Think of the children...

Just Can't Quit: How far will smoking bans go?

California became the first state to ban smoking in bars a decade ago. Since then, smoking bans have flourished in bars, restaurants, bowling alleys, universities—you name it.  Recently, the Bay Area city of Belmont passed a law that targets people who smoke in their own homes.

Smoking is one of the worst things you can do to your body, but how dangerous is second-hand smoke? Are banners saving lives or battering science? Are they progressive champions or plunderers of property rights?

Watch The Video

And then, if you have the time, watch this 25min 2002 film TALKING BUTTS: A SMOKING DOCUMENTARY.

The film features classic cigarette television ads, a cameo appearance by John Waters and interviews with authors, journalists, scholars, activists, several state attorneys general and one governor.

The real Iraq Body Count

The Iraq Math War

Why the Centers For Disease Control and the Pentagon sought to discredit the first scientific tally of Iraq's civilian death toll carried out by Les Roberts and Gilbert Burnham

The White House struck back with its own basic message: The study was bunk. Never mind that Roberts and Burnham had used methods similar to those employed for the Kosovo survey and others approvingly cited by the Bush administration. With the notable exception of This American Life producer Alex Blumberg, most reporters dutifully slapped Roberts' research with the "controversial" label. And when asked about the study directly, President Bush declared that it had been "pretty well discredited."

"By whom? By him and his political staff?" snaps Bradley Woodruff, who retired last year from his job as a senior cdc epidemiologist. Woodruff has conducted mortality surveys himself, and considers Roberts' research solid. But when cbs's 60 Minutes sought to interview Woodruff about the Lancet study in 2007, the cdc wouldn't allow it. And when Rep. Dennis Kucinich invited Woodruff to Washington to discuss the study, his bosses nixed that, too. "I never had this kind of censorship under previous administrations," he says.

But I don't WANT you to like us. Bah!

Victor Davis Hanson is upset that we might stumble on peace one day.

Hanson is “a blood-and-guts classicist and one of Vice President Dick Cheney's favorite dinner guests". Oh dear! And "a 2007 recipient of the National Humanities Medal" (sic) Oh dear, oh dear!

He also has terrible dress sense as you can see.

Hanson maintains a blog called “Works and Days” on pajamasmedia.com. (natch -MrP) In an entry shortly after Obama’s presidential win, Hanson briefly praised the president-elect for waging an “often brilliant (if not shrewdly stealthy) campaign.”

Regarding the support Obama received from abroad, Hanson wrote, “why would we wish governments currently composed of radical Palestinians, Iranians, Venezuelans, North Koreans, Syrians, or Russians to like or admire us? While we would wish not to gratuitously excite their ire, their empathy toward us should make us worried not relieved.

The Wedding Present

Tom Engelhardt: No Breathing Space in Washington

On the day that Americans turned out in near record numbers to vote, a record was set halfway around the world. In Afghanistan, a U.S. Air Force strike wiped out about 40 people in a wedding party. This represented at least the sixth wedding party eradicated by American air power in Afghanistan and Iraq since December 2001.

American planes have, in fact, taken out two brides in the last seven months. And don't try to bury your dead or mark their deaths ceremonially either, because funerals have been hit as well. Mind you, those planes, which have conducted 31% more air strikes in Afghanistan in support of U.S. troops this year, and the missile-armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) now making almost daily strikes across the border in Pakistan, remain part of George W. Bush's Air Force, but only until January 21, 2009. Then, they -- and all the brides and grooms of Afghanistan and in the Pakistani borderlands who care to have something more than the smallest of private weddings -- officially become the property of President Barack Obama.

“Voices from the New World of Journalism.”

The journalism 'priesthood' destroyed?

“I think we’re fooling ourselves a little bit in how much change is needed,” Michael Skoler of American Public Media said. The needed transformation lies well beyond the use of new tools. “People expect to share information.” But that goes against our ethos – getting the scoop, keeping it exclusive. Nor does allowing people to participate in, not just respond to, our work come naturally. “Deep in our souls we feel like that’s dumbing down our journalism. I would argue that it’s smartening it up.”

Well said.

Remember the survivors

The public prefers their war heroes to be dead

If war is a commonplace human activity, so too is compassion: yet true, enduring, adult compassion towards the maimed of war is one of the most strikingly absent features about how British society has responded to the aftermath of war.

After all, the original purpose of the artificial poppies was to give employment to men who had been maimed in battle. These broken men were still made to work to survive. The British never even had the French tradition of reserving seats in public transport for veterans mutiles par la guerre.

My father wasn't a front line soldier in the second world war. He volunteered in spite of the fact that both his appallingly bad eyesight and his status as an Irish citizen meant he didn't have to enlist. He served behind the lines as the company tailor and travelled with the 8th Army to north Africa and Italy.

He survived the experience, just. He contracted malaria in southern Italy from what was the only biological warfare attack during the war. 

After nine months in hospital he returned home a shadow of his former self and suffered recurring attacks for the next 20+ years.  He might have got a medal had he been wounded or even a pension but you get nothing for contracting a deadly tropical disease, even one used as a weapon by the enemy. 

But he survived, unlike many of his comrades and remembrance is about the survivors of war keeping their promise to never forget the fallen.

Still a little pension would have come in handy :)

The Last Tommy

The great Harry Patch, the last survivor of the Western Front.

90 years on

Paul Dacre: Confused, contradictory and hypocritical

Dacre delivered a long speech to the Society of Editors conference the transcript of which can be found here: RePress

It's a long and rambling speech with, it must be said, some good points but this section on the Max Mosley case is just too funny to miss. Remember, this is the editor-in-chief of The Daily Mail talking here:

Recently, of course, the very same Justice Eady effectively ruled that it’s perfectly acceptable for the multi-millionaire head of a mult-billion sport that is followed by countless young people to pay five women £2,500 to take part in acts of unimaginable sexual depravity with him.

The judge found for Max Mosley because he had not engaged in a “sick Nazi orgy” as the News of the World contested, though for the life of me that seems an almost surreally pedantic logic as some of the participants were dressed in military-style uniform Mosley was issuing commands in German while one prostitute pretended to pick lice from his hair, a second fellated him and a third caned his backside until blood was drawn.

Now most people would consider such activities to be perverted, depraved, the very abrogation of civilised behaviour of which the law is supposed to be the safeguard. Not Justice Eady. To him such behaviour was merely “unconventional”. Nor in his mind was there anything wrong in a man of such wealth using his money to exploit women in this way.

Would he feel the same way, I wonder, if one of those women had been his wife or daughter? But what is most worrying about Justice Eady’s decisions is that he is ruling that - when it comes to morality - the law in Britain is now effectively neutral, which is why I accuse him, in his judgments, of being “amoral”.

In the sporting celebrity case, he rejected the idea that adultery was a proper cause for public condemnation. Instead, he declared that because family breakdown was now commonplace, there was a strong argument for “not holding forth about adultery” or, in other words, attaching no greater inherent worth to marriage than to any other lifestyle choice. Thus no moral delineation was to be made between marriage and those who would destroy it, between victim and victimiser, between right and wrong.

In the Mosley case, the judge is ruling that there is no public interest in revealing a public figure’s involvement in acts of depravity. What the judge loftily calls the “new rights-based jurisprudence” of the Human Rights Act seems to be ruling out any such thing as public standards of morality and decency, and the right of newspapers to report on digressions from those standards.

Update 11/11/08: Toynbee tackles Dacre as does Neil Lyndon

How did we get into this state of affairs?

Scandal of care at top children's hospital

Treatment at one of Britain's leading children's hospitals is worse than that in the developing world, according to a damning doctors' report uncovered by The Observer which also reveals how parents are "told lies" to cover up sub-standard care.

In the document, which the head of the Royal College of Surgeons describes as alarming, consultants are scathing about the Birmingham Children's Hospital. Last night MPs called for a full inquiry into the quality of care at the hospital, where children are treated for life-threatening conditions such as liver or kidney failure, neurological problems and chronic heart complaints.

• Support for surgeons undertaking kidney transplants is so poor that consultants felt they had received better back-up when performing such procedures on a visit to Lagos, the capital of Nigeria.

• Transplant services for children with serious liver failure are so poor that they constitute "a third-class service [which is] putting patients at risk".

Remember Abu Ghraib?

Some would rather you didn't

Bush administration delays release of prisoner abuse photos

The Bush administration is doing everything it can to delay compliance with a court's order that the Pentagon turn over pictures of prisoners abused in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a new court filing.

A three-judge appeals court panel in September ordered the administration to turn over 87 photographs depicting abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and other sites. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the photos in 2005.

On Thursday, the administration requested a review of that decision by all 12 appeals court judges. The ACLU expected the move, a lawyer for the group said previously, but it was nonetheless a frustration for those attempting to uncover the full extent of abuse that accompanied the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pundits, eh? TWAT!

Neil Clark reminds us of Curranty-Eyed Neocon, Mystic Janet's predictions from earlier this year.

Janet Daley

Obama will not win the presidency: America will have been made to feel sufficiently good about itself simply by his nomination and the way it responds to him as a candidate not to feel the need to put him in the White House.

The popular, if not the electoral college, vote will be close but America will decide that in such dangerous times, it must choose the wise older leader, the war hero, the statesman who talks about foreign policy and national security with real authority.