Later On

Though it has already been observed that in the US we don’t call terrorist attacks by that name unless they are perpetrated by Muslims. If a Christian does a terrorist act, it is not called “terrorism” and it is quickly forgotten—or, as Greenwald points out, great efforts are made to (somehow) blame Islam and/or Islamic militants for the attack anyway. His column includes a link to a very interesting article on the phenomenon.

Actually, two different articles… but who knows?

Google+ article: Google+’s Circle Logic

Cyberwarfare: Cyber weapons: The new arms race

Also, an interesting opinion piece on how the GOP is pushing for a dishonorable solution: to default on US debt, incurred for programs Congress itself passed.

Reasons people offer for not getting their financial house in order: an interesting post at The Simple Dollar.

The episodes of anomalous and formerly rare weather events continues. But you ain’t seen nothing yet:

When it’s already 100 degrees outside, one degree more doesn’t seem like much. But in terms of the global average, a one-degree temperature rise has huge implications for people and the planet.

Since pre-industrial times, the global average surface temperature has increased by 1.4 degrees — with more than one degree of that warming happening in the past three decades. And we are already witnessing significant changes. In many parts of the world, cold days and nights have become rarer, and hot days and nights more common, over the past half-century. Arctic sea ice, Greenland’s ice sheet, and glaciers in the Alps and the Antarctic Peninsula are all melting faster. The oceans have become more acidic as a result of the buildup of greenhouse gases, and the warming of rivers and lakes is affecting freshwater fish and other species. As are result, animals and plants are migrating toward poles or higher elevations in search of more hospitable habitats.

And all this is happening with just 1.4 degrees of warming. What’s more, this is just an average, with actual temperatures rising at different rates, and with varying impacts, around the world. Without action to reduce carbon emissions, many leading climate scientists are projecting that the planet’s average temperature could rise as much as 11.5 degrees by the end of the century. The consequences are hard to imagine.

The consequences will rather obviously include massive die-offs of all species, including our own (due to massive crop failures and the disappearance of ocean fish). Unfortunately for us, the GOP strategy of shutting one’s eyes, clamping hands over ears, and singing, “Lalalala” in a loud voice is ineffective. Well, ineffective at stopping global warming, but incredibly effective at keeping it going—and even accelerating it.

UPDATE: A column in the NY Times on living with the greenhouse effect.

Today’s shaves was one of those that is so good you wish you could shave again, maybe in a couple of hours.

Part of it was the lather. I soaked my Vie-Long boar + white horsehair brush while I showered, then, after washing my beard with MR GLO, put the brush to work on the La Toja shaving soap. I loaded the brush by working up a lather, ignoring the first, big-bubbled and frothy result and continuing to work the brush on the soap until I was getting a fine-grained lather: Creamy Lather. That I applied and worked it further, brushing my entire beard and enjoying the sensation. This brush is still breaking in, so the tips are not yet soft, but they are invigorating and pleasant nonetheless.

With a fully lathered and softened beard, I picked up the Edwin Jagger DE87 with a previously used Feather blade and enjoyed a flawless, smooth shave. The Feather is indeed a fine blade. I had drifted away when I kept getting nicks, but I think since last using them my skills have improved. I now think it’s not that the Feather premium stainless razor has some special magic (though it is indeed a very nice razor), it’s mainly that I know better how to use a Feather blade. Plus the new EJ razor head is a very nice thing indeed.

Three passes, a splash of Acca Kappa, and I’m ready for Saturday.

The photo quality is not great, but the new camera should be here on Monday. In the meantime, I decided that the problem that killed the Canon S2 IS was that I kept getting photos directly from the SDHC card, removing and replacing it daily. I don’t think they’re made for that, and now I’m using purely the USB port.

Some variation of one of these recipes:

Mediterranean Spaghetti Squash (my name, but that’s what the recipe reminded me of)

Spicy Spaghetti Squash

Both recipes start the same—bake squash and let it cool—so I don’t have to decide until later.

I’m going to try this for my next pair of glasses.

And not just the Federal government: indeed, state and local governments are even easier and cheaper to buy: both states and cities are so eager for corporations to move in that they are pretty much willing to do anything. The first step is usually a bribe, offered in the form of freedom from taxes for a set period or indefinitely. The next seems to be to have the corporations write the laws that the government will then enforce for them. This happens at the state and local level, as discussed in the article at the link, and also at the Federal level where corporate lobbyists keep legislators in line. Legislators who are uncooperative generally see well-funded opponents come election time.

It’s more or less in the open. I think people no longer care.

From The Week:

The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland is still covering up the sexual abuse of children by priests, the Irish Government charged in a blistering new report. The Irish church promised in 1996 to report all abuse cases to state authorities, but the government found that clergy in the diocese of Coyne did nothing about complaints voiced against 19 priests between 1996 and 2009. Worse, the report found that the Vatican explicitly directed Irish bisops not to abide by the 1996 policy. And after a seminarian complained that the bisop of Cloyne, John Magee, inapprpriately hugged and kissed him, church officials justified such behavior as simply “Italianate.” The Irish government is now planning to make it a criminal offense to withold knowledge of child abuse from authorities.

The Vatican continues its corrupt and evil policies. But I think most people did not expect any reform within the Roman Catholic church. It’s an organization that actively opposes reform in so many areas.

UPDATE: And, in other news, the Vatican takes steps to keep women and married men from being priests in the Catholic church (which is no problem in the Episcopal church or other Protestant churches, of course.)

Here’s a more detailed report of the problems noted above.

I wish I could have tasted a Gros Michel, the predecessor to the Cavendish common in supermarkets today (but not, apparently, for much longer). I’ve read that the Gros Michel was much tastier than the Cavendish, with more flavor. But it was wiped out by a fungus, and now the Cavendish is similarly marked for disaster. Current situation described in this article.

Today I tried for Creamy Lather using an Omega 643167 artificial badger, a very nice brush for around $25, and Geo. F. Trumper Coconut Oil shaving soap. As I worked up the lather I noticed that the initial formation included a lot of large bubbles. That’s the lather that gets pushed over the side, save what I can recapture and continue working. In a relatively short time—though longer than I generally used to load the brush—the lather starts to change character and become thicker. I believe that’s the CL I sought.

At any rate, a very good lather and a good shave with a Gillette NEW holding a previously used Gillette 7 O’Clock SharpEdge. Three passes, a splash of Trumper’s West Indian Extract of Limes (a phrase I always think should be “Extract of West Indian Limes”, for surely that is what is intended), and I’m ready for Friday.

Two Murdoch ex-employees corroborate each other’s story on Jim Murdoch’s being explicitly told of things he subsequently denied knowing: the lies are starting to tumble out. It’s very, very hard to keep up a lie as more details must be produced: you have to rely on cognitive memory for consistency rather than on experience-memory, which is more reliable. Then when inconsistencies surface, additional lies must be told to explain them, and those lies, of course, quickly start to unravel as the skein of logical consistencies bursts the bounds of cognitive memory. Or, more briefly, their goose is cooked. Delicious.

I understand (theoretically) that some (many?) people have no curiosity about food. Given a menu of food selections, they look for things they’ve eaten before—preferably things they’ve eaten so often that the dishes are totally familiar.

I do not understand this at all. Given a menu, I will try to order things I’ve not had before, unless the chef or restaurant is famous for some specialty that’s a variation on a familiar dish.

Still, I’ve even met such people. When I was a grad student at the University of Iowa, we had another couple over for dinner, and at the end of the meal, the guy said that he had not previously tried a tomato. But he liked it. (One thinks of the needless tomatoless years, the innumerable hamburgers eaten without the slice of tomato, and so on.)

And just today I was talkin with a woman in her 50′s. I told her I was greatly enjoying my homemade buttermilk, and she said she had never tasted buttermilk.

How can that be? Do some people totally lack curiosity? Is buttermilk (or tomatoes or whatever) so frightening that one cannot even try a taste?

I know it happens, I’ve seen it, and I am still astonished and cannot understand.

Take a look. It’s gorgeous (though much of that is the setting, and the cost of the land is not included in the $150K).

I’m switching from BofA to my local credit union. Here’s how I run the BofA checking accounts:

Account A: One account is free of all charges save I have to buy checks… but I never write checks on this account. It is free only because I have a direct deposit (Social Security and pension checks).

Account B: The other account is free of all charges save I have to buy checks, and I use this account only for writing checks. This one was a free account at the time BofA had such things, and I got it grandfathered in, still free: no direct deposit required.

So my direct deposits (and any other deposits) go into Account A. My debit card takes money from Account A as well. Since I never write any checks on Account A, the balance I see (on my computer or on the ATM) is indeed the exact balance: there are no checks hovering out there that will suddenly swoop in and take money.

When I do need to write a check, I transfer the amount of the check from A to B, and then write the check on B. I keep track in a spreadsheet of the actual balance of B (i.e., the balance if all outstanding checks were to clear), so I know the actual amount available—generally around $1-$2. No sense keeping lots of money in there: if I have to write a check, the transfer from A takes are of it.

I developed this routine because I bit myself severely a few times, withdrawing money from a checking account balance that was illusory because some checks were outstanding. Of course I could carry around a checkbook or other record and note every withdrawal, deposit, and check, but that’s something to avoid.

With my set-up, I don’t have to track deposits, or even transfers. The amount I see as the account balance in A is actually available money; when I want to write a check, I transfer that amount to B and write the check and update the spreadsheet.

This works fine, but it’s going to be tricky to implement with the credit union, which wants to charge me $84/year for checking (plus cost of checks), a charge I can avoid only by having a direct deposit to the account. Hmm. I’ll figure something out.

I was told that within a couple of months I’ll be able to transfer money from my checking account there to an account at another bank, which means that I could keep my BofA checking account B and use the credit union checking account as A. (The credit union ATM card allows withdrawals only from checking, I do want to keep A as the account for receiving money and making ATM withdrawals.) That will work, once they have implemented the capability.

Well, not completely forgotten, but a lot of his books seem to have gone out of print. He was actively publishing the late 50′s and the 60′s. I really liked his story collection Among the Dangs,  particularly the title story. I think of him as a Berkeley writer. He was quite popular in the University of Iowa Writers Workshop in the mid-60′s, which is where I first encountered him.

He suddenly came to mind (for what reason I don’t know) and I tracked down several of his books on Abebooks.com. His current (and, I hope, temporary) lack of popularity results in very low prices for his books.

The doctor has looked at the X-ray, and I was lucky: no fracture or bone chipping. It’s simply a matter of torn ligaments, which take a long time to heal. He suggested that I continue the air cast (or whatever it’s called—this thing) for at least 3 more weeks and better 4. So I thought until classes start: 22 August.

I feel as though I dodged a bullet: a torn ligament is not good, but bone damage would be worse. No Pilates for a few weeks.

Lion is up and running. The two-finger scroll goes in the opposite direction, but easy to learn. They force you to do it right one time just to launch the thing for the first time, so that helps.

Here’s the headline: “Federal Judge Rejects Ecstasy Sentencing Guidelines.” It’s long been observed that the sentencing for a drug generally bears not relationship whatsoever to the harm caused by the drug. Alcohol and tobacco, which cause death with relative frequency, are perfectly legal, while a drug like marijuana, which is harmless, is illegal. I blogged about this idea—sentencing based on harm potential—five years ago, quoting the conclusions of a British MPs in a selected committee on science. The idea continues to surface, but looking at a drug’s potential for harm is unpopular in some quarters—namely, to those whose opposition is irrational. The idea of approaching drugs rationally recently was proposed at the highest levels internationally, with proponents of the report including the former Presidents of Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Switzerland, Prime Minister of Greece, Kofi Annan, Richard Branson, George Shultz, Paul Volcker and others.

And now this story, reported by Philip Smith:

A US District Court judge in New York last Friday refused to sentence an Ecstasy defendant according to federal sentencing guidelines, saying they punish such offenses more harshly than scientifically justified and are based on “selective and incomplete” evidence.

The ruling came in the case of Sean McCarthy, who faced 63 to 78 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to a single count of conspiracy to possess and distribute Ecstasy. But in the first federal court opinion rejecting the Ecstasy sentencing guidelines, District Court Judge William Pauley III instead sentenced him to only 26 months. . .

Continue reading. I’m sure that the hysterical Drug Warriors that Obama favors in his DEA appointments will fight this sort of rational approach to the bitter end, and they will be assisted by the kind of politicians who drew up the guidelines, ignoring the advice—based on science—that they sought and received. (More good info in the story at the link.)

This Vie-Long chimera—horsehair plus badger bristle—is a very nice little brush indeed. I got a Creamy Lather with no effort—horsehair seems to be the sweet spot for me, working better for this than either boar or badger (for me)—and enjoyed a perfectly wonderful shave. Floris a very good soap, though nowadays one must always add “in the formulation I have” since manufacturers seem to be continually working to reduce the quality of their products in order to cut costs and grow profits (not a good long-term strategy, but of course managers and decisionmakers figure they’ll be long gone when the inevitable collapse occurs: feather your nest while you can is the operative strategy). The Eclipse Red Ring does well for me, and the Swedish Gillette blade is holding up fine, thanks in part to good prep. A splash of Floris JF and I’m ready for doctor (sprain) and dentist (cleaning) today.

This latest batch of buttermilk I made from whole milk in a wide-mouth one-liter jar. I put it in the fridge yesterday and was just having a taste, using a spoon, when I suddenly realized that I was spooning up clabber—like a very loose yogurt, but set and not liquid, and distinct from the whey. Clabber is like the very softest and freshest cheese imaginable, unbelievably light. And I well remember how my grandmother liked it—which makes me realize that she must have made it herself. Hers had the clabber more set than mine, so she either let it work longer or perhaps a slightly different culture. Come to think of it, she didn’t refer to it as “buttermilk” but as “clabber and whey,” which is how I learned the word. She like to break up day-old cornbread in the clabber and whey, and sometimes she’d use cheesecloth to strain out the whey and make cottage cheese from the drained clabber curds.

Man, I bet I haven’t thought of those things since high school.