The last days of my mother, the control freak

Two weeks after my mother’s final stroke, it occurred to me she might not know she was dying.

The symptoms of her impending death were all there. She was too tired to open her eyes. She was subsisting on ice chips the size of a baby’s fingernail. Her extremities were cool, the traffic in her veins so lazy that the hospice nurses couldn’t find a pulse. Her breathing would cease for many seconds, then resume with a deep drag—until the next hiatus. She fiddled with the bedclothes and asked me what that dog was doing in the room. There was no dog.

“Do you know you’ve had two more strokes?” I asked her.

“No!”

I wasn’t surprised by her surprise. All year she’d expressed fresh astonishment each time she was informed of her condition—the first stroke that robbed her of memory and sight; the second and third that rendered her more demented, and incontinent; the fall that fractured her hip and propelled her further into frailty and confusion. “This is the first time anyone’s told me!” she’d declare.

My mother was a woman proud of being in charge. In fact, she could bear hardly a moment of not knowing what was coming next, of intellectual ambiguity or emotional irresolution.  Read Article

Cleaning the Henhouse

The latest salmonella outbreak, underscoring the failures of industrial farming, reminds me of the small chicken flock that I tended while growing up on a family farm.

Our chickens wandered freely, and one dawn we were awakened by frantic squawking. We looked out the window to see a fox rushing off with a hen in its mouth.

My father grabbed his .308 rifle and blasted out the window twice in the general direction of the fox. Frightened, it dropped the hen. Yet the hen, astonishingly, was still alive. She picked herself up, spun around dizzily a couple of times, and staggered back to the barn.

A month later, my aunt visited our farm with her Irish setter, Toby, who was always eager to please but a bit dimwitted. We chatted and forgot about Toby — until he bounded up proudly to show a chicken he had retrieved for us.

It was the very same hen that had survived the fox. We shouted, and Toby sadly dropped the bird. She ruffled her feathers, glared at the dog, and then stalked off while clucking indignantly.

Perhaps that hen might have been ready to choose a cage over the perils of canines on the range, and, obviously, my family’s model of chicken-farming was horrendously inefficient and no model for the future. But the other extreme of jamming chickens into small cages is a nightmare for the animals — and the salmonella outbreak underscores that it can be a health hazard to humans as well.  Read Article

The Peanut Solution

Like most tales of great invention, the story of Plumpy’nut begins with a eureka moment, in this case involving a French doctor and a jar of Nutella, and proceeds through the stages of rejection, acceptance, evangelization and mass production. The product may not look like much — a little foil packet filled with a soft, sticky substance — but its advocates are prone to use the language of magic and wonders. What is Plumpy’nut? Sound it out, and you get the idea: it’s an edible paste made of peanuts, packed with calories and vitamins, that is specially formulated to renourish starving children. Since its widespread introduction five years ago, it has been credited with significantly lowering mortality rates during famines in Africa. Children on a Plumpy’nut regimen add pounds rapidly, often going from a near-death state to relative health in a month. In the world of humanitarian aid, where progress is usually measured in subtle increments of misery, the new product offers a rare satisfaction: swift, visible, fantastic efficacy.
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Maggie Steber for The New York Times

Children, eating a peanut paste, at a seaside tent camp in Haiti.

Plumpy’nut is also a brand name, however, the registered trademark of Nutriset, a private French company that first manufactured and marketed the paste. It was not the intention of Plumpy’nut’s inventor, a crusading pediatrician named André Briend, to create an industry around Plumpy’nut. Briend, his friends say, was always personally indifferent to money. (Also, apparently, to publicity — he declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this article.) One element of genius in Briend’s recipe was precisely its easy replicability: it could be made by poor people, for poor people, to the benefit of patients and farmers alike. Most of the world’s peanuts are grown in developing countries, where allergies to them are relatively uncommon, and the rest of the concoction is simple to prepare. On a visit to Malawi, Briend whipped up a batch in a blender to prove that Plumpy’nut could be made just about anywhere.

Others, however, quickly realized that the miracle product had more than just moral value. Nutriset has aggressively protected its intellectual property, and the bulk of Plumpy’nut production continues to take place at Nutriset facilities in France. (Unicef, the world’s primary buyer, purchases 90 percent of its supply from that factory, according to a 2009 report prepared for the agency.) Internationally, there has been a vituperative debate over who should control the means of production, with India going so far as to impose sharp restrictions on Plumpy’nut, calling it an unproven colonialist import. Elsewhere, local producers are simply ignoring the patent.  Read Article

How Can a Democracy Solve Tough Problems?

If you asked me, what’s the most disappointing thing Barack Obama has done as President? I’d say, He appointed a “blue-ribbon” commission to study the federal deficit. I mean, how boring and worthy and worthless! Such commissions are an instant admission of defeat: We lack the political will to deal with (insert long-term crisis here), so we’re appointing a blue-ribbon commission to study it. The process is inevitable, especially in these days of rising partisan contentiousness. A consensus won’t be reached on the really tough issues. A high-minded, peripheral idea or two may emerge — frosting on a soap bubble — and then evaporate ... or worse, actually be implemented, as was the 9/11 commission’s foolishly redundant suggestion of a Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI), plopped atop the CIA and military spook agencies. No doubt yet another commission will eventually be appointed to study abolishing the DNI.

But what if there were a machine, a magical contraption that could take the process of making tough decisions in a democracy, shake it up, dramatize it and make it both credible and conclusive? As it happens, the ancient Athenians had one. It was called the kleroterion, and it worked something like a bingo-ball selector. Each citizen — free males only, of course — had an identity token; several hundred were picked randomly every day and delegated to make major decisions for the polis. But that couldn’t happen now, could it? Most of our decisions are too complicated and technical for mere civilians to make, aren’t they?

Actually, the Chinese coastal district of Zeguo (pop. 120,000) has its very own kleroterion, which makes all its budget decisions. The technology has been updated: the kleroterion is a team led by Stanford professor James Fishkin. Each year, 175 people are scientifically selected to reflect the general population. They are polled once on the major decisions they’ll be facing. Then they are given a briefing on those issues, prepared by experts with conflicting views. Then they meet in small groups and come up with questions for the experts — issues they want further clarified. Then they meet together in plenary session to listen to the experts’ response and have a more general discussion. The process of small meetings and plenary is repeated once more. A final poll is taken, and the budget priorities of the assembly are made known and adopted by the local government. It takes three days to do this. The process has grown over five years, from a deliberation over public works (new sewage-treatment plants were favored over road-building) to the whole budget shebang. By most accounts it has succeeded brilliantly, even though the participants are not very sophisticated: 60% are farmers. The Chinese government is moving toward expanding it into other districts.  Read Article

In the Crystal Ball:  More Regulation for Psychics

Starting this week, fortune tellers in Warren, Mich., must be fingerprinted and pay an annual fee of $150 — plus $10 for a police background check — to practice their craft. The new rules are among America’s strictest on palmists, fortune readers, and other psychics — and part of a growing push to regulate a business that has never been taken, or overseen, very seriously. But officials in Warren, a town of 138,000 near Detroit, say it’s time to weed out tricksters. “We had no mechanism of enforcement to protect people against unsavory characters,” Warren City Council member Keith Sadowski says. “We want to be sure there is some recourse in case we do get somebody who is not legitimate.”

Regulating an industry that deems itself clairvoyant, has no standard education requirements and yet rakes in cash for revealing spiritual truths may itself be an act of faith. It also might make good economic sense: just over one in seven Americans consulted a psychic or fortune-teller in 2009, according to the Pew Forum for Religion and Public Life. That could be 30 million or more of us.

Municipalities are now struggling to manage such activities. Annapolis, Md., only issues what it calls “fortune-telling licenses” if its police force concludes the applicant is “of good moral character.” Last year Will County, Ill., decided to count fortune tellers as official businesses, along with tattoo parlors and dog watchers. Three years back, Salem, Mass., famous for its 17th Century witch trials — and something of a magnet for spiritual artisans — tightened its rules on background checks for psychics, while easing its cap on the number of local fortune tellers allowed in town.  Read Article

Paris mosque slams burger chain’s Muslim outreach

PARIS – Note to big companies hoping to tap into France’s lucrative but long-neglected Muslim consumer market: Pitfalls may await, and not only in the form of complaints from the far-right.

As of this week, 22 outlets of popular French fast food chain Quick are serving burgers it says respect Islamic dietary law. And while many Muslims are delighted, the powerful main Paris Mosque complained Thursday that Quick’s criteria aren’t all-encompassing enough, and that the operation is meaningless.

Quick’s meat is certified as halal, but Cheikh Al Sid Cheikh, assistant to the rector of the Paris Mosque, said the burger chain should have had the other ingredients checked as well, from its mustard to buns to fries.

“The rest must be validated too, or else there’s no point,” he told The Associated Press. Quick responded that it has no intention of making any of its restaurants halal through-and-through — beer is still served there, for example, said spokeswoman Valerie Raynal.

Such cultural sensitivities are new territory for many French companies. Until recently in France, a country obsessed with secularism, companies were hesitant to reach out to France’s Muslim population, estimated to be 5 million, the largest in Europe.  Read Article

In mosque controversies, some Christians undermine their own faith

A church in Florida is poised to commemorate an act of violence committed in the name of Islam, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, with an act of stupidity committed in the name of Christianity, the public burning of the Koran.

This threatened libricide proves little more than the existence of a few attention-seeking crackpots in a continental country—the natural resource that makes cable news possible. But the Manhattan mosque controversy has exposed a broader, conservative Christian suspicion of mosques and Muslims. Protests against the construction of mosques in California, Tennessee and Wisconsin have often included Christian pastors. Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, a conservative Christian group, recently wrote: “Permits should not be granted to build even one more mosque in the United States of America, let alone the monstrosity planned for Ground Zero. This is for one simple reason: Each Islamic mosque is dedicated to the overthrow of the American government.”

In this debate, grace is in short supply but irony abounds. The Christian fundamentalist view of Islam bears a striking resemblance to the New York Times’ view of Christian fundamentalism—a simplistic emphasis on the worst elements of a complex religious tradition. Both create a caricature, then assert that the Constitution is under assault by an army of straw men. The debates within Islam on the nature and application of sharia law, for example, are at least as complex as the debates among Christian theologians on the nature of social justice. And the political application of Islam differs so greatly—from Saudi Arabia to Mali to Morocco to Bosnia to Tanzania to Detroit—that it defies easy summary.

Many Christian fundamentalists seem oblivious to the similarity of their own legal and cultural peril. In portions of America—say San Francisco or Vermont—conservative Christians are sometimes also viewed as suspicious, illiberal outsiders. Their opinions on gender roles, homosexuality and public morality are viewed as an attack on constitutional values—much as fundamentalists view the threat from Islam. Some secular critics of Islam—Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens come to mind—explicitly argue that the real threat to freedom comes from the oppressive moralism of the entire Abrahamic tradition—Jewish, Christian and Muslim.  Read Article

Dalai Lama speaks out against caging egg-laying hens

Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama on Wednesday expressed distress over the confinement of egg-laying hens in tiny battery cages and urged for an end to the fowl-abuse. In a statement, the Nobel laureate decried the cruel treatment meted out to hens by the egg industry and urged people to
switch over to eggs produced by cage-free hens.

“The abuse we inflict on hens has always been particularly disturbing to me and I have always been particularly concerned toward how these animals are treated in industrial food production,” he said.

Expressing his pain over the practice of confining egg-laying hens in tiny cages, the Dalai Lama said that in such cages, the birds cannot engage in their natural behaviour like spreading their wings, perching, scratching the ground, standing on a solid surface or laying eggs in a nesting area.

“Each hen has less space to live than the sheet of paper I have written this letter on. Turning these defenceless animals into egg-producing machines with no consideration for their welfare whatsoever is a degradation of our own humanity. Switching over to cage-free eggs would reduce the suffering of these creatures,” he urged.

The Dalai Lama’s statement comes as part of a major international movement against cruel and inhumane cages that is taking root against factory egg farms, including a campaign by the Humane Society International.  Read Article