Later On

What evil fools these mortals can be:

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin

by Timothy Snyder

A review by Doug Brown

Almost all accounts of non-combat deaths in the WWII European Theater focus on the Holocaust, as if it were a singular event and no other governments were involved in murdering civilians. In Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder opens up the scope to include murder by the Soviets in Central Europe from 1930 to 1950. The overall picture is one in which The Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and Lithuania were very bad places to be in the mid-20th century. Snyder refers to this area as the Bloodlands, as over 14 million non-combatants were killed there in a 20-year period.

Through the 1930s, Stalin was the primary tormentor in the Bloodlands. First came agricultural collectivization, which meant starvation for five million Ukrainians. This was followed hard upon by the Great Terror of 1937-38, in which another 700,000 people were shot. Many of these victims were also peasant farmers, as the failure of collectivization had to be blamed on someone.

Once Hitler and Stalin carved up Poland between them and co-occupied it from 1939-1941, the killing was close to equal on both sides. Both Germany and Russia sought to rid Poland of its intellectuals and leaders, in order to eliminate anyone with the fortitude to rise up against their occupiers. At this point the Holocaust hadn’t really begun, as Jewish resettlement was still the Nazis’ plan (rather than the euphemism it became).

All that changed with the invasion of Russia in 1941, particularly in 1942 after the invasion stalled. The Soviet Union was still killing large numbers of its subjects, and many German POWs died of starvation in camps. Likewise, over a million Russian POWs died in German camps during the war. But behind German lines something new was happening. SS and police units, often assisted by the local populace, would round up all the Jews in a town, march them off somewhere, and shoot them. For the majority of the time the Holocaust was happening, shooting was the method of murder. The gas camps came later, and only account for half of all deaths. Shooting was often more efficient; units in large actions could kill 10,000 people a day, whereas Auschwitz-Birkenau rarely reached that rate. Snyder argues that the focus in the West on equating the camps with the Holocaust has created an unrealistic picture of the event.

As the Eastern Front crumbled and Germany was driven back, there was no respite in the Bloodlands. Now the killing was happening behind the Soviet lines, as accused collaborators and nationalist elements were purged. During this desperate time, the Holocaust reached its peak; more victims died in 1944 than any other year. Russia stirred up resistance elements to bring about the Warsaw uprising, but made no effort to assist. The Germans brutally smashed the uprising and bombed the city to rubble; Snyder reports that more Poles died in those few weeks than the total number of Americans killed in all foreign wars combined. Once the war ended, killing continued under Soviet rule as all communists who weren’t 100% pro-Russia were purged.

To people living in Central Europe, Germany and Russia were alternately viewed as saviors and monsters. After the famine and Terror, some in The Ukraine weren’t sad to see the Russians driven out. But then the Germans started killing the survivors, concentrating on Jews and communist leaders. After living under that boot for a while, the Russians were momentarily welcomed back, a welcome quickly worn out by fresh purges. By some estimates, 1 in 5 Ukrainians were killed in a 20-year period. Snyder makes a good case for not viewing the Holocaust as an event separate from history, or even separate from geography. For the middle years of the 20th century, two murderous regimes made a swath of the East European Plain their killing fields. Bloodlands brought to me a fresh perspective on a period that I have read a great deal about, and I recommend it to all who wonder how people can be so horrible to each other.

I decided that I’d skip the weekend and enjoy a three-day stubble on Monday.

And read this excellent obit. (Scroll down at the link—definitely worth reading.)

From the Center for American Progress in an email:

The first decade of the twenty-first century ended with the hottest and wettest year in recorded history, which also saw an extraordinary level of climate disasters like the catastrophic heat wave in Russia and the floods in Pakistan. This young year is already continuing the misery. Record-hot seas, warmed by billions of tons of greenhouse pollution from the burning of fossil fuels, are fueling catastrophic floods and storms around the planet. Global food and energy prices are rising as nations overwhelmed by disasters struggle with production, which threatens our economic recovery. In the United States, the blazing summer of 2010 is being followed by a harsh winter of extremes: record snowfalls, disastrous flooding, and record heat waves. Climate scientists first warned policymakers of the harsh consequences of dependence on the unconstrained abuse of coal and oil in the 1950s and 1960s, forecasting a future which is now our generation’s reality. “The 2010 data confirm the Earth’s significant long-term warming trend,” confirmed the World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Michel Jarraud. “The ten warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998.” With unabated pollution, climate disasters are poised to reach unimaginable levels of devastation in the coming years. The political climate in Washington, DC is not any brighter, as polluters have taken over of the halls of Congress. Lobbyists for carbon pollution interests have set up shop in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Republican Party is dominated by politicians who paint global warming as a scientific conspiracy. Some Democrats have joined the Republican assault on President Barack Obama’s efforts to turn back carbon pollution, arguing that the only way to preserve the American dream is to leave the coal and oil industries in control of our nation’s energy destiny.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m still at 199.5 lbs, second day in a row. I suspect that it’s working up to a drop, but in the meantime I just keep eating right, logging my food, and exercising. It will happen.

Today, I’m shopping for a GOPM (glorious one-pot meal) of what Yarnell calls Cioppino, but obviously it’s a one-pot variation. I’ll use WW rotini pasta, and it calls for shrimp and scallops. Yum. Yellow and red bell peppers, and I really like the way the peppers turn out in these meals. I’m going to add some fresh fennel on my own: fennel seems to work well.

Of course, I’ll spice it up some to remove the curse of blandness. Wish I could add some Worcestershire sauce, but that has 3 weeks to go. (Check back in 21 days for a report.)

As a result of the Pilates, I intermittently feel that I’m holding my body in a new way. I suspect that these events will become more frequent as I continue the work. I am now very pleased that The Wife vetoed the large Pilates exercise classes at the Monterey Sports Center: those are good as exercise, but I doubt that they would have the same impact on my posture.

For one thing, they don’t have the machines, and although the mat exercises are “complete”, it still is a great help to novices to use the machines, which specifically exercise, strengthen, and draw attention to the muscle systems that have not been much used.

For another, the instructor has too large a class to provide individual attention. In the beginning, when I do just about everything wrong, it’s quite helpful to have on-going correction.

I noticed for the past couple of weeks that I’ve had a soreness in my back—sort of low and at the sides. Last night I suddenly realized, “Duh! I’ve been exercising those muscles a lot.” I tensed the muscles that we’ve been working on: exactly the places where my back was sore.

So that’s understandable, and the soreness will fade.

Lovely shave today, despite those few loose bristles sticking out of the brush. I didn’t notice before, but they’re gone now. The Simpsons Persian Jar 3 Super created a fine lather from the Tabac soap—always a good-lathering soap—and the Eclipse with its Swedish Gillette blade removed lather and stubble equally smoothly and easily. A splash of Tabac, and I’m on my way.

Interesting article in the NY Times by Pam Belluck:

Taking a test is not just a passive mechanism for assessing how much people know, according to new research. It actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques.

The research, published online Thursday in the journal Science, found that students who read a passage, then took a test asking them to recall what they had read, retained about 50 percent more of the information a week later than students who used two other methods.

One of those methods — repeatedly studying the material — is familiar to legions of students who cram before exams. The other — having students draw detailed diagrams documenting what they are learning — is prized by many teachers because it forces students to make connections among facts.

These other methods not only are popular, the researchers reported; they also seem to give students the illusion that they know material better than they do.

In the experiments, the students were asked to predict how much they would remember a week after using one of the methods to learn the material. Those who took the test after reading the passage predicted they would remember less than the other students predicted — but the results were just the opposite.

“I think that learning is all about retrieving, all about reconstructing our knowledge,” said the lead author, Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University. “I think that we’re tapping into something fundamental about how the mind works when we talk about retrieval.”

Several cognitive scientists and education experts said the results were striking. . .

Continue reading.

Via Open Culture.

I don’t know what’s going on, but it looks like a 3-D cross-section of a higher-dimensional structure, with the cross section moving along (through? into?) the structure. Anyone know?

Fascinating article in the Boston Globe by Chris Wright:

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

When Sir Isaac Newton made this remark, in 1676, the name Galileo Galilei would not have been far from his mind. Galileo, who died the year Newton was born, did much of the legwork for the English physicist’s Laws of Motion, as well as for many of the other principles that underpinned the Scientific Revolution. Galileo’s shoulders, possibly more than those of any single figure in history, have served as an observation deck for generations of scientists.

It was Galileo who conclusively swept away the idea that the sun revolved around the Earth, who dismantled the looming edifice of Aristotelian physics. Unlike others of the age, the Italian steadfastly refused to hammer the square pegs of discovery into the round holes of conventional wisdom. Through an unremitting dedication to observation and experiment, it was he who ushered in the age of modern science.

Given his devotion to empirical fact, it seems odd to think that Galileo’s most important ideas might have their roots not in the real world, but in a fictional one. But that’s the argument that Mount Holyoke College physics professor Mark Peterson has been developing for the past several years: specifically, that one of Galileo’s crucial contributions to physics came from measuring the hell of Dante’s Inferno. Or rather, from disproving its measurements.

In 1588, when Galileo was a 24-year-old unknown, a medical school dropout, he was invited to deliver a couple of lectures on Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” Many in Galileo’s audience would have been shocked, even dismayed, to see this young upstart take the stage and start poking holes in what they believed about the poet’s meticulously constructed fantasy world.

Ever since its 1314 publication, scholars had toiled to map the physical features of Dante’s Inferno — the blasted valleys and caverns, the roiling rivers of fire. What Galileo said, put simply, is that many commonly accepted dimensions did not stand up to mathematical scrutiny. Using complex geometrical analysis, he attacked a leading scholar’s version of the Inferno’s structure, pointing out that his description of the infernal architecture — such as the massive cylinders descending to the center of the Earth — would, in real life, collapse under their own weight. Later, Galileo realized the leading rival theory was wrong, too, and that even the greatest scholars of the time simply didn’t understand how real-world structures worked.

Debating the mechanics of the Inferno might sound like intellectual horseplay, the 16th-century equivalent of MIT cafeteria debates about the viability of “Star Trek” teleporters. But there was more to the lectures than this. . .

Continue reading AND there’s a video at the link..

The US seems very eager to butt in to other countries’ business. Philip Smith reports:

A year and a half ago, the Bolivian government of President Evo Morales formally requested an amendment to the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs to remove the ban on coca leaf chewing and bring the treaty in line with the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Now, with the deadline to contest that amendment drawing near, the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC) is reporting that the US and other Western countries are mobilizing to kill the amendment. The IDPC is calling on those countries to abstain from blocking the amendment.

There are only two weeks before the January 31 deadline. According to the IDPC, the US, Britain, Colombia, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and Sweden are all planning to try to block the amendment. The IDPC characterizes the move as trying "to stop the right of Bolivians to express their own culture."

Washington made it official Tuesday. An anonymous "senior US official" told the Associated Press the US would file a formal objection to the request. "We hope a number of other countries will file as well," he said.

While coca is the raw material from which cocaine is made, it is also a plant that has been used by the indigenous peoples of the Andes for thousands of years. It is valued for its mild stimulant and hunger-suppressing effects. Bolivia is the world’s third largest producer of coca, behind Peru and Colombia.

"Coca leaf chewing is one of the socio-cultural practices and rituals of the Andean indigenous peoples. It is closely linked to our history and cultural identity,” President Morales wrote in a letter to the UN seeking the amendment. This traditional practice "cannot and should not be prohibited," he added.

"At a time when drug prohibition has enriched and emboldened criminal cartels to such an extent that they are attempting to violently annex the state in parts of Mexico and Guatemala, the US is expending considerable effort in blocking the Bolivian government’s legitimate and democratic right to protect and preserve a harmless indigenous practice," said British MP Jeremy Corbin, secretary of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Bolivia. "The international community needs to get its priorities right and resist this culturally ignorant attempt to dictate to indigenous people in Bolivia."

And someone needs to tell Washington.

Just back from campus visit. Checked out the bookstore, my classroom again, and the library. I now have an MPC library card.

Then I checked on Molly. She’s fine. But she’s not going to college.

The Worcestershire sauce is now in the refrigerator in a sealed jar, where it will sit for the next three weeks. Then I strain and bottle it.

It was sort of fun to make, and it indeed smells like Worcestershire. I made the usual adjustments in the process: 4 cloves garlic instead of 2, 2 anchovies rather than 1, 2″ piece of cinnamon stick and 2″ piece of ginger instead of 1″ in each case. The syrup melted and became dark amber rather quickly, and clean-up was easy: water-soluble.

I made the GOPM (glorious one-pot meal) of chicken-mushrooms-spinach, very like what I made before, with these revisions:

• quinoa instead of rice
• an entire red bell pepper, chopped, instead of half a red bell pepper cut in strips
• 1/4 bulb fennel and some fronds, sliced thinly (on the red pepper layer)
• frozen spinach, an entire package—this was the loose kind, not the brick kind

I cut way back on the water since last time it had too much liquid. The only added liquid (beyond the liquid contained in the mushrooms and veggies) was the following whisked together:

• 2 Tbsp vinaigrette
• 2 Tbsp soy sauce
• 2 Tbsp water
• 1 tsp Dijon mustard

Morning weight 199.5, and I think that’s "actual weight." Fairly often I’ve experienced and dramatic drop, followed by a bounce back. It’s as though the lower weight is just being tried. Here’s the past 7 days, including this morning’s weight:

Weird, but I don’t worry about it, just keep on with what I’m doing. The display is because I use a Withings Wi-fi-enabled scale: the image is from my Withings Web site.

Today I managed the 30 min of Nordic Track with no stop, pretty easily. Yesterday I had to pause several times, but I have had a bit of a runny nose so I think I might have a slight cold. Maybe it’s going away.

Tasks for today:

1. Make Worcestershire sauce.

2. Go visit the MPC campus, bookstore, library, etc.

My Omega boar brush, now apparently well broken in, created a generous lather from the Klar Seifen shave soap, ample for 4, 5, or 6 passes. I did 3, using my Gillette President (rhodium plated now) loaded with a Swedish Gillette blade. Then a splash of Klar Seifen Klassik, and I’m good to go.

I was going to use the Grosvenor, but I can’t find the brush. Where could it go? My bathroom is not all that large. Suspicion naturally falls on Megs. Fortunately, the cleaning ladies will be here next Wednesday and they are great at finding things.

Too bad, too, because some are great. For example:

As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto: Food, Friendship, and the Making of a Masterpiece

by Joan Reardon

A review by Peggy McMullen

In March of 1952, Julia Child wrote a fan letter to Bernard DeVoto about a column he’d written for Harper‘s magazine a few months earlier on American knives. The stainless steel implements, he remarked, would not hold an edge and were impossible to sharpen.

"Your able diatribe against the beautiful-beautiful-rust-proof-edge-proof American kitchen knife so went to my heart that I cannot refrain from sending you this nice little French model as a token of my appreciation," Child wrote the historian and prolific journalist.

When she wrote the letter, Julia was living in Paris with her husband, Paul, who worked for the State Department’s U.S. Information Service. They had met while working for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II in what is now Sri Lanka. She’d grown up not knowing how to cook. Living in Sri Lanka and China had awakened an interest in food that, in France, burst into a passion with the country’s splendid food. In her letter, Child told DeVoto she’d spent the past three years in Paris studying French cooking (she began taking classes at Le Cordon Bleu in 1949).

A few weeks later, she got a letter back from DeVoto’s wife, Avis, who apologized that her husband, swamped with work and trying to get ready for a five-week trip, did not have time to write Julia himself.

Avis’ letter was no mere thanks and buh-bye. The chatty response expanded on the topic of knives and sharpening and asked Julia some more questions, ending: "Thanks again for the knife, which is a little gem. My husband, I regret to say, has snitched it for his own use — cutting the lemon peel the proper thinness for the six o’clock Martini — but it will be mine while he is in California."

Thus began a correspondence, friendship and melding of like minds that lasted the rest of their lives — and helped in the publication of Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Read the rest of this entry »

A reader passed along the link to this post, which indeed looks as though it might be of use to owners of small businesses. Here are the first few:

Whether you have an MBA or are starting your own business before finishing your undergraduate work, there’s more to learn about business than what you get out of classes and textbooks. Supplement your traditional coursework — and even your own experience — by listening to these innovative, insightful and gutsy business leaders who’ve got a lot to teach you about venture capital, collaboration, the new culture of leadership, and more.

Entrepreneurship

These lectures tackle topics in entrepreneurship, from appealing to the consumer to making great pitches.

1. Entrepreneurs: Four entrepreneurs share their journeys to open a new business, and the talks inspire passion and excitement.
2. Entrepreneurship and Society: This talk from UCTV is led by Tom Kemp, President and CEO of Centrify Corporation. He talks about what new ventures need in order to effectively appeal to the modern-day consumer.

. . .

Practical Education

From management to marketing, here are lectures that give you new ideas to help you build your business.

1. John Gerzema: The post-crisis consumer: Learn how to appeal to the post-recession consumer here.
2. Team Process Leadership: James Seferis’ innovative philosophy on business leadership and success involves active participation from all team members.
3. Finding Gold: Hiring the Best and the Brightest: Watch this lecture from UWTV to build an invaluable team that’s focused, motivated and cooperative.
4. Customer Relationship Management: Former Amazon.com executive Bill Price weighs in on customer relationship management.

. . .

Continue reading. Although the title of the post at the link states that the business owners must themselves be small, I think that is a typo: an omitted hyphen.

I have lots more stuff to do that in days past. There’s the Nordic Track, the journals, Pilates three days a week, Spanish two days a week (plus prep), the book, and so on. I was going to sign up for a Great Books discussion group, but there’s a schedule conflict with Spanish and I was also thinking I might be biting off more than I can chew.

I just made the Yucatan Fish recipe from GOPM, more or less. The layers and content in my version:

1/2 large yellow onion
1/2 cup quinoa
2 Tbs water [UPDATE: water quantity changed]
1/2 lb petrale sole fillets, cut into chunks
Salt and pepper and crushed red pepper
Juice of 1/2 lime
Thinly sliced Meyer lemon, unpeeled
1/2 red bell pepper, 1/2 yellow or orange bell pepper, and 1/2 green bell pepper, cut into chunks
1 cup frozen corn kernels
1 dry pint organic Sugar Plum grape tomatoes, cut in half
2 Tbsp Bragg’s Organic Ginger and Sesame vinaigrette dressing

She called for a medium onion instead, and also for 3/4 c quinoa—but my package gave the serving size as 1/4 c dry, and there is absolutely no point, when I’m on a reducing diet, to eat more than one serving.

She also inexplicably omitted the crushed red pepper.

She has you cut the peppers into strips, but I like square chunks: they give more pepper taste.

She called for a full 10-oz package of frozen corn kernels: 3.5 servings. No thanks. I stuck with 2 servings. She also called for regular tomatoes (4-6 small ones) and had you lay the slices across the top. I used the tomatoes that I had.

She gave the cooking time as 30-45 minutes, quite a range. She say it depends on how thick the fish fillets are. I’m going with 45 minutes.

I think this may end up having too much water.

UPDATE: I didn’t care for the lime peel (from the sliced unpeeled lime), so I’ve modified the above to use only the juice of the lime. But the Meyer lemons are fine. And there was WAY too much water: tomatoes, lemons, peppers, etc., all contribute. Next time I’ll try 2 Tbsp water, as shown now in the recipe.

UPDATE 2: Bottom line: quite good with changes noted. Nice combination of flavors and would be good with rice as well. I was worried about cooking fish with this method, but it works quite well.