For several years we’ve been hearing reports that moderate consumption of alcoholic beverages is a “heart healthy” activity. And for almost as long I’ve been saying, Follow the money. If you trace the funding for such studies back to their sources you find the wine industries of France and California footing the bill. Now it looks as though I’ve been right all along. “All those health benefits of moderate drinking may be based on nothing but a common methodological error in the studies, a meta-analysis suggested,” reports Medpage Today along with numerous other sources. A “common methodological error”? Wasn’t it Mark Twain who said, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics? When the wine industry is footing the bill for data analysis the error is not merely methodological, which is far too neutral a term. This is the spinning of data to support an industry. Various vested interests–grape growers, wine makers, retail outlets, and especially the federal government of the United States–want you to believe that alcoholic beverages are somehow “healthy.” The tobacco industry would like you to believe the same thing about cigarettes and, historically, that industry has engaged in the same sort of data spin as the wine industry has been pulling for the past decade or so. All of this is designed to divert our dizzy little short-attention-span minds from the obvious: alcohol is a dangerous drug–but it’s legal. Meanwhile, the planet’s only safe intoxicant is demonized throughout the world. It’s time to call the bull-shitters’ bluff: make alcohol illegal and legalize cannabis.
Archive for March, 2006
States’ Rights?
Rep. Cathy McMorris has done it again. This avowed conservative and Bushite, dedicated (she says), to small government and states’ rights, on March 8 voted yes on the National Uniformity of Food Act. This bill voids the rights of individual states to determine food quality and safety and places that power with the federal government. Says the Union of Concerned Scientists, “The bill would remove states’ power to warn consumers about mercury contamination or arsenic in bottled water, void California’s Proposition 65 which requires labeling on food products containing carcinogens, and cost taxpayers more than $100 million to implement. [The bill] is backed by large food manufacturers and trade organizations that have contributed millions of dollars to members of Congress.” Please contact your senators and ask them to oppose this bill.
V.
review by Brian Charles Clark
V.
Thomas Pynchon
HarperPerennial, 2005 (reprint)
Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V., was published in 1963 when its author was 26 years old. Forty-plus years on, it’s easy to see V. and Pynchon as the highly influential—and influenced—novel and writer they are. William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac are present in the fluid free association of Pynchon’s writing, while the novel is clearly a force field surrounding and influencing the likes of Richard Powers and Don DeLillo (especially with their interest in conspiracy) as well as T.C. Boyle and J.G. Ballard, to name just a few.
V. is an amazing piece of work and one that stands the conventional structure of the novel on its head:
Write Your Senator!
“Dear Senators Cantwell and Murray: I’m ashamed to admit that I once thought you were pretty good senators. But you and your party’s lack of support for Senator Feingold’s move to censure President Bush for his crimes against civil society, the people of Iraq, and the people of the world through torture and wrongful imprisonment, leave me sick at heart and stomach. You can count on me to do whatever I can to see that you are not reelected. No more Democrats, the party of the chickens. And no more Republicans, the part of the chickenhawks.” Use this letter as a model, if you like; and contact your senators using this form.
RIP – Ali Farka Touré
Beloved guitarist and statesman Ali Farka Touré died last week in Mali. The two-time Grammy winner is probably best know in the U.S. for his collaboration with Ry Cooder, Talking Timbuktoo. Corey Harris has written a lovely appreciation of Touré in Counterpunch, while the BBC has published a simpler obituary. Touré leaves behind a wife, eleven children and a new solo album.
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
review by Brian Charles Clark
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Giorgio Bassani
Trans. by William Weaver
Everyman’s Library, 2005
The ancient Greek word temenos suggests what lies at the heart of Giorgio Bassani’s melancholy novel: a walled reserve, a sacred space unmolested by the bustle of everyday political concerns surrounding it. A garden, in other words, is not only symbolic of a refuge; it is that refuge in the most ancient and material sense of the word. The garden of the Finzi-Contini family is indeed a reserve and refuge, its high walls holding at bay the implacable banality of fascism and anti-semitism that surges beyond its bricks.
In 1938, after knowing the Finzi-Continis for years, the young, unnamed narrator whom critics have come to call B, is invited within the walls. The daughter of the Finzi-Continis, Micòl, suggests they play tennis in order to divert themselves from finishing their theses. The Finzi-Contini garden becomes a temple of tennis: the young people gathering and playing in the garden are all Jews banned by fascist law from playing at the community courts in their Italian city of Ferrara. Read the rest of this entry »
Go FOIA Yourself
Ever wondered what the FBI has on you? Here’s a Freedom of Information request made simple. (The FBI has nothing on me. Not sure if that’s good or bad.)
