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Heritage Bigotry

A three centuries old pulpit in the Catholic Church of Our Lady in Dendermonde has been getting a lot of blog-play over the last week, principally among the devout believers in the great war of civilisations theory of modern geopolitics.

The pulpit was sculpted in wood around 1685 by Mattheus van Beveren, a Flemish artist too obscure to warrant his own Wikipedia page, to celebrate the victory of the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire over the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Vienna on September 12, 1683. This victory was such a big deal for seventeenth century Catholicism that, in November 1683, Pope Innocent XI decreed that the Feast of the Holy Name of Mary should henceforth be celebrated either on the Sunday after the Nativity of Mary or September 12, the date of the Battle.

There are two photos of the pulpit on the internet, repeatedly copied from this post at The Brussels Journal which was published in April, 2006. The pulpit is supported by a sculpture of two angels trampling on a bearded man holding a book as if to protect it. According to Matthias Storm, author of the post:

The person subdued by the angels and having a Koran in his hands is generally thought to be Mohammed. The sculpture represents the triumph of Christianity over Islam.

The sculpture is as technically accomplished as van Beveren's statuette, Cupid on a Lion, currently in the collection of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Unlike Alfred Hrdlicka, whose 1984 tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini (a depiction of the Last Supper as a homosexual orgy), attracted conservative ire when it was included in a recent retrospective of his works in Vienna, van Beveren didn't 'bite the hand that saved him'. Commissioned to celebrate a triumph of Christianity over Islam, he celebrated a triumph of Christianity over Islam.

According to some, we need a lot more van Beverens, and a lot fewer Alfred Hrdlickas, in our troubled modern age. If we can't have more van Beverens, we can have the next best thing. Like The Brussels Journal ('the voice of conservatism in Europe') we can acknowledge our proud heritage of anti-Islamic art, by posting the really good stuff on the internet, bringing it into the global purview. Eventually we might get noticed by the denizens of that other civilisation who will be obliging enough to remind us of the superiority of our own civilisation by taking aggressive offence at the published pictures. This week, a mere two years after the original publication of the pulpit photos that finally happened:

Belgian police is protecting a 17th century pulpit in the Flemish town of Dendermonde. The pulpit in the Catholic church of Our Lady dates from 1685, two years after the battle of Vienna when the Christian armies of the Polish King John III Sobieski defeated the Turks poised to overrun Europe. The sculpted wooden pulpit, made by Mattheus van Beveren, depicts a man subdued by angels and represents the triumph of Christianity over Islam. The man is generally thought to be Mohammed. He is holding a book which is generally assumed to be the Koran.

Two years ago, on April 16, 2006, during the height of the Danish cartoon affair, this website published a photo of the pulpit to show that there is a long tradition of depicting Mohammed in European iconography. Last Friday the Turkish newspaper Yeniçag reprinted our picture on its front page with the caption “Stop this hideous insult.” Yeniçag demands that Belgium remove the pulpit. The paper writes that “We have had the crusades and now they are still trying to humiliate us. This is as bad as the Danish cartoons and Geert Wilders’s Fitna movie in the Netherlands. Even Pope Benedict does nothing to stop these humiliations.” (bold added)

The rationale for publishing the photos of the pulpit (in bold) wasn't stated in Matthias Storm's original post, nor was there any discussion of the Danish cartoon affair.

The result of Yenicag's complaint has been the revival of that "long tradition of depicting Mohammed in European iconography" with the pulpit photo turning up on various conservative web-sites, usually with an amusing caption - amusing, that is, to any non-muslim who doesn't quickly tire of of reading the same shiatsu joke repeatedly rephrased.

The proper response for a citizen of any of the countries comprising 'Western Civilisation' is obvious: we must denounce the staff and publishers of Yenicaq and the religion which inspired their demands, creating the need for police protection of the church housing the pulpit. The lads at The Brussels Journal must be lauded as heroic defenders of western values. The publication of the photos on the net must be defended as a legitimate exercise of the democratic right of free speech (which it is) rather than decried as a rather silly and obvious provocation (which it also is). The thought that Van Beveren's sculpture is merely a crude piece of 17th century political and religious propaganda which would be much improved by an infestation of art-loving woodworms is not to be entertained. Like the statues of Ecclesia and Sinagoga on the walls of Paris's Notre Dame it's a part of our Western heritage, to be cherished and defended.

As for the people at Yenicag and their co-religionists, they very obviously need to bring their thinking up to date, and recognise that while demeaning caricatures used to be part of some Christian iconography, us Westerners had that Enlightenment thing and now we're completely over that stuff - give or take the occasional relapse.

Beguiled by Cruelty

How long will it be before 'Western Civilisation' once again accepts torture as a regrettable, but sometimes necessary, practice? Not long enough, when a discussion of torture leads even opponents of torture to start speculating about how it might be made acceptable.

According to commenter NPOV at Club Troppo:

I might accept that some type of torture could be (barely) ethically justifiable, whereby: a) the process was “humane” as possible - e.g. gradually increasing the dosage of a intravenously supplied drug that caused pain, with careful medical supervision to assure no risk of permanent damage or death, and no risk that the torturer stepped out of bounds b) there was a requirement of thoroughly determined “possession of knowledge” beforehand (in the same way we now determine guilt “beyond reasonable doubt” before jailing criminals) c) the method was determined to be a highly effective method of extracting life-saving information, when all other avenues had been exhausted I still wouldn’t vote in favour of such a proposal, but I wouldn’t strenously object to it either, as long the checks and balances were shown to be working.

It may be that NPOV's intention here is sardonic - that the conditions under which NPOV is prepared to turn a blind eye are impossible to achieve. But that intention is by no means clear.

The first condition - or something like it - is attainable. The essential fatty acid arachidonic acid is a biochemical precursor of the prostaglandins which contribute to pain and inflammation. A subcutaneous injection of arachidonic acid would have an inflammatory effect on tissues, causing the sort of pain that is usually relieved with aspirin. A local injection of bradykinin would work even better. Historical experience shows that medical supervision for torture sessions would be forthcoming, one way or another.

The only question remaining is whether there is a risk of the torturer stepping out of bounds - but the door has already been opened too far. It would take very little force of argument from an advocate of the use of torture to open it all the way.

To argue against the use of torture in this way is wrong-headed. Once it has been allowed that torture - under proper supervision - is acceptable, the requirements of proper process will be satisfied, quite quickly, in the same way that they have been satisfied in the past; by defining punctilious protocols for establishing and recording interrogations under torture to provide the appearance of due process.

Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger's witchhunters' manual Malleus Maleficarum (MM) (1486) provides a good example of this under the heading 'Of the Third Kind of Sentence, to be Pronounced on one who is Defamed, and who is to be put to the Question':

THE Third method of bringing a process on behalf of the faith to a conclusive termination is when the person accused of heresy, after a careful consideration of the merits of the process in consultation with learned lawyers, is found to be inconsistent in his statements, or is found that there are sufficient grounds to warrant his exposure to the question and torture: so that if, after he has been thus questioned, he confesses nothing, he may be considered innocent. And this is when the prisoner has not been taken in heresy, nor has he been convicted by his own confession, or by the evidence of the facts, or by the legitimate production of witnesses, and there are no indications that he is under such a suspicion as to warrant his being made to abjure the heresy; but nevertheless he is inconsistent in his answers when interrogated. Or there may be other sufficient reasons for exposing him to torture. And in such a case the following procedure is to be observed.

The import of this passage is simple - once you have made up your mind to torture someone, for whatever you think good reason ('there may be other sufficient reasons for exposing him to torture') here is the proper procedure for recording the verdict - here's how you cover your bureaucratic arse.

The requirement that torture be found effective (NPOV's third requirement) is no impediment to the adoption of torture, Those who want to torture, or want torture used, will quite simply assume that it is effective, as did Kramer and Spenger. Accepting torture as a legitimate way to obtain information gives validity to testimony obtained under torture. This leads to a particularly vicious circle, where the 'truth' obtained through torture is used to justify the continued practice of torture:

[Here is] an instance which came within our own experience. For in the diocese of Constance, twenty-eight German miles from the town of Ratisbon ... a violent hailstorm destroyed all the fruit, crops and vineyards in a belt one mile wide, so that the vines hardly bore fruit for three years. This was brought to the notice of the Inquisition, since the people clamoured for an inquiry to be held ... it was ... that it was a case of witchcraft for us to consider; and among a large number of suspects, we particularly examined two women, one named Agnes, a bath-woman, and the other Anna von Mindelheim.

These two were taken and shut up separately in different prisons, neither of them knowing in the least what had happened to the other.

On the following day the bath-woman was very gently questioned ... and although she was undoubtedly well provided with that evil gift of silence which is the constant bane of judges, and at the first trial affirmed that she was innocent of any crime against man or woman; yet, in the Divine mercy that so great a crime should not pass unpunished, suddenly, when she had been freed from her chains, although it was in the torture chamber, she fully laid bare all the crimes which she had committed ... although there had been no witness to prove that she had abjured the Faith or performed coitus with an Incubus devil ... saying that for more than eighteen years she had given her body to an Incubus devil, with a complete abnegation of the Faith.

After this she was asked whether she knew anything about the hailstorm which we have mentioned, and answered that she did [and gave a detailed account of how she had caused the hailstorm]

... when on the next day the other witch had at first been exposed to the very gentlest questions, being suspended hardly clear of the ground by her thumbs, after she had been set quite free, she disclosed the whole matter without the slightest discrepancy from what the other had told ... Accordingly, on the third day they were burned.(MM, emphasis added)

How is it possible for two witnesses who have been separated to agree so much on the details of their crime? There are two common elements - the threat or use of torture and the inquisitors. The first alleged witch most likely told her interrogators what they wanted to hear. The second, after being 'exposed to the very gentlest questions, being suspended hardly clear of the ground by her thumbs' merely had to corroborate those details as they were put to her by her interrogators. This is how torturers obtain the evidence to support their claim that torture works.

In 2005, an Iraqi blogger who was arrested and tried for the crime of logging onto the blog Raed in the Middle posted an account of his experience in prison which includes the stories of other prisoners interrogated under torture:

Maysam And Nathom [were] two brothers, in their twenties, very poor, amazingly good looking, if there was an Arabic version of Hollywood, they would sure be Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.

When I was in jail I cried twice, one of them was when Nathom came to the toilets from an interrogation session, and I was in the toilets at that time, and he started crying hard, he said that they beat him so much to the point that he had to say that his brother killed 300 people and stole many cars.

He came to the toilets while they started to torture his brother to make him confess of these crimes, I went back to the cell and cried for minutes, it was so unfair, so unfair.

That night we made jokes about it, and that since we all are supposed to be “terrorism experts” we knew that a sword can kill up to 50 people, so he must have used so many swords, or maybe he used chainsaw? How else would anyone kill 300 people with his own hands?

Yes, we made jokes about that, in prison, and when it’s such a silly situation, you learn to joke about it.
So the interrogator said: “so he killed 300 people?”
“yes sir” Nathom answered, and the interrogator writes the confession. “and he stole an Opel Car?”
“yes sir”
“a yellow one?”
“yes sir”
And then the interrogator put down the pen and said “you son of a b****, it has been more that two years since the war and I never saw one yellow Opel car”

(And it’s true, for some reason all Opels in Iraq are grey, some are black or blue but it’s rare, but no yellow ones!) All of that interrogation happened while Nathom is hanging upside down, and being hit at the same time. (emphasis added)

The pragmatists who would have us forget our 'squeamishness' about torture - our justified ethical repugnance at the idea of beating, electrocuting or waterboarding another human being until she is prepared to endorse any lies we want to tell about her and her friends and family - ignore this reality that has not changed from the fifteenth century to the present day.

Accommodating their arguments - even with ironic intent - is not the way to answer them. Beyond the ethical repugnancy of torture, there is a very sound political reason for citizens of a liberal democratic state to insist that the use of torture has no place. To allow torture is to open the way to a very different kind of state - the torture state.

Wonderful, Cosy, Feel-Good, NATURAL Chemicals

According to The Sydney Morning Herald, Louise Hall is a "Health Reporter". According to The Age, she's just Louise Hall. I guess "Lazy Hack from Sydney" doesn't look too good as a by-line when you're syndicating crap written by an interstate colleague. But let's not turn this into a Melbourne vs Sydney, Age vs SMH thing - The Age has one or two notably lazy hacks of its own, like this humourless humourist.

With the help of promotional material from Galen Naturopathic, Hall reports a surprising discovery:

FEELING blue? Mung beans, lobster, turkey, asparagus, sunflower seeds, cottage cheese, pineapple, tofu, spinach and bananas could lift your spirits.

It's easy to see how tucking into a lobster bisque or a turkey sandwich might make you feel better if you're feeling a bit glum - eating tasty food is a pleasant activity. The mung beans and tofu are a bit of an odd inclusion but there are people out there who like both - sometimes on the perverse basis that there's something virtuous about eating bland food to preserve the buff temple of your personal narcissism - so once again, the intrinsic pleasure of eating stuff you like might be the reason you'd experience a lift in spirits. According to Galen Naturopathic, via Hall, you'd be wrong to take such a naive view:

A diet high in tryptophan — an amino acid converted by the body into the feel-good chemical serotonin — can improve mood and wellbeing, a pediatrician and natural health expert, Caroline Longmore, said.

When and where did Longmore say this? Probably in a press release, such as this, where Longmore is described as "a French ex-paediatrician who has run Galen Naturopathic Centre in Richmond upon Thames for the past five years". Or in a spam e-mail to the world's Health Reporters.

The body cannot produce tryptophan so unless we get enough through diet, we may suffer a deficiency, leading to low serotonin levels, which is associated with mood disorders, anxiety, cravings and irritable bowel syndrome.

"Following a diet which contains foods rich in naturally occurring serotonin will improve your mood, leaving you energised and in a state of harmony and wellbeing," Dr Longmore said...

So Dr Longmore - a former paediatrician turned naturopath, proprietor of a naturopathy clinic named after the ancient Greek physician who is credited with holding back western medicine for more than a millenium - is spruiking a fad diet with Hall's eager assistance.

Right up to that last paragraph, neither Longmore nor Hall had put a foot too far wrong on the basic science too. Tryptophan is an essential amino acid which we have to get through diet - it's one of several such amino acids. And it is the biochemical precursor to the "feel-good chemical serotonin". It's just the spin that Longmore - through Hall - puts on those scientific facts that's a bit off.

The claim that "following a diet which contains foods rich in naturally occurring serotonin will improve your mood, leaving you energised and in a state of harmony and wellbeing," cranks the spin up by quite a few revs. Longmore's implied argument is that eating more tryptophan will lead to more serotonin synthesis and since we know that low levels of serotonin in certain parts of the human brain are associated with major (or clinical) depression it follows that eating lots of lobsters is going to be just as good for you as those nasty, big Pharma produced SSRIs. Not too long after the spin comes the outright bullshit:

In her e-book, The Serotonin Secret, Dr Longmore claims the best way to get optimum tryptophan levels is through a carefully devised eating plan.

She rates dozens of foods for their levels of tryptophan. Written with an Australian-trained medical scientist and naturopath, Katrin Hempel, the book has 50 recipes designed to solve serotonin imbalance without drugs. The concept works on the same principle as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, such as the popular antidepressant Prozac.

No it bloody well doesn't. The concept works - to gull people into buying copies of Longmore and Hempel's book - by misrepresenting science. To explain this, I'll have to take a short detour into some basic concepts of modern pharmacology.

First up, pharmacology doesn't interest itself in the origin of drugs. Morphine is a narcotic analgesic derived from opium poppies. Pethidine is a synthetic narcotic analgesic introduced into use in 1939. The two drugs are classed as narcotic analgesics because they produce the same effects - narcosis and pain relief. They've also been found to work on the same receptors in the nervous system.

A basic assumption of pharmacology - one which I doubt has been discarded in the few decades since I studied the subject at university - is that drugs (however defined) achieve their effects by either imitating the action of chemicals that naturally occur in the body (such as hormones and neurotransmitters) or by interfering with natural responses - at the cellular level - to those naturally occuring chemicals. This occurs because the drug binds to one of those receptor things, and either triggers a response, or hangs around doing nothing, like those boofheads who always plant themselves in doorways at parties.

SSRIs - Serotonin Specific Reuptake Inhibitors - are like the aforesaid boofheads. They block molecular "doorways" that take serotonin back into nerve cells after its release. The result is that the serotonin hangs around the synapse (the microscopic gap between one brain cell and another), long enough to have its "feel good" effect. But let's remember that it's only in the brain, and very specific sites within the brain where we want this happening. SSRIs are used in the treatment of clinical depression because they're very good at hitting that site. And because they've been tested and shown to work in clinical trials.

Raising your tryptophan intake because a former paediatrician tells you that it will lead to an increase in "feel-good" serotonin is a very different proposition. There's no evidence that it will work and quite a few reasons to think that it won't.

Making serotonin isn't the only use your body has for tryptophan. As an essential amino acid, tryptophan is also used in protein synthesis. So there's no guarantee that the extra tryptophan will get converted into "feel-good" serotonin. Neither is there any guarantee that extra serotonin production will happen in the brain - serotonin plays other roles in the body. It's present in blood platelets - when platelets bind to wounds to stop bleading, serotonin is released into blood vessels and constricts them.

At most, it might work, and if your tryptophan enriched diet includes a lot of those lobsters, turkeys, pineapples and bananas, you'll definitely have reason to feel good. You might even feel clever about boosting your serotonin levels, but you'd be fooling yourself; harmlessly, if your problem is merely "the blues" and you need a bit of a pick-me-up, not so harmlessly if the problem is more severe.

Hall finishes with a bit of token balance (there's more token balance earlier in the piece):

Britain's Food and Mood Project recommends eating chicken, sardines, turkey, salmon, fresh tuna, nuts and seeds to boost serotonin levels. But Associate Professor Michael Baigent, clinical adviser to the BeyondBlue anti-depression organisation, said there was only low-level evidence to suggest tryptophans had a medical effect.

Statistics show that in any 12 months, almost 17% of adult Australians have a mental disorder, with anxiety, depression and bipolar the most common.

In February, a major international review of clinical trials of new generation drugs, including Prozac and Aropax, found they were no more effective than a placebo, or sugar tablet, for most people with depression. (My emphasis there, to ensure you didn't miss the token balance)

That last paragraph isn't included in the SMH's version of the article - it most likely refers to the paper by Irving Kirsch et al where the conclusions were consciously spun by the paper's author to suggest a conclusion that was in fact refuted by the study's own data and data analysis.

Hall's article is a gift to Galen Naturopathic and to Australia's cray fishers, turkey farmers and growers of pineapples and bananas. But those 17% of Adult Australians with "mental disorders" have nothing to thank her for. Especially those who'll be hearing from friends and family that they need tostop wasting their time with the pills and get a bit more crayfish in their diet.

Qu(ot)e?

At the risk of stooping to the level of culture warrior by broad-brushing an entire subgroup of the community, it must be said that the chest-beaters on the Left and Right of our national discourse are surprisingly naive in the ways of politics. They think governments run nations when, in fact, they manage them as best they can. They mistake the limits of power for cowardice and think the exercise of policy reform is an exact science.

This isn't a comment against individuals, but against a style of writing that assumes only one version of Australia, be it Left or Right, is the true expression of national identity. Australia is open and closed. It has three established mainstreams: the traditional white male, the tertiary-educated woman and the Australia-born children of immigrants. Each brings a slightly different perspective to national identity, depending on the topic.

This level of complexity escapes the cultural warriors because they need caricatures of good and evil.

George Megalogenis in the Australian Literary Review.

Got that everyone? To understand Australian society in all its complexity, one stereotype is not enough. You need three.

Born Sluts and Instinctive Doormats

Which of the following quotations is the odd one out?

• Clear evidence of women’s promiscuity throughout evolutionary history is in the size and shape of men’s genitals and what men do with them. (Satoshi Kanazawa)
  


• For any woman, the need to submit, to surrender, to place all your trust and faith in another is a natural and useful instinct—despite assumptions to the contrary by the prevailing culture. (The Submissive Wife)
  


• There is a female instinct to want to be saved by a man who sweeps them up, marries them and causes them to live happily ever after. In a tempered form, this instinct mightn't be such a bad thing; many men do have the corresponding impulse to play the rescuer role.("Still not getting it" at OzConservative)
  


• Your prince may not ride up on a white horse, but it's not too much to ask to spend your life with someone attractive who makes you feel like a princess. Being loved by a man is your birthright as a woman. Mating is one of the oldest, ingrained human instincts. While self-sufficiency is admirable, it doesn't fulfill your need to be held and touched, to be intimate with a man. Acting as though you don't crave a leading man in your life doesn't make it so, but it does contribute towards keeping you single. (The Surrendered Single by Laura Doyle)
  

Whichever quotation you picked, you were wrong. It was a trick question. They're all bollocks.

If you find that unfair, here's a small concession. The last, from Laura Doyle's The Surrendered Single, only implies that women have an instinctual need to find either Mr Right or Mr Adequate and get themselves married. The other three - and the linked pages - make quite explicit claims about what is innate behaviour for women. They all use evolutionary just-so stories to support the authors' views of what women should be and how women should behave.

Freedom of Association

I can't remember when this happened - some time way back before I got married, obviously. When I'd finished Uni, had a job and enough income to afford a flat of my own.

It was a Friday night - I was in my poky little kitchen, turning a chook over in the black cast iron roasting dish, when I heard a knock on the door. "Bugger, she's early!" I thought. The chook still had a good half hour to go and so did the spuds. I hadn't got round to blanching the haricots vert yet, nor had I set the table or crammed the candles into the necks of the Mateus bottles.

But it wasn't her at the door - it was some bloke I hadn't ever seen before, and behind him a few people who all had one thing in common - they were complete strangers to me.

"G'day, I'm Eric," he said, "Tom said you might be able to help us out."

"Uh, I'm a bit busy right now - I've got a friend coming over for dinner at eight."

Tom I knew only vaguely - he was the weird downstairs neighbour with the Che Guevara poster glued to the outside of his front door who'd buttonhole you on the staircase to ask you if you were interested in going along to a forum on the socialist approach to stopping the international arms trade and other such exciting events.

"Yeah, well the thing is, we need somewhere to hold our meeting tonight."

"And?"

"Well Tom told us your thinking was fairly sound - for a bourgeois - so maybe we could use your place."

"I've got a friend coming over for dinner at eight."

So then this bloke, who still hadn't introduced himself to me gives me a pointed stare and said:

"You've heard of freedom of association, haven't you? It's a basic human right."

I gave him one of those blank looks you give someone who's just said, or done something totally astonishing, then patiently repeated:

"I've got a friend coming over for dinner at eight." Since that clearly wasn't going to be enough to get the message across I spelt out the consequences "You'll have to find somewhere else to hold your meeting."

"Typical f'k'n bourgeois pseudo-leftist..." he grumbled, "Care more about your own bloody sex-life than basic human freedoms!" His firends all gave me disapproving glares and disappeared into the night.

A few days later the managing agents for the flats came round to inspect Tom's place and he received an eviction notice. Apparently there'd been a few complaints from one or two of the other tenants about loud music in the wee small hours and other strange goings on. I didn't learn about it until I bumped into him as he was moving his stuff out to his new place.

"What sort of person would do something like that?" he asked, after recounting the events just described, "Where's the class-consciousness?"

"No idea." I said and went upstairs to sit down and listen to Bach's Mass in B Minor, on vinyl, confident that this time the et resurrexit wouldn't be interrupted by The Ballad of Joe Hill coming up through the floor.

Alarmism 101

I've been reading another bad book over the past week - a really bad book. It's a long spray at consumerism and urban sprawl. It follows a fairly familiar formula - after the introduction (where you tell the reader what you plan to say), the author moves onto a quick survey of the human condition, cramming in as many references as possible, then launches into several chapters of condemnation and denunciation.

Writing that first chapter is a complex job. To show readers you're not an intellectual snob, you have to mention popular culture, so references to pop music and movies (but not cinema) are a must, the earlier the better. Of course you naow have to convince them that you're not a bogan either, so you bung in the literary references. Reference one or two web-sites to show that you're not a complete Luddite (very necessary in this writer's case). Top that off with some guff about human evolution, neurology and psychology, add a dash of philosophy and religion and there's your first chapter written.

Pull it off, and your readers will be convinced that you're a very knowledgeable person, whose facts are reliable and opinion trustworthy. Well, some of them - enough, you hope to preserve you from the ingnominy of the remainer bin. As long as no-one notices the non-sequiturs and the fact that you're relying completely on emotive argument - including the odd dose of alarmism - you're home and hosed.

Here's an entertainingly alarmist passage from that first chapter, with some explanatory notes from me.

The fantasy [of a world without pain or mental suffering] approaches. A recent Scientific American article by Stefanie Reinberger showed how unpleasant tastes could be eliminated with a new type of food-additive called adenosine monophosphate (AMP).

A very good start - scare the reader by dropping in a frighteningly polysyllabic chemical name lifted from one article in Scientific American. On no account should you do any background reading - you might learn a couple of facts that might get in the way of your very enjoyable self-inflicted panic:

• Adenosine is one of the four nucleosides that make up RNA - a vital part of the biochemical mechanism that transcribes DNA sequences into proteins. Without adenosine, there would be no life as we know it.
  


• Adenosine monophosphate is a precursor to two other compounds - adenosine diphosphate (ADP) and adenosine triphosphate (ATP). All three compounds are used within living cells to transfer energy obtained from breaking down sugars and lipids (fats) to processes that build other cell constituents - like proteins. Without AMP, ADP and ATP there would be no life as we know it.

Moving on:

AMP is a 'bitter blocker' that overrides our ancient sensitivity to bitterness, acquired to protect us from eating toxic substances like strychnine, by preventing communication of the recognintion of bitterness from tastebud to brain.

A good, strong continuation: OMFG! They could use this "new" food additive to poison us all with strychnine and we wouldn't even know it!

The additive has already (2004) been approved by the US Food and Drug Admininistration; the application of similar principles could mean we never have to taste anything unpleasant.

A bit of a slip there - noting the US FDA's approval of the drug was a plus, but the second clause of the sentence is a bit of a let-down. Most of us prefer to avoid unpleasant tasting stuff, most of the time, which is why some cook, others eat out, and others buy take-away. But this is bad for us:

Brussels sprouts could taste like gruyere, or ice cream, or chocolate and still be as good for us as the bitter cruciform original.

It's important, in alarmist writing, to strike the right note of hysteria and the prospect of chocolate flavoured brussel sprouts is certainly hysterical. Also, while a malapropism (cruciform for cruciferous) assists in convincing the reader that you're hysterical, it reinforces the reader's tendency to respond with the kind of hysteria you don't want to engender.

But is this really what we want? Do we, even at the relatively trivial level of taste, want a world where our only sensations are pleasurable ones? Will pleasure have meaning when that's all there is?

Poor execution, but the author of this passage has the right idea - miss the major issues completely so you can pose a set of rhetorical questions whose answers will strike guilt and fear in the hearts of all but the most decadent of hedonists. The reason that adenosine monophosphate poses such a threat to civilsation and culture as we know it is because it's us that have gone soft - it has nothing to do with anything the food processing industries might do. Nothing at all.

The book, by the way is Blubberland by Elizabeth Farrelly, of the Sydney Morning Herald. This post is a by-blow from a more extended review that the anonymous one appropriated for another shot at temporary notoriety and a bit of ready money, fame and fortune being completely beyond his capabilities. No doubt that review will turn up here, later in the week.

(Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo in exile)

Go Ahead, Be Stupid - It's Your Democratic Right!

CHRIS UHLMANN: On a personal level, were you expecting to see some signs of a turnaround in the polls by now?

TONY ABBOTT: I think it would be fair to say that you always tend to expect that good government will get a political pay-off, and so far that isn't happening. But I remain reasonably optimistic.

I mean obviously Chris, the public have a right to vote for whomsoever they wish, and they have a right - if they wish - to replace a good government with an inept Opposition. I mean, they have that right.

But nevertheless I guess I have always been pretty confident in the basic good sense of the Australian people. So we'll just keep going forward up to the election and hopefully beyond and see what happens.

(AM, 16 July 2007. My emphasis.)

Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo

Guns Don't Kill People - Doctors Kill People!

According to a comment at Club Troppo, doctors are a bigger threat to community safety than guns. And this, being the internet, the commenter, Phil, had the links to prove it.

First there was this report in The National Rupert Daily, "Hospital Bungles are Killing Scores":

AUSTRALIA'S first national report into serious mistakes in public hospitals has found at least 130 avoidable instances in which patients died or were put at serious risk.

Operations or investigations on the wrong patient, or the wrong body part, accounted for the biggest share of the mistakes, at 41 per cent of the 130 "sentinel events" recorded in 2004-05.

...

Stephen Bolsin, associate professor of patient safety at Victoria's Geelong Hospital, said there was no evidence hospital safety had improved since a landmark 1995 report showed that up to 8per cent of hospital patients would be the victim of a preventable mistake - and 10 per cent of these would cause permanent disability or death.

"Safety breaches in Australian healthcare are killing more people than breast cancer or road accidents," Associate Professor Bolsin said.

"But it doesn't get anything like the attention ... there's no evidence things have changed over the past 10 years."

I don't know the death rate from breast cancer, but it seems to me that Professor Bolkin is indulging in hyperbole when he says that the Australian healthcare system kills more people than road accidents. A quick check of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau's Road Deaths Australia: 2006 Statistical Summary reveals this fact:

In 2006, there were 1,601 persons killed in 1,456 road crashes. Comparing the number killed with the previous year, this was a 1.6% decrease (1,627 persons killed in 1,472 crashes).

So the comparative scores are: road traffic deaths - 1,601, patients killed or put at serious risk by the health system - 130. If Associate Professor Bolsin's claim is correct we still have around 1,500 iatrogenic deaths to account for.

Phil's other link is to this page at the Sporting Shooters' Association of Australia web-site, titled "Doctors: A Health Issue". Here you'll find plenty of reports and links on the health risks of health care.

There are plenty of adjectives to describe this sort of reporting. "Honest" and "truthful" aren't among them.

(Cross posted at Larvatus Prodeo)