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Articles of Note

A variety articles that have caught my eye over the past couple of days. Firstly, the brilliant Tom Holland and Nabeelah Jaffer debate religion and the origins of Islam in New Statesmen:

I think in the early history of what emerges as rabbinical Judaism, of Christianity and of Islam, you see a near-identical process: the gradual fashioning, out of a great swirl of often inchoate rituals, convictions and scriptures, of a distinct religion that is coherent, in terms of both doctrine and institutions. Watchtowers and barriers go up, the aim being to keep the faithful inside set limits and to keep non-believers out. Histories are then written which make it seem as though the religion has always existed in the form that it now possesses, right from the very beginning…

Inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, discusses the issue of online privacy in the Guardian:

Of all internet developments, Berners-Lee said those costing him the most sleep were attempts by governments to tighten their control of or spy on the internet, which he said amounted to “a destruction of human rights”. He was highly critical of British government plans to expand surveillance of communication to include emails, social media and Skype, as well as monitoring all web use by individuals.

Foreign Policy magazine discusses how to nationalise an oil company, inspired by the Argentine President’s recent move.

It’s always preferable to handle these sorts of things with a boardroom handshake, but sometimes a firmer hand is needed. In 2009, Chávez mobilized troops to assist in the seizure of 60 oil service companies as part of his gradual takeover of the oil industry.

In 2006, Bolivian President Evo Morales ordered foreign oil companies — including Repsol — to renegotiate their contracts with the government within six months or leave the country. Just to make his point clear, he sent troops to occupy 56 oil and gas sites throughout the country.

Argentina has wasted no time. The government representative on YPF’s board reportedly arrived at work early today with a list of Spanish executives who had been banned from the company’s headquarters.

Finally, the Atlantic discusses why austerity is destroying Europe.

Europe’s policymakers have blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the workings of which they do not understand. They’re not evil. But they’re almost certainly wrong. Rather than consider the possibility that the economy might work differently than they think, they have settled on a simple message: The beatings will continue.

Apparently all that endless stuff in the right-wing press about it being right that the poorest pay for the sins of the rich via slashing welfare, limiting their rights and deliberately raising unemployment because of ideology, turned out not to be such a good idea for the economy, let alone people. As some have been writing about for months and months.

Green Talk with Zac Goldsmith

Zac Goldsmith, green campaigner and former editor of the Ecologist, is possibly the only Tory MP who is not engaged in the business of scumbaggery. This is a pretty interesting interview in which he talks about the transition from campaigns to the political machine, and current UK green policy.

To Bee Or Not To Bee

There’s a particularly fascinating article on the Guardian summarising some current strands of research into bee population collapses across the world. It’s fascinating in and of itself, of course – that, according to the Harvard Department of Environmental Health, a widely used pesticide containing neonicotinoids, a deadly nerve agent, is the likely culprit of “sharp worldwide declines in honeybee colonies”. Unsurprisingly, releasing a nerve toxin into the environment turns out not to be a great idea after all.

“The significance of bees to agriculture cannot be underestimated,” says Lu. “And it apparently doesn’t take much of the pesticide to affect the bees. Our experiment included pesticide amounts below what is normally present in the environment.”

To put that in context, it is estimated that the loss of bees would cost the UK economy £1.8bn in terms of having to hand-pollinate the crops that “bees service for free” (other parts of the world are already forced to do this).

The above results are consistent with a wide range of other studies now, dating back years:

Mickaël Henry, at INRA in Avignon, France, agreed with Lu that action is urgently needed on neonicotinoids. “We now have enough data to say authorisation processes must take into account not only the lethal effects, but also the effects of non-lethal doses.” In other words, testing whether the pesticide use kills bees stone dead immediately is no longer good enough, given the hard evidence now available that sub-lethal doses cause serious harm.

The second reason I find this interesting is the classic smear response from Bayer CropScience, who manufacture the pesticide in question, stating that the research was “factually inaccurate and seriously flawed”.

You might have noted companies frothing at the mouth like this before, as it’s exactly the kind of response that tobacco companies deliberately used to discredit the science connecting smoking and cancer, as well as our old favourite, oil companies attempting to discredit the science of global warming. The aim being to spread as much doubt as possible, as quickly as possible, to negate the impacts of the science with the general public, but more importantly the government.

For those of you interested in Bayer’s track record for environment and public health, there’s a neat summary here and also here. It’s pretty shocking stuff, but par for the course for a chemicals company.

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus

Great Bear Rainforest

There is so much bad news about the environment these days. Given that we in the UK have a wilfully blind and destructive government (even though this is a terrible attitude for the economy, for jobs and growth) it’s nice to see a spot of good news from the past few years. In fact, it is wonderful to see habitat protected for future generations to enjoy and indeed for the natural world itself to be left alone. Reminds me why we bother caring in the first place.

James Hansen: Why I must speak out about climate change

It would be immoral to leave these young people with a climate system spiraling out of control

And yet, that’s what we’re doing.