Archive for July 28th, 2009
Third edition of the Guide to Gourmet Shaving now available
I moved the book from Lulu.com because their shipping charges were too high: one copy of the book shipped domestically cost around $11 just for shipping and handling. With the new store, not only are shipping charges less (one copy ships for $3.60), but I also have been able to drop the price back to the original $11.95. (The Second Edition was $12.95.)
The new edition has an updated vendor list and additions to the text, including information about boar brushes.
If you want to email everyone you know to tell them to buy it, the store URL is:
I’ll be interested in any feedback on the new book you care to offer.
Very good post on the Gates situation
And I agree with it. Robin Wells at Huffington Post:
We’ve embarked on a national attempt to find something redeeming in the Gates-Crowley affair – to find the "teachable moment." Obama’s gracious and politically astute offer to bring the two men together is an example of what Obama does best – creating an uplifting moment of reconciliation, a feel-good moment in which each party can have their say in front of the cameras. But like a family psychodrama, I suspect that most of us know that it won’t stop there, and nothing will really have been resolved. Like a marriage counselor who has seen this particular couple’s arguments many times before, we know on a gut level that some hard truths are going to have to be addressed before the fractious couple that is white and black America can start to move on.
Yet, it’s important to be clear that I’m not applying any kind of moral equivalence to the actions of Professor Gates and Officer Crowley. On the facts as we know them, I believe that the treatment of Professor Gates was unjust and unprofessional. Yes, he was belligerent to a police officer. But that is no crime, and nowhere has Officer Crowley shown that there was any chance of a crime being committed, confirmed by the Cambridge Police Department’s quick decision to drop the charges against Professor Gates. Police officers are trained to be professionals, and a professional would have recognized that an obstreperous sexagenarian who walks with a cane standing in his own house and faced with a phalanx of armed police officers is no threat. And if Office Crowley had paid attention to his diversity training, he would have been prepared for the outrage accompanying perceived acts of racial profiling. The hard truth is that Officer Crowley’s defense that he was just doing his job just doesn’t wash. Having verified the facts, he had every opportunity to apologize to Professor Gates for the misunderstanding and leave. The hard truth that America needs to hear is that incidents of racial profiling and unfair treatment by the police and judiciary are oppressive facts of life for African American men even today.
However, the weary marriage counselor knows that finding a bogey-man and leaving it there isn’t going to get this couple out of their troubles. Rather, it’s likely to dig them in deeper into their self-justification.
The hard truth that Professor Gates needs to hear is that he is the one who handed over his power to Officer Crowley. Letting his agitation get the better of him, Gates lost the ability to shape the outcome of the encounter and set up his own victimization by a poorly trained police officer.
So what should Professor Gates have done instead? …
The culture of punishment in the US
Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America
by Anne-Marie CusacA review by Robert Perkinson
In his inaugural address, Barack Obama pledged to renew the nation’s founding creed, to carry forward "that precious gift, that noble idea…that all are equal, all are free." Some 1.8 million people gathered on the National Mall to hear the new president on that icy January morning. Yet a considerably larger mass — equivalent to adding the population of Boston to the celebration — spent the same day behind bars. For America is not only the land of the free, as the Navy chorus chanted from the presidential dais. It is also, to an extraordinary extent, the land of the unfree, the most incarcerated society on earth.
The United States was not always so locked down. For most of the twentieth century its incarceration rate hovered near one-tenth of one percent, roughly the same as in other industrial free societies. Then, from the early 1970s forward, the federal and state governments began extending sentences, curtailing judicial discretion and restricting early releases. The prison population soared. By the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, approximately one out of every 100 adults was in jail or prison, a proportion unmatched in the history of democracy.
During this same period, racial disparities in the criminal justice system have widened. At mid-century, during segregation, the black imprisonment rate was about four times higher than that of whites; by 2005 it was seven times higher. If current trends continue, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in three black men born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime. For the grandchildren of Brown v. Board of Education on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder, American justice has become more separate and unequal, not less.
The healthcare bill
The AP reports that “after weeks of secretive talks, a bipartisan group in the Senate edged closer Monday to a health care compromise that omits two key Democratic priorities but incorporates provisions to slow the explosive rise in medical costs.” The deal was likely to “exclude a requirement many congressional Democrats seek for large businesses to offer coverage to their workers” and a “provision for a government insurance option.” The Wall Street Journal says that “individuals familiar with the negotiations suggested” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus “would like to unveil a deal later this week. But unclear Monday was whether” ranking Republican Sen. Charles Grassley “would sign onto the deal and pave the way for committee action next week.”
Well, as the French would say… Quelle surprise!
It’s funny, earlier this summer I was watching the Federer-Roddick Wimbledon Final. Great match in a way, final set was 30 games long, one of the all-time epic battles. And yet, as I watched it, I thought to myself, “This has to be the least suspenseful epic sporting event of all time.” Because there was never any doubt in my mind that Federer was going to win the match. I simply could not envision a scenario where anything else than a Federer victory could happen. I think I even turned it off at 7-7 in the final set, figuring I could catch Federer’s award ceremony later on.
It’s the same with this health care bill. Who among us did not know this would happen? It’s been clear from the start that the Democrats would make a great show of doing something real, then they would fold prematurely, ram through some piece-of-shit bill with some incremental/worthless change in it, and then in the end blame everything on Max Baucus and Bill Nelson, saying, “By golly, we tried our best!”
Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with Max Baucus, Bill Nelson, or anyone else. If the Obama administration wanted to pass a real health care bill, they would do what George Bush and Tom DeLay did in the first six-odd years of this decade whenever they wanted to pass some nightmare piece of legislation (e.g., the Prescription Drug Bill or CAFTA): they would take the recalcitrant legislators blocking their path into a back room at the Capitol, and beat them with rubber hoses until they changed their minds.
Good medicine for all? Why not?
As part of his health care package, President Obama proposed creating an independent commission of medical experts that would determine the medical procedures for which Medicare will pay. The reason is that patients now receive many costly procedures that provide little or no medical benefit. If we can reduce this waste, we can have large savings, while possibly even improving health outcomes. President Obama describes this as promoting good medicine.
He has a case, but there is one problem with this picture. If the plan is to promote good medicine, why are we just doing it for the elderly receiving Medicare? Why don’t we want good medicine for everyone?
Specifically, the government could apply the experts’ judgments on appropriate procedures to any insurance plan that receives government support. This would mean that any plan that enrolls patients with government subsidies would be bound by the expert panel’s judgment. If we are confident that our experts will be acting based on sound medical evidence, why shouldn’t their assessment apply everywhere?
Another wildlife die-off
When wildlife biologists visited a remote spot in Canada called Banks Island in the spring of 2004, they discovered thousands upon thousands of dead musk oxen. It took years to determine the cause. They called it "rain-on-snow" — the worst case of it ever documented.
Musk oxen clash horns in a battle for dominance on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula. Researchers suspect that herds of reindeer, musk oxen and other Arctic animals may face starvation as a warming climate affects their ability to access food.Laurent Dick/AP
"Long story short, about 20,000 musk oxen starved to death because of this event," says geologist Jaakko Putkonen. It was a "humongous event" that took place in the fall of 2003.
Putkonen, who is a professor at the University of North Dakota, has since discovered a few anecdotal accounts of big rain-on-snow events that killed reindeer in the Arctic and in Scandinavia.
What happens is this: Unusually warm weather drops rain on top of snowpack. The rain either pools at the surface or trickles down to the soil below the snowpack, then freezes into a sheet of ice. Musk oxen, which are shaggy, cow-sized animals that weigh hundreds of pounds, can’t break through the ice to browse on plants underneath the snow. Sooner or later, they starve.
Canada looks at the future
Mike Blanchfield in the Calgary Herald:
Thousands of people pour out of Manhattan onto the waiting armada of ships. The "October Surprise” has hit with a vengeance – a massive hurricane has flooded and paralyzed New York City.
Dozens of world leaders watch the disaster unfold beneath them as they are airlifted from the United Nations General Assembly that had just convened on the banks of the now overflowing Hudson River.
"I guess the problem was that we counted on this not happening, at least not yet. Most scientists assumed the worst effects of climate change would occur later in the century,” the president of the United States writes in his diary. "The culmination of disasters, needed cleanups, permafrost melting, lower agricultural yields, growing health problems and the like are taking a much terrible toll, much greater than we anticipated 20 years ago.”
This presidential diary entry is, of course, fiction. But its inclusion in the 120-page November 2008 report by the National Intelligence Council, a Washington security think-tank, illustrates a grim and troubling reality that is causing worry in such diverse places as the Pentagon and British Defence Ministry, major aid agencies, the United Nations and, of course, among environmentalists.
Real life 21st Century threats due to climate change – massive flooding, droughts, population explosions, massive migrations of uprooted and desperate people facing life-threatening food and water shortages – have made "climate security” a buzzword that now extends far beyond the war rooms of western capitals.
The trepidation is very real that this will be the driver for war on a scale we have yet to see on this planet, bringing tension to stable parts of the world, making the tense places worse.
Bailout total $23.7 trillion??
Neil Barofsky, Special Inspector General of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (a.k.a. the “SIGTARP “) caused quite a stir in Washington last week when he released a quarterly report that attempted to tally up the total dollar amount of federal government commitments related to the bailout. Those commitments include federal government programs that spend taxpayer money or issue loan guarantees in an attempt to rescue financial services institutions and support the economy. While the administration and the media has focused on the $700 billion in bailout funds explicitly authorized by Congress, Barofsky tried to bring a little transparency to the complex array of federal programs including those of the Treasury and the opaque Federal Reserve. His report put the potential outlay of taxpayer dollars of the combined 50-plus programs at an astonishing $23.7 trillion.
The $23.7 trillion represents the first attempt by anyone in the federal government to provide a little "truth in lending" regarding the real, maximum cost to U.S. taxpayers of the bailout. To put this number in perspective Politico noted that the figure was larger than the total cost of all the wars the United States has ever fought, not to mention double the U.S. Gross Domestic Product.
To be clear, this number represents the maximum potential outlay. Not all of this money will be spent and some funds may be recouped. Barofsky reports that only $441 billion has actually been spent so far. Of course, even $441 billion is a huge outlay.
Administration spinmeisters promptly attempted to belittle the report. Most amusingly, a spokesperson from the Treasury Department characterized the numbers as misleading and inflated, even though they were generated from Treasury’s own data, and department officials had read and commented on Barofky’s report prior to its public release. For Barofsky’s response to the administration spin, check out his interview with ABC’s Jake Tapper.
This all would have been a short -lived kerfuffle in the halls of Washington except that the Washington Post recently reported that Treasury has asked the Department of Justice to issue a ruling placing the SIGTARP office more directly under the control of the Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy F. Geithner. This move clearly aims to undermine Barofsky’s independence and give Geithner the authority to quash the release of information from his office. No word yet from Justice on whether or not “truth in lending” will be official administration policy.
Trailer for Office 2010: The Movie
Interview with a Somali pirate
Interesting interview by Scott Carney with one of the Somali pirates. It begins:
For his story on the economics of Somali piracy, WIRED contributing editor Scott Carney spoke to one of the ocean-going hijackers. They talked about how to negotiate a ransom, when to kill a hostage, and how to avoid the Navy. Here’s the uncut version of that interview:
What was your job before you start this one or what forced you to become a pirate?
Every government in the world is off our coasts. What is left for us? Nine years ago everyone in this town was stable and earn[ed] enough income from fishing. Now there is nothing. We have no way to make a living. We had to defend ourselves. We became watchmen of our coasts and took up our duty to protect the country. Don’t call us pirates. We are protectors.
How do you pirates decide on what ransom to ask for? What makes them negotiate downwards?
Once you have a ship, it’s a win-win situation. We attack many ships everyday, but only a few are ever profitable. No one will come to the rescue of a third-world ship with an Indian or African crew, so we release them immediately. But if the ship is from Western country or with valuable cargo like oil, weapons or then its like winning a lottery jackpot. We begin asking a high price and then go down until we agree on a price.
How do you know a ship in far away coast in the first place and its flagship?Often we know about a ship’s cargo, owners and port of origin before we even board it. That way we can price our demands based on its load. For those with very valuable cargo on board then we contact the media and publicize the capture and put pressure on the companies to negotiate for its release.
From what I’ve seen, initial demands tend to be about 10 times the previous publicized ransom, is this a rule of thumb?
We know that we won’t get our initial demands, but we use it as a starting point and negotiate downwards to our eventual target. But as a rule, yes, that’s about right…
The big New Jersey sting
Zachary Roth has a good summary of the arrests in New Jersey, worth reading, and this statement in it leapt out at me:
Those arrests, and subsequent charges, can be divided into two categories — public corruption and money laundering.
The former netted 29 of the 44 people arrested, including Peter Cammarano III and Dennis Elwell, the mayors of Hoboken and Secaucus, and Leona Beldini, the deputy mayor of Jersey City, all Democrats; as well as state Assemblyman Daniel Van Pelt, a Republican. Much of the alleged corruption was said to be tied to election fundraising efforts.
My emphasis. I think forbidding ALL cash donations to politicians and funding all campaigns from public funds is the only way out of the stew of corruption that infests much the country and Congress in particular. But that will never happen, because legislators would have to pass laws that would exclude them from the money trough.
The Middle East situation
The Center for American Progress:
Key members of President Obama’s national security team are in the Middle East this week to build regional support for the President’s plan for a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace. After visiting Abu Dhabi and Damascus, special envoy George Mitchell held meetings in Israel where he made clear that "Obama’s personal objective vision" was of a comprehensive peace that "includes Israel and Palestine, Israel and Syria, Israel and Lebanon and normal relations with all countries in the region." Mitchell next stops were Egypt and Bahrain. Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates held meetings with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, mainly to discuss issues pertaining to Iran’s nuclear program, and afterward he flew to Jordan. National Security Adviser James Jones will lead "a multi-agency delegation of around 10 U.S. officials to Israel Wednesday for talks with their Israeli counterparts about Iran."
Why does the GOP view healthcare reform as bad?
I don’t get it. The Center for American Progress:
With congressional leaders confirming that the House and the Senate will fail to meet President Obama’s deadline to pass health care bills before the August recess, special interest lobbyists are celebrating their success in delaying some of Obama’s key health care initiatives. Following "the right’s delay and kill strategy," one influential lobbyist told The Hill that they hope that "creating delays" will allow opponents of reform to seize the "opportunity to outright kill a proposal" if negotiations were to then lose momentum, echoing a memo by GOP strategist Alex Castellanos that urged Republicans to "slow down" the health reform debate. In addition to health care delays, lobbyists for the financial industry have also succeeded in forcing House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA) to stall financial regulatory reform legislation. Incredibly, many of the financial institutions spending millions on lobbying are "major recipients of cash form the Troubled Asset Relief Program." Having succeeded in slowing down health care and regulatory reform in Congress, special interests are now transitioning to "go for the kill," with a multi-million dollar campaign to sink the legislation as members of Congress return home for the August recess. A key component of the lobbyists’ plan is to generously dole out campaign contributions to moderate Democrats who are best positioned to block reform.
I just get tired
I just don’t understand Republicans. Here’s James Inhofe, senior Senator from Oklahoma, saying (a) the US has sufficient oil and gas that it does not need to import any (US oil production peaked in 1970 and has declined steadily since), and (b) oil and gas do not pollute—which is so egregiously contrary to fact that one is stunned. Think of all the oil spills, all the products of combustion streaming into the air—what on earth is he thinking of?
Of course, Sen. Inhofe also denies that global warming is happening ("It’s a hoax") and is tight with The Family—he insists on bearing witness regarding Christ to foreign dignitaries before he will discuss any business.
But it’s not just Inhofe: there are the birthers, the steady stream of racist emails and "jokes", the fight to prevent … well, just about everything: healthcare reform, financial industry reform, cutting wasteful defense spending, prosecution of those who broke the law to spy on American citizens and set up programs of torture, and so on—hell, they are even continuing to block Obama appointments of eminently qualified appointees (they seem to want him to appoint Republicans).
And it’s not just the GOP: there’s Max Baucus, senior Senator from Montana and ostensibly a Democrat, working his head off to reduce healthcare coverage and ensure that there will be no government option.
I just occasionally get tired of how so many politicians so abundantly embody bad faith, stupidity, greed, criminal intent, racism, religious bigotry, fear of education, fear of scientific knowledge… It’s a long list.
Kell’s Original Hemp Oil Shaving soap
You’ll recall that I got an uncommonly good lather from a sampler of Kell’s Original shaving soap, that one a hemp/aloe vera blend. Naturally I order several more to try, and this morning I used the Hemp Blend Amber soap, which has a great fragrance, though not strong. I returned to a badger brush for this trial run, and I got another fine lather—perhaps not so overwhelming as the first go, but definitely a superior lather. The Gillette UK Super Speed with a new Astra Keramik blade did a fine smooth shave, and I topped it off with Pashana.
Tomorrow I’ll use the same soap with a boar brush for a comparison, and then on to the other Kell’s Original soaps I got.
