Odds and Ends

Amnesty Refuses to Back Down after Bush Rebuke: After Bush accused Amnesty International of “hating America” for its “absurd” recent report listing the Bush regime well up in the global list of human rights abusers, Amnesty has clarified its rationale: detention at Guantanamo without due process, torture, ‘outsourcing’ of criminal abuse of suspects to the world’s worst human rights abusers, self-exemption from the Geneva Conventions etc. Most tellingly, they noted that the rhetoric of the Bushies, rather than addressing the substance of their report, was typical of governments caught on the defensive for human rights abuses and trying to divert attention through scurrilous attacks on the reputation of Amnesty.

Beverage Bioterror: Lawrence Wein at the NYT reported that there is an enormous risk that US beverage supplies could be easily contaminated with easy to obtain (the authors cited a recipe available online) botulism toxin, potentially killing hundreds of thousands and creating a crisis of confidence in the marketplace.

The End of Globalization: The husband of Canada’s Governor General, author John Ralston Saul, writes a long and damning assessment of globalization’s false promise and the resurgence, for good and bad, of nationalism, and then turns it into a book. Thanks to Jon Husband for the link.

Consumer Reports Goes Green: Consumer Reports magazine now has a free online site that reviews environmental attributes of products and services and provides additional information on what you can do to live greener.

IllumiNations: I’ll have more about my visit to Orlando in a few days, but definitely one of the highlights of the trip was the spectacular fireworks and laser light show at Epcot. The fact sheet shows the typical Disney attention to detail (and sometimes, to excess) that makes everything they do clearly different from any competitor. And the accompanying music by British film composer Gavin Greenaway, entitled Reflections of Earth, is stunning (available on the Buena Vista CD Illuminations). I’m becoming quite a fan of film soundtracks, and judging from the number of best-selling soundtrack CDs (many of them without any hits from big-name vocalists) I’m not alone. Although John Williams is the best-known, I also like Thomas Newman, John Barry, Jonathan Elias, Jerry Goldsmith, Ron Grainer, Johnny Mandel, Dave Grusin and a host of others. Hopelessly eclectic, or the ‘new classical’?