On the heels of yesterday’s post about the snake-catching monopoly enjoyed by India’s Irula people, we thought we’d turn our gaze slightly east and see who runs the reptile round-ups in neighboring Bangladesh. Though the erstwhile East Pakistan has no formal caste system, its society does tend to frown on a semi-nomadic people known as the Bede, who traditionally spend several months a year living on ramshackle houseboats. The Bede steer those boats into far corners of Bangladesh’s labyrinthine river system, in search of snakes who can be used for street shows or, more profitably, as sources of precious folk medicines.
Yet the growing prevalence of modern medicines, while certainly a welcome development for Bangladesh overall, has made it ever-tougher (PDF) for Bede salesman to peddle their snake-derived wares:
Sixty-year old Mrs Sor Banu of Salipur explained, ‘When I was 15, we had plenty of work. Nowadays people are not interested in our medicines. If they see me walking with my sack of medicines, they often shout after me. Last week someone from whom I had tapped blood refused to pay me and forced me to run away. Sometimes they harass our girls’. Male customers sometimes ask Bede women to enter their houses to perform medical services, then lock the door and rape them. ‘My only son will become a petty trader. But selling our medical tools against evil eyes, indigestion, cold, fever, breast pain or rheum will not be sufficient’.
There is perhaps one small consolation for the Bede, and that’s the fact they finally were granted the right to vote last year—along with prisoners and eunuchs.
“The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.”–Vincent Van Gogh
In one of our recent posts regarding the troubled Pakistani snake-venom industry, we opined that government price controls were making the black market too appealing for Sindh Province’s snake charmers. As it turns out, a similar scenario is playing out far to the south, where India’s snake-catching Irula tribe is suspected of selling venom off the books.
For the uninitiated, the Irulas are tribals whose traditional job has been killing and skinning snakes. When this practice was outlawed in 1972, the Indian government decided to make the Irulas the nation’s official snake catchers, for the purpose of supplying the antivenin industry. (Plenty more background here.)
Alas, the government hasn’t always been efficient at gauging how much venom the Irulas need to sell to achieve economic contentment. And so when demand has been set artificially too low, the Irulas have allegedly given in to temptation to sell poison privately:
Every year, by November the society used to sell lyophilized venom powder to the tune of Rs. 90 lakh. But, this year due to delay in the issuance of orders from the wildlife authorities, the society had sold venom only to the tune of Rs. 25 lakh so far, Mr. Rajendran pointed out.
A gram of the rarest venom apparently goes for a princely $1,650 per gram, so there’s not much incentive for the Irulas to cut production merely to satisfy government orders. Such is one of the great downsides of monopolism, we reckon.
Given our recent, brain-bending encounter with the yellow fever vaccine, we’ve had a sharper eye for tales of preventive treatments gone awry. As a result, we just had to share this troubling tale of a Missouri Marine and MILVAX:
It wasn’t a bullet or roadside bomb that felled Lance Cpl. Josef Lopez three years ago, after just nine days in Iraq.
It was an injection into his arm before his Marine Corps unit left the United States.
It left Lopez in a coma, paralyzed and unable for a time to breathe on his own. He can walk now, but with a limp. He has to wear a urine bag, has short-term memory loss and must swallow 15 pills daily to control leg spasms and other ailments.
Yet the Springfield, Mo., man does not qualify for a special GI benefit of up to $100,000 for troops who suffer traumatic injuries.
Lopez suffered a rare reaction to the smallpox vaccine. The vaccine is not mandatory, but the military strongly encourages troops to take it.
Even though his medical problems would not have occurred had he not been deployed, the benefit was denied.
Just how unlucky was Lopez? According to the CDC, the odds of a serious reaction are somewhere between 14 and 52 in one million. Strangely, though, paralysis is not listed as one of the most dire side effects; we wonder whether that paralysis stemmed from Lopez’s post-vaccination treatment, during which time he was placed in an induced coma.
As for Lopez’s woes with the military bureaucracy, we instinctively side with the little guy here. Though the Pentagon seems to have plausible deniability due to the voluntary nature of the smallpox vaccination, we think there’s an irresistibly coercive element to strongly recommending the treatment. Honestly, how many deployed troops turn down the smallpox vaccine? Especially since the Pentagon is so gung-ho about insisting on the vaccine’s safety.
By stiffing Lopez, won’t the military just make other troops more wary about consenting to the vaccination? Isn’t miserliness counterproductive here?
Unlike some past movies we’ve highlighted as part of Bad Movie Friday—notably the irredeemably dreadful Hard to Ticket to Hawaii—Gleaming the Cube is actually halfway watchable, provided you’re willing to switch off your brain for 90 minutes. But even when we’re feeling truly charitable, there are two things that can’t help but irk us to our core:
1) We were sentient in the ’80s. We skated in the ’80s. Heck, we even idolized Christian Hosoi for a spell. But until this flick came out, we had never heard the term “gleaming the cube.” We still think the title stems from someone playing a practical joke on the screenwriters—sort of like Darryl Philbin convincing Michael Scott that “fleece it out” and “going Mach 5” are staples of street slang.
2) In what universe can a skateboard outrace a frickin’ motorcycle? C’mon, bad guys—accelerate down that hill.
More Gleaming the Cube action here. Not the sly introduction of the phrase “to gleam the cube,” courtesy of a character actor who’d eventually go on to bigger and better things.
In yesterday’s post on Pakistan’s troubled system of snake-venom collection, we opined that technology seemed to have changed the field little. But if we’d read the latest issue of the journal Toxicon, we wouldn’t have been so quick to make such blanket claims. Because as it turns out, a Florida cottonmouth researchers are blazing trails:
Scientists used a portable nerve stimulator to extract venom from anesthetized cottonmouths, producing more consistent extraction results and greater amounts of venom than the traditional “milking” technique.
The nerve stimulator is used in human anesthesia to measure the effect of muscle relaxants.
“It delivers a series of electric stimuli, of very low voltage and amperage, and causes no pain or tissue injury,” Heard said. “The electrodes are placed behind the eye, across the area of the venom gland. The nerve stimulator sends a current across the gland, causing reflex contraction and expulsion of the venom.”
The technique allows collection from snakes that might not otherwise give up their venom, which is an essential in the process of creating antivenins for victims of snake bite, Heard said.
“The stimulator is battery-powered and relatively inexpensive,” he said. “In addition, the anesthetic we used, known as propofol, can easily be transported.”
Yes, they have the cottonmouths on the same anesthetic that played a key role in robbing the Earth of Michael Jackson’s immense talents. Which for some strange reason makes us miss Captain Eo all the more.
For obvious reasons—primarily the abundance of English-language sources—the bulk of our First Contact series has focused on European accounts of “New World” civilizations. Today’s entry breaks that trend, however, by harkening back to a more intramural culture clash: that between the Romans and the Germans, during the waning years of the Roman Republic.
The eyewitness here is none other than Julius Caesar, who’s accomplishments as a writer are usually overshadowed by his military and political triumphs. But while no great wordsmith, Caesar was assiduous about recording his exploits north of the Alps. And though his Comentarii de Bello Gallico is mostly concerned with the tribes of present-day France, there is a passing mention of the more eastern “barbarians”—a people that Caesar would have encountered only as small clusters of settlers near the Rhine.
What seems to have struck the future dictator most about these Germans is not their martial prowess, but rather their disdain for any notion of private property—a disdain which, Caesar notes, may have contributed to the Germans’ tribal cohesion:
No one owns a particular piece of land, with fixed limits, but each year the magistrates and the chiefs assign to the clans and the bands of kinsmen who have assembled together as much land as they think proper, and in whatever place they desire, and the next year compel them to move to some other place. They give many reasons for this custom—that the people may not lose their zeal for war through habits established by prolonged attention to the cultivation of the soil; that they may not be eager to acquire large possessions, and that the stronger may not drive the weaker from their property; that they may not build too carefully, in order to avoid cold and heat; that the love of money may not spring up, from which arise quarrels and dissensions; and, finally, that the common people may live in contentment, since each person sees that his wealth is kept equal to that of the most powerful.
Could it be that Karl Marx was inspired by his nomadic ancestors’ views on property?
We’re solo parenting Microkhan Jr. this week, which means we have to put off lots of tasks ’til after his bedtime—specifically catching up on the day’s e-mail deluge. That’s precisely what we were doing last night, cold Ballantine in hand, when William Bell’s classic “I Forgot to Be Your Lover” came wafting across Radio Nova. It had been so long since we heard it—we lost our Stax Records box set during our last move, and with it a lot of our favorite Bell nuggets. “I Forgot to Be Your Lover” is perhaps the song we missed most, though the lyrics can be painful. The one that tugs on our heartstrings every time:
Oh, I been working for you
Doing all I can but
Work all the time
Didn’t make me a man
The YouTube poster mentions that the song was most recently sampled by Ludacris, but we’ll always remember it as the basis for the hook in Killah Priest’s meditative, True Master-produced “One Step.”
As if the Pakistani government wasn’t already catching enough flak for its inefficacy, now some learned herpetologists are criticizing its lackluster approach to rounding up poisonous snakes:
A report jointly prepared by Snake Research Academy (SRA) and University of Sindh, Jamshoro (SUJ) has slammed the snake catching methodology of the National Institute of Health Sciences (NIHS), Islamabad.
The authors of the report, Prof. Dr Ghulam Sarwar Gachal of SUJ and Snake Research Academy (SRA) Project Manager Tanveer Ahmed Shaikh, had both recently undertaken a visit to NIHS to observe the methodology of extracting venom employed, and to initiate interaction and exchange expertise to save snake species. However, they returned with unfavorable impressions.
They said that Sindh contributes 2,000 venomous snakes annually to fulfill the entire NIHS requirement of extract venom to manufacture anti-snake bite vaccines (ASVs). To achieve this purpose, NIHS had hired traditional snake charmers to catch poisonous reptiles from the wild and hand it over to them. The two researchers however maintained that this was an unscientific methodology for extracting venom.
The report said that when the researchers observed NIHS officials extracting venom, they realised that the methodology being employed was traditional and unscientific. The researchers alleged that NIHS personnel extract venom from the snakes after every 15 days, and continue doing so till the reptile dies.
It is worth remembering here that NIHS produces between 30,000 and 32,000 vaccines annually. Each vaccine contains 10ml, and is sold at a fixed price of Rs700.
The report warned that if the NIHS continues to apply its method of catching poisonous snakes and killing them for extracting venom, Sindh will be deprived of its natural species within three years.
Actually, our vague familiarity with the world of antivenin production makes us question the Pakistani researchers’ critique. Venom extraction has been altered little by the advent of new technology; even in the most advanced settings, the process still basically consists of manually forcing fangs onto a glass dish. (Video here.) On top of that, the 15-day waiting period is within the guidelines employed by American zoos, who recommend that venom be allowed to accumulate for between 14 and 30 days.
As merely hinted at later in the article, the problem actually seems to be the black market. Those snake charmers are apparently abusing their licenses and siphoning off venom for sale to health-care institutions (or individual victims) priced out of the government-run antivenin bank. American proponents of drug reform, take note—we foresee a similar scenario coming to fruition should the California marijuana model go nationwide. Regulation (particularly price control and taxation) is a tricky beast when the product in question can be manufactured for a relative pittance.
It’s basically impossible not to be bowled over by the abundance of languages in Papua New Guinea. Though the nation’s population clocks in at a shade less than six million souls, those residents speak a mind-boggling 830 languages. That’s enough to make PNG the most polyglot country on Earth, beating out runner-up Indonesia by 108 languages. (Nigeria takes third place, with a measly 521 living tongues; the United States has 364.)
We naturally assumed that this abundance of languages was due to PNG’s history of physical isolation between tribes. But the authors of Vanishing Voices dismiss that, pointing out that trade between neighboring tribes dates back centuries, as does multilingualism. They instead suggest a different theory, one that takes into account the way the power dynamics of village society, in which “Big Men” hold sway:
Language is, to adopt the terminology of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, a form of symbolic capital that may be as valuable in its way as are concrete goods. The traditional New Guinea situation makes sense from this perspective. Larger languages were available to be learned at minimal costs. Indeed, many people knew them already. However people were concerned to maximize their social capital within their immediate surroundings. It was, after all, the local group’s territory, and the local group within which one’s family had ot exist. There was a great incentive to maintain, alongside any regional languages used for trade, a form of speech peculiar to one’s local group which was used within it and which correlated with a commitment to it. As William Foley puts it, vernaculars were the “indispensable badge of a community’s unique identity.” This factor may well be enough to account for the maintenance of so many languages.
Plenty more on the ongoing efforts to document PNG’s linguistic traditions here; the richly detailed language maps are particularly striking.
We’ve always had a shaky handle on the definition of “feedback loop,” but we think this might qualify as a case in point. Yesterday, we noticed a fair bit of traffic coming Microkhan’s way thanks to a fantastic Ask MetaFilter thread slugged “Who are the best athletes nobody has heard of?” We were honored that a couple of our kabaddi paeans got shouted-out. Yet what truly brought a broad smile to our lips was the mention of a sportsman heretofore unknown ’round these parts: the great Bart Helmholt, master of the Frisian art of Fierljeppen. See above for the man at his best; perhaps the modern pentathlon powers-that-be should consider adding Fieljeppen to their line-up, instead of opting for those lasers. We’d certainly pay a mint to see the modern hexathon.
In the course of conducting some morning research on chimpanzee cannibalism, we found ourselves absorbed in a 2006 paper that compared the aggressive tendencies of chimps and humans. (A PDF can be downloaded by clicking here.) As it turns out, humans and chimps are equally adept that cold-blooded murder, but our primate brethren are far bigger fans of non-lethal violence:
First, we assembled data on lethal aggression from long-term studies of nine communities of chimpanzees living in five populations. We calculated rates of death from intraspecific aggression both within and between communities. Variation among communities in mortality rates from aggression was high, and rates of death from intercommunity and intracommunity aggression were not correlated. Estimates for average rates of lethal violence for chimpanzees proved to be similar to average rates for subsistence societies of hunter–gatherers and farmers. Second, we compared rates of non-lethal physical aggression for two populations of chimpanzees and one population of recently settled hunter–gatherers. Chimpanzees had rates of aggression between two and three orders of magnitude higher than humans.
That last claim, in particular, is a gross oversimplification. For starters, as the researchers admit, their mere presence as observers of chimpanzee communities may have reduced the normal amount of violence. On top of that, as the chart above demonstrates, the gap between chimp and human aggression was particularly glaring in some instances. The Arnhem Land people, an Australian aboriginal group, experienced a rate of non-lethal aggression that was 384 times less than the chimp median. If anything, the overall human rate seems to have been knocked askew by some potentially dodgy guesswork regarding violence rates among tribes such as the Kato of 1840s California.
Our takeaway here is that chimps engage in more non-lethal violence simply because they’re yet to develop socially acceptable—and less destructive—outlets for the innate aggressive tendencies they share with our species. Perhaps mankind’s genius wasn’t necessarily the invention of agriculture, then, but rather violent diversions that, while certainly dangerous to the actors directly involved, actually served to reduce population-wide attacks.
Hey, we’re sure it was no fun to be a gladiator, especially a retiarii doomed to fail. But better those few unlucky “athletes” be sacrificed than have every Roman clubbing his neighbor over the head. And once we figured out that non-lethal spectacles could suffice, our species was really rolling.
Much more on chimp aggression here, via Jane Goodall’s marvelous (and chilling) recounting of the Gombe “Four Year War.”
A valued Friend of Microkhan informs us that GMC is running a new crop of ads that refer to the Burma Road, where the company’s trucks did fine work plowing through the monsoon muck. This campaign obviously harkens back to one from the thick of World War II, when GMC touted its vehicles’ performance in the China-Burma-India Theater of operations.
And GMC was not alone in using the so-called Forgotten Theater to help hawk its wartime wares. Check out this excellent collection of ads keying off our troops’ exploits in South Asia. Aside from the great Coca-Cola ad above, we’re particularly fond of this Champion Spark Plugs bit. Who knew spark plugs could shoot red laser beams?
Our post about Teddy Roosevelt’s health-care reform attracted a fair number of responses, in particular the ending snippet about the Progressive Party’s opposition to privately contracted prison labor. As one commenter pointed out, this opposition wasn’t borne out of genuine concern over the practice’s moral shortcomings, but rather Big Labor griping over the downward pressure on wages. After all, why would a company hire unionized workers if it could enlist the services of inmates who needn’t be paid (at least directly)?
As it turns out, Roosevelt took an interest (PDF) in this issue during his days in the New York governor’s mansion, too—he introduced legislation that would have “devised means whereby free mechanics should not be brought into competition with prison labor.” The bill may have died before passage, but its mere introduction certainly garnered Roosevelt some key labor backing for his subsequent presidential run.
Delving into this snippet of history has got us thinking about an underlying topic: how often has economic self-interest led to changes that we now view as morally just? In other words, what great movements of yore may have had their origins in mere pragmatism, but are now viewed as genuinely righteous?
The first one that popped to our minds was 19th-century abolitionism. Now don’t get us wrong—there were certainly abolitionists who motives were entirely lacking in self-interest, and who were genuinely revolted by the “peculiar institution.” (We’re looking at you, William Wilberforce.) But there’s a case to be made that much of the movement’s success is due to the support of businessmen who recognized slavery’s economic shortcomings. Such is the core thesis of Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery, which argues that many English abolitionists were more keenly interested in propping up West Indian sugar prices than freeing their fellow man. And the Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James had a similarly skeptical take on abolitionist motives:
Those who see in abolition the gradually awakening conscience of mankind should spend a few minutes asking themselves why it is man’s conscience, which had slept peacefully for so many centuries, should awake just at the time that men began to see the unprofitableness of slavery as a means of production in the West Indian colonies.
Any other nominees for moral goods that have stemmed from economic or political self-interest, at least in part?
Modern pentathlon is by far our favorite Summer Olympics sport, topping even our beloved hammer throw. There’s just something inestimably cool about an event that’s modeled after a 19th-century military mission. Plus you have to dig the fact that the fifth place finisher at the 1912 games was a 28-year-old U.S. Army lieutenant named George S. Patton. (How he got beat out by four Swedes, we’ll never understand.)
But recent years have been rough on modern pentathlon—it’s just not the draw that it once was, and it’s status as Olympic event is seemingly in peril. The sport’s tsars have done plenty to tweak the format as of late, smooshing all five events into a single day, and combining running and shooting into a biathlon-like whole. But still the young’uns are resisting the pentathlon’s charms. So what’s next? Think space carnage:
The world governing body, Union International de Pentathlon Moderne (UIPM), have commissioned a series of trials that will see lasers replace bullets on the shooting range.
They are hoping the move could appeal to a younger generation of fans and will also help circumnavigate problems with gun laws, especially ahead of the London 2012 Olympics.
We only see this working if those lasers are directed at fellow competitors, rather than at distant targets. After all, who among us doesn’t enjoy a good game of laser tag?
In all seriousness, we’re conflicted about this proposed change. We do love lasers, and we’d hate for modern pentathlon to disappear from the Olympic map. But we’ve got a purist streak, too, and we have to ask—at what point do these ratings-centric alterations taint the soul of the sport?
(Laser-cannon image via Classic Johnny Quest; it’s apparently a screenshot from the “Mystery of the Lizard Men” episode)
Patrick Swayze starred in perhaps the most celebrated mom movie of all time—or, at the very least, the one that defined a certain kind of mom-ism in the latter Reagan Era. But we’ll always remember him as Dalton, the philosophical, mulleted boucer with a heart of gold and fists of stone. He now follows fellow Road House alum Jeff Healy into whatever comes next. Rest in peace.
We just returned from receiving the yellow fever vaccine, with a side of polio booster. Suffice to say that the injections have knocked our mental faculties for a loop; the video above, the psychedelic trailer for Geetaa Mera Naam, provides a pretty accurate snapshot of our current state. A small price to pay, though, for eliminating any chance of suffering the fate of 19th-century Philadelphians during our forthcoming trip abroad.
No matter where you stand on the whole health-care debate, it’s tough to argue with the fact that our revamped system needs to address our appallingly high rate of infant mortality. Though the American economy is the largest in the OECD, our babies perish more frequently than the organization’s average. In fact, our national infant mortality rate is only slightly better than Lithuania’s, and it’s slightly worse than Slovakia’s. And as the chart above shows, no improvement has been made in nearly a decade—a fact in part ascribable to the paucity of pre-natal care available to the un- and under-insured.
What’s most tragic about this situation is that so little investment would be required to improve the rate. That’s because the key to reducing infant mortality at this point is merely to ratchet down the rate of exceedingly premature births—that is, births in which the infant gestated for less than 28 weeks. For a blueprint on how this might be achieved, check out this seventeen-year study of infant-mortality rates in Dane County, Wisconsin, where the longtime discrepancy between black and white infant-mortality rates vanished thanks to slightly better prenatal care:
The percentage of black women receiving adequate, adequate plus, and intermediate prenatal care (measured by expected number and timing of clinical visits using the Adequacy of Prenatal Care Utilization Index [the Kotelchuck Index]) increased from 81.6% to 85.3%. Improvement in quality of care received is suggested by an increase in maternal medical conditions recorded on the birth record from 48.9% to 59.4%, and a decrease in birth record reported obstetrical complications from 50.2% to 42.5%, coupled with substantial reductions in infant mortality for black women with reported medical conditions or obstetrical complications. The decrease in infant deaths per 1,000 live births for babies born to black mothers with previous child deaths (from 84.2 IMR [eight of 95] for 1990-2001 to zero IMR [none of 47] for 2002-2007) and to those with previous premature births (from 54.3 IMR for 1990-2001 to 8.1 IMR for 2002-2007) underscores major improvement in birth outcomes among highest-risk pregnancies.
The ultra-celebrated Ta-Nehisi Coates has lent us plenty of support over the years, so we’d like to return the favor by calling attention to his latest conquest: the vaunted pages of The New Yorker, where his killer MF Doom profile just debuted. Though to call it a mere profile is a disservice—it’s also a meditation on the essence of hip-hop and, more fundamentally, the challenges of maintaining one’s love for an art form as the years stack up. Oh, and one of the piece’s interviews was conducted in an Atlanta alley. If you only read one non-Microkhan thing between now and 2010, this should be it.
About a dozen years ago, there was a minor to-do in Kentucky over the health hazards of burgoo—specifically the possibility that the consumption of squirrel brains could lead to some variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. The state’s government thus engaged in a pointed campaign to discourage the consumption of roadkilled squirrels, the brains of which are a key component of traditional burgoo recipes.
Yet was such a campaign anti-environmental? The tide certainly seems to be turning in favor of roadkill consumption:
The first rule of sustainability is that humanity should use abundance, and there is sadly an abundance of roadkill; at one famed US junction (Highway 27 at Lake Jackson near Tallahassee, Florida), a turtle has a 98.86% chance of being squished, while on our roads the People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES) estimates that 1-2% of the national population of hedgehogs, around 15,000, is killed on roads each year. Secondly, carrion appeals to those who hate waste and, as one prolific UK roadkill consumer puts it, out of 40 carcasses found here, 20 will be edible, which may seem like good odds for something that’s free. Finally and sensationally, animal rights campaigners tend to give roadkill the green light, including Peta, which deems roadkill meat acceptable fodder, as it’s meat that hasn’t come courtesy of the “barbaric” meat industry.
Our big question upon reading this piece: who is this “prolific UK roadkill consumer” that the author cites, and how does he or she ascertain the edibility of a flattened animal?
For the second time in less than a month, we’re off to the Land of 10,000 Lakes for a brief, work-related visit. We’ll do our best to post from the road, though we may get too caught up in ironing our shirts and watching tonight’s Titans-Steelers tilt.
Oh, and if anyone can recommend a good, cheap place to eat in downtown St. Paul, please advise. No lutefisk, please.
Staying on yesterday’s Black Hawk theme, we found a major scientific curio related to the Sauk chief: an 1838 account of Black Hawk’s phrenological characteristics, published in the not-so-renowned American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany. We’re big lovers of old-time junk science, and this paper is chock full of such wrongheaded (though utterly sincere) treats. One of our favorite passages goes:
The superior-posterior part, or the back and upper portion, of the head, embraces the organs of Self-Esteem, Firmness, and Approbativeness. These organs, when large, or very large, give a great amount of character, ambition, and influence of some kind, varying according to their combination; but combined as they are in Black Hawk’s head, with very large organs of the animal propensities, they would give a warlike ambition, and a great love of independence and power.
Of course, we realize that some of our cherished scientific beliefs will be similarly lampooned 170 years hence. We wonder which ones…
As soon as President Obama invoked Theodore Roosevelt’s name last night, we started digging through the archives in search of details about the Bull Moose’s call for health-care reform. It was a tougher get than we expected, as the proposal amounts to little more than a single line in the Progressive Party’s final 1912 platform; it was evidently a late add, as the language doesn’t appear in the August version (PDF). Roosevelt’s call-by-proxy basically goes as so:
The supreme duty of the Nation is the conservation of human resources through an enlightened measure of social and industrial justice. We pledge ourselves to work unceasingly in State and Nation for…the protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance adapted to American use.
In other words, as the PolitiFact crew noted a while back, the Progressives were basically calling for a version of Social Security plus health care. At least TR’s spirit can look down from the cosmos and know that the former came to fruition.
But once we found that health-care nugget, we couldn’t help but give the entire party platform a read. What a fascinating peek into the issues that mattered to left-of-center folks back in the day—the language gives us an excellent sense of just how hard life must’ve been for those on the bottom rung of the economy. Check out this plea for:
The abolition of the convict contract labor system; substituting a system of prison production for governmental consumption only; and the application of prisoners’ earnings to the support of their dependent families.
We never really understood how big of an issue this was until we unearthed this disturbing article on the history of 19th-century penal labor. This stat sorta blew our minds:
In 1885, some 67 percent of working prisoners were employed in the private sector.
In other words, America’s evolution into the world’s business leader was greatly aided by the incarcerated. And that revelation really makes us curious to read Slavery by Another Name.
UPDATE A great post on this very topic here, via Microkhan ally Oliver Tatom.
Trust us when we say that Voodoo Funk pretty much defines the phrase “Internet essential.” If you have even a cursory interest in vintage African sounds of the ’70 and ’80s, or even just plain ol’ vinyl collecting, you owe this site many hours of your time. It’s recently introduced us to a bevy of great Nigerian and Ghanian music, via mixes like this and this. The clip above shows Voodoo Funk’s German impresario doing what he does best—digging through dusty crates in search of gems to share. Call us dirty bohemians if you will, but we think the world could use more blokes like Frank.
In response to our post below about Oklahoma’s artery-mucking official meal, one of our favorite commenters chimed in:
This reads like every last meal I ever read about while I was growing up in the South. I guess Oklahoma death row inmates can save some time ordering– “I’ll have the ‘Official,” they say.
Alas, the entire feast is not within reach for the state’s condemned men. According to oddly addictive Dead Man Eating, H-Unit inmates are limited to a $15 budget for their farewell meal. And we reckon that at least a few of the obligatory items are likely not on the cafeteria’s regular menu, from which all meals must be ordered.
Neighboring Texas, however, does not seem to have the budget restriction. Note this gargantuan meal ordered by Michael F. Rosales in May:
Six beef enchiladas with cheese and jalapenos, one bowl of rice, one bowl of beans, diced lettuce and tomato, four pieces of fried chicken with three biscuits, one bowl of mashed potatoes, one vanilla cake with vanilla icing, one double-bacon jalapeno cheeseburger with no onions and a side of fries, one pint of sherbert, two glasses of Mountain Dew and two glasses of cold milk.
One of our big hobby horses ’round here is the natural rate of divorce—that is, the theory that a certain percentage of marriages are invariably doomed, and that policymakers should realize this when crafting divorce laws. If those laws are too strict, you just get a lot of miserable couples who become a drag on the economy; conversely, if divorce is too easy, society is roiled by more instability than it really needs to endure.
We bring this concept up again in light of a passage a reader sent us last week. It’s from the autobiography of Black Hawk, the full text of which is available via Northern Illinois University. Most of the passage describes the courtship rituals of the Sauk, which are wonderfully elaborate. (The girl’s yea or nay, for example, is delivered via the blowing out of matches.) But what really struck us was this snippet regarding the Sauk’s rather liberal divorce practices:
During the first year they ascertain whether they can agree with each other, and can be happy – if not, they part, and each looks out again. If we were to live together and disagree, we should be as foolish as the whites! No indiscretion can banish a woman from her parental lodge – no difference how many children she may bring home, she is always welcome – the kettle is over the fire to feed them.
This system obviously places a large burden on parents, as they must be prepared to re-host divorced adult children. But what’s more damaging to a society’s well-being—compelling older citizens to act as safety nets for their kids, or forcing couples to stick together despite irreconcilable differences?
This gluttonous revelation made us curious as to whether there’s any correlation between the nature of a state’s official foods and its ranking in the national obesity table. Could Mississippi make its citizens healthier by adopting water with a lemon slice as its official state drink?
Also, in case you’re curious as to why New Mexico has a state cookie, the scoop is here.
For those of you residing in or near the County of Kings, please consider checking out our live appearance tonight. No, we won’t be boring you with yet another Now the Hell Will Start reading. Rather, we’ll be taking part in Adult Education, which proudly bills itself as “a useless lecture series.” Tonight’s topic is beer, and the organizers have been kind enough to invite Microkhan to wax rhapsodic on one of his most esoteric areas of expertise: the long, sordid history of Zima. We built that expertise while reporting out this 2008 Slate piece, a lengthy obituary for the Grandaddy of Clearmalt Beverages. A snippet to whet your appetite:
Zima debuted in the midst of the “clear craze” of the early 1990s, when products ranging from Crystal Pepsi to Mennen Crystal Clean deodorant sought to take advantage of a vogue for (literal) transparency. Coors, then the nation’s No. 3 beer-maker, hopped on the bandwagon by devising a simple process for making a clear brew—just filter your lowest-grade lager through charcoal (a process that strips away both color and taste), then make the liquid palatable by adding citrusy flavorings.
Miller, then one of Coors’ chief rivals, mastered this technique, too, creating Clear Beer, which failed miserably. Coors thought it knew why: the presence of the word beer on the label. Clear brews may have been beer-based, but they were bound to disappoint true hops aficionados—there was no foamy head, and the taste was sodalike rather than malty. So Coors decided to pitch its see-through drink at male consumers who didn’t love beer but fancied themselves too macho for Boone’s Farm. (Coors pointedly instructed stores to never place Zima alongside wine coolers, which male drinkers regard as effete.)
Curiousity piqued? Do you have subway access? If you answered “yes” to those questions, please consider swinging by Union Hall at 8 p.m. We’ll fill you in on lots more, as well as read impassioned pleas from Zima’s hardcore fans. Yes, they exist.
We here at Microkhan are avid fans of Robert Young Pelton’s World’s Most Dangerous Places series, in part because we never cease being amazed by the man’s utter ballsiness. (Algeria sans security in the thick of civil war? Really?) But the lure in Pelton’s work isn’t just his bravado—it’s his frankness about which travels threats are overhyped, and which should truly strike fear into a wanderer’s heart. And high atop Pelton’s list is none other than the humble minibus, the sole means of motorized transport for millions upon millions of denizens of the developing world. Such vehicles, he warns, are far more hazardous to a traveler’s health than more reviled perils such as yellow fever, thieves, or cobras. Just check out the frightening WHO statistics: 1.2 million people die each year in traffic accidents, and another 50 million are gravely injured. And the worse a nation’s roads and law enforcement are, the higher your odds of meeting a grisly end while motoring.
But what determines the lethality of a nation’s ground transport? The poorest countries are not, in fact, those with the highest traffic fatality rates, due to the fact that they have limited cars on the roads. No, the worst offenders are those nations just wealthy enough to have lots of vehicles, but poor enough that little money is spent on safety. And according to a 2006 study, things don’t get better until per-capita income exceeds $11,500 (PDF):
We argue that as a country moves through the various stages of development it can be expected that, beyond some threshold level of per capita income, increases in per capita income will tend to push down the traffic fatality rate as the rate of decline in fatalities per vehicle begins to fully offset the rising motorization rate. Regardless, for any given level of per capita income, the rate of traffic fatalities can be expected to be greater the more unequally distributed is a country’s national income both because relative inequality makes it more difficult for a society to agree on a distribution of the tax burden necessary to fund traffic safety interventions and because inequality of income causes the different segments of a society to enter the roadways in different fashions.
According to the $11,500 Rule, then, Kazakhstan must be a truly dangerous place to go a-drivin’. Can anyone confirm or deny?
Speaking of Karōshi, we’ve been feeling a might frazzled by our workload as of late—not to mention the daily stresses of tending to Microkhan Jr. as he masters his use of the word “no.” So we’re looking forward to a few days in the Massachusetts hinterlands, where a longtime pal’s getting hitched over the holiday weekend. As such, we’re checking out ’til Tuesday; enjoy the epic Bollywood clip above as a special Labor Day treat, and see you back here after a few days of alcohol and night swimming.
On the heels of yesterday’s post about the snake-catching monopoly enjoyed by India’s Irula people, we thought we’d turn our gaze slightly east and see who runs the reptile round-ups in neighboring Bangladesh. Though the erstwhile East Pakistan has no formal caste system, its society does tend to frown on a semi-nomadic people known as the Bede, who traditionally spend several months a year living on ramshackle houseboats. The Bede steer those boats into far corners of Bangladesh’s labyrinthine river system, in search of snakes who can be used for street shows or, more profitably, as sources of precious folk medicines.
In one of our recent posts regarding the troubled 
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For those of you residing in or near the County of Kings, please consider checking out our live appearance tonight. No, we won’t be boring you with yet another 
