Later On

Good comprehensive list, with explanations.

Extremely clear and thorough step-by-step instructions, with photo. If you don’t want to attempt it, RazorEmporium.com does offer razor restoration services, but if it’s just a razor you picked up on eBay, you might well want to try it yourself.

Found via this post at Wicked Edge.

Amazing. The companies who are desperate to do fracking have repeatedly told us that there is NO WAY the process could contaminate our (shrinking) groundwater aquifers with their poisonous chemicals. Could they …. have lied? An American company, lying simply to increase profits? It does seem unlikely, and yet…

Abraham Lustgarten reports for ProPublica:

As the country awaits results from a nationwide safety study on the natural gas drilling process of fracking, a separate government investigation into contamination in a place where residentshave long complained that drilling fouled their water has turned up alarming levels of underground pollution.

A pair of environmental monitoring wells drilled deep into an aquifer in Pavillion, Wyo., contain high levels of cancer-causing compounds and at least one chemical commonly used in hydraulic fracturing, according to new water test results released yesterday by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The findings are consistent with water samples the EPA has collected from at least 42 homes in the area since 2008, when ProPublica began reporting on foul water and health concerns in Pavillion and the agency started investigating reports of contamination there.

Last year – after warning residents not to drink or cook with the water and to ventilate their homes when they showered — the EPA drilled the monitoring wells to get a more precise picture of the extent of the contamination.

The Pavillion area has been drilled extensively for natural gas over the last two decades and is home to hundreds of gas wells. Residents have alleged for nearly a decade that the drilling — and hydraulic fracturing in particular — has caused their water to turn black and smell like gasoline. Some residents say they suffer neurological impairment, loss of smell, and nerve pain they associate with exposure to pollutants.

The gas industry — led by the Canadian company EnCana, which owns the wells in Pavillion — has denied that its activities are responsible for the contamination. EnCana has, however, supplied drinking water to residents.

The information released yesterday by the EPA was limited to raw sampling data: The agency did not interpret the findings or make any attempt to identify the source of the pollution. From the start of its investigation, the EPA has been careful to consider all possible causes of the contamination and to distance its inquiry from the controversy around hydraulic fracturing. . .

Continue reading. Helpful graphic at the link.

One can certainly see why businesses (and thus the GOP) are so eager to shut down the EPA: the EPA spoils profits, and merely for reasons of public health and protecting national water supplies.

I mentioned in posts earlier today how I had difficulty understanding group reactions, and yet how deeply group behavior is embedded in our makeup: humans are social animals, and group identity is basic.

Thus we get the football hierarchy at Penn State closing ranks to protect a pedophile, because he’s a group member and the victims were not—just as the Catholic church continues its practice of covering up for pedophile priests; just as the police routinely protect fellow officers who clearly are doing wrong. And why? Because the miscreants are members of the group (whether football organization, church, or police) and the victims are not.

I watched a pretty good yakuza movie the other night (Street Mobster) and started looking at it in terms of group-oriented behavior. The protagonist, for example, in an argument before others chooses not to back down: very important choice, and very much made with an eye to group reaction. Indeed, sometimes it seems that most of our behavior is governed by group membership: we act to be within the group, we disdain those who are not in the group. It’s evident everywhere.

In the case of medical malpractice, the actions of physicians to protect their malpracticing members are obvious and frequent. Doctors will not discipline other doctors (except rarely) because those doctors are members of their group, and the injured patients are not. “Loyalty” is never to ethics, principles, or the law—”loyalty” is always to a person or a group, and the immediate test of loyalty is for the boss or group to order one to do something wrong to prove that s/he is loyal. A person who goes against the group for reasons of the law, or ethics, or morals, or conviction proves that s/he is “disloyal” and fair game. So doctors will not testify against one of their fellows, regardless of the harm caused.

This suggests to me that all surgical procedures should be videotaped and recorded, using multiple cameras. First, keeping a good record should help advance medical science. Also, detailed records can determine causes of things that went right or wrong. And finally, an objective recording of what actually transpired can keep doctors from having to testify against a fellow: they can just roll the tape. (This is similar to laws in many states that require videotaping police interrogations—a side benefit is that this procedure totally stops false claims of police abuse, just as videotapes of surgical procedures should end spurious accusations of malpractice.)

So physicians who fight malpractice generally fight to keep malpractice suits out of the courts—those physicians are not truly interested in ending malpractice, simply in protecting members of their group. What physicians generally do not address is how to reduce the incidences of malpractice.

Here’s an amazing story. Note the role of the American Medical Association in protecting the malpracticing physician. Marian Wang writes in ProPublica:

An agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that maintains a discipline and medical-malpractice database reopened it for public access yesterday, two months after the agency had first taken the database offline.

The National Practitioner Data Bank contains information used by hospitals, insurers, and licensing boards to track doctors’ records, check prospective hires, and make other decisions. A publicly available version of the database — which removed confidential identifiers such as doctors’ names and addresses — had long been used by reporters and others interested in patient safety. In the years it was online, journalists could reference the database and, with additional reporting, could at times identify doctors with uniquely long histories of being sued or disciplined for medical malpractice.

Then, two months ago, the government cut off public access — a decision that was sharply criticized by a number of researchers and journalism organizations.

What was behind that decision? Apparently, one Kansas doctor with a trail of malpractice suits.

A public records request by Sen. Charles Grassley and the New York Times turned up documents about the decision that shows that the agency closed the database days after the doctor, Robert Tenny, complained to the government. Thanks to the database, he told the Health Resources and Services Administration, or HRSA, he was about to get unwanted attention in his local paper.

We culled through the documents and pulled out some interesting snippets that give a glimpse into the backstory behind why the public database was temporarily shut down and why — even now — the restored database has some new restrictions.

A brief timeline:

Aug. 16 - A local newspaper reporter requested a comment from a neurosurgeon, Robert Tenny, through Tenny’s attorney. The reporter, Alan Bavley of the Kansas City Star, was working on a story about doctors who have went undisciplined despite histories of malpractice allegations. He had used both the public database coupled with publicly available court records to do his reporting. . .

Continue reading.

I’ve spent the morning going through an interminable backlog on Mail: I have switched from Outlook (on the Mac) back to Mail, iCal, and Address Book—three programs in place of one, but of course with Outlook you also have to switch completely from one to the other of those, though within the same program. But Outlook is not woven into the Mac OS the way that Mail, iCal, and Address Book are. (“iCal” = calendar program, not calculator, which is always my first thought.)

So I’m slowly weeding through the Mail, and doing more training of the Junk Mail detection routine, certainly a Bayesian application. (Outlooks filter is primitive in comparison, or so it seems to me.)

Eventually I’ll get caught up.

We evolved into social animals pretty early, apparently. Nick Bascom reports in Science News:

Primates may have evolved from living the lonely life to forming complex societies in two major steps, a new study of more than 200 species suggests. Understanding when and why the ancestors of Homo sapiensand its closest cousins adopted different social structures could help reveal more about the evolution of human society.

About 52 million years ago, primates — an order of animals that includes, among others, humans and great apes — might have stopped foraging alone and banded together in large, loosely formed, same-sex groups to search for food, anthropologist Susanne Shultz of the University of Oxford and colleagues report in the Nov. 10Nature. Then around 16 million years ago, primates began forming more stable social groups, such as male-female pairs and harems dominated by one male, the researchers suggest.

Teaming up this way may have been prompted by a switch from a nocturnal lifestyle to moving about in the sunshine. “Being active during the day would have allowed primates to travel across larger spaces and exploit their environment more effectively, but it would have also exposed them to a huge predation risk,” says Shultz. To make it through the day, primates would have needed a new defense strategy to deal with both a greater number of predators and also new kinds of hunters.

“What’s going to nail you at night is different than what’s going to nail you during the day,” says primatologist Anthony Di Fiore of the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved in the study. It’s tough to hide from eagle eyes in the daytime, but by joining up and serving as lookouts for each other primates would have given themselves a better chance of spotting and evading a swooping bird or other predator.

Re-creating the social behavior of animals that died millions of years ago can be tricky business. However, since behaviors are inherited, examining the ways living species interact socially can provide clues to the ways their ancestors behaved.

Shultz and colleagues examined the social behavior of 217 species of living primates, such as . . .

Continue reading.

Group reactions tend to mystify me. For example, the student reaction to Joe Paterno’s firing: I totally do not get it. OTOH, I do know many still defend the Catholic bishops who covered up for pedophile priests and kept them on, working with children. What’s very weird is that Mike McQueary, who as a 28-year-old adult actually saw Jerry Sandusky in the processing of raping the boy and, rather than intervening, protecting the child, and calling 911, McQueary quietly withdrew so that the rape could proceed without interruption. (In McQueary’s defense, he did not join in.) McQueary never did report the rape to the authorities, though he did tell his father and his father-figure Paterno. For all the good it did. Once McQueary saw that nothing was going to be done, he kept quiet.

McQueary still has his job and, so far as I can tell, is not under indictment.

The students are outraged that those who protect and enable child rapists would lose their job.

What do they teach at Penn State? Not the subjects—I mean, what are people actually learning there, about how to lead their lives?

UPDATE: Really excellent post looking into McQueary’s cowardice. Via James Fallows.

Men who hate shaving, rise up and get the gear that makes the morning shave enjoyable! Do not suffer in silence: it does not have to be an expensive, boring, tedious chore. It can be something you actually enjoy and look forward to. (Full disclosure: I have already set out the gear for tomorrow’s shave.)

This Vie-Long boar+horsehair is one of my favorite boar brushes—this and the Omega Pro 48, but I think you’ll admit this one has the edge in pizzazz. I got a fine lather from MWF—and again I wonder why some guys put water on top of the soap to soak: so far as I can tell, that step is totally unnecessary. OTOH, I did indeed soak the brush while I showered: it’s a boar brush, and they like that.

The iKon H2O has the comfort typical of iKon razors. I did put a drop of mineral oil on the bearing, which seemed slightly stiff, and that worked well. This is a two-piece razor: cap and baseplate/handle, so the bearing is needed for the handle to rotate (cf. the Pils), as an alternative to the knob/internal shaft of the Merkur “two-piece” razors (actually four piece, coulding the knob/internal shaft and the friction ring that holds it).

The blade was a previously used Treet black carbon-steel blade, in great shape since I rinse in alcohol at the end of the shave: no sign of rust and indeed a very smooth shave. I rinsed it in alcohol again at the end, though I don’t know whether it is good for a third shave—OTOH, I once got 15 excellent shaves from one of these blades, so it certainly deserves another try. A few years ago, these sold for 2¢ each, so quite a few guys used them as a single-shave blade, which eliminated the rust issue altogether.

A splash of Paul Sebastian, one of my favorites, and I’m ready for the day.

I’m enjoying the movie quite a bit, but am curious about his habit of whistling—do foxes whistle? I found this collection of fox sounds, and though some are interesting, no whistles. I also found what seems to be the movie on-line for free, and full-screen it’s not at all bad.

Thomas Ricks has a useful list:

As a public service, Best Defense is offering this primer for generals on their way to Afghanistan.

Here is a list of 19 things that many insiders and veterans of Afghanistan agree to be true about the war there, but that generals can’t say in public. So, general, read this now and believe it later-but keep your lip zipped. Maybe even keep a printout in your wallet and review before interviews.

My list of things to remember I can’t say

• Pakistan is now an enemy of the United States.

• We don’t know why we are here, what we are fighting for, or how to know if we are winning.

• The strategy is to fight, talk, and build. But we’re withdrawing the fighters, the Taliban won’t talk, and the builders are corrupt.

• Karzai’s family is especially corrupt.

• We want President Karzai gone but we don’t have a Pushtun successor handy.

• But the problem isn’t corruption, it is which corrupt people are getting the dollars. We have to help corruption be more fair.

• Another thing we’ll never stop here is the drug traffic, so the counternarcotics mission is probably a waste of time and resources that just alienates a swath of Afghans.

• Making this a NATO mission hurt, not helped. Most NATO countries are . . .

Continue reading.

The Wife just called to say that she saw a Chevy Volt in the wild, as it were, just driving along a street in Palo Alto, on the Stanford University campus. I imagine that model will sell well here in California.

Very interesting reminiscences from an 86-year-old guy. Well worth the click. Makes one want to store up some good memories for later.

We all knew that it was legal—except the cops, and they probably knew as well, but just didn’t want to be filmed, particularly when beating up a suspect—and now the courts have ruled. Pace Lattin reports at Technorati:

The First Court of Appeals has reached a decision that would allow the general public to video-tape police officers while they are working. This decision comes right after several well-known public cases have come to light involving citizens being arrested for video-taping police.

This specific case in question was Simon Glik vs.The City of Boston (and several police officers), in which a teenage Simon Gilk was arrested after videotaping Boston Police abusing a homeless man. While Mr. Gilk was not interfering with the police, he was arrested on wiretapping charges.

The ACLU had sued on his behalf, even when the charges were dropped, noting that there was a growing epidemic of citizens in the United States being arrested by police for videotaping, even when documenting police brutality and abuse.

The First Court Agreed with the ACLU that this should be legal, and wrote that: “The filming of government officials engaged in their duties in a public place, including police officers performing their responsibilities, fits comfortably within these principles [of protected First Amendment activity].

Gathering information about government officials in a form that can readily be disseminated to others serves a cardinal First Amendment interest in protecting and promoting the free discussion of governmental affairs.”

With the rise of YouTube and other social sharing services, more and more police have been under scrutiny for their public actions and in response have taken to pressing charges against civilians for videotaping them.

Currently there are several other cases . . .

Continue reading.

I have mentioned how I like my “extra” measuring spoons: a set comprising one each of 2-tsp, 1.5-Tbsp, and 2-Tbsp measuring spoons. The 2-Tbsp is, of course, the same as a standard coffee measure and is 1/8 cup.

I just added wheat germ to the mix. I put in a little 1-pint saucepan:

2 Tbsp rolled oats (“old-fashioned”)
2 Tbsp oat bran
2 Tbsp chia seed
2 Tbsp hulled hemp seed
2 Tbsp toasted wheat germ
1/2 tsp turmeric
good grinding black pepper

I pour 1 cup boiling water (plus a little—about 2 Tbsp, in fact) over that and stir it over heat until it’s thick. That happens fast and within 3 minutes, it’s done. I stir in a good amount of homemade pepper sauce and stir that in, then set it aside and put my 8″ T-Fal skillet with 1/2 pat butter on the burner.

I let the butter melt and foam and break in one extra-large (or jumbo) egg. A pinch of salt, a grinding of pepper, and I cook that over easy: let first side set, flip (practice over the sink using dry beans), cook briefly, and slide atop the egg. Sprinkle with Bac’Uns, and that’s, along with a pint of black tea, is breakfast.

Dr. Selby’s lid was broken in transit—it’s just a thin plastic shell—but the soap was undamaged. The horsehair brush shown is the Vie-Long 13061, and it works like a charm: abundant lather. I loaded the brush well and did have to add a little water, but a very nice lather ensued. The Selby fragrance is neutral—”soap”, I would call it—and the lather works well.

Today the Feather Premium with a previously used Feather blade: another quite comfortable razor, and a very good, clean, easy, pleasurable shave: three passes to perfection.

A splash of the Provence Santé, and I’m ready for the day. First stop is to buy some baby shampoo to begin the twice-daily washing of the eyes in preparation for cataract surgery next week.

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.