Wednesday night, post-Zizek-lecture links.

* President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday. Probably the best of a bad set of options.

* How Food Preferences Vary by Political Ideology. I have to confess they have my number on Chinese/Japanese/Thai, not eating fast food, and delicious, delicious Samoas—but my love of pizza and PB&J proves that beneath my leftist facade beats a deeply reactionary heart.

* Already linked everywhere: Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels’ Generous Offer.

* Ezra Klein: Four ways to end the filibuster. Related: Steve Benen, Harold Meyerson, Kevin Drum.

* GOP Death Spiral Watch: Lindsay Graham censured by the South Carolina GOP for acknowledging the existence of climate change.

* Salon: Wes Anderson's take on Roald Dahl is possibly the best movie about family, community and poultry thievery ever made.

Classic bad news/good news situation: Sure, Iceland's economy has completely collapsed, but at least it caused McDonald's to leave the country.

Day after Labor Day links.

* The U.S. drops to second-place in international competitiveness, behind the hated Swiss.

* Food flags.

* Washington Monthly foretells the death of the university in favor of trade schools like ITT. MeFi debates.

* Also at MeFi: Google Maps Monopoly and a time-travel linkdump.

* Gawker reports Facebook makes you smart and Twitter makes you stupid. Be advised.

* And a commenter on my Flickr account asks the real question: what's a young George W. Bush doing in my current blog icon?

Michael Pollan has denounced the Whole Foods boycott at New Majority.

John Mackey’s views on health care, much as I disagree with them, will not prevent me from shopping at Whole Foods. I can understand why people would want to boycott, but it’s important to play out the hypothetical consequences of a successful boycott. Whole Foods is not perfect, however if they were to disappear, the cause of improving Americans’ health by building an alternative food system, based on more fresh food, pastured and humanely raised meats and sustainable agriculture, would suffer.

He took a rather different attitude towards the chain in The Omnivore's Dilemma back in 2006, when his criticism of Whole Foods led to a twenty-five page reply from Mackey and then this reply to the reply from Pollan.

After spending time with you and reading your letter, I've wondered if perhaps I did, as you imply in your letter, present a unfair caricature of Whole Foods in The Omnivore's Dilemma, suggesting a store where organic, local and artisanal food is just window dressing to help sell a much more ordinary industrial product. Indeed, nothing would please me more than to conclude I owe you and the company an apology. I'm not quite there yet. But I sincerely hope you will prove my portrait of Whole Foods wrong, that the company has not thrown its lot in with the industrialization, globalization and dilution of organic agriculture, but rather stands for something better. For my own part, I stand ready to write that apology, and look forward to doing it.

The two met on a stage at Berkeley to continue the discussion in February the next year.

'Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food.' See also: 'As Waistlines Widen, Brains Shrink.' Both via MeFi (come for the steak, stay for the flamewar).

Still busy. Here's Tuesday's links.

* Sesame Street will parody Mad Men. Everyone is excited.

* Old-school Tweetspeak at the New York Times.

The 140-character limit of Twitter posts was guided by the 160-character limit established by the developers of SMS. However, there is nothing new about new technology imposing restrictions on articulation. During the late 19th-century telegraphy boom, some carriers charged extra for words longer than 15 characters and for messages longer than 10 words. Thus, the cheapest telegram was often limited to 150 characters.

Concerns for economy, as well as a desire for secrecy, fueled a boom in telegraphic code books that reduced both common and complex phrases into single words. Dozens of different codes were published; many catered to specific occupations and all promised efficiency.

* Mountain Dew as engine fuel.

* Play Pixel. You'll never want to do anything else.

* Right now, Detroit is as close as any city in America to becoming a food desert, not just another metropolis like Chicago, Philadelphia, or Cleveland with a bunch of small- and medium-sized food deserts scattered about, but nearly a full-scale, citywide food desert. (A food desert is defined by those who study them as a locality from which healthy food is more than twice as far away as unhealthy food, or where the distance to a bag of potato chips is half the distance to a head of lettuce.) About 80 percent of the residents of Detroit buy their food at the one thousand convenience stores, party stores, liquor stores, and gas stations in the city. There is such a dire shortage of protein in the city that Glemie Dean Beasley, a seventy-year-old retired truck driver, is able to augment his Social Security by selling raccoon carcasses (twelve dollars a piece, serves a family of four) from animals he has treed and shot at undisclosed hunting grounds around the city. Pelts are ten dollars each. Pheasants are also abundant in the city and are occasionally harvested for dinner.

Detroiters who live close enough to suburban borders to find nearby groceries carrying fresh fruit, meat, and vegetables are a small minority of the population. The health consequences of food deserts are obvious and dire. Diabetes, heart failure, hypertension, and obesity are chronic in Detroit, and life expectancy is measurably lower than in any American city.

* Glenn Beck in CYA mode.

* How do Americans spend their day?

Saturday morning linkdump 2: politics edition.

* The Vonnegut-flavored image at right is graffiti fresh from the streets of Burlington, Vermont.

* Vegetarianism, as every school child knows, is evil. I had an upstairs neighbor once who really believed this—he used to tell me all the time how vegetarians were on the fast track to full-on Nazism. Weird guy.

* Birther update: even OpinionJournal's odious "Best of the Web" column says the birthers are nuts. In the L.A. Times, Bill Maher says birtherism is no joke. But you and I know birtherism exists only in the feverish lies of Chris Matthews and Markos Moulitsas.

* Glenn Greenwald has a must-read post on corporate interference at MSNBC and Fox News.

In essence, the chairman of General Electric (which owns MSNBC), Jeffrey Immelt, and the chairman of News Corporation (which owns Fox News), Rupert Murdoch, were brought into a room at a "summit meeting" for CEOs in May, where Charlie Rose tried to engineer an end to the "feud" between MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox's Bill O'Reilly. According to the NYT, both CEO's agreed that the dispute was bad for the interests of the corporate parents, and thus agreed to order their news employees to cease attacking each other's news organizations and employees.

Most notably, the deal wasn't engineered because of a perception that it was hurting either Olbermann or O'Reilly's show, or even that it was hurting MSNBC. To the contrary, as Olbermann himself has acknowledged, his battles with O'Reilly have substantially boosted his ratings. The agreement of the corporate CEOs to cease criticizing each other was motivated by the belief that such criticism was hurting the unrelated corporate interests of GE and News Corp...

* Democrats facing big off-year electoral losses in New Jersey and Virginia?

* In the days leading up to Obama's decision to run, Axelrod prepared a private strategy memo -- dated Nov. 28, 2006 -- that has never been published before. He wrote that an outgoing president nearly always defines the next election and argued that people almost never seek a replica -- certainly not after the presidency of George W. Bush. In 2008, people were going to be looking for a replacement, someone who represented different qualities. In Axelrod's opinion, Obama's profile fit this historical moment far better than did Hillary Rodham Clinton's. If he was right, Obama could spark a political movement and prevail against sizable odds. He also counseled Obama against waiting for a future opportunity to run for president. "History is replete with potential candidates for the presidency who waited too long rather than examples of people who ran too soon. . . . You will never be hotter than you are right now."

* A new study demonstrating that organic food is no healthier than regularly produced food seems to entirely miss the point of organics.

Infinite linkdump Thursday, just politics.

* The Mark Sanford story grows stranger by the day, with 19 South Carolina politicians now on the record calling for his resignation. (TPM reports that Senators DeMint and Graham have gone to Sanford to prevail on him to resign.) Today he backed off a pledge to release his travel records, which suggests more trouble may be brewing for him.

* Who could have imagined that Exxon-Mobil would lie about its continued support for climate-change "skepticism" advocacy groups?

* Highlights from the first day of the Al Franken Century.

* Democrats can now "hijack elections at their whim": just another responsible, measured, and most of all empirically provable claim from RNC chairman Michael Steele, truly our country's finest elder statesman.

* But it's not all craziness: Michele Bachmann is facing criticism from the GOP for her weird lies about the Census.

* What caused the financial crisis? Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone (via MeFi) points to bubble economies nutured and created by giant investment firms, pointing the finger especially at Goldman Sachs. An Oklahoma lawmaker says it was "abortion, pornography, same sex marriage, sex trafficking, divorce, illegitimate births, child abuse, and many other forms of debauchery." I report, you decide.

* Malthusianism and world history: a chart from Conor Clarke.



It's clear these growth trends can continue forever.





* Ezra Klein has a new Washington Post column on the politics of food.

Cogitamus continues to do great work on the connection between human-animal diseases like the swine flu and unsanitary conditions in the meat industry.

It's Tuesday and I'm feeling just a little bit feverish.

* It's come to this: they're going to remake Drop Dead Fred. Don't ask why.

* Oh, the wisdom of markets: Stephen Dunbar demonstrates that Peak Oil has "peaked" by citing the temporary crash in demand due to the financial crisis and speculative recovery technologies as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Crisis averted!

* Meanwhile, the climate is still totally screwed. See also: The 340 residents of Newtok, Alaska will soon be among the first “climate refugees” in the United States. What's their governor have to say about this?

* Superpoop messes with Texas.

* David Kurtz comes through with your daily dose of swine flu commentary, the first on the rhythm of pandemic and the second on the deep, pervasive rot throughout the global meat industry.

* Science has proved that conservatives don't get Stephen Colbert.

Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.

Whenever I hear about this sort of thing I'm just shocked. Not only is the parody on The Colbert Report completely unsubtle—it's so unsubtle I even wouldn't say it counts as satire—but it's not as even as if Colbert is trying to fool anyone. If you didn't get the point just from reading the sidebar during "The Word," he breaks character, both deliberately and undeliberately, all the freaking time. Multiple times every show. He's practically holding the audience's hand.

Let's hope "more likely" still represents a rather small part of the sample...

Yet another Monday linkdump.

* Rep. John Lewis and four other congressmen were arrested today in front of the Sudanese embassy protesting the genocide in Darfur.

* Quantifying the seven deadly sins.

* Dinosaurs may not have been killed by the Chicxulub impact after all. This example of the scientific method working is naturally taken up by anti-intellectuals at the Corner to prove the scientific method doesn't work.

* More on the connection between swine flu and industrial agriculture.

* The Flaming Lips' "Do You Realize?" is now the official song of Oklahoma, instantaneously making the state 1000% more awesome.

Do you realize that you have the most beautiful face?
Do you realize we're floating in space?
Do you realize that happiness makes you cry?
Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?

* Scientific American concurs.

The swine flu outbreak in Mexico has everybody talking about pandemic and 1918. Schools and public events have been shut down in Mexico City, where 20 have died from the outbreak. The victims are mostly otherwise healthy people between 25 and 45, an atypical result likely caused by a phenomenon known as "cytokine storm."

Here's an aspect of the story the American media, unsurprisingly, isn't touching: the outbreak has been linked to factory-style pork production.

Our brains don't work: ...the mere presence of a salad on a fast food menu makes people more likely to order french fries. Via Marginal Revolution.

Good Magazine has a feature on how to reduce your water usage. It should surprise no one that the most effective single step to take is, as always, vegetarianism.

Sunday linkdump #3.

* The local food movement gets a big boost with news of a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. More at MeFi.

* Visualizing the organic food industry in the U.S.

* The Washington Post finally gets around to kind of correcting George Will's dishonest columns on climate change. Sure, it's been a month, but it's not like the paper comes out every day.

* You may remember from Jon Stewart's well-placed mockery when Barack Obama gave Gordon Brown a gift of twenty-five DVDs during his visit that paled in comparison to Brown's gift of a pen-holder made from the timbers of the HMS Resolute. Well, it's a little worse than you think.

Alas, when the PM settled down to begin watching them the other night, he found there was a problem.

The films only worked in DVD players made in North America and the words “wrong region” came up on his screen.

I've told you before, information wants to be free...

Even the list of DVDs itself is fairly unimpressive. Star Wars? The Godfather? Really? I've got to be honest, I think Brown's probably seen some of these.

I have an unpleasantly busy day today, and the open tabs are already building up. Here's a few links just to relieve the tension.

* Lieberman saved the stimulus? I guess the people who said we should be nice to him despite everything he's done may have had a point.

* Four Tennessee state representatives, all Republicans, have signed up to be plaintiffs in a lawsuit against President Barack Obama, aimed at forcing him to prove he is a United States citizen by coughing up his birth certificate. Good lord. How many times do we have to do this one?

* George Will v. climate science. Spoiler alert: Science wins. More (including charts!) from Nate Silver. I did a post like this over the weekend, if you missed it.

* Relatedly, from Marginal Revolution: What if all the smart people are in one party?

* Do not attempt to eat the world's hottest peper. That's just common sense. (Via Neil.)

Peanut butter apocalypse: FDA urges people to avoid peanut-butter products. Peanut butter sold in jars "appears to be safe." More links at MeFi. If this extended to peanut butter in jars it would cut my diet in half...

Monday!

* Almost as if they all receive their talking points from a single, central location, the entire right-wing spin machine has spontaneously decided to start talking about how the New Deal didn't actually work. Uh, sure.

* The first link doesn't make the absurdity clear, but Karl Rove is Twittering.

* Also in alternate-universe news: George Bush: Greatest President.

To prove his point, Barnes points to Bush's "ten great achievements":

1. Bush stood up to "global warming hysteria," and helped undermine the agenda of "alarmists."
2. He endorsed "enhanced interrogation," "secret prisons," and "wireless eavesdropping."
3. He seized unprecedented executive authority, and ignored congressional attempts at oversight.
4. He offered "unswerving support for Israel."
5. He signed the No Child Left Behind initiative.
6. He delivered his second inaugural address.
7. He signed the Medicare prescription drug benefit.
8. He pushed the Supreme Court even further to the right.
9. He improved U.S. relations with Japan, South Korea, and Australia.
10. He created a "fragile but functioning democracy" in Iraq.

You'll note Barnes is padding his list just a bit—delivering a second inaugural address is sort of light for a "top ten accomplishments" list, as is "improved relations with Australia."

* Also via Washington Monthly, Jon Swift has your retort.

* Not capturing Osama bin Laden isn't on Barnes's list, but Cheney tells us that doesn't matter.

Today on CNN’s Late Edition, host Wolf Blitzer asked Vice President Cheney, “How frustrating is this to you personally, knowing he’s [bin Laden] still at large?” Cheney hesitated, then simply replied that he would “obviously…like to solve that problem.” He added that it’s more “important” to “keep…this country safe,” indicating that bin Laden is inconsequential.

* North Carolina in the news! The Brunswick school district wants to teach creationism to kids. In 2008.

"I wasn't here 2 million years ago," Fanti said. "If evolution is so slow, why don't we see anything evolving now?"

There's your evidence.

* Eight reasons why we are in a depression.

* Half of world’s population could face climate-driven food crisis by 2100.

* After ten days of not sleeping, Randy Gardner was able to hold a press conference and beat a journalist at pinball. Note: this happened forty-four years ago, but I just found out about it yesterday.

Back in 2001, David Manilow sold a show to Chicago's WTTW station called "Check, Please!" The premise was simple: Each show would feature a couple locals who would review an eatery of their choice, then review the choices of the other amateur critics. But Manilow had a problem: He needed one more reviewer. So he called a young state Senator he knew, some guy named Barack Obama.

If being President doesn't work out,Barack's got something to fall back on. Via Ezra Klein.

Recipezaar: more recipes than you require.