Later On

Via Cute Overload:

The NY Times has a story that does a good job of outlining the facts of the case, and James Fallows has reflections worth reading about this and the toddler’s death in China.

The English Shaving Company, home of Edwin Jagger products, is offering free worldwide shipping until 5 December. This is a great opportunity. From an email:

Just thought I would let you know that we have a Free Worldwide Shipping offer on until December 5th 2011. Maybe some of your contacts and fans will like to know in time for holiday shopping.

We have put our DE razors together with the Edwin Jagger leather razor case as a set which makes a great gift for DE shavers.  See it at this link.

The US wants governments that focus on helping businesses—particularly American businesses—and any attention devoted to increasing the common welfare is viewed as a suspicious misdirection of effort. Paul Katz has a column in Salon on the success of Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and the US reactions to her successes:

When Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, was reelected two weeks ago by the largest margin of any leader since the return of democracy in 1983, even her bitterest opponents had to admit that she’d done something right. Clarín, Buenos Aires’ highest-circulation daily and a strong contender for the title of Kirchner’s enemy No. 1, acknowledged that the president had earned her victory by creating jobs and prosperity. Mauricio Macri, the conservative mayor of Buenos Aires, congratulated Fernández and told reporters, “If things go well for the president, things go well for us.”

But on the pages of America’s leading newspapers, the tone was strikingly less conciliatory. Despite her evident success, the New York Times dedicated itself to  cataloging Fernandéz’s failings before concluding, in the voice of one source, that Argentine economic growth will soon slow and “there will be a political reckoning.”  The editorial board of the Washington Post echoed this prediction, warning that Fernández might turn to authoritarian measures to preserve her power and suggesting, “so far the signs are not good.”

The U.S. press has been forecasting imminent disaster since Fernández’s late husband and predecessor, Néstor Kirchner, assumed office in 2003, promising to prioritize shared recovery over foreign lenders left in the cold by the country’s 2002 sovereign debt default. The couple’s unorthodox economic policies have done what Washington experts believed impossible. Kirchner’s way has fostered breakneck growth, dramatically reduced poverty rates and secured “kirchnerismo” three presidential terms. Yet U.S. media outlets have downplayed these achievements in favor of attention to the Kirchners’ perceived instability at home and unpopularity with creditors abroad.

It’s a narrative so ingrained in the DNA of Washington that not even a landslide election could wipe it out. . .

Continue reading.

Charlie Brown never learns—nor, apparently, does the SEC. Edward Wyatt reports in the NY Times:

When Citigroup agreed last month to pay $285 million to settle civil charges that it had defrauded customers during the housing bubble, the Securities and Exchange Commission wrested a typical pledge from the company: Citigroup would never violate one of the main antifraud provisions of the nation’s securities laws.

To an outsider, the vow may seem unusual. Citigroup, after all, was merely promising not to do something that the law already forbids. But that is the way the commission usually does business. It also was not the first time the firm was making that promise.

Citigroup’s main brokerage subsidiary, its predecessors or its parent company agreed not to violate the very same antifraud statute in July 2010. And in May 2006. Also as far as back as March 2005 and April 2000.

Citigroup has a lot of company in this regard on Wall Street. According to a New York Times analysis, nearly all of the biggest financial companies — Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America among them — have settled fraud cases by promising that they would never again violate an antifraud law, only to have the S.E.C. conclude they did it again a few years later.

A Times analysis of enforcement actions during the past 15 years found at least 51 cases in which the S.E.C. concluded that Wall Street firms had broken anti-fraud laws they had agreed never to breach. The 51 cases spanned 19 different firms.

On Wednesday, Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Federal District Court in Manhattan, an S.E.C. critic, is scheduled to review the Citigroup settlement. Judge Rakoff has asked the agency what it does to ensure companies do not repeat the same offense, and whether it has ever brought contempt charges for chronic violators. The S.E.C. said in a court filing Monday that it had not brought any contempt charges against large financial firms in the last 10 years. . .

Continue reading. I think some people should go to prison, and among them would be members of the SEC.

The US military actions may not be helping so much as we want to believe. Clive Stafford Smith in the NY Times tells of a meeting in Pakistan and what followed:

LAST Friday, I took part in an unusual meeting in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad.

The meeting had been organized so that Pashtun tribal elders who lived along the Pakistani-Afghan frontier could meet with Westerners for the first time to offer their perspectives on the shadowy drone war being waged by the Central Intelligence Agency in their region. Twenty men came to air their views; some brought their young sons along to experience this rare interaction with Americans. In all, 60 villagers made the journey.

The meeting was organized as a traditional jirga. In Pashtun culture, a jirga acts as both a parliament and a courtroom: it is the time-honored way in which Pashtuns have tried to establish rules and settle differences amicably with those who they feel have wronged them.

On the night before the meeting, we had a dinner, to break the ice. During the meal, I met a boy named Tariq Aziz. He was 16. As we ate, the stern, bearded faces all around me slowly melted into smiles. Tariq smiled much sooner; he was too young to boast much facial hair, and too young to have learned to hate.

The next day, the jirga lasted several hours. I had a translator, but the gist of each man’s speech was clear. American drones would circle their homes all day before unleashing Hellfire missiles, often in the dark hours between midnight and dawn. Death lurked everywhere around them.

When it was my turn to speak, I mentioned the official American position: that these were precision strikes and no innocent civilian had been killed in 15 months. My comment was met with snorts of derision.

I told the elders that the only way to convince the American people of their suffering was to accumulate physical proof that civilians had been killed. Three of the men, at considerable personal risk, had collected the detritus of half a dozen missiles; they had taken 100 pictures of the carnage.

In one instance, they matched missile fragments with a photograph of a dead child, killed in August 2010 during the C.I.A.’s period of supposed infallibility. This made their grievances much more tangible.

Collecting evidence is a dangerous business. The drones are not the only enemy. The Pakistani military has sealed the area off from journalists, so the truth is hard to come by. One man investigating drone strikes that killed civilians was captured by the Taliban and held for 63 days on suspicion of spying for the United States.

At the end of the day, Tariq stepped forward. He volunteered to gather proof if it would help to protect his family from future harm. We told him to think about it some more before moving forward; if he carried a camera he might attract the hostility of the extremists.

But the militants never had the chance to harm him. On Monday, he was killed by a C.I.A. drone strike, along with his 12-year-old cousin, Waheed Khan. The two of them had been dispatched, with Tariq driving, to pick up their aunt and bring her home to the village of Norak, when their short lives were ended by a Hellfire missile.

My mistake had been . . .

Continue reading. I wonder how what we’re doing in Pakistan will look in another generation.

A reader asked yesterday for a comparison of the Green Irish Tweed fragrances between the Queen Charlotte Soaps version and the original Creed version. (Creed’s Green Irish Tweed was Cary Grant’s favorite fragrance.) Nothing loath, I set about to satisfy the request.

I also got a couple of new horsehair shaving brushes from GiftsAndCare.com. The one in the photo is the Vie-Long Brown 13071 and I like it. It’s fairly resilient initially, but seemed to soften in the course of the shave and was quite soft for the third pass. It worked extremely well: I got a Creamy Lather with both soaps, but I have to say that the Creed soap is definitely a cut above—not so much for the fragrance, which in both soaps is quite light, but in the lather itself: richer, creamier, and altogether better. Of course, Creed shaving soap sells for almost 6 times as much as the Queen Charlotte version, and I’m not sure I’d go so far as to rate the lather as 6 times better—twice as good, perhaps, or even three times, but in terms of bang for buck, QCS is the winner; for bang alone, Creed, no contest.

I am quite happy with the brush and tomorrow I’ll use the other horsehair brush I got.

The iKon S3S is another case in which the performance multiplier is less than the price multiplier, but that said, in absolute terms this is one of my very best razors. I’m convinced the secret of its smooth, effective, and comfortable shave is the total mass of the razor pushing the blade’s edge through the (well-prepped) beard. Other razors generally are lighter than the S3S’s 4.5 oz. (Weight includes the (Personna 74 tunsten-steel) blade.)

BullgooseShaving.net still has some of the S3S razors. Given the vagaries of the iKon production schedule, I suggest that if you want one, you get it while you can—there are many guys still awaiting the return of the iKon open-comb bulldog razor, certainly one of the most comfortable shavers I own.

Altogether an informative shave. Thanks, Chris, for the suggestion of the GIT comparison.