Later On

The scary Muslim terrorist meme gets a lot of attention, but it distracts from the large number of non-Muslim terrorists. Not all the US non-Muslim terrorists are Christians (as was the terrorist in Norway), so I’m not suggesting we profile Christians.

Here’s a post by Ed Brayton where he discusses this interesting report (which dates from March).

I notice that many on the right are desperately trying to say that the Norwegian terrorist was not a Christian. Perhaps not in the sense of being Christ-like, but then most who belong to Christian faiths are not. But he was a Christian in exactly the same way that the Muslim terrorists were Muslims.

I agree that “exceptionally superb” is an odd locution, but when so many shaves are superb, I am driven to denote degree of superbness.

First, the prep was terrific and quite enjoyable. The Mennen shave stick was somewhat hard—a long time since I used it—but the Wee Scot went to work and soon I had plentiful lather, and a great lather at that: high lubricity, thick, dense, and quite wonderful to work with using the Wee Scot, rapidly becoming a favorite brush. (If you travel, why don’t you have one?)

The the Edwin Jagger DE87 with a Feather blade, a combination that is really terrific. I think I like this set-up more than the Feather premium stainless with the same brand of blade, but I’ll try the other to see. But this new EJ head with a Feather blade is going to be hard to beat. Plus it’s a good-looking razor.

Three very smooth passes left a very smooth face, to which I applied a splash of Klar Seifen. And now I am getting the apartment ready for the cleaning ladies.

Interesting graph from an interesting news story by Jame Rosen for McClatchy:

Today is going very slowly, though some good progress: I made an excellent pot of grub (3-4 meals), and 2 quarts of very nice yogurt from the Greek-yogurt culture (L. bulgaricus and S. Thermophilius) is in the fridge with its topping of towels to wick away the whey.

But I’m struggling elsewhere. When The Niece visited I got behind in my daily Spanish flashcard review, and now I see the dark side of Anki: hundreds of flashcards to get through in order to catch up. It’s a pain, but I’m now down to the two large decks, and today I’m determined to catch up with one. The other I’ll tackle tomorrow.

The other struggle is adding material and reorganizing part of the shaving book. Simply getting the narrative flow right is hard enough, but add to that the way that Microsoft Word will occasionally go crazy, adding carriage returns to footnotes, moving photos about, deciding in the middle of a page that it’s time to start text on the next page… frustrating. So this is a slog.

Just wanted to whine a bit.

UPDATE: It just occurred to me: For those familiar with Anne Lamott’s work, this feels an awfully lot like “bird by bird.”

Very cool. This one is good to watch fullscreen.

We have set memes in motion, but now they are evolving almost independently in the memeverse, as it were. Watch this TED talk and see how the memes—mathematical algorithms are memes—are starting to control what we do. And it’s not just the actions of the memes that shape our own decisions, actions, and destinies—note how much energy and expense is spent on the care of the meme: gutting buildings so the algorithm can run closer to communications channels, for instance. That is human activity in service of memes.

Fascinating talk, but look at it from the point of view of memes and their (extremely rapid) evolution—an evolution resulting from Darwinian competition among memes.

Nancy Wilson’s Jazz Profiles series on NPR are simply great: informative, great music, and a relaxed air that’s pleasant to listen to. Here is a collection of her programs on Miles Davis, and I want to draw your attention “The Enduring Legacy of Kind of Blue” (8 May 2010) and “Miles Davis: Kind of Blue” (1 August 2001)—and, why not, “Between Takes: The Kind of Blue Sessions” (29 January 2009) and “A Fresh Look at Miles Davis’s ‘Blue in Green’” (26 May 2006).

Note that all of these can be downloaded as MP3s for later listening.

The total collection of Nancy Wilson’s Jazz Profiles offers a royal introduction to jazz.

I never have, but if you do, this booklight is really terrific.

You as a corporation have a choice about hiring policies. Consider these two policies:

1. Given candidates who fully qualify for the job, give first consideration to the candidate who is unemployed.

2. Given candidates who fully qualify for the job, consider only those who are currently employed; discard applications from those not currently employed.

The reason for the first policy are several. Beyond common decency and humanity and empathy, a currently unemployed candidate is likely to have great motivation to do well and succeed. The reason for the second policy is that… well, if a guy’s down, you do have a good chance to kick him. It also keeps employees fearful and docile and subservient: they become frightened of losing their jobs and can be more easily exploited, which (to the sociopathic corporation) is a good thing.

Corporations are sociopaths: an important fact to remember and why careful regulation and monitoring is necessary. Unfortunately, corporations now have gained the upper hand, with respect to wealth and power, so the the individual is pretty much at their mercy now that they’re also taking over the government and have long since taken over the news, and those are the only counterbalancing powers currently active.

The illustration is from a NY Times article by Catherine Rampell on the phenomenon. And this video from The Real News Network is about how the imbalance of power is getting more lopsided in favor of corporations:

Above you see the first fruits of the new camera: the Simpson Emperor 3 Super, a Palmolive shave stick, my rhodium-plated Super Speed holding a Swedish Gillette blade, and Floris No. 89 aftershave.

The Palmolive shave stick is excellent. I wanted to review it because I was listing my favorite shave sticks, and wanted to confirm that it belongs in the list: it does. I took my time, and while I did not get a full-fledged Creamy Lather (difficult if not impossibly with a shave stick, unless after working up the lather and before shaving you do a second pass rubbing the stick against the grain of your beard, then working that additional soap into the lather… hmmm—wonder whether that would work. Guess I’ll have to give it a go.), but I did get a very good Frugal Lather.

Indeed, it struck me recently that Frugal Lather and Creamy Lather might be defined as the two endpoints of the spectrum of good lathers for shaving, with FL as the good lather requiring the least soap and CL as the good lather requiring the most. Today’s lather would be somewhere along that continuum.

Three smooth passes with the Super Speed, a splash of Floris No. 89, and I’m ready to get going.

Taken with my new camera.

The photo above comes from a fascinating article on modern-day science sets for kids, which I found via Brett McKay’s Google+ post. (Brett McKay runs the interesting blog The Art of Manliness. Full disclosure: I personally am manly and frequently do manly things, if they are not dangerous or scary, nor require much effort or skill.)

The article is well worth reading, and made me shed a tear for the chemistry sets I enjoyed as a boy.

Kurt Opsahi reports at The Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Yesterday in Righthaven v. Democratic Underground a federal court in Las Vegas ordered the notorious copyright troll Righthaven to pay $5,000 in sanctions and to file the court transcript containing its admonishment in hundreds of other copyright cases. EFF represents Democratic Underground.

Righthaven tried to build a business out of suing hundreds of bloggers and websites for allegedly infringing the copyrights in Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper articles, but was stopped short by evidence EFF uncovered: the secret “Strategic Alliance Agreement” between Stephens Media (publisher of the Review-Jounal) and Righthaven, which showed that the assignment of the copyrights was a sham.

In the decision dismissing Righthaven’s case, Judge Hunt also ordered Righthaven to explain why it should not be sanctioned for its failure to disclose media giant Stephens Media’s financial interest in the lawsuits.

The Strategic Alliance Agreement required Righthaven to pay half of the lawsuit proceeds to Stephens Media (publisher of the Review-Journal). Nevertheless, Righthaven and Stephens Media asserted that the media company did not have an ongoing interest in the litigation. These misrepresentations not only concealed Stephens Media’s role, but allowed Righthaven to continue to litigate hundreds of cases for months over a right that it did not have, raising defense costs and resulting in settlements that may never have happened if the truth had been known.

In its written response, Righthaven refused to accept responsibility, instead presenting several convoluted arguments that it hoped would get it off the hook, including – most brazenly – that the Court did not have authority to sanction it. As EFF explained in response, none of those arguments held water. Nevertheless, Righthaven apparently did not take the matter very seriously — when asked about the Order to Show Cause in a television interview, Righthaven’s CEO Steven Gibson called it a minor technical issue, and showed no remorse.

Yesterday, Righthaven appeared before the Court for one last chance to explain why it should not be sanctioned. Judge Hunt rejected all of Righthaven’s arguments.

The Court said that . . .

Continue reading.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an on-line form to let you easily contact your representative about the following:

The U.S. House of Representatives is currently considering H.R. 1981, a bill that would order all of our online service providers to keep new logs about our online activities, logs to help the government identify the web sites we visit and the content we post online. This sweeping new “mandatory data retention” proposal treats every Internet user like a potential criminal and represents a clear and present danger to the online free speech and privacy rights of millions of innocent Americans.

Tell your Representative to oppose this dangerous bill, before this week’s critical vote.

H.R. 1981 would impose sweeping requirements on a broad swath of online service providers to keep new records on all of their customers, just in case the police ever want to investigate any of them. In particular, the bill would require any “provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service” to keep for at least 18 months a record of which users were assigned to particular network addresses at particular times.

Such addresses, like the Internet Protocol (IP) address assigned to your cable modem by your cable company, or to your laptop by a wireless router, can be used to identify who visited particular websites or posted particular content online–threatening your right to privately browse the web and to speak and read anonymously when you’re online.

Mandatory data retention would force your ISP–and your workplace, your school, your library, your corner coffee-shop with free WiFi, and anyone else that offers you internet access–to create vast and expensive new databases of sensitive information about you. That information would then be available to the government, in secret and without any court oversight, based on weak and outdated electronic privacy laws.

That same data would also be available to civil litigants in private lawsuits–whether it’s the RIAA trying to identify downloaders, a company trying to uncover and retaliate against an anonymous critic, or a divorce lawyer looking for dirty laundry. These databases would also be a new and valuable target for black hat hackers, be they criminals trying to steal identities or foreign governments trying to unmask anonymous dissidents.

The House Judiciary Committee is about to hold a critical vote that will determine whether this dangerous, mass-spying proposal moves forward or not, and the bill could soon be on the House floor for a final vote. Demand that your Representative protect your online privacy and free speech rights by opposing H.R. 1981.

Lots of small stuff going on. I began the day by writing a couple of letters. Then the Nikon Coolpix P500 arrived, so the battery is charging. I must say it feels quite lightweight compared to the skookum feel of the Canon S2 IS.

I drove out to Monterey Peninsula College and canceled my registration. I’ll study the text on my own. I decided that, on the whole, I didn’t get so much as I liked from the class—due mainly to the lack of interest on the part of my fellow students, who mostly talked to teach other during class. I feel relieved that I don’t have to go to classes, but still determined to learn Spanish. I’ll use on-line materials along with the book. If self-study fails, I can enroll next Spring.

Then a stop at the grocery store for salad stuff and fruit and some milk: time for more yogurt.

Apologies for poor photo quality. New camera should arrive today. In the meantime, the shave was much better than the photo. Lea is a good shave stick, and the Mühle—quite a soft brush—worked up a fine lather. Three smooth and easy passes with the Merkur Slant holding a Swedish Gillette blade, a splash of Al-Innsbruck, and another great shave was enjoyed.

Some men still haven’t tried the Slant Bar. As I write in the book, I highly recommend that a Slant Bar is the ideal choice for the second razor, rather than another razor that has a straight-bar (or open-comb) guard. The Slant, because of the blade’s angle, gives quite a different shaving experience: extremely easy and close. You hold and wield the Slant exactly as if it were a straight-bar razor: the razor itself takes care of the different cutting action just by virtue of its design.

Merkur continues to offer a Slant-bar in new production, and Hoffritz Slant-bars, no longer made, are relatively easy to find on eBay with a “favorite” search. In fact, here’s one now. This one will go to just one shaver, of course, but if you keep watching, you’ll find more. And the Merkur is readily available. Highly recommended.

From the New Scientist:

PRIMORDIAL instincts that drive animals to seek out salt may be governed by the same mechanism that drives drug addicts to hunt down their fix.

Researchers deprived mice and rats of salt, then offered them salty water to drink. After killing the animals they examined gene activity in the hypothalamus, the brain’s “reward” centre. They found that gratification genes had been activated – the same genes that are active in cocaine and heroin addicts when their craving has been satisfied.

If the team used a drug to block the effects of dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with feelings of enjoyment, the animals did not drink the salty water. This suggests that the urge to seek out salt is indeed linked to the reward mechanism (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1109199108).

The discovery might open up new ways to treat addiction. “We’re not saying the new data tells us how to cure addiction, but it does point to new avenues of investigation,” says team member Derek Denton of the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Anyone who’s ever prepared a report for his or her boss (or worse, for his or her boss’s boss) is familiar with getting feedback that the report’s findings are obvious. Of course, had you asked the reader(s) to state, before reading the report, what its findings would be, it generally turns out that the findings so obvious in retrospect and rather obscure in prospect.

Here’s an interesting column By Duncan Watts in New Scientist along those lines. It begins:

IN JANUARY 1998, about halfway through my first year out of graduate school, where I’d just completed a PhD in engineering, my housemate handed me a copy of New Scientist containing a book review by the physicist and science writer, John Gribbin. The book was Tricks of the Trade by Chicago sociologist, Howard Becker, mostly a collection of Becker’s musings on how to do productive social science research.

Gribbin clearly hated it, judging Becker’s insights to be the kind of self-evident checks that “real scientists learn in the cradle”. But Gribbin didn’t stop there, noting that the book had merely reinforced his opinion that all social science was “something of an oxymoron” and that “any physicist threatened by cuts in funding ought to consider a career in the social sciences, where it ought to be possible to solve the problems the social scientists are worked up about in a trice”.

Twelve years later, and now a sociologist myself, I’ve learned that Gribbin is not alone in his scepticism about what social science offers. To many people, and I suspect to many readers of this magazine, it is deeply unclear what sociology has to say about the world that an intelligent person couldn’t have figured out on their own. It’s a reasonable question, and as a former “hard” scientist, it’s one that I admit to having asked myself. But as Paul Lazarsfeld, one of the giants of 20th-century American sociology, pointed out nearly 60 years ago, it also reveals a common misconception about the nature of social science.

Lazarsfeld was writing about “The American Soldier”, a recently published study of over 600,000 servicemen, conducted by the research branch of the war department during and immediately after the second world war. To make his point, Lazarsfeld listed six findings that he claimed were representative of the report. Take number two: “Men from rural backgrounds were usually in better spirits during their Army life than soldiers from city backgrounds.”

“Aha,” says Lazarsfeld’s imagined reader, “that makes perfect sense. Rural men in the 1940s were accustomed to harsher living standards and more physical labour than city men, so naturally they had an easier time adjusting. Why did we need such a vast and expensive study to tell me what I already knew?” Why indeed.

But Lazarsfeld then reveals the truth: all six of the “findings” were in fact the exact opposite of what the study found. It was city men, not rural men, who were happier during their army life. Of course, had the reader been told the real answers in the first place, they could just as easily have reconciled them with other things they already thought they knew: “City men are more used to working in crowded conditions and in corporations, with chains of command, strict standards of clothing, etiquette, and so on. That’s obvious!” But this is exactly the point Lazarsfeld was making. When every answer and its opposite appears equally obvious then, as he put it, “something is wrong with the entire argument of ‘obviousness’”.

Lazarsfeld was talking about social science, but as I argue . . .

Continue reading.

Here’s a review by Phillip Smith at Drug War Chronicles of what sounds like an interesting book:

To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War, by John Gibler

In Mexico, journalist John Gibler points out, there is the War on Drugs and then there is the drug war. The War on Drugs is the spectacle — the well-publicized deployment of troops, the high-level diplomatic meetings, the perp walks of captured capos before the media, all designed to show that the Mexican government is dead serious about confronting the “menace to society” that Mexican drug trafficking organizations, the mislabeled “cartels,” represent.

The drug war is what is really going on — the tens of thousands of murders, the amazing ability of cartel killers to do their dirty work in broad daylight in cities full of police and soldiers and never get arrested, the unending flow of drugs north and guns and cash south, the undeniable collusion between factions of the security apparatus and different cartels, all within the context of a nation unable to provide safety or security for its citizens.

The Mexican War on Drugs is little more than a charade, or, as Gibler puts it, “a terrifying farce.” And it is a charade in which the US is complicit. Our government is handing out $1.4 billion in Plan Merida funds, most of it going to the Mexican military and law enforcement apparatus to “strengthen institutions.” But those institutions our money is supposed to strengthen — the army, the national police — are precisely the ones complicit in the drug wars.

How is it that Ciudad Juarez could see 3,000 drug war murders last year in a city filled with soldiers and military checkpoints? How is it that 95% of those murders are never even investigated? How is it that convoys of SUVS filled with rifle-toting cartel gunmen pass freely through the streets? How is it that 90% of those arrested in the drug war in Juarez are affiliated with the Juarez Cartel (La Linea), while the Sinaloa Cartel, which is waging a deadly battle to take over la plaza (the franchise), has hardly anyone arrested? How is that 90% of those who were arrested are later released without charge?

And how is it that there is la plaza in the first place? . . .

Continue reading.

Very interesting book review. Of course, correlation is not causation. Still, one can speculate: perhaps the legal requirement that corporations focus solely on maximizing profits—shareholder return on investment more generally—along with the (in effect) absentee ownership by shareholders who generally hold little power (shareholder resolutions are ignored even if they pass (PDF of Harvard study) and indeed I was reading recently about how shareholder votes (that pass with solid majorities) to remove a CEO or a member of the Board of Directors are routinely ignored by Boards, or circumvented through a transparent device, such as removing a Director and then adding him back to the Board or refusing to accept a CEO resignation) produces a perfect cultural environment in which a sociopath can prosper—and indeed, as the book points out, produce value through exploiting their peculiar talents/disabilities.

The finding that upper management ranks are peppered with successful sociopaths would mean, I think, that the culture thereof must of necessity be sociopath-friendly, so doubtless even non-sociopaths must act in a sociopathic manner to fit in and to succeed—which would account for the high psychic price paid by some senior executives: if they are not sociopaths, having to lead sociopathic lives must exact a terrible toll (perhaps leading to self-medicating with alcohol and the like).

And, of course, if the corporation is increasingly managed by sociopaths, it is likely to increasingly act in a sociopathic manner—e.g., no loyalty whatsoever to its workers or to towns that depend on the local factory, and so on. I know that their loyalty is ostensibly to shareholders, but it also could be construed that their loyalty is only to themselves, not to any of the various stakeholders.

Perhaps the creations of the modern corporation in the 19th century was a somewhat chance mutation—it depended in good part on the outcome of two Supreme Court decisions (one in 1819, the other in 1886) on whether a corporation could be legally consider a “person”. But once the mutation was introduced into that particular cultural meme, it quickly proved successful and propagated profusely while evolving rapidly. That it also acts as a Petri dish for sociopaths was doubtless accidental, but the symbiosis of the two has created an enormously successful meme that seems, on the whole, to have wrecked the world.

You certainly can observe sociopathy in action in, for example, how oil and coal companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars denying scientific findings and holding off efforts to combat global warming—despite the obvious threat to life on the planet—so they can make more money. That seems very sociopathic to me.

What’s a bit worrisome is when sociopaths become cultural heroes and role models. That would produce a society in which more and more people were in it for themselves, to get as much as they can as fast as they can and devil take the hindmost. If that were to happen, you’d likely see politicians who are on the take, constantly working for money, listening mostly to people who give them money, and always looking to cash out in some big way. I guess you’d pretty much see the state of society today. The Murdoch situation is an epitome of where we find ourselves.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that our current social institutions (e.g., corporations) act as a kind of filtering mechanism that favors the promotion of sociopaths, with a gradual on-growing enrichment of the ranks of world leaders by the most successful of sociopaths.

UPDATE 2: A commenter points out the Iron Law of Oligarchy, to which the sociopath-filtering of a hierarchical organization contributes.

Tonight’s grub was really excellent. It just filled a 2-qt sauté pan; though I used protein and starch for one meal, I knew the total volume would make it two meals, so I cheated on the oil and used 2 meals’ worth.

4 tsp roasted-garlic olive oil
1 large spring shallot, chopped, including green parts
4 oz (1/2 block) tempeh, cut into chunks (long rectangles cross-cut into short rectangles)
1 ripe jalapeño, minced (including seeds and pith)

That sautéed toward brownness, then I added:

1/2 c cooked converted rice
1/2 c white wine

I used the wine to deglaze the pan, then added:

2 large domestic white mushrooms, cut into large (or small, your choice) chunks
1 small interesting yellow squash (long, with the blossom end a pale green), chopped
sprinkling of salt
freshly ground pepper

While that sautéed with occasional stirring, I rinsed and chopped:

4 leaves red chard, chopped (including stalks)
2 Tbsp Ginger People Sesame Peanut Sauce
1 lengthy squirt of Thai fish sauce
1 of those wads of sun-dried tomatoes that I get at the produce market: size of a medium lime, I would say. (And, come to think of it, lime juice would have been good.)
2 Tbsp capers
12 pitted Kalamata olives, roughly chopped

I covered it, reduced heat to low, and let it simmer 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. I could have added pine nuts, but decided not to. I would definitely have included a chopped Meyer lemon (including skin) if I had one. I should have added garlic but just plain forgot. But the shallot was enough: it was a double-bulbed big guy.

It did indeed make two meals: 2 (smallish) bowls uses 1/2 the total. One I topped with Bac’Uns, one with yogurt.

It had good umami, I assume from the Maillard reaction with the shallots et al. and from the sautéed dried tomatoes and the Thai fish sauce. Although I got only 1/2 serving of starch (that is, half the rice), I still had plenty of carbs from the veggies.

The other half of the tempeh I cut into small chunks and put into a baggie with Pickapeppa Sauce and a splash of vinegar to marinate overnight for tomorrow night’s dinner. (Tomorrow’s lunch is the other half of the above.)