21st January 2012
The principle of faith leaves believers unequipped to distinguish truth from falsity.
Sam Harris. Sam has written several books that have to do with the religious nonsense that permeates our planet.He has a great website - http://www.samharris.org/ Visit it.
Orang-utans – cruelty, rescue and ultimate extinction
One of the things I can never and will never get used to is man’s inhumanity to other species. In particular the primates that are so closely linked by DNA to us. Know that the abuse of those powerless to protect themselves affects me deeply. 
You see people advocating saving humans in favour of other species in dire straits. It is the moral dilemma question and it doesn’t matter how you answer it, you don’t feel comfortable. At least I don’t.
There are 7 billion humans on the planet at the moment and the dwindling number of other primates is solely down to our behaviour in relation to the planet we inhabit with them. There are an estimated 20,000 orangutans left in Indonesia and Borneo.
No one would really deny we are a rapacious species and extremely self centred. We don’t give much, If any, concern to the other species which attempt to share this planet. And if they get in our way, watch out. Extinction will be the end game. Theirs and ultimately, ours.
We dig up as much ground as we are able in order to remove all manner of fuels, metals and dangerous substances. We then pollute our atmosphere by processing these materials while leaving enormous scars on the surface of the planet.
We eat all available foodstuffs while tearing down hitherto ‘unused’ habitat to engage in more food stuff production to the detriment of every other species making a living in that habitat. In fact we eat so much that species’ stocks are depleted in the seas, in the wild and in the air.
We breed without restraint or thought for future generations while taking up more and more available space to build shelters for our burgeoning human population.
In the meantime, we imprison (for status) other primates and then neglect or deliberately mistreat them. Some zoos are appalling displays of inhumanity while others try to emulate a life in which endangered species may feel secure enough to breed.
This story came onto the Mirror in the UK. Now I know this paper is more a tabloid than a newspaper and I have found that over 60,000 complaints came in from readers condemning the incarceration of the featured Orang-utans. The complaints were directed to the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment Ministry in Malaysia. This link is to an article about the Melaka Zoo.
The first photo is horrific:
Fear and comfort. Siblings caged and malnourished
The second one indicates some rehabilitation. These photos are by Sean Whyte who was moved to write this book: The Ape Crusaders.
Rescued and relaxed. There is hope.
There is a terrific orangutan rescue centre that was featured on the Eden TV channel (I think). The series detailed what was done at the centre which is located in West Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo. The number of baby orangutans brought into the centre because their mothers had been killed by forestry and other workers is alarming. Some scenes were pretty hard to sit through, I have to admit.
Talk about familiarity breeding contempt. And greed for palm oil plantation land is leading the charge.
The Indonesians have lived with orangutans for so long that they have become nonentities and most certainly do not feature as our cousins but more as food. And now the Indonesians want the forest habitat for palm oil production. So basically, it is extinction time for the orangutans.
“There have been 125,000 protected orangutans killed, captured or sold into the illegal wildlife trade over the past 40 years without a single prosecution.” from a story in another tabloid: the Sun.
These great apes are known to be friendly, intelligent and personable. They used to be mainly fruit eaters but their habitat is not affording them the amount of food their populations need and there are stories about the orangutans having to resort to killing and eating the slow loris. I don’t know how common this is. There are rescue centres for the slow loris as well as other endangered species.
There is any number of rescue organisations and here’s one called the Centre for Orangutan Protection.
I may be a squishy person about animals – well, I know I am – but I defy anyone who has an ounce of compassion to look into the eyes of this baby orangutan and not see ourselves.
Hiya. Rescue is good.
Related articles
- Vegetarian orang-utans eat world’s cutest animal (newscientist.com)
- Humans killing at least 750 Bornean orang-utans a year (newscientist.com)
Criegee intermediates and atmospheric cleansing
these molecules
At first glance, Criegee biradicals or intermediates seem to hold a ray of hope for atmospheric clean up, at least of nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide and sulphur dioxide.
This article appeared this morning in the UK press. So I thought I would check out other articles. The National Post tells us that by converting some pollutants into compounds that can lead to cloud formation, the earth may be somewhat shielded from the sun as things hot up.
Of course news reports are hyped so I turned to more science based reports. Live Science (this is a great article) had a more useful amount of information. Now we all know that I am no chemist, organic or otherwise but I do like a working knowledge of things hitherto unknown to me.
I found that the name of the molecule is named after a German chemist Rudolf Criegee who first hypothesised its existence in 1949. I had not heard of him until today.
In 1949, the chemist Criegee proposed that biradicals — reactive molecules missing two chemical bonds — could form when ozone reacts with hydrocarbons like alkenes. These biradicals would presumably play a substantial role in both removing pollutants from the lower atmosphere (a process called oxidation) and producing secondary organic aerosols (primary aerosols come from such sources as sea spray and wind-blown dust, whereas secondary aerosols form from the reactions of atmospheric gases). (From LiveScience)
Apparently they are short lived molecules that form in the atmosphere when ozone reacts with a family of hydrocarbons called alkenes. Then I thought I should check out alkenes. And I did, here. These molecules contain at least one carbon-to-carbon double bond. Now, we all know that as a species we pump vast amounts of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere simply by living on our planet so any help in neutralising them is welcome. Here’s another alkene introductory article.
But before we get over confident and assume that we don’t have to do anything and the earth will look after its own (yet again), the British scientists who published these findings in Science, headed by Carl Percival
Carl Percival
from U of Manchester herald a warning.
Given that 90 percent of the alkenes in the atmosphere that produce these intermediates come from Earth’s ecosystems, the results suggest that “the ecosystem is negating climate change more efficiently than we thought it was,” said study co-author Carl Percival, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. “The most important message here is that we need to protect the ecosystems we have left.” (From LiveScience)
His co-author
Prof. Dudley Shallcross
Dudley Shallcross from U of Bristol echoes this warning and points out that chemicals are released naturally by vegetation which helps the production of Criegee biradicals. These remaining ecological areas in the world need protecting, he says.
One of the things I have noticed about human beings is that we all share the capacity to be embarrassingly blind to uncomfortable information, especially if a change in our behaviour could help to minimise the inevitable result of the information we prefer to ignore.
It seems to me that it is always business as usual whether you are an individual or a corporation, or a government, except their rhetoric discombobulates the rest of us.
We have to clean up our act but will we do it? I doubt it. As I have said before, this is most probably our last century.
Age-related Dementia and Mentation
I read an article in The Independent in Saturday entitled Life ends at 45…Study reveals when our mental powers start to diminish. Oh noes! I am 68 – 23 years too late to rectify anything and I didn’t even know it! Sob.
Alphabet blocks
I have always thought that if you keep learning new things, take an interest in current affairs, try out new skills and stay active and, of course, have an hereditary disposition that appears to advance mental marbles, then you should be okay. You know, increase the mental pabulum index. Sudoku was out, so was bridge, chess was okay but go was no go for me.
In my early 40s I went back to main stream employment and entered the arcane world of superannuation accounting. This was a new and complicated (wouldn’t you know it) section of accounting for employer funded pensions and/or lump sums for employees’ retirement. The best bit and the worst was the way the regulations kept changing and were defined by the time the particular regulation was passed in the legislature. So it was a minefield.
It was like the bloody Taxation Act. More and more little regulations were tacked onto the main legislation and had to be treated differently depending on promulgated timing. You needed a degree to deal with this stuff! Instead my employer sent me to numerous seminars and I collected a loft full of folders relating to changes, changes and more changes.
However, it did more than increase my coffee and alcohol intake. It made me think and allocate, absorb and apply different rules at different times to different clients’ needs. I learnt some good nous.
The other thing that happened, though it was later, was that I went into business for myself. I didn’t get excited by this because I quickly realised that no one is really in business for himself. All that it actually means is that you end up with many more bosses than you would ideally like and much less time for yourself.
Years later in my 60s as I was winding down from a working life, I became interested in chemistry. This became important to me because the 20thanniversary of Chernobyl was imminent and I realised I knew zilch, zip and nada about chemistry and especially radioactivity. And there was a lot of guff in the papers that set what Carl Sagan calls the baloney detection antennae wiggling.
Carl Sagan
So I sighed and settled down to learn the totally new language of chemistry. I had no coat hangers in my head on which I could drape my new knowledge. Those hangers had to be built from scratch. Wikipedia had an article on the Periodic Table of Elements with an interactive table. It is terrific and led me in my new found interest in chemistry and the radioactive nature of different elements.
My brother’s comment:
‘Applying your brain to learning things that you don’t know creates more synapses between your brain cells and their dendrites and in learning new stuff you are keeping your brain active. Theoretically this can stave off age related dementia. ’
Age related dementia! Wow I felt better, because I had never been drawn to bingo.
Chemistry was so solitary a study in my little house. And then, wouldn’t you know, physics poked its bloody head up saying – and what about me? I have developed the best long-suffering sighing reflex ever!
But I did come across some wonderful people. Lawrence Krauss – he is known as a theoretical physicist but has taught me a lot about physics, Star Trek and the Universe from Nothing. Between him and Brian Cox I know more about cosmology than previously. Sagan is good and Stenger. I mean, there are so many knowledgeable and personable people in the popular science network that no one really has any excuse to not know things.
Lawrence Krauss:-)
Brian Cox
Back to brain power. According to the Independent article, we had been fooled by earlier research into thinking that our brains did not begin to decline until the age of 60. So I was a little late with the Periodic Table.
I did rationalise that in my 40s I had risen to the challenge of learning and understanding the ridiculous regulations that had been imposed on accountants so I was sweet.
I have now noticed that I tend to forget what I went out of the room to do so I have to come back into the room and start again! I lose the names of common objects and expressions; I don’t even try to remember phone numbers though I seem to have retained a recognition factor that intimates a memory of sorts. I always had a good memory for numbers and pattern recognition. I don’t recall quotable quotes as well as I would like and I can’t deliver memorable literary speeches as easily as I once could.
The hunter gatherer is complaining about similar things. He has (had) the most remarkable music memory that could recall music after a single listening. Now it takes 3 or 4 times to get it into his brain. He had an eidetic memory as well that could recall written pages intact in detail. It irritates him that this is going. I can understand that.
I remember a paper written in 1956 called ‘The Magical Number Seven’ by George Miller. Its postulate was that humans could hold in working memory 7 pieces of information well enough but that anything over seven was problematic. It is an extraordinary paper and one that has stayed with me all these years. Look at the wiki article to see recent updates.
One of my psych lecturers, John Ross, proved to us that planned, organised mnemonics could develop a set of about 35 (I think) ordered pieces of information. It was an eye opener for me. I had never thought of that sort of map making. Ross and a student mapped the main university layout. I couldn’t help but be impressed. I never really mastered mnemonics though; not as a proper aide-mémoire.
We don’t seem to maximise those parts of our brains that are able to develop patterns, although we are most definitely pattern making primates. My hunter gatherer seems able to tweak the music patterns in his brain that flower into a bass baritone rendition of virtually any aria that he has ever heard.I wish I had that facility. I haven’t, but I do have the capacity, interest and diligence to learn new things to the level that my interest demands.
I hope I keep my marbles. Don’t we all hope the same.
Euthanasia, Assisted Dying is back on the Table
It is amazing how long supposedly progressive and developed societies take to change, amend or even tweak legislation that devolves any more power to Joe Public. Our societies are becoming more not less restrictive. The ancient Greeks would be horrified with our current do’s and don’ts enabled by our legislature and enforced by our police and judiciary. This is the Guardian article and yes!
Lord Falconer headed the Commission
The Commission on Assisted Dying was set up in September 2010 and Demos has made available a 400 odd page report on its findings and recommendations here. Its terms of reference were:
· to investigate the circumstances under which it should be possible for people to be assisted to die
· to recommend what system, if any, should exist to allow people to be assisted to die
· to identify who should be entitled to be assisted to die
· to determine what safeguards should be put in place to ensure that vulnerable people are neither abused nor pressured to choose an assisted death
· to recommend what changes in the law, if any, should be introduced
Now I think they are very carefully worded aims and the Commission has been very circumspect in its recommendations and to my mind did not go far enough. After all, surveys of the public and of medical practitioners show a very substantial majority in favour of euthanasia being legalised. The Commission was far too accommodating to the religite mores that seem to abound on this island.
This is from the wiki article
Even though polling in Great Britain reveals that “80% of British citizens and 64% of Britain’s general practitioners” are in favour of euthanasia being legalised, Parliament has refused to pass any laws of (sic) the issue.[4] In 1997, the British Parliament voted 234-89 to defeat the seventh attempt to legalize the act. The Church of England view is that “physician assisted suicide is incompatible with the Christian faith and should not be permitted by civil law.”
Seven attempts!! Good grief. When will these parliamentary representatives learn? Those of us who are part of that public majority are rightly annoyed that our parliamentary representatives are not voting to reflect our wishes. The toothless CofE still seems to have its sticky fingers into our legislative decision making. I suppose the 26 appointed bishops see themselves as arbiters of moral virtue in this island regardless of the increase in atheism in this island.
So far as I am concerned, the Commission’s recommendations are not comprehensive enough. Not that it will matter to me personally. I will exit this life when I am good and ready thank you very much.
It is a shame that Pratchett is not seen as qualifying because he has more than 12 months to live with his dementia, nor is Tony Nicklinson who suffers from locked-in syndrome and will live for more than 12 months. So, from my perspective, the recommendations actually don’t progress this issue very far at all. The unconscionable cruelty and neglect for people’s wishes still exists.
This is from the BBC’s article regarding the Commission’s recommendations:
The commission has been quite clear that a person first of all would have to be terminally ill to be considered for assisted suicide under its proposals.
The group has defined that as a patient who has less than 12 months to live.
It said that they should also be acting under their own steam and not be mentally impaired in any way.
In practice this means that dementia patients would not be eligible, including the author Sir Terry Pratchett, who helped to fund the commission, as those in the final year of the condition would not be considered mentally fit enough.
Nor would a person who has a significant physical impairment, such as locked-in syndrome, as they would have longer than 12 months to live under normal circumstances.
But a cancer patient with a prognosis of nine months would be eligible, if he or she met the other criteria.
This is tame stuff indeed. However, the religites have come out in force denouncing anything to do with suicide, assisted or not, as immoral and insupportable under their god’s supposed laws. These laws come, of course, in an ancient book, cobbled together with salient parts omitted by various rulers, by a group of illiterates in ancient lands purporting to be transcribing the word of their god. The rest of us call this fantasy visual and auditory schizophrenia, while the religites call it touched by god. Touched is right!.
I don’t have a problem with organisations like Care Not Killing, emotive though their choice of name is. Neither should they have a problem with
Terry Pratchett good solid citizen
Terry Pratchett’s Dignity in Dying or
Philip Nitschke’s Exit International or a myriad of other Voluntary Euthanasia societies worldwide. People who want to die need the assurance that those assisting them will not be treated as criminals. So yes, the law does need changing. It needs more than the Commission has recommended though. Poor Andrew Colgan
Andrew Colgan by himself
(and how many others) had to travel to Switzerland to Dignitas to end the life he did not want to continue with. And this is the wonderful Terry Pratchett.
It is not that long ago that suicide was a crime in itself. If you failed in your attempt to kill yourself you were charged with a crime and incarcerated. It wasn’t that long ago that having an abortion was a criminal offence. Slowly, very slowly, we are getting rid of religite influence in secular affairs but it is not quick enough for me. Religion’s perceived privileged role, now aided and abetted by the Tories in the sphere of education, is galling to a growing number of us. As well it should.
There is the British Humanist Association and the National Secular Society that keep trying to increase public awareness in this country; I wish they had more members and I wish more people spoke out publicly.
Come on you guys, either agree or add a comment. There are so many opinions, surely you have one.
Vaccines for a Healthy Community
Edward Jenner discoverer of vaccination. Image via Wikipedia
The anti-vaxxer movement (AVM) just won’t lie down and die. Its proponents are misinformed, wilful and stubborn about their perception of and insistence on their individual rights as distinct from the communal rights that their societies are entitled to expect of the individuals that form part of the societies. These are the communities in which the anti-vaxxers and the rest of us live our lives, enjoy a semblance of security and reap benefits of various sorts. We don’t expect to run into hitherto eradicated diseases because some community members arc up at vaccination and carry on dictating their human rights in a totally inappropriate arena.
It is the sheer arrogance and ignorance of these people that makes me liken them to religites. Under the guise of so called ‘personal choice’, they wilfully put whole communities at risk of infectious diseases by refusing vaccination for their offspring. That is unconscionable in anyone’s language. Especially in a language that has written cogent research papers about the efficacy of inoculation against disfiguring and fatal diseases that spread like wild fire amongst closely knit communities. The public health officials are trying to eradicate the potential for epidemics after all. The research scientists are of immense value in isolating and developing remedial measures.
And then these selfish, individualistic and socially inadequate people want to take the rest of the communities back to the 1800s before disease was even identified as emanating from bacteria and viruses. Germ theory was in its infancy, not really coming into its own until Koch’s Postulates in 1890.
The ant-vaxxers tend to be white, middle class and/or religite First Worlders. Most have never seen, and certainly don’t appear to understand, the threat of these diseases in developing countries and, by extension, into their own communities.
Immunisation programmes in the developed countries have minimised outbreaks of virulent viral and bacterial infections and this current generation has no knowledge of and has never seen the devastation of major outbreaks. They should count themselves lucky and keep their communities’ health stable. Deadly Choices by Paul Offit details how the AVM threatens our communities and the hard won battles we have waged against disease. This link is a late edit: I only found out about it today (10 Jan.2012). It is an interactive algebraic model showing the different effects within communities of immunisation and non-immunisation. Click through the different scenarios and watch what happens.
But no, they sit on their high horse and try to dictate personal choice against communal health. There are very few Andrew Wakefields among them. But they have done immense and very wilful damage. It took a long time to have Wakefield struck off the Medical Practitioners’ register. The damage that man has done to public health is immeasurable. Then there are the Meryl Doreys of the world and the idiots that she associates with. This article by David Gorksi reprinted on Richard Dawkins’ web site mentions the others especially in the US.
Smallpox virus. Image by Sanofi Pasteur
This is smallpox. Image via Wikipedia
When I think of the incredibly organised global effort by WHO to eradicate diseases like small pox, my heart sinks at the prospect of the anti-vaxxers undoing all that work. The following is taken from the WHO web site.
‘Ten years after the launching of the intensified plan to eradicate smallpox by WHO, the last instance of smallpox infection by natural route was recorded in Somalia, Africa. The very last patient of smallpox–from laboratory acquired infection–died in Birmingham, United Kingdom in 1978.
The global eradication of smallpox was certified, based on intense verification activities in countries, by a commission of eminent scientists in December 1979 and subsequently endorsed by the World Health Assembly in 1980.
For the past 30 years, populations the world over have breathed a sigh of relief at not having a single case of smallpox in their midst. This became possible because of two major strides in public health over two centuries of human quest: the first by Edward Jenner, a country physician and vaccination pioneer in England in 1798, and the second by WHO in 1958 when the World Health Assembly made the concerted call for global smallpox eradication.’
The Triple Antigen vaccine covers those dreadful diseases of Tetanus, Diphtheria, Whooping Cough and Polio. Anyone who has seen these diseases in action knows how helpless you can feel to alleviate suffering and potential death. Seeing wee babies die because they have contracted a deadly disease from an unvaccinated person at a time when they are too young to be vaccinated themselves is appalling.
I have barrier nursed tetanus patients. Not easy for them. The slightest noise can send their nerves and muscles into fatal spasm. Watching children die is not a pleasant thing to behold. Watching children with polio is not pleasant. Watching anyone in pain, distress and in danger of potential death from viruses and bacteria that can be eradicated makes any thinking, compassionate person determined to utilise all the medical and chemical science available to us to ensure our own children and the larger communities around us are not exposed to these hideous diseases. Tuberculosis is another one. Nearly eradicated and now a newer, more resistant strain crops up to threaten our communities again.
Off we go again, hunting for a way to stem its spread. And it isn’t just in developing countries that public health initiatives keep on adding further disease control to their programmes. This is from the New Australian Immunisation Schedule:
A new immunisation schedule applying to children born after 1st May 2000 was introduced several years ago. The main change was the introduction of hepatitis B vaccination for infants.
From November 1st 2005, this schedule has been further modified. The most recent changes include the inclusion of polio with the diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis injection, universal pneumococcal vaccination and chickenpox vaccination at 18 months. Hepatitis A is also provided for all indigenous children.
The numerous influenza viruses and the burgeoning common cold bacteria are cases in point. Viruses and bacteria mutate very quickly – that is their evolutionary strength, if you like. They have been making a living on this planet for much longer than we have and thousands of them inhabit our bodies. Usually they have a vested interest in keeping us (their host) alive so we can supply nutrient and habitat to them. On their generous side, they help us break down food into usable nutrients for our and their delectation!
Make no mistake – there are disadvantageous bacteria and viruses out there. They constitute the vast number of different species in this world. And they will survive long after we have overseen our own demise.
Should people with colds be expected to wear masks to prevent infecting others as Pascal Wallisch indicates? A resounding yes from me.
This link repeats the question that Wallisch asks:
‘Pascal Wallisch Should people with colds be expected to wear masks to prevent infecting others? My question is: Should this paradigm be extended to things beyond vaccination? Something that comes to mind immediately this time of year is coughing/being sick and wearing masks to prevent the infection of others. It does make a big difference. See this “paper” published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the related Schlieren imaging videos (below is one frame).
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMicm0904279’
It is time that we started assuming some responsibility for the larger coherent community than just our own family structure. While there are those who only extend the responsibility for communal health to those who wish to not become infected, I have to say that that is not good enough. Those who know they are infectious also have a responsibility to the larger community to protect the members of that community from their infection.
