Later On

Restoring Firefox (which I somehow munged, but no idea how) has been informative. A bit of a pain, but educational. Now I’m going to belatedly clean up the kitchen and fix lunch (a nice bunch of greens cooked with some celery root, I think). Regular blogging will resume tomorrow.

You’ve probably seen the story in the NY Times, but if not, read it. It’s important. Note this point toward the end of the story:

This year for the first time, the United States used a law that allows it to prosecute torture in other countries. On Jan. 10, a federal court in Miami sentenced Chuckie Taylor, the son of the former Liberian president, to 97 years in a federal prison for torture, even though the crimes were committed in Liberia.

Last October, when the Miami court handed down the conviction, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey applauded the ruling and said: “This is the first case in the United States to charge an individual with criminal torture. I hope this case will serve as a model to future prosecutions of this type.”

So the US is not in any position to criticize Spain should it prosecute American torturers, such as those named in the complaint:

1. Alberto Gonzales
2. John Yoo
3. David Addington
4. William Haynes
5. Jay Bybee
6. Doug Feith

Note also:

The 98-page complaint, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, is based on the Geneva Conventions and the 1984 Convention Against Torture, which is binding on 145 countries, including Spain and the United States. Countries that are party to the torture convention have the authority to investigate torture cases, especially when a citizen has been abused.

It occurs to me that, when I first reinstalled Firefox, I installed ALL the add-ons before restarting Firefox, and that may have caused problems (since many of the add-ons have to do some tinkering in Firefox—e.g., add a button to the Customize page). This time, I restarted after each add-on: lots of restarting, since this is the current list of add-ons:

Adblock Plus
AI RoboForm Toolbar
Answers
Book Burro
Classic Compact Options
Context Search
Cool Previews
Evernote Web Clipper
Faviconize Tab
Google Reader Notifier
Greasemonkey (along with a script to compress Google Reader display)
Grocery List Generator
IE View Lite
Java Quick Starter
Juice
Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant
PDF Download
Pronounce
Read it Later
ReminderFox
Save Image in Folder
Share Video
Slimsearch
Smarter Wikipedia
Stumble Upon
Tab Mix Plus *
TinyURL Creator
Traduku
Ubiquity
Ultra Recall Firefox Extension (installed by Ultra Recall)
Undo Closed Tabs Button
Update Notifier
Who Is This Person?

I’m still trying to track down the right Greasemonkey Google Reader script. The one I had listed the entries very close together, and the one I have now still puts too much space around the entries.

*UPDATE: I just replaced Tab Mix Plus with Tab Kit, which has some nicer features. You can’t use both, since they step on each other’s toes.

UPDATE2: I went back to Tab Mix Plus because I had trouble getting Tab Kit to open the new tabs where I wanted them. And I did find the right Greasemonkey Google Reader script, so now I’m back in action!

Working through re-doing Firefox to get it the way I like it has some advantages: like removing everything from a cabinet or closet or drawer before looking through it, sorting it, and then putting it all back. It reminds you of what you have, you can probably get rid of a lot of stuff you never use, and when it’s reorganized, then for a while you know where everything is.

Still making progress.

I uninstalled Firefox again, wiped out ALL files, reinstalled, and now am gradually installing my add-ons. Customization is working, thank god. Progress is being made. Regular blogging will resume sometime today.

Chuck Spinney has an exceptionally interesting post at Defense and the National Interest, which begins:

Over the course of my 33 year career in the Defense Department, first as an Air Force officer, then as a civilian, the central thrust my efforts evolved without design into a focus aimed at understanding why the Pentagon bureaucracy, the American military, the Congress, and the defense industry (i.e. the military-industrial-congressional complex or MICC) could not, and indeed would not, adapt to changing conditions in order to extricate themselves from what was clearly an ever more expensive death spiral of shrinking forces, aging weapons, continual pressure to reduce its readiness fight, should a war. I came to appreciate some general qualities are intimately associated with this intractable and ultimately self-destructive non-adaptive behavior.

The qualities impeding the decision-making system from making a rational adaptation to a clearly visible system of dysfunctional behavior included:

• The intimidating effects of increasing complexity (in terms of technological, conceptual, organizational, managerial, and political complexities) Complexity being defined as a quality of the “whole” that relates the number and arrangements of the “parts” to one’s ability ability to understand the “whole.” It follows, therefore, that increasing complexity runs up the number of parts and multiplies the variety of arrangements among those parts. This naturally decreases one’s ability to comprehend the whole. The increased difficulty of comprehension makes it more difficult to understand and identify what corrective measures are really needed and more difficult to reorient the whole by changing the large number and rearranging the variety of connections among the parts in a way that brings about the coherent adaptation to the problem. Viewed this way, a status quo devoted to increasing complexity can use that complexity to protect itself from change.

• Increasing giantism that leads to a an implicit condition of being too big to fail. This also thwarts the impulse to change. It is difficult to terminate humongous weapon systems like the F-22 or missile defense system when the dollars and jobs are flowing to hundreds of congressional districts usually spead throughout 40+ states. Increasing giantism is also reflected in increasing concentration in the industrial base into a smaller number of bigger industrial contractors who wield more political power.

• Increasing politicization — e.g, a hall of mirrors built by deceptive bureaucratic gaming practices, like those explained here. Politicization is also sustained and increased by the ease with which high and mid-level managers and military officer move back and forth through the revolving door between government and the private sector.

• Crony capitalism — or the condition where government-industry partnerships put industry interests ahead of public interests. As Eisenhower said in his farewell address, “the danger of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

• And perhaps most importantly, the existence of mind-numbing belief systems that have evolved to justify the current course of action, even in the presence of evidence to the contrary — e.g. the ubiquitous ideology that emerging technological advances will remove the fog and friction of war and thereby reduce the conduct of war to the equivalent of an engineering problem.

Now with the Pentagon’s self-destructive qualities in mind, read Simon Johnson’s essay in the current issue of The Atlantic. He explains why …

Continue reading.

The Washington Post reports today:

When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him.

The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.

In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida — chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.

Moreover, within weeks of his capture, U.S. officials had gained evidence that made clear they had misjudged Abu Zubaida. President George W. Bush had publicly described him as "al-Qaeda’s chief of operations," and other top officials called him a "trusted associate" of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None of that was accurate, the new evidence showed.

Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda, according to a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement and military sources. Rather, he was a "fixer" for radical Muslim ideologues, and he ended up working directly with al-Qaeda only after Sept. 11 — and that was because the United States stood ready to invade Afghanistan.

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I used to but pens with regular broad points and grind those into the proper shape for italic handwriting. (If the pen was available with an italic or stub point, I would buy it that way, but some pens came only in Fine, Medium, and Broad.) I actually wrote a little treatise on my method, but ultimately I decided that John Mottishaw did a much better job than I. Still, there’s a pleasure in making a pen exactly fit your own style of handwriting. Bob Slaughter points to this interesting article if you’re inclined to work on your pen nib.

What a strange and pleasant little movie. It’s clear from the selection of trailers on the DVD that the studio had no idea what to make of the film. Quirky, but I liked it.

I particularly liked this line, delivered in a confessional conversation when one character says, “Now, don’t laugh…” and the other responds, “Then don’t say anything funny.”

I wiped out Firefox totally, including all my customizations, and reinstalled it fresh. I’ve now re-installed almost all the add-ons I had. Now I’m figuring out how to get the bookmarks.

Update: Okay, I have all my bookmarks back. (Thank God.)

Update 2: I’m giving up. The “customization” function seems to be broken—that’s the one where you right-click on the navigation bar and then can customize the buttons. Two problems:

1. If I remove the “home” button for example, it returns the next time I start Firefox: the customization isn’t permanent.

2. The add-ons formerly had buttons that I could add in the customization. Now, no buttons for add-ons. Some of those (e.g., undo last closed tab) I used a lot.

I’m so frustrated now I’m going to go do something else.

Marion Nestle writes:

The Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation announce the release of a new report on how to fix the food safety system.  The report, Keeping America’s Food Safe: A Blueprint for Fixing the Food Safety System at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), makes a bunch of suggestions for strengthening the FDA.  The FDA, it says, needs to concentrate resources on the highest risks, enforce existing rules (what a concept), establish a position with authority over all food safety programs in the agency, and work with Congress to establish a Food Safety Administration within HHS.

Wait a minute: I thought two agencies were involved in food safety regulation.  Yes, HHS regulates most foods through the FDA, but the USDA regulates meat and poultry.  These are not two separate food systems. Wastes from food animals (USDA-regulated) contaminate fruits and vegetables (FDA-regulated).

Don’t we need one system?  I think we do.

And buried in the mess of bills submitted to Congress and currently under consideration (handily summarized by Bill Marler), are several aimed at doing just that.  This is a great time to weigh in on them, especially since polls show that nearly 75% of Americans are more afraid of food than they are of terrorists.

Joanne Mariner, a human rights attorney, has a good two-part post on the effects of Bush’s "War on Terror"

The Global Impact of U.S. "War on Terror" Abuses

The Global Impact of U.S. "War on Terror" Abuses, Part II

The first part begins:

Since September 2001, the U.S. government has been directly responsible for a broad array of serious human rights violations in fighting terrorism, including torture, enforced disappearance, arbitrary detention, and unfair trials. In many instances, US abuses were carried out in collaboration other governments.

To cite one example—albeit a particularly notable one—Pakistan’s intelligence agencies worked closely with the CIA to "disappear" terrorist suspects, hold them in secret detention, and subject them to torture and other abuses.

With Barack Obama’s term as U.S. president, the U.S. approach to fighting terrorism has changed. The scope of the Obama administration’s reforms is not yet clear, but it is obvious that the new administration wants to rethink many of the policies that were instituted over the past eight years.

This change in the U.S. approach is long overdue. What is called for, however, is not only for the United States to reform its own abusive policies, but also for U.S. officials to try to counteract the negative influence of past policies worldwide. As a brief review of US counterterrorism efforts will suggest, the human rights impact of the US-led "war on terror" has been felt across the globe.

Continue reading part I.

Interesting post by John Stauber:

John Podesta‘s liberal think tank the Center for American Progress strongly supports Barack Obama‘s escalation of the US wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is best evidenced by Sustainable Security in Afghanistan, a CAP report by Lawrence J. Korb. Podesta served as the head of Obama’s transition team, and CAP’s support for Obama’s wars is the latest step in a successful co-option of the US peace movement by Obama’s political aids and the Democratic Party.

CAP and the five million member liberal lobby group MoveOn were behind Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI), a coalition that spent tens of millions of dollars using Iraq as a political bludgeon against Republican politicians, while refusing to pressure the Democratic Congress to actually cut off funding for the war. AAEI was operated by two of Barack Obama’s top political aids, Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes, and by Brad Woodhouse of Americans United for Change and USAction. Today Woodhouse is Obama’s Director of Communications and Research for the Democratic National Committee. He controls the massive email list called Obama for America composed of the many millions of people who gave money and love to the Democratic peace candidate and might be wondering what the heck he is up to in Afghanistan and Pakistan. MoveOn built its list by organizing vigils and ads for peace and by then supporting Obama for president; today it operates as a full-time cheerleader supporting Obama’s policy agenda. Some of us saw this unfolding years ago. Others are probably shocked watching their peace candidate escalating a war and sounding so much like the previous administration in his rationale for doing so.

As soon as prisons went private, they of course formed a lobbying group. Generally speaking, this group favors harsh laws that lead to prison sentences for minor infractions: the more prisoners that there are, the more money they make. Jim Webb is fighting that industry and, perhaps more important, providing an example of political leadership:

There are few things rarer than a major politician doing something that is genuinely courageous and principled, but Jim Webb’s impassioned commitment to fundamental prison reform is exactly that.  Webb’s interest in the issue was prompted by his work as a journalist in 1984, when he wrote about an American citizen who was locked away in a Japanese prison for two years under extremely harsh conditions for nothing more than marijuana possession.  After decades of mindless “tough-on-crime” hysteria, an increasingly irrational “drug war,” and a sprawling, privatized prison state as brutal as it is counter-productive, America has easily surpassed Japan — and virtually every other country in the world — to become what Brown University Professor Glenn Loury recently described as a “a nation of jailers” whose “prison system has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history.”

What’s most notable about Webb’s decision to champion this cause is how honest his advocacy is.  He isn’t just attempting to chip away at the safe edges of America’s oppressive prison state.  His critique of what we’re doing is fundamental, not incremental.  And, most important of all, Webb is addressing head-on one of the principal causes of our insane imprisonment fixation:  our aberrational insistence on criminalizing and imprisoning non-violent drug offenders (when we’re not doing worse to them).  That is an issue most politicians are petrified to get anywhere near, as evidenced just this week by Barack Obama’s adolescent, condescending snickering when asked about marijuana legalization, in response to which Obama gave a dismissive answer that Andrew Sullivan accurately deemed “pathetic.”  Here are just a few excerpts from Webb’s Senate floor speech this week (.pdf) on his new bill to create a Commission to study all aspects of prison reform:

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Suddenly my Firefox has gotten a bit addled: buttons added to the navigation bar have disappeared—not only from the bar, but also from the customization menu—and changes I make (e.g., removing the “Home” button) are undone when I next start Firefox. What’s particularly galling is that some of the buttons are for add-ons that I use quite a bit: opening the last closed tab, for example, or making a Tiny URL from the current address. I suppose eventually I’ll figure it out—worst case, I can uninstall Firefox and start from scratch. :sigh: The small travails of daily life.

UPDATE: I uninstalled it, reinstalled it, and the problem is still there…

Yuzu is an oriental grapefruit, more or less, and based on the fragrance of the shaving soap, has a very nice smell. I got an excellent lather with the Plisson Chinese Grey, and the slim-handle Gillette adjustable (since it’s gold, I believe that it’s an Aristocrat—Gillette seems to have loved that name and reused it repeatedly) with a Polsilver blade did a fine job. The classic Stetson was nice, though I discover I actually prefer  Stetson Sierra aftershave. Now for coffee.

Interesting:

"Broken heart syndrome" is still a mystery to many in the medical community, but new data from researchers at The Miriam Hospital may shed some light on the clinical characteristics and outcomes of this relatively rare, life-threatening condition. Researchers created a registry of 70 patients with the syndrome, known medically as Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, who were diagnosed between July 2004 and April 2008. Two-thirds of the patients – almost all post-menopausal women – had experienced a very stressful physical or emotional event just before arriving at the hospital with heart attack-like symptoms. Although 20 percent were critically ill and required emergency treatment to keep them alive, all patients survived the first 48 hours and experienced a full and complete recovery,

The report is published in the April 1 issue of the American Journal of Cardiology.

"It can be difficult for cardiologists and emergency room physicians to diagnose and manage patients with broken heart syndrome. However, this data will helps us better understand the disease process and could play a major role in developing and tailoring more effective short and long-term treatment strategies," says lead author Richard Regnante, MD, an interventional cardiology fellow at The Miriam Hospital and a teaching fellow in medicine (cardiology) at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.

Broken heart syndrome was first described by Japanese researchers in the early 1990s. Symptoms typically mimic a heart attack and tend to follow exposure to an intense physical or emotional event. Experts believe these symptoms may be brought on by the heart’s reaction to a surge of stress hormones, like adrenaline, causing a part of the heart to temporarily weaken or become stunned (cardiomyopathy), although the exact mechanism is unknown. However, it appears that broken heart syndrome is temporary and completely reversible.

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Interesting:

When tiny semipalmated sandpipers embark on their annual odyssey from the Canadian Arctic to their winter residences in South America, they set out on one of the world’s longest migrations. On the way, the tiny birds stop off at the Bay of Fundy on the Canadian east coast, where they spend two weeks gorging on a superfood, Corophium volutator (mud shrimps), which have some of the highest levels of n-3 fatty acids (better known as omega-3 fatty acids) of any marine animal. According to Jean-Michel Weber from the University of Ottawa, omega-3 fatty acids have some rather astonishing effects. In humans they reduce the risk of coronary heart disease and alleviate depression. But it was not their potential medicinal properties that intrigued Weber; it was their ability to increase aerobic capacity, much like endurance training. Could the sandpipers be building up for their endurance challenge by simply eating? All the evidence suggest so, but Weber needed to test the miraculous fatty acids’ effects on less athletic birds, bobwhite quails, to be sure. Could he boost the couch potato quails’ endurance by simply feeding them omega-3 fatty acids? Weber and his team publish their discovery that quails can get fit simply by eating a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids on 27 March 2009 in The Journal of Experimental Biology http://jeb.biologists.org.

Teaming up with student Simba Nagahuedi, Weber fed three groups of the sedentary quails a tightly regulated omega-3 diet of n-3 eicosapentaenoic acid, or n-3 docosahexaenoic acid, or a 50/50 mixture of the two oils for 6 weeks. Then Nagahuedi checked the quails’ pectoral muscles to see if their capacity to consume oxygen to produce energy had improved. Measuring the activity levels of four oxidative enzymes the duo found that the enzymes’ activity levels had increased by between 58 and 90% to levels normally only seen in the migrating sandpipers. Weber admits that he was astonished by the increase. Even top human endurance athletes only improve their oxidative enzyme activities by 38 to 76% after 7 weeks of hard endurance training. But the quails had done even better without getting off their bottoms; they had got fit by simply eating omega-3 fatty acids.

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Interesting:

A new study by researchers at the University of British Columbia suggests taking public transit may help you keep fit. The study, published in the Journal of Public Health Policy, finds that people who take public transit are three times more likely than those who don’t to meet the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada’s suggested daily minimum of physical activity.

Doctoral student Ugo Lachapelle and Assoc. Prof. Lawrence Frank of the UBC School of Community and Regional Planning used 4,156 travel surveys from metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia, to examine whether transit and car trips were associated with meeting the recommended levels of physical activity by walking.

Because transit trips by bus and train often involve walking to and from stops, the study found that users are more likely to meet the recommended 30 minutes of moderate physical activity a day, five days a week.

According to the study, people who drove the most were the least likely to meet the recommended level of physical activity.

"The idea of needing to go to the gym to get your daily dose of exercise is a misperception," says Frank, the J. Armand Bombardier Chairholder in Sustainable Transportation and a researcher at the UBC Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability. "These short walks throughout our day are historically how we have gotten our activity. Unfortunately, we’ve engineered this activity out of our daily lives."

The researchers conclude that making transit incentives more broadly available may produce indirect health benefits by getting people walking, even if it’s just in short bouts.

"This should be appealing to policy makers because it’s easier to promote transit incentives – such as employer-sponsored passes or discount fares – than to restructure existing neighbourhoods," says Frank.

The research could have major implications for urban planning and public transit development, Lachapelle says.

"You don’t necessarily have to rebuild communities or make major investments in infrastructure to promote public health," he says. "There are things we can do in the interim, such as encourage people to drive less, and adapt their lifestyles which will get people more physically active and generate fewer greenhouse gasses."

Source: University of British Columbia

Interesting:

Considerably more people than previously believed are allergic to the most common fragrance ingredient used in shampoos, conditioners and soap. A thesis presented at the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden found that over 5% of those who underwent patch testing were allergic to the air oxidized form of the fragrance ingredient linalool. "I would suspect that about 2% of the complete population of Sweden are allergic to air oxidized linalool. That may not sound very much, but it is serious since linalool is so widely used as a fragrance ingredient. Linalool is found in 60-80 percent of the perfumed hygiene products, washing up liquids and household cleaning agents that can be bought in the nearest supermarket, and it can be difficult for people who are allergic to avoid these products", says dermatologist Johanna Bråred Christensson, author of the thesis.

Around one person in five in Sweden has some form of contact allergy. Nickel is by far the most common substance that causes eczema, but the thesis shows that oxidized linalool occupies third place in the list, after nickel and cobalt.

In the study, oxidized linalool was added at patch testing for more than 3,000 patients who wanted to find out what was causing their eczema. Between 5% and 7% proved to be allergic to the oxidized form of the fragrance ingredient.

"Linalool is present in many products around us, and this is probably the reason that contact allergy to this material is so common. Some people can shower with shower cream that contains linalool but never develop contact allergy, but we know that the risk increases as the exposure to t! he substance increases", says Johanna Bråred Christensson.

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