If you think of dogs and cats as members of the family, you might figure you could collect damages for pain and suffering if they were to die because of wrongdoing.

The law in California and many other states sees things differently. Pets are treated as personal property, like cars and computers.

But that could be changing, as contaminated pet food is believed to be responsible for the deaths of dozens of dogs and cats nationwide.

"You'll see a lot of pressure on legislators to remove liability barriers, to not see these animals as property but as entities like humans," said Jon Katz, the author of several books on the changing relationship between dogs and people. [More]

Labels: culture, food, law, production

Another week has come and gone here on the farm. Madison has had me out digging flowers. Now that the truck is fixed and it’s warmer, we’ve been driving down to the creek a couple miles past the farm so the kids can skip rocks and that’s where Madison found her flowers. There are old home places along the banks of the creek and lots of them have flowers growing abundantly. The kids call it Lilly Valley. That means Dad gets the shovel those that we need at our house. Garett doesn’t get too into the flowers, so he browses around for other treasures or picks up trash. Kind of strange to pick up trash, but he does. He says people are littering and destroying the earth. Hard to argue with that. So usually we come home with flowers and trash. It’s good for the kids to get out in the woods.

It’s time for garden tilling to get busy. I tilled 3 on Friday afternoon. Don’t make a lot of money at it, but at least it helps buy fuel. At $2.60 a gallon I can use the help. I thought I would have some trouble starting the 6000 after running it out of fuel, but all I had to do was loosen the fuel prime pump and pump a few times and it took right off.

1. The unapologetic product plugs for his sponsor. This is how the web is going to deliver bucks, I think. It is also how much of what you will read will be infused with marketing.
2. The pure attraction of the agrarian lifestyle, albeit attached to a full time job elsewhere. It is hard for even me not to envy this simpler, seemingly more rustic life.

Labels: culture, production

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Labels: food, production

Tending to others' spiritual needs certainly qualifies as a career with "meaning." In addition to traditional ministerial and religious education positions, you can also become a celebrant, someone who helps people mark important events in life with customized ceremonies that reflect their beliefs and backgrounds.

Labels: culture, fun

• Cooking with Dr. Pepper
• The Other Other White Meat
• Jello Confronts the Depression

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After mosquitoes bite a host with malaria, the parasite that causes the disease proliferates in the insect, readying itself to infect the next human victim. It's no fun being infected, and one might think that mosquitoes would have developed a resistance to the malaria parasite over time. But several studies have suggested that mosquitoes engineered to build defenses against malaria are less fit than insects that chose to live with the parasites.

Now there's reason to take heart. Several years ago, a group of medical entomologists at Johns Hopkins University created a strain of Anopheles stephensi (a mosquito that bites rodents) equipped with a gene called SM1 that makes the mosquitoes resistant to infection with Plasmodium berghei, a rodent malaria parasite. In the new study, published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group carried out a series of experiments in which 250 of these insects were put in a cage together with 250 wild-type counterparts and allowed to feed on malaria-infected mice. The resistant insects lived longer and produced more eggs than did those not resistant to the parasite, and after nine generations, some 70% of the population was resistant. The researchers speculate that carrying SM1 is a less costly strategy than whatever defenses malaria-resistant mosquitoes develop in the wild. [More]

GM mosquitoes that interfered with development of the malaria parasite would make it more difficult for the organism to become re-established after it had been eradicated from a target area, they said.

Malaria, spread by the single-celled parasite Plasmodium, is endemic in parts of Asia, Africa, and central and south America.

The organism is passed to humans through the bite of the Anopheles mosquito. Each year it makes 300 million people ill and causes a million deaths worldwide.

Some 90% of cases are in sub-Saharan Africa, where a child dies of malaria every 30 seconds. [More]

Labels: GM, health, science, technology

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Well, Mr. Bayrou is the anti-excitement candidate, a sort of political Prozac after all the amphetamines of the Sarkozy-Royal conflict. He is fairly young at 55, and he has a relatively full head of hair, but so far he has left the paparazzi in a soporific daze. He wants to unite everyone — he’s a member of a centrist party but might well appoint a Socialist prime minister; he is a Catholic but a staunch defender of secularism in schools. The message is that if he can unite God and the atheists, surely he can unite France.

Most of all, he is something that even urban voters see as quintessentially French — a farmer. His official Web site shows him pitchforking hay on the family farm, and he was recently quoted in the weekly Le Point as saying: “My friends and I aren’t the jet set. We’re the tractor set.” [More]

A Bayrou victory, which is unlikely but not impossible, would constitute a triple revolution. It would lead first to the end of the Socialist Party created by Francois Mitterrand. Following former prime minister Lionel Jospin's humiliating defeat in 2002, the Socialists simply would not survive a second consecutive failure to reach the second round. Moreover, a Bayrou victory could signify the end of the conservative party created by Chirac, as well as of Charles de Gaulle's Fifth Republic. But de Gaulle's legacy would most likely be snuffed out gently, with nostalgia for both Mitterrand and Chirac possibly proving very tempting for a people disaffected with the political system but desiring to be reassured. France wants the illusion of change, but is continuity what she truly desires? Finally, while this election was expected to usher in a new generation of politicians, few were prepared to anticipate the peaceful political tsunami that a Bayrou victory would bring. Yet that would be the outcome if the attraction towards the center proves to be as irresistible for significant segments of the Socialists and conservative parties as it now seems. [More]

Labels: EU, politics, trade

While the world is generally familiar with Machu Pichu and the Nazca Lines, another mystery has come to light through the modern science of satellite photography. This phenomenon is one that was previously known but the extent of its size and effort required to make it is just being fully realized.

A series oh holes, usually about 24 inches across and in neat rows of from nine to twelve, stretched for almost a mile in Peru. It starts at the base of a mountain and then climbs up the side and meanders up and down, over some of the roughest terrain. [More]

We have a tendency to grossly underestimate both the capabilities and intelligence of ancient people. Still, discoveries such as this suggest we ourselves may one day be sadly misunderstood as well.

Labels: culture, history

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First, it is not what they did that was important but it is what they said that made all the difference. Fed chief Ben Bernanke basically said that he is more willing to consider the fall off in the housing market and the blow up in the sub prime lending market as a more important consideration short term then inflation. Translation: he is likely preparing the market for the potential for rate cuts in the weeks ahead.

The reason this has significance is because it is telling you the Federal Reserve is ready to put the foot on the liquidity pedal and let Japan decelerate its liquidity pump. This lit a fire underneath the equity markets globally yesterday and has a profound impact on the likely acceleration of global growth as we head into the back half of 2007 and especially into 2008. It does not mean that the transition will happen with out some further disruptions but it does mean the Fed is aware of the danger of the yen-carry trade distortion and is looking to minimize, the best that it can, the effects of its eventual unwinding. Have no illusions of grandeur here: Japan will continue to raise rates in the year ahead and the yen-carry trade will unwind from its current amebic state. So expect the yen to strengthen significantly against the dollar and expect the US dollar to stay under pressure against most other currencies as well.

Labels: economics, economy, marketing

The government is on track to approve a new antibiotic to treat a pneumonia-like disease in cattle, despite warnings from health groups and a majority of the agency's own expert advisers that the decision will be dangerous for people.

The drug, called cefquinome, belongs to a class of highly potent antibiotics that are among medicine's last defenses against several serious human infections. No drug from that class has been approved in the United States for use in animals. [More]

Evidence from national databases suggests that both acute and chronic sinus inflammation (sinusitis) is being overtreated with poorly chosen medications, researchers report.

Data from 1999 and 2002 collected by the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey and the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey suggests that there were roughly 14 million visits annually because of chronic sinusitis and 3 million because of acute sinusitis. [More]

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Yaniv Ben-Zaken, a local gas station owner, will be selling Kosher for Passover gasoline during the holiday this year. The move, Ben-Zaken says, has become necessary due to the increased ethanol content in gasoline required by the government. The ethanol is typically derived from corn, which is a forbidden food for Jews on Passover. And, according to Ben-Zaken, underJewish law, it is also forbidden to derive any benefit from corn. [More]

The “article” does get the two points of Jewish law correct. First, we are forbidden on Passover from having any hametz in our possession or ownership and it is forbidden to obtain a benefit from hametz during the eight days of the holiday. Hametz is any of the five forbidden grains (wheat, barley, oats, spelt, rye) that has been in the presence of moisture for more than eighteen minutes.

In Northern European communities around the 15th Century, the prohibition on eating hametz was extended to a category of grains called kitniyot: rice, millet, corn, and legumes. Because ground up rice flour or corn meal closely resembles wheat flour, Ashkenazi Jews exclude kitniyot from their Pesach diet as well. However, as “Rabbi Shalom Silver” is quoted as saying in the article, one may possess kitniyot and obtain a benefit from it, use it in any form or fashion, so long as one does not eat it. Baby powder that contains cornstarch, for example, is perfectly acceptable on Pesach, so long as one is not tempted to make a snack of it. [More of the debunking]

Labels: culture, ethanol, fun, religion

Behold - the One-Click butter Cutter.

Ingenious as it is, it only needs a few upgrades to be the perfect table-top accessory.

• Battery power
• Remote control
• iPod connection

Labels: fun

Because emerging economies' supply of financial instruments is so unreliable, people may hoard more of them as a precautionary measure. Firms and households fear they will not be able to borrow to tide themselves over bad times, therefore they choose to save for a rainy day instead. Because they cannot transfer purchasing power from the future to the present, they must store it from the past.

If global imbalances are the result of such frictions, they are unlikely to unwind quickly. Financial systems, after all, do not mature overnight. If Mr Caballero is right, America is also less vulnerable to a sudden run on its securities. Where, he asks, would the excess demand for global assets go? [More]

Labels: economy, trade

But for ethanol made from trees, grasses and other types of biomass which contain a lot of cellulose, the energy balance can be as high as 16, at least in theory. In practice the problem is that producing such “cellulosic” ethanol is much more difficult and expensive than producing it from other crops. But the science, technology and economics of treethanol are changing fast. Researchers are racing to develop ways to chip, ferment, distil and refine wood quickly and cheaply. [More]

The Southern California Biorefinery Project will turn green waste and wood residues at landfills into about 19 million gallons of fuel grade ethanol per year. Additional products that will also be sold include lignin, gypsum, and yeast. BlueFires's current production estimates for the project will be significantly lower that DOE's cellulosic ethanol goal of $1.07/gal in production costs by 2012, and DOE's current estimate of approximately $2.26/gal. [More]

Labels: energy, ethanol

Forget mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. When somebody collapses in cardiac arrest, experts now say, bystanders should not bother breathing into his or her mouth, once considered a key component of cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

"Rescue breathing is an oxymoron," says Gordon Ewy of the University of Arizona College of Medicine. "We've been doing it wrong for 40 years." [More]

Labels: health

And another: Every year private pensions pay billions of dollars to retirees that aren't counted on the positive side in the official savings rate.

There is a rationale for this. The government books pensions as personal income when employers contribute it to a pension pool, not when it gets paid out years later, and retirees can actually spend it, said Oak Associates investment strategist Ed Yardeni, another analyst who holds higher-than-average faith in the U.S. consumer. (The idea is to measure income produced by current labor.)

But since the mid-1980s, as the population has aged, and traditional pensions for younger workers have dwindled, pension payouts have vastly exceeded pension inputs, and the gap has been getting wider. "A big discrepancy," Yardeni said.

Pension benefits surpass contributions these days by some $200 billion a year, said Franke. That's $200 billion in household income that doesn't get counted in the official savings accounts. If it were, it would add another 2 percentage points to the savings rate, I figure. [More]

Labels: economics

Richard Hebron, 41, was driving along an anonymous stretch of highway near Ann Arbor, Mich., last October when state cops pulled him over, ordered him to put his hands on the hood of his mud-splattered truck and seized its contents: 453 gal. of milk.

Yes, milk. Raw, unpasteurized milk. To supply a small but growing market among health-conscious city and suburban dwellers for milk taken straight from the udder, Hebron was dealing the stuff on behalf of a farming cooperative he runs in southwestern Michigan. An undercover agricultural investigator had infiltrated the co-op as part of a sting operation that resulted in the seizure of $7,000 worth of fresh-food items, including 35 lbs. of raw butter, 29 qt. of cream and all those gallons of the suspicious white liquid. Although Hebron's home office was searched and his computer seized, no charges have been filed. "When they tested the milk, they couldn't find any problems with it," says Hebron. "It seems like they're just looking for some way to shut us down." [More]

Labels: food