The problem with government secrecy is that rather than concentrating their efforts on information that is vital to keep secret, they mark almost everything as secret with very little justification. The more pieces of information you claim are secret, the more likely that some of that information will leak through the cracks. Meanwhile the attempt to keep many secrets removes focus from the truly vital pieces which makes any given secret more likely to slip out from divided attention.
On the other hand you don't want to draw attention to the information you are most worried about leaking. e.g. putting your confidential trash in a bag marked "confidential waste". Thus it can make sense to classify everything as "secret". So long as you don't have different levels of "secret". Once you have multiple levels you run a risk akin to someone not shredding something by mistake, which is less of an issue if the policy is to shred everything (and ditribute between several trash bags).
Israel isn't a secular state, and a country which declares a large subset of the people it controls not to be citizens isn't a democracy (see apartheid South Africa, again).
IIRC Israel and apartheid South Africa got on very well. Possibly then even cooperated on building nuclear weapons.
It's far from clear that Hezbollah started the war (and even less to suggest that it was done because of Iran's insistence),
It's a rather less than credible conspiracy theory that a Lebanese militia is under the control of the Iranian government. Sure they'll take money and weapons from Iran. No doubt they wouldn't say no to the same from Russia, China, Japan, France, the US, etc, etc.
unless you discount repeated, almost daily, incursions by the Israeli military into Lebanese territory, repeated violations of Lebanese airspace, and Israel's occupation of the Shebba farms.
Actually it's perfectly clear that it was Israel who started the latest war between Israel and Lebanon. The real suprise is that that Israel didn't re-invade Lebanon.
Iran does not deny the holocaust took place. That's just pure propaganda bullshit. That idiot Ahmadinejad denied it took place. I'm sure there are some others who agree with him, but there are plenty who accept the holocaust took place.
Actually the whole term "holocaust denial" is quite aptly described as "pure propaganda bullshit", since the definition of a "holocaust denier" is someone who does not accept, on faith alone, a claim about something from recent history. The vast majority of "holocaust deniers" would be better described as "sceptics of dodgy history". Typically it is a requirement for those making claims to back them up. Instead of enguaging in ad hominem attacks when anyone asks them for the most basic of evidence.
I'm guessing you weren't alive in 1979 when the US Embassy in Iran was overrun and everybody inside taken hostage.
For roughly 400 days they Iranians held those hostages. Why? Nobody remembers why, but they did it - and if nobody remembers why, it must not have been a very memorable reason (if any.)
The why goes back to 1953 and an event codenamed "Operation Ajax" which involved a CIA backed coup to remove Iran's democratic government and install a (US friendly) dictator. This dictator was ousted, by popular revolution, in 1979. The US Embassy was an obvious target given both the initial coup and the continued CIA connections to SAVAK.
Pray tell, what exactly have they done to suggest this, rather than the conclusion that they are a bunch of power-hungry fanatics who want to hold on to their privileged positions at the top of government.
The real trick would be devising a system of government which keeps out the kind of power hungry fanatics who are naturally attracted to government.
We were talking about nukes here, remember? I dont think Isreal or the US have nuked anybody lately, Korn pone.
The US is the only country to have nuked cities. Indeed the Nagasaki bomb actually missed by several miles. Anyway neither Israel nor the US appear able to not attack any other country. Maybe if either could keep within their own borders for a year or so...
Why do I feel like we're totally being played with all this recent "Nukular Iran" business? Last week we find out about a "secret" enrichment facility that it turns out we knew about since George Bush was president, then we get this whole kabuki dance at the UN with Gordon Brown and Sarkozi and Obama and Netanyahu each playing their respective parts in a drama that seems a little too rote.
What else is going on in the world that the "mainstream" media wants to avoid covering?
I've got a feeling that this drama is being played to entertain us and enrich the military manufacturers and contractors.
It "they" are going to push incredible conspiracy theories they might at least try for some more variation...
It sucks that the citizens of every country are expected to accept a lower standard of living while there seems to be no limit to the money available for these small men to play war games.
It might be better (and cheaper) entertainment to put all the warmongers in a "Thunderdome" style arena. (Or maybe someone can develop a working "Starfire Wheel".)
The article says this is about asylum seekers, not regular immigrants. Ie, those from Somalia are allowed entry because they are fleeing a war zone, whereas there is concern (unfounded or not) that some Kenyans are claiming to be Somali.
Given that Somalia and Kenya share a border It's quite possible that many Somali's would come out as "Keynan" and many Kenyans would come out as "Somali". You'd get similar issues if you tried this kind of thing on North Americans
And, as we all know, any information gathered by the UK government is normally in the hands of random Indians, Nigerians and Russians, etc within days,
Not just them. It's going to be in the hands of various other governments withing the same sort of time period.
and the information on database so corrupt as to be worthless in less than a year.
But various people will still try and treat it as meaningful.
(According to official data, about 30% of data on the police national computer system is just plain wrong - but nobody has the authority to delete it.)
How much of the other 70% is wrong enough to be misleading?
Uncontrolled immigration wrecks a society. France now has large ghettos of Middle Easterners and Africans who refuse to assimilate into French society.
You find similar things happening in many places "blank-Americans" probably being the most obvious.
They should be deported.
Assuming they would be welcome anywhere. People in Asian and African countries may well see such people as "European", "French" or just strange.
The problem isn't the scientific validity of the test; the problem is the idea that an emigrant's nationality should factor into whether they should be allowed residency.
Thing is that someone's nationality is indicated by human created documents. Their DNA simply isn't especially relevent.
But as it's applied as TFA indicates, in an attempt to differentiate between African nationalities, the project is doomed to failure, since a lot of African cultures are nomadic or have bred from nomadic stock, and no-one knows anywhere near enough about their DNA to establish a real pattern.
Not just with Africans, given that you find nomadic people all over the world.
It might be more honest if the British Government were to just admit that it is catering to a common and wide streak of racism that persists, and just cart anyone who doesn't speak with a BBC accent off to a concentration camp.
Personally I'd settle for putting the British Government in a concentration camp.
know that sounds inflammatory, but when I was last living in Britain on a full-time basis, Thatcher was openly fostering the most openly fascist attitudes I imagined possible. The Labour party used to at least nominally stand for social justice, but I see none of that in their policies of the last decade, and it could be argued that in many ways the present Labour government is simply a more insidious version of its predecessor.
They are called "New Labour", which might better be described as "Alternative Tory". Unfortunatly politics in the UK is heading the same way as that in the US, two political partys which don't differ that much.
They had a TV program last year when they did some genetic tests on people who considered themselves to be 100% English. I remember that out of 12 one had mitochondrial DNA that would have had his female line originating in Eastern Europe, one had Jewish ancestry and another Indian - and these were all people who did not know of any non-British relatives.
These techniques are useful for genealogy and archaeology but at these examples indicate utterly useless for determining citizenship, even of the "native born".
Right, because when someone invades your country you want to be able to nuke them on your own soil?
In order to invade an army generally needs to assemble an invasion force. i.e. put a lot of troops in once place. If there is any possibility of the invasion force being nuked then no sane third party country would want them anywhere near. So the invader is restricted to either their own country or a country they have occupied.
Countries without nukes invariably get invaded by the US, because we claim the leader is some insane radical. Venezuela is a great example. We didn't invade them (yet?), but the US was definitely involved in the coup d'etat to oust Chavez. Fortunately for democracy, the vast majority of the people in Venezuela fucking love that guy and he was rescued because of that. The US doesn't really care about democracy though.
"Operation AJAX" probably being the most relevent example here. Though the US toppling democractic governments they didn't like actually appears to have started with the Spanish American war... The real reason the US Government has an issue with Iran is most likely the same one they have with Cuba. The locals booted out a US backed dictator to get their country back.
Frankly, the Israeli first strike policy has in recent years become a belligerent one. Perhaps it works when you're bombing Hamas militia men in the Gaza strip,
Considering the they are still there and still the elected Palestinian government this would be a strange definition of "works".
but international warfare is a different game. Israeli jets flying 2000km to strike targets in another country because they might be a threat sometime in the future is not going to go down well with most reasonable people in the world.
Unless the result is the Israeli planes getting shot down and any surviving aircrew given the "Gary Powers treatment". Then most of the world can have a chuckle. Probably why Israel is very much against Iran buying an anti aircraft system from Russia, which simply cannot be used offensivly.
From the article "The restriction does not apply to navigation systems that do not have a mobile phone function" So they have a problem with mobile devices according to the article.
Wonder what the status of devices which obtain updates via mobile networks is...
WTF? The poor drink bottled water? I don't know what the prices are where you live, but here bottled water costs around 3,000 times more per unit volume than tap water.
Quite a few bottled waters are regular tap water anyway.
No poor people are going to be spending 3,000 times as much on something than they need to; if they can afford to then they are not poor.
Down to the power of marketing with people being convinced that the bottled stuff is somehow better. Unless you happen to live in somewhere like Iraq this simply isn't the case.
You've changed the question from how do we make sure *most* people stay at a healthy weight to how do we make sure *everyone* stays at a healthy weight.
Assuming that we can first work out what is a "healthy weight".
The law of diminishing returns is a well known economic concept, and your example of mandatory activities is an example of diminished returns.
It is where initial steps that are taken to address a problem give huge gains, but each additional step taken gives smaller and smaller gains until eventually it is no longer economically viable to go further.
There can also come a point where things actually become counter productive.
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When you sell a house to someone with no money, that's fraud. Especially when you know you're doing it.
It also should be fairly obvious that the only people who would take out such loans would be those without money of their own to lose...
The problem with government secrecy is that rather than concentrating their efforts on information that is vital to keep secret, they mark almost everything as secret with very little justification. The more pieces of information you claim are secret, the more likely that some of that information will leak through the cracks. Meanwhile the attempt to keep many secrets removes focus from the truly vital pieces which makes any given secret more likely to slip out from divided attention.
On the other hand you don't want to draw attention to the information you are most worried about leaking. e.g. putting your confidential trash in a bag marked "confidential waste". Thus it can make sense to classify everything as "secret". So long as you don't have different levels of "secret". Once you have multiple levels you run a risk akin to someone not shredding something by mistake, which is less of an issue if the policy is to shred everything (and ditribute between several trash bags).
Israel isn't a secular state, and a country which declares a large subset of the people it controls not to be citizens isn't a democracy (see apartheid South Africa, again).
IIRC Israel and apartheid South Africa got on very well. Possibly then even cooperated on building nuclear weapons.
In that war, Israel threatened to use nuclear weapons as a last resort, causing the US to send aid to make sure the war didn't reach that point.
Has Israel been blackmailing the US with that threat since. This would certainly explain all the "aid" which has gone to Israel...
It's far from clear that Hezbollah started the war (and even less to suggest that it was done because of Iran's insistence),
It's a rather less than credible conspiracy theory that a Lebanese militia is under the control of the Iranian government. Sure they'll take money and weapons from Iran. No doubt they wouldn't say no to the same from Russia, China, Japan, France, the US, etc, etc.
unless you discount repeated, almost daily, incursions by the Israeli military into Lebanese territory, repeated violations of Lebanese airspace, and Israel's occupation of the Shebba farms.
Actually it's perfectly clear that it was Israel who started the latest war between Israel and Lebanon. The real suprise is that that Israel didn't re-invade Lebanon.
Iran does not deny the holocaust took place. That's just pure propaganda bullshit. That idiot Ahmadinejad denied it took place. I'm sure there are some others who agree with him, but there are plenty who accept the holocaust took place.
Actually the whole term "holocaust denial" is quite aptly described as "pure propaganda bullshit", since the definition of a "holocaust denier" is someone who does not accept, on faith alone, a claim about something from recent history. The vast majority of "holocaust deniers" would be better described as "sceptics of dodgy history". Typically it is a requirement for those making claims to back them up. Instead of enguaging in ad hominem attacks when anyone asks them for the most basic of evidence.
A lot of talk about "terrorism" is really a discussion designed to get U.S. taxpayers to pay for Israel's security.
Kind of ironic considering which two countries refuse to condem state sponsorship of terrorism.
I'm guessing you weren't alive in 1979 when the US Embassy in Iran was overrun and everybody inside taken hostage. For roughly 400 days they Iranians held those hostages. Why? Nobody remembers why, but they did it - and if nobody remembers why, it must not have been a very memorable reason (if any.)
The why goes back to 1953 and an event codenamed "Operation Ajax" which involved a CIA backed coup to remove Iran's democratic government and install a (US friendly) dictator. This dictator was ousted, by popular revolution, in 1979. The US Embassy was an obvious target given both the initial coup and the continued CIA connections to SAVAK.
Pray tell, what exactly have they done to suggest this, rather than the conclusion that they are a bunch of power-hungry fanatics who want to hold on to their privileged positions at the top of government.
The real trick would be devising a system of government which keeps out the kind of power hungry fanatics who are naturally attracted to government.
We were talking about nukes here, remember? I dont think Isreal or the US have nuked anybody lately, Korn pone.
The US is the only country to have nuked cities. Indeed the Nagasaki bomb actually missed by several miles.
Anyway neither Israel nor the US appear able to not attack any other country. Maybe if either could keep within their own borders for a year or so...
But there is an important caveat. America always catches and releases. We invade, set up a new government, and for the most part *LEAVE*.
In the the case of the Guano Islands Act it took well over a century for the US to leave. In the case of Hawaii the US hasn't left yet.
Find me an empire in the past that did that?
Sounds like the former European Imperial powers...
Why do I feel like we're totally being played with all this recent "Nukular Iran" business? Last week we find out about a "secret" enrichment facility that it turns out we knew about since George Bush was president, then we get this whole kabuki dance at the UN with Gordon Brown and Sarkozi and Obama and Netanyahu each playing their respective parts in a drama that seems a little too rote.
What else is going on in the world that the "mainstream" media wants to avoid covering?
I've got a feeling that this drama is being played to entertain us and enrich the military manufacturers and contractors.
It "they" are going to push incredible conspiracy theories they might at least try for some more variation...
It sucks that the citizens of every country are expected to accept a lower standard of living while there seems to be no limit to the money available for these small men to play war games.
It might be better (and cheaper) entertainment to put all the warmongers in a "Thunderdome" style arena. (Or maybe someone can develop a working "Starfire Wheel".)
The article says this is about asylum seekers, not regular immigrants. Ie, those from Somalia are allowed entry because they are fleeing a war zone, whereas there is concern (unfounded or not) that some Kenyans are claiming to be Somali.
Given that Somalia and Kenya share a border It's quite possible that many Somali's would come out as "Keynan" and many Kenyans would come out as "Somali". You'd get similar issues if you tried this kind of thing on North Americans
And, as we all know, any information gathered by the UK government is normally in the hands of random Indians, Nigerians and Russians, etc within days,
Not just them. It's going to be in the hands of various other governments withing the same sort of time period.
and the information on database so corrupt as to be worthless in less than a year.
But various people will still try and treat it as meaningful.
(According to official data, about 30% of data on the police national computer system is just plain wrong - but nobody has the authority to delete it.)
How much of the other 70% is wrong enough to be misleading?
Uncontrolled immigration wrecks a society. France now has large ghettos of Middle Easterners and Africans who refuse to assimilate into French society.
You find similar things happening in many places "blank-Americans" probably being the most obvious.
They should be deported.
Assuming they would be welcome anywhere. People in Asian and African countries may well see such people as "European", "French" or just strange.
The problem isn't the scientific validity of the test; the problem is the idea that an emigrant's nationality should factor into whether they should be allowed residency.
Thing is that someone's nationality is indicated by human created documents. Their DNA simply isn't especially relevent.
But as it's applied as TFA indicates, in an attempt to differentiate between African nationalities, the project is doomed to failure, since a lot of African cultures are nomadic or have bred from nomadic stock, and no-one knows anywhere near enough about their DNA to establish a real pattern.
Not just with Africans, given that you find nomadic people all over the world.
It might be more honest if the British Government were to just admit that it is catering to a common and wide streak of racism that persists, and just cart anyone who doesn't speak with a BBC accent off to a concentration camp.
Personally I'd settle for putting the British Government in a concentration camp.
know that sounds inflammatory, but when I was last living in Britain on a full-time basis, Thatcher was openly fostering the most openly fascist attitudes I imagined possible. The Labour party used to at least nominally stand for social justice, but I see none of that in their policies of the last decade, and it could be argued that in many ways the present Labour government is simply a more insidious version of its predecessor.
They are called "New Labour", which might better be described as "Alternative Tory". Unfortunatly politics in the UK is heading the same way as that in the US, two political partys which don't differ that much.
Apparently, the UK's royal traditions have finally caught up with them and everybody in a position of power there is retarded.
That would be an improvement. Since then they'd be too stupid to come up with these kind of daft ideas or waste huge amounts of tax payers' money.
They had a TV program last year when they did some genetic tests on people who considered themselves to be 100% English. I remember that out of 12 one had mitochondrial DNA that would have had his female line originating in Eastern Europe, one had Jewish ancestry and another Indian - and these were all people who did not know of any non-British relatives.
These techniques are useful for genealogy and archaeology but at these examples indicate utterly useless for determining citizenship, even of the "native born".
Right, because when someone invades your country you want to be able to nuke them on your own soil?
In order to invade an army generally needs to assemble an invasion force. i.e. put a lot of troops in once place. If there is any possibility of the invasion force being nuked then no sane third party country would want them anywhere near. So the invader is restricted to either their own country or a country they have occupied.
Countries without nukes invariably get invaded by the US, because we claim the leader is some insane radical. Venezuela is a great example. We didn't invade them (yet?), but the US was definitely involved in the coup d'etat to oust Chavez. Fortunately for democracy, the vast majority of the people in Venezuela fucking love that guy and he was rescued because of that. The US doesn't really care about democracy though.
"Operation AJAX" probably being the most relevent example here. Though the US toppling democractic governments they didn't like actually appears to have started with the Spanish American war...
The real reason the US Government has an issue with Iran is most likely the same one they have with Cuba. The locals booted out a US backed dictator to get their country back.
Frankly, the Israeli first strike policy has in recent years become a belligerent one. Perhaps it works when you're bombing Hamas militia men in the Gaza strip,
Considering the they are still there and still the elected Palestinian government this would be a strange definition of "works".
but international warfare is a different game. Israeli jets flying 2000km to strike targets in another country because they might be a threat sometime in the future is not going to go down well with most reasonable people in the world.
Unless the result is the Israeli planes getting shot down and any surviving aircrew given the "Gary Powers treatment". Then most of the world can have a chuckle. Probably why Israel is very much against Iran buying an anti aircraft system from Russia, which simply cannot be used offensivly.
From the article "The restriction does not apply to navigation systems that do not have a mobile phone function" So they have a problem with mobile devices according to the article.
Wonder what the status of devices which obtain updates via mobile networks is...
WTF? The poor drink bottled water? I don't know what the prices are where you live, but here bottled water costs around 3,000 times more per unit volume than tap water.
Quite a few bottled waters are regular tap water anyway.
No poor people are going to be spending 3,000 times as much on something than they need to; if they can afford to then they are not poor.
Down to the power of marketing with people being convinced that the bottled stuff is somehow better. Unless you happen to live in somewhere like Iraq this simply isn't the case.
You've changed the question from how do we make sure *most* people stay at a healthy weight to how do we make sure *everyone* stays at a healthy weight.
Assuming that we can first work out what is a "healthy weight".
The law of diminishing returns is a well known economic concept, and your example of mandatory activities is an example of diminished returns.
It is where initial steps that are taken to address a problem give huge gains, but each additional step taken gives smaller and smaller gains until eventually it is no longer economically viable to go further.
There can also come a point where things actually become counter productive.