Peter Krupa

What would you do to live to 140? Anything? What if the condition was that, starting now, you could never, ever again consume anything spontaneously - no snacking, casual drinking, supermarket samplers, popping into restaurants, popcorn with a movie - and your daily caloric intake must not exceed, oh, I don’t know, 1,913 calories per day?

Who knows? You might live forever. And science is on your side.

It’s called the Calorie Restriction Diet, and New York magazine has a big long feature piece about it this week. The basic premise is that severe calorie restriction has been shown, in a whole bunch of animals, to dramatically increase life spans. It might work this way in humans as well (which would explain the longevity of Cubans), and a select group of fanatics are dedicating their lives to, um, living a really long time. By following a CR diet.

The really interesting thing about this diet is that its goal is not to look good - one subject in the article has orange hands from excessive beta carotene consumption, and all are painfully skinny, with body-mass indexes not found much outside Sudan. The ultimate goal of many practitioners of the diet is to live forever.

Literally.

The author of the article concludes that, barring any 11th-hour revelations about hidden health risks, the CR diet is probably the wave of the future. And I tend to agree with her:

It isn’t hard to see the diet’s appeal to a certain very familiar New York type: You’re skinnier than any social X-ray, you’re practicing a regimen as extreme and as grueling as any yogi’s, and you’ve got some impressive medical science on your side. For someone attracted to control, accomplishment, and power, this is the life.

…

Just take a good look around your neighborhood, your place of work, your therapist’s waiting room. Take a good look in the mirror maybe, too. That ought to be enough to tell you CR’s growth from cult to subculture to fact of mainstream cultural life is not so unimaginable. Yes, CR flies in the face of common sense, but it’s got the preponderance of scientific evidence on its side. Yes, it’s a little crazy, but the crazinesses it requires are only those already endemic to our age and area code.

That last bit is crucial: area code. Can you picture a future of affluent, educated, waif-like, 100-year-old urbanites ruling over an underclass of normally-proportioned, quizzical simpletons competing to send a portion of their young off to join the ranks of the - whatever you want to call it - the priesthood?

Fortunately I have no plans to get on the CR diet, and tonight, I ate a half a loaf of Italian bread with cheese and humus just to prove it. I think I blew my daily limit within about 20 minutes.

I’m fairly certain that by the time the future rolls around, I will be comfortably dead.

UN envoy to Sudan Jan Pronk was kicked out of Sudan for blogging about the Sudanese military.

Alright stupid, let’s go over the rules of blogging again: 1) Don’t blog about work; 2) don’t blog about the Sudanese military.

Seriously, how hard is this?

In what is probably a milestone moment for peterkrupa.com, I have not one, but two US Senate candidates posting in the comments section. God bless ‘em. But someone should explain to these sweet-hearted third-party candidates that they will never gain people’s respect if they keep making themselves so accessible.

Casino mogul Steve Wynn accidentally punched a hole through his priceless Picasso. As the story goes, he was showing off the canvas to friends when, in mid-gesture, he poked a bare elbow right through it. “Oh fuck/shit/goddamnit,” he is reported to have said.

Worse yet, he’d just agreed to sell it to some other obscenely rich person for $139 million, but the deal is off. Now how is he going to send his kids to college?

Fortunately, our advanced Western society has developed ways of make these disasters less disasterous. Slate explains how to make it all better. In other news, one of the New York Yankees killed himself by crashing a plane worth several hundred thousand dollars into a condo highrise.
As the poet said…

Hello everyone, and welcome to the first edition of the Salute to Captain Obvious, where we honor esoteric experts with obvious opinions and the media professionals who quote them. Today’s honoree comes from an otherwise good LA Times article about the Stephen Colbert Show. And I quote:

Paul Lewis, a Boston College professor who has studied humor and politics, said the series was just “a trap” for politicians.

“When they go on the show,” he said, “they often seem like buffoons.”

Captain Obvious, we salute you.

It comforts me to know that somewhere out there in the scary darkness of our complicated world, an expert is studying “humor and politics,” and that this expert is qualified to make bold, true, and possibly peer-reviewed statements about cable TV programming. Thanks especially goes to Times staff writer Jim Puzzanghera for digging up this valuable source to answer the burning and difficult question that I know was on all of our minds: Does Stephen Colbert make the guests on his show look like buffoons?

Now we know that, yes, he does. Why? Because Paul Lewis said so, and he teaches at Boston College.

OK, now, if I did this every time I ran across these valuable quotes from academic experts, I’d have time neither to eat, nor bathe, but that won’t stop me. And it’s up to you, my studio audience, to give me a hand by sending me a link whenever, during your browsing hither and yon, you run across an obvious opinion presented under the auspices of expertise.

America’s media professionals need to be recognized for their tireless efforts at digging up academic experts every time they need to pad an article with some stupid fucking quote. And we’re going to recognize them.

Columnist Marcela Sanchez has a column today in the Washington Post that had me bouncing up and down in barely-repressed glee. After presenting statistics that show Hispanic immigrants are holding a growing portion of the poverty pie, she writes:

But if immigrants, especially Hispanics, are card-carrying members of the U.S. underclass, society at large is having a hard time convincing them of it: Latino immigrants are too busy working, buying cars, purchasing homes and even investing abroad.

Such a lifestyle is not exactly the picture of poverty. The poor are supposed to be the down and out — the hungry and depressed standing in bread lines. Under this stereotype, they struggle for basic goods and services and are left outside the mainstream, unable to get ahead.

Yet observers of the Latino experience in the United States say that Hispanic immigrants generally don’t fit this mold…

Hispanic immigrants don’t necessarily feel excluded or underserved either. In an education survey, the Pew Hispanic Center and the Kaiser Family Foundation found two years ago that Hispanic immigrants were notably positive about the quality of public school education in their areas. More pointedly, the survey concluded that Hispanics are not a “disgruntled population that views itself as greatly disadvantaged or victimized.”

What Hispanics do with their money and how they live reflect not deprivation or exclusion but an attitude of abundance. Poverty is relative. Less than $20,000 a year may rank an immigrant as statistically poor, but this income may be seen as a fortune to someone who was making less than a tenth of that back home.

So at the end of the day what do we have? A growing number of immigrant poor? Well, yes. A growing number of depressed and downtrodden? No. Hispanic immigrants, like their immigrant predecessors, are optimists.

That’s right: Hispanics are the new Americans, and Sanchez has the statistics to prove it.

Now, the reason this column has me so giddy is that it turns traditional American politics completely on its head. American liberals have traditionally taken a paternalistic approach to poor minorities. The poor, they tell us, are disadvantaged, cruelly shat upon, and in need of a hand. Meanwhile, conservatives typically take the boot-straps approach - work hard and someday you’ll be a millionaire (maybe).

But in today’s debate over immigration, the positions are reversed: conservatives (who are supposedly anti-immigration) argue that the Hispanic poor are a drag on the economy, forcing liberals (who are supposedly pro-immigration) to argue that, on the contrary, poor Hispanic immigrants work hard, add to the economy, and can advance without demanding too much from government.

Don’t you see? It’s brilliant! The liberals sound like Regeanites!

The New York Times apparently hasn’t gotten the memo, but I’ll send it to them as soon as I post this. To wit: spike the stories about pitiable brown people and start writing about Hispanic entrepreneurialism! As I’ve said before, the best way to shut the Minute Men up is to talk about how Hispanic immigrants work hard, add to the economy, take care of themselves, and are upwardly mobile.

Paternalism is out, bootstrapism is in, and with each passing day, the terms “liberal” and “conservative” become more convoluted.

Obviously, it’s been a slow Saturday.

A mediocre Washington Post article today about draconian consumption laws in Cuba the Cuban black market provides us with one particular piece of unpardonable reportorial laziness. And I quote:

Satellite dishes are banned in order to block the U.S. government’s TV Marti, which broadcasts programming critical of Castro, National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon said in an interview. Internet use is restricted, he said, because the embargo prevents Cuba from tapping high-speed cables in international waters.

Of course, Alarcon knows his audience well, because only Americans would be arrogant enough to believe our economic embargo could possibly cut off a country’s access to the internet.

With a bit of quick googling I found that the Global Caribbean Network is laying a new, 890 km, 1 Tetra-bit line to connect the outlying islands of Baillif, Baie-Mahault, Saint-Martin, St-Barthelemy, St Croix, Puerto-Rico with Guadeloupe. The lucky contract winner is Alcatel, a French company.

Two questions then: First, how exactly could a unilateral US trade embargo block Cuba from plugging into a cable owned by non-American companies and located in international waters? (And since Guadeloupe is technically a part of France, and therefore the European Union, we’re not just talking about powerless Caribbean map stains).

Second, even if there is some legal problem with Cuba tapping into existing cables, Cuba is only 131 miles from Cancun. Why won’t Cuba hire Alcatel (or any of the dozens of other non-American telecom companies, this Turkish fiber optic producer, for example) to lay a line to Mexico and replace the current satellite connection? After all, the Global Caribbean Network goes 890 km to serve 4.8 million people, at a cost of 23.3 million Euros. Cuba, in comparison, has 11.3 million people. You do the math.

Answers to the above questions are obvious. The bigger question is, why do media outlets keep repeating, without comment, the asinine piece of propaganda that Cubans don’t have internet because of a US “blockade”? Believe what you want about the goodness/badness of US policy toward Cuba, but the US embargo isn’t stopping Cuba from buying things from the other 192 countries in the world.

The white, upper-middle class audience of the New York Times had its world rocked this morning. Reported the Times:

In the employment market for both legal and illegal immigrants, many nannies and maids are finding their first jobs among the older generations of Latinos, who are now in a position to hire domestic help. But while the two groups of strivers may gravitate toward each other because of cultural and language similarities, their intersection can also be fraught with odd tensions and broken expectations, say researchers, employers and workers.

To put it more bluntly: Latino bosses can be assholes to other Latinos. Now, we should all pause and ask ourselves, why does the white, upper-class staff at the Times consider this “a man bites dog” situation? I’ll tell you. Because white, upper-class liberals have been carefully trained to think of “minorities” as a big, massive lump of people that think the same, vote the same, and act the same.

Brown people aren’t supposed to act as individuals (i.e. - like self-interested white Americans). They’re supposed to stick together in a happy, impersonal, non-threatening, non-mobile group that lives somewhere uptown. When this stereotype breaks down, the Times writes a cover story.

There’s definitely a story here, but it’s not the one the Times is hocking. The above paragraph mentions “the older generations of Latinos, who are now in a position to hire domestic help.” I’m sorry, could you repeat that? “… She said that the employer’s own experience as a hotel housekeeper 30 years ago, when she came to this country from Argentina, has made her unusually demanding.”

So, if a fresh-off-the-boat Latino immigrant could, in 30 years, go from cleaning hotel rooms to hiring a fucking maid, something in this country must be working. How about running more stories about the amazing economic success of Latino immigrants, the upward mobility of their children, their rapid absorption of American culture, and American culture’s rapid absorption of them? That would shut up the Minute Men.

Instead, we get more heart-string-tugging sob stories about helpless brown people, as if this new wave of immigrants is too weak and stupid to advance the same way the Polish, Irish, Germans, and Italians did.

I’m tired of privileged white people writing about helpless brown people. It’s a played-out narrative, and offensive too. Find a new one.

While everyone is flapping about the North Koreans, the disaster in Iraq, and the looming mid-term elections, far more horrible things are in the offing. For instance, the third installment of The Santa Clause, which is likely a part of the next deadly wave of heartwarming Christmas fare.

Not that Christmas is the only excuse for maudlinity(?). Another installment of patriotism porn is also on the way: Flags of our Fathers, courtesy of Clint Eastwood. Earlier examples of this genre include The Alamo (Billy-Bob Thorton kills us some Mexicans) and, of course, The Patriot (Mel Gibson frees America from the Jews). Critics seem to be saying that Eastwood’s film is good. But WWII movies are kind of like sports movies: once you’ve seen the classics, there’s not much left to say. What we really need is more talking animal movies.

And speaking of magic, we’re coincidentally confronted this year with a second Victorian-era illusionist picture, furthering my theory that movies always come out in pairs (two astroid movies, two volcano movies, two alternate reality movies, two sword-and-sandal epic movies - you get the idea). The Illusionist reminded me of a mediocre wine: intriguing at first, but an awful finish. I have higher hopes for The Prestige.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, the end of the world. While US spy satellites were otherwise distracted, someone decided to make a musical based on the music of ABBA. Worse yet, it’s extremely popular. This is surely a sign of the coming apocalypse.