US Ignores Romel Beck Castro

If you've been following FIBA Americas tournament, you've probably heard that Team USA is the best they've been since 1992. They're more organized, more focused, playing as a team, well coached. Jerry Colangelo and Coach K must be geniuses, how did they (with most of the best basketball talent in the world) figure out how to beat countries like Venezuela, Canada (without Nash or Magloire), US Virgin Islands (without Tim Duncan) Brazil (without Varejao) and Mexico (without Najera)? Sounds exactly the same way that everyone was talking about this team when the got the bronze last year.


If you watched the Mexico game, you would've seen Kobe getting crossed over like this. Yes, that's the same Kobe that has taken the role of defensive specialist. This was by far the best play of the day in the FIBA tournament, but ESPN's and NBATV's highlights didn't show this play. Not only that but top 10 plays of the day in the FIBA tournament didn't include it. Not even in the top 10 for the day? Did Kobe pay someone off to make sure that nobody saw him almost fall over? Good thing someone was filming their TV during this game, otherwise it might've disappeared forever. Here's some numbers from the game. In the second quarter Mexico outscored the U.S. 28-20. For quarters 2,3 and 4 combined the U.S. outscored Mexico 82-77. That's a 5 point advantage for the U.S. in 3 quarters. If Mexico can keep the margin that close in 3 quarters what will Argentina be able to do in 4? Since the current U.S. team has the goal of winning the gold in Bejing, maybe the better question is what will a full-strength Argentina, Spain, Greece, Italy, etc. be able to do next year?

Tofu Tacos

As I mentioned in my last post, one of my favorite things at the Tofu Festival was the Tofu Tostada. I decided to try out the recipe for dinner tonight, slightly modified, and with tortillas instead of tostadas because we purchased an humongous bag of tortillas from Costco last weekend that we need to use up.

Tofu Tacos

In a medium bowl, combine:

• 3 medium tomatoes, diced
• 1/2 medium onion, diced
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1/2 medium green bell pepper, diced
• 3-4 tbsp cilantro, chopped
• 1 14 oz. package of extra firm tofu, diced (cook in some oil or cooking spray until slightly browned)
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• Juice of 2 limes
• Salt and pepper to taste

Pile filling on top of:

• Warm corn tortillas

If desired, sprinkle with:

• Cheese

and add a dollop of:

• Crema

Eat, make another one, repeat.

This recipe is pretty foolproof. You could change the proportion of ingredients according to your tastes—less onions and more cilantro, for instance—and I'm sure it'd still turn out great.

(Here's the original recipe, by the way, for you purists out there.)

From Little Tokyo with love

There is an old Chinese proverb that says, "Have a mouth as sharp as a dagger, but a heart as soft as tofu.” I don't really know what that means. But what I do know is that tofu is perhaps one of the greatest foods ever made. And that I would sit through LA traffic for only about three things, and one of those things is the LA Tofu Festival.

This was our first year at the Tofu Fest (and sadly, possibly our last, if what LAist says is true) and it did not disappoint. First of all, it had to be the most well-organized city gathering I've attended. They provided free parking and Subaru shuttles to take us from the parking lot to the festival area. Everyone was really friendly. Everything was reasonably priced (although I'd be willing to pay more if it meant bringing the festival back for another year). And as a double bonus, all the proceeds went to charity.

But back to the food. I will attempt to list the top five things I consumed (in no particular order).

• Tofu Okonomiyaki. Some call it a Japanese pancake. Others call it a Japanese pizza. I call it a fiesta in my boca.

• Tofu Tostada. So tasty, yet so simple to make. They were giving away the recipe with one purchase of a tostada, which made me happy.

• Fried Tofu with Peanut Sauce. I know what some of you are thinking. Tofu + Peanut Butter Flavor Drizzled on Top = ??? Let me solve that for you: Mmm.

• Young Coconut. Ok, technically not tofu—at all—but a nice refreshing beverage that I got to drink out of an actual coconut. With a straw, even.
  

• Tofu Teriyaki. Really flavorful. Goes well with Rooster chili garlic sauce.

We missed out on the Tofu Cheesecake, but fortunately I got hold of a recipe that I intend to try out sometime soon.

Also picked up a couple of t-shirts, a Soy What?! poster, the official festival cookbook, and a hardy plant that requires no water and thrives solely on solar power.

Overall, it was time and money well-spent.

But enough about me, let's talk about me

Although I think that all of the presidential candidates—Democratic or Republican—are narcissistic to some extent, I thought yesterday's Paul Krugman column in the NYT did a good job of analyzing the dangers of such a quality when combined with a lack of empathy (specifically, as displayed by Mitt Romney and Rudy "9/11" Giuliani).

Read the article here (TimesSelect subscribers only, unfortunately).

If you build it, they'll still come (Part II)

If you haven't read the first part, you can read it here. In this post I will continue to discuss the myths about illegal immigration.

The second myth: illegal immigrants are taking away jobs from US citizens. Many people that disagree with this myth would say that illegal immigrants are doing the jobs that Americans refuse to do. That argument is only partially true, because I don't believe that there's a job that Americans won't do, just a price that Americans won't do it for. Which is why many businesses not only hire illegals, but provide ways in which they can acquire fake papers and sometimes even have deals with "coyotes" (a term for those who guide illegals across the border). But the question at hand is whether or not illegal immigrants are actually taking jobs away from Americans. The way many people think about this is that there is some set number of jobs in the US, and since we already have a certain percentage of unemployed that bringing in more workers would make things worse. However, nearly all economists agree that immigrants (legal and illegal alike) create growth and more jobs than they take. Not only that, they have no adverse affect on the wages of native born citizens. Not surprisingly, Donald Huddle is about the only economist to disagree with this claim. Apparently, INS used his numbers for years despite his questionable methods:

[I]n 1981 he conducted a study by sending his graduate students out to three Houston area construction sites. The students counted the number of illegal aliens at the work sites, in part, by counting the number of workers wearing blue hats and labeling such people illegal aliens. From these numbers, Donald Huddle calculated how many Houston natives were displaced and then extrapolated this data for the entire U.S. construction industry.

Obviously, the color of a construction worker's hard hat is in no way indicative of their legal status. Blue hard hats aside, the idea that you can go to a construction site and observe which workers are legal or illegal is inaccurate and racist. And even if the numbers they collected were accurate, he used a sample of construction workers in Houston to describe the entire U.S. construction industry. In statistics, there are several acceptable forms of sampling, whether it be a simple random sample a stratified sample or a cluster sample. The basic idea is that any individual in the population has a chance of being selected. In this case, no construction site had any chance of being selected except those in Houston, which by statistical definition makes this study biased.

If you build it, they'll still come (Part I)

If you haven't heard, a lot of people want to build a wall between the US and Mexico. In Virginia, people who are frustrated with the federal government's handling of immigration are taking things into their own hands. These people don't like illegals coming into the US for several reasons. According to many of these people, illegal immigrants burden us with costs (hospital fees, schooling for their children, etc.) and don't pay taxes. They're taking jobs away from US citizens. They also burden us with high amounts of crime, they're responsible for most gang violence, and our prison system is filled with illegals. And we need to secure our border to protect ourselves against the terrorists, like the 9/11 terrorists that came across the Mexican border. However, it turns out that most of these claims are false and are nothing more than thinly veiled racism.

The first myth: illegals are costing US taxpayers billions of dollars by using our hospitals through Medicare, enrolling their kids in our schools, accepting welfare and many other things that they aren't paying for. The simple answer to this question is that they are paying for it. Illegals pay taxes just like anyone else. Some don't pay everything because they work "under the table" jobs, while others pay too much because they don't file their tax returns, even though they're legally allowed to. But with all these costs are they really paying enough in taxes to cover all the benefits they're receiving? According to Donald Huddle, an economist from Rice University, illegal immigration has a net cost (total cost minus total taxes collected from illegal immigrants) of $42.5 billion from 1970-1992, and $69 billion as recently as 1997. However, those numbers have been disputed by several sources, one of which is the Urban Institute, which published a study saying that through many errors of assumptions and calculations you can turn the $42.5 billion loss into a $29 billion surplus. The biggest of mistakes by Huddle was he did not include their Social Security taxes taken out as the taxes they were paying, which was about 15% of each of their paychecks. That alone would cut the $42.5 billion cost down to $12.5 billion. You can check out the other details of their report here.

The right-leaning (although they claim to be bi-partisan) Center for Immigration Studies has claimed that illegal aliens cost the US $10 billion, they pay $16 billion and use $26 billion in services. My first concern with this study is, since they are linked to Republican Party immigration restrictionists on Capitol Hill, how fair can their numbers be? Did they use some of the biased techniques used by Donald Huddle? Even if their study is completely fair, they admit themselves that "with nearly two-thirds of illegal aliens lacking a high school degree, the primary reason they create a fiscal deficit is their low education levels and resulting low incomes and tax payments, not their legal status or heavy use of most social services." Which means that if they are costing us money, it's because they're poor and therefore pay less taxes, not because they're using our schools or on welfare. By the way, no illegal immigrants are on welfare. They can't get approval for that with their illegal status. If they're raising a child that is a US citizen then they can get funding for the child but not for themselves. Yet, CIS considers this $1.9 billion cost a benefit received by an illegal rather than a citizen. In fact, many of the other costs they consider are for their children that have citizenship. Even so, if we're criticizing the illegals because they cost us money, and the reason they cost us money is because they're poor, we might as well ship all of our poor people to Mexico, legal or not, Mexican or not, because they're such a drain on the government. Plus, it sounds like the legal poor are costing us a lot more than the illegal poor, because they actually know how to use the programs and are not scared of deportation.

Confused by the series of tubes that is the Internets

Here's Romney trying to explain YouTube during a campaign stop in Iowa:

"YouTube is a website that allows kids to network with one another and make friends and contact each other," Romney explained. "YouTube looked to see if they had any convicted sex offenders on their web site. They had 29,000."

Uh, Mitt? I think that's actually MySpace. YouTube is that thing where people upload and share thousands of videos . . . you know, videos like the ones for that debate you're so opposed to participating in?

Please . . . step down now before your other circuits start to malfunction.

I'm Not A Snowman

I was going to create an animated snowman to ask Romney why he thinks it's ok to discriminate against all snowmen (just like Geico and cavemen), but I decided instead to ask this question.



If you think this question should be answered (or not answered) you can vote here.