Well the Russians like what I do

ISIS and the Second Target Station were yesterday featured on the Friday evening news of Russian TV channel NTV. Which at that time of day has estimated viewing figures of around 100 million viewers. So they care how we're spending your money.



We’ve had very positive feedback from our colleagues in Troitsk who were astonished to see ISIS pop onto the TV whilst they were eating their evening meal.

And the surreal Spiderman inclusion at the end is a somewhat tenuous reference to our material analysis of spider webs to see how they work. The tensile strength of spider silk is greater than the same weight of steel and has much greater elasticity. Its micro-structure is under investigation for potential applications in industry, including bullet-proof vests, and artificial tendons - so this research does have a point. Honest.

Save us from the Frankenfoods

A well-informed argument, yesterday

There is a sterling article in the Washington Post showing once again that if there is a God, he really hates Africa:

A virulent new version of a deadly fungus is ravaging wheat in Kenya’s most fertile fields and spreading beyond Africa to threaten one of the world’s principal food crops, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.

Stem rust, a killer that farmers thought they had defeated 50 years ago, surfaced here in 1999, jumped the Red Sea to Yemen in 2006 and turned up in Iran last year. Crop scientists say they are powerless to stop its spread and increasingly frustrated in their efforts to find resistant plants.

Nobel Peace laureate Norman Borlaug, the world’s leading authority on the disease, said that once established, stem rust can explode to crisis proportions within a year under certain weather conditions.

“This is a dangerous problem because a good share of the world’s area sown to wheat is susceptible to it,” Borlaug said. “It has immense destructive potential.”

Coming on the heels of grain scarcity and food riots last year, the budding epidemic exposes the fragility of the food supply in poor countries. It is also a reminder of how vulnerable the ever-growing global population is to the pathogens that inevitably surface somewhere on the planet.

Now Borlaug was one of the guys who originally helped contain the problem by breeding resistant strains of wheat, and he's still at it at 94. It's hard to quantify how many people's lives he and others like him may have saved during the course of their careers. A unanimous act of the US Congress stated in 2006: "Dr. Borlaug has saved more lives than any other person who has ever lived, and likely has saved more lives in the Islamic world than any other human being in history." The Nobel committee (he won the peace prize in 1970) put a number on this, estimating that he was personally and directly responsible for saving over one billion human beings in the Third World from starvation. Dr. Borlaug did it by pioneering the use of hybrid and genetically modified crops, designing new strains that could thrive in arid conditions where pesticides or herbicides were not available. He's also known for "Borlaug's Hypothesis" which proposes that the best way to reduce deforestation is to reduce demand for new farmland by using our best existing farmland to its maximum potential.

So back to the present:

Because there hasn’t been a major epidemic in 50 years, only a few living scientists have seen the destructive power of stem rust.

But Borlaug needed no history lesson. He recruited scientists from wheat-producing countries and raised funds to underwrite their work. Foundations in the United States and Japan pitched in, as did the governments of Canada, India and the United States, Singh said. Last year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave $26.8 million to a project led by Cornell University scientists.

A key first step was to comb the world’s wheat for resistant plants that could provide genetic ammunition to hold off the rust.

Well they've found a solution. The only problem is, they are going to have a bit of an effort implementing it because the likes of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Quacktitioner Royal have terrified the Africans so utterly about the perceived dangers of Genetically Modified foods. This crass exploitation of ignorance for a political agenda is likely to cause vast unnecessary suffering.

Before now we've seen Greenpeace(and other like-minded) activists wearing full biohazard spacesuits cutting down GM crops and disposing of them in sealed containers. By inviting reporters and photographers to document these demonstrations, they very effectively spread terror among the undereducated third-world public, and closer to home, among the hand-wringing middle classes.

Now, I think anyone would agree that you wouldn't do such a drastic(and illegal) thing without very good reason; so there must be a wealth of very good evidence that GM crops are only safely handled by hazmat disposal teams. No doubt the Greenpeace website will enlighten us.

The production of unexpected toxins and allergens. Because genetic engineering is a very imprecise technology, the insertion of foreign genes can stimulate the production of unexpected proteins, which may prove toxic or allergenic.

It could never be honestly described as a "very imprecise technology"; gene manipulation requires great precision, and produces far more precisely designed results than can be hoped for with 'natural' cross pollination. The very purpose of the research is to avoid toxic or allergenic results. When these results are found in GM crops, those products are not sent to the market. A large part of science involves learning how to make things better. Do we stop all scientific research in every field because learning how to make things better also teaches us what makes them worse?

Antibiotic resistance. Scientists add genes that confer resistance to common antibiotics.

What they meant to say is that some GM research seeks to find ways to make crops resistant to harmful bacteria, by incorporating the right toxins into the crop, thus eliminating the need to apply that toxin separately in the form of synthetic or organic pesticides (yes, organic pesticides contain the same toxins found in synthetic pesticides — they have to, otherwise they wouldn't function). Finding ways to manage this process to avoid creating resistant pests has been a major area of study in farming science for centuries. This is a farming problem that exists independently of GM. GM neither creates not exacerbates this issue.

Effects on the Environment. Genetically engineered crops represent new and potentially invasive forms of life.

All plant species are potentially invasive, and that's why farmers use good management techniques. There's no reason you should be expected to do this any more or any less with GM crops as you have always had to do with all crops.

Contamination of seeds and crops. People are still increasingly finding even non-GE stocks contaminated. This is due to cross pollination where contaminated pollen is carried by wind or as seeds spread out in the environment or are mixed up during handling.

This has always been true of all plants. Cross pollination has nothing to do with GM. It is responsible for all the biodiversity of plant life on the planet. Calling it "contamination" is simply using a weasel word to raise alarm about a perfectly natural, normal process.

GE foods remove consumer choice. Because of the widespread contamination caused by GE crops and the fact that many GE crops are not kept separate in the food system, consumers in the Philippines have been denied the right to choose not to eat genetically engineered food.

Again, this has always been true of all food crops. Virtually all modern food crops — cereals, corn, rice — are the result of human hybridization. Is Greenpeace applying this criticism to all food crops, or only to those developed by for-profit companies? Is this a scientific objection, or an ideological objection?

Biopiracy. In order to achieve the desired traits chemical companies often use genes acquired from plants, animals and bacteria found in poorer countries. In effect these genes are being stolen from the poor to feed corporate profits.

And what is Greenpeace's most frequent argument in favour of maintaining Brazilian rain forest? The forest, says Greenpeace, acts "as a crucial medicine chest for pharmaceutical advance." When it serves their purposes, Greenpeace is all in favour of using substances from plants in poor countries. But when someone else does it to feed people, suddenly it's "biopiracy". This is the height of hypocrisy. Increasing knowledge by studying genetics in a different country is good for everyone. Is this really the best Greenpeace can do?

Loss of Farmers Rights. Because genetically engineered seeds are patented, the seed company can maintain strict control over how the seeds are used.

This is true of all patented products in the world. Even Greenpeace retains strict control over their legally protected properties, profiting from T-shirt and other tree-hugging merchandise, and prosecuting those who violate their copyrights. This is yet another hypocritical and irrelevant argument that has nothing to do with the science or safety of GM.

Genetic engineering is unnatural. Because genetic engineering creates new living organisms that would never naturally occur, many people hold moral and spiritual objections to it.

Finally, an honest and factual objection. There's nothing at all wrong with having moral and spiritual opinions. What is wrong is calling them science, and using them to deny food to poor people to whom your spiritual notions may not be as important as feeding their starving children. And do you think there is anything natural about farming? Do you think that-without human interference- everything would've grown in neat little lines on flat fields in conveniently deforested areas and found some means of being uniformly fertilised and protected from blights and insects?

And yet, these are the best reasons Greenpeace can come up with to defend the act of terrorising Filipino and African farmers, or the tearing up of blight-free potato crops in the UK, or for similar acts of vandalism in France.

I'll leave it to Dr Borlaug to conclude:

"Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things."

That's some good work there, boys

More Fail

failblog.org


Well, quite.

The Balloon Debate

"Out you go Gordon"

A friend of Mrs Slug is a teacher at a secure unit for troubled youngsters (i.e. kids who've got 'issues' and have been locked up for their own good).
The other day they were staging some group exercises to get them thinking about issues, decisions and consequences. The scouts have a description of the idea here.
Brief summary: you've got a group of people in a pretend hot air balloon which is descending and needs to lose an occupant if the remainder are to survive. Each person in the balloon is given a role and has three minutes to argue why they are not to be jettisoned for the common good. And you can keep going with the remaining people until you have one left, who should be the most deserving of not been chucked.

As an example one of the first groups had for it's occupants: Father Christmas, The Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny. Everyone was pretty sure that Santa got to stay because his existence was more beneficial to them. The Fairy and the Bunny decision was a bit more contentious because how old you were determined the overall benefit of not having him topped.
You get the idea.

Anyway one group had as it's balloon occupants:

Gordon Brown,
a Policeman,
and a Social Worker.

(these are kids in custody, remember, who've had plenty of experience of these last two. In fact it would've been the word of a copper or an SW which would've had them put away)

'Gordon' went first. He thought for a while, consternation written all over his young face, and then addressed his peers:

"I know what the Policeman does, and I know what the social worker does, and I know what both of them do for society. But I'm not sure about the Prime Minister; in fact I don't think I'm good for anything at all. I vote that I be thrown overboard."

And after a brief discussion, the others swiftly agreed, and Gordon was duly lofted.

Sometimes you think there might be some hope for the country after all.

WTF?

Sorry, I seem to have been hit in the face with two metric tonnes of irony.

I'm going for a lie down.

I don't like lentils

Created by LPUK

According to LPUK I am 100% liberal.
Which is nice.

Of course, the term has been corrupted of late (particularly across the pond) to mean 'socialist' or something a bit 'lefty'. When what it actually means is 'leave me alone and I'll leave you alone, and lets both of us leave everyone else alone on the proviso that they leave us alone'.

Snappy, I'm sure you'll agree.

Andrew Wakefield = Hoon

A face that needs a shovel, yesterday

You have probably heard of Dr Andrew Wakefield. About ten years ago he and others published a small study of only 12(fucking TWELVE!) subjects in the Lancet. This small study sparked a huge controversy - Wakefield used it to claim that the MMR (mumps measles and rubella) vaccine caused autism. As a result compliance with the MMR dropped from 92% in the UK down to 85%, and measles cases soared from only 58 cases in 1998 to 1,348 cases in 2008. Which is just over a 2000% increase. Nice going, Doc.

Now the importance of this cannot be understated. Because no vaccination is perfect, in order to be effective more than 95% of kids need to be vaccinated. Below this and we risk compromising even those who have been vaccinated. This is why, if you choose not to vaccinate your kids you're not only putting them at risk, but also those who have(or can't); otherwise I'd be all for letting Darwin deal with your genes.
Oh and despite how many people you may know who caught the disease and shook it off with no long term problems ("Never did me any harm" etc.), it still kills about 3 in every 1000 cases in the developed world.
In the case of our 1348 cases, two children died. Guess who I blame.

Anyway, it turns out that whilst some have given Wakefield the benefit of the doubt regarding whether he was incompetent or knowingly fraudulent about his 'study', Brian Deer at the Times has found out that his biased and bullshit study results might of been fiddled to suit his scaremongering.

However, our investigation, confirmed by evidence presented to the General Medical Council (GMC), reveals that: In most of the 12 cases, the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records. Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal.

If true, this would lend credence to the theory that he was less misguided as he was a lying murdering bastard spreading anxiety in the minds of concerned parents everywhere in order to turn a buck.

This is all after he discovered that Wakefield had patented his own 'alternative' MMR vaccine prior to conducting his research, and would stand to make a massive profit if he could reduce confidence enough in the existing vaccine. After this was revealed all his co-authors disowned the paper and the Lancet printed a retraction. But the damage has been done now.

But hey, at least Andy is alright.

Meanwhile, in less outright fucking stupid places, Measles has been eliminated altogether.

Civil Servant apologises for being honest

A man having second thoughts, yesterday

Adviser 'sorry' for Diploma jibes

The civil servant in charge of science at England's universities department has apologised for criticising the new Diplomas as "schizophrenic".

Apparently Prof Smith made the fatal error of pointing out the glaringly obvious fact that the government should sort out the existing qualifications before going off half-cocked on an entirely new one. Of course they can't, because in order to address the lack of confidence in GCSEs/A-levels they would have to, you know, make them hard again; and that would mean yesterday's A-C grades would become today's C-E grades. That makes for bad tractor production stats, Comrade.

Similarly, we can't join in with existing qualifications like the International Baccalaureate (as preferred by some of the leading private schools) because it would only highlight the difference in quality of our school leavers when compared to those of other countries. I imagine the contrast would not be flattering.

It also means that if anyone(the next government for example) did get a grip of the system, and made the existing qualifications viable and worthwhile again, we would have an obvious demarcation point between the education system then and the education system now; and the students then would be marked apart from the students now, who would be in turn tarnished by the dates on their CV as being a product of the dead-band years of mediocrity. Not a great handicap to throw on someone in the slimmed down employment hard times which are a comin', but another lasting reminder of the shattering incompetence in all matters of this failed government.

As a final aside, this quote from Prof Smith is brilliant:

"If you ask a lot of scientists, chemists and engineers what turned them on in the first place, I am afraid it was things like making bombs.

"I think both in terms of funding, in terms of qualified teachers, and the insidious effects of health and safety legislation, we may have done something rather damaging to that fundamental curiosity.

"We need more explosions in schools."

This is SO true, but I don't know how well it would sit with Jacqui.
However, I feel I must point out to all the students (real ones, that is: doing subjects involving maths) that I'm an Engineer and I've worked in Nuclear, Defence and a smidge of Nuclear Defence and the one rule I'd go by is: The more interesting it sounds, the more soul crushingly boring it can possibly be. They did get me through the door though....

Now it's just embarrassing

After the rest of the world watched amused as the UK came grinding to a halt over the last week because of some wintry weather in winter, it appears we are to be subject to further international humiliation as our pathetic and verminous government kowtow to scary men with beards. If you're the government of a modern, developed country you don't arbitrarily limit the travel arrangements of the elected representatives of friendly neighbors. You just don't. This is banana republic stuff.

No one has the right to freedom from offence. If someone says something that 'offends' you and your precious sensibilities, either respond in kind or ignore them. It is not the role of government to dictate what is or is not offensive. The problem is of course , that this particular govenment doesn't agree and has legislated to that effect.
The boy Miliband said:

We have profound commitment to freedom of speech but there is no freedom to cry 'fire' in a crowded theatre and there is no freedom to stir up hate, religious and racial hatred, according to the laws of the land.

I hate this trite Fisherprice 'Baby's First book of Civil Liberties' waffle, and some authoritarian arse can always be relied upon to regurgitate it whenever they wish to curtail free speech.
The analogy is a bad one, anyway. If there actually is a fire, we can -and have a duty to- shout 'fire' as loudly as possible. Plainly Mr Wilders believes he can smell flames. And it wasn't against 'the laws of the land' until this government brought in it's blatantly Orwellian hatespeech laws.

Say what you like about Geert -I think he's a prick, and there is a crushing irony in him wanting the Koran banned in the same way as Mein Kampf is in Holland (book burning anyone?)- but at least he stands for something. I'm pretty sure that whilst he has fans and detractors, most civilised onlookers will be united in their contempt of the shabby and unprincipled crew running this country into the ground; and of us for allowing them to represent us in this fashion.

I recall being angry, bemused and frustrated watching the antics of ZNL over the course of their tenure; but this is a new low.

Яolcats

Your friendly neighbourhood slug is waist deep in hot neutron action, and so I haven't written anything for a while. This will be remedied soonest.
In the meantime, check out some eastern bloc lolcats:

http://rolcats.com/

Your floral offering serves as no deterrent to the inevitable, betrayer.

You will now join me in oblivion.

The indignant Russian speakers in the comments make it for me.