Another Legacy from Rummie

[Originally posted on goofyblog 4.4.07]

For awhile there in 2006, I thought it was prudent to drink diet soda. Sure it tastes funny, kind of metallic, but diet soda had less carbs than sugared sodas. Aspartame is the sweetener in most diet sodas. Surprisingly, it’s also in over 5,000 foods, drugs and medicine.

My diet soda jag wasn’t going well. Why was I having headaches and other minor ills? It could’ve been many things, caffeiene, alcohol, novacaine. Anyway, I decided to check trusty old google for aspartame references. And whoa! Who came up, but Donald Rumsfeld!?

During a time he was between appointments in Washington Searle made him CEO. Why would a drug company make a Washington insider with no real business experience one of their top executives? The operative word here is “insider.”

A little history:

Asparteme interacts with other drugs, has a synergistic and additive effect with MSG, and is a chemical hyper-sensitization agent.

The FDA’s own toxicologist, Dr. Adrian Gross told Congress that without a shadow of a doubt, aspartame can cause brain tumors and brain cancer and violated the Delaney Amendment which forbids putting anything in food that is known to cause Cancer. Detailed information on this can be found in the Bressler Report (FDA report on Searle).

Since its discovery in 1965, controversy has raged over the health risks associated with the sugar substitute. From laboratory testing of the chemical on rats, researchers have discovered that the drug induces brain tumors. On Sept 30, 1980 the Board of Inquiry of the FDA concurred and denied the petition for approval.

But then Ronald Reagan was elected 5 weeks later. Rumsfeld was on President Reagan’s transition team and a day after taking office Ronnie appointed Arthur Hull Hayes to be FDA Commissioner.

As recorded in the Congressional Record of 1985, then CEO of Searle Laboratories Donald Rumsfeld had said that he would “call in his markers” to get aspartame approved.

And though, for good reason, no FDA Commissioner in the previous sixteen years had allowed aspartame on the market, in 1981, the newly appointed Hayes ignored the negative ruling and approved aspartame. Later Hayes went to work for the PR Agency of the manufacturer, Burson-Marstellar, and has refused to talk to the press ever since.

[Sources for this story from Sepp Hasselberger, Mission Possible and News with Views, and there are thousands of references to this under-reported story and to the dangers of aspartame on Google.]

Good News from India

[Originally posted on goofyblog 4.3.07]

From Daily Reckoning Australia:

Last week, we met with our new partners from India. One thing that surprised us was the Indian labour market:

“Yes…there are more than a billion people in India…” said our partner, “but just go and try to find someone. The labor market is very tight. People who have been to business school - if they’ve been to a good one - can get a job anywhere. Not just in India, but almost anywhere in the world. So their salaries are up at world levels. If you want someone to sweep your driveway…yes, that will be very cheap. But if you want someone to do the kind of work we do…well, you will pay almost as much as you would in America. Salaries are rising fast.”

This from Associated Press:

“An annual survey by Hewitt Associates revealed that Indian salaries are likely to rise an average 14.5 percent in 2007, with banks and financial services companies offering the biggest hikes.

April Fool

[Initially posted on goofyblog 4.2.07]

This clip from Catherine Crier’s show on Court TV, the Crier Wire, is absolutely the best recap of the Bush presidency, including the recent MC Rove stupidity. If George Were King. Check it out!

81 Every Day

This may put the school shootings into perspective.

The New York produced the graphics below on daily American gun deaths. The last available data is from 2004. I find it interesting there are not enough black suicides to rate even one bullet in any of the age groups, while whites, white men in particular, rate at the least four except in the very youngest category.

Keep in mind while looking at this: over twice this figure (176) were injured by gun fire -- daily.

In the next 2 groups, suicide by gun becomes more prominent.

This last one gets me: lots of old white men. What's up with that? Does Charlton Heston know that part of the equation? Have a gun around the house, and the older you get, the more likely you'll use it -- on yourself.

Link (Via neatorama)

The Worst Company(s) in the World

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.30.07]

The Consumerist (Consumers Bite Back) had a poll asking their readers who is the worst company in the world. Halliburton came in second, but the RIAA tops the list.

This organization has been suing 7-year olds and parapalegics in a futile effort to preserve Big Music’s business model, a model no longer having any relevance. Recently, the RIAA demanded that universities keep records on their students, a move the universities say would cost them money they don’t have in their budgets.
Cd prices have always been too high and even though the technology took strong root by the early ’90s, making it possible to offer the consumer lower prices — via economies of scale; instead the prices have gone higher, yet the artists gets just about the same cut as they always did.

Treating music consumers like feudal serfs is typical of these bullies. But as David Byrne said at this year’s South by Southwest (NY Times):

That year will be the “tipping point,'’ much like the mid-to-late ’80s when CDs overtook cassette sales. Once download sales became the norm, Byrne said, it will allow manufacturing and distribution costs to approach zero. “That is a fact,'’ he said.

He said at that point, record labels will be faced with a sort of choice — to ramp up marketing services to use music as a loss leader for tours and merchandise revenue, or aim only for international stars of the ilk of Britney Spears.

The RIAA is just a front group for a few mega-large music companies, so the Consumerist identified them here.

UPDATE: An attorney for one of the many being sued by the RIAA has successfully had his client’s suit dismissed after he sent the following to attorneys for Sony Music:

The Evidence Code sections are quite clear: settlement negotiations of all kinds may not be used to prove the validity of any claim or defense. Mr. Merchant has and had no more duty to respond to attempts to “sell” him one of your clients’ boilerplate, non-negotiable $3750 settlements than he has to return cold calls from pushy life insurance salespeople. If your client (and your law firm?) are seeking probable cause shelter in a settlement negotiations house of straw (as suggested by your March 23 letter), all of you should consider the prevailing winds of the Evidence Code before making yourselves too comfortable. Straw will burn.

Your client takes the position that my middle-aged, conservative clients should speculate regarding the identity of persons your clients’ claim used their AOL account to download pornographic-lyric gangsta rap tracks as predicate to possible case resolution. In an age of Wintel-virus created bot-farms, spoofs, and easily cracked WEP encrypted wireless home networks (among other easy hacks), the only tech-savvy response to such a request is, “You’ve got to be kidding.” The extensive press that has been generated over computer security (and the insecurity of Windows XP and its predecessors) underscores the complete absence of facts on which probable cause to sue my clients could be established and your clients’ willingness (even insistence) that others be implicated in Big Music’s speculative, “driftnet” litigation tactics. Sorry: Mr. Merchant cannot and will not expose himself to still more litigation by speculating.

From Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.

Now a Word from our Founders

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.30.07]

Just discovered these quotes from our long-distant past:

Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war — the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty, to resort for repose and security, to institutions, which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe they, at length, become willing to run the risk of being less free.

– Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 8

The management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse, of all the trusts committed to a Government, because they can be concealed or disclosed, or disclosed in such parts & at such times as will best suit particular views; and because the body of the people are less capable of judging & are more under the influence of prejudices, on that branch of their affairs, than of any other. Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.

– James Madison in a letter to Thomas Jefferson

And from the present:

There can be no denying that the Framers’ efforts to protect the nation from involvement in unnecessary and unjust wars and from an enormous standing army have failed. The two mainstays of their plan — a small defensive military force and a constitutional separation of war powers — are dead letters. The country is routinely engaged in conflicts in every corner of the globe, none of which has anything to do with the military’s only legitimate purpose: to defend the country from invasion. The power to wage war has coalesced under the executive and the government maintains an increasingly imperialistic foreign policy. Free of the constitutional chains that the Framers imposed upon it, the federal government is now on a road of empire, intervention, militarism, aggression, occupation, and torture, not to mention increased taxes, inflation, and despotism at home.

– Bart Frazer, program director at The Future of Freedom Foundation

False Conquest

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.28.07]

Chalmers Johnson has just released Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, completing his trilogy on the United States as empire. He’s been making the circuit, giving long interviews.

What follows is the most logical explanation of why we invaded Iraq, the reaction of the Arab world and a cognizant assessment of the developing political and military situation:

Karlin: When Bush says we have to accomplish the mission, or Cheney says we have to achieve victory, the question hangs out there as to what our mission is now? And what could possibly be victory in these circumstances? To them, mission or victory mainly means that we are perceived as winning and Iraq remains under our control.

Johnson: I believe that’s absolutely true. It’s one of the reasons why we didn’t have a withdrawal strategy from Iraq — we didn’t intend to leave. Several people who retired from the Pentagon in protest at the start of the war — I’m thinking of Lieutenant Colonel Frank Hoffman particularly — have testified that the purpose of the invasion was to establish a new, stable pillar of power for the United States in the Middle East. We had lost our main two bases of power in the region — Iran, which we lost in 1979 because of the revolution against the Shah, whom we ourselves placed in power — and then Saudi Arabia, because of the serious blunder made after the first Gulf War — the placing of American Air Force and ground troops in Saudi Arabia after 1991. That was unnecessary. It’s stupid. We do not have an obligation to defend the government of Saudi Arabia. It was deeply resented by any number of sincere Saudi patriots, including former asset and colleague, Osama bin Laden. Their reaction was that the regime that is charged with the defense of the two most sacred sites of Islam — Mecca and Medina — should not rely upon foreign infidels who know next to nothing about our religion and our background.

The result was that, over the 1990s and going into the 2000s, the Saudis began to restrict the uses we had of Prince Sultan Air Base at Riyadh. They became so restricted that, finally, in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, we moved our main headquarters to Qatar and conducted the war from there. This left us, however, with only the numerous small bases we have in the Persian Gulf. But these are in rather fragile countries.

Iraq was the place of choice, to these characters, who knew virtually nothing about the Middle East. Spoke not a word of Arabic or knew even the history of it. Iraq was the one they picked out because it’s the second largest source of oil on earth, and it looked like an easy conquest.

We now know that the President himself didn’t understand the difference between Shia and Sunni Islam — that he did not appreciate that Saddam Hussein’s regime was a minority Sunni dictatorship over the majority Shia population. That once you brought about regime change there, the inevitable result would be unleashing the Shia population, who had previously been suppressed, to run their country, and that they would align themselves with the largest Shia power of all, a Shia superpower, namely, Iran, right next door, where most of their leaders had spent the period of the Saddam Hussein dictatorship.

That’s essentially what’s happened. It’s hard to imagine how this served our interests, given the deep hostility between Iran and the United States ever since we started interfering in that country back in 1953. It is hard to imagine how this served the interests of Israel, in that it gave Shia support there. Support from Iran now spreads throughout the Middle East to Hezbollah, Hamas, and other organizations.

Full interview is here.