The American Academy of Mircobiology released their report on Antibiotics in Agriculture. Their conclusion was that there wasn't enough information to draw any conclusions.

So William Webster ran the audit committe of a now insolvent company under investigation for fraud. In fact, he fired his accountants when they raised concerns about accounting practices. Harvey Pitt knew about it but didn't bother to inform anyone else at the SEC [on the other hand, they are the fucking SEC -- shouldn't they be able to figure this shit out for themselves?]. None of this should surprise anyone. But said company's line of work may sound curiously, uh, archaic:

U.S. Technologies invests in young Internet companies and runs a contract labor company using prison inmates.

[I meant the forced labor, although it is clearly naive of me to find that more archaic than internet start-ups].

Is anyone dumber than Harvey Pitt? This is what the WSJ said about Webster last week:

Why Judge Webster would want to play along with this is a mystery. He has little expertise in auditing, and the suspicion in financial markets, however unfair, will be that he's Mr. Pitt's factotum. Mr. Webster deserves better than to be dragged into service as political eyewash at this stage of his career.

No one expects cleansing miracles from the accounting board, but it will help financial markets if everyone believes that it is genuinely independent. Its most important work will be in the first two years when it sets general industry mores and some enforcement precedents.

One reason the U.S. recovers from its business scandals faster than, say, Japan is that it cleans up better. The political and bureaucratic connections that block reform and punishment in Tokyo get exposed and overcome in the U.S., and investor faith is restored more quickly. That's a point Mr. Webster could make to Mr. Pitt when turning down his job offer.

This Washington Post article on Slow Food in Florence focuses on pappa al pomodoro (which, oddly, is what I made for dinner last night). By comparison the attempt to make Swanson TV Dinners look sexy is pathetic. While the Florentine chef who refuses to serve pasta because it is foreign (i.e., not Tuscan) may seem extreme, the converse -- boosting frozen food sales by adding "Santa Fe" rice to a chicken meal -- is much worse. Not to mention capitalizing on Tyson's brand. Why don't they just put Emeril's fucking picture on it?

I have to say I am a little surprised at the near total lack of media coverage of last week's Salone del Gusto in Turin. La Stampa has a special section. Or you could just read Petrini's (predictable) reaction to the Soil Association report.

Why the japanese banking crisis is really scary [NYT]

If banks were forced to call in loans to pay off depositors, and if those loans financed their customers' dollar holdings, Japanese companies would be forced to sell their dollars for yen. Real money and purchasing power would then leave the United States as the conversion weakened the dollar, forcing a rise in interest rates and import prices and further raising the risk of recession.

I will remember Paul Wellstone, with Krugman, as a genuine populist:

Almost every politician in modern America pretends to be a populist; indeed, it's a general rule that the more slavishly a politician supports the interests of wealthy individuals and big corporations, the folksier his manner.

While I was away
ISNAR was trying to figure out if biotech is really going to help farmers in developing countries; Pioneer Hi-Bred and Dow AgroScience showed no love to inconvenient science; David Quist criticised chloroplast GE on ISIS [cpGE is the next-generation technique that is supposed eliminate gene transfer and be more reliable]; and lots of other bad things I got to avoid.

Observations from Europe
1. KLM served me quorn. I tried a tiny bite of it; it didn't taste bad, except insofar as it was airline food, but I found it much more disconcerting than, say, my andouillette from the day before. Isn't it odd that they have no qualms about eating this shit, while banning all GM food? I'm really starting to think the whole thing is almost exclusively a trade war.

2. The south of France is still fucked from those floods. A lot of roads are still closed and the vines are covered with mud. It was definitely much worse west of the Rhône -- Châteauneuf-du-Pape and the Dentelles seemed ok, but we'll have to see.
As far as European disasters go, have you noticed that Mt. Etna is exploding?

3. I take no solace in the fact that I predicted the Angels would be better than anyone thought -- in spring training I told my dad, I swear, that it wouldn't surprise me if they made the playoffs. That's pretty good compared to the expert predictions, but it's not like I put money on it when I had the chance. The only good thing that will come of this is managers (and GMs) making entertainingly stupid decisions. Expect a marked increase in contact hitters and the hit-and-run.

4. Just because you don't think your French isn't that bad doesn't mean it isn't.

good riddance
In reckless disregard of the State Dept.'s warnings, I'm leaving the country for a couple weeks. In the meantime you can read this Times article on the attempted reduction of allergenicity in plants with genetic engineering. If the WHO's rather elementary Q&A on GM food (guess what: it's safe to eat so far but we don't know about environmental effects) isn't cutting it, check out all the docs gathered here or read the inaugural issue of Environmental Biosafety Research. Learn about the latest listeria recall from the USDA or google news. When you're done, follow the news at cursor to see if I've been killed yet.

Jason Leopold may not be the smartest journalist, but it doesn't sound like he's just lying. So I wonder if the key Thomas White email Krugman quoted is really fake. It would be nice if Krugman would confirm or deny some of his details.

Attention accountants, captains of industry, and assorted other douchebag geniuses: stick it to the little people all you want, but stop fucking with your wife. Assholes.

Morgan Stanley's chief economist says the globalization of the service economy is going to be a primrose path to deflation:

The US and a US-centric world are in the throes of the most disinflationary pricing cycle ever experienced in services. To the extent that the globalization of services is only in its infancy, the once-natural cushion against deflation is likely to get thinner and thinner. The endgame of global deflation can no longer be dismissed out of hand. Unlike the past, it will now be exceedingly difficult for services to save the day.

Makes sense to me. Considering that the only way we're staving off recession now is record borrowing thanks to Greenspan's continuing housing bubble, deflation would be very bad for the US economy. And global deflation is even scarier. Though Brazil probably wouldn't mind.

The market will decide
The Iowa business school is running a real-money Congressional Control Futures Market, in case you're wondering how the election will turn out.

The USDA is taking care of your food safety. Don't worry about it [from memepool]. Thank God they're taking care of organic food for us too.

Speaking of which, the LA Times and the Chron have more on the effects of USDA certification. The former explains why complaints about the program are more significant than a bunch of hippies whining about being sold out by the man:

Organic farming, once seen as the salvation for the small farm, has become increasingly difficult to manage and only marginally more profitable, growers say, as large players with greater economies of scale have muscled in and driven down prices. "It's much harder now to start an organic farm than it was in the past," said R. Ford Denison, an agriculture professor and director of organic farming research at UC Davis. And he said the increased involvement of large farms is "probably having a more negative effect on the profitability of small organic farms than increasing demand is having a positive effect."

Which is not the only reason the USDA is missing the point

Plus, US backs off on GM food fight with EU -- thanks to which U.S. farmers can still find uncontaminated seed (here); more industrial monoculture "externalities"

The Society of Toxicology has concluded that GM food is in fact "substantially equivalent" to regular food for the purposes of food safety. Read this if you're worried about that.

Another big report on California AgBiotech is here. And Mark Schapiro, the correspondent from last week's Bill Moyers show on GM food, also has a long article in The Nation.

Wascally Waksal (sorry) [Forbes]
Dan Ackman notes that the amazing thing about ImClone isn't that the CEO repeatedly forged documents, but rather that the company has never brought a single product to market, lost between $10 and $100 million every year since 1984, and continued to exist -- with a market cap of over $5 billion.

Remember Long Term Capital Management? That's the hedge fund the Fed had to bail out in '98. Why should you care? Because J.P. Morgan Chase has $26 trillion in derivatives. They're not going to do so well in a recession, or if their credit is downgraded.

Wait, that already happened.

source = ethel

You don't know you're drinking organic wine because it's not labelled: people think it sucks, and you can't call it organic if you use sulfites, no matter what you did to the grapes. But grape growers in Cali at least think it's worth it:

Practices such as composting and controlling weeds by hand rather than with herbicides can be expensive, and most vintners acknowledge that, initially, there are additional costs to farming organically. There's also a lot of ongoing paperwork for anyone who's certified. But in the long run, some say, organic farming can cost less.

Bynum says he has cut his water use by half because the soil is so healthy. And, of course, he's not buying a lot of chemicals. Sanford looks at the additional labor costs this way: ``I think it's a trade-off between buying chemicals and paying people. I'd much rather pay people.''

See this Wine Spectator article on sulfites. I just had an astounding unsulfured Morgon and I was blown away, but the process is very tricky, expensive, and obviously better suited to Beaujolais than anything else.

According to Michael Moore et al., Senator Byrd is contemplating a filibuster to block Joint Resolution 46 (Bush's carte blache to start a war whenever he gets around to it), and is soliciting comments via email. Whether or not the latter part is true, you could certainly read his excellent remarks from last week, and beseech your own delegation to help him out. Certainly a better venue for his talents than the Civil Rights Act of 1963, which was filibustered for 77 days, of which Byrd went 14 hours straight on the night of June 9th.

The Times's "militant morality tale" about the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is instructive; instead of showing the fatal turn of the movement's embrace of radical Islam (as it purports to do), it demonstrates the inexorable logic of the authoritarian regimes that with US support (and Russian, let's not forget) fabricate the radicalism they want to destroy. See the article on the hamstrung Arab governments for further details.

Good point [FT]

Leftwing Spaniards think the Vatican should not be making saints out of collaborators of fascist regimes, while liberal Catholics remain suspicious of Opus Dei's power-building within the hierarchy.

Bill Moyers's show did a segment on GM food last week. I've really got to pay more attention to the PBS schedule. They've got a real nice website, with a transcript:

DR. MICHAEL PHILLIPS, PHD, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR FOR FOOD AND AGRICULTURE, BIOTECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY ORGANIZATION (BIO): If you're the government of Mexico, hopefully you've learned a lesson here and that is that it's very difficult to keep a new technology from, you know, entering your borders particularly in a biological system....

We're approving them here in the United States, to the South of Mexico, we've got Brazil, we've got Argentina, that's adopting these technologies and so it really is incumbent upon the Mexican government to step up the process and get your regulatory system in place so that you can begin accepting these new products and give your farmers the opportunity to choose.

Plus: GM contamination of organic crops is starting to become a real problem; the poultry industry shits a brick at the spector of allowing organic chickens to walk around; more anti-organic specious math from the Hudson Institute.

Remember the Maine? [NYT]

"We have never pulled the massive trigger of our weapons on a nation that has not attacked us first," said Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, slamming her fist on a lectern.

Note to media:

"There is no war," Remington wrote to his boss. "Request to be recalled." Remington's boss, William Randolph Hearst, sent a cable in reply: "Please remain. You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war."

Some other douchebag on the Times op-ed page is also a little confused about this:

Mexico attacked United States troops in 1846 because they had moved into disputed border territory; President James Polk used this as a convenient casus belli, but he was preparing a war message for Congress even before the attack. A half century later there was no credible evidence (there still isn't) that the Spanish sank the Maine in Havana harbor; Congress declared war anyway to liberate Cuba and flex American muscle. And the United States entered Vietnam not to avenge two attacks on American warships in the Gulf of Tonkin (one of which didn't occur) but because President Lyndon B. Johnson wanted to prevent the spread of Communism.

This is not to suggest that the United States was necessarily wrong to enter these wars; the Mexican War, Spanish-American War and Vietnam War all had large elements of moral purpose. The point is simply that we have often sought out battle, not waited for it to come to us.

Hearst's circulation was moral purpose? Or was it colonization by sugar companies?

Speaking of which, Braudel (I'm reading The Mediterranean) makes the perhaps obvious point that famine in the preindustrial mediterranean at least was often caused by economies that had been forced to abandon their local crops in favor of cash crop monocultures (i.e., sugar) for their colonial masters (Venice, Portugal). I'm sure this is utterly unrelated to the current problems in, say, Africa.

Here's a defense of the viability of organic agriculture vs. conventional. These people are fucking annoying, because they make you pay to see their references, which seems to me to weaken their case. Here, at least, is one of their sources, Rodale's 15-year trial. I already discussed the "21-year trial" and the tomatoes here.

EPO causes aplaisia [NYT]

"Frankly, I'm not sure we realized when we began just how difficult and complex this would become," said Per Peterson, the chairman of pharmaceuticals research at Johnson & Johnson. "But our knowledge is evolving, and we know much more today than we did a year ago."

This is a great parable. Should we have tested EPO for 20 years until we found a problem with it? No, the number of lives saved outweighs the problems. We should not take it off the market for the same reason. What the story indicates is the limitations of science. Biotechnology is based on luck, and chance (and of course a lot of hard work by people of varying intelligence). EPO is a protein discovered by chance, its functions dicovered by chance (or at least some of them), and the process of its synthesis was designed by chance. That's what trial and error is. And there's nothing wrong with that, it's the fucking definition of science. The problem is the vast number of scientists who want to hide that from you, or else don't even understand it themselves.

For example, a computer just predicted -- for the first time -- the shape of a protein molecule from its amino acid sequence. I bet you thought that kind of thing was something they did all the time. The chain, by the way, was 20 amino acids long. Again, look at the malaria/mosquito genomes:

Chris Curtis, Professor of Medical Entomology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who works on practical methods of controlling malaria, said: "I'm sceptical that the Anopheles mosquito genome will actually be useful in attempts to control malaria in very poor countries and I have a feeling that projects on the genome are done because molecular biologists think they can be done and are exciting to do. "The justifications are then added on afterwards. One suggestion is that one could make tailor-made insecticides. However I doubt if these would be affordable by governments with health budgets of $5 per head per year for all diseases." [BBC]

David Schubert of the Salk Institute in Nature Biotechnology

insufficient attention has been paid to three important issues: first, introduction of the same gene into two different types of cells can produce two very distinct protein molecules; second, the introduction of any gene, whether from a different or the same species, usually significantly changes overall gene expression and therefore the phenotype of the recipient cell; and third, enzymatic pathways introduced to synthesize small molecules, such as vitamins, could interact with endogenous pathways to produce novel molecules. The potential consequence of all of these perturbations could be the biosynthesis of molecules that are toxic, allergenic, or carcinogenic. And there is no a priori way of predicting the outcome. In what follows I outline these concerns and argue that GM food is not a safe option, given our current lack of understanding of the consequences of recombinant technology.

Given that GM plants will sometimes produce different amounts of proteins, and perhaps totally new proteins, as compared with the parental species, what are the possible results? A worst-case scenario would be that an introduced bacterial toxin is modified to make it toxic to humans. Prompt toxicity might be rapidly detected once the product entered the marketplace if it caused a unique disease, and if the food were labeled for traceability, as were the GM batches of tryptophan. However, cancer or other common diseases with delayed onset would take decades to detect, and might never be traced to their cause. Conversely, plant flavonoids and related molecules have great health benefits, and there is evidence that these can be depleted in GM crops.

These points were raised to some extent by Jane Rissler of UCS on CSPAN yesterday [Washington Journal, 9/30/02]. I have to say I felt sorry for her interlocutor, who seemed like a decent guy forced to hew to untenable positions by his industry paymasters. Of course it is in the interest of such industries to hire people who seem decent.

Meanwhile, a study in Science shows that a single gene confers DDT resistance in Drosophilia:

The results reinforce the hypothesis that resistance genes need not arise de novo to cause problems in a particular region. Through natural migration or human-mediated transport, resistant pests have the capacity to disperse and transfer genes over large areas in very short periods of time. This phenomenon has previously been described for mosquitoes that resist insecticides by amplification of insecticide-detoxifying carboxylesterase genes. Sequencing of DNA surrounding these genes implied a common origin and spread, probably through passive migration on ships or airplanes (3). Similar geographic spread has been confirmed for crop pests such as aphids and whiteflies, no doubt facilitated by the extensive global trade in plant produce [e.g., (4)]. The ease with which resistance genes can be transferred over large areas, both nationally and internationally, emphasizes that strategies for resistance management need to be implemented on an area-wide, even global, basis. A recent outbreak of malaria in South Africa was correlated with the spread of resistant mosquitoes from neighboring Mozambique (5).

Cyp6g1 is reported to have an unusually broad substrate specificity. It appears to resist not only DDT but also a range of other insecticide groups, including organophosphates, neonicotinoids (recently developed analogs of nicotine), and benzoylphenylureas (compounds interfering with insect development). These groups encompass strikingly different modes of action and might be considered ideal candidates for rotation strategies aimed at avoiding continuous selection for the same resistance mechanism. Patterns of cross-resistance are, however, very difficult to predict, particularly for detoxification mechanisms, where specificity may depend on subtle features of the chemical structure of insecticides. One important practical consequence is that as such broad-spectrum mechanisms accumulate in pest populations, the risk of resistance extending to new agents increases.

Science is "excited" by the prospects for "managing resistance". In unrelated news, Bell Labs had to fire a physicist for fabricating his data:

Scientists in the field are likewise saddened, although unsurprised, by the panel's findings. "I'm sorry that so many people were working on [replicating Sch�n's results] and couldn't get it to work," says physicist Lydia Sohn of Princeton University, one of the first to notice the duplicate graphs. "But hopefully people will learn something and move forward."

Bell Labs is the research arm of the communications giant Lucent Technology. Its chastening experience has raised questions about peer review, co-author responsibility and career progression in science.