Later On

While some law enforcement professionals see the stupidity and terrible waste, in dollars and lives, of our War on Drugs (I’m thinking, for example, of LEAP: Law Enforcement Against Prohibition), others see big money in the fight: Federal grants to buy all sorts of fun equipment—build your own SWAT team!—and of course bundles of cash, fancy cars, and other goodies through asset seizure.

And when there is money to be had, some people will get right to work and organize things to maximize the money they get. I don’t think the War of Drugs was directed at this goal, but that is what it has become. And those who are making money (on either side of the law: drug dealers and the DEA alike) do not want ANYTHING to turn off the spigot of cash. So we find resistance to ending the War on Drugs, not because the War reduces drug availability but because too much money is floating around.

Watch this clip and think about what is happening.

An interesting, thoughtful, and lengthy review of a new book on Barack Obama and the kind of man he is. Unfortunately, the review does not touch upon (and thus does not attempt to explain) Obama’s strange hostility toward civil and human rights nor his vendetta against whistleblowers—nor, for that matter, his decision that he can order American citizens assassinated at will.

Trent Hamm has an interesting post exploring the interplay between self-discipline and habits. I encountered these issues in the context of weight loss, and it struck me then how interrelated they are.

Habit allows one to put discipline in “rest” mode: habit carries you through tasks and activities without requiring “willpower”, that mysterious energy we employ when we attempt to act counter to our habits. In this sense, discipline is what we use to extinguish old habits and establish new habits, and that does require some alertness: if we drop our guard, the old habits are able to reassert their control, at least until new habits are well established.

I also found it useful to think about habits as responses learned by unconscious agents in the mind. Breaking the habit and establishing a new habit means retraining these unconscious agents, and that retraining can involve a variety of techniques. Common to all is the need for awareness of what you’re doing and what you’re feeling—as soon as you drift into automatic responses, the old habits kick in. That’s what they’re for: to provide direction for when we don’t want to be bothered thinking about it. Example: tying your shoes—indeed, getting dressed in general.

It’s obviously hard to extinguish well-established habits—that’s why they’re so invaluable—but it can be done. I just learned recently of the “extinction burst” just as the habit dies, and in some cases I think that action causes people to abandon their efforts to change the habit. It helps to know that one is experiencing the dying throes of the habit, not its resurgence.

The benefit of considering habits as activities of unconscious agents is that it allows you to address the agents (your unconscious) directly, and that does seem to help.

In general, the more you can arrange things to avoid the exercise of “willpower,” the better. For example, if you tend to crave cheese and/or butter popcorn in the evening, and you’re trying to lose weight, it greatly helps if you don’t have any cheese or popcorn in the house. That makes things much easier than have a refrigerator well stocked with cheese and full container of popcorn (with lots of butter in the fridge) and then sitting around all evening thinking about them, seeing the cheese when you open the fridge, and resisting as best you can the temptation to eat them. Just keep them out of the house, and less willpower is needed.

In other words, the amount willpower required to not purchase the item is MUCH less than the amount required not to the eat the item once it’s on hand. And if even purchasing it is too much resist, it generally requires less willpower simply to avoid that section of the store than to resist buying the stuff once you’re standing in front of it. And so on.

The nice thing is that once new habits are established, they become self-reinforcing: they are what you do when you’re not really thinking about it.

Today’s shave is dedicated to Eddie of Australia, who requested the shaving soap, and Todd, who suggested the Gillette Slim Handle in gold, one of the several models yclept “Aristocrat.”

So far as the lather experiment is concerned, I once again got tiny bubbles, though somehow they didn’t strike me so strongly as the Floris 89 of a couple of days ago. Maybe somehow I just noticed how small the bubble are. I will continue the examination, but less formally.

At any rate, I got a fine (small-bubbled) lather with the Rooney, and the Aristocrat with a once-used Treet Black Beauty blade did a fine job. A splash of the Klar Seifen, and I’m good to go.

The Patriot Act is patently unconstitutional, but we now live in a post-Constitution US, in which the rule is that the various power centers (the Executive and the Courts and Corporations, with Congress more or less a pawn of the Corporations) can do whatever they can get away with. And getting away with stuff is a lot easier if you keep it a secret.

Spencer Ackerman has a good article on this in Wired, which begins:

You think you understand how the Patriot Act allows the government to spy on its citizens. Sen. Ron Wyden says it’s worse than you know.

Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. Wyden (D-Oregon) says that powers they grant the government on their face, the government applies a far broader legal interpretation — an interpretation that the government has conveniently classified, so it cannot be publicly assessed or challenged. But one prominent Patriot-watcher asserts that the secret interpretation empowers the government to deploy ”dragnets” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.

“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden told Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”

What exactly does Wyden mean by that? . . .

Continue reading.

Just came across this timely post at The Kitchn [sic]. From the link:

1. What makes Latin grilling so special? 
If I had to pick one word to describe Latin cuisine, it would be vibrant. Bold, vibrant flavors, like garlic, cumin, chiles, and citrus are some of the ingredients that make up the foundation of Latin cooking. Overall, grilling tends to bring out the natural flavors of foods, but when they are marinated or spiced with Latin flavors, food seems to jump with zest.

2. Is it the ingredients or the technique that sets Latin grilling apart from other cultures’ approaches to the barbecue?
I think the ingredients, more than the technique, defines Latin grilling. Specifically, it’s the use of herbs, spices, and aromatics that really defines the cuisine and describes the traditional flavors of each country or region. While you will find fiery chiles and cilantro in Mexico, Cuba is focused on garlic and cumin, and Argentina on parsley, onions, and olive oil.

3. I’m grilling steak this weekend. What’s your go-to easy grilled steak method?

Read the whole thing.

The oral went fine, given my tendency to get brain-freeze under pressure. Still, I was able to stagger about in Spanish for a while.

I realized some time back—when I was learning Esperanto—that vocabulary is an important part of the foundation. Obviously, knowing words in the language is helpful, but it’s really more than that. (Vocabulary acquisition is quite easy in Esperanto, which is why I was able to discover this.)

When I studied Esperanto, I was quickly able to communicate because (as noted) vocabulary is easily learned—a single root can generate dozens of words, using standard affixes—and the grammer is dead simple. With Spanish, things are a little more complex, but I did get Anki and by the time we were working on lesson 3 I had entered the entire textbook Spanish vocabulary into Anki and was starting each day with going through the day’s cards. (The lessons in this text are long: just 6 lessons for the entire semester.)

Because Anki routinely presents 20 new words a day, with automatic review cycles based on each word’s difficulty, by the time we were halfway through lesson 5 I knew all the words in the text book. (I discovered this only when my morning pass through the day’s cards stopped turning up new words: it was all review.)

While my vocabulary compared to the language is modest, my vocabulary for the textbook we’re using is universal. That meant doing the exercises was easy: I knew all the words, so I could focus on the grammar of the thing.

I am so oriented to building up vocabulary (so that I don’t have to worry about whether I will know a word I need or encounter) that I’m constantly adding to my “random words” deck.

It’s risky to take words at random from the dictionary—the word you choose may be obsolete or obscure or not used in the sense in which you’re taking it—so I try to get words from my reading (e.g., the section Hoy in the LA Times). And now that this course is over, I’ll immediately create a deck of the vocabulary for the second-semester textbook and see whether I can master that over the summer, before the course starts. Then I can pretty much ignore vocabulary and focus on learning grammar and usage.

Fascinating video.

The Federal government, save for recent concessions to the increasing number of states that have legalized marijuana for medical reasons (concessions apparently made in bad faith, since the DoJ and DEA seem to be acting in direct opposition to assurances mouthed by Obama and Holder), has stoutly opposed any rational discussion of drug policy. At this point, having dug themselves do deeply into a useless and expensive approach—trying to remove drugs totally from our society, AKA “prohibition”—the government seems determined to double-down on the policy, like a bad gambler who’s been losing consistently.

One way the government fought rational discussion has been not to allow anyone to study marijuana. Their reasoning seems to be that study might reveal that it’s basically harmless, and then government policy would be seen to be stupid as well as horribly expensive (in dollars and lives). That would never do, for the government to appear in a bad light. So no studies were allowed until recent years.

Another approach is inaction. A few years ago, farmers in North Dakota were desperate for crops they could grow and make money. Industrial hemp (totally not a drug) would be a great crop, and industrial hemp is legal in the US. That is, it is legal to buy, own, and use, but it’s not legal to grow. This is our government in action—or, more accurately, in inaction: the North Dakota farmers petitioned the DEA to allow them to grown this crop (though, given that the plan is totally not a drug, I fail to see why the DEA would have any more jurisdiction over that than over corn or ivy). The DEA simply would not respond. No answer.

That’s the great idea our government has: when backed into a corner with reasonable requests, it shuts its eyes, puts it hands over its ears, and sings, “Lalalalalala. I can’t hear you. Lalalala.”

I don’t much care for this approach, I have to admit. I like reasonable discussion, working together to find the truth and develop a plan. But of course I would never make it in politics.

At any rate, this story by Philip Smith is quite interesting. It begins:

A coalition of medical marijuana and drug reform groups filed suit in federal court in Washington, DC, Monday in a bid to force the government to act on a rescheduling petition that has languished at the DEA for nearly nine years. The lawsuit asks that the government respond to the petition within 60 days.

The petition argues that marijuana has accepted medical use and should thus be removed from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act. Sixteen states and the District of Columbia currently allow for the medicinal use of marijuana, and an ever-increasing mountain of evidence has shown marijuana to be effective in treating a number of diseases and conditions.

The groups filing the lawsuit include . . .

Continue reading. From later in the article:

NORML filed a petition in 1972. That time, it took the DEA 22 years to reject it, overruling its own administrative judge’s finding that marijuana did have accepted medical use.

This kind of pig-headed stupidity always amazes me, but it seems fairly common. I surely do not understand whatever it is that substitutes for thinking in such instances and such people.

It’s been known since the 1930′s that BPA mimics human hormones in the body, and the fact that we put 8 billion pounds (4 million tons) of the stuff into the environment every year should give us pause. But for a long time we’ve continued to use it blindly. Now enough studies have been done that we’re using it knowingly. Janet Raloff has a good article on the recent FDA announcements, and Wikipedia provides excellent background information.

This morning I tried again for the fine lather (extremely small bubbles), using a different Floris soap but sticking with the Rooney Style 2. Here’s the result:

As you can see, very fine bubbles. It just occurs to me that I may have unconsciously modified my technique after getting a few comments on the size of bubbles in an earlier lather. Or the soaps or brushes may make the difference: that’s the point, I guess, of this exercise. Here’s the earlier post. Of course, those photos were of the lather on the brush, not on my skin, so I suppose that I should (a) take some photos of the fine lather on the brush and (b) include Durance L’óme in this series.

At any rate, it was a fine shave: three passes. As I mentioned yesterday, responding to a question from Eddy of Australia, I make two XTG passes on my upper and lower lip and chin, though without relathering: I just go both directions on the XTG pass. For the final ATG pass, I shave all my face, including upper lip, and I use my left hand to pull the skin under my chin as my right hand shaves it: the whiskers there tend to lie flat, and pulling the skin makes them stand up for the razor’s edge.

Eddie points out a vendor new to me: Highland MensCare. Check it out. He also requested that I try Trumper Rose as part of this test series, so that’s up for tomorrow.

I’m doing well, I hope, on prep for the oral part of my final tomorrow, so I’m taking a little break and watching Hard Boiled again. It’s a true classic, and I remember the awe I felt when I first saw it shortly after it was released in the US. It’s hard to believe that was only 19 years ago—it seems back further. And I remember animated discussions with my son about the movie and John Woo and that amazing opening. Great jazz, a possible little homage to Woody Allen (with Chow Yun Fat playing clarinet) and then a shootout to end all shootouts—at the very opening of the movie.

And this time, with my having viewed many, many Hong Kong movies since, I recognize an amazingly young Anthony Wong, already great. In fact, Chow Yun Fat and Tony Leung are also amazingly young. I guess 19 years can make a difference.

Anyway, great movie and great to see it again.

When a Justice of the Supreme Court makes errors the magnitude of those pointed out by Ed Brayton, it seems likely that the Justice in question doesn’t understand the error rather than is simply baldly lying, in writing, in public. In other words, Scalia probably believes what he wrote, which suggests that he could be suffering from dementia.

I’m sure he pays attention to what he hears, reads, and writes, but such an egregious and obvious misstatement suggests that he is no longer able to fully grasp what he hears, reads, and writes. (It’s also possible, of course, that in his belligerence and lack of self-control, he simply lied, but note that even belligerent assholes can suffer from senile dementia, aka Alzheimer’s disease.)

Way past due. To the degree that Arizona is capable of embarrassment, he was one. Details (and current situation) here.

I know that some who read this blog are ardent Obama supporters. I would be very interested in their responses to Jane Mayer’s article on the Thomas Drake case regarding Obama’s respect for the Constitution and his personal integrity and honesty.

The US, in common with other nations, has a wretched history of religious bigotry and persecution—indeed, that sort of competitive hatred seems to be a common characteristic of major religions—but at least the US has been spared the sort of wholesale slaughter that Europe once witnessed as various Christian sects did their best to kill each other off when they weren’t going after the Moors. Still, the US did its best and once was as fierce in its attacks on Jews and Catholics as it is today on Muslims. But that did change, and Kevin Schulz’s book Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise describes how the transition toward greater acceptance of those religions (and their adherents) came about. At the link is an intriguing review of the book.

Diane Ravitch wrote in The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education of her disillusionment with No Child Left Behind and other education initiatives (vouchers, charter schools, etc.) that seem to be destroying American education while enriching private companies with taxpayer money. She talked about how the government tends to take a “state view” of education, which one boss of mine used to call the view at 30,000 feet: no details or individual consideration, just making giant changes in the hope that gross changes will produce fine results—a hope that increasingly seems wrong-headed.

This article gives an example: the elimination of a program (to reduce costs so that taxes will never ever be increased because that would… do something very bad—the ideal is a government that spends no money at all, near as I can tell), a program that in fact was both effective in itself and also in achieving the very goals for which state-supported education was instituted in the first place. This is a pretty clear example of destroying an enterprise in order to save it, a specialty of our government ever since Vietnam.

I had to try Floris 89 shaving soap again to see whether the fine lather (very small bubbles, very dense—rather like spreading Nancy Boy shaving cream on your beard brushlessly) was a result of the horsehair brush I used yesterday or could be attributed to the soap. So today I tackled the soap with my Rooney Style 2 Finest, and once again produced the fine lather. Next steps: Try Floris JF tomorrow, to see whether that lather is similar, and then try some other triple-milled tallow soaps to compare—I’m thinking Truefitt & Hill and Geo. F. Trumper and TOBS, for example.

At any rate, I like the dense, fine lather, and I got three extremely comfortable passes from the iKon open-comb, using a Swedish Gillette blade of several shaves. A splash of Stetson Classic—a fragrance first launched in 1981—and I’m good to go. I do like Stetson, and I detect a vanilla note. Comments on the fragrance at BaseNotes.net mention the vanilla, but the BaseNotes analysis is:

Top Notes: Lemon, Lime, Bergamot, Lavender

Middle Notes: Patchouli, Jasmin, Vetiver

Base Notes: Amber, Tonka

“Tonka”?

While my weight remains “normal” according to my BMI (though at the upper end, bouncing right up against 25.0), I still want to push it down. It has been sticking stubbornly around 181-183, with occasional surges close to 185 or dips to 179.

I have found that it surges most when I don’t record what I eat. It also seems quite sensitive: I recently bought a little jar of dill-pickled green beans—practically no calories—and the morning after I ate them my weight surged. I think it was the sodium taken on board with the beans: I’ve been told that if I get too much sodium, the body immediately adjusts the sodium balance by retaining a lot of water, so your weight goes up quickly (and can come down just as quickly when you adjust your diet appropriately).

On class days I have trouble scheduling meals appropriately, but I have only two more classes to deal with and then my summer schedule is clear. And I am determined to reach 172 lbs. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I’ve continued walking and Pilates.

I just got this. I was buying the ink and didn’t even realize that a pen is included. The ink is a lovely intense black, and the pen is extremely cool (thus the post title). It’s an eye-dropper fill, so that’s already pretty cool. I have a few eyedropper-fills. The pen is a tube, no mechanism. The point unit unscrews, and you use an eyedropper to fill the tube with ink. Since it’s totally hollow, it holds a LOT of ink. Then the screw the nib unit back on and write for a very long time.

This one comes with two points: one is the usual fountain-pen nib (stainless with some sort of black finish), and that’s in place. The other is a replacement nib that’s a roller ball. You simply pull the fountain-pen point out—it’s held in place only by friction—and insert the rollerball unit. It writes a very smooth, very fine line and is utterly entrancing to use. You will rarely have to refill it, and since the pen’s transparent, the ink level is obvious. The cap snaps on (no threads).

It seem to have had an o-ring to serve as a gasket between the barrel and the nib unit, but it didn’t really work and it doesn’t seem to be necessary, so I’ve discarded it. No leakage so far.

I like it a lot.