Category Archives: Security

Food, Security

ConAgra Discontinues PopCorn Lung

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It turns out that diacetyl is not the same as butter, although advertising for Orville Redenbacher “Butter” and Act II popcorn might have confused some.

USA Today reports:

The nation’s largest microwave popcorn maker, ConAgra Foods, says it will change the recipe for its Orville Redenbacher and Act II brands over the next year to remove a flavoring chemical linked to a lung ailment in popcorn plant workers.

The decision comes a day after a doctor at a leading lung research hospital said in a warning letter to federal regulators that consumers, not just factory workers, may be in danger from fumes from buttery flavoring in microwave popcorn.

ConAgra’s spokesperson goes on about concern for the safety of their workers, but clearly this latest move comes as a result of the link to consumer safety. The NYT provides a more telling story about worker safety:

Kenneth B. McClain, a lawyer at the Missouri firm that has represented Mr. Peoples [a worker in Missouri] and Mr. Campbell, said he had tried or settled more than 100 cases involving diacetyl and other flavorings and that more than 500 were still awaiting resolution in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Missouri and Ohio.

At a two-week trial in March 2004, lawyers for the makers of diacetyl products — International Flavors and Fragrances and its subsidiary, Bush Boake Allen — maintained that the additive did not cause Mr. Peoples’s illness and that, in any event, the popcorn company had mishandled the substance. Jurors awarded Mr. Peoples $20 million. His case, like Mr. Campbell’s, was later settled for an undisclosed amount.

Melissa I. Sachs, a spokeswoman at International Flavors and Fragrances, based in New York, declined to comment on the cases. According to its latest annual report, the company has been sued by more than 150 workers in four states.

Who said butter was bad for you? Leave it to the threat of consumer action, long after people have shown unmistakable signs of suffering or even death, for the companies to start to consider changing their formula. Where is the so-called public servant in this story?

Since George W. Bush became president, [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] OSHA has issued the fewest significant standards in its history, public health experts say. It has imposed only one major safety rule. The only significant health standard it issued was ordered by a federal court.

[…]

Instead of regulations, [head of OSHA] Mr. Foulke and top officials at other agencies favor a “voluntary compliance strategy,” reaching agreements with industry associations and companies to police themselves.

National security in decline. Mr. Bush said Iraq’s voluntary compliance strategy was a failure, without any harm linked to Americans, and yet the real deaths of Americans at home caused by unregulated chemicals seem to go unnoticed…except by those suffering and the lawyers who remain independent of the Bush administration.

Speaking of lawyers and popcorn, you might want to take a look at the ConAgra Foods Legal Policy before you browse their website. For a company producing chemicals that cause harm to their workers and consumers, they sure have a lot of regulatory emphasis around access to a simple website:

Users are prohibited from violating or attempting to violate the security of the Site, including without limitation, (a) accessing data not intended for such user or logging onto a server or an account which the user is not authorized to access; (b) attempting to probe, scan or test the vulnerability of a system or network or to breach security or authentication measures without proper authorization; (c) attempting to interfere with service to any user, host or network, including, without limitation, via means of submitting a virus to the Site, overloading, flooding, spamming, mailbombing or crashing; (d) sending unsolicited e-mail, including promotions and/or advertising of products or services; (e) forging any TCP/IP packet header or any part of the header information in any e-mail or newsgroup posting; (f) by using any device, software or routine to interfere or attempt to interfere with the proper working of the Site or any activity being conducted on the Site; or (g) by using or attempting to use any engine, software, tool, agent or other device or mechanism (including, without limitation browsers, spiders, robots, avatars or intelligent agents) to navigate or search the Site other than the search engine and search agents available from ConAgra Foods on this Site and other than generally available third party web browsers (e.g., Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Explorer). Violations of system or network security may result in civil or criminal liability. ConAgra Foods may investigate occurrences that potentially involve such violations and may involve, and cooperate with, law enforcement authorities in prosecuting users who are involved in such violations.

Forging packets bad and strictly prohibited by ConAgra. Producing poisonous chemicals for consumption that violate the security of a person…not prohibited?

History, Security

Private Nazi Bunker Hotel Defies German Authorities

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Neo-nazis have found a loophole in the German laws, allowing them to create a shrine from a hotel built around one of Hitler’s bunkers:

Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden, located in Bavaria near the Austrian border, became Hitler’s holiday retreat in 1923. It was expanded after 1933, becoming a second seat of government along with Berlin under the Nazi regime.

The hotel “Zum Türken” and adjoining bunker were once the quarters for Hitler’s personal security staff and bodyguards from the Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers (SD). Visitors to the bunker can view SD detention cells and shooting ranges.

[…]

“The problem is that a relic of the Third Reich is privately owned and commercially marketed by the owner.”

Funny thing about fascists, perhaps due to want of corporatism, is they always seem to know how to manipulate the private sector to undermine rule of law for profit.

Energy, Security

Moller SkyCar

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Moller has a whole page dedicated to legislation, but I was not able to find anything related to security and safety. They have a safety link, but it does not go anywhere. Maybe they see the two as similar or even identical.

Their SkyCar plans are a realization of every science-fiction novel or science magazine forecast — personal passenger vehicles that fly. The upsides (pun not intended), especially when you consider the cost and harm of pavement, should be obvious. The downsides….

SkyCar

  1. Rules of the road
  2. Impact including noise, consumption and emission
  3. Insurance and Liability (could you blame a downdraft for an accident? who picks up the cost?)
  4. Did I mention noise?
  5. Measures of safety (is anyone expected to have a level of survivability?)

But it sure looks cool, and I look forward to the end of the pavement era. Asphalt was a horrible idea, as proven by the ongoing pot-hole and lack-of-timely maintenance culture it created.

As people talk about forcing file sharing users to pay a fair share for network consumption/load, I wonder what ever happened to forcing the largest vehicles to pay a fair share of the space they occupy, the heaviest vehicles to pay a fair share of the pavement repairs, or the most polluting vehicles to pay a fair share of the controls to offset their output.

History, Poetry, Security

Would the real diamond please step forward?

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Pretty green stones.

The excitement related to a recent mining discovery raises an interesting question about security and authenticity. Take this report from the BBC, for example:

The South African company says it has asked the president of the World Federation of Diamond Bourses to carry out the examination.

Experts have been sceptical about the discovery, saying the light-green stone may turn out to be a fluorite crystal.

But the firm insists it could still turn out to be a diamond.

Will the joy of the observer be lessened if it does turn out to be fluorite rather than diamond? I guess I am not a fan of diamonds to begin with, and do not really understand the fascination, so if someone told me the pretty green stone I was looking at was green fluorite I would be no less impressed. In other words, is value more tangible if it comes from complicated and obscure (even proprietary) tests or from less quantifiable expression and feeling?

Security sometimes is driven by the murky veins of marketing and sales, as explained by the Atlantic Monthly:

The diamond invention—the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem—is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value—and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems.

The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., incorporated in South Africa.

Fascinating. So again, what is so special about the diamond versus fluorite if not its actual appearance or properties? It seems it is the ruse of rarity.

No wonder the press is feeding on speculation about the likelihood of such a giant diamond being “possible”. A calculated control mechanism to prevent value fluctuation may be at work here, perhaps the same one that helped avert the market collapse in the 1980s predicted by the Atlantic Monthly.

As Blaise Pascal once said “We know truth, not only by reason, but also by heart.”