Later On

Useful tips.

What if criminals exerted their ingenuity in legitimate enterprises? Some seem to be quite clever, as this collection of posts illustrates: devices attached to ATM machines that skim the information from your card as you use the ATM. The posts describe how to detect them and give examples. From the link:

You can read about it here. I just installed it, and it is indeed pretty cool. OTOH, see this argument for switching to Google Chrome.

This is very cute, but note the following:

More @ http://www.cutebreak.com – As cute as the slow loris is, it is considered an endangered species and not really suitable as a pet. Not only are they illegal to own, but they have sharp teeth and wild-like behaviors. For example, the loris marks its territory with urine… constantly… for the span of its entire life. This is not a habit that can be changed like house training a cat or dog.

Take a look at this review of The Pork Shop. I very much want to try their jalapeño bacon.

Via the blog Bacon Unwrapped:

Take a look at this site: Greek cooking at its best.

The above is still sometimes said about the US medical "system." Kate Michelman’s experience shows otherwise:

It was a crisp and brilliant autumn day last October when the medical and financial crises with which my family had successfully, if barely, coped for seven years became a catastrophe.

My husband had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2002, a year after our daughter was paralyzed in a horse-riding accident. His balance had deteriorated until he fell two or three times at home last summer. In the face of his diminishing physical condition, a single fall could result in disastrous injury. We scheduled an appointment with his neurologist in Washington.

We pulled up to the main entrance of the hospital after the two-hour drive from our home near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. My husband opened his door, grabbed the roof of the car and began to pull himself out as I walked around to help him. I was too late. In an instant–time slowed enough for me to see the danger but raced ahead too fast for me to reach him–he lost his grip and fell to the concrete, shattering his hip, breaking his femur and causing internal bleeding that kept him in the hospital for months.

My husband is a retired college professor, and what the teaching profession lacks in salary it often makes up for with generous benefits. His health insurance would cover most of the emergency costs related to the fall–the surgeries, the hospitalization, the drugs. But in the astronomical sums the cost of medical care often entails, "most" is not a reassuring word. Months later, as his discharge from the hospital drew near, I sat in my living room looking at the bills piling up on the table. The co-pays, uncovered care and other costs had already reached $8,000, and we had virtually nothing left.

Seven years of caring for my husband and our daughter, who had no insurance at the time of her accident, had all but exhausted our savings. As my husband’s condition deteriorated, I was caught in a trap. We needed my income, but the kind of political consulting work that was my forte was incompatible with the demands of caring for him. It was simply not possible for me to be available for him 24/7 and simultaneously to work overtime, traveling for days or weeks on the campaign trail, to bring in the income that would keep us afloat.

The fraying financial thread by which we were already hanging …

Continue reading. And write to Congress that we need a national single-payer healthcare system.

Marci Hamilton of FindLaw has an interesting post:

This month marks the one-year anniversary of the valiant attempts by Texas Child Protective Services (CPS) to save the child sexual-abuse victims in the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) group situated at the Yearning for Zion (YFZ) Ranch outside Eldorado, Texas. In this column, I’ll take stock of related events since then, and explain the lessons they teach.

The authorities’ concerns were triggered by a call to a hotline, and confirmed when they entered the compound to discover a significant number of underage mothers – who were, plainly, victims of statutory rape — and clear evidence of bigamy involving underage persons, a first-degree felony in Texas. Not only did CPS have clear visual evidence of these crimes, but it also had written records showing that girls had been married off to much older men, even after those men had taken other spouses, and some disturbing pictures, including one particularly disgusting one of their prophet, Warren Jeffs (who is now in jail on other charges), passionately kissing a 12-year-old girl who was sitting on his lap.

The promise of the YFZ raid to free oppressed children, though, was never fully realized. All of the children but one has been returned. As I discussed in a prior column, the Texas appellate courts bear much of the responsibility. They refused to back up CPS’s actions, because they discounted the claims that girls had been victims of statutory rape, if those girls were over the legal age of consent at the time of the raid. The courts’ reasoning was offensive to victims of statutory rape, and made a mockery of Texas criminal law. It was also just another moment when the interests of child sex- abuse victims were trivialized for no good reason.

One Aspect of the Raid that Was Not Widely Covered: CPS Was Simply Following Its Usual Procedures

Most Americans were fascinated by the FLDS/CPS story as it unfolded, but many did not know that CPS’s actions were actually not out of the ordinary, though the context was extraordinary. As with any ordinary child-abuse investigation, once the authorities had clear evidence of abuse (in this case, of statutory rape and child bigamy), they took into custody all of the children who were sharing the same living conditions as the alleged victims, and who, therefore, were also at risk. CPS really had no choice but to bring out all of the children, because many of the adults and children lied about their ages and relationships, and because the FLDS compound was much like a commune wherein family lines and relationships were blurred. It was obvious that the child brides were part of a lifestyle that was being imposed on all of the children, and that not only were the girls at risk of rape, but the boys were also at risk, for they were being groomed to perpetuate the situation – groomed, that is, to be law-breakers.

By some measures, the State’s actions were the most promising step forward yet for the numerous victims within the FLDS. (To get a sense of the depth of the organization’s problems regarding children, read Flora Jessop’s recently-published book Church of Lies.) Twelve of the men from the compound have been indicted for perpetrating child sex abuse, aiding such abuse, or failing to report it. Before those indictments were issued, the most any prosecutor had achieved was to indict a single man from a compound at a given time, and such indictments rarely happened. Essentially, the FBI and the state Attorneys General had simply looked the other way in the states where compounds existed. The FLDS group made it difficult to investigate its crimes of abuse and abandonment of children by living in insular communes, and the authorities found it easier to co-exist with the illegal behavior than to try to stop it.

Thanks to CPS, however, we now have official documents that record the behavior of the FLDS that put children at serious risk. CPS pursued its investigation professionally, and released what should have been a shocking report detailing the problems discovered within this group, including approximately 25% of the pubescent girls being subjected to statutory rape and child bigamy. Unfortunately, the report barely made the national newspapers.

These are extraordinary developments for victims and justice, and CPS and the Texas system (despite the appellate courts there) deserve credit for taking us this far.

The Appallingly Wrong Decisions by the Texas Courts – and the All-Too-Familiar Public Relations Strategy by the FLDS Group

The Texas appellate courts were as wrong as CPS was right. Essentially, the appellate courts told the girls …

Continue reading.

NIST now has a YouTube chhannel. Check it out.

From Mind Hacks:

New Scientist has a fascinating article on some ‘I wish I’d thought of that’ research that looks at how we justify our choices, even when the thing we’ve chosen has been unknowingly swapped. It turns out, most of the time we don’t notice the change and precede to give reasons for why the thing we didn’t choose was the best choice.

It’s a fantastic use of stage magician’s sleight of hand to make a change outside conscious awareness.

We have been trying to answer this question using techniques from magic performances. Rather than playing tricks with alternatives presented to participants, we surreptitiously altered the outcomes of their choices, and recorded how they react. For example, in an early study we showed our volunteers pairs of pictures of faces and asked them to choose the most attractive. In some trials, immediately after they made their choice, we asked people to explain the reasons behind their choices.

Unknown to them, we sometimes used a double-card magic trick to covertly exchange one face for the other so they ended up with the face they did not choose. Common sense dictates that all of us would notice such a big change in the outcome of a choice. But the result showed that in 75 per cent of the trials our participants were blind to the mismatch, even offering "reasons" for their "choice".

The idea riffs on the well-known psychological phenomenon of change blindness but this is also a lovely example of what Daniel Dennett called "narratization", the ability of the mind to make a coherent story out what’s happening, with you as the main character, even when it’s clear that the outcome was determined externally. In a well-known article, Dennett cites this process as the key to our understanding of the ‘self’.

This was vividly demonstrated in split-brain patients who can be shown images to each independent hemisphere.

Each hand picks out a different picture, because the information is only accessible to the side that controls action for one side of the body, but when asked why they chose the two, they give a story of why the two pictures are related, even though they’re not conscious of initially seeing both pictures.

There’s a great summary in this New York Times piece from 2005, that comes highly recommended.

The New Scientist article covers this new technique for investigating this process with a nifty video of the slight-of-hand in action.

This story, by Dennis Jett in McClatchy, has a certain resonance:

There was a truly remarkable news item recently that received less notice than it deserved. A former president was tried, convicted and sentenced to a long jail term for crimes committed in his government’s fight against terrorism.

No, this was not George W. Bush’s worst nightmare come true. The story came from Peru where Alberto Fujimori was found to be responsible for the killing of a number of innocent civilians by government death squads. The conviction of Fujimori, who had been president from 1990 to 2000, was a rare triumph of justice over the impunity of power and was the first time in Latin America that an ex-president had been called to account in such a manner.

This happened even though Fujimori had a number of accomplishments to his credit as president. He brought Peru’s rampant terrorism under control, reformed its economy and signed a peace treaty with Ecuador ending a long-standing border dispute. Had he stepped down in 2000 with that as his record, he probably would have never been brought to trial. Instead he attempted to perpetuate himself in power by rigging his second reelection. He no doubt thought that, in office, the judicial system was too weak to try him and that, out of office, it would be used against him.

The charges against him were not new, but they did not move forward until he had been so thoroughly discredited that he was forced to resign from office and flee the country. He initially went into exile in Japan, but he then made the mistake of going to Chile – a country willing to extradite him.

The official U.S. Government reaction to the outcome of the trial was "This verdict is a powerful statement against impunity, and underscores the importance of the rule of law as a foundation of democratic government." This press guidance was never used, however, as no journalist bothered to ask the State Department. Perhaps no one wanted to embarrass Washington since there is no small irony in all this.

With new revelations every day, …

Continue reading.

I’m not going to blog much on the torture issue since the papers are full of stories derived from the Senate report. I recommend the Washington Independent and Salon.com for their articles, as well as the mainstream press. Some information is new:

• The sloppy and incompetent way the interrogation techniques were defined, in total ignorance of history and previous context. (They didn’t even know about the SERE program.)
• The way Wolfowitz pushed for more aggressive techniques/torture to try to get the intelligence that Al Qaida and Saddam Hussein were linked—that intelligence was hard to get because it wasn’t true, just a fantasy of Wolfowitz. He already had his conclusions, he just needed to torture prisoners until they corroborated it.

There’s more, but those stuck in my mind.

Blogging may be a little slow: I’m doing a lot of reading that I’m not blogging.

The Wilkinson shave stick and Simpsons Emperor 3 Super produced a very good lather, and the Progress was flawless in the shave: a fine razor indeed. Three quick passes, a splash of Blenheim Bouquet, and I’m good to go.

A story in the Washington Post:

Intelligence and military officials under the Bush administration began preparing to conduct harsh interrogations long before they were granted legal approval to use such methods — and weeks before the CIA captured its first high-ranking terrorism suspect, Senate investigators have concluded.

Previously secret memos and interviews show CIA and Pentagon officials exploring ways to break Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees in early 2002, up to eight months before Justice Department lawyers approved the use of waterboarding and nine other harsh methods, investigators found.

The findings are contained in a Senate Armed Services Committee report scheduled for release today that also documents multiple warnings — from legal and trained interrogation experts — that the techniques could backfire and might violate U.S. and international law.

One Army lieutenant colonel who reviewed the program warned in 2002 that coercion "usually decreases the reliability of the information because the person will say whatever he believes will stop the pain," according to the Senate report. A second official, briefed on plans to use aggressive techniques on detainees, was quoted the same year as asking: "Wouldn’t that be illegal?"
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Once they were accepted, the methods became the basis for harsh interrogations not only in CIA secret prisons, but also in Defense Department internment camps at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan and Iraq, the report said…

Continue reading.

Two stories just posted in the NY Times:

In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Past Use:

The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military training. How could that be torture?

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said…

Continue reading. And there’s also this story:

Report Gives New Detail on Approval of Brutal Techniques:

A newly declassified Congressional report released Tuesday outlined the most detailed evidence yet that the military’s use of harsh interrogation methods on terrorism suspects was approved at high levels of the Bush administration.

The report focused solely on interrogations carried out by the military, not those conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency at its secret prisons overseas. It rejected claims by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others that Pentagon policies played no role in harsh treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or other military facilities.

The 232-page report, the product of an 18-month inquiry, was approved on Nov. 20 by the Senate Armed Services Committee, but has since been under Pentagon review for declassification. Some of the findings were made public in a Dec. 12 article in The New York Times; a spokesman for Mr. Rumsfeld dismissed the report at the time as “unfounded allegations against those who have served our nation.”

The Senate report documented how some of the techniques used by the military at prisons in Afghanistan and at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as in Iraq — stripping detainees, placing them in “stress positions” or depriving them of sleep — originated in a military program known as Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape, or SERE, intended to train American troops to resist abusive enemy interrogations.

According to the Senate investigation, a military behavioral scientist and a colleague who had witnessed SERE training proposed its use at Guantánamo in October 2002, as pressure was rising “to get ‘tougher’ with detainee interrogations.” Officers there sought authorization, and Mr. Rumsfeld approved 15 interrogation techniques.

The report showed that Mr. Rumsfeld’s authorization was  …

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And, if possible, out of politics altogether. The Associated Press:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., offered to help the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. secure federal funds last year, just days before the agency awarded a contract to Feinstein’s husband’s firm in the housing foreclosure crisis.

Under FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair, the contract went to CB Richard Ellis Group, the biggest commercial real estate services company in the world. The Washington Times first reported details of the deal Tuesday…

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This is definitely a step in the right direction. Already our marine food supply is heavily contaminated with mercury. Renee Schoof reports for McClatchy:

The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday called for the nation’s first limits on mercury emissions from the more than 100 cement factories across the U.S.

The proposed new rule would require cement kilns to add pollution controls that would reduce mercury emissions by 81 percent by 2013. The rule also would reduce emissions of soot, hydrocarbons, hydrochloric acid and sulfur dioxide from the production of cement.

Mercury is contained in the raw material used in kilns and in the coal used for power. Once released into the air, mercury travels over wide distances and settles in soil and water. People are exposed to mercury mainly from eating contaminated fish.

The toxin can damage the brain and nervous system and is especially dangerous to fetuses and small children.

Environmental groups sued the EPA over a decade ago to try to force it to impose the emissions controls. The agency agreed to set new standards in court documents last year. It announced the new regulations late Tuesday.

A report by the environmental law firm Earthjustice, which was involved in the cases, said that the largest concentration of cement manufacturing in the U.S. is in Midlothian, Texas. Other plants are scattered around the country.

The EPA said in a statement that cement kilns were the fourth largest source of mercury emissions in the U.S. In addition to setting the first limits on mercury from existing kilns, the new rules also would tighten the limits for new kilns, it said.

Continue reading.

Eddie Gehman Kohan notes in Obama Foodorama:

The USDA has tragically and historically had a series of racially discriminatory policies in place, which the President and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack have pledged to address. Black farmers in particular have endured decades of economic discrimination from USDA policies, and have entered into a series of lawsuits and class action suits to address financial inequities. The most high-profile of these, known as the Pigford lawsuit, was settled in 1999, and the government paid out close to $1 billion in damages on 16,000 claims. But lawyers, activist groups, and farmers have worked for years to reopen the case, because many black and small farmers missed the deadline for filing; the deadline was swift, and many weren’t even aware that they could file. Dr. John W. Boyd, Jr., president of the National Black Farmers Association, has been leading the charge to reopen Pigford.

In August of 2007, he scored an important ally: Then-candidate Obama, while still an Illinois Senator, introduced Pigford legislation, which was incorporated into the 2008 Farm Bill. The costs were potentially huge: With an estimated 65,000 further claims pending, ultimate USDA payouts could be as much as $2 or 3 billion. (Photo above: Dr. Boyd meeting with then-candidate Obama, in May of 2008)

But of course, further payouts have been mired in the current budget considerations and, well, politics. Now that Mr. Obama is President, and working hard to re-boot the economy, the landscape for economic reparations has changed. Secretary Vilsack has said he’ll work with the Department of Justice to redress the economic issue, and today, White House budget spokesman Kenneth Baer went on the record with the AP to send out reassurances on the issue: "The president has been a leader on this issue since his days as a U.S. senator and is deeply committed to closing this painful chapter in our history."

The National Black Farmers Association isn’t waiting any longer, however. On March 28, they’re holding a rally at USDA headquarters on the National Mall, to call on President Obama and Secretary Vilsack to help rapidly seed change by paying out USDA funds. Dr. Boyd will speak, and a big turn out is expected.

Discrimination, Civil Rights And USDA: Some Background

It’s worth noting that many of the discriminatory issues endured by black farmers go all the way back to the Civil War era. Since then, policies towards black farmers …

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Possibly “yes.” ThinkProgress:

Yesterday on the Senate floor, Sen. James Inhofe announced that he intended to filibuster Obama’s nomination of U.S. District Judge David Hamilton to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. Inhofe’s announcement comes nearly three weeks after the Republican membership of the Senate Judiciary Committee boycotted Hamilton’s hearing claiming that “they had not been given sufficient time to prepare for the hearing.” Inhofe’s filibuster is surprising given the fact that Hamilton is generally viewed as representing “some of [Indiana's] traditionally moderate strain.”

Inhofe does not appear to have explained his decision to filibuster in front of his colleagues on the floor of the Senate. But in statements that he entered into the Congressional Record, Inhofe cited a 2005 ruling in Hinrichs v. Bosman in which Hamilton found that the Indiana House of Representatives may open proceedings with “non-sectarian prayers” only. Inhofe called it “insane” that the ruling would allow payers to invoke the name of “Allah” but not “Jesus”:

INHOFE: Further, ruling on a postjudgment motion, Hamilton stated that invoking the name of “Allah” would not advance a particular religion or disparage another. So, praying to Allah would be perfectly acceptable. [...]

I find this line of reasoning to be insane. Who in this body would not identify the name of “Allah” with the religion of Islam any less than they would identify the name of Jesus with Christianity?

But as Overruled notes, Hamilton’s ruling was not particularly novel. Rather, Hamilton was upholding the Supreme Court’s ruling in Marsh v. Chambers, which “held that legislatures can open their session with a non-sectarian prayer, and that such a prayer could invoke ‘God,’” as long as the prayer was not meant to “proselytize or advance any one, or to disparage any other, faith or belief.”

Hamilton found that “sectarian content of the substantial majority of official prayers took the prayers outside the safe harbor the Supreme Court recognized for inclusive, non-sectarian legislative prayers in Marsh v. Chambers.” As Hamilton explained in a post-judgment ruling, “‘Allah’ is used for ‘God’ in Arabic” and as such should be permitted:

The Arabic word “Allah” is used for “God” in Arabic translations of Jewish and Christian scriptures. If those offering prayers in the Indiana House of Representatives choose to use the Arabic Allah, the Spanish Dios, the German Gott, the French Dieu, the Swedish Gud, the Greek Theos, the Hebrew Elohim, the Italian Dio, or any other language’s terms in addressing the God who is the focus of the non-sectarian prayers contemplated in Marsh v. Chambers, the court sees little risk that the choice of language would advance a particular religion or disparage others.

If and when the prayer practices in the Indiana House of Representatives ever seem to be advancing Islam, an appropriate party can bring the problem to the attention of this or another court.

Additionally, Inhofe’s vow to filibuster is surprising given his previous insistence that filibustering judicial nominees is “not only an illegitimate use of a senator’s power, but is also literally unconstitutional.” As Steve Benen notes, in 2003, “Inhofe went so far as to say any senator who would dare filibuster a judicial nominee would necessarily be violating their oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution.’”