Alert Reader passes along this cautionary story on what life might be like 39 years in the future, when we reach 2000 AD.

Honeybee Sue makes shea-butter shaving soaps, and some time back I asked if she could produce a Lilac one—although Lavender shaving soaps are fairly common, Lilac I had not seen. She did, and so I asked for a Lemon. (J.M. Fraser’s Shaving Cream from Canada has a nice lemon scent, but I didn’t know of any lemon soaps.) I just got this message:

You would not believe how many Lemons I tested till I found the right one, but the important thing is…I found it!

And here it is.

There’s also 6 other new fragrances in the category. Vanilla Oak, Coffee Mocha, Peppermint, Gardenia, Rosemary Mint, and Victorian Rose.

If you have any more thoughts on new fragrances, please let me know!

Sue/Honeybee Spa Soaps

So on the way to me now are Lemon, Vanilla Oak, and Coffee Mocha shea-butter shaving soaps.

From the Carpetbagger (the original one, not the NY Times title-stealer):

The Union of Concerned Scientists has been taking a very close look at how ExxonMobil has been spending its “public information and policy research” funds. The UCS’s findings aren’t surprising, but they are devastating. (thanks to K.Z. for the tip)

A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists offers the most comprehensive documentation to date of how ExxonMobil has adopted the tobacco industry’s disinformation tactics, as well as some of the same organizations and personnel, to cloud the scientific understanding of climate change and delay action on the issue. According to the report, ExxonMobil has funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science.

“ExxonMobil has manufactured uncertainty about the human causes of global warming just as tobacco companies denied their product caused lung cancer,” said Alden Meyer, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Director of Strategy & Policy. “A modest but effective investment has allowed the oil giant to fuel doubt about global warming to delay government action just as Big Tobacco did for over 40 years.”

The UCS report, “Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to ‘Manufacture Uncertainty’ on Climate Change,” notes striking similarities between the tactics of the world’s largest oil company and the tobacco industry, including manufacturing doubts about indisputable scientific evidence, financing front groups to push bogus evidence, putting greed above public interest, and exploiting ties to Republican officials to block progress.

“When one looks closely, ExxonMobil’s underhanded strategy is as clear and indisputable as the scientific research it’s meant to discredit,” said Seth Shulman, an investigative journalist who wrote the UCS report. “The paper trail shows that, to serve its corporate interests, ExxonMobil has built a vast echo chamber of seemingly independent groups with the express purpose of spreading disinformation about global warming.”

UCS has the goods. Bring on the hearings.

From Inkling Magazine:

After water, coffee is the most widely consumed beverage in the world. Americans drink around 400 million cups every day, importing 2.7 million pounds of beans each year. Coffee is also the single largest source of antioxidants found in the typical US diet and a whole glut of studies have indicated positive medical impacts. But is coffee really a health tonic? Or just a blackened cup of morning drugs? Let’s break it down:

The Good

• Consistent coffee drinking may protect against Parkinson’s disease, though the protective effects are largely lost in women taking hormone replacement therapies.
• Coffee consumption seems to protect and fight against the development of Alzheimer’s disease; human studies have found that Alzheimer’s patients drank significantly less coffee than unafflicted people in the 20 years prior to diagnosis; a recent mouse study showed that caffeine equivalent to 5 cups of coffee per day reduced the build up of destructive beta-amyloid plaques in the brain.
• Long term coffee drinking may lower the risk of developing type-2 or adult onset diabetes.
• Coffee can protect against liver cirrhosis. One study of more than 100,000 Americans found that people who drank 4 or more cups per day cut their risk of cirrhosis by 80%. Especially good news for fans of Irish coffees.
• Coffee is an age-old asthma medication; caffeine is related to theophylline, a compound that helps relax and expand asthmatic lungs. In a 2001 meta-analysis, a UK team of doctors concluded that coffee was a weak, but helpful asthma treatment that could last up to four hours.
• Coffee lowers the risk of developing kidney stones, because it makes you pee out more calcium, instead of letting it pile up in your kidneys.
• Caffeine increases alertness and mental performance by blocking adenosine, one biomolecule responsible for creating that feeling of drowsiness.

The Bad

• It takes at least 30 minutes for the body to absorb caffeine, so there is no instant alertness effect.
• Caffeine is addictive, and comes with regular drug addiction problems, including withdrawal symptoms. Anyone for a coffee headache?
• Coffee contains two cholesterol-raising compounds cafestol and kahweol, though these can be nearly eliminated by using filters (and some evidence suggests they may even be anti-cancer agents themselves).
• Coffee consumption can exacerbate heartburn.
• Caffeine can increase the risk of heart attack, especially among those people who carry the “slow” gene variant for the enzyme that metabolizes caffeine.
• A coffee beverage can cost more than $5 at certain successful franchises.

Most of the mal-effects of coffee only begin to kick in at the heavy-drinker levels. Two cups a day or so seems to be safe enough and should still bestow the benefits.

From the same Froomkin column:

Robert Hodierne writes for the Military Times: “The American military — once a staunch supporter of President Bush and the Iraq war — has grown increasingly pessimistic about chances for victory.

“For the first time, more troops disapprove of the president’s handling of the war than approve of it. Barely one-third of service members approve of the way the president is handling the war, according to the 2006 Military Times Poll. . . .

“Just as telling, in this year’s poll only 41 percent of the military said the U.S. should have gone to war in Iraq in the first place, down from 65 percent in 2003. That closely reflects the beliefs of the general population today — 45 percent agreed in a recent USA Today/Gallup poll. . . .

“Almost half of those responding think we need more troops in Iraq than we have there now. A surprising 13 percent said we should have no troops there.”

Here are the results from the mail survey of active-duty personnel

Greg Sargent blogs for the American Prospect: “This is a very, very important poll. It’s the most comprehensive measure in some time of the troops’ attitudes towards the most important policy question of the day: Whether the U.S. should escalate its involvement in Iraq.

“Yet there hasn’t been a single mention of this poll in The New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Associated Press, as best as I can determine. . . .

“These very same news orgs all lavished extensive coverage on another, completely unscientific measure of the troops’ opinions of a ’surge.’ A couple of weeks back, Defense Secretary Robert Gates convened a photo-op sitdown with around a dozen troops to listen to their opinions. Mysteriously, all of those assembled agreed that they wanted more troops.”

I think the traditional media, owned by Big Business, is quite reluctant to address problems with the GOP. YMMV.

From Dan Froomkin’s column today:

And a White House Briefing reader, who wishes to remain anonymous, sent me this e-mail two whole weeks ago: “It seems that you, and many others who comment on the President, have a difficult time understanding his motivation regarding Iraq. It seems irrational if viewed in the context of what appears to be the indisputable facts on the ground. Why would a President deliberately ignore sound advice based on rational investigation?…

“He’s not stupid, and he has shown in the past that when defeat looks him in the eye he can do a 180 without a blink. So what’s up? I don’t have any more insight than the next person, but one thought that keeps rattling around in my head is this.

“Early on, when things started to go south in Iraq, Bush said something along the lines of solving Iraq would be left up to the next President. I know it wasn’t that blatant, but it gave the impression that he was perfectly willing to leave his successor with the whole mess if things didn’t ‘work out’ for him. Ever since that comment, I get the distinct impression that Bush is just trying to run out the clock in order to avoid facing an acknowledgment of the worst foreign policy disaster in this nation’s history.

“I fully expect for him to continue to assert that we can have success in Iraq, in spite of any evidence to the contrary, until the day he leaves office. He will stall, patch things together, anything to avoid the appearance of an acknowledgment of failure. He knows that Iraq is a failure, but if he leaves office still maintaining that we can ‘win’ or ’succeed’ there then history will not judge him so harshly.

“Obviously we will have to change course, but he’s not going to be the guy to do it. He will then maintain that someone else ‘lost’ Iraq because they didn’t have the courage and determination to stick it out. As with everything in his life, from his National Guard service to his serial failures in business and life in general, it’s all about him - not the country, not the job, not our reputation in the world or our hard won and universally admired heritage of concern for basic human rights. He’s not trying to save this country or Iraq, he’s trying to save himself and his ‘place in history’. He’s completely wrong of course, but given his history of privilege and never having to suffer the consequences of his long record of bad decisions, it does kind of make sense.

“We assume that, like most Presidents, he connects his self-image with actual success or failure in the real world. I increasingly am drawn to the conclusion that, regardless of the facts on the ground, he will consider himself a success as long as he never admits that his ill-fated adventure in Iraq can’t succeed.”

From Lifehacker, six webapps to help you. (Though I prefer to use Fitday on my computer rather than the Web version.)

And if your New Year’s plan includes learning a language, look at this collection of aids.

Cool that they are able to enjoy a normal life.

Little fish that nibble away dead skin—sounds great, doesn’t it? Bet it tickles.

Tonight is the first full moon of 2007. Here is a movie made of the previous 20 full moons—all to the same scale. The change in apparent size is because the moon’s orbit is so eccentric. The slight tilting is because of its libration: it wobbles.

From The Hill:

House Democrats hurried yesterday to put the finishing touches on ethics reforms that would ban lawmakers and staffers from accepting trips, gifts and meals from lobbyists and prevent the new majority from holding votes open to change the outcome.

Democrats will adopt and then amend the House Rules package tomorrow to ban all travel paid for by lobbyists or organizations that employ lobbyists, require the ethics committee to pre-approve travel paid for by outside groups, enact a total gift ban, and require lawmakers to pay the market cost of flying on a corporate jet, said Democratic staffers and officials with government watchdog groups.

And, because they feel they lost the 2003 Medicare prescription drug benefit vote because GOP leaders held it open for three hours, during which they flipped opponents into the “yes” column, Democrats will include a provision in the rules to prevent any sort of repetition, said aides to incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Democrats also will eliminate the practices of changing conference reports after members have signed them and excluding elected members from conference committees.

Until now, Democrats have not had to propose specifics or explain how they would work in practice. The biggest challenge for the new majority has been translating political rhetoric into tightly drafted legal language without loopholes, said Democratic aides. The concern is that language could be exploited for loopholes or yield unintended consequences.

New House rules could take eight weeks or longer to go into effect because the ethics committee (the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct) might be required to clarify and interpret issues, such as how to define a lobbyist and how a pre-approval requirement for travel would function.

State and local government agencies and some foundations, such as AIPAC and the Aspen Institute, want to be exempted from the new rules.

“We’re interested in the basic bans on paying for travel, bans on gifts and entertainment and making sure there are no loopholes in the provisions,” said Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21, a campaign-finance watchdog group.

Senior Democratic staffers, who returned to work on a day when the federal government was closed to mourn the death of former President Gerald Ford, planned to make the proposed rules changes public this afternoon at a press conference. Some aides who have jumped from the campaign trail into Congress have, as yet, no computers and only limited access to telephones.

Leadership aides plan today to brief chiefs of staff and press secretaries working for rank-and-file lawmakers.

Meanwhile, GOP Reps. Tom Price (Ga.), Eric Cantor (Va.), and Patrick McHenry (N.C.) plan to introduce a resolution next week modeled on legislation that Pelosi introduced in 2004.

Pelosi’s “Minority Bill of Rights” demanded that legislation move through the committee process before reaching the House floor and urged GOP leaders to give lawmakers 24 hours to review legislation before it is considered and voted on by subcommittees or on the House floor.

McHenry expressed concern that excluding Republicans from the legislative process would set a bad precedent. GOP Reps. Buck McKeon (Calif.), Peter King (N.Y.) and Jim McCrery (La.) yesterday urged the Democrats who will chair their committees to conduct hearings on proposals that Democrats will consider in the first 100 legislative hours.

McHenry seems to have a very short memory: the precedent of excluding one political party from the legislative process has already been set—and the GOP set it. Does he think that people really don’t remember. As for that Minority Bill of Rights: recall how the GOP handled that?

House Democrats’ anger at heavy-handed Republican tactics reached a new level yesterday, with the chamber’s top Democrat asking the House speaker to embrace a “Bill of Rights” for the minority, regardless which party it is.

In keeping with the general atmosphere of the House these days, aides to Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said he will not respond to the two-page proposal from Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

For decades, the party in power has used House parliamentary rules to limit the minority party’s ability to amend bills and shape debates. But Democrats — in the minority for 10 years after four decades of control — say Republicans have gone to unreasonable lengths in recent years. GOP leaders dispute this, but congressional scholars and even some rank-and-file Republicans agree in whole or in part.

I believe that in this case Speaker Pelosi would be perfectly justified in treated the GOP’s proposal exactly as they treated the proposal from the Democrats. Later on, after the 100 days, the GOP can be admitted into the process, but right now the GOP is interested only in acting as spoilers and obstacles. They still are not interested in governing, only in politicking.

To continue with the story from The Hill:

Read the rest of this entry »

They even admit it: the decision to send more troops to Iraq is a political decision, not a military decision. At one time, the rule was not to play politics with American lives. George Bush, though, clearly feels that rules do not apply to him.

The strange thing is that the escalation seems to be planned without any well defined mission. Just a “carry on, do the best you can” sort of thing. Well, no one ever said that the Decider was a good military strategist.

Choline seems to be something we should be getting:

Medical researchers, however, are exploring the effects of choline in various arenas. In fact, for several years there’s been clear evidence that lack of choline can harm an individual’s liver.

But more recent experiments in animals suggest that the compound can have more subtle benefits. A few scientists are, for example, investigating hints that extra choline in the adult diet boosts brainpower.

Generating far more excitement is evidence that supplemental choline given to a pregnant female can offer her offspring a wealth of life-long benefits. A growing number of rat studies indicate that choline enrichment in the womb can alter brain development in ways that facilitate learning later in life.

Prenatal choline may even guard the brain against toxic assaults and disease, not to mention senility and other neurodegenerative changes, notes Christina L. Williams, who heads the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Duke University in Durham, N.C.

Read the entire article, which contains useful tips like this:

Don’t be afraid of eating eggs despite their cholesterol, he chides. Their yolks are among the richest known natural sources of choline. A tall glass of skim milk offers as much choline as an egg does. And coming soon, predicts Gregory Paul, director of nutrition for Central Soya of Ft. Wayne, Ind., will be a host of foods—orange juice, baked goods, and pasta—fortified with choline-rich soy lecithin.

Interesting, eh?

Is it just me, or do you find that phlebotomists these days are much better than, say, a decade ago? Maybe better needles? Nowadays I barely feel the needle, and they nail the vein on the first try.

I get a blood draw four times a year for lab tests for my endocrinologist, once a year for a physical, and I donate blood three times year, so that’s my experience base. The donation is with an ALYX machine, which takes two units. Very nice for everyone. Have you donated lately? It’s easy and it’s fun painless and is good for the community.

The Washington Post has the front-page story. I don’t believe that our country used to be like this.

FBI agents witnessed possible mistreatment of the Koran at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, including at least one instance in which an interrogator squatted over Islam’s holy text in an apparent attempt to offend a captive, according to bureau documents released yesterday.

In October 2002, a Marine captain allegedly squatted over a copy of the Koran during intensive questioning of a Muslim prisoner, who was “incensed” by the tactic, according to an FBI agent. A second agent described similar events, but it is unclear from the documents whether it was a separate case.

In another incident that month, interrogators wrapped a bearded prisoner’s head in duct tape “because he would not stop quoting the Koran,” according to an FBI agent, the documents show. The agent, whose account was corroborated by a colleague, said that a civilian contractor laughed about the treatment and was eager to show it off.

The reports amount to new and separate allegations of religiously oriented tactics used against Muslim prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. After an erroneous report of Koran abuse prompted deadly protests overseas in 2005, the U.S. military conducted an investigation that confirmed five incidents of intentional and unintentional mishandling the book at the detention facility. They acknowledged that soldiers and interrogators had kicked the Koran, had stood on it and, in one case, had inadvertently sprayed urine on a copy.

The reports released yesterday were the result of an internal survey conducted in 2004 by the FBI, which asked nearly 500 employees who had served at Guantánamo Bay to report possible mistreatment by law enforcement or military personnel. More than two dozen incidents were reported, including some that the government had revealed in earlier document releases.

The new documents were turned over as part of an ongoing lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

In them, FBI employees said they had witnessed 26 incidents of possible mistreatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, including previously reported cases in which prisoners were shackled to the floor for extended periods of time or subjected to sexually suggestive tactics by female interrogators.

In a previously unreported allegation, one interrogator bragged to an FBI agent that he had forced a prisoner to listen to “Satanic black metal music for hours,” then dressed as a Catholic priest before “baptizing” him.

One agent reported being told that while questioning male captives, female interrogators would sometimes wet their hands and touch detainees’ faces in order to interrupt their prayers. Such actions would make some Muslims consider themselves unclean and unable to continue praying.

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