Later On

Thanks to TYD for this hidden-camera catch:

I’ve seen it so many times: the safety gauge’s needle has moved through the green, past the amber, and is now in the red! What to do? Business mindset gives the same answer all the time: “Carefully bend the needle so that it points again into the green. Be careful not to break the needle.”

So, for example, in the fight against mad-cow disease in the US: the beef industry adamantly opposes large-scale testing: as long as we don’t test, the number of reported cases stays low, so everything is fine.

That response is almost universal, regardless of industry and issue: if taking any step to reduce a danger is more expensive than hiding the danger, for a business the choice is obvious: hide the danger. Dump toxins where they won’t be found—or, if found, can’t be traced back to the business.

Business operates for one thing only: Grow profits. Whatever it takes. So the search for cheaper approaches is constant. The only serious question about doing something cheaper: “Will we get caught?”

Japan is learning that now, but it’s a lesson that doesn’t stick because the pressure to grow profits is unceasing, and if the current management team is not willing to “make the hard decisions” (i.e., lie, cheat, endanger public health, ruin lives, whatever), then they will be replaced by a team who will.

As a footnote, the US nuclear-power industry is currently funneling large sums of money to Representatives and Senators to forestall as much as possible reforms in the US, which currently keeps even more spent fuel rods in even less water than in Japan, and which still uses designs that proved ineffective in Japan. And they do NOT want to spend the money to improve those things. It would cut into profits. It’s much cheaper to buy off legislators.

I suppose that our legislators think spending billions upon billions fighting a harmless plant and locking up a higher proportion of our citizens than any other country in the world is worth depriving our next generation—our nation’s future—of good educations. Check this out. It seems easy to say, “We can’t afford good schools and teachers,” but impossible to say, “We can’t afford all the money we’re spending to enforce futile drug laws and imprison millions of people.”

This post by Ed Brayton is worth reading, I think. Looking on the bright side, it shows how much progress it’s possible to make from where we are now.

I got to thinking about my food post from last night, and in particular the recipe I improvised. That recipe will continue to transform, BTW. Today with the leftover rice/kale stuff, I’ll add a chopped yellow bell pepper, about 3 oz chicken breast cut into chunks, and a splash of red wine, and cover and simmer that, stirring occasionally, for 10-12 minutes, then let it sit a bit with lid on.

That will get another meal, but there will be some left. Probably I’ll add a little more liquid (stock, for example), cauliflower and carrots from the CSA share, and curry powder and end with a curry with chutney topping. If the curry is too thin (I like thicker mixes), I’ll just add 1-2 Tbsp chia seed and simmer a bit: that will firm it right up plus add some fiber, protein, and omega-3.

I got to thinking about this, and how I now view food as “grub,” in which preparation is less important than content. (Let me say at the outset, though, that the results of this approach are judged just as with any recipe: if I like the aromas, tastes, and flavors, the result is good; if I don’t, it’s bad. The issue is not the pleasure the food provides: I get plenty of that from what I cook, as The Wife will testify.)

The usual approach is to look for recipes that represent a particular style or cuisine: to make a meal that can be placed in a specific place on a culinary map, whether it’s American Southern or Mexican or Italian or French or Chinese or Greek or whatever. One typically uses combinations that have been worked out in a traditional context, such as the “holy trinity” of Cajun cooking (bell pepper, onion, and celery) and the mirepoix of the French (minced onion, carrot, and celery) and the various salsas of Mexico.

When you approach food as grub, those traditional combinations and ingredients are still available, of course: no reason why you can’t exploit them in your own cooking. But in the meal-skeleton approach I described, I focus mainly on the primary content (protein, starch, veg, and fat), looking at what I have on hand, and then once I find the components I will use, start to think about how to combine and cook them—will it be a stir-fry? a casserole? a stew? a soup? roasted separately and then combined? as a salad—and if so, tossed? or composed? And how can I increase its appeal with the various condiments I keep on hand?

As I work out in my head what the meal will be, I may well indeed use some traditional combinations from this particular cuisine or that, but the point is that I also consider cuisine-independent choices such as adding chia seed to curry. I feel free to improvise the content and format of the meal, so long as I meet the distribution requirements I mentioned above.

This is sort of a low form of cookery, unschooled in the principles of a particular cuisine, and it will never reach heights of refinement. But for day to day eating—and eating a soundly balanced diet in the right amounts—it works quite well. And it tastes good, too. But I do recognize that this is grub, not cuisine, haute or basse.

I don’t write “in my spare time” because …

Steve of Kafeneio got me thinking about making my own yogurt once I resume having yogurt. (It’s out of the house until I reach goal, and even then I’ll have to be careful.) I used to make my own yogurt and know the process. I add extra dried milk powder to make a thicker yogurt, and I avoid pectin like the plague. Unfortunately, the very best 1-quart yogurt maker (I like the big containers, because I strain the yogurt for yogurt cheese—this strainer has a 1-quart capacity, about the smallest you’d want (less, and the amount of cheese is not worth the effort)), the Salton YM9, has been discontinued and is no longer available, and most of what I’ve found uses plastic (BPA-infested) containers. So I may just go with the well-known wide-mouth jar, warm oven, and big towel to wrap around the jar. I have a large Pyrex flour canister that would work, except that it’s rather large: I have a picture in my mind of the yogurt filled thin-walled glass container, awkward size, covered with condensate and slippery, … no, I don’t want to go on. This one, just 2 oz more than a quart, ideal: buy a quart of milk, heat, add powdered milk and the yogurt culture, and you are pretty much set.

In looking over the reviews for the various yogurt makers on offer, I came across this excellent advice from msyoga:

. . . A few tips:

1. Soy-based yogurt is very difficult to get right. If you’re like me and you don’t mind eating dairy, but you want to eat more soy and prefer to avoid saturated fat, try using a quart of creamy soy milk (not light!) and adding 1/2 cup dry dairy milk powder to it, plus sugar and any flavor extracts. It makes an absolutely thick and creamy, delicious yogurt that sets up properly and has no weird flavor. I have experimented with pectin and do not like it — adding additional milk powder thickens the yogurt nicely.

2. Honey is naturally antibacterial, and therefore will impede your culture. Don’t sweeten with honey before culturing — use it afterward if you like it.

3. Do not use a starter yogurt that contains a lot of gelatin. It’s very difficult to get it to mix evenly with your warm milk, even if you pour the warm milk into the starter a little at a time. [You can readily buy dry yogurt culture in packets, as well. - LG]

4. Unfortunately, almond milk and hazelnut milk do not work, even if mixed with some cow’s milk. However, coconut milk (full fat) or coconut cream make an incredible, rich silky yogurt when mixed with dairy milk.

UPDATE: Just talked with The Eldest, who told me that she bought yogurt culture on-line from a place that offered an amazing variety: sweet, sour, thick, thin, whatever. I just Googled and found these:

Cultures for Health – 9 varieties (comparison of varieties)

Custom Probiotics – just two varieties, but also will do custom mix

She uses a large Pyrex bowl that comes with a glass lid.

UPDATE: I hadn’t realized that some yogurts—some tasty-sounding yogurts—are cultured at room temperature: no need for yogurt make, just pour the prepared milk (and they recommend goat milk) into a jar and put it on the counter.

UPDATE 2: Note this NY Times story (from the comment below—and see also the comment for a clever yogurt-warming idea: a heating pad).

Along with dyslexia and dysgraphia, we have dyscalculia. It occurs to me that the more abstract brain functions like reading, writing, and arithmetic are very much johnnies-come-lately evolutionarily, and the bugs are still being worked out. Evolution produces very ad-hoc, Rube Goldberg, workaround-oriented solutions because of the random-walk aspect of mutations and the chance occurrences that determine the environment and the necessity of always having to work with whatever’s at hand. These newest workarounds still have a high failure rate—as, indeed, does rationality itself, if you take a look about.

And Gov. Cuomo, who pushed for the bill’s passage, will sign.

This is great news. In my opinion, of course, but that opinion is shared by most Americans today—and many more in days to come. The trend is clear.

I’ve commented here and there that I think I’m less sentimental now in my view of food, and I’ve also commented on the meal skeleton. As it happens, The Wife was seeking my thoughts on meals for her—snacks, lunch, and dinner only, since breakfasts are under control. (Interesting how we settle on a breakfast and enjoy it daily.) I thought my response might be of interest and also trigger some discussion. I think you can see that I have taken a more practical and pragmatic approach to meal planning, and you can see how the meal skeleton helps one design a meal. My goal was to provide ideas for foods to have on hand so that when she wanders into the kitchen and starts thinking about a meal, she can just look around at what’s there and find all the components of a sensible and easily prepared meal.

She had a few requirements: She doesn’t like to cook and chop veg and all that. She likes foods that can be easily packaged on the days she commutes, and she likes meals that she can sort of graze on as she works. She reacts adversely to gluten and some foods (cheese among them, unfortunately).

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I was in correspondence with a guy in the UK new to wetshaving. We exchanged various emails, I sent him a copy of my book, and he just received his first order. You guys who are now wetshavers will doubtless remember the excitement of that first batch of real shaving gear.

Take a look:

Looks like a pretty fair set-up to me. It includes:

MR GLO
Geo F. Trumpers Almond Cream
Proraso aftershave balm
Proraso heal gel
SAL Alum-Bar
Omega 643167 brush
Vulfix 404 Grosvenor Brush
Merkur 38c
Dovo leather case
Blade Samples

Ah, the excitement when the package arrives! The sheer terror next morning as the blade approaches your face! The relief when it all goes well…

I now have half a dozen boxes of books destined either for Logos, a secondhand bookstore in Santa Cruz, or for the library. Lots of new shelf space, plus I discovered quite a few books that I own that I want to read (or reread). The apartment is at the in-between stage: a wreck, but with lots of empty shelves that I hope will tonight suck books from the floor and into place.

It seems very much like the Department of Justice is now accepting bribes to look the other way on prosecuting people for white-collar crime. It’s hard to read this report in any other way: the company pays $4 million, and in return the executives responsible for the crimes not only walk, they are not even charged or named. Businesses are going to love the new American system: rule by corporations.

This in the US, mind. Pretty shocking—and, as Brayton points out, this is the new norm in the US, so the police involved will suffer no repercussions.

Sounds like an interesting book.

Good post by Nick Baumann at Kevin Drum’s site. Worth reading in its entirety for the specific examples he cites (and the links), the article concludes:

The rights of all people accused of terrorism have been dramatically rolled back over the past ten years. So don’t expect that American citizenship will protect you when the government decides that you might be a terrorist, too.

Privatization—taking government activities previously done at cost and turning them over to private industry as profit-making activities—is certainly a marked trend. Unfortunately, a government agency might have as its mission various things such as eliminating some disease, or improving food safety, or running prisons as efficiently as possible, whereas a private business has as its mission, first and foremost, growing profits. Is there money in eliminating a given disease? No? Too few people get the disease? Okay, no more medical development there. They can lump it.

And when a government wants to reduce prison populations to the extent possible, a private prison operator wants to grow profits, and that requires increasing the number of prisoners and/or the duration of their sentences. So private prisons lobby madly to make more offenses carry mandatory prison terms and to pass things like the “3 strikes” laws that result in more life sentences.

Profits grow, but of course so does the taxpayer burden—it’s just a device to funnel tax money directly out to private corporations.

Ryan Reilly has an interesting report on the private-prison sector at TPMMuckraker:

Private prison companies have helped fuel government policies which lead to an increase in prison population and boost their profits, according to a recent report.

The private prison population has grown 353.7 percent in the past 15 years, according to astudy by the Justice Policy Institute. Major private prison companies have an incentive to encourage policies which keep that number on the rise.

“Steady increases in the number of people in private prisons, especially those coming from federally contracted beds, translate into increased revenues for private prison companies,” the report says.

“Since private prison companies are in the business to make money, policies that maintain or increase incarceration boost their revenues; from a business perspective, the economic and social costs of mass incarceration are ‘externalities’ that aren’t figured into their corporate bottom line,” it says.

Some of the biggest names in the private prison industry have given $835,514 to federal candidates since 2000 and a stunning $6,092,331 to state politicians in the last five elections cycles, according to data in the report.

“A lot of it is focused on the state level because a lot of the people in prison are in state facilities,” Paul Ashton, an author of the report, told TPM. . .

Continue reading.

I know it is verboten (if I may) to talk about Nazi Germany in political discussions, but still it is important to realize how a formerly free and democratic nation gradually moved to a more and more extreme form of authoritarian government. If we know and understand the process, we can detect its signs in other contexts—as in the US, in which the 4th Amendment is being more or less negated in practice, and where a major political party has moved to extreme positions (and an authoritarian mindset).

Via Ed Brayton, I found this disturbing report on the the background and activities of Bryan Fischer, whose endorsement is currently being sought by the GOP candidates for president. It’s a long and thorough report, but it documents the positions that the current GOP finds not only acceptable but (apparently) desirable, since they treat this guy with such deference and respect. The report begins:

Responsible politicians wouldn’t fawn over an unhinged activist who opposes civil rights and religious freedom for minorities, wants to make being gay a crime and decries his personal rivals as enemies of God, right? But that is exactly what is taking place today in the Republican Party, as likely and declared GOP presidential candidates line up to win the approval of Bryan Fischer, a radio talk show host and spokesman for the American Family Association.

Fischer’s unabashed bigotry is on full display throughout his writings and on-air rants. His entire career is based on leveling venomous attacks against gays and lesbians, American Muslims, Native Americans, progressives and other individuals and groups he detests. He wants to redefine the Constitution to protect only Christians, persecute and deport all American Muslims, prohibit gays and non-Christians from holding public office and impose a system of biblical law.

While Fischer’s views are undeniably shocking, what is most disturbing is his growing influence within not only the Religious Right but also the Republican Party. . .

Read the whole thing—it’s long, but it also shows where this country is headed, at least for one large segment of the population. This next election could put the country on a new course, especially since the Democratic Party—and in particular President Obama—have in large measure abandoned support for civil and human rights and do not consider the Bill of Rights—and in particular the 4th amendment—as being so important as they once did.

One of my shaving projects, as you have observed, is the pursuit of Creamy Lather with various soaps and brushes. Today I wanted to see whether I could get a Creamy Lather from Otoko Organics—a somewhat unusual soap, quite different from the traditional tallow-based cake—and do it with a horsehair+badger brush. The Vie-Long above is one of two horse+badger chimeras that I own. (I believe that “Otoko Organics” means more or less the same as would “Hombre Organics”.)

I did indeed get a creamy lather, though the color was a shade of gray—I imagine this is from the botanicals used in the soap. Withal, I proceeded to get three very nice passes, though the Shark Chrome may be entering the sunset of its days.

Continuing with another project—running through my collection of aftershave balms—this morning I returned to Mr. Taylor’s Luxury Aftershave Balm by Taylor of Old Bond Street. Although it comes in a tube, it’s a (thick) liquid rather than a gel. Nice fragrance, good feel, quickly absorbed. In fact, I quite liked it and will return for me.

In addition to the comment thread from yesterday, I just got an email from a friend who has maintained a normal weight his entire life, offering his insight that the cause of obesity is eating too much, and the solution is to eat less.

Whenever someone imparts this priceless wisdom, they seem to feel that they have actually contributed something—enabled the poor ignorant obese person grasp the essence of his difficulty and thus cured him on the spot, with two priceless words: Eat less.

It’s like curing depression by telling the depressed person, “Cheer up.” And, indeed, that is a cure: if they cheer up, they are no longer depressed!

The problem, of course, is that the depressed person wants to cheer up, but finds that is not so simple for him (or her) as it is for the person already cheerful. And the obese person may well want to eat less, but finds doing that is not so simple as it sounds—or as it seems to the slender.

You see, the problem is not the food or the calories. The problem is all the internal mechanisms, habits, mindset, environment, resources, expectations, etc., that result in the consumption of too many calories.

Because all that stuff is complicated and internal to the other person—and because people who have been slender all their lives have no concept of what is going on with the obese—it’s much easier for these saviors simply to ignore that and focus on what is easy for them: eating less.

And (as a friend pointed out) they, never having had to struggle with obesity, have no understanding of the issues—because, for them, there are no issues in this area. They can’t grasp the problem because they have no context. They see only the externals (the food) and think the solution is there (eat less of it).

Of course, if you pick an area in which they are experiencing problems, they are likely to point out that those problems are quite different, that their problems are intrinsically difficult, etc. So if one of their problems is too much debt, and you tell them, “It’s simple: spend less than you earn,” you would quickly be told that it’s not that simple, that certain expenditures are required by … well, by the same things that make obese people eat too much food: lifestyle, mindset, friends, habits, longings, emotional issues, and the like.

The trick here is not “eating less”, it’s uncovering those things that result in eating too much and then finding ways (other than food) to resolve those issues. Slender people don’t see that there is anything that could cause one to eat too much (except, I suppose, those invisible moral failings that hover around the edge of such conversations: insufficient moral fiber, strength of character, etc.—all reasons that redound to the credit of the slender person). Indeed, their complete innocence of such drives and issues is exactly why they are slender. And indeed, they may even think that their situation is exactly the same as an obese friend, only they themselves have the strength of character to resist food’s lure.

In writing this book on my weight loss, I keep analyzing how I slipped into obesity and what kept me there and how I climbed back out—and what I learned on the trip.

What I learned can be summarized as how to eat less—I learned the perceptions, habits, motivations, and lifestyle that drove the choices that resulted in obesity, and I learned how to change those. (Not so easy as it sounds, I might add.) If you follow the blog, you know that some changes were relatively easy, others required repeated attempts (or, as I now view it, much practice) before I mastered the skills of weight maintenance.

Eric Cantor is as despicable as he is stupid. James Fallows has an excellent comment on him:

I’ve complained in the past about Sen. Richard Shelby’s willful veto of Peter Diamond’s nomination as a Fed governor, and about Sen. Mitch McConnell’s intentional stall of nominees across the board, as a passive-aggressive way to hamstring the Administration.

Both of them now give way to Rep. Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader, who in walking out of the talks to avoid a default on U.S. debt gives as clear an example of petty-ambition-over-national-interest as we’ve seen in public life in quite a while.

The Atlantic Wire provides background for the move, and Ezra Klein makes the motivations clear. Cantor was happy to stay in the negotiations through the budget-cutting stage. But as soon as the unavoidable other part of the negotiations began — finding ways to raise revenue — he chickened out and left the hard work (for a Republican) to House Speaker John Boehner. As Klein accurately sums up it:

>>Cantor has the credibility with the Tea Party that Boehner lacks. But that’s why Cantor won’t cut the deal. The Tea Party-types support him because he’s the guy who won’t cut the deal. He can’t sign off on tax increases without losing his power base….

If you had to write a plausible scenario for how America defaults on its debt, or at least seriously spooks the market, this is how it would start….

Cantor is putting personal power before country here, and in a very dangerous way. If Boehner actually does manage to cut a decent deal despite Cantor’s effort to throw him under the bus, he may not hold on as leader of his party, but unlike Cantor, he’ll deserve to.<<

I am on the record, over the years, as a big believer in America’s resilient powers. But there are mistakes so large that they can badly hurt even the United States. A petulant demonstration to the rest of the world that we can’t meet the baseline obligation we expect of any two-bit duchy — that it will face its financial problems and honor its sovereign debt — would be a big, damaging step in the wrong direction. Good for John Boehner in recognizing that more than his own ambitions are at stake here. If the default actually comes, and markets panic, and interest rates for everything shoot up, keep the courageous Rep. Cantor in mind on that day.

Cantor’s explanation of why he walked out:

>>[E]ach side came into these talks with certain orders, and as it stands the Democrats continue to insist that any deal must include tax increases. There is not support in the House for a tax increase, and I don’t believe now is the time to raise taxes in light of our current economic situation. Regardless of the progress that has been made, the tax issue must be resolved before discussions can continue. Given this impasse, I will not be participating in today’s meeting and I believe it is time for the President to speak clearly and resolve the tax issue.<<