Electric Politics

Fat And Stupid

Thu, 17 May 2012 03:03:39 -0500

Americans consume almost forty pounds of high fructose corn syrup per person, per year. That's a lot. (And, thanks, by the way, because federal corn price subsidies put me through graduate school.) Despite industry telling us that "sugar is sugar" it's not. High fructose corn syrup also contains an extensive list of questionable processing chemicals in trace form, some of which may well cause cancer. But quite apart from all that, new research shows that consuming high fructose corn syrup makes you stupid. Well, it does if you're a rat, but the research results presumably apply to humans too. Americans consume much more high fructose corn syrup per person, several times more, than the Europeans or Japanese, which we can now consider as an additional, plausible factor in explaining our relative political impairment.

Pup Pup

Fri, 04 May 2012 16:41:55 -0500

Here's the soon to be addition to the Kenney family. We visited a couple weeks ago when the pups were six weeks old. On Monday they'll be eight weeks old, ready for their new homes, and we'll pick ours up from Deep Run Farm (down near Warrenton, Virginia). Thanks, Phyllis, Jack and Kristi!! Everything seems pretty much organized for the pup's arrival but any last minute suggestions regarding dog training materials would be most welcome.

Foggy Bottom Follies

Thu, 03 May 2012 12:37:21 -0500

You immediately knew something wasn't right, watching the State Department spokesman using the words "according to" when talking about the interactions of U.S. diplomats in Beijing with Chen Guangcheng. "According to" diplomats who talked with Chen, he said... What? No. You use the phrase "according to" when you want to explicitly invoke uncertainty about the reliability of the source of a report. "According to" translates from diplo-speak as "maybe this was what was said, or maybe it wasn't, but this is what they said they said and you can decide for yourself." As applied here by one U.S. diplomatic official to another U.S. diplomatic official it means (a) those idiots at the American Embassy in Beijing don't know their rear ends from a hole in the ground, or (b) headquarters has no clue what really happened, or (c) both.

America's Mad Cow Crisis

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 20:04:08 -0500

By John Stauber

Americans might remember that when the first mad cow was confirmed in the United States in December, 2003, it was major news. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had been petitioned for years by lawyers from farm and consumer groups I worked with to stop the cannibal feeding practices that transmit this horrible, always fatal, human and animal dementia. When the first cow was found in Washington state, the government said it would stop such feeding, and the media went away. But once the cameras were off and the reporters were gone nothing substantial changed.

Memory of Space and Time

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 08:49:41 -0500

A fascinating, tricky thing, memory remains less than well understood. Is it just a set of synaptic connections or maybe something else? When we train memory, what exactly are we doing? In a discontinuous leap forward it now appears that memory is an important basis — perhaps the most important basis — for what we label 'fluid intelligence.' And that a certain type of memory training has cross-over effects that significantly raise intelligence. (The military will be on this like white on rice.) To a materialist it may seem as though several fundamental questions about personhood and consciousness finally are being addressed. But I'd like to suggest an alternative gloss: by working distant, several-order memory functions one taps, perhaps, into prompts that go beyond self, into a kind of poetical inspiration, a mystical awareness independent of the human condition. Memory and forgetfulness. It's not all about us. [Graphic: Curl by Colette Calascione.]

Server Upgrade Late Tonight

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 07:48:10 -0500

BlueHost is upgrading EP's server. The work will be done tonight and will involve a brief interruption in service at some point during the late Sunday night/early Monday morning hours. So if you notice the site has disappeared, not to worry. ☺

Podcast Schedule Late April/Early May

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 17:24:33 -0500

This Friday my guest will be Dr. Ralph E. Gomory. Ralph is a former head of research at IBM and President Emeritus of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; currently he's a research professor at NYU. We talk about the virtues of protectionism and of class warfare. The Friday following, April 27th, for a sort of sequel, my guest will be the economist Dr. Ha-Joon Chang of the University of Cambridge. On May 4th, for a different sort of sequel, to talk about our "Age of Ignorance," my guest will be Charles Simic, the 15th U.S. Poet Laureate and Professor Emeritus at the University of New Hampshire. Then, on May 11th, for something more than a little different, my guest will be Col. John B. Alexander, Ph.D., talking about UFOs. John's background is unique, an intersection of special operations, the intelligence community, and very advanced R&D (as a civilian he was SES equivalent at Los Alamos National Laboratory) — 'a visionary' might be a good way to describe him. Somewhere in there I'll try to toss in an extra, much shorter interview about honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder with Dr. Alex Lu of Harvard. And several irons are in the fire...

Mitt Romney Cannot Be Elected President

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 03:04:54 -0500

On cable television you see a raft of political experts, vying to be impartial, advising Mitt Romney to "be himself." To be the "likeable guy" all his friends say he is. On a more partisan note people like former Michigan Governor Jennifer M. Granholm argue that there is no there there, that Mitt is a "hollow man." Both observations have merit but neither gets remotely close to the whole story. These and similarly tentative lenses fail to capture Mitt's real problem, namely Mormonism. In fact, nobody seems to want to talk about Mormonism, as if to do so were akin to the political incorrectness of barring transgender contestants from the Miss Universe Pageant. But unlike Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam or other authentic major religions, where beliefs — for better or worse, whether right or wrong — are openly aired and argued over, in the cult of Mormonism the watchword is secrecy. Mr. Romney can no more talk honestly about who he is, or who he thinks he is, e.g., about secret Mormon doctrine, than he could raise his magic Mormon underpants on a county courthouse flagpole. Even as intellectually degraded as Americans may be there aren't (yet) enough of us to take this particular hook without any bait. We're lucky for a change... Stipulating a two-way race I predict a landslide defeat for the Republicans.

Happy Easter!

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 04:03:22 -0500

It's 4:00 a.m. Do you know where your cook is? This year for Easter two of Sharon's kids came down from New York City. I figured I'd try something a little different with the Sunday lamb, so am improvising a Moroccan-style roast. I took a New Zealand semi-boneless leg of lamb, almost six pounds, and washed it with lemon juice. Then I made a paste of half a dozen large cloves of garlic, salt, pepper, turmeric, cumin, paprika, saffron and olive oil. Apart from the garlic and the saffron about a teaspoon each of everything else. Paste applied to lamb, lamb put on a rack in a heavy pan and tightly sealed with heavy foil, pan into a 220° oven. To cook for about nine hours, basting occasionally. To finish at about 475° uncovered, until crispy (15-25 minutes). In theory, you should be able to cut this with a spoon. We'll see... On the side, par-boiled baby potatoes browned in a frying pan with butter and chopped parsley; diced fresh carrots boiled with frozen peas; some mango chutney; some mint jelly; a nice Sancerre and a very nice Chianti Classico (for me). Also a store bought apple pie, but if I have the energy and find the motivation I may do something else for dessert. Yum!

Stand Your Ground

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 21:34:41 -0500

If a sworn police officer had shot and killed Trevon Martin that officer would, almost certainly, have had to surrender their weapon and be placed on administrative leave. And, in all probability — since Trevon Martin was unarmed (unless you count ice tea and skittles) — that officer would have subsequently been fired and then tried in a court of law. Stipulating the hypothetical, why then should civilians be held to a lower standard of accountability for shooting and killing one of their own? It's as if Florida has issued hunting permits for killing black people. What's distressing almost more than the killing itself is that it's taking so long to put Mr. Zimmerman behind bars. Florida won't do it. The only rational explanation there being that Florida cracker politicians are beholden to the 'Stand Your Ground' lobby. But the Feds won't do it, either. Presumably Mr. Obama is afraid of Florida voters in the November election. What an ugly mess...

Moebius, at Work

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 22:08:47 -0500

A Really Big Litter

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:29:36 -0500

One of the above pups — one of the black males, to be precise — will be coming home to chez Kenney sometime in mid-May. The Sire, Sam, is a brilliant Master Hunter and the Dam, Pary (Parasol), is a very sweet tempered creature. We drove down to central Virginia and met the parents a few weeks ago and fell in love. The pups' pedigree is really impressive but as I don't expect to show, compete with, or breed our pup I'll probably get a 'limited' AKC registration. (On the other hand, as I'd prefer anyhow not to have the little guy fixed, and maybe if it's not hideously expensive, I'll bump the AKC papers up to a full registration, for bragging rights.) We'll go down again to see the pups when they're about six weeks old, and will pick ours up at eight weeks. What to name him? And we've got a lot of puppy proofing and preparation to do, including explaining all this to the cats... Woof!

James Joyce Reading Finnegans Wake

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 01:34:49 -0500

Podcast Schedule Late March/Early April

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:09:44 -0500

For late March/early April we've got three great shows. On March 23d my guest will be Grant Smith, talking about his recent book Divert (with an epilogue by Col. Pat Lang), on the NUMEC affair. Friday, March 30th, my guest will be Ed Asner, a real hero to me and a powerful force for good on the Left. Then, on April 6th, my guest will be Dr. Timothy Messer-Kruse, talking about his recent, riveting book Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and about an essay he's written at the Chronicle of Higher Education on his experiences explaining — or, rather, failing to explain — the Haymarket history to Wikipedia.

Drat!

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 13:05:09 -0500

Now it looks like scientists haven't found evidence of faster than light particles after all. At least, not yet. But I'm still disinclined to believe that science has answered this question definitively. Heck, for all I know there's a faster than light universe out there with scientists who solemnly proclaim that nothing can move slower than the speed of light... I would think of it as a boundary question and I'm not so sure that science has tried to test it that way.