Macrobolic’s BodyBlog

<label class=”caption”>A protester is ejected from the Beijing Olympics torch-lighting ceremony in Greece
“We believe the Olympic Games are not the place for demonstrations and we hope that all people attending the games recognize the importance of this.” Thus spake Samsung Electronics, one of 12 major corporate sponsors of the Olympics, when asked last week whether recent events in Tibet were causing them any concern. Coca-Cola, another Olympics sponsor, has stated that while it would be inappropriate “to comment on the political situation of individual nations,” the company firmly believes “that the Olympics are a force for good.” The chairman of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, was also quick to declare that “a boycott doesn’t solve anything”—just as quick as he was to dismiss the demonstrators who waved a black banner showing five interlocked handcuffs, in mockery of the Olympic symbol, at Monday’s lighting of the Olympic torch in Greece. “It is always sad to see such a ceremony disrupted,” he declared, rather pompously.

And no one was surprised: Companies that have invested millions in sponsorship deals and Olympic bureaucrats who have invested years trying to justify their controversial decision to award the 2008 Olympics to Beijing are naturally inclined to use those sorts of arguments. But that doesn’t mean that the rest of us have to believe them.

Look a bit closer, in fact, and none of those statements holds up.<em />

A boycott doesn’t solve anything. Well, doesn’t it? Some boycotts do help solve some things. The boycott of South African athletes from international competitions was probably the single most effective weapon the international community ever deployed against the apartheid state. (”They didn’t mind about the business sanctions,” a South African friend once told me, “but they minded—they really, really minded—about the cricket.”) The boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics helped undermine Soviet propaganda about the invasion of Afghanistan and unify the Western world against it. I don’t know for certain, but I’m guessing that from the Soviet perspective, the Soviet bloc boycott of the Los Angeles Olympics four years later was successful, too. Presumably, it was intended to solidify Soviet elite opposition to the United States in the Reagan years, and presumably, it helped.

The Olympics are a force for good. Not always! For those who don’t remember, let me remind you that the 1936 Olympics, held in Nazi Germany, were an astonishing propaganda coup for Hitler. It’s true that the star performance of Jesse Owens, the great black American track-and-field star, did shoot some holes in the Nazi theory of Aryan racial superiority. But Hitler still got what he wanted out of the games. With the help of American newspapers such as the New York Times, which opined that the games put Germany “back in the family of nations again,” he convinced many Germans, and many foreigners, to accept Nazism as “normal.” The Nuremburg laws were in force, German troops had marched into the Rhineland, Dachau was full of prisoners, but the world cheered athletes in Berlin. As a result, many people, both in and out of Germany, reckoned that everything was just fine, and Hitler could be tolerated a bit longer.

The Olympic Games are not the place for demonstrations. Aren’t they? Actually, the Olympics seem an ideal place for demonstrations. Not only is the world’s press there with cameras running, the modern Olympics were set up with a political purpose: to promote international peace by encouraging healthy competition between nations. Hence the emphasis on national teams instead of individual competitors; hence the opening and closing ceremonies—since copied by other sporting events—as well as the national flags and national anthems.

These elements make the Olympics special, different from other international competitions, but they also sometimes give the games a nasty edge. The old United States vs. Soviet Union basketball rivalry; the parade of East German women with husky voices; the lists of who has won how many medals—all of that is evidence of the decades-old politicization of the Olympics. There were black power demonstrations at the 1968 Mexico City Games. A Palestinian group attacked and killed Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Games. Australian aborigines protested at the 2000 Sydney Games. And everything associated with the 2008 Olympics, from the massive Beijing building program, to the Olympic torch that is due to be carried across Tibet, to the Chinese Olympic Committee’s Web site ( it describes China’s commitment to promote "mass sporting activities" on an "extensive scale, improving the people’s physique, and spurring the socialist modernization of China") is blatantly designed to promote the domestic and international image of the Chinese state.

No wonder, then, that everyone who hates or fears China, whether in Burma, Darfur, Tibet, or Beijing, is calling for a boycott. And the Chinese government and the IOC are terrified that they will succeed. No one involved in the preparations for this year’s Olympics really believes that this is "only about the athletes," or that the Beijing Games will be an innocent display of sporting prowess, or that they bear no relation to Chinese politics. I don’t see why the rest of us should believe it, either.

Tuesday, January 8,  2008

TUESDAY, Jan. 8 (HealthDay News) — Young people who start smoking may be influenced to do so by movies they saw in early childhood, new research suggests.

What’s more, the study found that almost 80 percent of the exposure to smoking scenes in movies came through films rated “G,” “PG” and “PG-13.”

“Movies seen at the youngest ages had as much influence over later smoking behavior as the movies that children had seen recently,” said study author Linda Titus-Ernstoff, a pediatrics professor at Dartmouth Medical School.

“And I’m increasingly convinced that this association between movie-smoking exposure and smoking initiation is real,” she added. “That’s to say, causal. It is quite improbable that the association we see is due to some other influence, some other characteristic inherent in children or parental behavior. The relationship is clearly between movie-smoking and smoking initiation.”

The findings are published in the January issue of Pediatrics.

To gauge the impact of movie smoking on young people, Titus-Ernstoff and her colleagues focused on more than 2,200 boys and girls between the ages of 9 and 12 who were enrolled in grades four through six in 26 elementary schools in New Hampshire and Vermont.

Starting in 2002 and 2003, the researchers conducted interviews with the children, and their parents, to track whether or not the kids had smoked in the past.

The researchers used a list of 50 movies compiled from a larger pool of 550 films drawn from the top 100 box-office hits released over the five-and-a-half years before the study started in 2002. About 40 percent of the films were rated “R,” 40 percent “PG-13,” 14 percent “PG,” and 5 percent “G.”

The initial survey of the kids was followed by two more interviews approximately one and two years later. At each follow-up point, a new movie list was drafted to include 50 films randomly pulled from the top 100 feature releases and the top 100 video rentals of the past year.

All the movies on the lists were coded for the number of “smoking occurrences” — instances in which major, minor or tangential characters used or handled tobacco for the first time in a new scene.

While 21 percent of the smoking occurrences were found in “R” movies, slightly more than 60 percent were found in “PG-13″ movies, and almost 19 percent were found in “G” or “PG” films, the researchers said.

Included among the “G-rated” movies that had smoking scenes were 102 Dalmations, Tarzan  and Muppets from Space. “PG” films on the list that had smoking scenes were George of the Jungle,  Atlantis: The Lost Empire and  The Rainmaker.

By the third survey, almost 10 percent of the kids had started to smoke, and on average had viewed almost 37 films. That translated into an average exposure to almost 150 smoking occurrences.

After accounting for other factors that might influence behavior, the researchers concluded that 35 percent of smoking initiation among the children was directly attributable to seeing smoking scenes on the screen.

Children who may have seen smoking scenes at a preschool age were as likely to pick up a cigarette as those who had seen such scenes at a later age, Titus-Ernstoff said.

“What this means for parents is that they need to pay more attention to what children are watching,” Titus-Ernstoff said. “I think they tend to worry more about sex, violence and bad language. But bad language never killed anybody. And maybe they need to pay more attention to movies that glamorize smoking or other drug abuse.”

“Our finding is that the vast majority of smoking in movies that children are exposed to comes from movies that are youth-rated,” she added. “So even if parents are doing a good job protecting their children from ‘R’-rated movies, they still need to pay attention to the ‘G,’ ‘PG,’ and ‘PG-13′ movies.”

Titus-Ernstoff said concerned parents could try to pre-screen new movies for smoking scenes by checking out such Web sites as www.kids-in-mind.com for detailed film descriptions.

Danny McGoldrick, vice president of research with the non-profit Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, described the new study as “very strong” in terms of both its approach and findings.

“This adds to the already existing evidence of the impact of smoking in the movies,” he said. “And the last thing we need is for Hollywood to be helping the tobacco companies create a positive image around a product that ultimately kills half the people who use it, and a product whose vast majority of users start as children.”
        HealthDay

Story obtained from ISSAOnline.com