I don’t recall whether I’ve shared this before but my wife and I have a regular Saturday night ritual. Saturday night is steak night. Every Saturday we have approximately the same dinner: steak, baked potato, and a vegetable dish or salad (occasionally both). We split a small steak, no more than about 4 oz. for each of us, split a baked potato, and I usually prepare some sort of vegetable dish.

Last night’s vegetable dish was green beans and cherry tomatoes. I started by blanching about a half pound of fresh green beans for four minutes, then drained them. I then sauteed about twenty fresh cherry tomatoes in olive oil and garlic until the cherry tomatoes just started to brown and added the green beans, continuing to saute them for about two minutes, then turning the heat off and covering the pan until I was ready to serve. That’s it. It’s simple, delicious, and very pretty, the green beans still bright and the cherry tomatoes adding color.

That and a glass of wine makes for a darned nice dinner.

At American Conservative Daniel Larison reacts to the same op-ed by Bernard-Henri Lévy about which I posted the other day:

The chief danger of establishing a new Kurdish state is that it would be violently opposed by at least three of its new neighbors, and the people of Iraqi Kurdistan would be the ones to suffer as a result. This is why the case in favor of doing this is so exceptionally weak. Proponents of a new Kurdish state never take seriously any of the obvious problems and obstacles, but just wave them away or treat them as unimportant. BHL does much the same, and lamely accuses critics of being neo-colonialists because they are opposed to redrawing the boundaries of Iraq once again.

I’m glad to see someone other than me expressing at least a little skepticism about the prospects for an independent Kurdistan. Maybe I’m naive but I’m skeptical about the likelihood of liberal democracy anywhere the heads of the two major political parties are the hereditary chieftains of its largest tribes.

At Bloomberg View Leonid Bershidsky explains why negotiating with North Korea is impossible:

Mansky’s negotiations were with rather senior officials in the North Korean propaganda machine but perhaps things can go better if the supreme leader himself is involved in talks? Mansky doesn’t think so. “Paradoxically,” he says, “the man at the top doesn’t make decisions, either, because he’s dependent on the dictatorship he has created.” As Mansky tells it, the Kim dictatorship must maintain the cult that was created to sustain it, absurd rules and all; it’s a two-way street of mutual reinforcement. The Communist regime under which Mansky and I both grew up sort of worked like that, too — but North Korea has created a “perfect, flawless” version of the game,

[…]

Mansky looked for signs of the trademark late Soviet irony, the doublethink that allowed our parents, and for some time also us, to survive in an absurd system. He didn’t find any. That left him convinced that the indoctrination of North Koreans was absolute. While they realized the regime’s propaganda was fake, their belief in the necessity of that fakery was absolute.

It’s been tried. It didn’t work. It can’t work. Read the whole thing.

The only real prospect for dealing with North Korea short of risking a nuclear World War III resides in changing China’s incentives to the degree that they’re willing to shut North Korea’s nuclear weapons development program down. That will take determination of a sort that we haven’t shown in decades.

In his New York Times column Farhad Manjoo fumes over the Equifax data breach:

If a bank lost everyone’s money, regulators might try to shut down the bank. If an accounting firm kept shoddy books, its licenses to practice accounting could be revoked. (See how Texas pulled Arthur Andersen’s license after the Enron debacle.)

So if a data-storage credit agency loses pretty much everyone’s data, why should it be allowed to store anyone’s data any longer?

Here’s one troubling reason: Because even after one of the gravest breaches in history, no one is really in a position to stop Equifax from continuing to do business as usual. And the problem is bigger than Equifax: We really have no good way, in public policy, to exact some existential punishment on companies that fail to safeguard our data. There will be hacks — and afterward, there will be more.

There’s a simple, practical solution to that conundrum: let the courts decide. All that needs to happen to solve the problem is for Equifax to be held responsible for the costs, direct and indirect, of the data that it held’s becoming public and the problem along with the company will go away.

Holding vast amounts of private and sensitive data is a business model. When the profitability of the business model depended on inadequate controls as seems to be the case, why should the federal government act or not act to prop up that model? If the functions that Equifax performed are so vital to the functioning of our society as seems to be claims, perhaps we should not depend on a private company to perform them?

As to the executives who are alleged to have sold large blocks of their stock in Equifax prior to the announcement, the question will become what did they know and when did they know it? If they knew about the breach in anticipation of selling their stock, they should be indicted for insider trading and, if found guilty, subject to the maximum penalty—20 years in prison and a $5 million dollar fine. That will open the floodgates for what promises to be the largest class action suit in history.

We need to come to the understanding that size itself can be a problem. A company that is too large to be allowed to fail is too large to be allowed to exist.

At Bloomberg View Megan McArdle remarks on the politics of Silicon Valley:

Silicon Valley titans, suggests Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times, are really quite liberal. But there is one major exception to their liberalism: They aren’t very fond of regulation. Especially, one might add, regulation aimed at the tech industry.

This supposition is based on a single paper that is still under peer review. But I suspect that Manjoo was willing to write about it because it fits his anecdotal impression of these people, counterexamples like Peter Thiel notwithstanding. It certainly fits with mine.

If so, they’re certainly obeying the First Law of Politics, attributed to Robert Conquest: “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best”.

It’s not too surprising that the techies of Silicon Valley would be as sanguine as they are about government intervention. Most of the intervention they’ve experienced to date has explicitly been on their behalf, expressly intended to create a space in which their business models would flourish. Now they very much want to pull up the ladder to ensure that they, too, aren’t disrupted.

The “Voynich Manuscript” is a 15th century manuscript discovered in 1912. It’s full of cryptic handwriting and mysterious symbols and drawings and has attracted interest for more than a century. Now one researcher may have discovered what it’s actually about. From Ars Technica:

Since its discovery in 1969, the 15th century Voynich Manuscript has been a mystery and a cult phenomenon. Full of handwriting in an unknown language or code, the book is heavily illustrated with weird pictures of alien plants, naked women, strange objects, and zodiac symbols. Now, history researcher and television writer Nicholas Gibbs appears to have cracked the code, discovering that the book is actually a guide to women’s health that’s mostly plagiarized from other guides of the era.

Gibbs writes in the Times Literary Supplement that he was commissioned by a television network to analyze the Voynich Manuscript three years ago. Because the manuscript has been entirely digitized by Yale’s Beinecke Library, he could see tiny details in each page and pore over them at his leisure. His experience with medieval Latin and familiarity with ancient medical guides allowed him to uncover the first clues.

Read the whole thing. Mr. Gibbs’s theory makes pretty good sense.

HealthCareDive considers a recent survey of physicians that found that they believed that 20% of care is unnecessary. Here’s the quick summary:

• A survey of 2,106 U.S. physicians found that, on average, they believe 20.6% of medical care is unnecessary, including 22% of prescriptions, 24.9% of tests and 11.1% of procedures.
• An overwhelming majority (84.7%) attributed overtreatment to fear of malpractice, according to the study in Plos One. Other oft-cited reasons were patient pressure (59%) and difficulty accessing medical records (38.2%).
• More than seven in 10 respondents said there is a chance profit encourages overtreatment, and most believed less fee-for-service reimbursement would reduce overutilization.

Maybe it’s time to start asking the ancient question about our system: cui bono? Who benefits? Hint: if you perform an analysis of our system based on marginal costs and marginal benefits, the primary beneficiaries of our system are not patients.

I wish a lot more Americans were thinking about this. At War Is Boring Maj. Danny Sjursen questions the established orthodoxy in considering what we’re doing in the Middle East:

The United States is in many ways little more than an air force, military trainer and weapons depot for assorted Sunni despots. Now, that’s not a point made too often — not in this context anyway — because it’s neither a comfortable thought for most Americans, nor a particularly convenient reality for establishment policymakers to broadcast, but it’s the truth.

Yes, we do fight ISIS, but it’s hardly that simple. Saudi Arabia, our main regional ally, may portray itself as the leader of a “moderate Sunni block” when it comes to both Iran and terrorism, but the reality is, at best, far grayer than that. The Saudis — with whom Pres. Donald Trump announced a $110-billion arms deal during the first stop on his inaugural foreign trip back in May — have spent the last few decades spreading their intolerant brand of Islam across the region. In the process, they’ve also supported Al Qaeda-linked groups in Syria.

Maybe you’re willing to argue that Al Qaeda spin-offs aren’t ISIS, but don’t forget who brought down those towers in New York. While Trump enjoyed a traditional sword dance with his Saudi hosts — no doubt gratifying his martial tastes — the air forces of the Saudis and their Gulf state allies were bombing Yemeni civilians into the grimmest of situations, including a massive famine and a spreading cholera epidemic amid the ruins of their impoverished country.

Our wars in the Middle East are illegal and immoral, they aren’t in our interests, and they certainly aren’t in the interests of the people of the Middle East. We continue them for domestic political reasons, because some people profit mightily from them, and inertia. We could accomplish our legitimate goals in the Middle East at a much lower cost by legal and moral means. It’s long past time for a change.

The illogical hysteria behind claims about campus sexual assault

In speech, Betsy DeVos calls out Title IX failures.

Outrageous Leftist hypocrisy about Arpaio’s pardon and DACA

 The Bookworm Beat 9-8-17 — the illustrated edition and open thread

[VIDEO] English as she was spoke when Shakespeare wrote 

No The End of DACA Is Not Like the Round Up of Jewish Children During the Holocaust 

WoW! Forum: Should DACA Be Ended? 

A Modest Proposal Regarding Antifa*

A Humane And Fair Solution For DACA 

 Bill Whittle & D’Souza eviscerate Progressives for inciting hate and bigotry 

 Israeli nuclear opacity and oversight: yes or no? 

 What Kennedy Can Teach Trump on North Korean Crisis 

 Facilitators 

 Robert Spencer at David Horowitz Freedom Center Discusses War on Freedom of Speech 

 A Citizen’s Guide to Education Reform, With a Bandana 

 US LNG Shipments To Ukraine – Peace Through Fracking 

 Do We Have a Labor Shortage?

 Judge Jeanine Pirro: “Time to Go After ‘Mr. Holier-Than-Thou’ Jim Comey”