Later On

I’m making this recipe for dinner, and it’s simmering as I type. I like a rather thick soup, so I used just 4 cups (1 qt) of the beef stock, not 6. It also keeps from having half a carton of stock left over. I used domestic white mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, and dried porcini mushrooms. I’ll post an update once I partake.

UPDATE: Extremely good: substantial and rich tasting. I may well have to add the other 2 cups of beef broth: the barley swells as and after it cooks. It tastes so rich, given that there is no actual meat in it (whence the mushrooms: a meat substitute in mouthfeel—at least not a plant), that I wondered if it could have been a meal on the old Catholic requirement of having Friday be a day of abstinence: no meat. Would that have included broth, I wonder?

UPDATE 2: In ruminating on the rich taste, I decided that the black pepper was a vital flavor component. It’s like the beef flavor is the foundation, but the pepper is the wall—or some such. But a key part of the taste structure.

UPDATE 3: Still thinking on the taste—it’s a quiet night hereabouts—and have a few more realizations. First, that “satisfying” and “mouth-filling” taste is because it has tons of umami: the beef broth plus the sautéed mushrooms and the reconstituted porcini with the soaking water. And sautéing the aromatics—the onion, carrot, and garlic—at the beginning adds a different dimension of flavor, as does the sherry added with the stock. (I used a dry amontillado.) It really is a nice recipe, and you can see every ingredient playing its part. And the “full-meal” feeling provided by the flavors and textures is fulfilled with the barley’s protein. I’ll make this again.

Of course, no matter how good it tastes, one wants to try tweaks, such as some subset of a dash of Tabasco added with the sherry, along perhaps with a dash of soy sauce, and the soup served with shredded or shaved Parmesan on top.

UPDATE 4: A splash of cognac?

A non-denial denial:

… In his statement, Robbins noted that Matsko (the Assistant Principal at the school) did not deny seeing a Webcam picture and screenshot of him in his home—she denied having authorized or activated the Webcam.

"We have no reason to doubt Ms. Matsko’s statement that she did not personally activate the Webcam on my computer, but that has never been the issue," he said. "The issue is that we know someone accessed my Webcam and provided Ms. Matsko with a screenshot and a Webcam picture of me at home in my bedroom."

Read the whole story. Note also that the school, which has said the webcam is activated only if the computer is reported stolen, lost, or missing, has not said why they turned on the webcam on Robbins’s computer (which was not reported stolen, lost, or missing).

Amanda Terkel at ThinkProgress:

A new analysis by the Center for Public Integrity shows that corporate interests attempted to exert an unprecedented amount of influence in the health care debate over the past year. More than “1,750 companies and organizations hired about 4,525 lobbyists — eight for each member of Congress — to influence health reform bills in 2009.” These groups included 207 hospitals, 105 insurance companies, 85 manufacturing companies, and 745 trade, advocacy, and professional organizations. Overall, “[b]usinesses and organizations that lobbied on health reform spent more than $1.2 billion on their overall lobby efforts.”

In June, Senate Republicans met with health care lobbyists in order to “recruit stakeholders to oppose options such as a government-funded insurance plan and a mandate requiring employers to help pay for heath insurance.” Republicans also requested that health care lobbyists be given at least 72 hours to review any legislative language in the Senate Finance Committee. A recent Center for Responsive Politics analysis found that “federal lobbying soared to record levels last year,” with “about $1.3 million spent on lobbying for every hour that Congress was in session in 2009.”

Really, the GOP should fold. They no longer are able to field people with any serious interest in governing, just in fighting. Steve Benen:

I vaguely recall a time when Dems hoped Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley (R) would be one of the more sensible, reasonable members when it comes to health care talks. So much for that idea.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) — the Republicans point man on health care reform in the Senate — has flirted with the idea that requiring people to purchase health insurance is unconstitutional. But fully joined the "Tenther" fringe at today’s health care summit.

"The high cost of this bill comes from a non-constitutional mandate," Grassley said in an exchange with President Obama.

On the substance, relying on an individual mandate does not increase costs; it lowers them. Grassley’s understanding of the underlying policy goals is backwards.

But let’s put that aside. Grassley now wants us to believe individual mandates are "non-constitutional." This is the same Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) who told Fox News last summer, "I believe that there is a bipartisan consensus to have individual mandates…. There isn’t anything wrong with it."

It’s not just Grassley. Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Bob Bennett (R-Utah), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) all are on record co-sponsoring a reform measure that included an individual mandate.

The point here is not just to highlight the bizarre inconsistencies of Republican opponents of health care reform. This is also important in realizing why bipartisanship on health care has been quite literally impossible — Republicans are willing to reject measures they’ve already embraced, and ideas they themselves came up with.

All the Democratic outreach and compromise options in the world can’t overcome the fundamental lack of seriousness that comes with a party that opposes and supports the same ideas at the same time.

Via Kafeneio, who describes it in this post. It looks good. The intro:

Welcome to Fit-in 15! You’ve taken a great step toward being more active. Fitting-in just 15 minutes of focused activity each day can start you on the way to an energized lifestyle. Who knows where it will take you?

Fit-in 15 has been developed by Canada’s Doctors of Chiropractic, experts in muscle and joint function, and champions of healthy living. They recognize that it can be hard to find time in a busy day to focus on physical activity. That’s why they created Fit-in 15, an easy and manageable way to start the habit. Once Fit-in 15 becomes a regular part of your day, you may find yourself fitting in more.

15 minutes a day will get you started on the way to many health benefits:

• Better heart health
• Improved circulation
• Greater flexibility and strength
• More stamina
• A brighter outlook

Take a look at the site.

Interesting post by Steve Rolles at Transform:

The page on the UN Office on Drugs and Crime site that we flagged up on the blog earlier this week, has now been censored to remove the section featuring a rare outbreak of pragmatism making the case for cannabis decriminalisation.

These seems rather pathetic. The page in question has sat unmolested since September 2006, over 3 years, only to be stripped of the decrim-arguments now, the day after we blog about it. Why, its almost as if……

Anyway, as people should all know by now the internet never forgets, and you can read the page as it was using the ever useful Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

• Page before
• Page now (note missing section 4)

I hope that the fact they have rather childishly censored this page on their own site will help teach the UNODC another lesson: Internet users do not like being treated like idiots and tend respond rather badly.

So to all our internet friends: Please link this and the previous blog as much as possible, blog about it elsewhere, and use twitter, facebook, and all your other internet toys to get the original page (and its censorship) as much publicity as possible.

By all means contact a few journo friends as well, see if you can get it in the news. They should be interested as it makes considerably more interesting news than (or at least an interesting counterpoint to) the latest tedious INCB report, obsessed as ever with attacking countries who, wait for it, dare contemplate decriminalising drug possession.

Greenwald:

One of the strangest prongs of conventional Beltway wisdom is the lament that there is not enough bipartisanship.  The opposite is true:  many of the most damaging acts inflicted on the country by Washington are enacted on a fully bipartisan basis — the most destructive political act of this generation, the invasion of Iraq, was fully bipartisan, as were most of the post-9/11 civil liberties abuses and other Bush-era initiatives– and, at least in certain areas, the harmonious joining together of Republicans and Democrats continues unabated:

Senate votes to extend Patriot Act

Democrats retreat from adding new privacy protections to the law

The Senate voted Wednesday to extend for a year key provisions of the nation’s counterterrorism surveillance law that are scheduled to expire at the end of the month.

In agreeing to pass the bill, Senate Democrats retreated from adding new privacy protections to the USA Patriot Act.

The Senate approved the bill on a voice vote with no debate. It now goes to the House. . . .

Supporters say extending the law enables authorities to keep important tools in the fight against terrorism. It would also give Democrats some cover from Republican criticism that the Obama administration is soft on terrorism. . . . Some Democrats, however, had to forfeit new privacy protections they had sought for the law. . . .

"I would have preferred to add oversight and judicial review improvements to any extension of expiring provisions in the USA Patriot Act," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "But I understand some Republican senators objected."

A mountain of evidence has emerged over the last several years documenting pervasive, systematic abuse of the Patriot Act powers.  The proposed safeguards were extremely modest and would have provided minimal oversight on how those powers were exercised.  Leading Democrats such as Dianne Feinstein spent all years ensuring that the proposed reforms were weakened to the point of virtual meaningless.  But as weakened as they were, "some Republican senators objected" and might have called Democrats "soft on terror," so that was the end of that.  The domestic surveillance law that Democrats spent years assailing as dangerously overbroad when out of power is renewed in full now that they are in power.  That’s the Beauty of Bipartisanship, and the last thing we need is more of it.

Who doesn’t love a good food movie? I just found a great series of suggestions in the comments to this post. A few observations:

I don’t consider My Dinner With Andre or Melvin Goes To Dinner to be food movies but rather talk movies. The food is incidental; the movie is about the talk.

Eat Drink Man Woman is extremely popular: remakes include Tortilla Soup and Soul Food. And Mostly Martha was remade as No Reservations, though I prefer the original in each case.

From the Center for American Progress in an email. I think this one is very important.

On Friday, the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) released a long-awaited report investigating whether the legal advice in crucial Bush administration memos authorizing torture "was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys." The report found that attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee "had committed professional misconduct in writing the legal opinions that authorized torture." The report was softened, however, by Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis, the top career attorney at the department, who "overruled OPR’s finding of misconduct" in an accompanying memo, concluding only that that Yoo and Bybee exercised poor judgment and made bad legal arguments. While stating that his "decision should not be viewed as an endorsement of the legal work that underlies" the torture memos, Margolis also "barred OPR from referring the matter to state bar disciplinary authorities where Yoo and Bybee are licensed." What’s troubling, Margolis’ memo indicated that Yoo and Bybee’s legal decisions were understood as having occurred in the heat of the post-9/11 moment, (even though they were written in 2002) implying that "being under pressure" is an excuse for ignoring laws against torture.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is a terrible story, showing a total lack of respect for religion. I wonder if the fundamentalists would also stone people practicing (say) Buddhism or Shintoism or some other religion. Thanks to Steve C. for pointing out this article by AFP in the Montreal Gazette:

Haiti’s supreme voodoo leader vowed "war" yesterday after evangelicals attacked a ceremony organized by his religion honouring those killed in last month’s massive earthquake.

The attack on Tuesday in the capital’s sprawling Cité Soleil slum came with religious tensions rising, as Protestant evangelicals and other denominations recruit in the wake of the earthquake that killed almost 300,000.

"It will be war, open war," Max Beauvoir, supreme head of Haitian voodoo, said at his home and temple outside the capital. "It’s unfortunate that at this moment where everybody’s suffering that they have to go to war. But if that is what they need, I think that is what they’ll get."

Police said a pastor urged followers to attack the ceremony, resulting in a crowd of people throwing rocks at the voodoo followers.

Rosemond Aristide, a police inspector in Cité Soleil, said he has since spoken with the pastor, who agreed to allow voodoo ceremonies to take place there.

However, Aristide could not explain why no arrests were made nor provide further details.

Beauvoir claimed hundreds of Protestant evangelicals along with other people they hired attacked the ceremony, causing a number of injuries.

In fairness, the pastor who promoted this attack should have himself and his own congregation stoned when they attempt a worship service.

Amy Tuteur, MD, reviews Judith Warner’s new book We’ve Got Issues:

A hundred years ago it was rarely diagnosed in children. In the intervening timespan the number and type of diagnoses have exploded. Moreover, the number and type of treatments have also exploded. The favored treatment usually involves powerful medications with serious side effects. Big Pharma has made a fortune from these medications and is constantly searching for new variations to patent and sell.

I’m talking about childhood cancer, but I bet you thought I was talking about childhood mental illness. After all, everyone in contemporary society knows that childhood mental illness is over-diagnosed, that drugging children is the preferred method for dealing with the normal problems of childhood, and that normal children are being treated with powerful psychotropic medications simply because they are quirky and authentic.

That’s what Judith Warner (author of Perfect Madness) thought, too, when she sold a proposal back in 2004 for a book that would explore the over-diagnosis of mental illness and over-treatment of children with psychiatric medication. She knew it for all the reasons listed above: Childhood mental illness was rarely diagnosed in children 100 years ago; since then the number and type of diagnoses have exploded; the number and type of treatments have also exploded; the medications used to treat childhood mental illness are powerful and can have serious side effects; Big Pharma has made a fortune from these medications and is constantly searching for new variations to patent and sell.

But the same things apply to childhood cancer, and no one is suggesting that childhood cancer is over-diagnosed, that chemotherapy is the preferred method for dealing with the normal problems of childhood, and that normal children are being treated with chemotherapy simply because they are quirky and authentic. The conclusions we have drawn from the dramatic increase in the diagnosis of childhood mental illness are wrong. Though childhood cancer was rarely diagnosed 100 years ago, that’s not because it didn’t exist. It’s because we didn’t have the tools to recognize it or any effective medications to treat it. Similarly, we need to consider the fact that childhood mental illness is not new, just as childhood cancer is not new; we just lacked the tools to recognize it and any effective medications to treat it.

In We’ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication, Judith Warner has written a brilliant and compelling book, a must-read for any parent who has a child who is miserable and struggling. It is also a must-read for anyone who thinks he knows that childhood mental illness is over-diagnosed and over-treated. Parents who have dealt with mental illness in a child will find solace here, because someone has finally acknowledged that their child’s "issues" are not the normal problems of childhood, that they struggled for years against putting their child on medication, and that their most fervent wishes are not that their child will get A’s in order to get into a competitive college, but merely that he or she will be able to live outside an institution without hurting anyone.

Read the rest of this entry »

Continuing with using all my razors that have the Merkur Classic head, I come to the Edwin Jagger razors. Although EJ now uses a head designed by Neal Jagger working with Mühle, they previously used the Merkur Classic head, though with more polishing and better plating (chrome or gold). This is one of those older razors.

I liked the Rooney Style 3 Size 2 Super Silvertip so much that I used it again today. Man, does it hold a lot of lather! And it does a good job at creating lather as well, today from QED’s Frankincense & Myrrh shaving soap. I got a fine shave with the previously used Polsilver blade in the EJ Chatsworth, and of course Paul Sebastian is a favorite aftershave.

I got caught up so much in watching the healthcare summit that I almost forgot to blog this.

Max Bergmann at ThinkProgress:

Frank Gaffney, a protégé of Richard Perle and an influential figure in right wing national security circles, has firmly entered the world of right wing tin-foil hat paranoia.

Media Matters documents the development of a new right wing conspiracy theory, claiming that the Obama administration manipulated the redesign of the Missile Defense Agency to look like his campaign logo. This theory then evolved to claims that the new logo incorporates the Islamic crescent as well:

This nutty conspiracy theory was escalated by Frank Gaffney, who sees it as explaining Obama’s rationale behind his cuts to missile defense. How so? Well because he is a secret Muslim of course, which since all Muslims are out to destroy America, means Obama is out to do the same:

A just-unveiled symbolic action suggests, however, that something even more nefarious is afoot… Team Obama’s anti-anti-missile initiatives are not simply acts of unilateral disarmament of the sort to be expected from an Alinsky acolyte. They seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah… the new MDA shield appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo… Watch this space as we identify and consider various, ominous and far more clear-cut acts of submission to Shariah by President Obama and his team.

So according to Gaffney, Obama hates missile defense so much that he wants to change the Missile Defense Agency’s logo to reflect his campaign symbol, as well as his secret Muslim identity? While this makes no sense, as Brendan Nyhan explains this is part of a strategy to spread fear-mongering “smears against Obama’s loyalty and false claims about Obama’s religion. As laughable as ‘Logo-gate’ may be, the underlying strategy is deeply disturbing.” As Matt Duss has noted:

Gaffney’s own past work strongly argues against taking him seriously as an analyst. As someone willing to cast deeply irresponsible and transparently bigoted accusations against the president, however, he should be taken very seriously.

Yet Gaffney is a prominent member of the right wing security establishment. He writes a regular column for the Washington Times, is a frequent commentator on cable television, and runs his own right-wing defense organization. Just this past October, at Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy “Keeper of the Flame” annual award dinner, Vice President Cheney was the featured speaker and recipient of the reward. Other guest speakers included Sen. Jon Kyl and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

By spreading this crazy paranoid conspiracy, Gaffney not only is defaming the President, he is also defaming the people who work and lead the Missile Defense Agency. The idea that the President would pay attention to an agency logo redesign or that the design in any way reflected some secret Muslim agenda, as Richard Lehner of the Missile Defense Agency noted, “is ridiculous.” Lehner told Fox that “it isn’t a new logo to replace the official logo. It’s a logo developed for recruiting materials and for our public Web site. Also, it was used prior to the 2008 election and it has no link to any political campaign.”

Additionally, the one to approve the new logo is likely the head of the Missile Defense Agency, Lt. General Patrick O’Reilly, someone the right wing must now presumably believe is complicit with Obama’s secret plan to further the United States’ “submission to Islam.”

Good observation:

Quick comment on today’s healthcare summit: John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are smart enough to know their own limitations and choose others to speak for the Republican side. And they’ve mostly chosen speakers who are good at this stuff and know how to talk in ways that make sense.

The Democrats, who should be in better shape because they have a single leader, are insisting on letting every leader speak: Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Steny Hoyer, and Max Baucus so far. These folks are not great speakers. Why are they so lame that they insist on speaking anyway? For once in their preening lives, why don’t they just fade into the background and let President Obama orchestrate their side? Obama may yet come out on top in today’s session, but the behavior of the Democratic congressional leadership so far constitutes political malpractice.

Video, comments, live-blogging. Take a look.

I just watched Ricky Gervais’s The Invention of Lying. The movie starts slow and gathers speed only gradually, but then, with the underbrush cleared, he hits his pace and I found it both enjoyable and thought-provoking. YMMV, of course.

Here is my current recipe:

1 can Wild Planet sardines in extra-virgin olive oil (free shipping)
1/2 ripe avocado
1-2 Tbsp grated onion
good dash Tabasco Chipotle Sauce
ground black pepper
1-2 Tbsp sherry wine vinegar

Mash that all together (including the olive oil in the can), then spread half on a slice of whole-wheat bread for an open-face sandwich. (My toaster’s put away, but toasting the bread would be nice.)

Next time try adding paprika, soy sauce.

The above is terrifically yummy.

Take a look.

As it happens, I have a couple of pounds of fresh asparagus, so I’ll be making this recipe by Martha Rose Shulman.

1 pound asparagus
2 hard-boiled eggs
2 tablespoons champagne vinegar or sherry vinegar, or 1 tablespoon each fresh lemon juice and vinegar
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 teaspoons capers, rinsed and chopped
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley or a mixture of parsley, chives and tarragon
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

1. Snap the woody ends off the asparagus. Steam for five minutes. Refresh with ice-cold water, then drain and dry on paper towels. Cut into 1/2-inch pieces.

2. Cut the boiled eggs in half, mince the yolks and whites separately, and season with salt and pepper

3. In a salad bowl, whisk together the vinegar (or lemon juice and vinegar) and olive oil. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Add the asparagus, capers and herbs, and toss together. Add the chopped egg yolks and whites, then toss together again and serve.

Yield: Serves four

Advance preparation: You can have all of the ingredients prepared hours before serving, but don’t toss them together until ready to serve.

UPDATE: Good, but WAY too much dressing. Cut it in half, at least.

Typical of the GOP today:

Source: Richmond NewsLeader.com, February 22, 2010

House Representative Bob Marshall (R-Virginia), speaking at a press conference on February 18 to oppose funding for Planned Parenthood, said that disabled children are God’s punishment for women who have aborted their first pregnancy. Marshall said,

Looking at it from a cultural, historical perspective, this organization should be called “Planned Barrenhood” because they have nothing to do with families, they have nothing to do with responsibility … The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically. Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children. In the Old Testament, the first born of every being, animal and man, was dedicated to the Lord. There’s a special punishment, Christians would suggest.

But the following week, Marshall disputed the accuracy of his statements, claiming they were taken out of context and that the complete opposite was true: “I don’t believe that disabled kids are God’s punishments, period, end of discussion. I have defended disabled kids.” He also put out a press release insisting that he is a champion of disabled children, and saying he “regrets any misimpression my poorly chosen words may have created.”