Later On

These are terrific after being stored for a day or two—not so good right out of the oven. Highly recommended.

I was asked about l’Occitane Cade shaving soap yesterday, and I recall it as so-so, though I do like the fragrance. But things change, so I brought it out this morning and tackled it with the same horsehair brush that first produced a Creamy Lather for me. Using the same method, I got a perfectly fine lather from the soap. I think I was not loading my brush sufficiently. Unfortunately, the fragrance has faded over the years. But now I’ll get the soap back into rotation.

I do like the bowl as well: fits well into the palm of my non-dominant hand for the lathering.

Three passes with the S3S holding a Personna 74 blade. This is a very smooth-shaving and comfortable razor. A little of The Shave Den’s aftershave milk, as shown. Ingredients:

Hydrosol Blend (Rose, Hibiscus, Jasmine), Jojoba Oil, Water, Witch Hazel, Shea Butter, Lecithin, Allantoin, Vitamin E, Glycerin, Aloe Vera, Potassium Sorbate, Ascorbic Acid, Citric Acid

A fine shave and a good start to the day.

My Osterizer blender just died: the smoke escaped from the little motor and it runs no more.

What is a good blender? I’m thinking BlendTec.

James Fallows has a post with some intriguing quotations:

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes today about the persistence into this moment’s news of the past centuries’ racial traumas and racist institutions. Mike Lofgren, who recently retired from a career as a Republican staffer in the Senate, and whom I have quoted before, by coincidence makes a directly parallel point about the origins of the filibuster and the recent return of “nullification” thinking by Republican members of the Senate.

(Nullification in a nutshell: it’s the proposition that if you oppose something that has already become law, you act as if its passage never happened, and that you have an ongoing right to thwart its coming into effect. Fans of the OJ Simpson trial will remember the parallel concept of “jury nullification.” Fans of the Civil War will remember the role of the “nullification crisis.”)

Lofgren writes about yesterday’s assertion by Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina that he doesn’t “want” the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, which has already been voted into existence, to take effect. Lofgren’s case is worth reading very carefully:

I’m not surprised Lindsey Graham thinks he’s rediscovered another tradition of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body. After having worked there, my reaction to the Senate’s hallowed traditions would be along the lines of Churchill’s response to an admonition that he was tampering with the traditions of the Royal Navy: “And what are those traditions? – rum, sodomy, and the lash!”

In the Senate’s case, it would definitely be the lash of chattel slavery. The restrictive, minoritarian makeup and procedures of the Senate (at least those enumerated in the Constitution – most of them were established piecemeal by the Senate’s membership at later times) did not arise solely from a disinterested desire to create a bulwark against a hypothetical future tyranny. They came into being in the first place partly as a compromise to protect slaveholding interests in the less populous Southern states. And the history of the Senate for the next seven decades after the founding was closely bound up with the antebellum South’s defense of slavery. After the Civil War, and for the next hundred years, the Senate was often the last ditch of defense of the Jim Crow system. The current 60-vote threshold is actually a reduction from the previous 67-vote threshold, and was to some extent a reaction to the bitter fights Strom Thurmond and his segregationist colleagues waged through the mid-1960s against civil rights legislation.

Talk about your rotten boroughs – the institutional compromise with slaveholders means we are stuck with a Senate where the voter in the smallest state gets more than 50 times the representation of a voter in the largest state. [JF note: actually, about 66 times, Wyoming vs California.] This accounts for some of the crazy legislation we are saddled with, from the various farm bills to the 1872 mining law. It also makes the State Department’s bellyaching about undemocratic procedures in other countries seem hypocritical.

And as for the old-world gentility – has the Senate unfailingly been the arena of Cato and Cicero, or people of a less exalted demeanor? For every La Follette or Fulbright, there have probably been at least three John Calhouns, Bully Brookses, Jeff Davises, Joe MacCarthys Theodore Bilbos, or Strom Thurmonds.

Trying to govern a complex society of 310 million people via a museum piece like the Senate is like trying to operate an airline whose fleet consists of Wright Flyers. The liberum veto system in 18th century Poland (whereby one delegate to the Polish diet could prevent its functioning)led inexorably to legislative dysfunction and at least partially to Poland’s inability to defend its own national existence. The S & P credit raters were not wrong when they attributed the reason for their downgrading the U.S. credit rating in August less to economic fundamentals than to political dysfunction.

Update. A reader from the national-security world amplifies the historical references in Lofgren’s message:

“And as for the old-world gentility – has the Senate unfailingly been the arena of Cato and Cicero, or people of a less exalted demeanor?”

Of course, Cato the Elder was a famous demagogue who helped provoke a genocidal war against the remnants of Carthage, and Cato the younger, was a self-righteous prig willing to bring down the Roman republic rather than embrace a the quite reasonable legislation of the First Triumvirate largely out of personal feud with Caesar who was having an affair with Cato’s half-sister.

Cicero ordered the extra-constitutional murder of members of the Cataline Conspiracy — including fellow Senators and even former consul Publius Cornelius Lentulus Sura. He later foundered about, looking for short-term political advantages instead of taking the high road and helping to defuse the political dynamics that led to the Civil War in 49 BC.

So, our current day Republicans are behaving quite like Cato and Cicero in many ways.

TYD will appreciate the Update.

In keeping a careful record of what I ate and how much I weighed for months and months, I came to the conclusion that starches were a problem. I in effect moved toward a low-carb diet: 1/3 c servings of starch (regular starch serving is 1/2 c) and picked low-carb veggies: greens, onions, celery, zucchini, fennel, leeks, and the like, and not so much squash, corn, or the like.

Now Marni Jameson reports in the LA Times:

Following a low-carb diet, even for only two days a week, was better than following a calorie-restricted diet every day for losing weight and lowering insulin levels, which are both associated with lower risks of breast and other cancers, says a new study presented Dec. 8 at the American Cancer Research Society meeting in San Antonio.

“Weight loss and reduced insulin levels are required for breast cancer prevention, but are difficult to achieve and maintain with conventional dietary approaches,” said Michelle Harvie, a research dietitian at the Genesis Prevention Center, at University Hospital in South Manchester, England.

Harvie, who presented the findings, and her colleagues randomly assigned 115 women, who were all overweight or obese and who also had a family history of breast cancer, to one of three diets.

They were asked to follow either:

• a low-calorie, low-carbohydrate diet for two days a week
• a low-carbohydrate diet that allowed unlimited protein and healthy fats, such as lean meats, olives and nuts, also for two days per week
• a low-calorie, Mediterranean-type diet for seven days a week.

Those in the first group were allowed 650 calories on the two days of their regimen. Those in the first two groups were limited to fewer than 50 grams of carbs on their diet days. The third group was allowed 1,500 calories a day.

The women followed the diets for four months, and 88 completed the study. The highest dropout rate was among the . . .

Continue reading.

Very interesting show. Video from Al Jazeera:

From this article in the Daily Mail, which has more photos and information.

The politicians who are in a position to do something about the economic wreckage seem completely clueless but utterly confident, resolutely ignoring advice from economists who actually have some understanding of the mechanisms involved. But politicians love their own ideas, and many of those reflect a punitive, dismissive attitude toward people who lack position, power, and oodles of money. That sort of people, in the view of politicians nowadays, are “them,” and the politicians and their lobbyists, friends, and corporate supporters are “us,” and the primary role the politicians see for themselves is protecting “us” from “them,” and also punishing “them” for lacking money, power, and position.

Politicians seem increasingly ignorant—of science, of history, of economics, and of just about everything except feathering their own nest—and so we are heading back to places we thought we’d escaped. Paul Krugman discusses the direction we’re going in his NY Times column:

It’s time to start calling the current situation what it is: a depression. True, it’s not a full replay of the Great Depression, but that’s cold comfort. Unemployment in both America and Europe remains disastrously high. Leaders and institutions are increasingly discredited. And democratic values are under siege.

On that last point, I am not being alarmist. On the political as on the economic front it’s important not to fall into the “not as bad as” trap. High unemployment isn’t O.K. just because it hasn’t hit 1933 levels; ominous political trends shouldn’t be dismissed just because there’s no Hitler in sight.

Let’s talk, in particular, about what’s happening in Europe — not because all is well with America, but because the gravity of European political developments isn’t widely understood.

First of all, the crisis of the euro is killing the European dream. The shared currency, which was supposed to bind nations together, has instead created an atmosphere of bitter acrimony.

Specifically, demands for ever-harsher austerity, with no offsetting effort to foster growth, have done double damage. They have failed as economic policy, worsening unemployment without restoring confidence; a Europe-wide recession now looks likely even if the immediate threat of financial crisis is contained. And they have created immense anger, with many Europeans furious at what is perceived, fairly or unfairly (or actually a bit of both), as a heavy-handed exercise of German power.

Nobody familiar with Europe’s history can look at this resurgence of hostility without feeling a shiver. Yet there may be worse things happening.

Right-wing populists are on the rise from Austria, where the Freedom Party (whose leader used to have neo-Nazi connections) runs neck-and-neck in the polls with established parties, to Finland, where the anti-immigrant True Finns party had a strong electoral showing last April. And these are rich countries whose economies have held up fairly well. Matters look even more ominous in the poorer nations of Central and Eastern Europe.

Last month . . .

Continue reading.

Of course, we see evolution in action every time we see a living entity: evolution never stops, never rests. But the time scale of evolution is so slow we normally can see the changes only through a fossil record that covers millions of years.

TYD, though, points out that songbird evolution is detectable. By Alastair Wilkins in io9:

If you just look at their DNA, the various South American songbird populations all look pretty much the same. But their outward appearances and the songs they sing couldn’t be more difficult. We’re witnessing the birth of multiple new species.

We’ve known since Charles Darwin that species can change and evolve into new species, and we have a good working understanding of a lot of the basic mechanisms involved. But identifying the specific steps that go into speciation – particularly among more complex organisms like vertebrates – is a little trickier, and that’s why the recent survey of South American songbirds by biologists at Queen’s University in Canada and the Argentine Museum of Natural History is so intriguing.

There are very few genetic differences between the various populations, and yet they look almost nothing alike and generally sing completely different songs. The researchers were able to trace a few seemingly crucial differences between populations, some in the male reproductive plumage, as a well a few key parts of the songs used to court females.

These differences – both of which are, intriguingly, tied up in the male side of reproduction – should have some genetic component, even if it’s just a subtle set of differences between populations. The researchers want to zero in on these, which they have dubbed “candidate genes”, in the hopes that they will help explain the beginning steps of speciation.

Lead researcher Leonarda Campagna offers this eloquent encapsulation, which brings their work all the way back to the very beginnings of evolutionary biology:

One of Darwin’s accomplishments was to show that species could change, that they were not the unaltered, immutable products of creation. However it is only now, some 150 years after the publication of his most important work, On the Origin of Species, that we have the tools to begin to truly understand all of the stages that might lead to speciation which is the process by which an ancestral species divides into two or more new species. Studies like ours teach us something about what species really are, what processes are involved and what might be lost if these and other species disappear.”

People who cannot see from the copious evidence that evolution is an absolute fact on the same level of reality as, say, gravity and whose blindness is due to their interpretation of something written in an ancient book—well, I don’t get it. The evidence in favor of evolution is written in reality, in the world around us; the “evidence” against is some phrases is an ancient book—well, in many ancient books: almost every culture has creation myths in which the living forms we see are due to the marriage of the sky and the rain with mud, or some such. I like those that include turtles, for what it’s worth. But reality paints a clear picture whose truth is undeniable to the functioning mind.

An interesting article in The Scientist by Thomas Finger and Sue Kinnamon:

In the choice of what to ingest, the sense of taste is both a guardian and a guide. The sensations of bitter and sour keep us from eating potentially toxic substances and strong acids, while the preferred qualities of sweet, umami (the “savory” taste of glutamate), and salty drive intake of carbohydrates, amino acids, and sodium, respectively. Taste sensations are mediated by taste buds—small clusters of specialized epithelial cells on the tongue, soft palate, and larynx. Over the last two decades, as scientists have uncovered the array of G protein–coupled receptor (GPCR) cascades and ion channels that underlie taste signaling, they have also discovered, to their surprise, that the expression of these receptors and channels is not limited to taste buds. Indeed, elements of the taste transduction cascade occur in many chemoresponsive epithelial cells scattered throughout the stomach, the intestines, and even the airways. Despite the similarities in receptor molecules and signaling cascades, however, only the chemoreceptive systems in the mouth evoke a sensation of taste. The others, researchers are learning, serve different functions depending on their location.

The taste transduction story

The sensations of taste are divisible into five distinct qualities: salty, sour, bitter, sweet, and umami. Salty and sour sensory perceptions rely on ion channels, which are expressed in a variety of tissues, such as kidney, as well as in taste buds. Bitter, sweet, and umami qualities rely predominantly on two distinct families of GPCRs, Tas1R and Tas2R (T1R and T2R), first identified in taste tissues in 1999, but subsequently identified in other tissues, including gut and airway epithelia. Despite the difference in the qualities detected by the two families of taste receptors, both utilize similar, if not identical, downstream signaling effectors, including the taste receptor-associated G protein α-gustducin, one of the first identified proteins of a GPCR taste transduction cascade. . .

Continue reading.

My weight went up, but now it’s dropping steadily: I had gotten to 181.9 lbs, which caused me panic and consternation, but now I’m at 178.9 as of this morning and I’m finding it easy to stay on track.

I found a new trick when I’m obsessing about having another bite of food in the evening after I’ve finished dinner. (The no-bites discipline is now in effect.) When I am impelled to go get another bite of grub, I think, “Well, I could have a clementine instead, which would satisfy the hunger.” That starts to sound good, but then, before I get out of my chair, I think, “Or an egg: one egg, over easy. That would be quick and tasty and filling.” I consider the egg, and when it starts to appeal, I then say to myself, “The grub was mighty good—just a spoonful or two would finish the meal.” That sounds good, but then I consider, “But the clementine is fruit: sweet and tasty.”

And so on. I find three things, and switch ‘wanting’ from one to the other until I decide, “To hell with it. Too much trouble.”

I don’t really understand the mental mechanism, but whatever is driving me toward a food is easily distracted, so I throw out the others, and by going around and around, thinking about the three foods (and it does seem to require three: two is not enough because one quickly thinks, “Why not both?”), it somehow frustrates the little mechanism driving the want until it collapses. I’m surprised at how well it works. The key is to focus on one until you’re about ready to get out of the chair, and then start thinking of another and its benefits (and taste) until you think you might go for it, then switch to the third, and so on. It seems to work.

It’s very much like throwing out one’s sandwiches to the wolves chasing his sleigh: throw them out one at a time, the wolves stop to fight over it and eat it, and you gain on them. As they approach again, throw another sandwich. Same tactic.

A terrific shave today. I used the Proraso pre-shave soap, which I’m liking quite a bit, and then I used my Mühle brush (as I promised NoHelmet) to make a totally wonderful Creamy Lather from the Klar Seifen Klassik shaving soap.

The Mühle is quite a wonderful brush, soft and fluffy like my Omega silvertips, and it works up a fine lather. The Klar Seifen I initially did not care for in the little tin, but (a) it’s a really good shaving soap, and (b) after using the Altesse shaving soap (also good), I found I really like cupping the soap in the palm of my non-dominant hand and lathering briskly away, covering that hand in lather as needed: it rinses right off.

In the next edition, I’m going to include a section on super shaving soaps—the soaps that seem exceptional—and Klar Seifen will be among them, along with the usual suspects: Fitjar Såpekokeri, Martin de Candre, Dr. Selby, Altesse, Creed’s Green Irish Tweed, Floris London…

Three passes of the vintage Merkur Slant, paying careful attention to the whiskers at the corner of my right jaw, which seem to simultaneously grow down and also to the side, toward my ear. By being careful in the ATG work,I got that patch perfectly smooth at last.

A good splash of the Klar Seifen Klassik aftershave (also on the short list of top faves), and I’m ready for the day.

That’s a recipe title, I guess. I cooked 1 c of black rice (30 min) and 1 cup and just over of white rice beans (1 hr or so). I cooked the beans (sans soaking) until they were just getting tender, because I wanted to use them in a dish. I had a large, very fresh bunch of red chard I could cook with them and some onion and all, but what for protein? I had sardines, so I decided to go Mediterranean and add halved Kalamata olives and diced Meyer lemon. Then tomatoes seem good. What I did:

Heat 2 Tbsp olive oil in a 4 qt sauté pan. (That much oil because I know this will be multiple meals.)

1 large and 1/2 medium Spanish onion, chopped
salt, pepper
spicy paprika

When onion is transparent and beginning to brown, add

Lots of minced garlic (I used 3 of the little shrink-wrapped packs of peeled garlic: had to use it up)
1 jalapeño pepper (I cook with what’s on hand)

I sautéed that for a minute, then added

all the cooked black rice
all the cooked rice beans (drained)
2 Tbsp homemade Worcestershire
2 cans sardines
1 can tuna (when the sardines didn’t seem enough—still fish, I figure)

I cooked that for a while, stirring to mix, then gingerly folded in the large bunch of red chard after chopping it pretty well—pan is getting full—and added

2 Meyer lemons, diced (cut into slabs, stacked two at a time, make 3 cuts one direction (producing 4 strips in each layer), 3 cuts at right angles (16 dice per layer)). I don’t peel these: the peel adds good flavor with the greens and fish.

It was somewhat dry, so I added

1 pint canned dry-farmed tomatoes with liquid
1 small wad slivered dried tomatoes
24 Kalamata olives, halved (no pits this time)

One could add herbs of various kinds. I had a bunch of asparagus on hand, so I added after the chard had simmered, covered, for 15 minutes and reduced in volume.

1 bunch asparagus, tough ends broken off, chopped

Then I cooked it covered for 10 minutes longer, stirring a couple of times.

Quite tasty. Traditional Mediterranean dish, no doubt.

I’m cooking some rice beans (small white beans, quite elongated in shape, that look like fat rice grains, in a way), and I thought I remembered that they didn’t require soaking. So I look up “rice beans” as a Google search. It was hopeless. Even with using the quotation marks, no joy. But The Wife found them immediately.

I’m cooking them to have them with black rice: I’m obsessed with the black/white color pairing, and as with the lentils I also get a complete protein. And red beans and black rice would look pretty cool as well.

I should cook some of the red rice and arrange red, black, and white rice to make flags—Trinidad and Tobago, or Yemen, or Sealand, according to this Wikipedia article. I’m using up the last of my rice beans on hand and I probably will not repurchase (based on nutritional factors, not on cute appearance) based on this Wikipedia article.

James Fallows is tracking this. His column is definitely worth reading.

Read this post by Fallows. This is truly serious.

Very interesting post on how the world is more complex and nuanced that our politics descry, via a useful post by James Fallows.

I really, really do not understand the way politicians think—free of meaning, focusing (apparently) totally on intonation or some other aspect.

Amazon has released an app for the iPhone that simplifies doing price comparisons. As Shan Li writes in the LA Times:

Amazon’s Price Check, promoted in recent months, has users identify a product by scanning its bar code, taking its picture or saying or typing in its name. The app then pulls up prices offered through Amazon.

The context makes it clear that the app shows prices not only from Amazon but also from other merchants (who sell through Amazon’s Web site).

The objection is, of course, that people will use the app to compare prices, the last thing on earth those charging higher prices want. But the phrasing of the objection is odd:

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) entered the fray, calling the promotion “anti-competitive” and “an attack on Main Street businesses that employ workers in our communities.”

I do not see how this is anti-competitive in any way. Indeed, I think the objection the merchants have is exactly that it is competitive.

I have become sadly out of step with the world, to the extent that what people say often makes no sense to me whatsoever.

UPDATE: I think I figured it out. Sen. Snowe is of the party that maintains competition is always good, always the way to best performance, greatest advances, and so on. Minds such as these have great difficulty in dealing with cooperative behavior, and quickly call it “socialistic” (which in their minds is a bad thing). Competition is so closely identified with what is good that “competitive” is often used as a synonym for “good”: “a competitive price,” “competitive performance,” and so on.

So when “competitive” means “good” and you want to call something “bad,” “anti-competitive” seems to be the right phrase. And it does not occur to people with this mindset that something they dislike and think is wrong could be “competition,” because competition always, everywhere and in all circumstances, leads to the best result. Since in this case it leads to a result they do not want, then it cannot (for that very reason) be “competition.”

One doesn’t want to call this sort of thinking “stupid,” so one won’t.

I hope you’ve tried this recipe. And I just discovered the reason for the name (at the link).

Via The Eldest:

No criminal charges, of course: the workers “belong” to the corporation, so if the corporation causes their deaths, no criminal penalties apply, though a fine may be charged. Certainly no issue of “guilt” or any tacky thing like that.

This reminds me most vividly of the nobleman’s coach that crushed peasants to death with no penalties attached. It was the peasants’ fault for being in the way, and it was the workers’ fault for working for Massey Energy.

Our government will no longer prosecute corporations for wrong-doing, apparently. At least not for killing people. Perhaps for something more serious.

David Uhlman, a law professor at the University of Michigan who was chief of the environmental crimes section at the Justice Department from 2000 to 2007, has this Op-Ed in the NY Times:

Early on April 5, 2010, in the heart of West Virginia coal country, a huge explosion killed 29 workers at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine. Later that day, President Obama directed Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis to conduct “the most thorough and comprehensive investigation possible” and to work with the Justice Department to investigate any criminal violations.

On Tuesday, the Labor Department issued a 972-page report on the calamity — the nation’s worst mining disaster in 40 years. It concluded that Massey’s “unlawful policies and practices” were the “root cause of this tragedy.” It identified over 300 violations of the Mine Safety and Health Act, including nine flagrant violations that contributed to the explosion.

The scathing findings probably came as no surprise in West Virginia, where Massey had a well-earned reputation for putting miners at risk, breaking unions and polluting the environment.

However, what jumped off the pages for me, as a former federal prosecutor, was the revelation that Massey had kept two sets of books at the mine: one for internal use, which recorded hazards, and a second for Mine Safety and Health Administration inspectors, which did not. In addition, Massey routinely gave its facilities advance notice of inspections, which is a crime under federal law, and intimidated its workers so that they would not report safety and health violations.

Based on the Labor Department’s investigation, the Justice Department could have criminally prosecuted Massey under the Mine Safety and Health Act for the violations that caused the explosion. Prosecutors also could have charged the company with conspiracy and obstruction of justice for the ways it thwarted regulation.

Instead, on the same day the devastating report was released, the Justice Department announced that it would not criminally prosecute Massey. The news release issued by the United States attorney misleadingly described its nonprosecution agreement with Massey’s new owners as “the largest ever criminal resolution in a mining investigation.”

Let’s be clear: this is not a criminal resolution. Massey will not be charged with any crimes and will not plead guilty before a federal judge. Nor will there be a sentencing hearing where Massey apologizes to the families of the victims and is punished for its crimes.

The deal with Massey . . .

Continue reading.