Later On

Rather than just taking the word of the meatpackers, USDA may start doing its job. From Obama Foodorama:

Newly appointed deputy secretary for food safety at USDA Jerold Mande, who snuck into his position without much fanfare, has just announced that Fed inspectors will be searching for E coli in bench trim, a kind of whole beef cut that has routinely been left out of inspections. This seems to be in direct response to the massive Class 1 (you could die) recall of products from JBS Swift meat company. The 421,000 pounds of beef, produced in a single day, were found to be contaminated with E coli 0157:H7, which generally shows up in ground beef, rather than in beef cuts; somehow Swift managed to get contamination into their primal cuts. The voluntary recall, unfortunately, was plagued with a disturbing slowness on the part of the Food Safety and Inspection Service to publicize the names of retail outlets that had received contamo meat.

*Audio of the announcement, featuring Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack, Jerold Mande, and new FSWG honcho Michael Taylor is here. Taylor’s comments about food safety and farms is…curious.

From The Ethicurean:

Tree crops like apples, cherries, pears, walnuts and almonds rely on a chilly winter to set the stage for a productive spring and summer. But in a study released today, UC Davis scientists report that climate change is chipping away at the number of winter chill days available to tree crops in California’s Central Valley, jeopardizing the future of orchards that feed consumers around the country.

In 1950, says the report, half of the Central Valley was suitable for growing tree crops. Today, only 4% of the valley gets enough chilly days in winter to produce well in the summer and fall. By the end of this century, they predict that virtually none of the valley’s land area will be tree-fruit friendly.

The technological optimists are out in force on this one, of course, hoping that new breeds of tree crops can be developed to require fewer cold days. Others suggest increasing the use of, um, “rest-breaking chemicals” that can compensate for a lack of cold days. (Don’t ask us how.) But UC Davis researchers aren’t so hopeful. “The main walnut breeder at UC Davis is retiring,” says one of the study’s authors. “After that, funding will be short.”

Take-home message? “Climate change is not just about sea-level rise and polar bears,” says the lead author of the study. “It is about our food security. Climate change may make conditions less favorable to grow the crops we need to feed ourselves.” (LA Times)

Interesting selection. I certainly agree about the Seagram’s Extra Dry. But check out all of them.

Sassy Radish has a good post with several photos and good descriptions for this recipe:

Lemony Potato Salad
Adapted from Gourmet, July 2009

3 pounds small boiling potatoes
1 cup chopped celery (about 4 ribs)
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1 Tbsp horseradish
1/4 cup finely chopped chives
1 tsp grated lemon zest
2 Tbsp chopped dill
2 Tbsp fresh lemon juice
1 tsp sugar

Cover potatoes with water in a large pot and season well with salt. Bring to a boil, then simmer until tender, 12 to 20 minutes.

While potatoes cook, stir together celery, mayonnaise, horseradish, chives, lemon zest and juice, dill, sugar, 1 teaspoon salt, and 3/4 teaspoon pepper in a large bowl.

Drain potatoes and cool completely, then halve or quarter. Add to dressing and toss to coat.

The GOP is reduced to simply hoping Obama fails, and working toward that goal. Nothing constructive, no positive steps, just blind opposition, tinged with racism. The Center for American Progress:

Days before President Obama took office, hate radio talker Rush Limbaugh, the de-facto leader of the Republican Party, summed up his desired outcome for the Obama presidency in four words: “I hope Obama fails.” Just days after he uttered that statement, Limbaugh told his audience, “There’s one thing we gotta stop is health care. I’m serious, now. If they get that, then that’s the tipping point.” Nearly eight month’s later, the right wing’s approach to health care reform remains guided by Limbaugh’s vision — they simply hope it fails. And so the conservative movement is increasingly banking on a political strategy of opposing health care in the hopes that it will help resurrect the political fortunes of the struggling Republican Party. During a recent appearance on right-wing radio show, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) bluntly stated that defeating Obama’s health care agenda is “going to be a huge gain for those of us who want to turn this thing over in the 2010 election.” In a separate radio appearance, Inhofe — speaking for the right wing — explained, “We are plotting the demise on a week by week basis of where Bill Clinton was in 1993 and where Obama is today and his demise ratio is greater than Clinton’s was in 1993.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Iowa is, in many ways, a heads-up state, and Julie Knipe Brown has a story in the Miami Herald on Iowa’s latest progressive step:

A flock of sex offenders camping out in alleys, sleeping under bridges and hiding in places where police can’t keep track of them.

A patchwork of inconsistent city, township and county laws carving out zones where sex offenders are not welcome.

And squeamish politicians petrified, afraid that if they try to craft a fix, their next attack ad will be a snapshot of them with their arms around a sexual predator.

Sound familiar?

It may all seem like Miami-Dade’s quandary over what to do with the sex offenders living under the Julia Tuttle Causeway — but it’s not.

Iowa leaders faced nearly the same issues, but in April they settled things by doing something Florida hasn’t found the political will to do: change its sexual-predator law.

This past spring, Iowa’s state legislature — with almost no dissent — passed a new sex-offender law that superseded local ordinances and eased residency requirements for minor sex offenders.

The law ended the ban against some sex offenders living within 2,000 feet of a school or day-care center and created other zones where they are prohibited from lingering,visiting or working.

The new statute is less confusing, and while it’s not perfect, it has been lauded by law enforcement, victims’ rights advocates, the ACLU, prosecutors and legislators as a positive step.

Iowa offers a road map for Florida to break its political stalemate over how to deal with convicted sex offenders who have left prison.

The story in Iowa began in 2005 when the state legislature passed into law a strict measure prohibiting all sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or day-care center. But it became problematic almost from the start…

Continue reading.

Medical malpractice lawsuits have been found to be caused by medical malpractice, not by litigious patients. And in some situations, patients cannot sue even for egregious malpractice. Darren Barbee describes one such situation in the Star Telegram:

An Arlington airman whose legs were amputated after a gallbladder surgery went terribly wrong lacks the same basic legal right to sue his surgeon that state and federal prisoners enjoy, a New York congressman says.

But a bill in Congress could change that.

Airman 1st Class Colton Read, 20, was in serious condition at the University of California Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, where he was transferred after surgery that accidentally cut off blood flow to his legs. During the procedure at Travis Air Force Base, Calif., a vital artery, the aorta, was nicked or punctured as a device was being threaded into his belly, leading to complications, his family said Tuesday.

Under a 1950 Supreme Court decision known as the Feres Doctrine, Read or his family cannot collect damages from his military doctors for negligence or malpractice. As a result of the decision, "people who are either enlisted or drafted into the military become secondary, even tertiary citizens of the United States," said Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y.

Hinchey introduced legislation this year that he said would "enable members of the armed services and or their families to hold military medical activities accountable for medical care that may have been negligent."

He added that it would not allow soldiers to sue for combat-related injuries.

Without legal action hanging over military doctors’ heads, it’s more likely they won’t perform adequately, according to Hinchey.

"They can’t be held accountable for that absence of attention or . . . outright negligence," he said…

Continue reading.

Good column in Salon by Conason. It begins:

Nobody could be better positioned than the Democrats who call themselves "Blue Dogs" to sabotage healthcare reform, the primary objective of their president and the signature issue of their party for more than 60 years. Thanks to fawning publicity in the mainstream media that persistently describes them as fiscally conservative and ideologically moderate, the Blue Dogs enjoy an almost unassailable position in the middle of Washington’s stunted political spectrum.

Certainly the Blue Dogs are astute players of the game, their power enhanced by their willingness to echo Republican rhetoric while enjoying the perks and prerogatives of Democratic power. But this is a cynical group indeed, whose reputation for fiscal probity is grossly inflated — and whose loyalty to corporate interests, over and above the priorities of their party and the welfare of their constituents, is a darkening stain.

What supposedly troubles the Blue Dogs these days is the estimated cost of healthcare reform. By their calculations, a trillion dollars over 10 years represents an unsustainable expenditure, even if the program succeeds in providing universal quality coverage. The chairman of the Blue Dog healthcare task force, Rep. Mike Ross, D-Ark., has repeatedly threatened to kill any reform bill that increases the deficit. "We have to take steps to hold healthcare costs to the rate of inflation, or we will never balance our federal budget again, and health insurance costs will continue to become less and less affordable for the American people," he said last week.

Read the rest of this entry »

Not good. Janet Raloff in Science News:

Here’s a dirty little secret about polluted urban air: It can shave almost 5 points off of a young child’s IQ, a new report suggests.

That’s no small loss, says Kimberly Gray, whose federal agency cofinanced the study, to appear in the August Pediatrics.

Normally, baseline environmental exposures to a pollutant yield at most a subtle change — one that is hard to detect and with impacts that are hard to gauge, says Gray, of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, N.C. But the new study shows that children heavily exposed in the womb to common combustion pollutants known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons had, by kindergarten age, an IQ some 4.5 points lower than that of kids with minimal fetal exposures.

“An IQ change of 4 points is not a subtle effect,” Gray says. It’s in the range of what might be triggered by exposures to high levels of lead or by fetal alcohol syndrome, she explains.

Five years ago, molecular epidemiologist Frederica Perera of Columbia University and her colleagues reported that a fetus appears especially vulnerable to the carcinogen benzo(a)pyrene and related PAHs. These hydrocarbons are emitted by everything from cars and trucks to industrial boilers, coal-fired power plants — even cigarettes.

Animal studies suggested that …

Continue reading.

Not good. Janet Raloff in Science News:

Electromagnetic pulse is hardly a household term. But perhaps it should be. Every computer we buy, every system we turn over to computer control, every device that relies on electronic components — all cars, TVs and phones, for instance — makes us more vulnerable to such a high-energy rain of electrons.

EMP is a powerful and potentially devastating form of electromagnetic "fallout." It’s usually associated with nuclear weapons, although it can be triggered by any major explosive bursts. Unlike radioactive fallout, this rain won’t directly harm living things. It will just catastrophically fry all electronics and modern electrical systems by inducing staggeringly large and rapid current or voltage surges.

It makes a great equalizer for small nations looking to stand up to military Goliaths, argues Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (Rep.-Md.), a former research scientist and engineer who has worked in the past on projects for NASA and the military. All one needs to wreak some serious EMP damage, he charges, is a sea-worthy steamer, $100,000 to buy a scud-missile launcher, and a crude nuclear weapon. Then fling the device high into the air and detonate its warhead.

Such a system might not paralyze the entire United States, he concedes. ”But you could shut down all of New England. And if you missed by 100 miles, it’s as good as a bulls eye.”

Bartlett brought up questions about the power industry’s vulnerability to EMPs this morning at a House Science hearing convened to look at what’s needed to roll out a nationwide “smart grid.” Emerging sensor-driven systems would allow the U.S. power-distribution system to converse back and forth with any devices we plug into it…

Continue reading.

And its own horses: both went extinct in pre-history. The story by Susan Millius in Science News:

North America did too have a native honeybee.

A roughly 14-million-year-old fossil unearthed in Nevada preserves what’s clearly a member of the honeybee, or Apis, genus, says Michael Engel of the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

The Americas have plenty of other kinds of bees, but all previously known honeybees come from Asia and Europe. Even the Apis mellifera honeybee that has pollinated crops and made honey across the Americas for several centuries arrived with European colonists some 400 years ago.

“This rewrites the history of honeybee evolution,” Engel says, turning over the long-held view of Europe and Asia as the native land of all honeybees.

The newly discovered bee, found squashed and preserved in shale, no longer exists as a living species, Engel says. To a specialist’s eye, it looks closest to another extinct honeybee, A. armbrusteri, known from Germany…

Continue reading.

The Mama Bear soap puck is smaller in diameter than the interior of the jar so can trap the water that is exuded from the boar brush as you work up the lather, and I got a fine lather indeed. Plenty for three passes. The Omega Pro 48 (model 10048) is a fine brush—not the same as badger, but the different experience is just as good in its own way. And the price is excellent.

Lots of good lather, and the Shark blade, aging, still did a good job—its last, since I disposed of it in the blade safe following the shave. Arlington aftershave on a whim, and a good whim, too.

The life form most vulnerable to climate change would be the form that evolved precisely for its current climate AND it cannot move: plants.

Die-offs are already occurring. For example, great swathes of Canadian forest are turning brown and dead due to a beetle whose range has been extended, thanks to global warming.

And, if I recall correctly, all the free oxygen in the atmosphere is maintained solely by plants. That oxygen is constantly being consumed and converted to CO2 by us oxygen-breathers (not to mention those who burn fossil fuels), and the CO2 just sticks around—except that there are plants that consume it and produce oxygen.

But those plants: aren’t they in danger from  climate change?

I wonder how many have to be lost before we start losing the pace on CO2 build-up and oxygen consumption? How many plants will have to go before the level of oxygen in the atmosphere starts to drop?

And, of course, we’ve seen that those sorts of major changes tend to trigger positive feedback cycles that accelerate the change once a tipping point is reached.

So, just as in the article on the origins of animal life, we might be facing a total change in global atmosphere leading to a completely new environment—only this time to one hostile to oxygen-breathers.

Just a thought. Not totally comfortable, but a thought nonetheless.

Perhaps one of you can in the comments reassure me that I’m fleeing the wrong hound.

What if your staple food crop was becoming poisonous due to global warming? And what if it wasn’t you, but 500,000,000 others? How would you feel about global warming then? And about the people that caused it to happen?

Answers here.

New discoveries now paint the picture of the very beginnings of animal life—and why those beginnings were so late and so hard to find. One reason for the lateness is the incredibly hostile environment faced by the ur-animals.

This is really a fascinating article. You’ll want to read the whole thing. Amazing. It begins:

WHEN Darwin unveiled his theory of evolution, the earliest known fossils lay in rocks belonging to what Darwin called the Silurian age. Older rocks seemed devoid of fossils. The apparently sudden appearance of sophisticated animals such as trilobites did not fit in with Darwin’s idea of gradual evolution.

"If my theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Silurian stratum was deposited… the world swarmed with living creatures. To the question why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer," Darwin wrote in the first edition of On the Origin of Species. His conundrum is known as Darwin’s dilemma.

Of course, we have since discovered innumerable fossils from far earlier periods. Rocks as old as 3.8 billion years contain signs of life, and the first recognisable bacteria appear in rocks 3.5 billion years old. Multicellular plants in the form of red and green algae appear around a billion years ago, followed by the first multicellular animals about 575 million years ago, during the Ediacaran (see "The rise of animals").

Even so, many perplexing questions remain. Why did animals evolve so late in the day? And why did the ancestors of modern animals apparently evolve in a geological blink of an eye during the early Cambrian between about 542 and 520 million years ago? A series of recent discoveries could help explain these long-standing mysteries. These findings suggest that the first animals …

Continue reading.

I should get busy on things like this:

If you’re smart about your online life, you’ve created strong and varied passwords for all your accounts. You change those passwords often. And you never write them down or share them with anyone.

That’s all well and good while you’re alive. But your admirable devotion to protecting sensitive personal data can wreak havoc for your heirs after you die.

With an increasing portion of our personal lives stored online in password-restricted accounts — including bank accounts, automatic bill-pay arrangements, personal messages and even items with small monetary but major sentimental value, such as photos — piecing together an estate after a death can cause major headaches.

For example, if you have an online savings account separate from your regular bank account and the statement notifications are only emailed, not mailed, that account may get overlooked when your finances are disbursed to beneficiaries.

"We spend hours or days trying to track down the information," says Hyman Darling, an attorney with Bacon Wilson in Springfield, Mass., and chairman of that firm’s estate-planning department. "Very often things don’t come in the mail and we wouldn’t know about [the account] for some time." …

Continue reading for specific suggestions.

This is cool, and might be useful to students as well as teachers:

Has the world’s population distribution changed much over time? Does AIDS have a significant impact on population growth? When could world population stop growing? These popular lesson plans have been updated in July 2009.

Find out the answers to these questions and more.

The sections listed below explore eight elements of population dynamics. Charts and graphs supplement each topic with one full-sized chart (in PDF) suitable for class distribution or transparencies. Along with each topic are a frequently asked question and glossary terms. Teacher’s guides with discussion questions and web resources are also included in each section. For further investigation see also the most recent World Population Data Sheet.

Grade level: middle to high school
Time required: one week
Subjects: social studies, geography, and world history

I wonder whether students are bored enough during the summer to actually work on their own at something like this.

Caitlin Ginley at the Center for Public Integrity:

Two southern states — Louisiana and Mississippi — made the biggest strides in the Center for Public Integrity’s latest financial disclosure rankings for state legislators, but 20 out of the 50 states still received a failing grade and three of those states have no disclosure requirements at all.

Fourteen states in all have improved their disclosure laws since the Center’s last survey in 2006. In addition to Louisiana and Mississippi, Oregon, and Connecticut moved up in the rankings, while Massachusetts suffered the biggest drop.

Among the states that received failing grades are Illinois, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Indiana, Iowa, and Minnesota. The number of F’s represents an improvement, though minor, over the 24 states that failed in both 2006 and 1999. Idaho, Michigan, and Vermont continue to tie for last place, as no personal financial disclosure laws exist, or have ever existed, in those states.

“Citizens have a right to expect a certain amount of basic and personal information about their elected officials,” said Mary Boyle, vice president for communications for Common Cause. Disclosure laws allow the public “to make a judgment about whether there are conflicts of interest,” Boyle said. When states have weak or nonexistent disclosure laws, she added, “the public knows less about an elected official.”

The Center has been reporting on disclosure requirements in state legislatures since 1999, and bases its rankings on …

Continue reading. And click the link to check out their interactive map.

Glenn Greenwald:

An important new report (.pdf) was released today by Human Rights First regarding the overwhelming success of the U.S. Government in obtaining convictions in federal court against accused Terrorists.  The Report squarely contradicts the central claim of the Obama administration as to why preventive detention is needed:  namely, that certain Terrorist suspects who are "too dangerous to release" — whether those already at Guantanamo or those we might detain in the future — cannot be tried in federal courts.  This new data-intensive analysis — written by two independent former federal prosecutors and current partners with Akin, Gump:  Richard B. Zabel and James J. Benjamin, Jr. — documents that "federal courts are continuing to build on their proven track records of serving as an effective and fair tool for incapacitating terrorists." 

The core conclusion of this report is this:

In a call today to discuss the newly released Report, Benjamin said that the primary purpose of the report was to ascertain "the capacity of the federal courts to handle terrorism cases."  He concluded: "The 2009 federal courts have proven they are up to the task of handling terrorism cases.  The data and other observations confirm that prosecutions of terrorism defendants generally leads to just, reliable results and does not cause serious security breaches."

Specifically, the Report studied 119 cases of Terrorism filed in federal courts since 2001, covering 289 defendants.  Of those, …

Continue reading.

Interesting article by Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy:

One of the supposed virtues of democracy is the idea that free speech fosters a “marketplace for ideas.”  In theory, free and open discussion of vital public issues is supposed to winnow out ill-conceived notions and produce more sensible policy outcomes.  This benefit will be compromised when certain topics become taboo, however, or when specific institutions or dogmas become so well-entrenched in the political mainstream that anyone who questions them is easily marginalized.  When that happens, skeptics who would like to rise within the establishment will be deterred from raising their voices, and public debate will become truncated.  What John Kenneth Galbraith dubbed the “conventional wisdom” will tend to go unchallenged, and mistakes may get repeated instead of corrected.

What are some “taboo” subjects in contemporary foreign policy discourse?  To say that a particular topic is “taboo” doesn’t mean that nobody ever raises the issue or challenges the reigning orthodoxy; it just means that doing so is understood to be politically risky, especially for anyone who wants an influential place in the foreign affairs establishment.  So what are the topics or policy positions that a smart young foreign policy analyst should stay away from, especially if she is worried about getting elected, surviving a confirmation hearing, or landing a big job inside-the-Beltway? 

One might call them the “Ten Commandments for Ambitious Foreign Policy Wonks”

#1. Thou Shalt Not Question U.S. Membership in NATO.  For decades now, questioning the U.S. commitment to NATO immediately made one suspect in the U.S. foreign policy establishment.  This was certainly true during the Cold War, and it remains mostly true today.  It’s ok to criticize specific NATO policies or can to chide our European allies for free-riding, and there are a handful of people who have openly questioned whether NATO could or should continue now that USSR is gone.  But it’s still a sacred cow in the foreign affairs establishment, and you aren’t likely to advance your career by being an outspoken advocate of an American withdrawal.

#2. Thou Shalt Oppose the Spread of Nuclear Weapons.  Although a number of academics have debated whether the slow spread of nuclear weapons might have salutary effects in certain contexts, I can’t think of anyone in the policy establishment who has endorsed that view, even though the United States has turned a mostly-blind eye to nuclear acquisition on a number of occasions in the past.

#3…

Continue reading.