Dan Jones

Just in time Father’s Day, the rich-country think tank known as the OECD has issued its annual survey of the US economy. The Paris-based organization specializes in churning out reports that standardize data across national boundaries, enabling observers to compare countries against one another. The entire report is worth a glance, but its comparisons of government spending on social policies to support families really stood out to us.

For example, the amount of unpaid time new mothers in the US can take off, while legally entitled to keep their job, lags far behind other rich nations. And while the the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) provides some allows workers in large American companies to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave, “many do not take it or take shorter leave because they cannot afford it,” the OECD reports.

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And the US is the only advanced economy that does not have a nationwide paid leave policy for new mothers. However, there is some paid maternity leave in the US: New Jersey, California, and Rhode Island have family leave programs that new mothers can use, and some well-heeled companies provide it on their own.

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American spending on direct cash payments for family support items is some of the skimpiest, as a share of GDP.

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Though US spending on family support services is a bit better.

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And the US ranks roughly in the middle of the pack when it comes to spending via tax breaks.

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But all in, the US is one of the stingiest advanced economies when it comes to social spending on family support.

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Photo via the International Relations and Security Network ISN Flickr account

If there's one thing English people love more than cocaine, it's soccer. The problem is, fans up and down the country might have a tough time getting a buzz on during the World Cup thanks to an unprecedented coke drought. Traditionally, the tournament is a boomtime for dealers, and you'd expect a combination of sunny weather and games that potentially won't finish until 3 AM local time to fuel demand among all-day drinkers who don't want to fall asleep in public. But a string of international and domestic drug busts has led to a shortage just as the tournament gets underway. Though the North and the Midlands are the hardest-hit regions, prices are soaring and purity levels are plummeting all over the country.

Low-level drug-dealers are feeling the pinch. K, a twentysomething cocaine dealer who works up in Birmingham, told me, "I have not known a drought like this ever. There is just nothing about. We started shorting the amounts and cutting what we had left a couple of weeks back, but now we can't even get anything to do that. The World Cup and European Championships are usually mental for demand and as the games start late at night, I should be caning it for the next month.

"The England-Italy game is a 11 PM Saturday kickoff, so if it's a sunny day people will start early and I should be getting repeat sales throughout the evening into the morning—and if we win, even more for the celebrating afterwards."

The dealer, who normally sells five to seven ounces of cocaine a week in grams costing £50 ($85), added, "My phone has been red-hot from punters and dealers wanting coke for the weekend, but I and every other dealer I know can't lay our hands on any. We keep on being told to wait, but it is not looking good for this weekend.

"Then when everyone gets paid at the end of the month there will be even more madder sessions that people will want coke for—it is unthinkable the drought will still be going on then."

K reckons that the lack of cocaine on the streets will spell trouble for the police and pub owners. "People rely on coke to get them through all-dayers and -nighters; people use it every week—so take that away and people are going to be plastered drunk. The amount of fights will be insane, and if England loses then I bet a few [pubs] will get smashed up—it's standard."

Further up the food chain, a Staffordshire 40-something drug dealer, whom I’ll call Danny, is also frantically trying to lay his lands on coke. Danny sells nothing below a kilo. He told me, "It’s becoming like a crisis, man. The boat [that the police] caught coming in from Colombia last month has fucked everything up."

Danny began selling weed in the 90s and progressed to cocaine eight years ago after several other dealers were jailed. "I didn't think one shipment could cause such a shit storm, but that is the reason, we are being told," he fretted. "I've got contacts who I deal with and trust, from up north to down south, and everyone is saying the same thing."

In a joint operation the Scottish Police, Border Force agents, the National Crime Agency, and Dutch authorities arrested three Dutch nationals in the nearby Seamill Hydro Hotel in Ayrshire. Diving equipment, a rigid inflatable boat, and an underwater “scooter” were also recovered from the hotel. The three Dutch guys appeared at Leeds Magistrates Court the following week and were remanded in custody. They were believed to have arrived in Ayrshire posing as tourists.

The National Crime Agency estimate 25 to 30 tons of cocaine is smuggled into Britain every year. "The UK is one of Europe’s largest and most profitable markets. Traditionally, most of the cocaine destined for Europe, including the UK, has crossed the Atlantic by ship and entered via Spain," a spokesman for the NCA told me. "The most significant method currently used to smuggle bulk amounts is in maritime container ships arriving in European hub ports, such as Antwerp and Rotterdam, before being moved into the UK."

The UK's coke supply is also dwindling because of a massive bust in April, one of the biggest cocaine seizures ever made by the Colombian authorities. Seven tons of cocaine, with a street value of more than $250 million, was bound for Rotterdam but discovered in 6,900 packages hidden among pineapple preserves. The bust took the amount of cocaine discovered by the Colombian authorities to more than 25 tons in this year alone—already making 2014 one of the best years for busts ever.

In Staffordshire, Danny is counting the cost and is concerned about the ramifications of the drought. "This business is dangerous enough, and a drought like this is bad news for everyone, from the dealers to the users," he said. "There is a race against time to get coke in place for the World Cup, and shite synthetic stuff will end up being passed off as coke. The big winners will be the Albanians, who already have a big enough chunk of the market—they will fill the gap with proper crap."

Danny also told me that the shortage would inevitably lead to violence. "Dealers will also have to deal with new contacts, which always brings rip-offs, robberies, violence, and feuds. The police might think they are winning because there is a temporary drought but they have no idea of the consequences on the street."

He added, "No one wants to see pissed-up idiots fighting everywhere. It's better for everyone if all these football fans can just have a beer and a line and enjoy the World Cup like they have been planning to all year."

Follow Steve Zacharanda on Twitter.

In April, ARIN, the (North) American Registry for Internet Numbers, announced that it had reached "phase 4" of its IPv4 countdown plan, with fewer than 17 million IPv4 addresses remaining. There is no phase 5. APNIC, the Asia-Pacific registry, reached the 17 million (one "/8" or 2^24 IPv4 addresses) threshold three years ago, and the RIPE NCC in Europe less than two years ago. LACNIC, the Latin American and Caribbean registry, reached a similar threshold of a little more than four million remaining IPv4 addresses earlier this week. APNIC and the RIPE NCC will give ISPs and other network operators one last block of 1024 addresses, the rules for LACNIC are similar, and ARIN is tightening the address supply but still allows ISPs to come back for more. Only AfriNIC in Africa is continuing to supply IPv4 addresses as needed to network operators in its service region.

How did we get here?

It could have been worse. In the 1980s, there were several widely used networking protocols, such as DECNET, AppleTalk, IPX, and CLNP. DECNET had 16-bit addresses, AppleTalk used 24 bits, IPX 80, and CLNP a maximum of 160. The newly invented TCP/IP held the middle ground at 32 bits. However, unlike most of the other protocols, which were never intended to underpin global networks, IP is the Internet Protocol, designed to interconnect all kinds of smaller networks into a unified, global one. As such, making the addresses a meager 32 bits was a big failure of imagination. That's only ten digits when written down as a regular decimal number.

The result was that it took only a decade before IP address numbering ran into trouble. Originally, IP addresses came in three classes: A, B, and C. Class A consisted of 128 networks with room for 16,777,216 connected systems (hosts) each. Class B was 16,384 networks with 65,536 hosts, and class C 2,097,152 networks with 256 hosts each. In the early 1990s, more and more universities connected to the Internet. Universities typically had more than 256 computers—or at least the potential to grow beyond that number—so they tended to get class B networks, which quickly started to run out. Giving them a dozen or so class C networks was much more efficient, but now routers had to keep track of ten times as much information, and routing tables started to explode. The Internet Engineering Task Force was barely able to avoid disaster by abolishing the class system so an organization that needed, say, 3,000 addresses could get a "/20": a range of IP addresses sharing the same 20 bits (the prefix) with 32 - 20 = 12 bits left to number hosts within the network.

IETF

Under the new classless regime, the deployment of new IP address space slowed down to a much more sustainable pace as the Internet boomed and then busted (a little). Around the turn of the millennium, more and more people got broadband always-on connections, and a few years later the mobile era dawned, where untold millions of smartphones were continuously connected to the network, too. Surprisingly, these developments only produced a small uptick in the IPv4 address usage rate. The reason for this is probably that by now, NAT was seeing broad adoption.

Network Address Translation

Before there was Voice over IP, there was voice over the IP network; i.e., in the 1990s we used modems to encode digital data such that it could be transmitted as screeching noise over the analog phone network. (Actually, the core of the phone network was already almost exclusively digital by then.) Apart from cute noises, tied up phone lines, and mind-numbing slowness, dial-up connections had the property that a user only required an address as long as she was connected. So an ISP with 10,000 users may have had a modem bank with 1,000 modems and thus needed 1,000 IP addresses.

As dedicated ADSL or cable broadband connections became available, the notion of making a connection, doing your online business, and then disconnecting, quickly went away, and we became always-on. So now 10,000 users required 10,000 IP addresses. However, in the early days a cable or ADSL modem was still connected to a single PC. That PC thus held the IP address provided by the broadband ISP.

It didn't take long before people wanted to use more than just one PC with their broadband connection. ISPs were of course happy to provide more IP addresses—for a small extra fee. However, a cheaper solution is to share a single address among multiple computers. This is what Network Address Translation accomplishes. With NAT, computers and other IP-capable devices get an address from one of the IP address ranges set aside for private use: 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, or 192.168.0.0/16. A home router that implements NAT then translates between the internal address and the regular, public address given out by the ISP. By modifying the TCP port numbers where necessary, the NAT device can avoid conflicts between the TCP sessions from different internal systems when they're active at the same time. (And much the same for UDP.)

The Stanford vs. China story

In articles from a decade ago that forewarned the looming predicament we find ourselves in today, it was frequently noted that Stanford University (or MIT) holds more IPv4 addresses than the entirety of China. However, by 2006, organizations in China held a total of 98 million IP addresses, nearly six times as much as MIT's class A block. Stanford also used to have a class A block, but had returned this in 2000. Before that, the story was actually true, as China held fewer than 8 million IP addresses by the end of 2000. However, China (and some other Asian countries) used up a lot of IPv4 addresses while the getting was good: about 50 million addresses a year between 2008 and 2011, for a total of 330 million today. This makes China the second largest holder of IPv4 addresses, behind the US with 1.591 million.

Regional Internet Registries

If the numbers were reversed, both countries would have about one address per resident. But in the current situation, it's about a quarter of an address per person in China and more than five per person in the US. In Africa, the number of addresses often dips below less than one address per ten people. Only in the US, Canada, parts of Europe, and a few selected countries, such as Korea and Australia, is the number of addresses per person larger than one. And with just over 3.7 billion usable addresses, the average for the entire planet isn't going to be better than 1:2. Out of a possible 4.295 billion IPv4 addresses, 268 million are set aside for multicast. Another 268 million are marked as "reserved for future use," and many operating systems don't allow them to be used, unaware of the fact that the future has now arrived.

So what now?

In a statement to Ars, John Curran, president and CEO of ARIN, stressed the need to adopt IPv6: "This issuance of IPv4 space in accordance with global policy has been expected for some time (and will occur several more times in smaller amounts) but doesn't change the need for ISPs and websites to move to IPv6." LACNIC echoed that tone in its announcement: "Today, the need to deploy IPv6 is now more pressing than ever. It cannot be delayed any longer if connectivity providers still wish to meet the demands of their customers and those of new users."

It's true. There is no plan B. During the past 10 years, 1.6 billion IPv4 addresses have been given out. It's inconceivable that the Internet as we know it today can continue to grow at a meaningful rate over the next decades with pretty much no new addresses being added, even as addresses are now traded. Even if no additional addresses were required, when one ISP grows and another loses business, the contracting ISP is left with Swiss cheese-like address space full of holes while the growing one needs to find new addresses in the form of reasonably sized blocks to avoid exploding routing tables.

IPv6 is a new version of the IP protocol that increases the address length to a mind-boggling 128 bits, solving the problem, if not forever, then at least for many, many decades. Unfortunately, IPv6 is not compatible with IPv4—it only helps once everyone has upgraded. However, as Geoff Huston, chief scientist at APNIC, observes:

Yes there are some countries and some ISPs that are doing amazing things with IPv6 over the past 12 months: The United States at 7.5% continues to move quickly, as does Germany with 10%, but many many other countries appear to be sitting on their hands. LACNIC has now run out, but the level of IPv6 penetration in Brazil is 0.04%, which is better than Argentina (0.01%), or Mexico (0.02%) but not by much. 13 countries are above the average of 2.2%, while the other 190 or aren't. Given that networking is a matter of everyone working roughly at the same thing at the same time, things are still not looking good.

These are, of course, numbers of individual Internet users that have IPv6, (almost always) in addition to IPv4; see Google's measurements. It's also important to get websites and other services on IPv6, but those only use a tiny number of IPv4 addresses—it's the consumer ISPs that get the bulk of new IP addresses, which means that they're also the first ones to run into trouble when that's no longer possible.

And it gets worse: deploying IPv6 doesn't solve the short-term problem, as IPv6 users can't talk to IPv4-only services or other users who still only have IPv4 connectivity. Current operating systems can all use IPv6, but they don't always work as expected in an IPv6-only environment. And some applications, and, especially, networked devices, simply don't work with IPv6. The most notable example is Skype. All of this means that ISPs really have no other choice than to keep IPv4 running in some way for now.

NAT to the rescue—again

When broadband users couldn't get extra IPv4 addresses from their ISPs at a price they liked, they adopted NAT. So now that ISPs can no longer get IPv4 addresses at a price they like, they're also turning toward NAT. Of course there is a difference between a $50 home router that can handle the NATting for a single home and a NAT that can handle an entire neighborhood. These are called a Carrier Grade NAT (CGN), but they basically do the same thing. To avoid problems with the private addresses in the 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, and 192.168.0.0/16 ranges, there's a separate semi-private address block that ISPs can use between the CGN and their subscribers: 100.64.0.0/10. If you get an address in the range 100.64.0.0 - 100.127.255.255, that means you're behind a CGN. According to Geoff Huston, at least 3 percent of Internet users are already in that situation:

"A lot of CGNs are being deployed. Some recent work I have been doing shows that upward of 3% of IPv4 users present on a different source IPv4 address within 10 seconds—i.e. a minimum of 3% of users lie behind CGNs with relatively aggressive address lease timeouts. Secondly, a lot of shared Web hosting is being deployed. It is evidently commonplace to see upward of 10,000 Web host environments co-existing on a single host IP server address."

ISPs are playing their cards close to the vest, but it looks like many of the ones that are planning to start rolling out IPv6 soon will be deploying IPv6 along with CGN-based IPv4 for new users. They're reluctant to change anything for existing users, because the first rule of being an ISP is "don't generate support calls." Providing broadband Internet access is a very profitable business, but the profit generated by a customer evaporates faster than you can say "have you tried rebooting your router?" when said customer calls for support. ISPs that started deploying IPv6 in past years had access to enough IPv4 addresses to give users their own along with a range of IPv6 addresses. That is no longer true, or will no longer be true as soon as ISPs use up their own stashes of IPv4 addresses.

The downside of NAT is that it only works well in one direction: from the inside to the outside. When connections must be set up from the outside to the inside, such as in the case of peer-to-peer audio or video conferencing, additional logic is necessary to find a way to the right internal system through the NAT. This is bad enough when two users are both behind their own home NATs so that two NATs must be bypassed, but it gets much worse as ISPs deploy CGNs, so now four NATs can be in the path. CGNs also can't open up ports as easily as home NATs. As long as it's not firewalled too severely, IPv6 has none of these issues; with 2^128 addresses there is no need for NAT. So it makes sense for ISPs to deploy IPv6 along with CGN-based IPv4. However, there are still ISPs that pooh-pooh IPv6. Huston again: "The pessimistic view is that so far nothing much has broken in IPv4-land, so there is still some more time left to do nothing!"

Unless the ISPs that have been ignoring IPv6 plan to just keep their existing customers and not sign up any new ones, those ISPs are still going to be bitten by the IPv4 address exhaustion and will almost certainly be forced to deploy CGN at some point. With no pressure relief valve in the form of IPv6, all user traffic will have to flow through the CGN, which can then easily become a bottleneck and a single point of failure. As a result, the quality of service delivered by different ISPs will diverge more and more, with the ones providing unshared public IPv4 addresses as well as IPv6 doing the best and the ones using CGNs with relatively many users per public IPv4 address and no IPv6 doing the worst.

The good news is that so far, the Internet has always managed to adapt just before collapse was imminent. In the late 1980s, TCP congestion control saved the Internet from massive congestion. In the 1990s, classless interdomain routing and route flap damping kept the routers going. This time we only have to turn on a feature that's been in our operating systems for a decade and maybe replace an aging modem or two. Call me an optimist, but I think it can be done. But only at the very last moment, of course.

Supreme Court opinions are the law of the land, and so it’s a problem when the Justices change the words of the decisions without telling anyone. This happens on a regular basis, but fortunately a lawyer in Washington appears to have just found a solution.

The issue, as Adam Liptak explained in the New York Times, is that original statements by the Justices about everything from EPA policy to American Jewish communities, are disappearing from decisions — and being replaced by new language that says something entirely different. As you can imagine, this is a problem for lawyers, scholars, journalists and everyone else who relies on Supreme Court opinions.

Until now, the only way to detect when a decision has been altered is a pain-staking comparison of earlier and later copies — provided, of course, that someone knew a decision had been changed in the first place.  Thanks to a simple Twitter tool, the process may become much easier.

Code to the rescue

David Zvenyach is general counsel to the Council of the District of Columbia and, in his spare time, likes to experiment with computer code. Upon learning of Liptak’s column, which was based on a study by Harvard law professor Richard Lazurus, he decided to so something about it.

Last week, he launched @Scotus_servo, a Twitter account that alerts followers whenever a change is made to a Supreme Court opinion.

The process is fairly simple. As Zvenyach explained in a phone interview, it uses Node, an application written in JavaScript, to crawl the “slip” opinions posted to the Supreme Court website. If the application, which performs a crawl every five minutes, detects a change, it notifies the automated Twitter account, which tweets out an alert.

Shortly after, Zvenyach sends out a manual tweet that calls attention to the change — something he has already had to do, flagging a small change to a patent opinion this month:

In the short time since Zvenyach launched the tool, another coder has added a feature that highlights the changes, and likewise tweets them out. Here’s a screenshot:

Given courts’ frequent misunderstanding of technology, I asked Zvenyach if there’s a risk that the Supreme Court might block his tool from crawling the decisions. He says that he checked the court website’s terms of service, and that he doesn’t anticipate a problem (nor should he, I would add, since the decisions are public domain documents).

The @Scotus_servo account is just one example of how a simple piece of code can improve judicial transparency. Another is @FISACourt, which inspired Zvenyach, and which crawls the docket of the country’s controversial spy court and alerts the public when there is a new development in important cases about government surveillance.

The tools appears to be so cheap to create and deliver such obvious benefit, it’s a wonder that courts and government websites don’t integrate them as a matter of course.

Instead, in the case of the Supreme Court, it appears that one man’s simple script is for now the best way for the public to stay up to date on unannounced changes to the law of the land. Here, from Zvenyach’s GitHub page, is his self-proclaimed mission:

WHEREAS, It is now well-documented that the Supreme Court of the United States makes changes to its opinions after the opinion is published; and

WHEREAS, Only “Four legal publishers are granted access to “change pages” that show all revisions. Those documents are not made public, and the court refused to provide copies to The New York Times”; and

WHEREAS, git makes it easy to identify when changes have been made;

RESOLVED, I shall apply a cron job to at least identify when the actual PDF has changed so everyone can see which documents have changed.

To most people, urine is a waste fluid that’s promptly flushed away as soon as it’s expelled (unless you abide by the “yellow let it mellow” rule). But to scientists, your pee could be the golden font that advances carbon fuel-cell technology.

Korean scientists have demonstrated that carbon, a precious fuel cell material, can be extracted from dried urine and that it is a powerful conductor of electricity.

The findings, published Monday in Nature, offer an economical way to advance fuel cell technology, and could also improve the environment if deployed on a large scale.

Urine Power

Fuel cells — devices which harvest energy from a chemical reaction — often use platinum as a catalyst, making them expensive to produce. Researchers have been exploring ways to replace the metal with carbon. However carbon nanostructures, created synthetically, can also be quite expensive.

Now researchers from South Korea have proven that equally effective carbon compounds can be extracted from urine — making them a cheap stand-in for platinum or synthetic carbon.

To test the potential of pee, scientists collected urine samples from healthy individuals. Then, they heated individuals’ samples to evaporate the water, leaving behind a dried, yellowish deposit. Next, they super-heated various test samples of dried urine in a range between 700 and 1,000 degrees Celsius for six hours to carbonize the urine.

The heating process caused salts and other elements to gasify and leave behind carbon. Urine is loaded with other elements besides carbon, which makes the leftover carbon highly porous — ideal for fuel cell catalysts. As an added bonus, the gasified salts solidified and clung to the furnace wall after cooling; researchers say it’s possible to harvest these remnants for commercial use as de-icing salts.

Most importantly, the urine carbon was an excellent conductor of electricity, especially the batch that was heated to 1,000 degrees. Researchers said this is the first time carbon was extracted from urine using this simple method.

An Abundant Resource

Roughly 300 to 400 milligrams of urine carbon can be extracted from a single liter of urine, which means a single person can generate up to 0.2 ounces of the fuel catalyst a day. Multiply that by everyone using the restroom at this very moment, and you have yourself an abundant resource.

Researchers said urine could easily be collected at public restrooms and dried outdoors by the sun to create the yellowish powder that starts the process. Where these open fields of urine will reside is another question. But researchers say their findings could help put our waste, which pollutes waterways with phosphates and pharmaceuticals, to good use.

It’s certainly a lot to contemplate for your next trip to the lavatory.

Photo credit: Thomas La Mela/Shutterstock

Illustration: WIRED

Until recently, anyone may have been able to assemble a list of every Gmail account in the world. All it would have taken, according to one security researcher’s analysis, was some clever tweaking of a web page’s characters and a lot of patience.

Oren Hafif says that he found and helped fix a bug in Google’s Gmail service that could have been used to extract millions of Gmail addresses, if not all of them, in a matter of days or weeks. The trick would not have exposed passwords or otherwise allowed easy access to those accounts, but could easily have left users vulnerable to spam, phishing or password-guessing attacks. The bug may have existed for years.

The trick would not have exposed passwords, but could have left accounts open to spam, phishing, or password-guessing attacks.

The exploit involved a lesser-known account-sharing feature of Gmail that allows a user to “delegate” access to their account. In November of last year, Hafif found that he could tweak the URL of a webpage that appears when a user is declined that delegated access to another user’s account. When he changed one character in that URL, the page showed him that he’d been declined access to a different address. By automating the character changes with a piece of software called DirBuster, he was able to collect 37,000 Gmail addresses in about two hours.

“I could have done this potentially endlessly,” says Hafif, a penetration tester for security firm Trustwave Labs in Tel Aviv. “I have every reason to believe every Gmail address could have been mined.”

A hacker could have used the flaw to collect the addresses of not only personal Gmail users, but those of every business that uses Google to hosts its email including Google itself, Hafif says.

Here’s a video showing how the hack worked:

Zombie Warning Posters

 

Since my teens, I’ve been curious how many Olsons there are out there. I’ve seen some “celebrity” Olsons, and even made friends with a couple Olsons throughout my life, but I’ve always assumed that Olson is a fairly rare last name. To my glee, just yesterday I discovered that the U.S. Census Bureau releases lists of the most common surnames in the U.S. every 10 years. I was quick to look up my surname: 163,502 Olsons in 2000, up +19.5% from 1990. The Olsonian empire is growing!

If you want to look yours up, here’s the raw data: 1990, 2000.

Of course, I couldn’t stop there. Below, I plotted the fastest growing and declining surnames in the U.S. from 1990 to 2000. If you take note of the racial/ethnic background of the surnames, you’ll see an eye-opening trend: Hispanic/Latino surnames are rapidly growing, whereas White/Black surnames are steadily declining in the U.S. (I grouped White/Black because most of the declining surnames were evenly split between White/Black.)

Randy Olson

For those who follow the news, this finding should be fairly unsurprising: Hispanics/Latinos have been leading the U.S. in population growth for quite some time now. So while Lopez is probably gonna be all right, Jackson will soon have to beat it from the most common surname charts.

Just for fun, here’s the growth trends for some celebrity surnames:

• Roberts: 366,215 in 2000 (-3.8% from 1990)
• Ford: 178,397 (-12.5%)
• Carey: 54,924 (+16.2)
• Monroe: 53,475 (-2.3%)
• Hanks: 17,141 (+14.9%)
• Pitt: 8,666 (-12.9%)
• Eastwood: 5,113 (+2.8%)
• Bieber: 4,294 (-13.7%)
• Cruise: 3,058 (-38.5%)
• Johansson: 2,429 (-2.3%)

The U.S. Census Bureau hasn’t released the list for 2010 yet, but as soon as they do, I’ll update this post.

Question

Gramps,

I have a hard time understanding the reasoning behind coffee and tea not being allowed. I have a friend who left the church because of this. I just don’t get how coffee isn’t allowed but energy drinks and other things are.

Sam

Answer

Sam,

This may sound a bit harsh, but your friend did not leave the church over not being able to understand why coffee is included in the Word of Wisdom. Your question is really about obedience and why do we need to obey things we don’t understand. An unwillingness to obey is probably the prime reason many leave the church.

But let’s look at coffee and tea objectively.

Is coffee (and tea) harmful? The answer is undoubtedly yes. A quick search on the internet easily reveals some of its issues: Insomnia, headaches, heartburn, gout attacks, osteoporosis, incontinence, ulcers, reduction in fertility, forceful heart contractions, hallucinations, tremors, stress, high blood-pressure, etc., etc… Yes, most of these come from caffeine, something you also get from energy drinks and the like. But it can hardly be argued that coffee usage is beneficial to our health.

So, really, what are we asking? That we ought to be allowed to consume whatever we want to without any restrictions, in spite of the harm? Is the fact that one can get a temple recommend using energy drinks proof-positive that coffee and tea should be removed from the Word of Wisdom? Or, perhaps, should we be reconsidering our usage of energy drinks?

Regardless, it does not really matter. We cannot understand all the reasons the Lord gives every command. That is why we have the law of obedience, which includes the idea that we do as the Lord asks us to even if we do not understand. Coffee and tea usage being unhealthy does not seem particularly difficult to understand however. But even with some of the proposals that limited usage of some things included in the Word of Wisdom may be healthy (some suggest limited use of coffee can be healthy, and anti-oxidants in wine have been thought to be beneficial), the Lord’s commandments are His to give according to His will and understanding, not according to our wills and understanding.

Remember, this life is a test. What is that test? Will we obey? It’s a simple as that.

The Word of Wisdom can also be understood as a lesser law. We read in D&C 89:3, that it was, “Given for a principle with promise, adapted to the capacity of the weak and the weakest of all saints, who are or can be called saints” (emphasis mine). Ideally we should look to live the purest and highest form of the law, not the least and lowest form. The higher-law version of the Word of Wisdom may well ban energy drinks, or at the very least, those living it would abstain from any addictive substances. And who knows, perhaps obedience to the fullest principles of the Word of Wisdom during the Millennium will be a great part of what will enable us to live “to the age of a tree.”

What has been revealed of the Lord’s health code is, as taught in vs. 3 of Section 89, an adaptation for the weakest of all saints. But if one feels like there’s more – live it! Enjoy the health and good life it brings. As a general principle, abstaining from coffee and tea are minimum requirements for temple admittance (and to receive saving ordinances). There is no law that says one can’t abstain from energy drinks, caffeinated beverages, lemonades, juices, or ice water. Feel free to do so (though I would not recommend abstaining from the water part of ice-water). Just don’t act like your personal Word of Wisdom scaffolding is the foundation for everyone else. REMEMBER HIRAM PAGE!!

Interesting to note (if you have tastes similar to mine), this is not a new practice. Elder Widtsoe, in writing about the Word of Wisdom, included a section on the evils of refined (white) flour (the GMO’s of his day I guess). Later, Elder McConkie corrected this thinking in his book, Mormon Doctrine:

“Some unstable people become cranks with reference to this law of health. It should be understood that the Word of Wisdom is not the gospel, and the gospel is not the Word of Wisdom. As Paul said, “The kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.” (Rom. 14:17.)

There is no prohibition in Section 89, for instance, as to the eating of white bread, using white flour, white sugar, cocoa, chocolate, eggs, milk, meat, or anything else, except items classified under the headings, tea, coffee, tobacco, and liquor. As a matter of fact those who command that men should not eat meat, are not ordained of God, such counsel being listed by Paul as an evidence of apostasy. God has created “meats,” he says, “to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth.” (1 Tim. 4:3.) If some particular food or drink disagrees with an individual, then that person should act accordingly without reference to the prohibitions in this particular law of health.”

Elder Quentin L. Cook also taught:

“Certain members have wanted to add substantially to various doctrines. An example might be when one advocates additions to the Word of Wisdom that are not authorized by the Brethren and proselytes others to adopt these interpretations. If we turn a health law or any other principle into a form of religious fanaticism, we are looking beyond the mark”.

In the same article he helps us to understand what the mark is:

“The “Mark” Is Christ”

And Christ taught us the means whereby we hit the mark:

If ye love me, keep my commandments. (John 14:15)

Gramps

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Google may be standing up to government surveillance, but on Google Maps it shies away from conflict.

The company displays the borders of 31 states differently than the other 162 members of the United Nations. Many of these countries have long had disputed borders or are currently facing military conflicts.

Google Maps is customized in many ways to better serve people based on their location, and adhere to local laws, regulations, and preferences according to Google. But the geo-highlighting feature, which puts a border around searched areas, is unaffected by a person’s location. For instance, a search for “Brazil” in Google Maps yields this:

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The name of the country and its border turns red, highlighting it.

However, someone who searches for “South Sudan” gets this:

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There is no highlighting other than the Google’s branded pin.

Other searches yield even less detail. Google’s software responds to a search for “India” only by centering the map on the sub-continent and adjusting the zoom level to fit the nation on screen.

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India is especially sensitive about the representation of its borders. In December 2005 and later in November 2013, the country admonished Google for showing Pakistan-occupied Kashmir as part of Pakistan in various Google products. A recent report by the US Department of Defense made the same cartographic choice, catching the attention of Indian media.

In an email to Quartz a Google spokesperson said the company is “committed to providing our users with the richest, most up-to-date maps possible,” and that it uses multiple resources to decide how to depict political areas.

Here is the complete list of countries that are not highlighted on Google Maps, according to an analysis by Quartz:

• Albania
• Bhutan
• China
• Cyprus
• North Korea
• Egypt
• Georgia
• India
• Israel
• Japan
• Kenya
• Malawi
• Mauritania
• Mauritius
• Montenegro
• Morocco
• Nauru
• Pakistan
• Palestine
• Philippines
• South Korea
• Russia
• Serbia
• South Sudan
• Sudan
• Syria
• Macedonia
• Ukraine
• Tanzania
• Vanuatu
• Vietnam