Incredibly, the beleaguered citizens are still unrelenting in their protests. Were I in their position, I honestly don’t know if I would have ever kept it going at this point. Human will is a remarkable thing.

If you so choose, you can read more about my reflections on this conflict here. Please feel free to weigh in.

The first and most obvious advantage is the ability to obtain meat without having to kill anything. It may some day be possible to harvest meat no differently than we do crops – to enjoy its nutrition and taste without abetting the horrific and widespread suffering that results. As a would-be vegetarian concerned about the treatment of animals, I find this aspect most favorable. But I know of many non-vegetarians that have qualms about where they get their meat and how. Plenty of people enjoy animal products but the unsavory consequences.

Second, lab-grown meat wouldn’t be as ecologically devastating as industrialized farming. Many people are unaware of the environmental costs of supporting livestock on such a large-scale. Cattle alone literally produce tons of methane gas and excrement, which not only pollutes the local area but erodes our atmosphere. A lot of space and energy is required to support livestock, which means more deforestation and climate-altering CO2. As demand for meat increasing, especially in the fast-growing developing world, these trends will put even more undue stress on our planet.

Which leads to the third cause for support: the current meat-market is wasteful and inefficient, not only for the environment but for people. The billions of livestock we raise require a lot of water and food that could otherwise go to almost as many people. It’s estimated that enough grain to feed 100 million people goes to feed cows whose meat will ultimately feed only 6 million – in a world rife with starvation, this is a travesty, especially considering that meat is consumed more out of luxury than necessity (nutritionally, we don’t need as much meat, if any, as we do the staple grains we lose to provide it). Fresh water is also in short supply in much of the world, so in aggregate terms we’re competing with our own source of food over dwindling water resources.

Plus, if meat can be produced on an industrial scale, it may go a long way to mitigating mass hunger, assuming the process can be made cheaper and the supply mechanisms are more efficient (we already produce a surplus of good globally, yet malnutrition and starvation persist).

Of course, it’ll probably be awhile until we see synthetic meat on the market. As the article notes, scientists are working on improving the taste so it’s more palatable – as crass as it sounds, sensory stimulation probably guides people’s food choices more than any ethical or nutritional concerns. And if the controversy of GM crops is any indication, there will be a lot of reservations about consuming something that was grown in a lab. Such concerns would be understandable, which is why I hope to see more research and debate on this issue.

Please share your own reactions and thoughts.

Hat tip to my friend Javier for sharing this with me.

While his elder brothers pursued scholarly careers, Amerigo embraced the life of a merchant, eventually becoming a clerk for the famous Florentine commercial family, the House of Medici, headed by Lorenzo de Medici. Vespucci eventually won enough favor from his employer to be dispatched to Spain to handle important business there. It was an opportune time, as the Spanish crown was embarking on its age of exploration, providing patronage for a slew of expeditions following Columbus’s famous voyage. In fact, Vespucci provided vital supplies to a number of Indies expeditions, including beef rations for one or two of Columbus’s voyages.

Eventually, at the invitation of King Manuel I of Portugal, Vespucci participated as observer in several voyages that were exploring the east coast of South America between 1499 and 1502. Such expeditions were long and dangerous, but Vespucci was off to a good start: during the first of these voyages, he was aboard the ship that discovered that South America extended much further south than previously thought.

These expeditions, among the first of their kind, became widely known in Europe after two accounts attributed to Vespucci were published between 1502 and 1504. These letters provided exciting details about the then-unnamed new continents, which Vespucci was first credited with recognizing as new lands, not the Indies that many believed.

In 1507, a Latin translation was eventually published by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in Cosmographiae Introductio, a book on cosmography and geography, as Quattuor Americi Vespuccij Navigationes – the Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci. Eventually, most Europeans learned about the newly discovered continents within a few years of their dissemination.

In 1508, after only two voyages to the New World, King Ferdinand of Spain made Vespucci chief navigator of the kingdom, a well-paid and prestigious position created specifically for him. He was commissioned to found a school of navigation that would help to standardize and develop navigation techniques used by Spanish explorers, and even managed to create a rudimentary but fairly accurate method of determining longitude (which would only be surpassed much later by chronometers). He continued his role until dying four years later from natural causes.

As for his best known for, it actually had little to do with him. Some have suggested that Vespucci was exaggerating his role and fabricating details in the two letters that were published in his lifetime (three others were discovered in the 18^th century, but were of dubious authorship). Nowadays, most historians believe that even these two famous letters weren’t even written by him, although they could be fabrications written by others but partly based on his true accounts (it’s still being disputed).

Whoever is responsible, it was the publication and widespread circulation of these letters that may have prompted Waldseemüller, when drawing up an updated map of the world, to name the new continents America, after the man who had shared so much information about them (note that Waldseemüller’s translation was written in Latin, thus changing the explorer’s name to Americus Vespucius, the feminine form of which is America). As he explained, “I do not see what right any one would have to object to calling this part, after Americus who discovered it and who is a man of intelligence, Amerige, that is, the Land of Americus, or America: since both Europa and Asia got their names from women.”

This is just the most commonly accepted of several theories. As with most historical narratives, there are a lot of uncertainties. Whatever the case, it must be quite a fine legacy to be immortalized through two large continents, as well as being the shorthand for one of the most powerful countries in the world.

The researchers published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The age of the seeds is estimated to be between 30,000 to 32,000 years old, making this the oldest organism ever to be “resurrected.” The team recovered them from burrows located very deep beneath the Siberian tundra, some of which contained as many as 600,000 seeds. They were gathered and stored by an ancient species of ground squirrel whose prolific collecting may yet yield more well-preserved samples of other ancient plants.

As of this post, the developments are still ongoing. It remains to be seen if this plant can successfully propagate, or if it will be viable for long. If anyone wants more detailed and expert information on the significance of this finding, I direct you to a great post in Why Evolution Is True from biologist Jerry Coyne.

You can also read one of my earlier posts on yet another plant that was resurrected in a similar way. Though nowhere near as ancient, it was actually extinct until very recently.

What little most people learn is that it was a pretty pointless conflict that didn’t change much, though it does have the distinction of being the only conflict in which the independent United States was invaded and occupied. Oh, and the White House, along with much of the capital, was burned to the ground.

But our neighbors to the north have a very different perspective. The war remains a significant event in their nation’s history, to the extent that it is sometimes considered akin to a war of independence – the creator of a distinct Canadian identity. That’s right – we had fought a war with Canada, albeit before it was a full country.

Nowadays, it’s odd to imagine our two nations having anything more than a diplomatic spat (if even that), much less a full-blown war – aside from the lighthearted jabs against each other’s culture. For as long as anyone in North America can remember, relations between Canada and the US have always been markedly peaceful and productive – for example, we’re one another’s most important trading partners.

But each country’s early history was tenuous. Today’s famously open border wasn’t so welcoming, and the war of 1812 was in many ways a continuation of hostilities from the Revolutionary War. Some historians consider the war to have been a test of American independence too, given how close we came to defeat. The conflict was a lot more significant than most people realize.

In any case, there’s a great article from The Walrus, a Canadian general interest publication, that provides an insightful perspective on the war from the other side of the border. It’s a pretty long read, and a bit nationalistic, but it’s well worth it, whether you’re a history buff or someone who wants to understand another point of view (to me, both are one in the same).

Like most people, Canadians are hardly monolithic in their views. I welcome any readers from the Great White North to share their own viewpoint (not to the exclusion of non-Canadians of course).

I love the aesthetic, and I can see why the company behind it is called Jellyfish Art. It really is a perfect melding of nature and human ingenuity into something beautiful. This remarkable idea deserves the slew of news coverage it’s received. 

You can learn more about this invention, and it amazing young creator Alex, here. I hope to see this become a staple in local pet stores someday. I certainly plan on getting my own one of these days.

Hat tip to my friend Nati for sharing this with me.

Post Script:
Speaking of jellyfish, check out one of my older posts on a fascinating specimen that may hold the key to life extension.

The intractability of this issue leads many people to conclude that its origins lie in the moral and personal failings of the poor themselves. This disparaging view is what fuels the indifference and even hostility towards the underclass that only reinforces their plight. After all, why support programs that benefit people who lazy, irresponsible, or negligent? Why give money to those who don’t deserve it? Wouldn’t they just squander or abuse it like they have ever other opportunity?

Aside from the absurdity and prejudice of painting an entire class of people with such a broad brush, this perception is – to my knowledge – devoid of any empirical or scientific basis. Anyone could base their worldview on limited personal anecdotes or hearsay, but has there ever been a proper examination of what would happen if the poor were given more resources – without conditions or parameters?

Dominion, a grassroots Canadian news source, reported on a fascinating government program from several decades ago that did the politically unthinkable: giving poor people money, no strings attached. This effort was only recently uncovered by Evelyn Forget, a professor who fought to obtain the ample research data, which was gathering dust in a government archive.

Beginning in 1974, Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals and Manitoba’s first elected New Democratic Party government gave money to every person and family in Dauphin who fell below the poverty line. Under the program—called “Mincome”—about 1,000 families received monthly cheques.

Unlike welfare, which only certain individuals qualified for, the guaranteed minimum income project was open to everyone. It was the first—and to this day, only—time that Canada has ever experimented with such an open-door social assistance program.

In today’s conservative political climate, with constant government and media rhetoric about the inefficiency and wastefulness of the welfare state, the Mincome project sounds like nothing short of a fairy tale.

For four years Dauphin was a place where anyone living below the poverty line could receive monthly cheques to boost their income, no questions asked. Single mothers could afford to put their kids through school and low-income families weren’t scrambling to pay the rent each month.

For Amy Richardson, it meant she could afford to buy her children books for school. Richardson joined the program in 1977, just after her husband had gone on disability leave from his job. At the time, she was struggling to raise her three youngest children on $1.50 haircuts she gave in her living room beauty parlour.

The $1,200 per year she received in monthly increments was a welcome supplement, in a time when the poverty line was $2,100 a year.

“The extra money meant that I was also able to give my kids something I wouldn’t ordinarily be able to, like taking them to a show or some small luxury like that,” said Richardson, now 84, who spoke to The Dominion by phone from Dauphin.

As part of the experiment, an army of researchers were sent to Dauphin to interview the Mincome families. Residents in nearby rural towns who didn’t receive Mincome were also surveyed so their statistics could be compared against those from Dauphin. But after the government cut the program in 1978, they simply warehoused the data and never bothered to analyze it.

The federal and provincial governments ended up spending $17 million Canadian dollars on the program, far more than the intended amount. The cost overrun, combined with difficult economic times, contributed to the project’s speedy abandonment. I’d wager that cognitive bias play a role too – like most people, perhaps the officials involved felt it was a clear waste of money, and that even the positive results wouldn’t make up for the costs.

Indeed, touching firsthand accounts notwithstanding, perhaps the benefits were ultimately less than the costs, or maybe other people ended up wasting the misusing the money.

But Forget has culled some useful info from Manitoba labour data. Her research confirms numerous positive consequences of the program.

Initially, the Mincome program was conceived as a labour market experiment. The government wanted to know what would happen if everybody in town received a guaranteed income, and specifically, they wanted to know whether people would still work.

It turns out they did.

Only two segments of Dauphin’s labour force worked less as a result of Mincome—new mothers and teenagers. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies. And teenagers worked less because they weren’t under as much pressure to support their families.

The end result was that they spent more time at school and more teenagers graduated. Those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did.

“People didn’t have to take the first job that came along,” says Hikel. “They could wait for something better that suited them.”

For some, it meant the opportunity to land a job to help them get by.

When Doreen and Hugh Henderson arrived in Dauphin in 1970 with their two young children they were broke. Doreen suggested moving from Vancouver to her hometown because she thought her husband would have an easier time finding work there. But when they arrived, things weren’t any better.

“My husband didn’t have a very good job and I couldn’t find work,” she told The Dominion by phone from Dauphin.

It wasn’t until 1978, after receiving Mincome payments for two years, that her husband finally landed janitorial work at the local school, a job he kept for 28 years.

“I don’t know how we would have lived without [Mincome],” said Doreen. “I don’t know if we would have stayed in Dauphin.”

This conflicts with the popular notion that handouts have a corrosive effect on productivity. In fact, it would seem intuitive that giving someone money without any conditions would lower his or her incentive to work. Instead, the recipients used their newfound resources as an investment, bettering their circumstances in the long-term and thus multiplying the direct benefits.

Meanwhile, freeing up students to focus on their education brings obvious benefits – more attention to learning means good grades, graduation, and (generally-speaking) a better job. If young people can afford to be given better nutrition and healthcare, they’ll be more productive students. The developmental damage and negative stressed caused by poverty accounts for the poor performance of many low-income children.

As it turns out, this aid did more than bestow economic benefits. The positive outcomes were across the board.

Although the Mincome experiment was intended to provide a body of information to study labour market trends, Forget discovered that Mincome had a significant effect on people’s well being. Two years ago, the professor started studying the health records of Dauphin residents to assess the impacts of the program.

In the period that Mincome was administered, hospital visits dropped 8.5 per cent. Fewer people went to the hospital with work-related injuries and there were fewer emergency room visits from car accidents and domestic abuse. There were also far fewer mental health visits.

It’s not hard to see why, says Forget.

“When you walk around a hospital, it’s pretty clear that a lot of the time what we’re treating are the consequences of poverty,” she says.

The trauma of poverty can sometimes produce self-destructive behavior (such as alcoholism or substance abuse), violence, and psychological problems. The subsequent lack of healthcare access can exacerbate these trends and make them more costly for society to bear.

Furthermore, the greater access to healthcare that’s offered by “guaranteed income,” as this kind of financial aid is known in Canada, means addressing health problems before they become more severe and expensive. These savings extend to society as a whole, too.

Give people financial independence and control over their lives and these accidents and illnesses tend to dissipate, says Forget. In today’s terms, an 8.5 per cent decrease in hospital visits across Canada would save the government $4 billion annually, by her calculations. And $4 billion is the amount that the federal government is currently trying to save by slashing social programming and arts funding.

Having analyzed the health data, Forget is now working on a cost-benefit analysis to see what a guaranteed income program might save the federal government if it were implemented today. She’s already worked with a Senate committee investigating a guaranteed income program for all low-income Canadians.

I hope to see Forget’s report soon, as the implications of this project are significant. Not only could it alleviate human suffering at a lesser overall cost, but it changes our perception of human nature. Most people, when given the resources, will do better for themselves, which in the aggregate means overall prosperity for the nation as a whole.

It’d be even better if the Canadian government decided to reinstitute the program and apply it to more areas, or eventually on a national scale. Even some of Canada’s right-wing politicians are receptive to the idea.

Conservative senator Hugh Segal has been the biggest supporter of this kind of GI, claiming it would eliminate the social assistance programs now administered by the provinces and territories. Rather than having a separate office to administer child tax benefits, welfare, unemployment insurance and income supplement for seniors, they could all be rolled into one GI scheme.

It would also mean that anybody could apply for support. Many people fall through the cracks under the current welfare system, says Forget. Not everybody can access welfare and those who can are penalized for going to school or for working a job since the money they receive from welfare is then clawed back.

Most mainstream politicians here in the States, much less those on the right, would be bold enough to publicly support expanding welfare. Even Canada’s broadly liberal society would have qualms about it, for some the reasons I mentioned earlier:

If a guaranteed income program can target more people and is more efficient than other social assistance programs, then why doesn’t Canada have such a program in place already? Perhaps the biggest barrier is the prevalence of negative stereotypes about poor people.

“There are very strong feelings out there that we shouldn’t give people money for nothing,” Mulvale says.

Guaranteed income proponents aren’t holding their breaths that they’ll see such a program here anytime soon, but they are hopeful that one day Canada will consider the merits of guaranteed income.

The cost would be “not nearly as prohibitive to do as people imagine it is,” says Forget. “A guaranteed minimum income program is a superior way of delivering social assistance. The only thing is that it’s of course politically difficult to implement.”

Imagine how much more untenable this program would be in the United States, given that Americans are especially resistant to social policies and government spending. Even if GI was eventually found to be more cost-effective, it’d still be hard to convince people of its merits. There’s as much cynicism towards the state’s ability to do anything efficiently, as there is towards giving the undeserving poor more money for nothing.

But that’s why there needs to be more studies and trials. Maybe Dauphin was a fluke, or the project only works in specific circumstances (smaller population, rural areas as opposed to urban ones, etc). Maybe the benefits end up being outweighed by the costs, or begin to wear-off with time. We simply don’t have enough examples to go by.

Then again, countries such as Brazil and Mexico have enacted very similar GI programs, and their outcomes have generally been favorable too. The US could stand to experiment with similar measures, at least in a limited way, to see how they’d work. With the growing socioeconomic problems that we’re facing, there’s no reason not to be creative with ways to better our society even during a period of austerity. What are your thoughts?

But who prays for Satan? Who in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most, our one fellow and brother who most needed a friend yet had not a single one, the one sinner among us all who had the highest and clearest right to every Christian’s daily and nightly prayers, for the plain and unassailable reason that his was the first and greatest need, he being among sinners the supremest?
- Mark Twain’s Autobiography.

Some of the most tragic biographies I’ve ever read are those of criminals and tyrants. Sometimes, the perpetrators of evil deserve as much sympathy as their victims.

I used to a social experiment in which I’d tell people the story of a nameless figure who often times abused, mistreated, sickly, and in constant suffering throughout their early lives. My listeners would react with sympathy until they found out that such a figure turned out to be Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin.

This isn’t to say these men weren’t monsters. I’m not apologizing for the tremendous horror and agony they wrought upon the world. I’m merely contemplating what sort of factors lead some individuals to become senselessly evil on that level (or any level, for that matter). Evil doesn’t emerge in a vacuum. What sort of things corrupt people in this way?

Usually, the evil-minded are either the product of lifelong trauma – such as poverty, abuse, social oppression, and lack of familial support – or the consequence of genetic and psychological factors that are beyond their control (think of psychopaths).

This leads me to wonder how different history would be if Hitler or Stalin were born into loving families within stable societies, without any mental problems. How many criminals would have been upstanding members of society was it not for an accident of birth placing them in awful conditions.

Indeed, evil actions are rarely intentional in the way most people imagine. That is to say, no one ever believes that what they do is wrong. Humans have a way of rationalizing or self-justifying every action, regardless of how clearly heinous it may seem to everyone else

Some people grew up in a world that was always cruel, so why not behave accordingly? Others never had a chance to understand certain moral and ethical concepts, so how are they to know right from wrong? And many have poorly understood behavioral problems that they cannot help.

In any case, evil for its own sake is a myth, and the few individuals who have ever claimed to do bad things for no good reason are mentally abnormal to begin with.

I sometimes ponder how would’ve turned out if I was born and raised in more negative circumstances. What if I was regularly abused? What if I never knew love, or never received moral and ethical guidance? What if all I ever experienced was hardship, hatred, and apathy? What if I was born with the same neurological abnormalities that lead some people to lack empathy or self-control? Would I have ended up as the person I am now?

It’s highly doubtful; although that’s not to say everyone who experiences these things is guaranteed to be immoral and dysfunctional. We have no choice but to work with the cards we are dealt. We’re mostly shaped by forces beyond our control – the culture, society, time period, and socioeconomic level we are born and raised into at random. All we can do is adapt, and even then, some people are better equipped psychosocially than others.

This leads me to wonder: to what degree can we blame immoral people for their actions? If they never had anyone to guide them properly, or were born with a biologically embedded inability to reason or feel, are they really at fault for what they turn out to be? If their minds were warped by deterministic influences, can they really be said to have any control over their fate?

If so, to what extent – what’s the subsequent solution to the problem of evil, and how do we treat the delinquents of our society? Regardless of evil’s origins, or what solutions (if any) there may be to address it, I think we can agree that the greatest tragedy of evil is that exists in the first place, and that otherwise decent people fall into it for any number of reasons. Will it always be a scourge of the human condition forever? Is it an intractable part of human nature, if there is such a thing.

As always, thoughts and suggestions are welcomed.