Later On

I liked the feel of the iKon S3S head on the Edwin Jagger Chatworth’s handle, so I did it again, this time with the more color complementary faux-ebony plus chrome Chatsworth handle. It looks spiffy, I think, and shaves very nicely indeed: the light handle underscores the head’s mass.

A fine lather with HoneybeeSoaps.net Fresh Lemon, worked into a great lather with the Thäter brush. Three passes with the razor holding a Personna 74 blade, and splash of TOBS Sandalwood aftershave, and the weekend is starting well.

TYD passes along a link to this Bloomberg report by Bob Ivry, Bradley Keoun and Phil Kuntz:

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.

‘Change Their Votes’

“When you see the dollars the banks got, it’s hard to make the case these were successful institutions,” says Sherrod Brown, a Democratic Senator from Ohio who in 2010 introduced an unsuccessful bill to limit bank size. “This is an issue that can unite the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. There are lawmakers in both parties who would change their votes now.”

The size of the bailout came to light after . . .

Continue reading.

UPDATE: I hope you read the entire report: it’s somewhat long and totally shocking. And what’s weird is that none of the newspapers I read seems to even note the story: a bailout bigger than TARP, done in secret with no authorization from Congress and without informing the American people, and we think that’s okay now? Business as usual? I guess it is. We’re now moving into the harvest stage of the American experiment, I guess, in which the plutocrats will milk it for all they can until the inevitable riots, disruption, and revolt: it’s a very old pattern.

UPDATE 2: The more I read this story, the more it seems that Ben Bernanke found a way to ship $13 billion in taxpayer money directly to banks to beef up their bottom line. The banks got the money for free: in effect, simply given to them.

My question: Could I not have be given just a lousy half-million? So long as they’re simply giving money away.

This looks worth a try. I trust The Wife will take a close look.

These look good. If I get serious again about biking, I would definitely try these out.

The Wife passes along the link to Marc Pitzke’s column in Speigel:

Africa is a country. In Libya, the Taliban reigns. Muslims are terrorists; most immigrants are criminal; all Occupy protesters are dirty. And women who feel sexually harassed — well, they shouldn’t make such a big deal about it.

Welcome to the wonderful world of the US Republicans. Or rather, to the twisted world of what they call their presidential campaigns. For months now, they’ve been traipsing around the country with their traveling circus, from one debate to the next, one scandal to another, putting themselves forward for what’s still the most powerful job in the world.

As it turns out, there are no limits to how far they will stoop.

It’s true that on the road to the White House all sorts of things can happen, and usually do. No campaign can avoid its share of slip-ups, blunders and embarrassments. Yet this time around, it’s just not that funny anymore. In fact, it’s utterly horrifying.

It’s horrifying because these eight so-called, would-be candidates are eagerly ruining not only their own reputations and that of their party, the party of Lincoln lore. Worse: They’re ruining the reputation of the United States.

‘Freakshow’

They lie. They cheat. They exaggerate. They bluster. They say one idiotic, ignorant, outrageous thing after another. They’ve shown such stark lack of knowledge — political, economic, geographic, historical — that they make George W. Bush look like Einstein and even cause their fellow Republicans to cringe.

“When did the GOP lose touch with reality?” wonders Bush’s former speechwriter David Frum in New York Magazine. In the New York Times, Kenneth Duberstein, Ronald Reagan’s former chief-of-staff, called this campaign season a “reality show,” while Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan confidante Peggy Noonan even spoke of a “freakshow.”

That may be the most appropriate description.

Tough times demand tough and smart minds. But all these dopes have to offer are ramblings that insult the intelligence of all Americans — no matter if they are Democrats, Republicans or neither of the above. Yet just like any freakshow, this one would be unthinkable without a stage (in this case, the media, strangling itself with all its misunderstood “political correctness” and “objectivity”) and an audience (the party base, which this year seems to have suffered a political lobotomy).

Factually Challenged

And so the farce continues. . . .

Continue reading.

One of the several “decision traps” in the excellent book by Russo and Schoemaker Decision Traps (later revised and updated with the title Winning Decisions) is to confuse confidence with knowledge. Even (as pointed out in the book) juries are instructed to believe the more confident witness—and yet confidence is an extremely poor guide to knowledge and accuracy. If one is ignorant of a field, lacking any real expertise, it’s easy to be confident, as parodied in the poster “If you can keep your head when all about you are panicked and fearful, maybe you don’t understand the problem.”

We’re seeing this writ large in Europe, where elected political leaders with no expertise in economic theory or economics are making decisions on how to salvage Europe’s economy in the face of financial disaster including the likely downfall of the euro. The politician’s operate in a fantasy world in which hard austerity cleanses the moral pores and makes people feel confident (that word) once more, and then…  well, and then this will somehow fix things. Confidence! You take your new-found confidence to the store and buy your family food, and use a little more to pay the rent. With confidence, we can build a new Europe! It’s a confidence game!

Paul Krugman has a good column on that in the NY Times this morning:

Can the euro be saved? Not long ago we were told that the worst possible outcome was a Greek default. Now a much wider disaster seems all too likely.

True, market pressure lifted a bit on Wednesday after central banks made a splashy announcement about expanded credit lines (which will, in fact, make hardly any real difference). But even optimists now see Europe as headed for recession, while pessimists warn that the euro may become the epicenter of another global financial crisis.

How did things go so wrong? The answer you hear all the time is that the euro crisis was caused by fiscal irresponsibility. Turn on your TV and you’re very likely to find some pundit declaring that if America doesn’t slash spending we’ll end up like Greece. Greeeeeece!

But the truth is nearly the opposite. Although Europe’s leaders continue to insist that the problem is too much spending in debtor nations, the real problem is too little spending in Europe as a whole. And their efforts to fix matters by demanding ever harsher austerity have played a major role in making the situation worse.

The story so far: . . .

Continue reading.

A little ditty I learned in junior high just occurred to me:

Behold the happy moron.
He doesn’t give a damn.
I wish I were a moron.
My God! Perhaps I am.

It’s always the morons who are the most confident.

Steve of Kafeneio indirectly suggested the idea: he likes the idea of the iKon S3S, but also likes a long handle. Razor handles seem to have standardized on the threads, so I tried my Edwin Jagger Chatsworth handle—now that I see the photo, I should have used the faux-ebony and chrome, which would go better with the S3S stainless head, but I just picked my most familiar Chatsworth.

This is a little head heavy, but that’s not bad in a razor, I find. And I could have used the Lined Chatsworth (sold metal handle) for better balance.

Using the Rod Neep brush with the 1940 coin, I got a fine lather from HoneybeeSoaps.net’s Coffee Mocha shaving soap. The razor’s action was very pleasant indeed: I like the long handle, as it turns out.

A splash of Floïd, and ready for the day.

Dishwasher racks are still made on the same principle that once governed American automobile: don’t protect but (in the case of autos) build catchment compartments for salty slush to better rust out the car and require an upgrade. Autos don’t do that so much anymore (no thanks to American automakers, who resisted to the bitter end), but dishwasher manufacturers still get away with releasing shoddy products (thinly coated dishracks) so they will rust and require replacement.

But Cool Tools is on the job!

What poor social species have to put with. Do you think a honey badger would stand for this for one minute? He’d rip their throats out. And eat them.

New hobby: When you watch a movie or a TV show, or read a news report, see whether or not the event/story is about the group-oriented problems of someone.

And based on the column discussed here, way behind her. Like most Washington Post columnists, she never seems to reflect on what she writes or explore the implications of what she says. She just blurts it out and continues on her way. The column discussed at the link shows the kind of country she hopes the US will become.

Rania Khalek of Alternet has an interesting article in Salon on the effects of a creating a prison system with monetary incentives to imprison more people. Surprise! The system is working to get more and more people behind bars. Who could have predicted that?! The article begins:

The United States, with just 5 percent of the world’s population, currently holds 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, and for the last 30 years America’s business entrepreneurs have found a lucrative way to cash in on the incarceration surplus: private for-profit prisons.

While the implications of an industry that locks human beings in cages for profit is an old story, there is an important part of the history of private prisons that often goes untold.

Just a decade ago, private prisons were a dying industry awash in corruption and mired in lawsuits, particularly Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest private prison operator.  Today, these companies are booming once again, yet the lawsuits and scandals continue to pile up.  Meanwhile, more and more evidence shows that compared to publicly run prisons, private jails are filthier, more violent, less accountable, and contrary to what privatization advocates peddle as truth, do not save money.  In fact, more recent findings suggest that private prisons could be more costly.

So why are they still in business?

In a recently published report, “Banking on Bondage: Mass Incarceration and Private Prisons,” the American Civil Liberties Union examines the history of prison privatization and finds that private prison companies owe their continued and prosperous existence to skyrocketing immigration detention post-September 11 as well as the firm hold they have gained over elected and appointed officials.

The Rise of Private Prisons

David Shapiro, the primary author of the ACLU report, told AlterNet that prior to the early 1980s, private prisons were “virtually nonexistent.” That quickly changed as the War on Drugs “tough on crime” mentality swept the nation with institution of draconian sentencing and release laws for nonviolent offenders, causing an explosion in U.S. incarceration rate.  State and federal governments increasingly struggled with overcrowded prisons and the rising costs of housing the rapidly growing pool of inmates.

Coupled with the emergence of privatization madness under Ronald Reagan (a pattern that has continued under both Democrat and Republican administrations), skyrocketing imprisonment presented the perfect opportunity for the private sector to get in on the action, with promises of cost savings and more efficient operations than government-run facilities. In 1984, the Corrections Corporation of America was awarded a contract to operate a public jail in Hamilton County, Tennessee, and the nation’s first-ever private prison was born.

According to the ACLU report, From 1970 to 2005, the number of people locked up in the U.S. shot up by 700 percent. Meanwhile, between 1990 and 2009 the number of prisoners behind private prison bars exploded from 7,000 to 129,000 inmates, a growth rate of 1600 percent.  But the private prison boom of the ‘90s did not last.

Immigration Detention Saves the Day

In 1999, independent auditors were skeptical about whether CCA could stay afloat because beds were empty and the company experienced a $72 million net loss in revenue. By 2000, an article in BusinessWeek declared “the industry is in a rut, and its prospects have been severely trimmed. Overbuilding and ill-fated financial schemes have hammered stock prices. States, once eager to outsource their inmates, are backing out of private prison contracts. News of escapes and violence at private prisons adds to a climate of distrust.”  The article concludes that “the industry’s heyday may already be history.”

A 2001 article in the American Prospect, “Bailing Out Private Jails,” offers a snapshot of the industry’s bleak future at the turn of the century: . . .

Continue reading.

This recipe is for some meal-sized meatballs, not the cocktail-party meatballs made for toothpick delivery. Ingredients of just the meatballs:

• 1 pound ground beef (at least 16 percent fat)
• 1 pound ground pork
• 2/3 cup milk (whole or 2 percent)
• 3 slices of white bread, crusts removed (about 3 ounces)
• 1/4 cup ricotta cheese
• 1/4 cup grated parmesan or romano cheese
• 2 eggs
• 1 Tbsp kosher salt
• 1 Tbsp chopped fresh parsley
• 2 teaspoons black pepper
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano or marjoram
• 2-3 garlic cloves, minced
• About 1 cup of flour for dusting
• 1/3 cup olive oil
• 2 1/2 cups (24 ounces) of tomato sauce

Marijuana is a Schedule I drug. This means that, contrary to fact and observed evidence, it has no medicinal value whatsoever and thus is unavailable for any research to determine medicinal value: Catch 22, drug-war style.

Given that marijuana causes no detectable harm in adults using it moderately—significantly unlike cigarettes and alcohol—this rating tends to make people cynical about the government’s intelligence and/or motives. Not to mention that the current prohibition seems to achieve only negative effects..

Two governors have called on the DEA to reclassify marijuana, as reported in the LA Times by Michael Memoli:

A pair of U.S. governors appealed to the Drug Enforcement Administration on Wednesday to reclassify marijuana as a drug with accepted medical uses, saying current federal law makes it difficult for states that have legalized medical marijuana to safely regulate it.

The petition filed by Gov. Christine Gregoire of Washington and Gov. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island asks the government to change marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule II under the Controlled Substances Act. Schedule I drugs are those determined to have no accepted medical use in the United States. Schedule II drugs are those that have some accepted use and can be prescribed, administered or dispensed with controls, according to Gregoire’s office.

Sixteen states and the District of Columbia currently allow the use of marijuana for medical purposes; 10 more states are considering doing the same.

“State and local governments cannot adopt a regulatory framework to ensure a safe supply for — and limited to — legitimate medical use without putting their employees at risk of violating federal law,” Gregoire, a Democrat, and Chafee, an independent who was once a Republican senator, write.

“The situation has become untenable for our states and others. The solution lies with the federal government.” . . .

Continue reading. Even if the DEA won’t take this step—as they should—it would help if Obama and Holder could just get them to follow the policy (already stated) of not interfering with state-legal medical marijuana programs. The promise was made, the actions are in defiance of the promise—as so much of the Obama administration is (civil rights, terrorism, due process, 4th Amendment, and on and on).

I began thinking about the amazing degree to which we create the conversation we think we’re hearing. It’s commonly observed that the listener is rather more active in understanding spoken language than we think (and the same holds true of other things, but I want to focus on spoken language for the meoment).

When you listen, consider what happens: your interlocutor speaks, which in effect means making noises that travel through the air as sound waves, intermixing and overlapping with all the other sound waves traveling through the same patch of air—the neighbor’s barking dog (disconcertingly named “Mike”, so I often hear the shout, “Shut up, Mike! Be quiet!”, presumably addressed to the dog and not to me), a siren down the street, an airplane overhead, and so on. (I wonder how an air molecule knows how to move when it is hit with sound waves from every direction and at every frequency: its move is clearly the resultant of all the forces.)

This mix of air waves strikes the eardrums, agitating the little bones and creating electrical/chemical nerve impulses that travel the short distance to the brain. At that point “hearing” (the physical experience of sound) is over and “listening” (the processing the in the brain) begins.

Now that we have computers doing voice recognition, we have a better fix on what’s involved, though not on how the brain does it. The brain seems to use neural nets (naturally enough: they were derived from considering how the brain works) but the programming is mostly a mystery, I believe. Pattern recognition is clearly involved but to separate the various electrical impulses into categories (dog, plane, ambulance?/fire engine?/police?, my friend’s voice) and then parse those in real time with almost no delay—in the case of the conversation, separating sounds into words, figuring out which meanings are meant (in the case of homonyms, for example), then building the ideas thus represented into statements, all within milliseconds—that’s impressive. And much of the contribution comes from our own brains. A brain equally good and alert that knows only, say, Tamil would hear exactly the same sounds but would get no meaning: the meaning, obviously, is supplied by me.

The only way I can figure out (and I have studied this not at all: I am an armchair recliner speculator) that all this work can be done so rapidly is that the mind uses templates to impose a likely meaning and then make minor corrections. That could work because often we know generally what people will say: “Good morning! Hot/cold enough for you? [depending on season} How ya doing?" They may use different words, but correction is easier than digging up the meaning from scratch. This might account for the occasional misunderstood word: the template (or our expectations) were so strong they overrode the word that was spoken. Of course, speakers also make mistakes, but I would be that at least some errors come on the receiving/reconstructing end.

This also explains why children slowly acquire language skills: they are still accumulating their templates that will, once ready, allow speedier response. (The "templates," if such exist, would be neural pathways in the brain.) I recall hearing a children's radio program (Smilin' Ed McConnell, with Froggy the gremlin, my favorite character on the show) while my young cousin (around 4) was listening. I was then 8, and I was surprised by the long silence following each statement. I asked my aunt why the pauses, and she told me it was to give time for the young listeners to grasp the statement: their decoding, in effect, is still quite slow. I imagine this is true on TV as well---long pauses between statements---but TV can fill the dead-air time with visual activity, and Sesame Street, at least, was big on repetition: songs, usually, but with many phrases repeated until the kiddies get it.

[UPDATE: An illustrative example just occurred to me. In grad school I had a professor with a strong Indian accent. I could understand about one word in ten in the first lecture, but it was a math course so I could take notes (and context) from what he wrote on the blackboard. Very quickly, within a couple of weeks, I could understand him perfectly well, and by the end of the semester I thought he spoke with great enunciation and completely clearly.

The proposed model---gradual learning/development of a new set of templates so word recognition can be done more quickly---fits well with what happened. And, after all, at the end of the semester he was still speaking exactly as he was at the beginning. The change in clarity was totally within my own mind/brain. And new templates seems as good a term as any and sort of (hand-wavingly) explains what the same speech I could not recognize at all initially I could understand clearly at the end: ever-increasing (doubtless Bayesian) refinement of the rapid-recognition templates.]

Of course, we’re told that we construct the conversation, but the amount of pattern recognition and processing required sort of staggers me—and it’s done so quickly! And with such detail—though of course the detail is to some degree again our contribution: you can look at the bit rates in the nerves from sound and from light (vision), and though they are high, they don’t cover the detail of reality. Apparently we also have little “dithering” subroutines that cover the (relative) sparseness of what we actually get in our brains so that the picture is nicely filled out and looks complete, much as our visual faculty tactfully covers the blind spot.

I also got to thinking again of how group-oriented we as a social species are. I’ve been watching a lot of movies (and those who enjoy Ong Bak and the other Tony Jaa movies should check out Merantau, available on Watch Instantly: fairly violent at times, but the martial arts series are astonishing. We’re talking Donnie Yen quality here), and virtually all focus on group issues: a bunch of individuals become a team (a common theme of sports movies); an individual wants to join/leave a group and the struggles to do that; a member of two different groups is pulled two ways and must decide; a member of one group and a member of another group are bonded together despite the antagonism between the groups, and the ensuing struggles; and so on. Few movies about an individual alone—difficult to achieve the conflict, and even in one-person shows the monologues generally focus on group-related issues. And, of course, one cannot get dressed and leave the house without proclaiming their membership in a variety of different groups just by their clothing, means of transport, and so on.

I was pondering this, wondering whether I am just dressing up in different terminology a mundane experience—people have friends and family, and sometimes that presents problems—when I realized that all this is from our being a social species. If humans were a solitary species (cf. the honey badger, for example), most of these problems would vanish. “Two conflicting groups both want my allegiance? To hell with them! I don’t need no steenking groups!”

But that’s very difficult for humans, because as social animals we think in terms of groups, group identity, group membership.

Then, because I had been thinking about how we process spoken language, it struck me that the same kind of thing might be true about groups: just as our minds (might) use templates and rules of thumb to more quickly to construct/recognize what someone else is saying, maybe our minds use groups for much the same purpose: getting from a group a personality/character template and using that to derive one’s own identity. We certainly are familiar with the phenomenon of people identifying heaving with a football team or a branch of the service or a specific culture: maybe the identification is because those constituted the raw materials from which people construct a personality, in part: “A Marine will always… “, “Boy Scouts never … “, “In our beliefs, we condemn… “— whatever. The individual gets his or her worldview in large part from the group and—to some extent—”store” (as it were) their personality/worldview—themselves, in part—in the group, much like people now store their data and music in the cloud.

It does save time: faced with a tough decision, one can look at what a Marine/Boy Scout/fundamentalist would do, and take that as what they will do.

This would also help explain why people respond with such energy when their group is disparaged: because that is a part of themselves, and the Ego jumps in to protect itself.

I’m not saying this is good or bad—it’s probably inescapable for a social species. But I am intrigued by the idea of groups offering personality templates, as it were, to facilitate character formation.

Again, we all are familiar with this in other terminology: people send their kids to church, as Scott observes, to pick up as part of their personality the values and customs of that group. Same with other groups: when we join and interact, we learn more how we (as members of that group) are “supposed to be.”

This time the plot seems more credible. The men are not called “terrorists” (even though they are) because the media reserves that term for non-whites in general, and in particular for non-US citizens. If a white US citizen is a terrorist, some other name MUST be used or it might be inferred that a white and non-white were equal, something the US in general continues to be uncomfortable about.

Here they are, photos and plans. Chilling.

I think I ran this before, but it’s certainly worth a repeat. This is what people are opposing when they oppose marriage equality:

I came across the l’Occitane Cade shaving oil when I was looking for the Timor razor shown. I’m featuring it because it’s the razor featured in this Gizmodo post.

The shave: I used the Cade shaving oil as a pre-shave oil and once again no effects that I could tell. I did massage it in before washing with MR GLO, so I expect I rubbed it on and washed it off. Tomorrow I’ll try applying it after the MR GLO face wash, massaging it into my wet beard.

The Frank Shaving brush (and thanks to psywiped for pushing me to try the FS brushes again) worked quite well and feels good in the hand. Penhaligon’s Blenheim Bouquet made an exceptional lather—perhaps it’s not so strange that expensive, high-end products often turn out to be very good—and three passes produced a smooth visage.

Only the first two passes were done using the Timor, holding a new Treet Black Beauty blade. As I wrote on Wicked_Edge, “I would not recommend this razor. It could be good, but the base platform and top doors seem to be punched from metal and the ends not well finished, so the corners are unpleasantly sharp and uncomfortable. With more finish it might be a decent razor, but right now it’s not.”

It was so bad, in fact, that by the end of the second pass, I had had more than enough. I set it aside and used my vintage Slant for the final ATG pass.

I’m keeping the Timor. At some point I’ll take a file to those sharp corners and see whether a decent razor can emerge. [UPDATE: After thinking about it, I removed the blade from the razor and took the razor to a whetstone and rounded the sharp corners: very easily done (soft metal) and now a lot more comfortable. I'll do another shave and see what the modified razor is like.]

A pass with the alum block, a rinse, dry, and splash of Blenheim Bouquet, and I’m set: clean apartment, no appointments, and The Eldest has loaned me a Kindle book.