James Fallows has a post that I hope you’ll read. It begins:
In three previous installments – first, second, and third – readers have discussed the implications of a recent case in which a Boston-area musician, Vance Gilbert, caused an airline crew to panic and abort the departure of a plane. Gilbert is black. How much difference did that make?
This is newly on my mind because, when starting on the first leg of a long overseas trip today, I had the most unpleasant encounter in years with TSA officialdom, at Dulles Airport. (I am now at LAX, waiting for the connecting flight.TSA Officer Z*** of Dulles, I will remember you!) This encounter was a reminder that regardless of race, getting crosswise of security-officialdom can lead to a lot of trouble. It was also a reminder that asking “Why?” or “What is the reason for that?” to a uniformed official of the wrong temperament can be the first step down a path that is difficult to retrace. (This is probably the place to say: earlier this week I had an encounter with the DC police, after a neighborhood incident, that impressed me in a strong and positive way with the judgment, tact, and training of the squad that responded. Officer L. Myers, I will remember and be grateful to you.)
More about that later. For now, commentary from some readers on the interactions between long-standing problems of race and more recent security-state thinking. These messages are long but if you read them I think you’ll see why I’m quoting them in full. The first is from a reader in Washington DC: . . .
The Wife is a demon coffee drinker—when she goes into the locally-owned good little coffee shop in PG, they start making her 16-oz 4-shot latte as soon as she walks through the door—and she concurs that this stuff is really good. And they don’t have it in France, she adds.
About 1,700 pages of documents have been filed in the case, which involves a billing dispute between two charter companies who had been hired to carry out the secret flights. The records include flight itineraries for Khalid Sheik Mohammed and others. As the head of one of the companies testified, “We were transporting government personnel and their invitees.”
But what really caught our eye are potentially forged State Department letters authorizing the flights. The letters were sent to each air crew before flights and were signed by a State Department official who may not exist.
The letters were all signed by “Terry A. Hogan.” (Here is one of them.) But the Associated Press says there are indications that Hogan “was fictitious”: . . .
Continue reading. You can see why I saw “CIA” stands for “Criminals in Action”: they consistently break laws, and not just governmental laws: laws of common decency, morality, ethics, and whatever else they can find to break. And they expect total immunity for their lawbreaking, and by God! Obama is here to see that they get it.
When the CIA tortures someone, it can have nasty repercussions. For example, the person’s entire family might develop an intense hatred of the US, but of course that just provides more work for the CIA: it’s a self-licking ice-cream cone.
And, of course, the US sometimes later needs to make nice with someone they’ve tortured, as is happening now. (BTW, it’s not jut the US: it’s a general problem related to badly mistreating people with whom you later must deal (cf. Nelson Mandela et al.).) Rod Nordland gives an example in the NY Times:
TRIPOLI, Libya — Abdel Hakim Belhaj had a wry smile about the oddity of his situation.
Yes, he said, he was detained by Malaysian officials in 2004 on arrival at the Kuala Lumpur airport, where he was subjected to extraordinary rendition on behalf of the United States, and sent to Thailand. His pregnant wife, traveling with him, was taken away, and his child would be 6 before he saw him.
In Bangkok, Mr. Belhaj said, he was tortured for a few days by two people he said were C.I.A. agents, and then, worse, they repatriated him to Libya, where he was thrown into solitary confinement for six years, three of them without a shower, one without a glimpse of the sun.
Now this man is in charge of the military committee responsible for keeping order in Tripoli, and, he says, is a grateful ally of the United States and NATO.
And while Mr. Belhaj concedes that he was the emir of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which was deemed by the United States to be a terrorist group allied with Al Qaeda, he says he has no Islamic agenda. He says he will disband the fighters under his command, merging them into the formal military or police, once the Libyan revolution is over.
He says there are no hard feelings over his past treatment by the United States.
“Definitely it was very hard, very difficult,” he said. “Now we are in Libya, and we want to look forward to a peaceful future. I do not want revenge.”
As the United States and other Western powers embrace and help finance the new government taking shape in Libya, they could face a particularly awkward relationship with Islamists like Mr. Belhaj. Once considered enemies in the war on terror, they suddenly have been thrust into positions of authority — with American and NATO blessing. . .
Here’s a startling proposal, in two ways: it’s startling today, and the need to suggest it would be startling to the US of a few years back. The proposal: The US should not torture anyone, and it should vigorously investigate allegations of torture and punish anyone found responsible, in accordance with the laws we have, and in particular in line with the Convention Against Torture, the supreme law of the land, ratified by the Senate and signed by President Reagan. Obeying the law: it’s not just a good idea… etc.
I ballooned up to 185 lbs due to total inactivity (sprained ankle) and eating out with The Niece and The Wife. But I know now what to do, and this morning I was at 176.9. As I blogged earlier, I’m taking it down to 170 with 175 as the new panic point.
I’ve really settled into a meal pattern:
Breakfast is easy:
1/4 c oat bran
2 Tbsp chia seed
2 Tbsp hulled hemp seed
1/2 tsp turmeric
grinding of black pepper
1 cup of water
Simmer until thick, stir in homemade pepper sauce, and top it with an egg, cooked over easy with 1/2 pat butter and a pinch of salt, and Bac’Uns.
Put fat in skillet—actually, I now normally use a 3-qt saucepan (instead of my 2-qt sauté pan) so that I will have lots of rooms for the greens, voluminous when first added (before they cook down). Heat the pan and, when the fat is hot, add the following and sauté, stirring as needed. To stir, I use this, except that I had him make it with a 12″ handle instead of a 10″. He’s happy to do that, and I recommend it.
Veg: 1/2 large onion, or several shallots, or 1 bunch of scallions, sometimes a leek.
Garlic (several large cloves)
3 large mushrooms cut into thickish pieces — plain white domestic
1 zucchini or yellow squash, diced (more or less)
1 red bell pepper, seeded and chopped
1/2 cup chopped celery
1-2 serrano or jalapeño peppers good grinding of black pepper
Protein: 3-4 oz tofu (I use the firm) or tempeh
I sauté that for a while. I want a little browning to occur. Sometimes I cook the onion (or onion-equivalent) until it’s beginning to brown/caramelize before I add the other stuff.
It’s good to peel and mince the garlic first—you want that to be able to sit for around 15 minutes before you add it to the hot pan to give the compounds that form when garlic is crushed a chance to stabilize. I read that years ago in Science News; here’s a recent reference and here’s more interesting info about garlic.
I use plain white domestic mushrooms because they have all the nutritional value of the exotics and they’re cheaper and they taste fine. But sometimes I like to use dried mushrooms: I reconstitute them in boiling water and then use the water as the liquid.
I do use other vegetables, but those listed above are the stalwarts. Still, I might (for example) substitute bitter melon for the zucchini, or add some eggplant, or a chopped carrot. I don’t eat potatoes at all now. Lately I pretty consistently add a wad of slivered dried tomatoes, which I buy at a little produce market.
Beans are fairly high calories, so if I do use beans I will also add a grain (rice, corn, whole-grain wheat or pasta) and let that be the protein. Obviously beans, like protein or starch, must be measured to keep it at 1 serving or less.
UPDATE: I now always include celery—about 1/2 cup diced. (I added that above already.) The Wife told me the secret: as soon as you get home with the bunch of celery, wash it, chop it (the whole bunch), and dry it, using cloth or paper towels. Once it’s dry, you can store it in a covered container in the fridge until you use it up. And I very much like the presence of celery in things, I’m discovering.
After the above has had a chance to sauté long enough for some real cooking to occur (e.g., after the mushrooms release their liquid), I add:
Starch: 1/3 c starch (whole-wheat couscous, uncooked whole-wheat orzo or other pasta, cooked black rice, cooked white rice, cooked red rice, etc.) — 1/2 cup is a serving, but I go light on starches. For uncooked pasta, 2 oz is usually one serving, so I use 1.5 oz. Sometimes I add a scant serving of uncooked rice and let it cook in the liquid. (Serving size is on the Nutrition Facts label.)
Once I add the starch, I sauté a little longer. The rice, as noted, I use already cooked, but couscous or pasta I generally cook with the dish. Because the rice tends to stick, I watch closely. Once the stuff is really browning, I add:
Liquid: Good splash of liquid to deglaze the pan and steam the greens (chicken stock, dry Marsala, sweet vermouth, red or white wine, water from reconstituting dried mushrooms, plain water, etc.). A pint of canned tomatoes with their liquid is also good to add, even with the dried tomatoes. I added a jar of roasted red peppers together with that liquid to a recent batch.
I use about 1/2 cup liquid, but watch and use your own judgment as to whether more is needed. I am not making a soup, though: at the end, I like minimal free liquid.
Greens: Add a good-sized handful—around a quart—of leaves of kale, red chard, red kale, or collards; or 1/4 head red or green cabbage; or 1 bunch dandelion greens or spinach — it’s important to eat a lot of leaves every day. I often mix them: red kale plus red cabbage; red chard plus broccolini; and so on. I chop the greens until they are manageable. I include the stalks, too, which I chop fine. They soften when cooked, taste good, and add fiber.
I consider the greens to be the heart of the meal.
Greens will cook down a lot, so be generous. Spinach in particular tends to vanish. Sometimes I add raddichio or escarole to the other greens. Must have greens.
I add condiments as desired and try to have a fair variety on hand: capers, pine nuts, black olives, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, mirin, horseradish, fresh ginger, gomasio (or plain sesame seed), and so on. Plus I have curry powders of various kinds and lots of herbs and spices. These spruce up the taste and change the overall gustatory experience.
I always add a splash of vinegar to brighten the flavor—lately I’ve been using a champagne vinegar with lemon, but sherry vinegar or red-wine vinegar are stalwarts. The vinegar I add with the liquid, but in serving I sometimes put some Isola Wild Berry Cream of Balsamic Vinegar on top—very tasty. I call it “grub sauce.”
After the greens and anything else has been added, I cover and simmer for 20-30 minutes: 20 min for spinach, 30 min for kale, I check for liquid and if there’s much remaining, I add:
2-3 Tbsp chia seed — thickens any remaining liquid, adds fiber and omega-3 and protein
I serve topped with Bac’Uns.
The above serves for two meals currently, but I’m involved in losing weight. Soon that will be more like 1.5 or 1.25 meals.
Obviously this is grub, as I’ve defined it: foods combined with an eye purely to nutritional value and balance. But it’s surprisingly tasty, at least to me.
The things in boldface above constitute the skeleton of the meal. Obviously, you can run variations on this until the cows come home. And, equally obvious, the template focuses on meal content, not on how it’s prepared: you can stew, sauté, roast, broil, or serve as a salad—so long as the content distribution requirements are met and the limits observed, then it works. And the template ensures that you have the right content, so the specific veggies you choose and how you prepare them is totally up to you. I generally sauté and then braise a bit (for the greens—which, of course, are not necessarily green in color (this portion probably should be called “leaves” rather than “greens”—for example, a combination of red kale and red cabbage is tasty, but green it’s not)).
This meal pattern sort of evolved from my work with Healthy Way as I cast about for the simplest and most efficient ways of following their dietary guidelines. The overall template has been stable for a while, though only for the past few weeks have I been using mainly tofu and tempeh and only rarely chicken or fish. I did have fresh Monterey Bay sardines for a meal recently, but tofu and tempeh are so efficient and easy to use that I’ve drifted in that direction.
I will say, in looking at my meals, that I don’t think I’ve eaten so well from a nutritional standpoint in a long time, if ever. I find it interesting how my meal focus has changed as a result of using the template.
I see more and more ways in which memes drive us rather than the other way about, to the point of directing evolution. (Once the incredibly useful meme of language arose, natural selection quickly favored those best at using the new meme. The same argument has been made for other tools—the hand tools discussed in the article below resulted in favorable natural selection for those best able to grip and use the tools: memes driving us toward better gripping and the opposable thumb.) Take, for example, this Science News article by Bruce Bower on memes latching on to our humanoid ancestors:
A patch of soil in East Africa has yielded the oldest known stone hand axes and picks, examples of what researchers call the Acheulian industry.
Acheulian implements unearthed at Kenya’s Kokiselei site date to 1.76 million years ago, slightly older than previous finds (SN: 1/31/09, p. 11), say geologist Christopher Lepre of Rutgers University and his colleagues. Carefully shaped, double-edged hand axes and picks lay among much simpler tools — sharp flakes pounded off stones — at Kokiselei, the scientists report in the Sept. 1 Nature.
These finds underscore suspicions that stone flakes used as chopping devices, early tools known as the Oldowan industry, did not get supplanted by hand-ax making, Lepre says. Instead, the more complex Acheulian devices emerged while Oldowan implements — which first appeared about 2.6 million years ago in the same region — were still popular, although it’s unclear how long the two types of tools were used simultaneously at Kokiselei. Hand axes and other double-edged tools typify the Acheulian industry.
Homo erectus, a possible direct ancestor of modern humans, made Acheulian tools and perhaps Oldowan ones as well at Kokiselei, Lepre’s team suggests. Or, another hominid species might have crafted Oldowan artifacts there.
“If Acheulian tools gave hominids an edge in Africa, then perhaps groups lacking that technology were forced to find resources elsewhere, like Eurasia,” Lepre says.
In line with that proposal, other researchers have . . .
“Who wants yesterday’s papers?” sang Mick Jagger in 1967. “Who wants yesterday’s girl?” The answer, in the Swinging 60s, was obvious: “Nobody in the world.” That was then. Now we seem to want nothing more than to read yesterday’s papers and carry on with yesterday’s girl. Popular culture has become obsessed with the past — with recycling it, rehashing it, replaying it. Though we live in a fast-forward age, we cannot take our finger off the rewind button.
Nowhere is the past’s grip so tight as in the world of music, as the rock critic Simon Reynolds meticulously documents in Retromania. Over the last two decades, he argues, the “exploratory impulse” that once powered pop music forward has shifted its focus from Now to Then. Fans and musicians alike have turned into archeologists. The evidence is everywhere. There are the reunion tours and the reissues, the box sets and the tribute albums. There are the R&B museums, the rock halls of fame, the punk libraries. There are the collectors of vinyl and cassettes and — God help us — eight-tracks. There are the remixes, the mash-ups, the samples. There are the “curated” playlists. When pop shakes its moneymaker today, what rises is the dust of the archive.
Nostalgia is nothing new. It has been a refrain of art and literature at least since Homer set Odysseus on Calypso’s island and had him yearn to turn back time. And popular music has always had a strong revivalist streak, particularly in Reynolds’s native Britain. But retromania is not just about nostalgia. It goes deeper than the tie-dyed dreams of Baby Boomers or the gray-flecked mohawks of Gen X punks. Whereas nostalgia is rooted in a sense of the past as past, retromania stems from a sense of the past as present. Yesterday’s music, in all its forms, has become the atmosphere of contemporary culture. We live, Reynolds remarks, in “a simultaneity of pop time that abolishes history while nibbling away at the present’s own sense of itself as an era with a distinct identity and feel.”
“Why do Conservatives get a pass?” Excellent question. His answer begins:
Rick Perry would like to repeal the 16th and 17th Amendments, hates the New Deal, thinks Social Security is a Ponzi scheme and global warming is a gigantic hoax, and would pretty much like to roll back America’s entire social-welfare edifice “from housing to public television, from the environment to art, from education to medical care, from public transportation to food, and beyond.” Ruth Marcus is appalled:
Whoa! These are not mainstream Republican views—at least, not any Republican mainstream post-Goldwater and pre-Tea Party. Even Ronald Reagan, who had once criticized Social Security and Medicare, was backing away from those positions by the 1980 presidential campaign.
…Perry’s ideas range from wrongheaded to terrifying.… The subtitle of Perry’s book is “Our Fight to Save America from Washington.” Reading it summons the image of another, urgent fight: saving America from Rick Perry.
Here’s what gets me. Perry’s views are getting denounced by all the usual lefty suspects but not much by anyone else. And the reason for this is something very odd: In modern America, conservatives are largely given a pass for saying crazy things. They’re just not taken seriously, in a boys-will-be-boys kind of way. It’s almost like everyone accepts this kind of stuff as a kind of religious liturgy, repeated regularly with no real meaning behind it. They’re just the words you use to prove to the base that you’re really one of them.
This was not quite the Bruce Everiss Three-Razor Shave. (He has an update here.) This was to help a guy interested in Rockets, and I included Cella because of Gogo’s interest expressed in a comment. But let’s go through the shave in order.
First, a very nice lather from the Vie-Long “professional” model horsehair brush. Once again, I got a particularly good lather, something I attribute in part to the brush. Cella itself has a strange sort of fragrance: it struck me as duller and mustier than the sharp bitter-almond of the Vitos (another tallow-based soft shaving soap). Though the lather did a fine job, the fragrance reminded me of why I generally use other soaps. Fragrance, however, is the essence of YMMV, and doubtless some love this fragrance and hate the Vitos bitter-almond.
I first inspected the heads of the two Rockets, the flare-tipped red Rocket and the regular Rocket. To the naked eye—well, to the eye assisted by spectacles—the two heads are identical, but potentially there could be minute differences in blade angle and exposure. Not evident, though. For example, the naked eye can clearly see the difference in the heads of the Slim Handle Adjustable and the Fat Boy. No such difference here.
I started with the regular Rocket. Very smooth, very nice, very pleasant. A stout-hearted, oak-solid, working-man’s shave: no nonsense, just set about the job and do it efficiently. That was one side. I tried the flare-tip Rocket, and it felt much the same, but not quite so smooth cutting. I checked the blades: a Swedish Gillette blade in the regular Rocket, a Rapira in the flare-tip. Okay, that’s probably it. A better experiment would have been to put fresh blades in all, but hey! it’s early.
I tried the Super Speed on the cross-the-grain pass. It seemed a bit milder, but now I’m shaving a different sort of stubble. At this point, I realize the experiment is down the drain, and I’m just shaving with three razors. I check the blade in the Super Speed: Astra Superior Platinum.
The heck with it. I just finish the shave, using the Rocket on the final pass ATG. Damn, this is a nice razor! And so are the others. All nice razors. So much for science.
The final rinse, dry, and a nice splash of Savory Rose. Man, I do like these SCS aftershaves. I just placed an order for a good variety and was delighted to discover after the fact (when I got a little money back) that she is having a sale through Labor Day, and I had stumbled into it with my order. I feel even better!
Fair warning: she’s taking off early today, so get your orders in soon if you want the sale prices. Here are the aftershaves.
And for the suspicious minded: I pay for my products the same as any other customer, and I have no affiliation with SCS beyond that of satisfied customer. But I do write about shaving, and part of that is pointing out the things I like, and right now I’m liking the SCS aftershaves quite a bit. YMMV. Mine certainly did with the Cella.
I’m looking into formatting Leisureguy’s Guide to Gourmet Shaving for the Kindle because I continue to get requests for that. Initially I didn’t like the idea because the book is written with an eye to its being a gift—something a friend or family member gives to a guy for graduation or his birthday or some other occasion because he currently fails to enjoy his daily shave—and back then you couldn’t give a Kindle book to someone. Amazon seems to have worked around that, so I was left with the problem of formatting and in particular placing photos appropriately in text: in the Kindle, when you change point size, photos move about—and photos generally don’t look all that good on the Kindle anyway.
But then I realized that the Kindle fans were accustomed to these problems and didn’t object to the presentation. So I started looking into it. The technical details were a bit daunting, so I’m having a conversion service look at the book and they will give me a price for the conversion. (They’re away, so it will be a week or so before I get a response.)
But then, I decided to look more into it. I looked over some information on the Kindle Direct Publishing site, then decided to sign in and update my info. But before I can so much as log in, I have to concur with a rather detailed and lengthy agreement, which, Amazon went to some length to inform me, can be altered at any time by Amazon at its sole discretion. I, of course, have no power at all to alter the agreement.
Somehow, that strikes me as excessively one-sided: what sort of agreement is it in which one party is bound but the other is not? And it’s not a trivial agreement. Here it is (just FYI):
What’s the News: Social networking has been a star of the Arab Spring revolutions. People can’t stop talking about how Twitter and Facebook helped protestors organize, and when Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak suddenly cut access to the Internet and cell phone service on January 28th, many wondered how the protestors would share information and keep momentum. But as it turned out, depriving people of information had an explosive effect—far from the epicenter at Tahrir Square in Cairo, so many grassroots protests sprung up that the military was brought in. Two weeks later, Mubarak resigned.
“happy girl kitchen co. (certified organic)” is happily located next door to The Wife’s apartment building, and she’s an inquisitive shopper, so she checked it out. For her, she found some fabulous marmalades and “jamalades” and for me all sorts of pickled stuff in home-canning-style jars. And they do all that on the premises, with an open kitchen. Very nice, actually.
So I got the cumin pickled green beans and the dilly green beans because neither had any sodium to speak of. (5 gm per serving, and the servings were reasonable). And spicy pickled carrots.
You know, it makes sense that people who truly are all about the food—not just a marketing position, but truly want to create good food from good ingredients (“certified organic”), such people would of course watch the damn sodium levels. It’s exactly what large food corporations would be doing IF they cared about food. But they don’t: they care about profits, and could switch from food to widget parts in a heartbeat without a tinge of regret so long as the profits were significantly better. “What they want to do” isn’t in it: what they want to do is grow profits. That’s the focus. They really don’t notice anything else. It’s all spreadsheets, all the time. [I'm practicing my curmudgeon rap.]
But clearly the people at happy girl kitchen co really are all about the food. You can tell it just from a look at the clear glass jars of canned foods: the foods look good: not mushy, not off-color, not misshapen. Just perfectly good (certified organic) vegetables and fruit picked at the peak of ripeness (because we’re dealing here with small batches) and canned with care. So, big surprise? It’s great! Probably not such a surprise, looking at the whole operation.
At any rate, both the beans were good, carrots were good, My Chai Cola Light (5 calories) made in Santa Cruz—”Spices, Tea, & Fizz!”—is terrific, as well as was the bottle of pu-erh and Earl Grey tea (unsweetened) that I had earlier.
As you can see, I’ll be a regular customer.
Oh, and I bought a jar of canned, peeled, whole “dry farmed” tomatoes. They look wonderful in the glass jar: too pretty to eat. But I’ll force myself.
UPDATE: To give a perfect example of the Big Business approach to food: Excess salt has been linked to many health problems, particularly hypertension. Doctors continually advise patients to cut back on salt. Now it’s been found that salt, in the form of salty foods (particularly when combined with fat and/or sugar) is highly addictive.
Now when you say “addictive”, corporate ears listen carefully. Tobacco’s appeal as a product is exactly that it is addictive, and it turned out that tobacco companies were carefully titrating the nicotine content of cigarettes (which, in their eyes, constitute nothing more than a nicotine delivery system and—primarily—a source of profite) to increase the addictive potential. (And, of course, that’s why cigarette companies target the young: once you’ve got them hooked, you are pretty much home free. They will be buying cigarettes, and now all you have to do is to get them to pick your brand.)
At any rate, Campbell Soup, on learning of the addictive quality of salt, recently increased the salt content of their Select Harvest soups. Wall Street loved it.
The laughable bit—bitter laughter, true, but take what you can get: Campbell said that they had to do this because their customers wanted the soup saltier, and so Campbell had to make the soup saltier because their customers, poor things, do not have salt shakers and so cannot add salt if they want more. And the rest of us, who do not want excess salt, can simply remove some of the salt from the soup. Or go pound sand.
I think we’ve all known people for whom loyalty is a primary virtue, by which they mean loyalty to them—not to principles, not to integrity, not to the law, but to them personally. The Bush and Kennedy political dynasties are very much from this mold. Usually when a person so heavily emphasizes personal loyalty to them as an individual (rather than, say, a loyalty to the rule of law), it’s because they expect to demand cooperation on things that are of a very dubious nature, and they want to be sure that you’ll go along with that. Most people of this ilk spend much more time enforcing loyalty than they do in deserving it.
I thought of this in the following instances of “loyalty” in this column:
The CIA’s spokesman atThe Washington Post, columnist David Ignatius,recently announced that the glorifying term “Arab Spring” is no longer being used by senior intelligence officials to describe democratic revolutions in the Middle East. It has been replaced by the more “neutral” term “Arab transition,” which, as Ignatius put it, “conveys the essential truth that nobody can predict just where this upheaval is heading.” Note that what was until very recently celebrated in American media circles as a joyous, inspirational awakening of ”democratic birth and freedom” has now been downgraded to an “upheaval” whose outcome may be odious and threatening.
That’s not surprising. As I’ve written about several times, public opinion in those nations is so strongly opposed to the policies the U.S. has long demanded — and is quite hostile (more so than ever) to the U.S. itself and especially Israel — that allowing any form of democracy would necessarily be adverse to American and Israeli interests in that region (at least as those two nations have long perceived of their “interests”). That’s precisely why the U.S. worked so hard and expended so many resources for decades to ensure that brutal dictators ruled those nations and suppressed public opinion to the point of complete irrelevance (behavior which, predictably and understandably, exacerbated anti-American sentiments among the populace).
An illustrative example of this process has emerged this week in Egypt, where authorities have bitterly denounced Israel for killing three of its police officers in a cross-border air attack on suspected Gaza-based militants, and to make matters worse, thereafter blaming Egypt for failing to control “terrorists” in the area. Massive, angry protests outside the Israeli Embassy in Cairo led to Egypt’s recalling of its Ambassador to Israel and the Israeli Ambassador’s being forced to flee Cairo. That, in turn, led to what The New York Times called a “rare statement of regret” from Israel in order to placate growing Egyptian anger: ”rare” because, under the U.S.-backed Mubarak, Egyptian public opinion was rendered inconsequential and the Egyptian regime’s allegiance was to Israel, meaning Israel never had to account for such acts, let alone apologize for them. In that regard, consider this superbly (if unintentionally) revealing phrase from the NYTabout this incident:
By removing Mr. Mubarak’s authoritarian but dependably loyal government, the revolution has stripped away a bulwark of Israel’s position in the region, unleashing the Egyptian public’s pent-up anger at Israel over its treatment of the Palestinians at a time when a transitional government is scrambling to maintain its own legitimacy in the streets.
That word “loyal” makes the phrase remarkable: to whom was Mubarak ”loyal”? Not to the Egyptian people whom he was governing or even to Egypt itself, but rather to Israel and the United States. Thus, in the past, Egypt’s own government would have sided with a foreign nation to which it was “loyal” even when that foreign nation killed its own citizens and refused to apologize (exactly as the U.S. did when Israel killed one of its own citizens on the Mavi Marmara and then again over the prospect that Israel would do the same with the new flotilla: in contrast to Turkey which, acting like a normal government, was bitterly furious with Israel — and still is – over the wanton killing of its citizens; in that sense, the U.S. is just as “dependably loyal” as the Mubarak regime was).
But as remarkable as it is, that phrase — “authoritarian but dependably loyal” — captures the essence of (ongoing) American behavior in that region for decades: propping up the most heinous, tyrannical rulers who disregard and crush the views of their own people while remaining supremely “loyal” to foreign powers: the U.S. and Israel. Consider this equally revealing passage from The Guardian: . . .
Assuming that you eat daily, the Farm and Food Bill has a direct impact on you. And looking at the obesity rates in the US—still climbing—it has had a severely deleterious impact.
It’s a complex issue, but this blog post helps one understand it, at least in the context of a specific state. This sort of research and active participation is, I desperately hope, in progress in each state. The post begins:
Every 5 years the Food and Farm Bill is up for renewal. Since we’re approaching the next renewal period we’re starting to hear a lot of buzz coming from different vocal organizations as well as cities and states standing together to build power in numbers – Seattle issued their platform. This is going to be a difficult renewal period due to a complicated political and economic environment.
New York’s Senator Kristen Gillibrand is taking part in listening sessions throughout New York. She also sits on the House Agriculture Committee (first NY Senator to serve on the Agriculture Committee in 40 years!), so it’s imperative for her to understand New York’s role in farming and the potential growth for the State’s production throughout the food system. She was recently in Amagansett Long Island, hosting one of these listening sessions at Quail Hill Farm. She spoke about the security implications of food, why we need to reward farmers for conservation not production, and how food related issues would reduce our healthcare liabilities.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Title IV (Nutrition) received the portion of the 2008 Farm Bill budget, even more than the Commodity Subsidy title. In 2008, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that Title IV Nutrition of the 2008 Farm Bill, which includes SNAP, would cost over $188 billion, or about 66% of the bill’s estimated $283 billion in total spending (Food Systems Network NYC). More recent data, however, shows that in 2011 the Nutrition Title will account for over $69 billion, which is actually more than 75% of total Farm Bill spending this year (House Ag Committee 2011).
Why SNAP Matters. . .
Continue reading. Full disclosure: The author is my daughter-in-law.
The military has many problems, among them one noted in this editorial in the NY Times:
Racism in the application of capital punishment has been well documented in the civilian justice system since the Supreme Court reinstated the penalty in 1976. Now comes evidence that racial disparity is even greater in death penalty cases in the military system.
Minority service members are more than twice as likely as whites — after accounting for the crimes’ circumstances and the victims’ race — to be sentenced to death, according to a forthcoming study co-written by David Baldus, an eminent death-penalty scholar, who died in June.
The analysis is so disturbing because the military has made sustained, often successful efforts to rid its ranks of discrimination. But even with this record, its failure to apply the death penalty fairly is more proof that capital punishment cannot be free of racism’s taint. It is capricious, barbaric and discriminatory, and should be abolished.
The number of capital cases in the military system is small: of 105 cases in which the death penalty might have been applied between 1984 — when the military revamped its death penalty process — and 2005, 15 defendants were sentenced to death. (Another capital case in 2010 was not included in the study.) Eight have since been removed from death row because of various legal errors, and two were granted clemency.
In its analysis, the new report found a significant risk that . . .
This cell phone photo was shot by a resident of Ishaqi on March 15, 2006, of bodies Iraqi police said were of children executed by U.S. troops after a night raid there. A State Department cable obtained by WikiLeaks quotes the U.N. investigator of extrajudicial killings as saying an autopsy showed the residents of the house had been handcuffed and shot in the head, including children under the age of 5. McClatchy obtained the photo from a resident when the incident occurred.
It’s okay: they covered up the evidence with an airstrike. I can’t imagine that any of our troops were so much as disciplined for this episode. (Our military is increasingly beyond our control, it seems to me, and it is taking steps to extend its autonomy. For example, see my earlier post on their increasing grip on Hollywood.)
I wonder if our wars in Muslim countries have a net positive or negative effect on terrorism efforts against the US. I imagine we’ll find out.
A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.
The unclassified cable, which was posted on WikiLeaks’ website last week, contained questions from a United Nations investigator about the incident, which had angered local Iraqi officials, who demanded some kind of action from their government. U.S. officials denied at the time that anything inappropriate had occurred.
But Philip Alston, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a communication to American officials dated 12 days after the March 15, 2006, incident that autopsies performed in the Iraqi city of Tikrit showed that all the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head. Among the dead were four women and five children. The children were all 5 years old or younger.
Reached by email Wednesday, Alston said that as of 2010 — the most recent data he had — U.S. officials hadn’t responded to his request for information and that Iraq’s government also hadn’t been forthcoming. He said the lack of response from the United States “was the case with most of the letters to the U.S. in the 2006-2007 period,” when fighting in Iraq peaked. . .
Continue reading. FWIW, Dick Cheney is very proud of having brought about this war.
Interesting post by Wendy Bumgartner at About.com’s Walking section:
Exercise is often recommended for people with clinical depression. A recent study published in theJournal of Clinical Psychiatry showed that exercise helped people with depression who didn’t have their symptoms resolved with a single anti-depressive drug. Often they would be prescribed a second drug, but the researchers found that moderate to intense exercise produced the same level of improvement. Thirty percent of the participants had full remission of symptoms and another 20% had significant improvement.
Moderate intensity exercise would include brisk walking, while vigorous exercise would be running or using an exercise bike at a strenuous level. The study participants used treadmills and exercise bikes for 12 weeks.
One interesting finding was that more vigorous exercise produced better results than moderate intensity exercise in men. For women, vigorous exercise was only better for women who didn’t have a family history of mental illness.
The Gillette Rocket is the British bigger brother to the US Super Speed. The Rockets are, in a word, skookum, a quality the Super Speeds (in comparison) lack, though Super Speeds are skookum itself compared to a modern plastic razor. I have a Rocket and an Aristocrat, Jr., but somehow I had not thought of this flare-tip as a Rocket, which it clearly is: just as the regular Super Speed moved into a flare-tip format, so did the British Rocket, and the red tip means, I expect, what it means in the Super Speed: the more aggressive variant.
It wasn’t really all that aggressive: just a very pleasant shave. It seemed to do what you want of a razor without getting in the way or calling attention to itself. It submerged its personality into the flow of the shave and required no special attention. It was, I admit, carrying a Swedish Gillette blade of some uses, but it a did a fine job—for which some credit must be given to the lather.
A horsehair brush, naturally, this one with a dyed stripe that’s gradually fading. I find the La Toja “bowl” extremely good to grip. I hold it cupped in my left hand, as my right works the wet brush vigorously over the soap, building up a Creamy Lather. Because the opening of the bowl (covered with the piece of bark from a cork oak, as shown) is narrow, this process is sloppy and best done over the sink. But my! how the lather arises!
Three very smooth and pleasant passes, at the end of which I remembered that I was going to compare this razor to an American Super Speed of the same type—but the shave’s over. So it goes.
The Woods aftershave splash from Saint Charles Shave was a very pleasant surprise. I was expecting some traditional wood scent—pine or cedar or sandalwood—but this exotic combination was different and very pleasant indeed. I think I need some more Saint Charles Shave stuff because the Savory Rose was terrific, too. Take a look at her aftershave line-up.
Great gift for bar mitzvah, for graduation, for Father's Day (17 June 2012), for birthdays, ... for guys who shave but do not yet enjoy the task.
User comment: "I bought this as a gift for my fiancé, along with a wet-shaving starting kit and a safety razor. He DEVOURED this book, and finds himself reading it again and again. He finally enjoys shaving. This book has helped him figure out so many things about wet shaving, and has recommended it to all of his friends and family. Truly a great source of information for any man."
A perfect gift for a man who answer "Yes" to "Do you shave most days?" and "No" to "Do you actually enjoy shaving?" Give him a chance for happiness in one frequent task.
I feel even better!
