A Friday night undermybed.dk

Nu skal vi snart til det igen: Flæskesteg, and, rødkål, brunede og hvide kartofler, sovs (ikke sauce - den tynder variant), franske kartofler og måske syltede æbler med gele, og prikken over i’et, ris á la mande. Men selvom jeg år efter år lover mig sig selv mådeholdenhed, så lykkes det ikke alligevel når jeg sidder ved julebordet. Well, sidste år, hvor jeg fik kogt lammekød, var problemet ikke så stort.

 Nå, men nu har jeg altså fundet ud af hvordan det skal gribes an i år, så det handler bare om at overbevise familien. Strategien er at ligge hindring i vejen - og helst så mange som muligt:

• Spise julemiddagen af mindre tallerkener, så man må fylde op lidt oftere
• Hente maden på en buffet eller i køkkenet, så herlighederne kommer på lidt længere afstand
• Indtage julemiddagen ved hjælp af kinesiske spisepinde (det kommer til at tage lidt tid at flå flæskestegen i små bidder, men bliver sikkert underholdende)
• Spise suppe til forrest. Det er mest vand, fylder godt, og relativt kaloriefattigt Æhh, holder den? Sådan en hønsekødssuppe med fedtperler ovenpå lyder ikke specielt fattig på kalorier. Men selvfølgelig er suppen nok mindre kalorieholdig end and og brunede kartofler.
• Sørg for at al maden en hjemmelavet. Det sætter en grænse for hvor mange retter der kommer på bordet. Ideen er at man hurtigere “kommer til at kede sig” med at spise f.eks. flæskesteg og - voila - så spiser man mindre:

“Indeed, it’s not a bad idea to limit the total number of courses. Variety stimulates appetite. As evidence, Ariely brings up a study conducted on mice. A male mouse and a female mouse will soon tire of mating with each other. But put new partners into the cage, and it turns out they weren’t tired at all. They were just bored. So, too, with food. “Imagine you only had one dish,” he says. “How much could you eat?”“

Men måske er det alligevel lidt for upfront - det med spisepindene, altså. 

The world population is somewhere around 6,700,000,000 individuals. Is there an upper limit to how many people the planet/environment can accommodate when everyone needs ~2000-2500 calories/day, a car, heeting, and airplane travel?

Polar Bear from Plane Stupid on Vimeo.

Do we need to talk about population control? As in China? Or as birth control in Africa? And what difference does that make, when the greenhouse gases are being omitted from the chimneys of the developed world.Malthus was wrong, but is he still wrong?

 …And speaking of him:

“The first mistake Malthusians always make is to underestimate how society can change to embrace more and more people. They make the schoolboy scientific error of imagining that population is the only variable, the only thing that grows and grows, while everything else – including society, progress and discovery – stays roughly the same. That is why Malthus was wrong: he thought an overpopulated planet would run out of food because he could not foresee how the industrial revolution would massively transform society and have an historic impact on how we produce and transport food and many other things. Population is not the only variable – mankind’s vision, growth, his ability to rethink and tackle problems: they are variables, too.

 

The second mistake Malthusians always make is to imagine that resources are fixed, finite things that will inevitably run out. They don’t recognise that what we consider to be a resource changes over time, depending on how advanced society is. That is why the Christian Tertullian was wrong in 200 AD when he said ‘the resources are scarcely adequate for us’. Because back then pretty much the only resources were animals, plants and various metals. Tertullian could not imagine that, in the future, the oceans, oil and uranium would become resources, too. The nature of resources changes as society changes – what we consider to be a resource today might not be one in the future, because other, better, more easily-exploited resources will hopefully be discovered or created. Today’s cult of the finite, the discussion of the planet as a larder of scarce resources that human beings are using up, really speaks to finite thinking, to a lack of future-oriented imagination.

And the third and main mistake Malthusians always make is to underestimate the genius of mankind. Population scaremongering springs from a fundamentally warped view of human beings as simply consumers, simply the users of resources, simply the destroyers of things, as a kind of ‘plague’ on poor Mother Nature, when in fact human beings are first and foremost producers, the discoverers and creators of resources, the makers of things and the makers of history. Malthusians insultingly refer to newborn babies as ‘another mouth to feed’, when in the real world another human being is another mind that can think, another pair of hands that can work, and another person who has needs and desires that ought to be met.“

Det er jo ikke nogen overraskelse, men alligevel:

“In the U.S., Foer reports, people are prescribed about three million pounds of antibiotics a year. Livestock are fed nearly twenty-eight million pounds, according to the drug industry. By pumping cows and chickens full of antibiotics, farmers have been instrumental in producing new, resistant strains of germs—so-called superbugs. As soon as the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of a class of drugs known as fluoroquinolones in chickens, for instance, the percentage of bacteria resistant to fluoroquinolones shot up.”

Landmændene overfodrer med antibiotika og skaber problemer bakteriel resistens; de stuver køer, svin og fjerkræ sammen på uendeligt små arealer, og har produktionsenheder på mod een million dyr (som f.eks. den by i Mexico, hvor svineinfluenzaen opstod). Men det er jo ikke landmændene, der er usympatiske, og det er heller ikke husholdningerne, selvom det er vores daglige jagt på et bedre tilbud i køledisken, der tvinger landmændene til effektiv produktion.

Det er nok bare en af markedsliberalismens uheldige sideeffekter, og jeg tror spørgsmålet er, hvordan man bedst muligt internaliserer de eksterne omkostninger (dyreetiske, sundheds- og miljømæssige)  i prisen på et kilo flæsk…

En rigtig god udsendelse fra P1/Orientering om flertallet i Folketingets lyst til at overlade vurderinger, der burde tagets af domstolene, i hænderne på det danske politi. Spørgsmålet er om politiet er i stand til at vurdere, om et konkret tilfælde af en overtrædelse af knivloven er noget der kan ses igennem fingre med eller ej. Hvis politimanden er i dårligt humør, så ender lovertræderen med en tur i fængselet i 7 dage.

Looking through my old photos I found one of a mailbox next to a Blockbuster. On the mailbox was a note to the Postman. It reads something like:”

To the postman: By mistake I’ve “returned” a movie in the mailbox instead of the Blockbuster next to. Do you mind dropping the movie in their drop-box? Thanks.”

Oh dear. I hope they sorted it out :-)

Listening to the radio just now, I heard that in Breda in the Netherlands they have a Redhead Day where redheads gather once a year to celebrate (see their webpage). I should have attended, was my first thought. The guy on the radio had been doing some digging and had discovered that red haired have some odd characteristics.

• They require more anesthetics before surgery. Is this some generic phenomenon or is it just because red haired descend from the Vikings and have bigger & stronger bodies and thus needs more anesthetics
• Red haried are an endangered species. There will be fewer of us in 100 years, because the gene is dominated by the non-red hair gene - or something like that. Today we are less than 1% of the world population. Scotland has the highest concentration of 13%.
• Antonio Vivaldi had red hair.

Naturally, you’ll find more on Wiki

Maybe you’ve read about it. The war that is taking place in the streets of Copenhagen these days over the market for illegal drugs with Hells Angels supporters AK81 on the one side, and immigrant street-gangs on the other. The war does not yet involve mortar attacks and air-strikes, but ‘just’ drive by shootings en masse and plain liquidations. And it is all taking place in the middel of the city. Charming.

Anyway, the solution suggestions from the liberal/concervative minority government (supported by the national socialists) are as dim as you would expect. I’ve heard two suggestions: 1. Safe conduct for handing over firearms to the police. 2. A ban of motorcycle gangs. [To be fair, it should be noted that 1. originally was a left wing suggestion.] But I think it is obvious to everyone that these are only temporary and doubtful solutions.

Instead I would like to see a debate about two alternative solutions.

A. Liberalising the market for drugs. As a layman, I immediately see three sub-markets for illegal drugs with (presumably) a high degree of substitution between the substances. There is the market for mild substances such as Cannabis, a market for weekend-drugs such as ecstasy, and a market for the highly addictive as heroin. The market for the mild substances could be liberalised with the Netherlands as an example (state controlled outlets with prices below the black market) and the market for the highly addictive substances could be highly reduced by introducing doctor prescribed heroin for addicts (which is probably a good idea under all circumstances because it would prevent a lot of the crimes related to raising money to buy these drugs for addicts). I see no overt solution for the weekend drugs-market, but it is my conjecture that easy access to mild substances would reduce this market.

B.  See that war as a social phenomenon with roots in social marginalisation, alienation, unemployment, low education, ghettoisation. That requires a lon-run intensive effort, which is likely to be very, very expensive, but the Government seems to place a higher value on spending ~20 billion DKR [*] of taxpayer money on digging down high voltage air-power cables to beautify the scenary. But perhaps the Government coalition has envisioned the digging as a labour market programme for gang-members?

[*] = I have that  number from a recent article in Weekendavisen, but I could not find a link to that.

Information.dk har en fin artikel om Melodi Grand Prix og det Russisk-Georgiske, Russisk-Svenske, Israelsk-Arabiske forhold. Her et citat fra den Russisk-Georgiske del af historien:

“Ironisk nok deltog Georgien sidste år, blot et par måneder før Ruslands invasion af landet, i det Internationale Melodi Grand Prix med sangen “Peace will come”.

Sangerinden var blind, hvilket måske kan forklare det nu noget åbenlyse fejlskud.”

An interesting viewpoint from a nurse and researcher from Princeton University:

“Our interconnected global community will certainly confront another disease crisis; therefore, we must learn from the response to the current H1N1 crisis to do a better job in the future. During the initial stages of any outbreak, public health professionals and the media must be cautious when providing numbers on how many people are infected and how many have died. A country’s disease reporting capability is only as good as its medical and public health infrastructures. Therefore, we must assume that the numbers from countries with poorly integrated medical and public health infrastructures and large numbers of uninsured will be inaccurate.

And we must not forget that the name of the disease matters. By using the name “swine flu,” health officials inadvertently tied the disease to pigs even though there was no evidence that pigs were involved. The name led to some countries inappropriately slaughtering their healthy swine herds or banning pork products. They should have used the name “influenza A (H1N1)” from the start. In future outbreaks, health officials should only refer to a pathogen by its scientific name, taking care to avoid naming the causative pathogen after an animal, location, or subgroup of people to avoid inadvertently placing blame or scapegoating.”

At first it seems hard to disagree, but from a precautionary point-of-view, it is probably a good idea to exaggerate the risk initially, when little information is available, and then adjust the risk-level accordingly as more information becomes available. To me, it does not seem sensible to reject initial information based on the country of origin, but rather to judge the information by the quality of the accompanying documentation.

A second point is that Egypt might have ordered the slaughter of the 300,000 pigs anyway, purely because of religious reasons. The authorities were just waiting for an excuse…

Here in Amsterdam (as in Denmark) it seems as a big secret: the upcoming election for the 700+ seats in the European Parliament. Is it because we only vote for a tiny fraction of the many seats that noone cares? Or is it just the ‘times-of-not-caring’ about European politics because we are doing so well (disregarding the current crisis)? {Has the social democrats been too successful?}

Anyway, here’s a link to viewpoint by an LSE-professor. He thinks that the UK-national parties sees the election as a mid-term vote and therefore treat it merely as a national contest, but:

 ”A big difference between the European Parliament and most national parliaments is that the European Commission and the EU governments cannot railroad their laws through the European chamber. Coalitions have to be built issue-by-issue. As a result, more than 50% of amendments proposed by the European Parliament end up as law. In this respect, the European Parliament is more like the US Congress than the House of Commons.

So, European Parliament elections matter. If the centre-right wins we can expect more market liberalisation, fewer environmental regulations, and more restrictive immigration policies, while if the centre-left wins, we can expect stricter environmental standards, more labour market rules and liberal immigration policies.”

So maybe the the lack of interest among the public (if there is a lack of interest) is caused by journalists and politicians who are focusing on the wrong issues. In Denmark, it seems to me, that every discussion surrounding an EU election ends with a discussion of the EU membership (a referendum of 1972). Today the discussion is about the threat of east-expansion of the Union to the Danish welfare system and the labour market - in particular the flexicurity-system and ‘the Danish model’ (a system of no minimum wage in combination with strong unions that negotiate wages with the firms - around 75 per cent of Danish firms have made deals with unions). But these decisions - most notably the one opening the labour market for Polish labour - have already been taken, so why don’t we focus the discussion on something relevant? (climate, agricultural subsidies, market (de)regulation)

…but that’s just my five (euro) cents.