Bebo

You cannot trust much of the news when it comes to issues that have commercial impact, not even when it comes to the reporting of scientific studies on nutrition and food. Some of these studies were funded and managed by scientists supplied by the food industry itself!

From my page http://www.humantruth.info/food.html#PR :

“The food industry in Europe recently has been funding groups to protect its position against public and government alarm over obesity, junk food, misleading food labelling, diabetes and the advertising of fatty foods to children. British newspapers routinely carry reports and quotes on diet from the Social Issues Research Center, the British Nutrition Foundation and the International Life Sciences Foundations and routinely fail to point out that all three have received significant funding variously from Cadbury Schweppes, Nestlé, Kelloggs, the Dairy Council, Kraft and the Sugar Bureau. In 2003, Fleet Street reported the comments of a nutritionist called Dr Susan Jebb who attacked the Atkins Diet as 'a massive health risk', without explaining that her research into the low-carbohydrate diet had been funded the Flour Advisory Bureau. This kind of research may or may not be accurate; but it is the hidden hand of PR which is paying for it to happen and promoting it into the news.”
"Flat Earth News" by Nick Davies (200 15

My page which criticizes the mass media explains why such lobby groups find it so easy to insert content into the news. From http://www.humantruth.info/mass_medi... :

“Modern journalists work at breakneck speed to process stories as fast as possible. Therefore most news services rely heavily on public relations (PR) material in order to rapidly produce the stream of news. Much of this news comes from trusted wire agencies, but these also rely on PR input. Because of these pressures, public relations firms and commercial companies are having a heyday and find it easy to insert material into news media. In general, over half of all news stories are mostly PR or contain substantial PR-sourced material. Journalists themselves do not check the facts or figures of such inputs, nor admit in the articles themselves that PR material is the true source of the information, so the news often appears unbiased. Powerful commercial lobbies use this weakness to pervert public opinion.

For example in the 1950s the smoking lobby created a waft of innocent-sounding and scientific-sounding groups in order to discredit government information about the dangers of smoking. Oil and petrol lobbies have spent fortunes on the same PR tricks, as have food industry lobbies. They produce scientific reports engineered by their own scientists, which serve to boost their own industries by deceiving the public. In short, don't trust the news media directly even when they are reporting on scientific-sounding research groups. Always check facts with long-standing scientific bodies such as the Royal Society. Rich and activist commercialist lobby groups have a set of well-practised and efficient methods for manipulating the news and public opinion. The scientists and welfare groups who wish to get real scientific worries about certain industries out into the open are not funded or equipped to run public relations campaigns. Only multinational information campaigns, legal agreements and inter-national political bodies such as the EU have the oomph to be able to fight back against such powerful industries.”
"The Modern Mass Media: The Bane of Human Cultural Evolution" by Vexen Crabtree (200

I've redesigned all the http://www.vexen.co.uk/USA/index.html and cleared it all up so it is less clutered, and has colours that are easier on the eyes. The content is still the same, relevent to USA foreign policy (mostly) up to about 2003. The main page is the "Why do People Hate America", a summary of street-level criticisms of the USA, plus reasonable commentary on how much of the criticism is short-cited, illogical, irrational or ignorant. Nevertheless, a great deal of valid criticism remains.

After four years in Germany we have now moved back to the UK, near Salisbury. Many things we had taken for granted are now gone!

The house is a good size, really, for what we were expecting. The house overall is small and decrepid. Not only is UK housing smaller, older, less functional and designed worse than German houses, but *Army* houses are all but the worst on offer, excepting rundown council welfare houses.

But we're *making* this house good!

The front door is wonky and old, the whole house has poor insulation by any modern standards, there is no attic and no basement, and the kitchen for some reason is half devoid of cupboards... we will put up our own along one of its 2 walls, but, how many people have lived here without adding a little kitchen storage? There is no plumbing for a dishwasher machine, and it 'takes months' to get one installed - we started the process the day we moved in.

Not only is this cheap UK housing (would the Army pay for anything else, given the shortcomings of squaddies themselves?), but, we have to deal with Army beurocracy in order to get changes done. We have a broken pane of glass in the double glazing in the front room, and it has been a struggle simply to get it booked for someone to come fix it...

The worst thing is that many of the faults we're having (boiler, front door, dishwasher plumbing, bathroom light pullcord, shelves in airing cupboard and broken pane of glass in the front room), should all have been fixed in the period of time before we moved in - the house has been unoccupied since November at least, and we moved in Jan 26th.

We'll get there, and it'll be good, just got to battle on!