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Below is a brief excerpt from an interview in the Globe and Mail with Michael Pollan.

IB: One of the reasons people want to eat in a more engaged way seems to be a longing for community, as an antidote to our technological isolation. Food is community--and a very physical form of community, at that.

MP: Shared meals, breaking bread, making food, with one another, with nature, across generations--there is a longing for that. One of the earmarks of industrial eating is eating alone. Our eating has become very isolated and anti-social. ... So industrial eating or corporate eating has undermined the social dimension of eating. And people miss that. And I think that is one of the drivers that brings people to this movement.

This hidden amongst a bunch of other commentary on the backlash that seems to be creeping up against foodies as being elitist. It seems like there's something else that people feeling they're missing and are now trying to capture.

How often is your food consumption communal?

The New York Times recently had an article examining the role of women in Iraqi politics. It bemoaned that

No women took part in the protracted negotiations to reach a compromise government. And despite holding a quarter of the seats in Parliament, only one woman runs a ministry: women’s affairs, a largely ceremonial department with a tiny budget and few employees. In the previous government from 2006 to 2010, four women led ministries, and in the government from 2005 to 2006, six did, including the influential ones governing public works, refugees and communications.

It also noted that women had no role in Hussein's government and the resistance movements were dominated by men. It notes that "women" lobbied the American administrator Paul Bremer to insert a constitutional requirement that a quarter of seats in the Iraqi parliament be reserved for women (although it's unclear from the article whether that reference to "women" lobbying refers to Iraqi women or American feminist organizations).

Does this mean that women are being discriminated against? Compare to a latter portion of the article:

Only 5 of the 86 female lawmakers actually got enough votes to win seats without the quota. The remaining 81 were put there by party leaders because of the Constitution’s mandate.

"Many of those women who were chosen as part of the political parties were chosen because they were relatives of members of the party," said Safia Taleb al-Souhail, a member of Parliament who is part of the State of Law bloc, which Mr. Maliki leads.

"The parties didn’t really think to have women inside the party itself, and just chose many of the women, like, two weeks before the election," Ms. Souhail said. "This is what I meant exactly: there are not a lot of serious politicians."

This despite the estimate by the Iraqi electoral commission that 55-62% of votes in the most recent election were cast by women. The article notes that one female member of parliament arguing that women lacked the necessary experience to run a government and I'm inclined to agree. (And I'll also note that since women appear to constitute at least 55% of the voters, putting in a larger number of female politicians seems to be primarily ignoring the expressed views of those female voters.)

Where are the robots in Japan's nuclear crisis?

Funnily enough, despite Japan's investments in robotics over the years it seems that they've needed to turn outside the country to find robots that might be of use in helping to repair their power plants, thereby minimizing exposure to radiation for workers. We'll see what happens there. There may be reactors better able to deal with the problems that the Japanese ones have experienced.

Why Be Openminded?

GK Chesterton: "The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid." (HT: JT)

Jim Shaw's $16,000-a-day pension

The Globe and Mail argues to open up the market to foreign ownership, saying that Shaw's "basic margins are much higher than at big U.S. cablecos like Comcast and Time Warner (40 cents and 36 cents, respectively). The story in the old wireline phone business is the same: Bell and Telus enjoy lush profit margins compared to, say, AT&T and Verizon."

Majority of Muslims want Islam in politics, poll says

"A majority of Muslims around the world welcome a significant role for Islam in their countries' political life, according to a new poll from the Pew Research Center, but have mixed feelings toward militant religious groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah." Islam doesn't really seem as easy to put in a separation of churchmosque and state as in Christianity. Yet I don't really buy the idea of a completely secular state where everyone needs to check their beliefs as the door as beliefs do influence actions. (Radical secularism itself brings with it some implicit beliefs).

I would agree with St. Augustine that "An unjust law is no law at all." Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.

- Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, as cited in The Atlantic