Later On

The Niece pointed out this recipe in comments:

Cannellini Bean Spread Recipe

Recipe from Chef Kurtis Jantz of Trump International Beach Resort in Miami

4 ounces olive oil, good quality
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 Roma tomatoes, small, diced
15.5-ounce can cannellini beans, rinsed and drained
1/2 ounce parsley leaves, rough chopped
Sea salt to taste
Black pepper, fresh-ground, to taste

In a medium, tall-sided sauce pot, add olive oil and heat on high until just below the smoking point. Remove from the heat and carefully add minced garlic. As soon as you smell the aromatics of the garlic (you do not want the garlic to get overly brown), add the tomatoes and stir well. Return pot to the stove over medium heat and add cannellini beans. Simmer for 10 minutes stirring occasionally. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Remove from stove, and let cool slightly. Fold in parsley. Using blender or food processor, pulse blend just until the beans are broken up but not pureed, leaving some texture. You can add more olive oil to the mixture if you like it thinner. Cool to room temperature and serve.

I immediately went out to get the beans and tomatoes and will now make it.

UPDATE: Wow! is this ever good. I’m making a second batch now, with these additions: some Mexican oregano to the tomato when I add it to the hot olive oil, and 1-2 scallions, minced, at the very end, just before processing. I’m using my Veggichop for this and it works great.

UPDATE 2: Ixnay on the oregano: too assertive and covers the other flavors. Also, the scallions didn’t add anything. I think this is one of those rare recipes that’s perfect as it stands. I did use 3 cloves of garlic, of course.

Seems early to be making lists for 2009, but okay. Check it out.

One of the things I like about my Neo by AlphaSmart is that the screen shows only four lines. I find that, for me, when I see the whole page, I tend to start editing when I should be writing—as I’ve said, it’s my belief that trying to combine editing (the internal critic) with writing (the spewing out of words) can quickly lead to writer’s block. Seeing only four lines, I’m much less apt to start editing, with the pleasant result that I typically write more than I thought I was writing, sailing away with no distractions.

Here’s a cute idea to get the same benefit at your computer.

NPR’s Fresh Air interviewed Bart Ehrman, the author of Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them. You can listen to the interview here, and here’s a bit of what he has to say:

He says that each Gospel writer had a different message — and that readers should not "smash the four Gospels into one big Gospel and think that [they] get the true understanding."

"When Matthew was writing, he didn’t intend for somebody … to interpret his Gospel in light of what some other author said. He had his own message," Ehrman tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross.

In the Gospel of Mark, for instance, Jesus dies in agony, unsure of the reason he must die and asking why God has forsaken him. But in the book of Luke, Jesus prays for forgiveness for his killers. The two stories offer very different accounts, says Ehrman, yet many people tend to merge them.

"They put the two accounts into one big account," says Ehrman. "So Jesus says all the things that he says in Mark and in Luke, and thereby robbing each account of what it’s trying to say about Jesus in the face of death. … What people do is, by combining these Gospels in their head into one Gospel, they, in effect, have written their own Gospel, which is completely unlike any of the Gospels of the New Testament."

It looks increasingly as though the rating agencies, the accounting firms, and the regulatory agencies are more or less abandoning their mission in favor of making more money. Jonathan Weil at Bloomberg:

The banks demanded that the accountants give them leeway in how they report losses to investors. The accountants responded by giving away their souls.

This week, the Financial Accounting Standards Board unveiled what may be the dumbest, most bankrupt proposal in its 36-year history. If it stands, the FASB ought to change its name to the Fraudulent Accounting Standards Board. It’s that bad.

Here’s what the board is floating. Starting this quarter, U.S. companies would be allowed to report net-income figures that ignore severe, long-term price declines in securities they own. Not just debt securities, mind you, but even common stocks and other equities, too.

All a company would need to do is say it doesn’t intend to sell them and that it probably won’t have to. In most cases, it wouldn’t matter how much the value was down, or for how long. In effect, a company would have to admit being on its deathbed before the rules would force it to take hits to earnings.

So, if these rules had been in place last year, a company that still owned shares of American International Group Inc. or Fannie Mae, for instance, could exclude those stocks’ price declines from net income entirely. It would make no difference that the companies were seized by the government last year, or that both are penny stocks. The loss would get buried away from the income statement, in a balance-sheet line called “accumulated other comprehensive income.”

Desperate Bankers

These are the earnings we get when the people who write accounting standards give in to desperate bankers. And it’s no mystery why the three FASB members who voted for this — Leslie Seidman, Lawrence Smith and Chairman Robert Herz — did so. (The two who opposed it were Tom Linsmeier and Marc Siegel.)

Since the credit crisis began, the board’s members have been under assault by the banking industry and its wholly owned members of Congress. The most recent display came last week at a House Financial Services Committee hearing, where Democratic Representative Paul Kanjorski and other lawmakers beat Herz like a dog. Herz declined my request to be interviewed. A FASB spokeswoman, Chandy Smith, confirmed my understanding of how the rule change would work.

The banks want unfettered license to value their assets however they see fit, and to keep burgeoning losses out of their earnings and regulatory capital. The FASB had been holding its ground, for the most part. Now, though, the board has assumed the fetal position.

Differing Treatment

Under the current rules, securities get differing accounting treatments depending on how they are classified on the balance sheet. When labeled as trading securities, they must be assigned marked-to-market values each quarter, with all changes flowing through to net income. Otherwise, changes in value don’t hit the income statement, unless the securities have suffered what the accountants call an “other-than-temporary impairment.”

While the term may be cumbersome, the idea is that companies need to show losses in net income once they no longer can pretend that an asset’s plunge in value is only fleeting. Think of a man who gets sent to prison for 20 years. That’s not necessarily a permanent sentence. Yet it’s definitely not temporary.

The board’s proposal tosses the old principle aside…

Continue reading. For a different view, read this post.

Mary Kane of the Washington Independent as an excellent reminder:

The outrage over AIG bonuses is dying down, but it is only being replaced by a blame game. According to critics, President Obama went too far in his populist pronouncements against banks, and his administration, led by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, is bungling the rescue effort. Banking executives have piled on, telling The Washington Post that possible restrictions on their pay will sink their companies, and it’s all the government’s fault.

As a reality check, let’s review something that happened recently — a reminder of how we got into this crisis and who bears most of the responsibility for it. On Thursday, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation announced it had completed the sale of IndyMac, a once high-flying subprime lender that failed last summer. The total loss to the federal insurance fund? Some $10.7 billion, according to the FDIC.

IndyMac sustained huge losses selling Pay Option ARMs, which are loans that require little or no documentation. They allow the borrower to pay only the interest on the loan for several years, or to choose the amount of the monthly payment. These loans went south quickly, often because borrowers couldn’t afford the houses they bought or their loans reset to much higher payments as the loan balance grew.

Did any of this stop IndyMac from selling these loans, even at the end of its tenure, when it was clearly in trouble? No. Banking analyst Bert Ely told TWI that IndyMac used $10 billion in loans from the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco to continue making Pay Option ARMs — even when investors figured out that the loans might not be such good bets and refused to buy them anymore.

IndyMac wasn’t alone. Other struggling banks also borrowed from the Federal Home Loan Bank system to keep themselves afloat, as TWI reported. The financial newsletter of the Institutional Risk Analyst wrote that Congress ought to be investigating the whole mess:

“Most of the failed banks resolved by the FDIC during 2008 have been excessive users of FHLB advances…Remember, it was the availability of the FHLB advances as funding source which allowed the management of IndyMac to grow the bank’s size beyond that supported by its natural deposit base… Like WaMu and Countrywide, but even to a larger degree, IndyMac leveraged government funding via the FHLBs with unsafe and unsound lending practices – and all with the full approval of federal regulators!

Obama and Geithner weren’t in charge when all that deregulation was going on, as I recall. It’s true the rescue effort hasn’t been perfect, and the populist anger against AIG often has gone too far. And it’s convenient for congressional Republicans — the biggest cheerleaders of the free market for financial services — to try to pin some of the resulting damage on the people in charge now.

But the huge cost of winding down IndyMac is an important reminder: Don’t forget how we got here — and who led the way.

The availability of fresh water is shaping up to become a global crisis. Already in the US Southwest, legal fights are breaking out as various states and interests (consumers, farmers, businesses) fight for a shrinking water reserve. One answer is to find a technology that will make large-scale desalinization possible. The Scientific American has an article on this, which begins:

Almost three quarters of Earth’s surface is covered with water, but most of it is too salty to drink. And the 2.5 percent that is freshwater is locked up either in soil, remote snowpacks and glaciers or in deep aquifers. That leaves less than 1 percent of all freshwater for humans and animals to drink and for farmers to use to raise crops—and that remnant is shrinking as rising global temperatures trigger more droughts. The upshot: it’s becoming increasingly difficult to slake the world’s thirst as the population grows and water supplies dwindle. Analysts at the investment bank Goldman Sachs estimate that worldwide water use doubles every 20 years.

So the search for new water sources is on. One proved candidate is desalinization—technologies that extract the salt from brine drawn from the oceans or saline aquifers to create potable water. But the historically high price of desalinization has largely kept it at bay, a situation that’s changing as technology improves and growing demand squeezes freshwater supplies .

"The two main desalinization techniques are distillation and reverse osmosis, or RO," says Menachem Elimelech, an environmental engineer at Yale University. "Distillation, in which the raw water is evaporated and then condensed as freshwater, is energy-intensive, so it’s mainly used in the Middle East where oil is abundant." Thermal salt-removing processes require high temperatures so they tend to be expensive (more than $1 per cubic meter of freshwater), but the use of rejected "waste" heat from other industrial or power plant operations for co-generation can cut energy expenditure.

More commonly, however, desalinization plants rely on …

Continue reading.

Matt Taibbi has the scoop. Read it all. It begins:

It’s over — we’re officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country’s heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That’s $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG’s 2008 losses).

So it’s time to admit it: We’re fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we’re still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company’s CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet’s investment portfolio down." …

Continue reading.

Interesting:

In 1954 cigarette manufacturers ran an historic "advertorial" in over 400 U.S. newspapers called the "Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers" in which they stated their overriding concern for public health and promised to "cooperate closely" with public health authorities over concerns that cigarettes caused cancer. Instead, cigarette companies followed the ad with decades of deceitful actions that cost millions of lives. Is the food industry now following the lead of the tobacco industry? While food and tobacco are two very different issues, the food industry appears to be following a playbook similar to that used by the tobacco industry in responding to concerns that their products cause harm. The main features of the strategy include cultivating fears that government action infringes on personal freedom; focusing on personal responsibility as the sole cause of unhealthy diets; characterizing studies that hurt the industry as "junk science"; promoting the idea that there are no good or bad foods (thus no foods in particular should be targeted for change); vilifying critics by portraying them as "food police" and leaders of the "nanny state;" forming front groups to advocate industry positions; engaging in self-styled "corporate social responsibility" programs and promoting self regulation as the best answer to the public’s concerns. Will the food industry choose to take real actions that promote public health, or will it "supersize" past tobacco industry strategies that caused the deaths of millions of people? The food industry has an opportunity now to not only talk about the moral high ground, but to occupy it.

Useful site if you enjoy eBooks, whether on a dedicated reader or just on your laptop, netbook, mobile phone, etc.

PC has the list.

David Sirota has a report in Salon that should infuriate you:

United Steelworkers president Leo Gerard likes to say that Washington policymakers "treat the people who take a shower after work much differently than they treat the people who shower before they go to work." In the 21st century Gilded Age, the blue-collar shower-after-work crowd is given the tough, while the white-collar shower-before-work gang gets the love, and never before this week was that doctrine made so clear.

Following news that government-owned American International Group devoted $165 million of its $170 billion taxpayer bailout to employee bonuses, the White House insisted nothing could be done to halt the robbery. On ABC’s Sunday chat show, Obama advisor Larry Summers couched his passive-aggressive defense of AIG’s thieves in the saccharine argot of jurisprudence. "We are a country of law — there are contracts (and) the government cannot just abrogate contracts," he said.

The rhetoric echoed John Adams’ two-century-old fairy tale about an impartial "government of laws, and not of men." Only now, the reassuring platitudes can’t hide the uncomfortable truth.

Last month, the same government that says it "cannot just abrogate" executives’ bonus contracts used its leverage to cancel unions’ wage contracts. As the Wall Street Journal reported, federal loans to G.M. and Chrysler were made contingent on those manufacturers shredding their existing labor pacts and "extract[ing] financial concessions from workers." In other words, our government asks us to believe that it possesses total authority to adjust contracts at car companies it lends to, and yet has zero power to modify contracts at financial firms it owns. This, even though the latter set of covenants might be easily abolished.

According to New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, these allegedly inviolate AIG agreements promised bonus money the company didn’t have and were crafted by executives who knew the firm was collapsing, meaning there is a decent chance these pacts could be invalidated under "fraudulent conveyance" statutes. They also might be canceled via "force majeure" clauses allowing one party to rescind a pact in the event of extraordinary circumstances — like, perhaps, the collapse of the world economy. (Note: BusinessWeek reports that corporations are already citing the recession as reason to invoke such clauses and nix their business-to-business contracts.)

But, then, those legal cases require a government that treats AIG’s shower-before-work employees with the same firmness that it treats the auto industry’s shower-after-work employees, not the government we currently have — the one that believes "the supreme sanctity of employment contracts applies only to some types of employees but not others," as Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald says.

Mind you, this double standard works the other way, too…

Continue reading.

I had thought that I like Castle Forbes Lavender better, but I don’t know: the Lime is extremely limey and creates a wonderful thick, luxurious, and ample lather with a great lime fragrance. The Plisson Chinese Grey had enough lather for another shave or two when I finished. The little Gem G-Bar, with a fresh Gem Blue Star blade, did a fine three-pass shave: a very different feel from a double-edge razor, but quite effective. TOBS Sandalwood aftershave finished the job.

Throw overboard a body in a coffin that floats, then settle where the coffin washes ashore: that’s what Thor wants. And here’s why Thor is right.

Interesting:

For 10 years I have been teaching animal behaviour and conservation biology at the Boulder County Jail in Colorado. The course – part of the Jane Goodall Institute’s Roots & Shoots programme – is one of the most popular in the jail. Inmates have to earn the right to enroll and they work hard to get in…

Keep reading for the whole story.

Interesting. Maybe it was good that I had to take those piano lessons.

The total breakdown of high-tech regions. Editorial in New Scientist, with the link in the editorial giving the details:

The experts call it "dependency creep". The global positioning system has grown to become a pillar of modern life at a time when our local star has been calm. Over the coming years, however, worsening space weather is likely to cause GPS failures on a weekly basis.

According to a recent National Academy of Sciences report, every signal failure could cost a single offshore oil rig as much as $2 million, as GPS is used to keep the platform in place. And light aircraft without backup navigation systems could encounter unprecedented dangers. This is just the tip of the iceberg, yet politicians are unlikely to react to warnings of possible space weather catastrophes. Perhaps more traditional ways of catching their attention – devastating loss of lives and money – will do the trick (see "Space weather: worse than hurricane Katrina").

This is funny. Daphne Eviatar reports:

Here’s an interesting tip I just got from American Rights At Work about the Republican’s vociferous opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act, based on its oft-stated desire to protect employees’ rights to vote in secret ballots. (Contrary to Republican claims, the EFCA does not take away that right, but merely supplements it with the option of securing a union if a majority of employees sign cards saying they want one.)

From the Republican National Committee’s 2008 Platform:

The recent attempt by congressional Democrats to deny workers a secret ballot in union referenda is an assault, not only against a fundamental principle of labor law, but even more against the dignity and honor of the American work force. We oppose “card check” legislation, which deprives workers of their privacy and their right to vote, because it exposes workers to intimidation by union organizers.

This appears to be about core Republican principles. Well, sort of … except that it really isn’t. In its own elections, the RNC actually prohibits the use of secret ballots.

Here’s the relevant RNC Rule [RNC Rules, Rule No. 7(d), pg. 7]:

No votes (except elections to office when properly ordered pursuant to the provisions of Robert’s Rules of Order) shall be taken by secret ballot in any open meeting of the Republican National Committee or of any committee thereof.

Apparently, the Republicans are now more concerned about the dignity and honor and right to privacy of union workers than they are about the rights of their own members.

I had braised rabbit earlier this week, but this recipe by Melissa Clark sounds better:

Mustardy Braised Rabbit With Carrots

Time: 2 hours 45 minutes

0.25 cup all-purpose flour
2 thyme sprigs
1 rosemary sprig
1 whole clove
1 2.5-pound rabbit, cut into 8 pieces, rinsed and patted dry
1.5 teaspoons kosher salt
1.5 teaspoons ground black pepper
0.25 cup (4 tablespoons) extra virgin olive oil
4 large leeks, halved lengthwise, cleaned and thinly sliced crosswise
3 tablespoons chopped fresh sage
1 pound carrots, peeled, trimmed and cut into 1.5-inch chunks
1 celery stick, diced
3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
2 teaspoons whole coriander seeds
1 cup dry white wine
About 2 cups chicken stock
1 to 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard, to taste
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley, for garnish
Buttered noodles, for serving (optional).

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Place flour in a shallow bowl. Tie thyme, rosemary and clove in a spice sachet or square of cheesecloth (or just toss them in pot if you do not mind accidentally biting into clove later).

2. Season rabbit pieces all over with salt and pepper. Coat each piece evenly with flour; tap off excess. Heat 3 tablespoons oil in a large oven-proof Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Sear rabbit in batches, until browned all over, 5 to 6 minutes a side. Transfer to a paper-towel-lined plate.

3. Add remaining 1 tablespoon oil to pot; reduce heat to medium. Add leeks and 2 tablespoons sage and cook, stirring, until softened, about 2 minutes. Stir in the carrots, celery, garlic, coriander, salt and pepper. Cook, stirring, until vegetables begin to color, about 5 minutes.

4. Add wine and increase heat to high; simmer, scraping up browned bits from bottom of pot, until reduced by half, about 5 minutes. Return rabbit to pot. Add stock (it should come almost halfway up the sides of rabbit) and herb sachet (or herbs and clove). Transfer pot to oven and cook, partially covered, until meat is fork tender, about 2 hours.

5. Transfer rabbit pieces to a serving platter. If liquid seems too thin, place pot over medium-high heat and simmer until it thickens slightly. Discard sachet. Stir in mustard, to taste. Spoon sauce and vegetables over rabbit. Garnish with parsley and remaining 1 tablespoon chopped sage. Serve with noodles, if desired.

Yield: 4 servings.

From DougJ at Balloon Juice:

At the American Prospect, Adam S. writes:

Huh, I wonder why Jake Tapper, press access warrior, has blocked me from following his Twitter feed.Touchy, touch.

Time for a blogger ethics panel?

UPDATE: Tapper has also blocked Talking Points Memo.

Bonus Tapper: His exchange with White House Press Secretary  Joe Gibbs (sic) over “transparency that you and the president herald so much.” I think you’re supposed to believe in transparency too, Jake.

Tapper seems to be retaliating for getting mocked about obsessing about Obama’s Leno joke.