Not many people realize slaughtering horses for meat has been big business in the U.S. for generations. Yet in recent decades, public sentiment, matched by state and local laws, has risen against the practice, and in 2007 the last three U.S. horse slaughterhouses were shuttered. Since 2005, Congress has also withheld U.S. Department of Agriculture funding for horse-meat inspections to prevent new abattoirs from opening in states where horse slaughter is still legal. No federal law, though, forbids U.S. horses from being sent to slaughterhouses across the border. Which is exactly what has been happening in the two years since horse slaughter stopped here. The number killed in Canada and Mexico doubled to 49,000 in 2007 and rose to more than 72,000 last year, according to trade data.

Sending horses to slaughter in Mexico and Canada has had grisly consequences. They are hauled in crowded trailers as far as 1,000 miles from auctions and feedlots to abattoirs across the border. Many end up in unregulated slaughterhouses, where they are sometimes paralyzed with knife stabs in their backs, leaving them conscious as their throats are slit.

{ Salon | Continue reading }

related { In order to write about seal on Montreal restaurant menus, I would have to try it. }

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) is one of the most entertaining interviews going right now. 

An interview with the House Financial Services Committee chairman always makes for riveting television; you never know what will happen next. Conflict between the TV host and Frank can emerge at any moment. (…)

A review of TV transcripts of Frank interviews show a pattern — Frank apologizing (not exactly so sincerely) and then lashing out at anyone who is cutting him off.

During a May interview on CNN, while appearing with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Frank said, “I’m sorry, Michele, please don’t interrupt. I know you don’t want to hear this.”

Later in the interview, Frank said, “I’m sorry, Michele, why do you keep interrupting? I’m sorry you don’t like what I’m saying.”

In March on CBS, Frank scolded the TV host: “I’m sorry. Can I finish the sentence?”

A day earlier he’d appeared on PBS with Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.), and Frank fired away at his Financial Services colleague: “Excuse me, Scott. Please don’t interrupt.”

Some broadcasters don’t take any crap from Frank.

In a memorable 2007 interview on Fox News, Neil Cavuto asked, “Congressman, is it incumbent upon you to be so condescending, or do you want to answer my question?”

Frank countered, “You’re not going to run this like a junior high school class.”

{ The Hill | Continue reading }

In the winter of 1984, a young scientist named Steven Chu was working as the new head of the quantum electronics division at AT&T’s Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey. For months, he’d been struggling to find ways to trap atoms with light so that he could hold them in place and study them better. It was an idea he’d picked up from an older colleague, Arthur Ashkin, who had wrangled with the problem all through the 1970s before finally being told to shut the project down–which he did, until Chu came along.

Now Chu, too, had hit an impasse until, one night, a fierce snowstorm swirled through New Jersey. Everyone at Bell had left early except for Chu, who lived nearby and decided to stay a bit longer. As he watched the snow drift outside, he realized they’d been approaching the problem incorrectly: He first needed to cool the atoms, so that they were moving only as fast as ants, rather than fighter jets; only then could he predict their movements and trap them with lasers. It was a key insight, and Chu’s subsequent work on cooling atoms eventually earned him a share of the Nobel Prize in physics.

While it may sound inevitable in retrospect, big breakthroughs like that don’t come along too often. Nowadays, though, Chu is betting that they will– and must. As the U.S. energy secretary, Chu has been tasked with reshaping the country’s trillion-dollar energy economy, to reduce America’s reliance on fossil fuels and cut greenhouse-gas emissions 80 percent or more by mid-century- -essential to avoiding catastrophic climate change. It’s an enormous goal, and Chu believes the only way to achieve it is with multiple Nobel-caliber leaps in energy technology.

{ The New Republic | Continue reading }

photo { Christoph Martin Schmid }

{ Jon Berkeley’s How China Sees the World, The Economist, March 2009 | Enlarge | full story | Saul Steinberg’s View of the World from 9th Avenue, New Yorker, 1976 | Enlarge }

Is it possible that higher education might be the next bubble to burst? Some early warnings suggest that it could be.

With tuitions, fees, and room and board at dozens of colleges now reaching $50,000 a year, the ability to sustain private higher education for all but the very well-heeled is questionable. According to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, over the past 25 years, average college tuition and fees have risen by 440 percent — more than four times the rate of inflation and almost twice the rate of medical care. Patrick M. Callan, the center’s president, has warned that low-income students will find college unaffordable. (…)

Consumers who have questioned whether it is worth spending $1,000 a square foot for a home are now asking whether it is worth spending $1,000 a week to send their kids to college. There is a growing sense among the public that higher education might be overpriced and under-delivering.

{ The Chronicle of Higher Education | Continue reading }

illustration { Vanessa Prager }

Countries around the world began tightening their border and immigration controls Tuesday as the number of confirmed cases of swine flu continued to rise.

The number of deaths believed attributable to swine flu climbed to as many as 152 on Tuesday — all of them in Mexico — as news agencies reported the number of confirmed cases of infection in the United States stood at 50 after further testing at a New York City school.

Spanish Health Minister Trinidad Jiménez on Tuesday said Spain had confirmed a

second case of swine flu, in the eastern province of Valencia, but that the patient was recovering well.

Israel’s Ministry of Health on Tuesday reported the first case in the country. (…) Russia and South Korea each reported a suspected case of swine flu on Tuesday. (…)

Two people in Scotland — the first known victims of the virus in Britain — were said by hospital authorities on Tuesday to be recovering after contracting the flu while on honeymoon in Cancún, Mexico. (…)

Suspected cases have appeared in Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand, but confirmation is slow because most nations’ laboratories lack the test kit the C.D.C. is developing for the new virus.

{ NY Times | Continue reading | Swine Flu Cases Worldwide | graphic }

Hong Kong, the epicenter of a SARS outbreak six years ago, announced some of the toughest measures anywhere on Sunday in response to a swine flu outbreak in Mexico and the United States. (…)

Ever since the 2003 outbreak of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, Hong Kong has used infrared scanners to measure the facial temperatures of all arrivals at its airport and at its border crossings with mainland China.

Dr. Thomas Tsang, the controller of the Hong Kong government’s Center for Health Protection, said Sunday afternoon at a news conference that any traveler who had passed through a city with laboratory-confirmed cases and who arrived in Hong Kong with a fever and respiratory symptoms would be intercepted by officials and sent to a hospital to await testing.

“Until that test is negative, we won’t allow him out,” he said.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Pork producers question whether the term “swine flu” is appropriate, given that the new virus has not yet been isolated in samples taken from pigs in Mexico or elsewhere.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Swine influenza has killed 149 people in Mexico so far and infected many more worldwide. So how many pigs have died in the outbreak?

No more than usual.

{ Slate | Continue reading | Swine flu: What you need to know }

related { Risk communication before and during epidemics | The etymology of epidemiology and the cultural fears of worldwide disease }

more { Taking care of a sick person in your home during a flu pandemic | The “swine flu fiasco,” 1976 | Fighting swine flu with the power of design }

Geither’s brilliance has led him to change the perception of banks from being “too big to fail” into being “too big to be discussed in public.” His most impressive statement at yesterday’s Oversight Panel cross examination was that the “vast majority” of American banks are well-capitalized. He neglected to mention which financial firms are in trouble. It could be that two of the four largest banks in the US have too much trash on their balance sheets to make it through the year without large cash infusions. If anything like that is true, how well all the medium-sized banks are doing is hardly material. Since Geithner did say that only about $110 billion of the TARP was left in reserve, the water is inching toward the top of the levy. He did not refer to the new IMF data which came out just before his testimony. It said that worldwide banks were facing more severe write-offs. That fact was conveniently left outside the door.

{ Time | Continue reading }

The more I see and hear Secretary Geithner speak on financial services policy, the more I am convinced that this man has not a clue what he is doing and must therefore be acting at the instruction of others — Bob Rubin, Larry Summers and the folks at GS — IMHO.

( Chris Whalen | The Big Picture }

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told Congress Tuesday that he expects about $25 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program to be repaid by banks within the year. Both JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs have said they want to return their TARP money, and six smaller banks have already repaid theirs. Where does the returned money go?

Back into the program.

{ Slate | Continue reading }

(1) A person commits the crime of sexual abuse in the second degree [when that] if the person:

(a) Subjects another person to sexual intercourse, deviate sexual intercourse or, except as provided in ORS 163.412, penetration of the vagina, anus or penis with any object other than the penis or mouth of the actor and the victim does not consent thereto; or

(b) For the purpose of arousing or gratifying the sexual desire of the person or another person, intentionally propels any dangerous substance at a victim who does not consent thereto. (…)

(3) As used in this section, “dangerous substance” means blood, urine, semen or feces.

{ House Bill 2478 | 75th OREGON LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY–2009 Regular Session | Read more: House passes bill too gross to talk about. }

April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released.

I won’t be celebrating.

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it. (…)

Both authors were grammatical incompetents. Strunk had very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less. (…)

Some of the recommendations are vapid, like “Be clear” (how could one disagree?). Some are tautologous, like “Do not explain too much.”

{ Geoffrey Pullum | via New Yorker }

Police are hunting for vandals who chopped fiber-optic cables and killed landlines, cell phones and Internet service for tens of thousands of people in Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties.

The sabotage essentially froze operations in parts of the three counties at hospitals, stores, banks and police and fire departments that rely on 911 calls, computerized medical records, ATMs and credit and debit cards.

Ten fiber-optic cables carrying were cut at four locations in the predawn darkness. Residential and business customers quickly found that telephone service was perhaps more laced into their everyday needs than they thought. Suddenly they couldn’t draw out money, send text messages, check e-mail or Web sites, call anyone for help, or even check on friends or relatives down the road.

{ San Francisco Chronicle | Continue reading }

A two-decade surge of legalized gambling is chipping away at U.S. security and military readiness, not just the bank accounts of bettors, a comprehensive new collection of research on the hazards of gambling warns.

Casinos drain money from consumer products and services, weakening the economic engine that ultimately drives defense spending, according to the latest volume in the three-part United States International Gambling Report Series.

“We cannot maintain a strong military presence with a weak economy,” said University of Illinois professor John W. Kindt, a national gambling critic and contributing author and editor of the series. “Widespread gambling gambles with our national security by dragging down our national economic security.”

Gambling siphons money from the traditional consumer economy, where an economic “multiplier effect” triples the value of every dollar spent by creating jobs that supply goods and services, according to research compiled in the first academic collection examining gambling and its costs to society.

Russia cited the national security and military consequences of an economy weakened by gambling when it closed 2,230 casinos in 2006-07, virtually abolishing legal gambling in the former Soviet republic.

{ News Bureau/University of Illinois | Continue reading }

The naked body scanners are taking over. When we first checked in on them two years ago, the scanners, which see through clothing, were being deployed at a single airport. A few months later, they were upgraded to millimeter-wave technology, which delivered similar images with even less radiation—”10,000 times less than a cell phone transmission,” according to the Transportation Security Administration. At the time, TSA assured us that the scanners would be used only as a “voluntary alternative” to “a more invasive physical pat-down during secondary screening.” Only a few passengers, the ones selected for extra scrutiny, would face the scanners. The rest of us could walk through the metal detectors and board our planes.

Two months ago, TSA revised its position. It began testing millimeter-wave scans “in the place of the walk-through metal detector at six airports.” At these airports, everyone—not just people selected for secondary screening—would face the see-through machines. Anyone who objected would “undergo metal detector screening and a pat-down.” You might even get the “enhanced pat-down,” which includes “sensitive areas of the body that are often used by professional testers and terrorists,” such as “the breast and groin areas of females and the groin area of males.”

{ Slate | Continue reading }