Nestle

So Nestle, not content with trying to claim credit for using cow's milk as a laxative despite the fact that Indian medical texts have been recording that knowledge for a thousand years, is now trying to patent the extract of Nigella Sativa, otherwise know as the fennel flower.  This small plant has been used as a cure all remedy for a thousand years, treating everything from vomiting and fevers to skin diseases among the poorest people of the Middle East and Asia.  It has been widely available where Western produced pills and potions have not.

 

But now Nestlé is claiming to own it, and filing patent claims around the world to try and take control over the natural cure of the fennel flower and turn it into a costly private drug.

In a paper published last year, Nestlé scientists claimed to “discover” what much of the poorest of the third world have known for millennia: that nigella sativa extract could be used for “nutritional interventions in humans with food allergy”.

But instead of creating an artificial substitute, or fighting to make sure the remedy was widely available, Nestlé is attempting to create a nigella sativa monopoly and gain the ability to sue anyone using it without Nestlé’s permission. Nestlé has filed patent applications -- which are currently pending -- around the world.

Prior to Nestlé's outlandish patent claim, researchers in developing nations such as Egypt and Pakistan had already published studies on the same curative powers Nestlé is claiming as its own.

 

So not only is Nestle hijacking other peoples research, it is also trying to do the impossible.  The pharmaceutical companies while not do clinical trials on herbal and natural remedies because they cannot be patented and therefore cannot make the companies money.  So how come Nestle, a chocolate and cereal company, can patent a herbal remedy? This does not make sense until you look at Nestlé's bank budget.  It seems if a business has enough money they can do any thing they please.

 

And among companies Nestle has a long track record of not caring about ethics. After all, this is the corporation that poisoned its milk with melamine, purchases cocoa from plantations that use child slave labour, and launched a breast milk substitute campaign in the 1970s that contributed to the suffering and deaths of thousands of babies from poor communities.

But Nestlé is sensitive to public outcry, and that it's been beaten at the patent game before. The easiest way to put pressure on this company is to go to the website of consumer pressure group SumOfUs and sign their petition.  After that it's time to vote with your feet.  If a packet has the name Nestle on it, don't buy the product.  It is seriously annoying when you realise your favourite cereal, Cheerio, are a Nestle product (I'm speaking from experience here) but the only way we can hurt the Big Guys is if we kick them where it hurts - their wallets.  If the big corporations realise that every time they try to put profit before human rights and health their consumers are going to stop buying from them and their shareholders are going to get bad quarterly statements, then they will have to stop doing these violations.

 

The Big Companies may look big and scary but they rely on consumers to buy their stuff.  If we don't buy their stuff they go into administration and they then have to either change their practises so we go back to buying their stuff or they fold.

 

In the end, the power to make or break these big companies rests with us.  We can make them take responsibility for their actions and change the world for better.

Differences in Equality

I am going to take umbrage with Brendan O'Neill's article in the Big Issue Festive Edition out last week.

He dislikes the fact that it has been reported that researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have claimed that they have discovered that men's brains are built for perception and action while women's brains are more adept at reasoning and intuition.  He rounds out his argument saying that this is a "classic example of 'neurosexism'" - the use of neuroscience to propagate gender stereotypes.

Well excuse me but the last time I looked I, being a women, didn't have a penis and boys don't have wombs.  We are different, both physically and hormonally, so why is it wrong to suggest that we maybe different mentally?  Why is it wrong to suggest that we might have brains that are built differently?

As for it propagating gender stereotypes - I was under the impression that women were keep out of careers like politics and writing and the sciences because we were stereotypically less able to reason.  Therefore these researchers are suggesting the very opposite of stereotypes - they have said that "women's grey matter is more adept at reasoning and intuition".  As long as I understand the rules of language properly these researchers are saying women are better at reasoning than men.  So, if we take that science to the end of language, that would suggest that men should step out of jobs that require reasoning - like, say, running the country - and leave it to those who are better at reasoning i.e. women.

The other reason I dislike Brendan's article is because it smacks of hypercritical values in science - it's O.K. to use science to work out how an autistic's brain differs from the neuro-typical but it's not O.K. to use it to work out what the neuro-typical brain is shaped for men and women is normally.  So just how are the researchers meant to understand how the autistic brain differs in the first place?

Oh and enough thing that pocks a hole in Brendan's argument is that other researchers have use brain scanning to discover that the brain of an autistic women i.e. someone like me, is closer to the brain of a neuro-typical man in some areas, where as the brain of an autistic man is different from both the brain of a neuro-typical man and the brain of a neuro-typical women.

Conclusion - autism affects the brains of men and women differently!

They have also concluded that it is possible that there are more autistic women than first diagnosed and it is a certainty that the treatments and behavioural plans that help autistic men are highly unlikely to help an autistic woman.  Therefore more research is needed to discover what help autistic women the best.

This would certainly bare out my own experience because I have observed the autistic men I know to have very little understanding that their behaviour is sometimes unacceptable, where as I know that sometimes my behaviour is sometimes unacceptable, I just don't know what mask I need to put on to make my behaviour acceptable.

So if autism affects the brains of men and women differently, doesn't that suggest that there is an underlying difference in the first place.  However, just because we have different brains doesn't mean we aren't equal.

Why can't we be equal and different?  Why can't we celebrate that we have different talents and different strengths?  Why can't we use our different talents and strengths to help each other out?

Surely that is what equality is all about because if God wanted us to be all the same he would have made us as cans of beans!

Religion

With the run up to Christmas, known to Christians as advent, I've been thinking a lot about my religion and the fact that I don't believe everything in the Bible with just blind faith.

I know that many religious groups demand that you accept the Bible in totality, without question but I'm sorry that's just not possible because if you read the Bible from start to finish, it contradicts itself.  St Paul managed to contradict himself within one paragraph at one point.  Granted that was a bit about the rights of women and widows to remarry and St Paul always seems to go to pieces when ever someone mentions women.  Makes me wonder what he was afraid of.

So what do I believe?

I believe in the loving father, the Lord God Yahweh.  I believe in his son, my brother, Jesus Christ.  Before anyone starts phoning the men in white coats consider this - it says in several places that those who believe in God are sons and daughters of God.  Therefore, by the rules of language, Jesus, another son of God, is the brother of believers.

I believe that the soul is the immortal part of us, the part that goes on beyond the death of the body.  In short I believe the soul is the part that was created in God's own image, the energy that echoes the pure, wild energy that was there before the Big Bang and the creation of this universe.

I also believe that you don't have to be a Christian to go into Heaven.  I'm sorry but that is not the act of a loving father, that is the act of a fat old tyrant.

If God wanted us to be all the same he'd would have made us all black or all white or all sky blue pink with yellow dots.

That and it doesn't take a genius to work out that the finite cannot contain the infinite and the mortal cannot fully comprehended the immortal.  Think about it.  Could you bare to live through all the years from the rise of the Egyptian Empire to the rise of the British?  Humankind cannot do it and the only creatures we can image walking this earth through all those years are vampires.  Does that tell you something about how small our minds are.

So how can a human fully comprehend the fullness of God?  We can't.  So perhaps it's time we realised that when Christians say that 'God is this' and the Jews say 'God is that' and the Muslims say that 'Allah is this', we are like the three blind men all grasping different bits of the elephant.  The blind man who says that the elephant is like a rope is correct and the one who says the elephant is like a pillar is also correct and the ones who says that the elephant is like a fan is correct as well.  They are all right but they are all grabbing different parts of the elephant, which is why none of their descriptions match up.

Wouldn't you think the three blind men are stupid for going to war over the fact that they all describe the elephant differently?  Then how come we think it's alright to go to war over the different descriptions of God?

I believe that God is a loving father who doesn't care if each of his children calls him by a different name.  I believe that God doesn't care if you call him Father, Dad, Daddy, Dadda, Pappa, Pop or Abba (the Hebrew word for Daddy).  I also believe that he loves his children who don't know what to call him but spend their lives doing their best to make this world a better place when they leave it than when they arrived in it.  Because if you read the Bible that's all Jesus asked us to do - 'love one another as I have loved you'.

What is more I couldn't tell you where this belief comes from because it's not in the Bible.  All I can say is that I was attending a Bible study group that started on the whole 'Only Christians get into Heaven' reel and everything inside of me began screaming 'NO!'  Everything inside of me said that they were wrong.

What this force that tells me what I believe is, I don't know.  All I can say is that some where in either Isaiah or Jeremiah it says along the lines of:

"No more will they build God Schools.
No more will they tell each other
This is the Word of God or that is the Word of God.
For I will write my words upon their hearts
And they will listen to their hearts
And they will hear me."

Mandela

"I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul."

It is a sad fact that even the best and the brightest of us are going to die.  Yesterday we lost one of the best men of the modern age.

I will not say that Nelson Mandela was perfect for he was not. He was human like the rest of us. It has been said that it is a shame that he didn't manage his family as well as he did his country but there again the same charge could be levelled at Gandhi.  Unfortunately great works in the service of mankind take their toil and it is often the family who suffer.

That a side without him the world is a slightly darker place and we mourn a great statesman who's example of forgiveness saved the soul of a nation.  The end of apartheid could have resulted in the same blood and fury that has marred the modern history of Ireland.  It is a great relief to my soul that the land of my great grandparents is finally letting go of the hatred that has torn it's people apart.

South Africa could have gone the same way.  Lets face it, Nelson's people would have almost been justified if they had told the white people where to get off.  However, instead of taking his people down the road of vengeance and retribution, Nelson Mandela encouraged them to take the path of reconciliation.  Though the Residents that have followed him into office have quite lived up to his example, he laid a fountain that can't be removed from history.
Tributes have been pouring in from all corners of the globe today but I would say his greatest tribute is the peaceful South Africa that exists today.  That is what people will remember in a century's time.

"I am the master of my fate.
I am the captain of my soul."

E-mail Disaster

I was going to be doing a post about the latest campaign that I'm involved in, thanks to SumofUs but I had a very nasty shock when I tried to open my e-mail account so that I had all the information at my finger tips while I wrote.

The last time I opened my e-mail account I found that some one had hijacked it.  I had two alerts from friends who said that the last e-mail they received from me was not my normal content and they suspected that someone was playing silly buggers.  I also had a bomb load of 'Delivery Failure Notice's.  When I opened up the message that had failed to sent I didn't recognise it so I knew that someone had hijacked my account.

Since I had no idea what to do about it I simply signed out.  Having had a talk with a computer whizz friend, the other thing I was going to do today was change my password before starting on my blog.

Ha bloody ha!

I tried to sign in only to find that Hotmail had got wind of the hijacking and before I could deal with it myself (by changing the password) had locked my account out.  I now have to somehow verify that it is me trying to use my own e-mail account!

What is more the number that it had to send the verification code to was wrong and it wouldn't let me change it so I had to fill out a survey.  How many people could tell you the subject matter of the e-mails they sent yesterday?

Now I have to sit here and wait to see if I could remember enough to get my e-mail account back.  It could be as much as twenty four hours before I'll know and if I couldn't remember enough I'm looking at having to set up a new e-mail account.  Then I'm going to have all the fun and games of trying to remember all the people I'll need to contact to change my e-mail address.  That's assuming that I'll be able to open my current internet accounts with an invalid e-mail account so that I can change my listed e-mail.

However, I'm not really anger with Hotmail.  After all, they are only trying to do their job.

No the one I am right royally pissed off at is the little oik who hijacked my e-mail account in the first place.  Where do these people of doubtful heritage get off?  A Hotmail account is FREE!  Absolutely tossing free!  You don't need to hijack somebody else's account to avoid paying or anything.  So why'd you go and hijack somebody's else account when setting up your own account takes less than five minutes?  Hijacking my account probably took you longer, you dumb ass.

Do these people get off on the knowledge that they have just screwed up somebody's day? Do they enjoy sniggering at the thought of all of us panicking as we watch our contact list go down the pan?  Is this what they find funny?

Well if it is then I feel sorry for them.  They obviously have such pathetic little lives that the only joy they can have is screwing up those that have a better life than them.  Pity is the only possible response to such putrid uselessness.  They really must be totally ignorant if they cannot come up with something more productive with which to fill their time.  Granted, aspiring to a Darwin Award would be a more productive occupation for these pathetic pieces of pond scum but there you are.

For those of you who don't know, a Darwin Award is only awarded to people who do the human race a favour by removing themselves from the gene pool. I think I have just had the unfortunate moment of coming into contact with the actions of another candidate for said award.  I wonder if they would like me to explain how to make sure they receive said award?  After all if all they can do to have fun is mess up someone else's life then they are probably too ignorant to understand what I mean when I say 'removing themselves from the gene pool.

Bitter, I know but I'm the one who's just lost control over my own e-mail account.