Fat Harvest

posted 22 Nov 2009 16:45 by Dick Pountain   [ updated 9 Dec 2009 03:04 ]

 
The Guardian ran a far more macabre fat-related story (peru-gang-killing-human-fat). A Peruvian gang has been arrested for murdering people to harvest their body fat and sell it on to the cosmetic surgery industry as an anti-wrinkle treatment. Now fans of Chuck Palahniuk's "Fight Club" (and David Fincher's excellent movie of it) will recognise this as one of its more bizarre and incredible plot devices - our heroes steal waste human fat from liposuction clinics and make it into luxury toilet soap to sell in smart shops. Did the Peruvians get the idea from the movie, did the movie get it from the Peruvians? Is the story even true? The gang is supposed to have been operating in an area where the Shining Path guerillas are active, so it might just be black propaganda put out by the security forces.

I don't know, nor do I care enough to find out: the important point is that such doubts are now immediate and automatic. We're well into that epoch which Guy Debord prophesied in "Comments on the Society of the Spectacle" where fact and fiction become inextricably mixed: "With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning. For every imbecility presented by the spectacle, there are only the media’s professionals to give an answer..."

Fat in Fire

posted 22 Nov 2009 12:18 by Dick Pountain   [ updated 9 Dec 2009 03:04 ]
 
What a fuss about Kate Moss's anti-eating quote that "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels". Knives are out, accusations fly that Moss is pandering to the "pro-anorexia" lobby, and by implication is almost a murderer. The whole furore is just one more example of the hysterical moralism that's spreading through all levels of our society: carbon footprint; paedophilia; anorexia; you name it. Witches and communists are really old hat I'm afraid.

What really interests me about this row though is a huge reversal it reveals, if you examine the quote closely. Throughout most of human history hunger has been a pain, a punishment even. Voluntarily giving up eating was the province of ascetics, mystics, martyrs and political dissidents, and it was considered as a self-chosen *harm*. Kate's dictum though is based on a utilitarian calculus - feeling skinnier than, hence superior to, the next person, feeling good about your appearance, is a *pleasure* that outweighs the pain of hunger (and maximising pleasure is definitely the goal). So long as we in the rich half of the world have more food than we can eat, narcissism and hedonism will remain our ruling ethic - but for how much longer will that be the case?   

Quantum of Dumb

It feels as though the media reporting of science hit an all-time low this week. This morning the Guardian had the following headline about the Hadron Collider restart on Friday:

• 
  

  Cern prepares to resume 'big bang'

  Particles will begin whizzing around Large Hadron Collider again on Friday following explosion

Not just one but two references to bangs, to cater for those readers who believe it's going to blow us into another dimension, and the nicely ambiguous placement of "following explosion". Last night BBC 2 showed the worst "Horizon" I've ever seen (which is the more heartbreaking since it had been getting steadily back to form over the last year). They let that "nice Alan Davies" - who'd made a fairly amusing Horizon with Marcus du Sautoy about mathematics last year - have another go, this time to explain the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Then they chose the two most eccentric-looking physicists they could find to be his guides; filmed them in such a way as to make them look barking mad at all times; Seth Lloyd's explanation of quantum locality and Schrodinger's Cat was so inept that most viewers will have concluded it's all rubbish; and Alan Davies kept moaning all the way through to prove his credentials as a paid-up cool anti-intellectual.

It had me shouting at the screen for the first time in my life, and reinforced a growing suspicion that maybe the Copenhagen interpretation is rubbish (though not of course the phenomena that it purports to explain), merely a sop to quasi-religious idealism; that Einstein was right; and that maybe Carver Mead is the only person who's still in touch with reality (http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/People/CarverMead.htm).