Pie and Coffee 
Weapons
Recently there has been some discussion about scientists who are religious here, after Mike “outed” the secret Caltech-alumni organizing principle behind this blog. I have also recently read Richard Hamming’s depressing macho-macho speech on research. It is then perhaps opportune that, this Saturday, I went to the National Theatre to see Bertolt Brecht‘s The Life of Galileo (in a version by David Hare). Read the rest of this entry »
About twenty people gathered at the Federal Building last night in South Bend, Indiana, to repent and pray on the 61st anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan.
Another, more secular, vigil was held in South Bend earlier in the day.
The group, most wearing black, held signs reading “From Nagasaki to Lebanon / Mourn the Dead.”
Pictured: Mike Schorsch. Photo by Mike Benedetti. More photos.
The event was sponsored by the South Bend Catholic Worker and the Catholic Peace Fellowship. It began with the reading of a meditation, reprinted below.
(The South Bend Tribune covered this event. Last year when the Worcester Telegram & Gazette saw fit to cover a similar event in Massachusetts, they saw fit to “balance” the coverage by interviewing a WWII-era man with a poor understanding of the facts. The Tribune, to its credit, did not do this.)
A recent report, The ethics of modern warfare, produced by a joint committee of the Methodist Church and the United Reformed Church, recommended that the United Kingdom should not replace the Trident missile system.
Plowshares: Boing Boing mentions a Plowshares action by Greg Boertje-Obed, Carl Kabat, and Michael Walli. They hammered on a silo and spread their blood about while dressed as clowns.
If I could Update my comment on Boing Boing, it would read:
. . . hammering on a missile silo is meant to be
purelya symbolic act.
The interplay of symbolism and practicality is what makes these sorts of actions tricky to write about.
Tom Lewis points out that this is the third time Carl Kabat has tried to sabotage a missile while dressed as a clown.
Mike: I met Carl Kabat once, for ten seconds.
Scott: You’re doing pretty good—I met him once for ten minutes!
…
Claire: I think I met Carl Kabat once. He’s always in jail.
Read the rest of this entry »
Today we had glorious weather here in these isles. Her Majesty graced Oxford with a visit. But for the more politically-inclined, yesterday’s local-election results were announced, with the Greens taking a new seat in the Oxford City Council, up from 7 to 8 out of 48 seats, holding the balance of power in a hung council. Good results elsewhere as well.
Nick Anthis of The Scientific Activist (who broke the George Deutsch dropout story earlier this year) invited Michael Stebbins, Director of Biology Policy at the Federation of American Scientists, author of the new book Sex, Drugs and DNA: Science’s Taboos Confronted to speak in Oxford today on the topic “Biosecurity policy and the scientific community: new challenges in an age of terrorism”. He gave us a lot of Beltway insider stuff (especially after his talk when I bought him a drink at the University Club), and said that whatever craziness goes on in the USA will eventually come across the Atlantic unless we do something about it.
Further on the topic of the “fifty-first state”, Sir Gareth of Wolfson College just published a report on UK–USA research collaboration. To balance the Anglosphericity, here is a link to the “Investing in European Research” website.
This Saturday (29th April) will be the Remembrance Day for All Victims of Chemical Warfare. The IUPAC has a project for raising awareness of the Chemical Weapons Convention, reports the current issue of Chemistry International. Observant readers will notice that a link to the WMD awareness programme already appears on the sidebar here at Pie and Coffee. Last November, Democracy Now! (also sidebar-worthy) and George Monbiot at the Guardian both reported the use of white phosphorus in Iraq. Also see an earlier post here: “Botox: Cosmetic or Chemical Weapon?”
On Saturday 25 February 2006, a few of my friends and I joined about 50 others at St John’s College, Oxford, for the Christian Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament conference ‘Trident Replacement? What does theology say?’. One new development: WMD Awareness Programme. If the gentle readers read one website because of this report, it should be this. Read the rest of this entry »
Gilbert Márkus, an ex-Dominican and leader [sic] of Glasgow’s Catholic Worker community, wrote about faith and science in the Guardian this Saturday under the title ‘Face to Faith: Christians who attempt to mix God and science will only end up undoing the story of Genesis’, quoting several from the Order of Preachers inter alios. (Strangely, I could not find it on the Guardian‘s otherwise-excellent free website, but found it in the proprietary LexisNexis.)
Update: The article is now available.
Also deserving attention are two deals in which the British ex-public defence-research company QinetiQ is involved: selling the 1901 census to Friends Reunited, and approaching Carlyle group (mentioned in Fahrenheit 9/11) about its own privatization.
We are pretty rubbish as a species. We are not very good at passing on our genes or our bits (digital information). The longest-living legacy of ours is likely to be our crap, in the form of radioactive waste.
Read the rest of this entry »
St Francis House, the Catholic Worker house of hospitality in Oxford, England, celebrated its first anniversary since their rebirth on Sunday 2nd October: reports Strangers and Pilgrims, their newsletter. Read the rest of this entry »
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