Later On

Some governmental agencies work primarily on behalf of industry and big business, with minimal attention to the public needs or the public welfare. (Some, OTOH, work efficiently and quietly to benefit people—the Social Security Administration, for example.)

One of the departments most devoted to big business is the USDA. This dates back at least to 1947, when the USDA did a detailed study of the effects on small towns when small farms are replaced by Big Agriculture. The finding: towns that were prosperous and lively when surrounded by small farms became ghost towns and in some cases vanished entirely when Big Agriculture took over all the little farms.

This was disturbing news, so the USDA suppressed the report for 30 years, until Big Agriculture’s takeover was essentially complete. I imagine rewards were distributed to the appropriate USDA officials, perhaps in the form of sinecures.

And the USDA is still at it, as reported in this story by Peter Eisler, Blake Morrison, and Anthony DeBarros in USA TODAY:

In the past three years, the government has provided the nation’s schools with millions of pounds of beef and chicken that wouldn’t meet the quality or safety standards of many fast-food restaurants, from Jack in the Box and other burger places to chicken chains such as KFC, a USA TODAY investigation found.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says the meat it buys for the National School Lunch Program "meets or exceeds standards in commercial products."

That isn’t always the case. McDonald’s, Burger King, and Costco, for instance, are far more rigorous in checking for bacteria and dangerous pathogens. They test the ground beef they buy five to 10 times more often than the USDA tests beef made for schools during a typical production day.

And the limits Jack in the Box and other big retailers set for certain bacteria in their burgers are up to 10 times more stringent than what the USDA sets for school beef.

For chicken, the USDA has supplied schools with thousands of tons of meat from old birds that might otherwise go to compost or pet food. Called "spent hens" because they’re past their egg-laying prime, the chickens don’t pass muster with Colonel Sanders— KFC won’t buy them — and they don’t pass the soup test, either. The Campbell Soup Company says it stopped using them a decade ago based on "quality considerations."

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Just did the Nordic Track. (I can tarry indefinitely at the computer when I’m fixing to do the Nordic Track.) It seemed noticeably easier this morning, so I added another 10 seconds: 7 min 40 sec.

My knee hasn’t bothered me at all this morning. Still, I’m not going to walk until Saturday, and then only to the end of the block and back.

Now to do my Miriam Nelson exercises.

From this TPM LiveWire article:

Take a look at this little $3 app for the iPhone: it works from scanning the UPC barcode via the camera. There’s a link to a video at the link so you can see it in operation.

Regular readers with sharp eyes and good memories will note that the handle of my Omega 48 Boar brush has changed from silver to gold. The silver-handled one, well along in the break-in, went to a friend of the family, and the gold-handled one is its replacement—one certainly would not want to be without an Omega 48! So the new one begins its break-in today, and it did a good job with De Vergulde Hand shaving soap, though I did have to revisit the soap for the third pass—but that will be taken care of by the break-in.

The Mühle razor, gradually becoming a “favorite” razor, did a great job with a previously used Astra Keramik blade: three trouble-free passes to smoothness. And Geo. F. Trumper Spanish Leather is a favorite aftershave, with a fragrance that lasts longer than most of my other aftershaves.

Roger Cohen in the NY Times:

TOKYO — I was on a Japanese treadmill gazing at the usual numbers, speed and calorie count and so on, when I started to get mesmerized by the little images of food and drink on the screen.

At 35 calories, there was a frothy cappuccino, and then at 75 two pieces of tuna sushi, to be followed at 126 by an ice cream cone, at 150 by a beer and at 204 by an elegant glass decanter of sake. The 300-calorie mark ushered in chocolate cake, which segued at 325 to cheesecake. At 450 calories I caught a sweat-drenched glimpse of an egg-topped sandwich suggestive of a Croque Madame. Whatever followed was lost in translation.

I’d never seen anything like this in any gym and found myself lost in an obsessive, screen-gazing state. Were these images, I wondered, warnings about dishes and drinks to be avoided, or were they invitations to enjoy them later, the visual projection of a no-pain-no-gain philosophy? Or were they simply calorie-count notices of the kind now found in New York restaurants?

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Very interesting column at ConsortiumNews.com by Lisa Pease, a historian and writer who specializes in the mysteries of the John F. Kennedy era:

Obama, like President John F. Kennedy, has had his first encounters with the permanent warfare establishment, and so far, has been persuaded by their arguments. This book could open his eyes – and ours – to the possibility of another path.

In this eloquent, remarkable book, longtime peace activist and theologian Jim Douglass uses Thomas Merton, a prominent Catholic monk, to elevate the study of Kennedy’s presidency to a spiritual as well as physical battle with the warmongers of his time.

In 1962, as Douglass records in his preface, Merton wrote a friend the following eerily prescient analysis:

“I have little confidence in Kennedy. I think he cannot fully measure up to the magnitude of his task, and lacks creative imagination and the deeper kind of sensitivity that is needed. Too much the Time and Life mentality …

“What is needed is really not shrewdness or craft, but what the politicians don’t have: depth, humanity and a certain totality of self-forgetfulness and compassion, not just for individuals but for man as a whole: a deeper kind of dedication. Maybe Kennedy will break through into that someday by miracle. But such people are before long marked out for assassination.”

Merton coined the term “the Unspeakable” to describe the forces of evil that seemed to defy description, that took from the planet first Kennedy, then Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, and which tragically escalated the war in Vietnam.

Merton warned that “Those who are at present too eager to be reconciled with the world at any price must take care not to be reconciled with it under this particular aspect: as the nest of the Unspeakable. This is what too few are willing to see.”

The Unspeakable represents not only willful evil but the void of an agenda for good, an amorality that, like a black hole, destroys all that would escape from it.

Douglass defines the Cold War version of the Unspeakable as “the void in our government’s covert-action doctrine of ‘plausible deniability,’” that sanctioned assassinations and coups to protect American business interests in the name of defeating communism. 

Douglass traces Kennedy’s confrontation with the Unspeakable and his efforts to escape that trajectory. Kennedy came to understand that peace through war would never bring us true peace, but only a “Pax Americana,” which would foster resentment among the conquered, sowing the seeds of future conflicts, a fear that has proven true over and over in the years following his death.

Douglass opens with a sort of mea culpa, noting that by failing to see the connection between Kennedy’s assassination and his own personal fight against nuclear weapons, he “contributed to a national climate of denial.”

Douglass explains that the cover-ups of the assassinations of the Sixties was enabled in large part by denial, and not just by the government, but by those of us who never clamored for the truth about what happened.

Douglass reminds us that “The Unspeakable is not far away. It is not somewhere out there, identical with a government that has become foreign to us. The emptiness of the void, the vacuum of responsibility and compassion, is in ourselves. Our citizen denial provides the ground for the government’s doctrine of ‘plausible deniability.’”

Douglass quotes Gandhi on …

Continue reading.

Michael Tomasky in the Guardian:

A recent political development in your country has me reflecting again on my country’s political situation and wondering what on earth we Americans are going to do about a system that is irrefutably and almost irredeemably stuck in a state of paralysis.

I read about Alistair Darling’s proposal for a bank bonus tax with great interest. I’m no expert on British politics, but from what I’ve read over the past week I’ve gathered that the City is upset and that the pre-budget report as a whole hasn’t done especially well. And yet Guardian colleagues assure me there is no question the House of Commons will pass the budget. It’s a party discipline vote, and Labour has the majority. End of story. That the Tories have signaled support is just icing on the cake.

Sigh. If you’ve been watching the Washington healthcare debate, you know what that sigh was about. We Americans have always been proud of our constitution and the principle of separation of powers. The system has always ensured that the minority party has certain rights and that the executive branch cannot just muscle through Congress any old thing that it wants. Our founders wanted a system that moved slowly.

Do they ever have it. In fact, we now have a system that barely moves at all. Watching American politics through British eyes, you must be utterly mystified as to why Barack Obama hasn’t gotten this healthcare bill passed yet. Many Americans are too. The instinctive reflex is to blame Obama. He must be doing something wrong. Maybe he is doing a thing or two wrong. But the main thing is that America’s political system is broken.

How did this happen? Two main factors made it so. The first …

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Katey Walter Anthony, writing in Scientific American:

Key Concepts

• Methane bubbling up into the atmosphere from thawing permafrost that underlies numerous Arctic lakes appears to be hastening global warming.

• New estimates indicate that by 2100 thawing permafrost could boost emissions of the potent greenhouse gas 20 to 40 percent beyond what would be produced by all natural and man-made sources.

• The only realistic way to slow the thaw is for humankind to limit climate warming by reducing our carbon dioxide emissions.

Touchdown on the gravel runway at Cherskii in remote northeastern Siberia sent the steel toe of a rubber boot into my buttocks. The shoe had sprung free from gear stuffed between me and my three colleagues packed into a tiny prop plane. This was the last leg of my research team’s five-day journey from the University of Alaska Fairbanks across Russia to the Northeast Science Station in the land of a million lakes, which we were revisiting as part of our ongoing efforts to monitor a stirring giant that could greatly speed up global warming.

These expeditions help us to understand how much of the perennially frozen ground, known as permafrost, in Siberia and across the Arctic is thawing, or close to thawing, and how much methane the process could generate. The question grips us—and many scientists and policy makers—because methane is a potent greenhouse gas, packing 25 times more heating power, molecule for molecule, than carbon dioxide. If the permafrost thaws rapidly because of global warming worldwide, the planet could get hotter more quickly than most models now predict. Our data, combined with complementary analyses by others, are revealing troubling trends…

Continue reading.

Too many Senators are owned by industries and large businesses. They see their job not as doing what is best for the country or the people, but for their owners. I wish they were required to wear patches on their suits showing their owners (cf. race-car drivers). Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic:

The public option is dead this morning. And this time, it isn’t coming back to life. The Senate isn’t going to include any version of the idea in its bill. And while the House can still demand a public option in conference, nobody I know expects the House to prevail.

The primary causes of death were the fierce opposition of special interests and the institutional habits of the United States Senate, in which a clear majority of senators representing an even clearer majority of the people lack the power to pass a bill. The time of death? Somewhere around 6:30 p.m. last night, during a meeting of the Democratic caucus, in which Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that the votes for a public option just weren’t there—and that passing a health care reform bill, as quickly as possible, was too important to risk further debate and delay. [Probably the votes for a public option were there, but the Senate cannot pass Democratic measures without a supermajority of 60 because the GOP filibusters every single bill---just to obstruct. – LG]

After the meeting, even stalwart public option defenders like Sherrod Brown and Jay Rockefeller signaled their grudging agreement. And that’s because they knew Reid was right. The Majority Leader had spent most of the last month trying to round up the votes for a public option and, when the votes weren’t there, he put negotiators in a room to come up with an acceptable compromise. They did, only it still wasn’t acceptable enough for Senator Joe Lieberman [Asshat-CT]. And without Lieberman, the Democrats couldn’t move forward, at least not without great risk to the broader project. At the end of the day, Brown and Rockefeller and their allies simply care too much about people struggling with their medical bills—people who would still benefit, clearly, from reform without a public option—to mount further resistance. Lieberman, by all appearances, felt no compunction to put people over pique. That’s why he won. [Lieberman's peculiar and changing positions, along with his indifference to the people of Connecticut and the suffering of those lacking healthcare insurance, has aroused speculation that he is clinically a sociopath. – LG]

Disappointed progressives may be wondering whether their efforts were a waste. They most decidedly were not. The campaign for the public option pushed the entire debate to the left—and, to use a military metaphor, it diverted enemy fire away from the rest of the bill. If Lieberman and his allies didn’t have the public option to attack, they would have tried to gut the subsidies, the exchanges, or some other key element. They would have hacked away at the bill, until it left more people uninsured and more people under-insured. [And why? Because they really don't care what happens to people. – LG] The public option is the reason that didn’t happen.

And if public option supporters lost in the Congress, they won in the country as a whole. The underlying political problem for liberals remains what it has been for a generation: profound and widespread distrust of government. But polls consistently showed voters thought the public option advocates were right—that, at least when it comes to health insurance, government can be trusted. It was a small victory, but it’s on top of such small victories that political movements are built. Someday in the future, that movement may be powerful enough to win more sweeping changes. Who knows, maybe those changes will include a government-run insurance plan.

Those changes will come only if the owners of the majority of the Senate will allow it.

It still hurts a little, but now it’s like I bumped my knee. Definitely getting better. Tomorrow I’ll try the walk to the clock tower again.

Just kidding.

Shashank Bengali reporting for McClatchy Newspapers from Sirakano, Uganda:

At age 45, after giving birth to 13 children in her village of thatch roofs and bare feet, Beatrice Adongo made a discovery that startled her: birth control.

"I delivered all these children because I didn’t know there was another way," said Adongo, who started on a free quarterly contraceptive injection last year. Surrounded by her weary-faced brood, her 21-month-old boy clutching at her faded blue dress, she added glumly: "I fear we are already too many in this family."

On a continent where fewer than one in five married women use modern contraception, an explosion of unplanned pregnancies is threatening to bury Adongo’s family and a generation of Africans under a mountain of poverty.

Promoting birth control in Africa faces a host of obstacles — patriarchal customs, religious taboos, ill-equipped public health systems — but experts also blame a powerful, more distant force: the U.S. government.

Under President George W. Bush, the United States withdrew from its decades-long role as a global leader in supporting family planning, driven by a conservative ideology that favored abstinence and shied away from providing contraceptive devices in developing countries, even to married women.

Bush’s mammoth global anti-AIDS initiative, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, poured billions of dollars into Africa but prohibited groups from spending any of it on family planning services or counseling programs, whose budgets flat-lined.

The restrictions flew in the face of research by international aid agencies, the U.N. World Health Organization and the U.S. government’s own experts, all of whom touted contraception as a crucial method of preventing births of babies being infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

The Bush program is widely hailed as a success, having supplied lifesaving anti-retroviral drugs to more than 2 million HIV patients worldwide.

However, researchers, Africa experts and veteran U.S. health officials now think that PEPFAR also contributed to Africa’s epidemic population growth by undermining efforts to help women in some of the world’s poorest countries exercise greater control over their fertility.

"It was a huge missed opportunity to integrate HIV/AIDS and reproductive health in ways that made sense," said Jotham Musinguzi, a Ugandan physician who heads the Africa office of Partners in Population and Development, an intergovernmental group that promotes sexual health in developing countries.

In some countries that received substantial PEPFAR funding, such as Uganda and Kenya, health surveys have found that fertility rates remained constant or even rose slightly over the past decade. In Uganda, where many men want large families and abortion is illegal except to save a woman’s life, the average woman bears 6.7 children, one of the highest rates in the world.

This small nation of rolling hills and banana trees is at the epicenter of Africa’s demographic boom. Uganda is roughly the size of Nebraska, but in 40 years its population is projected to triple to 96 million, surpassing Japan, according to the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington research center…

Continue reading. Video at the link.

What does the Religious Right have against contraception? Oh, right: they think it causes promiscuity. How long will their idiot beliefs plague us?

Thanks to The Son, who asked me to log in to Google.com today. And it turns out that today is the 150th birthday of L. L. Zamenhof, the man who created Esperanto—still the best bet for a stable, neutral, second language to serve as an interlanguage. But the world would rather spend billions up billions hiring simultaneous translators, wiring up all those headphones, paying translators and printing the same document 5 times in 5 different evolved languages. I don’t understand people, sometimes. Well, mostly.

Of course most of the GOP Senators haven’t read the healthcare reform bill. Why would they? That’s a lot of work and they’re going to vote against it no matter what. James Inhofe specifically said that he wouldn’t bother reading it since he was going to vote against whatever bill was proposed. Igor Volsky at ThinkProgress:

This afternoon, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) openly challenged Sen. John Thune (R-SD)’s claim that the Senate health care bill does not offer benefits until 2014. “We are entitled to our own opinions; we are not entitled to our own facts,” Franken asserted. “Benefits kick in right away.” He concluded:

I stand here day after day after day and hear my colleagues, my good friends from the other side, say things that are not based on fact. […]

Senator Thune did say that none of the benefits started next year. He just, I guess, hasn’t read the bill. .. I do find that many of my colleagues who I’m very friendly with, haven’t read the bill and are not very familiar with it.

Watch a compilation:

The Senate health care bill spends $10 billion between 2011 and 2014 on interim benefits. Franken pointed out that the bill offers immediate insurance reforms for Americans purchasing coverage in the individual market and closes the donut hole in Medicare Part D.

Very interesting column in the Guardian by Ben Goldacre:

So as we career towards a mediocre outcome in Copenhagen, why do roughly half the people in this country not believe in man-made climate change, when the overwhelming majority of scientists do?

Firstly we have the psychological issues. We’re predisposed to undervalue adverse outcomes which are a long way off, especially if we might be old or dead soon. We’re inherently predisposed to find cracks in evidence that suggests we should do something we don’t want to do, hence the enduring appeal of stories about alcohol being good for you.

Suggesting that personal behaviour change will have a big role to play, when we know that telling people to do the right thing is a weak way to change behaviour, is an incomplete story: you need policy changes to make better behaviour easier, and we all understand that fresh fruit on sale at schools is more effective than telling children not to eat sweets.

This is exacerbated because climate science is difficult. We could discuss everything you needed to know about MMR and autism in an hour. Climate change will take two days of your life, for a relatively superficial understanding: if you’re interested, I’d recommend the IPCC website.

On top of that, we don’t trust governments on science, because we know they distort it. We see that a minister will sack Professor David Nutt, if the evidence on the relative harms of drugs is not to the government’s taste. We see the government brandish laughable reports to justify DNA retention by the police with flawed figures, suspicious missing data, and bogus arguments.

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Pat Garofalo at ThinkProgress:

Back in July, when a scheduled increase in the minimum wage from $6.55 to $7.25 per hour was about to take place, Fox News ran a segment examining how “the hike will hurt,” joining a media chorus about the supposed detrimental effect the increase would have on business hiring.

Now, with its Republican-inspired “Where are the jobs?” campaign in full swing, Fox has gone “on the job hunt” with a “new” idea for increasing employment: cutting the minimum wage. Jumping off from an op-ed by Washington Post editorial board member Charles Lane, Fox yesterday ran a handful of segments on the same basic premise —cutting the minimum wage may be the answer to the jobs dilemma. Watch a compilation:

Fox’s anchors seemed very pleased to have stumbled onto this line of thought. Of course, none of the anchors mention that almost all of the economic research on the subject shows that the minimum wage has little to no effect on employment. The most well-known researchers on the subject — David Card and Alan Krueger — examined a minimum wage increase in New Jersey, and found that “employment actually expanded in New Jersey relative to Pennsylvania, where the minimum wage was constant.”

Fox’s “brand new information,” meanwhile, is a study published last year by David Neumark of the University of California and William Wascher of the Federal Reserve that found that increasing the minimum wage may affect, by Neumark’s own admission, a “small number” of workers.

Of course, some employers would inevitably jump at the opportunity to hire workers dirt cheap and pay less than a minimum wage that already doesn’t lift a family of three out of poverty. It would actually take a minimum wage of $9.92 per hour to match the buying power of the minimum in 1968. “In today’s dollars, the 1968 hourly minimum wage adds up to $20,634 a year working full time. The new federal minimum wage of $7.25 comes to just $15,080.” That’s a total of $5,554 in lost wages.

And, if the minimum wage were decreased, how many employers would simply cut the wages of their current workers, at a time when consumer demand is already low? There are plenty of job creation ideas being bounced around these days, but you can count on Fox News to seize on one that would mean less money and a lower standard of living for workers.

To explain how short-term weather observations can be misleading about the direction of the climate. The post begins:

Time and time again, denialists try to suggest that the last 10 years, or 9 years, or 8 years, or 7 years, or 6 years, or three and a half days of temperature data establish that the earth is cooling, in contradiction to mainstream climate science. Time and time again, they’re refuted — shown to be either utterly foolish or downright dishonest or both. Logic seems to have no effect on them.

The simple fact is that short time spans don’t give enough data to establish what the trend is, they just exhibit the behavior of the noise. Of course that raises an interesting question: how long a time span do we need to establish a trend in global temperature data? It’s sometimes stated that the required time is 30 years, because that’s the time span used most often to distinguish climate from weather. Although that’s a useful guide, it’s not strictly correct. The time required to establish a trend in data depends on many things, including how big the trend is (the size of the signal) and how big, and what type, the noise is. Let’s look at GISS data for global temperature and test how much data we need to establish the most recent trend.

To do so, we’ll need to know how the noise behaves. We can get an idea of that by modeling the data since 1975 as a linear trend plus noise. We can estimate the trend by fitting a straight line to the data using linear regression: …

Continue reading. It really is an excellent explanation, including trying different approaches to find the best.

Useful technique.

Outlining was taught in elementary school with continued use into junior high. At the time, I viewed it as an arcane, useless skill, like diagramming sentences. We were sometimes required to submit an outline before we wrote a paper, but I (and, I believe, others) would write the paper first, derive from it an outline, and submit that.

It wasn’t until I started serious writing—in the workaday world—that I realized how essential outlining is. Now, if I’m writing anything of any complexity at all, I have to start with an outline. I can make notes and gather information, but I cannot actually start writing until I have an outline.

If you’re writing something straightforward, you can do with a mental outline. For example, if you’re writing assembly instructions, the outline initially could be simply the sequence of steps. But even there a moment’s reflection shows that the outline requires some work. For example, before the first step, one needs to establish context, which is why such instructions begin not with the first step but with an introduction of sorts: “You will need these tools…”, “The box should contain these parts…”, and “If any parts are missing, call 800-…”.

Similarly, the end is not usually the completion of the last step, but includes a congratulations, a promise of “many years” of use, and perhaps a number to call if you have difficulty in assembling.

But if you’re writing something more complex—say, the history of a political movement—you must have an outline before you begin, and much of the first part of writing will be massaging that outline to ensure that the argument you’re making can be followed. To try to start writing—how can you write any section unless you know where that section fits in the context—what came before, what will follow. And the outline, once finalized, lets you know that.

But when outlines were taught, there was no focus on their use and usefulness. All the focus was on the mechanics: how to number the levels of the hierarchy (I., A., 1., a., i., a), and so on), and the rules of indenting.

Nowadays I use the outline view in Word to develop the structure of what I will write, and until I get that structure right, I don’t even try for a draft—I just make notes.

I’m still focusing on the small lunch, small dinner idea, and today I’m making some turkey chili with the leftover ground turkey. (I needed 2 lbs for the turkey meatloaf muffins, but the store currently had ground turkey in 1.25 lb packs, so I have 1/2 lb left over.)

To augment the vegetable intake, I’m thinking of this:

1 large onion, chopped
8 cloves garlic, minced
3 anchovies, chopped (they’ll dissolve as they cook)
2 chopped New Mexico green peppers
1 chopped red bell pepper
2 chopped jalapeños
1 Tbsp olive oil

Sauté the above until onions are transparent. Add:

1/2 lb ground turkey

And continue to sauté, breaking up the turkey. Add:

Ancho powder
Chipotle powder
Aleppo pepper
Ground cumin
Mexican Oregano
8 chopped Roma tomatoes
5 chopped tomatillos
1 can black beans, drained and rinsed
1 can dark red kidney beans, drained and rinsed
1 cup frozen corn kernels
1/2 cup red wine
Good dash of soy sauce
Good dash of liquid smoke
Good dash of Worcestershire sauce
Pepper

Simmer until done—say, 30 minutes. Then add whole-wheat macaroni, amount tailored to liquid present, and continue to simmer until macaroni is cooked.

I also have a pack of bacon. I think I’ll roast that and cut up four cooked slices to stir into the chili when it’s done. This should last a couple of days.

UPDATE: What I plan to cook and what I actually cook often differ as I drift about the kitchen, adding things that catch my eye. The above has been altered to match what I’m cooking.