2004: A “very Martian New Year?” One can hope.

ANOTHER INTERESTING SOLDIER’S BLOG FROM IRAQ, featuring an account of Operation Red Dawn and Saddam’s capture.

JEFF JARVIS has a roundup of blog posts and other links relating to the Iranian earthquake, which looks to have been much worse than the first reports suggested.

EUGENE VOLOKH notes more crushing of dissent, this time in Framingham, Mass.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE IS FISKING SLATE’S RATHER ALARMIST COVERAGE of Mad Cow. Excerpt: “Let’s consider some facts. BSE has killed 143 people in Great Britain, the country hit hardest by BSE. That’s about 20 people per year since the outbreak began.”

UPDATE: More Fisking, via this email from a reader:

At the end of the quote that Prof. Bainbridge puts up from Slate about Mad Cow, this appears:

“Mad cow is similarly vicious, unstoppable, and mysterious. It murders by driving its young victims insane, then melting their brains. It theoretically puts anyone who ever ate English beef at risk. It was spawned in the miasma of rendering plants and slaughterhouses, our own hell’s kitchens. And the disease organism is a mystery.”

This statement contains, as far as I can tell, two falsehoods:

1). “The disease organism is a mystery.” False. The disease “organism” is in fact a misfolded protein known as a prion. Unlike other mis-folded proteins, which are either degraded or refoled, prions cause correctly folded proteins to become misfolded. The misfolded proteins glom up and form plaques, which cause the brain damage seen in BSE. This also explains why it arises ‘spontaneously’ in humans – the same kind of misfolding can occur in your brain.

2). “It was spawned in the miasma of rendering plants and slaughterhouses, our own hell’s kitchens.” False. See above. It is spawned in the brains of live cattle. It is transmitted to people through the apparatus of our food consumption, but no matter how kind the apparatus, the transmission would still occur.

Sir, I am a 3rd year student in Biochemistry, Cell and Molecular Biology. Unless I’m mistaken, the facts I reference above are broadly known and widely agreed upon. In that case, Slate’s failure to pick up on them represents not political hackdom but a failure of scientific reporting.

Sincerely,
Jeff Goldstein
Drake University, class of ’05

Or maybe a little of both.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The solution to Mad Cow? Why clones, of course!

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: More email, this time (sort of) defending Slate:

Glenn,
Your 3rd year undergrad correspondent made a rather serious ommission in his correction of Slate’s article. BSE does in fact develop spontaneously, but it is extremely rare (1 in 10,000,000 animals) and usually only affects older animals. BSE can also be transmitted by consumption of infected organs, primarily brain and spinal cord. Britain’s epidemic, and it was an epidemic among the cattle, was likely caused by the practice of taking “downer” animals (animals which appear to be ill at time of slaughter and are thus unfit for human consumption) and rendering them into high protein meal to be fed back to cattle as a dietary supplement–what one scientist called “high-tech cannibalism.” At some time in the past, either a downed cow with (spontaneous) BSE, or a downed sheep with the sheep equivalent scrapie, made it into the food supply of Britain’s cattle industry. The epidemic spread as other downed cattle with unrecognized BSE were fed back into the food chain. So Britain’s slaughterhouse practice were definitely a contributing cause to the BSE epidemic among cattle there.

Fortunately, BSE is very difficult to transmit to humans, even among people who eat large quantities of infected beef. The US cow with BSE is probably an isolated case of spontaneous BSE, since the USDA prohibts feeding downer animals back to other cattle. In fact, there is probably a small but consistent number of cases of spontaneous BSE that make it into the human food industry every year, and go unrecognized since most cattle are slaughtered when they are too young to show symptoms. This is just one of the many (minor) risks of eating beef, of far less oncern than E. coli, salmonella, or heartdisease.

Tom Thatcher (Ph.D.)
University of Rochester

Another reader is less charitable. Reader Christopher Barr notes:

The infected animal was not on a “feedlot,” but rather on a dairy. Holsteins are dairy cows. The infected cow was quite old and had become immobile, not unusual in very old animals, but in hindsight, clearly a symptom of the disease. A dairy cow that can’t walk can’t hack it at a commercial dairy since she can’t walk to the milking parlor. Hence, she was shipped off to the slaughter.

Make no mistake, no processor in his right mind would butcher an ancient dairy cow for human consumption. The animal was used for fertilizer, and other products that will never make it to your table.

The facts about Mad Cow are well known and widely published. Any diligent, competent, ethical reporter could have found them in five minutes.

Latest word is that the infected cow came from Canada.

MORE: Apparently, an earlier Canadian BSE case was spontaneous in origin.

STILL MORE: Some Canadians are calling the link to Canada “premature.”

MORE STILL: You have to scroll down quite a ways, but according to this story the cow in question was, in fact, slaughtered for human consumption: “The revelation came after the animal had been slaughtered and its meat sent to food distributors, including two in Oregon.”

Another reason not to eat bologna, I guess.

A 21ST CENTURY VERSION of The Grinch appears at the Mudville Gazette.

GOOD NEWS:

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkish authorities have broken up the Istanbul cell behind last month’s truck bombings and have confirmed its links to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network, the city’s governor said on Friday. . . .

“The suicide attacks were carried out by elements trying to organize for al Qaeda in Turkey,” governor Muammer Guler told a news conference in Istanbul, held to announce progress in the investigation.

“We can comfortably say that we have broken up the organization’s Istanbul activities,” he said.

It’s not over yet, but so far 2003 is looking like another bad year for Al Qaeda.

ANDREW SULLIVAN is announcing the winners of some very special awards.

HERE’S MORE on the deepening India-Israel alliance, from the new American Thinker blog. Also note this post quoting a European Parliament member who characterizes EU support for the Palestinian intifada as a “proxy war” against America. (Original story here.)

I’ve thought for quite a while that “proxy war” was the appropriate characterization, and indeed I’ve used that term here before. Europeans should worry, though, about what will happen if Israel — or America — decides to return the favor. Providing financial aid to terrorists who target European civilians would be uncivilized — but, then, the Europeans are supposed to be the civilized ones, no?

KATIE ALLISON GRANJU reports that the American Academy of Pediatrics has been plunged into a breastfeeding scandal — er, well, a breastfeeding ad scandal, anyway.

UPDATE: Here, by the way, is a link to Granju’s book, Attachment Parenting. And here is her blog. On the other hand, reader Tom Gunn is taking a rather cynical view:

How long do you think it will be before we start hearing this ad campaign detailing the dangers of infant formula feeding is nothing less than a thinly veiled attempt by the Bush administration, male doctors, and a few female traitors to keep women barefoot, pregnant and on the edge of town?

It’s probably up over at DU now. . . .

MORE EMBARRASSMENT FOR THE FORD FOUNDATION:

The quip going around nonprofit circles these days is that the Ford Foundation’s support for Palestinian extremists is the one area of funding it could defend on the grounds of donor intent–an allusion to the notorious anti-Semitism of automaker and founder Henry Ford.

But Chuck Grassley, for one, is not amused. In response to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency series detailing Ford’s support for Palestinian NGOs crusading against Israel, the Iowa Republican has announced that the Senate Finance Committee will review the matter. In so doing, we hope it raises a question long overdue for Congressional scrutiny: How U.S. tax laws intended to encourage charity have had the unintended effect of spawning a foundation priesthood funded into perpetuity and insulated from public accountability.

The NGOs and foundations deserve much, much closer scrutiny than they’re getting, both in terms of their activities, and in terms of where the money goes. And that’s even before you get to basic questions of accounting, oversight, and general honesty in advertising. The kind of financial shenanigans that go on in this world make the for-profit business scandals look minor.

UPDATE: A reader emails that this investigative series by the Boston Globe regarding the Cabot Family Foundation is a model for the kind of inquiry that ought to be going on. (Look to the lower right for links to more stories).

ANOTHER UPDATE: Greg Djerejian, who works in NGOs, says I’m wrong to compare NGO corruption to Enron and Parmalat. (Though his suggestion that we should compare dollar amounts seems to miss the point.) But fellow nonprofit reader Rudy Carrasco emails:

Good to see your details about Ford Foundation et al. Big foundations like Ford regularly grill and dissect small nonprofits, and they need to be grilled themselves. Truth is that all ngos need the grilling (it’s usually helpful for us) but there are times when the close inspection is about gate-keeping (keeping ngos that don’t toe the party line out of the money pool) and not about good governance. . . .

Made me mad again – because I get pressured, as a nonprofit bringing in under 400k a year, to govern well and properly – which is fine, it makes us better. But to see this double standard irks me. Good to see Ford held to same standards they hold us to.

Well, I’ve heard a number of horror stories from people I trust who work with NGOs. But, of course, without monitoring it’s hard to know just how deep the problem is. Personally, I think it’s probably pretty deep — because when you have large sums of money, few clear metrics for success, and little accountability to outsiders, it usually is. One useful article on this subject, though it’s now a bit old, is David Samuels’ Philanthropical Correctness: The Failure of American Foundations, from the September 18, 1995 issue of The New Republic. It doesn’t seem to be on the web, but here’s an excerpt:

In the past twenty-five years, however, a startling shift in foundation funding has occurred, away from research and toward the support of advocacy groups and the kinds of social service programs best accomplished by government and private charity. Of 240 grants made by the Carnegie Corporation in 1989, totaling $37 million, only 27.5 percent (sixty grants) went to American universities. Most were relatively small, and many went to non-research oriented projects such as an “international negotiations network” at Emory University’s Carter Presidential Center, or “Reprinting and Disseminating the Handbook for Achieving Sex Equity Through Education and the Sex Equity Handbook for Schools.” Most of the Carnegie grants fell into one of two categories: funding and disseminating a host of high-flown reports by Carnegie-sponsored commissions; and funding advocacy groups including the Organizing Institute, the International Peace Academy, the aclu Foundation, the National Council of La Raza, the Fund for Peace and the Children’s Defense Fund. It is the stuff of which Republican careers will doubtless be made: a multi-billion-dollar tax exemption for the political agenda of liberal elites.

Those who share the broader social concerns of the foundations might wonder as well whether doling out hundreds of millions of dollars to ideologically driven advocates–who lack the time, the training or the inclination to evaluate what they do–is the best prescription for future innovations in public policy. Foundations enjoy their present tax-free moorings because they claim to operate as a nonpartisan force dedicated to the pursuit of innovative solutions to our pressing social ills, sheltered from the shifting partisan winds. The preponderance of foundation grants to advocacy groups, however, suggests that foundations are less devoted to the reasoned pursuit of the public good than to the multiculturalist dogmas propounded by their staff. . . .

No longer subject to academic review, evaluations of foundation programs today are carried out by foundation staff and by grantees themselves. Certainly many of these recipients are worthy and well-intentioned. The trouble is that, under the new system, it’s almost impossible to evaluate what actual good they do. One recipient of major foundation grants, an educator in a Northeastern city who refused to allow his name to be published, described the process with a cynicism that appears to be general: “They think they’re being clever by asking you to come up with your own criteria for success–60 percent of children in the eighth grade will be reading at a ninth-grade level in two years, or whatever. And they ask you to select an independent evaluator’ to report on whatever progress has been made. It’s all very numerical: but the goals you select are always goals that you know you can reach. Maybe 60 percent of eighth graders are already reading at a ninth-grade level. Maybe it’s 70 percent. The foundations don’t know. And the evaluators you select are people with a stake in the project. They’re getting a salary–from you, or an organization related to yours; some part of their income comes from that grant. And so the project is evaluated, declared a success, and everyone–the program officer, the trustees and you–can go home happy.”

Samuels isn’t so much concerned with bags-of-cash corruption, exactly, as with the pumping of huge amounts of money into politics instead of actual effort to help people, and he notes the way in which many foundations have abandoned, or shifted, metrics for “success” so as to make real accountability difficult. Though that’s a form of corruption in itself, and it tends to lead to more traditional kinds of corruption, as well.

I believe that this article created something of a storm at the time, but it doesn’t seem to have changed things, much.

MORE: A reader sends a link to this transcript of an interview with Rep. Harold Ford (D-TN) who’s looking at foundation practices. Here’s an interesting fact: “The Ford Foundation, a $9 billion foundation, the government says you need to give away roughly half a billion every year. Almost $100 million of that, almost $100 million of that is overhead.”

As I say, more scrutiny is needed, at a number of levels.

HERE’S MORE ON THE PARMALAT SCANDAL, also known as “Europe’s Enron.” It’s worth reading this article in conjunction with Matt Welch’s post on French political corruption, as the model Welch describes isn’t limited to France.

There’s plenty of corruption, and journalistic-corporate bribery, in the United States, too. But there seems to be rather less of it than in Europe.

IKEA AND THE SWEDISH SOUL: An amusing bit of writing from DJ Magazine includes this one-sentence description of Sweden: “A flat-packed approach to reality — you think you know where you are with the thing and then there’s always one screw missing. . . .”

In another DJ-related matter, people keep asking me if I’m related to Tara Reynolds. Not as far as I know — though in some pictures she bears a strong resemblance to my sister — but I don’t think that Reynolds is even her birth name. Sorry.

MATT WELCH shares a French Christmas. Sounds yummy!

But scroll down a bit for his post on political corruption.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, the MadPonies have posted a Christmas photo essay on their site. Scroll down for a post on the making of the MadPony Christmas card, too, as well as much information regarding shoes, and the women who love them. No politics here!

And don’t miss Daniel Drezner’s post on credit cards, Christmas, and capitalism in Eastern Europe. No Christmas pix of Professor Drezner, though, which is undoubtedly a disappointment to women throughout the blogosphere.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jay Rosen has a Christmas post, one that notes a crucial distinction regarding “the media, as something vastly different from journalism.”

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO THE TROOPS: A nice post, with photos. Read this, from LT Smash, too.

UPDATE: And read this, from Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker, while you’re at it.

ANOTHER UPDATE: This Christmas item from StrategyPage is good, too.

IT’S A CHRISTMAS DEAN-O-RAMA! Eric Alterman is defending Howard Dean against the “Washington punditocracy.” Meanwhile Jonah Goldberg suggests Paris Hilton as Dean’s running mate. And Jeff Jarvis talks about Howard Dean’s newfound religion.

LILEKS has a Christmas bleat up today, and he’s right about the curious reluctance of people to openly wish a Merry Christmas these days: “At the Mall on Tuesday it was almost the Holiday That Dare Not Speak Its Name.” But the fable of the lights is my favorite of his Christmas bleats.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas!

TAPPAHANNOCK? Charles Paul Freund has some tough questions for Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri:

But then the attempted destruction of comparatively successful Muslim societies by a lunatic fringe is an old story, isn’t it? Osama bin Laden’s very first words directed to the West, as the Taliban were being overthrown, evoked lost Islamic Spain. But the glories of Spain’s Umayyads were destroyed not by European Inquisitors; they were ruined by armies of North African proto-Islamists who were as angry and as destructive and as crazy as you are. Cordoba and Toledo and Granada achieved their golden ages not through the efforts of people like you, but despite them. In the course of the struggle between an Islam of achievement and grace, and an Islam engulfed by righteous futility, have you never noticed that even Muslims prefer to forget people like you and to remember the other side? Even you and Osama, it seems, attempt to co-opt precisely the Islamic history you are attempting to negate.

But—my apologies—you’re no doubt busy planning noxious slaughter and here I am failing to get to my question, which is not about Umayyad Spain at all. It’s about Tappahannock, Virginia.

Read the whole thing. A reader, meanwhile, notes that the USS Tappahannock might be the real target, as it’s a fueling ship that would make a satisfactory explosion if it were hit by a plane.

UPDATE: Several readers note that the USS Tappahannock has been mothballed and isn’t likely to be much of a target at present.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Another reader notes that there is a USNS Rappahannock.

MERRY CHRISTMAS! A lovely gift-opening morning was had here, and we’ll be off to various family events today. Posting will be light, but not nonexistent.

In the meantime, you might want to read these thoughts by Lee Harris on the failures, and successes, of Christmas.

THE INSTA-DAUGHTER hasn’t believed in Santa Claus for a couple of years. But tonight, she insisted on putting out a plate of cookies for him anyway.

She knows she’s growing up, and although she likes that, she also has mixed feelings about it. Don’t we all.

DOES THIS say something about this year’s holiday mood? “Actually Hobby Lobby and Wal Mart were not as bad as I expected. The liquor store however was busier than I have ever seen it.”

Hmm. I’m calling the mood “Churchillian.”

UPDATE: Reader John Davies emails:

Yesterday I stopped into the gun store to get my first pistol.

The guy behind the counter said that all he did yesterday was call in transfer checks for gun sales. The phone lines were swamped and he said that he was on hold much longer than usual.

The woman on the other end recognized his voice.

Yes, I think the mood is Churchillian.

I’ve always liked Churchill.

THIS is interesting: “The French Government has ordered the cancellation of three Air France flights to Los Angeles following a security alert.”

UPDATE: More here, (Google translation here.)

Daniel Drezner has more, and says that Al Qaeda is stuck in a rut.

Roger Simon is planning on blogging from LAX tomorrow, so drop by his blog for developments from the eye of the storm. And expect updates from the Command Post terrorism page.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Captain Ed wonders if this should have been made public.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: More here from Kevin Murphy, summarizing this fascinating story from the Los Angeles Times.

MORE: Here’s a story from Friday’s Washington Post that raises more questions than it answers. And Roger Simon reports on LAX: “the atmosphere at LA International was orderly but grim.”

RICH, BLOGGY CHRISTMAS-EVE GOODNESS: Winds of Change is hosting this week’s Carnival of the Vanities.

STEVEN LEVY WRITES on how “the Internet could become a tool of corporate and government power, based on updates now in the works.”

There’s no question that some people — both within and without the United States — are working toward that very end.

It’s up to us to stop them.

THE NEW YORK TIMES: Pro-Saddam in the 1980s? Funny that they don’t talk about it now.