a few unrelated items

On my brief trip to Maryland for the holidays I had a run in with the police. My "suspicious" activity was pulling into the parking lot of a community park at 6pm and walking around near my car. I was detained for questioning for about 20 minutes by an armed asshole who, when I didn't give meaningful answers to his questions and asked if I was free to go, threatened to arrest me, called for backup, and had me thoroughly frisked.

I found Life of Birds at the library, and, well, I couldn't pass that up. Katsu loves it too. He's been staring like that for 10 minutes.

I found some ground water buffalo in the freezer last time I went to Cumbraes, and, well, I couldn't pass that up. I don't think I could blindly distinguish it from beef by texture or flavour. I won't be offering Katsu any of the spaghetti I'm making.

the wonders of pillage

way to completely ignore the moral argument, journal of wall street!

"isn't it amazing how much variety we have!!"

uh, yeah, and the cost of that variety is borne by peasants in mexico, slaving away in factories because a huge US corporation stole their land to grow cheap ass avocados, and those who will inherit our broken ecosystems, raped to death by monoculture and waste from the transport systems to bring you your fucking avocado to manhattan in february. such people have no power, and certainly don't read the WSJ. no need to consider their perspectives.

hippies and small farmers have unfair advantage say men with guns

People organize to get the food they want. They leave giant corporations out of the process, so those corporations send men with guns to steal that food. This is called "leveling the playing field for producers" by the government. Ha!

Eat local!

I've made this point before, but while Jon Schwarz is mentioning it, I'll say it again. Changing your eating habits is one of the easiest ways to really make a huge difference in the world. Think about how much money you spend per year on food, and imagine if that amount went into your local community to people growing food in an ethical way, rather than giving it to giant, evil corporations that abuse workers, animals, and the environment to increase profits for the wealthy people that own and manage them. Eat local!

indoor compost

My wife put together this helpful information about vermicomposting for a friend:


[I don't know why the 2nd one is sideways and I can't figure out how to change it]

I've included pictures of our bin and links I found helpful but basically this is what I did:

-Read up on vermicomposting (using worms to eat away organic matter then using their poo as great fertilizer!)

This series of short vids was great, since they described set up and then documented their failures and re-did it all.
http://ryanishungry.com/2007/03/24/apartment-composting-101-vermicompost-with-barb-finnin/ (she makes a kinda crucial descriptive mistake about depth versus width and length but a good intro nonetheless)
http://ryanishungry.com/2007/05/16/vermicomposting-jay-gives-a-worm-bin-update/ (hmmm)
http://ryanishungry.com/2007/06/16/vermicomposting-changing-the-world-1000-worms-at-a-time/ (put more of 'em to work!)
http://ryanishungry.com/2007/08/15/vermicomposting-results-barb-finnin-measures-us-up/ (oops)
http://ryanishungry.com/2007/09/14/vermicomposting-born-again-worm-bin/ (much better)
http://ryanishungry.com/2007/12/04/vermicompost-our-worm-bin-rocks/ (hooray!)


-Find a container that's waterproof and is longer and wider than it is deep. Worms will be active within the top few inches, just out of sunlight and just close enough to eat some stuff. Not deeper than 10-12".

-Vent this container (I drilled holes in all sides for drainage and airflow).

-Have something underneath to catch liquid or escapees.

-Decide how many worms you might need considering your bin size and your diet/output.

-Find a source for your worms (I called around to some bait shops after reading about different kinds of worms. None had them but luckily the Green Venture Eco House here in Hamilton had some.)

-Inside the bin I placed long strips of uncolored newspaper that had been wet and wrung for bedding. Emptied the worms and their castings (finished compost) on top (I also added soil, but learned later that some potting soils may be too harsh as well as unnecessary) and fed them.


TIPS
-After reading of some successful and unsuccessful bins, I've decided to process our waste in a blender before giving it to the worms.
-Check them daily (but they're fine with minimal to no care for days). Feed them if they've finished most everything. Don't keep it too wet (suffocation) or too dry (dessication).
-You'll get mites and wire/white worms but they're essentially a part of a healthy system.
-Covering their food with dry newspaper has kept fruit flies from laying their eggs and gives the worms some privacy while eating.
-I can tell the worms are happy and healthy when I pull off the lid and they all retreat into the dirt.
-ALWAYS wash your hands after handling (bacteria, fungus, mites).

DO NOT include the cabbage family. Some people warn against onions and garlic, and they do have a smell, but decaying Brussels sprouts give off an offensive odor. Truly.


Some Helpful Links:
http://www.nyworms.com/vermicomposting.htm
http://www.pr.uoguelph.ca/sustain/vermicompost.html
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/08/green-basics-vermicompost.php
http://agri.and.nic.in/vermi_culture.htm
http://www.cityfarmer.org/wormcomp61.html
http://www.redwormcomposting.com/

Good Luck!

fruit of the commute

lately i've been picking and eating wild rasberries, which seem to be growing wherever i go. i find this incredibly exciting. i'm having fantasies about collecting vast quantities of them and making preserves. instead i'm here blogging about it.

it all fits

I don't know how "stunning" this is, but... yeah.

Science 1 May 2009:
Vol. 324. no. 5927, p. 588
DOI: 10.1126/science.324_588a

American Association of Physical Anthropologists:

Civilization's Cost: The Decline and Fall of Human Health

Ann Gibbons

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGISTS, 31 MARCH-4 APRIL 2009, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

When humans were freed from searching for food from dawn to dusk, they finally had time to build cities, create art, and even muse about the gods. Agriculture and cities made human life better, right? Wrong, say archaeologists who presented stunning new evidence that most people's health deteriorated over the past 3000 years. "We document a general decline in health across Europe and the Mediterranean," says bioarchaeologist Clark Spencer Larsen of Ohio State University in Columbus. He's a coinvestigator of the European Global History of Health Project, an ambitious new effort to study the health of Europeans during the past 10,000 years.

Bad back. The rise in tuberculosis in the Middle Ages left its mark on the spine of this English skeleton. CREDIT: CHARLOTTE ROBERTS [Larger version of this image]

Most bioarchaeology studies tend to tell the tale of illness and death of people from a single site, such as a burial pit for plague victims or an ancient cemetery. Larsen's project is one of the first—and the largest—to try to reveal broad trends by assembling standardized data from large samples. In a series of posters, the team presented the first analysis of data on 11,000 individuals who lived from 3000 years ago until 200 years ago throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. "This is a real tour de force," says bioarchaeologist George Armelagos of Emory University in Atlanta, after reviewing the posters.

The project has taken 8 years and $1.2 million to organize so far. The goal was to pool 72 researchers' data on standardized indicators of health from skeletal remains, including stature, dental health, degenerative joint disease, anemia, trauma, and the isotopic signatures of what they ate, says project leader Richard Steckel of Ohio State. They also gathered data on settlement size, latitude, and socioeconomic and subsistence patterns so that they could compare rich and poor, urban and rural, farmers and hunter-gatherers.

They found that the health of many Europeans began to worsen markedly about 3000 years ago, after agriculture became widely adopted in Europe and during the rise of the Greek and Roman civilizations. They document shrinking stature and growing numbers of skeletal lesions from leprosy and tuberculosis, caused by living close to livestock and other humans in settlements where waste accumulated. The numbers of dental hypoplasias and cavities also increased as people switched to a grain-based diet with fewer nutrients and more sugars.

The so-called Dark Ages were indeed grim for many people who suffered from more cavities, tooth loss, rickets, scurvy, and bone infections than had their ancestors living in hunter-gatherer cultures. People became shorter over time, with males shrinking from an average of 173 centimeters in 400 B.C.E., for example, to 166 centimeters in the 17th century—a sure sign that children who were not members of the elite were eating less nutritious food or suffering from disease.

Why would people want to settle in towns or cities if it made them sick? One answer is that settlers suffered less bone trauma than nomadic hunter-gatherers, suggesting to Steckel that they might have felt safer in villages and, later, towns where an emerging elite punished violent behavior—but also controlled access to food.

The social and political inequities in urban centers meant that for nonelites, moving into cities was "almost a death sentence" for centuries, notes Armelagos. In the Middle Ages, people in the countryside were generally taller than people in cities.

After a long, slow decline through the Middle Ages, health began to improve in the mid-19th century. Stature increased, probably because of several factors: The little Ice Age ended and food production rose, and better trade networks, sanitation, and medicine developed, says Steckel. But take heed: Overall health and stature in the United States has been declining slightly since the 1950s, possibly because obese Americans eat a poor-quality diet, not unlike early farmers whose diet was less diverse and nutritious than that of hunter-gatherers. By understanding how disease and malnutrition spread in the past, researchers hope to apply those lessons in the future. "Our goal is to understand the health context for what we have today," says Larsen.

Brightly-lit opium dens

Fast food joints are brightly-lit opium dens -- funhouse mausoleums juiced by deforestation and massive animal suffering. We'd be much better off without them, but the national addiction runs too deep, and too many lobbies stay rich from the fat.
Dennis Perrin

It has been over a year since I last ate McDonald's food, or Burger King, or Wendy's. Hopefully I never will again.

Pessimism

I keep trying to write a post about how pessimistic I've gotten about the prospects for our species. But I keep getting too depressed by it to continue writing or putting effort into adding some good research to my points. I'll try again today.

The bottom line is that as far I can see, everything is fucked. The "Western" world's way of life is devastatingly unsustainable, which as a recent TomDispatch piece points out, is linked to three related impending crises: energy, agriculture, and global warming. And furthermore through NAFTA and the IMF and various other fucked-up neoliberal globilization efforts we've forced the impoverished part of the world to restructure their societies to meet our needs, destroying their way of life so we can maintain ours, the continuation of which is certain to result in suffering and death on an unimaginable scale, threatening the existence of human civilization and maybe even human existence.

I just don't see how there's any hope that any of this will be happily resolved. The leadership structures we have in place are incapable of addressing these matters; it simply isn't what our failed institutions are built to do, and it isn't what the people who occupy leadership positions are interested in doing. Rather than address these problems that are certain to devastate us without systematic changes in our day-to-day life, they continue to escalate the problematic policies (continuing to subsidize terrible agriculture practices, half-heartedly pursuing retarded alternative energy strategies, continually delaying meaningful carbon emissions regulations, advocating more oil exploration and resulting environmental damage) , and instead invest massively in genocidal resource wars.

It is hard to predict what the exact form of the impending devastation will be. (Somewhere in this doomsday rant I feel like I ought to mention that I'm obviously distinguishing here between death and destruction on the usual scale and on an even larger scale. Presumably the functional distinction is that the latter actually personally touches privileged people like me.) We're already watching the US economy crash as oil price soar. Tens or hundreds of millions of impoverished people are being driven the edge of starvation by rising food prices. We're seeing unprecedented natural disasters on a seemingly regular basis, but nobody is willing to explore the connection to global warming, yet alone use it as motivation to restructure our fucking societies around sustainable food and energy practices. And the ruling class in the US is threatening yet another war, this time with Iran, and belligerently mentioning nuclear weapons all over the place. Wars could well destroy everything before those other things get a chance to. Shit, we have nuclear arsenals in the hands of insane fanatics in North America, the Middle East, all over Europe and Asia.

I read Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed a few years ago, in which he documents how over and over in human history, people have been unable or unwilling to change their unsustainable ways to prevent the collapse of their own societies. I was thinking about rereading it. But maybe I shouldn't bother. I can just watch it in real time.

Cat food warning

Since I love cats and I love his blog, I'll pass along this word of warning for cat owners.

When we first adopted our boys, we did a lot of research and decided on a diet similar to what Hodgkins recommends. My understanding is that much of the cat food industry is basically based on the idea that cats are the same as dogs. They aren't. Dogs are omnivores; cats are obligate carnivores. Their systems aren't meant to ingest large amounts of grain, and health complications result. We're convinced the best diet for our cats would be a raw diet that includes organ meat and ground bone (good for dental health), but for now we use a high quality canned food that is mostly protein and fat. It is a bit more expensive than cheap dry food, but even by cold hard economic reasoning we figure in the long run it will save vet expenses.



It seems like most veterinarians don't know much about these dietary concerns, which isn't too surprising since they sell the mass-produced dry food in their lobbies. So you might never have even heard about this issue. Do some research and make good decisions for your cats!



update:
Kira posted about our food decisions as we were going through it. That post was before we fully figured things out, and we've been using Innova Evo for a long time now. We're considering another switch in the near future.

Return of the personal rant

I haven't done a rambling bulleted blog post in a long time. Well I just enjoyed a delicious Bell's Hopslam and a heaping helping of stir-fried veggies and rice, and the full belly and 10% ABV IPA have inspired me.

• I just got back from a 4 day trip to Canada to line up an apartment. We found one we both like, but now we're realizing that our application includes barely any income, no recent job history, no Canadian bank accounts or credit history, and my 3 convicted felonies. So we're hoping to somehow work all that out.
• Canada is just a nicer place than this country. You notice this as soon as you cross the border. Their road signs are like "Hey pal, please drive safely! It makes everyone happy!" In the US the same sign is "ATTENTION INSIGNIFICANT PROLES: YOUR SPEED IS MONITORED BY RADAR AND AIRCRAFT. IMMEDIATE PRISON FOR VIOLATORS. WE WILL TASER YOUR GENITALS TOO." And everyone you talk to anywhere up there is friendly and soft-spoken. And all the women are beautiful (but virtuous) and the streets are paved with candy and diamonds.
• I've been rather overwhelmed by emotions over the last couple weeks as the impending move is starting to feel more real. I'm very excited about it in lots of ways, but I'm conflicted because I somewhat feel like I'm running away from problems too. Maybe I'll dig more into that some other time. Or maybe it will be a later bullet.
  
• I still can't quite believe how well this whole grad school thing worked out for me. I honestly still don't quite know how I got my advisers to accept me. And then this week they put us up in their home for our visit. These are people who a few months ago I just knew as legends in the field, and next thing I know I'm accepted to their lab and crashing at their place. And I didn't even know if I'd get into grad school anywhere. It is just very weird and hard to process.
• The Lakers are so much better than it seems like they should be. And Denver isn't as good as people think they should be. Lakers in 5.
• Horus has been making huge strides the last few weeks. He regularly hangs out around us, and loves playing with a lot of toys. He and Katsu play together very nicely, and Hattori is getting a lot better with shy Horus too. Horus is starting to climb and jump up above ground level more often (we have various cat-climbing things around), and he's even taken a couple naps in human-occupied beds. He still won't consent to be petted, but if you try to touch his head now he sometimes will swat at your hand with his claws retracted. So he's just giving you a playful high-five instead of shredding your hand. He does a lot of chattering to himself in his pathetic-sounding meow voice. Good times with feline #3.
• I have to say something political right? Umm... Whatever. Fuck everyone.
• There is an amazing sushi place about a 10 or 15 minute walk from the apartment we want. It is kind of expensive though. That's going to be a problem.
• We'd have a dishwasher in that apartment. Holy shit that will be awesome. I estimate we spend an average of 20 to 30 minutes per day doing dishes now, so that will be a massive time savings. Not to mention we'll probably use a lot less water that way, which is only noteworthy for environmental reasons, as our rent will include water.

That's all.

My personal statement for grad school applications

Here are the opening sections of the personal statement I attached with my graduate school applications. Below this would be a customized paragraph expressing interest in the work of specific faculty members at each school, and sections about my academic, research, and other experiences.

In this personal statement I essentially want to summarize where I am and how I got here. Along the way I will discuss my research interests, career goals, and relevant experiences.


Worldview

My views include the following ideas:

• The foreign policy of the United States Government has been grossly immoral for at least 100 years. Many of its executive branch and military leaders during this time should be considered war criminals, with Congressional leaders of both parties fully complicit.
• Increasingly authoritarian domestic policies have eroded personal liberty in a multitude of ways, and are contrary to our supposed national ideals.
• The vast majority of our national dialog on these and related matters is remarkably ill-informed, predicated on false assumptions, and dominated by people with an interest in keeping it that way.
• The American lifestyle is perilously unsustainable and unhealthy. Our transportation, energy, and agricultural systems depend on unsustainable resource consumption and environmental destruction. Our economy is propped up by unsustainable debt levels. Our high-calorie diets and sedentary lifestyles are leading to deteriorating health while our healthcare system becomes increasingly unaffordable.
• Religion is a negative societal force. Its destructive consequences include the following: encouraging pride in scientific illiteracy and historical ignorance; glorifying sexist, racist, and homophobic ideas and actions; inhibiting compassion and stunting our moral reasoning abilities in favor of punishment and deference to authority.

These views are based on a great deal of reading and reflection, but each point would take far more space to adequately defend than I have available in this format. So I present them as an unsubstantiated list of my personal views, for which I believe I could argue convincingly and passionately, though I always consider myself open to intelligent counterargument.

Taking all of those views together, I find the hypocrisy, injustice, and immorality disturbing, almost indescribably so. I see understanding the thoughts and behaviors behind each of those points as a necessary contribution to fighting them, and I find myself driven to pursue this understanding.


Academic, Career, and Faculty Interests

I want to understand how individuals can hold obviously contradictory beliefs. Why do people have strong opinions on subjects about which they know almost nothing? I want to understand how each individual within a population can assume patterns of behavior that seem so obviously self-destructive to the group as a whole. How can people come to value superstition and dogma over logic and evidence? What forces drive these behaviors?

I’ve invested a lot of time and energy in trying to make sense of these things, and I’ve concluded that an academic career in psychology would be the best avenue for continuing this pursuit. I envision myself as beginning an academic career with a unifying theme of studying conditions that encourage or discourage reasonable behavior, drawing on findings from, and contributing to the body of knowledge in the fields of personality/social psychology and evolutionary psychology.

My interest in those particular fields developed because they’ve offered the most compelling insights for me as I’ve explored those questions. The classic social science experiments – Milgram, Stanford Prison – shed valuable light on Abu Ghraib and our national torture debate (I still can’t get over that there is any debate). I’ve found the personality research of Dr. Robert Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba, who has extensively studied authoritarianism and religious attitudes, similarly illuminating. Evolutionary Psychology offers the insight that many of the disturbing problems I listed could be united by a common theme of human confrontation with evolutionarily unprecedented situations: huge states, agriculture, powerful weaponry, hydrocarbon energy, and advanced scientific knowledge. The vast majority of the evolution of the human mind occurred in the absence of these innovations, and thrusting our stone age brains into the space age seems bound to cause trouble.

I’ve given political issues a prominent place in this essay because they arouse my passions these days, but I’ve touched on other areas as well: education, morality, health, religion, media consumption. There are a number of kinds of behavior that interest me under all of those headings. I hope to have the opportunity to explore one or more of those interests as a graduate student and beyond.

loss of diversity because of modern agribusiness

Thanks to Walt for passing it along.

collaborate, learn about justice

Great post over at The Primate Diaries. He recommends Chomsky and Zinn, two authors and activists I've praised here many times, along with many other people and organizations.

He provides some links to excellent resources to learn about them. I've felt like my internet reading routine is getting kind of stagnant, so I'm looking forward to exploring these. Now that I'm grooving on anarchy, I'd been meaning to read some Emma Goldman, so I'm particularly excited to learn more about her. My wife has been talking about Che Guevara recently, so we'll have to dig into that too.

I added a comment that sustainable agriculture is a topic that fits well into the social justice discussion. Check out his list and add your own ideas in the comments!

consume the terror

How is it possible that I've eaten the #1 most terrifying food in the world, a food more terrifying than #5, which is illegal and causes bloody diarrhea, or #4 which is a drink with dead baby mice as a featured ingredient?

I call bullshit on this list and on paulp's tumblog that led me to it.

Ramener

I've been ravaged by illness for the last few days, but that gave my wife the opportunity to introduce me to one of life's great pleasures: adding egg to Ramen Noodles. Just crack one into the boiling water to add extra deliciousness to your salty noodle-water.

Food pictures

you are what you eat

How much thought do you give to what you eat?

Where does it come from? Who sold it to you? Who sold it to them? Who sold it to them? What do all those people do with it? What don't they do with it?

You spend thousands of dollars a year on food. Do you think about where that money goes? What it supports? Who gets rich off it?

Is it good for you? Is it good for the environment? Is it good for the economy? Does it matter as long as it tastes good?

I think these questions all are important.

Jason Bourne kills your dinner plans

I love the Jason Bourne movies. They're on a select list of flicks that I can't turn off if I see them on TV. Tonight I saw the newest, The Bourne Ultimatum, and it somehow gave me a way to finally start blogging about food like I've been meaning to.

Bourne 3 deals with the idea of understanding the reasons for our actions. Assassins are told who to kill and aren't supposed to ask why. But Bourne, former CIA assassin, is troubled by the moral abominations of his past life and struggles to understand how he came to be in those situations.

There's a flashback scene where Bourne is given a gun and ordered to kill a hooded man, told only that doing so will help save American lives. Would you pull the trigger? I think that most people with a functioning moral compass answer that they would be reluctant to kill in almost any circumstances, and that in this specific scenario they'd minimally have to know a lot more before they'd take a life.

But if they were actually put into the situation, many more would kill than say they would. Why? Because people are social creatures, and they tend to follow orders. They rationalize that if an authoritative figure is giving them a command, there must be a good reason for it, and they probably ought to listen. Even if it turns out the order was morally wrong, it can't really be my fault, right? I was just following orders. The famous Milgram experiment chillingly documented this behavior.

Normal people can be manipulated or coaxed into doing things that they themselves would find morally wrong in other circumstances. Authority is one social mechanism to induce morally conflicted behavior. Another is the power of normalization - peer pressure, following the crowd. And yet another is to hide from people the immorality of the action. If everyone else does something, and I can't see anything obviously wrong with it, what harm can there be, right? Especially if the authorities are saying it is ok. That logic makes sense in the heat of the moment, but doesn't cut it for us as we carefully contemplate morals in a detached way. We see the moral obligation to make a reasonable effort understand the consequences of our actions before we act.

So what does Jason Bourne's moral crisis and the rest of this discussion have to do with food? Ask yourself these kinds of questions:

• Do you understand where your food comes from?
• Do you know how it gets from the ground to your plate?

If you're like most people, you don't know much about that. You know an apple grew on a tree and an egg came from a chicken on a farm, but you don't really know the whole process. And you certainly have very little idea about the complicated manufacturing project, the logistical miracle, that resulted in that soda or that microwave dinner or those corn chips.

Does it matter? Well, how about these questions:

• Do you understand the environmental impact of that process?
• Do you understand the public health impact of that process?
• Do you understand the political impact of your food choices?
  
• Do you know how the animals that you eat are treated?
• Do you know how the people who work along your food chain are treated?

If one or more of those sound like they might be issues of moral concern, you're probably a normal human being. You eat hundreds of times per year, spending thousands of dollars on food, and you don't know anything about the moral consequences of your actions. You don't know the answers to those questions because they're deliberately hidden from you. You eat more or less the way everyone else does, and it isn't something you've often thought to even question, aside from a few nutritional facts here and there. You compare prices, see what tastes good, and maybe try to be healthy sometimes.

Are you doing something morally wrong? Something to which you'd object if you only understood the whole situation? Would you kill a man without knowing why? Have you already? Why?

If you're like me, these are troubling questions. No wonder Bourne gets headaches. At first he tried to run away from the nightmare of all his questions, an understandable reaction. It is tempting to just try to forget about all this and keep eating the same way. Eventually Bourne realizes that he has to confront the questions.

And the answers turn out to be even more troubling. In real life and in the movie. No wonder Bourne is on an international rampage to get to the bottom of things. He has to understand it all before he can ever hope to make it right and try to be at peace.

Grilled Shark Loin

I am eventually going to blog about my new approach to food, but tonight I'm just going to tell what I cooked.

I found fresh shark loin in the seafood section at Safeway that said it was wild caught. (I don't know what other kind of shark meat is available, and I'm guessing it wouldn't work well to farm sharks, but I suppose we could find a way to make it happen if we really tried hard.) I marinated it in a mixture of olive oil, soy sauce, lemon juice, lime juice, garlic, salt, and pepper. That marinade wasn't from a recipe, it was just what was available in the kitchen and seemed like it might all work together. Then I grilled it.

It turned out ok. I think shark meat probably isn't my favorite, though I don't quite know how to describe it. It is almost bitter, and sort of musty. A few bites of it were very tasty though - the ones that were towards the center of the concentric circle patterns in the meat. They were the whitest in color and they tasted more like pork than anything else I could describe.

Even though I didn't especially like how it turned out, I'm glad I tried it. I used to be extremely averse to trying new food, but now I enjoy exploring.