Which goes first, the chicken or the egg?

The New Neo Posted on by

It’ll be the egg that will become obsolete (perhaps even illegal some day, like old-fashioned lightbulbs?) if Hampton Creek Foods (founded by Bill Gates) has anything to say about it:

In its food lab, biochemists grind up beans and peer through microscopes to study their molecular structure, looking for plants that can fulfill the culinary functions of eggs. So far, the company has analyzed some 1,500 types of plants from more than 60 countries.

The research has resulted in 11 “hits,” said Josh Tetrick, the company’s CEO.

“Our approach is to use plants that are much more sustainable ”” less greenhouse gas emissions, less water, no animal involved and a whole lot more affordable ”” to create a better food system,” said the former linebacker on West Virginia University’s football team.

The company’s first product ”” the mayonnaise ”” is sold for roughly the same price as the traditional variety. It soon hopes to start selling cookie dough and a batter that scrambles like eggs when fried in a pan.

“The egg is a miracle, so one of the hardest parts of replacing it is all the functions that it can do,” said Chris Jones, the company’s culinary director of innovations and a former contestant on Bravo TV’s Top Chef.

I dunno. It all seems fishy to me.

I can’t quite imagine a food that could function like an egg but isn’t an egg, which is indeed a “miracle” for its remarkable capacities, not just as an egg (as in scrambled, fried, boiled) but especially in baking.

And as for “sustainable,” what about all the energy used to turn the vegetable sources into egglike artifacts? What are the greenhouse gases involved in a chicken laying an egg?

It turns out that chicken feet have a tiny little carbon footprint:

Lamb, beef and cheese have the highest emissions, in part because they are derived from animals that release a consistent amount of methane gas, which is a potent green house gas pollutant. Chickens aren’t gassy creatures. They produce no methane and cause far fewer emissions during production. Also, pound for pound, they require less feed than hogs, beef or dairy cattle. Chicken is a good alternative to red meat, which is linked to a variety of health issues like obesity, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and even mortality. Of course, protein alternatives like rice and eggs are considerably better for the environment; beans and lentils are better still.

So even if you buy the AGW theory, neither chicken nor eggs seem to be a particularly good target. But hey, that doesn’t stop them from trying, does it?

Tokyo Story

The New Neo Posted on by

It was this comment at my post about outstanding movies that made me decide it was high time I saw “Tokyo Story,” a postwar Japanese film by Yasujirō Ozu that’s considered one of the greatest cinema masterpieces of the 20th century.

I’m not a film buff. I’m not into technique; for example, “Citizen Kane,” that black-and-white achievement everyone always raves about, leaves me relatively cold. The same with “Tokyo Story” when I began watching it. It seemed old-fashioned and downright odd, obscure and slow as molasses.

But then—it started to grow on me. At two and a quarter hours of no action at all except for families sitting around (on the floor, mostly) or standing around and talking, it had better.

After a few minutes I thought “Hmm—Chekhov, Japanese style.” And then a bit later, “These people are very different from us, but also very much the same.” There was a lot of smiling and nodding, but the film manages to convey the conflicted and sometimes negative feelings veiled by all that pleasant and socially-prescribed assent.

If you’ve seen the movie (or Ozu’s other movies, which I haven’t) you’ll know that its technical aspects are so idiosyncratic that it’s nearly impossible to ignore them. The camera is static, set as though it were a person sitting on a tatami mat and looking out at eye-level from that vantage point as a sort of voyeur.

Not that anything risque ever goes on here. Not even close. It’s about how familial generations interact, disappoint each other, swallow their hurts, love each other, deal with the mundane frustrations of life as well as the large, absorb tragedy, and keep on going. About how we are all alone and separate and yet not alone at all, although we might feel lonely.

The movie, although intensely Japanese (and Japanese of the postwar era, at that), is also universal. We are all members of families. We are all subject to the passage of time as it takes us along and then ultimately away. Most of us are not as successful, as happy, as whatever it was we thought we’d be when looking at life and the world through the eyes of a child. And most of us go on and manage to extract quite a bit of joy from the whole thing.

Ozu was interested in families, but he never married. He lived with his elderly mother, who predeceased him by only two years, and is buried with her in a shared grave marked with only the character mu (“nothingness”).

Ozu’s leading lady, the luminously lovely Setsuko Hara, also never married. She retired abruptly from film at the age of 43 only a short time after Ozu’s death, to live the rest of her life in seclusion with her sister. Hara (not her real name) is still alive at 93, but has never given an interview or surfaced long enough for the press to get even a photo.

A scene with Hara, who was age 33 here:

You’re heard of head cheese and toe cheese?

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, now we have human cheese.

I kid you not. Read at your own peril; don’t say I didn’t warn you.

To counter all of that, I have a question for you: do you like fruitcake? Now, some would consider it an a par with human cheese, but I am not one of them. I happen to like it, although I try to stay away because of its extreme caloric density, a trait it shares with pecan pie as the sort of neutron star of the calorie world.

If you do like fruitcake—or know someone who does—I hear tell this is a good example of the genre. Although it’s not a bargain price, a little goes a long way.

And I might as well use this opportunity to segue into a reminder to please use the neo-neocon portal for your holiday Amazon orders. Thank you all!

The public…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is experiencing political whiplash.

In reality, I think the public is disillusioned with both parties.

For those of you who rejoice at the “throw the bums out” mentality, I offer some cautionary words, taken from an earlier post of mine.

The following is an excerpt from Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free. The book, first published in 1955, is an exploration of Germans’ attitudes in the period leading up to WWII and including the war and its immediate aftermath. It features interviews with ten “typical” Germans, conducted a couple of years after the war’s end, and offers extraordinary and often relevant insights into how it was that Hitler came to power and stayed there so long.

Here is my general discussion of the book and its author, who was a man of the left. To understand the following excerpt, it is helpful to know that for the purposes of the book, Mayer refers to the ten interviewees as his “friends”:

National Socialism was a repulsion of my friends against parliamentary politics, parliamentary debate, parliamentary government—against all the higgling and the haggling of the parties and the splinter parties, their coalitions, their confusions, and their conniving. It was the final fruit of the common man’s repudiation of “the rascals.” Its motif was “throw them all out.” My friends, in the 1920’s, were like spectators at a wrestling match who suspect that beneath all the grunts and groans, the struggle and the sweat, the match is “fixed,” that the performers are only pretending to put on a fight. The scandals that rocked the country, as one party or cabal “exposed” another, dismayed and then disgusted my friends…

While the ship of the German State was being shivered, the officers, who alone had life preservers, disputed their prerogatives on the bridge. My friends observed that none of the non-Communist, non-Nazi leaders objected to the 35,000 Reichsmark salaries of the cabinet ministers, only the Communists and the Nazis objected. And the bitterest single disappointment of Nazism…was the fact that Hitler had promised that no official would get more than 1,000 Reichsmarks a month and did not keep his promise.

My friends wanted Germany purified. They wanted it purified of the politicians, of all the politicians. They wanted a representative leader in place of unrepresentative representatives. And Hitler, the pure man, the antipolitician, was the man, untainted by “politics,” which was only a cloak for corruption…Against “the whole pack,” “the whole kaboodle,” “the whole business,” against all the parliamentary parties, my friends evoked Hitlerism, and Hitlerism overthrew them all…

This was the Bewegung, the movement, that restored my friends and bewitched them. Those Germans who saw it all at the beginning—there were not very many; there never are, I suppose, anywhere—called Hitler the Rattenfé¤nger, the “ratcatcher.” Every American child has read The Pied-Piper of Hamlin. Every German child has read it, too. In German its title is Der Rattenfé¤nger von Hameln

California doctors don’t ♥ Obamacare

The New Neo Posted on by

California may have one of the better state Obamacare websites, but it sure doesn’t seem to have one of the better rates of reimbursement for doctors. And that may have big consequences:

An estimated seven out of every 10 physicians in deep-blue California are rebelling against the state’s Obamacare health insurance exchange and won’t participate, the head of the state’s largest medical association said…

California offers one of the lowest government reimbursement rates in the country — 30 percent lower than federal Medicare payments. And reimbursement rates for some procedures are even lower.

In other states, Medicare pays doctors $76 for return-office visits. But in California, Medi-Cal’s reimbursement is $24, according to Dr. Theodore M. Mazer, a San Diego ear, nose and throat doctor.

In other states, doctors receive between $500 to $700 to perform a tonsillectomy. In California, they get $160, Mazer added.

Only in September did insurance companies disclose that their rates would be pegged to California’s Medicaid plan, called Medi-Cal. That’s driven many doctors to just say no.

They’re also pointing out that Covered California’s website lists many doctors as participants when they aren’t.

“Some physicians have been put in the network and they were included basically without their permission,” Lisa Folberg said. She is a CMA’s vice president of medical and regulatory Policy.

As I’ve said before, the websites are turning out to be somewhat of a Potemkin village: a facade of something rather than the real thing. California seems to be a particularly egregious case, and it’s an important one because it is one of the most populous (and liberal, I might add) states in the union. If California fails to enroll a lot of people, it can’t end up very good for Obamacare. And if California does end up enrolling a lot of people and there are far too few doctors to serve them, it can’t end up very good for Obamacare.

I also wonder whether putting those doctors on the website as network participants when they are not was in fact an accident, or whether it’s a form of mild coercion that will soon become not-so-mild.

[NOTE: Regarding the title of this post—now that I’ve learned how to use HTML to make a heart, I seem to be doing quite a bit of it.]

72nd anniversary of Pearl Harbor

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is an updated repeat of a previous post.]

Today is the seventy-second anniversary of the December 7, 1941 Pearl Harbor attack. The generation that reacted to it by mobilizing and fighting World War II is on its last legs. But they were the ones we still call “the Greatest.”

I was reminded of this while watching one of those Oliver North “War Stories” TV shows, about Pearl Harbor. It featured some of the elderly participants reminiscing about that long ago day. Before each one spoke, there was a photograph of him back in 1941: young, vibrant, handsome, full of life. Now they were ancient, and most only vaguely resembled their former selves. But they still transmitted great moral strength and a kind of Gary-Cooperesque stoicism and understated bravery as they told their stories.

A couple of facts: it’s become fashionable to believe that FDR knew about the attack in advance and let it happen anyway. But those 12/7-truthers are almost undoubtedly wrong. Roosevelt wanted to get us into the war, and he knew a Japanese attack was coming at some point, and informed his generals to that effect, but he knew none of the particulars in advance.

This idea of a government in cahoots with the enemy, willing to let innocent Americans die, keeps coming up again and again. A certain not insignificant segment of the population appears to favor such conspiracy theories, probably because we don’t like feeling vulnerable to sudden attack. We’d rather think Daddy in the White House could have stopped it but chose not to—that makes him powerful but amoral, rather than powerless to protect us.

Here’s a post I published fiver years ago on Pearl Harbor Day. It focuses on FDR’s famous speech afterward, and the will and resolve he amply demonstrated. Will and resolve in war remain extremely relevant these days, in Afghanistan (at least Obama hasn’t made any references yet today to “the bomb that fell on Pearl Harbor,” his gaffe from July, 2008).

Here is just a little bit of Roosevelt’s post-Pearl Harbor speech, in case we need reminding of what American resolve used to sound like:

”¦No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

Here’s the speech itself:

The memorable phrase that began FDR’s address, “a date which will live in infamy,” wasn’t in Roosevelt’s earlier draft. It reads “a date which will live in world history.” That sounds like a high school essay; Roosevelt crossed out “world history” and added “infamy” in his own hand. A wise choice.

All presidents lie

The New Neo Posted on by

I suppose most of them—or at least many of them—do.

About sex.

About any number of things–usually minor things, or self-serving face-saving things when caught in error, or about things like smoking marijuana.

They also make errors: Bush on WMDs would be a good example, or Bush I’s promise not to raise taxes.

But I can think of no president who has lied in the way Obama has: about the fundamentals of who he is politically. About his plans for the United States. About the most basic details of a huge program he’s promoting, knowing he’s lying even as he’s promoting it.

That’s why I get so angry when I hear Obama supporters excusing him by saying “all presidents lie.” Not like Obama, they don’t.

Not to mention that long, long ago, in that time of hope and change and dewy-eyed voter optimism known as 2008, Obama was considered by his supporters to be someone who was above all that. Now they are reduced to shrugging their shoulders cynically and saying he’s no worse than all the others.

But actually, he is. Much worse. All lies are not created equal.

Whose work is this?

The New Neo Posted on by

Who was the artist, and when?:

durerPillows

It’s a drawing by Albrecht Dé¼rer, made in 1493 when he was 22 years old. It seems remarkably contemporary to me, considering. I guess pillows haven’t changed all that much—except for the invention of Memory Foam.

I don’t much care for memory foam. Sometimes it seems too hard and heavy; just not right. I prefer a pillow I can pummel and fold and wrestle with.

Here’s one of my very favorite (and timeless) Dé¼rer works. It is hyper-realistic, but unlike some art of that type it isn’t sterile. It conveys the character of a living, breathing animal:

DurerHare

Oh boy, now we have to worry about…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the destruction of the human race by artificial intelligence:

In 267 brisk pages, Barrat lays out just how the artificial intelligence (AI) that companies like Google and governments like our own are racing to perfect could — indeed, likely will — advance to the point where it will literally destroy all human life on Earth. Not put it out of work. Not meld with it in a utopian fusion. Destroy it…

ASI is unlikely to exterminate us in a bout of Terminator-esque malevolence, but simply as a byproduct of its very existence. Computers, like humans, need energy and in a competition for resources, ASI would no more seek to preserve our access to vital resources then we worry about where an ant’s next meal will come from. We cannot assume ASI empathy, Barrat writes, nor can we assume that whatever moral strictures we program in will be adhered too. If we do achieve ASI, we will be in completely unknown territory.

The theme of countless science fiction plots, come to life (or death)? Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus? Those of you with more scientific acumen than I can read the article and decide for yourself whether such a scenario is likely. Quite a few of the article’s commenters are skeptical.

RIP Nelson Mandela

The New Neo Posted on by

Nelson Mandela has died at the age of 95, and the inevitable articles have appeared summarizing his life and accomplishments. Some laud him as a saint, or at the very least, saintly. Others use the occasion to make political points of various kinds.

Mandela was a complex figure whose long life encompassed many changes and some contradictions and flaws. For example, he was an advocate of violence in his youth, and if not a Communist certainly a Communist sympathizer (a buddy of Castro) and a socialist. He was pro-Palestinian and pro-Arafat.

But he was a great man and turned out to be a surprising one, given his earlier history. When Mandela emerged from prison into a changed world and South African leadership, he decided to go a different way than the rest of the new black leaders of Africa:

In the half century since white colonial rule ended in Africa, leaders in country after country have promised freedom and democracy only to become corrupt dictators, often unleashing killing fields of violence. Uganda’s Idi Amin. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. The list is long.

Mandela had more reason than most to follow this very human path of vanity and racial revenge: he spent 27 years in white-run prisons, many in solitary confinement, many doing hard labor. But Mandela responded by doing the opposite, the unexpected. He became the anti-dictator. He became, in his own lifetime, a history-changing figure with powerful moral authority like India’s Mahatma Gandhi or Burma’s Aung San Suu-Kyi…

…[W]hen he was finally freed [from prison] in 1990, he worked with white President F.W. de Klerk to keep whites from fleeing, to prevent a wave of racial violence…[W]hen Mandela won the first democratic elections in 1994, he appointed de Klerk his deputy and kept many whites in the government, the exact opposite of the cruel, kick-them-out revenge others wanted…[H]e established Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, offering amnesty for the truth…[H]e used sports to promote reconciliation, encouraging blacks to support the once-hated Springboks, South Africa’s white rugby team…[A]fter just one term as president, he stepped down.

That last sentence is especially telling: he did not consolidate and extend his personal power in the way of so many dictators. Perhaps something about his 27 years of prison acted as a crucible to allow him to emerge a better and wiser person than when he went in. But there was nothing inevitable about that result, and it speaks to Mandela’s own strength of character that it happened that way.

What will happen to South Africa now? It may go down the dreadful path of some of its neighbors. But if it does not, it will be no small thanks to Nelson Mandela.

RIP.

This may make people think twice before they steal a truck

The New Neo Posted on by

I guess you never know what’s in it.

A nightmare:

Federal police and soldiers formed a cordon of several hundred yards around the highly radioactive container of cobalt-60, stolen earlier in the week in a carjacking as the material was being moved from a public hospital in the border town of Tijuana to a storage facility in central Mexico, news reports said.

The carjackers, who set off international alarm bells by absconding with the material, most likely had no idea what they were stealing and will probably die soon from exposure, Mexican authorities said at the end of a brief national scare.

The material had been in a Volkswagon truck that was equipped with a crane. The drivers had been waiting at a gas station until the facility to which they were delivering the material would be opening, when they were jumped and beaten by two men who then stole the truck. Speculation is that the thieves were interested in the crane, but their curiosity about the box most likely will do them in:

The cobalt-60 was found, removed from its casing, in a rural area…Jimenez said he suspected that curiosity got the better of the thieves, and they opened the box…

“The people who handled it will have severe problems with radiation,” he said. “They will, without a doubt, die.”