Later On

Earlier I blogged a brief story on the small network of companies that control most of the world’s wealth. Here’s more detail in the current issue of New Scientist, along with links.

Also, an interesting article from ProPublica on the noticeable lack of investigations and indictments following the financial debacle. I know that I have readers who believe that no laws were broken, but without an investigation, how do we know? (Of course, we can ask Goldman Sachs, Citibank, and others whether they broke any laws, but I’m pretty sure I can predict their answers.)

I even have one reader who believes that, once something is made illegal, companies are somehow unable to do it. (See comments at the first link.)

New Scientist has an interesting article by Chelsea White that describes how the Texas Commission on Environmental Health has refused to publish a report on the Galveston Bay because the Commissioner (appointed by Rick Perry) “disagrees with information in the report.”

The unasked question: On what basis is his disagreement? What is the data on which he bases his conclusions?

The reason the question is unasked: Because the commissioner has no data and no information. He simply doesn’t like the conclusions, so he erases them (apparently in the hopes that this will alter events in the real world).

I do believe that it is stupidity that will destroy the human race.

UPDATE: Bryan W. Shaw, PhD, who is the Commissioner who rejected the findings of the climate scientists, is an agricultural engineer. He is not a climatologist and apparently is simply bending the needle out of the red zone thinking that this solves the problem.

The situation in India is bad. Mehul Srivastava and Andrew MacAskill report in Bloomberg BusinessWeek:

The shooter managed with one bullet what dozens of threats had failed to do: Silence Shehla Masood.

Masood, a 38-year-old businesswoman in Bhopal, used public documents obtained under India’s Right to Information Act to expose local political corruption after she kept losing on government contracts. Her still unsolved Aug. 16 murder makes her the 12th Indian killed since January 2010 after invoking the RTI to reveal wrongdoing. Although no official numbers are kept, interviews with law enforcement and victims’ families reveal at least 40 others have been beaten or attacked after filing requests under the six-year-old act.

“When applications are filed, people in government will pass the information on to criminals,” says N. Vikramsimha, a Bangalore-based trustee of the Right to Information Research Center and author of Gateway to Good Governance, a book he wrote on the measure. “The criminal bosses then come after you.”

The violence mars what may be Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s smartest strategy to fight the corruption hobbling the economy. The Right to Information Act allows citizens to ask and receive within 30 days copies of official documents and government databases. Citizens can also ask questions about official activities. Indians have filed more than 500,000 RTI requests in the 12 months through March, and the answers helped lead to the ouster of Maharashtra state’s chief minister and the arrest of three members of the organizing committee of the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

According to 2008 field experiments by Leonid Peisakhin and Paul Pinto, then doctoral candidates at Yale University, filing an RTI request is almost as effective for slum dwellers as paying a bribe to get a new ration card sooner for food and cooking supplies. “This is the most important piece of legislation passed in post-independence India,” said Subhash Agrawal, an RTI activist who successfully campaigned to make Supreme Court judges’ and ministers’ assets public. “It is a tragedy that these people have died, but it is also a sign of how powerful a tool the law is.”

For people living in remote areas, which often have few government officials, making RTI requests poses special risks, says Suhas Chakma, the New Delhi-based director of the Asian Centre for Human Rights. The official dealing with the request faces a conflict of interest in cases that reveal corruption or inefficiencies, since his own job could be jeopardized by releasing the information, he says. “The increase in violence is a direct result of people getting more and more aggressive with their requests,” says Chakma, whose organization collects data on the assaults. “In the beginning, people didn’t realize how powerful this law was. Now everybody knows, even the criminals and the corrupt.”

Eight of the 12 murdered activists lived in remote areas or towns. . .

Continue reading.

Yet another success for the people who want to destroy our environment and natural treasures: the Vietnam rhino is now extinct. Species are dropping like flies now. Edyta Zielinska’s report in The Scientist:

Although conservationists haven’t recorded a sighting of a Javan Rhino in Vietnam since 2008, the droppings collected between 2009-2010 confirmed that there was only one animal left. In April 2010, researchers found the rhino’s body. It was already beginning to decompose, and its horn had been sawed off, suggesting it was most likely killed by poachers.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature reported that rhino populations were under increasing pressure from poachers this year, due to demands from Asian markets, according to BBC News. Only 50 of these rhinos or fewer are thought to remain in the wild.

“It is painful that despite significant investment in the Vietnamese rhino population, conservation efforts failed to save this unique animal,” Tran Thi Minh Hien, World Wildlife Federation-Vietnam country director,said in a prepared statement. “Vietnam has lost part of its natural heritage.”

Interesting article by Patti Wood pointed out by Long Beach friend:

I was sure I had time to do a few more things, make a few more phone calls, maybe watch the news. I had plenty of time to pack my suitcase and get to the airport. The flight wasn’t leaving for three hours. So I had another bowl of cereal and read a little of the paper then looked up at the clock and realized I had an hour to pack and get on the plane.

I threw my stuff in my bag, ran down the stairs, and jumped into the car. Charged with adrenaline I sped 20 miles over the speed limit, a veritable Andretti at the Indy 500, to get to the airport. Searching madly for a parking space, I squealed the tires to turn sharply around the corner as someone pulled out of one. I ran to the gate flying past hundreds of staring people. Lugging my carry-on over my shoulder like a firefighter’s pack, I arrived breathless at the gate as they made the last call.  I had made it again.  I smiled with satisfaction and slowly walked on the plane.

The term “chronemics” refers to the use of time management as a form of nonverbal communication and lateness as a profound communicator. I was communicating big time.

Ten years ago after one particularly rushed trip. I sat in my airplane seat sipping my ginger ale and asked myself why I was late yet again. I was always rushing to planes. However exact I was with time in the rest of my life, I always seemed to rush to catch my flights. I knew that we do things because they reward us in some way and I asked myself what I got from running late. Almost immediately I realized the reward:  a rush, a race car driver’s high. I ran late to feed my excitement-loving soul.

The funny thing is that I am a professional speaker. You would think I would get enough adrenaline standing up in front of audiences. But apparently I didn’t. So instead of spending the flight, reading Delta Sky Magazine and picking out things I couldn’t afford such as chair massagers and surround sound speakers, I spent that flight figuring out what  I could do to satisfy that need without running late to the airport. Among other things on my adrenaline list was a comedy improv class and a weekly singles group. The rush replacements worked. These days even my limo driver thinks I leave too early to get to the airport. But I like being on time too much to regard his teasing. Lateness doesn’t feed my soul anymore.

Are you ever late? Does lateness feed you? Do you constantly have people waiting on you? Do you know people who drive you crazy because they are always late? Have you ever admonished someone for always being late? Has someone called you on it?  Here are other ways that lateness communicates. Look at the list for the likely match or combination of matches to your issue.

1. THE RUSH. . .

Continue reading. Interesting article. I had not though about the rewards (and message) of being always late—I had assumed it was simply incompetence in that arena.

The recent toddler death in China brought forth once more the Kitty Genovese case, but as a comment on James Fallows blog points out, the facts of the case are not commonly understood. Check out this article from 27 March 2009:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The Bystander Effect is sometimes called The Genovese Syndrome, named for Kitty Genovese, a young woman who was murdered in Kew Gardens, Queens, New York 45 years ago this month. Her death wasn’t just tragic. It was an indictment of humanity, as issued in the lead of The New York Times story. Quote: “For more than half an hour, 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.” That story set the template for the tale of Genovese, irrefutable evidence of the dehumanizing effects of urban life. But subsequent investigations have shown that story to be greatly exaggerated, and one of the most indefatigable investigators of the Genovese murder is Joseph De May, a lawyer, historian and resident of Kew Gardens. He’s studied the legal briefs and the court transcripts. He’s walked the scene of the crime. And he’s convinced he knows what really happened.

JOSEPH DEMAY: Kitty Genovese was returning that night from a night out, and she parked her car in the parking lot of the Long Island Railroad Station. What she did not know was that she had been followed by a man in a white car, a man by the name of Winston Moseley, and his aim that night was to find a woman that he could kill. As soon as Winston Moseley saw her lock the door to her car, he pulled a hunting knife out of his pocket and he started running toward her. According to his testimony, he chased her about half a block down the street towards Lefferts Boulevard, caught up with her, jumped on her back and stabbed her two to four times in the back with the hunting knife. She started screaming bloody murder, and her screams started to wake people who were asleep in an apartment building across the street and in a two-story Tudor-style building which was on the same side of the street, remembering, of course, that the attack took place about 3:15 in the morning on what was supposedly the coldest night of the year, so people had their windows shut. Moseley said he was standing over Kitty, trying to figure out a place he could take her to work on her, when he heard someone call out from the building across the street, “Leave that woman alone.” He then realized that his car was parked where it could be identified. So he ran off, got into his car, backed it around 82nd Road, about half a block up, parked, and waited. In the meantime, Kitty walked, however unsteadily, around to the back of the building. She collapsed inside a small foyer in the back of that two-story Tudor building. And 10 minutes later, Mr. Moseley came back, found her there, and that’s where she suffered the wounds that would eventually kill her. There was only one person who was in a position to witness that second attack, and that was a man who had an apartment, the entrance to which was at the top of the stairwell to that vestibule. He said that he didn’t want to call the police because he didn’t want to get involved. Apparently, his problem was that he was inebriated; he had been highly intoxicated. So he contacted a woman who lived in the building and she eventually did call the police.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Wasn’t she screaming during the second attack?

JOSEPH DE MAY: The wounds that she apparently suffered during the first attack, the two to four stabs in the back, caused her lungs to be punctured, and the testimony given at trial is that she died not from bleeding to death but from asphyxiation. The air from her lungs leaked into her thoracic cavity, compressing the lungs, making it impossible for her to breathe. I am not a doctor, but as a layman my question is, if someone suffers that type of lung damage, are they even physically capable of screaming for a solid half hour?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: This article in The New York Times was written by a longtime copy editor named Martin Gansberg. Editor Abe Rosenthal gave Gansberg the story. How did the misreporting happen?  . . .

Continue reading.

Excellent idea: Shovel-ready clinics. Jeffrey Leonard describes the initiative in The Washington Monthly:

Barack Obama has spent most of his first term as president wrestling with three enormous tasks: kick-starting the economy to create jobs again; standing the banking sector back on its feet; and providing health care to the 40 million Americans who lack insurance. He’s made progress on all these fronts.

But let’s be honest. Despite billions in federal stimulus money, the American jobs machine is barely functioning, and millions of previously hardworking Americans, especially in construction and the “trades,” are sitting idle. Despite billions in bailouts, America’s banks are barely lending, especially to small businesses. And while Obama did pass health care reform, those very reforms actually threaten to overwhelm an already severely strained primary health care infrastructure with a huge wall of new “customers” demanding health care services.

In 2014, a little more than two short years away, the provisions in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that are designed to expand coverage will kick in, initiating a deluge of insurance-card-carrying Americans into the health care system. These disproportionately low-income, newly insured people will live in every state and community in the country. Unless we act now, they stand to join the ranks of the “medically disenfranchised”—the more than 50 million already insured Americans who have no regular access to primary health care for lack of physicians and facilities in their local communities. Think our transportation infrastructure is under stress? Our health care infrastructure is like an already clogged highway system that’s about to take on 32 million new vehicles overnight.

These three problems—the economy’s failure to create jobs, the banking sector’s unwillingness to lend, and the health care system’s lack of capacity to meet an accelerating rise in demand—might seem intractable, especially in a deadlocked Washington where no new money is likely to be put on the table. But if we could take off our ideological blinders for a moment—if conservatives could stop seeing every federal action as an assault on freedom, and liberals could get beyond their belief that spending more federal money is the way out of every problem—we would find a modest answer to all three of these problems staring us in the face.

Part of the solution is relatively uncontroversial. As Congress and the president have acknowledged, the way to meet the flood of new patients coming down the pike is to expand the nation’s existing network of community health centers— nonprofit clinics that offer primary care to the medically under-served, often in rural areas or inner cities. But to get this done, there’s no need to appropriate billions more in direct government spending. Rather, there is a way to lure skittish banks into lending private capital to finance a health center construction boom in all fifty states, simply by tweaking the language of an existing federal lending program. Doing so would save money in the long run by providing cost-effective primary care to those who desperately need it. And it would quickly create tens of thousands of jobs, many of them in the hard-hit construction sector. Moreover, unlike the roads, bridges, and other complex infrastructure projects the Obama administration wants to fund, few of which are shovel ready, health center projects could get the hammers swinging in months, not years. . .

Continue reading.

Yesterday a commenter mentioned that Mitchell’s Wool Fat shaving soap “seems to hate floppy brushes”, by which I believe he means a soft brush. (“Floppy” is the pejorative description of a soft brush.) I have not found that to be the case, but to check (yet again) I brought out my MWF and the softest, fluffiest brush I own, a luxuriant Omega silvertip.

Once again: no problem whatsoever in bright forth abundant, wonderful lather. I do not understand the problem that some seem to encounter. Hard water definitely affects soap performance, but the commenter specifically is using softer water—such as the relatively soft water here in Monterey. Perhaps the problem is that too little time is spent brushing the soap to load the brush.

I thought of doing a video—my camera can do that—but decided I would drive myself crazy. But, truly, there’s nothing to it: wet the brush, brush the soap, lather the face. No problems at all.

I brought out the Wee Scot just for fun, and as part of my prep I decided to see how the tiny travel puck of Czech & Speake would do with a brush more i proportion to its size: wonderful lather, not problem. I imagine that my initial problem was the familiar one: insufficient loading of (large) brush from the (tiny) puck of soap. I lathered with the C&S, then rinsed it away: just part of the prep today.

Two passes with the Omega brush and its (abundant, pleasurable) lather, using the Progress with a Swedish Gillette blade: a terrific razor, let no one doubt. The final pass I used the Wee Scot, working up (easily) a lather from the MWF.

A splash of Blenheim Bouquet and I’m good to go.

MWF, like other soaps, does not do well in hard water. But with soft water, it’s a pussycat and any decent badger brush, no matter how soft, can quickly produce a fine lather. That has been my experience.

From this story.

The paranoid and authoritarian segment of our population seem to be gravitating toward positions in the Department of Homeland Security, the Transportation Security Agency, and the FBI, from whence they will no doubt in time emerge to do great damage, as happens from time to time until the people of the country finally say, “Crap! I don’t want to live like this!” and beat the bastards back and throw them out into the political wilderness, where they lick their wounds and nurse their grievances until the random swings of history and culture give them another opportunity. But they seem always to be around and ready to take over—for your own good—as soon as they get the chance. Take a look at this story by Jessica Guynn in the LA Times:

The U.S. government wants your information.

It’s flooding Google with requests for personal information about users for criminal investigations, according to a so-called transparency report the Internet search giant released Tuesday.

The number of such requests jumped 29% in six months, Google reported.

U.S. government agencies sent Google 5,950 criminal investigation requests during the first half of 2011 compared with 4,601 requests during the last six months of 2010. Google complied in part or completely with 93% of those requests which can include court orders and subpoenas.

The number of users and accounts affected: . . .

Continue reading.

Take a look.

Correlation is not causation, or so I’ve heard. One could easily argue that either of the two is the “cause” of the other, but in fact they probably are both expressions of a whole cluster of cultural values and mindsets.

Take a look.

I’m reading Climbing Mount Improbable, by Richard Dawkins, and I cannot imagine why I waited so long to begin it. And I must not have previously begun it, or I would not be able to put it down: enormously entertaining, filled with fascinating connections and insights and adaptations. Truly a book to be enjoyed. (Link is to used copies sorted by total cost (including shipping).)

I have just put a hold on The Blind Watchmaker at the library. Great stuff.

Mark Bittman’s blog contains a letter (contents below) along with the provenance of the writer. I am proud to say that my daughter-in-law is actively working to improve the “Farm Bill”: the massive Federal legislation that determines to a significant degree our national nutrition. Here’s the blog entry and letter:

I’ve known George Faison for 25 years or more; he was a co-founder of D’Artagnan and is now a co-owner of Debragga and Spitler, a New York meat wholesaler that’s been doing business since 1924, and a main supplier to many of the city’s best restaurants. This is a letter George sent late last week to a well-known chef, and one he’ll be sending to others. (It’s worth noting, if for no other reason than to answer the inevitable question, which I asked myself, that George doesn’t only sell naturally-raised meats – he sells industrially-produced stuff as well. But he’s on a campaign to persuade the chefs who insist that’s what they want to change their minds, and I know he’d like to supply only the right stuff.) I’ve changed nothing except misspellings.

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Hey Chefs:

This note explains my thinking about why I believe that you should be pursuing clean agricultural ingredients as standard practice in your restaurants.

Our food supply system is broken. Badly. 80 percent of the U.S. beef production is controlled by four industrially producing companies. Three of these companies also process 60 percent of the nation’s pork.[1] Too much chemical fertilizer and pesticides are used to produce our crops. The variety of crops produced around the world has diminished dramatically in the last 60 years. There are now nearly 5,000,000 fewer American farmers since the 1930s.

Yes, this industrial structure has significantly lowered the monetary cost of the food we consume. But this is misleading. While the amount of money we spend on food has declined, the quality and nutrition supplied by this food has deteriorated. As a country, about one third of all adults are obese, and since 1980, the incidence of obesity has tripled among children ages 2-19.[2]

In 1960, we spent 18 percent of our take home pay on food and 5 percent on health care. Now we spend 9 percent of our take home pay on food and upwards of 17 percent on health care. According to Michael Pollan, during his Oprah interview in February, “We spend less of our money on food than any other people at any other time on this earth.” What’s wrong with this picture?

People have gotten used to eating cheap food and it is killing them. There is little flavor and little nutrition and we eat more and more, because so much of it has been engineered to trigger consumption (salt and sugar have been proven to be addictive, like nicotine in cigarettes).

Regarding meat and poultry, here is what drives me to promote naturally raised meats.

By clean I mean the following:

1. Antibiotic free: Over 70 percent of the antibiotics used in this country are fed to the animals we eat. 70 percent! The practice is banned in Europe. The antibiotics are fed to animals housed in Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). They are so densely housed that they get sick. The producer gives them feed treated with antibiotics so they won’t get sick. Hogs are crammed into concrete and metal pens with grates that allow the excrement to fall through. Chickens are packed into closed houses where the lights are turned on four times each day to make them eat more often. Conditions like these would make any animal sick.

The key problem when antibiotics are overused is that it can lead to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It is a great threat to our country’s health. In fact, there is an antibiotic-resistant Staph bacteria called MRSA that is definitely impacting employees working on hog CAFOs. According to the CDC, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported that in 2007, 18,650 people died of MRSA, whereas approximately 16,000 died of AIDS. Additionally, JAMA reported that MRSA was also responsible for upward of 94,000 life threatening illnesses.[3]

2. Hormone Free: Hormones are given to dairy cows to produce more milk and beef cattle to accelerate weight gain. The goal is obviously to maximize production in the shortest amount of time. Hormones are hell on dairy cows, causing them to lactate practically round the clock, which is abusive, and the quality impact on beef cattle is huge. Forty years ago, Prime grade made up 6 percent of all beef carcasses graded. Today, that percentage is 1.5!

According to the owner of a very large cattle processor who is well respected in the beef industry here in the U.S., the reason for the reduction in cattle quality is directly related to the use of hormones. The cattle grow quicker but they put on more water weight. The amount of time required for the muscle to develop and the fat to intersperse during grain feeding is shortened by 35-50 percent thanks to hormones. The result is cheaper cattle for the most part. But it is absolutely less flavorful. And there is less highly marbled Prime cattle rising to the top, resulting in dramatically higher prices for Prime beef over choice.

Commodity cattle that are fed hormones are moved to a feedlot after as little as 9 months. There, they are given antibiotic-laced feed to keep them healthy while they adjust to a largely grain diet (that’s like you moving from a salad-based diet to an all-cheese diet overnight). These cattle are intensely fed for 75-100 days. Very efficient. Very cheap.

Naturally raised cattle are on pasture for 16-20 months before transferring to a low density feedlot where they are fed a mixed diet (dried grass/grain for 200 days in a naturally raised, clean program; 400 days for a wagyu program). It takes a lot longer to raise clean, healthy cattle, and this is why they cost more. But they taste a lot better and they marble better. Our naturally raised, clean beef program typically grades over 20 percent Prime, and that’s a lot more than commodity at 1.5 percent.

But the impact of hormones in our food system is becoming increasingly controversial. The practice is banned in Europe. The use of hormones in our food supply has been linked to the earlier onset of menstruation in young women in western societies over the last 40 years. (These dates coincide with the introduction of hormones as an additive/growth stimulant in dairy and beef cattle.) The issue with earlier onset of menstruation is that it is associated with a vastly greater incidence of cancer in women, breast and cervical.[4] That is just one reason why many of our retail customers are ordering DeBragga’s grass fed or naturally raised beef.

So why does this matter to you? Maybe it doesn’t. But from where I sit, I see more and more of our chef/restaurateurs making the switch to naturally raised meats and poultry for the reasons I describe above, and more (like animal welfare, for example). We know that a greater and greater number of our clients, especially in New York City, are looking for these ingredients, even expecting us to be offering them. As an industry, restaurants are on the cutting edge. Not just in culinary technique and quality, or décor and service, but in the quality and production standards used to make the ingredients in our recipes.

Yes, naturally and humanely raised meats cost more. Maybe you can counter the higher monetary cost by offering smaller portions. Or expect chefs to charge more money for it.

I do not think the solution to our food supply problem is to use poorer quality ingredients because they cost less money. In the long run, the true cost of these meats is so much higher.

George

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[1] Hendrickson, Mary and William Heffernan. “Concentration of Agricultural Markets.” Department of Rural Sociology, University of Missouri. April 2007.

[2] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

[3] Journal of the American Medical Association, October 17, 2007.

[4] Sellman, Sherrill, “The problem with precocious puberty,” Nexus Magazine, Vol 11, 3, April – May 2004.

What’s odd is that we are doing this damage to ourselves—or, more accurately, a number of businesses are doing it to the public purely so the businesses can be more profitable. This seems very much like the lack of empathy so condemned in the passers-by who allowed the toddler to be killed.

I like the idea of this device, but who in the world sets their thermostats to 74ºF (as shown in the little video of happy users)?

Worth looking into, I would think.

I just learned of this fine radio station (to which I am now listening) thanks to an email from a friend (the two-time recipient of Playing the Piano for Pleasure, as it happens). Recommended for Classical and Jazz.

Failed in part because the mission was poorly defined, poorly executed, and a colossal drain on US resources: money, manpower, morality, and more. Michael Lind takes a look at some of the ways in which we were led to failure:

The United States is leaving Iraq. It is not leaving because it accomplished its mission of replacing a hostile regime in that country with a friendly regime. America is leaving because the Iraqis are kicking America’s soldiers out. The U.S. has replaced one hostile regime in Iraq with another hostile regime.

If ever there were a complete foreign policy disaster, it has been the Iraq war. Most foreign policy failures are imperfect idiocy. At least elements of the failed policy made sense at the time. By invading Iraq, the U.S. carried idiocy to perfection. The Iraq war was a catastrophe for the United States in every way—strategic, economic, political and moral.

Strategic. From the end of the Gulf War in February 1991 to the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, the U.S. pursued a policy of “dual containment” of Iran and Iraq. Though far less costly than the invasion of Iraq would prove to be, this dual containment policy was expensive, in part because of the cost of U.S. occupation of part of Iraq and frequent bombing of the territory that Saddam still held.

There is much we have yet to be learned about the deliberations of the George W. Bush administration, but it is clear that one of the strategic goals of the invasion of Iraq was to replace the policy of dual containment with a policy of containment of Iran. Iran, the enemy of both Israel and America’s Sunni Arab protectorates like Saudi Arabia, would be encircled by permanent, well-garrisoned U.S. military bases in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The Iraqi people, the neoconservative policymakers of the Bush administration seem to have hoped, would welcome Americans as liberators and allow their country to be turned into another South Korea or Okinawa—a permanent staging ground for American hegemony in the Middle East.

Instead, eight years after the war began, America’s military is so loathed in Iraq that it is being expelled by the Iraqi government. America’s soldiers are leaving because Iraq refused to negotiate a status of forces agreement, which exempts American soldiers from local laws. These agreements are the norm in other countries where the U.S. has stationed large numbers of troops, including Japan and South Korea. They trust that the American military will punish crimes by American soldiers committed in its country. The fact that Iraq refuses to exempt U.S. soldiers from prosecution under its own laws demonstrates the extent to which the misconduct of the U.S. military and its mercenary contractors alienated the Iraqi population.

In addition to refusing to host permanent American bases, the Iraqi government is also refusing to play its assigned role as strategic counter-balance to Iran. Indeed, under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the new democratic Iraq has aligned itself with Iran and supports Syria’s autocratic regime against Arab spring protesters. One wonders what the architects of the Iraq war would have said, if told by a visitor from the future back in 2003 that as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Iran would have a new ally in the Middle East. Or that democratic Iraq’s new friend, the Syrian regime, would crush protesters claiming that they are inspired by … al-Qaida!

Economic. Remember the Bush administration’s assertions that the Iraq war would pay for itself? . . .

Continue reading.

Culture does not require language (itself a product of culture) and humans began using tools and fire long before they created language (and that was done, so far as we can tell, once only: all languages descend from the initial invention). It looks as though orangutans also possess culture—and thus memes—from this report by Bob Grant in The Scientist:

Populations of orangutans living in different jungle habitats develop and transmit distinct behaviors in a manner akin to human cultural transmission, according to a new Current Biology study that considered the effects of geography, genetics, and environment on the behavioral differences. Researchers have previously shown that populations of the red apes living in the jungles of Borneo and Sumatra perform certain behaviors—such as kissing into a clenched fist like a trumpet or using a branch as a fly swatter—in different ways. But it has been unclear whether the variation among populations was due to social learning, indicating culture, as opposed to variation in the environment or genetics. Now, researchers from the University of Zurich have shown, using thousands of hours of behavioral observation data combined with genetic profiling and scores of environmental and ecological measurements, that cultural transmission must be at play in the patchwork of behavioral differences seen across the species’ range. “The novelty of our study is that, thanks to the unprecedented size of our dataset, we were the first to gauge the influence genetics and environmental factors have on the different behavioral patterns among the orangutan populations,” study co-author Carel van Schaik told Wired.

Previous research has demonstrated a similar phenomenon in wild populations of chimpanzees. Together, the results suggest that the tendency to develop and share particular behaviors in a group of apes may have roots in evolutionary ancestors shared with humans. “The cultural interpretation of the behavioral diversity also holds for orangutans—and in exactly the same way as we would expect for human culture,” Michael Krützen, who was first author on the study, told Wired.

Just came across again and enjoyed once more—as the commenter on Wicked_Edge states, the thing that makes this is the parceling out of tasks among the various blades:

The site is in German, but it contains many excellent photos of razors clearly labeled, and the brand names and models are obvious. Worth exploring. Here’s just one entry from the “razors” category, sub-category “New, Improved“. The entry is at the top right: the little sterling silver travel razor, whose photo, when clicked, opens to show: