Later On

This one looks good to me. Ingredients:

1 (15oz) can kidney beans, drained and rinsed lightly (if at all)
1/2 cup pecans, diced (and checked for shells)
1/3 cup onion, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon cumin
1 tablespoon + 2 teaspoons green curry paste
1 bunch cilantro, chopped finely
1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon ketchup (optional)
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 large egg white
1/3 cup flour (whole wheat, white, chickpea, oat – anything but pastry or semolina)

I will just use 2 Tbsp of the green curry paste, and a rounded Tbsp of ketchup. And I’ll use the whole egg.

Life imprisonment based on suspicion: I never thought I’d see it in the US. Greenwald:

One of the most intense controversies of the Bush years was the administration’s indefinite imprisoning of "War on Terror" detainees without charges of any kind.  So absolute was the consensus among progressives and Democrats against this policy that a well-worn slogan was invented to object:  a "legal black hole."  Liberal editorial pages routinely cited the refusal to charge the detainees — not the interrogation practices there — in order to brand the camp a "dungeon," a "gulag," a "tropical purgatory," and a "black-hole embarrassment."  As late as 2007,Democratic Senators like Pat Leahy, on the floor of the Senate, cited the due-process-free imprisonments to rail against Guantanamo as "a national disgrace, an international embarrassment to us and to our ideals, and a festering threat to our security," as well as "a legal black hole that dishonors our principles."  Leahy echoed the Democratic consensus when he said:

The Administration consistently insists that these detainees pose a threat to the safety of Americans. Vice President Cheney said that the other day. If that is true, there must be credible evidence to support it. If there is such evidence, then they should prosecute these people.

Leahy also insisted that the Constitution assigns the power to regulate detentions to Congress, not the President, and thus cited Bush’s refusal to seek Congressional authorization for these detentions as a prime example of Bush’s abuse of executive power and shredding of the Constitution.

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Matthew Alexander, author of How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq, writes a NY Times Op-Ed:

Tomorrow will be one year since President Obama signed an executive order outlawing torture, yet our debate about interrogation methods continues. Though the president deserves praise for improving matters, the changes were not as drastic as most Americans think, and elements of our interrogation policy continue to be both inhumane and counterproductive.

Americans can now boast that they no longer “torture” detainees, but they cannot say that detainees are not abused, or even that their treatment meets the minimum standards of humane treatment mandated by the Geneva Conventions, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (the so-called McCain amendment), United States and international law, or even Mr. Obama’s executive order.

If I were to return to one of the war zones today — as an Air Force officer, I was sent to Iraq to head an interrogation team in 2006 — I would still be allowed to abuse prisoners. This is true even though in my experience, torture or even harsh but legal treatment never got us useful information. Instead, such tactics invariably did just the opposite, convincing detainees to clam up.

The adoption last year of the Army Field Manual as the standard for interrogations across the government, including the C.I.A., was a considerable improvement. But we missed a unique opportunity for progress last August when the president’s task force on interrogations recommended no changes to the manual, which was hastily revised in 2006 in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

For example, an appendix to the manual allows the military to keep a detainee in “separation” — solitary confinement — indefinitely. It requires only that a general approve any extension after 30 days. Rest assured, there will be numerous waivers to even that minuscule requirement.

Yes, there are legitimate reasons to isolate detainees. Domestic law enforcement agencies do it to prevent suspects from colluding on alibis and allow investigators the leverage to use non-coercive interrogation techniques like confronting one detainee with the other’s statements.

But military interrogators do not operate in a vacuum. The consequences of their actions have far-reaching effects — like Al Qaeda’s exploitation of American abuse of prisoners as a recruiting tool. And, in any case, extended solitary confinement is torture, as confirmed by many scientific studies. Even the initial 30 days of isolation could be considered abuse.

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The NY Times editorial on the Supreme Court decision:

With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century. Disingenuously waving the flag of the First Amendment, the court’s conservative majority has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.

Congress must act immediately to limit the damage of this radical decision, which strikes at the heart of democracy.

As a result of Thursday’s ruling, corporations have been unleashed from the longstanding ban against their spending directly on political campaigns and will be free to spend as much money as they want to elect and defeat candidates. If a member of Congress tries to stand up to a wealthy special interest, its lobbyists can credibly threaten: We’ll spend whatever it takes to defeat you.

The ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission radically reverses well-established law and erodes a wall that has stood for a century between corporations and electoral politics. (The ruling also frees up labor unions to spend, though they have far less money at their disposal.)

The founders of this nation warned about the dangers of corporate influence. The Constitution they wrote mentions many things and assigns them rights and protections — the people, militias, the press, religions. But it does not mention corporations.

In 1907, as corporations reached new heights of wealth and power, Congress made its views of the relationship between corporations and campaigning clear: It banned them from contributing to candidates. At midcentury, it enacted the broader ban on spending that was repeatedly reaffirmed over the decades until it was struck down on Thursday.

This issue should never have been before the court. The justices overreached and seized on a case involving a narrower, technical question involving the broadcast of a movie that attacked Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008 campaign. The court elevated that case to a forum for striking down the entire ban on corporate spending and then rushed the process of hearing the case at breakneck speed. It gave lawyers a month to prepare briefs on an issue of enormous complexity, and it scheduled arguments during its vacation.

Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., no doubt aware of how sharply these actions clash with his confirmation-time vow to be judicially modest and simply “call balls and strikes,” wrote a separate opinion trying to excuse the shameless judicial overreaching.

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Bob Herbert has a very good column in the NY Times today:

How loud do the alarms have to get? There is an economic emergency in the country with millions upon millions of Americans riddled with fear and anxiety as they struggle with long-term joblessness, home foreclosures, personal bankruptcies and dwindling opportunities for themselves and their children.

The door is being slammed on the American dream and the politicians, including the president and his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill, seem not just helpless to deal with the crisis, but completely out of touch with the hardships that have fallen on so many.

While the nation was suffering through the worst economy since the Depression, the Democrats wasted a year squabbling like unruly toddlers over health insurance legislation. No one in his or her right mind could have believed that a workable, efficient, cost-effective system could come out of the monstrously ugly plan that finally emerged from the Senate after long months of shady alliances, disgraceful back-room deals, outlandish payoffs and abject capitulation to the insurance companies and giant pharmaceutical outfits.

The public interest? Forget about it.

With the power elite consumed with its incessant, discordant fiddling over health care, the economic plight of ordinary Americans, from the middle class to the very poor, got pathetically short shrift. And there is no evidence, even now, that leaders of either party fully grasp the depth of the crisis, which began long before the official start of the Great Recession in December 2007.

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Jack in Amsterdam reminds me that Django Reinhardt was born exactly 100 years ago today. Can you imagine how excited the doctor must have been? He probably rushed home to tell his wife: "Guess who was born today! Django Reinhardt!"

And here’s why he was so excited:

I woke up with a splitting headache, so after taking a couple of Advil, eating breakfast, and reading a bit, I went back to bed and slept another hour. I’m now up, and the headache is abating slightly, but today (absolutely beautiful) will be a rest day, probably including a walk.

I also discovered that my Logitech Webcam Fusion doesn’t work with Win 7 x64—the joys of the bleeding edge. I looked: no drivers yet for it for this OS.

Another boar-brush shave. This little Omega hasn’t begun to break in yet, but I got a good lather (with a trip to the soap for the third pass), and the Elite Razor did a fine job with its new(ish?) Astra Keramik blade. A splash of TOBS Shaving Shop, and I’m ready to go.

A final nail in the coffin of Watts’ thesis: On the reliability of the U.S. Surface Temperature Record. The post begins:

The website surfacestations.org enlisted an army of volunteers, travelling across the U.S. photographing weather stations. The point of this effort was to document cases of microsite influence – weather stations located near car parks, air conditioners and airport tarmacs and anything else that might impose a warming bias. While photos can be compelling, the only way to quantify any microsite influence is through analysis of the data. This has been done in On the reliability of the U.S. Surface Temperature Record (Memme 2010), published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. The trends from poorly sited weather stations are compared to well-sited stations. The results indicate that yes, there is a bias associated with poor exposure sites. However, the bias is not what you expect.

Weather stations are split into two categories: good (rating 1 or 2) and bad (ratings 3, 4 or 5). Each day, the minimum and maximum temperature are recorded. All temperature data goes through a process of homogenisation, removing non-climatic influences such as relocation of the weather station or change in the Time of Observation. In this analysis, both the raw, unadjusted data and homogenised, adjusted data are compared. Figure 1 shows the comparison of unadjusted temperature from the good and bad sites. The top figure (c) is the maximum temperature, the bottom figure (d) is the minimum temperature. The black line represents well sited weather stations with the red line representing poorly sited stations…

Continue reading.

I enjoyed these.

2.172  And so after Apries had been deposed, Amasis became king [of Egypt – LG]. He was from the Saitic nome [a nome is an Egyptian administrative district, run by a governor – LG], and Siouph is the name of his native city. The Egyptians at first despised Amasis and paid him no respect, since had formerly been a common man and was not from a prominent family. But then Amasis won them over by his cleverness and sensible tact. Among his countless valuable possessions was a gold foot-basin, in which Amasis himself and all his dinner guests always washed their feet. Well, Amasis broke this basin into pieces and had them reworked into a statue of a divinity, which he erected at the busiest location in the city. And the Egyptians frequently visited the statue and worshiped it with reverence. When Amasis learned how the Egyptian citizens were reacting to the statue, he summoned them and revealed that the statue had come from the foot basin into which they had previously vomited, urinated, and placed their dirty feet [presumably not in that order – LG], but now they were worshiping it with reverence. Then without further ado, he told them that he himself had turned out just like the foot-basin: he had been a common man before, but now he was their king. And that is how he won over the Egyptians so that they considered it just to become his slaves.

The Hellenes viewed kingdoms (such as Persia and Egypt) as having one free person (the king or the queen), with all the rest as being slaves who must obey the king or queen. (I imagine our British readers have a different view.)

Continuing:

2.173  Amasis established the following daily routine for himself. He worked diligently on serious matters of government from dawn until the peak market hours [about 9:00-10:00 a.m. - LG], but after that he would drink and banter with his drinking companions. His close friends and family were disturbed by this behavior and admonished him: “Sire, you are not conducting yourself properly by pursuing worthless pastimes. You ought to be seated solemnly upon your stately throne, transacting affairs of state throughout the day; that way, the Egyptians would know that they were being governed by a competent man, and your reputation would improve. But as it is, you are not acting at all like a king.” Amasis retorted: “When archers need to use their bows, they string them tightly, but when they have finished using them, they relax them. For if a bow remained tightly strung all the time, it would snap and be of no use when someone needed it. The same principle applies to the daily routine of a human being: if someone wants to work seriously all the time and not let himself ease off for his share of play, he will go insane without even knowing it, or at the least suffer a stroke. And it is because I recognize this maxim that I allot a share of my time to each aspect of life.” That is how Amasis answered them.

And one more thing, which I think is quite modern—cf. catching Al Capone through income tax evasion:

2.177 It is said that during the reign of Amasis, Egypt prospered from both the river’s floods over the land and the land’s yield of produce to its people, and the number of inhabited cities increased to 20,000 in all. He is the king who established the law requiring each Egyptian every year to declare how he made his living to the governor of his nome. If someone failed to do this, or if he revealed that his livelihood was not a just and honest one, his punishment was death. Solon the Athenian took this law and established it for the Athenians; it is an admirable law, and may it always remain in force.

I got Dell Tech Support on the line about my speakers. Apparently they’re so old (purchased, along with my old computer, in 2005) they are incompatible with the new equipment. :sigh: Now obsolescence is both planned and enforced.

David L. Nathan, MD, a psychiatrist in Princeton, N.J., is a clinical assistant professor at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. His comment begins:

Most Americans are paying too much for marijuana. I’m not referring to people who smoke it—using the drug generally costs about as much as using alcohol. Marijuana is unaffordable for the rest of America because billions are wasted on misdirected drug education and distracted law enforcement, and we also fail to tax the large underground economy that supplies cannabis.

On Monday, the New Jersey legislature passed a bill legalizing marijuana for a short list of medical uses. Outgoing Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine says he will sign it into law. This is a positive step, as cannabis has several unique medical applications. But the debate over medical marijuana has obscured the larger issue of pot prohibition.

As a psychiatrist, I treat individuals who often suffer from devastating substance abuse. Over many years of dealing with my patients’ problems, I have come to realize that we are wasting precious resources on the fight against marijuana, which more closely resembles legal recreational drugs than illegal ones. My conscience compels me to support a comprehensive and nationwide decriminalization of marijuana.

Prohibition did decrease alcoholism and alcohol consumption in the 1920s. However, the resulting rise of violent organized crime and the loss of tax revenue were untenable and led to the repeal of Prohibition. By analogy, while the broad decriminalization of marijuana will likely reduce the societal and economic costs of pot prohibition, it could lead to more use and abuse.

The risks of marijuana use are mild compared to those of heroin, ecstasy and other illegal drugs, but the drug is not harmless. A small number of my patients cannot tolerate any use without serious impact on underlying disorders. Others become daily, heavy smokers, manifesting psychological if not physiological dependence. While most of my patients appear to suffer no ill effects from occasional use, the drug makes my work more difficult with certain individuals.

So why do I support decriminalization?

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An email I just received:

My landmark marijuana regulation bill (AB 390) was approved 4-3 by the Assembly Public Safety Committee on January 12, concluding the first formal consideration of marijuana legalization in American history. The Marijuana Control, Regulation, and Education Act (AB 390) would create a regulatory structure similar to that used for beer, wine and liquor, permitting taxed sales to adults while barring sales to or possession by those under 21. Public opinion polls and editorials across the country have come out in favor of moving towards a smart, reasonable policy around marijuana.

While the bill has now expired due to constraints of the legislative calendar, I will be reintroducing the bill in early February to continue this vital discussion about our state’s drug policies. I am committed to addressing our marijuana policy because California’s drug policies affect every aspect of our state government – including our border security, environment, law enforcement, prison system, economy, and public safety. Now more than ever we must acknowledge that our current model of prohibition has failed and move to a more reasonable approach.

Here is a recent editorial reinforcing the call for legalization.

Please don’t hesitate to contact my office if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

Assm. Tom Ammiano

Worth reading.

I think we now can discern the rough contours of America’s decline. It began with the Vietnam war, which began the polarization of American society, with liberals (in general) strongly opposed to the war and conservatives (in general) in favor. This was capped by Nixon’s administration, which was a disillusioning experience for many, with the vice president (Spiro Agnew) caught taking bribes in his office and Nixon impeached and leaving office in disgrace. Later, Newt Gingrich and his cohorts grasped the idea that our Federal government (Congress and the Executive) was based to a surprising extent on unwritten—and, indeed, unspoken—rules of conduct and behavior: traditions (such as courtesy) that made it easier for elected officials to work together.

The GOP at that point discovered that if they ignore these rules, conventions, and traditions, they could grasp the levers of power and win. Actual governing was not the issue—winning was. This eventually led to the impeachment of the president over a trivial—indeed, personal—offense, which was itself an example of ignoring rules and conventions.

Politicians began at that point to be disconnected from the past (the traditions and examples that shaped our Republic) and from the future (no longer does the probable judgment of posterity and history matter). Instead, the Republic, which was to a great extent a structure of invisible understandings and traditions, began to fail.

It failed spectacularly with the Bush Administration, from the very outset, with the Supreme Court picking the president on a partisan basis and the GOP mobs closing down the recount. Then began a sudden makeover of our traditions, with torture institutionalized (and thus awakening a strong faction on the Right in support of torture). And the Tom DeLay House, with its ignoring House rules and traditions in order to win, at all costs, contributed.

Now the GOP seems to have no interest at all in governing or in working to better the country’s situation. Resistant to evidence and to argument, the GOP today seems dedicated to one program: make sure that Obama’s presidency fails and block all legislation that might help the country (and thus Obama’s presidency). Why they are so fervent is not clear, but I strongly suspect that one reason is that the GOP cannot abide the idea that a black president could have a good administration, in sharp contrast to the Bush administration just before. So they are going to make sure that Obama fails worse than Bush.

And the Supreme Court has now handed an enormous political microphone to corporations to complete their tacit takeover of our government. With unlimited funds available to influence voters and politicians, corporations can now control the government. And what will they do? The single imperative corporations obey is to increase profits. One easy way to do that is to minimize regulation, starve the regulating agencies, and tilt the laws in favor of corporations (which they do by buying legislators, whose sole interest now seems to be to become wealthy (generally, wealthier) and to get re-elected. The corporations will be able to do that for politicians who cooperate with them.

So much damage has been done to our governing institutions that I do not think America can recover. The Bush presidency did enormous damage, but it was wrecking a government already in a bad state of repair, and the Obama presidency seems to have little interest in fixing things. Obama is too hands-off to fight, and Congress is stymied by the feckless and reckless application of its own rules.

I don’t see things getting better. The Supreme Court was in earlier days a bulwark against the heated passions of the day, but the Supreme Court today is a partisan organization. See, for example, James Fallows’s post on John Roberts and these NY Times editorials, one on the Supreme Court and the other on today’s GOP. But don’t think that the Democrats are off the hook. They are being inept and many of them (the Blue Dogs) seem to be Republicans insofar as their votes are concerned. They seem to have destroyed any hope of healthcare reform.

Everything takes time. For example, today’s SOTD photo: I tried to reinstall Adobe Photoshop Elements v. 4, but that won’t run on Win 7. So I downloaded Picasa and tried to figure it out—specifically, saving photos for the Web. The Wife told me that the only way she had found was to email the photo to herself, which reduced the filesize while preserving photo quality. Unfortunately, Picasa also clips the photo size so that clicking the photo does not enlarge it.

Lots of little discoveries like that. Plus I am still having trouble finding files—and Windows Explorer for Win 7 is different because Win 7 introduces the idea of "libraries," which I need to study a bit.

Still, the transfer went very well. It  even brought over some programs, such as PureText, which enables you to paste formatted text without the formatting (as if it had first been pasted to Notebook, then recopied and pasted where you want it). I use that a lot in blogging, since Live Writer would otherwise include the formatting of pasted text.

I have reinstalled Evernote and got it working. Roboform now works with Chrome, and I got Roboform reactivated. I have my square monitor back up and running—and what a relief. I truly hate those widescreen monitors.

Pictured is the Omega boar brush made in honor of Giovanni Arbate. This is only my second use of the brush, so it’s far from broken in. It created a very nice and lightly mentholated lather from the Proraso soap, though I did have to return to the soap to renew the lather for each pass. I imagine that will change over time. (I still think I prefer the Omega 48, FWIW.)

The Progress with a brand new Gillette 7 O’Clock SharpEdge blade did a wonderful job: smooth and easy shaving with no resistance at all from the stubble, leaving a perfectly smooth finish. These blades are awesomely sharp without the weirdness of Feather blades.

TOBS Eaton was a fine finish on a dark rainy morning.

UPDATE: I downloaded trial version of Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 and resaved the photo. Now if you click on it, you can see the enlargement (actual pixels).

Transferred a lot of files, installed a handful of programs, and so on. This is going to take some getting used to.

I had to rent a monitor to do the transfer, and I got to wondering about a bigger monitor. The only problem is that square monitors, like the one I have, are no longer made in sizes about 20". The manufacturers figured out that a 22" widescreen is a lot less area than a 22" square, and that saves big bucks in manufacturing. (Think of the limiting case: a screen just under 22" wide and ε" tall.)

The widescreen monitor is, so far as I can tell, useful only for spreadsheets and for watching widescreen video/movies. I don’t do much of either. I’ll stick with the square.

Marion Nestle at Food Politics:

I keep saying that you don’t need complicated theories to explain childhood obesity.  Just read the newspapers!  Yesterday’s New York Times carried two stories that fully account for kids’ caloric balance these days.

The first (front page) describes a Kaiser Family Foundation study that counted the number of hours kids spend online each day.  The bottom line: “practically every waking minute.”

The second is a food section story documenting the astonishing rise in snacking among kids to the point where parents are harassed beyond belief  about having to supply snacks for every activity.  And you should see what goes on in schools.   The bottom line: also practically every waking minute.

No wonder kids are gaining weight.

The question, of course, is what to do about it.   Dealing with the snacks will be easier and that’s a great place to start, no?

After reading about the health costs of extended sitting (with or without TV in the picture), I thought this article at Dumb Little Man had some good ideas on how to break up the sitting time. The article begins:

We all know we need to exercise more – our lifestyles are way too sedentary compared to that of the previous generations. It’s not all our fault. The days of the 9 to 5 job are long over and despite huge advances in technology, our lives seem to be a lot busier compared than that of previous generations.
Even when I have been motivated to get a gym membership and start exercising, it only lasts for a few months. At the first sign of stress and deadlines at work, the gym routine gets kicked off the list. So here are a few tricks to include some activity in daily habits to take it from a sedentary lifestyle to a mildly active one.

• Park far away: Instinctively, almost all of us look for a spot as close to our destination as possible. Instead get into the habit of parking a block away, or parking at the farthest parking spot. If you are grocery shopping, park in the store’s lot but choose the back row. Clearly you wouldn’t want to be caught pushing a shopping cart down the street trying to get to your car.

• Take the stairs instead of elevators: If it is one or two floors, always take the stairs. If you need to go up/down several floors then take the stairs to two floors above/below and then take the elevator. As you get used to it, increase the number of floors you use the stairs for. If you park in a level parking lot, always park in one of the higher levels and walk down.

• If possible, walk or bike to work: This is not possible for everyone, but if you live in a place where the pollution is less and your workplace is relatively close by, then choose to walk or bike instead of driving.

• Skip the stop: If your city has a subway or bus system, skip your stop and get off at the one after (or before) and then walk from there. You’ll get to enjoy the air and neighborhood a little while increasing your heart rate.

Continue reading. (And, no, I haven’t started the file transfers yet. I’m still on the old machine.)