Later On

The Wife just recently bought an iPhone. So far, she likes it quite a bit and has not encountered the problems listed in this article (many of which seem to be with the very first version). I thought it might be of interest to those readers who have or are contemplating iPhones.

Of course, today I was shaving a two-day stubble, which seems to result in a better shave for some reason. I used Kell’s Original Unscented Shave Stick, and he promises soon to have a scented version available. With the Rooney Style 2 Finest—still my favorite of all brushes—I got the usual impressive Kell lather. I did not add a driblet of water to the brush during the lathering, as I often do, because Kell’s Original does best if you’re a bit stingy with the water.

The Merkur Slant bar provided an excellent shave, thanks to the slant and the somewhat used Swedish Gillette blade it carried. Three quick passes, and I had an absolutely smooth face with nary a nick. A splash of Speick finished the shave perfectly.

Glenn Greenwald has a good column that begins:

Time‘s Joe Klein was at a beach party last weekend and was confronted about his recent, vague statement that “there are Democrats who are so solicitous of civil liberties that they would undermine legitimate covert intelligence collection.”  The person doing the confronting was Aimai of NoMoreMisterNiceBlog — who also happens to be the granddaughter of I.F. Stone (which ends up being relevant to the confrontation) — and she masterfully recounts the revealing and hilarious Klein outburst that ensued, during which, among other things, he accused me of being “evil,” a “crazy civil liberties absolutist”  and “crazily anti-national security.”

Continue reading. It’s good. Especially read the piece at the second link in the paragraph.

Interesting new development. Well worth reading.

Not terribly surprising, but I hope action will soon be taken. Bernie Becker in the NY Times:

The Energy Department strives to be a leader in championing energy efficiency. Its Web site lists energy-saving tips, while Secretary Steven Chu calls conservation one of the department’s most important goals.

But at many of the agency’s buildings, even at national laboratories where talented scientists seek technological breakthroughs to save energy, the department has failed to use one of the most effective tools available to any ordinary household: thermostats that automatically dial back the temperature when nobody is around.

A recent audit found that the department could save more than $11.5 million annually in energy costs by properly employing these “setback” controls to adjust the heat and air conditioning at night or on weekends.

The Energy Department’s inspector general found that the department, which spends almost $300 million annually on utilities, could save enough energy to power more than 9,800 homes each year by doing what experts say every household in the country should also be doing.

The payback would far exceed the costs, and in some cases the equipment has actually been installed but is not working.

Cathy Zoi, an assistant energy secretary, said that the department took the audit’s findings seriously and that the report could give the agency “the impetus to show that efficiency really is a high priority.” …

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Interesting contribution to national health from Medicare, as reported by Reuters:

Clearer U.S. guidelines on how to treat elderly heart attack patients appear to have saved lives, with a marked reduction in heart attack deaths over 10 years, researchers reported Tuesday.

They found a 3 percent drop in the number of patients who died within a month of having a heart attack between 1995 and 2006, after Medicare started applying clearer standards on treatments.

"Among Medicare beneficiaries, for every 33 patients admitted in 2006 compared with 1995, there was 1 additional patient alive at 30 days," Dr. Harlan Krumholz of the Yale University School of Medicine in Connecticut and colleagues wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

They also found a lot less variation in death rates from one hospital to another — a finding that might support healthcare reform efforts that include more standardized guidelines on patient care.

Krumholz and colleagues studied the records of 2.7 million patients discharged from 4,000 hospitals after having heart attacks between 1995 and 2006…

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Fascinating article in The Nation by Leslie Savan:

Something rather remarkable happened on Tuesday’s Morning Joe. Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York pointed out that the health insurance industry has no clothes, and Joe Scarborough, after first trying to spin it some gossamer threads, broke down and said, By God, you’re right, this emperor is a naked money-making machine!

Well, he didn’t use those exact words, but Joe did seem to finally get that America has granted insurance companies the right to create bottlenecks in the financing of healthcare in order to extract profits out of the suffering of ordinary people—without providing any actual healthcare whatsoever.

"Why are we paying profits for insurance companies?" Weiner asked Scarborough. "Why are we paying overhead for insurance companies? Why," he asked, bringing it all home, "are we paying for their TV commercials?"

Weiner, who recently warned that President Obama could lose as many as 100 votes on a health bill if a public option is not included, really wants single payer—Medicare for all Americans is his goal. What a crazy, way-out, reckless notion, Joe went into their encounter believing. But Weiner asked some simple, direct questions that no politician, much less Obama or HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, has managed to pose: …

Continue reading. FWIW, neither Obama or Sebelius has been an effective advocate for a good healthcare system—indeed, both seem somewhat uninterested in real reform and are backing the wrong players (Max Baucus, for example).

Thanks to Jack in Amsterdam for pointing out this article in The Independent by Johann Hari:

Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarised by the comedian Bill Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital."

The election of Obama – a black man with an anti-conservative message – as a successor to George W. Bush has scrambled the core American right’s view of their country. In their gut, they saw the US as a white-skinned, right-wing nation forever shaped like Sarah Palin.

When this image was repudiated by a majority of Americans in a massive landslide, it simply didn’t compute. How could this have happened? How could the cry of "Drill, baby, drill" have been beaten by a supposedly big government black guy? So a streak that has always been there in the American right’s world-view – to deny reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm of their own creation – has swollen. Now it is all they can see.

Since Obama’s rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from one fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental breakdown. It started when they claimed he was a secret Muslim, and – at the same time – that he was a member of a black nationalist church that hated white people. Then, once these arguments were rejected and Obama won, they began to argue that he was born in Kenya and secretly smuggled into the United States as a baby, and the Hawaiian authorities conspired to fake his US birth certificate. So he is ineligible to rule and the office of President should pass to… the Republican runner-up, John McCain.

These aren’t fringe phenomena: a Research 200 poll found that a majority of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn’t born in the US, or aren’t sure. A steady steam of Republican congressmen have been jabbering that Obama has "questions to answer". No amount of hard evidence – here’s his birth certificate, here’s a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here’s the announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper – can pierce this conviction.

This trend has reached its apotheosis this summer with the Republican Party now claiming en masse that Obama wants

Continue reading.

Some US citizens lack the paperwork to prove it. Born outside of the hospitals and healthcare system, raised in the streets or by relatives, they have no papers—which makes their life very hard. Really, some government agency should have the responsibility of investigating their origins and providing papers to as many as they can establish were born here. Garrett Therolf has the story in the LA Times:

Many days, Jamal King stands at South Vermont Avenue and West 46th Street in South Los Angeles, his muscled arms covered with tattoos flaunting his membership in the Rolling 40s, a drug-running criminal gang.

His former foster father often drives past slowly, wagging his finger.

“I know people look at me and just see a gangbanger,” King said. “It’s not really who I am. It’s just temporary.”

But King’s hope for a better life is hobbled by more than poverty and his surroundings — he lacks a birth certificate.

He was born in a car 20 years ago as his mother tried to get to a hospital. By age 2, he was being raised by Los Angeles County’s child welfare system. At 18, he was sent by the system into adulthood without a single form of identification: no driver’s license, no Social Security card, no way to prove who he was.

Unable to qualify for even an individual taxpayer identification number, he has less ability to navigate through society than an illegal immigrant. He can’t open a bank account, obtain a job, receive government benefits, enroll in higher education.

“It’s like I don’t exist,” King said. The only form of identification recognized by authorities is his fingerprints. “In jail, they know exactly who I am.”

Not long ago, a state assemblyman wanted King to travel to Sacramento to testify about a bill designed to help get papers for people in his position. King couldn’t make the trip. No one could figure out a way around identification requirements at the airport…

Continue reading.

Robert Reich concludes a brief but disturbing article with this note:

So why does the fate of healthcare rest in Grassley’s hands?

It’s not even as if the gang represents America. The three Dems in the gang are from Montana, New Mexico and North Dakota – states that together account for just over 1 percent of Americans. The three Republicans are from Maine, Wyoming and Iowa, which together account for 1.6 percent of the American population.

So, I repeat: Why has it come down to these six? Who anointed them? Apparently, the White House. At least that’s what I’m repeatedly being told by sources both on the Hill and in the administration. "The Finance Committee is where the action is. They’ll tee up the final bill," says someone who should know.

Sounds like an interesting book:

Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of Two Sexes

by Gerald N. Callahan

A review by Leanne Mirandilla

Male/Female. Two checkboxes, and only one choice. But according to immunologist/pathologist Gerald N. Callahan, the answer isn’t that simple. In Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of Two Sexes, Callahan sets out to demonstrate that the assumed existence of two separate, “normal” sexes is shakier than we might think. Through scientific and sociological research, he shows that the sexual binary is merely an assumption, not fact.

Anyone who has dabbled in gender theory will be familiar with the concept that gender and biological sex are separate. While our biological sexes are fixed at birth, gender identity “results from the interaction of many different factors, including genetics, prenatal environment…pre- and postnatal hormones, and childhood psychosocial and environmental factors,” writes Callahan. Not only are there more than two genders, but the argument could be made that there are as many genders as stars in the sky. Callahan shows that this is not only true of gender, but of biological sex as well.

Around 2,000 children per year in the U.S. are born intersexed, due to a variant set of chromosomes (not simply XX or XY), or various enzyme or hormone deficiencies. Callahan explains each of the different types of intersexuality and profiles several intersexed individuals. These profiles are easily the most riveting part of the book, illuminated the struggles of each person in a society where nothing is as strictly regimented as gender roles. Intersexed people face misunderstanding, misdiagnosis, abandonment by their loved ones, assault and depression — yet most of Callahan’s subjects maintain hope in the midst of it all.

Humans did not always view male and female as two polar points, or marginalize anyone who defied categorization. Callahan points out alternative views on the sexes: In the Ancient Greek and Renaissance periods, the common opinion was that women and men shared more similarities than differences. In certain non-Western cultures, intersexed individuals take on specific social roles, co-existing harmoniously with the rest of their society or even being revered.

But Callahan’s chapter on how intersexuality is viewed in non-U.S. cultures lacks the thoroughness and depth that is apparent in other areas of the book. He mentions how hijras …

Continue reading.

I do love bluefish, and we don’t get it out here. Stuffed and roasted, they are a rare treat. The NY Times Magazine devotes an article and a couple of recipes to the bluefish today. You on the East Coast should pay attention to that.

The CIA has a lot to answer for, and destroying videotapes of the interrogations will cover up only so much. It becomes increasingly difficult to trust the organization, which seems to feel it has the right to ignore laws. The latest report, covered by Joby Warrick and R. Jeffrey Smith in the Washington Post:

CIA interrogators used a handgun and an electric drill to try to frighten a captured al-Qaeda commander into giving up information, according to a long-concealed agency report due to be made public next week, former and current U.S. officials who have read the document said Friday.

The tactics — which one official described Friday as a threatened execution — were used on Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, according to the CIA’s inspector general’s report on the agency’s interrogation program. Nashiri, who was captured in November 2002 and held for four years in one of the CIA’s "black site" prisons, ultimately became one of three al-Qaeda chieftains subjected to a form of simulated drowning known as waterboarding.

The report also says that a mock execution was staged in a room next to one terrorism suspect, according to Newsweek magazine, citing two sources for its information. The magazine was the first to publish details from the report, which it did on its Web site late Friday.

A federal judge in New York has ordered a redacted version of the classified IG report to be publicly released Monday, in response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union. Since June, lawyers for the Justice Department and the CIA have been scrutinizing the document to determine how much of it can be made public. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has been weighing the report’s findings as part of a broader probe into the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation methods.

The IG’s report, written in 2004, offers new details about Nashiri’s interrogation, including the incidents in which the detainee reportedly was threatened with death or grave injury if he refused to cooperate, one current and one former U.S. official told The Post. Both officials have seen classified versions of the report…

Continue reading.

Up at a reasonable hour, but sat down to finish last night’s episode of Firefly and watched another while breakfasting on a whole ripe cantaloupe (delicious) and pistachio nuts and a cup of tea. Now to do a serious cleaning up. Cleaning ladies coming Wednesday and I need to be ready.

Ambinder seems totally cocooned in his bubble of narcissism.

Some memes evolve quite rapidly. Consider the one-generation evolution of a pidgin language to a creole—the creole is a true language, and clearly the memes evolve to better fit our brains.

Assuming one is a member of Netflix, which DVDs should he actually purchase?

Those would be the movies that (a) can be watched over and over with enjoyment each time, and (b) must be watched as soon as one thinks of it.

Those that I have include, for example, Fawlty Towers; The Black Adder Series; Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister; The Office (UK version); Soapdish; The Lady Eve; Piece of Cake; The Great McGinty; Palm Beach Story; The Navigator; All That Jazz;  and, I now think, Flirting With Disaster.

Nominations in this category welcome.

Some conservatives deny evolution by saying, “It’s just a theory.” Well, as I’ve pointed out, there’s also a theory of gravity. “But gravity is a fact,” one replied. So is evolution, and in much the same way: mass cannot but accelerate (however slightly) towards other mass (by the basic characteristics of space-time), and living things cannot avoid evolving—that’s the nature of life in reality.

Susan Blackmore writes in the second chapter of The Meme Machine:

One can understand that evolution is a fact if one can reason logically: evolution is a logical necessity given the facts that we know and do not dispute, as outlined above.

Interesting op-ed in the NY Times by William H. Dow, Arindrajit Dube And Carrie Hoverman Colla:

Two burning questions are at the center of America’s health care debate. First, should employers be required to pay for their employees’ health insurance? And second, should there be a “public option” that competes with private insurance?

Answers might be found in San Francisco, where ambitious health care legislation went into effect early last year. San Francisco and Massachusetts now offer the only near-universal health care programs in the United States.

The early results are in. Today, almost all residents in the city have affordable access to a comprehensive health care delivery system through the Healthy San Francisco program. Covered services include the use of a so-called “medical home” that coordinates care at approved clinics and hospitals within San Francisco, with both public and private facilities. Although not formally insurance, the program is tantamount to a public option of comprehensive health insurance, with the caveat that services are covered only in the city of San Francisco. Enrollees with incomes under 300 percent of the federal poverty level have heavily subsidized access, and those with higher incomes may buy into the public program at rates substantially lower than what they would pay for an individual policy in the private-insurance market.

To pay for this, San Francisco put into effect an …

Continue reading.

This recipe by Mark Bittman in the NY Times sounds quite tasty indeed:

Pan-Roasted Corn and Tomato Salad

• 1/4 pound bacon, chopped
• 1 small red onion, chopped
• 4 to 6 ears corn, stripped of their kernels (2 to 3 cups)
• Juice of 1 lime, or more to taste
• 2 cups cored and chopped tomatoes
• 1 medium ripe avocado, pitted, peeled and chopped
• 2 fresh small chilies, like Thai, seeded and minced
• Salt and black pepper
• 1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro, more or less.

1. Cook bacon in a large skillet over medium-high heat until it begins to render fat; add onion and cook until just softened, about 5 minutes, then add corn. Continue cooking, stirring or shaking pan occasionally, until corn begins to brown a bit, about 5 more minutes; remove from heat and let cool for a few minutes. Drain fat if you wish.

2. Put lime juice in a large bowl and add bacon-corn mixture; then toss with remaining ingredients. Taste, adjust the seasoning and serve warm or at room temperature.

Yield: 4 servings.