Daily Archives: April 6, 2004


Nope, No Transparency Here

The bushies will not release to the 9/11 Commission the complete text of rice’s preempted 9/11 speech. Josh Marshall tries to understand why not:

Unless the argument is that we can’t let our enemies know the depth of the poor judgment displayed by the president’s national security team it is searchingly hard to fathom what possible national security issue could be implicated by handing over the speech since it was — do we have to say it? — a speech! A speech for public consumption.

And just to be clear:

Trent Duffy, a spokesman for the White House, said only: �The White House is working with the commission to ensure that it has access to what it needs to do its job.�

These folks must have a different understanding of the commission’s job then the rest of us.


Do it Often

If you are a guy you might want to modify your behavior as appropriate:

Frequent sexual activity may reduce a man’s risk of prostate cancer, according to a study in the April 7 Journal of the American Medical Association.
The cancer risk in men who reported more than 20 monthly ejaculations was 33 percent less than that of other men, the Harvard University study showed.

Your mileage will vary…..


Privacy, Forget It

The US National Security Agency apparently played a major role in the arrest of 9 folks in Britain and 1 in Canada on charges of planning a terrorist act and belonging to a terrorist group. The key: an intercepted email message:

“That’s the first admission I’ve actually seen that they actually monitor Internet traffic. I assumed they did, but no one ever admitted it,” Mr. Farber said.
Officials at the NSA could not be reached for comment. But U.S. authorities are uniquely positioned to monitor international Internet and telecommunications traffic because many of the world’s international gateways are located in their country. And once that electronic traffic touches an American computer — an e-mail message, a request for a website or an Internet-based phone call, for instance — it is routinely monitored by NSA spies.
“Foreign traffic that comes through the U.S. is subject to U.S. laws, and the NSA has a perfect right to monitor all Internet traffic,” said Mr. Farber, who has also been a technical adviser to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

Uhhh, no they do not have that right and to the extent that there are laws allowing this behavior they need to be severly curtailed if not eliminated. There is too great an opportunity for abuse and, at minimum, these searches should not be allowed without probable cause. This does not appear to be the case at NSA.
Frankly, I would have expected Farber, who sits on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation to express a little more concern about this.


Losing Height to Europe

I spend a lot of time around the sports of basketball and rowing and, though dealing with a biased sample, I thought Americans were getting taller. There seem to be more and taller women and men in these programs then in the past.
But Burkhard Bilger reports in this weeks New Yorker that this is not the case across the population as a whole:

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the country seemed set to regain its eminence. The economy was expanding at a dramatic rate, and public-hygiene campaigns were sweeping the cities clean at last: for the first time in American history, urbanites began to outgrow farmers.
Then something strange happened. While heights in Europe continued to climb, Komlos said, “the U.S. just went flat.” In the First World War, the average American soldier was still two inches taller than the average German. But sometime around 1955 the situation began to reverse. The Germans and other Europeans went on to grow an extra two centimetres a decade, and some Asian populations several times more, yet Americans haven’t grown taller in fifty years.

One possible reason:

In a recent British study, one group of schoolchildren was given hamburgers, French fries, and other familiar lunch foods; the other was fed nineteen-forties-style wartime rations such as boiled cabbage and corned beef. Within eight weeks, the children on the rations were both taller and slimmer than the ones on a regular diet.

This may not be the whole story but it certainly provides food for thought and, I think, individual action.
Via Newmarks Door.