If you’re a serious coffee drinker, …

This is for you. Holds 3 Ventis (almost half a gallon: it holds 61 oz, half a gallon is 64). And read how well it insulates. You could stop by Starbucks for a fill-up and have coffee for most of the morning…

FBI believes it is above the law

My God, this feeling that the law does not apply is spreading. Certainly the law doesn’t apply to Barack Obama, who is free to ignore the treaty requirements (the highest law of the land) in the Convention Against Torture—nor did it apply to the torturers and those who murdered prisoners (apparently CIA). And now we see that the FBI was telling its agents that they could ignore the law. Once the notion is accepted that some, by virtue of their jobs or their offices, are above the law and can break the law publicly and with impunity—well, everyone wants to get on that train. Michael Schmidt and Charlie Savage report in the NY Times:

Training material used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation said agents had the “ability to bend or suspend the law and impinge on freedoms of others,” but that language has now been removed, according to a briefing the bureau recently provided to Congress.

The language suggesting that agents could bend the law was contained in 876 pages of training materials about Muslims and Arab-Americans the F.B.I. deemed to be offensive or inaccurate and removed after a review of about 160,000 pages of such material over the past six months, according to aides present at the briefing.

Also removed was the admonition that agents should never stare at or shake hands with an Asian, and the assertion that Arabs had “Jekyll and Hyde” personalities making them more likely to have “outbursts and loss of control” than even-keeled Westerners.

A description of some of the material deemed inappropriate was contained in a letter sent on Tuesday by Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, to the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III. The letter was first reported by Wired magazine, which last year published similar leaked training materials that prompted the F.B.I.’s broader review.

Michael Kortan, a spokesman for the F.B.I., confirmed the removal of the language suggesting “the ability to bend or suspend the law,” which he described as “inartful.” But — pointing to a set of talking points that apparently accompanied the material — he said the trainers meant that under normal circumstances, agents have the ability to eavesdrop legally on private communications if they obtain wiretap orders from a court.

“I cannot emphasize enough that we disagree with the implication that training attendees, who were analysts, were led to believe that we actually bend or suspend the law or anything like that,” Mr. Kortan said. . . [despite the clear language telling agents that they had the “ability to bend or suspend the law and impinge on freedoms of others.” Mr. Kortan is a VERY inartful liar. And it was NOT an “implication”, it was a totally clear and open statement. The scum. – LG]

Continue reading. I guess obeying the law is not so important now in the US. Having power is the thing—like the police officers I blogged yesterday who slammed a guy to the pavement for the perfectly legal act of photographing them making a traffic stop: the cops broke the law, but they will not be punished, because they have power. The guy was obeying the law, but that’s not the point nowadays in the US—at least in some obvious cases. And, in the case at hand (the FBI), the agents were clearly and explicitly told that they were not bound by the law. Great.

I would bet that the top priority in the FBI right now is to find who leaked the documents and do everything possible to destroy him/her and his/her career.

Back from retina doctor

Things proceed apace, and I see him again in 3 weeks. The bubble has gone down about halfway, and I can see clearly (though needing correction) the top half of things, but the bottom half is still obscured by the bubble. But wait! The bubble, being gas, would be on top of the vitreous fluid—and it is. I always forget: the eye uses a convex lens so image is reversed and upside down—our brain fixes that. So the “clear” part of my vision travels through the vitreous fluid, which is in the bottom of the eye, which is where the image of the tops of things is formed. (The light from the bottoms of things, naturally, goes through the convex lens and thus goes to the top of the retina, where the gas bubble still interferes.

I have the long-lasting gas bubble, but eventually it will go. And the retina repair is doing well.

Pilates analogy

From a letter I wrote to a friend:

In the movie Ordinary People, a family has lost their older son in a boating accident, and the younger son (played by Timothy Hutton) goes to see a psychiatrist (Judd Hirsch). It’s a town in Illinois, and Hutton goes upstairs in an office building to a hallway where the psychiatrist’s office is located. He’s standing front of the door (psychiatrist’s name on the frosted glass) when another door, farther down the hall, opens and Hirsch sticks his head out. He says that he’s the psychiatrist Hutton is to see, and to come on in.

So Hutton goes in and they begin the session. Hutton sees his (emotional) problems as a lack of control, so he’s telling Hirsch that he’s come in hopes of increasing his control of his emotions. Uh-oh. Hirsch explains that first, perhaps, they should explore what’s happened and see whether more control really is the answer.

And, of course, it turns out not to be the answer. The movie has nicely symbolized this: Hutton expects that he will go through the obvious door, but it turns out that a different door is opened and is the one he needs to go through.

That sort of thing happens with Pilates: you think you’re just going to get more fit, but it turns out that other doors open.

Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas calls for breaking up “too-big-to-fail” banks

And an excellent idea it is, too. Jesse Eisinger reports at ProPublica:

An annual report from a regional Federal Reserve bank is typically a collection of banalities and clichés with some pictures of local worthies who serve on the board.

And so it is with this year’s annual report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, whose pages are graced by the smiling, stolid portraits of board members who run local companies like Whataburger Restaurants.

But the text is something else entirely. It’s a radical indictment of the nation’s financial system. The lead essay, which is endorsed by the president of the Dallas Fed, contends that despite the great crisis of 2008, a cartel of megabanks is still hindering the economic recovery and the institutions remain too big to fail.

The country’s biggest banks look much as they did before the 2008 financial crisis — only bigger. They have “increased oligopoly power” and “remain difficult to control because they have the lawyers and the money to resist the pressures of federal regulation,” Harvey Rosenblum, the head of the Dallas Fed’s research department, wrote in the essay.

Having seen the biggest banks make risky bets, crush the economy and get rewarded leaves “a residue of distrust for the government, the banking system, the Fed and capitalism itself,” Mr. Rosenblum wrote.

It’s one thing for the Occupy movement to point out how bailing out the biggest banks — with little cost to their executives or shareholders and creditors — has demolished credibility. It’s quite another for top officials in the Federal Reserve system to put it in an annual report.

As for Dodd-Frank’s “resolution authority” — the power to dissolve big financial institutions that Barney Frank famously hailed as a death panel for banks — well, not so much. “For all its bluster, Dodd-Frank leaves TBTF entrenched,” Mr. Rosenblum wrote, using the acronym for “too big to fail.”

Yes, Dodd Frank has mechanisms in place to prevent taxpayer bailouts of the largest banks, he concedes. Banks are supposed to have “living wills” that explain how they could be seized and wound down while minimizing the use of taxpayer money.

But the Dallas Fed is deeply skeptical that this would work in real life. . .

Continue reading.

Homemade veggie burgers (good for vegans, too)

This recipe looks pretty good. I think I may make it. Ingredients:

Note: For best texture, the veggie burgers must be cooked within thirty minutes of adding bread crumbs or they will become mushy. To prepare in advance, combine all ingredients except for crumbs and mix in the crumbs just before forming the patties and serving.

Special equipment: food processor

Yield: makes about 2 pounds veggie burger mix, active time 1 hour, total time 1 1/2 hours

• 1 1/2 pounds button mushrooms, trimmed
• 1/4 cup canola oil (or grapeseed oil)
• Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 6 thyme sprigs
• 1 whole small eggplant (about 1/2 pound)
• 2 large leeks, chopped fine (about 1 1/2 cups)
• 1 large celery rib, chopped fine (about 1/2 cup)
• 1 medium clove garlic, grated on a microplane grater (about 1 teaspoon)
• 3/4 cup dry pearl barley
• 1 (14-ounce) can garbanzo beans, drained and patted dry on paper towels
• 1 cup toasted cashews, pinenuts, or a mix
• 1 teaspoon Marmite, Vegemite, or Maggi seasoning
• 1 teaspoon soy sauce
• 1 1/2-cups panko-style bread crumbs (see note above)

Top 10 lessons learned from the Iraq War

Well, maybe “learned” is inaccurate. Stephen M. Walt has an excellent article at Foreign Policy. Really: an essential article, especially as we now consider war with Iran. It begins:

This month marks the ninth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Regardless of your views on the wisdom of that decision, it’s fair to say that the results were not what most Americans expected.  Now that the war is officially over and most U.S. forces have withdrawn, what lessons should Americans (and others) draw from the experience? There are many lessons that one might learn, of course, but here are my Top 10 Lessons from the Iraq War.

Lesson #1:  The United States lost. The first and most important lesson of Iraq war is that we didn’t win in any meaningful sense of that term. The alleged purpose of the war was eliminating Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, but it turns out he didn’t have any. Oops. Then the rationale shifted to creating a pro-American democracy, but Iraq today is at best a quasi-democracy and far from pro-American. The destruction of Iraq improved Iran’s position in the Persian Gulf — which is hardly something the United States intended — and the costs of the war (easily exceeding $1 trillion dollars) are much larger than U.S. leaders anticipated or promised. The war was also a giant distraction, which diverted the Bush administration from other priorities (e.g., Afghanistan) and made the United States much less popular around the world.This lesson is important because supporters of the war are already marketing a revisionist version. In this counternarrative, the 2007 surge was a huge success (it wasn’t, because it failed to produce political reconciliation) and Iraq is now on the road to stable and prosperous democracy. And the costs weren’t really that bad. Another variant of this myth is the idea that President George W. Bush and Gen. David Petraeus had “won” the war by 2008, but President Obama then lost it by getting out early. This view ignores the fact that the Bush administration negotiated the 2008 Status of Forces agreement that set the timetable for U.S. withdrawal, and Obama couldn’t stay in Iraq once the Iraqi government made it clear it wanted us out.

The danger of this false narrative is obvious: If Americans come to see the war as a success — which it clearly wasn’t — they may continue to listen to the advice of its advocates and be more inclined to repeat similar mistakes in the future.

Lesson #2: It’s not that hard to hijack the United States into a war. The United States is still a very powerful country, and the short-term costs of military action are relatively low in most cases. As a result, wars of choice (or even “wars of whim”) are possible. The Iraq war reminds us that if the executive branch is united around the idea of war, normal checks and balances — including media scrutiny — tend to break down.

The remarkable thing about the Iraq war is how few people it took to engineer. It wasn’t promoted by the U.S. military, the CIA, the State Department, or oil companies. Instead, the main architects were a group of well-connected neoconservatives, who began openly lobbying for war during the Clinton administration. They failed to persuade President Bill Clinton, and they were unable to convince Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to opt for war until after 9/11. But at that point the stars aligned, and Bush and Cheney became convinced that invading Iraq would launch a far-reaching regional transformation, usher in a wave of pro-American democracies, and solve the terrorism problem.

As the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman told Ha’aretz in May 2003: “Iraq was the war neoconservatives wanted… the war the neoconservatives marketed…. I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office [in Washington]) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.”

Lesson #3: The United States gets in big trouble when . . .

Continue reading.

More censorship from the MPAA Ratings Board

This action by the MPAA Ratings Board is high-handed and stupid. Andrew O’Hehir reports in Salon:

With its unerring instinct for being on the wrong side of every major social and aesthetic issue, the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings board has refused to budge off its R rating for “Bully,” an earnest and moving documentary made for and about tormented preteens and teenagers. There’s almost a perverse, Santorum-style integrity about the MPAA’s staunch resistance. Its ratings board — an anonymous group of Los Angeles-area parents — stands tall for some unspecified and imaginary set of American values, in the face of a viral lobbying campaign that has enlisted Justin Bieber, Johnny Depp, Martha Stewart, Ellen DeGeneres and nearly 500,000 other people, and made an overnight media celebrity out of 17-year-old Katy Butler, a self-described victim of bullying who started the online petition.

But what’s really perverse, of course — not to mention cruel and repellent — is a ratings decision that ensures that the kids who most need the succor that “Bully” has to offer are now the least likely to see it. I’m both a parent and a movie critic, and I understand the usefulness of a ratings code and the impossibility of screening all entertainment options for your kids in advance. But while the MPAA board pretends to be a source of neutral and non-ideological advice to parents, it all too often reveals itself to be a velvet-glove censorship agency, seemingly devoted to reactionary and defensive cultural standards. In the “Bully” case, the board has ended up doing what it usually does: favoring the strong against the weak, further marginalizing the marginalized, and enforcing a version of “family values” that has all sorts of unspoken stereotypes about gender and sexuality and race and other things baked into it. In short, the MPAA has sided with the bullies and creeps.

Controversies over MPAA ratings are nothing new, of course, and there’s already an entire documentary film — Kirby Dick’s “This Film Is Not Yet Rated” — devoted to the subject. But in the past they’ve usually concerned depictions of non-normative sexuality (especially lesbian/gay sex, or adult female sexuality of any kind), about which the ratings board is infamously panicky, or violence, which is tolerated at almost any level and intensity. In stigmatizing a social-issue documentary, the ratings board has accidentally opened up a new front in the culture wars — one where, over the long haul, its nervous-Nellie neo-Puritan values are unlikely to prevail.

Without doubt, the MPAA has handed “Bully” director Lee Hirsch and Harvey Weinstein, whose company is releasing the film, a formidable marketing weapon and a tremendous amount of free publicity. Even more significantly, it has provided Weinstein an opening to drive a wedge into the MPAA’s rating system and its hegemonic control over what films are shown where. As promised some weeks ago, the Weinstein Co. will now release “Bully” without a rating, which would ordinarily kill off any chance of reaching a mass audience. While MPAA ratings have no legal force, national cinema chains generally won’t program unrated movies, and often can’t advertise them in newspapers. (Unrated releases are assumed to be adult-oriented indies or foreign films, released by specialty distributors and confined to art-house theaters.)

Mind you, there’s no one in show business who knows how to sell a movie from a maverick or outsider position better than Harvey Weinstein. He has apparently persuaded AMC, the second-largest theater chain in North America, to screen “Bully” in some locations, and it’s possible other exhibitors will follow suit. But while the pissing contest between Weinstein and the MPAA should make for good spectator sport — and may further erode the MPAA’s power, which is certainly welcome — it’s still true that middle schools and high schools won’t be able to screen “Bully” for their students, and that in most cases theaters showing it won’t admit unaccompanied teenagers.

At least officially, the R rating for “Bully” is a response to some frank teenage conversation (especially the use of the word “fuck,” always a shibboleth). As a parent of young children, I wholeheartedly agree that young people should be instructed to avoid such language at Grandma’s dinner table (or within adult earshot generally). But are we really expected to take that seriously? A few F-bombs in a sober, serious, troubling documentary — and that’s what we need to protect real-life teenagers from? As I see it, the smatterings of profane language make a convenient stand-in for all the stuff in “Bully” that’s genuinely obscene, and that can and should make us all uncomfortable. Like the story of Kelby Johnson of Tuttle, Okla., a 16-year-old out lesbian who has been ostracized by her entire town, including her teachers, school officials and other authorities; or 17-year-old Tyler Long of rural Georgia, an awkward and introverted kid who hanged himself in his bedroom closet after years of taking abuse from classmates and being ignored by adults; or 14-year-old Ja’Meya Jackson of Yazoo County, Miss., who went to prison after confronting her school-bus tormentors with a loaded gun.

No one knows exactly how or why . . .

Continue reading. Bullying is common, and to make it visible and show the human costs of bullying should not be stymied by bluestocking concerns.

Another interesting talk—remember Hypercard?

Dying in the 21st Century

Very interesting talk. Since all of use will die in the 21st century, it’s certainly relevant.

Guns: What would it take for the US to consider reasonable restrictions on firearms?

It’s hard to imagine anything that would move the US toward more reasonable restrictions on firearms ownership. Drew Westen has an interesting column on the topic in the NY Times, from which I quote:

. . . President Obama delivered a moving speech on Jan. 12 at the scene of the carnage in Tucson. In it, the president called on the nation to mourn not only the shooting of a beloved member of Congress but the lives of the people who died at the hands of Giffords’ assailant, including a 9-year-old girl and a federal judge. But on neither that national day of mourning nor on any day since has the president or the members of Congress, who are either too frightened or too corrupted by the National Rifle Association, honored Giffords or the memory of those who died in that massacre in Tucson in the most appropriate way: with a return to common sense, like reestablishing the assault weapons ban that might have saved their lives. Later in January, Representative Carolyn McCarthy and Senator Frank Lautenberg proposed legislation to outlaw high-capacity magazines; it has gone nowhere.

The first President Bush, unlike his swaggering son (who advocated the demise of a ban on assault weapons whose sole purpose is to hunt humans) showed political courage by publicly quitting the N.R.A. in disgust in 1995 when it began advocating ideas like its contention that citizens need military-style assault weapons to protect themselves against our own government (members, for example, of the National Guard). In colorful but paranoid language, it called law enforcement officers “jack-booted government thugs,” prompting the elder Bush to condemn the group for its disrespect for the law and those who defend it. Since then, it has successfully advocated for increasingly radical laws. One of them, of course, is Florida’s “stand your ground” law, which discourages de-escalation of potential firefights in public with predictable results, like the shooting death in Sanford, Fla., of Trayvon Martin.

Between the Giffords massacre and Martin’s death, we have seen more shootings and more bipartisan moments. Around the anniversary of the Tucson massacre that cut short the congressional career of an extraordinary woman — a woman I had come to know personally and adore in her five years in Congress — came two more mass killings. One occurred in Chardon High School in a small town in Ohio, as a 17-year-old opened fire on students with a Ruger .22-caliber semiautomatic with a capacity of 10 rounds. Fortunately the alleged shooter, T.J. Lane, didn’t have access to a gun with more firepower. About two weeks later, a man entered one of the nation’s premiere medical centers, at the University of Pittsburgh, with two semiautomatic handguns, and opened fire.

And in yet another show of bipartisanship, political leaders on both sides of the aisle put on their silencers. If an assassination attempt on one of their own did not move members of Congress to ask whether the N.R.A. has a little too much sway in their chambers, a few dead and wounded teenagers, medical patients, and their family members were not going to unlock their safeties. Most have clearly made the risk assessment that they have more to fear from the N.R.A. than they do from an occasional sniper. In the 2010 election cycle, the N.R.A. spent over $7 million in independent expenditure campaigns for and against specific candidates, and it has a remarkable record of success at taking out candidates and elected officials with the misfortune of being caught in its crosshairs.

Over a million Americans have lost their lives to gunfire since that awful spring of 1968 when both Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were killed by assassins’ bullets. Last year alone guns killed or wounded another100,000 Americans; roughly 30,000 of them died. Had that occurred elsewhere, we would call it genocide.We don’t know exactly how many have been killed in the fighting in Libya, Egypt and Syria, but our elected officials have had far less trouble calling for the ouster of Middle Eastern leaders than the leadership of the N.R.A.

But it’s not just money that prevents common-sense action on gun violence in America. Millions of Americans hunt, and a third of all households in the United States own a gun. Guns were part of the frontier culture that shaped the American psyche, and hunting has passed from generation to generation in much of America. As a son of the South, I could give an intruder a run for his money (although, like most people, I would do better to rely first on our security service and the loud alarm a break-in sets off), and I put on my thickest Southern accent and tease my soon-to-be teenage daughter that I’ll be out on the front porch “cleaning my shotgun” when her first date arrives at the door.

In so many cases, it’s a failure of our leaders — Republicans, who prey on the fears of their constituents and don’t even bother anymore to hide the puppet strings pulled by large corporations, and Democrats, who too frequently forget that humans are supposed to be vertebrates (and hence to have a spine) — to speak to Americans’ ambivalence about guns. Over the years in my capacity as a strategic messaging consultant, I’ve tested a range of messages on guns, and the messages that resonate with hunters and gun owners sound like this: “If you need an M-16 to hunt deer, you shouldn’t be anywhere near a damned gun,” or “If you’re hunting with an AK-47, you’re not bringing that meat home for dinner.” The first things responsible hunters teach are never to point a gun anywhere but up or down unless you mean to shoot, and where the safety is. . .

Read the whole thing.

Should wrong-doing be reported to authorities?

That is, if you know of or observe a crime being committed, or even a serious violation of rules and regulations, do you have any duty to recognize and report it (assuming that confronting the miscreant is unwise or impossible, or if s/he persists after confrontation)?

My own thought is “yes,” but the water is muddied by “loyalty”. For example, suppose the miscreant belongs to a group to which you belong. For many people, that ends the discussion: group loyalty is the highest morality for these, so reporting a fellow group member’s wrong-doing would mean being disloyal (to the group or to the fellow group member). The moral thing to do is either to ignore the misdeed or indeed to help cover it up.

We see this constantly: in the Catholic hierarchy, in police forces, in the military, in business: group members are constantly told that loyalty is the paramount virtue, and informing the authorities of misdeeds in the group is contemptible.

That’s why I don’t much value loyalty as a virtue: it seems to mean mostly to ignore or hide wrongdoing. Indeed, loyalty seems to become an issue only if the group or members of it are doing something wrong. If everything’s going fine, loyalty is no problem, but if you detect (say) someone in your department is taking kickbacks, are you “loyal” to him? or do you report the crime? What if he’s your uncle/cousin/brother/whatever? Does that require you to choose between becoming an accomplice or being “disloyal”? Indeed, for many a simple criticism of something the US is doing or has done is prima facie evidenceof “disloyalty”.

Why, exactly, is loyalty so important? Can someone explain to me what benefits it provides?

Right now I’m reading the Wikipedia article on loyalty.

“We’re all born believers”

The way the mind works—assuming an agent is responsible to initiate movement, and readily accepting that agents can be invisible, plus an assumption that because we do things for a purpose, everything we see is similarly done for a purpose—predisposes us to religious belief. (This does not, of course, speaking the the factual truth of religious belief: that is, those who believe in a religion will view the mind’s structure as God helping us along toward finding Him, while those who disbelieve in religion will see religion as an outgrowth of a quirk of the mind developed via evolution—much as our minds push us toward common errors in decision-making. These quirks of our mind were studied intensely by Daniel Kahneman got a Nobel prize for the work he did with Amos Tversky (who had died by the time the prize was awarded) and gave rise to the new field of behavioral economics.

The common errors can be corrected, but knowing the tendency is useful in avoiding the errors. Winning Decisions, by Russo and Schoemaker, is an excellent guide to avoiding the most common errors to which evolution has directed our minds. Well worth study. An earlier version of the book, titled Decision Traps: The Ten Barriers to Decision-Making and How to Overcome Them, is readily available (link is to used editions for $1). It’s really an excellent book: the process of making a decision consists of 4 steps, and the book discusses the two most common errors made at each step, plus the most common error in even approaching the decision, and the common (and critical) error following the decision. Highly recommended. $1. Think about it.

To continue: Because our minds have a tendency to operate in a particular way does NOT (a) mean that we’re stuck with the automatic process/assumptions, nor (b) that the automatic process gives the best answers. Now that we can think, we can improve over the natural tendencies (just as we have improved our natural condition in nature by developing language, which led to the accumulation of human culture: the knowledge expressed through our daily activities of making and using things and ideas—at first just from observation but, as we developed our ability to reason (beyond mere rationalization) and to create carefully structured experience (experiments) as a way to learn specific things).

At any rate, scientists are beginning to discover why religion is such a common response to the phenomenon of existence, even though even the religious will agree that our evolved tendency to be religious leads most of us astray. That is, most people believe in false religions, a statement with which even the religious will agree. (Regardless of the religion that Person A believes, s/he’ll find that most of the world does not accept that religion but believes instead in a false religion (i.e., for Person A, a religion other than A’s own) or don’t believe in religion at all.

So what are these tendencies? Justin Barrett describes them in an article in New Scientist:

By the time he was 5 years old, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart could play the clavier and had begun to compose his own music. Mozart was a “born musician”; he had strong natural talents and required only minimal exposure to music to become fluent.

Few of us are quite so lucky. Music usually has to be drummed into us by teaching, repetition and practice. And yet in other domains, such as language or walking, virtually everyone is a natural; we are all “born speakers” and “born walkers”.

So what about religion? Is it more like music or language?

Drawing upon research in developmental psychology, cognitive anthropology and particularly the cognitive science of religion, I argue that religion comes nearly as naturally to us as language. The vast majority of humans are “born believers”, naturally inclined to find religious claims and explanations attractive and easily acquired, and to attain fluency in using them. This attraction to religion is an evolutionary by-product of our ordinary cognitive equipment, and while it tells us nothing about the truth or otherwise of religious claims it does help us see religion in an interesting new light.

As soon as they are born, babies start to . . .

Continue reading.

The military calling

The military profession was one a regular calling, along with things like the law, the church, and medicine. In recent years, because of the incompetence of many officers and commanders as well as poor choices of wars to fight, many view the military with a jaundiced eye. It’s important to realize that the military can be much more than the US has frequently made of it. Via Scott Feldstein’s blog, I happened upon this excellent talk by a guy who seems to be an admirable officer. Well worth watching.

Another extraordinary shave

So I tried a shave similar to yesterday’s: different pre-shave soap (went with MR GLO), different brush (though still a Rooney), different shaving cream (though an excellent shaving cream), and different aftershave balm (though quite similar to the Primalan), but the same razor and blade.

So my thought is that the Weber ARC is quite good at removing stubble that lies flat to escape cutting—that, or else I’m getting the knack.

I think I’ll continue with the shaving creams a bit and see if I can continue the streak of superb shaves. Tomorrow, though, I’ll use the other Weber, probing at whether it’s the head design or the coating.