Thursday, November 17, 2005

Trashy

From Essey, a Danish design firm, comes Bin Bin, one of the prettiest trash bins I've seen.



(Via Core77.)
 

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

The ingestion of tradition

My campus paper reports that the USDA made a surprise visit to one of the student eateries a little over a week ago and found that some "meat and poultry dishes from several Hyde Park vendors did not comply with federal regulations."

According to Amy Conners, the general manager of Cobb, the food was problematic because the vendors required a processor's license from the USDA in addition to a restaurant license to sell prepared meat and chicken off-site. [...]

But, she added, a loophole exists that allows meat and poultry "between two traditional pieces of bread" to be sold legally.

I ask—what are "traditional slices of bread"? A Wonder Bread sandwich, I presume, would not count. But does the grain have to be sown, reaped and milled using only horses, mules and the occasional serf? Or does the labels "old fashioned," "country style," or "no trans-fat" suffice?

But that's not the only trouble with these policies.

Instead of obtaining processor's licenses, however, the vendors are selling similar dishes that replace meat and poultry with seafood, which does not fall under the same regulations, along with tofu.

Tofu, I understand. Even when it goes bad, you get soy sauce or something. But seafood? Seafood?! Yeah, ban roast beef and give shrimp a free pass! Botulism, people!
 

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Tuckness on Lockeness

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Alex Tuckness, a political theorist at Iowa State, has just published an article on Locke's Political Philosophy in the Stanford Encyclopedia.

John Locke (1632-1704), is among the most influential political philosophers of the modern period. In the Two Treatises of Government, he defended the claim that men are by nature free and equal against claims that God had made all people naturally subject to a monarch. He argued that people have rights, such as the right to life, liberty, and property, that have a foundation independent of the laws of any particular society. Locke used the claim that men are naturally free and equal as part of the justification for understanding legitimate political government as the result of a social contract where people in the state of nature conditionally transfer some of their rights to the government in order to better insure the stable, comfortable enjoyment of their lives, liberty, and property. Since governments exist by the consent of the people in order to protect the rights of the people and promote the public good, governments that fail to do so can be resisted and replaced with new governments. Locke is thus also important for his defense of the right of revolution. Locke also defends the principle of majority rule and the separation of legislative and executive powers. In the Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke denied that coercion should be used to bring people to (what the ruler believes is) the true religion and also denied that churches should have any coercive power over their members. Locke elaborated on these themes in his later political writings, such as the Second Letter on Toleration and Third Letter on Toleration.

I'll be giving it a read in a few days, but right now I have to run the dishwasher.
 

Sunday, November 06, 2005

Alito bit of this, Alito bit of that

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

I haven't had the time to comment on the Samuel Alito nomination; I've been too busy with a paper submission and an upcoming fellowship application. Man does not live by blog alone. So I thought I'd refer y'all to Cass Sunstein, from the University of Chicago Law School, who's discussed the matter at some length in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post and an interview in NPR's Fresh Air.

Harriet Miers I opposed because she wasn't up to the level of achivement that we've come to expect from Supreme Court nominees. That level, of course, is a different thing from constitutional qualification (the Constitution doesn't even require the Justices to be attorneys fergodsake!), but is an important criterion nonetheless. Sam Alito is obviously qualified, but I still think that he should be opposed. It's perfectly legitimate for the Senate to consider the ideological makeup of the Court, if we think that the USSC's decisions should reflect the nation's understanding of its own foundational charter. And given that the mechanism for deliberation on that self-understanding is the two-party system, the Democrats have every right (duty, indeed) to raise the issue of his conservatism and vote accordingly. As do the Republicans.

And that's where the filibuster comes in. By effectively requiring a supermajority, the filibuster is a deliberative tool that forces the nomination of consensus candidates, which are precisely the ones that will probably reflect the national political landscape the best.