Later On

Take a look.

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This recipe sounds like just the ticket for a cold wintry evening. Ingredients:

2 tablespoons olive oil
4 bone-in pork chops (1-inch thick)
Coarse salt and ground pepper
4 strips bacon, coarsely chopped
1 medium onion, cut into 1/2-inch slices
1 head green cabbage (about 2 1/2 pounds), cored and cut into 8 wedges
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
3 cups whole milk

I’ll make a half-recipe, which will do for lunch and dinner.

UPDATE: I just bought the stuff for this dish, and it occurred to me that a sliced Granny Smith apple would work very well for half a recipe (two apples for the full recipe), so that’s what I’ll do.

One of the odder cries from the Right was that allowing gay marriages would cause heterosexual married couples to get divorces. (I can’t explain—ask a conservative). That fear is not substantiated by events. Amanda Terkel at ThinkProgress:

One of the most common arguments advocates use against marriage equality is that it will threaten the institution of traditional marriage. In April, Iowa’s Supreme Court unanimously overturned a 10-year-old ban on same-sex marriage, which the far right decried as an undemocratic decision anathema to the views held by the majority of America. But a new Des Moines Register poll finds that despite the histrionics from conservatives, 92 percent of Iowans “say gay marriage has brought no real change to their lives.” The poll also shows that residents are evenly split in their views toward same-sex marriage.

What does seem to be the case is that strongly fundamentalist religion causes divorce:

Barna’s results verified findings of earlier polls: that conservative Protestant Christians, on average, have the highest divorce rate, while mainline Christians have a much lower rate. They found some new information as well: that atheists and agnostics have the lowest divorce rate of all.  George Barna commented that the results raise "questions regarding the effectiveness of how churches minister to families." The data challenge "the idea that churches provide truly practical and life-changing support for marriage."

Seems like an interesting piece of software for teams that work together.

Fascinating series by Alan Berlow at Salon.com:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 1 begins:

Here’s a not very tough question of legal ethics to ponder over the morning coffee: Let’s say you’re on trial for murder, and the judge and the prosecutor in your case have been having an affair. Is it possible for you to get a fair trial?

In the case of Charles Dean Hood, the short answer is, "Don’t bet your life on it."

Hood, who was sentenced to death for a 1989 double murder, is scheduled to be executed by the state of Texas on June 30. Unfortunately for Hood, in the 15 years since he arrived on death row, the issue of the strange and not-so-secret relationship of State District Court Judge Verla Sue Holland and Collin County District Attorney Tom O’Connell has never been raised in a single state or federal court.

Now, it should be stated at the outset that the private affairs of public officials, including extra-marital relations, should under all but the most extraordinary circumstances remain solely the business of the parties involved.

But when a person is charged with a serious crime and his life hangs in the balance, such a private relationship may well become a matter of public interest, because the public has a right to know that the judicial process that prosecutors and judges swear to uphold will not be compromised.

Read the rest of this entry »

Good question that stimulates a good column by Kevin Hall at McClatchy:

More than a year into the gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression, millions of Americans have seen their home values and retirement savings plunge and their jobs evaporate.

What they haven’t seen are any Wall Street tycoons forced to swap their multi-million dollar jobs and custom-made suits for dishwashing and prison stripes.

There are plenty of civil and class-action lawsuits from aggrieved investors angered by the losses in their mortgage bonds, hedge funds or pensions. Regulators have stepped up their vigilance after the fact. But to date, no captain of finance tied to the crisis has walked the plank.

There have been some high-profile arrests and federal convictions of financial giants — such as Ponzi scheme king Bernard Madoff and Stanford Financial Group chairman Robert Allen Stanford. They weren’t among the causes of the financial meltdown, however, just poster boys for an era of lax enforcement, weak regulation and devout faith in free markets.

"A lot of people who are responsible (for the crisis) seem to have gotten awfully rich in the process," said Barbara Roper, the director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America.

Read the rest of this entry »

Obama sometimes is extremely disappointing to liberals and progressives. From Paul Krugman’s column today:

… What’s wrong with financial-industry compensation? In a nutshell, bank executives are lavishly rewarded if they deliver big short-term profits — but aren’t correspondingly punished if they later suffer even bigger losses. This encourages excessive risk-taking: some of the men most responsible for the current crisis walked away immensely rich from the bonuses they earned in the good years, even though the high-risk strategies that led to those bonuses eventually decimated their companies, taking down a large part of the financial system in the process.

The Federal Reserve, now awakened from its Greenspan-era slumber, understands this problem — and proposes doing something about it. According to recent reports, the Fed’s board is considering imposing new rules on financial-firm compensation, requiring that banks “claw back” bonuses in the face of losses and link pay to long-term rather than short-term performance. The Fed argues that it has the authority to do this as part of its general mandate to oversee banks’ soundness.

But the industry — supported by nearly all Republicans and some Democrats — will fight bitterly against these changes. And while the administration will support some kind of compensation reform, it’s not clear whether it will fully support the Fed’s efforts.

I was startled last week when Mr. Obama, in an interview with Bloomberg News, questioned the case for limiting financial-sector pay: “Why is it,” he asked, “that we’re going to cap executive compensation for Wall Street bankers but not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or N.F.L. football players?”

That’s an astonishing remark — and not just because the National Football League does, in fact, have pay caps. Tech firms don’t crash the whole world’s operating system when they go bankrupt; quarterbacks who make too many risky passes don’t have to be rescued with hundred-billion-dollar bailouts. Banking is a special case — and the president is surely smart enough to know that…

PayPal used to offer a good interest rate on your balance, but apparently those days are gone. current rate is 5/100ths of 1% per annum. So if your balance is $100, you would earn 5¢ per year on it. Not exactly a great deal.

Breakfast at Toasty’s is pleasant but is starting to add up, so I think I’ll eat there Monday mornings only: a good start to the week.

So I did that this morning, then walked across the street to the PG PO and mailed a couple of packages, stopped at FedEx/Kinko’s to ship back MBT shoes that didn’t fit, and now sit here all organized, more or less.

Megs, perched on boxes I must mail today, observes me closely.

The little mixed-bristle Omega did a fine job of providing lather for a three-pass shave. And  Honeybee Spa soaps make a great lather. The Cedarwood Amber has a very nice fragrance.

The Slant Bar did its usual great job—one teeny nick on my upper lip, but My Nik Is Sealed took care of that with no problem. And Floïd is always a good finish.

Ready for the day!