Ten thousand years ago in what is now eastern Turkey, humans were settling into villages and starting to produce what humans produce best: garbage. Wild boar, omnivorous and not above scavenging, found this convenient. So the gutsiest among them stuck around the trash heaps even when people were about. Humans killed the most aggressive pigs, leaving the tamest to breed amongst themselves—and thus the domesticated pig was born.Wait, wait, wait:
But this would become a human-livestock relationship like no other, argues historian Mark Essig, whose book exploring humanity’s long relationship with swine, Lesser Beasts, is out today. While cows have always been out at pasture, pigs have historically lived right among people, roaming cities and earning themselves an often unpleasant reputation. They’ve become more than just a source of food: They’re a cultural force, a tool religions and cultures use to solidify their own identity—or attack their enemies.
At the very heart of it all is the fact that pigs eat poo. Good for them! Quite frankly, that’s a solid evolutionary move: They won’t find much competition for the stuff. It’s a bad idea, though, if you’re looking to make friends among humans. In the Near East, an area not exactly known for its expansive forests (the pig’s ancestors were used to roaming among trees digging up tubers and hoovering up acorns), early domesticated swine kept to the cities, eating feces and garbage and the occasional human corpse.
Interestingly, their traditional diet is probably why pigs are so damn smart: They can figure out how mirrors work and use them to search for food—oh, and they can play videogames. Being a grazer like a cow requires very little brain power, but being an omnivore requires real smarts to secure your next meal.
So, according to Essig, the pig’s bad habits led certain Near East cultures and religions, including Judaism, to brand it as a pariah. But then the Romans came along—and the Romans really, really liked pork. Essig attributes this to differences in religions and geography. “The Near Eastern religions tend to be focused on purity in a complex theological way that just wasn’t true of the Romans,” he says. “But the other bare fact is that with the Romans, the Italian peninsula is much wetter, so you have oak forests where the pigs can graze.” The Romans let pigs continue this foraging way of life in forests around their great city, then shipped them in to eat. Because pigs weren’t wallowing in the streets, the Romans didn’t brand them as unclean.
" While cows have always been out at pasture, pigs have historically lived right among people, roaming cities and earning themselves an often unpleasant reputation. They’ve become more than just a source of food: They’re a cultural force, a tool religions and cultures use to solidify their own identity—or attack their enemies. At the very heart of it all is the fact that pigs eat poo. Good for them! Quite frankly, that’s a solid evolutionary move: They won’t find much competition for the stuff. It’s a bad idea, though, if you’re looking to make friends among humans."Seriously? Has this writer never owned a dog? Back in that small window of time when my dog was allowed in the house, he wanted out, and when I let him back in he waited about two minutes before barfing up a giant, fresh pile of cow manure right there on my bedroom carpet. Cleaning up a bunch of dog puke and cow shit isn't something you want to do at 2:30 in the morning, especially when you are getting up for work at 6. And yet, people love dogs. Weirdly, in the West, people will eat pigs, who are smarter than dogs (and only slightly more likely than dogs to eat you if you were to be incapacitated around them), but not eat dogs. As for the religious restrictions against pork, I subscribe to the theory that deaths from trichinosis and other diseases from undercooked pork are the genesis for Jewish and Muslim folks being banned from consuming it. Dietary restrictions as religion. I guess that isn't uncommon even in the modern era. Count me as a fan of swine. I'll probably have to read this book sometime.
Home Depot Inc. co-founder Arthur Blank, having bought the Atlanta Falcons, is getting help from the city to build a $1.2 billion football stadium to replace a venue that a skeptic noted is barely older than Miley Cyrus.Are you fucking kidding me?
The billionaire said his ambition to bring another Super Bowl to town rides on replacing the Georgia Dome, which opened in 1992, with funds including $200 million in taxpayer money.
Antarctica boasts some of the largest icebergs ever recorded. In 2000, Iceberg B-15 broke free from the Ross Ice Shelf—a floating platform of ice that can be hundreds or even several thousands of feet thick. (Large icebergs are given designations so they can be tracked.) The Ross Ice Shelf is the largest ice shelf in Antarctica and is about the size of France. Remarkably, a vertical ice wall towering 50 to 100 vertical feet fronts 370 miles of the Ross Sea. The ice shelf was named for Captain James Ross Clark who first sighted the shelf on January 28, 1841. Iceberg B-15 measured twenty-two miles wide and 183 miles long, and was estimated to weigh three billion tons. At 4,200 square miles, the iceberg was eight times the size of the city of Los Angeles. I was fortunate to witness one of these behemoths on a cruise to Antarctica aboard the Explorer II—on whichI was lecturing with a friend, geologist Henry Pollack—in 2007. We sailed for hours, seemingly within reach, of a thirty-one-mile-long iceberg that had grounded itself near Clarence Island off the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Henry, who had visited Antarctica frequently over a span of eighteen years, was, like me, nonetheless awestruck by this iceberg’s grandeur. Emerging one hundred vertical feet from the sea, the immense iceberg towered above us, dwarfing our ship as we passed.While the loss of the arctic environment is a tragedy of sorts, I'm pretty sure the impact of climate change on humans will be pretty immense, and, from our perspective, will obviously be much, much worse outside of the arctic than in it (say in Bangledesh, for instance). The importance is that Antarctica and the North Pole are the canaries in the coalmine, and as McClintock points out, is already wreaking havoc on life there.
As global temperatures rise, icebergs will more often break off, or calve from, the mainland....
A warming Antarctic Peninsula riddled with icebergs has consequences that are hidden from the casual observer. The increased amount and sizes of icebergs scouring the coastal seafloor disrupt the marine communities there. Marine biologists have long known that near-grounded icebergs behave much like earth movers at construction sites, displacing tens of thousands of square yards of seafloor sediment. The exposed portion of an iceberg acts as a sail, transferring the energy of wind and current to motion, causing the berg’s base to plow through soft sediments and scrape over hard rocky bottoms. Massive iceberg scars extend for miles along coastal Antarctic seafloors, and these are devoid of seaweed, sponges, sea anemones, soft corals, sea spiders, starfish, brittle stars, and even fish. Over a period of a few years, the process ecologists refer to as community succession will kick into gear along these iceberg scars. Temporary communities of rapidly settling and fast-growing, but short-lived, seaweeds, sponges and sea squirts will give way to more stable “climax” communities comprised of more competitive seaweeds and marine invertebrates that grow slower and have longer life spans. Climax communities are ecological communities in which populations of bacteria, plants, and animals remain stable and exist in balance with each other and their environment. In the big picture, Antarctic seafloors that are subject to intermediate levels of periodic iceberg scour are checkered with short-term opportunistic and long-term stable communities and, as such, sustain higher overall diversities of species. But just as intermediate levels of iceberg disturbance may increase species diversity, too much iceberg disturbance may actually compromise this diversity. Heavily ice-scoured seafloors, like a graded construction site, can be biological deserts. Climate warming could result in an overabundance of coastal icebergs that regionally decimate near-shore seafloor communities.
Piketty is certainly right to emphasize that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the income compression that occurred in the middle of the twentieth century. It was the product of global conflict and domestic political struggles. In Europe, two World Wars and the progressive tax policies that were needed to finance them did enormous damage to the old estates and great fortunes: many rich people, after paying their income and inheritance taxes, didn’t have enough money left to replenish their capital. During the postwar era, inflation ate away at their savings. Meanwhile, labor-friendly laws enabled workers to bargain for higher wages, which raised the proportion of income that labor received. And the task of rebuilding after the wartime destruction made for the rapid expansion of G.D.P. This helped to keep the growth rate above the rate of return on capital, fending off the forces of divergence.Piketty's suggested solutions closely match what I think would be required-a much more progressive tax system, targeting income or wealth. The main criticism Cassidy has with Piketty's book is that it doesn't address the convergence of living standards between developing economies and developed ones, which Cassidy suggests in a great benefit that may justify the rising inequality in the Western economies. I think this overlooks a significant issue, which is that the inequality in developed economies is driven by the managerial and financial class using arbitrage to profit from the convergence. In other words, they are profiting massively by shifting wealth from the U.S. and European middle classes to China, India and other countries. Why do they profit from it? Because they can. Do they work for it? Hell no. We're caught in a rigged game.
In the United States, the story was less dramatic but broadly similar. The Great Depression wiped out a lot of dynastic wealth, and it also led to a policy revolution. During the nineteen-thirties and forties, Piketty reminds us, Roosevelt raised the top rate of income tax to more than ninety per cent and the tax on large estates to more than seventy per cent. The federal government set minimum wages in many industries, and it encouraged the growth of trade unions. In the decades after the war, it spent heavily on infrastructure, such as interstate highways, which boosted G.D.P. growth. Fearful of spurring public outrage, firms kept the pay of their senior executives in check. Inequality started to rise again only when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan led a conservative counter-revolution that slashed tax rates on the rich, decimated the unions, and sought to restrain the growth of government expenditures. Politics and income distribution are two sides of the same coin.
Piketty takes some well-aimed shots at economists who seek to obfuscate this reality. “In studying the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it is possible to think that the evolution of prices and wages, or incomes and wealth, obeys an autonomous economic logic having little or nothing to do with the logic of politics or culture,” he writes. “When one studies the twentieth century, however, such an illusion falls apart immediately. A quick glance at the curves describing income and wealth inequality or the capital/income ratio is enough to show that politics is ubiquitous and that economic and political changes are inextricably intertwined and must be studied together.”
That’s more than mere rhetoric. By insisting that economic laws always take shape through social norms, values, and political choices, Piketty would rescue his discipline from the aridity of abstraction and return it to the richer model of political economy that its best nineteenth-century practitioners pursued. Certainly, it’s hard not to be impressed by his history and his methodological assault on theorists who believe that economics can be reduced to a pure science.
The “multibank engine” designed by Chrysler for the M3, and used in the M4 as well. A modification of an automobile engine, the multibank engine combined five six-cylinder engines by linking them to a single driveshaft. Hyde notes that critics called the engine “the eggbeater”; it was only used in the M3 during the spring and summer of 1942, before the M3 was superseded by the M4.Via The Vault:
These photos come from a new book of photographs from Detroit’s wartime factories,Images from the Arsenal of Democracy, by historian Charles K. Hyde. The book takes its title from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Dec. 29, 1940 fireside chat, in which the president called upon Americans to support the new industrial effort to arm American allies: “We must be the great arsenal of democracy. … We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice, as we would show were we at war.”There are some other cool pictures. The M3 tank looks like it had to be the world's shittiest tank. If the WACO gliders were flying coffins, these had to be tracked coffins.
Here are some examples of cheeses named for their originating regions:On giant blocks of cheese:
…Asiago comes from the Asiago plateau in Northern ItalySeveral countries have thought highly enough of cheese to have postage stamps devoted to the varieties they have developed. And one northern Italian bank maintains 300,000 wheels of Parmesan, worth $200 million, as collateral for loans.
…Brie was birthed in the Brie region east of Paris
…Camembert is named after a village in Normandy
…Cheddar was first produced in Cheddar, Somerset County
…Gorgonzola is named after an Italian town near Naples
…Gruyère is named after a town in Switzerland
…Havarti is named after a farm north of Copenhagen
…Munster is named after a village in Alsace, France
…Roquefort is made by seven companies in and around Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, France (if a similar cheese comes from outside that area, it must be called something else, such as “blue cheese”)
…Swiss cheese originated in Switzerland’s Emmen valley, which is why it’s called Emmental or Emmentaler
Besides tradition, another reason for the “location, location, location” phenomenon in cheese has to do with the economics of terroir (from the French for “land”). The terroir factors affecting cheese flavor include vegetation, climate, animals, season of the year, altitude, soil, and microorganisms. In the U.S., one aspect of the economics is the back-to-the-land movement, which provided incentive for dairy farmers to produce artisanal cheeses with a “sense of place.” Another economic facet is the ability to sell in a far-off market. Before refrigeration and automobiles, Vermonters came to realize that a sturdy cheddar would survive the trip to the lucrative New York market better than a high-moisture cheese that aged quickly; Vermont specializes in cow’s milk cheddar to this day.
Speaking of big cheeses (literally), a Cheshire cheese weighing 1,235 pounds and using the milk of 900 cows was once sent by sleigh for 500 miles from Massachussetts to Washington, D.C., and presented to President Thomas Jefferson on January 1, 1802. Inscribed with “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God,” it was called the Mammoth Cheese due to the discovery of mammoth (now known to be mastodon) bones the year before. Cautious of accepting free gifts, Jefferson paid $200 for it and displayed it in the East Room for a year. Not to be outdone, supporters of President Andrew Jackson made a 1,400-pound cheese for him in 1837.Other questions answered include why fresh cheese curds squeak (trapped air) and whether you can make cheese from human breast milk (no). I'm a sucker for these kinds of books. I've read about cod, salt, poisons, chemical compounds and other random things. I'll probably end up reading about cheese.
But the largest cheese prior to the 20th century was a 22,000-pound cheddar made in Perth, Ontario, for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. A larger, 34,591-pound cheddar cheese measuring 141.5 feet by 61.5 feet by 51.5 feet was made for the Wisconsin Pavilion at the 1964-65 World’s Fair in New York. The current record-holder however is a 56,850-pound Cheddar made in Oregon by the Federation of American Cheese-makers in 1989.
Another beautiful shot of the northern lights over @DenaliNPS. It truly never gets old. #alaska pic.twitter.com/Grw4egJnp1
— US Dept of Interior (@Interior) February 13, 2014There's an irony I want to mention ... I write about the bringing of electricity to rural America and the role that the government played in the 1930s with the Rural Electrification Administration and very moving stories of farmers who never had electricity finally getting it. The first place in America to get electricity courtesy of FDR was out in the sticks, in Western Ohio — the 8th Congressional District, which is the district today represented by John Boehner. John Boehner — I don't want to get into a political fight here — is an archetype of "against big government," and yet the district he represents benefited hugely from big and wise government in the 1930s.That's right, he's talking about my county and my rural electric co-op:
The earliest of millions of electric cooperative poles installed with funds from the federal Rural Electrification Administration was set by Miami Rural Electric Cooperative (now Pioneer Rural Electric Cooperative) in Piqua, Ohio, on November 14 (1935).There are a number of other examples, but for some reason, rural Americans prefer the myth of self-reliance to the reality of communal support. I am afraid that idiots like Jim Jordan, Tim Huelskamp and Steve King might cause the non-rural majority of the country to take actions to remind rural areas of how dependent they really are on the rest of the country. That would not be a good thing.