Mad cow

Richard Rhodes, in  Deadly Feasts, 1997, writes that the only way to prevent the transmission of mad cow disease, an infection of the brain by misshaped proteins, is to stop feeding animal proteins to other animals – cannibalism. Since the meat industry is unlikely to comply, I’m thinking of going vegetarian except for fish. Although even vegetarians are at risk, since possibly contaminated chicken manure is used as a fertilizer.

Deadly Feasts is a good read, a fine example of lucid popular scientific writing.

Rhodes writes that the U.S. “has ample supplies of soybean protein, so its livestock industry could survive even a complete ban on feeding animal wastes to animals.”

Mad cow disease is transmissible to other animals, including humans. It eats holes in the brain and is always fatal.

But the British BSE [mad cow disease] disaster was not some throwback to antique conditions or mere bad luck. It followed in part from the pernicious, pervasive and deeply corrupt antigovernment fanaticism that has taken hold in Britain and the U.S. in the last two decades…. – Rhodes

Ecstasy

Stoned and watching a Peter Jennings program on Ecstasy:

·        Very widely used by all kinds of people with very few deaths or noticeable side effects.

·        Research by one scientist indicating brain damage used the wrong drug, methamphetamine (speed, crank). Done on monkeys. Supposed to prove seretonin depletion. (Brain neurotransmitter, effects mood, appetite, sleep.)   Total crap.

·        Government misinformation in antidrug advertising campaigns, claims that contradict the direct experience of drug users, breed total distrust. So young people won’t believe the government when it warns them about real drug dangers, like smoking.

On the other hand, there may be dangers with Ecstasy:

·        A few susceptible people may have bad reactions and die, but the numbers are probably smaller than those for legal prescription or over-the-counter drugs.

·        Ecstasy can affect the body’s heat-regulating mechanism, so someone dancing in a hot rave could overheat.

·        Ecstasy hasn’t been around long enough to know what the long-term effects are.

·        The most serious risk, and one that would give me pause, is that it’s a street drug so you don’t know what you’re getting. There could be, and often is, anything in that pill.

When I was young in the '60s, whoever was most oblivious to risk would try a drug first and then pass it on to the rest of us, with a recommendation as to dosage. “Yeah, I’d say half a tab is about right.”

Dreams

I was concerned that Mother (13 years dead) wasn’t getting out enough. I suggested to someone that we carry her outside. Then I thought well, it’s getting cold out, maybe that’s not a good idea.

In a dream I wake up in the morning, looking out over a beautiful southwestern canyon, many birds in the air.

Hauling a berry bush branch out into a parking lot where I can get at it, berries look good but each one, when I reach for it, has a bad side. One swells up, when I touch it, into a big ugly gray mess.

Possibly a reference to all that wine I drank last night. I probably shouldn’t. Not really doing the job anyway.

I can turn on lights now in dreams.

Art

Spaulding Gray died.  Suicide. How sad. Such a talented man. I enjoyed the movies of his monologs.

Gentlemen of Space is a novel about a man in 1976 who enters a contest to become the first “ordinary” astronaut and go to the moon. I’ve noticed that it takes me a while to warm up to “literary” fiction. A lot of hemming and hawing, trying out different approaches, philosophizing, before it settles down and tells the story. Literary fiction is very indirect, often fatally.

On the other hand, it’s not simple minded. There may be surprises. Some good writing. Interesting character views.

I can only read so many crime novels about people killing people before I think, this is shit.

I’ve stopped making myself finish novels that don’t grab me. Life is too short.

In my family we were taught that you should clean up your plate.

Swimming Pool: One of those long slow foreign movies. I’m not sure that I got it. Kept expecting something more to happen. I did appreciate the naked women, especially the older one. Although she didn’t seem like someone I would want to get anywhere near. Aside from the sex, a cold movie, distant.

What I wonder about Europeans is, judging them only by their movies, how can they stand to move that slow?

Adaptation: One of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen. A screenwriter is trying to “adapt” a philosophical, literary book, The Orchid Thief, blocked, driving himself crazy. In desperation he writes himself into the script, so it becomes a circular movie about him trying to write a movie.

I wrote myself into the script a long time ago. I needed some kind of minimal glue to hold all the bits and pieces together.

Drift is free-range writing.

Aging

I’m noticing lately that I’m making little embarrassing mistakes, and wondering if that’s an aging thing or if I just frequently don’t have my brain in gear. Absent-minded.

Pretty much everything negative that happens, mental or physical, I wonder if it’s an aging thing. That’s an aging thing.

Sore feet are an aging thing. I’m losing my connection to the ground.

Folk rock performers on OPB tonight, liked some of the music but they looked so old that it made me nervous, so I turned it off. Scary.

The problem with nostalgia is that it makes you see how far you are now from then.

This thing hasn’t got any reverse gear.

Like those dreams where you’re trying to drive a car and the brakes don’t work. I wake up with my foot pushing on the brake pedal.

Is it a good thing to sing the same songs when you’re old that you sang when you were young?

Why old people get grouchy: Everything takes too much energy, is too much trouble. And my feet hurt.

Men have more friends early in life, women more friends later in life. Psychology survey takers found that out. They say women tend to make friends both on and off the job. But a remarkably high proportion of aging fellows only know a few other surviving men they’d long ago met at work. – “Boyd’s Factoids”, Wink

Future

Century City on TV tonight. Now there’s a great concept: lawyers in 2030. As if we don’t have enough of them on TV already. Arguing about cloning. Holograms, neon strips around the edges of their computer monitors, who knows why. I don’t think 2030 is going to look like that.

26 years from now. 26 back takes you to 1978. What is different now from 1978? Some of the buildings have changed in downtown Eugene and a lot of business has been built up further out, but that’s just more of the same. I suppose the cars are different but I tuned out on that a long time ago. Seems like cars have been boring since the 60s. I don’t notice clothes either, but I don’t think people look much different. The only thing I can think of is that now we have computers everywhere and use them to communicate. At least I do.

People? What we talk about? Scientific advances? Cloning, although it doesn’t impact our lives yet. Space station, ditto. Mars probes, interesting, but people on Mars would be futuristic. The human genome project and the possibility of genetic therapy. Better treatments for cancer, but the big breakthrough always seems to be just around the corner.

Which is typical of the future, always receding, like a rainbow.

Terrorism. Homelessness. I don’t remember homeless people in 1978. When did that happen, sometime in the 80s?

Gay people out of the closet and militant, that’s a big change.

Full-scale wars. In the Carter years, because of Vietnam, that was still not allowed. I thought it never would be. Then Reagan started small and gradually got us used to war again.

Immortality

I’m reading Merchants of Immortality by Stephen S. Hall, about biological research on aging. Hall says for most of mankind’s history the average person died in their 20s. But that is a little misleading because a high childhood death rate skewed the numbers downward. I would be interested in seeing an age of death distribution graph for the present and different historical periods.

We died in our 20s, Hall wrote, because evolution had no interest in our fate once we had reproduced.

Even at the start of the 20^th century, I’ve read, the average U.S. lifespan was around 50. By the 1930s it was in the mid 60s. They thought there would be no problem financing social Security. People would retire at 65, if they made it that far, and then die. Now if you live to 65, I read recently, you will probably live into your 80s. I might have another 20 years to go. In which case I want to be able to walk without my feet hurting.

Research in 1994 changed ideas about cell lifespan. Cells were believed for a long time to be immortal. Then they discovered there is a limit to how many times cells can divide, after which the cells age and die.

The exception is cancer cells, which really are immortal, unfortunately. So there are two good reasons for understanding the process: we might be able to keep healthy cells dividing longer, and stop cancer cells from dividing.

Hall writes about how religious hysteria (my word, not his), translated into politics, has held back human stem cell research. Stem cells are the early fetal cells, capable of developing into any type of cell. Such cells could be used to generate replacements for human cells that wear out or are injured. A possible cure, for example, for Alzheimer’s.

Stem cells have been harvested from embryos and then grown in labs to create more stem cells. The Christian right sees the embryos as people, and the use of them as abortion.

The embryo at fourteen days contains about 2000 cells. It has no brain, no limbs, no feelings, no sentience, no consciousness, no organs – indeed, no differentiated structure or morphology of any sort (neural development begins at about day eighteen).

Reproductive embryologists report that human embryos have a very high natural rate of mortality during the first few weeks of development…. In a purely biological sense, there is no right to life for any embryo, if at minimum 50 percent of fertilized eggs in healthy women fail to implant….

…

No serious scientist believes victory over mortality is possible. We may someday be able to slow down the aging process, but reversing it is unlikely, and engineering the germ line to attain greater life span represents a risky form of human experimentation few if any societies on earth would be willing to undertake.

…

… by mid-century we’ll have added a decade to average life expectancy simply by doing what we’re already doing….
– Hall

People

Some of the people I’ve known have been, perhaps, too stable.

Middle-class professionals are professionally nice, like it’s part of their job, a necessary social skill.

A book I’m reading says every family has its myth. Mine are wanderers. I gained the fatal knowledge of nonattachment, and now I belong nowhere.

I’ve always been interested in places, and I explore each new place, walking a lot, going to meetings, feet on the ground, trying to place it. But I’m not really there. Here. I’m lost in space. Long ago I missed the exit to home on the freeway, and have to keep driving. I stay somewhere for several years at a time, but always leave. It’s not wanderlust anymore, not for a long time. Something happens, and I have to leave. All places are the same place, and it doesn’t exist.

Sometimes I think my main talent is for leaving things behind.

My experience is that most of the things I try don’t work out, so if I want to accomplish anything I have to try a lot.

People do change. I no longer read computer magazines. That wasn’t the answer.

Lately hard to focus on anything, my mind keeps jumping around.

Time for an overhaul, from the ground up, new camshaft, ventricular fibrillation, original sin.

“Boyd’s Factoids”, in Wink, says that “The American divorce rate in this century has been four times as high as the British, three times as high as the French.” Why would that be?  There is also a difference between our country and theirs in how we take care of people – the British and French have universal health care, etc.  Is America just that much more competitive, individualistic and uncaring?

Politics

Reading The Oregonian’s coverage of the peace march in Portland yesterday, I wish I could have been there.  They say  the Portland Radical Cheerleaders were chanting, "We're sexy! We're cute! And rad-i-cal to boot! We're angry! We're tough! And we have had enough!”

I think the European attitude toward empire is, been there, done that. Not enough return to justify the expense. Makes you look bad. If you have to shoot someone to take their money you must not be very smart. Americans are so clumsy. As someone wrote, there is a reason empires went out of style.

Democrats are the most aggressive wimps. They don’t want to do anything that takes a political risk, and they want to make the left follow suite, mainly by constantly attacking us in every available medium.

So we have a choice: we can shut up and see the left disappear, or fight back. Running Nader for president is our way of fighting back. I don’t know how many state ballots he’ll get on, but it would only take one swing state to sink Kerry.

The Democratic party needs an intervention. It needs to be forced to take a look within, instead of blaming the left for standing up to it.

To be fair, Democratic activists did try to take back their party from its “leaders” during the primaries, but it didn’t work. Having failed, they now want us to close ranks around Kerry. I don’t think so. I’m not a Democrat.

The TV ad battle has started, Bush vs. Kerry, politics for morons. Bush has enormous amounts of money. I wonder if viewers will get sick of him.

Gephardt ran commercials in Iowa asking voters, “What do we really know about Howard Dean?” What do we really know about John Kerry? He seems to have often straddled issues, and often come down on the wrong side: NAFTA, welfare “reform” act, Patriot Act, war with Iraq. Like Clinton, Kerry is a waffler.

There is no question that Democrats make good slaves. Don’t let them make you one too.

Someone wrote that American politics “covers the gamut from A to B.” In the U.S., if you were part of a small political minority, with no chance of winning an election, you were considered irrelevant. As we’ve seen over the last four years of Democrats yelling at Nader voters, a leftist political minority is looked upon as having no right to exist, and we’re supposed to shut up and go away. Even if you represent, in Oregon, roughly one voter in 20 (2000 election), you are not allowed to play in the big boys’ corporate-financed game. It’s unfair, Democrats tell us, for us to compete. We have no right. We are arrogant egotists. No power, no legitimacy.

But a funny thing happened to the major parties in recent years. Driven by the need to please their corporate masters and Suzy Suburban, Democrats dragged their party to the right. Unable to see a significant difference between the parties, voters started mentally flipping a coin, resulting in a 50-50 split between the major parties in presidential elections.

Amazingly enough, this has given the American left, powerless since the 1960s, the deciding vote, if we have the guts to use it. Democrats know we have the power, hate it, and are screaming at us not to use it. But if we don’t use it we won’t have it, and Democrats will continue drifting to the right. American politics will become ever more narrow. The power to say “no” is the only power we have, or are ever likely to have.

I say let’s use it.

More recently, a pair of French economists, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, found that between 1973 and 2000, the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers saw their average real income fall by 7 percent. – Natasha Degen, The Ambition Tax,” Village Voice, March 17 - 23, 2004