Later On

Good collection of hacks by Dustin Wax at Lifehacker.org.

The Archdruid often has good and thoughtful posts. Here are a couple:

Some Advice for Distributists:

One of the pitfalls that lies in the path of those who try to gauge the outlines of the future in advance, and swallows no small number of them, is the assumption that today’s popular beliefs and assumptions are a good guide to tomorrow’s. Sometimes, to be sure, this turns out to be the case, and some widespread opinion or other remains glued in place for decades or centuries – though this usually happens to opinions that most sensible people think will soon be abandoned. More often, though, there’s no belief less popular at any given time than the most firmly held convictions of the recent past.

A reminder of this landed in my inbox a few days back, in an article about …

A Struggle of Paradigms

Perhaps the most fascinating factor shaping today’s debates about the future of industrial society, and certainly among the most frustrating, is the rapidity with which any such debate plunges into territory outside the reach of rational argument. Watch a conversation about the subject, and nearly always one of two things will happen: either the participants will find they share basic assumptions in common, and will proceed to build a conversation on that firm ground, or their assumptions will differ and they’ll spend the rest of the conversation talking past one another.

Any number of examples could be cited, but the one that comes to mind just now is …

I blogged earlier the Washington Post story about warnings that the "harsh interrogation techniques" were torture and produced unreliable information. Here’s the ThinkProgress summary by Faiz Shakir:

In a July 2002 document uncovered by the Washington Post, the military’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency warned that the Bush administration’s interrogation program was “torture” and that it would produce “unreliable information.” JPRA is the military agency that ran the program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE), “which trains pilots and others to resist hostile questioning.” JPRA warned in the 2002 document:

The unintended consequence of a U.S. policy that provides for the torture of prisoners is that it could be used by our adversaries as justification for the torture of captured U.S. personnel.

Update: The Aug. 1, 2002 Bybee torture memo addressed to CIA legal counsel John Rizzo makes reference to the JPRA. "Your on-site psychologists have also indicated that JPRA has likewise not reported any significant long-term mental health consequences from the use of the waterboard." Did Bybee know that JPRA viewed such techniques as torture?

The FAA resisted releasing information about bird strikes on airplanes by airport. The fear, I suppose, would be that people would look at the data and perhaps change airports—or maybe decide not to fly. But it’s been released under orders from the Obama Administration, and here’s the (searchable) database. In fact, the page provides access to a LOT of data—scroll down the page at the link for a full view.

Interesting post at Mind Hacks:

Discover Magazine has an interesting Carl Zimmer article on one of the most intriguing questions in neuroscience – why do we have two cortical hemispheres? And why are they not quite the same?

It turns out that the ‘brain of two halves’ is incredibly common in the animal kingdom and that many creatures also show the behavioural lateralisation that we most readily see in humans as someone being left or right handed.

But it’s no entirely sure why we, or indeed, or animal compatriots, have evolved this way, although various theories are kicking around:

David Stark of Harvard Medical School recently found additional clues about lateralization in his studies of 112 different regions in the brains of volunteers. He and his collaborators discovered that the front portions of the brain are generally less tightly synchronized across the hemispheres than are the ones in the back. It may be no coincidence that the highly synchronized back regions handle basic functions like seeing.

To observe the world, it helps to have unified vision. At the front of the hemispheres, in contrast, we weave together streams of thought to produce complex, long-term plans for the future. It makes sense that these areas of the brain would be more free to drift apart from their mirror-image partners.

Zimmer goes on to puncture the myth of ‘left brained’ and ‘right brained’ people, or indeed, thinking styles, erroneously labelled with these pseudoscientific terms.

While certain cognitive styles have been correlated to greater activation in the left or right hemisphere, to describe a whole class of problems of thinking methods like this is nonsensical because the two hemispheres of the brain work together.

It’s like claiming someone is a good cook solely because they come from Italy. The generalisation is so broad it just doesn’t apply to individual people or situations.

Anyway, the Discover article is an excellent whistle-stop tour through the curious world of brain lateralisation.

Glenn Greenwald today:

Earlier this week, I interviewed Manfred Nowak, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, regarding America’s obligations under its treaties and international law to investigate and prosecute allegations of torture and provide legal remedies for torture victims to have their day in court.  The podcast recording, and background on these issues, is here.  Following is the transcript of the interview:

Glenn Greenwald: My guest today is Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, and he’s also a law professor in Austria.  He made news this week when he stated that President Obama’s announced policy of immunizing CIA officials who tortured detainees violates international law as well as America’s treaty obligations. Professor Nowak, thanks very much for joining me today.

Manfred Nowak: Thank you. You’re welcome.

GG: Before I ask you about the specific issues involved in that statement, could you just describe for us what your position with the United Nations is, what does it do, what’s its authority?

MN: I am United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. That is a global mandate for all countries in the world. I report to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations, which is the highest political body consisting of state representatives dealing with human rights in the United Nations, and I report to the General Assembly directly in New York. And my work is dealing on a daily basis with complaints from victims, families, non-governmental organizations, about torture.

I send urgent appeals and allegation letters to governments to ask them to investigate these allegations, to stop the practice. I carry out fact-finding missions to many countries in the world, the most recent one was in Uruguay and Montenegro, and next month I go to Kazakhstan or I, of course, I just came back this morning from Bangkok where I delivered a speech to International Harm Reduction Congress on torture and the international drug policy. But it is an expert position; my main profession is that I am a Professor of International Human Rights at Vienna University, and this is a voluntary expert function for the United Nations for six years. I was appointed at the beginning of December, 1st December 2004 and the mandate will end in November 2010.

GG: Back in January of this year, you made a statement in which you said:  "Judicially speaking, the United States has a clear obligation to bring proceedings against top government officials who authorized techniques that under international law are considered torture."

Can you describe, just in summary form, what the sources of the legal obligations are with regards to bringing proceedings against government officials who either engaged in or authorized torture? …

Continue reading.

Via Cute Overload, which also posts these links:

- Please Won’t You Help This Kitteh?
- Just Say Nyerhe to Boxes
- Perfect 90-degree Haunch Splayage

And it included the word in a warning sent in 2002 to those drafting the torture memos. From the WaPo story by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick:

The military agency that provided advice on harsh interrogation techniques for use against terrorism suspects referred to the application of extreme duress as "torture" in a July 2002 document sent to the Pentagon’s chief lawyer and warned that it would produce "unreliable information."

"The unintended consequence of a U.S. policy that provides for the torture of prisoners is that it could be used by our adversaries as justification for the torture of captured U.S. personnel," says the document, an unsigned two-page attachment to a memo by the military’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency. Parts of the attachment, obtained in full by The Washington Post, were quoted in a Senate report on harsh interrogation released this week.

It remains unclear whether the attachment reached high-ranking officials in the Bush administration. But the document offers the clearest evidence that has come to light so far that technical advisers on the harsh interrogation methods voiced early concerns about the effectiveness of applying severe physical or psychological pressure.

The document was included among July 2002 memorandums that described severe techniques used against Americans in past conflicts and the psychological effects of such treatment. JPRA ran the military program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE), which trains pilots and others to resist hostile questioning.

The cautionary attachment was forwarded to the Pentagon’s Office of the General Counsel as the administration finalized the legal underpinnings of a CIA interrogation program that would sanction the use of 10 forms of coercion, including waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning. The JPRA material was sent from the Pentagon to the CIA’s acting general counsel, John A. Rizzo, and on to the Justice Department, according to testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee…

Continue reading. So those involved in setting up the US torture program knew, or should have known, that what they were doing was (a) torture and therefore (b) illegal and (c) ineffective.

Ogalalla all the way today. The Rooney Style 2 brought up a very good lather, and the Edwin Jagger Georgian with a new PolSilver blade did a fine job. I am smooth faced and bay rum redolent. Now for a cup of tea.

This guy should be booted from the Democratic Party, since he doesn’t really seem to hold Democratic values seriously. Satyam Khanna in ThinkProgress:

Greg Sargent reports that centrist Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson (NE) — who voted to confirm both Sam Alito and John Roberts — will oppose Dawn Johnsen’s nomination to lead the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Nelson says he opposes Johnsen, a noted legal scholar and outspoken critic of the Bush administration’s torture program, because of her pro-choice views:

Senator Nelson is very concerned about the nomination of Dawn Johnson, based on her previous position as Counsel for NARAL. He believes that the Office of Legal Counsel is a position in which personal views can have an impact and is concerned about her outspoken pro-choice views on abortion.

Nelson is buying into the right-wing’s war against Johnsen. Outspoken anti-choice Republican Rep. Chris Smith (NJ) said Johnsen has a "a prejudice against motherhood, the family and a fundamental respect for all human life." The National Review’s Andy McCarthy claimed she would be a "culture-war agitator." Republicans have threatened a filibuster against her.

Update: Nelson had opposed the use of the filibuster on John Bolton and former Bush EPA administrator Stephen Johnson. "Nelson generally opposes the filibuster on nominees, even if he doesn’t like the candidate," notes Brian Beutler. It remains to be seen whether he will filibuster Johnsen.

Joe Barton is not serious about his duties, obviously. But I do think in part this is because he’s stupid—and, of course, totally owned by the oil industry.

This recipe by Mark Bittman sounds great:

Cumin-Spiced Lamb Burgers

Yield 4 servings
Time 30 minutes

The grilling process is familiar: The heat need not be too high, and the heat source should be at least four inches from the rack, to avoid burning. Lamb, because it is leaner than most beef, tends to brown more evenly and catch fire less readily. Turn once or twice, and you are done.

• 1 1/2 pounds lamb in one-inch chunks
• 1 medium onion, peeled and cut into chunks
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• Salt and pepper
• Lemon wedges for squeezing

1. Start a charcoal or gas grill, or heat a broiler. The fire should not be too hot, and the rack should be about 4 inches from the heat source.

2. Combine all ingredients except lemon in a food processor, and pulse on and off until meat is ground. Shape into burgers, and grill about 8 minutes total for rare meat, turning once. Squeeze lemon juice over burgers and serve on toasted buns.

Can’t find it in the store? Then make it at home. This recipe from the SmarterFitter blog is very quick and easy (and photos of the bread at the link):

Three Minute Spelt Bread

You can use whatever seeds or nuts you have on hand to make this recipe. I used almonds, pumpkin and flax seeds.

500g [1.1 lbs] Spelt Flour
10g [1/3 oz] fast-acting dried yeast
1/2 tsp sea salt
50g [1.75 oz] sunflower seeds
50g [1.75 oz] sesame seeds
50g [1.75 oz] linseeds [i.e., flaxseed]
500ml [2.1 cups] warm water

Preheat oven to 200 C / 390 F. Combine all the ingredients, adding the water last. Mix well and turn the dough into a greased loaf tin. Put straight into the oven and bake for an hour. Remove the loaf, turn it out of the tin and then return it to the oven without the tin for another 5-10 minutes.

An update to a column yesterday by Greenwald:

The Atlantic‘s Ta-Nehisi Coates posts video of the Peggy Noonan comments and writes:

The job of journalists is to challenge the government and to challenge their readers and viewers. What sort of journalist tells his readers that some things must be mysterious?  What sort of writer tells her readers, and viewers, essentially, to not ask too many questions? We have a fine era, when otherwise respected, intelligent, and well-read people step on a national stage and endorse national ignorance.

There’s nothing unusual about Noonan’s mentality; it’s the dominant mindset of our political and media class.  The American Prospect‘s Adam Serwer notes a column from The New York Times‘ Roger Cohen today arguing against prosecutions (of course) and observes:

Cohen’s argument simply reflects the consensus among certain journalistic and political elites that the powerful simply shouldn’t be held accountable when they make mistakes, because, after all, we all make mistakes. This compassionate attitude naturally doesn’t extend beyond this small group. America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, fully 1 percent of the population. I’m sure there are millions of people currently incarcerated who would like it if Cohen’s policy of absolution for crimes was extended to them.

That elite-protecting consensus is the central affliction of America’s political culture.  It explains not only how we continuously shield our elites from the consequences of their crimes, but also explains the reason such crimes keep happening.  If you constantly announce to a small group of people that they will be able to break the law with impunity, you are rendering inevitable future rampant criminality. That’s just obvious.

I am stunned by the number of people who want no investigations of the US torture scandal, with indictments and prosecutions as warranted, because it would be a lot of trouble. What planet are these people from?

Of course, that’s probably not the real reason for the opposition. As Glenn Greenwald points out at the end of this column, the reason people fight investigation is because they’re implicated. The conclusion of his column:

Democrats spent the last several years vehemently complaining about the “politicization of the Justice Department” under Alberto Gonzales.  Yet so many of these same Democrats are now demanding that the Obama DOJ refrain from prosecuting Bush criminals based on purely political grounds:  namely, that those prosecutions will interfere with Obama’s political agenda.

Blocking criminal investigations for political reasons is definitively corrupt — period.  That’s true whether Democrats or Republicans do it.  In The New York Times today, Mark Mazzetti and Neil Lewis advance the Jane-Harman/Alberto-Gonzales/AIPAC scandal by making clear that at the core of the scandal lies the actions of Alberto Gonzales, who intervened to block a criminal investigation of Harman for purely political reasons:

One reason Mr. Gonzales intervened, the former officials said, was to protect Ms. Harman because they saw her as a valuable administration ally in urging The New York Times not to publish an article about the National Security Agency’s program of wiretapping without warrants.

As Michael Isikoff pointed out on Rachel Maddow’s show earlier this week, what Gonzales did there (blocking a criminal investigation of Harman because the investigation would undermine the White House’s political interests) is extremely similar to what many Obama loyalists are arguing now (that criminal investigations of Bush crimes should be blocked because such investigations would undermine the White House’s political interests).  That is what made the efforts of Rahm Emanuel, Robert Gibbs and even Obama to dictate who would and would not be prosecuted so improper:  it the role of independent Justice Department officials to make that decision based on purely legal and apolitical grounds, not the role of White House officials to try to interfere for political reasons.  I was preceded yesterday on Warren Olney’s To the Point program by Philip Zelikow, and Zelikow said:  “I really don’t think the President should have opinions on who should or should not be prosecuted — full stop.”

Punishing politically powerful criminals is about vindicating the rule of law.  Partisan and political considerations should play no role in it.  It is opponents of investigations and prosecutions who are being driven by partisan allegiances and a desire to advance their political interests.  By contrast, proponents of investigations are seeking to vindicate the most apolitical yet crucial principle of our system of government: that we are a nation of laws that cannot allow extremely serious crimes to be swept under the rug for political reasons.  That’s true no matter what is best for Obama’s political goals and no matter how many Democrats end up being implicated — ethically, politically or even legally — by the crimes that were committed.

UPDATE:  Just to underscore how continuously Democrats are complicit in thwarting the rule of law in the United States:   one of Obama’s most impressive and rule-of-law-defending appointees, Dawn Johnsen, has had her nomination as OLC Chief blocked for months by the Right, and the office of a key Democratic Senator — Ben Nelson — just told Greg Sargent that Nelson “is all but certain to vote against Johnsen,” substantially increasingly the GOP’s chances of preventing her from becoming head of the OLC.  That’s our bipartisan Washington establishment in a nutshell:  key Bush torture architects such as John Rizzo and Bush intelligence policy defenders such as John Brennan are able to remain in positions of high power in the Obama administration, while those, like Johnsen, who want accountability for government crimes are considered fringe, extremist and unfit for office.

Is Sen. Ben Nelson really a Democrat? He doesn’t much act like one.

Lee Fang reports for ThinkProgress:

While serving as a U.S. attorney during the Bush administration, Christopher Christie, now a Republican candidate for Governor in New Jersey, tracked the whereabouts of citizens through their cell phones without warrants. The ACLU obtained the documents detailing the spying program from the Justice Department in an ongoing lawsuit over cell phone tracking.

While the documents reveal 79 such cases on or after Sept. 12, 2001, they do not specify how many of the applications were made during Christie’s tenure. Christie served as U.S. attorney from Jan. 17, 2002 through November 2008. ACLU staff attorney Catherine Crump noted:

Tracking the location of people’s cell phones reveals intimate details of their daily routines and is highly invasive of their privacy. The government is violating the Constitution when it fails to get a search warrant before tracking people this way.

The new revelations about the cell phone tracking program under Christie is yet another example of the warrantless spying programs authorized under the Bush administration. Previous programs approved without a court order or warrant have included the secret program to monitor radiation levels at over 100 Muslim sites and the NSA spying program on the phone and e-mail communications of thousands of people inside the U.S. These programs run contrary to the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which forbids "unreasonable searches" and sets out specific requirements for warrants, including "probable cause."

During his tenure as U.S. attorney, Christie also awarded his former boss, John Ashcroft, a $28-52 million dollar no-bid contract to "monitor a large corporation willing to settle criminal charges out of court." Former Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach blasted the decision, saying that awarding a no-bid contract "suggests other political things, and that seems to me to be as wrong as it can be." Christie also doled out "a multi-million-dollar, no bid contract to an ex-federal prosecutor who declined to criminally prosecute Christie’s brother on stock fraud charges two years earlier."

Christie’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, declined to comment on the cell phone spying program "due to pending litigation."

Drew Armstrong of Congressional Quarterly reports that Sen. Baucus is not too interested in a government-run healthcare plan option:

Sen. Max Baucus , D-Mont., said Friday that while he has not written off the idea of a government-run insurance plan for his health care overhaul proposal, it probably won’t be his first line of attack, preferring to focus instead on the system for self-insured companies.

At a breakfast with reporters hosted by the journal Health Affairs, Baucus laid out details of his health care overhaul plans, many of which he will share in greater depth in a closed-door session April 29 with Finance Committee members.

While a government-run insurance plan was still on the table, Baucus said “it might be a bit on the side of the table.” Instead, he said, he would focus on preserving the insurance system for self-insured companies while expanding private insurance and public programs such as Medicaid, the insurance program for the poor. “We’ll end up with more private insurance and more public insurance,” he said.

He later backed off that statement slightly, saying he might return to the government-run idea later on. Baucus has previously backed the idea of a government-run plan to compete with private insurers and drive down costs, but the political difficulty of the idea has put pressure on him to drop it. Many Republicans vehemently oppose any idea of a government-run insurance plan, while many of the left are demanding its inclusion.

His vision would make substantial changes to the insurance market, but with the goal of letting those who have insurance that they like keep it.

For many uninsured looking to buy coverage, Baucus would like to “set up a system similar to Massachusetts,” where people can buy insurance through a “connector” that offers standard minimum benefit plans with subsidies for those who cannot afford it.

It would be a national marketplace, Baucus said, or at least with a common national standard. “I think the whole system should be more national, and the benefits have to be more national. You can’t have benefits be one level in one state, and another level in other states.”

But he would try to make sure that it did not deeply impact companies that buy insurance already. Health care experts have theorized that any large change to the insurance market, especially with a government-run plan option, would result in some companies and people shifting from company-provided insurance to the independent or government market…

Continue reading. I believe that a government-run healthcare plan MUST be an option. Our experience with insurance-run plans are that they are inefficient, expensive, and unresponsive. If the overall package includes a government-run option, people at least would have a choice.

You can email Sen. Baucus here.

Even if a small apartment has a regular bed, this little number could be useful in case of a guest.

This guy loves them, too. He refers to one make, but also check out these links:

• Korin
• Japanese Chefs Knife
• Just Knives 101
• Chefs Knives To Go

And, when the time comes:

Japanese-Knife Sharpening (since Japanese Western-style knives (i.e., double bevel) use a finer angle than Western knives). (See also this post on knife sharpening.)

A few other comments: in Western knives, I find Wüsthof to be noticeably better than Henckel (in terms of holding an edge and edge sharpness). But now I mainly use my Japanese knives.

UPDATE: In the comments, Josh points out that the guy has an update on his knife post.