Later On

Marian Wang at ProPublica:

The federal agency that administers Medicare and Medicaid contributed to gaps in a national database of disciplined health care providers when it failed to report disciplinary actions as required by law, a new investigation found.

Significant gaps in the decades-old database came to light earlier this year when ProPublica found that many states hadn’t been reporting disciplinary actions taken against doctors, nurses, therapists and other health practitioners as required.

But the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a federal agency that’s part of the Department of Health and Human Services, essentially undermined its own department’s efforts to manage and maintain the federal database.

The new investigation was conducted by the department’s inspector general. It found that CMS, which oversees health care programs serving about 45 million Medicare beneficiaries and 59 million Medicaid beneficiaries, took disciplinary action against numerous bad medical providers but did not report those actions to the Healthcare Integrity and Protection Data Bank.

The database is meant to help hospitals and other entities make informed hiring decisions, and to prevent incompetent, fraudulent, or abusive medical providers from crossing state lines to continue practicing and putting patients at risk. But as we’ve reported, the database is riddled with gaps, and many states have also failed to report.

Because the sanctions that went unreported by CMS often involved institutions such as nursing homes and laboratories, the repercussions of this missing data may be less serious compared to the data that went unreported by states. Unlike individual practitioners, they’re less able to move across state lines and set up shop elsewhere.

CMS is required by law to report the following types of disciplinary action to the database: revocations and suspensions of laboratory certifications; terminations of providers from participation in Medicare; civil monetary penalties against all types of providers, managed care plans, and prescription drug plans.

Some of the data that should’ve been reported includes 148 sanctions imposed against laboratories in 2007 and 30 sanctions taken against managed care and prescription drug plans between January 2006 and July 31, 2009. From 2004 to 2008, the agency banned 45 nursing homes from participating in Medicare, and those actions were not reported until fall 2009, long after the required reporting timeframe, the inspector general’s office said.

One CMS division —responsible for tracking and reporting actions against Medicare-certified providers—didn’t report a single action between 2001 and 2008.

Officials from the agency wrongly believed “that only adverse actions related to fraud and abuse should be reported to the HIPDB,”the inspector general’s office found.

CMS acknowledged the lapse in a written response to the inspector general’s office. The agency said it will work on reducing the extent of manual reporting and building the necessary infrastructure to meet reporting requirements in the future.

Via Open Culture by Dan Colman, who notes:

From the makers of Wallace and Gromit comes the smallest stop-motion animation ever. The lilliputian main character, aptly named Dot, stands a mere 0.35-inch-tall. According to Popular Science, the animators “used a 3D printer to make 50 different versions of Dot, because she is too small to manipulate or bend like they would other stop-motion animation characters.” Then each print-up was hand-painted by artists looking through a microscope. Once the set and characters were ready to go, the directors attached a CellScope (a cellphone camera with a 50x magnification microscope) to a Nokia N8 and let the cameras roll. You can watch the final cut above.

via Popular Science

I ordered a couple of different mixes from meandgoji.com, and today they came. I’ll have to pick up some milk, and tomorrow I’ll report on one of them.

Mass customization meets the breakfast market.

15 minutes on the Nordic Track ski machine, in accordance with TYD’s suggestion to hold off until the weekend for advances in duration.

In fact, I doubt that I would have got on save that this monitor goes back at noon, and I certainly wanted to subject my exercise to monitoring.

Obama is a mystery to me. How can such hard-right, repressive, authoritarian if not totalitarian attitudes co-exist with his more progressive side? Marci Wheeler discusses the latest outrage:

The government appealed its loss in the habeas petition of Mohamedou Ould Salahi Friday.

It’s worth reviewing what this appeal is about. At the District level, Judge James Robertson ruled that while Salahi had clearly been an al Qaeda sympathizer and, before al Qaeda declared war on the US had been a sworn member of al Qaeda, the government had presented no admissible evidence (the most damning evidence submitted was gotten by torturing Salahi) that he was working under the orders of al Qaeda when they detained him in 2001.

His ruling is important–and damaging for the government’s hopes to indefinitely detain those who it can’t charge–for two reasons. First, because he hewed very closely to the terms of the AUMF.

If the government has any authority to detain Salahi without charging him with a crime, its source is the Authorization for Use of Military Force, Pub. L. 107-04, 115 Stat. 224 (2001).

“The President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” Authorization for Use of Military Force, Pub. L. 107-04, 115 Stat. 224 (2001).

That purpose, the “prevent [ion of] any future acts of international terrorism,” has the Supreme Court’s seal of approval, see Boumediene, 128 S.Ct. at 2277 (“The law must accord the Executive substantial authority to apprehend and detain those who pose a real danger to our security.”) those who, as the government argued in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 124 S.Ct. 2633, 2639 (2004), were “part of or supporting forces hostile to the United States or coalition partners . . and who engaged in an armed conflict against the United States.” (internal quotations omitted) .

And based on the AUMF’s reference to those who attacked us on 9/11, Robertson ruled that a suspicion that Salahi might one day return to al Qaeda–even if he had not been part of al Qaeda in 2001 when it attacked the US and had not taken up hostilities against the US–was not enough to detain him indefinitely.

The government’s problem is that its proof that Salahi gave material support to terrorists is so attenuated, or so tainted by coercion and mistreatment, or so classified, that it cannot support a successful criminal prosecution. Nevertheless, the government wants to hold Salahi indefinitely, because of its concern that he might renew his oath to al-Qaida and become a terrorist upon his release. That concern may indeed be well-founded. Salahi fought with al-Qaida in Afghanistan (twenty years ago) , associated with at least a half-dozen known al-Qaida members and terrorists, and somehow found and lived among or with al-Qaida cell members in Montreal. But a habeas court may not permit a man to be held indefinitely upon suspicion, or because of the government’s prediction that he may do unlawful acts in the future -any more than a habeas court may rely upon its prediction that a man will not be dangerous in the future and order his release if he was lawfully detained in the first place. The question, upon which the government had the burden of proof, was whether, at the time of his capture, Salahi was a “part of” al-Qaida. On the record before me, I cannot find that he was. [emphasis original]

And of course, given that both sides admit much of the evidence is inadmissible because it was coerced, this raises questions of what happens to those we’re holding because they incriminated themselves under coercion.

And when are we going to prosecute those lamebrain f**kwits who totally destroyed our ability to prosecute malefactors—and in the process committed war crimes? Answer: Never, if Obama has his way.

Prairie Creations is a vendor is new to me, but some guys over at DamnFineShave.com think highly of the product. I like how you get to choose (tallow or tallow+lanolin; scented, essential oils, or unscented; soap, cream, or shave stick). Take a look. She also sells aftershave balm, lip balm, exfoliating scrubs, etc.

Amanda Enayati in Salon.com:

In the first 24 hours after someone broke into my car in my own driveway, I was mostly mad at my husband. Who leaves a backpack with a BlackBerry and a wallet full of cash and credit cards in the car overnight, with a GPS visible on the dashboard and the freaking car doors unlocked? We might as well have hung a sign on the door that read:Suckers live here. Welcome!

The day before had been magical — a beautiful, warm, sunny fall Sunday in San Francisco. We lingered in the city too long but still had to buy groceries on our way home from an exhibit of watercolors and drawings from "Where the Wild Things Are." As we pulled into our driveway, I said to my husband, "I’ll run in and start dinner. You bring in the bags." And that’s the last thing I remember. The next morning, the glove compartment was open, papers hanging out. The GPS was gone.

I canceled four credit cards and ordered a new BlackBerry before I thought to check Craigslist. I didn’t know what I’d find, but it occurred to me that pawn shops were the domain of desperate crackheads and that the savvy modern thief would hock stolen wares online. I did a search in a 40-mile radius of my neighborhood. My GPS was the first thing that popped up.

To be honest, I wasn’t certain that Garmin Nuvi 265w was my GPS; I didn’t remember the model number. For all I knew this was some poor schmuck who’d fallen on hard times trying to get a little cash. Still, it was awfully suspicious. It was the only Garmin on Craigslist that morning. And the entire ad was written in capital letters, as if that particular seller were jumping up and down, trying to get my attention.

My hands shook as I tapped out what I hoped was a casual e-mail query: "Hi!! I could TOTALLY use a GPS. Is this one still available? Where are you located? Thanks!!! Jasmine." . . .

Continue reading.

Absolutely excellent post: "A guide to the technology for keeping government accountable".

Bookmark this one. It’s at Reason.com and written by Radley Balko. It begins:

This summer the issue of recording on-duty police officers has received a great deal of media attention. Camera-wielding citizens were arrested in Maryland, Illinois, and Massachusetts under interpretations of state wiretapping laws, while others were arrested in New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon, Florida, and elsewhere based on vaguer charges related to obstructing or interfering with a police officer.

So far Massachusetts is the only state to explicitly uphold a conviction for recording on-duty cops, and Illinois and Massachusetts are the only states where it is clearly illegal. The Illinois law has yet to be considered by the state’s Supreme Court, while the Massachusetts law has yet to be upheld by a federal appeals court. Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler recently issued an opinion concluding that arrests for recording cops are based on a misreading of the state’s wiretapping statute, but that opinion isn’t binding on local prosecutors.

In the remaining 47 states, the law is clearer: It is generally legal to record the police, as long as you don’t physically interfere with them. You may be unfairly harassed, questioned, or even arrested, but it’s unlikely you will be charged, much less convicted. (These are general observations and should not be treated as legal advice.)

One reason this issue has heated up recently is that the democratization of technology has made it easier than ever for just about anyone to pull out a camera and quickly document an encounter with police. So what’s the best way to record cops? Here is a quick rundown of the technology that’s out there.

Cameras without wireless networking capabilities are the least attractive option. If they are destroyed or confiscated, you have probably lost the damning video you just recorded, including the video documenting how your camera was confiscated or destroyed. But provided you can hold on to your camera, digital video recorders today are inexpensive, small, and wonderfully practical. The best-known everyday, easy-to-use brand right now is probably the Flip Video line, which start at $149. Even the cheapest Flips fit in your pocket, power up in about three seconds, and feature one-button recording. They are also easy to use. They include a built-in USB port and instant formatting for sites such as LiveLeak and YouTube.

Kodak has a pocket video camera for $100, and Amazon list a couple dozen different flash-memory cameras for under $50. Still too expensive? For $20, this camera sold at USBGeek is shorter than a stick of gum and shoots 640×480 video at 30 frames per second. It has a memory slot to hold up to 32GB of memory and a two-hour battery life. Or try this keychain camera. It’s tiny, has the advantage of not looking much like a camera, shoots 720×480 video at 30 frames per second, and sells for all of $12 (with free shipping) at Meritline.com.

Last year’s demonstrations in Iran and the 2009 police shooting of Oscar Grant on a subway platform in Oakland, California were very public incidents, with dozens of cell phones taking photos and video as they happened. Authorities could not possibly have confiscated every phone camera (although in both cases they tried). But in other cases, police confiscate cameras, and when they are returned the potentially incriminating video or photos are gone. But technology is helping there too…

Continue reading.

Another synthetic brush, this one made by Taylor of Old Bond Street, and like the other synthetics that I own, this one is “artificial badger”—a bristle that mimics quite well the action of a badger-bristle brush.

And, continuing the lime and bay rum series, the Castle Forbes Lime gave its usual great lather—and the TOBS brush was totally satisfactory. The Feather premium razor with a Feather blade provided a very smooth shave, and a splash of Ogallala Bay Rum was a fine finish.

I can’t shower wearing the heart monitor, but I’ll be damned if I go out without shaving. I was thinking of that, and realized that it was also important to me to post my shave of the day: I now have a public, however small it is, and I have an obligation to them.

I’m watching an intriguing documentary: Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037. It’s available via Netflix Watch Instantly. One intriguing thing is the brief scenes with famous pianists, who have stopped by Steinway & Sons to pick out a piano.

It made me recall the absolutely wonderful Men, Women, and Pianos: A Social History, by Arthur Loesser. Highly recommended.

I’ve mentioned this before—it’s highly recommended by James Fallows, and I think would be incredibly useful to any student or any other person who takes notes of meetings. Clive Thompson reports in the NY Times Magazine:

In the spring, Cincia Dervishaj was struggling with a take-home math quiz. It was testing her knowledge of exponential notation — translating numbers like “3.87 x 102” into a regular form. Dervishaj is a 13-year-old student at St. John’s Lutheran School in Staten Island, and like many students grappling with exponents, she got confused about where to place the decimal point. “I didn’t get them at all,” Dervishaj told me in June when I visited her math class, which was crowded with four-year-old Dell computers, plastic posters of geometry formulas and a big bowl of Lego bricks.

To refresh her memory, Dervishaj pulled out her math notebook. But her class notes were not great: she had copied several sample problems but hadn’t written a clear explanation of how exponents work.

She didn’t need to. Dervishaj’s entire grade 7 math class has been outfitted with “smart pens” made by Livescribe, a start-up based in Oakland, Calif. The pens perform an interesting trick: when Dervishaj and her classmates write in their notebooks, the pen records audio of whatever is going on around it and links the audio to the handwritten words. If her written notes are inadequate, she can tap the pen on a sentence or word, and the pen plays what the teacher was saying at that precise point.

Dervishaj showed me how it works, flipping to her page of notes on exponents and tapping a set of numbers in the middle of the page. Out of a tiny speaker in the thick, cigar-shaped pen, I could hear her teacher, Brian Licata, explaining that precise problem. “It’s like having your own little personal teacher there, with you at all times,” Dervishaj said.

Having a pen that listens, the students told me, has changed the class in curious ways. Some found the pens make class less stressful; because they don’t need to worry about missing something, they feel freer to listen to what Licata says. When they do take notes, the pen alters their writing style: instead of verbatim snippets of Licata’s instructions, they can write “key words” — essentially little handwritten tags that let them quickly locate a crucial moment in the audio stream. Licata himself uses a Livescribe pen to provide the students with extra lessons. Sitting at home, he’ll draw out a complicated math problem while describing out loud how to solve it. Then he’ll upload the result to a class Web site. There his students will see Licata’s handwriting slowly fill the page while hearing his voice explaining what’s going on. If students have trouble remembering how to tackle that type of problem, these little videos — “pencasts” — are online 24 hours a day. All the students I spoke to said they watch them.

LIKE MOST PIECES of classroom technology, the pens cause plenty of digital-age hassles. They can crash. The software for loading students’ notes onto their computers or from there onto the Web can be finicky. And the pens work only with special notepaper that enables the pen to track where it’s writing; regular paper doesn’t work. (Most students buy notepads from Livescribe, though it’s possible to print the paper on a color printer.) There are also some unusual social side-effects. The presence of so many recording devices in the classroom creates a sort of panopticon — or panaudiocon, as it were. Dervishaj has found herself whispering to her seatmate, only to realize the pen was on, “so we’re like, whoa!” — their gossip has been recorded alongside her notes. Although you can pause a recording, there’s currently no way to selectively delete a few seconds of audio from the pen, so she’s forced to make a decision: Delete all the audio for that lesson, or keep it in and hope nobody else ever hears her private chatter. She usually deletes.

Nonetheless, Licata is a convert. As the students started working quietly on review problems, their pens making tiny “boop” noises as the students began or paused their recording, Licata pulled me aside to say the pens had “transformed” his class. Compact and bristling with energy, Licata is a self-professed geek; in his 10 years of teaching, he has seen plenty of classroom gadgets come and go, from Web-based collaboration software to pricey whiteboards that let children play with geometric figures the way they’d manipulate an iPhone screen. Most of these gewgaws don’t impress him. “Two or three times a year teachers whip out some new technology and use it, but it doesn’t do anything better and it’s never seen again,” he said.

But this time, he said, was different. This is because the pen is based on an age-old classroom technique that requires no learning curve: pen-and-paper writing. Livescribe first released the pen in 2008; Licata encountered it when a colleague brought his own to work. Intrigued, he persuaded Livescribe to donate 20 pens to the school to outfit his entire class. (The pens sell for around $129.) “I’ve made more gains with this class this year than I’ve made with any class,” he told me. In his evenings, Licata is pursuing a master’s degree in education; separately, he intends to study how the smart pens might affect the way students learn, write and think. “Two years ago I would have told you that note-taking is a lost art, that handwriting was a lost art,” he said. “But now I think handwriting is crucial.”

TAKING NOTES HAS long posed a challenge in education. Decades of research has found a strong correlation between good notes and good grades: the more detailed and accurate your notes, the better you do in school. That’s partly because the act of taking notes forces you to pay closer attention. But what’s more important, according to some researchers, is that good notes provide a record: most of the benefits from notes come not from taking them but from reviewing them, because no matter how closely we pay attention, we forget things soon after we leave class. “We have feeble memories,” says Ken Kiewra, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Nebraska and one of the world’s leading researchers into note-taking.

Yet most students are very bad at taking notes…

Continue reading.

From the Center for American Progress in an email:

Last week, the U.S. Census Bureau released its Current Population Survey, documenting the American population’s access to health insurance and family economic well-being. One stunning fact revealed by the new Census data was that "the ranks of the American poor soared to their highest level in a half a century" and that nearly "44 million Americans — one in seven — lived last year in homes in which the income was below the poverty level, which is about $22,000 for a family of four. While this is the largest number of people since the Census began tracking poverty 51 years ago," this figure would have been much larger without the economic policies pursued by Congress and the administration. The data is sobering to a national discourse that often omits the poor. Yet, it also points towards continued action to bring the unemployment rate down and boost demand. The country must continue successful policy initiatives that have kept millions out of poverty thus far, such as the Recovery Act, and pursue additional policies aimed at addressing the alarming fact that the world’s richest country now has more people in poverty than ever before.

THE SHAME OF A NATION: The Census Bureau data finds that a shocking number of Americans are now officially classified as living in poverty. In 2009, roughly "4 million Americans  fell into poverty," with a total of 43.6 million people meeting the income qualifications to be described as impoverished. The data also found that one in four African-Americans is in poverty, and that women are also particularly hurting. An analysis by the National Women’s Law Center of the Census numbers found that the poverty rate for women rose to 13.9 percent last year, compared to 10.5 percent among men. Additionally, poverty rates "were substantially higher for women of color, approaching one in four among African-American women (24.6 percent compared to 23.3 percent in 2008); Hispanic women experienced a similar increase from 22.3 percent in 2008 to 23.8 percent last year." Geographically, southern and rural states tended to have the most poverty, with Mississippi faring the worst with 23.1 percent of people in poverty, with New Hampshire having only 7.8 percent.

GOOD POLICIES KEEPING PEOPLE AFLOAT: While the poverty numbers are shamefully high given the wealth of a rich nation like the United States, a number of progressive policies have served to keep millions more Americans from falling into poverty. After being passed in early 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) — commonly referred to as the stimulus — saved or created 1.4 million to 3.3 million jobs, according to analysis by the Congressional Budget Office. Additionally, the expansion of tax credits like the Child Tax Credit (CTC), Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and Making Work Pay tax credit, along with additional food stamp assistance and emergency unemployment compensation kept more than 6 million Americans out of poverty, according to data provided by the Census Bureau. Expanding and extending unemployment insurance — which faced enormous opposition from conservative pundits and politicians — alone kept 3.3 million Americans out of poverty.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m wearing one of these. The doctor will charge me half price ($300) if the insurance company refuses to pay the $600 they charge for the test.

Note that the entire unit, when new, cost $1995.

It’s not yet clear to me whether the $300 includes the physician’s analysis of the data, in which case, fine. But if they want to charge me $300 just for wearing a $1995 unit for 24 hours, I think we’re going to have to talk.

Here’s how.

Krugman:

Anger is sweeping America. True, this white-hot rage is a minority phenomenon, not something that characterizes most of our fellow citizens. But the angry minority is angry indeed, consisting of people who feel that things to which they are entitled are being taken away. And they’re out for revenge.

No, I’m not talking about the Tea Partiers. I’m talking about the rich.

These are terrible times for many people in this country. Poverty, especially acute poverty, has soared in the economic slump; millions of people have lost their homes. Young people can’t find jobs; laid-off 50-somethings fear that they’ll never work again.

Yet if you want to find real political rage — the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason — you won’t find it among these suffering Americans. You’ll find it instead among the very privileged, people who don’t have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.

The rage of the rich has been building ever since Mr. Obama took office. At first, however, it was largely confined to Wall Street. Thus when New York magazine published an article titled “The Wail Of the 1%,” it was talking about financial wheeler-dealers whose firms had been bailed out with taxpayer funds, but were furious at suggestions that the price of these bailouts should include temporary limits on bonuses. When the billionaire Stephen Schwarzman compared an Obama proposal to the Nazi invasion of Poland, the proposal in question would have closed a tax loophole that specifically benefits fund managers like him.

Now, however, as decision time looms for the fate of the Bush tax cuts — will top tax rates go back to Clinton-era levels? — the rage of the rich has broadened, and also in some ways changed its character.

For one thing, craziness has gone mainstream. It’s one thing when a billionaire rants at a dinner event. It’s another when Forbes magazine runs a cover story alleging that the president of the United States is deliberately trying to bring America down as part of his Kenyan, “anticolonialist” agenda, that “the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s.” When it comes to defending the interests of the rich, it seems, the normal rules of civilized (and rational) discourse no longer apply.

At the same time, self-pity among the privileged has become acceptable, even fashionable.

Tax-cut advocates used to pretend that they were mainly concerned about helping typical American families. Even tax breaks for the rich were justified in terms of trickle-down economics, the claim that lower taxes at the top would make the economy stronger for everyone.

These days, however, tax-cutters are hardly even trying to make the trickle-down case. Yes, Republicans are pushing the line that raising taxes at the top would hurt small businesses, but their hearts don’t really seem in it. Instead, it has become common to hear vehement denials that people making $400,000 or $500,000 a year are rich. I mean, look at the expenses of people in that income class — the property taxes they have to pay on their expensive houses, the cost of sending their kids to elite private schools, and so on. Why, they can barely make ends meet.

And among the undeniably rich, a belligerent sense of entitlement has taken hold: it’s their money, and they have the right to keep it. “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes — but that was a long time ago.

The spectacle of high-income Americans, the world’s luckiest people, wallowing in self-pity and self-righteousness would be funny, except for one thing: they may well get their way. Never mind the $700 billion price tag for extending the high-end tax breaks: virtually all Republicans and some Democrats are rushing to the aid of the oppressed affluent.

You see, the rich are different from you and me: they have more influence. It’s partly a matter of campaign contributions, but it’s also a matter of social pressure, since politicians spend a lot of time hanging out with the wealthy. So when the rich face the prospect of paying an extra 3 or 4 percent of their income in taxes, politicians feel their pain — feel it much more acutely, it’s clear, than they feel the pain of families who are losing their jobs, their houses, and their hopes.

And when the tax fight is over, one way or another, you can be sure that the people currently defending the incomes of the elite will go back to demanding cuts in Social Security and aid to the unemployed. America must make hard choices, they’ll say; we all have to be willing to make sacrifices.

But when they say “we,” they mean “you.” Sacrifice is for the little people.

John Cole at Balloon Juice:

This NY Times piece is quite frightening:

Patricia Reid is not in her 70s, an age when many Americans continue to work. She is not even in her 60s. She is just 57.

But four years after losing her job she cannot, in her darkest moments, escape a nagging thought: she may never work again.

College educated, with a degree in business administration, she is experienced, having worked for two decades as an internal auditor and analyst at Boeing before losing that job.

But that does not seem to matter, not for her and not for a growing number of people in their 50s and 60s who desperately want or need to work to pay for retirement and who are starting to worry that they may be discarded from the work force — forever.

Since the economic collapse, there are not enough jobs being created for the population as a whole, much less for those in the twilight of their careers.

Of the 14.9 million unemployed, more than 2.2 million are 55 or older. Nearly half of them have been unemployed six months or longer, according to the Labor Department. The unemployment rate in the group — 7.3 percent — is at a record, more than double what it was at the beginning of the latest recession.

It really is just enough to make your blood boil. Millions of Americans like Patricia did what they were supposed to do. They worked their whole lives, were dedicated to a company, they lived within their means (as she must have, because she has been unemployed for years and is still in her home), and because of the economic downturn brought on by unprecedented greed of the FIRE crowd, she may spend the rest of her life barely making it, if she is lucky. There will never be enough job creation in the short term (3-5 years) to soak up all the people like her. Hell, the way things look, we may be at 10 percent unemployment forever.

Meanwhile, we’ve got a bunch of over-privileged whiny-ass titty babies bitching about their bonuses, and the Republicans, the glibertarians, and the blue dogs, all think the people who matter are the bonus babies. Not Patricia Reid. Meanwhile, that same crew of creeps is doing everything they can to extend tax cuts for the very rich while cutting large holes in the safety net that would protect her. It really is this simple- the Republican and glibertarian world view is that Donald Trump needs a tax cut, and Patricia Reid needs to wait until she is 68 or 70 to collect social security- at a reduced rate, because we “can’t afford it.”

I linked to a couple of specific posts recently, but the blog is worth an RSS subscription: Bruce on Shaving, whose current lead article is a very interesting piece on the St. Petersburg razor industry. Check it out.

I’ve added the blog to my shaving links at the right.

I fell into a discussion of shave sticks on DamnFineShave.com and that motivated me to take a break from the lime/bay rum series for my Monday shave: a two-day stubble is perfect for a shave stick.

The discussion did illuminate one point for me: some men—particularly men who are just beginning to shave—have beards too sparse or soft to scrape soap from the shave stick, so for these a shave stick is simply an exercise in frustration. These guys often grate the shave stick and tamp the moistened gratings into a puck.

The Rooney 2 worked up a terrific lather, and the Slant with an aging Astra Superior Platinum blade did a good job—but I’ve now replaced the blade: not quite good enough.

A splash of TOBS Mr. Sidney’s aftershave—very pleasant, old-timey fragrance—and I’m good to go.

Better Off Ted starts promisingly for those who have worked in modern corporations.

Monarchy: Series 1 (UK Version) and Monarchy: Series 2 (UK Version) look quite good—I’ve just begun at the beginning.

Not available on Watch Instantly, but pretty good: Macao, with a very young Robert Mitchum and Jane Russel, both of whom were strikingly beautiful at the time. This movie forced me into the manual for the DVD player: the picture was stretched across the wide screen of the TV, and I was certain I had set to stick with the format of the original. I waded through the menus and found the setting: choices of “Original” or “Fixed”. The print explained that “original” used the original format and “fixed” made sure everything filled the wide screen regardless of original format.

One choice was black letters on white background, the other white letters on a  black background. You could toggle the choice by using the up or down arrow. The question was: Which one is chosen? No indication at all. So I just toggled it (the colors of each choice reversed), clicked “okay”, and tried again. The DVD restarted, but it was in the correct aspect ratio, and it was suddenly quite clear that Jane Russel was NOT dumpy at the time.

Interface designers: if you’re presenting only two choices, it must be obvious which choice is “chosen”.

UPDATE: Macao was definitely worth watching. Made in 1952, when Robert Mitchum was 35 and Jane Russell was 31—I think that they look so astonishingly young because we are now accustomed to seeing them when they were older. And Jane Russell did a fine job on “One For My Baby, One More For The Road.”

This recipe looks good (also easy), though I would normally make up 2 cups of beans rather than 1 (i.e., use an entire 1-lb package).