Later On

This bike looks pretty cool.

The previous post described how the financial industry has, in effect, taken over the SEC. They are also taking over the legislative branch as well as the executive. Lee Fang reports at ThinkProgress:

Has Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) turned the House Oversight Committee into a bank lobbying firm with the power to subpoena and pressure government regulators? ThinkProgress has found that a Goldman Sachs vice president changed his name, then quietly went to work for Issa to coordinate his effort to thwart regulations that affect Goldman Sachs’ bottom line.

In July, Issa sent a letter to top government regulators demanding that they back off and provide more justification for new margin requirements for financial firms dealing in derivatives. A standard practice on Capitol Hill is to end a letter to a government agency with contact information for the congressional staffer responsible for working on the issue for the committee. In most cases, the contact staffer is the one who actually writes such letters. With this in mind, it is important to note that the Issa letter ended with contact information for Peter Haller, a staffer hired this year to work for Issa on the Oversight Committee.

Issa’s demand to regulators is exactly what banks have been wishing for. Indeed, Goldman Sachs has spent millions this year trying to slow down the implementation of the new rules. In the letter, Issa explicitly mentions that the new derivative regulations might hurt brokers “such as Goldman Sachs.”

Haller, as he is now known, went by the name Peter Simonyi until three years ago. Simonyiadopted his mother’s maiden name Haller in 2008 just as he was leaving Goldman Sachs as a vice president of the bank’s commodity compliance group. In a few short years, Haller went from being in charge of dealing with regulators for Goldman Sachs to working for Congress in a position where he made official demands from regulators overseeing his old firm.

It’s not the first time Haller has worked the revolving door to help out Goldman Sachs. According to a report by the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, Haller — then known as Peter Simonyi — left the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2005 to work for Goldman Sachs, then quickly began lobbying his colleagues at the SEC on behalf of his new firm. At one point, Haller was compelled to issue a letter to the SEC claiming he did not violate ethics rules. A brief timeline of Haller’s work history underscores the ethical issues raised with Issa’s latest letter to bank regulators:

– After completing his law degree in 2000, Haller was employed by Federal Energy Regulatory Commission as an economist, and later with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the Office of Enforcement.

– In April of 2005, Haller resigned from the SEC to take a job with Goldman Sachs. He soon began lobbying the SEC on behalf of Goldman Sachs.

– On September 2, 2009, Haller left Goldman Sachs to take a job with the law/lobbying firm Brickfield Burchette Ritts & Stone.

– In January of 2011, Haller was hired to work for Issa on the Oversight Committee. Under the supervision of Haller, Issa sent a letter dated July 22, 2011 to bank regulators (including the heads of the Federal Reserve, FDIC, FCA, CFTC, FHFA, and Office of Comptroller) demanding documents to justify new Dodd-Frank mandated rules on margin requirements for banks dealing in the multi-trillion dollar OTC derivatives market, like Goldman Sachs.

When he took over the chairmanship of the Oversight Committee this year, Issa dramatically shifted the committee’s focus away from its traditional role of investigating major corporate scandals. Instead, Issa has used the committee to merge the responsibilities of Congress with the interests of K Street and Issa’s own fortune.

In June of this year, ThinkProgress broke the story about Issa’s own complicated relationship with Goldman Sachs. We revealed that Issa purchased a large amount of Goldman Sachs high yield bonds at the same time as he used the Oversight Committee to attack an investigation into allegations that Goldman Sachs had systematically defrauded investors leading up to the financial crisis. This conflict of interests, along with our exclusive story about Issa’s earmarks benefitting his own real estate empire, received coverage in a recent piece by the New York Times.

We also broke a story last month revealing other revolving door conflicts within Issa’s staff. Peter Warren, Issa’s new policy director, maintains some type of financial contract with a student loan lobbying group he led last year, and received a bonus from the lobbying group before leaving to work for Issa. Since joining Issa’s staff, Warren and his colleagues have fought to weaken the recently created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the new agency charged with overseeing student loans.

The new revelations about Peter Haller, however, raise even more significant ethical concerns than Peter Warren and other ex-lobbyists working for Issa. Why did Issa hire a high-level Goldman Sachs executive to work on stopping regulations on banks like Goldman Sachs? Haller’s direct involvement in the July letter brings Issa’s ability to lead the Oversight Committee — charged with conducting investigations on behalf of the public interest — into serious doubt.

Related posts on how our government is passing into industry hands:

• Exclusive: Top Staffer for Rep. Issa’s Committee Maintains Financial Relationship With Lobbying Group
• Tea Party Senators Marco Rubio And Ron Johnson Selected Their Chiefs Of Staff From Same K Street Lobbying Firm
• Lobbyist In Charge Of ‘Trying To Kill’ Financial Reform Hired By GOP Chair To Oversee Financial Regulations
• At Least 13 New Republican Members Of Congress Hire Corporate Lobbyists To Manage Their Office

UPDATE: Goldman Sachs guy in Issa’s office responds.

Matt Taibbi asks the question in an interesting article in Rolling Stone. It seems not unlikely: regulators get very close to regulated industries and can exhibit Stockholm syndrome augmented by lucrative job offers once they leave their regulatory job (provided, of course, that they played ball with the industry when they were regulating it). His article begins:

Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file – “Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?” No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.

That, it now appears, is exactly how the Securities and Exchange Commission has been treating the Wall Street criminals who cratered the global economy a few years back. For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation’s worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – “18,000 … including Madoff,” as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.

Under a deal the SEC worked out with the National Archives and Records Administration, all of the agency’s records – “including case files relating to preliminary investigations” – are supposed to be maintained for at least 25 years. But the SEC, using history-altering practices that for once actually deserve the overused and usually hysterical term “Orwellian,” devised an elaborate and possibly illegal system under which staffers were directed to dispose of the documents from any preliminary inquiry that did not receive approval from senior staff to become a full-blown, formal investigation. Amazingly, the wholesale destruction of the cases – known as MUIs, or “Matters Under Inquiry” – was not something done on the sly, in secret. The enforcement division of the SEC even spelled out the procedure in writing, on the commission’s internal website. “After you have closed a MUI that has not become an investigation,” the site advised staffers, “you should dispose of any documents obtained in connection with the MUI.”

Many of the destroyed files involved companies and individuals who would later play prominent roles in the economic meltdown of 2008. Two MUIs involving con artist Bernie Madoff vanished. So did a 2002 inquiry into financial fraud at Lehman Brothers, as well as a 2005 case of insider trading at the same soon-to-be-bankrupt bank. A 2009 preliminary investigation of insider trading by Goldman Sachs was deleted, along with records for at least three cases involving the infamous hedge fund SAC Capital.

The widespread destruction of records was brought to the attention of Congress in July, when an SEC attorney named Darcy Flynn decided to blow the whistle. According to Flynn, who was responsible for helping to manage the commission’s records, the SEC has been destroying records of preliminary investigations since at least 1993. After he alerted NARA to the problem, Flynn reports, senior staff at the SEC scrambled to hide the commission’s improprieties.

As a federally protected whistle-blower, Flynn is not permitted to speak to the press. But in evidence he presented to the SEC’s inspector general and three congressional committees earlier this summer, the 13-year veteran of the agency paints a startling picture of a federal police force that has effectively been conquered by the financial criminals it is charged with investigating. In at least one case, according to Flynn, investigators at the SEC found . . .

Continue reading.

Cool little app that makes the Mac red button work like the PC red rectangle with the x: to actually quit the program.

Interesting story by John Tierney (notoriously unreliable on scientific matters, so check his links) in the NY Times. It begins:

Three men doing time in Israeli prisons recently appeared before a parole board consisting of a judge, a criminologist and a social worker. The three prisoners had completed at least two-thirds of their sentences, but the parole board granted freedom to only one of them. Guess which one:

Case 1 (heard at 8:50 a.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.

Case 2 (heard at 3:10 p.m.): A Jewish Israeli serving a 16-month sentence for assault.

Case 3 (heard at 4:25 p.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.

There was a pattern to the parole board’s decisions, but it wasn’t related to the men’s ethnic backgrounds, crimes or sentences. It was all about timing, as researchers discovered by analyzing more than 1,100 decisions over the course of a year. Judges, who would hear the prisoners’ appeals and then get advice from the other members of the board, approved parole in about a third of the cases, but the probability of being paroled fluctuated wildly throughout the day. Prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 70 percent of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were paroled less than 10 percent of the time.

The odds favored the prisoner who appeared at 8:50 a.m. — and he did in fact receive parole. But even though the other Arab Israeli prisoner was serving the same sentence for the same crime — fraud — the odds were against him when he appeared (on a different day) at 4:25 in the afternoon. He was denied parole, as was the Jewish Israeli prisoner at 3:10 p.m, whose sentence was shorter than that of the man who was released. They were just asking for parole at the wrong time of day.

There was nothing malicious or even unusual about the judges’ behavior, which was reported earlier this year by Jonathan Levav of Stanford and Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University. The judges’ erratic judgment was due to the occupational hazard of being, as George W. Bush once put it, “the decider.” The mental work of ruling on case after case, whatever the individual merits, wore them down. This sort of decision fatigue can make quarterbacks prone to dubious choices late in the game and C.F.O.’s prone to disastrous dalliances late in the evening. It routinely warps the judgment of everyone, executive and nonexecutive, rich and poor — in fact, it can take a special toll on the poor. Yet few people are even aware of it, and researchers are only beginning to understand why it happens and how to counteract it.

Decision fatigue helps explain why . . .

Continue reading. It’s quite interesting that “willpower” does have validity as a concept in some situations. The column (after many interesting examples) concludes:

. . . The cumulative effect of these temptations and decisions isn’t intuitively obvious. Virtually no one has a gut-level sense of just how tiring it is to decide. Big decisions, small decisions, they all add up. Choosing what to have for breakfast, where to go on vacation, whom to hire, how much to spend — these all deplete willpower, and there’s no telltale symptom of when that willpower is low. It’s not like getting winded or hitting the wall during a marathon. Ego depletion manifests itself not as one feeling but rather as a propensity to experience everything more intensely. When the brain’s regulatory powers weaken, frustrations seem more irritating than usual. Impulses to eat, drink, spend and say stupid things feel more powerful (and alcohol causes self-control to decline further). Like those dogs in the experiment, ego-depleted humans become more likely to get into needless fights over turf. In making decisions, they take illogical shortcuts and tend to favor short-term gains and delayed costs. Like the depleted parole judges, they become inclined to take the safer, easier option even when that option hurts someone else.

“Good decision making is not a trait of the person, in the sense that it’s always there,” Baumeister says. “It’s a state that fluctuates.” His studies show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don’t schedule endless back-to-back meetings. They avoid temptations like all-you-can-eat buffets, and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions.

“Even the wisest people won’t make good choices when they’re not rested and their glucose is low,” Baumeister points out. That’s why the truly wise don’t restructure the company at 4 p.m. They don’t make major commitments during the cocktail hour. And if a decision must be made late in the day, they know not to do it on an empty stomach. “The best decision makers,” Baumeister says, “are the ones who know when not to trust themselves.”

Many millions of people live where clean drinking water is difficult if not impossible to find. A post at Treehugger describes some appropriate technology and includes this clip:

Some useful information in this post by Melanie Pinola, including many good links. It begins:

ust because you enjoy great food doesn’t mean you have to spend a lot of money dining out or buying upscale foods for delicious meals at home. With the advice of some noted chefs and food writers, you can elevate the level of your home-cooked meals even while working with a tight grocery budget, producing feasts that wow for just a few dollars per serving.

We’ll show you where to shop and what to stock in your pantry to maximize your dollars-to-enjoyment ratio. We’ll also show you how to save more on buying meat (often the most expensive part of the meal) and techniques and recipes for cooking up some exquisite dishes. Note: you don’t have to consider yourself a “foodie” to use these suggestions—all you need to bring is a desire for great food. . .

Continue reading.

The story is horrible, but note the Pima County Attorney’s view that the family should not get even a dollar. Phillip Smith reports:

The attorney for the family of Jose Guerena, the ex-Marine gunned down in his own home as a Pima County SWAT team burst in, has filed a notice of claim. Such a legal maneuver lays the groundwork for a damage-seeking lawsuit.

Earlier reports said that the lawsuit will seek $20 million in damages from the Pima County Sheriff’s Office, several Pima County municipalities, and the SWAT team members. It will claim that the SWAT team used excessive force and was negligent in the raid.
Guerena, who shared the home with his wife and young son, died after SWAT team members fired 71 rounds at him as they burst through his door and confronted him in his underwear in a hallway holding a weapon. The fatal May 5 raid was part of a series of raids that day in what police said was the investigation of a drug rip-off gang.

But no drugs, cash, or illegal items were found at Guerena’s home, and, to date, no one has been arrested for anything in relation to that investigation or those raids. The officers involved in the raid have already been exonerated of any wrongdoing by local officials.

On Friday, Guerena family attorney Chris Scileppi told Fox 11 News that a newly released sheriff’s department video showing Vanessa Guerena being pulled from the house and 4-year-old Joel Guerena running to safety after his father had been shot demonstrated just how horrific Guerena’s death at the hands of police had been.

“They just give a snapshot of the horror that his wife his small child went through as they crawled past their dying husband and dying father,” said Scileppi.

Two days earlier,  . . .

Continue reading.

Continuing the Week of Synthetic Brushes, I used the Mühle “artificial horsehair” brush this morning with Yardley vintage shaving soap. I got a fine lather—typical of horsehair—and with the Edwin Jagger DE89 holding the same Feather blade as for previous shaves, did three very nice, very smooth passes.

I did not really need an oil pass, but Jojoba Oil has come up in the Wicked_Edge discussion and made me want to use it again. It is quite remarkable stuff. A quick oil pass, rinse, dry, and apply a good splash of Geo. F. Trumper Skye.

Re: “soap brushes” v. “shaving-cream brushes”: I have a guess now as to how the idea arose. If a guy lives in a hard-water area but doesn’t realize it, he will find that he gets a fine lather from shaving cream, but using the very same brush he can’t get a good lather from a shaving soap.

The fault in this case is not the brush but the water: hard water doesn’t hit shaving cream as it does soap. But this guy now thinks he has a shaving cream brush. Perhaps he then buys a stiff, scrubby brush, which gets more soap more quickly into the mix and probably could raise something of a lather. “Aha!” he naturally thinks, “This is a soap brush.”

But underlying the entire problem is not the brush selected but the water used. Thus my standard recommendation to try shaving with a gallon of distilled (aka “purified”) water from the drugstore. That should reveal whether hard water is a problem.

It must take a strong stomach to be around those school officials these days.

Interesting article in The Daily Beast by Casey Schwartz:

On a sweltering August morning, in a classroom overlooking New York’s Hudson River, a group of 3-year-olds are rolling sticky rice balls in chocolate sprinkles, as a teacher guides them completely in Mandarin.

This is just one toddler learning game at the total–immersion language summer camp run by the primary school Bilingual Buds, which offers a year-round curriculum in Mandarin as well as Spanish (at a New Jersey campus) for kids as young as 2.

Bilingualism, of course, can be a leg up for college admission and a résumé burnisher. But a growing body of research now offers a further rationale: the regular, high-level use of more than one language may actually improve early brain development.

According to several different studies, command of two or more languages bolsters the ability to focus in the face of distraction, decide between competing alternatives, and disregard irrelevant information. These essential skills are grouped together, known in brain terms as “executive function.” The research suggests they develop ahead of time in bilingual children, and are already evident in kids as young as 3 or 4.

While no one has yet identified the exact mechanism by which bilingualism boosts brain development, the advantage likely stems from . . .

Continue reading.

Very interesting article by David Robson in New Scientist:

Before reading this article, you might like to try our test: Which of these words sounds bigger?

Through the looking glass, Lewis Carroll’s Alice stumbles upon an enormous egg-shaped figure celebrating his un-birthday. She tries to introduce herself:

“It’s a stupid name enough!” Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. “What does it mean?”

“Must a name mean something?” Alice asked doubtfully.

“Of course it must,” Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: “My name means the shape I am – and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.”

PURE whimsy, you might think. Nearly 100 years of linguistics research has been based on the assumption that words are just collections of sounds – an agreed acoustic representation that has little to do with their actual meaning. There should be nothing in nonsense words such as “Humpty Dumpty” that would give away the character’s egg-like figure, any more than someone with no knowledge of English could be expected to infer that the word “rose” represents a sweet-smelling flower.

Yet a spate of recent studies challenge this idea. They suggest that we seem instinctively to link certain sounds with particular sensory perceptions. Some words really do evoke Humpty’s “handsome” rotundity. Others might bring to mind a spiky appearance, a bitter taste, or a sense of swift movement. And when you know where to look, these patterns crop up surprisingly often, allowing a monoglot English speaker to understand more Swahili or Japanese than you might imagine (see “Which sounds bigger?” at the bottom of this article). These cross-sensory connections may even open a window onto the first words ever uttered by our ancestors, giving us a glimpse of the earliest language and how it emerged.

More than 2000 years before Carroll suggested words might have some inherent meaning, Plato recorded a dialogue between two of Socrates’s friends, Cratylus and Hermogenes. Hermogenes argued that language is arbitrary and the words people use are purely a matter of convention. Cratylus, like Humpty Dumpty, believed words inherently reflect their meaning – although he seems to have found his insights into language disillusioning: Aristotle says Cratylus eventually became so disenchanted that he gave up speaking entirely.

The Greek philosophers never resolved the issue, but two millennia later the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure seemed to have done so. . .

Continue reading.

For some odd reason, Obama has decided to ignore everything now known about the economy and how it works and put his trust in policies and initiatives that are known to worsen the problem. He’s not stupid, so presumably he just wants to get re-elected badly enough that he’s willing to damage the country on the off chance that it might help his election prospects… wait, that does sound stupid, doesn’t it?

Here’s the story from Dean Baker, an economist, in the Guardian:

A front page story in Sunday’s New York Times gave the country the bad news. President Obama is no longer paying attention to economists and economics in designing economic policy. Instead, he will do what his campaign people tell him will get him re-elected, presumably by getting lots of money from Wall Street.

The article said that President Obama intends to focus on reducing government spending and cutting programmes like social security and Medicare. This is in spite of the fact that: “A wide range of economists say the administration should call for a new round of stimulus spending, as prescribed by mainstream economic theory, to create jobs and promote growth.”

In other words, President Obama intends to ignore the path for getting the economy back to full employment that most economists advocate. Instead, he is going to cut government spending – because his chief of staff and former JP Morgan vice president Bill Daley and his top campaign adviser David Plouffe both say this is a good idea.

While people are justified in having little respect for economists – almost the entire profession missed the $8tn housing bubble that crashed the US economy – it is still scary to see that policy will be determined by people with no knowledge of economics whatsoever. After all, do Daley and Plouffe even have a theory as to how cutting government spending could help the economy?

There, of course, is a theory as to how budget cuts could boost growth. The theory is that lower deficits in the present and/or near future will reduce fears that government spending will be crowding out private economic activity. This would lead to lower interest rates. Lower interest rates will provide a boost to investment and consumption. Also, lower interest rates in the United States will make dollar assets less attractive to investors. This will cause the dollar to decline against other currencies, improving our trade balance.

However, no part of this story makes sense in the current economic environment. US interest rates are already at ridiculously low levels, with the 10-year Treasury rate falling below 2.2% in the wake of the recent euro crisis. Does anyone really believe that the rate will go much lower even with large cuts to the budget?

Furthermore, even if interest rates did fall, it is difficult to believe that it would have much impact on either investment or consumption. Investment is not very responsive to interest rates even in the best of times. It is extremely unlikely that firms will rush to buy new equipment even if interest rates were to take another large plunge, when most are still operating with vast amounts of excess capacity.

Consumers remain heavily indebted due to the collapse of house prices. Furthermore, the huge baby boom cohort is going to feel more need to save than ever with the government slashing its social security and Medicare benefits.

The trade side of the picture doesn’t look much. . .

Continue reading.

Now it will be interesting to see whether they get no punishment and are immediately forgiven for trying to lie their way out of trouble, or whether they actually face consequences. I do think they will try to avoid accountability and acknowledging responsibility because that is what business leaders do. But I hope they will be sentenced to some time in the slammer. It might help them reconsider some life decisions.

Here’s the story in the Guardian, by Nick Davies:

Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and their former editor Andy Coulson all face embarrassing new allegations of dishonesty and cover-up after the publication of an explosive letter written by the News of the World’s disgraced royal correspondent, Clive Goodman.

In the letter, which was written four years ago but published only on Tuesday, Goodman claims that phone hacking was “widely discussed” at editorial meetings at the paper until Coulson himself banned further references to it; that Coulson offered to let him keep his job if he agreed not to implicate the paper in hacking when he came to court; and that his own hacking was carried out with “the full knowledge and support” of other senior journalists, whom he named.

The claims are acutely troubling for the prime minister, David Cameron, who hired Coulson as his media adviser on the basis that he knew nothing about phone hacking. And they confront Rupert and James Murdoch with the humiliating prospect of being recalled to parliament to justify the evidence which they gave last month on the aftermath of Goodman’s allegations. In a separate letter, one of the Murdochs’ own law firms claim that parts of that evidence were variously “hard to credit”, “self-serving” and “inaccurate and misleading”.

Goodman’s claims also raise serious questions about Rupert Murdoch’s close friend and adviser, Les Hinton, who was sent a copy of the letter but failed to pass it to police and who then led a cast of senior Murdoch personnel in telling parliament that they believed Coulson knew nothing about the interception of the voicemail of public figures and that Goodman was the only journalist involved.

The letters from Goodman and from the London law firm Harbottle & Lewis are among a cache of paperwork published by the Commons culture, media and sport select committee. One committee member, the Labour MP Tom Watson, said Goodman’s letter was “absolutely devastating”. He said: “Clive Goodman’s letter is the most significant piece of evidence that has been revealed so far. It completely removes News International’s defence. This is one of the largest cover-ups I have seen in my lifetime.”

Goodman’s letter is dated 2 March 2007, soon after he was released from a four-month prison sentence. It is addressed to . . .

Continue reading.

UPDATE: Marian Wang has a brief article at ProPublica that has a lot of useful links:

Read the rest of this entry »

Terrific article about huitlacoche (which I recently had at Millennium, the vegan haute cuisine restaurant in San Fancisco), called “corn smut” in the us: a totally delicious fungus. The article includes a wonderful little video about huitlachoche and how to prepare it. It really is yummy: terrific mushroom taste. The article, by Tim Johnson in McClatchy, begins:

At this time of year, when corn grows high, some farmers go into their fields hoping that a disease has infected their crops.

They inspect for swollen husks, a telltale sign that a parasitic fungus has spread into a spongy iridescent mass inside the ears.

The farmers are pleased, for the fungus is one of the greatest delicacies of the Mexican kitchen. It’s been called the Mexican truffle, and a “food of the gods.” The unique, earthy taste has been part of local cuisine since Aztec times.

The name of the fungus in the indigenous Nahuatl language is huitlacoche (pronounced weet-la-KOH-chay, sort of rhyming with Don Quixote). As hard as that may be to say, it’s infinitely sweeter sounding than the English name: corn smut. That moniker is a slur to huitlacoche’s complex flavors and defamation of its culinary properties.

“It’s completely different from other fungus. There are Ph.D.s here trying to figure out why its taste is so special,” said Dr. Clemente Villanueva, a geneticist at the Autonomous University of Chapingo, a top agricultural school that’s in the same valley as Mexico City.

The cultivation of huitlacoche is skyrocketing, as urban Mexicans are regaining an appreciation of foods native to their country. Once a haphazard if tasty infestation, huitlacoche now is being farmed commercially, with farmers injecting spores of the fungus into immature cornstalks. The fungus ruins the corn for human consumption, but it sells for much more than the corn itself, which can still be used to feed livestock. As a result, huitlacoche production has climbed fourfold in the past five years, Villanueva said. . .

Continue reading. And watch that video at the link.

An inability to admit error can become a problem if it interferes with learning—and Michelle Bachmann is living proof of just how little a person can learn. This careful account of a grievous error she made, and the on-going lies she uttered to avoid admitting the error, tells you much about Bachmann.

Someone asked on reddit for links to little-known sites that more people should know. Quite a few responses. Among them:

Learn/Education/Tutorials

• Qwiki - Transcribed audio/images into a video from any wiki article
• WolframAlpha - Computational knowledge engine
• ThinkTutorial - Free Computer Tutorials and Lessons
• Lizardpoint - Learn geography
• TED - Ideas worth spreading
• KhanAcademy - Science/Math tutorials
• HowStuffWorks - Fucking magnets
• ThinkingAllowed - Thought-provoking videos
• CS50.tv - OpenCourseware – Harvard Computer Science 50
• Open Yale Courses - OpenCourseware – Yale
• Library.nu - eBook database
• MIT – Free Online Course Material - Lectures, Assignments, Projects, Media
• StudyBlue - Create flashcards to study
• theNewBoston - Learn programming
• Lifehacker - Tips/tricks for everyday
• AddictiveTips - Tech Tips
• ReadPrint - Online books
• Erowid - Learn about drugs
• Cramster - Homework help
• Academic Earth - Online Academic Video Lectures
• Instructables - Makes, How To, and DIY
• HowCast - Instructional Videos
• TopDocumentaryFilms - Watch free documentaries online
• DocumentaryHeaven - Watch free documentaries online
• After The Deadline - Because you’re not that smart
• TutVid - Free Adobe application tutorials
• Videojug - How-To videos and guides
• Tech-Recipes - Tech-related tutorials/tips for a variety of categories

Tools

• Zamzar - Online file conversion
• ReadItLater - Save pages to read later
• Tinyurl - URL Shortener
• L-Mail - Send letters online
• WhatTheFont - Match fonts
• Tineye - Reverse image search
• Sleepyti.me - Sleep calculator
• Ninite - Fast way to update/install software
• BugMeNot - Find/Share login/passwords to avoid signing up
• WhatIsMyIp - Find your IP address
• Mailinator - Disposable email account
• Scribd - Text hosting
• PopURLs - Feed from top stories of news aggregators
• 10minutemail - Disposable email account
• PrintFriendly - Make webpages printfriendly
• EasyBib - Bibliography/Citation Maker
• Pipl - Web people search
• Pixlr - Online photo editor
• Mibbit - Web IRC
• ShadyURL - Create alternative “shady” urls
• DownForEveryoneOrJustMe - Is google.com down?
• Kapersky - Online virus scanner
• SynchTube - Watch YouTube videos in sync with your friends
• Lipsum - Create filler text
• CoolUtils Image Converter - Resize images for avatars
• Dropbox - File hosting
• MediaFire - File hosting
• Ge.tt - File hosting
• ZumoDrive - File hosting
• DepositFiles - Another file hosting resource
• FilesTube - Search and Download Files
• MultiUpload – Upload to multiple popular hosting sites with 1 upload
• FileCrop - Search engine for shared files
• TheFinalCost - Calculate Shipping totals
• Imgur - Best image hosting
• DummyImage - Create dummy images of any format
• VectorMagic - Create vectors from any image
• Challonge - Create tournament brackets
• Prezi - Because powerpoint slides are boring
• TypeWith.me - Online word document collaboration
• eBuddy - Web and mobile messaging
• Iedone – Online IDE & Debugging Tool
• Readability - Make articles easier to read
• Do I have a dead pixel?
• RunPee – Find out when the best time to use the bathroom is during movie
• Dailylit – Read books by email or RSS
• ShowMeWhatsWrong - Instant Screen Recording for troubleshooting
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Tons more at the link.

The Eldest sent me this recipe link at first light, and I went to the store first thing and got the makings for it. It’s in the oven now. I had grand plans to cut the olive oil to 3 Tbsp (about 2 tsp per serving, assuming four servings) but there were a LOT of vegetables, so I ended up doing the 1/2 cup after all. I suspect that this is going to make quite a few meals—starting with my lunch today and dinner as well, and maybe hand some off to The Wife (she can pick out the green beans). Ingredients:

4 10-oz. lamb shoulder chops
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper,
 to taste
8 oz. green beans, trimmed
8 oz. okra
6 cloves garlic, smashed
2 medium tomatoes, sliced 1⁄2″ thick
2 medium zucchini, cut into 1⁄2″ pieces
2 onions, roughly chopped
2 small eggplants, cut into 1⁄2″ pieces
1⁄2 cup extra-virgin olive oil

UPDATE: Just had it. Changes I would make:

Oven at 335º rather than 325º. Maybe even 340º but no hotter.

Needs some herb-zip. Lemon juice would be a good addition, and grated lemon zest. I would also add some cayenne. If not lemon juice, a little wine vinegar or sherry vinegar. Thyme? Rosemary might work.

Pretty dang good. I would use 3 or even 4 tomatoes, not 2.

Think about including pitted Kalamata olives. And pine nuts.

The Omega 643167 artificial badger shown is my current recommendation for beginner brush, based on fine performance and modest ($25) price. And once again it worked up a terrific lather, this time with QED Mocha Java shave stick, certainly a favorite. Just as an experiment, once I had plentiful lather, I tried working it up further in a lathering bowl and it did seem to improve the lather somewhat. Then three passes with the Merkur Slant holding a Swedish Gillette blade of several (many?) previous uses. A splash of Acqua di Parma, and I was ready to get started on the day—this some hours ago.