Later On

From the NY Review of Books:

I had a dream: Israeli Arab students, enraged by the war in Gaza, were protesting at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A counterdemonstration by Jewish students erupted. When the head of university security, a Holocaust survivor, tried to intervene, the Arab students called him a Nazi.

Actually, I didn’t dream this. Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist at the university, related the incident, which occurred in the first days after Israel began its Gaza war on December 27. But dreams cut to the quick. There’s no point denying that a line of sorts runs from the forty-three people killed by Israeli fire near a United Nations school in Gaza on January 6 back to the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 and to Berlin, 1945.

History is relentless. Sometimes its destructive gyre gets overcome: France and Germany freed themselves after 1945 from war’s cycle. So, even more remarkably, did Poland and Germany. China and Japan scarcely love each other but do business. Only in the Middle East do the dead rule. As Yehuda Amichai, the Israeli poet, once observed, the dead vote in Jerusalem. Their demand for blood is, it seems, inexhaustible. Their graves will not be quieted. Since 1948 and Israel’s creation, retribution has reigned between the Jewish and Palestinian national movements.

I have never previously felt so despondent about Israel, so shamed by its actions, so despairing of any peace that might terminate the dominion of the dead in favor of opportunity for the living.

More than dreams, I’ve been having nightmares. I cannot see a scenario in which any short-term Israeli tactical victory over Hamas is not overwhelmed by the long-term strategic cost of this war. Khaled Meshal, the political director of Hamas in Damascus, declared fifteen days into the war that it had “destroyed the last chance for negotiations.” A little over a year after the Bush administration’s much-heralded Annapolis conference, a Mideast peace has never seemed more distant. On Israel–Palestine, as much else, the outgoing president’s capacity to exit in flames is conspicuous.

But before I get to that, let me return, for a moment, to those protesting Israeli Arab students. There are about 1.3 million Arab citizens of Israel, or a little less than 20 percent of the population. Their loyalties are divided, but never before have they protested so vigorously. That’s a fair guide to the virulence of Arab sentiment, stoked by graphic around-the-clock coverage of the Gaza carnage from the al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya networks. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, resorting to the same loaded World War II lexicon, has called Gaza “a concentration camp,” a term also recently used by Cardinal Renato Martino, the head of the Vatican Council for Justice and Peace.

These jackboot allusions—which include Meshal’s reference to a Gaza “holocaust”—are untenable: a Jewish minority in any Arab state of the size of the Arab minority in Israel is unimaginable. Israel remains a small island of relatively liberal democracy in a repressive Arab sea. But it is ghettoizing itself, not least from the agonizing plight of the estimated 1.5 million Palestinians crammed into the narrow strip of land that is Gaza.

The high-tech security fence built to wall off the West Bank and the near-hermetic sealing of Gaza since the Israeli withdrawal in 2005 are in the end attempts to shut out reality…

Continue reading.

From Dan Froomkin’s column yesterday:

Ken Bode writes in the Indianapolis Star op-ed: “Last week, the White House issued a report titled, ’100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration.’ Bush did 12 press interviews, one final press conference and a final speech to the nation Thursday night. The number one assertion in all of these: ‘I kept America safe.’

“Well, the number one fact Americans need to remember is that on Aug. 6, 2001, Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice were given an intelligence report headed, ‘Osama Bin Laden Is Determined to Strike in the U.S.’ Rice was warned that instigators might already be in place. What did The Decider do? He handed back the report to the CIA analyst and said, ‘All right, you’ve covered your ass now.’ . . .

“‘We kept America safe’ is their first great lie.”

From The Week, three web sites that you may find useful:

Dopplr.com

Welcome to Dopplr, an online service for smarter travel.
Learn more about Dopplr, sign up now, or visit the city page for Helsinki.

“You put in your travel schedule and link to your friends. It allows you to see where everyone is. I love it.” – Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia in The New York Times.

Mon.thly.info

Mon.thly.Info is a simple tool to help you keep track of your menstrual cycles.

Thank God I discovered Mon.thly.Info—a website that takes the guesswork out of menstruating by tracking and predicting your period, free of charge.” —BUST Magazine

I think the only way it could be better is if it delivered tampons, put my heating pad in the microwave and massaged my feet.” —CheeseDip

Oh, and it’s free. This is why the internet was invented.” —Jezebel

Bedposted.com

Bedpost is a personal web application that will give you some insight into your sex life.

Matt Yglesias makes the case for it.

John Cole of Balloon Juice:

Via James Joyner, more lunacy in the drug war front:

The strip-search case was brought by the mother of Savana Redding, who in 2003 was an eighth-grade student at a public middle school in Safford, Ariz. Another student, found with ibuprofen pills in violation of a strict school policy, said Savana had given them to her.School officials searched Savana’s belongings, made her strip to her bra and underwear, and ordered her, in the words of an appeals court, “to pull her bra out to the side and shake it” and “pull out her underwear at the crotch and shake it.” No pills were found. The pills that prompted the search had the potency of two over-the-counter Advil capsules.

A trial judge dismissed the parent’s case against the school officials, ruling that they were immune from suit. After a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed that decision, the full appeals court agreed to a rehearing. By 6 to 5, a larger panel of the court reversed the decision, saying the suit could go forward against the assistant principal who had ordered the search.

“It does not require a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old child is an invasion of constitutional rights of some magnitude,” Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw wrote for the majority, quoting a decision in another case. “More than that: it is a violation of any known principle of human dignity.”

Judge Michael Daly Hawkins, dissenting, said the case was in some ways “a close call,” given the “humiliation and degradation” Savana had endured. But, Judge Hawkins concluded, “I do not think it was unreasonable for school officials, acting in good faith, to conduct the search in an effort to obviate a potential threat to the health and safety of their students.”

While James and the Supreme Court are focusing on worthwhile Constitutional issues, this seems to me to be missing the point, and akin to trying to cure heart disease by making better defibrillators. We need to look at what got us to this point that school officials would even CONSIDER performing a strip search for over the counter medication. This is a manifestation of decades of drug war mania and the ensuing zero tolerance idiocy.

This sort of thing should never have risen to the point that it is a constitutional issue, as this is an issue of common sense. It makes no sense to strip search kids for a pill they can buy at any store without any questions asked, yet this sort of nonsense happens every single day (albeit perhaps not to this degree). This is the school equivalent of the TSA pouring out breast milk because they are worried about lactating mothers blowing up planes. It is insanity, and zero tolerance is shorthand for zero thinking.

That seems to me to be the bigger issue.

The far-Right is still running in circles trying to say that Obama was not born in the US. They point to the Constitution, which states that “No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President…” (See this Snopes post.)

I’m wondering if they will mount a similar campaign if a Democrat ever runs for president who was delivered via C-section, that failing the test of “natural born Citizen.”

Marion Nestle:

Common Sense Media looked at 173 studies of the effects of watching TV on child and adolescent health.  Of 73 studies examining correlations between TV-watching and obesity, 86% found strong associations.  TV-watching was also strongly associated with such unfortunate outcomes as cigarette smoking, drug use, early sexual activity, and poor academic performance.  Conclusion: if you want to encourage kids to be healthier, turn off the TV!

This chart via Marion Nestle’s What to Eat blog:

I take fish oil capsules (wild-salmon oil), 2 grams with breakfast, 2 grams with dinner. And I recently started taking Coenzyme Q-10. But I don’t take any of the others. Echinacea, I’ve read, is somewhat good at helping combat minor illnesses, but only if you don’t take it regularly. I do put a tablespoon of flaxseed in with my oat groats when I make hot cereal each morning.

Nestle comments:

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine has released its annual statistics on use of such therapies.  I love the definitions: complementary therapies are used along with conventional medicine; alternative is in place of, and integrative uses both.

Two very interesting posts by Mark Kleiman. The first explains why Jefferson (and other figures of the time) did so little reading of the Greek classics, and in particular, very little reading of Plato and Aristotle, whose works today I would consider an essential part of one’s liberal education. The second discusses the sequence in which one might read Plato’s dialogues. Worth reading and quite interesting.

This recipe by Mark Bittman looks easy and tasty.

Chicken Biriyani

Yield 4 servings
Time 1 hour

It is important to leave the lid on as much as possible; you want to make sure the chicken cooks fairly quickly and that the aroma remains in the pot.

• 4 tablespoons butter
• 1 large onion, chopped
• Coarse salt and ground black pepper
• 1 large pinch saffron
• 10 whole cardamom pods
• 5 cloves
• 1 3-inch cinnamon stick
• 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger
• 1 1/2 cups basmati rice
• 3 cups chicken stock
• 1 3- to 4-pound chicken, cut up and trimmed of excess fat; skin removed if desired
• 1/4 cup slivered blanched almonds, optional

1. Put 2 tablespoons butter in a deep skillet or casserole that can be covered. Turn heat to medium-high. Add onion and some salt and pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until onion softens, 5 to 10 minutes. Add spices, and cook, stirring, another minute.

2. Add rice, and cook, stirring, until ingredients are well combined, 2 or 3 minutes. Add stock, chicken and more salt and pepper, and bring to a boil. Cover and simmer.

3. Cook undisturbed for about 25 minutes. When chicken and rice are tender and liquid is absorbed, turn heat off. If either chicken or rice is not quite done, add no more than 1/2 cup boiling water, and cook until done.

4. Melt remaining butter in a small skillet over medium heat. Add almonds (or simply melt butter), and brown lightly. Pour mixture over biriyani, and sprinkle with a bit more salt. Let rest 2 or 3 minutes. Take pot to table, and serve.

Note: Cardamom seeds can be eaten, but cloves should be removed after cooking.

I don’t much like the mouthfeel of cardamon seeds and might substitute ground cardamon—except that I have a little jar of cardamon seeds to use up.

Bernd and Florian from feineseifen.de offered to send me a sample puck of their Waro shaving soap. I normally do not accept free samples, but in a moment of weakness I agreed. The soap—the lemongrass fragrance shown at the link—arrived yesterday, and today I lathered up with the Simpsons Duke 3 Best. I got a lather with no problem, but when I applied it to the beard, the lather was a quick-dying kind, hard to see by the end of the pass. Yet there was plenty of lather in the brush for the next pass. So this soap doesn’t work well for me, and I would guess (comparing the lather to other shaving soaps) that something is missing in the formulation that, say, D.R. Harris soaps have. The lemongrass fragrance, though, was very nice.

Still, I did get a good shave with the Apollo Mikron. And the Royall Lyme was, as always, a pleasant finish.

My friend Linda told me about this, and said it was something she had thought up herself.

Take one head of cauliflower, cut away leaves (but not the central stalk), and cut into large pieces. Put those into the top of a steamer and steam them for around 15 minutes. Put cauliflower in a bowl, add a slab of butter, and use a potato masher to mash it. It will have the fluffy texture of a perfectly roasted Idaho potato. Add salt and pepper and (for me) the juice of half a Meyer lemon, stir, and eat.

Absolutely divine!

Very interesting indeed:

From beginning to end, the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Eric Holder’s nomination as attorney general observed the ban on candid discussion of the main objection to confirming him. The forbidden topic: the real reason behind the pardon of Marc Rich eight years ago, a controversial action that Holder reviewed as deputy attorney general — and that he failed to oppose for reasons he did not mention.

In an editorial that appeared on the morning of the hearings, the Washington Post urged the Senate to question Holder “closely” on the Rich matter. But it is difficult for senators (and editorial writers) to ask pertinent questions when they are completely ignorant of the real background and motivations of the players in the case. Even now, the true machinations behind the Rich pardon cannot be discussed honestly — perhaps because they implicate the government and the security services of the state of Israel.

Sitting quiet and grave before the committee, Holder listened as Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., one of the leading windbags of our time, held forth on how dreadful Rich is and how awful the pardon was. The fugitive trader, who still lives in Switzerland, had “a reprehensible record,” Specter said — alluding to reports that Rich did business in Iraq and Iran. The Pennsylvania Republican demanded to know how Holder could possibly have recommended a pardon for such an odious figure.

No doubt Holder was advised by the president-elect’s transition team not to argue with Specter or anyone else about Rich. He must have been told not to talk about the foreign-policy issues that heavily influenced his view of the Rich decision. So he offered a meek mea culpa, took his lumps from Specter, and promised that his mistakes had made him a better man. Considering that his objective is to get through the hearings without undue stress, that was probably the wisest course. Telling the truth would only have inflamed the Republicans and the press, while creating unwanted drama for Obama.

Still, it would have been a refreshing change from the usual confirmation minuet if instead of humbly apologizing, Holder had tartly instructed the buffoonish Specter, his fellow senators, the press, and the public about the actual circumstances of the Rich affair. He might have started with the fact that continuous lobbying on Rich’s behalf from the highest Israeli leaders and their American friends — among whom Specter no doubt counts himself — became even more intense in the days before Clinton left office. He could have noted that such pressures coincided with Clinton’s efforts to conclude a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians. And he could have explained to Specter that Rich’s deals in Iran and Iraq were often related to his other role — as an asset of the Mossad who gathered intelligence and helped to rescue endangered Jews from those regimes.

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Take a small bowl of canned pumpkin. Stir in some cinnamon, small pinch of salt, apple-pie spice (or pumpkin-pie spice), and slivered almonds. Top with crème fraîche or nonfat yogurt. Tasty and healthful.

This statement from Obama, for example:

Five days before taking office, Obama was careful not to outline specific fixes for Social Security and Medicare, refusing to endorse either a new blue-ribbon commission or the concept of submitting an overhaul plan to Congress that would be subject only to an up-or-down vote, similar to the one used to reach agreement on the closure of military bases.

But the president-elect exuded confidence that his economic team will succeed where others have not.

“Social Security, we can solve,” he said, waving his left hand. “The big problem is Medicare, which is unsustainable…. We can’t solve Medicare in isolation from the broader problems of the health-care system.”

Interesting email I just received:

In 2009, MPP will work to introduce legislation in the U.S. Congress that will remove criminal penalties for marijuana possession. In order to generate support, we need your help. Please visit our action center today and send a letter to your member of Congress.

In 2007, there were more than 775,000 arrests for the simple possession of marijuana – not trafficking or production, but simple possession – and 872,720 total arrests for marijuana offenses. These numbers represent a tremendous cost to American taxpayers ($10 to $14 billion annually by conservative estimates). And yet, despite our strict laws, America has one of the world’s highest rates of marijuana use. Recent studies show that teen marijuana use is on the rise; in some demographics, marijuana use is more common than smoking cigarettes. Marijuana prohibition has failed.

It’s time for Congress to rethink this wasteful and ineffective policy. Please visit this page and send a letter to your member of Congress today.

It’s important for your new representative to hear from you, and it will only take a minute of your time. Thank you.

Do take action. It’s amazing how ignorant our elected Representatives and Senators often are. I’ll never forget the letter I got from Sen. Dianne Feinstein in which she revealed that she thought marijuana was some form of opium.

Anonymous Liberal has an excellent post. It begins:

Here’s Eric Lictblau in the New York Times this morning:

A federal intelligence court, in a rare public opinion, is expected to issue a major ruling validating the power of the president and Congress to wiretap international phone calls and intercept e-mail messages without a court order, even when Americans’ private communications may be involved. . . .

The decision marks the first time since the disclosure of the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program three years ago that an appellate court has addressed the constitutionality of the federal government’s wiretapping powers. In validating the government’s wide authority to collect foreign intelligence, it may offer legal credence to the Bush administration’s repeated assertions that the president has constitutional authority to act without specific court approval in ordering national security eavesdropping.

Umm. No. Though the opinion itself hasn’t been released yet, it’s clear from the rest of the article that the ruling had nothing to do with the president’s authority. Rather, the court upheld the Protect America Act against a constitutional challenge, likely on Fourth Amendment grounds. In other words, the court ruled that Congress was within its constitutional authority to pass that statute, a completely unsurprising conclusion.

If that’s the case, and I’m virtually certain it is, there is nothing at all in this ruling that offers any …

Continue reading. AL does later in the post get a link to the opinion, and his suppositions about its content turn out to be correct.

It’s amazing how often prestigious newspapers simply get their stories wrong, reporting errors as fact, injecting opinion and showing bias, and so on. But getting the plain facts wrong—inexcusable. Thank God we have knowledgeable people in the blogosphere to point out those errors, however much it infuriates the reporters to be called out on their mistakes.

All four of these are well worth reading. They include statements casually made (by Tom Friedman, for example) that just take your breath away.

Tom Friedman offers a perfect definition of “terrorism“

Establishment Washington unifies against prosecutions

Today’s FISA ruling: a case study in 8 years of lying and ignorance

A real discussion on TV regarding U.S. policy towards Israel

Daphne Eviatar of the Washington Independent writes:

The United States could be the first Western nation in recent years to try a prisoner for war crimes allegedly committed as a child.

So says the ACLU, which is calling on the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child and the U.N. Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict to stop the military commission war crimes trial of Omar Khadr, the 22-year-old Canadian national who the Bush administration wants to try at Guantánamo Bay for war crimes he allegedly committed when he was 15. Khadr’s trial is scheduled to begin Jan. 26.

Will Obama let it happen?

The ACLU wrote yesterday to the UNCRC, urging it to stand up to the United States and oppose the trial: “while such a public statement is an exceptional measure for the Committee to adopt, it is warranted by the urgent circumstances. If the trial of Omar Khadr goes forward, it would establish dangerous precedent for the United States and the entire world.”

The ACLU’s letters ask the organizations to call on President-elect Barack Obama to suspend the trial. But it raises an interesting question: Even if he stops the military commissions from going forward, what’s Obama going to do with these guys?

As I noted yesterday, a U.S. District Court judge Wednesday ordered another Gitmo prisoner, picked up as a 17-year-old, released. He’d been held for support he allegedly offered to Al Qaeda when he was 11.  And the judge found there wasn’t any credible evidence to support the charges. …

Continue reading.

Much praise is being laid about for the amazing rescue of all passengers and crew after the aircraft crashed into the Hudson River. That miracle is due in no small part to unions.