Read the Unclaimed Territory takedown of Bill Kristol, whom TIME magazine has named as one of its “star” columnists. The UT post opens with this gem that Kristol wrote on 17 March 2003, on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq:

We are tempted to comment, in these last days before the war, on the U.N., and the French, and the Democrats. But the war itself will clarify who was right and who was wrong about weapons of mass destruction. It will reveal the aspirations of the people of Iraq, and expose the truth about Saddam’s regime. It will produce whatever effects it will produce on neighboring countries and on the broader war on terror. We would note now that even the threat of war against Saddam seems to be encouraging stirrings toward political reform in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and a measure of cooperation in the war against al Qaeda from other governments in the region. It turns out it really is better to be respected and feared than to be thought to share, with exquisite sensitivity, other people’s pain. History and reality are about to weigh in, and we are inclined simply to let them render their verdicts.

Well, it’s been almost four years since Kristol penned those smug, taunting words, and I think it’s fair to say that history and reality have indeed weighed in. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Our invasion has destabilized the entire region (and not in a positive way) and has actually exacerbated the overall terrorist threat our country faces. We are no longer feared or respected, at least nowhere near the degree we were before the invasion. Over 3000 American soldiers have lost their lives (with many thousands more badly injured). Tens of thousands of Iraqis (perhaps hundreds of thousands) have been killed and millions more displaced. We’ve squandered billions of dollars, as well as our national credibility and mystique. And our armed forces are currently bogged down and stretched to the limit as they undertake the thankless task of policing an escalating civil war.

Now, you would think that being so incredibly wrong about such an important subject might hurt your career prospects, and that would probably be true in any other field. But in the world of Washington punditry, being consistently and catastrophically wrong about everything is apparently not an obstacle to advancement. As David Corn reports, TIME Magazine has invited Kristol to become one the magazine’s new “star” columnists.

I can see why TIME wanted Kristol so badly. His track record over the last few years is rather remarkable. Here’s a sampling of some of Kristol’s most impressive contributions to our political discourse over the last few years:

Continue reading.

I earlier blogged about a study linking fat and cancer. Now here’s another:

It’s not the calories you eat — it’s the calories you don’t burn off that increase cancer risk, studies of mice suggest.

It’s now well known that a restricted-calorie diet cuts the risk of getting cancer and slows the growth of some cancers. Most researchers think this is directly related to calorie intake.

But not Tim Nagy, PhD, professor of nutrition sciences at the University of Alabama, Birmingham.

When you eat more calories than you burn off, you store the extra calories as fat. Nagy wondered whether it’s these extra fat cells, rather than the extra calories themselves, that affect cancer risk.

To test this idea, Nagy’s research team devised a clever experiment with mice genetically engineered to get prostate cancer.

Eat Same, Burn More Calories

They fed two groups of mice exactly the same number of calories.

But one group of mice lived in cages warmed to a balmy 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The other group’s cages were kept at 71.6 degrees.

Mice in the cooler cages burned more calories to keep warm.

After three weeks, they weighed less than the warmer mice. And they were less likely to have prostate cancer.

Eat More, Burn More Calories

In a second experiment, both groups of mice were allowed to eat all they liked.

The mice in the cooler cages ate about 30% more than the warmer mice.

They wound up as fat as the warm mice. And they got prostate cancer at about the same rate — despite their extra calories.

All in the Fat?

“This study suggests that … being lean as opposed to being obese has a greater protective effect against cancer,” Nagy says in a news release. “Excess calorie retention, rather than consumption, confers cancer risk.”

Fat cells, Nagy and colleagues note, aren’t just storage cells that hold extra energy. These cells emit many kinds of chemical signals that have profound effects on the body.

One of these signals is called leptin. Leptin promotes some cancers. The heavier mice in the Nagy study had higher leptin levels than the cooler, leaner mice.

Another signal is adiponectin, which seems to protect from cancer. The fat cells of obese people don’t give off as much adiponectin as fat cells of lean people.

The heavier mice in the Nagy study had lower adiponectin levels than the cooler, leaner mice.

Exercise the Answer?

It’s not a good idea for people to chill themselves in order to avoid cancer. But maybe, Nagy and colleagues suggest, people could get the same effect by exercising more. That, too, burns calories.

“From a public health standpoint, it would be interesting to determine if a similar benefit [as that seen in the cooler mice] could be achieved with exercise,” Nagy and colleagues suggest.

The study appears in the Jan. 1 issue of the journal Cancer Research.

Chris Hedges tells the story of the efforts of the Christian Right to take over law enforcement and the military. The Christian Right has already worked systematically to take over Boards of Education in various states, to force education to recognize Creationism and reject evolution. But this new direction is ominous indeed. His report begins:

The drive by the Christian right to take control of military chaplaincies, which now sees radical Christians holding roughly 50 percent of chaplaincy appointments in the armed services and service academies, is part of a much larger effort to politicize the military and law enforcement. This effort signals the final and perhaps most deadly stage in the long campaign by the radical Christian right to dismantle America’s open society and build a theocratic state. A successful politicization of the military would signal the end of our democracy.

During the past two years I traveled across the country to research and write the book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” I repeatedly listened to radical preachers attack as corrupt and godless most American institutions, from federal agencies that provide housing and social welfare to public schools and the media. But there were two institutions that never came under attack—the military and law enforcement. While these preachers had no interest in communicating with local leaders of other faiths, or those in the community who did not subscribe to their call for a radical Christian state, they assiduously courted and flattered the military and police. They held special services and appreciation days for all four branches of the armed services and for various law enforcement agencies. They encouraged their young men and women to enlist or to join the police or state troopers. They sought out sympathetic military and police officials to attend church events where these officials were lauded and feted for their Christian probity and patriotism. They painted the war in Iraq not as an occupation but as an apocalyptic battle by Christians against Islam, a religion they regularly branded as “satanic.” All this befits a movement whose final aesthetic is violence. It also befits a movement that, in the end, would need the military and police forces to seize power in American society.

One of the arguments used to assuage our fears that the mass movement being built by the Christian right is fascist at its core is that it has not yet created a Praetorian Guard, referring to the paramilitary force that defied legal constraints, made violence part of the political discourse and eventually plunged ancient Rome into tyranny and despotism. A paramilitary force that operates outside the law, one that sows fear among potential opponents and is capable of physically silencing those branded by their leaders as traitors, is a vital instrument in the hands of despotic movements. Communist and fascist movements during the last century each built paramilitary forces that operated beyond the reach of the law.

And yet we may be further down this road than we care to admit. Erik Prince, the secretive, mega-millionaire, right-wing Christian founder of Blackwater, the private security firm that has built a formidable mercenary force in Iraq, champions his company as a patriotic extension of the U.S. military. His employees, in an act as cynical as it is deceitful, take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. These mercenary units in Iraq, including Blackwater, contain some 20,000 fighters. They unleash indiscriminate and wanton violence against unarmed Iraqis, have no accountability and are beyond the reach of legitimate authority. The appearance of these paramilitary fighters, heavily armed and wearing their trademark black uniforms, patrolling the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, gave us a grim taste of the future. It was a stark reminder that the tyranny we impose on others we will one day impose on ourselves.

Continue reading.

Here’s a test that will give you some idea. My own take has been that Bush has narcissistic personality disorder, which can account for some of the overt lying. But take a look at the test in the first link and see what you think.

Worth pondering:

I used to be just like them, I think to myself as I watch the line at the coffee shop extend almost out the door. I used to stop there almost every day for a hot chocolate and a bagel with cream cheese in the morning, something to perk me up just a bit before I went to work. Now I drive on past the place, sipping on my mug of homemade hot chocolate and munching on an English muffin from home with some cream cheese on it.

Every single day, millions of people spend at least $5 on their morning coffee run. $5 per day, for 365 days, adds up to $1,825. An extra $1,825 a year into a retirement plan starting at age 25 that earns only 7% a year adds up to $391,662.46 on your sixty fifth birthday.

I used to be just like them, I think to myself as I watch some of my coworkers go out to eat together. Instead, I slip my brown bag of leftovers out and head off to the lounge to catch up on my reading and perhaps chat with that interesting woman who just finished up the latest Pynchon novel.

Every single weekday, millions of people dine out for lunch at a cost of at least $10 a meal. $10 a day, five days a week, fifty two weeks a year, adds up to $2,600 a year. An extra $2,600 a year into a retirement plan starting at age 25 that earns only 7% a year adds up to $557,974.88 on your sixty fifth birthday.

I used to be just like them, I think to myself as I eye a line of people waiting for some take out food to bring home to their families, handing over $25 for some prepared food so they can drive home, plop it on the table, and make their family believe that food magically appears — that it’s not something you make for yourself. I plan to go home, make an inexpensive and delicious meal for my family that costs less than $15, and take the leftovers for lunch tomorrow.

Every single day, millions of people take a meal home with them to their families at night; other nights, everyone dines out. That extra $10 a day, 365 days a year, adds up to $3,650. An extra $3,650 a year into a retirement plan starting at age 25 that earns only 7% a year adds up to $783,324.93.

I used to be just like them, I think to myself as I watch the hordes of people jamming the parking lot at Target. Some of them walk out with huge bags of consumer goods, chatting on their Razr phones, and jump into their SUV.

Every single week, millions of people buy $100 worth of consumer goods that they don’t need - or even necessarily want. They see ads, or they see their neighbors having something, and they must have it now. $100 a week, fifty two weeks a year, adds up to $5,200 a year. An extra $5,200 a year into a retirement plan starting at age 25 that earns only 7% a year adds up to $1,115,969.76 on your sixty fifth birthday.

I used to be just like them, I think to myself as I go to sleep at night. But when I glance up at the ceiling just before I close my eyes, listen to my wife’s breathing next to me and my son’s shallow night-time sigh in the baby monitor, I’m glad that I changed things.

Just a few simple changes can make you sleep a lot better at night.

Worth reading—and John Dean should know this territory pretty well.

Task List might be of interest to students who have a Mac—or their teachers, who also do homework, alas.

Task List is the simple way to manage your homework. After all, it’s bad enough that you have to do homework in the first place - why should keeping track of it be difficult too? Task List 5 builds on the many features of Task List 4, and offers you even more ways to keep track of what you need to do. Even better, it makes it easy to actually do something about your homework, with features such as multiple file attachments for each task, a built-in tabbed notes editor, and convenient reference information and links, just like your composition notebook. Best of all, Task List 5’s new interface makes it easy to view your information in as simple or complex a manner as you wish.

Both The Wife and I enjoy solitude—and we also enjoy being together. Still, solitude is special. This Psychology Today article talks about the importance of solitude. One of my correspondents, when I was actively writing a lot of letters, craved solitude, but in her family it was considered offensive. So no closed doors, and certainly no locked doors. No possibility of keeping a journal—a locked desk drawer was as offensive as a locked study door.

The article begins:

What’s really blocking our joy in relationships, our creativity, and our peace of mind? One surprising answer, in this age of alienation, is a lack of solitude.

Meaningful alonetime, it turns out, is a powerful need and a necessary tonic in today’s rapid-fire world. Indeed, solitude actually allows us to connect to others in a far richer way.

We live in a society that worships independence yet deeply fears alienation: our era is sped-up and overconnected. The earth’s population has doubled since the 1950s, and in cities across the world, urban crowding and the new global economy have revolutionized social relationships. Cellular phones now extend the domain of the workplace into every part of our lives; religion no longer provides a place for quiet retreat but instead offers “megachurches” of social and secular amusement; and climbers on the top of Mt. McKinley whip out hand-held radios to call home. We are heading toward a time when, according to the New York Times, “portable phones, pagers, and data transmission devices of every sort will keep us terminally in touch.” Yet in another, more profound way, we are terminally out of touch. The need for genuine and constructive aloneness has gotten utterly lost, and, in the process, so have we.

Now, more than ever, we need our solitude. Being alone gives us the power to regulate and adjust our lives. It can teach us fortitude and the ability to satisfy our own needs. A restorer of energy, the stillness of alone experiences provides us with much-needed rest. It brings forth our longing to explore, our curiosity about the unknown, our will to be an individual, our hopes for freedom. Alonetime is fuel for life.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I first read The Evolution of Cooperation, Anatol Rappaport’s name was familiar to me, and I was thrilled that he had won Axelrod’s prisoner’s dilemma tournament. While I was in high school, I had read and absorbed Rappaport’s book Operational Philosophy. This was around 1957, and the book and its ideas fascinated me. I think Rappaport was at the University of Chicago at the time. If you ever come across the book, give it a go.

(Post updated for clarity. Thanks, Steven.)

The GOP notoriously sidelined the Democrats during the time GOP controlled Congress: keeping Democrats out of meetings, not allowing them to participate in marking up legislation, requiring votes before the Democrats could read the legislation, and so forth. This was a sharp contrast to the way Democrats had worked with the GOP when the Dems controlled Congress.

Now, I see, the Democrats plan to sideline the GOP during the first 100 hours of legislation, when the Democrats plan to pass a number of measures urgently needed by the public and important in terms of Democratic priorities for the country. The GOP is in no position to complain, but complain they surely will—it’s a party of whiners, after all.

So far as I’m concerned, this is a very good step. Robert Axelrod wrote a fascinating book, The Evolution of Cooperation, in which he describes two round-robin tournaments with a computer playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma, using strategies submitted by the contestants. In each game, repeated interactions allowed the winning strategy to be clearly defined. Wikipedia has an entry describing the contest.

The winner of the first tournament was Anatol Rappaport’s Tit-for-Tat strategy: in the first round, the strategy was to cooperate, and thereafter the strategy simply reflected what the opposing strategy did on the previous turn, cooperate or defect. The book talks about why this is a winning strategy. (Some of the strategies were complex and considered a lengthy pattern of previous moves.)

The second tournament, held after the results of the first were available and analyzed, was again won by Rappaport, and again with the Tit-for-Tat strategy. One oddity was that no one else submitted that strategy, even though it was the clear winner in the first tournament.

The strategy seems to win because it offers cooperation and doesn’t bear a grudge, but if the opponent doesn’t cooperate on its next turn the strategy doesn’t cooperate either. In other words, while ready to cooperate, the strategy isn’t a pushover.

And that seems exactly what the Democrats are doing. Although they are ready to cooperate, they are going to launch their program with a taste and a reminder for the GOP that the Democrats can also sideline them. And, incidentally, keep the GOP from being a spoiler in an important program of legislation. The GOP has descended to the point where the party seems totally uninterested in policy and policy consequences, but instead is totally focused on scoring points for the next election.

The story from the Washington Post under the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

A list of all the keyboard shortcuts for Firefox, along with useful URLs, etc.

The GOP is not exactly opposed to safe food, but they are certainly opposed to Federal regulations and inspections that ensure the food is safe. The GOP is opposed to anything that might cause businesses an inconvenience, and the public be damned. From the NY Times:

Nothing in “The Jungle” sticks with the reader quite like what went into the sausages. There was the rotting ham that could no longer be sold as ham. There were the rat droppings, rat poison and whole poisoned rats. Most chilling, there were the unnamed things “in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.”

Upton Sinclair wrote “The Jungle” as a labor exposé. He hoped that the book, which was billed as “the ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of wage slavery,” would lead to improvements for the people to whom he dedicated it, “the workingmen of America.” But readers of “The Jungle” were less appalled by Sinclair’s accounts of horrific working conditions than by what they learned about their food. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” he famously declared, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

“The Jungle,” and the campaign that Sinclair waged after its publication, led directly to passage of a landmark federal food safety law, which took effect 100 years ago this week. Sinclair awakened a nation not just to the dangers in the food supply, but to the central role government has to play in keeping it safe. But as the poisonings of spinach eaters and Taco Bell customers recently made clear, the battle is far from over — and in recent years, we have been moving in the wrong direction.

When “The Jungle” was published, the public reaction was instantaneous. Outraged readers deluged President Theodore Roosevelt with letters. Roosevelt was ambivalent, but he invited Sinclair to the White House for lunch, and promised to send his labor commissioner and assistant Treasury secretary to Chicago to investigate.

Sinclair settled into a New York City hotel and started a publicity campaign. He wrote articles with titles like “Campaign Against the Wholesale Poisoners of the Nation’s Food,” and released more stomach-churning details. Armour made its potted hams, he charged, by taking nubs of smoked beef, “moldy and full of maggots,” and grinding them with ham trimmings. In a newspaper letter to the editor, he dared J. Ogden Armour, the meatpacking magnate, to sue for libel.

Read the rest of this entry »

Probably because this morning I paid attention to what I was doing, I enjoyed a wonderfully smooth and close shave with not a nick or scratch. I used a soap from Saint Charles Shave that smelled like an Oreo-cookie cheesecake. Unfortunately, Sue labels the soaps on the wrapper, long since discarded, and I did not have my wonderful Brother PT-65 label-maker at the time. Since she changes the fragrance line-up regularly, it’s a mystery—but a wonderful fragrance, nonetheless.

Brush was an Edwin Jagger Silvertip. Lather was excellent. Razor was the Vision, whose acoustics are unmatched: a light ripping sound as the blade cuts through the stubble.

Finished with the alum bar, and then Taylor of Old Bond Street Bay Rum, to which I’ve become very partial.

Really a fantastic shave. Paying close attention pays off.

Astronomers believe that they have found light that comes from the first stars of the universe, 13 billion years ago.

Biblical literalists (who believe, for example, that the Earth is 6,000 years old and Noah’s Flood created the Grand Canyon) are often hard pressed to explain away the plain evidence to the contrary. For example, a park ranger found her talks challenged:

The summer before my senior year of college I worked as a park ranger guiding hikes in one of the most beautiful state parks in the country. Its central feature was a 256-foot waterfall that plunged down through a gorgeous natural amphitheater, cutting through bands of limestone and sandstone and collecting in a deep pool, the perfect hangout for summer swimming. My favorite program was the hike to the base of the falls. Layers of rock are like chapters in a history book and this canyon, carved so deeply, told an ancient story. Standing at the bottom, calling out over the roar of the falls, I got to teach the exciting conclusion, “The layers of slate and shale beneath our feet tell us that 300 million years ago, this deciduous forest was a tropical jungle.”

“What book d’ya get that out of?” came the reply one day. And thus it began, for this waterfall was not only located in ancient rock, it was also in the heart of the Bible-belt. I had heard there were people who believed the Earth was only 6,000 years old, but I never thought I would actually meet any. That summer, and every other summer I worked teaching science to the public, I met a lot of them. Though most objectors would just walk away from the program, some mothers would cover their children’s ears to protect them from the “blasphemous park ranger.” One man, after I patiently explained how we know the age of rocks, finally just threw up his hands, exclaimed, “The Devil made that rock look that old to turn you away from God,” and led his family back up the trail. [full article at the link - LG]

The final defense: either the Devil is strong and ubiquitous enough to distort God’s creation to fool us (and God allows that), or God himself is the Author of the trickery—e.g., creating the universe 6000 years ago with light already en route from stars millions of light-years away so that we would be tricked into thinking those stars are millions of years old.

And yet that defense seems preferable to recognizing that the Bible is not a work of scientific explanation and that the stories therein were written with the understanding and worldview of ancient times.