John on Dean Esmay's blog writes about evolution and vegetarians.#

Agriculture and its concomitant boost in the food supply led to a lot of sweeping changes in the way humans developed as individuals. A better food supply means that people live longer, children have a better chance of surviving in to adulthood, and those same children can probably have more children with a better chance that they will survive as well. This isn't anything new in the way of theorizing, by the way, and it's all pretty general, but then so is evolution.

So for ten thousand years or so humans have been living within a food supply system that is unlike anything they have experienced previously. We eat tons of carbohydrates and processed sugars that simply were not a part of the diet as we evolved. The result is that a new evolutionary pressure is being placed on Man- we are slowly sorting out the species on the basis of who can easily handle a high carbohydrate diet, and who cannot.

In The Third Chimpanzee (link to my notes), Jared Diamond writes about how this isn't entirely true. Before agriculture, humans had small and very healthy tribes where they could live -- but afterwards they had very large and not as healthy tribes. Read about how Native Americans started to get terrible teeth and bones and start to have higher and higher infant mortality rates when they started to grow and consume corn.

The other comments John makes are very interesting... the idea seems to be that vegetarians are doomed to extinction because they are purposely going against evolution and not using all the resources available to them.

No population in a closed environment can expand forever and humans will eventually have to accept this somehow. Similarly, eventually the environment will be completely destroyed and we'll have to accept that as well. And there is also the concern that is an unethical life worth living?

I have only questions, no answers.

Dean Esmay on beer as the Golden Elixir of Civilization.#

Buck leaned back in his chair and began to explain. It seems that the some of the oldest written words in history, a tablet from some 1800 BC, are a recipe for brewing beer. Not the pale pilsners that Americans seem fanatically hooked on for certain, but a brewed beverage designed to lighten the mood and elevate the spirit none-the-less. Most historians and archeologists agree that agriculture was one of the central building blocks of civilization, but why did ancient man, nominally a hunter/gatherer, suddenly take up the growing of grain?

"To increase the food supply, of course," I opined, my own second helping of Buck's Basement Brewery's bitter best loosening my tongue just a bit.

"Horse-shit! Wild grains and fruits were already being harvested and there was no real need to go to all that trouble just for food. Remember, we're talking about people who have not sat still in the same place since the dawn of time."

It seems that even that early, Man had discovered that certain fruits and grains, properly prepared, could yield a number of intoxicating beverages. Once those ancient wanderers got a taste they wanted more. But the food supply would not support much beer making, so in an example of the problem-solving skill that has elevated Man above all other land-dwelling primates, agriculture was born.

Jared Diamond thinks that the purpose of agriculture was not to increase the food supply for the same number of people, but to increase the food supply so that a tribe could support more people. Then they would be able to compete better with other tribes in war and reside the nomads from the steppes (the Huns.) I realize that Dean is writing about a joke, but I feel obligated.

Dean Esmay writes up some predictions for the 2004 Election and his thoughts on Howard Dean.#

Something that has been obvious to me for a while is that if certain candidates hope to get ahead, they need to sharply differentiate themselves from Howard Dean, and to attack him. This has also been something I've hoped for, since Dean has always disturbed me. Alas, the other candidates have all, until very recently, held their ammo and treated him with kid gloves. This bothers me because, win or lose the Presidency, I believe Howard Dean is an unhealthy force.

I suppose some will suggest that I only say all this because I think Dean will topple Bush. Uh, no. At least four of the current Democratic candidates have at least as good a chance of that, if not better. If I had to choose who I wanted, it would be Lieberman, because I think he would make a good President, and is the only one who's still talking anything like good sense about the war. My problem is that I believe the Dean campaign is more of a cult than a political movement, and he's on the wrong side of too many issues.

One of the big problems that Esmay has with Dean, that I agree with, it the focus on the money and that this is something that can and should be praised:

Here's a free tip, guys: it's ideas that win campaigns, not money. People don't follow the guy with the money; money follows the guy with the people. You need enough money to be credible. Then, if what you're saying catches people's imaginaton, and you look like you could win, more money will flow to you naturally.

I would argue that money should not matter, but that it unfortunately does so that the only money that should matter is that money with real people behind it. It is the votes and the people who matter, not your fundraising prowess, regardless of how that money can be used to coerce people into 'supporting' you.

Esmay believes that Dean is not really the person many people see him as. This is an example of a the cult-think of the Deanniacs.

However, Sullivan misses a key point. So do many others, who continually think of Howard Dean as a bleeding heart lefty. While Dean has done much to embrace those people, he isn't really one of them. If he sews up the nomination early, he's got literally months and months to redefine himself.

I suspect that he will, if given the opportunity, make a Nixon-style pivot, and drive hard to the right for the remainder of his campaign. Given that his following is so cultlike, he would not lose most of them by doing so. A few would walk away, shattered and disillusioned, but most will either not notice, or will find some way to rationalize it.

Esmay then goes on to illustrate what sort of things Dean will do to secure the presidency, rather than support the people who are propping him up.