Later On

I have never been able to understand the willful ignorance of those in the Tea Party and their allies: being completely ignorant about some topic (on which they take impassioned stands, BTW) and then REFUSING to learn about it.

One explanation is, of course, a kind of specific insanity: the desire to cling to ideas whether they are factual or false, without much caring about the different.

Sometimes it goes further: the willfully ignorant want to make sure that other people also remain ignorant. I see this a lot on the Right, where statements KNOWN to be false are repeated anyway.

And here’s a good example, reported in the NY Times by Michael Luo:

In the wake of the shootings in Tucson, the familiar questions inevitably resurfaced: Are communities where more people carry guns safer or less safe? Does the availability of high-capacity magazines increase deaths? Do more rigorous background checks make a difference?

The reality is that even these and other basic questions cannot be fully answered, because not enough research has been done. And there’s a reason for that. Both scientists in the field and former officials with the government agency that used to finance the great bulk of this research say the influence of the National Rife Association has all but choked off funds for such work.

“We’ve been stopped from answering the basic questions,” said Mark Rosenberg, former director of the National Center for Injury Control and Prevention, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was for about a decade the leading source of financing for firearms research.

Chris Cox, the N.R.A.’s chief lobbyist, said the group had not tried to squelch genuine scientific inquiries, just politically slanted ones. “Our concern is not with legitimate medical science,” he said. “Our concern is they were promoting the idea that gun ownership was a disease that needed to be eradicated.”

The amount of money available today for studying the impact of firearms is a fraction of what it was in the mid-1990s, and the number of scientists toiling in the field has dwindled to just a handful as a result, according to researchers.

The dearth of money can be traced in large measure to a clash between public health scientists and the N.R.A. in the mid-1990s. At the time, Dr. Rosenberg and others at the C.D.C. were becoming increasingly assertive about the importance of studying guns as a public health phenomenon, financing studies that found, for example, having a gun in the house, rather than conferring protection, significantly increased the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.

Alarmed, the N.R.A. and its allies on Capitol Hill fought back. The injury center was guilty of “putting out papers that were really political opinion masquerading as medical science,” said Mr. Cox, who also worked on this issue for the N.R.A. more than a decade ago.

Initially, pro-gun lawmakers sought to eliminate the injury center completely, arguing its work was “redundant” and reflected a political agenda. When that failed, they turned to the appropriations process. In 1996, Representative Jay Dickey, Republican of Arkansas, succeeded in pushing through an amendment that stripped $2.6 million from the C.D.C. budget, the very amount it had spent on firearms-related research the year before…

Continue reading.

I’m now cooking Chicken Satay, using her recipe except I cut the amount of rice in half: I’m still on a reducing diet. It sounds good. I got a splat of freshly ground peanut butter at Whole Foods (recipe calls for 2 Tbsp), which is used in a sauce with minced scallions, minced garlic cloves, grates fresh ginger, soy sauce, and a little chicken stock. It suddenly occurs to me that I meant to add crushed red pepper flakes to that to avoid the curse of blandness that seems to afflict so many of these recipes. So it goes.

I still find the Texsport 2-quart cast-iron Dutch oven to be the best of the lot that I’ve tried, but I haven’t tried Le Creuset and I haven’t tried the Staub round 2.25-quart cocotte. The latter will arrive tomorrow, so soon I’ll try using that one.

UPDATE: Another “meh” recipe: flat, bland, and not very good. Snow peas, like shrimp and scallops, do not in my opinion work well in GOPM meals—they cook too long. (Green beans, OTOH, work great!)

Tomorrow I’ll do a fish version, but I’m definitely making up my own recipe. Those are ever so much better (to my taste, naturally).

UPDATE 2: I just couldn’t face the other half of this mess and so I threw it away. I hate to throw away food. Then I made up my own recipe, which was quite nice. And I made it in the Cajun Cookware Dutch oven, which actually is 2 quarts: I’m on a reducing diet, so the 2.5-qt Texsport is not what I want now. The layers:

1/2 sweet onion, chopped coarsely
1.5 cups whole wheat rotini (which is 1.5 servings: I go light on the starch)
1/3 cup light coconut milk
1/2 lb Dover sole fillets
salt, pepper, crushed red pepper flakes
4 domestic white mushrooms, sliced
1/2 bulb fennel, cored and sliced (fennel works quite well in this method)
1/4 head red cabbage, shredded
6 asparagus stalks cut into 1″ sections
1 Meyer lemon, cut into chunks

Whisk together:

2 Tbsp vinaigrette (I use Bragg’s)
1 Tbsp white balsamic vinegar
1/2 Tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp Dijon mustard

Pour over the top, cover, 45 minutes at 450ºF, two meals.

Via Open Culture:

Check ‘em out. Doesn’t include The Searchers but does have Stagecoach and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon. Also (from that link):

Tarkovsky Films Free Online

Free Hitchcock Movies Online

Orson Welles’ The Stranger: The Full Movie

The Best of Ken Loach on YouTube

Remember this guy?

Here’s a longer video with several more amazing illusions.

Sounds good:

How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell

A review by Sarah L. CourteauLast fall, two Harvard psychologists published a study for which they had developed a smartphone application that allowed people to rate their happiness in the midst of everyday activities ranging from sex to commuting. The intrepid (intrusive?) researchers found that people whose minds wander are less happy than those who focus on the present moment. It’s the sort of phenomenon Michel de Montaigne would fasten upon if he were alive today — he spent much of his life disciplining himself to live in the here and now — and one more reminder of why the essays of this minor French nobleman and vintner have resonated with so many readers in the four centuries since he wrote them. Living today amid the wheat and chaff of the Age of I, it’s easy to forget that not long ago, personal accounts, unless they related heroic and likely exaggerated feats or events for the historical record, weren’t written for public consumption. The man who changed that was Montaigne, born near the city of Bordeaux in 1533 to a family that had bootstrapped itself from workaday to nobility. From his pen, which produced 107 essays in all, was born an entire genre based on the idea that writing about one’s own experience can, as biographer Sarah Bakewell puts it, “create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity.”

Montaigne spent the last two decades of his life fleshing out his essays, when he wasn’t reluctantly attending to the political duties that sought him out, fleeing an outbreak of the plague, or running interference in the religious wars that were rending France. Some of his essays run a few paragraphs, and others are much longer. In my Everyman edition of his complete works, translated by Donald Frame, his essays occupy 1,000 pages, and his letters and travel journals a few hundred more.

What distinguished Montaigne from his contemporaries, as Bakewell explains in How to Live, her unconventional and thoroughly charming biography, was his interest in how people — and he was always Subject A — actually live, rather than how they ought to live. Whether he was musing on his sensitivity to human body odor, the consciousness of his beloved cat, or the question of whether a captive is likelier to elicit mercy from his captors through pleading or bravado, Montaigne’s writings embody the meaning of the French word essayer, which means to try. He twisted his subjects this way and that, now asking an impertinent question, now adding a colorful observation, now offering a personal or historical anecdote. He often contradicts himself, a habit that seems to reflect his character as much as the fact that his essays are pastiches of at least three major editions. He added — but seldom subtracted — material over the years.

Montaigne gained a large following before his death in 1592, at age 59, of complications related to kidney stones. Informed by the traditions of Stoicism and Skepticism, he has been regarded by some critics in the years since as a bit of a cold fish (and not sufficiently religious), but many others have found his temperate views a comfort. In How to Live, Bakewell organizes her delightful introduction to Montaigne just as the man himself might have wished — not chronologically or comprehensively, but around the loose themes and questions that informed his life and touch upon our own. “I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter,” he wrote. “You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff.” It’s hard to imagine a more modern and democratic sentiment in this age when we are all famous for 15 minutes — or believe we have a right to be.

Sarah L. Courteau is literary editor of The Wilson Quarterly.

Bruce Bower reports in Science News on an interesting finding:

Young kids lacking self-management skills are way more than annoying. They’re more likely to be big-time losers in the game of life, a new study finds.

Low levels of conscientiousness, perseverance and other elements of self-control in youngsters as young as age 3 herald high rates of physical health problems, substance abuse, financial woes, criminal arrests and single parenthood by age 32, says an international team led by psychologists Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi of Duke University in Durham, N.C.

Increasing self-control difficulties among children herald progressively greater numbers and seriousness of these adult troubles, the scientists report online January 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, has long held sway as the prime mental influence on health and achievement. But self-control’s close link to adult health and accomplishment remained after researchers accounted for children’s IQ scores and family income. “Self-control and intelligence are both valuable for life success, but after years of effort, IQ has proven difficult to change through interventions,” Moffitt says.

For as-yet-unknown reasons, 7 percent of youngsters in the long-term study developed notably better self-control as they got older. Members of this group displayed better health, made more money and had fewer criminal run-ins as adults than would have been predicted by their self-control levels as young children.

Moffitt and Caspi say that their findings offer the first evidence that even small improvements in children’s self-control have the potential to reduce health care costs, cut welfare dependency and lower crime rates.

Home and school programs designed to strengthen self-management show promise in early trials, Moffitt holds. Researchers need to confirm the effectiveness of these approaches so they can be adapted for widespread use, in his view.

Interventions exist that parents and teachers can use to strengthen children’s self-control, remarks criminologist Alex Piquero of Florida State University in Tallahassee. A 2010 research review led by Piquero concluded that programs grounded in behavioral rewards, training in coping skills and role-playing stimulated by videotaped situations worked best in boosting kids’ self-control.

In the new investigation about 1,000 children . . . 

Continue reading.

Thanks to Jack in Amsterdam for pointing out this article in Slate by Sarah Wildman:

For as long as I can remember, my father has maintained the same workout regimen. Most mornings, as the rest of the house struggles to start the day, he begins a series of exercises—the "Müller technique." Body swings. Stretches. Hopping on one foot. Lunges with arms windmilling, first backwards, then forwards. Sit-ups, push-ups, toe-touches. He does all this clothed in nothing but underwear. He is finished in 25 minutes, or less.

When I was very young, I remember watching my grandfather practice Müller as well, as he had each morning since he learned it at Jewish summer camp on the banks of Austria’s Lake Wolfgangsee. After I gave birth and found it harder to get to the gym, my father suggested I try Müller: "You can do it at home!"

Born in Asserballe, Denmark in 1866, J.P. Müller was, for a time, as famous as that other Danish export, Hans Christian Anderson. Maybe more. At the turn of the last century, Müller’s wildly popular cult of physical fitness swept Mitteleuropa, turning parlor-sitting dandies from Copenhagen to Berlin to London into ironmen. Müller’s My System was published first in 1904 as little more than a long, bound pamphlet graced with an image of the Greek athlete Apoxyomenos naked and toweling himself. The exercise guide, which promised that just "15 minutes a day" of prescribed* exercise would make "weaklings" into strong men (and women), was ultimately translated into 25 languages, reprinted dozens of times, and sold briskly well into the 20^th century.

Müller was the Tom Paine of free body movement and fresh air. Like many a radical, he was resisted at first, called pornographic (partly because he often appeared in a loincloth—even while skiing in St. Moritz). His was a call to throw off the restrictive shackles of the Victorian era—a literal stripping away of restrictive layered clothes and corsets, a rejection of the "pallid, sickly looks" once prized as beautiful, and the "false dignity which forbids people, for instance, to indulge in so healthy and beneficial an exercise as running." He admonished: "Do not let a day pass without every muscle and every organ in your body being set in brisk motion." And bathing—the man had a fondness for cleanliness many of his contemporaries did not share: "This does not only refer only to people of the ‘working’ classes. I have often met ‘gentlemen’ in frock-coats and top hats and ladies in evening dress of whom you could tell by the smell of them, even at a distance of several feet, that they seldom or never took a bath."

Born sickly himself, so small "I could be placed in an ordinary cigar box," Müller nearly died of dysentery at two and "contracted every childhood complaint." His own strength, in other words, was acquired, not inherited, through physical exercise.

The Müller system is pretty much as I observed each morning growing up; it is something like a precursor to Pilates, it borrows from ballet, and it needs no equipment, other than commitment. It is strict but appealingly accessible. Unlike some of the other popular physical fitness gurus of the time—including the Prussian Eugene Sandow, who is known as the father of bodybuilding—Müller wasn’t interested in building muscle mass through dumbbells. And while My System wasn’t only aimed at men—in his original pamphlet, he explains that a woman needs to develop a "muscular corset" (that is, core muscles)—Müller, eventually, added to his bookshelf, writing My System for Ladies and My System for Children. There was also the remedial My Breathing System for those for whom, trapped in a Victorian sartorial nightmare, respiration had to be taught.

Aside from being popular, My System was also intuitively, precociously, on the mark. . .

Continue reading. And there’s an interesting video at the link.

A shave stick today, and I do like the Boots packaging—and the shave stick inside isn’t bad at all. A very good lather, thanks in part to the Lucretia Borgia, then the Mühle open-comb and a Swedish Gillette blade did three passes, very smooth and trouble-free. I noticed when I rinsed out the brush that I had enough lather for two or three more shaves.

Then a splash Mr. Sidney’s Original Aftershave, and I’m ready to dive into the day, having already done my 30′ of Nordic Track.

I’m watching Dames, a 1934 Busby Berkeley musical. The dance numbers make me think that Berkeley would have loved fractals and playing with them.

I just got the newest edition of Glorious One-Pot Meals. (My spiral-bound version is from several years back.) Man! has she added a lot of recipes. I suggest that this is one book to buy new rather than secondhand.

Sorry for light blogging today, but I stayed up last night and developed a first outline of the book. Quite a relief—the story has so many strands, I couldn’t figure out how to present it. And this morning I slept in—I’ve been waking up at 4:00 a.m. and having trouble getting back to sleep. I guess my unconscious was at work on the outline, but now it seems in pretty good shape, so I can get some sleep again.

It’s very nice to get rid of the stubble. Skipping the shave for the entire weekend is a bit too much for me.

Everything worked as it should: a great lather from the Dovo, thanks in part to the Rooney, then the Hoffritz Slant Bar smoothed things nicely with just three easy passes. A splash of Tabac, and I took The Wife’s car in for service (including a manufacturer’s recall to replace the water pump, thus saving $525).

A “conflict of interest” is a polite way of referring to a pay-off—probably not in cash on the spot, but in cash in the future from investments and rewards. Tom Hamburger (no relation) reports for the LA Times:

A government watchdog group alleges that two of the Supreme Court’s most conservative members had a conflict of interest when they considered a controversial case last year that permitted corporate funds to be used directly in political campaigns.

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are the subject of an unusual letter delivered Wednesday by Common Cause asking the U.S. Justice Department to look into whether the jurists should have disqualified themselves from hearing the campaign finance case if they had attended a private meeting sponsored by Charles and David Koch, billionaire philanthropists who fund conservatives causes. A Supreme Court spokesperson said late Thursday that the two justices did not participate in the Koch brothers’ private meetings, though Thomas “dropped by.”

If it believes there is a conflict, the Justice Department, as a party to the case, should ask the court to reconsider its decision, Common Cause said.

The landmark case, Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, was decided a year ago this week. It permitted corporate and union funds to be spent directly on election advertising, a practice that had previously been restricted. The Kochs have been significant donors to independent-expenditure campaigns, which increased dramatically after the Citizens United decision.

The letter is based in part on references to Scalia and Thomas made in an invitation to an upcoming meeting this month of elite conservative leaders sponsored by the Kochs. The invitation, first obtained by the liberal blog Think Progress, names the two justices among luminaries who have attended the closed Koch meetings at unspecified dates in the past.

Representatives of the Kochs declined repeated requests for comment. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Decisions about recusal from individual cases are up to each individual justice.

Some legal scholars dismiss the complaint as unlikely to succeed. But others said raising the issue could engender useful public scrutiny and debate about judicial independence.

Steven Gillers, a legal ethics specialist at New York University, said the Koch brothers’ use of Scalia and Thomas’ name for their upcoming meeting was “troubling.”

“I believe the nation has a right to know exactly what role if any the Justices played in the Koch gatherings, including the content of any remarks they made and whether Citizens United was a subject of any gathering they attended,” Gillers said. “The answers can help determine whether they were able to sit in the case and, if not, whether the result should be overturned. . .

Continue reading.

Today’s one-pot meal was extremely tasty:

1/4 large onion, sliced
1.5 cups egg noodles
1/3 cup lite coconut milk
sprinkling of turmeric
8 oz boneless pork chop, trimmed of fat and cut into bite-size pieces
salt, pepper, a little crushed red pepper flakes
sliced mushrooms (does everyone use an egg slicer to slice mushrooms?)
1/2 bulb fresh fennel, cored and sliced
1/2 large yellow bell pepper, cut into 1″ squares

I planned the next layer to be chopped cabbage, but I was using one of the squat Dutch ovens and ran out of room. No doubt that the Texsport 2-quart Dutch oven, with its greater height, is better for this type of cooking. I do have a Staub 2.25-quart enameled cast-iron cocotte on the way, and I think that will work well. (It comes in many colors. I was tempted by Grenadine, but went with the color at the link.)

Whisk together:

2 Tbsp vinaigrette
1 Tbsp golden balsamic vinegar
1 tsp Dijon mustard

Pour over the top, cover, and put in 450º F oven for 45 minutes.

It was quite tasty, but a little monochrome. I think I should have used a red bell pepper instead of yellow and also put a chopped zucchini in. A layer of sliced tomatoes on the top would have been good.

But, hey! no complaints. It was quite tasty indeed. [UPDATE: The turmeric, BTW, gave the egg noodles a wonderful rich golden color. I used only a light sprinkling, and perhaps the coconut milk helped as well. At any rate, I'm doing it again. - LG]

TYD pointed out that the current issue of Fine Cooking features one-pot meals (links here and below are to the magazine), and it has some good ones. They are all braises, however: a different approach. They also looked harder: this method is just:

1. Load the pot
2. Roast for 45 minutes
3. Eat two meals

No leftovers, only one pot to clean.

I did enjoy the issue, except the strange article on “grains” that talks at length about seeds that are NOT grains. (I think the author is simply ignorant.) The seeds discussed: teff, farro, millet, quinoa, and amaranth. Farro and millet are indeed grains; teff, quinoa, and amaranth (and buckwheat, for that matter) are not. The unfortunate author then exposes profound food ignorance in a national magazine. And doesn’t Fine Cooking have editors? or are they as ignorant as the author?

I really liked the article on meat loaves. I’ll be making some of those.

Radley Balko describes a total mess:

Last week The Washington Post reported that Sal Culosi’s parents have reached a $2 million settlement with Fairfax County, Virginia, police Detective Deval Bullock, who shot and killed the 38-year-old optometrist during a January 2006 SWAT raid on his home. The unusual settlement reflects the outrageous facts of this case, in which an unarmed man suspected of nothing more than betting on sports was recklessly gunned down during an unnecessarily violent operation.

The SWAT team came to Culosi’s house because another Fairfax County detective, David Baucum, overheard him and some friends wagering on a college football game at a bar. "To Sal, betting a few bills on the Redskins was a stress reliever, done among friends," a friend of Culosi’s told me shortly after his death. "None of us single, successful professionals ever thought that betting 50 bucks or so on the Virginia/Virginia Tech football game was a crime worthy of investigation." Baucum apparently did. After overhearing the wagering, Baucum befriended Culosi. During the next several months he talked Culosi into raising the stakes of what Culosi thought were friendly wagers. Eventually Culosi and Baucum bet more than $2,000 in a single day, enough under Virginia law for police to charge Culosi with running a gambling operation. That’s when they brought in the SWAT team.

On the night of January 24, 2006, Baucum called Culosi and arranged a time to drop by to collect his winnings. When Culosi, barefoot and clad in a T-shirt and jeans, stepped out of his house to meet the man he thought was a friend, the SWAT team moved in. Moments later, Bullock, who had had been on duty since 4 a.m. and hadn’t slept in 17 hours, killed him. Culosi’s last words: "Dude, what are you doing?"

Culosi’s parents, Sal and Anita Culosi, later learned that police stopped a nurse at Fairfax Hospital, where Culosi’s body was taken after the raid, from notifying them that their son, one of three children, had been shot. (The optometrist’s father is also named Salvatore, shortened to Sal, although the son was named after an uncle on his mother’s side—ironically, a police officer who was killed in the line of duty.) The Culosis did not hear about the raid until five hours after their son had been shot and killed, preventing the devout Catholic family from administering last rites.

In the months that followed, Baucum continued his investigation, badgering Culosi’s grieving friends and relatives after pulling their names and numbers from the cell phone he was carrying and a computer taken from his home the night he was killed. Steve Gulley, Culosi’s brother-in-law, told The Washington Post the following April that Baucum called him and menacingly asked, "How much are you into Sal for?" Scott Lunceford, a lifelong friend of Culosi’s, told the Post Baucum called him and accused him of being a gambler. The calls, Gulley told the paper, smacked of intimidation aimed at discouraging a lawsuit.

Police departments in Northern Virginia are notoriously stingy with information, and the Culosis grew increasingly frustrated with Fairfax County Police Chief David Rohrer. The public did not even learn Bullock’s name until The Washington Post‘s Tom Jackman reported it based on a tip from a confidential source. (The Fairfax County Police Department still has not released the name of the police officer who shot unarmed motorist David Masters in November 2009.) It took more than a year for the police department to issue its report (PDF) on Culosi’s death. The report, prepared by Chief Rohrer’s staff, claimed Bullock accidentally fired his gun—resulting in a direct hit that pierced Culosi’s heart—after the door to Bullock’s SUV recoiled and struck him in the arm as he was getting out of the vehicle. The report did at least acknowledge that Bullock inappropriately had his finger on the trigger of his weapon. It also conceded that in hindsight sending a SWAT team after an unarmed man accused of a nonviolent crime probably was a mistake, although it did not fault the department for doing so.

The Culosis were dubious. They believed Bullock mistook the cell phone their son was holding the night he was shot for a gun. They hired their own investigators, who determined, based on the department’s own measurements of the crime scene, that when Bullock pulled the trigger he was away from his vehicle and much closer to Culosi than he had claimed. Using the recorded locations of shell casings, police vehicles, and Culosi’s body, they produced computer animations (see below) showing that the incident could not have happened in the manner described by Chief Rohrer’s report. . .

Continue reading. You really should watch that animation at the link.

Thanks to The Wife for pointing out. More info here.

We had ample warning about Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings. Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress:

Federal judges and justices are required by law to disclose their spouse’s income — thus preventing persons who wish to influence the judge or justice from funneling money to them through their husband or wife. Yet, as the Los Angeles Times reports, Justice Clarence Thomas has not complied with this requirement for years:

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas failed to report his wife’s income from a conservative think tank on financial disclosure forms for at least five years, the watchdog group Common Cause said Friday.

Between 2003 and 2007, Virginia Thomas, a longtime conservative activist, earned $686,589 from the Heritage Foundation, according to a Common Cause review of the foundation’s IRS records. Thomas failed to note the income in his Supreme Court financial disclosure forms for those years, instead checking a box labeled “none” where “spousal noninvestment income” would be disclosed. [...]

Virginia Thomas also has been active in the group Liberty Central, an organization she founded to restore the “founding principles” of limited government and individual liberty.

In his 2009 disclosure, Justice Thomas also reported spousal income as “none.” Common Cause contends that Liberty Central paid Virginia Thomas an unknown salary that year.

This revelation that Justice Thomas failed to comply with his disclosure obligations comes as he is caught up in another ethics scandal regarding his participation in fundraisers for far-right political groups. Thomas once attended a gathering of wealthy corporate activists convened by billionaire Charles Koch to raise money for right-wing political causes, and he also attended at least one fundraiser hosted by the far-right think tank that used to employ his wife.

A Supreme Court justice lending a hand to a political fundraising event would be a clear violation of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, if it wasn’t for the fact that the nine justices have exempted themselves from much of the ethical rules governing all other federal judges. Under the Code of Conduct, “a judge should not personally participate in fund-raising activities, solicit funds for any organization, or use or permit the use of the prestige of judicial office for that purpose,” except in certain very narrow circumstances that don’t apply to the Koch and Heritage fundraisers.

Nor is Thomas the only justice engaged in ethically questionable activities. Justice Antonin Scalia also attended one of Charles Koch’s right-wing fundraising and strategy sessions, and Justice Samuel Alito is a frequent speaker at fundraisers for groups such as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute — the corporate front that funded the rise of Republican dirty trickster James O’Keefe and that used to employ anti-masturbation activist Christine O’Donnell.

Worst of all, today’s revelation that Justice Thomas has been submitting incomplete financial disclosures suggests that the conservative justices’ engagement with corporate political advocacy could be much more widespread than previously believed. If the justices are not disclosing their activities, it’s anyone’s guess what they could be hiding.

Take a look at the articles in this series. The one about the private spy outfit is quite interesting.

I made quite an inglorious one-pot meal yesterday: way too much liquid, tastes didn’t work, etc. It was a kind of seafood curry (shrimp and scallops), which I thought I’d like better than the Cioppino recipe I was looking at. Live and learn. The result can be best described as edible.

Today’s was almost perfect. Layers, beginning with bottom:

1/2 sweet onion, sliced (and I made some slices thick)
1 c. (i.e., 1 serving) whole-wheat rotini
1/2 c. egg noodles (wanted to see how they would do)
1/3 cup lite coconut milk
8 oz chicken breast cut into bite-size chunks
Salt, pepper, crushed red pepper
Sliced mushrooms
1/2 red bell pepper and 1/2 yellow bell pepper, cut into 1″ squares
1/2 fennel bulb, sliced thinly
1 c green beans, but into 1″ pieces

Mix in a small bowl:

2 Tbsp vinaigrette
Good dash soy sauce
1 tsp Dijon mustard
4-5 cloves garlic, minced

Pour that over the top. Cover, 45 minutes at 450º F.

It’s very tasty. Egg noodles (and rotini) worked well. Good flavors.

UPDATE: I’ve been thinking about it, and I have serious doubts whether this cooking method is suitable for shrimp or scallops, neither of which should be cooked too long. OTOH, the petrale sole worked fine. So I’ll stick with regular fish—next up with be Dover sole, and then perhaps some Pacific swordfish cut into chunks.

And I would say it’s not just college students. Sara Rimer reports for McClatchy:

An unprecedented study that followed several thousand undergraduates through four years of college found that large numbers didn’t learn the critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills that are widely assumed to be at the core of a college education.

Many of the students graduated without knowing how to sift fact from opinion, make a clear written argument or objectively review conflicting reports of a situation or event, according to New York University sociologist Richard Arum, lead author of the study. The students, for example, couldn’t determine the cause of an increase in neighborhood crime or how best to respond without being swayed by emotional testimony and political spin.

Arum, whose book "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses" (University of Chicago Press) comes out this month, followed 2,322 traditional-age students from the fall of 2005 to the spring of 2009 and examined testing data and student surveys at a broad range of 24 U.S. colleges and universities, from the highly selective to the less selective.

Forty-five percent of students made no significant improvement in their critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college, according to the study. After four years, 36 percent showed no significant gains in these so-called "higher order" thinking skills.

Combining the hours spent studying and in class, students devoted less than a fifth of their time each week to academic pursuits. By contrast, students spent 51 percent of their time — or 85 hours a week — socializing or in extracurricular activities.

The study also showed that students who studied alone made more significant gains in learning than those who studied in groups.

"I’m not surprised at the results," said Stephen G. Emerson, the president of Haverford College in Pennsylvania. "Our very best students don’t study in groups. They might work in groups in lab projects. But when they study, they study by themselves."

The study marks one of the first times a cohort of undergraduates has been followed over four years to examine whether they’re learning specific skills. It provides a portrait of the complex set of factors, from the quality of secondary school preparation to the academic demands on campus, which determine learning. It comes amid President Barack Obama’s call for more college graduates by 2020 and is likely to shine a spotlight on the quality of the education they receive. . .

Continue reading.