01.27.07
Tacit agreements between the Administration and the Media
As discussed in some of the testimony in the Libby trial, the Bush Administration made a practice of releasing bad news late on Friday, so that it wouldn’t get much coverage on the weekend and by Monday will have blown over. One blog said that journalists never caught on to this trick.
On the contrary, it seems to me that the media not only caught on, they made a tacit agreement with the Administration: the media tacitly agreeing that, if the Administration released news late Friday, the media would not cover it. How the media benefits from this (other than not having to do much work late Friday or over the weekend), I don’t know. But the Administration could not possibly have continued to follow this pattern with the media noticing.
It’s like the tacit agreements reached across No-Man’s Land in The Great War: you don’t shell us at night and we won’t shell you, so both sides get a chance to rest. That sort of thing.
Otherwise, we would have to believe the media are so terminally stupid that they never noticed the pattern, and they never really paid any attention to anything that happened after, say, 3:00 p.m. on a Friday.
Thoughts on “24″
So everyone kept talking about “24″ and, since I don’t get TV (no cable, no antenna), I finally decide to check it out on DVD.
Season One was okay, and Nina Myers (Sarah Clarke) is a serious babe, but Kim Bauer is a total pill who immediately does the opposite of whatever she’s told—a real pain—and I didn’t think much of Jack’s wife either: a big whiner. But otherwise, not a bad storyline and nice caper/espionage/terrorist sort of action.
Season Two I’m watching now, and the percentage of time devoted to trivial domestic conflicts has risen noticeably, and Kim is, if possible, even MORE of a pill than previously. As soon as she’s told not to do something, she WILL be doing it. (The kind of kid who, when told not to put beans up her nose, knocks you down in her rush to the pantry to get a handful beans.) She’s told she must NOT tell ANYONE that a nuclear bomb is set to go off in LA, and she agrees. Then she immediately tells her boyfriend, she tells a cop, she does all but hire a publicist. What a total jerk.
I feel like it’s going rapidly downhill, and if Season Three continues the trend, I’ll skip the rest.
UPDATE: And now Kim Bauer may have killed a cop. Her defense will be that she really didn’t want to do it, but her boy friend asked her to. She is nothing but trouble. But, hey, maybe at the end of the season Nina Myers will kill Kim. Something to hope for.
Most frequently used phrase this season: “Trust me.” Do people really say that with any expectation of being trusted? It’s like someone saying, “Can I be your friend?”, which should always be answered, “Later.”
Update 2: Well, I quit after Season 2. Another lowlight from Kim Bauer: her dad tells her he’s going to sacrifice himself by flying the nuclear bomb into the desert, and her immediate response is, “What about me?!” Yes, lovely. This comment on Netflix about Season 3 made me decide to call it quits:
The most annoying thing about 24 has always been Kim Bauer. Not just the mediocre actress, but the character. 24 is such a well written show, you expect it to be above having the classic “just how stupid ARE they?” characters, but case in point… the selfish and bratty Kim Bauer. The constant kidnapping, the cougars, the abusive husbands, the weird survival freak guys… it’s like the writers just throw inplausable crap at her because it’s funny. Luckily, you could always just laugh at her, or just get up and use the bathroom during the Kim parts. Like while Jack is being shot at while he’s on the phone with an angry Kim who’s stomping her foot because she wants a sleepover. But now that she WORKS AT CTU, she’s onscreen all the time. And the writers want you to take her seriously. Two years ago, babysitter. Now? CTU Computer genius! See? The “Counter Terrorism for Dummies” book really helped! But it doesn’t work. She’s still stupid and bratty. She puts the entire country at risk because she wants to spill the beans to her Dad about something. She doesn’t understand how her needs don’t come before national security. The weakest, most annoying part of the series now takes a front seat.
Another thing that annoys me is that the perils that Kim’s absolute stupidity and contrariness deliver her unto seem to just fade from view as if the writers got tired of it and just leave it—at least so far in this series it seems that way.
Scott Ritter warns about war with Iran
Scott Ritter warned about going to war in Iraq, and he was ignored by the Bush and the GOP Congress. Now he’s warning about going to war in Iran:
In April 2001 I was invited to Washington, DC, by a group of Republican Congressmen collectively known as the Theme Team. The subject was Iraq. It seems that the Theme Team, responsible for monitoring the ideological pulse of America, was somewhat perturbed that a self-described Republican and former Marine officer, not to mention a former UN weapons inspector, was trash-talking America’s Iraq policy. While this sort of action might have been acceptable during the tenure of a Democratic President like Bill Clinton, it was not part of the grand design when it came to the presidency of George W. Bush.
The conference room was packed with more than seventy Representatives and their staffs. I provided an opening in which I stressed that the case being made against Saddam Hussein and Iraq, centered as it was on the issue of WMD, did not hold water. I chastised the Republican lawmakers with a warning: If they continued to support the policy of confronting Saddam’s Iraq over a trumped-up charge, they would not only get America involved in a war it could not win but would end up destroying the credibility of the Republican Party, and turn control of the Congress, and eventually the Presidency, to the Democrats. There were questions asked, and answers given, and in the end most thanked me for what they called an “illuminating” meeting.
Then they proceeded to do nothing.
Today that warning has become reality. America is bogged down in a losing war in Iraq, the Republican Party lies in shambles over its partisan support of a policy that was never debated or discussed but rather rubber-stamped and the Democrats now control the Senate and the House of Representatives. There is a very real chance that the Democrats will take control of the presidency in 2008, since the debacle that is Iraq will not be resolved prior to that date.
President Bush will go down in history with complete ownership of the Iraq War. The Republican Party will also be tarnished by this legacy. It doesn’t matter that the policies of sanctions-based containment and regime change, which set in motion the events leading up to the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, were conceived of and implemented by Clinton, or that the Democrats in Congress were as complicit (and incompetent) in their support of those policies through their “bipartisan” support of both the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (which set America’s policy toward Iraq as regime change) and the War Authorization Resolution of 2002, which punted away Congress’s constitutional responsibilities when it came to the declaration of war. To most Americans, the war in Iraq is a Republican war, and blame has been placed squarely at the doorstep of the Republican Commander in Chief who got us there, George W. Bush.
Things you don’t want to hear from the pilot
For example:
Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get it under control. I trust you are not in too much distress.
That would be a bad sign, would it not? Read the entire account, which begins:
With unbelievable restraint, Captain Eric Moody addressed British Airways flight 009 as his Boeing 747 drifted inexorably down towards the Indian Ocean.
Displaying the stiff-upper-lip spirit that built an empire, he uttered the words that are every air passenger’s worst nightmare: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get it under control. I trust you are not in too much distress.’
Minutes before, while cruising at ten kilometres above the sea, Captain Moody had instructed his first officer to send a Mayday call to ground control in nearby Indonesia. The date was June 24, 1982, and this extraordinary flight has since gone down in aviation history.
As a new TV documentary investigating the so-called ‘Jakarta Incident’ makes clear, nothing was quite as one might expect that terrible night.
Incredibly, passengers and crew reacted to the captain’s cataclysmic announcement not with screams and hysteria, but with an extraordinary calm as the realisation that they were almost certainly sinking to their deaths hit home.
Looking out of the aircraft windows, they could see that their plane was coated in an eerie white light and that the engines were on fire, with great jets of flame trailing into the sky.
Bad news on public access to scientific research
The greed of Big Business makes itself known again:
The battle over public access to scientific literature stretches back to the late 1990s when Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus began plans for PubMed Central—a repository for all research resulting from National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding—and, a few years later, launched the Public Library of Science (PLoS). These easily accessible journals and repositories have struck fear into the hearts of traditional publishers, who have enlisted the “pit bull” of public relations to fight back, reports news@nature.
The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers hired Eric Dezenhall, head of Dezenhall Resources, a PR firm that specializes in “high stakes communications and marketplace defense,” to address some of its members this past summer and potentially craft a media strategy. Dezenhall declined to comment for this article, citing “our longstanding policy due to strict confidentiality agreements neither to identify our clients nor comment on the work we do for them,” in an email response to a request for an interview. But “nobody disagrees on the goals of high-stakes communications—sell a controversial product, win an election, defuse conflict and so forth,” Dezenhall notes in the “manifesto” on the firm’s website. “The life-or-death public relations struggles facing businesses today are not about information they are about power.” In this case, the struggle is over access to scientific information.
Specifically, according to Dezenhall’s suggestions in a memo, the publishers should “develop simple messages (e.g., Public access equals government censorship; Scientific journals preserve the quality/pedigree of science; government seeking to nationalize science and be a publisher) for use by Coalition members.” In addition, Dezenhall suggests “bypassing mass ‘consumer’ audiences in favor of reaching a more elite group of decision makers,” including journalists and regulators. This tack is necessary, he writes, because: “it’s hard to fight an adversary that manages to be both elusive and in possession of a better message: Free information.” Finally, Dezenhall suggests joining forces with think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute [proud promoters of the Iraq War and the escalation - LG] and National Consumers League in an attempt to persuade key players of the potential risks of unfiltered access. “Paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles,” he adds.
Of course, open access does not mean no peer review. While the NIH is not in the business of peer review, according to Dr. Norka Ruiz Bravo, NIH’s deputy director for extramural research, the entirety of PLoS journals are peer-reviewed. “Open access journals are peer-reviewed to the same standards,” notes Mark Patterson, PLoS’s director of publishing. “We wanted to provide an open access alternative to the best journals to allow the very best work to be made publicly available.”
Great news! Honeybee Spa soap in a jar
Honeybee Spa now makes their excellent shea-butter shaving soaps available in a jar, similar to the way QED soaps are sold. She sells a three-pack at a very reasonable price, so here are my suggestions:
Coffee-Mocha, Sandalwood Vanilla, and Fresh Lemon. 
Note this from the listing:
We are more than happy to combine shipping on items if you purchase more than one of our products.
If you purchase multiple items, or have any questions, please contact us (at honeybeespa@att.net) before submitting payment.
Why you need to watch your diet and weight and to exercise
Because you have a 50-50 chance of having the gene that predisposes a person toward (type 2, I presume) diabetes:
A recent study by a Saint Louis University researcher confirms findings that about half of the U.S. population has a version of a gene that causes them to metabolize food differently, putting them at greater risk of developing diabetes.
Edward Weiss, Ph.D., assistant professor of nutrition and dietetics at Doisy College of Health Sciences at Saint Louis University, looked at a relatively common version of a gene called FABP2, which is involved in the absorption of fat from food.
Those people with the variant gene processed fat differently than those who don’t have it. They burned more fat, which may have hindered their ability to remove sugar from the blood stream and burn it. Diabetes is characterized by too much sugar in the blood.
“This study adds to what was previously known about this gene variant by showing that after consuming a very rich milkshake, people with the variant gene process the fat from the drink differently than other people,” Weiss says.
That is not to say that half of U.S. residents are destined to get diabetes, he adds.
“While the variation of the gene appears to contribute to the diabetes risk, it does not cause diabetes by itself,” Weiss says.
“Many other genes, some known and some unknown, are involved in a person’s overall risk of developing diabetes. Those are things a person can’t control. But there are risk factors for diabetes that a person can change — lifestyle factors, such as diet and exercise.”
The study was published in the January issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
What Bush is doing
And regardless of the crocodile tears he sheds, he continues to do it and even to escalate. This story shows what happens, and it’s part of the reason that, in the past, war has been the last resort. This time, Bush just couldn’t wait to start a war in Iraq.
Army specialist Katie Lavely is certainly no anti war activist. She has proudly served several months in Iraq.
She’s due to return to active service soon, but she doesn’t want to go. It has nothing to do with politics, but everything to do with her little boy, two year old Devic.
Devic just lost his father, also a soldier serving in Iraq. Lavely does not want to risk her son losing BOTH his parents.
Her ex-husband was Sergeant Victor Langarica. He died Saturday when insurgents shot down his helicopter near Baghdad.
Lavely knows when she signed up; she made a commitment, but tell that to a two year old boy.
Lavely says, “I’m expecting them to understand and leave me here with my son, but the military is the military. So, whatever they say goes.”
Lavely and her family live in Brunswick Maryland. 9 News Now will stay with this story and let you know what happens.
Bush is not “commander-in-chief”
He’s just “commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy of the United States. If you’re not in the Army or the Navy (or, presumably, the Marines or the Coast Guard), he’s not your commander-in-chief. Instead, he’s your elected public servant.
Glenn Greenwald has a great post on this today.
Hardiness zones moving north
As global warming advances, the map of hardiness zones is changing. Here’s an animation of the change. The Carpetbagger reports:
For those concerned with gardening, landscaping, and agriculture, it’s pretty obvious that areas that were once too cold for certain kinds of plants are suddenly warm enough to find themselves in an entirely new zone. Warmer weather plants that were limited to southern climate zones can now grow in climate zones further north.
From a natural point of view, this points to an ongoing problem of climate change, but from a political point of view, it’s worth noting that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been working on updating its climate map for nearly four years, but hasn’t produced a finished product. (Thanks to reader B.M. for the tip.)
A warming climate has required a new look at what plants and trees can be grown in what parts of the country, according to the National Arbor Day Foundation. The nonprofit tree-advocacy group has put together its own version of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “hardiness-zone” map….
The foundation created the revised map after its members kept asking about an update and providing feedback about species that were thriving in areas contrary to the USDA zones, he said. The problem with the USDA map is that it uses 1990 information, [Woody Nelson, spokesman for the National Arbor Day Foundation] said. “The climate has gotten so much warmer since then,” he said. “Our understanding is that the USDA has been working on an update for years, beginning back in 2003.
“They never get around to announcing when they’ll get it done. In the meantime, millions of people want to plant trees and gardens, and we just wanted to get on with it.”
Both maps are based on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climate data, but the foundation uses the more recent information. That makes a difference, because the 10 warmest years on record — records that officials began keeping about 1880 — were logged during the last 15 years, according to NOAA. Last year is in the No. 1 slot as the warmest.
The USDA, which started working on a new map in 2003, said an update should probably be available in the “near future.” One hates to be cynical, but do you suppose the Agriculture Department doesn’t want to help highlight global warming trends and their impact on U.S. climates? Just throwing that out there as a possibility.
Reader B.M. has already crafted an administration response: “You can’t trust plants. Agriculture has a well known liberal bias.”
Why Ari Fleischer sought immunity
From Slate’s trial dispatch (via The Plank):
It turns out Ari Fleischer will be the next witness, once court resumes Monday… The defense team wants to note—for the jury’s benefit—that Fleischer demanded immunity before he would agree to testify, because this might cast Fleischer’s testimony in a different light.
And here Fitzgerald makes a nice little chess move: Fine, he says, we can acknowledge that Fleischer sought immunity. As long as we explain why. Turns out Fleischer saw a story in the Washington Post suggesting that anyone who revealed Valerie Plame’s identity might be subject to the death penalty. And he freaked. [Emphasis added.]
Christy Hardin Smith on the trial people
Christy Hardin Smith has a very nice post this morning, discussing the personalities of the various players in the Libby trial. She’s on site as an observer, so she recounts her interactions. Go read.
Vintage Blades LLC
A relatively new vendor of shaving products: Vintage Blades LLC, who sell straight razors, safety razors, and even some kind of new-fangled razor that uses some sort of cartridge.
Very nice selection, and they have the estimable Rooney shaving brushes with handles in faux ivory, faux horn, and faux ebony—and in my opinion, you want faux handles in a shaving brush: true ivory, true horn, and true ebony are too much at risk from the constant wetting with soap and water.
He carries three grades of Rooney: Pure Badger, Super Silvertip, and Finest. I’ve not used the Pure Badge, but the Super Silvertip is great and the Finest is truly awesome. Style 1 handles are a little small for my taste. I prefer Style 2 and Style 3 handles. For brush size, if you’re lathering on your face (as I do), the Small size works best—and it’s plenty large. I do have a Rooney Style 3 Large Super, but it’s so large that it more or less requires that you use a lathering bowl.
A new grip for the Futur
Interesting observation from a shaver on ShaveMyFace.com:
I am currently using a Futur I was able to buy here at SMF.
After my first shave with the Futur I was looking at its slick shape and the tapper in the middle caught my eye. As I looked at it, the razor was telling me to hold it from the tapper, after i did that the the design of the razor made sense.
So during my second shave I held the razor from its waist. I was shaving with a different razor: the Futur was easier to maneuver and applying 0 pressure was easy when holding the razor from its waist.
I know now that the Futur is counterbalanced.
This is the value of the shaving forums: the pooling of knowledge and information from a broad range of experienced shavers.
UPDATE: More here.
A save-the-Hubble movement
Via The Eldest, this email:
The founder of Savethehubble.org, Michael Paolucci, has kindly given me the opportunity to speak to you and I will be brief. I am the director of a documentary work-in-progress entitled SAVING HUBBLE. The film is an innovative project that examines, in-depth, the decision to abandon Hubble in 2004. The concept is to study this decision in the context of contemporary American political policy and tell the story of mistaken priorities, both in the space program and in other arenas.
Much of the film has been shot already and a trailer is available for viewing online at our website: www.savinghubble.com.
My goal for SAVING HUBBLE is for the film to become a true grassroots movement. Like you, I am excited that Hubble has regained favor within NASA (through the recent rescheduling of Servicing Mission 4), but my film goes beyond the Hubble issue and challenges the space agency and our government to change course on a number of issues. The film will examine the cuts and delays that have affected many NASA science programs and examine larger issues like federal spending priorities, especially with regard to defense budgets and how they shape the overall funding pool. In short, are we a country that builds nukes or space telescopes? The decision is ours to make.
Perhaps another secret of exercise
Okay, I admit it: I have to exercise. So I was particularly interested to read this:
The physical rewards of exercise derive not just from muscular exertion but, to a surprising extent, from a person’s mind-set about exercise, a new report suggests.
Alia J. Crum and Ellen J. Langer, psychologists at Harvard University, made this provocative discovery when they studied 84 women who clean rooms at seven Boston-area hotels. It’s a physically taxing job. Each woman scours a hotel room for 20 to 30 minutes, cleaning an average of 15 rooms daily.
For at least a month, women who had heard a brief presentation that explained how their work qualifies as good exercise displayed more weight loss, larger blood pressure declines, and other health advantages compared with peers given no such information, Crum and Langer say.
This finding suggests that exercise enhances physical health, at least in part, via the placebo effect—that is, as a consequence of an individual’s beliefs and expectations. “If our mind-sets control our psychological and physical reactions and we can control our mind-sets, then we can have direct control over our health,” Langer says. The new study appears in the February Psychological Science.
The Pirate of the Pine Forest
Today brought forth the GEM G-Bar again. It’s amazing how that little hook at the end of the handle is just right for shaving against the grain. And I felt a fine outdoorsy way in using Fleetwood’s Pine shaving soap, lathering up with the Simpson Harvard 2 Best Badger. Great and bracing smell. The alum bar at the end, of course, gliding over my face, and then Pinaud’s Bay Rum aftershave—quite bracing and three-masted aroma.
Incredibly smooth shave, with no nicks. My technique is definitely improving. My first go-around with the GEM G-Bar required 4 passes, and today I think I could have done two, but I was enjoying the shave so much I did the across-the-grain pass anyway.
