Weekly Reads for 31 October 2014

This week’s interesting reads include looks at an Ebola vaccine, humans as animals, groups trying to influence Montana judicial elections, and more. Read these for a more satisfying treat than sugary candy!

In Depth: How Big Business Buys State Courts – “As part of its “Judicial Fairness Initiative” aimed at electing conservative judges, the RLSC has said it plans to spend $5 million in 2014 and has already spread more than $1.6 million across races in North Carolina, Montana and Missouri alone, according to campaign records and analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice. The RLSC’s most generous donors are familiar names in right-wing campaign finance, including Koch Industries, Walmart, AT&T and ExxonMobil, to name a few.” Truthout

The Hunt for an Ebola Vaccine by Paul Howard – “There is some good news. After embarrassing missteps by almost every national or international authority monitoring Ebola, government and industry are finally hitting their stride.” City Journal

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: What Plato can teach us | – “This is one of the morals to be drawn from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new book, Plato at the Googleplex, in which she imagines Plato reappearing on a book tour in 21st-century America. Goldstein’s Plato is our contemporary, a thinker who still has much to teach us about knowledge, truth, goodness and beauty. Her book is also a defence of the discipline of philosophy itself against those she calls “philosophy-jeerers”—who think there are no interesting or substantive questions that can’t be answered by science. Goldstein, as I discovered when I met her in London last week, thinks not only that certain philosophical questions of the sort Plato asked still resonate, but also that the progress of science will continue to throw up new questions which philosophers are well-placed, if not to answer definitively, then at least to frame in a clarifying way.” Prospect Magazine

The truth about evil | John Gray | News | – “Against this background, it would be easy to conclude that talk of evil in international conflicts is no more than a cynical technique for shaping public perceptions. That would be a mistake. Blair’s secret – which is the key to much in contemporary politics – is not cynicism. A cynic is someone who knowingly acts against what he or she knows to be true. Too morally stunted to be capable of the mendacity of which he is often accused, Blair thinks and acts on the premise that whatever furthers the triumph of what he believes to be good must be true. Imagining that he can deliver the Middle East and the world from evil, he cannot help having a delusional view of the impact of his policies.” The Guardian

Jared Diamond: ‘Humans, 150,000 years ago, wouldn’t figure on a list of the five most interesting species on Earth’ | Books | The Guardian – “There are corners of Christian America where Diamond’s emphasis on humans as animals – chimps in all but a few crucial respects – might be controversial in itself. Unlike Richard Dawkins and others, though, he has opted not to wade into debate with fundamentalists. “It doesn’t appeal to me to argue with people I don’t respect,” he says. “I learn from arguing with decent people whose views aren’t my own … but I don’t have that respect for people who insist that science is not a way of learning about the world, and who refuse to accept that humans are derived from other animals.” Besides, he was about to step – unwittingly, he insists – into another minefield. Towards the end of The Third Chimpanzee, he broaches the question that would define his career: not why humans came to dominate other animals, but why some humans came to dominate others.” The Guardian

Big Sugar’s Sweet Little Lies – “In fact, a growing body of research suggests that sugar and its nearly chemically identical cousin, HFCS, may very well cause diseases that kill hundreds of thousands of Americans every year, and that these chronic conditions would be far less prevalent if we significantly dialed back our consumption of added sugars. Robert Lustig, a leading authority on pediatric obesity at the University of California-San Francisco (whose arguments Gary explored in a 2011 New York Times Magazine cover story), made this case last February in the prestigious journal Nature. In an article titled “The Toxic Truth About Sugar,” Lustig and two colleagues observed that sucrose and HFCS are addictive in much the same way as cigarettes and alcohol, and that overconsumption of them is driving worldwide epidemics of obesity and type 2 diabetes (the type associated with obesity).” Mother Jones

[Six Questions] | The APA Grapples with Its Torture Demons: Six Questions for Nathaniel Raymond – “One of the enduring questions surrounding the torture and black-sites program run by the CIA between early 2002 and the early fall of 2006 relates to the role played by psychologists and the bizarre conduct of their professional association, the American Psychological Association (APA). Drawing on a cache of secret email communications between key players in the torture program and senior officers of the APA, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter James Risen suggests in Pay Any Price, his new book, that the APA rushed to change its ethics rules to allow its members to participate in the torture program. A key role in these disclosures is played by Nathaniel Raymond, a war-crimes investigator who analyzed these furtive communications for the FBI and who now heads Harvard’s Signal Program on Human Security and Technology. I put six questions to Raymond about the new disclosures, what they tell us about the APA, and the adoption of torture techniques by the CIA.” Harper’s Magazine