Interesting:

A commenter asked an astute question in response to my post on religion and dietary laws:

What are your thoughts on kashrut primarily as a means of group identity reinforcement, ritual, and control? In pre-literate times or in unstable social settings, wouldn’t dietary habits be a useful means of tracking who is and is not a member of one’s tribe? (Dietary laws also have the effect of conferring monopoly power to those preparing and selling the food.)

I think the function of these religious laws - and the Old Testament is stuffed full of such laws - goes well beyond mere identification. While it’s nice to know who is a member of the tribe, these dictates from above also help grease social interactions within the tribe. Via Razib, the Economist recently had an interesting article on the phenomenon:

To test whether religion might have emerged as a way of improving group co-operation while reducing the need to keep an eye out for free-riders, Dr Sosis drew on a catalogue of 19th-century American communes published in 1988 by Yaacov Oved of Tel Aviv University. Dr Sosis picked 200 of these for his analysis; 88 were religious and 112 were secular. Dr Oved’s data include the span of each commune’s existence and Dr Sosis found that communes whose ideology was secular were up to four times as likely as religious ones to dissolve in any given year.

Read the rest of this entry »

Good news:

Algae is the best plant out there for converting sunlight to energy. It’s 100x better at creating usable energy per acre than corn is. And tons of new and old companies are trying different strains of algae and different ways of growing them not to mention using them to clean the flue gas coming out of power plants.

Algae, it turns out, eat NOx emissions without trouble, and, of course, grow much faster in higher concentrations of CO₂. The only problems are sulfur dioxide, which can acidify the water (just like it does to rain) and kill the algae, and mercury, which can accumulate in the algae and make them dangerously toxic.

Welcome to the future, where single-celled plants eat our pollution and power our cars. Who’d a thunk…

This is amazing:

Eric Alterman and George Zornick document the evidence of the media’s declining coverage of the Iraq war. They note:

– A study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that in all of 2007, the topic of the Iraq war occupied an average of 15.5 percent of the “newshole” in the media; in the last quarter it fell to nine percent, and then to 3.9 percent in the first quarter of 2008.

– The broadcast networks’ nightly shows devoted more than 4,100 minutes to Iraq in 2003 and 3,000 in 2004, before going down to 2,000 a year, according to Andrew Tyndall, who monitors the broadcasts and posts.

– Only two newspapers noted the 4,000th combat death of a U.S. soldier in Iraq

Or maybe not. I’m sure Bush and the GOP are pleased that the War is not getting much attention from the media.

If you have a kid or kids or plan to, this article is worth bookmarking. Here are the first three items at the link:

1. Self-sufficiency. This one tip could simplify your life greatly, over time. However, it will make things more complicated in the short term. The idea is to teach your kids to do things for themselves as they get older and more capable. Teaching them to do something themselves instead of just doing it yourself takes time and can be a little frustrating at first, but it will pay off for years to come. My kids, for example, can make themselves breakfast, shower and dress themselves, brush their teeth, and generally get themselves ready in the morning with only minimal prompting from us. They can clean their rooms, wash dishes, sweep, mop, dust, wash the car. The older ones can cook basic dishes and babysit the younger ones. This type of self-sufficiency has saved my wife and me tons of time and trouble over the years.
2. One calendar. If you have more than one kid, you might have a lot of activities going on that you need to track, from school events such as Christmas performances and parent-teacher conferences to extracurricular activities such as soccer practice, dance classes, or Spring concerts. Organize your life with a simple calendar (I use Google Calendar) and enter all activities and appointments on this one calendar, from kids’ stuff to your own goings on. When they hand you papers from school, or soccer schedules, immediately enter everything onto the calendar. Then a quick glance at the calendar each day will help you plan your day.
3. Toy bins. It’s an inevitable fact of life that kids have lots of toys, and that they will be everywhere. You will drive yourself crazy if you try to manage them with dictator-like ruthlessness. Instead, let kids play, but have lots of bins where they can toss the toys inside when they’re done. Then cleaning up is a cinch — they just toss everything on the floor into the bins, and move on to making their next mess. You can have designated bins for certain toys (this one’s for Legos, this one’s for stuffed animals, this one’s for cars), and also have some general-purpose bins for things that don’t fit anywhere else. Don’t be too strict about them — the whole purpose is to make things simpler.

And I’m making this one, too:

Streamlined Cassoulet
Yield 4 to 6 servings Time 40 minutes

This recipe needs instant flavor as well as tenderness. Pork tenderloin, cut into chunks, meets both requirements. Sausage adds a little fat to the stew, which is traditional and necessary. Give it a five-minute browning to crisp the skin and deepen the flavor.

• 4 cups chopped tomatoes, with their juice (canned are fine)
• 1 tablespoon chopped garlic
• 4 cups white beans, nearly fully cooked (drained if canned)
• 1 cup stock, dry red wine, bean cooking liquid or water
• Salt to taste
• 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper, or to taste
• 1 pound Italian sausage, preferably in one piece
• 1 pound pork tenderloin, cut into 1-inch cubes
• 1 boned duck breast

1. Combine tomatoes and garlic in a large saucepan, bring to a boil and add beans. Bring to a boil again, stirring occasionally, then reduce heat so mixture bubbles regularly but not furiously. Cook about 20 minutes, adding stock or other liquid when mixture thickens. Add salt and cayenne when beans are tender and flavorful.

2. While beans are cooking, put sausage in a skillet, and turn heat to medium-high; brown on both sides, turning only once or twice. Add to pot with bean mixture, along with pork cubes. Raise heat a bit if necessary to keep a simmer going. Stir beans occasionally so pork cooks evenly.

3. Cut a 1/2-inch crosshatch in skin side of duck breast, right down to fat layer. Put breast, skin side down, in skillet that sausage cooked in, and turn heat to medium-high. Cook until nicely browned, pouring any rendered duck fat and juices into bean mixture. Turn duck, and brown meat side. Then crisp up skin side again for a minute or so, once more pouring any fat into beans. Total cooking time for breast will be 6 to 8 minutes. When it is done, add breast to beans.

4. To serve, carve sausage and duck breast into serving pieces, and place on plates. Top with beans and pork.

Variation
In step 4, combine the cut-up duck with the beans and pork in a shallow baking dish. Finish the dish by toasting some bread crumbs, seasoned with salt and pepper, in the fat remaining from browning the duck. Sprinkle these on top of the stew, then run under the broiler to brown just before serving.

Authentic cassoulet from southern France contains beans, braised mutton, sausage, confit of goose or duck and maybe a slab of bacon, all stewed together so the flavors meld. The idea of preparing it in 40 minutes or less is heresy, but I was determined to find a reasonable compromise when, a few years ago, I realized I would be unable to schedule the usual three-day production to serve to friends.

This sounds great to me:

Long ago, during her university year abroad in the Soviet Union, Jackie learned some kitchen survival skills that some time later served her well as a grad student living in a furnished room with minimal cooking facilities. Most weeks, she’d bake a couple of loaves of dense, flavorful, durable Russian-style bread and make an enormous pot of borscht based on cabbage, meaty bones and, of course, beets.

And for dessert? Something else she picked up in Leningrad, from her friend Irina: boiled cans of sweetened condensed milk. The word order is the recipe: “boiled cans” of milk. Remove the labels from the cans to pre-empt their coming off and disintegrating into an ugly mess. Place the unopened cans — yes, unopened — in a pot of boiling water, perhaps on top of a washcloth so that they don’t rattle. Cover the pot and simmer for two and a half or three hours, taking care to replenish the water as needed to keep the cans submerged: if it boils dry, the cans (I am told) can burst.

Why would you do this? Because the sugared milk somehow metamorphoses into a thick, glossy, very sweet substance of a rich coffee-and-cream color, a substance very much like a do-it-yourself version of dulce de leche. Once it has cooled, you can just eat it (in small quantities) with a spoon, which was Jackie’s preferred method. It smears nicely on plain cookies and is a dandy sundae ingredient. Also, as we’ve recently discovered, it is the key to making banoffee pie, which apparently was invented in 1972 at an English restaurant called The Hungry Monk.

It goes something like this: Line a fully baked pie crust with sliced, very ripe bananas and top them with a can or a bit more of this condensed milk stuff, then with whipped cream lightly flavored with instant coffee. Serve cold. If this sounds good to you, you’ll love it, as we do. If you think it sounds awful, give it a try anyway, though I make no promises.

Just received this, and thought it had some good points:

Have you recently found yourself asking: where are the water fountains? Spring is here, but too many of our water fountains are broken or disappearing. Shouldn’t you be able to spend a nice sunny day in the park and have easy access to a working water fountain? And shouldn’t kids be able to drink water during their school day – and not bottled water from a vending machine?

May 5-9 is National Drinking Water Week. Our cities play a key role in delivering water – and keeping our water fountains running - to our communities. And mayors can make all the difference. For example, Boston Mayor Tom Menino and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak already are committing hundreds of millions of dollars to improve their city’s water systems. See what action communities across the country are taking to Think Outside the Bottle.

To commemorate National Drinking Water Week, let your local community and school board officials know that you and your community needs your water fountains!

Download a copy of the Think Outside the Bottle Pledge for elected officials and the Think Outside the Bottle Pledge for institutions.

Take the Pledge to your next town hall or school board meeting and get your community Thinking Outside the Bottle. Click here and you can download our guide to get tips on getting your city to take action!

James Fallows:

Mark Danner’s new article assessing the Bush-era “War on Terror” is very much worth reading. (A sample below.) It is one of a rapidly-increasing number of good essays, speeches, and policy proposals looking at how the U.S. went wrong after 9/11 — and not just in Iraq — and how the next administration can start correcting the long string of previous mistakes.

This discussion needs to become more widespread, intense, and practical. John McCain is a vastly more admirable person than George W. Bush, but his strategy for Iraq and national security in general is an extension of Bush-Cheney. If and when the Democratic party moves past its current fratricide, it needs to make a big push here, not just for election purposes but so it can do something in 2009 if given the chance.

As the discussion continues, I immodestly offer this link to “Declaring Victory,” the Atlantic story I wrote a year and a half ago on ways out of the War on Terror trap. As we near the end of the intellectual paralysis and policy rigidity of the Bush-Cheney years, some of the ideas people described to me back then seem, at least to me, all the more relevant.
From Mark Danner’s article:

Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin Drum:

The Guardian reports that U.S. diplomat John Negroponte got a chilly reception in Pakistan earlier this week:

On Tuesday, senior coalition partner Nawaz Sharif gave the visiting Americans a public scolding for using Pakistan as a “killing field” and relying too much on [President Pervez] Musharraf.

….The body language between Negroponte and Sharif during their meeting on Tuesday spoke volumes: the Pakistani greeted the American with a starched handshake, and sat at a distance .

In blunt remarks afterwards, Sharif said he told Negroponte that Pakistan was no longer a one-man show. “Since 9/11, all decisions were taken by one man,” he said. “Now we have a sovereign parliament and everything will be debated in the parliament.”

The Washington Post reports on our response:

The United States has escalated its unilateral strikes against al-Qaeda members and fighters operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas, partly because of anxieties that Pakistan’s new leaders will insist on scaling back military operations in that country, according to U.S. officials.

….Thomas H. Johnson, a research professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., said: “People inside the Beltway are aware that Musharraf’s days are numbered, and so they recognize they may only have a few months to do this. Musharraf has . . . very few friends in the world — he probably has more inside the Beltway than in his own country.”

That’s a great way of improving our relationship with the new leadership in Pakistan, isn’t it? We know they want us to cut back on bombing their territory, so we go ahead and increase our bombing of their territory instead in order to get in a few last licks. What a terrific way to demonstrate exactly what we think of those pesky elections they just held, eh?

Very interesting article, pointed out by The Eldest:

A visit to Baltimore Polytechnic Institute creates a strong impression: This is a place for doers.

Teachers and students at Poly, as it is known here, seem to gather up knowledge and information because they have a use for it. A student is doing background research for her two-year project with local scientists on cannibalism among blue crabs. A group of teenagers searches the Web for a design concept to improve a robot they are entering in a contest. And an aeronautics class discusses the afternoon’s weather forecast—as measured from the roof of the school—as a factor in flying several radio-controlled model helicopters.

That focus on applied information is a clue to the bigger purpose at this public school on the northern end of the Baltimore school district: To be a caldron for the blending disciplines known as STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

STEM “is blending practice with theory,” says Barney J. Wilson, the energetic leader of the school. “Folks talk about STEM as if it were in a box, but it’s a way of thinking and living. To really understand it, you have to live it.”

For the past two decades, the high school—which for more than a century was organized around manual arts and, later, vocational technology—has remolded itself around STEM.

Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s get rid of all three smallest denomination coins. Here’s why:

Several years ago, Walter Luhrman, a metallurgist in southern Ohio, discovered a copper deposit of tantalizing richness. North America’s largest copper mine—a vast open-pit complex in Arizona—usually has to process a ton of ore in order to produce ten pounds of pure copper; Luhrman’s mine, by contrast, yielded the same ten pounds from just thirty or forty pounds of ore. Luhrman operated profitably until mid-December, 2006, when the federal government shut him down.

The copper deposit that Luhrman worked wasn’t in the ground; it was in the storage vaults of Federal Reserve banks, and, indirectly, in the piggy banks, coffee cans, automobile ashtrays, and living-room upholstery of ordinary Americans. A penny minted before 1982 is ninety-five per cent copper—which, at recent prices, is approximately two and a half cents’ worth. Luhrman, who had previously owned a company that refined gold and silver, devised a method of rapidly separating pre-1982 pennies from more recent ones, which are ninety-seven and a half per cent zinc, a less valuable commodity. His new company, Jackson Metals, bought truckloads of pennies from the Federal Reserve, turned the copper ones into ingots, and returned the zinc ones to circulation in cities where pennies were scarce. “Doing that prevented the U.S. Mint from having to make more pennies,” Luhrman told me recently. “Isn’t that neat?” The Mint didn’t think so; it issued a rule prohibiting the melting or exportation of one-cent and five-cent coins. (Nickels, despite their silvery appearance, are seventy-five per cent copper.) Luhrman laid off most of his employees and implemented his corporate Plan B: buying half-dollars from banks and melting the silver ones (denominations greater than five cents aren’t covered by the Mint’s rule); mining Canadian five-cent coins (which were a hundred per cent nickel most years from 1946 to 1981); and lobbying Congress.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is disgusting:

UPDATE: Here’s a photo of  Efraim E. Diveroli, the 22-year-old company president:

Since 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan sharply intensified, the Afghan government has been dependent on American logistics and military support in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur.

With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces.

Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.

In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking.

Moreover, tens of millions of the rifle and machine-gun cartridges were manufactured in China, making their procurement a possible violation of American law. The company’s president, Efraim E. Diveroli, was also secretly recorded in a conversation that suggested corruption in his company’s purchase of more than 100 million aging rounds in Albania, according to audio files of the conversation.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve talked about the efforts to investigate and prosecute Jerry Lewis (R-CA), which keep running into odd problems. For example, the lead government prosecutor was moved off the job. And now:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) on Wednesday called on Attorney General Michael Mukasey to explain the decision to eliminate the public corruption unit in Los Angeles that has been investigating Rep. Jerry Lewis’s (R-Calif.) ties to a lobbying firm.

 

The U.S. Attorney for the central district of California in Los Angeles reassigned the 17 lawyers in the public corruption unit and disbanded it earlier this month. The decision has stirred ill will and low morale within the office and raised questions about whether pending and future public corruption cases will be rigorously pursued, according to press accounts.

Attorneys in the Los Angeles office have spent years reviewing an FBI investigation into Lewis’s connection to a lobbying firm and the earmarks its clients received. Lewis has doled out more than a million dollars in attorney fees related to the probe.

Attorneys in the special corruption unit were assigned to other sections of the office and were told that their cases against public officials would be mixed in with other cases. Because cases against public officials require extensive work and result in fewer prosecutions, Feinstein is concerned they would be shunted aside for those that result in more convictions.

In a letter sent to Mukasey Wednesday Feinstein demanded a detailed explanation of why the decision was made, saying it “raises serious questions about the future of public corruption cases and whether they will be vigorously pursued in the central district of California especially given all of the turnover and disruption that has occurred.”

The DoJ under Bush has been directed to focus on prosecuting and investigating Democrats only. That’s reflected in the statistics, BTW.

EthanHam.com has a good tip today:

The Brooklyn Museum has a interesting online exhibit of Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. It features several ways to sort and browse through the images and the ability to magnify the images and really see the prints’ details. Very nicely done!

I’m looking for a really good recipe for baked beans. I guess I should add that I want to start with dry beans, making them from scratch. (Many of the recipes I found in a Google search started this way:

Baked Beans

Ingredients:
2 cans baked beans
1….

and so on. To start with the first ingredient being the very thing you want to make seems extremely odd to me—like a recipe for Beef Strogonov whose first ingredient is Beef Strogonov.

At any rate, if you have a favorite recipe (that doesn’t call for baked beans as an ingredient) or have a link to same, let me know. Below are five that I found—tell me which sounds best to you. (Rather than use a crockpot, I’ll put them in a covered pot in a 200º oven.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Businesses—and now, it seems, academia—go to great lengths to keep consumers in the dark: an informed consumer is not wanted. The latest example:

The lead author of the largest lung cancer screening study ever performed has come under fire for accepting cigarette company funding for the study. Dr. Claudia Henschke, chief of the Chest Imaging Division at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, stunned the lung cancer research community by concluding that 80 percent of lung cancer deaths could be prevented by the widespread use of computerized tomography (CT) scans. Small print at the end of the New England Journal of Medicine article describing the study results noted only that the study had been partly financed by the Foundation for Lung Cancer: Early Detection, Prevention and Treatment. However, the foundation was underwritten almost entirely by the Vector Group, the parent company of the Liggett Group, Inc., manufacturer of Eve, Liggett Select, Grand Prix, Quest and Pyramid brand cigarettes. Researchers and universities are increasingly creating foundations and institutes as a way to shield information about their funders from the public, publishers and the press, reports the New York Times.

Source: New York Times, March 26, 2008

From Healthbolt:

In a recent Men’s Health snippet, the sheer repulsiveness of toilet splatter (for lack of a better term) is spelled right out for us. Right down to the nitty gritty details of all that a flush of the toilet has in store for us. …

* With each flush, fecal pathogens can splash out of the bowl and hang tight on nearby surfaces — including you!

* The splash radius of a toilet is usually 3 to 4 feet (so you may want to rethink where you keep your toothbrush, no?)

* The splash radius of a high-powered public restroom toilet is as far as 20 feet and can pack as many as 1 million infectious organisms in its spray.

* It takes the ingestion of as few as 10 particles of various viruses or bacteria to cause such pleasurable symptoms as fever, diarrhea and vomiting. Yum.

* Such spray-friendly viruses and bacteria include:

• Hepatitis A
• Norovirus
• Shigella
• Salmonella
• E. Coli

So, wow. Interesting stuff, hey? Now do you see why I’m such a drone when it comes to hand-washing (and opening the door of a restroom with a paper towel upon your exit)? Also, you may want to make it common practice to close your toilet seat lid at home before you flush and move items such as brushes, contact cases, medications and the like as far away from the pot as you can. The toilet can be just as nasty as it is necessary, so protect yourself from its blast, and all will be right in the world.