Later On

Some interesting articles:

Companies Get Tougher with Employees Who Smoke – It will be interesting to see whether, say, R.J. Reynolds or Liggett & Meyers adopt such policies. They are always driven to grow profits, and cutting employee costs is one way to do that.

GoPro’s Incredible Small, Durable Camcorder – Extremely interesting technology. What is needed is this sort of camera that uses WiFi to stream its video to a haven the cloud—especially useful when police or other officials are confiscating cameras to hide evidence of their misdeeds.

North Miami’s Condo Catastrophe — This definitely triggers a strong “What were they thinking?” response—so much so that it seems there must have been reasons not obvious (because deliberately hidden) for the decisions. Or maybe it is simple blind incompetence.

Raves for Robert Brunner’s All-New Nook — This one is looking good.

Pictured above is the nib of Montblanc’s Agatha Christie “Limited” Edition fountain pen. (“Limited” is in quotation marks because a run of 30,000 copies doesn’t really seem all that limited.) At the link, click “Collector’s information following text for more details. The clip is also a snake: it’s wrapped around the top of the cap, then the is crawling down the side, with its head (two inset rubies for its eyes) downward.

I like the pen a lot: very cool looking with a definite 1920′s vibe, writes well, and now with an italic point is destined for much more use that it saw over the past decade, stored in its box.

I keep making the mistake of varying too many things at once. Did I mention that I tend toward impatience? This morning I tried only three new things:

1. Truefitt & Hill Ultimate Comfort Pre-shave Oil—I’m going to try pre-shave oils once more. They’ve never done a thing for me, but perhaps I did not give them a sufficient chance.

2. A new brush, the Pogonotomy Limited Edition 2011 Horsehair: the first shave with the new brush.

3. A new shave stick, the Lea, completely new to me.

Withal, the lather was so-so, and I don’t know which (if any) of the above contributed to that outcome. The brush is brand new: no history there, and a new brush may require some breaking in. I’ve never used the T&H pre-shave oil, nor the Lea shave stick.

For the third pass, I did work up a little lather from the bowl of Vitos sitting on the counter, and that worked fine, so my suspicions are focused on the Lea, but it will require a few more shaves.

Still: the end result was quite a satisfactory shave. The Shark Chrome blade in the razor seemed to be struggling, so I replaced it with a new Gillette 7 O’Clock PermaEdge, and the shave immediately improved.

Three passes, a splash of New York, and all is well.

I just watched Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (on Netflix Watch Instantly) again. I thought it held up very well indeed. Quite solid, and the money spent where it counted—the screen credits, for example, wasted not a cent.

What struck me most, however, was how very possible the idea of privatizing our police forces now seems. Think of it: profit-motivated cops, going for bonuses. How soon will be the first? And what trend could be more ominous?

UPDATE: To answer the second question: An even more ominous trend would be when corporations go for vertical integration: they have already privatized the prisons. Police forces might be next to be privatized, and then if the judiciary could also be brought under private control, you could have a very efficient system at rounding up the powerless, running them before one of your courts, and then into one of your prisons, collecting taxpayer money at each step. Then, to grow profits, the corporations just increase the number rounded up, probably by using their influence in state legislatures to make more things illegal and to make more crimes carry mandatory prison sentences. It becomes a money-making machine, with the “criminals” more or less the resource being mined. Extended legislation (new sort of crimes) can increase the available money-producing resource (people accused of crimes who can be caught, sentenced, and imprisoned). Of course, the Public Defender system would have to be undermined and underfunded and, ultimately, undone: the Public Defender’s office drives up corporate costs and also reduces corporate profits by getting “not guilty” verdicts.

I should point out that the first step—getting legislatures to attach mandatory minimum sentences to more crimes and get more people into prison for life (guaranteed income, from the corporation’s point of view) through “3 strikes” laws is already a fact and rather far advanced in California (and probably in other states as well: I live in California so I’m more familiar with its situation). Private prisons in California were so successful—and the corporations’ lobbying efforts were augmented by the prison guards’ union, which had the same objective (more prisoners, thus more work for prison guards), with the result that the state budget share claimed by prisons has ballooned.

Indeed, the first steps toward putting the judiciary under corporate control have already occurred in Pennsylvania, where a corporation running prisons for juveniles had two judges on its payroll: the judges made sure that juveniles who appeared before them went to prison, and in return were rewarded by the corporations (for which the juveniles represented profit-potential). I’m not sure whether the judges were on salary or paid as piecework, but in any event the corporate goals and methods were clear.

That’s the direction we’re headed: Privatize everything, promise lower taxes, and keep that taxpayer money flowing into the coffers of private corporations. Ah, the efficiency of free enterprise: people are going to moved so quickly from their daily lives into prison that they won’t know what hit them.

Memes—units of culture that can be mimicked and thus repeated (evolving in the process)—seem to affect us on every level. We’ve known this phenomenon as “cultural influence”, but I like the way the meme idea leads to interesting speculation.

But here’s an actual example: 9 photos of young Chinese women, all of them raised in China save one from Australia. The challenge: Pick out the Australian.

Here’s the answer.

What has been done by President Obama is astounding, never mind that he is (I have read) a Constitutional scholar—that is, he must know what he is doing is breaking the law. This is the state of the US government today: led by willful lawbreakers, with a Congress desperate to do anything for money (thus no Wall Street prosecutions). Take a look at what Obama has done:

In August, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder — under continuous,aggressive prodding by the Obama White House – announced that three categories of individuals responsible for Bush-era torture crimes would be fully immunized from any form of criminal investigation and prosecution:  (1) Bush officials who ordered the torture (Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld); (2) Bush lawyers who legally approved it (Yoo, Bybee, Levin), and (3) those in the CIA and the military who tortured within the confines of the permission slips they were given by those officials and lawyers (i.e., “good-faith” torturers).  The one exception to this sweeping immunity was that low-level CIA agents and servicemembers who went so far beyond the torture permission slips as to basically commit brutal, unauthorized murder would be subject to a “preliminary review” to determine if a full investigation was warranted – in other words, the Abu Ghraib model of justice was being applied, where only low-ranking scapegoats would be subject to possible punishment while high-level officials would be protected.

Yesterday, it was announced that this “preliminary review” by the prosecutor assigned to conduct it, U.S. Attorney John Durham, is now complete, and — exactly as one would expect — even this category of criminals has been almost entirely protected, meaning a total legal whitewash for the Bush torture regime: . . .

Continue reading.

Man, these sound good. This week, for sure.

This makes sense. It’s interesting that the GOP has stoutly resisted efforts to find people cheating on their taxes, constantly cutting back on the IRS efforts to find such people. Wonder why?

One reason Greece is in such a bind today is that the government never really tried to collect taxes.

Just got an email request for a summary of what I know currently about making Creamy Lather.

Lather creation from a shaving soap starts as the brush is loaded and continues as you work the brush in a bowl or in a cupped hand or on your face. Of these three choices, I prefer “on your face.” The loading of the brush can be protracted and vigorous, with proportionately more lather creation happening in that phase and less on the face (Creamy Lather), or it can be shorter, using less soap, with more working up the lather on the beard (Frugal Lather). Both work quite well. Frugal Lather uses less soap, Creamy Lather is more luxurious.

By starting with a brush fully loaded with water (after soaking the boar while showering, hold it up and let it drip a bit, but don’t shake it out) and working the brush longer on the soap (for, say, 60-75 seconds), Creamy Lather lather can be achieved: extremely dense, with minute bubbles. It’s more like shaving cream than the Frugal Lather you get after loading the brush for, say, 15-20 seconds—more luxurious: slicker, smoother, thicker.

Once I stumbled on this, I realized that the process had been explained quite clearly, but I simply had failed to get it. I made the lather by accident, realized it was special, and started trying to make lightning strike again. I succeeded eventually, and I realized I was doing exactly what those previous explanations had quite clearly told me to do.

Mantic has a video on this as well, though my original source was Zach, who explains it in detail here.

UPDATE: Through experimentation and experience, I’ve found that horsehair shaving brushes seem to do the best job of making Creamy Lather, at least for me.

My first batch of Filmjölk (Fil Mjölk) yogurt simply would not start. This is a room-temperature culture, so the milk just sits on the counter.

Belated discovery: the quart of goat milk I got is ultra-pasteurized. Cultures for Health specifically recommend against using ultra-pasteurized dairy products (milk, goat milk, cream, etc.) because the yogurt cultures tend not to work. Yep.

Off to the store now for a quart of milk from some cow. I’m going to add (organic) powdered (cow) milk to it for a thicker yogurt. (The customer service person also told me that it’s not a good idea to mix goat and cow milk if you’re making yogurt—and also that goat milk is naturally homogenized, which I didn’t know.)

My friend David, who’s just retired from an active career in which he directed a consulting company that worked with many corporations told me this morning that quite a few business are, as a matter of policy, ignoring job applications from people who are currently unemployed. They have decided to offer jobs only to those who already have jobs.

This is the corporate culture America has created.

How widespread is this? Hard to say, since companies are not going to be forthright about such policies, but it’s somehow not surprising, given how corporations have conducted themselves in general.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, here’s what I think is a reasonable policy that reflects some empathy: “Given equally qualified applicants for an open position, preference is given first to applicants currently unemployed (if any).” Simple, fills the requirements, and helps not only one person and family but the nation as a whole.

My fervent hope is that the persons who set this policy lose their jobs (layoff, company belly-up, whatever), and in their subsequent job search they find only companies that follow the policy those persons set.

An important communique received from the Marijuana Policy Project via email:

“What I’m not going to be doing is using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state [medical marijuana] laws.”
Barack Obama, Oregon Mail Tribune, March 22, 2008

Two days ago, without any public comment, President Obama broke the above campaign promise to medical marijuana patients when his Justice Department issued a new departmental policy for enforcement of federal marijuana laws in states with medical marijuana programs. Deputy Attorney General James Cole stated that while federal prosecutors should not go after sick and dying individuals, they may choose to prosecute businesses that provide marijuana to patients, even when the providers are abiding by state law.

To put it simply, this is absurd.

Please email the White House today, and ask the Obama administration to respect the rights of the states – and the needs of the patients – by leaving medical marijuana providers who act in compliance with state law alone.

Despite the memo’s claim to the contrary, it contradicts what had been official DOJ policy and flies in the face of numerous past statements by the president and his attorney general. In May 2010, Attorney General Eric Holder testified in Congress that “if the entity is, in fact, operating consistent with state law, and is not — does not have any of those factors involved that are contained in that Deputy Attorney General memo, … [threatening to arrest the dispensary’s employees] would be inconsistent with what the policy is as we have set it out.”

Please tell the Obama administration that providing channels for patients to safely obtain their doctor-recommended medicine is a crucial component of workable medical marijuana laws. Then, please post this link to your Facebook or Twitter account. Without necessary medical marijuana providers, many patients may have to revert to buying marijuana from the criminal market.

Finally, if you were an Obama supporter in any capacity during his 2008 campaign, please call his 2012 campaign headquarters and demand that he keep his promise to medical marijuana patients.

Thank you kindly for supporting marijuana policy reform.

No shave today—got a late start and decided to wait until tomorrow.

Had a thought this morning re: patience. When I ended my contract with the diet counselors at the end of February, I was 185 lbs, as I recall; I wanted to get below 175, and on June 30 reached 173.6: a loss during that time of 11.4 lbs.

Getting to goal seemed to go very slowly, but I had finally learned to be patient and simply keep to my plan, eating moderately, weighing daily, and being alert for bad trends. I ended up taking 12 weeks to lose that last 11.4 lbs: just under 1 lb a week. That’s quite a reasonable rate of weight loss.

I see now that I have been too impatient to master many things: my impatience made me expect results WAY too early. I’m like the kid who planted carrots, and when the green appeared, pulled them up each day to see how much they had grown: by checking for progress too soon and too often, I would get discouraged in projects that require a certain amount of time, and long before the time required for true mastery or completion, I would have quit because my progress seemed too slow. But maybe it was not the progress that was the problem, but rather my expectations.

“Slow and steady wins the race.” I keep coming back to that, and I now understand that the full idea is “Slow and steady and patient and persistent to master a skill.” And for an obese person to get to a healthy weight and maintain that weight, I’m now convinced, should be looked upon as acquiring a skill.

Company gone, getting things back to the routine. Tomorrow will be a “regular” day again.

First batch of yogurt is still goat milk. I talked to Cultures of Health about the problem and learned that sometimes the conditions the cultures encounter in shipping can kill them (perhaps ship with artificial ice?), and that you don’t mix goat and cow milk: different proteins. I also didn’t realize that goat milk is naturally homogenized.

Upcoming: a week of trying pre-shave oils.