James’s Blog

I was surprised to hear from the BBC article about the Finnish school shooting that Finland has the third highest rate of gun ownership in the world, with 56 guns for every 100 people. I also wondered what the U.S. stats are like. So I dug around the Small Arms Survey’s annual report, and found the following chart:

That’s almost one gun for everybody! The chart came from the Chapter 2 summary of the report, which contains more sobering statistics.

Well, thanks for clearing that up, Mr. A. Maybe it’s because they’re all killed when they are teens. I like how the crowd just laughed at his face.

(via AmericaBlog)

This is happening in Whiting, IN, 25 miles from where I live. Here is the summary of the excellent Tribune article:

• BP wants to expand their facility to refine heavier Canadian crude oil. This costs 3.8 billion dollars. There will be 80 new jobs.
• BP wants to release 54 percent more ammonia and 35 percent more sludge into Lake Michigan each day, bringing the total to, on average, 1,584 pounds of ammonia and 4,925 pounds of sludge. The total wastewater flow into Lake Michigan will remain at a constant 21 million gallons a day.
• BP says they can’t clean the wastewater because they don’t have room to build additional cleaning facilities. State and federal officials agree.
• The sludge amount matches the maximum amount allowed under federal guideline. Even so, the Clean Water Act prohibits any downgrade in water quality near a pollution source even if discharge limits are met. BP got around this rule by mixing the waste water with fresh water 200 feet offshore. This is actually against Indiana law, but the state officials granted an exception. Federal officials do nothing.

We wouldn’t expect the federal officials under this administration to do anything to improve (or simply stop degrading) our lives. But the Indiana officials don’t have enough foresight to realize that those 80 jobs aren’t going to last if there’s some economic downturn, while the heavy metal in the sludge will probably be around for a few centuries. They apprently learned nothing from the experiences in Michigan, where cities remain broken and polluted after the auto industry left.

BP spends billions on expansion, but has no money to, say, cart off the waste to some remote corner of Indiana hinterland. Instead BP dumps the waste into the lake that is the water source for millions. It’s as if they’re deliberately trying to offset their green image.

Remember how SARS started? The Chinese government is at it again. From NYTimes:

A mysterious epidemic is killing pigs in southeastern China, but international and Hong Kong authorities said today that the Chinese government is providing little information about it, or about the contaminated wheat gluten that has caused deaths and illnesses in other animals.

The lack of even basic details is reviving longstanding questions about whether China is willing to share information about health and food safety issues with potential global implications.

The Times also reported over the weekend that contaiminated Chinese medicine killed over 100 people in Panama. It’s ironic that the same government that is reluctant to share information about its own disease outbreaks can stop Taiwan from joining the World Health Organization. It’s disgusting when a UN agency puts people’s lives and health in danger in order to appease insecure big countries.

The recent news about the riots in Tallinn is a little depressing. From this video footage, it looks to be mostly riled-up young men destroying stuff, as usual. The Russian government response pisses me off. The Estonian Prime Minister has the proper response to Russia:

We don’t consider it necessary to hold deep discussions with the Russian authorities over the internal affairs of Estonia.

It annoys me when big countries with influential culture can be so insecure and feel the need to mess with neighboring small countries, like the Chinese with Taiwan or, to a lesser extent, the Americans with Cuba. It’s the 21st century; stop the world domination game already.

I’ve added some nice pictures from Tallinn, from a more peaceful day, during my trip there in summer 2005.

As usual, the New York Times has the best election maps, in glorious Flash format, that squeeze an overload of information into one little page on screen. This House map begins by morphing a US geographical map into boxes representing all the House seats. Hovering over a box shows all the seats in that particular state; clicking the box shows the race results. The House results analysis map is even more amazing: All 435 seats are mapped on a US map, with the margins of victory from this year and 2004 mapped on horizontal bars. Hovering over a seat highlights how much the margin of victory for that seat has changed in this election cycle. Clicking different areas of the page allows us to look at different groupings of the seats: by geographical regions, states, districts that went Democratic in 2004, income, racial makeup, etc. The Senate result map has similar ways of generating county by county information. Kudos to the Flash people at NYT that came up with this amazingly creative concept in Flash. It took me a while to even figure out how the page works, and I shudder at the amount of programming it took to make such a page.

Speaking of Flash pages, the state of the affair is that you need to click on it once before anything will work. (It appears to affect Internet Explorer and Opera. I suppose that one can avoid the problem by switching to Firefox, but why should I?) I don’t care about all the patent lawsuits; please just fix the problem, soon.

Ralf König is one of my favorite cartoonists; his website has a good sample of his work. (The German site has more content. It is entertaining to run the cursor up and down the menu selections.) He reponded to the Danish cartoons of Muhammad and the violence thereafter in the way of the following cartoon in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung [cartoon] [article]. In a recent interview with Die Welt, he said that it was his first ever cartoon as a political statement, even though in the US most of his cartoons might be considered as political statements just because they deal with gay or sexual topics.

Wikipedia has a detailed report on the cartoons themselves and the events following their publication. There are many cartoon responses to the whole debacle. This is one of my favorites, by the Chilean cartoonist Alen Lauzan Falcon:

Of course, the most awesome one is the Alien. For me, the whole thing was the first time I thought that perhaps the Middle East is really teeming with those crazy religious types that one can’t reason with, at least enough of them to incite deadly mob violence, burn down embassies, and issue death threats, in the name of their religion, all because a cartoon.