– I frequent several analyst sites and follow the world news daily through a number of on-line newspapers across the globe. No one, of course, really has the complete picture of a subject as complex as U.S. foreign policy but I’ve watched this short clip now several times and I think it comes close.
– Give it a look and see if you agree. Your comments, as always, are welcome.
U.S. Foreign Policy Video Recap: ➡
– I was pretty amazed to read this though, apparently, it’s been around for awhile. Some color laser printers lay down a fine pattern of yellow dots on their printed pages which the Secret Service can use to back track to the specific printer that printed the document. It’s apparently a way to track-back to the folks who would use the printers to make counterfeit money, for example. And, in the most perfect of worlds, where the authorities aways acted only in the public good, that would be fine.
– But this is the country where J. Edgar Hoover bent the government to his will through several presidencies. It is the country where a professional agent’s career in the current administration was ruined because the administration didn’t like the fact that her husband reported the truth about the absence of WMD in Iraq. And it is the country wherein “Scooter” Libby, fully and fairly convicted of crimes connected with the agent’s unmasking – had his sentence commuted by the president. This list could go on for a long long time. But those were just the few things that came to mind this second. But, do I think all the government’s decisions are always and solely for the best good of the American public??? Naw, I don’t. So read this story and see how it makes you feel. Laser printers today, cell phones yesterday, door knobs tomorrow?
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MIT Media Labs launches SeeingYellow.com to call for protest against printer manufacturers whose laser printers secretly monitor usage
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and other privacy advocates have long warned that some color laser printers produce a nearly invisible grid of yellow dots on documents that store the serial number of the printer and the date stamp of the printed page. Now Benjamin Mako Hill and other members of MIT Media Labs’ Computing Culture research group have established seeingyellow.com to spotlight this practice as an incursion on the civil liberties of the users of the laser printers. The yellow-dot “watermark” allows the US Secret Service to enlist the help of the manufacturers in tracking counterfeit currency generated on laser printers. A statement on seeing yellow.com calls this practice a “direct attack on the privacy of the owners and users of printers, and in particular, on their right to free, anonymous speech.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation previously reported on this issue and has posted a DocuColor Tracking Dot Decoding guide that explains how the Xeroc DocuColor model printers produce the yellow dot pattern. It also provides a utility for translating your particular dot pattern to determine what information it stores. The DocuColor pattern is a repeating 15 x 8 grid of yellow dots on the entire page that encodes up to fourteen 7-bit bytes of data, such as model number, serial number, and date of printing. Other manufactures such as Brother, Hewlett Packard and so on also produce similar tracking patterns.
On his blog Mako points out that “The Federalist Papers were one of the most important set of documents in early US political history and they have fundementally shaped the way the US and its governments grew. They were (originally) published anonymously and there’s reason to believe that they would have said what they did or even been published at all if were immediately traceable to their authors.”
Alexander Hamilton co-authored the Federalist Papers, before being blackmailed by James Reynolds for having an affair with his wife, Maria Reynolds. Mr. Reynolds was later arrested for counterfeiting.
To the original: ➡
– Just just watched a sobering video.  I have to confess, it didn’t sober me much because I already see things through the same lens the video presents.  And that is that even with all we are doing and even with all the folks who are waking up to the predicament we are in, it isn’t going to be enough and, in essence, we are going to go over the climate change civilization breakdown falls. ÂÂ
– But, watch the video and make your own judgements.
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To the video by John Doerr, a very rich venture capitalist and a very smart fellow: ➡
– I really eat this stuff up. The more it surprises us and the more counter intuitive it seems, the more we need to own it, I think.
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Why most suicide bombers are Muslim, beautiful people have more daughters, humans are naturally polygamous, sexual harassment isn’t sexist, and blonds are more attractive.
On to the article, enjoy! ➡
– the author of the following, Wang Feng, is a Beijing-based journalist.
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I awoke this morning to the headline in the Chinese newspapers: “China bans diethylene glycol in toothpaste.” My first reaction: Finally, the bureaucrats have given in to international pressure. It seems China can use all the international humiliation it can get.
Diethylene glycol, a toxic industrial solvent, is often used in China to replace the similar but more expensive glycerine, a harmless food additive. Chinese-made toothpaste containing diethylene glycol has been discovered and recalled all over the world. But until this morning, Chinese officials had insisted that a small amount of diethylene glycol in toothpaste was harmless to the human body. Never mind that a Chinese shipment of it was blamed for the deaths of over 100 Panamanians after a drug maker there put it into a cough syrup, believing it was glycerine. Chinese officials maintained that it was a safe additive in toothpaste even in the very statement that later banned such a use: “There is no known case of direct human poisoning by toothpaste with diethylene glycol,” the statement said. Yeah, right. Pardon me if I would still rather do without it in mine.
I am happy with the outcome now – that is, if China can really enforce this ban effectively. Good luck with that. Our government has, under mounting U.S. pressure, vowed more than a few times to root out pirated DVDs of Hollywood blockbusters. But guess how much I paid for a copy of “Spiderman III” at my neighborhood store?
The toothpaste saga is a textbook case of a public health and food safety crisis that wouldn’t have even raised eyebrows inside China, much less been addressed and resolved on a national level, if it hadn’t escalated into an international scandal. And the toothpaste issue is a relatively minor case in a string of serious crises that have continuously tarnished the “Made in China” label. Among those are the recent American pet food scare and the Panamanian cough syrup deaths (although I’ve never quite figured out why the deaths of 17 U.S. cats got so much more worldwide news coverage than the deaths of more than 100 Panamanians.)
Even when domestic scandals do break, they aren’t usually handled in a way that instills public confidence. When a fake medicine killed dozens of patients in China a year ago, it triggered a national outcry and a subsequent government investigation. In the end, officials announced only that they had fined the factory, and suspended its license “pending further inspection and improvement.” The public was told nothing else — why the Chinese FDA had approved the drug in the first place, or why regulators hadn’t found the problem until the patients were dying in agony.
The final revelation came earlier this year when Zheng Xiaoyu, then head of the Chinese FDA, was sacked, investigated for corruption and swiftly sentenced to death. He lost his appeal six weeks later and was executed this past Monday. In the media storm surrounding Zheng’s downfall, we learned that the man had almost single-handedly approved tens of thousands of drug licenses without following due procedure, pocketing millions in bribes from pharmaceutical firms. His corrupt administration was also blamed for some of the international crises, including the Panamanian poisoning case. Zheng’s execution was no surprise to observers. Many believe he was made into a scapegoat, a convenient target for focusing public wrath.
So, transparency at last? Not according to Zheng’s lawyers. They tried hard to spare his life, citing the amount of money involved (much less in comparison to many other convicted corrupt officials sentenced only to life in prison), and his cooperation with investigators. But Zheng’s trial was also one of the most secretive and least publicized in recent years. The government never released the details of its case against him, and no one knew which companies had bribed him until his lawyers defied a government gag order and posted court documents on the Internet. They did so in a desperate protest against the shroud of secrecy under which the case was handled.
More… ➡
Tens of millions of people could be driven from their homes by encroaching deserts, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia, a report says.
The study by the United Nations University suggests climate change is making desertification “the greatest environmental challenge of our times”.
If action is not taken, the report warns that some 50 million people could be displaced within the next 10 years.
The study was produced by more than 200 experts from 25 countries.
This report does not pull any punches, says BBC environment reporter Matt McGrath.
One third of the Earth’s population – home to about two billion people – are potential victims of its creeping effect, it says.
“Desertification has emerged as an environmental crisis of global proportions, currently affecting an estimated 100 to 200 million people, and threatening the lives and livelihoods of a much larger number,” the study said.
The overexploitation of land and unsustainable irrigation practices are making matters worse, while climate change is also a major factor degrading the soil, it says.
People displaced by desertification put new strains on natural resources and on other societies nearby and threaten international instability, the study adds.
“There is a chain reaction. It leads to social turmoil,” said Zafaar Adeel, the study’s lead author and head of the UN University’s International Network on Water, Environment and Health.
The largest area affected was probably sub-Saharan Africa, where people are moving to northern Africa or to Europe, while the second area is the former Soviet republics in central Asia, he added.
More… ➡
To the full PDF version of the UN report: ➡
– One of the recent favorite hobby horses of the folks who oppose the idea that mankind’s activities are causing global climate change has been the notion that variations in the sun’s output are behind the changes we are seeing. They come up with an alternative like this periodically and run with it until the accumulated evidence undermines it too badly to continue. Then they switch to another and run off in a different direction.
– Here’s an academic paper from the Proceedings of The Royal Society which states clearly that if anything, the sun’s influence in recent years should have cooled the climate. Next hobby horse, anyone?
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Abstract:
There is considerable evidence for solar influence on the Earth’s pre-industrial climate and the Sun may well have been a factor in post-industrial climate change in the first half of the last century. Here we show that over the past 20 years, all the trends in the Sun that could have had an influence on the Earth’s climate have been in the opposite direction to that required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures.
To the main paper: ➡
– I’ve got a friend who has strong doubts about the gathering scientific consensus around Global Climate Change. We’ve debated the issue to a stand-still and decided to let it sit since we agree on so many other aspects of the Perfect Storm Hypothesis.
– But, I’ve heard many of his concerns loud and clear about the reliability of the science behind the ‘consensus’ on Global Climate Change – so it gives me the creeps to publish this little piece. It’s like putting a sharp knife in his hand. And, frankly, what the article has to say is worrisome.
– But, having said that, this article and others like it should become the impetus to make science and the scientific process better rather than the revelations that tear it down. because, after all, science is the best tool we have in the box – bar none.
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In a 2005 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, epidemiologist John Ioannidis showed that among the 45 most highly cited clinical research findings of the past 15 years, 99 percent of molecular research had subsequently been refuted. Epidemiology findings had been contradicted in four-fifths of the cases he looked at, and the usually robust outcomes of clinical trials had a refutation rate of one in four.
The revelations struck a chord with the scientific community at large: A recent essay by Ioannidis simply entitled “Why most published research findings are false” has been downloaded more than 100,000 times; the Boston Globe called it “an instant cult classic.” Now in a Möbius-strip-like twist, there is a growing body of research that is investigating, analyzing, and suggesting causes and solutions for faulty research.
Two papers published this spring in the open-access journal PLoS Medicine by Benjamin Djulbegovic from the University of South Florida and Ramal Moonesinghe from the CDC have delved into the issues raised by Ioannidis and suggested possible ways to mitigate this apparent failure of scientific enterprise. One of the suggestions is to ensure that experimental results are independently replicable. “More often than not, genuine replication is not done, and what we end up with in the literature is corroboration or indirect supporting evidence,” says Moonesinghe.
More… ➡
Grim and stern as an old friend would say. The People’s Daily online just carried a story announcing that Zheng Xiaoyu, former director of China’s State Food and Drug Administration (see here for story on his crimes) ), was executed this morning. I thought Zheng’s appeal of the death sentence handed down on May 29th was still pending but the story also noted that it had been rejected on June 22nd. I guess that it still seemed likely he would receive some sort of last minute reprieve, given how senior he was and the fact that his deputy was just given a suspended death sentence, which usually means effective life imprisonment. I don’t know why I was even a little surprised, though. As we observed earlier, Zheng’s timing was awful if he was hoping for a pardon. With the current international hullabaloo about safety regulation in China there was no way he was going to be let off the hook. Will his execution make a difference? Hard to say. Certainly it’s got to have some impact in the short term, but memories fade and the allure of stacks of those crisp, roseblush 100 renminbi bills is strong.
More… ➡
– Before China learns that there has to be a resonable balance between profits and people, a lot of bad stuff is going to happen.
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This morning, I heard the news that half of Beijing’s bottled water is counterfeit. I was horrified. It seems that illegal factories fill the used plastic bottles from the tap or with perfunctorily filtered water. The bottle tops and tape that they use to seal the bottle look identical to the genuine ones. The bottles aren’t sterilized and the number of mold fungi and e. coli bacteria that have been found in such water can easily make drinkers sick. An industry report quoted by Beijing Times calculates that more than 100 million bottles of such water were sold last year. The profit derived from these illegal sales exceeded 1 billion RMB, or about $12 million.
As a Chinese, I am used to reading about dangerous fakes. But this case really enraged me. This is water that many of us drink every day, after all. And the whole reason people pay extra for bottled water is for the quality—and safety. The Beijing Times did a story a couple of days ago that revealed the illegal business has been going on for five years. One unlicensed water bottler told the newspaper: “I filter the tap water before filling the bottle because I am a moral person and I don’t want to get people sick.”
More… ➡
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