oil); and how America responds to the new playing field are the great political questions that will shortly be answered.

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Books in the Past, Present and Future

Posted on June 1, 2011 by Control

Libricide, more commonly referred to as book burning, is a phenomenon both very real and also fictional. The most recent publicized occurrence was the burning of a Qur’an in Florida in March 2011.

[Terry Jones] said the punishment — burning the book after it had been soaked in kerosene for an hour — was determined from four choices on his organization’s Facebook page. He said “several hundred” were polled and voted for burning over shredding, drowning and facing a firing squad.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2011-03-21-quran-burning-florida_N.htm

You can check out their Facebook page if you do an Internet search for “Dove World Outreach Center Facebook”. Linking to their page would only raise their profile further which is not something I really want to do. The Southern Poverty Law Center has deemed them a hate group.

There are plenty of other examples throughout history which are well documented on Wikipedia.

Of course, there are fictional examples as well, perhaps most notably Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. This is a book that is well worth reading. For those of you who have not already done so, I won’t reveal any spoilers. Just read it, you won’t regret it.

Searching on Amazon earlier today, I noticed that Fahrenheit 451 is a book that is only available in physical form. There are no electronic versions for modern electronic reading devices like the Kindle or tablets such as iPad. Somewhat ironic that a book about libricide should be available only in burnable form. Another novel Crash by J.G. Ballard, set in a techno-future society is not yet available in techno-electronic form.

It will be interesting to find out if more books will get the electronic treatment once the Kindle 4 release date is announced. There are signs that the 4th generation Kindle will be ready sometime later in 2011.

How do you burn a virtual book?

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Barack Obama Toasts the Queen

Posted on June 1, 2011 by Control

President Obama’s gaffe while toasting Queen Elizabeth II was not really his fault but it does make for a bit of a chuckle. The Royal band started their rendition of God Save the Queen during one of Obama’s pauses, rather than at the end of his speech.

He pressed on regardless, with a nice bit of backing music, then when he did actually finish, the Queen refused him a clink of glasses.

Blatant mistake from the band conductor; bit of a faux pas from Obama; and rudeness from the Queen. Maybe etiquette and politeness are not as closely related as I thought.

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Conspiracy on Wikipedia

Posted on May 29, 2011 by Trippy Traveller

While reading about the Thai Junta crack down of the media just after the coup d’état on September 19th 2006 on Wikipedia I tried to follow to links from the article. The first was to the website of www.19sep.org – an official protest site to the putsch and then to www.Thaksin.com. The first site was no longer up. It was just a holding page like you see for sites due to be auctioned – all original content removed. The second lead me to a burgundy page telling me my computer was being attacked and that I might want to get the hell out of there quick. I did.

I did some quick research. The Thaksin.com really was a nasty virus that my firewall blocked. The cached copy of the site said ‘hotels in Thailand’ on a black screen and then proceeded to try and burrow its way into my computer. For the 19sep.org there was no cache available. This is odd because old copies of sites that stop paying their dues normally knock around as ghosts in the machine for months if not years after their official demise. It didn’t take me long to find out why. The site was obviously hosted in Thailand and was completely shut down by the Council of Democratic Reform (the moniker the interim junta in Thailand chose to be called).

For any interested in what happened to the people’s protest to the coup d’état in 2006 the organization has set up under a new URL – http://www.workersliberty.org/node/7060. It is a site that makes for interesting reading – far more direct, impassioned and less balanced than the Wiki entry but far more relevant in pointing out just how many times this has happened to the Thai people.

“Between 1957 and 1973 Thailand had an uninterrupted period of military rule…On the 14 October 1973, a mass popular uprising, led by students, but significantly involving urban workers, overthrew the military dictatorship. On 6 October 1976 civil rights were crushed by a military coup…By 1988 Thailand had a full parliamentary democracy once again. In 1991, the army made a last ditch attempt to maintain significant political influence by staging a coup against a corrupt, but democratically elected government. In May 1992, the military was overthrown, by another uprising in Bangkok. May 1992 resulted in the restoration of parliamentary democracy and the eventual reform of the political system.”

The thing to note was how the 19 September, 2006 coup was the first takeover by the military in the age of the internet. This was no problem internally because only 12% of Thailand is online, but it was potentially embarrassing for foreign relations. For the first few days the military regime was slow to shut down servers of sites critical to the coup. During that time a lot of information was available on the internet. Now it seems that although democracy has been restored to Thailand under The Democrat Party (the yellow shirts) the military are still keen to crack down on sites that point the finger at the military when analyzing what went on in 2006.

At the time of the coup it was a shame that the foreign press didn’t do more to give Thaksin Shinawatra more support as a democratically elected head of state that was ousted while visiting his daughter who was studying in London. Perhaps the fact that Thaksin was responsible for the foreign takeover of Thailand’s biggest telecommunications company Shin Corp. and then didn’t pay any tax on the profits for his sales of the shares did nothing to endear him with the liberal media. Still it is disgraceful that the inept and heavy handed Thai military were able to so easily squash democracy in Thailand without much international condemnation (http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/3754).

One wonders what the King was doing during all these violent changes of power, one also wonders why he is so revered. There is a common rumor going around Thailand that he was subject to death threats. His father Ananda Mahidol was found shot to death in the Royal Palace on June 9th 1946. In November 1947 the military again staged a coup to bring the King’s assassins to justice. The court case was an obvious stitch up (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ananda_Mahidol) as the newly self-appointed (and unelected) government wanted to find quick scapegoats.

This might explain why the incumbent King, Bhumibol Adulyadej has near universal approval in Thailand. Maybe it is not his connivance that was behind September 19th. The Yellow Shirts may claim allegiance to the monarchy, but it was the interests of the military and urban elite of Bangkok that they helped with their protests. Their famous sit-in at Bangkok airport that lead to the fall of the democratically elected People’s Power Party of 2007 (Thaksin’s banned Thai Rak Thai party under a new name) was in the interests of the military more than the monarchy. After all to stage a coup to get rid of a party and then have that party win the next election was a waste of time from the military’s point of view.

The King is just smart enough to not get in the way of the Thai army. It is a lesson that he learnt the hard way.

What I am saying is that the issue of the Red Shirts (Thaksin supporters) and the Yellow Shirts (Royalists) was and still is a smokescreen. The King remains silent. The military wanted to remove Thaksin whose populist policies were eroding their own power base. It was possible that if the military hadn’t staged a coup than Thaksin might have done. If Thaksin had gained not only the support of the rural poor of the north and had been able to place his yes men in the top military posts he would have greatly upset the balance of power in Thailand. The military are not the only power in Thailand – they share it with the government, the King and business interests. Thaksin gave the green light to his demise by openly profiting from selling Shin Corp. It was pure greed on his part and gave enough moral outrage to the Yellow Shirt movement to legitimize the 2006 coup d’état and the 2007 transference of power.

The military in Thailand do not have an ideological agenda. They do however run a number of highly profitable legal and illegal enterprises. The top jobs in the military are rotated to give each member of the elite military coterie their time at the feeding trough. The main purpose of the military is to maintain their privileged position in Thailand. Thaksin sought to disrupt this position and very much authored his own downfall. The history of Thailand has shown that the military cannot keep hold of power in the form of dictatorship (like in Burma) indefinitely. But what the military in Thailand do possess is the means of coercion (http://links.org.au/node/1883):

The military has a monopoly on the means of violent coercion and it has been prepared to gun down unarmed protesters in the streets. The last example was in April and May 2010 when more than 90 people died.

Despite the restoration of the parliamentary process in Thailand (with the junta’s favored party in charge and a new constitution that absolves them of all wrong doing) the military continue to use coercion; and in my case using viruses against my computer. The fact that Wikipedia links to these viral sites shows the reach of the military and the old adage that you cannot trust any authority all the time.

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