Fortunately, this is a question that the Dutch Christian newspaper Nederlands Dagblad ((Motto: Don’t try to access us on the Sabbath, we shut the site down”) now addresses: Who knows whether the Tour was clean in 2009. And indeed, we can’t know yet whether that absence of doping incidents this year actually meant that no one was cheating. (“No one was cheating”: that’s a concept rather difficult to wrap your mind around in any case, no?) We can’t know now, but we can get a better idea with the passage of time, because that is what in fact has been the big recent advance in anti-doping techniques according to this article: after-the-fact (or retrospective) analysis. Since 1 January of this year the procedures for conducting that have been set down in an iron-clad legal and procedural framework.

Bike-race contestants all submit urine samples now, as before, but in this new system they are frozen and thus made available for chemical analysis for the next eight years. Herman Ram, director of the World Anti-Doping Agency, is even quoted here as cautiously venturing the opinion that perhaps the 2009 Tour de France was clean because of this advance: “I give it a more than reasonable chance that, for the first time since maybe the beginning of the Tour [i.e. since the first Tour de France in 1903!] we have seen a clean edition. I base this on the deterring effect that retrospective analysis has, a strong weapon.” In fact, a retrospective test is scheduled for the fall to, in effect, check the probity of last year’s Tour de France, as urine samples from fifteen of the top racers there will be checked, especially for the presence of CERA, a new brand of blood-doping chemical that first came to authorities’ attention back in 2008 and was detected then in a couple of (Italian) contestants – presumably as the anti-doping authorities were scrambling in an ad hoc fashion to react to it.

This CERA example points to a curious dilemma that those authorities face. Naturally, there will never be an end to to the medical innovations unscrupulous riders, or rather the medical experts behind them, come up with to gain a race-advantage and which at least initially will be undetectable with then-current technology. That’s why it’s so valuable to have both the technical and legal/regulatory basis in place to test urine samples for up to eight years. But that portion of the sample that you test, you destroy, so eventually you can exhaust a rider’s sample when, if you had just held on to some, you could later test again for some new blood-doping innovation you didn’t know about before.

So do you just wait to test when that eight-year period is almost up? For that matter, why do the anti-doping authorities want to test (and therefore use up some of the urine samples of) those fifteen riders from last year’s Tour? The answer should be obvious: it’s just too lame to wait too late to announce bad news. “Uh, we’re sorry, but we now know that racer XXX cheated back in the Tour de France eight years ago and we’re revoking his title and taking back his winnings,” that after the miscreant in question has had those eight years to bask both in glory and a considerably-enhanced financial endowment.

Competitive bicycle-racing: Don’t fool yourself that it’s about riding a bike fast. It’s all about chemistry!

                          

But Dutch culture also stems from a rather Calvinist historical background (think “Thou Shalt Not!”), which cannot but give rise to various paradoxes – if you’d rather not call them “hypocrisies” – such as that, while it’s legal to buy hash and marijuana in small amounts, it’s strictly-speaking illegal to supply the stuff in any commercially-meaningful amounts. And the public authorities take a particularly dim view of marijuana “farms” or “plantations.”

Combine all that with Dutch technical ingenuity, and what you can come up with as a result is what (fittingly) the Dutch religious newspaper Nederlands Dagblad is now reporting: Unmanned helicopter tracks down marijuana-cultivation. You can get a good look at what is being discussed here by clicking through on that link and looking at the accompanying photo. (Dutch technical ingenuity, alas, also meant that that picture was protected by the embedding-software so that I was not able to “borrow” it to post it here directly.) It’s a smallish, less than a meter-long, remote-control helicopter, termed by the police that use it a “Cannachopper.” It’s truly a chopper with a difference, namely its “cannasniffer,” an odor-detector that can identify that unique fragrance emitted by smokable weed (even if still-unharvested). It also has an infra-red camera, i.e. heat detector, since that is usually the first give-away that some unconventional agriculture is taking place: cultivating marijuana requires substantial heat. Once alerted by signs of that, the aircraft can usually swoop closer to take a sniff with the “cannasniffer” and so come to a definitive verdict about what is going on.

So far there is only one “Cannachopper” in existence, because the program is still in its experimental stage. But the results from early field-trials, performed out in the somewhat out-of-the-way area of Dutch countryside called the Achterhoek, have been encouraging: a weed plantation in the neighborhood of the town of Doetinchem (warning: this name can really only be pronounced correctly if you are truly Dutch!) was discovered and five people were arrested. So it does seem likely that many more “Cannachoppers” will soon be flying around in the Netherlands, although the police spokesman did also speak of the possible need for it “to be further modified.” What does he have in mind? Making it resemble more its big brother, the AH-64 Apache, with a mini-chain gun and Hellfire missiles for self-defense? In his statement that spokesman also advocated deploying the “Cannachopper” in order to get “more blue on the street,” i.e. to free up police manpower for other things. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn out to add more blood-red to the street as well.

                          

Right, but what about closer to (the €S) home, what about the Netherlands’ economy? Also from Het Financiële Dagblad, we get some good news straight from the Dutch premier Jan Peter Balkenende that he is confident that the strong character of the Dutch will get them through the hard times.

(Unfortunately, I can’t get the link to Balkenende’s HFD op-ed piece; I think it was kept for the print edition only, HFD often still does that. But we do get a news article about that from the Dutch press-agency ANP that appears in a number of the Dutch dailies, among which for example the Algemeen Dagblad: Premier: Out of the recession on character.)

“Against headwinds we in the Netherlands kick harder,” the Premier writes, “That’s in our character.” He is also confident that the Dutch should come out all right in the end because the authorities seem better prepared this time – having already successfully moved to bail out a couple of teetering local banks – and because the country has a long tradition of its “social partners” (i.e. business and labor and government) cooperating to do what is best for all. A case of whistling in the dark, you say? You may well be right, but it also seems that similarly rosy-ish opinions are held by an important stratum of Dutchmen and -women who are not paid to be publicly optimistic: the entrepreneurs. This article in another Dutch Daily, Het Parool, discusses the results of a recent survey undertaken among around one thousand Dutch small- and medium-sized enterprise businesspeople. Forty percent expect a better financial result from their businesses next year than they had this year, although 25% have already noticed a downturn in sales and 50% consider the worsening economic conditions to be “a serious threat.” So as I say: “rosy-ish.”

But leave it to a Christian paper to contribute a silver lining to the discussion! A unique piece in the Nederlands Dagblad reminds us of a remarkable means the Dutch have come up with in recent times to boost export earnings: Footballers are an important export product. And this is not just some puff-piece written to remind us of, say, Klaas-Jan Huntelaar (pictured in the article) – lately of Ajax Amsterdam, but recently sold on to Real Madrid for a tremendous sum because that world-renowned club needed a striker to replace Ruud van Nistlerooy, who is out for the rest of the year with a knee injury (and who himself, of course, is another spectacular example of a Dutch football export). No, this piece (by-lined to ND’s economic editors) has the solid numbers, from a Netherlands Central Bank study no less. Over the past five years the Netherlands has accumulated a trade surplus when it comes to football players in the amount of €225 million, even though far more foreign players came to play in the Netherlands during that period (272) than left the Netherlands (180). It’s apparently a matter of superior “football value-added,” you understand: the Netherlands is a far better place to get your kicks.

                          

A Dutch paper this morning picked up on this story, and naturally it was the Nederlands Dagblad, an explicitly Christian newspaper: Obama waits on going to church. (No sign of the story, though, on the website of that other Dutch Christian newspaper, the Reformatorisch Dagblad.) Their coverage (from the “foreign editor”) for the most part repeats that of Politico, although they also obliquely justify why it might be that the Obama’s have not yet found their new church-home, by mentioning that which church they might choose is currently the subject of feverish speculation equal to that which attended the choice of Sidwell Friends as their daughters’ new school. And they quote an unnamed Obama staff-member reassuring us that “The Obama family attaches much worth to religious experience in a church.”

                          

Great! So does that mean, for example, that the Netherlands will be willing to take in some of the 250-or-so prisoners who remain? You know, probably some of them are actually terroristic nasties, but nasties whom US authorities will nonetheless have problems ever prosecuting because of how some of the evidence against them was gained (i.e. by torture). So while it’s conceivable that about the only thing that can eventually be done is to set them free, quite often their native countries don’t really want to have them back.

Well . . . not so fast. The good Foreign Minister will first need to consult with his colleague, the Justice Minister: “I want to take a look with Hirsch Balin [that's the Dutch Justice Minister] how they can get a trial in accord with our norms and values.”

                          

Chisinau? You might recall that as the capital of the Republic of Moldova. It may not share any border with Russia, but in fact it is one country that has more to worry about in the face of the new Russian assertiveness than most, as André Tibold of the Nederlands Dagblad reminds us today (Moldova is also worried about provocations).

That is mainly because the situation there and the situation in Georgia are so similar. It’s almost eerie:

• Former territory of the Soviet Union, now aspiring to membership in European institutions? Check. (Moldova has made it clear that it wants to join both NATO and the EU; according to Tibold, in Romania it even has an advocate to push for its membership within both of these.)
• Break-away region within that state supported by Moscow? Check. (In Moldova it’s Transnistria, a strip of land along the Dniester River on Moldova’s eastern edge, that seems to go big-time for things like the hammer-and-sickle and statues of Lenin.)
• Russian “peacekeeping” troops stationed within said break-away region? Check. (There are formally 1,200 of these “peacekeepers,” but in addition the 14th Russian Army is stationed in Transnistria as a solid expression of Russian support. Those troops were supposed to withdraw under terms of the Istanbul Accord that Russia signed with the OSCE in 1999, but . . .)
• Russian troops staying on in an area from which they had previously signed an agreement to depart? Check. (That 14th Russian Army is still solidly in Transnistria to this day.)

Yes, you can be sure that events of earlier this month in Georgia and South Ossetia were followed very closely by officials both in Chisinau and in Tiraspol (Transnistria’s capital) – to the point that both Russia and Transnistria were also very keen to see what the official reaction to those events would be from the Moldovan government, as that could be interpreted as its statement on their own political impasse. At first the Moldovan authorities simply echoed the official EU position, calling for a cease-fire and withdrawal of Russian troops. That was not good enough for Transnistria, since it did not include a condemnation of Georgia’s initial attack on South Ossetia, so Transnistrian President Igor Smirnov broke off all official contacts with Moldova, until later the Moldovan government gave in and also condemned the Georgians.

But the Moldovans remain under considerable pressure. In the past Russia has blocked importation of any of that country’s agricultural goods – which hurts, because that is basically all that it sells to the outside world – to make its displeasure known over the Moldovans’ aspirations towards the EU and (particularly) toward NATO, only to relent and lift them. Last May, Moscow proposed a deal: it would intervene to finally solve the Moldova-Transnistria dispute, and at the same time withdraw 1,500 of its troops, if Moldova would basically give up its Western aspirations – i.e. forget about the EU and NATO, and also withdraw from the GUAM Organization for Democracy and Economic Development, a regional organization meant as a counter-weight to Russia made up of GUAM: Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova.

As of yet, there’s been no decision from Moldovans about how to respond. But the newly-threatening Russian face after Georgia probably doesn’t make that any easier for them.

UPDATE: Ah, mainstream attention (of a sort) now for Moldova’s travails! Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog now has an entry mentioning how the Russian pressure is now increasing on that country, and on Azerbaijan. But he concludes that this is just something that we – the West – will have to live with, since we need Russia’s cooperation in more important matters, like Iran.

                          

At least these papers definitely provide an alternative take on happenings in the public sphere, both national and international. For instance, the dilemma the Nederlands Dagblad finds itself in with its coverage of the “Pray at the Pump” movement in America (Supplicants see lower gas prices as answered prayers) is particularly delicious. At bottom, you realize that they must be sympathetic to folks like Rock Twyman, discussed in the article, who is so confident in the power of mass public prayer that he began “Pray at the Pump” last April to get Christians to assemble at gas stations all over the U.S. of A. to join hands and pray aloud for lower prices. And what do you know: gas prices have recently headed downwards. “There is no one else for us to turn to than God,” Twyman is glad to tell journalists. That flaming secularist, Jay Leno (not called such in this article: that’s my own ironic characterization) had the gall to pick out Twyman’s movement as the butt of jokes, but not only has the latter been proved right, he also has shown himself willing to include Leno in his prayers at his home-base Shell station in Northwest Washington, DC.

On the other hand: Perhaps the very idea of praying to lower prices is absurd on its face, regardless of whether subsequent developments seem to justify it or not. Indeed, whoever is the Nederlands Dagblad writer here (the attribution is only to the paper’s “church editor”), s/he is willing to raise some pointed questions. Perhaps some people pray the opposite way, i.e. for higher gas prices, for the sake of the environment: which way would God rule on this one? And if you want to pray, aren’t there rather more-deserving causes to pray for, like for the hungry, the war refugees, etc.?

Then sometimes these Dutch evangelical publications really amaze with the sensitivity of their antennae to obscure doings by their American counterparts. How about the medical journal Archives of Surgery, for example? Ordinarily this sort of journal publishes articles with sexy titles like Evaluating the Degree of Difficulty of Laparoscopic Colorectal Surgery, but the Reformatorisch Dagblad somehow recently picked up something in its pages rather out of the ordinary (Americans trust God more than the doctor). This has to do with the recently publication in Archives of Surgery of an article, Trauma Death, that reveals that 57.4% of people (and even 19.5% of medical professionals) “believe that divine intervention could save a person when physicians believe treatment is futile.” Again, it probably took an explictly Christian newspaper like this one to be looking for news like this in the first place, but it’s also true that it’s this sort of publication where you can usually detect between the lines something of an approving attitude towards attitudes and behaviors that many others (certainly most Europeans) would find rather bewildering.

UPDATE:Whoops, here’s another one – that is, a Christian-oriented national newspaper – but it’s Danish: Kristeligt Dagblad, or “Christian Daily.” Let’s see if I can remind myself to check whether it, too, goes off-line on the Sabbath. Anyway, I’ve got it covered for you.

                          

It’s not alone, though: the Reformatorisch Dagblad, or “Reformed Daily,” is similar, although that website does stay open on Sundays. People should not confuse the allegedly “anything goes” atmosphere of cosmopolitan cities like Amsterdam (see this weblog’s recent coverage of the famous yearly Gay Pride parade there, for example) with Dutch culture as a whole, which in fact features some enclaves which can easily hold their own in the Christian piety department with any of the American Amish communities.

The Nederlands Dagblad reports today, as the 2008 Olympic Games open in Beijing, that the Chinese church leader Zhang Mingxuan was recently arrested by the authorities in his hometown in the province of Henan, along with his wife and another associate, and brought to an office of the “security services” in that province’s capital, Zhengzhou. This follows Zhang’s being driven out of his Beijing by the authorities at the beginning of last month, and then out of the city itself two weeks ago.

The Stichting De Ondergrondse Kerk (a Dutch name, of course: “Foundation of the Underground Church”) has issued a call to make these opening days of the Olympic Games days of prayer on behalf of the persecuted Christians in China.

                          

The thought didn’t start with Snow, however, as Ruurd Ubels makes clear in coverage of the issue in the Netherlands’ Nederlands Dagblad. (That’s the openly “Christian” – meaning Reformed Protestant – Dutch newspaper.)

And it’s rather good to learn that it didn’t start there, since Snow is burdened with the label inherent to the Treasury position (and, indeed, most cabinet posts) in the George W. Bush administration: namely, “little more credible than your average salesman.” But how about the Los Angeles Times? That’s where this whole idea originated, writes Ubels, in an article last week, so that Snow’s on-camera endorsement might instead signify this thing starting to gather some momentum.

“Now what’s this all about?” you might ask. In fact, if you’re particularly on-the-ball (as Ubels is here – but then again, it’s more-or-less his job to be), you might add “After all, the 44-year-old singer known in real-life as Paul David Hewson has never had any economics or financial training to speak of!” And indeed, Ubels cites one perceptive on-line LA Times reader who, in comments left on the site, made the intriguing analogy that appointing Bono to head the World Bank would be equivalent to making Bill Clinton a concert saxofonist.

Nonetheless, Ubels has the Times gamely holding on to this rather bizarre idea. (I have to take his word on it, in Dutch, from the Nederlands Dagblad article I link to here; I can’t get the original Feb. 25 editorial, although anyone can buy it here.) After all, in the first place, from 1999 he has been very politically engaged in the issues of Third World debt and trade regimes. He is used to hob-nobbing with the great and the good international policy-makers in these areas. Finally, Bono would be able to rely on an excellent World Bank staff to brief him on the economic and financial angles, while he has bundles of invaluable charisma to exert in order to get things done.

But back to that Bill Clinton analogy: All this Bono stuff is amusing, all right, but in real-life the clever money would be on Bill Clinton himself as next to take up that World Bank top spot. Except that, Ubels reminds us, while theoretically the top management of the World Bank decides on who will be that institution’s president, in reality it’s the man in the Oval Office who has the final say. And, need I remind you, that current occupant is not only Republican but rabid on the subject of who is “with him” and who is “against him,” and also explicitly ran against all that Bill Clinton supposedly stood for back in 2000.

                          

That the Nederlands Dagblad is covering this subject at all is itself a hoot, since this is the religious newspaper that puts the phrase “Involved as a Christian” (Christelijk betrokken) in its masthead, and whose website shuts down entirely on the Sabbath. (I’m serious: next Sunday try to take your browser to the ND website; all you’ll get is a spare welcoming page politely reminding you that it is closed for the Christian day of rest.) But just as I have already learned that it’s always worthwhile to take a look at the ND’s daily list of articles (except on Sunday, of course) because at times they cover things with an interesting angle or even achieve a scoop, so I should also not be surprised that they can occasionally come up with a humorous take on a funny story.

And this is a funny story – as well as, as we’ll see, a rich source for numerous puns – but also apparently a legitimate one. After all, there is a website – Lip Balm Anonymous – devoted to this alleged problem of lip balm addiction. (I know you’ll go check it out; it’s all in English. Don’t miss the “LBA News” section down at the lower-right: “Lip Balm Anonymous was rated #327 out of 505 in the new book 505 Unbelievably Stupid Web Pages. LBA is considering taking legal action against the author and publisher.”)

43 ROUTES TO LIP BALM DEPENDENCY

That’s all very well, but ultimately ND reporter Lo van der Wal (and I don’t know whether that’s a man or a woman) adopts an attitude towards LBA that is scarcely more respectful than that 505 book. For example, Van der Wal brings up for discussion early on the LBA Self-Test for Lip Balm Addiction offered on that site. Forty-three questions?! (e.g. “8. Are you experiencing financial difficulties due to your lip balm use?”) And if you answer even one of them with “Yes,” you’re supposed to be at least a candidate for a “lip balm dependency problem”?

That can’t be right, Van der Wal concludes, and cites testimony available elsewhere on the Net that debunks the whole concept of lip balm addiction. For instance, “[a]ccording to Dr. Charles Zugerman, associate professor of clinical dermatology at the Northwestern University Medical School, people do not become addicted to lip care products or the ingredients in them. Rather, people may become habituated to the soothing feeling of having a lip care product on their lips. . . . There is no such thing as physical addiction to lip balm.” And there are plenty of further press-extracts from other medical experts, making the same point, from the same on-line source.

FROM OUR OWN DUTCH LIP-DOCTOR

The thing is, this “on-line source” is the website for Blistex, one of the leading world-wide lip balm manufacturers! Could all this “expert testimony” shooting down the idea of physical addiction be nothing more than lip service? (I regret to admit that that last bon mot does come from Van der Wal – aided by the fact that the term does translate directly into Dutch – and not from me.) Journalistic integrity – meaning a journalist’s obligation to embark upon true research when writing up a story, beyond just Mad Magazine – requires that the ND reporter get a truly independent opinion, from an expert s/he finds his/herself. This Van der Wal does find, in the shape of dermatologist Dr. C.J.W. van Ginkel, out of Deventer (a city in the mid-eastern Netherlands – and could you come up with a more Dutch-like name than the good doctor’s even if you tried?).

It turns out that Dr. van Ginkel is also rather sceptical about the idea of lip balm addiction. And he is quite qualified to judge these things, as an expert in contact-allergies (e.g. those provoked by the use of cosmetics), who tells Van der Wal that he has to put up at least once per week with lip from his patients complaining about dryness and/or chapping. (Too often it amounts to “cheek,” although that’s usually not the area being complained about; sometimes it’s even “jaw.”) Usually the need (and therefore the desire) for additional lip protection is simply a matter of physical factors such as particularly dry, sunny, or windy weather, or even excessive exposure to artificially-dry environments such as air-conditioned buildings. But excessive licking – a nervous tic like biting one’s nails – is also a contributing factor; as Van der Wal hears it from Dr. van Ginkel’s own lips, “Your saliva is quite aggressive,” with all sorts of nasty enzymes contained within it. The doctor even suggests an experiment to bear out the truth of what he’s saying (although we have to hope he intends it as simply a thought-experiment): “Just lick your underarm one hundred times. Then you’ll get an eczema spot there for sure.”

Finally, another psychological factor that can lead people to use lip balm is the odors that are built into them, most commonly vanilla, that people get used to smelling in that spot that, after all, is just below their nose. But in Dr. van Ginkel’s opinion such psychological triggers never come close to qualifying as an actual physical addiction. Nor, if for whatever reason one does become a devoted lip balm fan, does he give much credence to the theory that lip balm can inhibit lips’ own production of fatty substances to keep themselves naturally moist and smooth.

If the good doctor has anything to say about it, then, there will be no health warning-labels affixed to tubes of lip balm anytime soon. About the worst he can say about such products is that people usually preferred to be kissed without the additional presence of such substances rather than with. In short, Dr. van Ginkel’s would advise people looking for valid information to refer to that Blistex website rather than Lip Balm Anonymous – that is, if they’re seeking lip sync.