On those bags of chopped, washed, mixed lettuce
I’m so old I can remember when you had to wash and dry lettuce by hand. What a pain in the neck that was.
Then came a fabulous invention: the salad spinner. Salad spinners may seem pretty primitive to you younguns, but I can assure you that when they first came out they seemed like a marvelous advance.
Then, wonder of wonders, came bagged and washed lettuce mixes of all types. What convenience!
But it turns out that all is not wonderful with those little baggies, after all:
“Mass-produced chopped, bagged lettuce that gets shipped around the US amplifies the risk of poisoning,” [Marler, a food safety attorney] said.
Instead of shipping heads of lettuce or large carrot sticks that people wash, we chop them and mix them up in processing, then package them in plastic bags. In that process, Marler said, “The bacteria has a chance to grow. And a lot of people get sick.”
This prepackaging makes it harder to find the cause of a food poisoning outbreak. Different lettuces grown at different farms get mixed into bags that are distributed at supermarkets and restaurants all over the country, so food safety officials need to search for the common link among suppliers.
“When it gets processed, you might have four to five farms supplying the processor on any day. So was it farmer one, two, three, or four that was contaminated?” Marler asked. It also means that when something goes awry in a batch, it can cause a very widespread problem ”” like the one we’re seeing now [with romaine].
…“I think the [question] is: Is the convenience worth the risk?”
That indeed is the question.
E. coli is dangerous and can even kill. That said, it is very rare for a person to die from it. For example, so far in the recent romaine lettuce outbreak no deaths have been reported. I don’t eat romaine lettuce ordinarily, but there’s nothing special about romaine that predisposes it to the problem, so avoiding romaine is not the solution, except temporarily. I probably won’t be going back to the old rip-soak-and-spin method any time soon, though.
Juror in Cosby trial says Cosby’s 2005 deposition on Quaaludes sealed the deal [Part I]
[NOTE: I feel like I might be belaboring this Cosby situation, since I already wrote a post describing some of the miscarriages of justice I noticed about the Cosby trial. But I continue to learn new things about that trial that bother me, and so I’ve written this 2-parter to describe two of them. Whether Cosby is guilty or innocent (and on the whole I think he’s probably guilty), I don’t think he got a fair trial, and I find that very disturbing.]
This is interesting:
[Cosby juror] Harrison Snyder said in an interview aired Monday on ABC’s Good Morning America that Cosby’s deposition ”” in which he admitted giving women drugs to have sex with them ”” was the evidence that made him believe Cosby was guilty [of assaulting Constand]…
The 22-year-old said it “wasn’t an open-and-shut case” but that he had no doubt the jury made the right decision in convicting Cosby Thursday on three counts of aggravated indecent assault.
Why was that 2005 deposition allowed into evidence in the first place in the criminal trial? This article from a month ago indicates the judge originally seemed to be leaning against it. But the testimony was allowed, and in the articles I’ve found about that decision (for example, this one) I haven’t seen much explanation of the judge’s reasoning behind it.
What was the 2005 deposition about? Remember as you read this that the recent criminal trial and the 2005 civil trial were both about an act alleged to have occurred in 2004, although the questions in the deposition and the act or acts admitted to therein occurred during the 1970s [emphasis mine]:
Cosby apparently obtained quaaludes [legally] through a prescription, the AP reported.
In the deposition, which stemmed from a sexual abuse case against Cosby filed by a former Temple University employee [Constand], Cosby was asked by a lawyer, “When you got the quaaludes [in the 1970s], was it in your mind that you were going to use these quaaludes for young women that you wanted to have sex with?” Cosby answered, “Yes.”…
“There is no acknowledgement that he gave the quaalude to someone underage, or to a woman who wasn’t consenting,” Brafman told TIME. “Quaalude was the love drug of choice in those years. Doctors were lawfully prescribing it in those years.”…
Quaaludes, the brand name for methaqualone, were a popular sleeping pill in the 1960s and were used in the 1970s and ’80s as a club drug, particularly to help people come off of a cocaine high…In 1984 President Ronald Reagan signed a law banning the production of the drug, making it illegal. Cosby’s admission concerns a period during the 1970s, when quaaludes would have been legal with a prescription.
Philip Jenkins, a professor of history at Baylor University and the author of Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America, who spoke generally about the use of quaaludes in the ’70s and not specifically about how Bill Cosby may have used them, said that drug was indeed believed to be an aphrodisiac that consenting adults could use to have sex. “Quaaludes were something that was meant to send you to sleep,” Jenkins told TIME. “But it was also supposed to be the world’s greatest aphrodisiac. It was meant to knock you out, but also give you an overpowering sense of sexual urge.”
Cosby has said that the pills he gave Constand were Benadryl, by the way, and Constand has claimed the pills were blue in color. But quaaludes apparently never came in blue.
A bit more detail about Cosby’s actual testimony in the 2005 deposition can be found here:
In the civil deposition, Cosby acknowledged obtaining seven different prescriptions for Quaaludes during the 1970s, and said he’d used them with a woman named Theresa at the Las Vegas Hilton sometime during that decade.
“Did you ever give the Quaaludes to any other female but Theresa?” Constand attorney Dolores Troiani asked him during the 2005 deposition.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Did you ever give any of those young women Quaaludes without their knowledge?” Troiani asked.
“I misunderstood. Woman, not women. Just her,” he responded.
So, he admitted to using quaaludes with one woman and contemplating their use with others in the 70s. He never answered the question about consent because his lawyer objected to the question and the objection was apparently sustained. Here is Therese’s (that’s the proper spelling) description of what happened [emphasis mine]:
Therese Serignese, now 57, was 19 (and known by her maiden name, Therese Picking) and standing with her younger brother and sister outside of a gift shop of the Las Vegas Hilton in 1976 when, she says, a man approached her from behind, slowly slipped his left arm around her shoulder, and said in a teasingly playful voice, “Will you marry me?”
She says she turned to face Cosby, the hotel’s headline act.
He offered her ”“ and only her ”“ a free ticket to his show, she says. And when she was escorted backstage afterward to the green room, she remembers feeling that she was meant to stay as the 10 or so other people there made their goodbyes. Alone with the entertainer, she claims he approached her on a couch, held out his hand, “and he had two pills there, and a glass of water, and he told me to take them,” she tells PEOPLE.
The pills, she says, were Quaaludes. “He identified what they were; that’s how I knew,” she says. “At that point I didn’t know what to do, so I just obeyed. I just did it.”
She then remembers having intercourse without having given consent.
If Therese Serignese is telling the truth (and let’s say she is) there is no excuse for Cosby’s behavior. He was 42 and she 19, and he was predatory and exploitative of her youth and inexperience. Was it rape? I would say there’s a strong case for it.
But as far as her consent to just the pill-taking goes (not the sex, but the pill-taking), she did give consent, even by her own admission. I wonder—I really wonder—whether that detail was ever introduced into the recent criminal trial.
The fact that a juror such as Snyder was influenced to believe Cosby was guilty by Cosby’s admissions in that deposition shows why that testimony should most likely have been excluded, in my opinion. I’ve seen no indication that the deposition dealt with the question of consent to the pills, which was very important. The other party in that incident with the admitted use of quaaludes (Ms. Serignese) was apparently not questioned during the criminal trial on that issue (or on any other issue). I don’t know how much testimony was allowed in the criminal trial about the fact that quaaludes were commonly used as party drugs back in the 1970s, but it seems to me that that should make their use back then irrelevant to an incident alleged to have occurred around thirty years later. A juror such as Snyder, who is 22 years old, would have had no context in which to place the 1970s acts described in the deposition, and I wonder whether he was given any such context.
I don’t know if this entire situation troubles you, but it troubles me. And—as I indicated in my previous post—this sort of thing disturbs me whether or not Bill Cosby is guilty. I happen to think that the evidence on the whole indicates that he is guilty, but from what I know so far (without having been on the jury and heard all the evidence, of course) I would say his guilt has not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. And yet he was convicted, apparently because of evidence like that deposition, which seems to have made the difference for at least one juror.
[Part II is coming soon. It concerns an agreement that may or may not have been made with Cosby in that civil trial, a deal that would have barred his deposition from being used in a criminal trial.]
Was offline…
…now online.
I’m at Comcast’s mercy.
Egad
I don’t know what to make of this, but it certainly caught my attention:
In a passing statement, North Korean officials said they wanted their regime to be a “normal country” and brought up the possibility of a “McDonalds-style” US investment.
Are millennials edging away from the Democrats?
If this poll is any indication, the answer is “yes.”
That doesn’t mean they’re going over to the Dark Side—i.e. the GOP. But more of them are in the undecided camp, and might at some point end up flipping their votes:
The online survey of more than 16,000 registered voters ages 18 to 34 shows their support for Democrats over Republicans for Congress slipped by about 9 percentage points over the past two years, to 46 percent overall. And they increasingly say the Republican Party is a better steward of the economy.
Although nearly two of three young voters polled said they do not like Republican President Donald Trump, their distaste for him does not necessarily extend to all Republicans or translate directly into votes for Democratic congressional candidates.
This is mainly among white millennials, but of course as we’ve seen with the recent furor over Candace Owens and Kanye West, the future may hold a possibility that some (I doubt very many, but some) black millennials will be starting to wonder, too.
Netanyahu’s Iranian files
Netanyahu made an announcement today:
Netanyahu, a longtime opponent of the nuclear agreement, said Israeli forces had recently seized reams of secret documents from Iran detailing what he called Tehran’s past attempts to conceal a military nuclear program. Iran has always insisted that it is developing nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
“Tonight we’re going to reveal new and conclusive proof of the secret nuclear weapons program that Iran has been hiding,” Netanyahu said. “Iran lied. Big time. After signing the nuclear deal in 2015, Iran intensified its effort to hide its nuclear files.”…
The files predate the 2015 nuclear deal and thus do not reveal a technical violation of that agreement, which Trump has threatened to abandon next month. Many U.S. officials and experts have long believed that Iran conducted research into the development of nuclear weapons in the past decade.
So these files constitute evidence that what most people suspected was true of Iran actually was true of Iran.
And, by extrapolation, probably still is true of Iran.
The opposition says it’s really irrelevant:
“While Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump have long been determined to undermine this agreement, their own security establishments continue to confirm that the deal is working and that Iran is compliant with all of its commitments. Nothing we were shown today contradicts or disproves that expert assessment,” said Dylan Williams, [J Street’s] vice president of government affairs.
And I have to say that it’s not clear what’s new here, except for the details. After all:
[Q] So when Netanyahu says the entire basis for the deal was a lie, he’s only partly correct: Iran may have lied, but the deal was already based on the assumption that Iran had lied?
[A] That’s absolutely correct. I would say that the basis for the deal was a face-saving way out for Iran whereby we didn’t make the Iranians fess up that they had a nuclear weapons program. Of course it would have been better if they had been willing to do that. But in order to get the deal we chose not to force the Iranians to fess up.
I’m obviously not condoning Iran lying to the IAEA, and of course these documents need to be fully investigated for their veracity and the IAEA should push Iran on the information found in these documents. So I’m not saying we shouldn’t just ignore it. But I am saying that we forged the Iran deal on the basis that Iran had a nuclear weapons program that it wasn’t about to admit to.
If you make a deal with liars, why would they not lie again? I think the argument of people such as James Acton, the co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace and the person being interviewed in the above quote, is that if we don’t trust them the situation is dire. Of course, the situation is dire if we do trust them and they’re not trustworthy.
Reagan said “trust but verify” (which was actually an old Russian proverb). When Obama was negotiating the Iran deal, the administration supposedly changed the saying to “distrust but verify”—which would have to mean “that the P5+1 deal must verifiably eliminate any pathway to nuclear development for Iran.” The problem is that it didn’t.
[NOTE: I think there is also some significance in the fact that it may have been Israel who just attacked some weapons sites in Syria. My guess is that this is a message to Iran.]
[ADDENDUM: Also, Iran must be wondering how those files were obtained. And “wondering” is a mild word for what I mean.]
The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner: so funny I forgot to laugh
The brouhaha over the jokes (that should be the “jokes”) at the White House correspondents’ dinner is basically a big yawn.
The most interesting part of it is that even some people on the Democratic side of things seem to have been a bit put off by the mean-spirited quality of the “humor” on display that night. Or maybe they were merely put off by an approach that seems to have targeted Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ looks. Or maybe they just felt the proceedings exposed too much of their own venom, contradicting their own version of themselves as objective purveyors of truth, and made it seem as though the abominable Donald Trump showed great good judgment in boycotting them.
I bet certain other attendees wish they hadn’t been there, too
But my takeaway is: why would anyone be surprised at this? This sort of freely-expressed bile has long ago become mainstream. And comedians are for the most part no longer the least bit funny.
I don’t think that latter observation is solely because I’ve become an old curmudgeon myself, although I suppose I have. But I’ve noticed that being edgy, offensive, and obscene has become a substitute for humor these days.
I used to actually go to comedy clubs now and then. The last time I did was a long time ago, and the transition had already occurred. I didn’t laugh once, and I think most of the people who did were either very drunk or very stoned.
This year, I’m surprised that the White House Correspondents didn’t invite the enormously unfunny Kathy Griffin to be the keynote comedy act and do a reprise of her enormously unfunny severed head routine.
Posting will be a bit late today
I’ve had a busy day today, so posting will be delayed till later than usual in the afternoon.
Nothing special going on; just some appointments and tasks I need to do. But I thought since we’re all creatures of habit (at least, I am) I’d let you know.
Tune in later…
When we had to wait
While taking a walk the other day in a suburban area, I passed a yard with a tire swing tied to a large tree branch.
Into my head popped a song lyric that goes like this:
Life was just a tire swing
‘Jambalaya’ was the only song I could sing…
That was it. Just a fragment. What was it from? I remembered that I’d first heard the song on the car radio, back when the car radio was all I had to entertain myself while driving (and before that, I’d had no car radio at all for quite a few years).
No iPod. No CDs. Not even audiotapes. Just that little ole car radio and me. I was in the habit of listening to one particular radio station that played nonstop non-pop songs—some country music, some folk songs, and a lot of singer-songwriters.
That was the first place where I’d ever heard any song by Richard Thompson: it was “From Galway to Graceland,” if I’m not mistaken. Thompson’s unique voice wasn’t the prettiest in the world, but there was something so arresting about it that I had a 3-day-long earworm for the song and had to find out who sang it. I’d missed the moment when they’d announced that on the radio. No internet, no Google; I couldn’t think of any other way to find out the singer than to listen intently to the station and wait for them to play it again and announce it again.
And play it again they finally did, some weeks later. They said it was “Richard Thompson.” I made a mental note, and Richard Thompson made a lifelong fan.
Same for Don McLean and “American Pie.” It had a great hook: “Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry/And them good ole boys were drinking whiskey and rye/Singing ‘this’ll be the day when I die’…” I waited for the next time the station played that song, and discovered the name and artist.
That’s the way we used to do it. It was like a treasure hunt. I suppose I could have gone to a record store (remember them?) and asked. But I didn’t think of it.
But now, of course, the answer to the “life was just a tire swing” question is at my fingertips. I’d never Googled it before this, but voila! The answer is Jimmy Buffet, with these words—and here it is, as though by magic. I don’t have to wait for any radio station to get around to playing it (which would be a mighty long wait these days):
And here, just for the heck of it, is Richard Thompson with “From Galway to Graceland”:
The phenomenon wasn’t just limited to music, either. Every week when I was a kid I’d eagerly await the arrival of the TV Guide and open it. What was I looking for? The movies that were scheduled that week. I had three or four that were always on my radar screen, although their identity changed over time as I grew from child to teenager. At this point I don’t even remember what they were, but I do remember my extreme excitement on the rare occasions when one of them appeared on the TV Guide list.
And then, of course, I had to be home at that exact time to see it. No going out and setting the VCR to record it, no tevoing. And if there was a conflicting show at the same time, tough. You had to make your decision—had to say yes to one, and let the other one ride:
Alfie Evans and British liberty
Alfie Evans died last night. RIP, and condolences to his mourning and suffering family.
Evans’ death has spotlighted some legal and philosophical issues about the Brits that I first noticed years ago when I was researching the laws of defamation in England. The common thread is the British attitude towards liberty. This may seem like a digression, but believe me it’s not:
Given how closely the U.S. and Britain align on many topics, the degree to which they differ on the issue of free speech is striking…
In American courts, the burden of proof rests with the person who brings a claim of libel. In British courts, the author or journalist has the burden of proof, and typically loses.
Britain is not an outlier, either. In fact, it’s the US that is the outlier in its more stalwart defense of liberty (the same is true of the laws of hate speech). And the Alfie Evans case—with its enormous and complex medical and philosophical and religious overlay—is also an example of liberty denied by the state.
So I agree with this:
…I cannot help but look on with sadness and occasional revulsion as the British State increasingly seems to regard and treat its citizens as subjects.
The people of the UK are still able to elect their leaders and impose dramatic changes, of course, so it would be a gross overstatement to liken their government (as some critics have) to a totalitarian regime. But a string of recent stories and incidents have raised serious fears in my mind about whether Great Britain is becoming something other than ”” something less than ”” a truly free country…
…Free people have a general sense of what freedom looks like, and that isn’t it.
And this:
Imagine having to go to a hospital in a case where no abuse or neglect has been alleged, let alone imagined, and having to bargain for the release of your own child. Now imagine that added to the knowledge that the hospital’s plan for your child is to neglect him to death, even though he has been breathing on his own for three days straight, and when other medical facilities are volunteering to offer treatment or at least palliative care for as long as the child still lives.
In a previous post I discussed how the US presently treats similar cases. It is still quite different here; generally, the parents’ wishes are afforded more weight. I think this bears repeating:
A better analogy to the Charlie Gard case [and that of Evans] is that of Jahi McMath, involving a minor child and a dispute between Jahi’s family and her hospital and doctors over the definition of brain death and when life support should end. However, the McMath case was settled by an agreement between the child’s family and the hospital in which the family was allowed to take her from the hospital and continue life support.
If the Charlie Gard case had occurred in the US, however, the legal emphasis differs. In the UK, disputes between parents and doctors are brought to court under an objective best interests of the child standard. But in the United States, in similar cases the best interests “tend to be resolved in favor of parental rights,” according to Dr. John D. Lantos, director of Bioethics Center at Children’s Mercy Kansas City. And, when courts do overrule parents’ wishes in the US, they usually do so to order care over parental objections rather than the opposite.
The different legal standard in the UK was further described by Claire Fenton-Glynn, legal scholar at the University of Cambridge:
“English law”¦does not see parents as having the ”˜right’ to make decisions on behalf of their children. The concept is called parental responsibility: That is, the parent has a responsibility to make decisions, to look after the child,” she said. “Parenthood doesn’t give them rights; parenthood gives them responsibilities.”
And lawyer and ethicist Seema Shah describes the differences between American and British law this way:
Legally, though, US courts are following the same best-interest standard as the UK, but the way it works here, at least in practice, is that “courts are deferring to parents,” Shah said.
We could go the way of Britain, however. The general drift of this country, particularly during the Obama years, was in that direction. I doubt the majority of people in this country would welcome the adoption of something like British law in cases like that of Alfie Evans, despite our general leftward shift. Actually, I doubt that the majority of people in Britain favor this policy, either, but the only poll I could find on the subject was this highly unscientific one in which 92% of respondents said Alfie’s parents should have been allowed to take him to Italy. My guess is that although that might not be the true figure, it still represents the fact that a strong majority of people in Britain are not happy with the decision of their government.
But more and more it seems as though judges and elected officials are going in an entirely different direction than the people they are supposed to represent and serve. It is not the least bit surprising that this tends to be in the direction of increasing their own power over those citizens. The Alfie Evans case is a particularly poignant and stark example of the exercise of this power.