Month: July 2014

Channel 1 in Israel released a
transcript in Hebrew it claimed was of a tense phone call between
President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The
Times of Israel provided an
English translation:

Barack Obama: I demand that Israel agrees to an immediate,
unilateral ceasefire and halt all offensive activities, in
particular airstrikes.

Benjamin Netanyahu: And what will Israel receive in exchange for
a ceasefire?

BO: I believe that Hamas will cease its rocket fire — silence
will be met with silence.

BN: Hamas broke all five previous ceasefires. It’s a terrorist
organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel.

BO: I repeat and expect Israel to stop all its military
activities unilaterally. The pictures of destruction in Gaza
distance the world from Israel’s position.

BN: Kerry’s proposal was completely unrealistic and gives Hamas
military and diplomatic advantages.

BO: Within a week of the end of Israel’s military activities,
Qatar and Turkey will begin negotiations with Hamas based on the
2012 understandings, including Israel’s commitment to removing the
siege and restrictions on Gaza.

BN: Qatar and Turkey are the biggest supporters of Hamas. It’s
impossible to rely on them to be fair mediators.

BO: I trust Qatar and Turkey. Israel is not in the position that
it can choose its mediators.

BN: I protest because Hamas can continue to launch rockets and
use tunnels for terror attacks –

BO: (interrupting Netanyahu) The ball’s in Israel’s court, and
it must end all its military activities.

Neri Zilber, a journalist from the Washington Institute for Near
East Studies, tweeted
that the transcript came from an American source, meaning it was
likely translated into Hebrew by Channel 1 and then back into
English by the Times of Israel.

State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said
that, if true, the leak of the transcript represented “a severe
violation of a private diplomatic discussion,” while the Obama
White House’s National Security Council tweeted
a few minutes ago that the transcript bears no “resemblance to
reality” and that it was “shocking and disappointing someone would
sink to misrepresenting” a private conversation by fabricating a
transcript.

Last night HBO premiered
Love Child, a
documentary about a couple in South Korea who let their newborn
child die of starvation in 2010 while they played online video
games for hours on end in a PC café. The documentary gets its title
from the name of the newborn—Sarang, which means “love” in
Korean.

The documentary describes the couple’s game-centric life and
interviews the attorney who defended them, a worker at the game
café they frequented, and the journalist who covered the tragedy
and legal case for the Western media, among others.

The documentary is an odd duck in that it strives to avoid some
well-worn media pitfalls that result in fear-mongering in the
reporting of video game “addiction,” yet its approach doesn’t seem
to delve into any sort of science or research, other than a look
inside a Korean company that provides what seems like specious
aversion therapy to gamers. Instead the film superficially drifts
over the nature of South Korea’s extremely high-tech, game-centric
culture, pulling at little strings of ideas here and there without
accomplishing much.

It’s frustrating to watch as the documentary descends into
babble about whether people who play a lot of games or spend a lot
of time interacting through the Internet differentiate between the
real world and a virtual world. This discussion seems to typically
originate as fact-free musing from people about gamers rather than
from the gamers themselves. Do people know they aren’t actually
ones and zeroes? The chin-stroking takes a turn for the absurd when
the documentary lets forth the suggestion that Sarang’s parents
didn’t quite understand that babies need food to live because of
all the time they spend in video games (the game in question, a
now-defunct online role-playing game called Prius,
involved taking care of a child-like assistant amid the adventures,
and her existence is played up as much as possible to contrast with
Sarang’s neglect). Their defense attorney is partly responsible for
pushing the “they didn’t know how” narrative, so it makes sense for
him to try to make the argument, but the documentary lets the
nearly incomprehensible assertion just lie there all the way until
the nearly the end, when somebody finally points out that people
generally know that other people need food to live without special
training.

In fact, the documentary reinforces the idea of gamer parents
ignorant of the logistics of actual life by describing the communal
nature of Korean society and suggesting the parents didn’t have
good relationships with their own parents (the family members
themselves, though, are not interviewed for the documentary). South
Korea’s response to video game or Internet addiction has been
government regulation—passing curfews to prohibit teenagers from
playing video games after a certain time, reinforcing the idea that
the problem is communal, not individual. Though there is a voice in
the documentary stating that the problem isn’t lack of regulation,
his words become the segue to the exploration of the aversion
therapy clinic. It’s the equivalent of using drug addiction to
promote drug courts. It doesn’t really help illuminate
anything.

The documentary floats over the basics of Korean culture like a
travelogue on some lower tier cable channel without delving deeply
enough to allow the viewer to understand what is really going on.
Perhaps nobody really did, thus the long pauses for canned footage
with ugly, multi-colored filters playing over junior college-level
musings over the nature of the real world versus virtual reality.
The documentary brings up the fact that the father was unemployed
and was attempting to make money as a “gold farmer” in games. These
are people who grind the drudgery of earning the online currency of
games and then turn around and sell it for real money to other
players so they can save time and purchase in-game goods without
having to go through all the effort. But then this economic
component of the couple’s troubles is ignored. Why couldn’t he find
work? Was he unemployable because he was playing video games all
the time, or was the order reversed? Did he end up playing video
games because he couldn’t find a job within Korea’s information
society?

Love Child clearly wants to make the viewer feel as
though game addiction did ultimately cause Sarang’s death. But the
documentary doesn’t want to appear to engage in fear-mongering, and
yet it doesn’t really do the hard work to make a valid case. The
evidence remains circumstantial. A bunch of television news talking
heads are shown referencing “Internet addiction,” but given the
media’s reputation for mangling the results of scientific studies,
it’s not clear what we’re supposed to take away from these
invocations. It looks almost like Love Child wants it both
ways—to engage in Internet addiction fear-mongering but in a
fashion that appears sober and reflective and therefore not subject
to the same criticism.

It’s a shame, because it’s not as though these isolated
incidences aren’t worth deeper analysis. I’ve seen lives destroyed
by obsessions with gaming just as I have with drugs. But there’s
nothing actually useful about Love Child. It nibbles
around the edges of a messy situation, afraid to get its hands
truly dirty, perhaps out of fear of undercutting its own debate
over the real vs. the virtual.

I have long been tracking the career of lies and
disinformation that constitute the anti-intellectual trajectory of
virulent anti-biotech activist
Vandana Shiva. For example, back in 2001, I reported:

Ten thousand people were killed and 10 to 15 million left
homeless when a cyclone slammed into India’s eastern coastal state
of Orissa in October 1999. In the aftermath, CARE and the Catholic
Relief Society distributed a high-nutrition mixture of corn and soy
meal provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development to
thousands of hungry storm victims. Oddly, this humanitarian act
elicited cries of outrage.

“We call on the government of India and the state government of
Orissa to immediately withdraw the corn-soya blend from
distribution,” said Vandana Shiva, director of the New Delhi-based
Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology. “The U.S.
has been using the Orissa victims as guinea pigs for GM
[genetically modified] products which have been rejected by
consumers in the North, especially Europe.” Shiva’s organization
had sent a sample of the food to a lab in the U.S. for testing to
see if it contained any of the genetically improved corn and soy
bean varieties grown by tens of thousands of farmers in the United
States. Not surprisingly, it did.

“Vandana Shiva would rather have her people in India starve than
eat bioengineered food,” says C.S. Prakash, a professor of plant
molecular genetics at Tuskegee University in Alabama.

Writer Mary McCarty famously said of Lillian Hellman: “Every
word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” Nothing truer
could be said of Shiva.

In a
superb article, International Center of Genetic Engineering and
Biotechnology researcher Anand Ranganathan nicely summarizes
Shiva’s legacy of dishonesty and outright fabrication. Below are
some representative quotations from Shiva along with some analysis
by Ranganathan:

Shiva: “Science and masculinity were associated in domination
over nature and femininity, and the ideologies of science and
gender reinforced each other. The witch-hunting hysteria which was
aimed at annihilating women in Europe as knowers and experts was
contemporous with two centuries of scientific revolution.
It reached its peak with Galileo’s Dialogue…”

Shiva: “Scientific
missions colluded with religious missions to deny rights to
nature. The rise of mechanical philosophy with the emergence of the
scientific revolution was based on the destruction of concepts of a
self-regenerative, self-organising nature which sustained all life.
Just as technology changes seed from a living, renewable resource
into mere raw material, it devalues women in a similar way.”…

Shiva has been the chief proponent of the lie that the failure
of biotech cotton has resulted in 250,000 Indian farmers committing
suicide. As Ranganthan accurately reports:

Perhaps the most scathing indictment of Dr. Shiva’s claims comes
from an article in the scientific journal
Nature that takes a dispassionate look at GM Foods,
and in doing so exposes the falsehood that Bt cotton has led to
genocide. Has it? The short answer is, no. Dr
Shiva’s assertion runs counter to the study carried out by
researchers at the
International Food Policy Research Institute. Their report,
Bt Cotton and Farmer Suicides in India, shows irrefutably
that the rate of farmer suicides has remained
constant over the past decade, even as the area under Bt cotton
cultivation has shown a dramatic increase, not to mention an
equally dramatic jump in
cotton production.  Yet another scientific study,
Economic impacts and impact dynamics of Bt cotton in
India, published in the prestigious journal PNASc, shows that
India’s switch to Bt cotton has led to a “24% increase in cotton
yield per acre through reduced pest damage and a 50% gain in cotton
profit.”.

Unfortunately, Dr. Shiva’s rebuttal to the damning
Nature article is as dense as it is
incoherent. “Yes, I am an ecologist and feminist”, she begins,
“But I am also a scientist – a fact (Nature) intentionally
avoids mentioning. As a Quantum Physicist, I have been trained to
look at the interconnectedness and non-separability of processes,
which in a mechanistic and reductionist paradigm, are seen as
separate and unrelated…Reality cannot be cooked up in papers, no
matter how prestigious the journals in which these concoctions are
published. Reality is what happens in reality…”

Not only does Dr. Shiva stick to her earlier claim – “It is,
indeed, a genocide,” she also junks the peer-reviewed PNASc study,
stating: “Every statement of (that study) is false as shown from
both our field studies and studies of India’s parliament and
leading scientific institutions.” Dr. Shiva does not provide any
citations of her “field studies” or those conducted by “India’s
parliament”. Why should she? The beauty of pseudo-science is that
it beats science hands-down. It is accessible, comprehensible,
reachable, even desirable. Granted, it is not logical, responsible,
practical, or dependable but then these are lyrics not
virtues…

Like a proselytiser loathed to extol the virtues of other
religions, Dr Shiva refuses to budge from her anti-GMO,
anti-science pedestal, even going the extra mile to help foreign
NGOs prevent new technologies from reaching the
domestic food sector. She likens farmers being given freedom to
choose GM Foods to rapists being
given the freedom to rape. So it goes.

Vandana Shiva’s mind is made up. A
science-hater-turned-philosopher-turned-activist-turned-quantum
physicist is busy sowing seeds of doubt among the gullible. Fools
who challenge her will only end up supplementing those seeds with
the nourishment they need, for they have now taken root and shall
one day, just like their progenitor, bloom into magnificent trees
laden with lies and deceit, ripe and pluckable. As the Navajo
saying goes, you can’t wake a person who is pretending to be
asleep.

As a committed practitioner of propaganda Shiva follows
Joseph Goebbels notorious rule for fomenting propaganda:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will
eventually come to believe it.”

But it is still a lie.

Via the Genetic Literacy Project.

I have long been tracking the career of lies and
disinformation that constitute the anti-intellectual trajectory of
virulent anti-biotech activist
Vandana Shiva. For example, back in 2001, I reported:

Ten thousand people were killed and 10 to 15 million left
homeless when a cyclone slammed into India’s eastern coastal state
of Orissa in October 1999. In the aftermath, CARE and the Catholic
Relief Society distributed a high-nutrition mixture of corn and soy
meal provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development to
thousands of hungry storm victims. Oddly, this humanitarian act
elicited cries of outrage.

“We call on the government of India and the state government of
Orissa to immediately withdraw the corn-soya blend from
distribution,” said Vandana Shiva, director of the New Delhi-based
Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology. “The U.S.
has been using the Orissa victims as guinea pigs for GM
[genetically modified] products which have been rejected by
consumers in the North, especially Europe.” Shiva’s organization
had sent a sample of the food to a lab in the U.S. for testing to
see if it contained any of the genetically improved corn and soy
bean varieties grown by tens of thousands of farmers in the United
States. Not surprisingly, it did.

“Vandana Shiva would rather have her people in India starve than
eat bioengineered food,” says C.S. Prakash, a professor of plant
molecular genetics at Tuskegee University in Alabama.

Writer Mary McCarty famously said of Lillian Hellman: “Every
word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” Nothing truer
could be said of Shiva.

In a
superb article, International Center of Genetic Engineering and
Biotechnology researcher Anand Ranganathan nicely summarizes
Shiva’s legacy of dishonesty and outright fabrication. Below are
some representative quotations from Shiva along with some analysis
by Ranganathan:

Shiva: “Science and masculinity were associated in domination
over nature and femininity, and the ideologies of science and
gender reinforced each other. The witch-hunting hysteria which was
aimed at annihilating women in Europe as knowers and experts was
contemporous with two centuries of scientific revolution.
It reached its peak with Galileo’s Dialogue…”

Shiva: “Scientific
missions colluded with religious missions to deny rights to
nature. The rise of mechanical philosophy with the emergence of the
scientific revolution was based on the destruction of concepts of a
self-regenerative, self-organising nature which sustained all life.
Just as technology changes seed from a living, renewable resource
into mere raw material, it devalues women in a similar way.”…

Shiva has been the chief proponent of the lie that the failure
of biotech cotton has resulted in 250,000 Indian farmers committing
suicide. As Ranganthan accurately reports:

Perhaps the most scathing indictment of Dr. Shiva’s claims comes
from an article in the scientific journal
Nature that takes a dispassionate look at GM Foods,
and in doing so exposes the falsehood that Bt cotton has led to
genocide. Has it? The short answer is, no. Dr
Shiva’s assertion runs counter to the study carried out by
researchers at the
International Food Policy Research Institute. Their report,
Bt Cotton and Farmer Suicides in India, shows irrefutably
that the rate of farmer suicides has remained
constant over the past decade, even as the area under Bt cotton
cultivation has shown a dramatic increase, not to mention an
equally dramatic jump in
cotton production.  Yet another scientific study,
Economic impacts and impact dynamics of Bt cotton in
India, published in the prestigious journal PNASc, shows that
India’s switch to Bt cotton has led to a “24% increase in cotton
yield per acre through reduced pest damage and a 50% gain in cotton
profit.”.

Unfortunately, Dr. Shiva’s rebuttal to the damning
Nature article is as dense as it is
incoherent. “Yes, I am an ecologist and feminist”, she begins,
“But I am also a scientist – a fact (Nature) intentionally
avoids mentioning. As a Quantum Physicist, I have been trained to
look at the interconnectedness and non-separability of processes,
which in a mechanistic and reductionist paradigm, are seen as
separate and unrelated…Reality cannot be cooked up in papers, no
matter how prestigious the journals in which these concoctions are
published. Reality is what happens in reality…”

Not only does Dr. Shiva stick to her earlier claim – “It is,
indeed, a genocide,” she also junks the peer-reviewed PNASc study,
stating: “Every statement of (that study) is false as shown from
both our field studies and studies of India’s parliament and
leading scientific institutions.” Dr. Shiva does not provide any
citations of her “field studies” or those conducted by “India’s
parliament”. Why should she? The beauty of pseudo-science is that
it beats science hands-down. It is accessible, comprehensible,
reachable, even desirable. Granted, it is not logical, responsible,
practical, or dependable but then these are lyrics not
virtues…

Like a proselytiser loathed to extol the virtues of other
religions, Dr Shiva refuses to budge from her anti-GMO,
anti-science pedestal, even going the extra mile to help foreign
NGOs prevent new technologies from reaching the
domestic food sector. She likens farmers being given freedom to
choose GM Foods to rapists being
given the freedom to rape. So it goes.

Vandana Shiva’s mind is made up. A
science-hater-turned-philosopher-turned-activist-turned-quantum
physicist is busy sowing seeds of doubt among the gullible. Fools
who challenge her will only end up supplementing those seeds with
the nourishment they need, for they have now taken root and shall
one day, just like their progenitor, bloom into magnificent trees
laden with lies and deceit, ripe and pluckable. As the Navajo
saying goes, you can’t wake a person who is pretending to be
asleep.

As a committed practitioner of propaganda Shiva follows
Joseph Goebbels notorious rule for fomenting propaganda:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will
eventually come to believe it.”

But it is still a lie.

Via the Genetic Literacy Project.

Just in time for fall,
Congress is nudging the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to
accelerate the approval process for several new sunscreen
ingredients. Most have been in wide use in Europe and around the
world for the better part of a decade. 

The Sunscreen Innovation Act, which passed [the House] on a
voice vote, would impose deadlines on the FDA to ensure it approves
existing and future sunscreen ingredient applications faster.

A nearly identical bill is pending before the Senate Committee
on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Sen. Johnny Isakson (R.,
Ga.), a principal sponsor of the bill, said he expects the Senate
will vote on a version in September. The other main sponsor is Sen.
Jack Reed (D., R.I.).

“If you’ve got products that are being used around the world
that you can’t use in the U.S. because the process has
stalled—that’s just inexcusable,” said Mr. Isakson, who has had
melanoma.

The FDA responded to the congressional action…by
putting out a press release that was almost, but not quite,
entirely unrelated to the actual question of the glacial
approvals process. 

Commissioner Margaret Hamburg touted the FDA’s actions to reduce
the incidence of skin cancer, including some very strongly worded
warnings on sunlamps. So there’s that. The press release also
included a link to some
tips on sun safety, including a suggestion to wear
effective sunscreen.

Here’s a crazy idea to increase sunscreen use and effectiveness:
What if there was a brand that was
easier to spread? Or protected against a broader spectrum of light?
Or caused less skin irritation? Oh wait.

Of course, even if the FDA takes Congress’ push seriously, none
of this will help the
sunburned schoolchildren
of America in districts where the skin protectant has
been banned: 

Earlier this month, police in
Enfield , Connecticut
wanted to arrest Matthew Worden, one of their own cops, on
charges of assault and fabricating evidence related to the violent
arrest of a suspect in April. Their arrest warrant was rejected by
the state’s attorney in Hartford, Gail Hardy, because there were
“many moving parts” in video captured of the arrest.

This week, the Hartford Courant, which has run
several stories about this incident in the last month, ran an
editorial calling on the chief state’s attorney to re-examine the
case, pointing to the number of civilian complaints filed against
the officer in the last seven years. The editorial
begins:

Enfield police officer Matthew Worden has lived on the edge.

He has been the subject of 14 civilian complaints in the last
seven years, The Courant recently reported, with allegations
ranging from rudeness and discourteous conduct to excessive force
and racial profiling. He was the object of about a third of the 26
complaints against the nearly 100-officer department in the last
four years, half of the six filed in 2013.

But other than one suspension of 60 days, after he got into a
fight with a fellow officer in 2007 during a domestic dispute with
his then-girlfriend, none of the complaints stuck and Mr. Worden’s
career has progressed without interruption.

The newspaper argues that it usually ought to be “difficult to
prosecute police officers for on-duty actions” but in this case,
especially considering the department’s interest in arrest and
prosecution, it ought to be easier. The editorial suggests cops
should generally “get the benefit of the doubt,” but that after
seven years of misconduct Worden should not get.

Worden remains on paid leave as the department is still
conducting its internal affairs investigation into the April
beating.

A ruling from the 5th Circuit Court
of Appeals will allow Mississippi’s one remaining abortion clinic
to stay open, despite the fact that doctors there do not have
admitting privileges at a local hospital. In 2012, the Mississippi
legislature passed a law requiring all abortion
clinic doctors to have such privileges—ostensibly in the name
of women’s health, but more realistically as way to restrict
abortion access. 

Since then, doctors with the Jackson Women’s Health
Organization—the only abortion clinic in the state—have applied for
admitting privileges at 13 regional hospitals and been denied every
time. 

Meanwhile, the clinic has been
fighting the law in court, and the matter came before the
5th Circuit Court of Appeals in April. In the court’s
2-1 decision,
handed down today, judges held that the law “imposes an undue
burden on a woman’s right to choose an abortion in Mississippi, and
is therefore unconstitutional.” 

You’ve
probably heard about the
tragic case of Eric Garner: On July 17, New York City Police
officers tackled, asphyxiated, and killed the 56-year-old father of
six with chokehold. He was allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes.
The NYPD has been getting some backlash for its heavy-handed

“broken window” policing, and this weekend Garner’s widow led a

rally in opposition to police brutality, which has particularly
affected the
black community. Amid the NYPD’s damage control effort, one
young man staged a sort of protest of his own against the
police.

During an annual basketball tournament on Friday in Staten
Island, a “patrol car rolled into the park across the street” from
the court, leaving “players and spectators fear[ing] police had
arrived to break up the game.” This was part of the setup,
explains SILive.com. “The cop parked the car just in front of
the hoop” and 20-year-old Brian Hogan-Gary leapt over the hood and
executed a clean slam dunk. As planned, the cop car’s sirens went
off. The crowd went wild.

Although Joel Soto, the organizer of the tournament, cleared the
stunt with the department beforehand, what appears to have been
unplanned was Hogan-Gary’s attire: just before taking the
shot, he pulled off his jersey and revealed a shirt that read
“R.I.P. ERIC GARNER” on the front and “JUSTICE” on the
back. 

According to SILive.com, Garner’s sons are part of the
basketball league that stages the tournament, but they weren’t
present.

It may have been a small, silent act, but it takes some brass to
pull that one over the NYPD. Does the fact that it happened during
a cop-approved event lessen Hogan-Gary’s chutzpah? I’d argue not.
Rather, it seems like it underscores his wit – kind of like when
the NYPD ran a Twitter campaign to boost its image, only to be
flooded with countless passive-aggressive replies in the form of

photos of cops kicking the crap out of people. The police try
to put on a kinder, gentler façade, and people like Hogan-Gary keep
that picture in check.

Below is one angle of the shot. Click
here for another angle.