I just watched the first episode of Season 3 of Yes, Minister, “Equal Opportunities” via Amazon Prime (free streaming video). It’s pretty easy to find: I just moved to the “TV Series” menu item, which lets you pick “Genre” and “Comedy” seems to be exclusively British comedies—at least that’s all I saw. Different seasons of the same series appear randomly, so you have to browse. But I bet there’s a search.
I hadn’t realized that this series was pretty much an instruction manual in the economic and political theories of the Thatcherites, but once I saw the YouTube video on that, it’s obvious when you watch the episodes. But damn! they’re funny.
I’m finding that Anki really will do everything I want, but it’s a complex program. I highly recommend that you view his videos on how to use the program. Here’s the first.
I have tried several cast-iron dutch ovens for Glorious One-Pot Meals type of cooking. I thought I would summarize my experience here:
I prefer the shape of the Texsport 2-qt Dutch oven (tall cylinder; $24.47) to that of the Cajun Classic (squat cylinder; $33.60). The Cajun Classic is enameled, but for quite a few things that will make no difference. [UPDATE: The Texsport turns out to be, in actual measure, 2.5 quarts---i.e., 2 quarts plus 2 more cups. The extra room just is filled with vegetables, so no problem---I do measure starch and protein carefully. - LG]
Of course, there’s also Le Creuset, at $140. Too much, especially since it comes with a handle unsuited to high temperature cooking. You can buy an all-metal handle for $10 to replace the original, but The Son points out that a drawer knob makes a fine handle for much less.
If you want a seriously good enameled cast-iron pot well suited to this type of cooking, I would recommend Staub: Somewhat expensive (retail at $187, on Amazon for $100), the Staub 2.25-quart round cocotte is be an excellent size and comes in some great colors. In quality of design and manufacture it is (IMO) head and shoulders above Le Creuset.
I did get a Staub 3.5-quart round cocotte as well: it makes 4 meals at a time. But I still use the smaller Staub and the Texsport quite frequently.
Lodge makes a pre-seasoned cast-iron 2-quart “serving pot” that would work as well, but it looks like the squat, wide. $30 for this one.
Another wonderful shave, and thanks to Robert for getting me to use the Slant Bar more frequently: it is indeed an awesome razor.
A fine lather from D.R. Harris Arlington, thanks to the Rooney Style 3, Size 1 Super Silvertip. Three passes with the Hoffritz and its Swedish Gillette blade, then a return to Arlington: a splash of the aftershave and I’m ready to whip through the remainder of the homework due today.
Don’t forget: each recipe shown here bakes in a 2-quart cast iron Dutch oven and feeds 2 adults. However, simply double the recipe and pot size to feed 4, or triple to feed 6, etc. Each increase will require approx. 8 more minutes in the oven as well.
Steve of Kafeneio has made his first Glorious One-Pot Meal—and he doesn’t mess around: he uses a 6-liter (!) dutch oven. Good results, though, and some interesting ideas for future creations. Take a look.
If any other readers have tried making a GOPM, I would be very interested in knowing what you used and how it turned out. Getting new ideas is always interesting and often helpful.
Two series, no longer produced, but available in their entirety and well worth watching—indeed, well worth purchasing, since you (or at any rate, I) can watch them over and over with enjoyment. And both Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister are available for instant view on Amazon—free to Amazon Prime members.
If you do watch instantly, be careful to start with the first season and watch the episodes in sequence: the plots build on what has happened earlier in the series. Four seasons are available for Yes, Minister, but only two for Yes, Prime Minister, though I was sure that had more seasons. Maybe the full collection is available only on DVD.
These two series, though excellent comedies, are as instructive about politics as another comic show, Jon Stewart’s.
Here’s a sample from the first series, “Yes, Minister”:
But if Dreamfields does work for you, this study strongly suggests you could get the same effect from eating $.99 store brand pasta as you could eating the much more expensive Dreamfields. Just cook the regular pasta for the 9 minutes that Dreamfields suggests. Cooking any pasta longer than that will makes it digest more quickly.
Two last things:
1. Only cooked dry pasta metabolizes slowly. Fresh pasta–the kind you buy in the freezer section or at some fancy italian restaurants–is made with regular flour, not the more semolina flour that contains resistant starch. Fresh pasta digests very quickly and you will see a much larger spike after eating it.
2. The label portion size for a serving of pasta is tiny. Measure out 2 dry ounces on a cooking scale and cook it and you’ll see what I mean. The serving of pasta you get at a restaurant is anywhere from 3 to 6 label portions. Since that very small 2 ounce portion contains over 50 grams of carbohydrate, the restaurant servings are anywhere from 150 to 300 grams. And that’s without the “low fat” high carbohydrate sauce dumped on top.
I eat pasta (whole wheat, usually), and I always weigh what I will cook. If I’m in weight-loss mode, I use a 1.5-oz serving instead of 2-oz (weights of pasta before cooking).
I was particularly interested in this post on neuropathy, a danger diabetics face. From the post:
What’s new and interesting about this new study is the discovery that mitochondria are born at one end of the nerve nearest the spine and migrate toward other end, and that, because the feet nerves have the longest journey, their mitochondria take the longest time to make the trip and hence the oldest and the most prone to manifest damage.
The study suggests it takes two to three years for the mitochondria in the feet to migrate to their destination. What we can take from is is the following: If you have developed neuropathy in your feet due to exposing your nerves to high blood sugar levels, once you take steps to stop diabetic neuropathy from happening–by lowering your blood sugar to normal levels–you should expect it to take at least three years for your new and improved mitochondria–the ones that haven’t already been damaged–to make the long trip down the nerve cell to your toes.
This is why dietary studies that only last a year are useless for showing the real impact on health that is achieved by a diet that lowers blood sugar to normal levels. But if you know it will take three years after you have brought the damage to a halt to restore your nerves, you should have the patience to stick to it.
The benefits are incalculable. Especially when you remember that nerve damage from high blood sugars doesn’t just affect your toes. It affects other long nerves, like the vagus nerve that controls everything from heart beat to your digestive tract.
This was of particular interest to me because I find myself increasing involved in things in which the payoff is long term—things that progress slowly and require continuing effort: learning Spanish, losing weight, getting fit. And those things are hard because your day-to-day progress seems tiny compared with the amount to be accomplished. But I’m here to tell you that day-by-day will take one a long way: many a mite makes a mickle, as you know.
For me, knowing that the mitochondria and en route down the long nerves and that, if I just keep up the exercise and watch my weight for three years, there will be a big payoff—well, it’s certainly enough to keep me going on the Nordic Track quite a while longer.
One of the peculiarities of our high-tech society is that much of what sustains it is invisible or simply unnoticed by most of us most of the time. We flick a switch and the lights come on. We drive to the supermarket and find the shelves stocked to overflowing. How all this is made possible doesn’t usually rate a second’s thought.
The Port of Los Angeles and nearby Port of Long Beach are enormous and complex operations with a simple goal: to import and export (mostly import) vast amounts of stuff as efficiently and effectively as possible. Sprawling across 10,700 acres of Southern California waterfront — an area fifteen times the size of Central Park — they are the two busiest ports in the country, together accounting for 40 percent of waterborne cargo in the United States, more than half of which ends up east of the Rockies. In 2008, the Port of Los Angeles alone was responsible for $243.7 billion of global trade. Five days a year — Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Day, and “Bloody Thursday,” a holiday commemorating two strikers killed in the 1934 West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike — activity at the two ports grinds to a halt. But one imagines that the cargo vessels and tugboats, dozens of cranes, thousands of trucks, and 500,000 people who work at the ports are not at rest on Bloody Thursday, merely idling in neutral.
So dependent is our economy on the cargo flowing through the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach that a biological metaphor is appropriate. On a helicopter tour of the area, Bill Sharpsteen follows the Alameda Corridor, a 20-mile railroad expressline that connects the Port of Los Angeles to the transcontinental railroad network. The port, he reflects, is a massive heart, pumping what the country needs, or wants, through this major rail artery, which eventually separates out into thousands of smaller vessels and capillaries. And indeed, from the air, it has that appearance, an industrial vascular system whose disruption would cause an economic heart attack for the country.
Thus, a no-work holiday is the heart of commerce skipping a beat, a palpitation that can be planned for and lived with. What will concern you after reading The Docks, Sharpsteen’s new book about the Port of Los Angeles, are the unplanned events — labor disputes, terrorist attacks and other security emergencies, financial crises, and environmental repercussions — that have the potential to bring the national economy to its knees, because the Port of L.A. connects Chicago to Hawaii and South Carolina to South Korea and China to everyone. It’s happened before. A ten-day West Coast lockout in 2002 cost the U.S. economy up to $15 billion while ships full of rotting food sat anchored out at sea.
The images most Americans have of a modern port are of eight-story hammerhead cranes and multicolored shipping containers stacked five-high at a terminal waiting to be loaded on to a truck or train or shipped empty back to Asia. But in The Docks, Sharpsteen introduces us to the people behind (and below) those images. Thousands of cargo vessels enter the Port of Los Angeles every year, and bringing in each one involves about 200 steps coordinated among dozens of different entities. Sharpsteen talks to the port administrators, shippers, longshoremen, pilots, clerks, chandlers, tugboat captains, truck drivers, Coast Guardsmen, Customs and Border Protection agents, and port police who keep the docks running smoothly, profitably, and safely. He describes too how the docks have changed in the last fifty years. He interviews retired longshoremen who remember when discharging a ship’s cargo required five to eight gangs of eight “hold men” each, back when a ship might be in port for five days while it was unloaded and reloaded, before mechanization reshaped the industry in the 1950s and 1960s. (Now a ship is in port for just two days.) He tells the story of the women who at great physical risk integrated the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in the 1980s.
Less visible but no less important are the community activists who try to keep their powerful neighbor accountable. Sharpsteen talks with a mechanic protesting the aesthetic impact of the port, a university professor studying the health effects of the port’s “Diesel Death Zone,” and the eco-attorneys who won an important case requiring many ships to plug into the electrical grid rather than continuously run their polluting engines. The Docks could easily have read like a bureaucrat’s report, dry and groaning under the weight of statistics. Instead, in a mosaic of evocative stories and vivid images (Sharpsteen is also a photographer and award-winning documentary producer), the world of the port comes alive.
Early in the book, Sharpsteen compares the Port of Los Angeles to the electric company. Both are rarely considered in our daily lives. As long as the refrigerator hums quietly, as long as we can still get cheap toys at Wal-Mart, our favorite Australian wine at the supermarket, and Brazilian oranges in winter, why worry? But it’s worthwhile to remember that our appetite for imports — not to mention the world’s comparatively smaller appetite for our exports — is being fed by the machinery of industry and hundreds of thousands of proxies. To read The Docks is to be mindful of those proxies and honor their work, even as we ask hard questions about what it means to be addicted to cargo “pumping through a single, vulnerable port.” Because sooner or later the lights aren’t going to turn on, and then what?
John Pattison is the co-author of Besides the Bible: 100 Books that Have, Should, or Will Create Christian Culture (Biblica, 2010). He lives with his wife and daughter in Silverton, Oregon.
I seem to have much less movie time than previously, doubtless due to increased activity (Spanish, Pilates, etc.). So I’m trimming Netflix back significantly, dropping GreenCine altogether, and taking advantage of this like this, from Open Culture:
We took our Free Movie collection and neatly placed the films into categories this weekend, making the big collection a little easier to navigate. If you’re looking for free movies, we have 340 films listed in the following categories.
I’m really enjoying Pilates now that I’m beginning to feel what’s going on. I must have been terribly unaware of my body and body movement, and that is doubtless why initially I was having such difficulties. But now, just about 4 months into it, I am much better at feeling what my muscles and bones are doing, so that I can better follow the instructor’s guidance, and the way tiny changes in stance or in muscle tension or in one’s mental metaphor of the movement makes a significant difference in how the movement feels is just fascinating. I sort of want to go daily now.
Today we worked on the kinds of stances and movements I make using the Nordic Track, and I can’t wait to get onto it tomorrow and see how it feels with the new awareness.
We take you back to another era when funding for public broadcasting was in doubt – to 1969, when Richard Nixon planned to cut PBS’ funding from $20 million to $10 million. Here Fred Rogers, the gentle creator of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, gets six short minutes before Senator John Pastore, the chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications, and makes his pitch for publicly-funded educational television. In those 360 seconds, Rogers gets the gruff senator to do a complete 180 – to end up saying “It looks like you just earned the 20 million dollars.” And, indeed, it turned out just that way. Those were the days…
I would think it would be obvious that the US certainly has no leg on which to stand when it condemns strongly how other nations torture people: we not only have tortured people, sometimes to death, but we resolutely refuse to investigate the incidents. So how does Obama get off condemning torture in other countries (and, moreover, condemning some countries for not investigating allegations of their past misdeeds, including torture—I’m thinking here of Indonesia)? Has he absolutely no sense of shame? Is he totally oblivious?
At any rate, a former chief prosecutor at Guantánamo has an interesting column on this topic:
Once upon a time, Americans across the political spectrum were united behind efforts to prevent torture and punish torturers. The United States signed the UN Convention Against Torture (CAT) in 1988 when Republican Ronald Reagan was president. A Democrat-controlled Congress ratified it in 1994. The CAT says, “No exceptional circumstance whatsoever … may be invoked as justification of torture,” a principle the US endorsed without reservation. The CAT requires nations to enact domestic laws criminalising torture, and in 1994, a torture statute was added to the US criminal code.
A Republican member of Congress sponsored the War Crimes Act in 1996, which made “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions – like torture – federal crimes. He wanted Americans abused by former adversaries to get the justice they deserved but had been denied. The measure passed a Republican-controlled Congress by unanimous consent and President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, signed it into law.
Americans were solidly against torture when they believed they were beneficiaries of anti-torture laws. But then, the 11 September 2001 attacks occurred – and created an exceptional circumstance used by some as justification to draw new lines between right and wrong.
Susan Crawford had held key posts in Republican administrations dating back to Reagan; then, in 2007, Secretary of Defence Robert Gates appointed her head of the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In an interview with Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward published a few days before President George Bush left office in 2009, Crawford explained why she dismissed charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani, the so-called 20th hijacker. “We tortured Qahtani,” she said; “His treatment met the legal definition of torture.”
US government officials in other detainee cases reached similar conclusions:
Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement last month that the Justice Department’s Office of the Solicitor General would no longer defend the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in federal court spurred some interesting discussion among legal scholars and commentators about the decision’s rationale and significance. What should a president do when he believes his duty to uphold the Constitution conflicts with his duty to enforce the country’s laws? DOMA’s conservative defenders were for the most part predictably outraged—although, as my colleague Damon Root pointed out last week, conservative darling Robert Bork and current Chief Justice John Roberts made similar decisions while working in the Office of the Solicitor General during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, respectively.
The Obama administration will continue to enforce DOMA; it just won’t defend the law against federal court challenges. (House Speaker John Boehner [R-Ohio] says the House will have its own lawyers do so.) But Obama’s willingness to repudiate a law he believes is unconstitutional raises some other questions. What about federal cases that don’t involve laws passed by Congress, such as cases where criminal defendants argue that their constitutional rights have been violated? If Obama agrees with them, why not take their side, or at least not rush to defend the prosecution?
Obama now owns this atrocity. Dafna Linzer reports for ProPublica:
President Obama yesterday formalized indefinite detention for dozens of men held at Guantanamo Bay and announced that the Pentagon would move ahead with military trials for a handful of other detainees.
In an executive order [1], which we first reported on in June 2009 [2], the White House created a board to periodically review the dangerousness of prisoners being held without charge or trial. The order says the new process will allow detainees — some in custody for nearly a decade — to challenge the government’s determination that they pose a threat if released.
While the order is new, most of the ideas [3] it contains are not. This is the third time such a board has been created for nearly the same purpose. Two similar processes to review detainee cases were in place during the Bush administration. Like its predecessors, the Obama administration’s review process will operate outside the courts and will be subject to no independent review. Also like the Bush White House, the Obama administration alone will choose all members of the review board and appoint a “personal representative” to advocate on behalf of the detainees.The major difference is that the White House, sidestepping claims that detainees have a right to counsel, will allow them to hire private attorneys The order states that the government will not pay legal fees. While detainees will have access to some evidence against them, the government will choose what evidence to share. The process is meant to be more adversarial than it had been under the Bush administration. Detainees can submit their own evidence to the review board but will be permitted to call only those witnesses the government determines to be reasonable. It is unclear whether a detainee can dismiss his personal representative or how the lawyer and representative will work together. The order allows a detainee to make his case for release once every three years.
Many Guantanamo detainees now have lawyers and are represented in federal court challenges of their detentions. But the standards for the executive order are different. In court proceedings, the detainees have been challenging the lawfulness of their detentions based on the government’s evidence. The separate review, created by the executive order, will rely not just on evidence used in court but on additional factors brought in by the Pentagon, which acts as warden of Guantanamo. Though not spelled out in the order, factors could include a detainee’s behavior while in custody. . .
Continue reading. The sidebar at the link contains many interesting references. Glenn Greenwald points out that the Obama policy is exactly the same as the Bush-Cheney policy:
President Obama yesterday signed an Executive Order which, as The Washington Post described it, “will create a formal system of indefinite detention for those held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay” and “all but cements Guantanamo Bay’s continuing role in U.S. counterterrorism policy.” The Order — which codifies a system of charge-free indefinite detention and military commissions once ostensibly scorned by Democrats — was captured perfectly by this headline from Time:
None of this is the slightest bit unexpected. The new Executive Order has been previewed for months and merely codifies what has long been Obama’s policy: “long” in the sense of “since he’s inaugurated” — not, of course, “when he was a Senator and presidential candidate.” I’m writing about this merely to address the excuse from the White House and its loyalists that the fault for this policy, this inability to “close Guantanamo,” lies with Congress, which forced the President to abandon his oft-stated campaign pledge. That excuse is pure fiction.
It is true that Congress — with the overwhelming support of both parties — has enacted several measures making it much more difficult, indeed impossible, to transfer Guantanamo detainees into the U.S. But long before that ever happened, Obama made clear that he wanted to continue the twin defining pillars of the Bush detention regime: namely, (1) indefinite, charge-free detention and (2) military commissions (for those lucky enough to be charged with something). Obama never had a plan for “closing Guantanamo” in any meaningful sense; the most he sought to do was to move it a few thousand miles north to Illinois, where its defining injustices would endure.
The preservation of the crux of the Bush detention scheme was advocated by Obama long before Congress’ ban on transferring detainees to the U.S. It was in May, 2009 — a mere five months after his inauguration — that Obama stood up in front of the U.S. Constitution at the National Archives and demanded a new law of “preventive detention” to empower him to imprison people without charges: a plan the New York Times said “would be a departure from the way this country sees itself.” It was the same month that the administration announced it intended to continue to deny many detainees trials, instead preserving the military commissions scheme, albeit with modifications. And the first — and only — Obama plan for “closing Guantanamo” came in December, 2009, and it entailed nothing more than transferring the camp to a supermax prison in Thompson, Illinois, while preserving its key ingredients, prompting the name “Gitmo North.”
None of this was even arguably necessitated by Congressional action.
Continue reading. I believe most Democrats strongly opposed the Bush-Cheney policy, but seem to support the identical policy with a Democratic president. That’s pitiful.
I’ll be making this. Layers, from the bottom, for 2 meals:
2/3 cup black beans
1/3 cup converted rice
1/2 chopped purple onion
8 oz pork chop, trimmed of fat and cut into bite-size pieces
Salt, pepper, crushed red pepper
Minced garlic
Sliced tomatillos
Red bell pepper
Hatch green chilis
Chopped yellow crookneck squash (I would use frozen corn if I had it)
Chopped purple cabbage
Sliced tomatillos
Kumquats cut in half
I bought some salsa verde for the pour-over, but I also got an interesting sauce made from black beans, pomegranate, and chipotle, so I might use that instead or as well. Also the juice of a lime and some of my Worcestershire sauce and some ground cumin mixed in.
If I had a gas range, I would char and skin some Anaheim or green chilis and add those. The Hatch chilis will do quite well, though.
UPDATE: I revised the above to reflect how it turned out. The pour-over:
3/4 cup salsa verde
2 Tbs sherry vinegar
1 Tbs Worcestershire
1 tsp ground cumin
good dash of liquid smoke
Whisked together, poured over the top.
I ended up with two layers of tomatillos—I wanted to use up those that I had, and I wanted to find out whether they do better on top or in the middle.
UPDATE 2: Too much liquid, though it’s tasty. I suspect the tomatillos threw off more liquid than I expected. I would next time (a) use a bit more rice and (b) cut the salsa verde to 1/4 cup. The cumin was a nice touch. I want to use some chipotle next time.
Another good shave. I do like Figaro shaving soap—it’s a soft soap (or firm shaving cream) with the scene of bitter almonds. A fine lather with the Gerson brush, then three passes with the Apollo Mikron holding a Swedish Gillette blade. A splash of the Klar Seifen sandalwood aftershave, and good to go.
Great gift for bar mitzvah, for graduation, for Father's Day (17 June 2012), for birthdays, ... for guys who shave but do not yet enjoy the task.
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