Later On

A very nice shave. I made what seemed to me a fine lather from the MWF, using an Omega artificial badger brush, then three smooth passes with the Gillette gold-plated slim-handle—an Arisocrat? Executive? I can’t keep track of their names, which they reuse prolifically. The blade was a Gillette 7 o’Clock SharpEdge. A splash of Stetson Classic, and I’m ready for class—once I get dressed, of course.

This is what I want for breakfast:

Pulled-pork eggs benedict with chipotle hollandaise

I tried a few new things. In the onion layer, I added a packet of dried chanterelle mushrooms. Then the 1/2 cup rice I sprinkled over that, and then I added 2 Tbsp chia seed. When I added the liquid, I made sure that there was enough to reconstitute the mushrooms, knowing the chia seed would thicken any excess liquid satisfactorily.

Both innovations turned out extremely well. I also used a good sprinkling of spicy paprika on the protein layer—chicken breast, in this case. The greens were broccolini, and they worked well.

I might switch to weekly from fortnightly: the amount of veg I got is more like a week’s worth. Well, it is supposed to be a week’s worth for a family of four, but I imagine that’s a family that doesn’t eat so many veggies as I—and also some families of four would have lunch at work and/or school, and have dinner as their only veggie-including meal at home.

At any rate, the booty includes:

• 4 leeks
• 1 bunch of red chard
• 1 bunch of dandelion greens
• 1 bunch of collards (quite young & delicious looking)
• 1 head of Romaine lettuce (spectacular)
• 1 bag of navel oranges
• 1 bag of clementines
• 1 bunch of pascal celery
• 1 head cauliflower
• 4 crowns of broccoli

All of it was wonderfully fresh and healthy looking. I’ll easily eat that in a week.

Fortunately, I’ve been saving the plastic bags from produce I buy at Whole Foods, so I was able to bag it all and put it in the refrigerator.

I can’t wait to have it. I have a 3.5 quart cast iron Dutch oven I’ll be using so I can fit in an entire bunch of greens. Of course, I still will measure out 2 scant servings of starch and 2 servings (i.e., 8 oz) protein. So though I will use a bigger pot, the difference will be only in vegetables—and greens cook down a lot.

I do not think the US is doing well in Afghanistan. Events like this one, reported in the NY Times by Alissa Rubin and Sangar Rahimi are more likely to increase terrorism than reduce it:

Nine boys collecting firewood to heat their homes in the eastern Afghanistan mountains were killed by NATO helicopter gunners who mistook them for insurgents, according to a statement on Wednesday by NATO, which apologized for the mistake.The boys, who were 9 to 15 years old, were attacked on Tuesday in what amounted to one of the war’s worst cases of mistaken killings by foreign-led forces. The victims included two sets of brothers. A 10th boy survived.

The NATO statement, which included an unusual personal apology by the commander of the NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, said the boys had been misidentified as the attackers of a NATO base earlier in the day. News of the attack enraged Afghans and led to an anti-American demonstration on Wednesday in the village of Nanglam, where the boys were from. The only survivor, Hemad, 11, said his mother had told him to go out with other boys to collect firewood because “the weather is very cold now.”

“We were almost done collecting the wood when suddenly we saw the helicopters come,” said Hemad, who, like many Afghans, has only one name. “There were two of them. The helicopters hovered over us, scanned us and we saw a green flash from the helicopters. Then they flew back high up, and in a second round they hovered over us and started shooting. They fired a rocket which landed on a tree. The tree branches fell over me and shrapnel hit my right hand and my side.”

The tree, Hemad said, saved his life by covering him so that he could not be seen by the helicopters, which, he said, “shot the boys one after another.”

Continue reading. This reminds me of the incident we learned of through Wikileaks, in which an Army helicopter gunned down people attempting to help the wounded.

I think these actions will be defended only because they were not the actions of an enemy. In the US today, the same behavior is condemned if done by our enemies, excused if done by us. There seems to be no recognition that the US is doing very bad things, things that work to increase terrorism.

The US can certainly massacre civilians, but when our forces had the opportunity to capture Bin Laden, they instead allowed him to escape and did not push the attack.

This is an astonishing story in The Washington Monthly by Meg Stalcup and Joshua Craze:

On a bright January morning in 2010, at Broward College in Davie, Florida, about sixty police officers and other frontline law enforcement officials gathered in a lecture hall for a course on combating terrorism in the Sunshine State. Some in plain clothes, others in uniform, they drifted in clutching Styrofoam cups of coffee, greeting acquaintances from previous statewide training sessions. The instructor, Sam Kharoba, an olive-skinned man wearing rimless glasses and an ill-fitting white dress shirt, stood apart at the front of the hall reviewing PowerPoint slides on his laptop.As he got under way, Kharoba described how, over the next three days, he would teach his audience the fundamentals of Islam. “We constantly hear statements,” Kharoba began, “that Islam is a religion of peace, and we constantly hear of jihadists who are trying to kill as many non-Muslims as they can.” Kharoba’s course would establish for his students that one of these narratives speaks to a deep truth about Islam, and the other is a calculated lie.

“How many terror attacks have there been since 9/11? Muslim terror attacks,” Kharoba asked the room. Silence. “Let’s start the bidding.”

“Over a hundred,” someone volunteered.

“I got a hundred,” Kharoba called back. Another audience member, louder now, suggested three hundred.

“Three hundred!” Kharoba declared.

“Over a thousand,” offered another voice in the audience.

Kharoba stopped the bidding. “Over thirteen thousand,” he said. “Over thirteen thousand attacks.” He paused to let the statistic sink in.

Kharoba belongs to a growing profession, one that is ballooning on the spigot of federal and state dollars set aside for counterterrorism efforts since the attacks of September 11, 2001. He is a counterterrorism instructor to America’s beat cops, one of several hundred working the law enforcement training circuit. Some are employed by large security contractors; others, like Kharoba, are independent operators.

Kharoba was born in Jordan, and he likes to intimate that members of his family are important tribal leaders. This lends a veneer of insider credibility to classroom remarks that might otherwise seem like off-color jokes. He showed the class some photographs taken in the Gaza Strip. “This is the Arab version of a line,” Kharoba told the students, gesturing to a photo of Palestinians rushing toward a passport agency. Then he showed a YouTube video of two uniformed men beating a nameless prisoner. “This is what Miranda rights are in the Arab world,” he said.

Fortunately for an adept American police officer, Kharoba said, jihadists telegraph their extremist intentions in altogether predictable ways. One only has to learn the signs. Take Mahmoud—Kharoba’s preferred name for a generic Muslim. Kharoba can tell whether Mahmoud is a Wahhabi (a member of a fundamentalist Islamic sect from Saudi Arabia) just by going through Mahmoud’s trash. There will be no pre-approved credit card offers, because interest is forbidden in Islam. There will be no brown wax fried-chicken bags, because fried chicken isn’t halal. For Kharoba, extremist Muslims are as easy to spot as American gang members.

“When you see a bunch of guys in red, what do you know?” Kharoba asked.

“They are Bloods,” responded the audience, many of whom deal with gangs regularly.

“When you have a Muslim that wears a headband, regardless of color or insignia, basically what that is telling you is ‘I am willing to be a martyr.’” There were other signs, too. “From the perspective of operational security, there are two things I am always looking out for: a shaved body and moving lips,” he explained. “Some of the Pakistani hijackers shaved their whole bodies in a ritual of cleanliness. If their lips are moving, these guys are praying. As they are walking through an airport, every second they’re going to be praying.”

America today is too politically correct to acknowledge the reality of Islamic fanaticism, Kharoba said. “Would Islam be tolerated if everyone knew its true message?” he asked the class. “From a Muslim perspective, do you want non-Muslims to know the truth about Islam?”

“No!” came the audience reply.

“So what do Muslims do?” Kharoba demanded.

“Lie!”

Kharoba strode forward to the front of the room, his voice slower now, more measured. “Islam is a highly violent radical religion that mandates that all of the earth must be Muslim.”

The class broke for lunch.

That afternoon, Kharoba offered more tips on how to detect violent Muslims. “You remember the Alligator Alley incident?” he asked.

He was referring to . . .

Continue reading.

This report in the Richmond Times-Dispatch by Barton Hinkle has good news:

This week Virginia Democrats scored a major victory for liberals when the Senate started rolling back eminent-domain abuse in the commonwealth.

That’s not how the issue is commonly perceived, of course. In fact, The Washington Post spun it just the other way in its lead paragraph on the story: “The Democratic-led state Senate handed a victory to tea party activists and other conservatives in Virginia on Tuesday by agreeing to start the process of adding new protections for private property to the state constitution,” the paper reported.

Well. It’s certainly true that the activists pushing back against eminent-domain abuse tend to come from the right side of the political spectrum: Americans for Prosperity (conservative), The Institute for Justice (libertarian), the Cato Institute (libertarian), the Family Foundation of Virginia (conservative) and so on. Generally speaking, government seizures of private property are to right-wingers what rising income inequality is to left-wingers: a profound injustice crying out for redress.

But the issue goes deeper than who’s cheering and who’s shrugging. Property rights, like free-speech rights, benefit everyone — and eminent-domain reform should be a liberal cause for a number of reasons. Here are four.

First, there’s the David-vs.-Goliath aspect. You don’t hear about many eminent-domain cases pitting scrappy local governments against Lockheed Martin, Exxon or Proctor & Gamble. To the contrary, recent cases have involved:

•Roanoke seizing a building that belonged to the owners of a mom-and-pop flooring company so it could turn the property over to Carilion, a billion-dollar health-care corporation.

•Norfolk trying to seize the property of Central Radio so it could hand the land over to Old Dominion University.

•VDOT trying to cheat a small day-care owner out of just compensation — and spending more on lawyers to fight the case than it would have shelled out by paying her original asking price.

In these and other cases, those rooting for the underdog share common cause with property-rights activists.

The assembly-passed measure stipulates that private property can be taken only for a genuine public purpose, covers condemning entities previously exempted (such as utilities and VDOT) and requires truly just compensation for economic losses. (Sponsored by Democratic Del. Johnny Joannou, the measure still must win legislative passage again after the November elections and then be approved by referendum before it is enshrined in the state’s Constitution.)

A second, related, reason liberals should support eminent-domain reform is . . .

Continue reading.

Pretty overt sell-out from Chris Dodd.

Bruce Everiss had a terrible experience with Durance L’òme shaving soap, which he recounts here. I have used Durance L’òme shaving soap and rather liked it: the sea buckthorn idea is somehow appealing.

Given that our experience with the soap is so different, I thought that the manufacturer had probably changed the formulation, something that manufacturers do without notice. I suggested that I mail him my puck, so he could do a side-by-side comparison, but lo! he mailed his puck to me.

So once again, we have a shave of two lathers:

I decided to use two of the Omega artificial badger brushes, since so far as I can tell they use the same knot and exhibit the same performance. Bruce’s puck is on the left in the photo, my old puck on the right. The Thayers is an idea suggested by a reader: mix the Meehan Bay Rum with a little witch hazel to tame the sting, and I thought lemon witch hazel would be good.

The two pucks had slightly different fragrances, with the puck from Bruce having a stronger fragrance. But then that puck is new and mine is a few years old, sitting out uncovered. So that difference could be due to aging.

When I made the lather, I didn’t notice any significant differences in performance, and in shaving they both were okay with my skin. Three smooth passes—I just put a new Swedish Gillette blade in the Merkur Slant—and a splash of the aftershave combination, and I was done.

The aftershave combination worked like a charm: no noticeable sting, and the fragrance is nice.

The soap: I don’t know. They work fine for me, but then we have different water and different skin. Still, it’s a remarkable difference. The initial loading of the brushes easily held up for three passes, and after the shave was completed, I took photos of the brushes:

Again: that’s from the original loading, and after three passes.

I don’t get it. I can only report that, with the local water and with my skin, Durance L’òme works for me. Your mileage obviously may vary.

It’s important for psychological health that one has a sense of control. Psychologists often refer to the “locus of control,” and the Wikipedia article at the link begins:

Locus of control in social psychology refers to the extent to which individuals believe that they can control events that affect them. Understanding of the concept was developed by Julian B. Rotter in 1954, and has since become an important aspect of personality studies.

Individuals with a high internal locus of control believe that events result primarily from their own behavior and actions. Those with a low internal locus of control believe that powerful others, fate, or chance primarily determine events.

Those with a high internal locus of control have better control of their behavior, tend to exhibit more political behaviors, and are more likely to attempt to influence other people than those with a high external (or low internal respectively) locus of control. Those with a high internal locus of control are more likely to assume that their efforts will be successful. They are more active in seeking information and knowledge concerning their situation.

One’s “locus” (Latin for “place” or “location”) can either be internal (meaning the person believes that they control their life) or external (meaning they believe that their environment, some higher power, or other people control their decisions and their life). . .

More information at the link. Gaining a sense of control seems to be one of the issues in eating disorders, self-harm (e.g., cutting oneself), and other apparently drastic actions. But in a good sense, it also involves (for example) losing weight, getting organized, and other positive expressions.

The Simple Dollar has an interesting post (with interesting comments) on how some people use shopping (and buying things) as a way of getting a sense of control. The post begins:

This past week, I had a wonderful exchange with Maggie, an administrative assistant at a Fortune 500 company. In one email, Maggie said the following, which I found quite compelling.

The rest of my life feels completely out of control. My children are demanding, as are my bosses, and the demands change all the time. The kids are constantly making messes at home, undoing any house cleaning that I do. I seem to be learning a new software suite every month. I wake up some mornings feeling completely frazzled, while other mornings I feel completely wonderful.

One of the few times I feel genuinely in control of my immediate situation is when I’m shopping. I control what I buy, and when I leave that store, I feel that I’ve exerted control over that purchase. That sense of control feels very good. It feels like a bubble against the craziness of the rest of my life.

I think Maggie hit upon a very big element of why people today have a hard time getting a grasp on their spending and resent any suggestion of change in their spending habits. In the eyes of some, the ability to purchase is one of the last pieces of controllable freedom in their very chaotic life.

I can certainly see how my life was much like this for many years.

I would often feel very relaxed when I would go into a store or a coffee shop. In here, I was no longer responsible for children. I was no longer responsible for server uptime. I was no longer responsible for figuring out strange demands from clients.

A store became something of a place of solace. While I was in there, I would feel as though I was in control of what I did. I decided whether or not to make a purchase. I decided how long to stay. I decided whether or not to order another coffee or buy a second book. It was wholly my decision, which contrasted with most of the rest of my life where it felt as though the decision-making power was out of my hands.

Of course, such a perspective often developed a weird, negative relationship with . . .

Continue reading.

Kevin Drum has a good article about the issues fueling the Wisconsin fight:

In 2008, a Liberal Democrat was elected president. Landslide votes gave Democrats huge congressional majorities. Eight years of war and scandal and George W. Bush had stigmatized the Republican Party almost beyond redemption. A global financial crisis had discredited the disciples of free-market fundamentalism, and Americans were ready for serious change.

Or so it seemed. But two years later, Wall Street is back to earning record profits, and conservatives are triumphant. To understand why this happened, it’s not enough to examine polls and tea parties and the makeup of Barack Obama’s economic team. You have to understand how we fell so short, and what we rightfully should have expected from Obama’s election. And you have to understand two crucial things about American politics.

The first is this: Income inequality has grown dramatically since the mid-’70s—far more in the US than in most advanced countries—and the gap is only partly related to college grads outperforming high-school grads. Rather, the bulk of our growing inequality has been a product of skyrocketing incomes among the richest 1 percent and—even more dramatically—among the top 0.1 percent. It has, in other words, been CEOs and Wall Street traders at the very tippy-top who are hoovering up vast sums of money from everyone, even those who by ordinary standards are pretty well off.Second, American politicians don’t care much about voters with moderate incomes. Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels studied the voting behavior of US senators in the early ’90s and discovered that they respond far more to the desires of high-income groups than to anyone else. By itself, that’s not a surprise. He also found that Republicans don’t respond at all to the desires of voters with modest incomes. Maybe that’s not a surprise, either. But this should be: Bartels found that Democratic senators don’t respond to the desires of these voters, either. At all.

It doesn’t take a multivariate correlation to conclude that these two things are tightly related: If politicians care almost exclusively about the concerns of the rich, it makes sense that over the past decades they’ve enacted policies that have ended up benefiting the rich. And if you’re not rich yourself, this is a problem. First and foremost, it’s an economic problem because it’s siphoned vast sums of money from the pockets of most Americans into those of the ultrawealthy. At the same time, relentless concentration of wealth and power among the rich is deeply corrosive in a democracy, and this makes it a profoundly political problem as well. How did we get here?

Continue reading. Interesting graphs at the link.

I truly need to declutter and have done some recently—and planning to do more. I thought this article was interesting, though he clearly takes it way beyond what I would contemplate.

Turns out it’s a totally recent problem with relatively easy solutions. Read Kevin Drum’s post.

Above you see my two Slant Bar razors: the Hoffritz on the left, the Merkur on the right. So far as the actual shaving, I cannot tell any difference between them. But, as you see, there are small differences in design.

And today’s shave. I wanted to use a Slant Bar again today, and I did get a lovely shave. Then I tried applying the Meehan to my face, left wet after the final rinse that ends the shave. That helped, but still more sting than I get from other aftershaves. This one may end up being cologne only.