Month: April 2013

Guinea pig?

Most recent scientific work looking at guinea pigs and diet mostly concerns what the animals eat (as a proxy for humans), and not having them eaten (by those same humans), but research from the 1980s finds guinea pig is good for you, with more protein and less fat than flesh from pigs, cows, sheep, or chickens. Guinea pig is also good for Mother Earth—you don’t need a Ponderosa-sized spread to raise them, and they convert their feed into edible protein twice as efficiently as a cow.

Update from a reader with insights as to why the meal isn’t more popular in American restaurants:

My father is from Peru and I’ve eaten home-cooked guinea pig while up in the Andes visiting family. Unlike what you can get away with when serving chicken, guinea pig – to taste at the very least “good” – must be cooked to order. This fact would disqualify most restaurants from serving it, I assume. It’s often pan fried whole in a chili paste/sauce in a wok-like vessel and because there is no thick portion of meat. And I would not want to eat a whole guinea pig that had been sitting under a heat lamp for three hours. It’s different with a fried chicken leg or breast, right? This is probably why (at least as of 10 years ago when I last visited) most all restaurants in Peru won’t serve it on menu.

(Image by Flickr user Erin & Camera)

A reader writes:

The idea of arms being limited to “well-regulated militias” in the Constitution, as your reader claims his father taught him, shows a complete lack of understanding of both the document and the history of its writing. The (presumably sarcastic) remark that the Court has “let any unstable jerk be a militia, and let him regulate himself” is actually the entire point of the Second Amendment. The right to bear arms was an essential right in 1787 because of the risk of Indian incursion, not as a bulwark against tyranny or a defense against foreign invasion. The concept of a “well-regulated militia” as it concerned pre-Revolutionary America actually would often have been little more than a posse of all available homesteaders organized to defend the area or march on a nearby settlement.

In this context, each individual actually does represent his own militia, because he may be the only one available to defend an isolated farm. The idea that the Founders intended weapons to be limited exclusively to organized military formations is preposterous; with few exceptions, such formal organizations did not exist. In many frontier regions, there would have been no defense available to settlers if the Amendment was read as many now propose.

This absolutely does not mean that gun control is unconstitutional, however. The inclusion of the phrase “well-regulated militias” in the Amendment was not an accident, even if it is frequently misread today.

The Founders intended weapons to be readily available to the extent that Americans would be ABLE to form a “well-regulated militia” to defend against incursion. This is the appropriate reading of the Amendment. Gun control should therefore be based, as it was in 1934 and 1994, on a determination of what constitutes a necessary weapon to enable the formation of a militia. I personally think that hunting rifles and pistols probably constitute an adequate complement of weaponry for a militia (in a country with a standing army), but others may disagree. Tragedies like Newtown should be occasions to reevaluate our definitions.

Instead people on the right defend the right to bear all weapons as a defense against Obamacare or something while people on the left, like your reader, dismiss the right to bear arms entirely on the grounds that militias don’t exist anymore.

Is the Second Amendment outdated? Probably, but I don’t see a sizable movement to repeal it anywhere. Instead of talking past each other we should be debating which types of weapons are defensive and which are not. This is what Obama has tried to do in the past few months, to his credit.

Another reader:

You published correspondence from a reader who wrote: “Well, the NRA finally found a Court that was willing to ignore the word ”militia” and the concept of “well-regulated” – overturning 230 years of jurisprudence. ” This statement is way off-base.  The NRA was not behind either of the cases that went to the Supreme Court resulting in the finding that the Second Amendment protects an individual right.

In fact, the NRA tried every imaginable approach to keep the case that eventually became Heller from going forward.  They filed a copycat suit with other plaintiffs and named additional defendants who brought much more power and influence to the opposing side.  They tried to have their suit consolidated with the original suit, with their attorney named as counsel.  They also tried to get their allies in Congress to enact legislation that would moot the case.  Only after those bringing the suit had prevailed at the appellate level (four years after the original filing) did they finally simply stay quiet while the rest of the litigation proceeded. Similarly, they did not finance or back the McDonald case that incorporated the right established in Heller to state law.

When the Heller case was decided, it brought the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence into line with the consensus of the majority of Constitutional Law scholars, including liberal Constitutional Law scholars.  Your correspondent should read the amicus brief filed by Jack Balkin of Yale Law and others – whom no one could possibly describe as anything other than liberal – in the McDonald case.

Francesca Mari zooms in on it:

Microhistory arose largely in Europe and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s in reaction not only to the top-down historical narratives common to political history but also to the increasingly quantitative ones of social history. Microhistorians argued that the generalizations of capital “H” Great Man History distorted the truth of how most individuals actually lower-case lived and therefore advocated telling the stories of what one practitioner called “the normal exception”: the interesting small player who could stand in for the average person and, as a result, offer a unique angle overlooked by elite texts and master narratives. Although at first a European phenomenon—perhaps best exemplified by Carlo Ginzburg’s 1976 The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller—microhistory also found its advocates on this side of the Atlantic: Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, for example, and Laurel Ulrich’s Pulitzer Prize–winning A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812.

Mari focuses on the work of Jill Lepore:

Although one of her essays shows how a biography won Andrew Jackson the presidency and set a presidential precedent, another shows how Thomas Paine, who motivated the American Revolution with his pamphlet Common Sense, died alone in Greenwich Village shortly after being turned away from the poll booth, his nails curled over his toes like claws. Perhaps such instructives are why Lepore doesn’t primarily write for writing’s sake in the form of finely-crafted fiction. She writes to redeem a set of truths about the past for consumption by the normal exception, an audience of ordinary lives, readers who want history that sounds like them: “Who tells the story,” Lepore says in her preface to The Story of America, “like who writes the laws and who wages the wars, is always part of that struggle”—a struggle over who’s included and who’s excluded, which is to say, over who is empowered.