Later On

Interesting article by Ronald Bailey, published in Reason in July, 1997:

Darwinism is on the way out. At least, that’s what Irving Kristol announced to a gathering at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington not long ago. Darwinian evolution, according to the godfather of neoconservatism, "is really no longer accepted so easily by [many] biologists and scientists." Why? Because, Kristol explained, scientifically minded Darwin doubters are once again focusing on "the old-fashioned argument from design." That is to say, life in all its apparently ordered complexity cannot be understood in terms of chance mutation and the competition for survival. There must, after all, be a designer. So, exit Darwin; enter–or re-enter–God.

This may seem to some readers to be a personal quirk of Kristol’s. Perhaps as he approaches Eternity (he’s 77), he may want some grand company there. But Kristol’s friend and colleague Robert Bork is claiming the same thing: Charles Darwin and his theories are finished. In his new work, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, Bork pins his own anti-evolutionary attack on Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, a recent book by biochemist Michael Behe. Bork declares that Behe "has shown that Darwinism cannot explain life as we know it." He adds approvingly that the book "may be read as the modern, scientific version of the argument from design to the existence of a designer." Bork triumphantly concludes: "Religion will no longer have to fight scientific atheism with unsupported faith. The presumption has shifted, and naturalist atheism and secular humanism are on the defensive."

Are these merely two isolated intellectual voices preaching that old-time design? Hardly. Last summer, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank devoted to studying the role of religion in public policy, and now headed by neoconservative Elliott Abrams, called together a group of conservative intellectuals, including Kristol, his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Hoover Institution fellow Tom Bethell, to listen to anti-Darwin presentations by Behe and Michael Denton, author of Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Himmelfarb has told at least one colleague that she, too, thinks the Behe book "excellent."

There’s yet more. The neoconservative journal Commentary, of all periodicals, joined this attack last June with a cover essay, "The Deniable Darwin," written by mathematician David Berlinski.

"An act of intelligence is required to bring even a thimble into being," wrote Berlinski, "why should the artifacts of life be different?" Berlinski warmly endorsed Behe’s book, praising it as "an extraordinary piece of work that will come to be regarded as one of the most important books ever written about Darwinian theory. No one can propose to defend Darwin without meeting the challenges set out in this superbly written and compelling book." Commentary Editor Neal Kozodoy says he was "delighted" that his magazine served as a "forum for airing this issue." Berlinski "hit a nerve," according to Kozodoy, not only among the scientists he criticized, but "out there, among general readers, many of whom seem preoccupied with the issues he raised."

What’s going on here? …

Continue reading. And for the likely origin of life on earth (by natural processes), see this article.

Very interesting article by Nicholas Xenos:

A very curious piece appeared on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times on June 7, 2003. Its author was Jenny Strauss Clay, a professor of classics at the University of Virginia, and the title was, “The Real Leo Strauss.” Highlighted in a box midway down the page were the words, “My father was a teacher, not a right-wing guru.” Clay wrote,

Recent news articles have portrayed my father, Leo Strauss, as the mastermind behind the neoconservative ideologues who control United States foreign policy. He reaches out from his 30-year-old grave, we are told, to direct a ‘cabal’ (a word with distinct anti-Semitic overtones) of Bush administration figures hoping to subject the American people to rule by a ruthless elite. I do not recognize the Leo Strauss presented in these articles.

The “recent articles” had appeared in an array of magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the International Herald Tribune, and The New Yorker. In only one of these does the term “cabal” appear. That one was Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker article, the opening line of which is, “They call themselves, self-mockingly, ‘The Cabal,’ a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.” Abram Schulsky, “a scholarly expert in the works of the political philosopher Leo Strauss,” directs this self-identified cabal, according to Hersh.

In Clay’s apologia on behalf of her father, she wrote, “My father was not a politician. He taught political theory, primarily at the University of Chicago.” It is not incidental that Leo Strauss rarely, if ever, referred to what he taught as political theory, but that is another thing that I will come back to. “He was a conservative insofar as he did not think that change is necessarily for the better,” which is a rather bland description of a conservative. “Leo Strauss believed,” she wrote,

In the intrinsic dignity of the political. He believed in and defended liberal democracy, although he was not blind to its flaws. He felt it was the best form of government that could be realize, ‘the last best hope.’ He was an enemy of any regime that aspired to global domination. He despised utopianism, in our time Nazism and communism, which is predicated on a denial of a fundamental and even noble feature of human nature, love of one’s own. His heroes were Churchill and Lincoln.

Keep in mind a few of the things that come up in this paragraph. Among these is the notion of the “dignity of political.” We still need to know exactly what Leo Strauss thought the political was, as well as what he thought liberal democracy was and in what sense he was a defender of it. The use of the word “regime” on the part of his daughter is not entirely innocent, as we will see later on, and the notion that Churchill and Lincoln were his heroes and on the other hand that Nazism and communism were the things that he abhorred—I am going to come back to all of those things in due course.

Prof. Clay went on to say, “The fact is that Leo Strauss”—and this is very important and is the reason why the issue here is ultimately of much more than academic interest—

Also recognized a multiplicity of readers, but he had enough faith in his author to assume that they, too, recognized that they would have a diverse readership. Some of their readers, the ancients realized, would want only to find their own views and prejudices confirmed. Others might be willing to open themselves to new, perhaps unconventional or unpopular, ideas. I personally think my father’s rediscovery of the art of writing for different kinds of readers will be his most lasting legacy.

Strauss’ students are aware of the impression their admiration for him makes on outsiders. Allen Bloom was the best known of those students thanks to his best-selling 1987 anti-egalitarian diatribe The Closing of the American Mind, and more recently to his having been “outed” by his old friend Saul Bellow in Bellow’s novel, Ravelstein. In his tribute to his former teacher, published after Strauss’s death, Bloom observed that “those of us who know him saw in him such a power of mind, such a unity and purpose of life, such a rare mixture of the human elements resulting in a harmonious expression of the virtues, moral and intellectual, that our account of him is likely to evoke disbelief or ridicule from those who have never experienced a man of this quality.”[i] Bloom’s rhetorical strategy here of appropriating a projected criticism—the fawning admiration Straussians have for their teacher/founder and turning it around—also has the effect of demarcating an “out-group” that does not understand from an in-group that has experienced the truth, which is another characteristic feature of the style and substance of what makes a Straussian.

It is partly the aura that emanates from Strauss that gives credence to the claims of conspiracy when Straussians are involved in something, if that is in fact the claim that people make. More particularly, the prominence given to the notion of a charismatic founder within the Straussian fold means that it quickly begins to look like a cult.

Who was Leo Strauss? …

Continue reading.

The Eldest is a great fan of pressure cookers. Paula Crossfield, writing in Mark Bittman’s blog:

I received a great gift this year for Christmas: a pressure cooker. Popular in Europe, India and many other parts of the world, pressure cookers have become quite modern: my five-quart Swiss-made Kuhn Rikon has a lid that is simple to close, a lock inside which prevents me from opening the lid until the pressure is released, and a pressure indicator so I know when to turn down the heat. No more soup on the ceiling.

With it, I can cook most dried beans in twenty minutes or less. Some, like lentils or split peas, can be done in less than ten. Most vegetables need five minutes or less in a pressure cooker, and grains cook in a third of the time it would take in an ordinary pot. You can be endlessly creative: combine them in soups like a black-eyed pea chili or in Indian-style curries.

Lorna Sass, the author of the re-released cookbook “Cooking Under Pressure,” says that the pressure cooker “makes possible a healthy, new definition of fast food.” She continued, “I’m an impatient cook. If I have an appliance that allows me to eat a delicious lentil soup about 15 minutes after the idea comes to mind, that’s my idea of a great appliance.”

The key to pressure cooking is in the liquid you add to your grains, beans, veggies and meat. Liquids heat fast, and the steam produced helps build pressure in the sealed pot, quickly tenderizing the fibers of the food inside. The result of that contained cooking holds other surprises: intense flavor, and more nutrients maintained in the food.

Risotto, says Lorna Sass, is an impressive dish that has succeeded in converting many people to pressure cookers. I decided to make a basic broccoli risotto, based on her recipe. I chopped an onion, …

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Monday shaves are always great: Two-Day Stubble v. The Slant Bar. It’s always no contest, and even with a much used Astra Superior Platinum blade, the shave was still wonderfully easy and smooth. Of course the fine Irisch Moos lather, ginned up by the Sabini brush, helped a lot. And New York is always a great finish.

First, for the steak and sauce, see the update here.

Second, I started watching The American President from the beginning and am glad I did: I spotted several nice touches I missed the first time around.

No longer does Windows "start up"; now it simply starts. What a relief. Every time I booted Windows XP I had to see that redundant preposition. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Here you can hear the interview, and here’s the transcript.

Fascinating paper (PDF). We’ve certainly see enough instances to already suspect this finding.

And I suspect that, with global warming, it will happen again. Anne Gibbons reporting for Science, the publication of the AAAS:

With 6.8 billion people alive today, it’s hard to fathom that humans were ever imperiled. But 1.2 million years ago, only 18,500 early humans were breeding on the planet–evidence that there was a real risk of extinction for our early ancestors, according to a new study. That number is smaller than current figures for the effective population size (or number of breeding individuals) for endangered species such as chimpanzees (21,000) and gorillas (25,000). In fact, our toehold on the planet wasn’t secure for a long time–at least 1 million years, because our ancestral stock was winnowed with the emergence of our species, Homo sapiens, 160,000 years ago or so and, again, with the migration of modern humans out of Africa. "There’s this history of a precarious existence not just for our species but for our ancestors," says co-author Lynn Jorde, a human geneticist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

Researchers have long known that modern humans lack the genetic variation found in other living primates, such as chimpanzees or gorillas, even though our current population size is so much larger. One explanation for this lack of variation is that our species underwent recent bottlenecks–events where a significant percentage were killed or otherwise prevented from reproducing. Some researchers proposed that the lack of variation in our maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA suggested these bottlenecks took place as our ancestors spread out of Africa relatively recently. One possibility occurred 70,000 years ago, when the Toba super-volcano erupted in Indonesia and triggered a nuclear winter that fewer than 15,000 individuals survived. Studies of diversity in other regions of the human genome, however, attributed low genetic variation to chronically low numbers, with as few as 10,000 breeding humans at different times during the past 2 million years. But the problem with all these studies is that they tracked specific genetic lineages, and not the entire genome and, hence, populations.

Now, a new method of studying markers across the entire genome is allowing geneticists to look back farther in time, before the emergence of our species 200,000 years ago, to see the population history of our really ancient ancestors, such as Homo erectus. Jorde and his colleagues used short lengths of DNA that randomly insert themselves into the genome, known as Alus, as probes to find ancient parts of the genome. Alu insertions are rare events but once inserted, they are hard to remove–a 300-basepair-length of an Alu is seldom lost in entirety, so Alu insertions work like fossils to mark ancient regions of the genome. By examining the mutations in DNA near Alu insertions in two completely sequenced modern human genomes, they could calculate how much genetic diversity existed in our ancestors. They used the number of those genetic differences between the two genomes to calculate how large the population was at that time.

As they report online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers found that the ancient human effective population size 1.2 million years ago, the number who could breed–was about 18,500, and couldn’t have been larger than 26,000…

Continue reading.

Johann Hari reviews James Hansen’s new book Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity:

I started reading James Hansen’s new book, Storms of My Grandchildren, at the edge of a vanishing Arctic. I sat on a bare brown Greenland hillside listening to the ferocious crack and crash of the dying glaciers in the distance. As I watched the corpse of the ice sheet float by, broken into a thousand icebergs, it seemed the right place to begin the leading NASA scientist’s explanation for what I was seeing. Since the year I was born, 1979, 40 percent of the Arctic sea ice has vanished. If we don’t change our behavior fast, Hansen says I will live to see the day when it is all gone, and the North Pole is a point in the open ocean, reachable by boat. He stresses these are only the starting symptoms of a planetary fever that will remake the map of the world—and the capacity of human beings to survive on it. I finished reading the book at the Copenhagen climate summit, where the world’s leaders gathered to offer a giant shrug.

Professor Hansen has been driven into a strange situation, and produced a strange book. For one-third of a century now, this cantankerous scientist has been more accurate in his predictions about global warming than anyone else alive. He saw these disastrous changes coming long before others did, and the U.S. government has tried to censor or sack him for his prescience. Now he has written a whistle-blower’s account while still at the top: a story of how our political system is so willfully, deliberately blind to environmental realities that we have no choice now but for American citizens to take direct physical action against the polluters. It’s hardly what you expect to hear from the upper echelons of NASA: not a call to the stars, but a call to the streets. Toss a thousand scientific papers into a blender along with All the President’s Men and Mahatma Gandhi, and you’ve got this riveting, disorienting book.

How did such an implausible American story come to pass? Hansen was born into a dirt-poor family in Iowa, to a farmer who left school in the eighth grade. But he was whip-smart and rose through university science departments, where he spent a decade studying the atmosphere of Venus. But then he noticed a more interesting story was happening right in front of him: “The composition of the atmosphere of our home planet was changing before our eyes, and it was changing more and more rapidly.” Yes, we had known for more than a century that human beings were releasing warming gases into the atmosphere. Every time we burn a lump of coal or a barrel of oil, we unleash in one sudden burst greenhouse gases that took millennia to accumulate. But Hansen believed the effects were now becoming plain—and could be dangerous.

After studying the evidence, in 1981 he made a number of predictions for what a warmer world would look like by the early 21^st century. He said that the Arctic ice would be retreating dramatically and the fabled “North-West Passage” would open up, making it possible to sail through the Arctic. It has happened. I have seen it. Yet he was derided at the time as “alarmist” by the political class, and the Reagan Energy Department responded by slashing his research budget.

This set the pattern for his career: Hansen makes scientific warnings that are correct and need to be known by the public, and he is punished for it. In 1988, he famously testified before a Senate committee, …

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From the London Evening Standard:

Evidence relating to the death of Government weapons inspector David Kelly is to be kept secret for 70 years, it has been reported.

A highly unusual ruling by Lord Hutton, who chaired the inquiry into Dr Kelly’s death, means medical records including the post-mortem report will remain classified until after all those with a direct interest in the case are dead, the Mail on Sunday reported.

And a 30-year secrecy order has been placed on written records provided to Lord Hutton’s inquiry which were not produced in evidence.

The Ministry of Justice said decisions on the evidence were a matter for Lord Hutton. But Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, who has conducted his own investigations into Dr Kelly’s death, described the order as "astonishing".

Dr Kelly’s body was found in woods close to his Oxfordshire home in 2003, shortly after it was revealed that he was the source of a BBC report casting doubt on the Government’s claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction capable of being fired within 45 minutes.

An inquest was suspended by then Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer, who ruled that Lord Hutton’s inquiry could take its place. But in the event, the inquiry focused more on the question of how the BBC report came to be broadcast than on the medical explanation for Dr Kelly’s death.

Lord Hutton’s report in 2004 concluded that Dr Kelly killed himself by cutting an artery in his wrist. But the finding has been challenged by doctors who claim that the weapons inspector’s stated injuries were not serious enough.

One of the doctors seeking a full inquest, former assistant coroner Michael Powers, told the Mail on Sunday he had seen a letter from the legal team of Oxfordshire County Council explaining the unusual restrictions placed by Lord Hutton on material relating to his inquiry.

The letter states: "Lord Hutton made a request for the records provided to the inquiry, not produced in evidence, to be closed for 30 years, and that medical (including post-mortem) reports and photographs be closed for 70 years."

Dr Powers asked: "Supposedly all evidence relevant to the cause of death has been heard in public at the time of Lord Hutton’s inquiry. If these secret reports support the suicide finding, what could they contain that could be so sensitive?

More here from blogger Larisa Alexandrovna:

Well this latest news won’t fuel any conspiracy theories (cough) or bring even more serious questions about the alleged murder (not suicide) of former UN weapons’ inspector Dr. David Kelly (cough).

Before we get into the latest astonishing developments, here is a quick summary of who Dr. Kelly was and what happened to him:

1. Dr. David Kelly worked for the Ministry of Defense/U.K. as an expert in bio-weapons. He was also one of the key UN weapons inspectors in Iraq.

2. He became concerned about the US/UK claims of WMD in Iraq in the build-up to the Iraq war in 2003. Much the same way that former US Ambassador Joseph Wilson became concerned about US claims of yellowcake uranium purchases by Iraq from Niger. Like Wilson, Dr. Kelly became an anonymous source for a journalist. In Kelly’s case, he met with BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan.

3. The MoD leaked Kelly’s identity (just like Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity was leaked) to the press.

4. A Parliamentary committee tasked with investigating the planted intelligence on Iraq asked Kelly to testify, which he did.

5. Several days after his testimony and while preparing for a trip with his wife, Dr. Kelly was found dead in a park nearby his home, which was ruled a suicide. On the day he "committed suicide" he had sent an email to New York Times reporter Judith Miller in which he said "many dark actors playing games."

6. Leading physicians and first responders who arrived at the park and inspected Kelly’s body did not think he committed suicide, even going so far as to sue the British government to prove their case.

Continue reading.

UPDATE: BTW, if you’re watching any of these on a laptop, I highly recommend that you use a good set of headphones to listen—they will provide much better sound than those tiny laptop speakers.

Via Boing Boing, which has more info on the clip:

The above great clip was the last in a series, and you really should look at ALL of the clips:

Adventure 14: The Importance of Skill

Adventure 13: Artists Communicating Together Without Words

Adventure 12: A Priceless Fragment of American Folk Blues History

Adventure 11: Jammin’ The Blues

Adventure 10: Bernstein On What Makes American Music American

Adventure 09: Buddy And Shirley At The Codfish Ball

Adventure 08: The Ambassador Of Jazz Comes Marching In

Adventure 07: Superhuman Powers of Concentration

Adventure 06: Beehives, Bluegrass and Beautiful Ignorance

Adventure 05: A Scenester And A Square

Adventure 04: Rhythmic Innovation

Adventure 03: The Power To Create Emotion in Time

Adventure 02: Bakersfield Shines in a Nudie Suit

Adventure 01: The Coolest Sound EVER!

UPDATE: I would dearly love to have a zoot suit with the drape shape, and one of those fantastic hats—though I doubt that I could carry it off. (The suit would wear me, rather than the reverse.) Cab Calloway had a stunning yellow zoot suit.

Little by little it’s becoming just a revenue enhancer for health insurance companies. The latest, blogged by John Aravosis at AmericaBlog:

Joe and I saw this coming two days ago. And unfortunately it’s looking increasingly like we were right.
A day after former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe is elevated to a more senior adviser status at the White House and the DNC, Plouffe pens an op ed in the Washington Post in which he seems to suggest that much of President Obama’s promise to ban pre-existing conditions is now being jettisoned.Plouffe wrote in the op ed, which was certainly cleared with the White House, if not written by them:

Parents won’t have to worry their children will be denied coverage just because they have a preexisting condition.

Their children? The original promise – even the bad Senate bill – protects everyone, of any age, from being denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions. Now it’s just children?

And before anyone argues that Plouffe was simply using children as an example – that the legislation could still cover everyone – look at what else happened in the last two days. CBS News reported that the pre-existing conditions promise was now looking unlikely. But even worse, the NYT talked to folks on the Hill and health policy experts, and they were told the compromise package might just protect kids under the age of 19 from being denied for pre-existing conditions. No one else.

It would sure be one hell of a coincidence if Plouffe, on behalf of the White House, is now talking about kids being protected from pre-existing conditions when the growing chatter in town is that only kids may now be protected from pre-existing conditions – that the rest of us are about to get tossed under the Martha Coakley bus.

As Joe noted the other day, the pre-existing conditions promise, for "all Americans," was the top item on the Obama transition’s health care reform page. So, in an effort to appease the masses, they’re now considering gutting the one provision that everyone likes, the one provision that defines the legislation.

Obama has shown before that he doesn’t consider a promise to be binding in any degree. He solemnly promised in his early campaign, explicitly and repeatedly, that he would vote against immunity for the telecom companies for their illegal spying on American citizens. The when the vote came up, he voted for it. At that point I stopped contributing money to his campaign. If he reneges on promises even while still campaigning, one certainly cannot expect that he will keep any promise once he’s elected. And, sure enough, …

Dana Perino, not a publishing climatologist, once offered her own projections of the effects of global warming, which were quite positive: people would fare better in winter, for example. John Cook of Skeptical Science has a nice table that summarizes peer-reviewed findings of the impacts (both positive and negative) of global warming. Since governments will not take action, I believe that global warming will continue until the tipping point (if we’ve not reached it already). Take a look to see what your children and grandchildren will have to deal with.

Interesting: they used the backdoors that were put in to allow the US government to look at your data and mail. Bruce Schneier:

Editor’s note: Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and author of "Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World." Read more of his writing at www.schneier.com.

(CNN) — Google made headlines when it went public with the fact that Chinese hackers had penetrated some of its services, such as Gmail, in a politically motivated attempt at intelligence gathering. The news here isn’t that Chinese hackers engage in these activities or that their attempts are technically sophisticated — we knew that already — it’s that the U.S. government inadvertently aided the hackers.

In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access.

Google’s system isn’t unique. Democratic governments around the world — in Sweden, Canada and the UK, for example — are rushing to pass laws giving their police new powers of Internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell.

Many are also passing data retention laws, forcing companies to retain information on their customers. In the U.S., the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act required phone companies to facilitate FBI eavesdropping, and since 2001, the National Security Agency has built substantial eavesdropping systems with the help of those phone companies.

Systems like these invite misuse: criminal appropriation, government abuse and stretching by everyone possible to apply to situations that are applicable only by the most tortuous logic. The FBI illegally wiretapped the phones of Americans, often falsely invoking terrorism emergencies, 3,500 times between 2002 and 2006 without a warrant [and, of course, with no punishment or accountability: the US is no longer a nation of laws, except for non-official civilians; Obama has even promised not to go after crimes committed "in the past"---which, of course, is everything that happened before this instant. – LG]. Internet surveillance and control will be no different.

Official misuses are bad enough, but it’s the unofficial uses that worry me more. Any surveillance and control system must itself be secured. An infrastructure conducive to surveillance and control invites surveillance and control, both by the people you expect and by the people you don’t.

China’s hackers subverted the access system Google put in place to comply with U.S. intercept orders. Why does anyone think criminals won’t be able to use the same system to steal bank account and credit card information, use it to launch other attacks or turn it into a massive spam-sending network? Why does anyone think that only authorized law enforcement can mine collected Internet data or eavesdrop on phone and IM conversations?

These risks are not merely theoretical. After September 11, the NSA built a surveillance infrastructure to eavesdrop on telephone calls and e-mails within the U.S. Although procedural rules stated that only non-Americans and international phone calls were to be listened to, actual practice didn’t match those rules. NSA analysts collected more data than they were authorized to and used the system to spy on wives, girlfriends and notables such as President Clinton [again: no punishment, no accountability---the State knows best, so keep your trap shut – LG].

But that’s not the most serious misuse of a telecommunications surveillance infrastructure…

Continue reading.

And so on. It’s a Mark Bittman recipe (and at the link is background info and a video showing him making it):

Tri-Tip Steak With Tomato Romesco

1 tri-tip steak, about 2 to 2 1/2 pounds, or other 2-inch-thick steak — [take out of fridge 2 hours before cooking so that it can come to room temperature. - LG]
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 cup cherry tomatoes
2 tablespoons almonds, shelled
3 garlic cloves, peeled and lightly crushed
1 jalapeño pepper, seeded and chopped, optional
1 to 2 tablespoons sherry or red wine vinegar, or to taste
1/3 cup olive oil
1/2 teaspoon pimentón or other chili powder, optional.

1. Heat oven to 500 degrees. Generously season both sides of steak with salt and pepper. Put a large cast-iron skillet over high heat. When it is very hot, add steak to one side of pan and tomatoes, almonds, garlic cloves and jalapeños, if you are using them, to the other. Sear steak for 3 to 5 minutes, stirring tomato mixture once or twice.

2. Once a nice crust has formed on one side of steak, turn it over, carefully transfer the now-charred tomato mixture to a food processor, and put pan in oven. (If tomatoes are not a bit blackened, leave them in pan and check again after a minute or two in oven.) Cook until steak is rare to medium-rare, about 6 to 12 minutes longer depending on its thickness (an instant-read thermometer will register 125 degrees when steak is medium-rare). Transfer steak to a plate and let it rest for 5 to 10 minutes.

3. While steak is cooking or resting, add vinegar and olive oil to tomato mixture in food processor, and season with salt, pepper and pimentón or chili powder if using. Process, adding more olive oil or vinegar as you like, until mixture reaches desired consistency. Sauce should still be a little crunchy from almonds.

4. Slice steak thinly, against grain [I think he means across the grain. - LG]. Serve with sauce.

Yield: 6 servings.

Tri-tip is common out here, though it’s sold more as a roast than a steak. I think in the East it’s harder to find.

UPDATE: Unbelievably good!! I used two serrano peppers, which is what I had, and I did remove seeds and ribs. I used 4 cloves garlic and hot paprika for the chili pepper. Otherwise I followed the recipe.

As he says, lots o’ smoke. I was worried that the tomatoes wouldn’t char, but they did right away. The first couple I thought I had just missed a rotten spot, but after 8-10 more, I got the idea. I charred for the full 5 minutes with the cast-iron skillet, heated in the oven, over high heat. (And Bittman is right about the smoke: lots of it. Have the exhaust fan on high, and I also ran my air cleaner.)

Then I removed the tomatoes, peppers, almonds, and garlic into the food processor and turned the steak and put it into the 500º F oven. It took longer than he indicated to get to 125º internal temp, but then I had not taken the tri-tip out 2 hours early so it could come to room temperature—so bad an oversight that I’m honor-bound to make another, correctly.

Also: Don’t worry about leaving pieces of crunch from the almond when you do the processing: lots of crunch will come through if you stop when the sauce seems made.

I used sherry vinegar. Vinegar seemed odd at first, but then I thought of Worcestershire sauce, A1 sauce, horseradish, mustard: all vinegar-based. And bearnaise sauce has a fairly high acid quotient, if I recall correctly. In any event, this sauce turned out to be a perfect partner for the steak.

For the salt, I used Maldon salt for everything.

The wine was Rhone de Robles. (Paso Robles, a town south of here on Highway 101, is surrounded by vineyards.)

Both of these movies are on Netflix “Watch Instantly”.

Watch just the credits and the opening scene  — all the action before the first dialogue. The level of overall creativity struck me as amazing: the music, the paintings, the credit sequence overall, and the smooth story-telling of the dialogue-free story (to that point)…  Gloria, by John Cassavetes.

The other is a movie that is astonishingly good given its lack of overall visibility: The American President, with Michael Douglas and Annette Bening, written by Aaron Sorkin. In fact, it’s so good that I figured it had to be somehow a corporate dismissal of a politically liberal movie (in the sense that the appealing president is a Democrat and the antagonist is a Republican). Politics aside, it’s an excellent comedy—good enough to lift me out of a blue funk into which I had somehow fallen.

Both strongly recommended.

Herodotus writes:

[3.102] Besides these, there are Indians of another tribe, who border on the city of Caspatyrus, and the country of Pactyica; these people dwell northward of all the rest of the Indians, and follow nearly the same mode of life as the Bactrians. They are more warlike than any of the other tribes, and from them the men are sent forth who go to procure the gold. For it is in this part of India that the sandy desert lies. Here, in this desert, there live amid the sand great ants, in size somewhat less than dogs, but bigger than foxes. The Persian king has a number of them, which have been caught by the hunters in the land whereof we are speaking. Those ants make their dwellings under ground, and like the Greek ants, which they very much resemble in shape, throw up sand heaps as they burrow. Now the sand which they throw up is full of gold. The Indians, when they go into the desert to collect this sand, take three camels and harness them together, a female in the middle and a male on either side, in a leading rein. The rider sits on the female, and they are particular to choose for the purpose one that has but just dropped her young; for their female camels can run as fast as horses, while they bear burdens very much better. 

[3.104] When the Indians therefore have thus equipped themselves they set off in quest of the gold, calculating the time so that they may be engaged in seizing it during the most sultry part of the day, when the ants hide themselves to escape the heat. The sun in those parts shines fiercest in the morning, not, as elsewhere, at noonday; the greatest heat is from the time when he has reached a certain height, until the hour at which the market closes. During this space he burns much more furiously than at midday in Greece, so that the men there are said at that time to drench themselves with water. At noon his heat is much the same in India as in other countries, after which, as the day declines, the warmth is only equal to that of the morning sun elsewhere. Towards evening the coolness increases, till about sunset it becomes very cold.

[3.105] When the Indians reach the place where the gold is, they fill their bags with the sand, and ride away at their best speed: the ants, however, scenting them, as the Persians say, rush forth in pursuit. Now these animals are, they declare, so swift, that there is nothing in the world like them: if it were not, therefore, that the Indians get a start while the ants are mustering, not a single gold-gatherer could escape. During the flight the male camels, which are not so fleet as the females, grow tired, and begin to drag, first one, and then the other; but the females recollect the young which they have left behind, and never give way or flag. Such, according to the Persians, is the manner in which the Indians get the greater part of their gold; some is dug out of the earth, but of this the supply is more scanty.

The above is not the translation that I’m reading, but I didn’t want to type so much.

And what were those ants? Marlise Simons writes in the NY Times, 25 November 1996:

he fabulous tale of the giant ”ants” that dug up gold in a far-off El Dorado and enriched the Persian Empire has circulated for some 2,500 years. Historians have variously recorded it as fact, mocked it as extravagant and passed it along the ancient grapevine.

It was popular in Athens and Rome, and Alexander the Great, on his way to India, is said to have known about the tale. Scholars and fortune hunters have tried to explain the enigma for centuries.

Now a team of explorers says it has solved the puzzle. The explorers believe they have pinpointed the land of the legendary gold-digging ants and the people who profited in one of the most inaccessible regions of the Himalayas along the upper Indus River.

They say the outsize furry ”ants,” first described by Herodotus in the fifth century B.C., are in fact big marmots. These creatures — Herodotus calls them ”bigger than a fox, though not so big as a dog” — are still throwing up gold-bearing soil from deep underground as they dig their burrows. Most important, the explorers say they have found indigenous people on the same high plateau who say that for generations they have collected gold dust from the marmots’ work.

”I think this confirms the legend that has fascinated so many people,” said Michel Peissel, a French ethnologist, who has just returned here from a monthlong journey in the western Himalayas of northern Pakistan. ”I think it vindicates Herodotus, who has often been called a liar.”

Other explorers have suggested that the furry ”ants” of antiquity were marmots, but until now there were no known reports of the site where indigenous people actually collected and sifted sand to get the marmots’ gold.

That place, Mr. Peissel said, is the Dansar plain, a high plateau overlooking the Indus River near the tense cease-fire line between India and Pakistan. It is an isolated region where the Indus comes roaring through deep gorges on its way south. On both sides of the river, Mr. Peissel said, are small settlements of Minaro tribal people, an ancient remnant who have remained so isolated in the high valleys that they still preserve some stone-age customs.

Up in those barren highlands, Mr. Peissel said, he first went to study the Minaro 14 years ago on the Indian side of the border, traveling in disguise because the military zone was off-limits to outsiders.

”That’s where I first heard the startling news that the villagers used to collect the earth from the marmot burrows because it contained much gold dust,” said Mr. Peissel, who speaks Tibetan, like the Minaro.

But the Dansar plain, where the old people used to get the gold dust, the locals said, was five miles away on the other side of the Indus, now the Pakistani side. It took 14 years for Mr. Peissel and a British photographer, Sebastian Guinness, …

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From Dan Colman at Open Culture:

This week, Bill Gates joined the rest of the world and launched his personal blog, The Gates Notes. And, without wasting any time, he started talking about an issue near and dear to my heart — the resources (both paid and free) available to lifelong learners everywhere. In a very down-to-earth kind of way, Gates gives you the lowdown on two courses he recently purchased from The Teaching Company. If you regularly visit Open Culture, you know that I, too, am a fan of The Teaching Company’s service. They travel across the US, and record great professors lecturing on great topics. At last count, I have purchased 24 of their courses over the past three years (all as mp3 downloads), even while consuming many free courses available on the web. (See our online collection of Free Courses.) Anyway, I digress. It’s good to share the edublog space with Mr. Gates, even for a day. You can track him at the gatesnotes.com.

Some trenchant remarks by Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog:

Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens may have had his tongue in his cheek, or perhaps wanted merely to taunt the majority, when he wrote in Thursday’s opinion on the role of corporations in national politics: “Under the majority’s view, I suppose it may be a First Amendment problem that corporations are not permitted to vote, given that voting is, among other things, a form of speech.”  It is a tantalizing notion.

Suppose that General Motors Corp., troubled that a candidate for Congress from Michigan was too favorable to the United Auto Workers, decided to do everything in its corporate power to defeat that candidate.  So, aside from spending huge sums of its own money (none of it federal bailout money) to influence the outcome, it went to the office of the voting registrar in downtown Detroit.  It sought to sign up, affirming that it was a citizen and resident of Michigan.  Denied registration, it sued, claiming that, under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, it was a “person,” and, as a “citizen,” it was entitled to equal protection under the election laws.  Would the Supreme Court buy that?

General Motors might already be halfway to winning its lawsuit.  It has been understood, for decades, that corporations are “persons” under the Constitution.  And nothing the Supreme Court said Thursday undermined that notion.  If anything, the decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission conferred new dignity on corporate “persons,” treating them — under the First Amendment free-speech clause — as the equal of human beings.

At least in politics, the Court majority indicated, corporations have a voice, and they have worthy political ideas.  Here is the way Justice Anthony M. Kennedy put it (partially quoting from an earlier ruling): “Corporations and other associations, like individuals, contribute to the ‘discussion, debate, and the dissemination of information and ideas’ that the First Amendment seeks to foster.”

It does not matter that the right-to-vote scenario is quite implausible.  The fact is that the decades-old image of American corporations as a destabilizing and perhaps even corrupting influence in politics has now been thoroughly re-examined by the Supreme Court, and the corporate “person” emerges from the process with — in the eyes of the majority — a burnished image of good citizen.  There is a deep chasm of perception, between Thursday’s majority and the dissenters, about the nature of the corporate personality…

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