Later On

Interesting finding:

A team of chemical engineers have discovered what may be the "ancestral Eve" crystal that billions of years ago gave life on Earth its curious and exclusive preference for so-called left-handed amino acids. The results are published in Crystal Growth and Design.

Researchers used mixtures of both left- and right-handed aspartic acid (an amino acid) in laboratory experiments to see how temperature and other conditions affected formation of crystals of the material.

They found that under conditions that could have existed on primitive Earth, left-handed aspartic acid crystals could have formed easily and on a large scale. "The aspartic acid crystal would then truly become a single mother crystal: an ancestral Eve for the whole left-handed population," the article notes.

The authors point out that conditions on the primordial Earth held an equal chance of forming the same amounts of left-handed and right-handed amino acids. Nevertheless, when the first forms of life emerged more than 3 billion years ago, all the amino acids in the proteins had the left-handed configuration. That pattern continued right up to modern plants and animals.

Citation: Tu Lee, Yu Kun Lin, ‘The Origin of Life and the Crystallization of Aspartic Acid in Water’, Crystal Growth&Design, 2010; 10(4), 1652; doi: 10.1021/cg901219f

But also note these links, published with the above note:

RELATED ARTICLES HERE ON SCIENTIFIC BLOGGING

• Did A Meteorite Cause The Existence Of Left-Handed Amino Acids?
• Why Life Is Left-Handed: Amino Acids From Space, Says Astrobiologist

Dennis G. at Balloon Juice:

Michael Steele is doing his best to help his Republican Confederate Party celebrate Confederate History Month.

And he is so very helpful. Last Tuesday night he was asked why African-Americans should vote Republican he told his audience of students at DePaul University:

“You really don’t have a reason to, to be honest—we haven’t done a very good job of really giving you one. True? True”…

And then he explained why.

Back in the day, pundit Michael Kinsley defined a ‘gaffe’ as a statement where a politician accidentally tells the truth. By this definition Michael Steele is a Gaffe machine. To explain why blacks do not have a reason to vote Republican Steele admitted that his Party had intentionally turned its back on folks of color as part of their “Southern Strategy“:

“We have lost sight of the historic, integral link between the party and African-Americans,” Steele said. “This party was co-founded by blacks, among them Frederick Douglass. The Republican Party had a hand in forming the NAACP, and yet we have mistreated that relationship. People don’t walk away from parties, Their parties walk away from them.

“For the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South. Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, ‘Bubba’ went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton.”

Disclosing that the ‘Southern Strategy’ was and is a real policy of the Republican Confederate Party has landed Mr. Steele into more hot water with the old white guard of the party.

As usual, the real masters of the Republican Confederate Party wasted no time trying to deny the existence of a ‘Southern Strategy’ and discount Steele’s latest bit of truth telling gaffe. David Weigel lays out some the ongoing denial by the usual suspects. Bruce Bartlett chastised Steele:

I think it’s too bad that Steele gave Democrats reason to believe that their distorted vision of how Republicans came to dominate the South is correct. It may be his biggest gaffe so far.

Remember, in Washington a gaffe is when you accidentally speak the truth and when you tell your ‘biggest gaffe’ it is because you are telling a truth that some wish to keep in the shadows.

The “Southern Strategy” is one of those truths.

It was Lee Atwater who described how the SS worked is a 1981 interview published in the 1990 book, The Two-Party South by Alexander P. Lamis. In 2005, NYTs columnist Bob Herbert quoted the interview in his column:

Listen to the late Lee Atwater in a 1981 interview explaining the evolution of the G.O.P.’s Southern strategy:

‘’You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

‘’And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’‘’ [snip]

The payoff has been huge. Just as the Democratic Party would have been crippled in the old days without the support of the segregationist South, today’s Republicans would have only a fraction of their current political power without the near-solid support of voters who are hostile to blacks.

When Democrats revolted against racism, the G.O.P. rallied to its banner.

It was Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” that moved the Confederate party from the Democrats to the Republicans. And this was done by exploiting racism overtly with actions and covertly with coded talking points and dog whistles.

These days Kevin Phillips is known as somebody who has broken with the Republican Party, but back in 1970 he was in the Nixon White House working with future felon Attorney General Mitchell to develop the ‘Southern Strategy’. Phillips was profiled in a 1970 NYTs article (here is a link to a pdf). It is long piece, but worth the read. Here are some excerpts that shed a light on how the Republican Party started to date the Confederate Party (emphasis added):

[Kevin Phillips] On Negroes and the G.O.P.:

“All the talk about Republicans making inroads into the Negro vote is persiflage. Even ‘Jake the Snake’ [Senator Jacob K. Javits] only gets 20 percent. From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that . . . but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.” [snip]

“My argument was this: Your outer Southerners who live in the Ozark and Appalachian mountain ranges and in the Piedmont upcountry-and now in urban-suburban Florida and Texas-have always had different interests than the Negrophobe plantation owners of the Black Belt. This is a less extreme conservative group. It adheres with other Republican constituencies across the country and can be appealed to without fragmenting the coalition. When you are after political converts, start with the less extreme and wait for the extremists to come into line when their alternatives collapse.” [snip]

A new ethnic disturbance-the emergence of the Negro-Latino—finally shattered it [the Democratic coalition]. The Democratic party, veteran accumulator of minorities that it was, tried to accumulate by rote the Negro minority and trumpeted its cause through the tried formulae of patronage for its spokesmen, government aid, social planning and bureaucratic intervention. But since the grievances of the colored minorities were caused in part by the exploitation and exclusion practiced against them by older Democratic constituencies, something had to give, and did. The two bulwarks of the old coalition, working-class Catholics and the descendants of the Confederacy, began to defect from the Democratic party because of its identification with the newcomers.

These defectors have not yet lodged permanently in the suspect G.O.P. Many of them are in way stations-the Conservative party of New York, the Wallace movement. But they have left the Democrats and Phillips feels they have no place to go in the end but the Republican party. Hence, the emerging Republican majority that will dominate American politics until the year 2004. [snip]

Sterilized and scientific as are the terms by which Kevin Phillips plots the emerging Republican majority, its common denominator is hostility to blacks and browns among slipping Democrats and abandonment of the Democratic party because of its identification with the colored minorities.In the Northeast. the slippage is among blue-collar Catholics who find their jobs threatened and their neighborhoods and political clubhouses overrun by invading Negroes, while their erstwhile party seems to cluck approval. In the Outer South, the national Democratic party has begun to replace the G.O.P. as the symbol of alien causes-the Negro politicians and Federal interference with local autonomy. Hence, the shift to Republicanism, a trend which for the same reasons has engulfed the milder border states and will, Phillips insists, capture the perfervid Deep South when events force the abandonment of the more extreme Wallace alternative. [snip]

In the “Latin crescent “lower Florida, Louisiana, Texas-the political emergence of the Cuban and Mexican- American minorities, joined with Negroes and white radicals in a Democratic alliance, will drive the majority constituency of traditional white Democrats into the G.O.P. Phillips sees California and “the heartland.” the 25 interior states, many of which are dominated by Southern immigration patterns, as the great electoral bastion of a Republicanism that is against aid to blacks, against aid to big cities and against the liberal life style it sees typified by purple glasses, beards, long hair, bralessness, pornography, coddling of criminals and moral permissiveness run riot.

This may also be the source of the DFH meme, but I digress.

Phillips helped to create this monster and it may be why he has turned on it. He predicted a Republican majority through 2004 with the embrace of this strategy and he was right. His error was that he (and others) thought that the Republicans could and would be able to control the racism they were embracing for political expediency. They could not. And now the Republican Party has been taken over by the Confederate Party. Phillips is horrified and he should be.

Michael Steele blurted this out to the students at DePaul University and in that moment joined the effort to help celebrate CHM with the light of truth. Thanks dude, you da man. I hope they let you keep your job forever.

Cheers, dengre

UPDATE: Post corrected by removing parenthetical remark that characterized Bruce Bartlett as a longtime crony and friend of Jack Abramoff. Bartlett emailed to inform me that he doesn’t even know Jack Abramoff.

The Wife particularly detests the ads that show someone fumbling a simple everyday task—like pouring milk—to improve the credibility of the "solution" being advertised. The fumbling is important, because the solutions are generally useless—mainly because the tasks do NOT cause problems for most people, only for the awkward incompetents in the ads. Someone has done a great service by collecting all the "before" parts of those ads:

Just as we all suspected, it was a deliberate obstruction of justice. Of course, they’re covered by the Obama decree that crimes committed in the past will not be prosecuted, except for the whistleblower who embarrassed NSA. That person will feel the full weight of the law. But torture, illegal imprisonment, murder, destroying evidence—that’s all okay with Obama and Holder. No problem.

Ed Brayton:

The ACLU released documents last week gained through a FOIA request the other that show clearly that the CIA deliberately destroyed interrogation tapes because they knew what the tapes showed was illegal and would cause great damage to the agency if released. The memos released show CIA officials discussing that fact and talking about how the tapes should be destroyed.

Marcy Wheeler, as always, has an incredibly thorough look at the documents released and has been analyzing them.

Ed Brayton:

The situation in Lower Merion schools outside Philadelphia is even more absurd than anyone imagined. The school’s own investigation has concluded that more than 56,000 pictures of students were snapped through laptop webcams.

Lower Merion School District employees activated the web cameras and tracking software on laptops they gave to high school students about 80 times in the past two school years, snapping nearly 56,000 images that included photos of students, pictures inside their homes and copies of the programs or files running on their screens, district investigators have concluded.

In most of the cases, technicians turned on the system after a student or staffer reported a laptop missing and turned it off when the machine was found, the investigators determined.

And there’s more:

But in at least five instances, school employees let the Web cams keep clicking for days or weeks after students found their missing laptops, according to the review. Those computers – programmed to snap a photo and capture a screen shot every 15 minutes when the machine was on – fired nearly 13,000 images back to the school district servers.

The data, given to The Inquirer on Monday by a school district lawyer, represents the most detailed account yet of how and when Lower Merion used the remote tracking system, a practice that has sparked a civil rights lawsuit, an FBI investigation and new federal legislation.

The district’s attorney, Henry Hockeimer, declined to describe in detail any of the recovered Web cam photos, or identify the people in them or their surroundings. He said none appeared to show "salacious or inappropriate" images but said that in no way justified the use of the program.

"The taking of these pictures without student consent in their homes was obviously wrong," Hockeimer said.

A federal magistrate judge is expected this week to begin the process of arranging for parents whose children were photographed to privately view the photos.

The fact that the school is admitting this publicly now after its own investigation and admitting it was wrong suggests to me that none of this happened intentionally or systematically. Now I imagine the school will reach some sort of consent decree and settlement with the families affected and hopefully fix the whole system.

Steve Benen:

Senate Republicans recently struggled to explain the propriety of GOP leaders Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) huddling with hedge fund managers and Wall Street elites, strategizing on how best to kill financial regulatory reform. But as bad as that looked, yesterday was arguably even uglier.

[Yesterday afternoon], President Obama traveled to New York to tell the nation’s most influential bankers to call off their "battalions of financial industry lobbyists" and embrace a new regulatory structure meant to avert another economic crisis. But around the same time back in Washington, D.C., bank lobbyists hosted a fundraiser for Senate Republicans, including Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who has become the Republican liaison for Wall Street fundraising.

The invitation to the fundraiser, obtained by the Party Time blog of the Sunlight Foundation, shows that the it was hosted by lobbyists Wendy Grubb, Kirsten Chadwick, Scott Reed, and a variety of corporate PACs. Grubb is a top lobbyist for Citigroup, a bank that took taxpayer TARP funds and has yet to repay them. Chadwick, a former staffer to Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO), is a lobbyist for Zurich Financial Group, a financial services conglomerate.

The event was held at the headquarters of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), and was ostensibly a fundraiser for Florida Sen. George LeMieux (R) — who isn’t seeking another term, and doesn’t really need to be raising money.

After the Sunlight Foundation obtained and posted the invitation to the gathering, a few outlets sent folks to cover the event. But senators, lobbyists, and assorted elites were not in a chatty mood — attendees refused to answer questions, and all but one of the senators decided to not even use the front door.

Evan McMorris-Santoro explained why they might have been embarrassed: "There’s nothing new about politicians in Washington having closed-press meetings with lobbyists. There’s not anything new about politicians fundraising at those meetings. But this event came at the exact moment Obama was taking on one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies — the financial industry — on its home turf…. [W]hile Obama took on lobbyists, the GOP fed them."

It’s not exactly surprising, but there is an impressive shameless quality to the whole thing.

I believe that the prohibition against images of Mohammed is strictly Sunni. The Shi’as don’t have a problem with it. Via Andrew Sullivan:

From the Center for American Progress in an email:

The military has rescinded its invitation to evangelist Franklin Graham for its upcoming National Day of Prayer, saying his past remarks about Islam were "not appropriate."

Graham, the son of famous evangelist Billy Graham, has thrown hateful rhetoric against Islam and once called it a "wicked and evil religion."

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an organization dedicated to "ensuring that all members" of the Armed Forces have their religious rights respected, called on the Pentagon to cancel the speech, citing his anti-Islamic remarks.

Appearing on Fox News yesterday, Graham affirmed the concerns of his critics, urging those "enslaved under Islam" to convert to Christianity because "they can be free by Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ alone." "They don’t have to die in a car bomb they don’t have to die in some kind of a holy war to be accepted by God," Graham added.

In a recent interview with the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn, Graham stood by his "evil religion" remarks, saying, "I never backed down from that. I never retracted from that."

The military "feared that if Graham spoke at the Pentagon, Islamic militants would publicize his comments, potentially fueling tensions in Muslim nations like Iraq and Afghanistan, where U.S. troops are deployed."

There are also an estimated that 3,409 Muslims actively serving in the U.S. military.

The bigots never seem to get that the US is a secular nation that welcomes all religions.

From the Center for American Progress in an email:

With national elections approaching on May 6, the United Kingdom hosted its first-ever prime ministerial TV debate last week, featuring Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the Labour Party, David Cameron of the Conservative Party, and Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats. Heading into the debate, the election was "considered too close to call" and "likely to be a two-horse race between Labour and the Conservatives." But Clegg, who offered himself "up as the fresh and honest alternative to two tired old parties," was the clear winner in the post-debate polls, instantly altering the dynamics of the race. Clegg’s debate performance and the subsequent surge in the polls for the Liberal Democrats has led some observers to compare him to President Obama and his rise in the 2008 campaign. The three leaders engaged in a second debate yesterday, in which Cameron and Brown both engaged Clegg more aggressively in an effort to stop what some have dubbed "Cleggmania." Though the Liberal Democrats are often labeled the "centrist party" in Britain, much of Clegg’s surge has been attributed to his steadfast advocacy for progressive policy positions.

Read the rest of this entry »

Watch it soon.

Kent shaving soap is Mitchell’s Wool Fat soap rebranded. The puck above is pretty dried out—I got this a few years ago as a spare, but haven’t used it. Still, I had no trouble at all in getting a very nice lather indeed, using the Lucretia Borgia synthetic bristle brush. The Mikron, with a Swedish Gillette blade that’s still going strong, did a fine job, and a splash of Stetson Classic was a fine finish.

Marine life had better evolve damn fast. Les Blumenthal for McClatchy:

With the oceans absorbing more than 1 million tons of carbon dioxide an hour, a National Research Council study released Thursday found that the level of acid in the oceans is increasing at an unprecedented rate and threatening to change marine ecosystems.

The council said the oceans were 30 percent more acidic than they were before the Industrial Revolution started roughly 200 years ago, and the oceans absorb one-third of today’s carbon dioxide emissions.

Unless emissions are reined in, ocean acidity could increase by 200 percent by the end of the century and even more in the next century, said James Barry, a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California and one of the study’s authors.

"Acidification is changing the chemistry of the oceans at a scale and magnitude greater than thought to occur on Earth for many millions of years and is expected to cause changes in the growth and survival of a wide variety of marine organisms, potentially leading to massive shifts in ocean ecosystems," Barry told the Senate Commerce Committee’s Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard Subcommittee on Thursday…

Continue reading.

Marian Wang at ProPublica:

The Wall Street Journal has a noteworthy investigation today, and one that I thought was worth flagging.

Essentially, it found the borrowers whose home mortgages were the underlying collateral in Goldman Sachs’ Abacus 2007-AC1 CDO deal. That’s the CDO that is now the subject of the SEC’s civil-fraud charges against Goldman Sachs.

Finding these homeowners could not have been an easy process. The Journal looked through the Abacus pitchbook and found the 90 bonds that were in the portfolio. Then it matched them with “court records, foreclosure listings, title records, and loan servicing reports” to find the 500,000 mortgages that ultimately, hedge fund manager John Paulson bet against.

But he wasn’t just betting against mortgages. He was betting specifically that those homeowners—or at least most of them—would not be able to pay their mortgages, resulting in losses significant enough to yield big profits through his credit default swap. And he turned out to be right. Many homeowners struggled to pay but couldn’t. Paulson, as a result, made $1 billion off his bet against them.

The Journal found that of the 500,000 mortgages bundled and stuffed into that one CDO, more than half of them are “now in default or foreclosed.” That’s a lot of stories bundled into one complex, failed financial product.

One of those homeowners was a 44-year-old heating and air-conditioning repairman who got into a motorcycle accident in 2006, was unable to find work, and couldn’t afford his mortgage payments. He lost the house to foreclosure in October and plans to move out of his house next week, reports the Journal. Other homeowners had risky loans with adjustable-rate mortgages, and when interest rates floated too high, borrowers couldn’t afford the payments.

Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people in 48 states had their homes and mortgages bundled into this financial product. The Journal’s work digs past the complexity of the CDO to show that those homeowners’ financial hardship resulted in gain for savvy financial players like Paulson. Paulson, for its part, makes no apologies for its bets, or the fact that it made a profit while others lost their homes. From the Journal:

“There’s no question we made money in these transactions,” said a Paulson spokesman in a statement. “However, all our dealings were through arms-length transactions with experienced counterparties who had opposing views based on all available information at the time. We were straightforward in our dislike of these securities but the vast majority of people in the market thought we were dead wrong and openly and aggressively purchased the securities we were selling.”

Goldman Sachs, which allowed Paulson to help select the CDO portfolio, maintains that it “did not structure a portfolio that was designed to lose money,” and argues that it “lost more than $90 million” on this particular Abacus CDO.

“We wouldn’t have put skin in the game that way if we believed there was something wrong with this transaction,” said Goldman Sachs’ general counsel, Gregory Palm, in a conference call with analysts earlier this week. But news reports point out that Goldman didn’t intend to put its “skin in the game” on this deal. Instead, it had sought buyers in order to offload its stake in the investment almost from the start.

"Profit above all" is the name of the game.

Turkey necks make excellent chili at the rate of 1 turkey neck to 1 qt chili. Today:

1 large onion, chopped

Sauté above in 2 Tbsp olive oil, 1 Tbsp habanero oil until onion begins to brown/caramelize.

Add:

5 cloves garlic, minced
meat from 3 cooked turkey necks*
1 Tbsp Mexican oregano, crushed
1.5 Tbsp Ancho chili powder
1.5 Tbsp ground cumin
2 tsp ground chipotle
Salt & pepper

(The spice measures are very approximate. I just add by sight.)

Continue to sauté for about 4-5 minutes, then add:

2 14.5-oz cans diced tomatoes (one can with chipotles, one with roasted garlic)
1 15-oz can black beans, drained and rinsed
1 15-oz can dark red kidney beans, drained and rinsed
good dash soy sauce
good dash Worcestershire sauce
dash liquid smoke, if you like

Bring to a boil, then simmer covered over very low heat for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

———————–

* To cook turkey necks: put in a large pot, filled with water to about 2″ above necks. Add spices—some star anise, whole allspice, whole cloves, peppercorns—and a large pinch of salt. Bring to boil, reduce heat, and simmer for three hours. Remove necks from water and, after they have cooled, strip the meat from the bones.

Of course, whenever you cook meat by simmering (whether turkey necks, beef tongue, whole chicken, or whatever), it’s good to include some aromatics in the cooking liquid: onion, carrot, celery, and parsley.

Kevin Hall and Chris Adams reporting for McClatchy:

A Senate panel investigating the causes of the nation’s financial crisis on Thursday unveiled evidence that credit-ratings agencies knowingly gave inflated ratings to complex deals backed by shaky U.S. mortgages because of the fees they earned for giving such investment-grade ratings.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will hold a detailed hearing on Friday, where its chairman, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., will introduce email records in which executives from Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investors Service acknowledge compromising the integrity of ratings in order to win business from big Wall Street firms.

"They did it for the big fees they got," Sen. Levin told reporters on Thursday after outlining the broad strokes of what he’d pursue Friday when he puts current and former ratings agency officials on the hot seat.

The documents to be released Friday confirm what a McClatchy investigation revealed last October _ that pressure from top ratings-agency executives to retain market share and the fees that brought meant that ratings on complex deals were malleable. Some fees were as high as $1.4 million.

The agencies rate the quality of financial products such as bonds and serve as guides trusted by investors. Many bonds they rated as top-quality in the recent crisis turned out to be junk. The fallout from their rollover to Wall Street’s financial firms was a housing collapse that triggered a global financial crisis.

In one example obtained by the committee, a Moody’s employee sent an email to …

Continue reading. Of course they would lie in the ratings if it would increase their profits. Without a second thought. If any experience any qualms, they no doubt justified their actions by the thought that the free market would fix any problems.

Typical of a business: Brad Johnson reports at ThinkProgress:

Coal baron Don Blankenship’s Massey Energy has prevented miners from attending funerals of the 29 victims of the killer explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, WV. Massey has taken steps to keep up the mining in the grief-stricken community. The “threat of job loss” from Massey’s non-union mines, “be it spoken or simply understood — has created a culture of fear in some corners of Southern West Virginia, where coal is the only real industry, and Massey is king of the hill”:

Massey Energy, the Virginia-based coal giant that runs the Upper Big Branch Mine, has denied time off for miners to attend their friends’ funerals; has rejected makeshift memorials outside the mine site; and, in at least one case, required a worker to go on shift even though the fate of a relative — one of the victims of the April 5 disaster — remained unknown at the time, according to some family members and other sources familiar with those episodes. In short, the company might be taking heat for putting profits and efficiency above its workers, but it doesn’t appear to have changed its tune in the wake of the worst mining tragedy in 40 years.

“They told my husband, ‘You’ve got a job to do and you’re gonna do it,’” the wife of one Massey miner told the Washington Independent’s Mike Lillis, referring to the funerals he’s missed this month for friends who died in the blast. “What else are we gonna do?”

UPDATE: Massey’s board has hired a politically influential Texas public relations firm to manage the increasing criticism for putting coal profits above principles.

From the top:

Pils, 4.0 oz

Futur, 4.3 oz

Vision, 4.4 oz

All weights include the blade. Based on my experience, I would love the Pils with a handle the same shape and diameter as the Futur. The waist of the Futur is at the point of balance (ditto for the Vision), which makes it easy to handle. The waist also provides a good grip regardless of the direction you’re shaving (with, across, and against the grain).

Any of these would be handle to hold with soapy hands, but wet hands (unsoapy) work fine.

The Futur and Vision are, of course, adjustable and the Pils is not: no biggie. I get a terrific shave with the Pils.

UPDATE: I guess we could call these razors the “Quarter Pounders.” The better of my two Apollo Mikrons (Mikroi?) is a “heavyweight” razor, and it runs just 3.3 oz (including blade). The Progress with a metal knob replacing the plastic is 3.4 ounces (with blade) and the Gillette Fat Boy is just barely 2.9 ounces (likewise)—the scale readout kept flicking between 2.8 and 2.9.

Glenn Greenwald:

For those who believe that there are certain types of hypocrisy and double standards too blatant and shameless even for the U.S. Government to invoke, I’d like to point out how wrong you are:

The Washington Post, today:

The Pakistani military is holding thousands of suspected militants in indefinite detention, arguing that the nation’s dysfunctional civilian justice system cannot be trusted to prevent them from walking free, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials. . . .

Top U.S. officials have raised concern about the detentions with Pakistani leaders, fearing that the issue could undermine American domestic and congressional support for the U.S.-backed counterinsurgency campaign in Pakistan and jeopardize billions of dollars in U.S. assistance.

Pakistani officials say that they are aware of the problem but that there is no clear solution: Pakistan has no applicable military justice system, and even civilian officials concede that their courts are not up to the task of handling such a large volume of complex terrorism cases. There is little forensic evidence in most cases, and witnesses are likely to be too scared to testify. . . .

The United States has not pushed for a specific solution but has encouraged Pakistan to begin handling the detainees within the law, U.S. officials said. . . . Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, an army spokesman, said the military is "extremely concerned" that the detainees will be allowed to go free if they are turned over to the civilian government. . . .

U.S. officials say they worry that the detentions will further inflame the Pakistani public at a time when the government here needs popular support for its offensives.

"They’re treating the local population with a heavy hand, and they’re alienating them," said an Obama administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. "As a result, it’s sort of a classic case going back to Vietnam; it [risks] actually creating more sympathy for the extremists."

NPR, June 26, 2009:

Ever since President Obama proposed holding terrorism detainees without trial, the debate over preventive detention has been growing. Now, NPR has the first look at a detailed legislative proposal to hold detainees indefinitely. . . . In a speech last month at the National Archives, President Obama opened the door to the possibility that some terrorism detainees will neither be tried nor released.

New York Times, May 22, 2009:

President Obama’s proposal for a new legal system in which terrorism suspects could be held in "prolonged detention" inside the United States without trial would be a departure from the way this country sees itself . . .

Mr. Obama chose to call his proposal "prolonged detention," which made it sound more reassuring than some of its more familiar names. In some countries, it is called "administrative detention," a designation with a slightly totalitarian ring. Some of its proponents call it "indefinite detention," which evokes the Bush administration’s position that Guantánamo detainees could be held until the end of the war on terror — perhaps for the rest of their lives — even if acquitted in war crimes trials.

Associated Press, February 20, 2009:

The Obama administration, siding with the Bush White House, contended Friday that detainees in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights.  In a two-sentence court filing, the Justice Department said it agreed that detainees at Bagram Airfield cannot use U.S. courts to challenge their detention. The filing shocked human rights attorneys.

New York Times, April 10, 2009:

The Obama administration said Friday that it would appeal a district court ruling that granted some military prisoners in Afghanistan the right to file lawsuits seeking their release. The decision signaled that the administration was not backing down in its effort to maintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight.

New York Times Editorial, January 17, 2010:

We keep waiting — in vain — for the Obama administration to stop trying to block judicial scrutiny of some of the Bush administration’s most outrageous policies on the detention of prisoners.

Most recently, Neal Katyal, a deputy solicitor general, tried to persuade a three-judge federal appeals court panel to deny hearings to a group of prisoners who have been held under harsh conditions without adequate review for more than six years. Their prison — at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan — is a much larger version of the Guantánamo Bay prison that President Obama has ordered closed.

The Washington Post, January 22, 2010:

A Justice Department-led task force has concluded that nearly 50 of the 196 detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should be held indefinitely without trial under the laws of war, according to Obama administration officials.

The task force’s findings represent the first time that the administration has clarified how many detainees it considers too dangerous to release but unprosecutable because officials fear trials could compromise intelligence-gathering and because detainees could challenge evidence obtained through coercion.

LA Times, March 21, 2010:

The White House is considering whether to detain international terrorism suspects at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, senior U.S. officials said, an option that would lead to another prison with the same purpose as Guantanamo Bay, which it has promised to close. . . . [A]ny suspected terrorist held inside the U.S. would probably have the right to challenge his detention in federal courts. Bagram, for now, is outside the reach of U.S. courts.

Let’s teach those Pakistanis that we’re not going to tolerate their lawless and tyrannical detention of people without charges and trials.  We won’t put up with it.  Especially not when it’s "justified" with the Orwellian claim that their real civilian courts can’t handle the prosecutions and they’re "afraid" that Dangerous Terrorists might be released if they give them due process because they’re unprosecutable.  Kudos to the Obama administration for teaching them that countries that live under the Rule of Law simply don’t deny people trials based on such excuses.  It’d be one thing if they were assassinating these people without any charges or trials — that, of course, would be understandable — but not detaining them.  We’re the Leader of the Free World and we simply can’t be seen associating with or supporting regimes that would do such a thing.  Besides, unlike the U.S., it’s not like Pakistan really faces an Existential Threat from Islamic radicals or anything, so (unlike us) they really have no acceptable excuse for doing these things.

UPDATE:  In related news, The New York Times Editorial Page today excoriates those tyrannical Iranians for holding, without trials, 3 American hikers who crossed into Iran and who are accused of spying (h/t Chris Dowd).  And the NYT today also reports that U.S. officials are demanding that Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki investigate a now-closed, undisclosed secret prison in Baghdad where Sunnis were held without charges and tortured; Look Backward!, we demand, and impose accountability for such heinous crimes! (h/t GlennNYC).

I wonder whether the Pakistani or Iranian government also targets individual citizens for execution without trial, just on their leader’s say-so. It would be odd indeed if the Obama Administration condemned other governments for extra-judicial executions.

Interesting interview by Tom Ricks of Geoffrey Wawro about his new book Quicksand:

A few months ago historian Geoffrey Wawro and I did a panel discussion together for a group of documentarians specializing in military history. He mentioned then that he had a new history of the American experience in the Middle East being published soon, and now it is out. It is called Quicksand.

Yesterday I interviewed him by e-mail.  

Best Defense: What are the essential facts that Americans don’t understand about the Middle East?

Geoffrey Wawro: Americans look at the Middle East through the lens of terrorism. This is analogous to the Cold War tendency to view the Middle East as a place under perpetual threat from Communism. In fact, most Middle Eastern peoples detest terrorism, and their security services are committed to its destruction. Unfortunately, states like Iran, Syria, Libya and Iraq under Saddam play a double game. Although frightened by terrorist extremism, they succor groups that they can wield tactically against their enemies, chiefly Israel. In the event of a U.S. war with Iran, those groups — like Hezbollah — would be unleashed against Americans and U.S. interests as well. What this means for Americans, is that we must proceed delicately. It is foolhardy to imagine we can "rid the world of terrorism," if only because terror attacks are an asymmetric weapon wielded by weaker states against stronger ones. Syria is certainly a "terrorist state" in the sense that it gives cover to anti-Israeli terrorist groups — which Damascus regards as no more objectionable than Israeli F-16s — but it is also a country that we can do business with, solidifying gains in Iraq, managing Lebanon and the Kurds, and fighting al-Qaeda. This complexity, with its strong odor of amorality, exasperates Americans, but is an ineradicable piece of the Middle Eastern landscape, of the "quicksand" I describe in my new book.

BD: What do you think of the Obama Administration’s handling of the Iran situation? …

Continue reading.

The problems continue to mount. As I think about it, the root cause seems (to me) to be the highly authoritarian and hierarchical structure of the Catholic church, which emphasizes unquestioning obedience—not a good direction for people to go, and noticeably absent in the original church (Jesus and his followers). Certainly Jesus was the teacher, but there seems to have been much discussion and relatively little in the way of hierarchical structure: it was Jesus as leader and teacher, but the followers were equal.

The hierarchy and the authoritarianism were probably the result of the political structures of the time, but once those things start, those who have power in the structure exert themselves continually to maintain and increase that power until you get the rigid and unyielding structure you see in the Vatican.

Modern times, with what we’ve seen in history and have learned about people and power, supports a more egalitarian structure: flatter, with fewer levels, and a lot more individual initiative and responsibility. This started with the Protestant Reformation and has continued since, with the rise of modern democracies.

Obviously, though, in any structure those who have power generally resist change (lest they lose their power) and try to gain more power, and corrective actions will always be needed. Free and honest elections are a way to introduce that change that is less disruptive than previous methods (generally: bloody revolution).

I doubt that the Catholic church will be able to embrace the change that’s needed, including less emphasis on obedience and more on thinking, and putting all people (regardless of race, height, and whether gay or straight, male or female) on the same level. For one thing, the Catholic church embraced "unchanging teachings" regardless of new developments, and that doesn’t work so well: the world is a changing place. Sometimes the church crawls down from its position (it did finally recognize that it was wrong about Galileo, though it took some hundreds of years), but generally they endure regardless—so that, for example, they still condemn the use of condoms regardless of the HIV epidemic—pretty merciless, when you think about it.