Coriander (cilantro) is not Indian?

Coriander is, of course, an important ingredient in Indian cooking.  The Asian "Indian", that is.  Vegetable vendors in the parts of India where I grew up would typically toss in a few stems of coriander leaves if we purchased vegetables.  To put the finishing touches in a "rasam" or a "kitchadi" with a little bit of chopped up coriander is usually the norm.

And, yes, the coriander seed and its powder are key components of the various curries made.  So, I had always assumed that this was a plant that was native to India.

Well, surprise, surprise .... it is not!

This NY Times piece notes that:

The coriander plant is native to the eastern Mediterranean, and European cooks used both seeds and leaves well into medieval times.

What?

The reporter further writes:

I’ve found cilantro pestos to be lotion-free and surprisingly mild. They actually have deeper roots in the Mediterranean than the basil version, and can be delicious on pasta and breads and meats. If you’re looking to work on your cilantro patterns, pesto might be the place to start.

Sounds great to me.  Next time I make pasta, cilantro will take the place of basil :)

Quote of the day: on the fiscal mess we are in

Robert Reich:

If any three people are most responsible for the failure of financial regulation, they are Greenspan, Larry Summers, and my former colleague, Bob Rubin. In 1999 they advised Congress to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, which since 1933 had separated commercial from investment banking. By 1999, Wall Street was salivating over such a repeal because it wanted to create financial supermarkets that could use commercial deposits to place bets in the financial casino. That would yield the Street trillions.
At the same time, Greenspan, Summers, and Rubin also quashed the efforts of the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation to regulate derivatives, when its director began to worry that derivative trading already was getting out of control.
Yet Greenspan continues to take no responsibility for what occurred. In the interview he just completed he avoiding saying anything about the failure of the Fed under his watch to adequately oversee the banks, and the absence of sufficient financial regulation to begin with.
I dislike singling out individuals for blame or praise in a political system as complex as that of the United States but I worry the nation is not on the right economic road, and that these individuals — one of whom advises the President directly and the others who continue to exert substantial influence among policy makers — still don’t get it.

Meanwhile, there is a talk that Summers is leaving the administration ...

So, is the economy doing better or ...?

Same tea leaves ready by different people yields different results. 
Compare Robert Reich's op-ed in the WSJ with Daniel Gross' essay in Newsweek and you might even think that they are talking about two different planets.  And it is not that either one is a hardcore Republican.  Reich is a lefty Democrat, and Gross always has come across as the DLC Democrat type.
First: here is Gross:

the long-term decline of the U.S. economy has been greatly exaggerated. America is coming back stronger, better, and faster than nearly anyone expected—and faster than most of its international rivals. The Dow Jones industrial average, hovering near 11,000, is up 70 percent in the past 13 months, and auto sales in the first quarter were up 16 percent from 2009. The economy added 162,000 jobs in March, including 17,000 in manufacturing. The dollar has gained strength, and the U.S. is back to its familiar position of lapping Europe and Japan in growth. Among large economies, only China, India, and Brazil are growing more rapidly than the U.S.—and they're doing so off a much smaller base. If the U.S. economy grows at a 3.6 percent rate this year, as Macroeconomic Advisers projects, it'll create $513 billion in new economic activity—equal to the GDP of Indonesia.

Since he wrote this, the DJIA finished the day at 11,006
Reich writes:

Some economic cheerleaders say rising stock prices are making consumers feel wealthier and therefore readier to spend. But most Americans' biggest asset is their homes. The "wealth effect" is felt mainly by the richest 10%, whose net worth is largely stocks and bonds. The top 10% accounted for about half of total national income in 2007. But they were only about 40% of total spending. A vigorous jobs recovery can't be based on 40% of what was spent before the economy collapsed.

 Reich worries about the job losses, and the economy's inability to create new ones, fast:

Since the start of the Great Recession in December 2007, the economy has shed 8.4 million jobs and failed to create another 2.7 million required by an ever-larger pool of potential workers. That leaves us more than 11 million jobs behind. (The number is worse if you include everyone working part-time who'd rather it be full-time, those working full-time at fewer hours, and people who are overqualified for the jobs they're in.) This means even if we enjoy a vigorous recovery that produces, say, 300,000 net new jobs a month, we could be looking at five to eight years before catching up to where we were before the recession began.

Gross, any response to this one?

All well and good, the skeptics note, but we've got a long way to go. To recoup the 8.2 million jobs lost since December 2007, it'll take four years of growth at 170,000 jobs per month. And by definition, it's hard to identify the next transformative economic force—the next steam engine or interstate-highway system. White House economic adviser Larry Summers tells a story about the economic summit in Little Rock after the 1992 election. In the thousands of pages of briefing papers and policy briefs, one word didn't appear: Internet.

I will stop here, before I drive myself crazy :)  Can you imagine how much more incomprehensible this will all become if I added in here a truly economic conservative's analysis as well?

Chart of the day: Facebook beats Google

Of course, this was bound to happen .... when every age group--from pre-teens to classmates of my 80-year father are on Facebook ...

The question is how FB will translate this into cash ...

A Public Intellectual Feels the Heat

That is the title of this piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  I can relate to "feeling the heat" in so many ways ... The author, Michael Messner is on the faculty at USC (yay, Go Trojans!!!) writes about the responses he received after the LA Times published his op-ed essay where he advocated raising taxes in order to save Social Security.  But, despite all the nasty responses, Messner writes:

My piece was read by a huge number of people, who possibly then discussed it with others. There is a vast public out there; I'm determined to thicken my skin and remain a part of it.

I concur.
In fact, to engage the public on such issues is a prime responsibility that I take seriously.  (Not on my campus though, because I have been explicitly told--in writing--that I do not have a right to express my views.)

A couple of days ago this op-ed of mine was published--yes, also about taxes.  Some of the responses online are ... well, you make the call :)

Oranges writes:

HEADLINE NEWS: Taxes make government services available to all!

What a wonderful concept. It's almost like the Garden of Eden but not exactly. Close though!

Aahh, to know that government will take care of me and that I'm not responsible for anything . Nope. I inherited all that is evil dating all the way back to the day Eve ate that apple.

mjacks06:

'Sriram Khé of Eugene is an associate professor of geography at Western Oregon University.'

Geography? They couldn't get an economics professor to write an article on taxes? Odd..

Quote of the day

From Calvin--no, not the theologian, but the comic character:

Physical education is what you learn from having your face in someone's armpit right before lunch

:)
Well, it might as well be from the sixteenth-century theologian because the cartoonist, Bill Watterson, named the character that original "Calvinist"

Image of the day: A good deal on the web :)

India's Commonwealth (shame) Games

It was a few weeks ago that I blogged about the various illegal labor practices, particularly child labor, in the construction activities in New Delhi--related to the upcoming Commonwealth Games in October. 

The BBC's online correspondent in India, Soutik Biswas, not only confirms those earlier reports, but adds a lot more details as well.  Biswas writes:

I have just finished reading a 116-page report by a committee appointed by the Delhi high court on the "condition of workers" engaged in construction work on Commonwealth Games sites in the Indian capital. The October Games, on which the government is spending more than $2bn, is the biggest international sporting event India has ever hosted. The report is shocking. It confirms Delhi's worst kept secret - how the shiny new stadia and other infrastructure hide the exploitative and unsafe conditions that 150,000 workers have to work under.

 So, in a vibrant, chaotic and unruly democracy that India is, one would expect such conditions to be huge political issues, right?  Ain't so, writes Biswas:

But what I find particularly galling is the silence of political parties on the state of workers. The local Hindu nationalist BJP has made an issue about the proposed serving of beef to guests at the Games. The Congress-led Delhi government is going to town with a planned "good manners" campaign, imploring the city's people to behave properly during the Games. The parties of the Left are silent. All this even as the government cleared nearly 700 million rupees in extra funds for the Games, taking its bloated budget to more than $2bn.

Even CNBC has reported on this!:

The main stadium is months overdue and remains a tangle of cranes, and residents are furious over new taxes to pay for the Games.

Meanwhile, dozens of construction workers have died and hundreds of thousands are laboring in unsafe conditions in the rush to prepare the city for the Games, a court-appointed investigation said.

... "For poor people there are no benefits from all this," said Ramesh Dubey, a sidewalk vendor angry over a proposed hike in cooking gas taxes. "This whole show is by rich people and will only benefit rich people."

Oh well .... I recall the days of the Asian Games in New Delhi, back in 1982 when I was an undergraduate student.  I boycotted watching any of the events on television because I was convinced that it was a colossal waste of resources in a poor country. 

The lefty in me is always concerned about public expenditures that are not beneficial to the poor.  Which is why even in America, a few years ago I wrote an op-ed that government is not responsible for entertaining the people and, therefore, there shouldn't be any taxpayer subsidies for sports stadia and the like.  If only I ruled the world!!!

The Sarah Palin Network

She is baaaaack :)  "That is so Palin" .... Tina Fey, that is ...

Judge Diane Wood for the Supreme Court

I don't drink wine, but am reasonably ok with the wine that I pick for dinners.  So, if I can be successful there, why not with my bets on the nominee to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by Justice Stevens' retirement? :)

I say it will be Judge Diane Wood.
Why so?

I can't imagine President Obama nominating a male and, thereby, having only two women justices there.
Judge Wood is from the University of Chicago--Obama's ol' stomping grounds
Her degrees are from the University of Texas, which breaks the Harvard-Yale stranglehold on the court.
Wood is a Protestant--Stevens is the only Protestant in the current court. (Six are Catholic, and two are Jewish)
Wood clerked for Justice Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade

Convinced?

Why is Pope Benedit like Argentina's Pinochet?

Benedict will be in Britain between September 16 and 19, ...

[Richard] Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.
The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.

What is the case here with Pope Benedict?

The lawyers believe they can ask the Crown Prosecution Service to initiate criminal proceedings against the Pope, launch their own civil action against him or refer his case to the International Criminal Court.
Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, said: “This is a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence.”
Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, said: “This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalised concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded payoffs, but justice and punishment.

Wikipedia on Pinochet's arrest in Britain, and his trial(s)

Should we worry about April 19th?

Before 9/11, there was 4/19.  At about 9:00 am on April 19th 1995, a huge explosion leveled the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 and injuring a lot more.  The casualty included children who were in the daycare facility.
This was no result of any clash of civilizations, nor did it bring about any question of why do they hate us.  Because, it was the rarely ever discussed home-grown terrorism.

The Alfred P Murrah building in Oklahoma City was bombed at 9.01 in the morning, as a normal working day on the Great Plains was getting under way – not by Islamic fundamentalists plotting in Afghan caves, but by a paramilitary unit of Americans who called themselves "patriots", led by a former serviceman and 1991 Gulf war veteran, Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh was executed in 2001, and his principal accomplice, Terry Nichols, is serving life.

Here is the horrible coincidence: it is on April 19th that the Tea Party folks will be holding their protests all across the country.  So, let us see: people upset with taxes--which are due on the 15th--more so during this Great Rececssion; people upset with the recent healthcare reform; people worried that the government is coming after their guns; Faux News whipping up hysteria at the drop of a hat; Jihad Janes; .... and national protests are on the 19th?  Seems like a horrible lining up of the planets.
Remember Arlington Road?