09.13.06
Artichoke hearts and bacon
I made a bean salad tonight and decided to include artichoke hearts. I had frozen quartered artichoke hearts, and the instructions were to simmer them in water—period. No time. I figured that mean they were already cooked, so after I took out the chopped bacon, I put the frozen hearts in the hot bacon grease and simmered them there. They browned nicely, and didn’t pick up much of the grease: I removed them with a slotted spoon when they were ready and added to the salad. Very tasty. Good idea. I started with 12-16 oz. of thick bacon—can’t remember package size for sure.
Shaving and Proust
Odors, aromas, fragrances, and smells are keys that can unlock distant memories. I just got an email from a guy who said, “I even flashed back to a dusty memory of sitting as a child on the closed toilet seat lid, watching my Dad whip up the lather in his Old Spice mug while I inhaled the fragrance of the Noxema cream he had rubbed all over his face.” And this wonderful note in the ShaveMyFace forum:
i picked up a bottle of [Pinaud] clubman on saturday and used it on sunday. after i shaved and went to the living room my wife got a funny look on her face and came closer to get a better smell. after a couple of deep sniffs she got a bit misty eyed.
when i asked her what the deal was she said that whatever aftershave i used — the clubman — was the same scent that she remembered always being on her grandfather (whom she was very close to and loved very much). she said that after his passing, she didn’t ever think that she would ever smell that scent again and that her tears were tears of joy in rememberance of him.
Good column on a poor job
Take a look at this column:
It must be hard to be president and maintain a sense of life beyond security perimeters and G-men with earpieces. But there’s more than that behind a naïve statement George W. Bush uttered last week. After federal judge Anna Diggs Taylor issued a ruling that laid waste Attorney General Gonzales’s novel defense of Bush’s extra-constitutional eavesdropping habit—that, in effect, the judge had no right to judge George, the argument also currently employed by Saddam Hussein—Bush claimed that “those who herald this decision simply do not understand the nature of the world in which we live.” It’s hard to swallow that line from a man who is himself so very distant from the world in which the rest of us live. And that’s the crux of the Bush problem: Bush, ensconced in his privileged life, has lost sight, or perhaps never even had sight of his actual, constitutionally decreed job decription.
In the Bush era, a lot of words have been drained of their once useful meanings. “Hypocrisy,” for instance, is but the fading shadow of its former glory. Last week, when Bush and his pals trotted out to show the cameras lots of chiselled resolve in the face of a terrorist plot across the ocean, the word was begging to be hauled out. The Boston Globe reported that many types of liquid explosive-detecting technology have already been produced, and some have proven to work well. But “the TSA has not outfitted airports with the devices, in part, because officials have to prioritize where they spend limited dollars.” George Bush projected his resolve from a safe distance—he already has scanning technology at the White House.
But of all the terms left without meaning, there is one which most strongly deserves revival. It sounds positively quaint in the age of Bush propaganda. George Bush, whether he knows it or not, is a “public servant.” He is subservient to you. To me. And most of all, to the Constitution. His oath of office, after all, calls for him to protect that venerable document, that enshrining of all the rights that he and his see as mere impediments to their “unitary executive” and wartime powers theory.
A majority of the nation seems to have repeatedly been hoodwinked into a very different view of Bush’s job. The term “public servant” has disappeared from public discourse, and perception managers like Karl Rove would just as soon usher it quietly into the graveyard where its cousins “liberal democracy” and “greater good” now wander, diaphanous specters.
The word deserves revival, if only to give a name to what Bush has defied in order that we might better explain it to those who would prefer a protective, strict father figure as leader. We don’t elect bosses—we elect employees. Just because you get the corner office doesn’t mean you own the building.
If you accept, as the Constitution sets out, that Bush is merely the head of one of three equal centers of power among public servants, it becomes all too clear just how far Bush is from any notion of public servitude. Jesus reversed his disciples’ expectations by washing their feet. That, as Bush should know if he is the devotee of the Bible his conservative Christian base believes him to be, is the Biblical view of power through servitude.
Read the rest at the link.
Amazingly clear example of moral depravity
We live in a time when obvious moral and ethical failure—totally corrupt value systems—are clearly visible all around us. Via Firedoglake, here’s an example (.wav video): the US Army deliberating blocking a system—working and ready to deploy—that would save the lives of US soldiers because it wants to protect a contract to develop a similar system from scratch. The Army really doesn’t care about the troops—that’s clear from the unarmored Humvees, the inadequate body armor, the lack of sufficient manpower and resources. The entire attitude was revealed when General Shinseki was cut off at the knees for honestly answering a question from Congress about how many troops would be required in Iraq.
UPDATE: Here’s a sales video from the company that makes Trophy, the system referred to above.
Good tea in new bags
The NY Times has a good article on how tea is now being sold in pyramidal bags—and real tea, not tea dust:
THE tea bag, a clever enough idea at first, went terribly awry somewhere along the way, at least in the view of people who love to savor their tea. Now it is in the process of large-scale reinvention, and some of those who currently shun it with almost ostentatious disdain are very likely to be won over.
At age 100 or so, the old bag is increasingly being filled with fine whole leaf tea, the kind connoisseurs brew in their teapots, and the bag itself has been redesigned in shapes that are not only elegant but constructed to allow those flavorful leaves to show what they’ve got.
With tea sales in the United States now four times what they were a decade ago — about $6.2 billion annually, according to the Tea Association of the USA, a trade group — the American tea drinker seems ready for a change for the better.
The change, some say, is overdue. Look closely at a conventional tea bag in your cupboard or in the paper cup from the local deli. Chances are that instead of leaves it is filled with indistinguishable bits, the detritus left after tea leaves are sifted and graded. The tea industry calls it dust, and the beverage it makes is likely to be rusty-looking and often bitterly tannic. But it no longer has to be, nor is it necessary to brew a whole pot of tea to achieve something better tasting.
Perhaps the surest sign that the tea world is changing is this: Lipton, the world’s largest tea company and a division of Unilever, will start selling tea bags containing long leaf teas in supermarkets nationwide next month.
Instead of paper, the leaves will be enveloped by nylon mesh bags in a delicate pyramid shape.
Lipton is following the lead of American businesses like Harney & Sons, Mighty Leaf, Adagio and the Highland Tea Company, which for several years have sold tea bags filled with high-quality full-leaf teas, ones with complex, often floral, herbaceous, spicy or fruity nuances.
Smelling a trend, new companies, like Revolution Tea, Numi Tea, Two Leaves and a Bud, and Tea Forté, have formed expressly to sell fine teas in tea bags. Harrisons & Crosfield, from England, and the luxury Parisian tea purveyors Le Palais des Thés and Mariage Frères have also introduced tea bags.
“We decided to put some of our teas in tea bags because that’s the way most people drink tea,” said Wanja Michuki, the president of the Highland Tea Company, in Montclair, N.J., which sells fine teas from Kenya, the leading exporter of tea worldwide.
More at the link, including this sad note:
And even though the better tea bags will produce an excellent cup of tea, some of the finer points of tea making have been lost, like the different water temperatures and steeping times required, depending on whether the tea is black, oolong or green. An exception is the tea made by Le Palais des Thés: a suggested temperature and brewing time is printed on the foil packets that contain the muslin tea bags. But how many tea drinkers pay attention to those arcane details anyway? [Only those who like tea. --- LG]
“People like good tea but not the work,” said Michael Harney, a vice president of Harney & Sons, in Millerton, N.Y., a company that his father, John, founded. “We see our customers switching from loose tea to sachets all the time now.”
Goodbye, habeus corpus
Dan Froomkin points out that habeus corpus is leaving—can freedom be far behind?
Detainee policy is being hotly debated on Capitol Hill this week. But the press coverage of the White House arm-twisting is arguably missing the big story: The loss of habeas corpus.
As blogger Hilzoy writes, the ostensibly moderate Republican bill on detainee policy “would eliminate the right of any alien who is in US custody outside the US, or who ‘has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant’, to file for habeas corpus…
“Denying the right to file for habeas corpus to all people detained outside the US, or who have been found to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant, means that virtually all detainees would have no legal recourse if they felt they had been unjustly imprisoned, or if their legal rights had been violated.”
Combine that with a broad definition for “enemy combatant” and you’ve got a momentous shift in American law.
Legal blogger Marty Lederman adds: “With respect to the Administration’s detention and interrogation practices, it would largely undermine the salutary effects of the landmark Supreme Court decisions in Rasul and Hamdan, and might well provide effective legal cover for many of the CIA’s ‘alternative’ techniques.
Ann Woolner writes a timely Bloomberg opinion column about the reshaping of America’s legal landscape since September 11, 2001.
“As a measure of how far things have gone in the law, consider a single amendment to an anti-torture bill passed last year.
“Congress curtailed one of the most elemental rights, that of habeas corpus, when it said the men held at Guantanamo Bay could no longer go to the U.S. Supreme Court to challenge any aspect of their imprisonment.
“That’s ‘just about the most stupendously significant act that the Congress of the United States can take,’ Justice David Souter remarked at an oral argument this spring.”
Yale Professor Bruce Ackerman writes in a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed: “Consider the case of Jose Padilla. A few months after Sept. 11, the president declared him an ‘enemy combatant,’ and locked him up in a military brig for three and half years. During all this time, Padilla was denied the right to challenge his detention before a military or civilian tribunal. . . .
“This gives the presidency a terrible precedent for the next Sept. 11. We all hope that this attack won’t come for a long time. But the day after the next tragedy, the Padilla case will be invoked to support the president if he sweeps hundreds or thousands into military detention. After a year or two the Supreme Court may intervene on the side of freedom. But perhaps the vote will go 5-4 the wrong way.
“It can’t happen to me, we tell ourselves. Very few Americans have done anything to support the Islamo-fascists, whatever President Bush may mean by this dark term. But the next attack may be by home-grown terrorists. All of us are potential Jose Padillas, not a select few.”
As I repeatedly point out, President Bush is directing his extreme actions (torture, denial of habeus corpus, indefinite imprisonment with no charges, etc.) toward suspects, not convicted felons. And anyone can be a suspect—even you. All that is required is that someone in authority suspect you. And the reasons for being suspected tend to grow over time: first is that you know someone who’s associated with terrorism, then that you know someone who might know someone else who might be associated with terrorism, then that you are critical of the President and his policies, and then that you are critical of authority. Only recently a guy was detained (this time for only 25 minutes, but who knows what lists his name is now on—and perhaps in time the names of his friends) because he made a remark critical of the head of the Transportation Security Authority. We are going in a bad direction.
Already two of the people whom we have tortured (or arranged for their torture) have been totally innocent—one a man from Canada, the other a man from Germany. The had done nothing wrong, but that didn’t save them from being suspected, taken away, imprisoned (one for a year), and repeatedly tortured. The US has not apologized, nor will it allow them to sue for any compensation.
The chicken that killed Grandpa
The LA Times has a recipe that looks as good as the backstory. Here’s the recipe:
The chicken that killed Grandpa
Total time: 1 hour, 20 minutes
Servings: 6 to 82 pounds assorted summer squash (zucchini, pattypan, etc.)
1 chicken (about 4 1/2 pounds), cut up (cut each breast in half)
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
3 minced garlic cloves
1 teaspoon cumin seeds, crushed
1 small jalapeño, seeded and chopped fine [They must be kidding, or this is a misprint: use 2 large jalapeños, not seeded, and chopped coarsely. --- LG]
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
4 ears of corn, kernels cut off
1 1/2 pounds tomatoes, peeled, seeded and cut into large dice (6 large Roma tomatoes, about 2 cups)
2 tablespoons roughly chopped cilantro, plus additional for garnishTrim the squash, and cut into one-half inch slices. If using wide-body squashes such as big pattypans, cut them in half first. Zucchini should be simply sliced, unless they’re gigantic garden zucchini. Pat chicken pieces dry, then sprinkle them generously with salt and pepper.
In a large, heavy casserole, heat the oil until it is hot but not quite smoking. Brown the chicken well on all sides, about 5 minutes, either in two batches or using an additional skillet. Remove to a bowl.
Pour out all but about 1 tablespoon of the oil from the casserole. Sauté the onion, garlic, cumin and jalapeño in the oil over medium-low heat until they are soft and translucent, about 2 minutes. Add the vinegar, turn heat to high, and deglaze the pan, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom, until just about a teaspoon of liquid remains.
Add all the chicken except the breasts to the casserole, then add the squashes, corn and tomatoes. Cover and simmer over medium heat for 15 minutes. Add the cilantro; taste the sauce, adding salt if necessary. Add the chicken breasts, stir to combine, cover and simmer for another 20 minutes.
Spoon off as much fat as you can, adjust seasoning. Serve with rice and sprinkle with cilantro.
Each serving: 398 calories; 38 grams protein; 20 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams fiber; 19 grams fat; 5 grams saturated fat; 134 mg. cholesterol; 124 mg. sodium.
UPDATE: I made it today (10 Nov 2006). Pretty good, in fact. I used eightball squash (a zucchini variant) and pattypan squash, and instead of fresh tomatoes two 14 oz cans of diced tomatoes in their juice. I only had one large jalapeño, so I used that (including seeds—just cut off stem and chopped). Result was a dish that was not particularly hot, but did have some presence. I’ll make it again: chicken in succotash, more or less.
Steal an election? Easy peasy if they use Diebold
Boing Boing has a post on stealing elections when Diebold machines are used:
Princeton security researchers Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman, and Edward W. Felten have taken apart one of Diebold’s notorious voting machines and done a thorough security analysis of its workings. They showed that they could easily install software on the machine that would allow an attacker to steal votes from one candidate and give them to another — they showed that this would be undetectable, and easily done. They’ve published a paper and an amazing, disturbing video showing how this could be done.
This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities–a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine’s hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures.
Diebold insists that their machines are secure, and that they don’t need voter-verified paper audit-tapes that keep a real-time log of the votes cast — but this latest attack, which requires only a few minutes to execute, shows that America’s votes should not be run on Diebold hardware.
EFF has done amazing work in fighting Diebold at standards bodies, in courts, and in the press, working to ensure that American elections aren’t overturned by bad code and greed.
Diebold has been protected from investigation and oversight in part because it’s a major contributor to the GOP. Indeed, the Diebold president promised to deliver Ohio to Bush:
The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”
The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O’Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O’Dell’s company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.
O’Dell attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors - known as Rangers and Pioneers - at the president’s Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month. The next week, he penned invitations to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser to benefit the Ohio Republican Party’s federal campaign fund - partially benefiting Bush - at his mansion in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.
The letter went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, was set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election.
“Anything goes” at Interior Department
So says the Inspector General:
Earl Devaney, the inspector general of the Department of the Interior, will give a blunt assessment of the level of ethics there in testimony to be presented to a congressional subcommittee Wednesday.
“Simply stated, short of a crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior,” Devaney will tell the subcommittee, according to an advance copy of his prepared remarks obtained by ABC News.
Devaney was asked to investigate a controversy that’s been brewing on Capitol Hill for months over what critics call a giant giveaway to the major oil companies.
The giveaway, according to the critics, stems from leases issued by the government to oil companies in the late 1990s that exempted them from paying royalties on deepwater drilling, regardless of how much profit they ultimately reaped from that exploration.
The issue has taken on heightened urgency in the wake of the recent discovery of huge new oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico. The federal government could lose more than a billion dollars in royalty payments from this new source alone. Over the long term, the leases could cost the government as much as $20 billion, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office.
Devaney did not find evidence of outright collusion between Interior Department officials and oil companies over the leases in question — writing that “we do not have a ’smoking gun.’”
Instead, he blames the leases on “bureaucratic bungling,” calling it a “very costly mistake which might never have been aired publicly absent The New York Times,” and inquiries by Congress. The Times first reported the omission of price thresholds in the leases.
But Devaney’s overall indictment of the department’s practices is stinging.
“Over the course of this seven-year tenure, I have observed one instance after another when the good work of my office has been dynamically disregarded by the department,” he writes in his testimony. “Ethics failures on the part of senior department officials, taking the form of appearances of impropriety, favoritism and bias have been routinely dismissed with a promise ‘not to do it again.’” Read the rest of this entry »
