Later On

Faiz Shakir at ThinkProgress:

The 52-member Blog Dog Coalition has been constantly attempting to weaken President Obama’s efforts to pass progressive health care, clean energy, and economic recovery legislation through Congress. According to a new report by the Center for Public Integrity, many of the industries that are opposing Obama’s agenda are now contributing heavily to the Blue Dogs:

So far this year, the political action committee attached to the fiscally conservative House Democratic voting bloc is on track to shatter all its fundraising records, raising more in the first six months of 2009 — more than $1.1 million — than it did in the entire 2003-04 fundraising cycle.

Nearly 54 percent of the Blue Dog PAC’s haul this year comes from the energy, financial services and health care industries, up from 45 percent in 2004, according to analysis of CQ MoneyLine data by the Center for Public Integrity.

Former Rep. Charlie Stenholm (D-TX) told Politico that the reason for the corporate cash influx is an obvious attempt to influence Blue Dogs’ policy views. “I mean, what other conclusion could you come to?” he said with a laugh. “And that’s something that the Blue Dogs have sought. They want to be in that position, to have influence.”

This discussion is worth reading.

ThinkProgress:

Roll Call reported today that Senate Democrats are “increasingly frustrated by the secrecy and duration of Finance Chairman Max Baucus’ (D-MT) bipartisan talks on health care reform.” One unnamed Senator appeared irritated that Baucus ” is unlikely to run any deal by his caucus before he shakes hands on an agreement with Republicans.” OpenLeft then wondered how Baucus’s campaigns are financed and found that from 2005 to the present, the health insurance industry has significant representation among his top-ten donors:

Also today, Politico reported that many of the industries opposing President Obama’s agenda are contributing heavily to the House’s 52-member Blue Dog Coalition, which has been consistently trying to weaken efforts to pass health care, clean energy, and economic recovery legislation.

The blogging spirit seems to have abandoned me for today. Still, I can post some notes:

I’m watching some MGM musicals—well, re-watching them. The Band Wagon (1953) is much better than I recall—really a fine musical. Next up is Silk Stockings, another Astaire-Charisse vehicle.

I’ve started walking again, focusing on habit development rather than distance. I started with 1 block out and back, and have been adding a block a day and today walked 5 blocks out and 5 back. Not a real walk, but I’m resisting the temptation to leap ahead in distance in favor of building a strong habit.

Cooking continues apace. The greens for today will be kale and red chard, probably with a duck breast.

I’m greatly enjoying Iain M. Banks’s sf novel Matter. I want to read more novels of the Culture.

The brush above is the Omega Pro 48 (model number 10048), which, along with Omega Pro 49 (model 10049), are the stalwarts of boar brushes, as I understand it. The Pro 48, as befits its elevated status, costs a princely $16.49. (I have to adjust from the prices of silvertip badger brushes.)

I switched to the Pro 48 because the Vulvix didn’t seem to have the capacity I wanted—and besides, I like to vary things (or didn’t you notice?).

Wow! This one is the real deal. I took the advice of my boar brush sensei Zach, and vigorously worked up the lather (in a bowl that preserves the run-off—”slag” in Method terms) with a lot of pumping of the brush. Lots of very nice lather from the Woods of Windsor puck, and plenty of lather in the brush for three passes. It’s interesting how board bristles tend to cling together when wet, making the brush more pointed in shape than one finds with badger. But no problem in lathering or in working on my face. And this is without any breaking in (although I did soak the brush during my shower, something I don’t bother to do with badger brushes). The brush should get better and better as I use it.

Not only did I get a great lather, but the blade in the Gillette 1940′s Milord was exceptionally sharp and crisp and I got an absolutely pefect effortless shave. I was astonished to see that this paragon of a blade was an Astra Keramik. Hmm. Have to use  more of those, I think.

Aquarius as the  aftershave was fine. This is truly an exceptional shave today. Lovely.

Another new discovery: Best Grooming Tools. Good prices and fantastic selection. They’re located in Bohemia, New York. Take a look.

Yesterday I made a roasted chicken using this recipe. I poured all the pan drippings into a little fat separator and poured off the juices to serve with the chicken, leaving the fat in the separator.

So tonight I’m cooking the greens from yesterday’s three beets. I pour the fat from the roasted chicken into the large sauté pan and add:

greens, rinsed and chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
1 handful slivered almonds
1 handful flame raisins (sweeter than Thompson raisins)
1 Tbsp habanero oil
Salt

I would have added some of the anchovies left over from yesterday had I thought of it. At any rate, after sautéing the above over low heat and covered for 10 minutes, it was superb: spicy and sweet and tasting of greens and onions. Great stuff.

I just got rid of my old Uniden phone—the AT&T replacement system arrived, so I put an ad in the Monterey-Salinas Freecycle forum, got an email within an hour, and the guy just picked up the old system. I did explain that it had intermittent static on the line, but he said, "Hey, it’s better than what I’ve got now." He’s happy, I’m happy, the phone will not go to the landfill yet, and he came and picked it up at my apartment.

This is an interesting publication for the footloose and fancy free.

From the Center for American Progress another sign of the disappointing Obama who reneges on his campaign promises:

Using a Bush administration argument, the Obama White House "has turned down a request from a watchdog group for a list of health industry executives who have visited the White House to discuss the massive healthcare overhaul." Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington asked about visits from 18 executives, but the Secret Service replied that the documents "were considered presidential records exempt from public disclosure laws."

Glenn Greenwald:

Amazingly, reports that Eric Holder is considering commencing an investigation into Bush-era torture crimes has created extreme consternation in multiple Beltway circles despite how narrow and limited those investigations would be.  As I wrote last week, numerous reports indicate that Holder wants to replicate the Abu Ghraib travesty by investigating only low-level interrogators who exceeded the torture limits approved by John Yoo and George Bush, and not investigate the high-level policy makers who instituted the criminal torture regime or the DOJ lawyers who authorized it.

Since then, the Newsweek reporter who first printed what DOJ officials told him about Holder’s intentions, Daniel Klaidman, confirmed in an interview on The Young Turks that Holder intends to confine any investigations only to "rogue" interrogators who exceeded John Yoo’s torture permission slips while shielding high-level Bush officials who acted in accordance with Yoo’s decrees.  Proving yet again that there is nothing more difficult than satirizing our rotted political culture, here is what I wrote about Holder’s intentions last week:

Holder’s plan, at least at the moment, is — from the start — to confine the prosecutors’ authority to investigate to CIA agents who went beyond what John Yoo and George Bush decreed could be done ("he used more water than Yoo said he could"; "he tied him up for longer than Yoo authorized"; "the room was colder and the freezing water icier than Yoo allowed"). At least if these reports are accurate (and, for several reasons, that’s unclear), anyone who "merely" did what John Yoo said was legal — meaning everyone who matters — will be shielded and immunized.

Here is what The New York Times‘ David Johnston writes today about Holder’s intentions:

Mr. Holder has told associates he is weighing a narrow investigation, focusing only on C.I.A. interrogators and contract employees who clearly crossed the line and violated the Bush administration’s guidelines and engaged in flagrantly abusive acts.

But in taking that route, Mr. Holder would run two risks. One is the political fallout if only a handful of low-level agents are prosecuted for what many critics see as a pattern of excess condoned at the top of the government. . . . .

The limited inquiry, at least initially, would review more than 20 abuse cases, including some involving prisoner deaths, which were referred to federal prosecutors in Virginia but did not result in prosecutions.

In addition, an inquiry would probably examine whether the C.I.A. operatives who questioned high-level Qaeda detainees at secret prisons exceeded the Justice Department’s legal guidance.  A footnote in a recently released 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum said that the C.I.A. inspector general had found in the 2004 report that interrogators used waterboarding with greater frequency and a larger volume of water than seemed to be approved by the Justice Department.

If low-level CIA interrogators — and only them — end up as the targets of investigations because they used m0re water than John Yoo allowed, or turned the thermostat lower than the hypothermic levels which the DOJ permitted, or waterboarded with more frequency than Jay Bybee approved, I wouldn’t blame the CIA for being furious.  It was the regime itself, implemented at the highest levels of our government, that was criminal.  Prosecuting only low-level interrogators who followed the torturing spirit of those policies but transgressed some bureaucratic guidelines would be a travesty on par with what happened with the Abu Ghraib "investigations." …

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Mark Benjamin in Salon:

Editor’s note: Read an interview here with a detainee who claims he saw a "big, tall" American near the site of the massacre.

It has long been known that soon after the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, hundreds or thousands of Taliban prisoners who had surrendered in the city of Kunduz were herded into metal containers and suffocated or shot, allegedly under orders from an Afghan warlord. As Newsweek reported in August 2002, the bodies were then piled into mass graves in Dasht-e-Leili, Afghanistan, near Shibarghan.

Earlier this month, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter James Risen advanced the story, revealing that the United States had resisted any war crimes investigation into the massacre, despite learning from Dell Spry, the lead FBI agent at Guantánamo Bay following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, that many Afghan detainees were telling similar stories of a mass killing. Spry directed interviews of detainees by FBI agents at Guantánamo Bay, and compiled allegations made by the detainees.

But what the Times did not report was that many of those same detainees also alleged to Spry’s interviewers that U.S. personnel were present during the massacre, a potentially explosive allegation that, if true, might further explain American resistance to a war crimes probe of the deaths. In an exclusive interview, Spry  told Salon that he informed Risen about the additional allegation that U.S. forces were present. Risen confirmed to Salon that Spry told him of the allegations, but said he did not publish them, in part, because he didn’t believe them.

In late 2001, according to initial media reports on the massacre, Afghan warlord Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum ordered hundreds and perhaps thousands of Taliban prisoners who had surrendered in the city of Kunduz into metal shipping containers. They were given little food and water over a three-day period and transported to a prison outside Shibarghan. They licked perspiration off one another to stay alive. Many suffocated. Others died when guards fired pell-mell into the containers. Murder by metal shipping container is apparently the mass killing technique of choice among some warlords in Afghanistan.

Risen’s story in the Times earlier this month said the slaughter "may have been the most significant mass killing in Afghanistan after the 2001 American-led invasion." The Times added that American officials resisted a war crimes investigation because the warlord who allegedly orchestrated the mass killing, Dostum, was a paid CIA asset who had worked closely with U.S. Special Forces. At the time of the killings, Dostum was working hand-in-glove with soldiers from the Army’s 5th Special Forces Group. During that phase of the war in Afghanistan, small numbers of Special Forces soldiers typically accompanied much larger numbers of U.S.-allied Northern Alliance forces on the battlefield.

That article showed that Spry assembled accounts from roughly 10 prisoners who said they had survived the massacre and later ended up at Guantánamo. Those prisoners described being "stacked like cordwood" in the shipping containers while the mass killing occurred.

The paper showed that Spry sent the information up his chain of command. A senior FBI official halted a subsequent investigation. The military also evinced little interest. Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz apparently told another defense official at the time that the United States wasn’t going to go after Dostum for the deaths, because he was a valuable asset.

What the Times did not say was …

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In Salon, James Hannaham writes:

When I heard that prominent black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested for breaking into his own home in Cambridge, Mass., it made me proud of America. It may seem paradoxical to focus on the positive side of the preeminent scholar’s public humiliation. This is, after all, a distinguished staff writer for the New Yorker, the man who helped Oprah find her roots. It may seem that there’s no positive side at all. (His own neighbor, a Harvard magazine employee, didn’t recognize him and called the cops. How pathetic is that?)

But last night I happened to be reading a book that put the whole incident into context, a volume that never fails to chill me: "We Charge Genocide," a petition brought before the U.N. in 1951 that makes a very convincing case for defining the treatment of African-Americans in the U.S. as a genocide. This remarkable book consists, in part, of a litany of shocking bias crimes committed against black citizens across the country — and only documented ones occurring between 1945 to 1950. A typical entry reads: "February 13 — ISAAC WOODWARD, JR., discharged from the Army only a few hours, was on his way home when he had his eyes gouged out in Batesburg, South Carolina, by the town chief of police, Linwood Shull … [A]n all-white jury acquitted Shull after being out for 15 minutes." And so on, for 50-odd hair-raising pages. Believe me, Toni Morrison couldn’t top it.

So the Gates story makes me thankful that it’s not 1945 anymore, the year when, on Dec. 22, Cab Calloway was "slugged by a city policeman" in Kansas City and needed "eight stitches … in his head." Hallelujah that the incident did not result in Mr. Gates’ lynching, death and dismemberment (followed by a hefty fine), though the worst-case scenario of conflict between blacks and the police has followed this pattern too often in the past — and still flares up, but not to the same degree, and blacks have considerably more recourse under the law. I’m reassured that the public, the police and the media no longer officially condone racial profiling and violence against people of color even if we still slip into the pattern, or echo it, from time to time. There is even some debate among letter writers on news sites about whether Gates-gate constitutes a case of profiling at all. In the past such bias would go without saying and never create a ripple, much less an outrage — like the stories in "We Charge Genocide," which, if anything, only convinced the U.N. to define genocide in a way that would keep the U.S. from facing our race problem.

I’m not saying that our modern transgressions are excusable just because arresting a Harvard professor in his own home is milder than blinding a black veteran, or that outrage is inappropriate. I’m simply rejoicing in the fact that the work of historians like Gates and documents like "We Charge Genocide" have made injustice visible to those who might not have examined it before — especially its perpetrators. This does not apply only to whites, by the way — I’m also including the ingrown racism of people of color. The majority of us would rather forget the hideous violence that underscores the history of race relations. We’ve made progress, as Gates himself has noted, and our impatience with the process is what causes it to move forward in the first place. The fact that Gates, who knows this narrative so well, has found himself forced to play a role in the real story of discrimination is, to me, like something out of a movie — it’s as if he’s awakened from a nightmare about slavery to discover a shackle around his neck.

This intrinsic irony is why, though I’m sure Mr. Gates’ arrest was traumatic for him personally — and if I knew him other than as a public figure I wouldn’t say this at all — I find it difficult to contain my joy or laughter when I think of this incident purely as a cultural event, especially now that the charges have been dropped and Gates has only sustained injury to his pride. First of all, I’m elated that …

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Dan Colman at Open Culture points out a good resource:

A quick fyi: The Free Music Archive now offers up over 10,000 free, high quality (and legal) mp3s. The archive is run by WFMU, the renowned freeform radio station that also runs the excellent “Beware of the Blog.” All of the audio has been hand-picked by music curators, and you can use the audio pretty much however you want. Nicely, WFMU has also developed a Twitter stream where they announce new additions to the archive. You can learn more about the archive here.

History is not only something everyone should know, but it’s also fascinating reading. Take, for instance, this book:

Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (American History)
by Jackson Lears

A review by Paul Devlin

Instead of finishing the business of giving African Americans equal opportunity and full citizenship during the post-Civil War years, the United States went corporate. This period — a focal point of our current popular imagination for reasons stretching from the steampunk craze to similarities between Iraq and the Philippines to the same old Wall Street shenanigans — does seem especially relevant for understanding "modern America." A cruelly ironic twist, noted by Jackson Lears in his thought-provoking Rebirth of a Nation, is that the Fourteenth Amendment, originally conceived to protect former slaves, was used to protect corporations in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). Lears writes, "what began as a measure to confer rights on ex-slaves became a boon for big business." After the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877, Reconstruction was abandoned as Federal troops withdrew from the South. The former slaves were also abandoned, and democracy for all was put on hold for about ninety years.

Lears claims that cultural interpretations of these tumultuous times tend to overshadow political ones; his goal is to reconnect the cultural and the political. After the Civil War, the combination of the lingering memory of the trauma and the new comforts created by the rise of technology and consumerism led to widespread fears, among affluent whites, of physical and spiritual decline. Lears claims that this created a widespread yearning for "rebirth," which culminated in imperialist adventures. Theodore Roosevelt, a figure for whom Lears has little affection, personifies this development for him; in Lears’s assessment, Roosevelt possessed a lethal combination of Oedipal issues surrounding the Civil War, paranoia about his personal health, and an eagerness to flex American muscles on the world stage. Fair enough. At the same time, Roosevelt’s conservation achievements get scant mention here; when they do come up, they are framed as "popular longings for revitalization." Lears also neglects the fact that TR invited Booker T. Washington to the White House — a big deal at the time, and a source of pride for the black community. Meanwhile, Woodrow Wilson‘s reprehensible views on race were "a predictable product of his moment and milieu." What about TR’s milieu? Wilson, that "huge fan" of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, has his views on many topics simply described; TR’s are consistently indicted.

Lears’s first chapter, "The Long Shadow of Appomattox," is his most original, interpretive, and gripping section, casting a long shadow over the rest of the book. In it he discusses a depressing feature of early-modern American popular memory: "rather than a struggle to end slavery, the war became a testing ground for personal heroism — a theater of the sublime where white men, North and South, had repeatedly demonstrated their valor." Walt Whitman conveniently represents some northern white men in the ante- and post-bellum eras as enlightened progressives before the war, creepy Anglo-Saxon fantasists afterward. But while these distortions ran deep, to the point where the valor of black soldiers and the horrors of slavery were suppressed in the popular memory, they were not totally so. Lears omits mention of the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston (1897), a significant masterpiece depicting Shaw in command of the heroic black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment. The black regiment is marching, in August Saint Gaudens’s creation, with stern, resolute, and dignified expressions. William James (an important positive figure for Lears), in his oration at the dedication of the statue, lauded those "warm blooded champions of a better day for man."

In the minds of many Americans at the time, …

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Mark Bittman has a great compilation of salad recipes in the NY Times today, along with some tasty-sounding dressings:

Basic Vinaigrette 

Real Ranch Dressing 

Yogurt-Feta Dressing

Miso-Ginger Dressing

Avocado-Basil Dressing 

Creamy Vinaigrette 

Ginger Vinaigrette 

Mayonnaise

The salad recipes begin:

MOSTLY VEGAN SALADS

1. Cube watermelon and combine with tomato chunks, basil and basic vinaigrette. You can substitute peach for the watermelon or the tomato (but not both, O.K.?). You can also add bacon or feta, but there goes the vegan-ness.

2. Mix wedges of tomatoes and peaches, add slivers of red onion, a few red-pepper flakes and cilantro. Dress with olive oil and lime or lemon juice. Astonishing.

3. A nice cucumber salad: Slice cucumbers thin (if they’re fat and old, peel and seed them first), toss with red onions and salt, then let sit for 20 to 60 minutes. Rinse, dry, dress with cider vinegar mixed with Dijon mustard; no oil necessary.

4. Shave raw asparagus stalks with a vegetable peeler. Discard the tough first pass of the peeler — i.e., the peel — but do use the tips, whole. Dress with lemon vinaigrette and coarse salt. (Chopped hard-boiled eggs optional but good.)

5. Grate or very thinly slice Jerusalem artichokes; mix with pitted and chopped oil-cured olives, olive oil, lemon juice and a sprinkling of coarsely ground cumin. Unusual and wonderful.

6. Sichuan slaw: Toss bean sprouts, shredded carrots and celery, minced fresh chili, soy sauce, sesame oil and a bit of sugar. Top with chopped peanuts and chopped basil, mint and/or cilantro. (The full trio is best.)

7. Grate carrots, toast some sunflower seeds, and toss with blueberries, olive oil, lemon juice and plenty of black pepper. Sweet, sour, crunchy, soft.

8. Chop or slice radishes (or jicama, or the ever-surprising kohlrabi) and combine with chopped or sliced unripe (i.e., still crunchy) mango, lime juice and mint or cilantro.

9. Chop or slice jicama (or radishes or kohlrabi) and mango and mix with coconut milk, lime juice, curry powder and cilantro or mint.

10. Cook whole grape tomatoes in olive oil over high heat until they brown lightly, sprinkling with curry powder. Cool a bit, then toss with chopped arugula, loads of chopped mint and lime juice.

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Again via James Fallows, this article by Franklin Spinney:

On July 7, the Times [UK] carried a remarkable report describing the trials and tribulations of the Welsh Guards, who are now engaged in the ongoing offensive against the Taliban in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. It described in riveting detail how accumulating mental and physical stress are grinding down the bodies and minds of what are clearly highly-motivated, well-trained, and competently-led troops. My aim is to elaborate on the Times report by examining its information from a different perspective. My hope is that this will provide a better appreciation of the Taliban’s game.

With the exception of the last sentence in the penultimate paragraph (i.e., "The Taliban fight not to win but to outlast"), which is silly, the Times provides a graphic description of the pressures on the individual British soldiers, and it is an excellent window into the effects of the Taliban’s military art. The information suggests the Taliban’s strategic aim is to wear down their adversaries by keeping them under continual strain and by working on their psychology, or as the late American strategist John Boyd would say, by getting inside, slowing down, and disorienting their adversary’s Observation – Orientation – Decision – Action (OODA) loops. Moreover, the Taliban’s operational art seems particularly focused on the mental and moral levels of conflict. Outlasting, by running away to fight another day whenever faced with superior forces, is a central part of any winning strategy directed toward achieving this aim. (Interested readers can find a brief introduction to OODA loops in the last section of my remembrance of Boyd in the Proceedings of the Naval Institute, Genghis John. And for an example of an implicit application at the mental and moral levels of conflict, see my essay in CounterPunch, How Obama Won).

The Times report also contains information describing NATO’s operational art. It suggests that NATO’s operational focus is aimed at occupying or cutting lines of communication (LOCs) by occupying checkpoints or outposts. This operational level aim reflects NATO’s belief that control of checkpoints along the LOCs will make it possible to control movement of the Taliban, and thereby make it easier to protect the Afghan population from the Taliban. By definition, if successful, this outcome would slow down and physically disconnect the Taliban’s OODA loops from the political environment, thus establishing the blanket of military security needed for achieving the strategic aim of winning the hearts and minds of the people through political action. But we will see that this is more an exercise in self-referencing than in strategy.

The differences between the Taliban’s art of war and NATO’s art of war raise the question of who has and will maintain the initiative, or in the context of Boyd’s strategic theory, whose OODA loops are really being slowed down, disoriented, and made more predictable in what is an emerging war over the Afghan LOCs?

The Times report does not address this question, but it contains some very suggestive information in this regard.

The Taliban …

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Via James Fallows, an interesting view by Eamonn Fingleton of Detroit’s collapse:

For decades East Asian competition has played a controversial role in the decline of the American car industry.  Both Japan and Korea have long been accused of unfair trade and closed markets. For their part Japanese and Korean officials have argued that their markets are open and that an incompetent and heedless Detroit doesn’t make the sort of cars their consumers want.           

In all the charges and countercharges,  little of the remarkable truth of Detroit’s trade problems has come out. To see how well — or rather how badly — you understand the background, try this quiz:           

1. What was the Detroit companies’ share of the Japanese market in 1930? (a) About 90 per cent. (b) About 20 per cent. (c) Less than 4 per cent.

2. How many models do the Detroit corporations currently make with the steering wheel on the right (the standard configuration for Japan)? (a) More than 40. (b) 12. (c) 3.           

3. What was the combined share of all foreign makers – American, European, and Japanese – in the Korean car market in the last decade? (a) Less than 2 per cent. (b) Around 15 per cent. (c) More than 70 per cent.           

The correct answer in each case is (a).           

If you flunked, don’t feel bad. Just cancel your newspaper subscription.           

For decades American press coverage of global car industry competition has been abysmal. Reporters and commentators have almost never dug below the surface and their idea of fact checking has too often consisted merely of "accurately" recycling previous observers’ errors. Worse many commentators have displayed an almost venomously elitist bias against Detroit. In short, readers of the American press have been fed a diet of falsehoods, while key facts that give the lie to the foreign trade lobby’s special pleading have been swept under the carpet.           

Much of the most egregious press coverage moreover has emanated from writers and editors at some of the most “respected” media organizations, not least the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. Reuters and Associated Press have not been far behind  and even the automobile trade press has often unforgivably spun the story to Detroit’s great disadvantage.

Part of the problem has been that …

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Last night’s dinner first:

3 beets, scrubbed and coarsely grated in food processor
1 medium onion, chopped
1 can dark-red kidney beans, drained and rinsed
6 oz sheep’s milk feta, crumbled
1/2 cup slivered almonds
1/2 cup grated Monterey Jack and Cheddar cheese
1/2 jar anchovies, minced
4 pieces crisp bacon, cut into squares
good squirt of Sriracha sauce (about 2 Tbs)
dash of soy sauce
olive oil
lemon juice
sherry vinegar
salt
pepper

Man, the above is tasty! I have enough for lunch today, too.

I got my new replacement phone and spent some time this morning assembling it, plugging it in, entering numbers in the directory, and so on. Very nice. Much superior to the old Uniden I was using.

Recent movies: Twentieth Century, with John Barrymore and Carole Lombard, is a good comedy—I didn’t know John Barrymore could be so goofy. He does a fine job—as he did in quite a different role in Grand Hotel, which I also recently watched. I’m embarrassed to say that I never before saw Grand Hotel and thus had never actually seen Greta Garbo (in the role of a Russian ballerina) say, "I vant to be alone." Good movie.

Another shave with the Vulfix boar brush—again, just two passes before I must recharge the brush with soap—in fact, I had to recharge after the first pass, but then I had enough for the second and third passes. (I do have some larger boar brushes, but I’m starting with this one.)

Truefitt & Hill did, of course, result in a fine lather, and the red-tipped Super Speeds do a fine job for me. No nicks, very smooth, and TOBS Mr. Taylor’s aftershave is quite nice.

The first step in such research is to look at people using the current systems and see what they actually do—and what they actually do is to use a lot of paper. Take a look:

The results of a new study of the pen and paper workarounds employed by healthcare providers who use an electronic medical record system may help make electronic medical records even more useful to health-care providers and the patients they serve. "Exploring the Persistence of Paper with the Electronic Health Record" appears in the September 2009 issue of the International Journal of Medical Informatics.

Observing that doctors, nurse practitioners, nurses, pharmacists and others who use electronic health records have not totally abandoned paper, including notes stuck or taped to a computer monitor, index cards, and even notebooks, the researchers, led by Jason Saleem, Ph.D., a Regenstrief Institute investigator and assistant research professor in the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, documented how and why they were using paper.

"Electronic medical records are instantly accessible to the healthcare team. But so much information is included in an electronic medical record, how does the individual health-care provider pick out what is important at a specific time? Not all uses of paper are bad and some may give us ideas on how to improve the interface between the health-care provider and the electronic record," said Dr. Saleem, who is also a research scientist at the Health Services Research and Development Center of Excellence on Implementing Evidence-Based Practice at the Roudebush Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Indianapolis.

In the study of 20 health-care workers at the Roudebush VA Medical Center, the researchers found 125 instances of paper use which fell into 11 categories. The most frequently cited reasons for using paper workarounds were efficiency and ease of use. Second most frequently was as a memory aid. The third most frequent reason was to recognize or alert others to new or important information.

"Any use of pen and paper workarounds needs to be coordinated with the electronic record because if it circumvents the electronic medical records it creates the potential for medical error," said Dr. Saleem, a human factors engineer specializing in the delivery of medical care.

An example of use of paper which the researchers labeled as useful was the issuing of pink index cards upon arrival at a clinic to patients who had high blood pressure. The data also was entered into the electronic medical record. The pink cards were passed along to the physician to alert him or her to elevated blood pressure. The study, which was descriptive in nature, did not speculate on whether this alert function could be performed equally as well by the electronic system.

Noting that electronic systems have the ability to alert clinicians reliably and consistently, the study recommended that designers of these systems consider decreasing the overall number of alerts so clinicians don’t ignore them due to information overload.

Source: Indiana University