Later On

If you’re a Krugman fan, you’ll enjoy this New Yorker profile by Larissa MacFarquhar:

When it is cold at home, or he has a couple of weeks with nothing to do but write his Times column, or when something unexpectedly stressful happens, like winning the Nobel Prize, the Princeton economist Paul Krugman and his wife, Robin Wells, go to St. Croix. Here it is warm, and the days are longer, and the phone doesn’t ring much. Here they live in a one-bedroom condo they bought a few years ago, nothing fancy but right on the beach. The condo’s walls are yellow and blue, the furniture is made of wicker, there are pillows and seashells. There are tall, sprawling bougainvillea bushes along the side of the road.

“We first fell in love with St. John,” Krugman says. “It was New York lawyers who’d decided to give up on the whole thing and live on a houseboat and wear their gray ponytails.”

“But St. John went too upscale,” Wells says.

“Our complex is more Midwesterners. Retired car dealers and so on.”

The east end of St. Croix is something of a tourist spot, but the west end, where they decided to settle, is where the Crucians live, and it has a Jimmy Buffett feel to it that they like. In Frederiksted, the west end’s tiny town, there are a couple of coffee shops, a KFC, a Wendy’s, a few churches, a post office, and a promenade by the sea with concrete picnic tables. Not many people about. Farther out along the coast, there are beach bars with plastic chairs and Christmas lights, men with beards and very tanned middle-aged women sitting and smoking in the afternoon.

“The west end is where the whites who’ve gone native live,” Wells says. “They have a couple of beach bars with not very good blues and jazz bands. They were playing Neil Young as we went by the other night, and Paul said, ‘Boy, that was an awful rendition.’ ”

“It was Buffalo Springfield.”

“Yes, Springfield, O.K. I said, ‘Aging boomers, they love any rendition, no matter how bad.’ ” …

Continue reading.

Interesting article by Louis Menand in the New Yorker:

You arrive for work and someone informs you that you have until five o’clock to clean out your office. You have been laid off. At first, your family is brave and supportive, and although you’re in shock, you convince yourself that you were ready for something new. Then you start waking up at 3 A.M., apparently in order to stare at the ceiling. You can’t stop picturing the face of the employee who was deputized to give you the bad news. He does not look like George Clooney. You have fantasies of terrible things happening to him, to your boss, to George Clooney. You find—a novel recognition—not only that you have no sex drive but that you don’t care. You react irritably when friends advise you to let go and move on. After a week, you have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. After two weeks, you have a hard time getting out of the house. You go see a doctor. The doctor hears your story and prescribes an antidepressant. Do you take it?

However you go about making this decision, do not read the psychiatric literature. Everything in it, from the science (do the meds really work?) to the metaphysics (is depression really a disease?), will confuse you. There is little agreement about what causes depression and no consensus about what cures it. Virtually no scientist subscribes to the man-in-the-waiting-room theory, which is that depression is caused by a lack of serotonin, but many people report that they feel better when they take drugs that affect serotonin and other brain chemicals.

There is suspicion that the pharmaceutical industry is cooking the studies that prove that antidepressant drugs are safe and effective, and that the industry’s direct-to-consumer advertising is encouraging people to demand pills to cure conditions that are not diseases (like shyness) or to get through ordinary life problems (like being laid off). The Food and Drug Administration has been accused of setting the bar too low for the approval of brand-name drugs. Critics claim that health-care organizations are corrupted by industry largesse, and that conflict-of-interest rules are lax or nonexistent. Within the profession, the manual that prescribes the criteria for official diagnoses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the D.S.M., has been under criticism for decades. And doctors prescribe antidepressants for patients who are not suffering from depression. People take antidepressants for eating disorders, panic attacks, premature ejaculation, and alcoholism.

These complaints are not coming just from sociologists, English professors, and other troublemakers; they are being made by people within the field of psychiatry itself. As a branch of medicine, depression seems to be a mess. Business, however, is extremely good. Between 1988, the year after Prozac was approved by the F.D.A., and 2000, adult use of antidepressants almost tripled. By 2005, one out of every ten Americans had a prescription for an antidepressant. IMS Health, a company that gathers data on health care, reports that in the United States in 2008 a hundred and sixty-four million prescriptions were written for antidepressants, and sales totalled $9.6 billion. As a depressed person might ask, What does it all mean? …

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From Congressional Quarterly:

The House completed work Friday on an intelligence authorization bill that does not include a controversial provision aimed at harsh interrogation techniques.

Leaders delayed action on the bill late Thursday because of opposition to the provision, which would establish penalties for intelligence personnel who use “cruel, inhuman or degrading” techniques.

The bill went back to the Rules Committee, which approved a parliamentary move that would strip the provision, which had been offered by Jim McDermott , D-Wash.

McDermott’s language would have imposed a 15-year prison sentence for intelligence personnel found to be using such techniques and jail time of up to five years for medical professionals who enable those interrogations.

Republicans criticized the provision during floor debate Thursday.

“This will fundamentally change the nature of the intelligence community by creating a criminal statute governing interrogations,” Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, said.

Rules Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes of Texas dismissed the GOP concerns, saying the provision simply underscored existing anti-torture statutes.

The bill would set policy for 16 intelligence agencies and the intelligence-gathering activities of the federal government. The Senate backed its version of the intelligence authorization in September by voice vote.

The two chambers now will try to resolve several policy differences in order to send the president an intelligence authorization bill for the first time since 2004. The Senate bill will be used as the legislative vehicle for going to conference

James Fallows talks about his experience with the phone. He begins:

Have a long queue of tech items to catch up on — before returning to "Going to Hell," China-US relations, new small-plane developments, beer, and, yes, "work." First up on the tech front: Nexus One phone, as previously mentioned here.

I could try to be fancy in introducing my comment, but why bother: This thing is great. It’s now been eight weeks since I switched my SIM card from a perfectly good Blackberry Curve to the Nexus One to see how it worked. I’ve never thought of switching it back and no longer have any idea where the trusty little Blackberry might be. (Sorry, BB! It’s not your fault.)

My one big complaint remains: typing on the on-screen "soft" keyboard, like an iPhone’s, just is a nuisance. On the other hand, the voice-recognition software is usable enough that more and more I rely on it instead of typing — for Web searches, to dial phone numbers, to give map and navigation instructions. Medium complaint: the battery makes it through a full day of use, but just barely. On the other hand, the battery is easily swapped out, unlike an iPhone’s, so in theory you could take a charged spare. Small weird complaint:  most users I’ve spoken with mention that it’s surprisingly hard to figure out how to keep the phone-call ringer ON while turning the email notification ringer OFF. Yes, there’s a way — it’s just not obvious.

In other aspects, this is great and better the more I use it. Seamless integration with Gmail, Google search, and Google’s calendar, task, maps, and voice functions — as you might expect.  Somewhat more surprisingly, a full and sharp version of Google Earth; plus, a voice-powered Google Translate function that spans a very large number of languages and, on the ones I have tried, works better than I would have thought. (You say a phrase in English and it gives you, say, the Chinese version — in characters. Hasn’t worked so well when we try to speak Chinese into it! Maybe that shows it actually is working….) Also integrated with, gasp, non-Google functions: Pandora, NPR and NYT news, lots more.

The "Navigate" function …

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What a good idea!!

Do you ever microwave food while it’s in a plastic container? Do you have the idea that it is safe to do that? Read Nicholas Kristof’s column in the NY Times:

Autism was first identified in 1943 in an obscure medical journal. Since then it has become a frighteningly common affliction, with the Centers for Disease Control reporting recently that autism disorders now affect almost 1 percent of children.

Over recent decades, other development disorders also appear to have proliferated, along with certain cancers in children and adults. Why? No one knows for certain. And despite their financial and human cost, they presumably won’t be discussed much at Thursday’s White House summit on health care.

Yet they constitute a huge national health burden, and suspicions are growing that one culprit may be chemicals in the environment. An article in a forthcoming issue of a peer-reviewed medical journal, Current Opinion in Pediatrics, just posted online, makes this explicit.

The article cites “historically important, proof-of-concept studies that specifically link autism to environmental exposures experienced prenatally.” It adds that the “likelihood is high” that many chemicals “have potential to cause injury to the developing brain and to produce neurodevelopmental disorders.”

The author is not a granola-munching crank but Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, professor of pediatrics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and chairman of the school’s department of preventive medicine. While his article is full of cautionary language, Dr. Landrigan told me that he is increasingly confident that autism and other ailments are, in part, the result of the impact of environmental chemicals on the brain as it is being formed.

“The crux of this is brain development,” he said. “If babies are exposed in the womb or shortly after birth to chemicals that interfere with brain development, the consequences last a lifetime.”

Concern about toxins in the environment used to be a fringe view. But alarm has moved into the medical mainstream. Toxicologists, endocrinologists and oncologists seem to be the most concerned.

One uncertainty is to what extent the reported increases in autism simply reflect a more common diagnosis of what might previously have been called mental retardation. There are genetic components to autism (identical twins are more likely to share autism than fraternal twins), but genetics explains only about one-quarter of autism cases.

Suspicions of toxins arise partly because studies have found that disproportionate shares of children develop autism after they are exposed in the womb to medications such as thalidomide (a sedative), misoprostol (ulcer medicine) and valproic acid (anticonvulsant). Of children born to women who took valproic acid early in pregnancy, 11 percent were autistic. In each case, fetuses seem most vulnerable to these drugs in the first trimester of pregnancy, sometimes just a few weeks after conception.

So as we try to improve our health care, it’s also prudent to curb the risks from the chemicals that envelop us…

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Christian Miller for ProPublica:

Wade Dill does not figure into the toll of war dead. An exterminator, Dill took a job in Iraq for a company contracted to do pest control on military bases. There, he found himself killing disease-carrying flies and rabid dogs, dodging mortars and huddling in bomb shelters.

Dill, a Marine Corps veteran, was a different man when he came back for visits here, his family said: moody, isolated, morose. He screamed at his wife and daughter. His weight dropped. Dark circles haunted his dark brown eyes.

Three weeks after he returned home for good, Dill booked a room in an anonymous three-story motel alongside Interstate 5. There, on July 16, 2006, he shot himself in the head with a 9 mm handgun. He left a suicide note for his wife and a picture for his daughter, then 16. The caption read: "I did exist and I loved you.”

More than three years later, Dill’s loved ones are still reeling, their pain compounded by a drawn-out battle with an insurance company over death benefits from the suicide. Barb Dill, 47, nearly lost the family’s home to foreclosure. "We’re circling the drain," she said.

While suicide among soldiers has been a focus of Congress and the public, relatively little attention has been paid to the mental health of tens of thousands of civilian contractors returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. When they make the news at all, contractors are usually in the middle of scandal, depicted as cowboys, wastrels or worse.

No agency tracks how many civilian workers have killed themselves after returning from the war zones. A small study in 2007 found that 24 percent of contract employees from DynCorp, a defense contractor, showed signs of depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, after returning home. The figure is roughly equivalent to those found in studies of returning soldiers.

If the pattern holds true on a broad scale, thousands of such workers may be suffering from mental trauma, said Paul Brand, the CEO of Mission Critical Psychological Services, a firm that provides counseling to war zone civilians. More than 200,000 civilians work in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the most recent figures.

"There are many people falling through the cracks, and there are few mechanisms in place to support these individuals,” said Brand, who conducted the study while working at DynCorp."There’s a moral obligation that’s being overlooked. Can the government really send people to a war zone and neglect their responsibility to attend to their emotional needs after the fact?"

The survivors of civilians who have committed suicide have found themselves confused, frustrated and alone in their grief…

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Kevin Drum at Mother Jones:

During the healthcare summit yesterday, John McCain hailed California and Texas for implementing damage caps in medical malpractice suits. But then he stumbled a bit and decided he actually wanted to talk only about Texas, not California. He nervously made a lame joke about California stealing Arizona’s water to cover this up, but at the time I tweeted: "McCain doesn’t want to talk about California’s damage caps. Why? Because it hasn’t kept premiums down."

And it hasn’t. We passed a law called MICRA in 1975 that limited noneconomic damages in malpractice cases to $250,000. Adjusted for inflation, that cap is now about the equivalent of $60,000. Nonetheless, its impact on malpractice premiums has been negligible. The chart below comes from the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, which definitely has a dog in the fight since it was founded by insurance industry scourge Harvey Rosenfield, who championed Proposition 103, an initiative that implemented state approval of insurance rates. It was passed in 1988.

Still, the results are pretty clear. After 1975, malpractice premiums continued to zoom upward, rising at an even higher rate than in other states. But after 1988 (that’s the green line for easy reference), California premiums leveled off while rates in the rest of the country continued to rise. The reason for this is pretty simple: large damage awards are actually pretty rare and don’t make up a big proportion of total malpractice payouts. Ending them doesn’t change the overall picture much. But it does substantially cut into trial lawyer income.

Which, of course, is the whole point. If you want to annoy trial lawyers, you should cap damages. If you really want to reform malpractice law, however, look elsewhere.

Very good column at Climate Progress, which begins:

I’d like your help debunking this atrocious piece of media misreporting, “Push to Oversimplify at Climate Panel.”

Yes, the WSJ piece wins the prize for the most unintentionally ironic headline since it is the media’s self-destructive push to oversimplify that has led to repeated libeling of Michael Mann and other climate scientists (see “Newsweek staff who play fast and loose with the facts are imperiling not just their profession but the planet” and “Abandoning all journalistic standards, CBS libels Michael Mann based on a YouTube video — while reporting his exoneration!”

I am running a full response by Dr. Mann below.  It seems the least I can do in response to the umpteenth false attack on his reputation.  It simply boggles the mind — and raises serious questions of journalistic bias for the paper — that the WSJ can run this error-riddled attack on Mann and the Hockey Stick without even mentioning any of these three central facts:

• The Hockey Stick was affirmed in a major review by the uber-prestigious National Academy of Scientists (in media-speak, the highest scientific “court” in the land).
• The Hockey Stick has been replicated and strengthened by numerous independent studies.  My favorite is from Science last year — see Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, “seminal” study finds (the source of the figure below).
• Penn State itself in recent review, concluded, “After careful consideration of all the evidence and relevant materials, the inquiry committee finding is that there exists no credible evidence that Dr. Mann had or has ever engaged in, or participated in, directly or indirectly, any actions with an intent to suppress or to falsify data.”

Jeffrey Ball and Keith Johnson mention none of that, since those facts would undermine their phony narrative on the subject, which sums up this way, “In other words, maybe the chart shouldn’t resemble a hockey stick.”

In other words, maybe it should:

[click graph to enlarge, and click again to enlarge even more - LG]

Here is Mann’s quick response to the piece:

The article creates a factually incorrect narrative by conflating a number of unrelated things which follow a timeline that doesn’t support the interpretation provided.  It refers to email discussions between Keith Briffa and various 2001 IPCC report chapter 2 on “climate observations” co-authors, including Chris Folland, myself, and others:

Continue reading.

For a long time science has tried to figure out what water is so strange: for example, that it’s densest at 4º C, so that ice floats (lucky for us). Edwin Cartlidge explains in New Science:

We are confronted by many mysteries, from the nature of dark matter and the origin of the universe to the quest for a theory of everything. These are all puzzles on the grand scale, but you can observe another enduring mystery of the physical world – equally perplexing, if not quite so grand – from the comfort of your kitchen. Simply fill a tall glass with chilled water, throw in an ice cube and leave it to stand.

The fact that the ice cube floats is the first oddity. And the mystery deepens if you take a thermometer and measure the temperature of the water at various depths. At the top, near the ice cube, you’ll find it to be around 0 °C, but at the bottom it should be about 4 °C. That’s because water is denser at 4°C than it is at any other temperature – another strange trait that sets it apart from other liquids.

Water’s odd properties don’t stop there (see "Water’s mysteries"), and some are vital to life. Because ice is less dense than water, and water is less dense at its freezing point than when it is slightly warmer, it freezes from the top down rather than the bottom up. So even during the ice ages, life continued to thrive on lake floors and in the deep ocean. Water also has an extraordinary capacity to mop up heat, and this helps smooth out climatic changes that could otherwise devastate ecosystems.

Yet despite water’s overwhelming importance to life, no single theory had been able to satisfactorily explain its mysterious properties – until now. If we can believe physicists Anders Nilsson at Stanford University, California, and Lars Pettersson of Stockholm University, Sweden, and their colleagues, we could at last be getting to the bottom of many of these anomalies.

Their controversial ideas expand on a theory proposed more than a century ago by Wilhelm Roentgen, the discoverer of X-rays, who claimed that the molecules in liquid water pack together not in just one way, as today’s textbooks would have it, but in two fundamentally different ways…

Continue reading. 

Interesting stuff.

They’re still here:

Source: ABC News, February 25, 2010

The private military contractor Blackwater — which rebranded itself as "Xe" in February, 2009 to distance itself from negative incidents like the September, 2007 shooting in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square that killed at least a dozen people — has created a shell company called "Paravant" to try and keep winning lucrative government military contracts. Both Paravant and Xe are owned by Eric Prince, owner of Blackwater. Paravant won contracts to operate in Afghanistan without identifying its affiliation with Blackwater/Xe to the U.S. government. Paravant has been operating as a subcontractor to global defense contractor Raytheon, but the new name and hidden identity haven’t changed Blackwater/Xe/Paravant’s behavior. In September, 2008, a Paravant employee signed out more than 500 AK-47 assault rifles from a bunker in Afghanistan that held weapons designated for the Afghan National Police and Army. The employee signed the weapons out using the name "Eric Cartman," the racist, obnoxious character from the cable TV cartoon "South Park." The rifles were signed out even though employees had been denied permission to carry weapons on several occasions. Some of the weapons were still unaccounted for for months afterward. Two days after the rifles were taken from the bunker, a Paravant contractor shot another contractor in the head after his AK-47 accidentally discharged.

Sounds like the night-club district, doesn’t it? Steve C. explains in this post, worth the click. And he links also to the Blue Zones website. I just took the Vitality Compass test: Chronological age: 70; Biological age 62.8; Life expectancy: 92.5.

See also this video:

As study after study has proved, the main driver of medical malpractice lawsuits is—surprise!—medical malpractice. When anesthesiologists were hurting because of medical malpractice lawsuits and escalating insurance premiums, they decided to tackle malpractice itself. By dint of study, innovation, testing, and maintaining standards of practice, the anesthesiologists reduced incidents of malpractice to close to zero, ending lawsuits and making their insurance relatively inexpensive. Still the Republicans cling to the idea as a panacea. Steve Benen at Political Animal:

Ask any Republican lawmaker what kind of health care reform provisions they can tolerate, and just about 100% of the time, the first two words out of their mouth will be "malpractice reform."

Here, for example, was Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) during the afternoon session at the health care summit yesterday.

"[T]he point is that we don’t have to go very far. There’s two examples right now of medical malpractice reform that is working. One is called California and the other is called Texas. I won’t talk about California because we Arizonians hate California because they’ve stolen our water.

"But the fact is that Texas has established a $750,000 cap for non-economic damages; caps doctors at $250,000; hospitals at $250,000; and any additional institution, $250,000; and patients harm to a finding of medical malpractice are not subject to any limitations on recoveries for economic losses. And I hope you’ll examine it."

I hope policymakers will examine it, too, because the results of the experiments in California and Texas offer some important lessons.

McCain preferred to ignore California’s experience, not because of water rights, but because the caps haven’t worked the way conservatives would have liked.

He might also want to re-think the results out of Texas, where victims have repeatedly been screwed, and where costs weren’t reduced anyway.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin’s (D-Ill.) remarks on this yesterday were pretty devastating. I hope McCain will examine it.

Essential reading: The Medical Malpractice Myth.

Faiz Shakir at ThinkProgress:

A long-awaited Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report released last week found that lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee “had committed professional misconduct in writing legal opinions that authorized torture.” The OPR report revealed that many of Yoo’s emails had vanished:

[W]e were told that most of Yoo’s records had been deleted and were not recoverable. [Former Deputy AAG] Philbin’s email records from July 2002 through August 5, 2002 — the time period in which the Bybee Memo was completed and the Classified Bybee Memo (discussed below) was created — had also been deleted and were reportedly not recoverable.

The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) “called on Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the destruction of emails” and reported that “he destruction of these emails represents a blatant violation of the Federal Records Act (FRA) and may break criminal laws.”

In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said the deleted records pose “very serious concerns about government transparency and whether the [OPR] had access to all of the information relevant to the inquiries.”

Leahy then asked whether the DOJ has initiated an investigation into the circumstances behind the destruction of the emails. Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary G. Grindler said the DOJ is in the process of trying to establish the facts for why the emails disappeared. Grindler also studiously avoided suggesting that any foul play was behind the disappearance of the emails, stating that there was “nothing nefarious” about the deletions. Leahy then drew a parallel between the Yoo emails and the emails that the Bush White House previously claimed had disappeared:

I recall when millions of emails mysteriously disappeared during the Bush administration, and I had [said] they don’t just disappear. They must be there. And I recall them sending their press secretary Ms. Perino out to say, ‘what is he some kind of IT expert? That’s foolish, they’ve been deleted. They’ve disappeared. We all know they’ve disappeared. Why would anyone suggest otherwise.’ And then we found 22 million emails.[...]

During the firing of the U.S. Attorneys…there were a number of emails by Mr. Karl Rove and others in the White House that were missing. Now, two months ago, we finally find those emails of course after the investigation was over and after the time when the U.S. Attorneys might have been reinstated. I hope we don’t have to wait that long this time.

Watch it:

Newsweek reports that the National Archives is pressing the Justice Department to investigate the “possible unauthorized destruction of e-mail and other records” within the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

From the Center for American Progress in an email:

During yesterday’s seven-and-a-half hour bipartisan health care reform summit, President Obama urged Republicans to abandon their obstructionist tactics and work with Democrats to pass comprehensive reform. Obama highlighted areas of bipartisan agreement in his health care proposal and suggested that Democrats would move forward with or without Republican support. "I will tell you this, that when I talk to the parents of children who don’t have health care because they’ve got diabetes or they’ve got some chronic heart disease; when I talk to small business people who are laying people off because they just got their insurance premium, they don’t want us to wait. They can’t afford another five decades," Obama said. And while it’s unclear whether the forum moved the debate forward, it provided Obama with an opportunity to engage "in a spirited and detailed policy debate with Republicans about one of the most compelling and ideologically polarizing issues facing the nation." The New York Times observed that "Mr. Obama’s mastery of the intricacies of health policy was impressive even to some Republicans." "It was sort of his classroom," Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) said. "I was glad we did it, because the president’s megaphone is the biggest one and when he shares it with Republicans like he did, that gives us several hours to make our case, and I thought we made it well.’"

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Still enjoying my great shave. I’m having breakfast, in the light of this little table which is now mounted on my refrigerator door:

Daily	3x / week
breakfast fruits whole grains leafy greens nuts carrots white tea	oily fish avocado yogurt broccoli sweet potato

So far I’m doing well: I’m eating breakfast (a sardine-avocado open-face sandwich on 100% whole-wheat bread, along with a pot of white tea with lemon, followed by a Bosc pear). I bought a couple of sweet potatoes, which I’ll roast today and then eat cold (they make a great dessert). I’ll go out and stock up on nuts and get some leafy greens.

For carrots, I roast up a big batch and then enjoy roasted carrots as a snack. I cut them in 1"-2" sections, toss with a little olive oil, and then roast in a 400º F oven for about 40 minutes, shaking the pan occasionally so they don’t burn on the bottom.

After watching some of the healthcare summit yesterday and reading summaries today, I’ve lost interest in the debate because it’s not a debate: the GOP is unwilling to listen, unwilling to recognize facts, unwilling to accept even their own ideas once voiced by a Democrat. They are not serious and some of them seem to be struggling with the limitations of their own capabilities. They have nothing to offer in regard to two serious problems the Dems are at least trying to address: that insurers won’t issue policies to anyone with a "pre-existing condition" (the list of which continually grows) and how to get good healthcare to the millions who cannot get insurance. So the GOP is irrelevant to the healthcare discussion except for their unending fight to derail the legislation. I don’t find "Scrap the bill" much of a platform.

I watched the family movie Matilda last night and I enjoyed it: a wish-fulfillment fantasy for a child who has little in common with her family.

Yesterday I used a relatively enormous brush, so today I thought I would go toward tiny. The little Simpsons Classic is a very nice brush and held ample (and excellent) lather—certainly enough for four passes, though I went for only three. The secret, as previously mentioned, is to take your time rubbing the brush tips over the soap to be sure you pick up enough soap for the shave. (A shave stick takes care of this for you, using your whiskery stubble to scrape off enough soap directly to your beard.) The soap in question, QED’s Bay Rum (or “Bay Run” as I seem to have labeled it), has a great fragrance: very bay rummy.

The Edwin Jagger lined Chatsworth in gold is my last Merkur Classic head, though I have plenty of QED soap left over. Still, I just received a brand new shaving soap that will make its debut tomorrow. I’m excited.

The Chatsworth did a great job: perfectly smooth face, no nicks. The well-used Swedish Gillette continued to do good work. And TOBS Bay Rum was the perfect aftershave today.

Marion Nestle at Food Politics:

Who knew that the food ingredient business ran on bribes?  The New York Times (print edition) calls its report of the latest scandal, “Hidden Ingredient: The Sweetener.”  By “sweetener,” the Times is not referring to aspartame or even Splenda: it means bribes.

You are an ingredient supplier and want a big food company like Kraft, Frito-Lay, or Safeway to buy your products?  Easy.  Bribe their purchasing managers.

In my book, Food Politics, I discuss food industry sales tactics ranging from soft (advertising, lobbying) to hard (manipulating media, cozying up to federal officials, and suing critics).  These, as I point out, are legal.  Fixing prices, is not.  Neither is bribery.

This is not a pretty story.  Managers were bribed to purchase inferior ingredients such as moldy tomato sauce.  Companies relied on the suppliers for quality assurance.

The moral: companies need to do their own product testing and consumers need to demand that they do.

Thanks to William Neuman of the Times for his excellent investigative report, handicapped as it was by not being able to interview the jailed perpetrators

I don’t know about you, but I think a little more government inspection at random intervals would not be amiss.

Good for Gordon Brown, who in effect said to the US, "Grow up!" Amanda Terkel at ThinkProgress:

As conservatives in the United States try to argue that repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) would lead to all sorts of horrors like an increase in “body art,” natural disasters, and a reinstatement of the draft, British citizens are serving comfortably alongside openly gay men and women. Yesterday at a reception at Number 10 Downing Street to celebrate February’s LGBT History Month, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown underscored the country’s more progressive position:

Brown singled out the lesbians, gays and bisexuals from the Army, Navy and Air Force who attended the event in uniform.

He told them: “You are the pride of our country and we thank you very much. We know this debate continues in America today. I would say to people who still favour ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’, look at our experience in Britain.”

Brown also hosted a reception for LGBT History Month last year, when he slammed California’s Prop. 8 as “unacceptable.”

A recent report by the Palm Center backed up Brown’s statements on gay men and women serving openly in the military. The study found that foreign militaries have been able to quickly and successfully integrate:

Other key conclusions of the new study are that preliminary findings that open gays do not disrupt military effectiveness hold over time, including in Britain, whose policy of non-discrimination marked its ten-year anniversary last month; that successful transitions did not involve creating separate facilities or distinct rules for gays or straights; and that the U.S. has a long tradition of turning to foreign armed forces as relevant sources of information about effective military policy.

Yesterday on the House floor, Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) read a letter from an active duty soldier in Afghanistan who had “learned that a fellow soldier was also gay, only after he was killed by an IED in Iraq.” The deceased soldier’s partner also “wrote the unit to say how much the victim had loved the military; how they were the only family he had ever known.” (HT: Towleroad)