Later On

Ed Brayton is succinct and correct:

The ACLU has filed an appeal with the 4th Circuit in Padilla v. Ashcroft. This is the case filed by Jose Padilla against former Attorney General John Ashcroft for authorizing his detention and abuse in prison without any due process. The district court ruled that Ashcroft had qualified immunity, an absolutely absurd conclusion. Qualified immunity is overcome if it can be shown that the official actions taken violated a clearly established right.

What right could possibly be more clearly established than that the government cannot arrest someone and hold them in prison for two years without ever charging them or allowing them to speak to an attorney? This is not a close case and the district court blew it. Unfortunately, I expect the appeals court to do the same thing — because lawless high-ranking government officials don’t get punished for violating the constitution anymore.

The U.S. has changed a lot.

I don’t like Facebook and the way it takes and sells all my information. Google+ looks like a very interesting alternative, enabling you to define multiple different circles of friends, acquaintances, and business relationships.

I have applied for admission—Google+ is still in beta—but James Fallows has a couple of interesting posts about it. First, this post:

Recent posts having been so long, I’ll try to make this terse:

- I have used Google+ for most of the past week; it’s being rolled out gradually to see how the system scales, much as Gmail was originally. When you’ve got it, among the things you’ll see is a little display like the one at right, letting you choose to stream info from various groups of people, or “Circles,” you’ve set up.

- My feelings are similar to those Dan Gillmor spelled out in the Guardian: the system is still beta-ish but promising in many ways.

- One of the immediate appeals is how quick, ergonomically easy, and aesthetically nice it is to set up “circles” that match the natural patterns of your real life. One for immediate family, one for “friends you actually know,” another for “professional acquaintances who are sort of friends,” etc. Or by interest. In my case: airplane people, beer people, China people, tech people, Atlantic people, NPR people, etc. This is technically possible with Facebook “lists” but more of a chore. And, just like in life, one person can be in more than one “circle.”

- The other immediate appeal is that the privacy bias seems set in your favor, rather than constantly playing hide-the-ball with you, as Facebook does. The reason I hate and mistrust Facebook is its constant record of changing the privacy terms, not saying it’s done so until it’s caught, and always setting the default in the least private and most advertiser-exploitable way. (Yes, I realize I do not exemplify FB’s ideal demographic.) Privacy settings here are much simpler and by default are generally private.

- Whether this will catch on after the faddish new-thing stage, and in what ways it will prove actually useful, who knows. I’ve already seen a lot of promise in being able to switch easily from, say, a stream of China info to one about airplanes or beer, rather than an undifferentiated flow; and a surprising number of people are already on the system. But this is still the tinkering phase. More later.

A second post discusses trust issues, with quotations from and links to various other writers. Well worth the click.

Interesting report (from 2008) in Science News about the cholesterol risk posed by eggs in one’s diet. Full disclosure: I have an egg each morning for breakfast (long with hot cereal), and occasionally an egg or two in a salad or the like. I based this dietary choice on a whole cluster of findings over the past five or 10 years. As the article notes, however, some people respond more strongly to dietary cholesterol than others. My own cholesterol levels seems in good control, but YMMV.

As noted in the article, this particular study was funded by the American Egg Council, but:

The new study’s findings do dovetail with large studies by other groups having no industrial financing. For instance, in 1999, Frank B. Hu of the Harvard School of Public Health and his colleagues reported no increased risk of coronary heart disease or stroke in men or women who ate more than one egg per day. The analysis compared diet and cardiovascular risk among nearly 38,000 participants of two long-running epidemiologic studies.

A Michigan State University analysis, reported a year later, analyzed the diets and blood-cholesterol data for more than 27,000 people—a representative cross-section of the U.S. population. It found that cholesterol was lower in people who ate more than four eggs per week than among people who eschewed eggs. However, the researchers cautioned, “this study should not be used as a basis for recommending higher egg consumption for regulation of serum cholesterol.”

When I sent this article with a friend, he said that, contrary to the statement in the article, the American Egg Council also funded the two larger studies referenced. In fact, he said, the American Egg Council is behind any study that finds eating eggs in moderate amounts is benign. I do not know how he learned this, but in the interest of full disclosure I include his statement.

For me, the study’s details, as described in the article at the link, make sense. YMMV.

It always astonishes me when organizations, when a serious potential problem is pointed out, viciously attack the person pointing out the problem. This approach seems so wrong-headed to me—indistinguishable from stupidity. Here’s a prime example, reported in the LA Times by Ralph Vartabedian. His report begins:

Walter Tamosaitis, once a top engineer in the nation’s nuclear weapons cleanup program, has been relegated to a basement storage room equipped with cardboard-box and plywood furniture with nothing to do for the last year.

Tamosaitis’ bosses sent him there when he persisted in raising concerns about risks at the Energy Department’s project to deal with millions of gallons of radioactive waste near Hanford, Wash., including the potential for hydrogen gas explosions.

“Walt is killing us,” said Frank Russo, Bechtel Corp.’s top manager at the project, in an email to Tamosaitis’ boss urging that the engineer be brought under control.

Now, an independent government watchdog agency, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, has backed up Tamosaitis and issued a rebuke to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, concluding that the safety culture at the $12.3-billion project is “flawed” and that significant risks exist in the plant’s design.

The conclusion came after a nearly yearlong investigation, which took testimony from 45 witnesses and reviewed 30,000 documents. It confirmed that Tamosaitis had been “abruptly removed from the project” when he raised technical questions about its design, and that the actions against him had frightened other engineers. . .

Continue reading. Of course, when the disaster does occur, people like Frank Russo are either nowhere to be seen, or they appear in the news saying things like, “No one could have predicted this terrible tragedy.”

Very pleasant shave this morning, and I’m glad to be shut of pre-shave oil. Does that ever NOT work for me, though some shavers swear by it. For me, it kills the lather and doesn’t help with lubrication at all (perhaps because in working up the lather on my beard, the soap scrubs the oil away, though I would think oil absorbed by whiskers would make them waterproof). OTOH, the oil pass at the end, after the brush is put away (a few drops of oil rubbed onto the wet beard area of the final lathered pass) works well: it does lubricate the skin for polishing, and the whiskers are long since fully wetted.

Today’s shave uses the Pogonotomy horsehair brush, made by Vie-Long, and it created a very nice lather—Creamy Lather, but in smaller volume than the boar brushes generate—from the Truefitt & Hill, a truly fine shaving soap. Three smooth passes with the Eclipse Red Ring holding a Swedish Gillette blade, a splash of the Alpa (a traditional aftershave fragrance, reminiscent of a barber shop—at least to me), and I’m enjoying a day at home.

Regarding the book trip: too much work and time for too small a return. I’ll try a secondhand bookstore here in Monterey,  but it may be that all outgoing books are library donations.

This sounds cool and intriguing.

I’m now rereading the first part of Timothy Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious. It’s a fascinating book, and we’ve made amazing progress once we started studying the mind scientifically rather than through introspection and the like.

I read the first half or so a while back, then mislaid the book, which turned up in the Great Book Purge. As I reread it, I see that I immediately absorbed and started applying the ideas from the book. The whole pattern-recognition approach to dieting (co-opting the unconscious to help) is directly from an experiment described in the book that showed how the unconscious can recognize a pattern that the conscious mind simply cannot detect.

I highly recommend this book. It will tell you interesting things about yourself, and the ideas in it are quite useful.

I’m sitting in a Noah’s Bagels on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz. Logos is going through 6 boxes of books I brought up, and I’ll return in 5 hours to learn the outcome.

The shave this morning included Gessato pre-shave oil, a new hefty Shavemac brush—perhaps a tad too large—Klar Kabinette shaving soap, a Joris razor with a Gillette 7 O’Clock Super Platinum blade, and Alt Innsbruck.

The shave is fine, but that’s the end of the experiment with pre-shave oil. Not only do they do nothing to improve the shave (for me), they seem to actively reduce the lather, though why oil mixed into the lather would affect it…  never mind. It does, and I’m swearing off. They’re good for an oil pass at the end (once the lather and brush phase is over), but earlier in the shave: not for me, thanks. I’ve now tried that route several times (the first a few years ago), and they have never worked. But some shavers swear by them. YMMV.

I’ll post the photo later. I’m thinking I’ll sell my two Joris razors: slantman’s suggestion—try a blade angle of around 20º instead of the more common angle of around 30º—does indeed tame the harshness. but I really need to think the collection. Once I photograph these guys, they will go on the BST thread at SimplyShaving.net.

UPDATE:

The Pilates session today went quite well. Surprisingly (to me) often, I could make the appropriate correction when it was pointed out, and in a couple of instances could sense the difference from making a small adjustment of angle in posture. And we did a lot of work—some of the exercises become much harder when you do them right (as opposed to, say, weightlifting: easier when done right, harder when done wrong).

The result was that I came home, tilted back in the chair, and fell into a profound (and restorative) slumber for an hour.

Yesterday I went a little overboard with the yogurt and the olive oil in the tomato-watermelon salad, so today I’ve been scrupulous. Standard breakfast, one plum plus one apricot for each snack, and a green salad for lunch with tuna. Coming in to make dinner, I was definitely peckish, the no-bites rule in full effect. And I didn’t want any more added oil. So, time for food improv. I started adding to my two-quart sauté pan:

1/4 large sweet onion, chopped
6-8 large cloves garlic, chopped finely (but larger than minced)
1/2 small can tomato paste (opened to show Terry the Rösle can opener in action)
1/2 cup red wine
1/2 cup water
2 small yellow zucchini, diced
1 small Italian eggplant, diced
3-4 oz boneless skinless chicken breast, cut into chunks
1 bunch Italian parsley, chopped

At this point I added more water, mixed the above, and started looking around for more to add. Some discoveries were made in a search for mushrooms, which I unfortunately did not have.

~2 Tbsp homemade pepper sauce
multiple lashings of freshly ground pepper
~1-2 Tbsp Mexican oregano, crushed
2 Tbsp capers
4 leaves red chard, with stalks, chopped
5-6 anchovies packed in a jar, chopped (for umami, obviously)
~10-12 pitted Saracena olives, drained and chopped
~3/4 c grape olives, whole (last-minute discovery and addition)

I stirred that up and decided that it was too thick for my first thought, which was to add some cut pasta to cook in the sauce. So instead I got out my little 1-qt saucepan and made 1/2 cup converted rice (low glycemic index), which is two servings: eat half for dinner tonight, let the rest dry a bit for stir-fry tomorrow.

After 20 minutes the rice was done, and I turned off the burner let the pan sit covered for 10 minutes more. (Hunger is the best sauce, so the delay has gastronomic goals.)

A serving spoon of rice into a bowl, fill with the sauce, and the thought of shaved Parmesan struck me—but I have none. OTOH, I do have Pt. Reyes Blue leftover from the tomato-watermelon salad, and I thought, “Blue, gorgonzola, what’s the diff?” and crumbled some on top.

OMG it’s good. Incredibly rich tasting—a combination of the tomato paste, red wine, anchovies, Pt. Reyes Blue, and all the rest. I added no salt at all, and it didn’t seem to need any. I felt I was dining high on the hog tonight.

It makes a tremendous amount, as well: two large meals, at least. Yet in theory that’s food for one meal.

The Stipula Optima—or at least the Stipula Optima I’m using at the moment—is certainly among the first rank of fountain pens for daily use. Piston fill with a visible ink reservoir, and if you run out of ink, you can screw the piston all the way down and that squeezes enough ink forward to write another few paragraphs. Extremely nice point and excellent flow: not too wet, not too dry.

This recipe sounds very tasty. Ingredients:

2 tbsp. plus 2 tsp. extra-virgin olive oil
3 tbsp. minced yellow onion
12 oz. ground lamb
4 oz. ground pork
2 tsp. dijon mustard
1 tsp. each finely chopped parsley, mint, and dill
1 tsp. dried Greek oregano
1⁄2 tsp. ground coriander
1⁄2 tsp. ground cumin
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 scallion, chopped
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
1⁄3 cup crumbled feta cheese
10 leaves baby arugula
8 black olives in oil, drained, pitted, and roughly chopped
8 sun-dried tomatoes in oil, drained and roughly chopped
2 tsp. fresh lemon juice
2 hamburger buns, toasted

Extremely interesting column that gives insights into Manning’s likely motives.

I blogged earlier about my distaste for a corporate policy of hiring only those persons who are currently employed: “No unemployed need apply.” That policy seemed gratuitously vicious to me, but I just had an insight into a reason why the policy is now so popular.

Recall that businesses do not like periods of low unemployment. Lower unemployment means higher labor costs (supply/demand) and also makes it easy for employees to leave for another, better job—making it necessary for businesses to try to make their work environments more attractive, which (to a business) is a distraction. Better to have high unemployment (as now) so that workers will cling to their jobs and will put up with much more mistreatment (and lower wages) before they will quit.

So one can see that if companies can communicate to workers that they will not even consider hiring someone who is currently unemployed, it makes workers much more frightened of losing their jobs—if they are out of work, they will find it even harder to find a new job—and thus more easily cowed.

Businesses NEVER want empowered workers. That’s why businesses, ably assisted by the GOP, are systematically destroying unions. And they also water down labor laws. They will do ANYTHING to ensure that workers are powerless. That’s the way they like it: powerless workers are more easily exploited to increase profits. If you exploit them to the point they begin killing themselves, you can string netting over stairwells, as the Taiwanese company did, to make suicide more difficult. But keep them powerless at all costs.

And here’s how it works out in one case, in a Mother Jones article by Ted Genoway:

ON THE CUT-AND-KILL floor of Quality Pork Processors Inc. in Austin, Minnesota, the wind always blows. From the open doors at the docks where drivers unload massive trailers of screeching pigs, through to the “warm room” where the hogs are butchered, to the plastic-draped breezeway where the parts are handed over to Hormel for packaging, the air gusts and swirls, whistling through the plant like the current in a canyon. In the first week of December 2006, Matthew Garcia felt feverish and chilled on the blustery production floor. He fought stabbing back pains and nausea, but he figured it was just the flu—and he was determined to tough it out.

Garcia had gotten on at QPP only 12 weeks before and had been stuck with one of the worst spots on the line: running a device known simply as the “brain machine”—the last stop on aconveyor line snaking down the middle of a J-shaped bench [DC] called the “head table.” Every hour, more than 1,300 severed pork heads go sliding along the belt. Workers slice off the ears, clip the snouts, chisel the cheek meat.

They scoop out the eyes, carve out the tongue, and scrape the palate meat from the roofs of mouths. Because, famously, all parts of a pig are edible (“everything but the squeal,” wisdom goes), nothing is wasted. A woman next to Garcia would carve meat off the back of each head before letting the denuded skull slide down the conveyor and through an opening in a plexiglass shield.

On the other side, Garcia inserted the metal nozzle of a 90-pounds-per-square-inch compressed-air hose and blasted the pigs’ brains into a pink slurry. One head every three seconds. A high-pressure burst, a fine rosy mist, and the slosh of brains slipping through a drain hole into a catch bucket. (Some workers say the goo looked like Pepto-Bismol; others describe it as more like a lumpy strawberry milkshake.) When the 10-pound barrel was filled, another worker would come to take the brains for shipping to Asia, where they are used as a thickener in stir-fry. Most days that fall, production was so fast that the air never cleared between blasts, and the mist would slick workers at the head table in a grisly mix of brains and blood and grease.

Tasks at the head table are literally numbing. The steady hum of the automatic Whizard knives gives many workers carpal tunnel syndrome. And all you have to do is wait in the parking lot at shift change to see the shambling gait that comes from standing in one spot all day on the line. For eight hours, Garcia stood, slipping heads onto the brain machine’s nozzle, pouring the glop into the drain, then dropping the empty skulls down a chute.

And then, as the global economy hit the skids and demand for cheap meat skyrocketed, QPP pushed for more and more overtime. By early December, Garcia would return home spent, his back and head throbbing. But this was more than ordinary exhaustion or some winter virus. On December 11, Garcia awoke to find . . .

Continue reading.

This time I remember to use the pre-shave oil through the simple physical reminder of putting the little bottle of oil on top of the soap as I left the brush to soak while I showered.

The oil in this case is Shave Secret, and once again I could detect no benefit. I do confess that attempting to, in effect, waterproof my whiskers before applying lather does seem counter-productive to me, but in any event I could not tell that the oil was of any help at all.

I got a good lather from my new Queen Charlotte soap, Celestial Woods, which has a refreshing fragrance. The Vie-Long boar + white horsehair brush performed well, though the lather didn’t quite sustain itself to the third pass so I had to revisit the soap with the brush. I blamed this on the pre-shave oil, though it could be innocent. I guess I’m just suspicious.

Three passes with the OSS, though I swapped out the Shark Chrome blade after the first pass for a new one: the old blade seems to have lost its zing, but then I got 9-10 shaves from it.

After the third pass, I decided to try Shave Secret in an Oil Pass: apply a little oil to your rinsed beard area (I use my left hand since I must hold the razor in my right) and do an ATG polishing pass. That worked quite well indeed.

A splash of TOBS Sandalwood (on the “woods” theme), and I was ready for a holiday.

Fascinating article in Mother Jones by Tom Philpott. Full disclosure: I used to eat a lot of meat, and I did get type 2 diabetes, so the article seems particularly interesting to me. In fact, I commented just recently that I now rarely visit the meat counter—it formerly was a regular stop when I went to the store—and when I do, I walk away with a 4-oz package (generally a lamb chop) or a boneless, skinless, chicken breast that makes 6 or so meals. In the old days, I would put 4 or 5 packages of around 12 ounces each into the shopping cart. (No wonder I was obese: the shopping cart is just the first station on the route to my stomach.)

The article begins:

The United States has one of the highest diabetes rates in the developed world—and the malady is spreading faster here than it is in most other rich nations, a recent Lancet study (registration required) found.

I’ve always associated our diabetes problem with the steady rise in sweetener consumption since the early ’80s, triggered by the gusher of cheap high-fructose corn syrup that opened up at that time. But another culprit may be contributing, too: exposure to certain pesticides and other toxic chemicals. A new peer-reviewed study published in the journal Diabetes Care found a strong link between diabetes onset and blood levels of a group of harsh industrial chemicals charmingly known as “persistent organic pollutants” (POPs), most of which have been banned in the United States for years but still end up in our food (hence the “persistent” bit—they degrade very slowly).

The ones with the largest effect were PCBs, a class of highly toxic chemicals widely used as industrial coolants before being banished in 1979. Interestingly, the main US maker of PCBs, Monsanto, apparently knew about and tried to cover up their health-ruining effects long before the ban went into place. Organochlorine pesticides, another once-ubiquitous, now largely banned chemical group, also showed a significant influence on diabetes rates.

The researchers identified a group of 725 diabetes-free elderly Swedes and tracked them for five years, studying the level of POPs in their blood. Thirty-six of them ended up contracting Type 2 (non-hereditary) diabetes—and the ones who did had significantly higher POP levels than the ones who didn’t. The researchers stress that the study’s sample size is small, but their findings build on other recent data suggesting a POP/diabetes connection. Evidence for such a link is “piling up,” David Carpenter, head of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany, told Reuters. . .

Continue reading. Monsanto’s efforts to continue selling a product that destroyed the health of American’s is, unfortunately, a typical and logical consequence of the fact that corporations always (and must) put profits as the primary objective—and the current corporate takeover of American government.

As a consequence of the great book purge (on-going), I’m finding books that I had forgotten about or misplaced. One I was delighted to discover is Timothy Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious.  I had read enough of it to be aware of some of the activities and decisions of my unconscious self, which helped quite a bit. And my answering the question, “Do you feel better?” by looking not at my feelings but at my observed activities—that’s right out of the book.

Quite a fascinating book if you want to know more about yourself. Highly recommended.

The Villi tastes good, though not quite so thick as I like—but with this first batch I didn’t add powdered milk, which makes the resulting yogurt thicker. Most of the Villi is now draining in my yogurt-cheese maker, the Cuisipro Donvier, which has a 1-qt capacity and does a very good job (and also serves as a storage container).

I’m starting a second batch today, using 2% milk instead of whole milk and adding powdered milk as well.

UPDATE: The new batch of Villi is very thick already, after just 9 hours on the counter. (They suggest 12-16, and I’m thinking I might let it go overnight.)

UPDATE 2: The Wife says that the Villi yogurt cheese (made with whole milk) tastes like crème fraiche.

That’s one of my Joris razors, this one plated with palladium. I had sort of let the Joris razors drop from my rotation because they seemed so harsh, but Jerry (slantman) gave me a tip on SimplyShaving.net: drop the blade angle. Instead of the usual ~30º angle, go shallower, to ~20º. I tried that this morning, and it completely worked: the problem was merely that the Joris (and, apparently, the new Mühle R41) heads use a substantially different blade angle than that to which I was accustomed. Now I know. I should have experimented more with altering the angle.

From the top: The Semogue 2000 soaked while I showered, then it worked up a good lather from the ersatz Old Spice shaving soap (this one was from HoneybeeSoaps.net, I believe). Three passes with the Joris holding a Gillette 7 O’Clock PermaSharp, and the shave was pleasant. A brief pass of the alum bar, police the sink area, rinse, and a splash of Old Spice to finish.

The Gessato pre-shave oil was today just along for the ride: I totally forgot about it as I swung into the shave. I was thinking only of what I had learned about the Joris.

Tomorrow I’ll start the pre-shave oil sequence once more…

The Villi culture worked after the Filmjölk failed. (Cultures for Health is sending a free replacement for the Filmjölk—they said occasionally cultures don’t survive shipment.)

I’m quite excited. It’s a thick yogurt, but I’ll chill before tasting. It cultures at room temperature (just stir it into the milk and leave sitting, covered, on the counter), and it can be used indefinitely: use 1/4 c of the current batch to start the next.

I’ve now ordered more to try: Bulgarian, Matsoni, and Greek. I like the suggestion regarding the Greek yogurt: 3 parts milk, 1 part heavy cream.

This is intriguing.