Author: admin

Probably Michael Bloomberg knows better than
to try this: The European Union’s extremely meddlesome food
regulations are
threatening Denmark’s cinnamon rolls. They have more cinnamon
in them than the government collective thinks Danish people should
be allowed to consume.

From The (U.K.) Telegraph:

The season’s festivities in Denmark have been overshadowed by
the prospect that it could be the last Danish Christmas before a
European Union ban on their beloved kanelsnegler or
cinnamon rolls.

The proposed ban followed plans by Denmark’s food safety agency
to implement EU regulations aimed at limiting the amount of
coumarin, a naturally occurring toxic chemical found in the most
commonly used type of cinnamon, cassia.

Under Danish interpretation of the EU legislation the amount of
cinnamon in “everyday fine baked goods” will be limited to 15mg per
kilo meaning a ban on Kanelsnegler pastries, a winter favourite in
all Nordic countries, which take their name from their coiled snail
shape.

The problem, though, is that although coumarin is technically
toxic chemical, experts say it’s not this toxic.
Furthermore, it only affects those who are particularly sensitive
to it. People aren’t keeling over from eating cinnamon rolls –
well, at least not because of their toxicity anyway. NPR

explored what experts have to say about cinnamon:

Experts say that adults would have to eat a lot of Cassia
cinnamon to be at risk. For an adult, that limit is about a
teaspoon a day, according to the set by the European Food Safety
Authority — or roughly about as much cinnamon as you’d find in an
entire batch of cookies.

For small children, the amount is lesser, but even so, the child
would have to eat a lot of cinnamon rolls and also be susceptible
to the toxin. An expert tells NPR:

Only certain individuals are even going to be susceptible to
liver issues from coumarin. … That person would have to exceed the
maximum recommended daily intake for at least two weeks before
liver problems cropped up — and if problems do occur, the toxicity
is reversible.

In other words, there’s little reason to regulate cinnamon
content in food at all, let alone with such harsh rules.

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• Massachusetts and Vermont, who
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• California school districts are
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Stanford University researchers Jonathon Mayer and Patrick
Mutchler were skeptical when President Obama told
the nation that the NSA is just collecting metadata and thus
not violating Americans’ privacy — so they investigated how
easy it would be for someone to match metadata, which includes
information about a caller’s location, length, and number calls,
with a caller’s identity. They found it is
“trivially” simple to do, even for those with limited funds and
software.

Mayer and Mutchler, computer scientists who study technology
policy, decided to run an experiment testing the ease with which
one can connect metadata to names. For the experiment, volunteers
agree to use an Android app, MetaPhone,
that allows the researchers access to their metadata. Mayer and
Mutchler say that it was hardly any trouble figuring out who the
phone numbers belonged to — and they did it in a few
hours.

From their
blog:

So, just how easy is it to identify a phone number?

Trivial, we found. We randomly sampled 5,000 numbers from
our crowdsourced
MetaPhone dataset and queried the Yelp, Google Places, and
Facebook directories. With little marginal effort and just those
three sources—all free and public—we matched 1,356 (27.1%) of the
numbers. Specifically, there were 378 hits (7.6%) on Yelp, 684
(13.7%) on Google Places, and 618 (12.3%) on Facebook.

What about if an organization were willing to put in some
manpower? To conservatively approximate human analysis, we randomly
sampled 100 numbers from our dataset, then ran Google searches on
each. In under an hour, we were able to associate an individual or
a business with 60 of the 100 numbers. When we added in our three
initial sources, we were up to 73.

How about if money were no object? We don’t have the budget or
credentials to access a premium data aggregator, so we ran our 100
numbers with Intelius, a cheap consumer-oriented service. 74
matched. Between Intelius, Google search, and our
three initial sources, we associated a name with 91 of the 100
numbers.

The researchers conclude that, “If a few academic researchers
can get this far this quickly, it’s difficult to believe the NSA
would have any trouble identifying the overwhelming majority of
American phone numbers.”

The study confirms what numerous critics of the NSA have been
saying. A professor speaking on behalf of the ACLU, for instance,

said in an August court hearing testifying against the
program:

Although officials have insisted that the orders issued under
the telephony metadata program do not compel the production of
customers’ names, it would be trivial for the government to
correlate many telephone numbers with subscriber names using
publicly available sources. The government also has available to it
a number of legal tools to compel service providers to produce
their customer’s information, including their names.

Some government officials also aren’t buying the story that bulk
collection of
“just metadata” is harmless. In his
preliminary injunction against the program last week,
Judge Richard Leon said:

The Government maintains that the metadata the NSA collects does
not contain personal identifying information associated with each
phone number…[but] there is also nothing stopping the
Government… using public databases or any of its other vast
resources to match phone numbers with subscribers.

Stanford University researchers Jonathon Mayer and Patrick
Mutchler were skeptical when President Obama told
the nation that the NSA is just collecting metadata and thus
not violating Americans’ privacy — so they investigated how
easy it would be for someone to match metadata, which includes
information about a caller’s location, length, and number calls,
with a caller’s identity. They found it is
“trivially” simple to do, even for those with limited funds and
software.

Mayer and Mutchler, computer scientists who study technology
policy, decided to run an experiment testing the ease with which
one can connect metadata to names. For the experiment, volunteers
agree to use an Android app, MetaPhone,
that allows the researchers access to their metadata. Mayer and
Mutchler say that it was hardly any trouble figuring out who the
phone numbers belonged to — and they did it in a few
hours.

From their
blog:

So, just how easy is it to identify a phone number?

Trivial, we found. We randomly sampled 5,000 numbers from
our crowdsourced
MetaPhone dataset and queried the Yelp, Google Places, and
Facebook directories. With little marginal effort and just those
three sources—all free and public—we matched 1,356 (27.1%) of the
numbers. Specifically, there were 378 hits (7.6%) on Yelp, 684
(13.7%) on Google Places, and 618 (12.3%) on Facebook.

What about if an organization were willing to put in some
manpower? To conservatively approximate human analysis, we randomly
sampled 100 numbers from our dataset, then ran Google searches on
each. In under an hour, we were able to associate an individual or
a business with 60 of the 100 numbers. When we added in our three
initial sources, we were up to 73.

How about if money were no object? We don’t have the budget or
credentials to access a premium data aggregator, so we ran our 100
numbers with Intelius, a cheap consumer-oriented service. 74
matched. Between Intelius, Google search, and our
three initial sources, we associated a name with 91 of the 100
numbers.

The researchers conclude that, “If a few academic researchers
can get this far this quickly, it’s difficult to believe the NSA
would have any trouble identifying the overwhelming majority of
American phone numbers.”

The study confirms what numerous critics of the NSA have been
saying. A professor speaking on behalf of the ACLU, for instance,

said in an August court hearing testifying against the
program:

Although officials have insisted that the orders issued under
the telephony metadata program do not compel the production of
customers’ names, it would be trivial for the government to
correlate many telephone numbers with subscriber names using
publicly available sources. The government also has available to it
a number of legal tools to compel service providers to produce
their customer’s information, including their names.

Some government officials also aren’t buying the story that bulk
collection of
“just metadata” is harmless. In his
preliminary injunction against the program last week,
Judge Richard Leon said:

The Government maintains that the metadata the NSA collects does
not contain personal identifying information associated with each
phone number…[but] there is also nothing stopping the
Government… using public databases or any of its other vast
resources to match phone numbers with subscribers.

Clark Bianco at Popehat has a
bracing holiday rant against the state with the NSFW title
“Burn the Fucking System to the Ground.”

It’s interesting in how it brings white-hot heat against the
practices of the state without coming from an explicitly
libertarian perspective about things like when and where it is
appropriate for the state to act. There’s no big controversial
political philosophical premises or reasoning involved.

It’s just pointing out–in ways that people who think of
themselves as “left” or “right” should be able to
understand–that the state acts in many ways to perform utterly
unconscionable acts that ruin people’s lives for no good
reason–and does so in a way that can seem more based on class
divisions than any “state vs. people’s rights” calculus that has
anything to do with beliefs in the necessity or propriety of
government.

Some excerpts:

The older I get, the more I see, the more I read, the more clear
it becomes to me that the entire game is rigged. The leftists and
the rightists each see half of the fraud. The lefties correctly
note that a poor kid caught with cocaine goes to jail, while a Bush
can write it off as a youthful mistake (they somehow overlook the
fact that their man Barrack hasn’t granted clemency to any one of
the people doing federal time for the same felonies he committed).
The righties note that government subsidized windmills kill
protected eagles with impunity while Joe Sixpack would be deep in
the crap if he even picked up a dead eagle from the side of the
road. The lefties note that no one was prosecuted over the
financial meltdown. The righties note that the Obama administration
rewrote bankruptcy law on the fly to loot value from GM
stockholders and hand it to the unions. The lefties note that
Republicans tweak export rules to give big corporations subsidies.
Every now and then both sides join together to note that, hey! the
government is spying on every one of us…or that, hey! the
government stole a bunch of people’s houses and gave them
to Pfizer,
because a privately owned for-profit corporation is apparently what
the Constitution means by “public use”.

….the system is not reformable. There are multiple classes of
people, but it boils down to the connected, and the not connected.
Just as in pre-Revolutionary France, there is a very strict class
hierarchy….

Jamal the $5 weed slinger, Shaneekwa the hair braider, and
Loudmouth Bob in the 7-11 parking lot are at the bottom of the
hierarchy. They can,literally, be killed with impunity …
as long as the dash cam isn’t running. And, hell, half the time
they can be killed even if the dash
cam is running….

Next up from Shaneekwa and Loudmouth Bob are us regular peons.
We can have our balls squeezed at the airport, our rectums explored
at the roadside, our cars searched because the cops got permission
from a dog (I owe some Reason intern a drink for that one), our
telephones tapped (because terrorism!), our bank accounts
investigated (because FinCEN! and no expectation of privacy!). We
don’t own the house we live in, not if someone of a higher social
class wants it….And if there’s a “national security emergency”
(defined as two idiots with a pressure cooker), then the
constitution is suspended, martial law is declared, and people are
hauled out of their homes.

Next up from the regular peons are the unionized,
disciplined-voting-blocks. Not-much-brighter-than-a-box-of-crayolas
teachers who work 180 days a year and get automatic raises.
Firefighters who disproportionately retire on disability the very
day they sub in for their bosses and get a paper cut.

A step up from the teachers and firefighters are the cops: all
the same advantages of nobility of the previous group, but a few
more in addition: the de facto power to murder someone as long as
not too many cameras are rolling….

Above the cops, the prosecutors, and the judiciary we have the
true ruling class: the cabal of (most) politicians and (some) CEOs,
conspiring both against their own competitors and the public at
large. If the public is burdened with a $100 million debt to pay
off a money losing stadium, that’s a small price to pay if a
politician gets reelected (and gets to hobnob with entertainers and
sports heroes via free tickets and backstage passes)….

It is corrupt, corrupt, corrupt….

The system is not fixable because it is not broken. It
is working, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,
to give the insiders their royal prerogatives….

Burn it to the ground.

Burn it to the ground.

Again, a kind of anger that theoretically could fuel a genuinely
“populist libertarianism” without explicitly libertarian roots.
Interesting to think about.

[Hat tip: the Twitter feed of magazine editor and TV talk show
host Matt Welch]