Under The Sun

A chemical plant that the US says is a key component in Iraq’s chemical
warfare arsenal
was secretly built by Britain in 1985:

Senior officials recorded in writing that Saddam Hussein was actively
gassing his opponents and that there was a “strong possibility” that the chlorine
plant was intended by the Iraqis to make mustard gas. At the time, Saddam was
known to be gassing Iranian troops in their thousands in the Iran-Iraq war. But
ministers in the then Thatcher government none the less secretly gave financial
backing to the British company involved, Uhde Ltd, through insurance guarantees.

When a 13-year-old Scottish girl handed in
an essay written in text message shorthand, she explained to her flabbergasted
teacher that it was easier than standard English. The BBC report also quotes
the winning entry from a competition on the Ship of Fools web site, to reduce the
Lord’s Prayer to the 160 characters available in a phone text message:

“dad@hvn, ur spshl. we want wot u want &urth2b like hvn. giv us food
& 4giv r sins lyk we 4giv uvaz. don’t test us! save us! bcos we kno ur boss,
ur tuf & ur cool 4 eva! ok?”

I see a new version of the NIV coming…

Lesbian Japanese Monkeys Challenge Darwin’s Assumptions, reported by the UK
Telegraph. I’m not sure about the story but it’s a great headline! For a moment I
thought it might about a community group of the type favoured by the National Lottery
Fund for hand-outs from the gullibility tax — “Lesbian Monkeys against Darwinism”
sounds like a worthy cause.

Taking weirdness to new levels, one of the “related links” on that Telegraph story is

Reagan ‘Dumbed Down’ Politics, the relatedness of which escapes me. That story claims
that researchers at Cornell University, New York, used a computer program to
analyze every State of the Union address:

In the early 19th century “militia”, “British” and “enemy” were the
most popular buzzwords, while in the Civil War the key words were “slaves”,
“rebellion” and “emancipation”. In the 1930s the buzzwords were “depression”,
“recovery” and “banks”, while 20 years later they were “communist”, “free”,
“atomic” and “defence”. During the early 1970s “inflation”, “energy” and “oil”
were most used… Reagan’s included “that’s”, “we’re” and “we’ve”, along with
“it’s”, “child” and “don’t”. Clinton’s were usually related to welfare - including
“medicare”.

Is life imitating the Onion, or is the Telegraph engaging in Onionesque satire?
The strange thing is that Telegraph is one of the most conservative UK newspapers —
I once heard someone quip that “if the Church of England is the ‘Tory Party
at Prayer’, the Daily Telegraph is the ‘Tory Party at Sleep’”.

Scientists Report that the Universe is “Ugly” according to a report by
the UK Telegraph. The idea is that simple explanations for natural phenomena
are “beautiful” and complexity is unaesthetic. There is some justification for this;
for example, the planet Neptune was discovered because astronomers were reluctant
to abandon the “beautiful” simplicity of Newton’s theory of planetary motion, which
required an hitherto unknown planet to account for the observed motion of Uranus.
The trouble is, in the popular world view the search for neat and tidy explanations
blinds people to the real nature of the universe: “There are more things in Heaven
and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”.

A new map of the
Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Radiation - the so-called
echo of the Big Bang - shows an unexpected symmetrical variation:“It could be
telling us something about the shape of space on the largest scales. We did not
expect this and we cannot yet explain it.”

How should dubious scientific claims be evaluated, particularly in a court of
law? The Chronicle of Higher Education offers
The Seven Warning Signs
of Bogus Science - with the caveat that even a claim with several of the signs
could still be legitimate.

The US is preparing to use toxic riot-control agents in Iraq in contravention
of the Chemical Weapons Convention, according to the UK Independent:

The use of chemical weapons by US forces was explicitly banned by
President Gerald Ford in 1975 after CS gas had been repeatedly used in Vietnam
to smoke out enemy soldiers and then kill them as they ran away. Britain would
be in a particularly sensitive position if the US used the weapons as it drafted
the convention and is still seen internationally as its most important guardian.

Obesity
epidemic blamed on food firms A World Health Organization report blames the
food industry for promoting unhealthy products:

“Part of the consistent and strong relationships between television
viewing and obesity in children may relate to the food advertising to which they
are exposed,” it says. “Fast-food restaurants and foods and beverages that are
usually classified under the ‘least eat’ category in dietary guidelines are amongst
the most heavily marketed products, especially on television.”

The Agonist has published a map showing the popular (rather than government) support for and against war on Iraq. As Churchill might have said, never in the field of human conflict has so little support been given by so many to so few.