The tiny village of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, nestled at the base of a limestone promontory overlooking a valley not far from Montpellier, has become ground zero in a nasty spat precipitated by George W. Bush days before he packed up and headed for a spider hole in Crawford.

The pristine valley is honeycombed with cravasses and caves that provide a completely unique environment in which ewe’s milk can be fermented just so to become Roquefort cheese, a blue-veined delicacy that some say is lovely with a spot of rye toast and a full-bodied red.

On January 13, US Trade Representative Susan Schwab announced the Bush administration had leveled a 300% duty on Roquefort cheese, essentially nixing the entire US market.

She said it was in retaliation for the EU ban on imports of hormone-containing US beef.

She added that the administration targeted other scrumdiddly items like French truffles, Italian sparkling water and “fatty livers of ducks and geese,” which last time we checked was foie gras.

But only poor Roquefort got nailed with a duty so steep it might as well be a ban, according to the Washington Post.

“This measure is completely out of proportion,” Robert Glandières told the Post. He’s a sheep farmer and heads of the Regional Federation of Ewe Raisers’ Unions.

“It’s a…provocation.”

Maybe so, but the Roquefort Economy is probably going to be just fine. The US had imported only 450 tons of the stuff per year, or 3% of the amount produced.

Besides, the Big O’s in town now. He knows that Roquefort tastes great on an arugula salad.

In a first-of-its-kind effort to assess total social costs of methamphetamine abuse, the RAND corporation pegged 2005 costs at $23.4 billion, which puts it in the same league as heroin.

Government surveys indicate that about 1% of the US population at least 12 years of age uses the drug at least once in a given year. That’s much higher than heroin and fully half that of cocaine. 

 About 400,000 of these are addicted to the drug, and more and more smoke it rather than swallowing or snorting it. Smoking offers a faster, more intense high and it’s more likely to foster addiction.

Meth abuse used to be a problem for Hawaii and the rural West and South, but it’s been catching on in the East and Midwest. 

RAND scientists estimated methamphetamine directly caused 900 deaths in 2005, and that social costs associated with this premature mortality were $4 billion.

The scientists then added $4.2 billion for costs associated with crime, $900 million in foster care costs secondary to parents’ addiction, nearly $700 million in productivity losses, $550 million for rehab costs and $350 million in health care costs.

They threw in $60 million for morbidity and mortality associated with exploding meth labs and toxic waste clean-up, and then  added $12.6 billion in estimated costs for things like the burden imposed by addicts on friends, families and children that don’t end up in foster care.

The calculation can be found here.

Christakis and Fowler are at it again!

Two months ago they caused a stir by publishing research in BMJ which seemed to show that happiness is contagious, a conclusion that some chalked up to an inexcusably naïve failure to recognize the effects of epiphenomena in social networks.

Now these crowd pleasers have put a piece in PNAS which concludes that a person’s popularity is genetically determined. 

Or as Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard told Medical News Today, “We were able to show that our particular location in vast social networks has a genetic basis.”

“In fact, the beautiful and complicated pattern of human connection depends on our genes to a significant measure,” he waxed.

Does this guy think he’s Ram Dass or what?

To reach this data-mining epiphany, Christakis and Fowler characterized the social networks of 1,110 identical and non-identical teen-aged twins from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.

They measured popularity by the number of times an individual was named as a friend and the likelihood those friends knew each other.

Does this work for everybody?

Whatever, the scientists observed a higher concordance among the networks of identical twins than their non-identical counterparts.

They also concluded that whether a person was central to, or at the periphery of her social network was genetically determined, which inspired them to raise Charles Darwin from the dead, all in the same article.

Maybe it’s good to be on the periphery of a social group, they mused, like when there’s Ebola virus floating around. Then again, those hub-of-the-network types have access to more information like which Starbucks still has Christmas Blend in stock.
 
Please people.