Iraq: an exit strategy proposal

Fred Kaplan, in Slate, summarizes two similar proposals for an Iraq exit strategy. He prefaces his discussion by stating that Cheney/Bush are a lost cause and that this strategy, tragically, must wait for the next administration - approximately 650 days from now (I need to find a countdown button for my blog). Emphases mine ...

Two new proposals for exiting Iraq. - By Fred Kaplan - Slate Magazine

... Simon and Cole agree that the United States' main goals, at this point, should be to limit the effects of the civil war (which is already well in progress) and to keep the conflagration from spreading across the region.

It may seem paradoxical at first glance, but the best way to accomplish both goals may be to declare that we are leaving—that we're doing so on a timetable to be negotiated with the Iraqi government and in tandem with a separate, broader negotiation to end the civil war, but we are getting out...

...Cole further recommends holding new provincial elections so that the elected Sunni Arab representatives could stand in for guerrilla groups in the national talks, as Sinn Fein did in Northern Ireland.

However, both Simon and Cole emphasize, this step must be linked to active engagement with all of Iraq's neighbors. Cole lays out a scenario in which the United States and Britain work with the United Nations or the Organization of the Islamic Conference on this task, citing as a model the Bonn conference of December 2001 that helped install a unity government in Afghanistan. He envisions the Iraqi government arranging formal security commitments with the foreign ministers of Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. He also suggests inviting Saudi Arabia to reprise the role it played in brokering an end to the Lebanese civil war in 1989, noting the credibility that King Abdullah has with the Sunni Arabs—though he notes, in that case, the Iranians will have to play a similar role in helping to shut down the Shiite militias, especially Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi army.

Under this scheme, the United States would negotiate a phased withdrawal in tandem with these political settlements. Simon notes that some U.S. troops should stay—to secure Baghdad International Airport, the Green Zone, and access routes in between. He also urges a stepped-up U.S. military presence elsewhere in the Persian Gulf. Cole is not in favor of a total U.S. pullout, either. (Nor, it should be noted, are the House or Senate Democrats, who, in their bills, provide continued funding for troops involved in counterterrorism, training Iraqi security forces, and protecting U.S. personnel.)..

... If the next president puts something like these plans in motion, will they amount to anything? Neither Simon nor Cole is naive on this score. Both admit their proposals are gambles. For my own part, I doubt that the Iranians have a deep interest in a stable Iraq and wonder, with trepidation, what price they'd demand in exchange for helping to build one...

I'll be looking for Phil Carter's response to Kaplan's summary and I'd very much like to read a Dyer response. Dyer, I think, is more optimistic than Kaplan about Iran's interest in a stable (albeit weak and vulnerable) Iraq. I read Kaplan as signing on, reluctantly, to the plan.

Of course all of this is an implicit statement that Iraq is another Vietnam. We should be so lucky -- Vietnam is a trading partner, reasonably good neighbor to Thailand, and non-terroristic de facto ally of the US. If the US failure in Iraq turns out as well as the US failure in Vietnam then Bush will be ranked as only among the three worst presidents in US history.

I think the model here is the British departure from Northern Ireland -- in which the EU played an important role (so, alas, did 9/11. That day the IRA knew the end had come for them.). If Phil goes for it then it will have my vote too ...

A frivolous top 100 person list -- from Japan

I assume it's frivolous -- "Jean of Arc" was presumably Joan's younger brother. Still, it's a fun read. Genghis Khan is number #11, probably higher than on most US lists but arguably lower than he merits. Jean is #6.

The most interesting persons, of course, are Japanese. All with links to Wikipedia.

Grand canyon skywalk: how blogs change the cost of incompetence

Blogs may reduce the lifespan of an incompetent implementation ...

April 4, 2007: Grand Canyon Skywalk

...The whole experience was quite disappointing. While the views were spectacular, the cost was just far too high, especially because they were not clearly advertised ...

Most people will want to hold off visiting until the tribe gets their house in order.

Pet food poison: Americans smarter than expected?

The early media coverage of the pet food poisoning was so feeble I assumed Americans weren't making some rather obvious connections. I was wrong. This probably explains why Congress has agreed to hold hearings (emphases mine)...

JWT :: Americans Doubt Safety of Nation's Food Supply in Wake of Pet-Food Contamination

... The random and representative survey of 1,172 Americans 18 or older was conducted the week ending March 31 to gauge Americans' perception of the safety of the nation's food supply in the wake of the recent pet-food contamination. The research builds on JWT's legacy of tracking anxiety in the post-9/11 environment. (Sixty-three percent of the respondents have children, 75 percent own pets, and 3 percent said the recent pet-food contamination affected their pets.)

According to the survey, 60 percent of Americans agree strongly or somewhat with the statement "I'm starting to believe that the food supply in the U.S. isn't as safe as it used to be." Nearly half (47 percent) do not believe that the U.S. government is adequately prepared to respond quickly to an attack on our nation's food and/or water supply (only 24 percent do). Forty-four percent do not believe that the U.S. government has adequate measures in place to prevent deliberate attacks on our nation's food and/or water supply, compared to a quarter who do. And 74 percent and 71 percent of respondents agree that safety measures at food/beverage manufacturers and farms, respectively, need to be heightened to prevent a deliberate attack on our food supply.

There's one report today that the FDA is publicly admitting the poisoning may have been deliberate. That would not be surprising, and it need not have occurred in China either.

Gribbin, Wittgenstein, Amazon and the reasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics

The serendipity of modern life, abetted by the evolution of the podcast, the USB-equipped car stereo, and emergent algorithmic connections [1], has meant that I am simultaneously listening to a 2003 In Our Time podcast on Wittgenstein, reading a 1994 book by John Gribbin, and sluggishly pondering the limits to reason.

There's something in there I am not clever enough to tease apart, something about what mathematics can and cannot tell us about "the real" [2], and how our forms of expression (language, mathematics, visualization, etc) match up to the challenge of describing "the real".

The common thread, just on the tip of the cognitive tongue, feels like a extended debate about whether it is "true" (whatever that means) to say that mathematics is "unreasonably effective" at describing "the real", or whether a combination of metaphor, intuition and empirical intuition is a better guide.

If we go with the latter, then mathematics is "merely" a self-consistent (but limited and tricksy) toolkit with which an almost unlimited number of models of "the real" may be extended or manipulated. It is thus not "unreasonably effective" but rather "reasonably" (as in understandably) ineffective (and effective too).

Sigh. If I were to try to toss in 'Strange Loop' (Hoftstader) [3], Wolfram and (inevitably) Godel my head would probably explode, but if I had three times my currently declining intellect perhaps it would all make sense. Maybe if I keep rereading Gribbin (who is much underestimated I think) and replaying Wittgenstein I'll make a bit more progress. Or not.

Notes and asides

[1] Amazon, Google and Wikipedia all played their role in producing a never ending web of relationships. This blog, posting, in its own small way, will be one more bit of noise for our friendly reinforcing neural network. Of course we all know about Google and Wikipedia, but Amazon is continuing to add new layers of reinforcing connections between its artifacts, one of which led to this book: A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel And Einstein. Amazon's link to used books (how do they make money from that?) means I was able to pick it up for $5 impulse purchase. Hence Amazon gets in the post title.

[2] In parens since reality is starting to feel very different from our historical sense of it.

[3] Speaking of strange loops and the arrow of time, while writing this a funny stutter in the relationship between Blogger and my browser cache switched the post transiently back to an earlier version. Which did produce a weird sensation ...

Dyer on "300" - Iranians are wrong, right, and need not fear

Dyer, reviews the movie '300', without bothering to watch it (he seems to know Miller's comic, however, which is a bit curious). I love his conclusion:

... So the gallant Greek-Americans triumph over the evil Persians, and let that be a lesson to evil-doers everywhere. But our Iranian friends should not worry that this film is juicing American youth up for an invasion of their country, because the kids just won't get it. Down in the teenage bloodlust demographic, practically nobody knows that the Persians of ancient times and the Iranians of today are the same people.

I bet that even without bothering to watch the movie (he's in Cuba) that his conclusions are correct. 300 looks to the Iranians as a conspiracy to whip up the West against them, but it's really emergent rather than conspiratorial propaganda.

I suspect I'll pass on the movie myself, I've given up on getting hair on my chest.

Are we contributing to the delinquency of untenured academic bloggers?

I hope it's widely understood that blogging is an impediment to promotion in every field that values propriety, discipline, and convention, which is basically every field except, perhaps, journalism. The pursuit of tenure is an oft cited example. Tenure is an oddly persistent medieval institution with some similarity to the job stability of senior executives (those who have contracts), 1970s union jobs, and owner-operators (equity holders). The process of acquiring tenure varies depending one's gender and ethnicity, but in general it requires a great deal of work, the successful development of an institutional revenue stream, and adherence to a largely unwritten code of social and political conduct. Activities that do not lead to a revenue stream, such as teaching too well, writing for the public, and, above all, blogging, are considered a sign of an undisciplined and romantic mind that is unlikely to produce a strong ongoing revenue stream.

I think the skepticism about writing, blogging and teaching too well are justified and that they are, indeed, signs of a impractical and naive sensibility. They suggest the candidate is a dreamy idealist who has confused the narrative of the academic quest with the reality of running a grant engine. Shtetl-Optimized is, alas, the most recent example of a young academic learning this lesson the hard way. [4/9/07: I should have read it a bit more closely. It was an alleged April Fools joke. Hmmphh. I hate when that happens. Since I was taken in, I won't attempt to judge the merits of the jest ... Still one might protest it was too plausible to be a top notch effort.]

I feel a bit guilty. As a keen reader of academics who blog, I am necessarily contributing to their vice and their downfall. It reminds me of why I stopped hitchhiking as a young man -- not so much because of the danger I experienced, but because I feared I was encouraging drivers to pick up other hitchhikers I'd met (among whom were a few very unsavory characters).

Perhaps I should restrict my reading to tenured faculty, such as Brad DeLong. On the other hand, I share the vice of these misguided academics and, arguably, their peril. Does that lessen my complicity?

Our fiends the toxoplasma

Carl Zimmer updates us on the diabolical machinations of the mind controlling parasites that infest half of humanity: The Loom : Parasites as Neuropharmacologists. Maybe this explains tiger petting in Thailand.

PS. I do recommend the Thailand travelogue link, which has more than one connection to micro-organisms. I spent most of a year near the old fish market as a feckless youth. There is more continuity than I might have imagined, though I think the writer is over simplifying a wee bit ...

Quantum reality, with the math: Decoherence and Hidden Variables

I've been reading some popular physics books in my latest attempt to figure out how bad reality is looking these days. The answer is, pretty bad -- even worse than your average middle-aged American. So a post on a new blog I'm following caught my eye...

PHYS771 Lecture 11: Decoherence and Hidden Variables

... if you teach an introductory course on quantum mechanics, and the students don't have nightmares for weeks, tear their hair out, wander around with bloodshot eyes, etc., then you probably didn't get the point across. So rather than deny this aspect of quantum mechanics -- rather than cede the field to the hucksters and charlatans, the Deepak Chopras and Brian Josephsons -- shouldn't we map it out ourselves...

...But why should we care about multiple-time probabilities? For me, it has to do with the reliability of memory. The issue is this: does the "past" have any objective meaning? ... Or does the past only "exist" insofar as it's reflected in memories and records in the present?

The latter view is certainly the more natural one in quantum mechanics. But as John Bell pointed out, if we take it seriously, then it would seem difficult to do science! For what could it mean to make a prediction if there's no logical connection between past and future states -- if by the time you finish reading this sentence, you might as well find yourself deep in the Amazon rainforest, with all the memories of your trip there conveniently inserted, and all the memories of sitting at a computer reading quantum computing lecture notes conveniently erased?

... if we accept the usual picture of quantum mechanics, then in a certain sense the situation is far worse: the world (as you experience it) might as well not have existed 10^-43 seconds ago...

... When I was talking before about the fragility of quantum states -- how they're so easy to destroy, so hard to put back together -- you might have been struck by a parallel with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Obviously that's just a coincidence, right? Duhhh, no. The way people think about it today, decoherence is just one more manifestation of the Second Law....

...
At this point the sharp-eyed reader might notice a problem: won't the branches have to collide eventually, when the tree "runs out of room to expand"? The answer is yes. Firstly, if the Hilbert space is finite-dimensional, then obviously the parallel universes can only branch off a finite number times before they start bumping into each other. But even in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space, we need to think of each universe as having some finite "width" (think of Gaussian wavepackets for example), so again we can only have a finite number of splittings.

The answer of decoherence theory is that yes, eventually the branches of the multiverse will start interfering with each other -- just like eventually the universe will reach thermal equilibrium. But by that time we'll presumably all be dead....

...

The idea of hidden-variable theories is simple. If we think of quantum mechanics as describing this vast roiling ocean of parallel universes, constantly branching off, merging, and cancelling each other out, then we're now going to stick a little boat in that ocean. We'll think of the boat's position as representing the "real," "actual" state of the universe at a given point in time, and the ocean as just a "field of potentialities" whose role is to buffet the boat around. For historical reasons, the boat's position is called a hidden variable...

.... Thinking about hidden variables seems scientifically fruitful: it led Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen to the EPR experiment, Bell to Bell's Inequality, Kochen and Specker to the Kochen-Specker Theorem, and me to the collision lower bound...

... Hidden-variable theories will give me a perfect vehicle for discussing other issues in quantum foundations -- like nonlocality, contextuality, and the role of time...

Now, you might've heard of a little thing called Bell's Inequality. As it turns out, Bell's Inequality doesn't quite rule out hidden-variable theories satisfying the two axioms above, but a slight strengthening of what Bell proved does the trick.

So what is Bell's Inequality?

...since I'm not a member of the Physics Popularizers' Guild, I'm now going to break that profession's time-honored bylaws, and just tell you the conceptual point directly.

We've got two players, Alice and Bob, and they're playing the following game. Alice flips a fair coin; then, based on the result, she can either raise her hand or not. Bob flips another fair coin; then, based on the result, he can either raise his hand or not. What both players want is that exactly one of them should raise their hand, if and only if both coins landed heads. If that condition is satisfied then they win the game; if it isn't then they lose. (This is a cooperative rather than competitive game.)

Now here's the catch: Alice and Bob are both in sealed rooms (possibly even on different planets), and can't communicate with each other at all while the game is in progress.

The question that interests us is: what is the maximum probability with which Alice and Bob can win the game?

Well, certainly they can win 75% of the time. Why?

Right: they can both just decide never to raise their hands, regardless of how the coins land! In that case, the only way they'll lose is if both of the coins land heads.

Exercise: Prove that this is optimal. In other words, any strategy of Alice and Bob will win at most 75% of the time.

Now for the punchline: suppose that Alice and Bob share the entangled state with Alice holding one half and Bob holding the other half. In that case, there exists a strategy by which they can win the game with probability

To be clear, having the state .... does not let Alice and Bob send messages to each other faster than the speed of light -- nothing does! What it lets them do is to win this particular game more than 75% of the time. Naïvely, we might have thought that would require Alice and Bob to "cheat" by sending each other messages, but that simply isn't true -- they can also cheat by using entanglement!

So that was Bell's Inequality.

... It follows that, if we want it to agree with quantum mechanics, then any hidden-variable theory has to allow "instantaneous communication" between any two points in the universe. Once again, this doesn't mean that quantum mechanics itself allows instantaneous communication (it doesn't), or that we can exploit hidden variables to send messages faster than light (we can't). It only means that, if we choose to describe quantum mechanics using hidden variables, then our description will have to involve instantaneous communication.

... So what we've learned, from Alice and Bob's coin-flipping game, is that any attempt to describe quantum mechanics with hidden variables will necessarily lead to tension with relativity. Again, none of this has any experimental consequences, since it's perfectly possible for hidden-variable theories to violate the "spirit" of relativity while still obeying the "letter." Indeed, hidden-variable fans like to argue that all we're doing is unearthing the repressed marital tensions between relativity and quantum mechanics themselves!

Mixed in with the above reasonable sounding words is some moderately serious math, none of which I could follow. For me the discussion affirmed that the 'hidden variable' interpretations of QM do collide with the spirit of special relativity.

China limits the retail organ trade

I'm surprised the government is taking action; I'd not thought they were really feeling pressured.

China issues human organ transplant rules in attempt to clean up industry - International Herald Tribune

China has published rules governing human organ transplants ...

... The new regulations issued Friday by China's State Council, or Cabinet, include a ban on the sale of human organs for profit and on donations by people under 18, according to the text of the regulations published by the Communist Party newspaper People's Daily.

The rules, which take effect May 1, also make it illegal to harvest human organs without permission, and standardize transplant procedures at the limited number of hospitals licensed to perform such operations.

Little information about China's lucrative transplant business is publicly available. Human rights groups have said many organs — including those transplanted into wealthy foreigners — come from executed prisoners who may not have given their permission.

"The regulations show that China is responding to great international concern over organ trade in the country," said Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch, in a telephone interview...

China's state-run Xinhua News Agency said most organs used in transplants come from deceased Chinese citizens who had voluntarily donated. But according to Bequelin, more than 90 percent of organs used in transplants were obtained from judicial executions.

A senior Chinese health official acknowledged last year that a majority of organs were harvested from executed prisoners, but only with their prior consent, according to the state-run China Daily newspaper...

... Health officials say China faces a severe shortage of human organs, estimating that out of 1.5 million people who need transplants in China each year, only about 10,000 operations are carried out.

Voluntary donations remain far below demand in China, partly due to cultural biases against organ removal before burial

I wonder how bad things were getting. As predicted by Niven about 40 years ago, the combination of a low threshold for the death penalty and organ harvesting prior to execution (in China I believe the practice is to harvest first, then "execute") leads to a very steep downhill slope. Even with that combination, however, China is meeting about 0.5% of the organ demand.

One driver for this legislation may be the legitimate concern that rich foreigners will buy up what organs are available, further limiting availability in China.

Theocrats in the justice department

A 34 yo GOP appointed US attorney in the twin cities area was in the news recently. Most of the senior members of the Rachel Paulose's office have requested demotions to avoid working with her. She's a right wing theocrat and friend of the infamous Ms. Goodling, the latest Bush appointee to fall in defense of Karl Rove

A Top Aide to the Attorney General Resigns - New York Times

... Ms. Goodling, 33, was not widely known before her refusal to testify. She is a 1995 graduate of Messiah College in Grantham, Pa., and received her law degree at Regent University in Virginia Beach, according to many Web site postings. Messiah describes itself as “committed to an embracing evangelical spirit,” while Regent was founded by the Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson...

I wonder how widespread the GOP practice of seeding right wing theocrats into justice department positions is ...

Update 4/29/07: There's a thoughtful comment on this post from a Messiah alumn that's worth reading.

Spam: latest innovation - social engineering by consecutive email threads and using process patents as an offensive weapon

Diabolical. Really, any non-geek online doesn't stand much of a chance these days.

The latest innovation in my spam employs an automated incremental social engineering strategy. I received 4 messages over a period of two days from an aol.com address. They went to my junk email account (yahoo.com) but evaded Yahoo's quite good spam filters [Google's filters are also failing recently, must be another new innovation]. They are written to sound like emails sent accidentally to the wrong person, with language and style that's apparently designed to be "appealing"

i'm wondering if you were able to open my card
i didn't realized you called my cell untill my tango class
you won't believe richard called me around 1 pm like nothing happened,
he was asking me if i want to joined him and his friend for dinner
i said i have to prepare my report for trump, and it's true
the man is not all there, i sent him e-mail tonight

The key innovation is that they're progressive and not nonsensical. The early messages are benign, but the later messages include links and images. I imagine the idea is that the recipient is lulled into thinking these are "legitimate" and thus relatively trusted, and eventually responds or interacts with the messages. Then the payload is delivered.

It's easy to imagine how sophisticated these schemes will become.

I've read that spam fighting is now limited by a range of process patents on techniques like 'managed reputation filtering of authenticated sending services'. I wonder if the spammers hold the process patents. It would make sense for a spammer to use process patents to block all possible spam defenses, thereby turning the defective (Bush/Cheney strangled of course) US patent office into an offensive weapon. Rather similar to a pathogen turning an organisms immune system against it.

I expect we'll have to wait for Cheney/Bush to retire before we see any redress.

Pet poison: Congress to hold hearings, implications sinking in

The wider implications of the 2007 pet poisoning story are beginning to sink in. Congress will hold hearings, which will doubtless show that Cheney/Bush have signficantly impaired FDA capabilities. There's a growing recognition that if the toxins really did originate in China (vs. a US based importer/shipper), that thousands of Chinese citizens may have suffered kidney damange. Reports have stopped confusing the death toll in animal testing with the total estimated death and injury toll. Lastly, the broader implications for homeland security and food management are being discussed ...

China probing tainted wheat gluten claim

.... Only 873 tons have been linked to the contaminated pet food in America, raising the possibility that more of the bad product could still be in China or the United States. Xuzhou Anying says the U.S. is its only foreign market.

Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University, said Friday that importing the ingredients for food products from developing countries is becoming "increasingly common."

"This is what globalization is about," said Nestle, who is writing a book about pet food.

While regulators recognize that more and more food is reaching the U.S. from developing countries, Nestle said the Food and Drug Administration is not equipped to sufficiently monitor its quality.

"The FDA is an agency under siege," she said, lacking the funding and manpower to adequately screen imported food, though they are slowly being "reluctantly dragged into it, kicking and screaming."

An FDA spokeswoman, Vash Klein, said the agency did not have time to comment on Friday.

Nestle said that she has always wondered why imported vegetables from Mexico, for example, don't make Americans sick when American tourists traveling in Mexico often get sick from vegetables they eat there. Experts have told her, she said, that Mexican vegetables slated for export to the U.S. are "produced under conditions that are identical to conditions in the U.S."

"But if you think about it for a second, you realize that the FDA isn't going off into the wild to inspect everything," Nestle said, noting that the agency is able to inspect only 2 percent of the goods that cross U.S. borders.

Neal Hooker, a professor of agricultural economics at Ohio State University, said that while the FDA cannot inspect every good that comes into the U.S., it does insist that developing countries meet higher production standards for the goods they intend to send to the U.S.

Hooker said the agency can be fairly effective, despite its infrequent product inspections, because it brings pressure to bear on the system of production and works with foreign governments to ensure compliance.

But government regulations are not the only -- or even the most effective -- means of enforcing high standards. Hooker said the market also offers powerful incentives.

The pet food companies who received tainted ingredients, for instance, "are going to ask for things much more rigorously than a nation can ask for. And they will get them," he said, or they will take their business elsewhere.

Similarly, he said, Mexican vegetable growers may have even higher production standards than U.S. farmers because certain hygienic practices can increase the shelf-life of food, allowing the use of slower -- and cheaper -- shipping methods.

TIME on pet food: last post of the day on this topic

Last one, I promise. This is from TIME.

Unraveling the Pet-Food Mystery | TIME

... critics of the pet food industry point to two factors that may contribute to unsafe food: the centralization of the process for making food and the use of unsanitary material from rendering plants. The recall brought to light that the wheat gluten, which was eventually recalled, came from a single Chinese company but ended up in over 100 brands of pet food. ChemNutra Inc., based in Las Vegas, bought 873 tons of gluten from the Chinese company, farmed it out to three pet food makers and one distributor that services the industry. A highly centralized process may be cheap, but "at that size and scale if something goes wrong it goes wrong big time," says Nestle.

Rendering plants, which boil down dead animal carcasses from slaughterhouses into fats and proteins, sell cheap material that often ends up in pet food. The "meat" in your cat's kibbles could be any kind: there's no law against even using rendered material from cats and dogs in pet food. Plants can mix in anything from road kill to supermarket deli meats, and investigations by KMOV-TV in St. Louis and the Los Angeles Times have suggested that pets killed in animal shelters just might make it into the slop. The Pet Food Institute, whose members create most of the dog and cat food sold in the U.S., told the Times that pets are not allowed in their products. But the FDA has admitted to finding "very, very low levels" of sodium pentobarbital — the chemical used to euthanize animals — in some brands of dog food. Wayne Pacelle, President of the Humane Society of the U.S. said the allegations need more scrutiny. "The pet food industry is not the most transparent of industries and it has been really difficult for the public to obtain information," he says.

What Should You Feed Fido?

Besides staying away from recalled products, pet owners might want to consider using natural food from smaller companies. "I would suggest feeding pets organic instead of commercial dog food from big companies who are focused on filling food at the cheapest price," says Friedrich from PETA. Some pet lovers are bypassing store food altogether, serving up home cooked meals — everything from bone-shaped biscuits to homemade hamburgers. Sales of cookbooks for cats and dogs have increased dramatically, according Nielsen BookScan. But Goldstein of Cornell warns against cooking for your pet. "I would hate for people to stop using commercial pet food, because it's the healthiest diet in the long term for dogs and cats who need multiple vitamins at the proper ratios."

I wonder how "balanced" those vitamins really need to be - especially for dogs. Goldstein needs to point to some science. In the meantime we're going to go "organic" as a starting point, though it will be a gradual migration. (Gradual because our dog's diet is already gluten free, migration because this has shown how insane the pet food industry is.)

Poisoning 2007: Melanine as a marker, and where the heck did the stuff come from?

More from the NYT. Everyone denies they know anything about any gluten, WalMart's dog biscuits are recalled and Menu Foods extends the timeline that animals may have been injured by another two months ...

22 Brands of Dog Biscuits Are Added to Pet Food Recall - New York Times

... Menu Foods, which last month recalled more than 90 brands of its “cuts and gravy” pet food, said yesterday that it had extended the period of time covered by its recall to include food made after Nov. 8, 2006. The company, based in Ontario, initially recalled only food made from Dec. 3, 2006, to March 6, 2007.

The company also added 20 additional varieties of those brands to the recall list yesterday. Information about the recalled pet food can be found at www.fda.gov/oc/opacom/hottopics/petfood.html.

Menu Foods said it acted after a supplier, ChemNutra of Las Vegas, recalled all wheat gluten it had imported from the Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company of Wangdien, China. ChemNutra said Wednesday that the F.D.A. had found melamine in the gluten. The agency said it was now testing all wheat gluten from China.

The Chinese government said yesterday that no wheat gluten had been exported to the United States or Canada. Xuzhou Anying denied it had ever shipped wheat gluten to either country.

“We are a trading company and don’t manufacture the product,” added Mao Lijun, the company’s general manager. Michael Rogers, director of the Division of Field Investigations for the F.D.A., said records showed that the tainted gluten came from China.

... Melamine, which is also used as a slow-release fertilizer, is generally not known to be toxic. Some theories are that it might act as a marker for another unknown toxin that causes renal failure in pets, Dr. Sundlof said, or that cats and dogs are extremely sensitive to melamine.

“We still have a lot of work to do to understand why melamine is involved, as it is a relatively nontoxic substance,” Dr. Sundlof said. “We are relatively certain that there is a connection here someplace.”

... Dr. Halbur and Grant Maxie of the University of Guelph in Ontario, which is also investigating the cause of the illnesses and deaths, said it would probably take months to determine what made the pets sick.

Tons of gluten apparently just materialized from thin air, contaminated with all kinds of junk. Sounds like the vets suspect the Melanine is just one more contaminant and that the real poison may take months to find.

In the meantime, the whole story gets more appalling.

Update: The NYTs has a f/u article ...
April 6, 2007
China Says It Had Nothing to Do With Tainted Pet Foods
By DAVID BARBOZA

SHANGHAI, April 5 — China said today that it had no record of exporting any agricultural products that could have tainted the pet food that has been linked to the deaths of cats and dogs in the United States.

The government said that wheat gluten — which has been linked to a nationwide pet food recall in the United States — had not been exported from China to the United States or Canada. The government also disputed some reports that the chemical aminopterin, a rat poison, could have entered the American pet food supplies from China. The government said the chemical is not used in rat poison here...

...the Chinese company identified by the Food and Drug Administration as the exporter tied to the tainted pet food ingredient denied today that it was the source.

“We have never exported wheat gluten directly or indirectly to the U.S., Canada or the Netherlands,” said Mao Lijun, the general manager of the Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company, an agricultural products company in the coastal Jiangsu Province.

...ChemNutra, a Las Vegas company that supplies pet food makers, said it imported 792 metric tons of wheat gluten from Xuzhou between Nov. 29 and March 8. The products were then shipped from its Kansas City warehouse to three pet food makers and one distributor of pet food ingredients in the United States and Canada.

The wheat gluten ended up in pet food made for several companies, including Menu Foods of Ontario, Canada and Hill’s Pet Nutrition, a division of Colgate-Palmolive as well as private label pet foods.

But Xuzhou now insists it never shipped the packages.

“Maybe some company bought our product and exported it without our knowledge,” said Mr. Mao, the general manager of Xuzhou Anying.

Earlier today, however, The Associated Press reported that another official working at Xuzhou had acknowledged that the company shipped wheat gluten to the United States...

... Agricultural product and melamine traders here in China said today that the chemical is sometimes used as a fertilizer but that Chinese farmers have turned away from it in recent years because it is considered too costly.

They also said melamine was used in a wide variety of manufactured goods all over the country, everything from DVD’s to plastic forks and knives, and was widespread in areas where wheat production is strong...