Later On

People are now looking for HFCS in the list of ingredients and not buying products containing it (rice vinegar, for example).

Businesses, in my experience, will always take more or less the same step when confronted with a serious problem—characterized metaphorically by the needle going into the red zone. Businesses, in seeing that, will universally solve the problem by bending the needle so that it still points to green.

So, given the public displeasure with HFCS, what will businesses do? Find a new name, of course. Tara Parker-Pope writes in the NY Times (and thanks to TYD for pointing out the article):

The Corn Refiners Association, which represents firms that make high-fructose corn syrup, has been trying to improve the image of the much maligned sweetener with ad campaigns promoting it as a natural ingredient made from corn. Now, the group has petitioned the United States Food and Drug Administration to start calling the ingredient “corn sugar,” arguing that a name change is the only way to clear up consumer confusion about the product.

“Clearly the name is confusing consumers,” said Audrae Erickson, president of the Washington-based group, in an interview. “Research shows that ‘corn sugar’ better communicates the amount of calories, the level of fructose and the sweetness in this ingredient.”

According to the market research firm NPD Group, about 58 percent of Americans say they are concerned that high-fructose corn syrup poses a health risk.

Some scientists over the years have speculated that high-fructose corn syrup may contribute to obesity by somehow disrupting normal metabolic function,but the research has been inconclusive. As a result, most leading scientists and nutrition experts agree that in terms of health, the effect of high-fructose corn syrup is the same as regular sugar, and that too much of either ingredient is bad for your health.

Marion Nestle, a professor in New York University’s department of nutrition and a longtime food industry critic, says that Americans consume too much of all types of sugar, but that there is no meaningful biochemical difference between table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup…

Continue reading.

I don’t think businesses really have a problem with any dangers HFCS might pose—businesses want to sell product, and they don’t really care whether it’s healthful or not. (Look at how they are fighting against giving up bisphenol-A.) What businesses probably dislike is that consumers are now reading the list of ingredients and making decisions on that. Businesses fought long and hard against letting consumers know the ingredients of food products, and some businesses still will not release that information. But most foods now list ingredients, and I’m sure consumers are surprised at finding how sugar (whether HFCS or other sugar) is added to virtually every product—like salt.

Christine O’Donnell takes the position that masturbation is sinful, thus (I suppose) proving that we are all sinners. (Mark Twain once addressed the issue of masturbation, saying, among other things:

Homer, in the second book of the Iliad says with fine enthusiasm, "Give me masturbation or give me death." Caesar, in his Commentaries, says, "To the lonely it is company; to the forsaken it is a friend; to the aged and to the impotent it is a benefactor. They that are penniless are yet rich, in that they still have this majestic diversion." In another place this experienced observer has said, "There are times when I prefer it to sodomy."

Here’s Christine:

I wonder whether the GOP will attempt to prevent masturbation by government decree, just as they are fighting to prevent same-sex marriages.

Save money and time and help people out. I got this email from Tom Wright this morning:

… We are the world’s first neighbour-to-neighbour car rental company (we pair car owners who don’t always use their car with sensible drivers in their area who need a car to use). The idea is that rather than use car rental or pay to join a car club – you simply rent a neighbours car. We are free to join for participating owner’s and drivers and take away the need to put anymore cars on the road. Owner’s make money whenever they are not using their car…

We are only 4 months old but already in 300 towns and cities across the UK.

Take a look at their site, WhipCar.com. I hope this spreads to the US.

From their site:

• Find your perfect car to use. Sort by car type, price, and location.

• Select the car (or cars) you would like to use. If you need something special – ask a WhipCar owner directly.

• WhipCar takes care of all the hassle. We include fully comprehensive insurance and even provide breakdown cover.

• WhipCar pairs safe drivers with car owners who aren’t using their cars.  Read more

• All WhipCars are independently vetted, giving you complete peace of mind.  Read more

• All prices automatically include insurance which will cover you for the duration of hire.  Learn more

• You must be at least 21 and a safe driver to book a WhipCar from one of our owners.  Learn more

As of this morning, 25.9 lbs lost to date. And I think I now have a good feel for the meals: content and amount. High time, of course: I’ve been on this three months. But habits form slowly, and the idea is that by the time I hit my target weight (175 lbs) I am fully accustomed to a new way of eating.

My breakfasts this morning is one of my faves:

1/4 c oat groats
1 c water
1/2 tsp turmeric

Put that on burner in my small pan, turn burner to "4" and set timer for 45 minutes (shower, shave, dress, blog). Then add:

good dash of homemade pepper sauce
sliced 8′ hard-boiled egg (yolk still soft)
good shaking of artificial bacon bits

Quite tasty, in fact. The turmeric is because of its extremely strong anti-inflammatory effect.

Yesterday early afternoon sitting in my chair I became aware of chest pains, only they were tiny (little more than twitches) and of short duration (around 1 second) and not very painful (no more than a pinch on my arm). They were, though, in the general region of my heart.

I know, I know: I am supposed to fly to the hospital. But our local hospital is expensive and does not play well with Blue Shield, so I instead called my cardiologist. He was not in, the but the woman to whom I talked asked sensible questions, said she would call the doctor (who was not in) and then call me back.

She did. No worry. He said the angiogram was clear, so that this was probably me feeling the extra beats. I see him this morning, and he’s going to hook me up with a monitor (which, I gather, is a machine rather than analogous to a hall monitor). More anon.

My endocrinologist, who’s not seen me for 3 months, was quite pleased at my weight progress and my fasting blood-glucose reading (107). HbA1c was 5.8%, well within the normal range.

So far so good.

A reader commented that badger brushes offer the only true shaving experience:

… I am not against the synthetic brushes. But [using] badger brushes is the classic traditional way to shave. That’s what this whole shaving thing is about. Otherwise just get foam in a can and a disposable razor.

I find that I disagree. A superb badger brush is my own preference (specifically, the Rooney Style 2 Finest), but I can get quite an enjoyable traditional shave with other brushes, including traditional (boar and horsehair as well as badger) and the innovative (modern “artificial badger” synthetic). So channeling the spirit of protest that seems so lively in our country today, I will use non-badger for the remainder of the week—and fully enjoy those traditional shaves with traditional lather. Indeed, the step from lather created by a brush (of any type) from a shaving soap or shaving cream is so distant from foam in a can that I fear for those who cannot detect the difference.

In any event, I like the Bay Rum/Lime combo, so I’ll be featuring that as well. This morning’s shave was a true pleasure: the Tryphon Bay “Rhum” has a wonderful fragrance—but is no longer available, at least not for now. I got a fine lather with my Omega boar brush, which is breaking in nicely. Then the shave itself, with my lesser Mikron (I like the other, used yesterday, better) with a Schick Platinum Plus blade—quite a nice blade for me, I find.

The shave ends with a nice splash of Geo. F. Trumper West Indian Extract of Limes aftershave.

Gardiner Harris reports in the NY Times:

A major egg producer linked to an outbreak of salmonella that has sickened more than 1,500 knew that its Iowa henhouses were contaminated with salmonella as far back as 2008, according to records released Tuesday by Congressional investigators.

Sponges swabbed over the egg belts in the barns as well as other places at Wright County Egg found at least 426 instances of contamination with salmonella from 2008 to 2010, according to the records. In at least 73 of the tests, the strain was in the family that includes Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be in found in eggs and causes human illness, the investigators found.

Other records provided by the company to Congress “did not show whether Wright County Egg took appropriate steps to protect the public after receiving the positive test results,” Representative Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat who chairs the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, wrote in a letter to Austin J. DeCoster, the owner of the company who is known as Jack.

Wright County Egg and another company, Hillandale Farms, recalled more than 500 million eggs last month after health officials traced bacteria to those companies. A subsequent inspection by the Food and Drug Administration found that the barns of the egg producers were infested with flies, maggots and rodents and had overflowing manure pits.

The inspections were the first by the F.D.A. to check compliance with new federal egg safety rules that were written well before the current outbreak and went into effect in July.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Stupak said that investigators also have lab test records from Hillandale Farms but are still reviewing them.

In his letter, Mr. Stupak noted that his committee had asked for the results of all tests taken in Wright County Egg’s barns that showed salmonella contamination. “Despite the committee’s specific request, your response on September 11, 2010, did not include the 73 potentially positive results for Salmonella Enteritidis,” he wrote. A committee spokeswoman would not disclose how investigators uncovered the test results. The tests were performed by Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at Iowa State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine…

Continue reading.

Matt Taibbi reports in Rolling Stone:

I have more coming on this story later this afternoon – I’m still talking to some folks down in Birmingham who are helping me sort out the news – but I wanted to relay an unnerving development in the Jefferson County, Alabama sewer story.

Earlier this year I wrote about the Jefferson County story in a piece called “Looting Main Street” in Rolling Stone. In this tale employees of a group of high-powered Wall Street banks, led in particular by JP Morgan Chase, funneled money to local politicians in Alabama, who in turn signed off on toxic interest-rate swap deals that left the county saddled with monstrous debt for a generation.

Jefferson County is essentially the world’s worst credit card story. The local pols ran up massive bills to build a “Taj Mahal of sewer-treatment plants,” then saddled future voters with a blizzard-worth of rate hikes, punitive fees and late charges. Alabamans who should have paid $250 million for their new sewer system now owe over $3 billion, thanks to their corrupt politicians and the greedy carpetbagger banks who dragged these local hicks into deadly derivative deals.

These types of finance scams are the template for a whole new type of symbiotic relationship between politicians and the financial services industry: deals like the JeffCo interest-rate swaps allow politicians to borrow vast sums essentially without immediate consequence, making it possible to green-light politically-popular programs during their terms but leaving future leaders holding the bag when the bills come due. We saw similar stories in Greece and in the Denver school system; hundreds of communities in Italy and other European countries are also experiencing similar debt-blowups thanks to rate swaps and other deadly deals.

Anyway, back in the mid-nineties, the average sewer bill for a Jefferson County family of four was only $14.71. By the time I wrote my story earlier this year, most citizens were paying about four times that amount – and as of this summer, the average JeffCo sewer bill was $63. Well, the news now comes out that rates will go up again, and in the best case scenario they will jump 25%a year. The worst case? Jefferson County sewer rates could jump as much as 527%, with some estimates placing the average monthly bill as high as $395 a month.

This is what happens when corrupt politicians turn over their financial sovereignty to private businesses. This question is going to be resolved in the courts, where the lawyers for the trustee of the county’s sewer debt – Bank of New York-Mellon – requested that a Circuit Court judge appoint a receiver to decide sewer rates.

Depending on whom the judge appoints to the seat, the decision could go down one of two ways. If the judge orders the receiver to set sewer rates that are “reasonable,” then the citizens of Birmingham, who incidentally never voted to borrow this money, will merely be faced with astronomically high (and perhaps the highest in America) sewer rates.

But if the judge rules in favor of the creditors, then JeffCo is screwed. One lawyer quoted in the Birmingham News put it this way: "But if [the judge’s order] says the receiver shall act in accordance with the indenture … you’ll have a lot of people who won’t be flushing their toilets."

Again, Birmingham voters really have never had much of say in any of this. Moreover, unbelievably, there might even be fees envisioned for citizens of the area who don’t even use the sewers. There is talk of “a fee of $30 a month for homes and businesses near, but not connected to, county sewer lines and $20 a month for others not on the system.”

Will update this later.

Update: So I talked to a couple of the lawyers involved in this case. What basically happened here is that when some of the monoline insurance companies who were insuring Jefferson County’s bonds saw their credit ratings downgraded in 2008, that triggered language in the count’s bond deals that accelerated their debt payments. Specifically, thanks to those downgrades, Jefferson County was suddenly legally obligated to retire $800 million in bonds in four years.

Imagine if you had a downgrade in your credit rating and that suddenly forced you to pay off your whole mortgage in four years, that’s roughly the deal here. Since the county can’t make those payments, they’re in default – and when they went into default, that opened the door legally for a receiver to be appointed. That receiver legally has the power to fix and raise rates. There’s really no issue of fact here; the bondholders are legally entitled to get that 500% increase.

Fortunately for Jefferson County, the Alabama constitution has a section that mandates that rates must be “reasonable.” But there’s going to be an argument in state court about what “reasonable” means, and the creditors are going to argue that the massive rate hikes that are being talked about are “reasonable.” Most people I talked to didn’t think there was any way Jefferson County will ever see a 500% rate increase, but everyone agrees it’s still going to be a crooked number, no matter what it ends up being.

This is all just a footnote to a crime that was really committed a long time ago, but it’s worth pointing out that even though the predatory debt scheme has been exposed, and everyone in America knows the citizens of the county were gruesomely ripped off, the debts haven’t gone away or anything for the people who actually live there. One Birmingham woman who wrote to me this morning says she’s considering moving. “My husband and I are talking about moving out of Jefferson County,” she says.

Not what one wants. Jess McNally reports for Wired:

An examination of jury verdicts over the past decade involving people charged for exposing others to toxic substances, has revealed that the more victims are involved in a case, the less harshly the perpetrator of the crime is penalized.

The study, which also included two experiments in the lab, is the first to show that the bias toward feeling empathy for a single individual versus many — known as the identifiable victim bias — causes people to make judgments based on emotion that are disproportionate to the severity of a crime.

“The inspiration for the study was the observation that we tend to focus an extraordinary amount of attention and resources to crimes that have a really small number of victims, and have a harder time remaining engaged to larger scale kinds of crime,” said psychologist Loran Nordgren of Northwestern University, lead author of the paper Aug. 25 in Social Psychological and Personality Science (.pdf).

The bias, which the researchers named the scope-severity paradox, has implications for a wide variety of fields, including the politics and media coverage of large-scale issues such as climate change or mass genocide.

“It fits well with a line of research that shows that as the number of people who are victims of some problem — whether it’s a crime or a famine — the responsiveness to it, and the likelihood of taking action to reduce the problem, decreases,” said psychologist Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon, who was not involved in the study.

It has to do with the way empathy works, Slovic said. People empathize with people by putting themselves in the other person’s shoes. The more shoes there are, the harder it is to empathize with any single individual. People don’t multiply their feelings of empathy by the number of people involved.

The study tested whether the identifiable victim bias applies to the severity of punishment given in a series of three experiments. In the first experiment, participants were asked to read a story about a financial adviser who defrauded his clients. Half the participants read a story where only two or three people were harmed, and the other half read a story where dozens of people were harmed.

When asked to evaluate the severity of the crime and recommend a punishment, the fictional financial adviser who defrauded just a few people was judged more harshly than the one who defrauded many.

In the second experiment, participants were asked to read a story about a food processing company that sold tainted food and made people sick…

Continue reading.

Apparently people are growing tired of lying as a medium of political discourse. John Richardson writes at Esquire‘s Politics Blog:

Late last week, an influential conservative writer named Dinesh D’Souza wrote a column called "Making the Rich Pay" over at Forbes. "Our spender-in-chief has outlined another $50 billion in proposed government spending," he began. "That’s on top of the $700 billion bailout. And the $850 billion stimulus.  And the $1 trillion or so that Obama intends to spend on his environmental schemes.  Not to mention the $1.6 trillion slotted for health care over the next decade."

Obama isn’t worried about all the spending, D’Souza wrote in the very next paragraph, because the president "wants the whole tax bill to be paid by the rich."

Now, I have an article of faith: Never assume, no matter how strong the temptation, that other people are low-life lying manipulators without a shred of human decency. Years of journalism have taught me that, on the contrary, most people have a reason for thinking the things they think. If you can tap down to that, you can have a meaningful conversation.

So I got D’Souza’s e-mail address and wrote him a note.

Dear Mr. D’Souza:

I read your column and I would like to ask you, before I call the column dishonest on the Esquire blog, what your reasoning was. For example, the idea that Obama wants the rich to pay for "all" his spending. This seems flatly wrong since nowhere have I seen Obama call for the elimination of all existing taxes save those on the rich. There are a number of other points I’d like to discuss. My number is…

D’Souza wrote back a few hours later:

Well, the taxes that everyone else is paying are supporting lots of programs that were in place prior to Obama’s new spending. So new spending has too be paid for by new taxes, or by eliminating existing tax breaks. And Obama wants that burden to be borne exclusively by the rich.

I wrote back right away:

But that’s not what you said. You listed the bailout, the stimulus, health care, and another trillion on unspecified "environmental schemes" (I assume you’re referring to bills that may be passed by a future Congress) and said that Obama "wants the whole tax bill to be paid by the rich." So far as I know, nobody has ever suggested that the bailout and stimulus and health care and cap-and-trade would all be paid for by the rich. On the contrary, conservatives like yourself have been quite loud in warning that it would be paid for by "future generations." This would seem to make your statement flatly untrue — in fact, a bald-faced lie. Or perhaps you have another explanation?

This time, I didn’t hear back from him. Which is too bad, because the rest of the piece went on to accuse Obama of  "outright hostility" to business. D’Souza promised to follow up with a story about "the roots of Obama’s rage." This is the theme of the next in a string of frustrating books from D’Souza, and this one made its debut in an earlier Forbes piece called "How Obama Thinks." In it, D’Souza argued that Obama hates capitalism because his father was a Kenyan socialist. The evidence? Obama called his autobiography Dreams from My Father:

Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn’t writing about his father’s dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father.

By this logic, John F. Kennedy was a gangster because his father ran rum and all the Bushes are Nazis because Prescott Bush did business with the Germans. It’s especially puzzling because one of the main conservative attack points against Obama — which appears in D’Souza’s lede, for chrissakes — is that Obama and his elitist cabal of Goldman Sachs alumni sold out Main Street by bailing out Wall Street. But if Obama secretly wants to destroy the United States, wouldn’t it have been much more effective just to let Wall Street crash?

What I don’t understand is this: . . .

Continue reading.

But you can avoid getting a cold:

Experts say that the best advice for dodging cold bugs may be the simplest: Wash your hands and don’t touch your face. If you can adhere to these two rules, you could be well on your way to cold-free dreamland. But this is easier said than done. Just try not touching your face for a day. Most of us do so one to three times every five minutes, or two hundred to six hundred times a day. (We also pick our noses about five times an hour.) These are hard habits to beat. If you want to avoid a cold this season, start practicing now.

That is from a very interesting interview with Jennifer Ackerman, who wrote a recent book on the common cold.

Scott Horton posts at Harper’s:

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals split down the middle in finding (PDF) that the Justice Department was entitled to halt a civil lawsuit between private parties because of the threat that the suit would expose state secrets. By the margin of a single vote, it reversed the decision of a panel of the same court (PDF) holding that the doctrine could only be applied to individual pieces of evidence, not to entire lawsuits.

The case, Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, involved claims by an individual that he was seized and then tortured in a proxy arrangement directed by the CIA. Jeppesen Dataplan was directly involved, restraining and transporting the victims with knowledge that they would be tortured; that knowledge is exhibited, for example, in briefings to the company’s employees. These facts were established beyond any reasonable doubt without the need to turn to classified information. Indeed, one of the most respected courts in the English-speaking world—the Court of Appeal in London–had already viewed the formidable evidence and demanded a criminal investigation,now pending. The British court concluded, just as the Ninth Circuit was legally obligated to do, that state-secrecy claims could not be used to block discovery of evidence of crimes. Under the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which adopts the position that the U.S. Justice Department took in 1946, the crime of disappearance connected to torture is a crime against humanity, with no statute of limitations and no defense of superior orders applicable.

The Holder Justice Department would have us believe that it is protecting state secrets essential to our security. That posture is risible, and half of the court saw through it. The dilemma faced by the Justice Department was rather that evidence presented in the suit would likely be used in the future (not in the United States, obviously) to prosecute those who participated in the extraordinary renditions process. Twenty-three U.S. agents have already been convicted for their role in a rendition in Milan. Prosecutors in Spain have issued arrest warrants for a further 13 U.S. agents involved in a botched rendition case that touched on Spanish soil. Prosecutors in Germany have opened a criminal investigation into the use of Ramstein AFB in connection with torture and illegal kidnappings. Prosecutors in Poland are pursuing a similar matter. And Prime Minister David Cameron was recently forced to brief President Obama on his decision to direct a formal inquiry which could lead to prosecutions tied directly to the subject matter of the Mohamed case. This is the remarkable background to the case decided by the Ninth Circuit, and remarkably not a single word about this appears anywhere in the opinion—or even in most of the press accounts about it.

Both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have called the Department on its acts of constitutional treachery. From the West Coast:

The decision to short-circuit the trial process is more than a misreading of the law; it’s an egregious miscarriage of justice. That’s obvious from a perusal of the plaintiffs’ complaint. One said that while he was imprisoned in Egypt, electrodes were attached to his earlobes, nipples and genitals. A second, held in Morocco, said he was beaten, denied food and threatened with sexual torture and castration. A third claimed that his Moroccan captors broke his bones and cut him with a scalpel all over his body, and poured hot, stinging liquid into his open wounds.

From New York:

The state secrets doctrine is so blinding and powerful that it should be invoked only when the most grave national security matters are at stake — nuclear weapons details, for example, or the identity of covert agents. It should not be used to defend against allegations that if true, as the dissenting judges wrote, would be “gross violations of the norms of international law.” All too often in the past, the judges pointed out, secrecy privileges have been used to avoid embarrassing the government, not to protect real secrets. In this case, the embarrassment and the shame to America’s reputation are already too well known.

The majority opinion is so thoroughly unconvincing that the court makes a pathetic plea to other branches of the government to do what is properly its function: fixing the claims of torture victims and awarding them damages.

By signing the Convention Against Torture, the United States made an unequivocal commitment to the international community to compensate those who are tortured by its agents. The Ninth Circuit has made a liar out of Uncle Sam and a mockery of its duty to uphold the law proscribing torture.

Dinesh D’Souza has an article in Forbes in which he gives free rein to his rather disturbed imagination in creating from whole cloth a series of fears about Obama. The interesting aspect of that article is the response it triggered in The Economist, which eviscerates the rotting entrails of D’Souza’s argument. The beginning of the latter article:

I DON’T find it at all difficult to understand how Barack Obama thinks, because most of his beliefs are part of the broad consensus in America’s centre or centre-left: greenhouse-gas emissions reductions, universal health insurance, financial-reform legislation, repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, and so forth. Dinesh D’Souza, on the other hand, appears to have met so few Democrats in recent decades that he finds such views shocking, and thinks they can only be explained by the fact that Mr Obama’s father was a Kenyan government economist who pushed for a non-aligned stance in the Cold War during the 1960s-70s. Since the majority of Democrats don’t have any Kenyan parents and have no particular stake in the anti-colonialism debates of the 1960s-70s, I’m not sure how Mr D’Souza would explain their views. In any case, Mr D’Souza’s explanation of Mr Obama’s views doesn’t make any sense on its own terms. This, for example, is incomprehensible: "If Obama shares his father’s anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more." Come again? Progressive taxation is caused by…anti-colonialism? Message to American billionaires and the people who write for them: many events and movements in world history did not revolve around marginal tax rates on rich people in the United States.

In other words, while I don’t have any trouble understanding how Barack Obama thinks, I have a lot of trouble understanding how Dinesh D’Souza thinks. And if I were to try to understand his thinking using the same methods he uses to interpret Mr Obama, I might look to his Indian background, which is where he says he gained his insight into anti-colonialism. Mr D’Souza notes simply that he grew up in Mumbai, but a more complete accounting is that his parents were members of the Christian community in the state of Goa, which was colonised by Portugal. The last name "D’Souza" is a common family name in West Africa, where it indicates that the family is descended from the slave-trading coastal mixed-race elite. In India, however, it indicates that the family likely belongs to the Roman Catholic Brahmins, Hindu Brahmins who were converted by missionaries beginning in the 17th century. Interestingly, the Christian community in Goa retained a Hindu-style caste system, with Catholic Brahmins continuing to discriminate against Catholic dalit or "untouchables", whom they refer to as mahara or chamaar. Elite Catholic Brahmin households in Goa sent their children to Jesuit schools (like the one Mr D’Souza attended) and often spoke Portuguese at home, referring to the main local native language, Konkani, as the lingua des criados ("language of servants").

Goa remained a Portuguese colony until it was annexed by India in 1961, which happens to be the year of Mr D’Souza’s birth. Many Goan Christians did not welcome the annexation, fearing they would be subsumed in the Hindu-Muslim mega-state. A later source of anxiety was India’s affirmative action (or "reservation") policies, which set aside university slots and civil-service jobs for people from recognised historically stigmatised groups, known as "scheduled castes and tribes". Beginning in the early 1980s, when Mr D’Souza was off studying at Dartmouth, these affirmative-action policies engendered widespread resistance among India’s elite classes, who were terrified of losing their privileged status in a colossal country where hundreds of millions of indigents might overwhelm the available spots at top schools (and reduce their kids’ chances of, say, going to Dartmouth). Goa itself has set itself up as a redoubt against the reservation policies: it has the fewest scheduled castes and tribes of any Indian state. This is largely because elite Christians have refused to acknowledge discrimination against the Christian dalit, or to allow them to be recognised as a scheduled caste. Pope John Paul II rebuked Indian bishops for these practices on his visit to Goa in 2003.

In 2000, Mr D’Souza wrote a book called "The Virtue of Prosperity" that included an unusual defence of nepotism and elitism in education. As Tim Noah wrote at the time, in this passage, Mr D’Souza explicitly argues against equality of educational opportunity: . . .

Continue reading.

Phil at Bullgoose shaving included the soap above with my most recent order. It has a light, clean, “soap” fragrance and makes quite a nice lather, assisted by the Rooney 2. The Apollo Mikron gave a very smooth and easy shave. I was remembering the first several times I used this razor: I kept getting nicks and was disappointed in the razor, but then I stopped getting nicks and now it’s one of my favorites. I assume I just learned how to use it: daily practice leading to improvements in skill because of the unconscious learning that occurs.

Finally, a splash of 4711 and I’m good to go. Tomorrow I’ll use my other Mikron to compare and contrast.

It’s always a bad sign when governments start stamping everything "secret". The issue is usually not national security but rather self-protection on the part of incompetents: the first rule of f**k-ups, like the first rule of Fight Club, is to keep it completely secret. Bury it totally so that no one will ever know. Failing that, the whitewash is the next line of defense.

Secrecy is increasing in the US. Jennifer Janisch and Oriana Zill de Granados report in ProPublica:

Since 2006, more than a dozen of Colombia’s most notorious paramilitary leaders have been extradited to the United States to face drug-trafficking charges in federal district court in Washington.

The extraditions stunned Colombians, who had hoped that testimony from the men, given as part of a national amnesty program, would help expose the truth about two decades of vicious murders, assaults and kidnappings. In videotaped confessions in Colombia, one had taken responsibility for more than 450 slayings.

But outrage over the extraditions reached a boiling point earlier this year, when U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton blocked public access to seven of the paramilitary leaders’ cases, erasing virtually every trace of their existence.

There is no way to know if the men have negotiated lenient sentences — or if they are even still in custody. An eighth defendant, accused in Colombia of murdering a judge, was released on his own recognizance, records show, after cousins in College Park, Md., vouched for him.

The Colombian cases are drawing new attention to the practice of sealing entire court files, triggering a broader controversy over judicial secrecy.

Though court policies discourage this degree of secrecy, a 2009 internal study showed that federal judges order it in thousands of cases a year, sometimes without justification.

Some judges not only block public access, but also remove file numbers and all other signs of a case from the record. In the D.C. district, there is no uniform procedure for sealing a case, leaving individual judges to decide how much to disclose, Chief Judge Royce Lamberth said.

The cases against the Colombian paramilitaries show the stakes of a transparency debate that might otherwise seem academic.

"More than anger, I feel powerless," said Bela Henriquez, whose father, Julio, was kidnapped and killed on the orders of one defendant. "We don’t know what they are negotiating, what conditions they are living under. What guarantee of justice do we have?"

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that public access to court cases is protected by the First Amendment because it is a crucial check on judicial power.

But some factors – national security material, an ongoing government investigation, vulnerable witnesses or victims – can [be used to] justify secrecy…

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I broke 230 lbs at the diet counselor and 225 lbs at home (home weight taken just before shower). I seem to wear 4.5 lbs of clothing (beyond shoes and pocket stuff, which I remove before weighing at the counselor’s). That’s quite consistent since I pick from a severely limited range of wardrobe choices. (My lack of interest in and knowledge of fashion is obvious to those who have seen me.)

I’m really eager to get back to the Nordic Track ski machine—I can resume on Friday.

I’ll see the cardiologist on Wednesday and learn what we now know. And I see my endocrinologist tomorrow, a visit I’m eagerly anticipating: the last time I saw him I was just going to see the diet counselor for the first time.

Once a country ceases to learn from its experience—once it turns aside from the hard lessons of history—decline is well underway. From The Real News Network:

I’ve come to a new conclusion. Here’s more info:

A totally wonderful shave this morning, as good a shave as I’ve ever had. The Edwin Jagger synthetic-bristle brush (of the good kind of synthetic bristles that I see now are called “artificial badger”) generated loads of thick dense lather from the Irisch Moos on my beard, and then my newly plated rhodium slant bar by Hoffritz did a superbly smooth shave. Finally, Irisch Moos aftershave—a sample I got with my latest order from Bullgoose Shaving. (I ordered a puck of Mitchell’s Wool Fat to make into a shave stick, but at the last minute decided to forward that on to the The Older Grandson, who will soon be starting to shave. His grandmother is a potter, and I thought she (and he) could make a custom bowl for the soap. )

I really like the aftershave and have now ordered a bottle of it.