founder of veganism dies... at age 95!

Obituary: Donald Watson
September 2, 1910 - November 16, 2005

DONALD WATSON survived to the age of 95; good propaganda in his campaign to convince the world that there is nothing inherently lethal about a vegan diet. He always regarded himself as a propagandist, in the term’s non-pejorative sense. When interviewed at 92 he was pleased to report that he had lived thus far without resort to medication “either orthodox or fringe”, and with hardly a day’s illness.

His parents were meat-eaters who did not enjoy particularly good health or long lives. His father, a headmaster who had worked his way up from being a farm boy, impressed on his son the importance of never swearing, which was helpful, Watson said, when spreading the word: “It annoys some people, and propagandists should not annoy anyone except with the truth of their message.”

Law to help fishy, four-footed friends in Rome

Who knew the Romans were so concerned with animal welfare?

In the greater animal kingdom, the plight of the little goldfish is especially harsh. The tiny creatures are scooped into plastic bags and awarded at carnivals and fairs. They are confined to bowls where they can do nothing but swim around and around. Some (it has been claimed) go blind.

No more. The municipal government of Rome has entered waters where few city halls dare tread. Under a new law, the city's goldfish are entitled to a proper, full-sized aquarium, and they can no longer be given out as contest prizes.

The rules were drafted by the city of Rome's Office for Animal Rights. The 59-point statute ordering better treatment for all pets, from cats and dogs to birds and lizards, was approved by the City Council last month and will go into effect today.

The unusually strict measure is winning plaudits from animal-rights activists, snarls from pet-shop owners and puzzlement from all quarters about whether the law can actually be enforced. City officials, though, said it was time to take a stand.

'We needed to send a strong message: Pets are not objects,' said Cristina Bedini, an 11-year veteran of the animal-rights office. 'We are saying that owning a pet is a joy, but it is also a duty. Responsible ownership is the only way to fight cruelty.'
...
In addition to protection for fish, the law requires dog owners to walk their canines daily or face a $625 fine. It bans the display of pets-for-sale in store windows, and gives legal recognition to "gattare," the "cat ladies" who feed an army of strays.

Also banned: choke and electrical collars and, for dogs and cats, declawing and the clipping of tails and ears for cosmetic reasons.

Cory Doctorow on movie theaters' ridiculous treatment of paying customers

Cinemas as police-states: why box-office revenue is in decline?

Film previews in Hollywood have long been a police-state affair: turn up at the movies, get frisked, have your valuable phone (which in turn contains your very, very valuable identity) confiscated and entrusted to a teenager earning minimum wage, and then be overtly surveilled through the course of the film.

Now the Hollywood police-state experience has come to Toronto, as James Reid discovered at last week's preview of Derailed. Viewers were wanded with metal-detectors, frisked, had their property confiscated, and so on. The thing is, these measures are becoming more common in regular screenings, too. A ticket-taker at Toronto's Paramount cinema tried to confiscate my still camera last year when he saw me taking pics of my friends in the lobby with it. Sorry, no. You can't have my $500 camera to keep until your $5 matinee is over.

It shouldn't amaze me, but it does. The thing that keeps people turning up at the cinema is the cinema experience -- big screens, the companionship of others, the show of it all. Souring that show with stupid, insulting anti-piracy ads (um, why are you showing condescending, threatening ads to the people who paid money to see the movie -- shouldn't you be targeting the people who don't buy tickets?) is bad enough.

But converting cinemas into airport security zones and asking ushers to act like Sky Marshals is positively suicidal. What fantasyland are MPAA executives inhabiting in which treating your customers like criminals makes them want to go on spending their money at your business?

Pirates vs. Sonics!

Cruise ship Britons attacked by pirates

A LUXURY cruise ship with 22 British tourists aboard survived an attack by Somali pirates armed with rocket-propelled grenades yesterday as it rounded the Horn of Africa.

The 10,000-ton Seabourn Spirit came under fire at about 5.30am. The pirates approached in 25ft speedboats and shot at the ship with the grenade launcher and machineguns. Terrified passengers watched as the pirates tried to get aboard — only to be repelled by crew members who set off what one described as a “loud bang”.
...
“They were firing the rifle and then fired the rocket launcher twice. One of the rockets certainly hit the ship — it went through the side of the liner into a passenger’s suite. The couple were in there at the time so it was a bit of an unpleasant experience.”
...
The Seabourn Spirit, owned by the cruise giant Carnival, was on its way from Alexandria in Egypt to the Kenyan port of Mombasa. It offers the height of luxury, with huge suites, marble bathrooms and more than one crew member to each passenger. Cruises aboard the liner cost from £6,100 for a 16-day sail to £18,270 for an epic 46-day voyage.

The liner used a sonic blaster to foil the pirates. Developed by American forces to deter small boats from attacking warships, the non-lethal weapon sends out high-powered air vibrations that blow assailants off their feet. The equipment, about the size of a satellite dish, is rigged to the side of the ship.

The waters off the Somali coast are among the most dangerous in the world. They are occasionally patrolled by a combined taskforce, known as CTF150, currently under the command of the French navy.

Somalia has had no recognised government since 1991. There have been at least 23 pirate attacks off its coast this year alone. Andrew Livingston, a spokesman for the National Union of Marine, Aviation and Shipping Transport Officers, described its long coastline as a “massive problem area”.

“We’ve always said it’s going to take a major incident to get something done,” he said. “We’ve gone from what used to be something like maritime mugging 20 years ago to really sophisticated attacks with grenades and rocket-propelled explosives.”

more info about man made meat

New Harvest is a nonprofit research organization working to develop new meat substitutes, including cultured meat — meat produced in vitro, in a cell culture, rather than from an animal.

man made meat

Another idea I predicted might soon be a reality:

When meat is not murder

Researchers have published details in a biotechnology journal describing a new technique which they hailed as the answer to the world's food shortage. Lumps of meat would be cultured in laboratory vats rather than carved from livestock reared on a farm.

Scientists have adapted the cutting-edge medical technique of tissue engineering, where individual cells are multiplied into whole tissues, and applied them to food production. "With a single cell, you could theoretically produce the world's annual meat supply," said Jason Matheny, an agricultural scientist at the University of Maryland. According to researchers, meat grown in laboratories would be more environmentally friendly and could be tailored to be healthier than farm-reared meat by controlling its nutrient content and screening it for food-borne diseases.

Vegetarians might also be tempted because the cells needed to grow chunks of meat can be taken without harming the donor animal.

Experiments for Nasa, the US space agency, have already shown that morsels of edible fish can be grown in petri dishes, though no one has yet eaten the food.

Mr Matheny and his colleagues have taken the prospect of "cultured meat" a step further by working out how to produce it on an industrial scale. They envisage muscle cells growing on huge sheets that would be regularly stretched to exercise the cells as they grow. Once enough cells had grown, they would be scraped off and shaped into processed meat products such as chicken nuggets.

"If you didn't stretch them, you would be eating mush," said Mr Matheny.

The idea of doing away with traditional livestock and growing steaks from scratch dates back at least 70 years. In a horizon-scanning essay from 1932, Winston Churchill said: "Fifty years hence we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium."

Several decades too late, Churchill's vision finally looks set to become a reality.

Lab-raised steaks will be off the menu for some time though. Scientists believe that while tissue engineering is advanced enough to grow bland, homogeneous meat, tasty and textured cuts will have to wait.

"Right now, it would be possible to produce something like spam at an incredibly high cost, but the know-how to grow something that has structure, such as a steak, is a long way off," said Mr Matheny.