Hasta La Gadget!

With all the donuts and cakes in the world, it can be really hard to make room for healthy foods in our lives. Most of the time, we’re just too full on brownies to even think about eating a bowl of oatmeal. That’s why pairing baked goods with whole grains is pure genius. It’s delicious AND nutritious, folks. And when those baked goods are quickbreads and muffins, it’s easy too.

We’re not going to go so far as to say these recipes are good for you — they’re still made with sugar and butter. But, at least they’ll supply you with a serving of whole grains. And that’s a great reason to have yourself another slice of banana bread, or three.

Here are 12 quickbreads and muffins that’ll help you sneak whole grains into your life. Bake healthier.

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The real question you should be asking yourself every morning is, “Why wouldn’t I eat pasta for breakfast?” Pasta comes in so many shapes and styles that making room for it at the breakfast table makes sense: it’s a great way to ensure you’re getting enough of this universal comfort food. Whether you’re eating leftovers in the morning (no harm, no foul in eating leftover pasta cold), or whipping up a quick, fresh dish on the spot, pasta is an excellent choice for your first meal of the day.

Pasta can be hearty and filling, but a good one won’t weigh you down, which is the mark of a great breakfast food. Noodles have long been the morning sustenance for people around the world. In Vietnam, pho is eaten for breakfast, and in Myanmar, mohinga, a soup with vermicelli noodles, is a popular breakfast dish. When we think of our favorite quintessential Italian pasta dishes, a lot of them sound like they’d be a great replacement for bacon and eggs. Some of them, like pasta carbonara, even include bacon (or traditionally pancetta) and eggs! Some people believe in eating your biggest meal of the day in the morning. Whether you follow this ideology or question it, there’s definitely room for pasta in your morning routine — a big bowl or a baby one.

The New York restaurant scene has jumped on board the breakfast pasta train, serving as both a great introduction for skeptics and newbies, and confirmation for those already used to eating leftover bucatini for breakfast. Bar Primi serves a breakfast spaghetti that includes kale, pancetta and a poached egg. One look is all you need:

We launched brunch this weekend at @barprimi .
Here is Breakfast Spaghetti pic.twitter.com/9WXitja112

— Andrew Carmellini (@andrecarmellini) July 14, 2014

Other New York City restaurants have also taken up the cause. Not only will you find regular pasta dishes offered on brunch menus, you’ll also find breakfast-specific pasta, like carbonara with a fried egg on top, on in restaurants through the city. Brooklyn’s Krupa Grocery serves breakfast gnocchi, so you can go directly from your real pillow to shoving pillows of deliciousness into your face.

Whether it’s a pasta dish geared toward a traditional American breakfast — loaded with foods like eggs and toasted bread — or something that challenges your breakfast norms entirely, give pasta a chance one morning. Here are 17 pastas that would definitely get us out of bed.

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We could go on about the inherent contradiction of “Downton Abbey” as the biggest hit on public television – that a series about a fading, genteel (and Gentile) British aristocracy and its servants dominates the schedule of a broadcasting service mandated to promote diversity and give a voice to the underrepresented. And sometime soon, we will talk about precisely that and more.

And we could go on at length about the Downton fantasy vs. reality ratio, the series “polishing up history to make the class divide less savage,” as British journalist Polly Toynbee pointed out when the show’s current season began. “What we never see,” she wrote in The Guardian, “is bedraggled drudges rising in freezing shared attics at 5:30 am; slopping out chamber pots, heaving coal, black-leading grates, hauling cans of hot water with hands already made raw by chilblains and caustic soda. We never dwell on the hardship of scrubbing floors, or scrubbing clothes, or scouring grease; in pre-detergent days, they were up to their elbows all day long.”

But for now, let’s talk instead about Congressman Aaron Schock, Republican from Illinois. You’ve heard about how his interior decorator pal, proprietor of a company called Euro Trash, redecorated Schock’s new Capitol Hill office in high “Downton Abbey” style – which is more than somewhat ironic because, as Josh Israel at ThinkProgress pointed out, “Schock has repeatedly voted against federal funding for public broadcasting, voting to defund National Public Radio and for a Paul Ryan budget that zeroed out all funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.” But even more important, Schock’s expensive tastes and how he spends money to make money for his party tells a sad story of the state of Congress and campaign fundraising.

It has been three weeks or so since Washington Post reporter Ben Terris stumbled onto Schock’s mini-manor: “Bright red walls. A gold-colored wall sconce with black candles. A Federal-style bull’s-eye mirror with an eagle perched on top.” And that was merely the reception area. Schock’s inner sanctum was: “…another dramatic red room. This one with a drippy crystal chandelier, a table propped up by two eagles, a bust of Abraham Lincoln and massive arrangements of pheasant feathers.”

Schock’s communications director, Benjamin Cole, just about collapsed from the vapors when he found out a reporter had slipped past the velvet ropes (“You’ve got a member [of Congress] willing to talk to you about other things,” he complained. “Why sour it by rushing to write some gossipy piece?”) Within days, Cole was gone, due not to the Downton dustup but for making stupid racist comments on Facebook that he apparently thought were amusing. As Violet Crawley, the dowager countess, would say, “Vulgarity is no substitute for wit.” (Yes, we confess, “Downton Abbey” is a guilty pleasure for us, too…)

In truth, Schock’s office looks more like a cut-rate version of the infamous Red Room in “50 Shades of Grey” than the height of inherited, entitled elegance. House members pay for such renovations and furniture from a taxpayer-funded account that also covers staff and official travel. For example, according to USA Today, after Rep. Schock was first elected, during a period from December 2009 into the first part of 2010, the congressman spent nearly $120,000 on furniture and renovations, including hardwood floors, “high-end countertops” and painting.

The Euro Trash decorator friend said she had offered her current professional services for free, although the nonpartisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) notes that in 2012, Rep. Schock’s campaign paid $5,522 to her company for “office equipment.” Within a day or so of the Post story, Rep. Schock announced he would be paying her for her work as well as the various new furnishings, which presumably include the pheasant feathers. House rules prevent taking for free anything worth $50 or more — “gifts of services, training, transportation, lodging, and meals, whether provided in kind, by purchase of a ticket, payment in advance, or reimbursement after the expense has been incurred.”

This isn’t the first time Congressman Schock’s financial dealings have come under scrutiny. The congressional newspaper Roll Call notes, “The House Ethics Committee still has a referral” from March 2012, stemming “from an Office of Congressional Ethics investigation that found he may have improperly solicited contributions for an anti-incumbent super PAC.” And recently, the progressive website Blue Nation Review reported, “The month before the 2012 elections, Congressman Schock sold his house to a major Republican donor who was also one of his campaign supporters for a price that appears to far exceed the market value at the time.” The donor was a vice president at the construction equipment company Caterpillar Inc., which in last year’s midterm elections was Schock’s second biggest campaign contributor.

Come to think of it, Schock’s new office decor puts us more in mind of a bordello, if it was decorated by Pee Wee Herman. Which might be the more apt metaphor for Congress these days. Although the transfer of cash isn’t supposed to take place on the premises, members are doing very well with their outcall services, whether they’re Republicans or Democrats. As Ken Silverstein recently wrote at The Intercept, we now have “a political consensus that churns out business-friendly policies no matter which party is in power…”

“One of the reasons that government works well for the wealthy is that so many elected officials are wealthy themselves, and directly benefit from the economic measures they pass. The median net worth of the current Congress is slightly north of $1 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics [CRP], and that surely understates their wealth because it’s based on financial disclosure forms that don’t require the listing of real estate holdings.”

CRP estimates Schock’s net worth, as of 2013, at $1,398,695, right at that median sweet spot. Promoting his image as one of the younger members of Congress (he’s now 33), Rep. Schock likes to feature pictures of himself surfing, snowboarding and hang gliding at various beautiful locations (he often hires a personal photographer). But this isn’t just about publicity for his admirably toned physique. Schock is all about raising money for his party and fellow Republican members – and to pull in that kind of cash perceived wisdom says you have to spend a bundle to attract it. That translates into lots of trips, expensive meals, private jets and time in lavish hotels and resorts. It’s a burden but someone has to do it.

Politico reports, “In Aspen, Colorado, [Schock] stays at the Little Nell, a five-star resort near the ski slopes. In Las Vegas, he prefers the pricey Wynn hotel. While in Vail, Colorado, and San Francisco, it’s the Four Seasons. In Miami Beach, he’s sampled the Delano, Fontainebleau and the exclusive Soho Beach House. And in Beverly Hills, California, he’s tried both the Peninsula and the Beverly Wilshire.”

It’s also about providing playtime for deep-pocketed contributors. Again, according to Politico, “… Schock is constantly fundraising, and he has repeatedly attended high-profile events. On Jan. 31, 2014, Schock cut a check to the NFL for more than $10,000 to cover the cost of Super Bowl tickets. In April 2013, Schock spent $3,320 on tickets to the CMA Country Music Awards. Instead of holding fundraisers at golf courses — as dozens of other Republicans do — Schock insiders say he prefers sporting and music events.” And you wonder why so little attention is paid to the poor and middle class?

Like one of the characters from “Downton Abbey,” Aaron Schock has made quite a climb, from public servant downstairs to pampered upstairs aristocrat. Meanwhile, when he’s not jetting to and fro, raising and spending cash, perhaps Congressman Aaron Schock can dream up new ways of raking in money — and spending it — as he sits in his ornate new office. What next? With the pope speaking before Congress in September, how about selling indulgences to corporate fat cats and turning the congressman’s workspace into a modest replica of the Sistine Chapel? That might be just the thing.

On Wednesday, the European Union will unveil its post-2020 climate-change strategy, kicking off a 40-day period during which most industrialized nations are expected to upload their strategies to the United Nations web site. By the end of June, every country in the world should have offered its own Intended Nationally-Determined Contribution to the climate challenge, and by October we’ll know how they all fit together.

This story has been re-posted from Ecosystem Marketplace. You can view the original here.

24 February 2015 | If you search for “INDCs” on Google News, you’ll learn a lot about what’s happening “in DC” (the US Capitol) but little about the “Intended Nationally-Determined Contributions” that are the linchpin of a revolutionary approach to fixing the global climate mess – and that’s a shame, because transparency is a major selling point of INDCs, which are the concrete, specific proposals that developed countries are submitting to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) through the end of March, with developing countries being given until June.

• For more of our daily coverage from Lima, visit “With Lima Talks Over, Attention Shifts To Country Initiatives.”
• For more coverage of INDCs and REDD+, visit “REDD Is In The New Climate Text, But Will It Be An INDC?“
• For WRIs latest take on INDCs, visit “INDCs: Bridging the Gap Between National and International Climate Action.”
• For a complete list of all INDCs submitted to-date, visit the UNFCCC’s INDC portal.
• Click here to see Adopt-a-Negotiator’s “INDCs for Dummies.”

INDCs emerged in the closing hours of the 2013 talks in Warsaw, and they were designed to end the futile 20-year quest for a top-down global climate-change treaty that’s designed to be one-size-fits all but almost always ended up suiting no one. In place of that Quixotic quest, we now have a combination of bottom-up and top-down initiatives: INDCs are the bottom-up part, and the treaty currently working its way through the UN process is the top-down part. The two are evolving in an iterative process where developments in one inform the other, and visa-versa. This, however, means that even as countries begin posting their proposed INDCs, it’s not really clear what activities will be recognized under the treaty.

More clarity should come in June, when negotiators will meet in Bonn, Germany, to finalize the draft text that will be put through one last wringer at year-end talks in Paris. The June text should provide enough clarity for all the world’s INDCs to be tweaked and for the UN Climate Change Secretariat to fold them together into a synthesis report by October 1.

At that point, we’ll add up all the activities and hope they keep the earth from warming more than 2°C.

Then, come December, INDCs and the draft text will converge in Paris – the culmination of a massive undertaking that’s designed to let individual countries do what they can, but in a way that makes it possible for other countries to compare efforts and that sparks a race to the top as countries vie for positions as climate leaders.

And it begins in earnest on Wednesday, when the European Union unveils its INDC.

What’s in an INDC?

The Lima talks in December set the minimum requirements for an INDC: they must, at the very least, provide verifiable, quantifiable information on the reference point that countries will take as their base years and target years – a step most major emitters have already taken. Indeed, the United States explicitly referenced INDCs when it unveiled its proposed deal with China last year and announced it would reduce its emissions by 26-28 percent, with 2005 as a base year and 2025 as a target year. At the same time, China says it’s emissions will continue to drift upwards, but will peak by 2030 or sooner. The EU says it will reduce its emission by 40 percent, with 1990 as a base year and 2030 as a target.

In addition to base and target years, INDCs must outline the scope and coverage of country activities, their planning processes, and the basic assumptions underlying their reasoning.

Earlier this month, negotiators met in Geneva to produce something akin to a laundry list of activities that will be recognized as an INDC, but they ended up producing an 86-page wish list that included every idea for an INDC that’s kicking around the UNFCCC – including six separate options for land-use alone – but from here through the June talks, it’s whittle, whittle, whittle, at least in theory.

In a blog post earlier this week, Kelly Levin and David Rich of the World Resources Institute (WRI) identified three questions that they felt the global community should ask when assessing INDCs:

1. What are the country’s future emissions if its INDC is achieved? Because INDCs are “nationally determined,” each country decides its own appropriate contribution to reduce emissions and keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius. Because INDCs will come in a variety of forms, it is necessary for the global community to know what each country’s emissions are expected to be in 2025 or 2030 if its INDC is implemented in order to determine if the total effect of all INDCs is sufficient to keep the world within its global carbon budget. It will also be essential to look at the long-term prospects for transformation of emitting sectors to enable a longer-term phase out of emissions.
2. How fair and ambitious is the country’s INDC? Countries are expected to explain how their INDC is a fair and ambitious contribution to the UNFCCC’s objective: avoiding the most dangerous impacts of climate change. Countries may explain fairness through multiple criteria, such as emissions responsibility (such as historical, current, or projected future emissions per capita or total emissions), economic capacity and development indicators (such as GDP per capita), or relative costs and benefits of action. Countries may also explain their ambition in terms of how much INDCs deviate below current “business-as-usual” emissions, or how quickly their economy is decarbonizing. WRI’s Open Climate Network (OCN) is working with eight focus countries to evaluate emissions trends and abatement potential to help inform initial INDCs.
3. Which planning processes and policies are available for achieving the INDC? In order for international negotiators and civil society to have confidence the INDC will be achieved, each country should define what domestic policies and planning processes exist or will be put in place to achieve the INDC. This information will also be critical for understanding to what extent a country is putting in place policies that will drive transformative change over the longer term.

INDCs and Comparability: a Reading List

To work, INDCs have to be transparent and comparable across countries. If most countries feel the INDCs are fair, the theory goes, they’ll play the game to win, rather than simply not to lose.

In the lead-up to the Lima talks, Niklas Höhne, Hanna Fekete, and Markus Hagemann summarized the challenge on the New Climate blog.

“INDCs of countries with similar circumstances will have to be judged by others to be equally ambitious,” they wrote. “But how can you judge whether a country’s contribution is fair and ambitious in comparison to others, when all 194 countries are very different in development, industrial structure, capabilities and responsibilities – and these aspects even change over time?”

It’s a short and quite readable piece that offers five potential indicators and links to several enlightening examples, but for a more philosophical dive, you can turn to “Comparability of Effort in International Climate Policy Architecture“, a discussion paper published at the very beginning of last year by Joseph Aldy of Harvard and William Pizer of Duke in January.

The paper begins by proposing four attributes of a good metric (comprehensive, observable, replicable, and broadly applicable), but its real value is the solid, nuts-and-bolts comparison of ideas that have been in the air for years, and that some countries love and some hate. They look at different ways of measuring emission levels, different ways of thinking about a carbon price, and different ways of using taxes and trade to enforce bilateral agreements to make sure countries don’t inadvertently export their emissions.

Similar ideas surfaced in a less formal context at the University of Chicago late last year, in a debate over what Milton Friedman might do to combat climate change.

If comparability seems overwhelming, check out WRI’s CAIT Equity Explorer. It’s a nifty tool that lets countries make comparisons based on their levels of development, their emissions, and how vulnerable they are to climate change.

For some insight into the INDCs we may see from developing countries, check out “A Mitigation Analysis of CDKN Priority Countries“, which the Climate & Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) published In July. Published by Helen Picot, Kiran Sura and Christopher Webb, it takes stock of efforts already underway in several developing countries – including India – that together account for 9% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Steve Zwick is Managing Editor of Ecosystem Marketplace. He can be reached at SZwick@ecosystemmarketplace.com

“Since practical ability differs from person to person, the majority of such abilities, in nearly all societies, is gathered in a minority of men. The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history.” So said Will & Ariel Durant, distilling 5,000 years of history, back in 1968, in a short collection of essays daringly titled The Lessons of History. Nearly half a century later, their thesis has a contemporary ring.

I stumbled across this little gem when one of my readers, Rohan Thompson of Sydney, kindly sent it to me. The writing is superb and reminded me of Edward Gibbon, whose monumental work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, written from 1776 to 1788, can still be read with immense pleasure and instruction. Will Durant, a historian and philosopher, was actually a socialist, reformer and civil rights campaigner, and a person of enormous personal goodwill, which makes his rather conservative conclusions doubly interesting.

I don’t entirely agree with his thesis, but it made me think. It can be summarized very succinctly, in three stages.

First comes the concentration of wealth, which inevitably follows the concentration of abilities in a small minority of people.

Then, as the concentration of wealth becomes increasingly obvious, comes pressure for redistribution from the rich to the poor.

Finally, “the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.”

The Formula for Greek Recovery

He gives the example of Athens in 594 BC, where the disparity of wealth had reached a dangerous climax. The poor and the rich were at daggers drawn. But then “good sense prevailed; moderate elements secured the election of Solon.” Although an aristocrat and businessman, Solon devalued the currency – Greek politicians of today please note – thus easing the pressure on debtors. He ended imprisonment for debt, cancelled arrears on taxes and mortgage interest, instituted a highly progressive income tax, and gave free education to the sons of soldiers killed fighting for Greece. “Within a generation almost all agreed that his reforms had saved Greece from revolution.”

“The government of the US, in 1933-52 and 1960-65, followed Solon’s peaceful methods, and accomplished a moderate and pacifying redistribution; perhaps someone had studied history. The upper classes in America cursed, complied, and resumed the concentration of wealth.”

“We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution … all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism … of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.”

Koch’s Quibbles

I find it a bit surprising that a person of the Left can so readily buy the line that wealth creation is in some sense the natural result of unequal abilities. Apart from the obvious point that the rich have better education and contacts, so that someone from a privileged background – Bill Gates, for example – has a head start and the economic freedom to pursue an eccentric interest (in his case, computers before they were mainstream), there is also the less obvious point that the ability to make money is not an indicator of extraordinary general intelligence or social worth.

Perhaps this is clearer today than in 1968. But I tell you, I know plenty of money-makers, and I have practised the art myself a little, and it does not require extraordinary ability. In the pantheon of general skills, I would place it a little above successful flower-arranging, and far below what is required to win at Wimbledon or even the Rio Open. Quite apart from the fact that money-making has a much higher element of luck than almost any other respected skill, the insight required to make a fortune is usually intellectually negligible, and often requires as much skill in capturing value – through restriction of competition – as in creating it. In this regard, Bill Gates is much more typical than, say, Steve Jobs.

I hasten to add, though, that the precarious foundation of wealth creation does not justify a large measure of redistribution. For we have to ask whether, these days in a rich society, redistribution benefits anyone very much, apart from the idealistic – or opportunistic – politicians who sponsor it.

Redistribution is good if it increases the total wealth in society, or saves people from destitution. Redistribution – as in the 1930s – can sometimes do both simultaneously.

But redistribution can also be bad, in three ways.

First, it usually tends to increase the power of the state. Except when anarchy beckons, this is nearly always a bad thing. The state is usually inefficient, oppressive, and given to wasting money on white elephants or even worse, black ones – by which I mean war and the whole apparatus of “defense”, for which read “aggression”. Once you have a mass of armed forces, with privileged access to power and a vested interest in conflict, the temptation to throw its weight around becomes irresistible. America and the world would be richer, more free, and happier places if the US military were a quarter of its current size.

Even worse, redistribution inevitably brings dependency. To live off the state means to fail to live off one’s own efforts. This is as true of the upper-middle-class civil servant or general as it is of the poor. Anyone employed by a large organization has very little discretion for “doing their own thing.” The population is enormously talented; but only a small minority of people actually use more than a tiny fraction of their abilities. They don’t have to; they are not encouraged to; and often they are not allowed to.

Third, high rates of taxation usually mean low rates of tax receipts. If income tax was reduced in any country by, let us say, a third, within a few years the tax receipts would probably be higher. Redistribution can thus frustrate its own purposes. Redistribution is great for tax accountants and for antisocial and criminal activities, but it is not very good for the poor. If you doubt this, look at the relatively high standard of living of the bottom quarter of the population is countries such as Switzerland or Singapore, where taxes are relatively low; or at the progress made by the poor in countries such as India or China, where forced redistribution of wealth in recent decades has become much more moderate.

Redistribution matters less than Social Mobility

The Durants had remarkably little to say – at least in The Lessons of History – about social mobility. For a society to be fair and dynamic, redistribution is of much less importance than high social mobility. Let us be clear, social mobility means the ability to fall just as much as it means the ability to rise. A society where the rich all remain rich is just as bad, or worse, than one where the poor all remain poor.

The real problem in society is not that the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer – which is arguably true in the US, but not in Europe, and certainly not in the world as a whole – but that social mobility within most countries (though not in the world as a whole) is declining. The reasons are complex, but there are two which I think are supremely important.

One which is apparent to many is that the gap between high quality education and mainstream education is getting larger. The rich overwhelmingly have privileged access to the very best universities and other sources of knowledge – and just as important, appreciation of its value.

The less obvious reason is that it is much easier for the middle and upper classes to start their own businesses. They are much more likely to have a little capital themselves, the ability to risk a fresh start, contacts who will supply more capital, and the ability to argue their case persuasively. And today, the best route to riches and social mobility is to start a business. For sure, only a small minority will succeed in making much money. But those who do, will make a great deal. Generally they are the people who need it least, and for whom upward social mobility is least necessary.

Conclusion: the 80/20 View of Social Engineering

If we want to improve the fairness, cohesion, and overall wealth of our society, we have to make it much easier for those near the bottom to become successful entrepreneurs. The last way to do this is through general redistribution and the power of the state. The best way to do it is to redistribute the quality of education and the desire and chance to start a business.

As always, a large majority of good results follow from a small proportion of causes. A few aspects of redistribution are vital, but most are a waste of energy, or worse. Only if we focus on education and stimulating the entrepreneurial urge where they are currently weakest can we build a better world.