Live from Austin!

I subscribe to Nutrition Action Healthletter . A recent edition carried an article on ethical (and healthy) fish consumption. It included handy lists of fish that can safely be eaten, fish that are good alternatives in a pinch, and fish which you should avoid eating–either because of health concerns, or because they are endangered.

I just scanned, OCRed and edited the lists to put in my BlackBerry, so I thought I’d post them here in case you want to copy them to your own phone’s notepad.

Best choices

Arctic char (farmed)
Barramundi (U.S. farmed)
Catfish (U.S. farmed)
Clams (farmed)
Cod - Pacific (Alaska longline)
Crab - stone or Dungeness
Halibut - Pacific
Atlantic Herring/Sardines
Lobster - spiny (U.S.)
Mussels (farmed)
Oysters (farmed)
Pollock (Alaska wild)
Salmon (Alaska wild)
Scallops - bay (farmed)
Striped bass (wild* or farmed)
Sturgeon (farmed) or its caviar
Tilapia (U.S. farmed)
Trout - rainbow (farmed)
Tuna - albacore (U.S. or British Columbia, troll or pole)
Tuna - skipjack (troll or pole)

Good alternatives

Basa (farmed)
Clams (wild)
Cod - Pacific (trawled)
Crab - blue*
Crab - king (U.S.)
Crab - snow
Flounder (Pacific)
Lobster - American (Maine)
Mahi mahi (U.S.)
Oysters (wild)*
Scallops - sea (Northeast U.S. and Canada)
Shrimp (U.S. farmed or wild)
Sole (Pacific)
Squid
Surimi (imitation crab)
Swai (farmed)
Swordfish (U.S. longline)*
Tilapia (Central America farmed)
Tuna - bigeye (troll or pole)
Tuna - yellowfin (troll or pole)
Tuna - canned white (albacore)* or canned light

Fish to avoid

Chilean seabass*
Cod - Atlantic*
Crab - king (imported)*
Flounder (Atlantic)
Grouper*
Halibut - Atlantic
Lobster - spiny (Caribbean imported)
Mahi mahi (imported)
Monkfish
Orange roughy*
Rockfish (Pacific)
Salmon (farmed, including Atlantic)*
Scallops - sea (mid-Atlantic)
Shark*
Shrimp (imported farmed or wild)
Snapper - red*
Sole (Atlantic)
Sturgeon (imported wild)* or its caviar*
Swordfish (imported)*
Tilapia (China or Taiwan farmed)
Tuna - albacore (Iongline)*
Tuna - bigeye (Iongline)*
Tuna - yellowfin (longline)*
Tuna - bluefin*

* indicates mercury contamination is a concern, and you should limit consumption for health reasons.

And if you’re wondering why someone who doesn’t eat meat would eat fish, evidence is that humans evolved on a diet heavy in fish , which is why Omega-3 seems to be so good for mental health and skin problems.

Or as the cliché puts it: meat is murder, fish is justifiable homicide.

InfoUSA is a list broker, a company that aggregates personal data and sells it to telemarketers and catalog sales companies. The New York Times reports:

InfoUSA advertised lists of “Elderly Opportunity Seekers,” 3.3 million older people “looking for ways to make money,” and “Suffering Seniors,” 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. “Oldies but Goodies” contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents apiece. One list said: “These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change.”

So InfoUSA actually sells lists of suckers deliberately selected for their gullibility. You might be wondering who buys these lists. Well, the NYT investigated.

InfoUSA sold [one list] dozens of times, to companies including HMS Direct, which Canadian authorities had sued the previous year for deceptive mailings; Westport Enterprises, the subject of consumer complaints in Kansas, Connecticut and Missouri; and Arlimbow, a European company that Swiss authorities were prosecuting at the time for a lottery scam.

[...]

Records also indicate that infoUSA sold thousands of other elderly Americans’ names to Windfall Investments after the F.B.I. had accused the company in 2002 of stealing $600,000 from a California woman.

Between 2001 and 2004, infoUSA also sold lists to World Marketing Service, a company that a judge shut down in 2003 for running a lottery scam; to Atlas Marketing, which a court closed in 2006 for selling $86 million of bogus business opportunities; and to Emerald Marketing Enterprises, a Canadian firm that was investigated multiple times but never charged with wrongdoing.

The story goes on to reveal that according to internal e-mails, InfoUSA knew some of their customers were scammy, but continued to sell them lists of sick and/or gullible elderly people to exploit.

Update: InfoUSA have put out a press release giving us their side of the story. My summary: “We’re not selling lists of suckers any more, we sold that part of the business. Plus, the authorities didn’t find us criminally liable, and anyway it was a long time ago.”

It’s not surprising to find that while Jason Fortuny can dish out people’s private information, he isn’t as happy when his public information is publicized.

While he continues to bluster about not being scared of the people he lied to and embarrassed, I note that he has removed his address and phone number from his whois entry.

When someone posted a summary of his criminal record on his journal, he deleted the posting. When they re-posted it elsewhere, someone got their account yanked. (Hmm, I wonder who?)

Of course, it’s all public information these days, so LiveJournal are just being stupid as usual. You can go to the Washington State courts web site, enter his name in their name search, and up comes his case history.

I’m not sure what you have to do to end up in court in a criminal traffic case, but he’s been there 5 times. More interesting is the civil commercial case which resulted in a judgement against him. Perhaps someone with nothing better to do will request a copy of the document and post the details on their web site. Me, I’m hoping he fades into obscurity.

There’s a new service out there called PayPerPost. Basically, you get paid for posting ads in your online journal.

So far, so ho-hum. One thing that makes this one a bit different is that the ads aren’t separated into their own section alongside your postings, like Google AdWords; rather, the postings themselves are the ads. Furthermore, buyers get to dictate the wording of the links.

In addition, the question of disclosure is left entirely open. Maybe all your postings are ads; maybe some of them are. Maybe you tell people, maybe you don’t. It’s up to you.

I decided to take a look at what the result was like. In the forums I found some people who were pimping their web sites; here are some URLs.

• http://www.juliesjournal.com/
• http://anaisamy.vox.com/
• http://www.whateverifeellike.com/
• http://www.simplekindoflife.com/

Reading the above is an interesting experience. Sometimes it’s blatantly apparent where the ad is. (In these quotes, underlining shows where the links were in the originals.)

I really need a Caribbean vacation. It’s time to stop dreaming of going somewhere like this and just start to plan and save for it. [...] Warm Islands.com is a perfect place to read about all the things I can do when I get there.

I just know a friend of mine needs to reduce cholesterol in his diet. I think this is the reason he gets sick so often, and feels winded so easily. I’m going to have him try Vasacor an all natural cholesterol supplement.

Another thing that I used to be big into a couple of years ago, but kind of let go by the wayside is taking women’s vitamins. [...] Osteo Essentials is clinically shown to support bone protection - which to me means will help strengthen them. I want to promote and develop strong bones now before it’s too late.

I don’t think any human being ever uses the phrase “…is clinically shown to…” in conversation. Sometimes it’s not so clear, though:

After lugging my laptop bag around all day for three days and seeing other people with their wheeled laptop cases, I’m starting to think I need one. My new laptop is lighter than my previous one, but it’s still damn heavy, especially when walking through the enormous hotel here from my room to the business areas.

Check out Tumi at Luggage Online. Isn’t that bag sweet? It’s got room for everything: laptop plus all my paperwork in really nice organized compartments. I want it!

On the one hand, the author had already said she was attending a show in Las Vegas. On the other hand…

Here’s a quote from a posting which, to me, demonstrates the problem with the whole thing:

This time last year…we were caribbean bound! I had already been on one cruise, and was about to embark on another. In September 2005, we went on an adults online cruise with a few other couples, my sisters, a brother-in-law, and an adult nephew. [...]

During our day in Jamaica, we visited a beatiful garden at the top of a hill overlooking the city of Ocho Rios. After that, we headed to Dunn’s River Falls - a must see! You can literally climb up the side of the mountain by walking up the falls. [...]

I think the best way to visit the Caribbean is by cruise ship - and if you need help choosing the right cruise for you, look no further than these cruise ship reviews. Our 7 night cruise was with Carnival, on one of their newest ships, the Carnival Victory.

I started out reading it as reminiscence, triggered by her noticing that it was a year since her last cruise vacation. It starts to sound kinda interesting, approaching a travelogue. But then suddenly, you hit what looks like blatant paid linkage. Does she really think cruise ships are the best way to visit the Carribean, or is she just being paid to say so? Maybe the whole September 2005 cruise is fictitious, planted at the request of the advertiser in order to seed the idea of taking larger family groups on cruises. Are the sisters, brother-in-law and nephew real? If so, why don’t they have names?

The thing about trust is that once you lose it, it’s hard to get back. Once you realize someone has lied to you, you tend to view everything else they say with suspicion. I have a hard time understanding why anyone would want to read a personal web site where you had good reason to believe the author was lying a large proportion of the time. Then again, even Jason Fortuny has fans.

Thank you, Bush administration. I’ve just been required to spend the most mind-numbing couple of hours carefully reading page after page of ethical guidelines. Rules that should be blatantly obvious to anyone with any ethical sense whatsoever. It’s all about ensuring that I don’t do things like take Dick Cheney out to the Country Club in order to get juicy government contracts on a no-bid basis, or organize a price-fixing system to defraud California.

Apparently some government agencies no longer allow their employees to accept any free food or drink from contractors. There’s a written notice I have to make sure is displayed before I offer any government employee coffee or a doughnut. If I’d known public officials were that cheap…

Much as I appreciate the problem, I can’t help despairing of a world where there’s a need to tell people “You are prohibited from engaging in fraud”. The course material even then goes on to define the term, enumerating examples. Perhaps at some point someone said “What, false invoices are fraud? Fraud isn’t allowed? Nobody told me!”

One of the biggest problems in medical research is testing. When a disease only affects humans, animal testing is no use, and it’s often tough to get enough volunteers to test drugs which are possibly worthless, or even dangerous.

The massive multinational GlaxoSmithKline faced this problem in 1995. They had a number of experimental AIDS drigs they needed to test, and they just couldn’t find enough volunteers.

Happily, they were able to obtain assistance from the Catholic Church, who run an orphanage in New York called the Incarnation Children’s Center.

The Incarnation Children’s Center had quite a few orphans who had been born to HIV-positive mothers, as well as children whose parents had simply been deemed unfit to look after them. This meant that conveniently, no parental consent was required; the New York political authorities and the Catholic Church took the parental guardian role.

The New York Administration for Children’s Services agreed that experimental AIDS drugs might help the kids. Doctors from the US AIDS Clinical Trial Group at Columbia University Medical Center agreed to supervise the trials. Hence, starting in 1995, GlaxoSmithKline-sponsored scientists found themselves with a supply of more than 100 black and Hispanic orphans to perform medical experiments on. A range of ages was available, from three months old upwards.

Experiments with a seven-drug cocktail of AIDS medications went well, so in 1997 the orphans were used to obtain data on herpes drugs as well, and others were dosed with AZT. Finally, Glaxo and Pfizer got in on the action, and sponsored tests to determine the long-term safety of antibacterial drugs on three-month-old babies.

The medical trials ended in 2000. The story has been uncovered by The Observer. Let’s see how the US corporate media cover it…

So as I walked through Davis Square today, I looked down and noticed a small ziplock bag filled with powder. On closer look, the crystals appeared to be slightly larger than regular sugar, perhaps similar in size to Demerara brown sugar. The color was off-white, with a touch of yellow, maybe the merest hint of brown. The bag was about 6cm by 4cm and packed fairly full.

I considered what it might be. None of the innocent possibilities seemed likely. It was too light in color to be brown sugar, and too yellow to be regular bleached sugar. Silica gel? Maybe, but who keeps silica gel in a transparent plastic ziplock bag?

OK, I thought, so suppose it’s not something innocent. Cocaine is fine white powder, so that’s not it. Crack comes in rocks, so probably not that either. Overall, and speaking strictly as a non-expert, I guessed the most likely possibilities were heroin or crystal meth. It seemed like rather a lot of powder to be heroin, but since my entire knowledge of typical dosages of heroin is taken from having watched Trainspotting once, I could be hopelessly wrong. I learned quite a lot about the chemistry of illegal drugs at school, but they didn’t really go into much detail about how to recognize and evaluate the quality of a sample.

I considered what, if anything, I should do. Obviously the law abiding thing to do would be to pick it up and hand it in at the local police station. Wait, did I say “law abiding”? I meant fucking stupid. Yeah, I’m going to walk into Somerville PD with a plastic bag full of something I think might be crystal meth.

In other words, thanks to the War on Drugs, I did nothing. I quietly went on my merry way. And then I thought about a recent cartoon by Ted Rall, about a similar situation and the War on Terrorism.

So anyhow… if you dropped your baggie of crystal meth in Davis Square, it might still be outside the Somerville Theater.

People tend to assume I’m vegetarian because of some deeply-held radical belief that meat is murder. I’ve even had some friends ask if it’s OK for them to eat meat in my presence. Well, I like mammals, and I don’t think they should be mistreated, and I don’t personally feel I should eat them; but the fact of the matter is, I’m vegetarian primarily for a much more mundane reason.

I don’t like the taste of meat.

I never have done. As a child I found chicken and turkey palatable, so long as there were no bones involved. Beef was OK as long as it was flavored with something and minced up so you couldn’t tell what it was. Every other kind of meat I disliked to a significant degree, and I loathed pig meat of every variety, from tough salty unpleasant pork chops to greasy fatty salty bacon.

(You there at the back, stop drooling.)

The worst part of all was the fat, which made any kind of meat-on-the-bone sheer torture. The texture of white fat on my tongue provokes my gag reflex. My mother, of course, thought it was a ploy and that I just wanted to eat candy or cookies or something instead. Well, frankly I wanted to eat anything instead; I’d have gladly eaten sawdust to get out of having to finish those pork chops. Same goes for liver and the other disgusting animal organs that people used to eat in England in the 1970s.

My mother dealt with my reluctance to eat meat in the time-honored way of mothers everywhere: she laid a massive guilt trip on me.

There were poor families who would have been delighted to get a piece of liver like that. There were children starving in Africa who would find a feast in the scraps of meat carelessly left on that pork bone. There was no way I would be allowed to leave the table until I had eaten everything, every last scrap, and I was clearly a horrible child for even daring to think otherwise.

And so it was that I was programmed to be unable to leave food on the plate. Not even the smallest scrap. And the same programming rendered me unable to tolerate the wastefulness of an unscraped yogurt carton or a ketchup bottle being thrown out while there was still a good tablespoon of ketchup in it.

There’s a sting in the tale, though. It turned out that the behavior my mother carefully instilled in me drove my dad nuts. The sound of cutlery on plate was like fingernails on a blackboard to him, and the sight of me licking a yogurt carton lid would make the red mist descend before his eyes.

After six years in America and a lot of effort, I am beginning to deprogram myself, because an inability to leave food uneaten in America is a dangerous health hazard. A couple of weeks ago I left some food uneaten at a restaurant because I had sated my hunger. Today I turned down a portion of french fries and let someone simply throw them away. OK, I still lick the yogurt carton lids, but it’s one step at a time, you know?

April 22, 2002, Armonk, New York—IBM today was ranked Top Corporate Citizen of the year by Business Ethics Corporate Social Responsibility Report. The publication’s annual listing of the 100 Best Corporate Citizens is based on a quantitative measure of 650 public companies’ corporate service to seven stakeholder groups, including employees, customers, the community, stockholders, the environment, and overseas stakeholders. [More]

The prosecution has unearthed an Arthur Andersen training video where they explain to employees the benefits of shredding evidence before expected legal action.