Draxblog III

Bird Flu in Croatia

 

What happens few hours after Ivo Sanader resolutely says that there isn't any bird flu in Croatia?

I had generally miserable evening, which got even more miserable when Croatian TV stations began interrupting their otherwise mundane and uninteresting program with the breaking news about Croatia entering another period of "interesting times".

 

 

Vandalism of Nova TV

Nova TV apparently doesn't only encourage anti-social behaviour among contestants of their reality shows. Their employees too act like spoiled sociopaths in order to increase ratings.

The last example was provided in tonight's news show when a female reporter, in an apparent attempt to point towards printed encyclopaedias being superior to Internet, vandalised Croatian edition of Wikipedia. The History of Croatia article claimed that Croatia had been part of European Union from December 2004. The reporter made such edit in order to "check whether anyone would notice and correct that mistake". According to her "it took 30 hours to notice". According to change log, the vandalism was reverted by Croatian Wikipedians in a matter of minutes, but the reporter nevertheless continued in an apparent attempt to make a point for today's news show.

So, our intrepid reporter (whose name I didn't remember) not only vandalised an important source of public information but also lied her posterior off to the Croatian public on-air.

I wonder whether there will be any consequences for such blatant breech of journalist ethics.

UPDATE:

The name of the reporter is Barbara Golja.

Humanity of Croatian Television

The most important event today, at least according to the editor of HRT afternoon news, was the shocking fact that Veterinarian Faculty of Zagreb University has already started experimenting on dogs and that some of those creatures had their bones broken in order to test new drugs. The news was accompanied with the statement of Luka Oman, leader of Zagreb animal rights NGO, who returned from the meeting with Faculty heads in "highly emotional" state. All the blame for this was put to Professor Antun Brkić (Antun Brkic) who conducted experiments "against the law and without any knowledge of Ljiljana Pintar, faculty dean".

Needless to say, news about suicide bomber blowing up 90 or so innocent people in Iraq came second.

 

Benedict’s First Score

Recent defeat of an Italian referendum which was supposed to replace ultra-restrictive IVF legislation is interpreted as a great victory for Catholic Church. And it is even greater victory for Benedict XVI who showed that his clout expanded even beyond the walls of Vatican City. Just as he was underestimated in the conclave, he was underestimated in his ability to influence politics in nominally secular country like Italy.

There are already speculations that Benedict’s successful campaign against the referendum represents only a test for even more ambitious attempts to push Catholic agenda in Italian legislation. Some commentators believe that in very short time abortion and divorce might become thing of a past in Italy.

Many tend to disregards those warnings as pure sensationalism and panic. On one hand, it is quite inconceivable to imagine Italy becoming a de-secularised in the 21st Century, especially in times when church attendance continues to fall and Church begins to look more like a tourist attraction than an important factor in everyday life of an average Italian.

But there is one factor few people, except Benedict XVI, took into account.

Reasons why Italians don’t attend Church nor follow Church doctrine have very little to do with ideology or religious convictions. The more simple explanation for the decline of Church is in devout Catholic lifestyle becoming unattractive, bothersome and inconvenient for increasing number of Europeans. In other words, there are fewer and fewer young Italians who would stay at home on Saturday evening only to attend Sunday mass.

Benedict XVI reasoned that most of those who don’t bother to walk to the nearest Church aren’t likely to walk to nearest polling booth either. The very same hedonism and prosperity that drove the Church away from average people in Western Europe is going to prevent those same people from fighting for the secular nature of their countries.

Referendum was easy to defeat – all Church had to do was to call people not to go the polls and thus deprive it of necessary 50 % turnout. And people, whether they agreed with Church positions or not, listened to that call.

By doing that, they established the precedent that could do to European secularism what fall of Berlin wall did to European Communism.

The Cruel Sea

Living by the sea always had its benefits throughout history. Sea provided relatively easy attainable sources of food, commerce routes and, if some countries and regions were lucky, additional source of income in the form of tourism. But today that very sea, instead of being the blessing, became a curse. When the largest recorded earthquake in past 50 years occurred, this planet was fortunate enough to have it on land. Today people of Southern Asia weren't that fortunate. It goes without saying that all this would fuel religious fundamentalism, disrupt world's commerce and add to long-term political instability.

X Prize

Today was a great day for all space exploration enthusiasts. X Prize has been won. And all this happened on the 47th anniversary of Sputnik launch.

It took almost half a century for private initiative to catch up with state bureaucracies.

I Hope They Are Right...

...with the estimates because if they aren't, I have approximately one hour before anything I write in this blog becomes totally irrelevant.

Dinaric Boys Can Jump

I couldn't fail to notice interesting discussion at Gene Expression about national make-up of NBA foreign players. Dinaric regions of former Yugoslavia are, of course, mentioned as the source of many basketball talents.

Price of Getting High

Like many, I'm amazed with the absurdity of drug laws that put cannabis and other so-called "soft" drugs into the same basket with heroin and crack. I don't think that I should repeat other people's arguments about branding generally harmless people as criminals, linking pot and crack dealers and wasting precious law enforcement resources into something which is not the real problem.

But, through the years, I also got increasingly sceptical towards all those who, in trying to fight anti-drug laws, went to the other extreme and created whole cult of pot, claiming that it represented solution to all of the world's problems. I also became less receptive towards all those claiming that pot was completely harmless drug and that its use hadn't got any nasty side effects. It seems that my scepticism was justified.

To Mars!

I can only begin to think how would non-American public react to President Bush's initiative.

As far as I'm concerned, there is nothing wrong with the idea of space exploration being raised on new level. The only problem is who and how is going to foot the bill. I guess that those who aren't going to foot the bill - non-Americans - are going to be among Bush's initiative's harshest critics, simply because the rising anti-Americanism in the world is going to be affect views about space exploration in general.

Most people in the world today (with exception of Russian and Chinese) view space exploration as something strictly American and, therefore, something wrong. Rationalisations of that attitude ("robotic probes are cheaper", "they should spend money on AIDS and rain forests instead" etc.) are going to come later.