We are going to spend a few days in Spain – normal service will resume after we return …
(And by the way, this posting was published at 23:00 hrs on the 29th May. But, the neat thing is with Wordpress, it doesn’t appear until the time in the timestamp for the posting (05:30 hrs on the 30th) has been exceeded – the advantage of building the weblog dynamically when it is visited.)
The European Commission formally agreed yesterday to provide the Department of Homeland Security and officials from the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection in the USA with data on airline crew and passengers flying from Europe to destinations in the USA. This was against the wishes of the European Parliament, which voted three times against the deal.
The 34 data fields which will be made available are listed on the last page of the document of agreement, which you can read here (pdf file, 70 KB). They include the traveller’s address, contact phone numbers, full payment information, e-mail address, and bag tag numbers.
Should be enough to allow the Department of Homeland Security and US Customs to find out all about you.
I can’t help feeling there is some truth in the critisism, that the Americans have too few forces on the ground in Iraq, when I read that looters are driving off with complete office complexes. The buildings, not the contents.
Philip G. Zimbardo ran an experiment in 1971 in Stanford University which predicts the behaviour found in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Originally intended to be run over two weeks, with two groups of randomly selected, healthy, normal students playing the roles of prisoners and guards, the experiment had to be stopped after six days because the prisoners were being maltreated and sexually abused by the guards:
I ended the study prematurely for two reasons. First, we had learned through videotapes that the guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night when they thought no researchers were watching and the experiment was “off.” Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuse of the prisoners.Second, Christina Maslach, a recent Stanford Ph.D. brought in to conduct interviews with the guards and prisoners, strongly objected when she saw our prisoners being marched on a toilet run, bags over their heads, legs chained together, hands on each other’s shoulders. Filled with outrage, she said, “It’s terrible what you are doing to these boys!”
Visit The Museum of Coat Hangers – the earliest ones date back to about 2000 BC.
According to Paul Campos, author of The Obesity Myth, writing in New Scientist (free 7-day subscription neccessary to access), a couple of weeks ago, the war on obesity is based not on sound science but on medical self-interest and cultural hysteria. Here a quote from his article:
From records of nearly 2 million Norwegians spanning a decade, it found the highest life expectancy among people with a body mass index (BMI) of 26 to 28 – people who were solidly overweight, according to definitions now used by, among others, the World Health Organization and the American public health establishment. Furthermore, the study found people with a BMI of 18 to 20 (almost all of whom these same institutions would classify as “ideally thin”) had a lower life expectancy than those with BMIs between 34 and 36: who under current classifications were 60 to 75 pounds (25 to 35 kilograms) overweight, and therefore seriously obese.
On the other hand, Craig Lambert in this month’s Harvard Magazine, is convinced that the epidemic of obesity is a vast and growing public health problem. And here again, a sample from his article:
“Portion sizes have increased dramatically since the 1950s,” says Beatrice Lorge Rogers ‘68, professor of economics and food policy at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. For proof, consider a 1950s advertising jingle: “Pepsi-Cola hits the spot/12 full ounces, that’s a lot.” Well, it’s not a lot any more. For decades, 12 ounces (itself a move up from earlier 6.5- and 10-ounce bottles) was the standard serving size for soft drinks. But since the 1970s, soft drink bottles have grown to 20 and 24 ounces; today, even one-liter (33.8 ounce) bottles are marketed as “single servings.” It doesn’t stop there. The 7-11 convenience store chain offers a Double Gulp cup filled with 64 ounces of ice and soda: a half-gallon “serving.”
Both articles make an interesting read, despite taking opposing views. And once you have made up your own mind, you may want to check out your own BMI (body mass index) using this handy calculator, which handles both metric and imperial measures.
Update 2004-05-27:
Whatever your views on the two articles above, Kellogg’s viral marketing of a product aimed at children, containing over 33% sugar and hydrogenated fat is a convincing reason for not letting the food industry self-regulate their marketing – Kellogg’s has previously said that it was keen to see a self-regulatory code, rather than having legeslation to regulate food marketing.
Only nuclear power can stop global warming a leading environmentalist, James Lovelock says. His call to support nuclear power was rejected yesterday by both Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. Lovelock believes that global warming is occuring at such a pace that there is now no time left to develop alternative power sources commercially, such as wind- and solar power.
Writing in today’s Independent he says that the attachment of the Greens to renewable energy is “well-intentioned but misguided”, like the Left’s 1938 attachment to disarmament when he too was a left-winger, comparing the situation to that in Europe in 1938 with the Second World War looming and nobody knowing what to do. He also critisises the “the denial of climate change in the US, where governments have failed to give their climate scientists the support they needed”.
Video film of the wedding the American military denied had taken place has emerged.
And Susan Sontag comments on the brutalisation of society in America, which results in neither Bush’s administration (e.g. James Inhofe, Republican member from Oklahoma: “more outraged by the outrage” over what the photographs show) nor a portion of the American public seeing anything particularly wrong with the photographs of torture of Iraqis which are still emerging in the American press. Sontag makes similar points to those Michael Moore made in his film Bowling for Columbine in 2002.
No wonder Rumsfeld feels it neccessary to ban cameras, camcorders and camera-cellphones in Iraq’s military zones.
Update – 2004-05-26:
The Register thinks we might have been hoaxed on the claim that Rumsfeld banned cameras etc. in the military – the source could have been an article in The Daily Farce.
Israeli justice minister, Yosef Lapid, a Holocaust survivor, got into hot water from Ariel Sharon after commenting on recent TV footage of the Iraeli demolitions in Palestine. Over 40 Palestinians have been killed in the Rafah refugee camp, where dozens of homes have been demolished in less than a week. Referring to the TV pictures, Mr Lapid said he was
“...talking about an old woman crouching on all fours, searching for her medicines in the ruins of her house and that she made me think of my grandmother”.Lapid spent part of World War II in a Budapest ghetto and lost many members of his family in the Holocaust, including a grandmother who died at Auschwitz.“I said that if we carry on like this, we will be expelled from the United Nations and those responsible will stand trial at The Hague…”
He stressed that in his comment on the Rafah offensive, he was “not talking about Germany or the Nazis”. I personally can’t see what distinguishes many aspects of Israeli government treatment of the Palestinians from the way that the Jews were treated in World War Two. It is time that people start thinking about the suffering in Palestine, not only in Israel but equally importantly in the USA, which until recently has blindly followed Mr. Sharon wherever he chooses to go. Right now, the UN can’t rebuild houses in Palestine as quickly as the Israelis are demolishing them.
Now the Bahn has come up with a new approach. One which has worked. They invited spray-painters to paint the walls of the underpass for them. Here are the results – two weeks after the work was finished, there hasn’t been a single graffito anywhere in the underpass or in the station building.
