Curry spices could help reduce methane gases from cows & sheep

An potentially interesting new method in battling climate change.

"Methane is a major contributor to global warming, and the slow digestive system of ruminant animals such as cows and sheep makes them a key producer of the gas," Mr Hasan explained. "What my research found was that certain spices contain properties which make this digestive process more efficient so producing less waste – in this case, methane.

"Spices have long been used safely by humans to kill bacteria and treat a variety of ailments," he added. The study looked at five curry spices – cumin, coriander, clove, turmeric and cinnamon. Each was "ground up" – as if chewed by the sheep – and added to an in-vitro solution mimicking that found in the rumen of the animal. The level of methane released by each was measured against a control.

The most effective was found to be coriander, which reduced methane production from 14 millilitres per gram of food to eight – a drop of 40 per cent. Turmeric produced a 30 per cent reduction and cumin 22 per cent.

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Investors have little faith in brokers

That they are anywhere above whale turds is amazing. The brokerage industry continues to get a free ride from Washington and will continue gauging customers for years to come. Forking over well-placed lobbyist money does pay rewards.

The industry's three biggest firms -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney and Wells Fargo Advisers -- ranked below the industry average and received some of the lowest overall satisfaction scores.

The general reputation of brokerages, meanwhile, continued to sink this year despite the rebound.

An increasing proportion of investors said they believed their investment firm was driven more by profit concerns than focused on the customer.

Read the rest of this post...

The Senate No's on Financial Reform received 35% more banking cash per senator

Quick hit on the Financial Reform Bill — Free Speech Dollars at work. From Matt Taibbi's new blog at Rolling Stone (my emphasis):

An analysis by a group called Maplight.org uncovered an interesting fact about the vote. The 38 Senators who opposed the bill in the cloture vote this afternoon received an average of $103,266 in campaign contributions from commercial banks. The 60 Senators who were yea votes took an average of $76,759.

Obviously this is just part of the puzzle, but it's worth noting. The pull Wall Street exerts on a bill like this comes via several different avenues -- campaign contributions are one, the potential for future employment (a big factor for staffers, and for retiring members like certain Democratic Party committee chairs) is another, the proximity of the lobbyist community (one staffer I know grumbled about the "literal intermarriage" factor, i.e. members married to lobbyists) is another.

It looks like the linked site, Maplight.org, is worth book-marking as well — a very useful tool. Taibbi will have a longer piece in the print edition; can't wait.

Side note: For fun, check out Taibbi's takedown of the Steinbrenner Slobituary, the wall-to-wall paean to one of America's worst bosses. The post offers a formula for calculating how long the public slobbering will go on, and contains a fast Full Taibbi on our special version of the perfect peasant. A taste:

They've got peoples' heads so turned around in this country that this ring-around-the-collar self-flagellating terror at being thought of as poor and subordinate has people reflexively worshipping their bosses, to the point where George Steinbrenner -- a workplace Caligula so stupid and self-centered that he could not be convinced George Constanza wasn't named after him -- is somehow thought of as cute and lovable.

Something spicy for a hot afternoon. Enjoy.

GP

(About the "peasant" reference: "It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board.") Read the rest of this post...

The Willie Hortonization of Barack Obama

From Ari Rabin-Havt of Media Matters Action:

A long line of inmates solemnly enters and exits a prison yard through a revolving door. As the lone black inmate reenters society, he peers into the camera with a menacing glance. He is the only inmate to do so.

The ad described above was created by George H.W. Bush's campaign as part of a broad strategy to terrify America by, as psychologist and political consultant Drew Westen explains, playing on "fears of the dangerous, lawless, violent, dark black male."

While the most infamous Willie Horton ads were created by an independent organization, it was Bush's media consultant Roger Ailes who "gleefully" told Time Magazine in August of 1988, "The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it."

1988 wasn't Ailes' first experience dividing Americans along racial lines. During a taping of the "Man in the Arena" series in 1968, the Nixon campaign stumbled on a problem when a panelist they thought was a physician turned out to be a psychiatrist. Ailes quickly figured out a solution. According to Rick Pearlstein's Nixonland, Ailes would substitute a "good, mean, Wallaceite cab-driver. Wouldn't that be great? Some guy to sit in there and say, 'Awright, Mac, what about these n***ers?'" Pearlstein added that "Nixon then could abhor the uncivility of the words, while endorsing a 'moderate' version of the opinion."

Given his history, it should be no surprise Ailes' minions at Fox News have obsessed over the discredited 18 month-old story of alleged voter intimidation by New Black Panther Party members on the day of the 2008 election. Since June 30, Fox News has spent over 8 hours of airtime and 95 segments on the story.

Read the rest of this post...

China takes over as largest consumer of power

The US owned that position for around 100 years. Wall Street Journal:

China, powered by years of rapid economic growth, is now the world's biggest energy consumer, knocking the U.S. off a perch it held for more than a century, according to new data from the International Energy Agency.

The Paris-based agency, whose forecasts are generally regarded as bellwether indicators for the energy industry, said China devoured 2,252 million tons of oil equivalent last year, or about 4% more than the U.S., which burned through 2,170 million tons of oil equivalent. The oil-equivalent metric represents all forms of energy consumed, including crude oil, nuclear, coal, natural gas and renewable sources such as hydropower.

The figures reflect, in part, how the global recession hit the U.S. more severely than China and hurt American industrial activity and energy use. Still, China's total energy consumption has clocked annual double-digit growth rates for many years, driven by the country's big industrial base. Highlighting how quickly its energy demand has increased, China's total energy consumption was just half the size of the U.S. 10 years ago.

Read the rest of this post...

Gulf water explodes in lab test

The test results were much worse than the lab expected. Even worse, people are walking on these beaches and kids playing in this water. Read the rest of this post...

Is it such a bad thing if DC 'elites' have different opinions than the average American?

With all due respect, I don't want the average American running my government. As Jon Stewart once said (and I paraphrase): I want my president to be smarter than me. I remember one poll, a few months back, showing that only 6% or so of the American people believed that the stimulus created any jobs. As CBO showed, the 94% were wrong. So I'm sure that those of us who believed the stimulus created jobs were out of step with the mainstream of American opinion. We were also right.

I want DC populated with people who are smarter than the rest of the country. Only in America do we worship at the altar of dumb (e.g., Sarah Palin), and look with distrust on those who are smarter than us. Read the rest of this post...

Right-wing nut, angry at liberals in Washington, opens fire on cops in CA. Gun nut mom talked about coming 'revolution.'

Wonder where he got his fair and balanced look at American politics?

A 45-year-old parolee, described by his mother as angry at left-wing politicians, opened fire on California Highway Patrol officers on an Oakland freeway early Sunday and was hit by return fire while wearing body armor, authorities said.

She said her son, who had been a carpenter and a cabinetmaker before his imprisonment, was angry about his unemployment and about "what's happening to our country."

Williams watched the news on television and was upset by "the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items," his mother said.

Janice Williams said she kept the guns because "eventually, I think we're going to be caught up in a revolution." But she said she had told her son many times that "he didn't have to be on the front lines."

And tell me again why people like this are permitted to own guns? Read the rest of this post...

AMERICAblog iRecommend

[bump]

To the many other AMERICAblog features, we're happy to add this new one:

AMERICAblog iRecommend

As the title suggests, AMERICAblog iRecommend is for your recommendations of exceptional books, movies, music, a good food recipe, a super vacation spot, a wonderful wine, a funny or endearing YouTube video, or even just a great park you've recently discovered. Maybe you have incorporated innovative ways to live well at less cost. Whatever you are into and have found to be particularly pleasurable or informative or entertaining or useful and would like to share with others, that's why we have created iRecommend.

Think of Billy Elliot's leap into the air in the movie's final frame, that Ohhhhh moment of experiencing something especially wonderful.

To make the thread easily searchable for people looking for interesting stuff, please make your comment a brief description of what you are recommending and if you can, add a link to more details. Additional recommends can be made in a new comment.

You will find a link to this post and its thread at the top of the middle column.

Thanks for your contributions.

~mirth Read the rest of this post...

Or maybe red-state kids believe men lived alongside dinosaurs 6000 years ago

UPDATE: One more point. Maybe the reason more Blue State kids get into good schools and good professions is that Red State kids are growing up in states where the local officials, and members of Congress, are more interested in banning gay marriage and passing tax cuts than they are in improving their local education and health care systems. Their kids are growing up at a major disadvantage as compared to smarter, healthier kids in Blue States. But at least they don't have to worry about the gays down the street as they head to work at the local Winn-Dixie, talking about how their side got screwed in the War of Northern Aggression. Priorities, people.
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Ross Douthat writes in the NYT that there's good reason for people like Glenn Beck to think that Barack Obama is a Marxist. According to Douthat, elite American colleges turn away rural white Christian kids, supposedly out of prejudice, and thus all those poor white Christian kids are marginalized.

Hmmm... maybe. First, here's Douthat:

Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.

This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.

This I believe. And sometimes it's necessary to even the balance, and other times I think it's too much. I remember applying for a job at the Congressional Research Service in 1989 (or so) and the interviewer told me that I basically didn't have a chance of getting a job because I was white. That kind of ticked me off, but I was only 25, and not the activist I am today, so I let it slide. It struck me at the time, and still does today, that such a blatant racial element in hiring was a tad overboard. I know, this is about a job instead of school, but the same issue applies: When, if ever, do we overcompensate to be diverse?

But cultural biases seem to be at work as well. Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”

This provides statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren’t racial minorities; they’re working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions. Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.

Actually, without more information, this study tells us nothing. For all we know, kids who go into ROTC might, on average, be jocks who get lower grades, and/or kids who don't participate in other extra-curricular activities, and are thus less well rounded applicants. The issue might not be ROTC per se, it might the kind of kid who goes into ROTC. There's no way to know without further data.

Now this line made me laugh:

Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.

Yes, it's liberal bias that stops conservative kids from going into philanthropy. Perhaps, or perhaps conservative kids just aren't as interested in helping people as are liberal kids. As for academia, same problem - when you grow up in a state where you're taught the earth is only 6,000 years old, perhaps you're just not as academically minded as kids from states who teach them actual science. Same problem for media - conservative kids are told that the media is a liberal bastion, which it isn't, so no wonder they don't want to work there. Also, the media is about facts. Today's conservatives aren't terribly interested in facts or the truth. If it's not FOX News' brand of yellow journalism, they don't want to have anything to do with it. It's all about self-selection.

And finally, the arts. Well, perhaps conservatives just aren't as creative as liberals. Or they find the arts too foofy. Who's to know. But perhaps, just perhaps, our kids excel at all the categories above simply because they're smarter. Considering the conservative attitude towards facts, and science, it's only a matter of time before the Texas school curriculum starts manifesting itself in poorer and poorer scholastic, and ultimately, job applicants among conservative kids.

Teach your kids that men lived alongside real dinosaurs and yes they probably won't get into Harvard. But I'll bet there's a job waiting for them as fact-checker at FOX. Read the rest of this post...

Obama to GOP: Stop trashing and dissing unemployed Americans

President Obama just delivered remarks in the Rose Garden on unemployment stating that "it's so essential to pass the unemployment extension that comes up for a vote tomorrow."

Obama had three people standing with him who have been unable to find jobs even as their unemployment benefits have been or will be exhausted. And, he noted how the Senate GOPers have changed the tradition this time:

And, for a long time, there's been a tradition under both Democratic and Republican Presidents to offer relief to the unemployed. That was certainly the case under my predecssor when Republican Senators voted several times to extend emergency unemployment benefits.

But, Obama went further and noted the hypocrisy of the GOP Senators:

And, I have to say after years of championing policies that turned a record surplus into a massive deficit, the same people who didn't have any problem spending hundreds of billions of dollars on tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans are now saying we shouldn't offer relief to middle class Americans...who really need help.

Obama also blasted the GOP talking point that people on unemployment don't want to work, "That attitude reflects a lack of faith in the American people."

Obama exposed just how craven the GOPers have been:

It's time to stop holding workers laid off in this recession hostage to Washington politics. It's time to do what's right. Not for the next elections, but for the middle class.

He asked Senators to put politics aside. Unfortunately, the current crop of Republican Senators, led by Mitch McConnell, never put politics aside. They'll sacrifice American workers who have lost their jobs -- and, then totally disrespect the unemployed by claiming they don't want to work. The President needs to keep hammering the GOPers for what they did to the economy and what they're doing now to hurt those most affected by the economic crisis.

With the addition of Senator Byrd's replacement, Carte Goodwin, the Democrats should be able to secure cloture with the votes of Maine's Snowe and Collins. Read the rest of this post...

Wash Post's series on 'A hidden world, growing beyond control'

Dana Priest and William R. Arkin from the Washington Post have written a three-part series, Top Secret America, on our nation's national security and intelligence system. The first line sets the tone:

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

This series had been creating a lot of buzz before it was even published. And, no doubt, it will create much more now. Among the findings:

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

Feel safe? One expert consulted in this series state that there's no way to tell if we're safer now.

The first installment is well worth reading. Read the rest of this post...

Report: Hiring improved last quarter

The numbers are not great but any progress is a good sign. That there is some optimism for the second half if the year is also positive news.

Economists say the U.S. recovery continued during the second quarter of this year with more businesses hiring workers and fewer cutting jobs, but the pace of growth has slowed, a new survey shows.

The National Association for Business Economics said its latest survey, released Monday, found 31 percent of businesses added workers between April and June, the highest level in three years.

And 39 percent of those surveyed say they expect to hire more workers over the next six months — the most since January 2008. Manufacturers reported the strongest increase in demand and profitability. Finance, insurance and real estate sectors saw the slowest growth.

Read the rest of this post...

Monday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

The President is going to make remarks about the economy this morning at 10:30 a.m. (Eastern). He's apparently going to encourage Congress to pass the extension of unemployment benefits. He really needs to smack the Republicans for blocking that legislation -- and smack them hard. The GOPers created the economic crisis, but now won't help those mostly affected by it. Yesterday, the NY Times had an article about a Kentucky woman who is dealing with long-term unemployment. Mitch McConnell should meet his constituent, Terri Sadler. He could learn a lot from her about the economic realities in his home state.

Secretary Clinton is on a trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan this week. There's a conference of donors in Kabul tomorrow. Donors want to know that their money is being used appropriately and corruption is being reined in. Yeah, I'm sure Karzai is right on top of that.

Elena Kagan's nomination for the Supreme Court will clear the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. Her confirmation will be on the Senate floor before the August recess.

On July 19, 1993, Bill Clinton announced the compromise policy that would be known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

What else? Read the rest of this post...

Syria bans burqas in schools

With all of the current discussions happening today, this is not where most would think a burqa ban would be put in place.

The Syrian minister of higher education has prohibited the entrance of veiled female students into universities and colleges throughout the country, news agencies reported Sunday.

Dr. Ghitath Barakat explained that the donning of face veils, which cover everything but the woman's eyes, "opposes the morals and values of the academy".


Barakat's decree followed similar ones approved by a number of European parliaments, including Belgium and France.


Reports say the minister's decision was prompted by complaints made by a number of parents, who said the women wearing the burqas – traditional dresses that cover the entire body – should be satisfied by simply adopting modest dress.

Read the rest of this post...

BP valve probably causing leakage

The concern with the latest BP attempt to stop the massive leak has been that the pressure of shutting well down could force the sea floor to rupture and create an even larger problem. Observers had been closely following the valve pressure which would indicate whether or not there was a leak elsewhere. It now sounds as though US officials were not seeing enough pressure in the valve which suggests a leak somewhere else. If the well starts leaking elsewhere that could become a substantial problem. Opening new leaks beyond the well will be difficult to shut down. After the painful start to this disaster by the US government, it is good to see them paying more attention and finally, giving orders. BBC:

BP had hoped the cap could stay in place until relief wells stop the leak for good.

But with pressure readings from within the well lower than expected, scientists had raised concerns that oil could leaking into the surrounding undersea bedrock.

And in a letter to BP chief managing director Bob Dudley, Admiral Allen said: "Given the current observations... including the detected seep a distance from the well and undetermined anomalies at the well head, monitoring of the seabed is of paramount importance...

"I direct you to provide me a written procedure for opening the choke valve as quickly as possible without damaging the well should hydrocarbon seepage near the well head be confirmed."

Read the rest of this post...