From Drug War Facts:

Meaning of the terms used in chart:

Withdrawal: Presence and severity of characteristic withdrawal symptoms.

Reinforcement: A measure of the substance’s ability, in human and animal tests, to get users to take it again and again, and in preference to other substances.

Tolerance: How much of the substance is needed to satisfy increasing cravings for it, and the level of stable need that is eventually reached.

Dependence: How difficult it is for the user to quit, the relapse rate, the percentage of people who eventually become dependent, the rating users give their own need for the substance and the degree to which the substance will be used in the face of evidence that it causes harm.

Intoxication: Though not usually counted as a measure of addiction in itself, the level of intoxication is associated with addiction and increases the personal and social damage a substance may do.

Source: Jack E. Henningfield, PhD for NIDA, Reported by Philip J. Hilts, New York Times, Aug. 2, 1994 “Is Nicotine Addictive? It Depends on Whose Criteria You Use.”

Wow. Amazing.

A chain decides to require book publishers to pay it in order to have their books sold by the chain. A book publisher replies. The letters—particularly the second—are wonderful. Well worth reading.

The protection of civil rights in this country is, I think, a bipartisan issue. Both conservatives and liberals believe, I should think, that individual citizens have a right to privacy and to having the government butt out of their private business, including communications, travel, and the like. No surveillance, in other words. John Dean, a well-known Republican and former Nixon staffer (counsel to the President), weighs in the topic:

Congressional Democrats are getting a lot of well-earned heat from rank-and-file members of their party, not to mention editorial writers and bloggers, for their lack of spine in refusing to reject the Bush/Cheney Administration’s sweeping amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Just before Congress departed for its August recess, the Administration jammed through in five days - from start to finish — the dubiously titled Protect America Act (PAA) of 2007, over the protest of the Democratic leadership. The only thing good about the PAA is that it is temporary - with a six month expiration date (although surveillance programs authorized under it can operate for up to one year.)

On her Democracy NOW daily program, Amy Goodman’s (streaming video) interviewed Salon.com’s law blogger, Glenn Greenwald, and the president of the National Lawyers Guild, Marjorie Cohn, about the PAA. The interview nicely sets forth what happened and its broad implications. Simply stated, Bush threatened to make a political issue of any effort by Congressional Democrats to protect the civil liberties of American. Bush surely succeeded beyond his most fervent hope in his intimidation of sixteen Democratic members in the Senate and forty-one Democratic members in the House, earning these members a place on “the roll of shame” in the blogosphere.

A Threat Greater Than That to Civil Liberties: Executive Aggrandizement

The Washington Post, the New York Times, and politically-diverse organizations ranging from the John Birch Society and the Cato Institute to the American Civil Liberties Union all agree that the PAA is a serious mistake, and threat to the civil liberties of Americans. They point out that the law ignores the Fourth Amendment while, at the same time, hiding its actual operations in national security secrecy. Indeed, Congress was not even certain about the full extent of what it has authorized because President Bush and Vice-President Cheney refused to reveal it.

It is not likely that law-abiding Americans will even know that the U.S. Government’s intelligence gathering operations are listening in on their calls to and from foreign countries, or similarly scanning emails. For this reason, it is not to be expected that many Americans will care about what the Democratic Congress has given a Republican president who has proven himself insensitive to anyone’s privacy other than his own.

There is, however, a threat in this new law even greater than its robbing Americans of their communications privacy, which commentators and critics have virtually ignored.

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Interesting. Via a commenter and also in an email from Cloudmark support in response to my complaint:

You are experiencing a problem caused by a corrupted file that was part of an automatic Cloudmark update. [Wow! Here's an idea: test before distribution. - LG]  We have isolated and resolved the issue.  Please perform the following steps to remove the corrupted file which will resolve the issue on your computer:

For Windows 2000/XP

1. Right click on your Start button and select Windows Explorer.

2. Select Tools > Folder Options an click on the View tab.

3. Click on the radio button that says ‘Show hidden files and folders’ and then click OK.

4. Navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\{insert your username here}\Local Settings\Application Data\Cloudmark\SpamNet\

5. Delete all of the files in this folder [actually, as it turns out, they mean "delete all files and folders in this folder" - LG]

6. Restart your computer

The advocates of privatization (which include many who stand to make money off the effort) generally tout the benefits of a free-market competitiveness: greater efficiency, lower costs, improved service, more innovation, etc. Unfortunately, in some cases privatization leads to lower efficiency, high costs, worse service, lack of innovation, and even criminal behavior. From the New Yorker:

When Americans think of college these days, the first word that often comes to mind is “debt.” And from “debt” it’s just a short hop to other unpleasant words, like “payola,” “kickback,” and “bribery.” At least, that’s how it’s been since this spring, when news broke that student-loan companies had been using unsavory and possibly illegal tactics to get preferential treatment from university financial-aid officers. At some universities, officers were given stock options in companies whose loans they recommended to incoming students, while at others lenders offered millions of dollars in perks to schools that would stop doing business with competitors. In response, the Senate passed a bill toughening rules against “inducements” from lenders to administrators. All well and good, but it leaves untouched a more fundamental scandal: the huge profits that lenders make from student loans are being earned on the government’s dime.

For decades, student-loan companies have had one of the cushiest businesses in America. We want college students to be able to finance their education at reasonable rates. But banks are understandably leery of lending to people with no collateral and uncertain future earnings. So we provide incentives to lend. The federal government, for instance, guarantees the so-called Stafford loans that college students get: if a student defaults, the government will pay off almost the entire loan. On top of that, the government hands out billions of dollars in subsidies to lenders every year, all but insuring them a steady profit. In effect, lenders get a guaranteed return with very little risk.

This convoluted process is good at making student-loan companies rich—Sallie Mae, the biggest issuer of student loans, earned $1.3 billion last year, with a return on equity that dwarfs most other companies’. But it’s not very good at getting government money to students cheaply and efficiently. President Bush’s 2007 budget shows, for instance, that it’s four times as expensive for the government to subsidize and guarantee private loans as for it to issue those loans itself. In other words, the current system is not just corrupt. It’s also inefficient. So why are we stuck with it?

In part, it’s ideology, and the dominance of what you might call the privatization mystique—the idea that anything the government can do, the private sector can do better. Often, this makes sense: the free market is more likely to come up with efficient ways of creating and distributing products and services than the government is. But the student-loan market isn’t a free market in any meaningful sense of the term, because the government effectively determines prices, insures against losses, and subsidizes volume. In this environment, most of the competition among private companies is really just squabbling over how to split up the spoils. Economists call this behavior—when a company seeks to manipulate economic conditions rather than actually create value—“rent-seeking.” It’s common in areas where the fetish for privatization has taken hold, such as the outsourcing of homeland security to private contractors and the boom in private Medicare insurers. (The private insurers are less efficient than Medicare and receive billions in subsidies from the government.) Outsourcing tasks to private companies is supposed to let government reap the benefits of the free market. But sometimes it just ends up uniting the worst of government and the worst of the private sector into one expensive mess.

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Payment for an earmark that brings enough money to get a great profit: Congress for sale, in other words. Don Young is not the worst, no doubt, but he’s plenty bad enough. Regardless of political persuasion (liberal or conservative), I think anyone would be opposed to this sort of deal. From TPMmuckraker:

They say that earmarking is a rigged system, a system of organized bribery (the “favor factory” as Jack Abramoff called it). But rarely has there been such startling evidence of a quid pro quo as Rep. Don Young’s (R-AK) $10 million earmark for a highway interchange in Florida (the state farthest from Alaska). The earmark came only days after a real estate mogul raised $40,000 for Young at an event in Florida.

But it gets worse. It turns out that Young had to bend, if not break, Congressional rules to do it.

The Naples Daily News reports that he probably changed key language in the bill after it had been passed in the House and Senate. The language left zero ambiguity about where exactly all that cash was supposed to go:

The words “Coconut Road interchange” were not in the federal transportation bill approved by Congress in 2005.Those words were attached to a $10 million earmark sometime after the House and Senate votes but before the president signed the bill into law.

Within that time, someone with access to the bill deleted the earmark’s original language that would have given $10 million more for widening and improvements to Interstate 75 and attached the phrase “Coconut Rd. interchange I-75/Lee County,” according to a study by a former federal official who lives on Sanibel Island.

The wording must have changed during a process called “bill enrollment” when grammatical and technical — not substantive — changes are allowed to be made. As Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense tells the paper, “I’ve seen little gimmicks and little tricks used to make sure somebody’s friend or contributor is taken care of but this is by far one of the more underhanded, surreptitious examples I’ve seen — ever.”

The Coconut Road project stands to benefit Daniel Aronoff, a wealthy part-time Naples resident who held a fund-raiser for Young right before the earmark mysteriously appeared. But since the news about the timing of the Coconut Road language broke, local officials in Southwest Florida have started discussing using the money on a bigger project to widen Interstate 75 — which is what the language in the bill was before Young changed it.

A reader just passed along a link to this site, which I’d not seen before: The World Clock. Take a look. Pretty cool.

It’s done by Poodwaddle.com, which is pretty interesting in itself.

Mark Bittman strikes again. I earlier blogged his 101 quick dinners. Now he adds 10 more, taken from the (more than 400) comments to the original column:

1 Tortilla soup: Obviously best with fresh salsa, homemade stock and so on, but even with store-bought ingredients this has appeal: Combine one cup of cooked black beans and one cup of corn kernels with four cups of chicken stock in a pot; heat through. (You can add leftover chicken meat.) Fill four bowls with cilantro, tortilla chips, salsa and shredded cheese. Pour broth over chip mixture and serve.

2 Fast beans and vegetables: Sauté chopped onions, minced garlic and sliced zucchini in extra virgin olive oil. Add two cups of cooked white beans and two cups of chopped tomatoes. Season with salt and pepper, lots of basil and a little more oil. Serve plain or over couscous.

3 Sauté chopped chorizo (the hard Spanish kind) in olive oil until it begins to crisp. Add two cups of chopped tomatoes and one cup of water or clam juice; cook until saucy. Add a dozen or more well-scrubbed littleneck clams and cook until they open. Serve in bowls, along with bread.

4 Lebanese fava bean salad: Heat equal amounts of canned fava beans and chickpeas; mash with a potato masher along with a minced garlic clove, lemon juice to taste and salt. Garnish with chopped parsley and diced tomatoes. Eat with pita.

5 The Greek fried egg: Heat olive oil gently in a skillet with fresh oregano; fry eggs in it. Pour into a bowl and top with crumbled feta cheese and a handful of olives. Serve with country bread.

6 Basil chicken, Indian style: Ideally, this is marinated for hours, but you can either cheat and skip that, or think ahead. Grind together half a cup of basil leaves, five cloves garlic, a one-inch piece of ginger, half a cup of plain yogurt, two tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, one tablespoon lemon juice and some salt. Toss with one-and-a-half-inch chunks of chicken breast (or salmon, pork or other protein); marinate in the refrigerator for up to 24 hours, stirring occasionally. Shake off excess marinade and broil or grill chicken until done, turning once.

7 Mix grated lemon peel with softened butter (or olive oil) and salt. Cut the lemons into quarters and alternate on skewers with shrimp. Grill or broil, brushing with lemon butter, until shrimp are done.

8 Bean-and-tuna salad: Good, olive-oil packed tuna is a must here: Combine two cups of cannellini beans, drained, with a minced red onion, a can of tuna, olive oil and salt and pepper as needed. Chopped sage is great in this, as are rosemary and basil.

9 Toss three cups of strawberries, hulled and halved or quartered, with a tablespoon of good aged balsamic vinegar and some black pepper. Wash and dry four cups arugula, then toss with salt and olive oil. Combine with the berries, and crumble fresh goat cheese over all.

10 Cucumber soup: Peel and seed, if necessary, four to six medium cucumbers (or three English cucumbers); purée in a food processor with a seeded, stemmed jalapeño (optional), a scallion, a clove of garlic and a cup or more of yogurt or sour cream; add a little cold water if necessary to get the machine to work. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve in bowls, garnished with a little more yogurt or sour cream, and some snipped dill or chives.

And I’ll add one of my own:

Put some oil (olive oil, chicken schmalz, duck fat) in a sauté pan over medium or medium-high heat. Add the following as the sautéing continues:

chopped onion (and garlic, too, if you like)
chopped jalapeño or habañero or crushed red pepper—your choice
chopped summer squash or zucchini
chopped green beans
chopped broccolini
chopped asparagus
chopped greens—e.g., two leaves of fresh kale
kernels of corn (I mostly use TJ’s frozen roast corn, but also cut kernels off fresh corn)
maybe some drained canned beans (about 1/4 cup)
maybe some pitted black olives

After you’re happy with the mix and how well it’s sautéed, add about 1/2 cup of chicken stock (and often juice of a lemon as well) and 1/3 cup of pasta (farfalini is good), along with good grating of black pepper. Cover and let simmer over low heat for 15 minutes, maybe stirring once.

Make a well in the mix, break a fresh egg into it, sprinkle crumbled or grated cheese over all, and cover again. After 5 minutes, open it up, spoon it into a bowl, and eat.

Obviously, you use whatever veggies you have on hand—at least, that’s what I do. You can add dash of Worcestershire, other herbs—heck, you can add anything you want.

Having universal healthcare through a single-payer program seems to be a contentious issue—naturally enough, especially for parties with a financial interest. Insurance companies, for example, would lose a lot of money, as would pharmaceutical companies. Either their services would no longer be needed (insurance companies) or they would end up having to cut profits because of negotiations and the probable increased use of generics (pharmaceuticals). So these large, powerful, and wealthy interests fight universal healthcare tooth and nail—not for ideological reasons, but purely because of money. In a way, they have no choice: the capitalistic system of absentee ownership (through stock ownership) places on the management of companies a fiduciary responsibility to increase value—generally by increasing profits—for the shareholder’s benefit. So those companies cannot legally say, “Hey, that’s a great idea: provide healthcare to everyone while cutting costs and making the system simpler and more responsive, with a more healthy citizenry as a result”—even if it’s true. They are legally bound to fight the idea.

And some think that if you are offered a service, whether that service is good or not depends on who’s offering it. If the identity of the service provider is hidden, these would not be able to judge the service. But if you reveal the identity (e.g., the government), those would instantly be able to say whether the result is good or bad. Bush, for example, said specifically that extending governmental programs to provide healthcare to children not otherwise covered by health insurance would be bad because that care would be provided by the government.

And, it must be said, that often one encounters non-factual arguments, both for and against universal healthcare. It seems to me that these arguments occur more frequently on the “opposed” side—partly because we have many examples of universal healthcare working just fine: excellent care at low overall cost, and everyone covered. So to oppose that, it seems frequently necessary to stretch the truth, or use only selected facts. Thus we often hear of wait times in countries with universal healthcare—but little about wait times in the US, which (BTW) does not and to a great extent cannot collect reliable overall statistics on healthcare precisely because the US system is so fragmented.

All this is to introduce an excellent post by The Anonymous Liberal, who takes apart a particularly specious argument against universal healthcare. I wanted to provide the preface, because his/her tone is more provocative than what I plan for this blog. The post:

Read the rest of this entry »

I blogged earlier about my olive oil problem—the Moroccan olive oil I like no longer available, and searching for a substitute. I thought I had found a low-cost answer in Whole Foods Greek Olive Oil, but now:

On August 10, 1991, a rusty tanker called the Mazal II docked at the industrial port of Ordu, in Turkey, and pumped twenty-two hundred tons of hazelnut oil into its hold. The ship then embarked on a meandering voyage through the Mediterranean and the North Sea. By September 21st, when the Mazal II reached Barletta, a port in Puglia, in southern Italy, its cargo had become, on the ship’s official documents, Greek olive oil. It slipped through customs, possibly with the connivance of an official, was piped into tanker trucks, and was delivered to the refinery of Riolio, an Italian olive-oil producer based in Barletta. There it was sold—in some instances blended with real olive oil—to Riolio customers.

Between August and November of 1991, the Mazal II and another tanker, the Katerina T., delivered nearly ten thousand tons of Turkish hazelnut oil and Argentinean sunflower-seed oil to Riolio, all identified as Greek olive oil. Riolio’s owner, Domenico Ribatti, grew rich from the bogus oil, assembling substantial real-estate holdings, including a former department store in Bari. He bribed two officials, one with cash, the other with cartons of olive oil, and made trips to Rome, where he stayed at the Grand Hotel, and met with other unscrupulous olive-oil producers from Italy and abroad. As one of Italy’s leading importers of olive oil, Ribatti’s company was a member of ASSITOL, the country’s powerful olive-oil trade association, and Ribatti had enough clout in Rome to ask a favor—preferential treatment of an associate’s nephew, who was seeking admission to a military officers’ school—of a high-ranking official at the Finance Ministry, a fellow-pugliese.

However, by early 1992 Ribatti and his associates were under investigation by the Guardia di Finanza, the Finance Ministry’s military-police force. One officer, wearing a miniature video camera on his tie, posed as a waiter at a lunch hosted by Ribatti at the Grand Hotel. Others, eavesdropping on telephone calls among Riolio executives, heard the rustle of bribe money being counted out. During the next two years, the Guardia di Finanza team, working closely with agents of the European Union’s anti-fraud office, pieced together the details of Ribatti’s crime, identifying Swiss bank accounts and Caribbean shell companies that Ribatti had used to buy the ersatz olive oil. The investigators discovered that seed and hazelnut oil had reached Riolio’s refinery by tanker truck and by train, as well as by ship, and they found stocks of hazelnut oil waiting in Rotterdam for delivery to Riolio and other olive-oil companies.

The investigators also discovered where Ribatti’s adulterated oil had gone: to some of the largest producers of Italian olive oil, among them Nestlé, Unilever, Bertolli, and Oleifici Fasanesi, who sold it to consumers as olive oil, and collected about twelve million dollars in E.U. subsidies intended to support the olive-oil industry. (These companies claimed that they had been swindled by Ribatti, and prosecutors were unable to prove complicity on their part.)

In 1997 and 1998, olive oil was the most adulterated agricultural product in the European Union, prompting the E.U.’s anti-fraud office to establish an olive-oil task force. (“Profits were comparable to cocaine trafficking, with none of the risks,” one investigator told me.) The E.U. also began phasing out subsidies for olive-oil producers and bottlers, in an effort to reduce crime, and after a few years it disbanded the task force. Yet fraud remains a major international problem: olive oil is far more valuable than most other vegetable oils, but it is costly and time-consuming to produce—and surprisingly easy to doctor. Adulteration is especially common in Italy, the world’s leading importer, consumer, and exporter of olive oil. (For the past ten years, Spain has produced more oil than Italy, but much of it is shipped to Italy for packaging and is sold, legally, as Italian oil.) “The vast majority of frauds uncovered in the food-and-beverage sector involve this product,” Colonel Leopoldo Maria De Filippi, the commander for the northern half of Italy of the N.A.S. Carabinieri, an anti-adulteration group run under the auspices of the Ministry of Health, told me.

Continue reading.

Security seems to be one of those things like vitamin A: absolutely essential, but too much is lethal. (For this reason, the liver of the polar bear is not eaten: it contains enough vitamin A to kill.) In Iraq today, there is obviously insufficient security. James Fallows poses an interesting question: when do we arrive at too much security?

Steve Riley is a security expert at Microsoft; John Mueller holds the Woody Hayes Chair in National Security Studies at Ohio State.

I know and like John Mueller (who is also a leading expert on Fred Astaire), and in my Atlantic article “Declaring Victory” one year ago I talked about his argument that America’s over-reaction to the threat of future terrorist attack had damaged it more deeply than attacks themselves were ever likely to. He laid out this theory at length in his book Overblown.

I don’t know Riley but was intrigued by this report, on the Australian tech website APCMAG, of his saying that the unthinking attempt to remove all possible security threats often destroys the efficiency, value, and integrity of the thing you are trying to “protect.” What’s intriguing is that Riley, unlike many tech officials, drew the explicit comparison: too many security features can make software unusable, and too much security can make free societies unrecognizable. (Or just hopelessly inefficient, as with the recent impossible legislative requirement that every single shipping container entering the United States be scanned before it leaves a foreign port.)

This leaves only two questions: Did the report accurately reflect Riley’s views? I emailed him via his site to ask. And if so, why did he let his company include in Windows Vista something called “User Account Control,” which exemplifies the overkill approach to security that he so astutely warns about?

Actually, there’s one more question: Who will be the first historian to say of America in the years after 9/11: they had to destroy the country in order to save it?

Via The Eldest, the story of the real-life “Omar” (a character in the great TV series The Wire, which—should you watch it—must be watched in chronological sequence: each season is one big story, and each season after the first builds upon what has happened in the previous seasons.) and his intended:

BALTIMORE, Aug. 2 — Donnie Andrews was a stickup man with a .44 Magnum who robbed drug dealers and was sentenced to life in prison for murdering one of them.

Fran Boyd was a heroin addict who shoplifted to get from fix to fix, passing her stupors in the shooting gallery and stash house that once was her middle-class home.

Their separate stories of decline into drugs and violence are nationally known: Mr. Andrews was the inspiration for the character Omar Little, a ruthless thug who stalks dealers on the HBO series “The Wire.” Ms. Boyd was the protagonist of “The Corner,” an HBO miniseries that chronicled her fall into addiction.

But the story of their shared redemption is less widely known. On Aug. 11, they are getting married after a lengthy courtship that was as much about turning their lives around as it was about finding each other. Over a decade in the making, their union is a source of inspiration for the grittier parts of West Baltimore, where few people who end up on the corner using and selling drugs manage to break free, and even fewer return to make a difference.

“Donnie and Fran are a street version of Cinderella and Prince Charming, but when they fell in love they didn’t have any magical dust in their eyes,” said the Rev. Frank M. Reid III, pastor of the Bethel A.M.E. Church here, who will perform the ceremony. “They also show us something about salvation, since now they’re using their skills from the corner to pull other people through.”

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Interesting and long evening last night. After working fine for two days, Outlook 2007 suddenly crashed. I got the little message “Do you want to send a report to Microsoft?” and clicked send. In Outlook 2007, the program immediately restarts when you click your respond to that message (whether you send the report or not). It restarted, and instantly the message reappeared: it crashed again. This cycle went on for a while: click, restart, instant crash.

The a new message appeared. “Your program seems to be failing repeatedly” or words to that effect, and “Do you want to run diagnostics?” So I did run a set of diagnostics, which fixed one thing, then tried again. Repeating crashes again.

I contacted Microsoft. I get free phone help for 90 days—new product. I first talked to a screener, who got the nature of the problem, and then said she would direct me to the tech support group (in India, I believe). She couldn’t open a case number for me because her computer was updating itself.

The guy in India was incredibly patient (The Wife used to work in tech support for a software product, and she says the patience is a façade. And she reminded me of the tech support guy we new who would put the phone on hold and hit himself.) He walked me through MANY tries, but I’ll just give you the take-home lessons:

First, if you click Start, Run, and enter “outlook /safe” (without quotes) and press enter, Outlook will start up so you can use things like Tools, Options to make changes.

Second, Tools, Trust Center, Add-ins will show you your list of add-ins. At the bottom is a little “Manage” option, with a dropdown list. Choose “COM add-ins” and click Go, and you can check or uncheck various add-ins. I unchecked a bunch of third-party add-ins, clicked “OK” and exited Outlook. Then I started it again the regular way (not in safe mode).

It worked fine. So I called a halt and said I could figure out the rest. (We’d spent almost two hours at this point, much of it waiting for re-boots, diagnostics, and repairs.) And this morning it’s clear that the villain is my Cloudmark add-in. All other add-ins back with no problem, but if Cloudmark’s added to the mix, bam. So an email to Cloudmark support’s been sent, and soon we’ll have an answer. (Probably uninstall and reinstall, but maybe there’s a new version with a fix.)

The reason I went with Office 2007 instead of Open Office is (1) I had already ordered it, and (2) I wanted the integration with OneNote 2007, a fantastic program.

I discovered that a courteous new reader has conservative political views, and it occurred to me that I should include with the political posts why I think the post is important and correct in its take. That is not so much to convince others as to offer a reason for my view of the issue. I’ll start doing that, and I invite the conservatives among my readers to provide their view in the comments—the reasons that they view the events or story in  a different way.

We’re all in this together, after all, and none of us will make it out alive.

I ventured on a new brush, one with a handle by Scott Meyer, who also makes fountain pens. (You can see other examples of his brushes here.) I’ve discovered, BTW, that the fountain pen world and the safety-razor shaving world seem to have a relatively large overlap.

It’s quite a soft brush—the sort some scorn as “floppy.” But each brush, I find, has its charm and its strengths. Since it’s soft, I disdained using a shaving cream—the easy way out—and chose a soap that has in the past presented a challenge in the lathering: Prè de Provence. It’s a French soap (did you guess?) that’s enriched with shea butter and comes in a little tin with a screw-off lid. It’s been sitting in the shaving soap/cream rack for quite a while, since my last effort to get a good lather.

So: wet the brush under hot water—and it collapses immediately. Very soft. I give it three good shakes to remove excess water and started brushing the tips over the soap (which I had not wetted—I don’t do that). The softness of the brushing was rather nice, and I brushed quickly over the top of the soap, coaxing lather out. In a trice, the brush tips where thickly coated with soap.

I moved brush to beard, washed with Mr. Glo and rinsed, and brushed the soap over all my beard. It was quite interesting: you can’t do the vigorous scrubbing thing that’s possible with a stiffer brush, but you can definitely work the brush around vigorously. I added the usual driblet of hot water to the center of the brush, and quickly had lots of great lather.

Once again: the dichotomy of “soap brushes” and “cream brushes” is false. Any brush works with both, and the notion that a stiff, scrubby brush works better than a soft brush with soaps is, IMHO, totally false. If you give the soft brush a good shake and then work it over the soaps surface until it has picked up a full charge of soap—which it easily does—it will work up a fine lather.

So I like my new brush fine, though I can understand the point that it’s probably not the best first brush for a new shaver, who lacks basic brush skills. He probably would be better off with something slightly stiffer and easier to use. But once you know how to handle a brush and want something unique for the collection, this one’s a good choice.

The razor today was the Gillette President, day two on the Gillette Silver Blue, a fine blade. Three passes, smooth face, alum block, and a very nice aftershave that I’ve not used for a while: Lustray Spice, which has a spice fragrance that (to me) is better than most.