[irradiation] may reluctantly have to be used

Opponents of irradiation say:

The best alternative to food irradiation to reduce pathogens is in good agricultural practices. For example, farmers and processing plants should improve sanitation practices, water used for irrigation and processing should be regularly tested for E. coli, and production plants should be routinely inspected.

Farmers have much to answer for other practices too, for example:

A potential contributor to this problem that has heretofore escaped serious public health scrutiny is the feeding of animal excrement to livestock, a common practice in some parts of the United States. In 1994, 18% of poultry producers in Arkansas collectively fed more than 1,000 tons of poultry litter to cattle, and the procedure is also common in some other geographic areas as a means of eliminating a portion of the 1.6 million tons of livestock wastes produced in the United States annually.

Or closer to home, The Englishman noted some time ago:

....after Defra's admission that the current outbreak [Feb, 2007] of avian flu could have been brought from Hungary in turkey meat, the betting is here that the one thing the media will not be doing is putting the blame where it properly belongs [the EU].

Having said all that, there is a certain obligation on us to accept current realities, however averse we are to them and it does have some truth to it that irradiation can help eliminate much of the trouble. And yet concerns remain:

Endpoints investigated have included subchronic and chronic changes in metabolism, histopathology, and function of most systems; reproductive effects; growth; teratogenicity; and mutagenicity.

The pro-irradiation lobby has now [Apr, 2008] produced yet another study aimed at the consumer directly:

Washing fresh fruits and vegetables -- even with disinfectants -- may not be enough to stop food poisoning, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.The report found that while washing helps reduce the chances of catching a bug, some microbes can hide too well, including getting inside the leaves of some produce.

The corollary is clear and of course google news produces this in the very next article. Highly suspicious, eh? I'm somewhere between the two myself but would like to know your opinion on this.

[polygamous sect] chapel in the house of prayer

[Update Friday evening: one or two were a little confused whether this post was condoning this sect or was opposed. Vehemently opposed of course - these are not Christians - they're paedophiles in this blog's opinion.]

We've all by now seen the lurid details of the polygamous sect in Texas and I shan't be repeating them:

The ranch and compound are owned and run by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It is a sect which broke away from the Mormon Church when it banned polygamy more than 100 years ago. Inside the ranch they still practice polygamy.

The sect's prophet is Warren Jeffs, a self-confessed polygamist who was jailed last year for being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old girl who married her cousin. Authorities have kept the ranch under surveillance since it was bought by the sect five years ago.

It seems, according to this article that things are being handled better here than they were at Waco.

It's worth looking at the proliferation of sects spawned in America. As the whole gay and feminist movements show - there is a fiercely protected freedom of action in America which the rest of us don't always understand. So all sorts of weird things are going to be tolerated, except by the good ole boys.

But there's something more when it comes to Christian sects. Just as Islam, whether rightly or wrongly, has violence associated with it, so Christianity definitely attracts very weird thinking.
In scripture it would be characterized as tares among the wheat and the advice in the gospels is to wait until the harvest and then cut them out.

Daniel Defoe wrote, in 1701:

Wherever G-d erects a house of prayer, the Devil always builds a chapel there and 'twill be found, upon examination, that the latter has the larger congregation.

It stands to reason. If Christianity is correct, for the sake of argument, then the Devil exists. Therefore he would be hell bent on destroying the redemptive power of Christ in people's minds. Therefore one of the best ways is creating strawmen who are putting views and focussing on passages and generally being obnoxious, to the extent that people who haven't read it up themselves will turn against it in droves.

So, instead of focussing on the faith, hope and charity part, they zero in, for example, on homophobic and red-necked passing references and make, of them, the whole focus. This is a twisting of the message but suffices to turn people away from any possible redemption.

As I say, "if Christianity is correct" and that's outside the scope of this post to either prove or disprove. But certainly passages are seized upon and taken out of context and even bloggers are good at doing this - one blogger was fond of biblical images to push his strange philosophy last year but most people saw through that. The Crusaders did that. A noble idea twisted in its execution.

This is the eternal cross [forgive the reference] that Christianity has had to bear - the false prophets, the wolves in sheep's clothing, the real message twisted and presented as some sort of parody of pious rectitude, always scheduled to be Swaggarted at some stage down the line to reinforce the real message that the redemptive power of Christ is bunkum.

And the aping is amazing - from the pipe organ to the pseudo biblical blessings, the other side has it all down pat. That particular blogger made a comment on a post a long time back that he actually preferred the paraphernalia, the regalia and the flim flam to the original gospel message itself. He preferred the ritual to the mental adjustment required.

So it will always be. The true Christians are few and it is next to impossible to keep to the path and still be a human being. I by no means lay any claim to being a proper Christian.

[starbucks] palace of culture

Recently, this blog made reference to the ubiquitous Starbucks but not all is bad - check out this pic from Clive Davis.

[thought for the day] thursday evening

A man may have his head in the clouds or his feet on the ground but if he has his feet on the ground, he can't remove his trousers.

And while we're on the subject of trousers, here is a little article on their origins.

Or a screen shot on the danger of having the wrong trousers [shhh - don't mention penguins]

If that's not enough for you, here's a video on the art of ...


How To Turn Up Trousers

[kiln living] when you can't get out of the kitchen

Long day but not particularly difficult until I got home. Have the final year for lectures and seminars all week and the other years have had more prosaic work than normal.

At home though we have an amazing situation. These housing blocks are centrally heated and the boiler is turned on on the one day in October and turned off on the one day in April. No exceptions, no consideration of the actual weather out there.

It was 29 degrees Celsius on the street today and guess what - the central heating was on in every flat at full winter level. No concept of anyone phoning the guy and asking, "Could you possibly turn it down a little?" No concept in his own mind that the house might need him to mosey on over and flick a switch.

Of course I'd do it myself but The Key to the Boiler is a jealousy guarded thing, touched only by the annointed.

Unlike some of the neighbours, I do have a solution - the airconditioning unit. So there we were, the client and I in a room with the heater blasting and the air-conditioning on full bore. My friend said that a German had admonished her country for being wasteful with resources.

Well, it's true.

The brightest of readers wil have tumbled to the obvious anomaly - why not just open the balcony door and windows? Sounds logical, doesn't it? Yes, sounds logical but it's not possible - ten minutes with the door or window open and the road fumes fill the flat so the door needs to be closed.

So in this state of heat exhaustion my cleaning girl arrived and I took off for the shops downstairs whilst she did her thing. First thing I noticed was that most people were wearing jackets and I had my polo T on. Just as I appear to be out of step with the majority on the gay issue, so I seemed to be out of step on this.

The only way to check was with the young bucks who always underdress - well they had light jackets and T shirts on. This worried me no end because it wasn't normal that I felt warm and they were giving me peculiar looks.

Anyway, now we're here, the balcony is open and I'm blogging to you. And Britain had snow?

Sigh.

[net tools] roundup of flickr and twitter

This seemed a nice little net roundup:

Flickr video feature spurs online revolt. Not all that surprising to see a mini user revolt after Flickr finally added video uploads. A segment of the user base is unhappy for fear that the photosharing site will lose focus and “turn into another YouTube”.

I don't upload to Flickr but admit to using them for photos on occasions. Video of 90 seconds, available only to Pro users? Naaa - why bother?

Why I deleted my twitter account. I didn’t close my twitter account but cartoonist, marketer and author Hugh MacLeod has done. He says that he finds it “too easy”, and in a brilliant cartoon depicts how uncreative it is compared to longer form blogging.

On the other hand, a post titled Twitter may have crossed the chasm, where he described the service as “cheap” in terms of effort required from the user. Combined with the ‘instant gratification’ you get whenever you log-in to Twitter (i.e. updated content), the barriers to entry are much lower compared with many other forms of online publishing.

I don't use Twitter either as I can't see the point of it. Is it meant to be used as a noticeboard for what you plan to do that day? Would an e-mail to the relevant friend not be sufficient? Perhaps not. As blogging though, it seems a bit bitzie to me.

Then again, Twitterers wouldn't like my style of blogging which places unreasonable demands on attention spans.