Category Archives: Food

Energy, Food, Security

America losing War on Terrorable Diseases

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John Stewart has some razor-sharp analysis of the stem cell veto by President Bush. You have to watch this.

Incidentally, Senator Feinstein provides a crucial bit of information on the debate:

The Castle-DeGette legislation now approved by both the House and the Senate would make available for use stem-cell lines derived from embryos left over from in vitro fertilization clinics — embryos that are already slated to be disposed of and, therefore, it is difficult to understand the objections.

[…]

Let us be clear: We are talking about embryos that will be destroyed, whether or not this bill becomes law. It is an indisputable fact these embryos have no future.

I can think of nothing more ethical than using embryos that would otherwise be wasted, to generate new, viable stem-cell lines offering medical hope and promise to so many.

Is it that the President just opposed to progress? Hates science? How can it be that he would rather cells be destroyed than used to cure people of terminal and debilitating illnesses?

Maybe it’s just me, but this puts his position on emissions control and global warming in perspective. The official response seems to be that no one, even scientists, can really be certain of anything and therefore life as we know it must go on unchallenged. This reminds me of a VP many years ago who launched a product against the advice of the infosec team because “they can’t prove the risk is absolute”, whereas he said his resolve and faith of success were absolute. The company lost over $250K for the next seven days as their site failed and that VP was eventually let go because the negative economic impact of his highly anti-scientific approach was so readily apparent.

A similar theme apparently emerges with regard to the Bush administration’s new policy on agriculture and ranching. Environmental scientists and conservationists were recently told that they will not be allowed to form an opinion after only one year of apparent destruction by ranchers — a minimum of two years of data is required. In addition, the new policy is based on the declaration that “cattlemen themselves are the best stewards of the land”. Scary reasoning, as many have tried to point out:

“That’s an extremely unbalanced requirement,” said John Buckley, executive director of the Twain Harte-based Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center, “unless they’re also requiring that the public’s costs are taken into account.”

Buckley said that would mean the economic costs associated with degraded watersheds and damaged wildlife habitat also should be weighed in determining the future of public-land grazing.

Another case of externalities, where those who care about a balanced outcome try to show the long-term harm of not taking action, and the Bush administration shows its disdain for people who want to use a truly scientific approach to factoring risks.

Imagine this type of governance in information security or structural engineering, where experts would be told that they could not warn of critical flaws until months after discovery and users were already clearly harmed. Software companies gotta’ make money, right? Even then a security team might be told that software developers are the best stewards of the software and thus should ultimately decide when to fix a bug, if at all.

Back to economic and social considerations, it’s important to note how the Bush administration bends the term to suit their purpose. A look at the bigger picture makes it seem that they should reverse their own policy:

The ranchers pay $1.35 per animal unit month — the amount of forage required to feed a cow and a calf for one month.

This fee has remained unchanged for years, and is lower than fees charged for state or private lands. Past efforts to revise the grazing fee — including a 1991 proposal passed by the House to boost it to $8.70 — have collapsed on Capitol Hill.

“It really, truly is an abuse of the taxpayers to not at least charge fair market value,” Buckley said.

Ranchers clearly have some lobby power. Who will pay, though, if turns out that they were taking unfair advantage of the land and causing residual and external harm? Have you experienced the pesticides and herbacides that ruin drinking water and kill off the local flora and fauna? What about heavy metals from industry? Who pays for the clean-up of someone else’s folly? What if they are drunk or delusional? Differing values, it seems, are at the heart of the issue especially when obvious harm takes many years to see.

Food, Poetry

Holy Scriptures of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

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by Chuckstar

FSM is my chef; I shall not starve.
He maketh me rigatoni with sweet sauces:
He leadeth me inside the kitchen.
He restoreth good taste:
He leadeth me to the pasta strainer for al dente’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the foodcourt lacking pasta,
I shall fear no burgers: for thou art with me;
Thy noodley appendages, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me with marinara and alfredo;
Thou annointest my spaghetti with meatballs; My plate runneth over.

Surely cappucino and dessert shall follow pasta all the meals of my life,
and I will eat in the Olive Garden forever.

Food for thought…

Food, Security

Soul Source Chocolate

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It’s been a while since I wrote about food. Shame, really, since so many fine cheeses have come and gone in my kitchen. This might be a good time to talk about how the local has become global and global local, but instead I think I’ll just pop open a couple sole source bars of chocolate (yes, soul is meant to be a pun) and imagine myself transported to a place far, far, away…

The Pacauare River is one of Costa Rica’s wildest rivers, cutting through virgin rainforest gorges that shelter jaguars, ocelots, monkeys and a multitude of bird species.

Mmmm, I can taste the ocelots in every bite. Next, I’m off again to…

The Los Rios region of Ecuador produces exceptional cacao, often referred to as Arriba (up river). The one mighty national strain, Arriba Nacional, is now on the very of extinction.

–insert joke about paddles here–

Close your eyes, taste the chocolate, and dream of lush greenery.

Well, and there you have it. This somewhat reminds me of the heady days in the early 1990s of small batch and single barrel bourbon marketing; when you could get 750ml of Knob Creek for $15 and Bush Pilot Rye was not yet extinct.

Here’s to the little guys to whom you can trust your taste-buds. And just to bring it back to security, if you ever wonder how to explain “input validation” just ask yourself how you avoid putting undesired objects into your mouth at dinner time.

Anyone else think that SQL injection attacks are to databases what global-franchise goods are to your stomach? Ah yes, back to global as local versus local as global…

EDITED to ADD: Dagoba has issued a recall on some of the their chocolate products due to traces of lead. So, while chocolate might taste good, you still have to be careful that the people who make and sell the stuff have preventive and detective controls in place to protect your health. Bourbon, on the other hand, well you’re on your own with that stuff.

Food, History, Security

Neither history nor security

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Once in a while I run into a “study” being done by someone under odd pretense that begs the question “who approved this for funding?” Here is a perfect example:

Simon, who teaches at Philadelphia’s Temple University, thinks that by spending time at Starbucks — observing the teenage couples and solitary laptop-users, the hurried office workers and busy baristas — he can learn what it means to live and consume in the age of globalization.

“What are we drinking, and what does it say about who we are?” Simon asked during a recent research trip to London.

His research has taken him to 300 Starbucks in six countries for a caffeine-fueled opus titled “Consuming Starbucks” that’s due for publication in 2008.

Observing teenage behavior in public places? This appears to me to have nothing to do with the study of history (more like sociology, psychology, or anthropology, if not culinary arts). He then goes on to postulate about the “comfort” patrons feel when they isolate themselves in familiar and unchallenging surroundings…

Simon believes Starbucks succeeds by “selling comfort” in an anonymous, often dislocating world. He says he has lost track of the number of times people have told him that when they traveled to a strange country, “the first thing I did when I got off the plane was go to Starbucks.”

Brilliant. He’s lost track? This man has discovered that the franchise concept works by selling comfort to people afraid of the unfamiliar and thus unwilling to take any chances. What a breakthrough in history. The only thing more preposterous would be if his book was funded by the company he is studying, since it so eloquently has the same namesake. And 2008? I’ve never heard of a “current event” study taking so long to reach publication. This is why historians should stay out of fashion design too, incidentally. Where’s the blog? By the time he writes this thing his observation of “teenage” behavior is very likely to be irrelevant.

IMHO, here’s a more notable topic worth reviewing, relative to the past versus the explosion of bland coffee-houses in London — it’s called the history and decline of the community and their gathering places (e.g. the local pub) in England. In the early 90s you could not find a decent cup of coffee in downtown London to save your life, but there were a hundred opinions for every ten pints of domestically produced beer usually in some relation to current events. Brand loyalty meant something deep and mysterious, somehow tied together with hundreds of years of publican tradition. Today, you can’t take a step without running into someone sloshing a smelly black imported brew in styrofoam containers as they race along the street, and I somehow doubt that these global-franchise loyalists could give a crap about history or even local issues. Good or bad? Who knows, but I’m certainly not going to ask for money as a historian to sit in Starbucks around the world for two years to “prove” that strangers like comfort.