Month: September 2012

Jackson Landers investigates why chicken is such a pervasive taste across various meats:

Looking back … on the evolutionary tree, modern reptiles are related to chickens through a group of animals known as diapsids, which originated around 300 million years ago. Modern snakes and lizards are both descended from the diapsids—and as it happens, I have had the pleasure of eating a nice assortment of them: black spiny-tailed iguanas, green iguanas, and various snakes. What all of them had in common was a taste and a color after cooking that was like chicken, coupled with a texture reminiscent of crab meat. You wouldn’t mistake the texture of snake for chicken, but run it through a meat-grinder, and you wouldn’t know the difference. Another group of animals related to diapsids are the testudines: turtles and tortoises. Their exact evolutionary origins are murky, but what’s clear is that they taste like chicken.

(Photo by Flickr user etee)

As a first generation immigrant, Parul Sehgal writes about the way books provide an entry point into a new culture:

"All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery," wrote George Orwell in his essay "Why I Write." Joan Didion took it a step further in an essay with same title. She argued that very act of "setting words on paper" is "an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space. Both establish as the reader as passive, even as the victim. Both are wrong.

Some of us read rapaciously and with mysterious agendas of our own. And I’d hazard that the more we—or our communities—have been disenfranchised or humiliated, the harder we’ll read when we come to books. Because we’re not just reading, are we? We’re spying. We’re reading ourselves into societies and narratives that have excluded us. We’re trying to get inside your head.

Is when you're still up at 2 in the morning, alone in an empty apartment on a mattress, half-empty coke zero bottles scattered around the room, and sneakers inches away from your face that are beginning to smell like Chinese food, and you click on Drudge and you get that photo lay-out he has right now. Update from a reader with a screenshot:

I'm jet lagged from a return trip from China, so I've been having trouble sleeping. I just rolled over at 5am to check the Dish, opened Drudge as suggested, and and immediately burst out laughing. Thanks for the tip from this insomniac:

Today on the Dish, Andrew detailed why drone attacks aren't part of a "just war," analyzed Romney's late-in-the-game image reversal, and broke down election odds. He then took on the "intelligence briefing" smear and live-chatted about his latest cover story on Obama. Greenwald and readers reacted to Andrew's Obama-as-Reagan argument, Stan Collender laid out Boehner's dilemma, and Nyhan and Sprung debated whether the GOP will come to the table. Poll-doubting gained momentum, Nate Silver imagined a Romney victory without Ohio and Bob Wright wondered how that comeback line might sound.

Meanwhile, Erick Erickson blamed "elitists" for the Romney nomination, an unemployed Ohio resident reflected on the 47 percent, and Daniel McCathy asked whether the GOP was still a national party. Something fishy then emerged on Romney's taxes, Tom Tancredo endorsed pot decriminalization, Jose Antonio Vargas tried to to stamp out "illegal alien," and Bill Bishop examined public opinion on immigration. In the ad war, the candidates churned out more of the same while MoveOn.org encouraged DIY ads. 

Looking globally, David Kenner exposed torture in Syria, Eli Lake questioned what the White House knew about Libya and FOTD here. The Bible neglected to hate on gays, stars outnumbered sand grains, Christopher Mims deconstructed Facebook's emerging market strategy, and a professor noted who will foot the bill for current law students. Terror tickled, readers chimed in on whom weddings are really for and Dan Baer most certainly was not an interior designer. Dina Martina addressed "the monster that is pinkeye," Louis CK conquered the entertainment industry and J.K. Rowling shed light on the sex-around-unicorns taboo. MHB here and VFYW here.

– G.G.

(Photo by Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images.)

Robert Krulwich solves the eternal quandry with help from David Blatner's forthcoming book, Spectrums: Our Mind-Boggling Universe, from Infinitesmal to Infinity:

They said, if you assume a grain of sand has an average size and you calculate how many grains are in a teaspoon and then multiply by all the beaches and deserts in the world, the Earth has roughly (and we're speaking very roughly here) 7.5 x 10¹⁸ grains of sand, or seven quintillion, five hundred quadrillion grains. That's a lot of grains. 

But if you got a Hubble telescope and counted all the "distant galaxies, faint stars, red dwarfs, everything we've ever recorded in the sky" you'd end up with  "70 thousand million, million, million stars in the observable universe (a 2003 estimate), so that we've got multiple stars for every grain of sand — which means, sorry, grains, you are nowhere near as numerous as the stars."

(Photo: Blue Straggler Stars in Globular Cluster M53 by ESA/Hubble via NASA)

Erick Erickson points his finger at "elitists":

There are a lot of elitist Republicans who have spent several years telling us Mitt Romney was the only electable Republican. Because the opinion makers and news media these elitists hang out with have concluded Romney will not win, the elitists are in full on panic mode. They conspired to shut out others, tear down others, and prop up Romney with the electability argument. He is now not winning against the second coming of Jimmy Carter.

Friedersdorf notes Erickson's amnesia: 

Whether considered judgment or dishonest hackery explained their 2007 praise for Romney, it is that very praise that won him considerable support in the rank-and-file and next-in-line status in the GOP. It isn't surprising that some of these figures are trying to assign blame elsewhere as the possibility of a Romney loss sends waves of fear through the right, but they're as responsible for putting Romney in this position as anyone, and certainly more responsible than the center-right pundits on whom they try to blame everything that goes wrong in the Republican Party.

Larison makes related points. Douthat's view:

[I]t’s not the fault of the "DC-Manhattan elite" that the Tea Party rallied briefly around wannabe cable-news personalities Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain, or that Rick Perry made Pawlenty look like Cicero, or that the voters of South Carolina decided to give Newt Gingrich an extra two weeks in the spotlight instead of rallying around the strongest remaining not-Romney candidate. Indeed, given how lukewarm the pundits and donors were to Romney’s candidacy all along, perhaps Republican populists need to look in the mirror, and recognize that the lackluster performance of all the Tea Party candidates in what was supposed to be the Tea Party’s year might say more about that movement’s limitations than about the machinations of its enemies.

David Kenner goes over a new report detailing the torture of children by the Assad regime:

Instead of the bland political jargon of most reports on the Syrian crisis, the Save the Children report is composed of roughly two dozen firsthand accounts of those who had witnessed, or been the victim, of torture. "I was tortured with electricity," said 24-year old Mohamad. "The children were too — I saw this. We were in the same jail. The guards didn't hesitate — they used electricity on their hands, their legs, their backs, their genitals. They would beat the children until they bled. Many died."

He highlights this account:

"I knew a boy called Ala'a. He was only six years old. He didn't understand what was happening. I'd say that six-year-old boy was tortured more than anyone else in the room. He wasn't given food or water for three days, and he was so weak he used to faint all the time. He was beaten regularly. I watched him die. He only survived for three days and then he simply died. He was terrified all the time. They treated his body as though he was a dog."

Kenner also notes the incidents of torture are likely part of the reason the rebellion hasn't lost its mettle. But Assad's forces are not the only ones torturing - Ghaith Abdul-Ahad reports that in Aleppo, as areas of the city constantly change hands, everyone is at risk when happening upon fighters from either side of the conflict. Abdul-Ahad passes along one such bad-luck encounter:

First they made their suspect kneel. "Sir, sir, I made a mistake," the young man pleaded. "Please sir." His voice was quivering.

The rebels went silently to work. They didn't speak, but each seemed to know exactly what to do. They made the suspect lie on his stomach as one fighter put his foot on his spine and pulled his arms back until he screamed.

Two more knelt by his feet, pushing his lower legs between a kalashnikov and its sling and twisting the gun until it was tight around his calves. A fourth rebel pinned the young man's shoulder to the ground with his foot, placing the tip of a bayonet on the nape of man's neck.

A fifth man tore through the contents of a cabinet until he found a power cable. He sat twisting it and wrapping it in tape until it resembled a nightstick. A sixth young rebel sat with a pen and paper to take notes.

"Sir, sir, it's a mistake! I thought you were soldiers!"

 

Recently, the NYT highlighted the work of Matthew Vines, whose detailed, hour-long video attempts to dismantle Bible-based condemnations of same-sex relationships, all based on the six references to them in scripture that he then scrutinizes. He argues that the references have nothing to do with modern, loving gay couples:

"It is simply a fact that the Bible does not discuss or condemn loving, gay relationships," said Mr. Vines, eating an omelet at Tom’s Restaurant in Brooklyn the day after his church appearance. "The point is that these texts have a meaning, and the traditional reading of them is wrong. It is incorrect — biblically, historically, linguistically."

The core of his argument:

[K]ey for Mr. Vines was the realization that every instance of homosexuality in the Bible represented excess lust, gang rape or "unnatural" acts committed by heterosexual men. Portrayals — much less condemnations — of naturally gay men, for whom opposite-sex relationships are not an option, simply never appear.

"That’s huge, that argument," he said. "It’s key. It’s being made, but it needs to be made more, and more often.

Relatedly, David Sessions interviewed Gene Robinson, the first gay bishop in the Episcopal Church, who had this to say about how we read the Bible:

Religious people are always in danger of reading themselves and their preconceived notions into the texts they hold sacred. That is true for any religion, and we must always read those texts in the community of fellow believers and in light of the critique of non-believers, to ensure that we aren’t seeing and hearing what is not there. Even then it is difficult not to hear what we want to hear. Jesus did seem to prefer his family of choice over his biological family and surrounded himself with a group of men and women, 12 men of whom were selected for special tutoring, three of whom were groomed for special leadership, and one of whom was described as “the one whom Jesus loved.” That is simply descriptive of what is in the text. It is better not to be too ambitious about extrapolating from that description to conclusions about what that means. But it would be hard to construe from the text that Jesus was a big supporter of a husband-wife-and-2.2 children as the only model for a family.

But you raise a terrific point in your question. Isn’t some of the conflict over gay marriage related to the larger issue of a loss of nuclear family stability? I would answer, "Absolutely!" There is a lot of anxiety around. Have you noticed? Divorce and remarriage are common; people change jobs frequently, rather than working for one employer for a lifetime; middle-class wages have stagnated; and for the first time in American history, the next generation may not have a better life than their predecessors. Add to this the new fluidity of the family—blended families, single-parent families, same-sex-partnered families—and everything seems up for grabs. And when we’re anxious, we look for someone or something to blame. In this case, the tremendous changes occurring in American families and the anxieties that accompany those changes are sometimes blamed on gay and lesbian people and their quest for marriage equality. That’s easier than taking a hard look at the real stressors on the institution of marriage and family and trying to do something about them.

During a burial service for U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer 2 Thalia S. Ramirez, Brigadier Gen. Charles Flynn (L) presents the American flag that covered her casket to Ramirez's husband, U.S. Army Sgt. Jesse Belbeck, at Arlington National Cemetery on September 26, 2012. Ramirez died September 5 in Logar Province, Afghanistan, from injuries suffered when a OH-58D Kiowa helicopter crashed. By Win McNamee/Getty Images.

Jay Cost has jumped on the polling skeptics bandwagon:

I suspect that when the Democratic enthusiasm bump from the DNC finally settles, we are going to see the two parties sort themselves roughly in line with what they have done through history – meaning a slight edge for the Republicans, not the Democrats. That is also going to shrink Obama’s margin.

Jamelle Bouie responds:

This sounds persuasive, until you realize that it’s been nearly three weeks since the Democratic National Convention ended, and there’s no sign of diminished enthusiasm among Democrats. Indeed, despite wide speculation that Obama will have to worry about lower enthusiasm and turnout among core groups — like African Americans and Latinos — the available polling suggests that this is an overblown concern.

Elsewhere, Bouie and Bob Moser compare Republicans in 2012 to Democrats in 2004:

A cottage industry of liberal bloggers and pundits arose to explain how “biased” sampling had skewed the polls. If you weighted Republicans and Democrats correctly, they argued, then John Kerry would be ahead. But that was missing the point. Pollsters don’t weight the partisanship of the electorate in one way or another. They simply survey a large, randomly selected group of people, and report their party identification. If there are more Republicans than Democrats in a collection of samples, it’s because there are more Republicans than Democrats.

Bush won, as you might recall.

Sam Wang piles on:

I encourage you to focus away from the Presidential race. Of more practical interest are questions where the outcome is uncertain: a few Senate races (ND, IN, MT, and CT), and House control. Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS is probably making adjustments to reflect this polling reality. It’s hard to imagine them pouring much more money into the Presidential race.