Take the picture now, focus later
Very cool camera technology, especially for us point-and-shoot types. All the detail work, including focusing, can be done later.
Could the Army be lying? Again?
Disturbing story by James Dao in theNY Times:
Capt. Susan Carlson was not a typical recruit when she volunteered for the Army in 2006 at the age of 50. But the Army desperately needed behavioral health professionals like her, so it signed her up.
Though she was, by her own account, “not a strong soldier,” she received excellent job reviews at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where she counseled prisoners. But last year, Captain Carlson, a social worker, was deployed to Afghanistan with the Colorado National Guard and everything fell apart.
After a soldier complained that she had made sexually suggestive remarks, she was suspended from her counseling duties and sent to an Army psychiatrist for evaluation. His findings were shattering: She had, he said in a report, a personality disorder, a diagnosis that the military has used to discharge thousands of troops. She was sent home.
She disputed the diagnosis, but it was not until months later that she found what seemed powerful ammunition buried in her medical file, portions of which she provided to The New York Times. “Her command specifically asks for a diagnosis of a personality disorder,” a document signed by the psychiatrist said.
Veterans’ advocates say Captain Carlson stumbled upon evidence of something they had long suspected but had struggled to prove: that military commanders pressure clinicians to issue unwarranted psychiatric diagnoses to get rid of troops.
“Her records suggest an attempt by her commander to influence medical professionals,” said Michael J. Wishnie, a professor at Yale Law School and director of its Veterans Legal Services Clinic.
Since 2001, the military has discharged at least 31,000 service members because of personality disorder, a family of disorders broadly characterized by inflexible “maladaptive” behavior that can impair performance and relationships.
For years, veterans’ advocates have said that the Pentagon uses the diagnosis to discharge troops because it considers them troublesome or wants to avoid giving them benefits for service-connected injuries. The military considers personality disorder a pre-existing problem that emerges in youth, and as a result, troops given the diagnosis are often administratively discharged without military retirement pay. Some have even been required to repay enlistment bonuses.
By comparison, a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder is usually linked to military service and leads to a medical discharge accompanied by certain benefits.
In recent weeks, questions about whether the Army manipulates psychiatric diagnoses to save money have been raised at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Wash., where soldiers undergoing medical evaluations before discharge complained that psychiatrists rescinded PTSD diagnoses, leaving the soldiers with diagnoses like personality disorder that did not qualify them for medical discharges.
In a memorandum, an Army ombudsman wrote that . . .
Continue reading. I find it quite easy to believe that the Army is acting in bad faith and lying about it. It continues a familiar pattern of the organization.
Should Corporations Have More Leeway to Kill Than People Do?
TYD passes along a link to an interesting NY Times article by Peter Weiss:
NEXT week, the Supreme Court will hear a case with many potential ramifications for American and international law, and for corporate responsibility for human rights around the globe. The justices will be asked to decide whether the corporations to which they have been extending the rights of individuals should also be held accountable for crimes against human rights, just as individuals are.
The story behind the case begins in 1980, when my colleagues at the Center for Constitutional Rights and I helped obtain the first semblance of justice to the family of a slain 17-year-old Paraguayan youth named Joelito Filártiga.
A police inspector general in Asunción, the capital, had tortured the boy to death in retaliation for his father’s opposition to Paraguay’s brutal dictatorship. But the case was decided in New York, far from Paraguay, where the crime had occurred and where justice had proven impossible for the Filártiga family; the boy’s murderer was ultimately ordered to pay the family $10.4 million in damages.
The precedent-setting case was made possible by a remarkable decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which allowed it to be brought under a long-obscure law enacted by Congress in 1789. Known as the Alien Tort Statute, the law has been interpreted to mean that foreigners who commit heinous crimes abroad in violation of international law can be held accountable in the United States if they are present or do business here; the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality in 2004.
Since that decision, dozens of successful alien tort claims have been brought in American courts — at first against individuals, and eventually against corporations. As a result, many foreign victims of egregious crimes — ranging from torture and slave labor to the execution of loved ones — that were sanctioned, endorsed or commissioned by corporations have found justice in our courts.
Yet in September 2010, a divided Second Circuit — the very court that had rendered the Filártiga decision — held that only individuals, and not corporations, can be sued under the statute.
That ruling, in a case known as Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, came less than a year after the much more famous — and criticized — Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, which removed restrictions on political spending by contributions and wildly expanded the concept of corporate personhood.
Together, these decisions have triggered a wave of outrage among advocates for human rights, which see in them a signal from the courts that corporations have extensive rights but few responsibilities under American law. . .
Continue reading. We see a cafeteria approach to defining “corporate personhood”: an attempt by conservatives to select only advantageous aspects of personhood and reject the rest. Part of the corporate takeover.
Ad hoc shave
I didn’t really have a plan in mind. I spotted the Omega 20107 boar brush (an excellent size for face-lathering, recommended to me by NoHelmet of wicked_edge: it’s just enough smaller than the Pro 48 to make it better), and since I haven’t used that for a while, put it in to soak while I showered. Once out, I picked up the Marvy mug holding my Scodioli Hierophant shaving soap and lathered away vigorously.
I got a very pleasing creamy lather, and I note that my 20107 is already nicely broken in: tips quite soft on my face. Lather in place, I picked up my British Gillette Aristocrat, Jr. with a previously used Astra Superior Platinum blade: three smooth passes (with good, clear sounds of stubble being cut), the final rinse, alum, rinse, dry a splash of Thayers Lemon Witch Hazel, and off to Toasties for breakfast.
Extremely interesting: “In Break, Hamas Supports Syrian Opposition”
Report here. One possible interpretation: Hamas can read the handwriting on the wall and is aligning itself away from the losing side. Just a thought. And in any case: a welcome development.
White lentils, black rice
The beans+grain theme has me stoked. I was thinking about the white lentils I saw on the shelf, and decided on this:
Lentil-rice salad
Cook (separately), rinse with cold water, and drain:
1 cup black rice (starch)
1 cup white lentils (starch and, with rice, protein)
Combine with:
8 oz diced tofu (protein)
1/2 large sweet onion, chopped
2 handfuls chopped celery
2 jalapeños, chopped
1 red or yellow bell pepper, chopped
1 avocado, chopped
1 bunch parsley, chopped (greens)
1 bunch cilantro, chopped (greens)
2 Tbsp EVOO (oil)
juice of 2 lemons, Meyer if they have them
grindings of black pepper
Mix, chill, add whatever else comes to mind—soy sauce?—and serve several meals.
Really excellent grub, sort of by accident
I made the grub earlier described, and at the link you will find the final version of the recipe and the surprisingly good—rich, hearty—outcome, and why.
UPDATE: Extremely hearty. This is one yummy soup/stew.
Why false confessions?
David Shipler has an interesting column in the NY Times:
Several months after Antonio Ramirez was shot seven times in Oakland, Calif., the police picked up a frightened 16-year-old named Felix, isolated him in an interrogation room late at night without a lawyer, rejected his pleas to see his mother, and harangued him until he began to tell them what he thought they wanted to hear.
They wanted a diagram of the crime scene, he later told his court-appointed lawyer, Richard Foxall, but whatever he drew was so inaccurate that the police never produced it. When he described escaping in one direction after the killing, they corrected him, because they knew from witnesses that the shooter had gone the opposite way. When he didn’t mention an alley nearby, they told him about it, and he incorporated it into his statement. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” said one officer, as Felix recalled to his lawyer.
So, they demanded, where was the gun? Felix denied having a gun. “That’s when they really got out of control and started yelling at him,” Mr. Foxall said. “He started to feel personally threatened.” Slyly, he made up something demonstrably untrue: that he had left the gun with his grandfather. “I thought this was brilliant,” his lawyer said, because it discredited the tale he was concocting. “He doesn’t have a grandfather. Both grandfathers are dead.”
Once the police had badgered a rough murder confession from Felix, they taped it. Yet the confession lacked a critical detail — one that officers neglected to feed to him. Felix learned it three days later in court when he was handed the charge sheet and saw the date of the crime. He stared at the document and realized that he had the perfect alibi: On the day that Antonio Ramirez was gunned down, Felix had been locked up in a juvenile detentionfacility for violating probation in a case of theft.
The murder charge was dropped, of course, and Mr. Foxall was greatly relieved. “I would have hated to have had to try the case,” he said. “It would have been very scary. Juries don’t want to believe that somebody will confess to a crime he didn’t commit.” Judges don’t want to believe this either. In fact, according to Mr. Foxall, the juvenile commissioner in Felix’s case said, “Well, I don’t understand — why would he confess?”
If you have never been tortured, or locked up and verbally threatened, you may find it hard to believe that anyone would confess to something he had not done. Intuition holds that the innocent do not make false confessions. What on earth could be the motive? To stop the abuse? To curry favor with the interrogator? To follow some fragile thread of imaginary hope that cooperation will bring freedom?
Yes, all of the above. Psychological studies of confessions that have proved false show . . .
Before and after photos from Japanese earthquake/tsunami
The Wife found this site of photos: before and after shots taken from the same location. You switch between them by clicking the photo. The “before” shots are after the event, showing the wreckage, and the “after” shows after the clean-up—with so much missing.
We should make careful plans, but we must also recognize always the possibility that our plans will be blasted to bits by events. That means that while we may like our plans, we should hold them loosely and be ready to improvise—and that means maintaining a certain situational awareness so that “plans” flex frequently in response to what’s going on. Rigidity is not your friend.
Think of a plan not as a map of a known territory (the future), but rather as a map you’re in the process of making, one that requires frequent revision as more of the territory becomes known. Review and revise as needed—but still: plan.
Great fragrance of fine woods
Celestial Woods shaving soap by Queen Charlotte soaps has a very nice fragrance indeed. “Woody cedar and evergreen pine are blended with just the right amount of exotic Mysore sandalwood” is how they describe it. I did have to renew lather for the last pass, but I noticed at the start that my brush wasn’t doing a good job today—insufficient water? It was the Morris & Forndran large Blonde Badger. No problem, of course: I freshened the lather with some Scodioli soap that I wanted to try anyway and will probably use tomorrow.
The razor was the Merkur Progress holding a Swedish Gillette blade, and it did its usual fine job save for one mysterious nick in the middle of my chin—small enough so the alum block stopped it, but I applied My Nik Is Sealed anyway.
A good squirt of Hermès Eau d’Orange Verte moisturizing balm as the aftershave, a good breakfast, and ready for a fine day. I ate the pork chop for dinner, so the lentil-rice-tofu soup will be vegetarian after all.
Grub with lentils, rice, tofu, and collards, at least
Have a hankering for a soup grub, and this occurs to me:
In 7-qt pot:
1.5 Tbsp EVOO
1.5 med yellow onions, chopped
Sauté for 5 minutes, then add:
12-14 (pre-peeled) garlic cloves, minced
4 small carrots, chopped
1 handful chopped celery (the remains of the stash)
1 bunch parsley, minced
shaking crushed red pepper
grinding black pepper
2 tsp dried marjoram
2 tsp dried thyme
2 tsp dried savory
Sauté that briskly for a while, then add:
4 oz tofu, diced
1/2 c black rice (uncooked)
1/2 c lentils (uncooked)
1/2 c mixed lentils and grains combo packaged for soup — this stuff*
28 oz canned diced tomatoes – Muir Glen “Fire-Roasted” in this case
2 qt water (I didn’t measure—may have been slightly less)
1 Tbsp Penzeys Chicken Soup Base
1/2 bunch collards, chopped small, stalks minced
good shaking of wakame flakes (required)
Brought to boil, reduced heat, covered, and simmered one hour. Very tasty indeed. I think I may add some miso later on (after a few servings plain). I estimate 6 meals or so.
UPDATE to reflect what I actually did, with appropriate revisions made above. Successful grub. A very thick soup/stew.
UPDATE 2: I was describing to The Wife how extremely tasty this one was. Part is how chewy it is from the grains and veg, but also it tastes quite rich. Of course, I got out of the practice of using herbs regularly, so I particularly notice their contribution, but as I was telling her how much umami it seemed to have, I realized, of course: the wakame flakes. Seaweed (sea vegetables if you want) are quite high in glutamate, which is the source of the umami taste. So I made a thick, high-umami vegetable soup—and hit the template rather neatly, if I say it as who shouldn’t.
Right after the soup finished, it smelled a lot like miso soup, though it had no miso in it. So I assume that what I was smelling (here and in miso soup) are the wakame flakes newly reconstituted. That smell died down over half an hour or so, and now the soup simply smells—and tastes—good.
*SooFoo update: I keep tasting this soup—can’t believe how good it is—and I have to say that SooFoo is a winner and worth tracking down. Here I have to go to Cornucopia in Carmel to get it. Amazon lists it, but it seems unavailable for now. Still: mighty tasty stuff.
ANOTHER UPDATE: I keep tasting the soup and it tastes better and better. This recipe is definitely a keeper. The wakame flakes are not optional.
Do Santorum’s religious beliefs require him to lie?
Apparently so. Strange religious outlook, that lies are good, but apparently that is what Santorum believes. (His belief system, overall, does not seem to be shared by many.) Glenn Kessler posts in the Washington Post:
“In the Netherlands, people wear different bracelets if they are elderly. And the bracelet is: ‘Do not euthanize me.’ Because they have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands but half of the people who are euthanized — ten percent of all deaths in the Netherlands — half of those people are enthanized involuntarily at hospitals because they are older and sick. And so elderly people in the Netherlands don’t go to the hospital. They go to another country, because they are afraid, because of budget purposes, they will not come out of that hospital if they go in there with sickness.”
— Former senator Rick Santorum, at the American Heartland Forum in Columbia, Missouri, Feb. 3, 2012
These were interesting remarks by one of the leading candidates for the GOP nomination. Though Santorum made this observation earlier in the month, a video of his comments only circulated on the web over the weekend and a number of readers asked whether he is correct. (His comments also spawned headlines in Holland, such as one that proclaimed: “Rick Santorum Thinks He Knows the Netherlands: Murder of the Elderly on a Grand Scale.”)
So we will check his statistics — 10 percent of all deaths in the Netherlands are from euthanasia and 50 percent of those die involuntarily — and also his claim that the elderly wear bracelets requesting that they not be euthanized.
(Full disclosure: The Fact Checker’s parents emigrated from Holland and I have direct, personal experience with the practice of euthanasia there. My father’s brother requested euthanasia when he was diagnosed with a terminal disease and after various remedies were ineffective. In the United States, he might have lived another two or three months, in great pain, and likely would have lapsed into a coma before death. But, after a conclusion by the Dutch medical establishment that he had no chance of survival, he arranged for his death at home with his family at his side. He even called me an hour before his death to say good-bye.)
We realize this is an emotional issue in the United States. But the simple facts, as Santorum described them, should be clear.
The Facts
In 2001, The Netherlands became the first country to legalize euthanasia, setting forth a complex process. The law, which went into effect a year later, codified a practice that has been unofficially tolerated for many years.
Under the Dutch law, a doctor must diagnose the illness as incurable and the patient must have full control of his or her mental faculties. The patient must voluntarily and repeatedly request the procedure, and another doctor must provide a written opinion agreeing with the diagnosis. After the death, a commission made up of a doctor, a jurist and an ethical expert also are required to verify that the requirements for euthanasia have been met.
Late last year, in the first such case, . .
Rick Santorum is a very religious person—just ask him—and apparently his view of religion is that lies are perfectly okay. While it’s true that Santorum claims intimate knowledge of the Father of Lies (Satan, whose plans and techniques Santorum claims to know in detail), I hadn’t realize that Santorum was actually using similar techniques. Quite interesting. I hope people ask him on his religious views on lying.
Casual libel
One drawback of the Internet is the casual way libelous statements are spread about.
Recently a guy responded to my Sharpologist post “Shaving-Tool Innovation & the Weber Razor” that my Weber razor is not (as I thought) version 1.0—there was an earlier version, of which only a few copies were sold. That early model had no DLC coating, had a “W” embossed on the head, and other differences. It apparently did not provide so good a shave as the current model (much like the version 1.0 iKon did not match the performance of the later models). He provided a link to a Badger & Blade thread discussing the first Weber, which was quite interesting.
Since I was there, out of curiosity I did a search on “Leisureguy” and found a poisonous little post in this thread:
Notice the total lack of substantiation: just a slam, based on his “belief”, the grounds of which are not given but obviously did not include actually bothering to look at the book: in the preface, I thank “the shavers who have suggested ideas and improvements for the book.”
In explaining the origin of the book, I note:
This book grew out of my own experience, augmented and illuminated by the experiences other shavers shared in the on-line shaving forums. I thank the guys on Pogonotomy.com, ShaveMyFace.com, TheShaveDen.com, the RazorandBrush.com Message Board, Wicked_Edge, DamnFineShave.com, and BadgerandBlade.com. I also thank the vendors listed in the appendix for the fine array of products and information they offer, essential to the practice of traditional shaving. And in particular I want to thank shaving novices, whose questions and desire for reliable information first stimulated this book.
In the book itself, I provide credits for each quotation and for many ideas (e.g., to Chris Moss for his pointing out the use of Trumper’s Coral Skin Food and of glycerin as pre-shaves—not to mention credit to him and Sara Bonneyman for the Moss Scuttle).
So the statement posted is totally false: I did not get “most of my information” from B&B, nor do I fail to offer appropriate credit. I do have to admire the writer’s hypocritical expression of pity from his august perch of ignorance and also the perfection of his ignorance.
Oh, well: such people will always be around, I suppose. And they go after almost any target, always with the same technique: utter ignorance, no substantiation, a vicious slam, and move on. Here’s an example of exactly the same sort of unsubstantiated libel, this one more general and harder to repudiate but equally based in ignorance: the writer has obviously never visited the store, just passing along (or making up) a (vicious) rumor. Malice is more common than one would like.
Looking at hones from a technical perspective
I found this video quite interesting.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/iKeFNjyaDNA)
Best cheap laptop: under $500
It’s a Windows machine, of course: MacBooks are too expensive for this category. And it seems exceptionally capable at the price. Take a look.
Disturbing disease: Acute pancreatis
Certainly puts in perspective my cataract-surgery issues. Ole H. Petersen, Oleg V. Gerasimenko, and Julia V. Gerasimenko write in The Scientist:
Sometimes the human body turns on itself. Cancer and autoimmune diseases involve some form of physiological revolt, when a body’s own cells and molecules rise up to bring about its undoing. Patients suffering from most of these disorders have a variety of treatment options, formulated from a mechanistic understanding of the molecular roots of the diseases. But in acute pancreatitis, a largely untreatable disease, the exocrine cells of the pancreas—whose role is to manufacture enzymes that are normally mixed with bile from the liver to digest dietary proteins and fats—malfunction and digest themselves and surrounding tissues and organs in a more mysterious fashion. Acute pancreatitis is usually preceded either by heavy alcohol consumption or by blockage of the duct that unites the common bile duct and the pancreatic duct with hardened lumps of bile called gallstones. Searing pain, vomiting, fever, internal bleeding, multiple organ failure, and if untreated, death, can result.
Acute pancreatitis involves an act of molecular cannibalism. A protease called trypsin, produced by the pancreas’s acinar cells, is normally released into the pancreatic duct as a proenzyme, before travelling to the gut, where it’s activated to break down the protein molecules in the food we eat. Inactive pancreatic proteases are packaged into small organelles called zymogen granules (ZGs), which are clustered inside the acinar cells. They are normally in a chemically inactivatable form, cemented together by calcium. But when acute pancreatitis strikes, the packaged enzymes become activated, break down the granules, and are then free in the cytoplasm, where they begin to digest the pancreas from the inside out.
For all that is known about the cellular progression of acute pancreatitis, its molecular triggers have remained cloaked in mystery. And neither science nor medicine has yet offered answers for how to treat the sometimes fatal disease. For more than 200,000 acute pancreatitis patients admitted to hospitals in the United States each year, that means relying only upon pain-relief drugs, intravenous fluid replacement, antibiotics, and changes in diet to stave off the serious internal damage that the disease can wreak.1
But recently, new light has been shed on the pathobiology of acute pancreatitis, from which prevention and treatment opportunities are emerging. . .
Trade-offs
In an email recently I suggested that one good category of interview question is to ask about challenging trade-offs the interviewee had to make in the course of his business, art, craft, whatever.
I think it’s a good category for several reasons. For one thing, trade-off situations are common, so the interviewee will have encountered some. Moreover, trade-off situations are generally pivot points of the project or operation or whatever: the very reason that time is spent investigating trade-offs is that the decision point is critical. And a lot of thought is given to trade-offs, the interviewee can generally list the arguments for and againsst—and that provides a natural entry into the technical background of the issue.
I got to thinking recently about how my knives gradually grow dull through daily routine and use, so I periodically have to have them sharpened, and I was struck by how Megs’s toenails are the opposite: they gradually grow sharp through daily routine and use, so I periodically have to have them clipped to make them dull once more. Weird, but of course life is anti-entropy in any case.
I got to thinking—you can see how my mind wanders—to dog toenails. They may require clipping, but they don’t grow long and sharp. I was trying to picture a dog with long sharp claws, and retractability (or, what it is in fact, extensibility) of such claws is important if the animal is to run quickly over ground. (The cheetah’s claws, in fact, are not extensible: more like dog claws.)
Obviously there are trade-offs: long claws = better kills, less running. Which way to go?
The way evolution works is through letting trade-offs play out in real time: the natural selection of the active environment determines empirically which trade-offs deliver better over time—and, of course, it’s a long time: evolution takes time for many individuals and generations to be born, live, procreate (or not), and pass away, over and over, as the benefits of one or another variant pay off (or don’t).
So what we see, as we look at the biosphere (and indeed the memesphere) is the working out of trade-offs: all that you observe are the resultants to date of trade-offs along every dimension, each trade-off influenced by all the others simultaneously occurring as well as by environmental factors beyond the organism—ice ages, volcanic eruptions, great droughts, and so on: the framework changes and that changes the direction of beneficial adaptations—or, more accurately, may make a previously beneficial adaptation a handicap and elevate another as conferring great benefits in the new environment. But, of course, everything else is simultaneously changing and working out other trade-offs. The biosphere/memesphere is a system (of sorts) in which everything influences everything else, though the remoter ripples may be faint.
It’s interesting to look at the all the plant, animal, fungus life and see it as a cross-section—this instant—of an on-going process of workiing out trade-offs in response to a constantly shifting environment. The level of details is overwhelming, eh?
Mocha-Java and a fine shave
QED’s Mocha Java shave stick, a longtime favorite, which produced a terrific lather with my butterscotch Frank Shaving brush. I picked a Gillette Slim Adjustable that was gold-plated—one of many razors Gillette titled “Aristocrat”—with an Astra Superior Platinum blade. Three quite enjoyable passes, and then a good splash of Floris No. 89 aftershave, a fragrance I’ve lately enjoyed a lot. I have the EDT as well.
