Later On

From Mark Bittman’s blog:

Andrea
Yield 4 to 6 servings
Time 30 minutes

All ingredients approximate (obviously).

• 3 to 4 small heads escarole, separated into leaves and well washed
• Salt, sparingly
• Extra virgin olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic
• A small handful of pine nuts
• The same amount of salted capers (the smaller the better), well washed, repeated, until little salt remains
• A not-quite-as-small handful of raisins
• The same amount of black olives, preferably “olive di gaeta,” though kalamata will do, pitted

1. Boil the escarole leaves in slightly salted water for 6 to 7 minutes, drain and dry.

2. Simmer the garlic in a large pan with the oil until it’s lightly golden, then remove. Add the escarole and cook over medium heat for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. At the end the escarole should be quite tender and the mixture nearly dry.

3. Add the remaining ingredients, cover, and cook for another 5 minutes or so.

4. It’s unlikely you’ll need to add salt, but do so if necessary, then serve at room temperature. In fact, “the longer it sits the better,” says Andrea, who adds “it’s even better the following day.”

MakeUseOf.com has an excellent guide for people (like me) who are only now setting up routers and making a wireless home:

Wireless internet at home is incredibly comfortable. Once everything is set up and running, you can easily connect multiple devices over the air and move them around the house freely.

The trouble is setting up the network and eventually figuring out how to connect each device. There are some common mistakes that are best avoided in the first place. If you’re struggling with your WiFi, let this be your "WiFi For Dummies" troubleshooting guide…

Continue reading.

Or so says MakeUseOf.com. Read about it here.

Very interesting article in ProPublica by Chisun Lee:

The federal judges who are reviewing lawsuits [1] filed by Guantanamo inmates have found that 29 of the 35 men whose cases they’ve completed have been unlawfully detained. For ordinary convicted criminals, that would mean that the authorities who imprisoned them would have to let them go. But the jailer at Guantanamo – the executive branch – is still holding 20 detainees the judges have cleared for release.

The impasse over releasing these prisoners is usually discussed as a logistical problem of foreign diplomacy or domestic politics. But it also raises a deeper question of principle: What is the meaning of the constitutional right of habeas corpus – a core American right to be free from unjust imprisonment – in the new and potentially expanding context of terrorism detention?

The right appears in the original text of the Constitution and is meant to protect the liberty of individuals even when it’s politically unpopular. That protection comes from the federal courts, where judges are not elected but rather are kept independent of popular sentiment by lifetime appointments. Habeas petitions are most commonly filed by prisoners claiming errors in their convictions due to faulty forensic evidence, prosecutorial misconduct or other wrongs.

The traditional remedy to wrongful imprisonment is release. But in the case of the Guantanamo prisoners, the shape of justice has been much fuzzier. In June 2008, the Supreme Court said the detainees have the right to sue for their freedom via habeas petitions, ending years of litigation by the Bush administration to try to block them. But a February ruling by the federal appeals court in Washington – sought by the Bush administration and embraced by the Obama administration – declared that, while Guantanamo detainees have the right to sue and have their imprisonment found illegal, they don’t have a right to actual release.

The appeals court wasn’t moved by the fact that these foreigners had been taken against their will and erroneously placed under U.S. jurisdiction – a finding that trial judges have made in the overwhelming majority of cases so far. Instead, the court likened the captives’ predicament to that of undocumented immigrants who are caught, saying the president has wide discretion to detain people who for political reasons are difficult to send elsewhere.

Since the February decision, trial judges who’ve rejected the government’s evidence as too flimsy have been barred from ordering the president actually to release detainees…

Continue reading.

It’s evident that big businesses have quite a bit of control of Congress through giving money, directly or indirectly, to members of the House and the Senate. Some Representatives and Senators resist, but the great majority are happy to take the money because they intend to earn it by the way they vote.

With the globalization of business, business becomes even more powerful because a globalized business is no longer dependent on any one country and can play one country against another (just as businesses in the US play one state against another when opening a new plant: they place the plant where the state government subsidies are greatest).

Of course, governments have the force of arms (police and military) on their side, but nowadays companies also have mercenary troops that they can field—Blackwater (now Xe) has mercenaries serving corporations in African countries, for example.

So as we look at the next hundred years or so, will governments find themselves displaced by and subordinate to big businesses? I would hope not, because governments are in theory (and, in the US, explicitly in the Constitution) supposed to govern to benefit the public welfare:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

In contrast, businesses have only one purpose: to grow revenues and profits. Not only is the public welfare beside the point, minimizing costs (in order to maximize profits) often requires the business to take steps that undermine the public welfare—e.g., through dumping toxic wastes into the ground, water, and/or air. Businesses will continue such practices until forced to stop. With the control of state and federal government that businesses already enjoy, stopping such practices can require decades—and in the meantime, businesses continue to enrich themselves and undermine the public welfare.

I got to thinking about this when reading Daniel Schulman’s article in Mother Jones titled “Is Blackwater Too Big To Fail?”:

Erik Prince’s security enterprise has a division for pretty much everything. Need planes or choppers? See Aviation Worldwide or Presidential Airways. A compliment of Colombian mercs? Greystone at your service. For-hire spooks? Total Intelligence Solutions—emphasis on total—is standing by. And for the super-double-secret covert work—the kind that the CIA keeps even Congress in the dark about—Prince has a division for that too. According to the New York Times, it’s called Blackwater Select.

Building on its scoop that the company played a role in the CIA’s abandoned program to assassinate Al Qaeda operatives, the Times reports today that this secret division also plays a part in the agency’s predator drone program:

Read the rest of this entry »

The mainstream media has two great burdens:

1. Arrogant insular reporters who cannot admit they have made any errors and so who render themselves incapable of learning and improvement.

2. Corporate ownership that ignores news that might hurt corporate profitability—e.g., news it thinks the public might dislike, or news of the corporation’s own misdeeds.

The latest is Marc Ambinder condemning those who had it right on the political use of the terror alerts under Bush. Ambinder got it wrong, and he has nothing but contempt for those who were right. Paul Krugman:

Brad DeLong, Glenn Greenwald, and Marcy Wheeler are angry with Marc Ambinder. And rightly so.

The basic issue is this: Tom Ridge, he of the color-coded terror alerts, has now confirmed what many of us suspected all along: that declarations of a higher threat level were called for political purposes, so as to step on Democratic messages or divert attention from Republican scandals. Yet Ambinder (and others) say that they were justified in ignoring the strong circumstantial evidence that this was happening, and that those who saw the truth in real time could not and should not have been taken seriously.

Ambinder initially said that he wasn’t going to listen to people motivated by “gut hatred” of Bush; he’s now apologized, but said that the skeptics still had no right to be that suspicious of Bush administration motives in the absence of hard data.

But there was, in fact, plenty of hard data. Brad emphasizes the writing of Ron Suskind, who revealed many of the national-security scandals very early in the game — and was discounted not because his reporting was weak, but because it was considered unreasonable to suggest that what was actually happening was indeed happening.

Read the rest of this entry »

Three reviews that I found of interesting (link takes you to the review):

A Working Stiff’s Manifesto: A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine That Fired Me, and Three I Can’t Remember

Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America’s Road to Empire through Indian Territory

The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

Amenable mortality measures “deaths from certain causes before age 75 that are potentially preventable with timely and effective health care,” such as treatable cancers, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. See if you can spot those nations with universal healthcare and those nations in which the invisible hand of the market governs healthcare in this graph:

Click chart to enlarge.

Hint: only one nation in the list lacks universal healthcare and relies on the free market to take care of healthcare for its citizenry. Additional hint: The conservative political faction in that country maintains that their country offers “the best healthcare in the world.” They believe that repeating the statement will make it come true (magical thinking).

I learn something new every day. "Amenable mortality," for example, from this ThinkProgress post by Matt Corley:

MCCAUGHEY: Let me say one thing that’s really important. Right now, if you’re seriously ill, the best place to be is in the United States. We are number one…

STEWART: If you have the resources.

MCCAUGHEY: No, we are number one.

STEWART: If you have the resources.

MCCAUGHEY: We are number one in cancer survival rates in 13 out 16 most common forms of cancer and that, those data reflect the experiences of all people, not just those with insurance. So, my view…

STEWART: We’re 50th in infant mortality and 46th in life expectancy.

MCCAUGHEY: Wait a second, life expectancy, when you remove violent crime and car accidents, we are number one.

Watch it: Exclusive – Betsy McCaughey Extended Interview Pt. 2

McCaughey is referring to a commonly cited University of Iowa presentation. But she and others who cite it are ignoring the fact that there is another measure that is used to specifically examine a health care system’s impact on life and death — “amenable mortality.”

Amenable mortality measures “deaths from certain causes before age 75 that are potentially preventable with timely and effective health care,” such as treatable cancers, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. According to the Commonwealth Fund, the United States ranked last in comparison to 19 industrialized countries with a rate of 109.7 deaths per 100,000 in 2002–03. In the leading countries, mortality rates per 100,000 people were 64.8 in France, 71.2 in Japan, and 71.3 in Australia.

Update: James Fallows, a longtime McCaughey watcher, comments on her performance here.

One does like a little luxury every now and then, so I went to Toastie’s, a quiet little breakfast and lunch café in Pacific Grove, for my breakfast. They have one breakfast I particularly like: poached eggs perched atop their homemade hash, with tomatoes on the side. That, with whole wheat toast and coffee, is a fine and satisfying breakfast.

Interesting take, based on personal experience. Stephen Amidon writes at Salon.com:

My eldest daughter had a rough first week. Born after 22 hours of hard labor, her pink skin proceeded to turn an alarming shade of yellow on the second day of her life. It was a bad case of jaundice. She would need to be placed in an incubator, whose ultraviolet light would hopefully clear up the condition. If not, a transfusion would be required. My exhausted wife and I watched in numb horror as our child was encased in the clear plastic box that was to become her crib for the next seven days. What we had hoped would be a straightforward delivery had turned into a nightmare.

Because I am American, and those endless days and nights were spent in a maternity hospital in London, the week that followed has been very much on my mind as I listen to the recent attacks on the British National Health Service. It is a system that I found to be very different from the one currently being described as "evil" and "Orwellian" by politicians and commentators eager to use it as an example of the dark side of public medicine.

I was initially skeptical about the NHS. I’d grown up comfortably in suburban New Jersey; good private healthcare was always immediately available through my father’s insurance. When my English wife became pregnant soon after we settled in London, I was alarmed by the idea of having our first child born in a system I had been told was underfunded, overstressed and inefficient. After all, healthcare in the UK was free. How good could it be? Friends and relatives back in the States were spending thousands to have children. If you get what you pay for, I was about to get a whole lot of nothing.

My first glimpse of our prospective hospital was not promising…

Continue reading.

Occasionally you come across an error in a book or movie that is so egregious you wonder whether the author knows anything at all—unfair, of course, but still.

Example: In the movie Defiance, a thousand Jews who have escaped from the Nazis are hiding in the vast Belorussian forest, with some of their number fighting as partisans alongside the Communists. It’s the winter of 1941 and illness has struck: typhus. When the leader of the band asks whether anything will help, he’s told that ampicillin would be a great help and the Communists have some, but won’t share it.

Every schoolchild knows that ampicillin is a derivative of penicillin, and penicillin was introduced late in the war: it was rare and considered a miracle drug. From Wikipedia:

The challenge of mass-producing the drug was daunting. On March 14, 1942 the first patient was treated for streptococcal septicemia with U.S.-made penicillin produced by Merck & Co.^[12] Half of the total supply produced at the time was used on that one patient. By June 1942 there was just enough U.S. penicillin available to treat ten patients.^[13] A moldy cantaloupe in a Peoria, Illinois market in 1943 was found to contain the best and highest-quality penicillin after a worldwide search.^[14] The discovery of the cantaloupe, and the results of fermentation research on corn steep liquor at the Northern Regional Research Laboratory at Peoria, Illinois, allowed the United States to produce 2.3 million doses in time for the invasion of Normandy in the spring of 1944. Large-scale production resulted from the development of deep-tank fermentation by chemical engineer Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau.^[15]

Ampicillin was introduced in 1961. What on earth could they have been thinking?

The other gross error is from a well-regarded new novel The Good Thief, by Hannah Tinti, a native English speaker who grew up in Massachusetts. I’m reading along with some enjoyment, but on the first page of the second chapter I find this description of the orphanage boys making wine:

Brother Joseph supervised as they added the sugar and yeast to the collected juice, covered the pails with cheesecloth, and set them aside. Later they would skim off the sediment…

I stopped at that point, stunned. How could anyone write “skimming off the sediment” if they knew at all the meanings of the words “to skim” and “sediment”?

The lack of copy editors is starting to hurt.

On the advice of the proprietor, I bought the Omega 21047 boar brush: tiny, but formidable. This one works better than the similar size in badger, interestingly. And it held lather for three passes. It does have a bit more loft, so that may explain its better performance.

The puck in the Edwin Jagger mug is the Soap Opera’s Himalaya puck, which I very much like: lots of shea butter in the mix. The Apollo Mikron with (I think) an Astra Keramik blade did a fine job.

And Paul Sebastian aftershave is always a fine finish.

Just ordered a Dell Latitude in this configuration:

Latitude E5400      Intel® Core™ 2 Duo P8700 (2.53GHz, 3M L2 Cache, 1066MHz FSB)
Operating Systems     Genuine Windows Vista Business Bonus-Windows XP Professional downgrade
Memory     4.0GB, DDR2-800 SDRAM, 2 DIMMS
Internal Keyboard     Internal English Dual Pointing Keyboard
Graphics     Mobile Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD
Primary Storage     250GB Hard Drive, 5400RPM
Touchpad and Trackstick dual pointing
LCDs     14.1 inch Wide Screen WXGA+ Anti-glare LCD Panel
Bluetooth     Dell Wireless® 370 Bluetooth Module
Modem     No Modem
AC Adapter     90W A/C Adapter (3-pin)
Primary Optical Device     8X DVD with Cyberlink PowerDVD™
Wireless LAN (802.11)     Intel® WiFi Link 5300 802.11a/g/n Draft Mini Card
System Documentation     Resource DVD and Quick Reference Guide
Primary Battery     9 Cell Battery
Hardware Support Services     3 Year Limited Warranty and 3 Year Mail-in Service
Installation Services     No Onsite System Setup
Accidental Damage Service     3 Year CompleteCare Accidental Damage Protection
Security Software     Norton Internet Security™ 2009 15 Month
Windows 7 Upgrade Program Info     Windows 7 Upgrade Web Site
Processor Branding     Intel Centrino 2 Core Duo Processor

It’s always worthwhile talking to a sales associate. He upgraded the DVD drive so I could burn DVDs, and he cut the price by $75, always nice. We’ll see how it goes.

With a big box of fresh fruit and veggies. Returns at Costco, it turns out, are dead easy. No problem at all. Now to cogitate on what I should get. I’m pretty sure I want a screen smaller than 14": the enormous widescreen laptops are not of interest to me at all.

Returning computer and the like. But I shall return.

I’m returning the computer. This on the advice of the Symantec technician, who said that there was something deeply wrong with the operating system and other files on the computer—this after a few hours of remote control. He thinks that the files were corrupted somehow in the initialization. He found that several key files (Windows Installer for one) were not working, and although he could fix the problems he found—and would eventually be able to load Norton 360—he felt that those problems might be the tip of the iceberg. So he recommended that I return the computer for replacement.

Moreover, I found the widescreen format not to be useful for the way I use the computer, and so i think I might re-investigate the whole thing, including the Apple possibility.

Stay tuned.

This is basically the same brush as the one I used yesterday, but with an acrylic handle instead of wood. A very good brush, and reasonably priced. Both brushes are from VintageScent.com. (Their domain name is still unrenewed—check in September. As pointed out in the comment, the correct URL is singular: one scent, not more than one.) It created an excellent lather from D.R. Harris Arlington.

The long-comb Gillette NEW with a Bolzano blade provided a perfectly smooth and trouble-free shave, and Arlington was a fine finish.

Ah, computers! So I start up my HP notebook computer and go through the start-up stuff. It has Norton already installed, but I need to activate it. I activate, and am taken (via Internet Explorer) to the Norton site, where I buy Norton 360 (after reading reviews). I pay for it, and then try to download but the download button doesn’t work. After more experimentation, I discover that IE has crashed. Great.

I start IE up again, download and install Firefox, and successfully download Norton. I click set-up, and it opens the installer.

1. It installs a couple of files and says it has encountered another Norton product which it will uninstall.

2. It uninstalls it, then says I must restart. I click the restart button.

3. The computer reboots, the Norton set-up opens automatically, and go to 1.

The loop is infinite. For variety, after the reboot the Norton set-up opens only large enough to show the three buttons: minimize, maximize, and close. None of the buttons work in that case.

I come in to the desktop to find a contact for Symantec support. Ha ha ha. They do have live chat help, though, so I go for that. It doesn’t work with Firefox, only with IE 5.5 or above.

I have IE on my desktop, but whenever a URL is entered in the address bar, that URL opens in Firefox instead. I tried uninstalling and then reinstalling IE, but that didn’t help.

So no help from Symantec, and of course with no anti-virus on the laptop, I don’t want to connect to the internet with that machine.

One bit of advice from the Symantec site is to try deleting Norton by hand. I open the Control Panel, and there’s no "install/uninstall software". I finally discover the function under "Programs".

I’m getting just a bit frustrated. I know: Get a Mac.

Any suggestions for good anti-virus software? I don’t want to get it connected to the internet until I have something installed. It comes with Norton, which I dislike, and I’m not too fond of McAfee, for that matter.