Later On

Today has been a lazy day so far, with every prospect of ending that way. I slept late, got up for a while, then went back to bed. I’m up now, but I’m thinking I’ll do the minimum necessary (bring up recycling and count out meds) and spend the rest of day reading and taking it easy. Everyone needs a day off from time to time.

Megs does the thing of finding a place on the carpet she likes (usually in a pathway), crouching down comfortably with her front paws tucked her, and then retracting her brain so that she is, in effect, a soft, furry rock. I suspect that this happens one the cat fully trusts you—she knows I’m not going to step on her, so she just looks as I walk by or step over or whatever. At that stage of the relationship, the cat will also walk across you as though you’re furniture (The Wife’s phrase).

I like to think of a couple who have never had a cat adopting one and trying to figure it out. For example, I picture them waiting at the vet’s when the door opens and taking the cat in. "We don’t know what’s wrong with her. Last night, about half an hour after dinner, everything was fine, and then she suddenly had some sort of fit. She was running up and down the hallway and around the room like something terrible was chasing her. We almost called you then, but we waited until this morning. What’s wrong with her?"

Or someone familiar with dogs who catches the cat drinking from their water glass. They get the cat, bring it to the glass, and say "No!" firmly, pointing at the glass, and believe they have dealt with the problem.

From a story in today’s NY Times:

The U.S. is now relying heavily on foreign intelligence services to capture, interrogate and detain all but the highest-level terrorist suspects.

Note the Newspeak "detain" instead of the Oldspeak "imprison". In Oldspeak, "detain" doesn’t refer to prison. When I tell someone I was "detained," I certainly don’t mean I was imprisoned—I mean I was held up briefly (by traffic or a persistent salesperson or the like). You can be detained in an airport briefly, but once the steel door slams and locks, "detain" seems terribly weak: "The terrorists at Guantánamo are in detention." Sounds like high-school kids in an after-school study hall, doesn’t it?

Still, one must master the language of our brave new society.

I must try this. Maybe they’ll have it at the wedding.

Priests should get out a bit more. From Boing Boing, via Scott Feldstein:

Retired Catholic Archbishop Rembert G Weakland, who has been accused of covering up widespread child rape by priests in Milwaukee, has a forthcoming memoir in which he wrote the following bits of wisdom:

"We all considered sexual abuse of minors as a moral evil, but had no understanding of its criminal nature."

Weakland, who retired in 2002 after it became known that he paid $450,000 in 1998 to a man who had accused him of date rape years earlier, said he initially "accepted naively the common view that it was not necessary to worry about the effects on the youngsters: either they would not remember or they would ‘grow out of it’."

"We did not know that child abuse was a crime," says retired Catholic archbishop

I skipped yesterday’s walk because the day was gloomy and overcast. It’s the same way today, but I thought I had better walk anyway. The day off did me good: legs ached less. Today, since I skipped yesterday, I went a little farther: 47 min 39 seconds.

The Younger Daughter was disappointed to find that the Stanford University writing courses I blogged earlier happened at exactly the same time that she would be teaching summer school, and I was disappointed because the courses were not free. So a quick Google search turns up 10 universities that offer FREE on-line writing courses—including MIT, Purdue, and others. Take a look.

Let me just post the first couple of entries in a new blog I’m making. First:

As I approach threescore and ten, I find that I’m starting to review my life. As I recalled various memories, it occurred to me that you might well be interested—and that a blog is the ideal format, since my recounting of a memory may raise questions (of clarification, context, etc.) and/or may not match your own memories, and the blog’s “comment” function is ideal for that. Thus the blog name “Memories”—not “My Memories,” since it may well be our memories.

This is a private blog, and only the immediate family can sign in.

And the second post, just to give an actual example:

I recall one of my mother’s earliest memories, and a memory she could place exactly in time. She and my uncle Woody (a year younger than my mother and her cat’s-paw) had stolen some food from the kitchen, since it’s ever so much better if you’ve stolen it  than if you eat it at a meal at the table. They had to hide so they could eat it unseen, so they went to the outhouse and shut the door—not a great dining room, but it afforded excellent privacy.

My grandfather’s house was right next to the railroad tracks in Ardmore, and adjacent to the viaduct that crossed them, which was—I don’t quite recall, but I would say 7 or 8 blocks from downtown. My mother said that she and Woody had just gotten started when they heard a tremendous explosion.

Later she found that the cause and date, so she was able to know the purloined snack was being consumed at 2:20pm on Monday, 9/27/1915, which makes her just 4 years old at the time.

My own earliest memory (so far as I can recall) was near a site with a lot of earthmoving equipment at work. They were creating Lake Texoma, building Dennison Dam. I see by the article at the link that the project was completed in Feb 1944, but this was summertime, so it would have been summer of 1943—when I was 3 1/2 years old—or summer of 1942—when I was 2 1/2. The former seems more likely.

It occurred to me that this idea might work well for other aging parents.

Honeybee Spa’s Mocha Java is a favorite shaving soap, and with the ebony-handled Sabini it created an extremely good lather this morning. The Gillette Executive with a relatively new Astra Superior Platinum blade provided an extremely smooth shave, and a splash of Royall Vetiver finished the job. My skin feels quite nice. Love the Honeybee Spa shaving soaps. And now for some black tea.

Interesting:

Source: Reuters, May 22, 2009

The major American cigarette manufacturers, including Altria and Reynolds American, have lost their appeal of a 2006 Federal court ruling that convicted them of fraud and racketeering. A three-judge panel of the Washington, D.C. U.S. Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a lower court’s 2006 decision that the cigarette companies had systematically lied to the public in a 50-year conspiracy to defraud the public about the health hazards of smoking cigarettes. The Court also agreed that tobacco companies must publish "corrective statements" on the adverse health effects and addictiveness of smoking and nicotine, and stop using misleading labels like "low tar," "light," "ultra light" or "mild," since such cigarettes are now known to be no safer than others because of the way people smoke them. The court said that tobacco companies "knew about the negative health consequences of smoking, the addictiveness and manipulation of nicotine, the harmfulness of secondhand smoke, and the concept of smoker compensation, which makes light cigarettes no less harmful than regular cigarettes and possibly more."

Here’s a review of Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine:

Near the end of 1959, with China in the midst of Chairman Mao Zedong’s crazily utopian Great Leap Forward, the official Communist Party newspaper issued some dietary instruction for the masses of the country’s newly collectivized agricultural workers. ”The peasants must practice strict economy,” The People’s Daily intoned. ”Live with the utmost frugality and eat only two meals a day, one of which should be soft and liquid.”

Life and history are in the details, and one of the many virtues of this disturbing and important book by the British journalist Jasper Becker is its attention to the small, concrete matters that display larger, more abstract ones in the fullness of their horror and absurdity. ”Hungry Ghosts” is Mr. Becker’s powerful, sober, lucid and sometimes lurid account of what was probably the worst famine in history, the one that resulted from Mao’s blindly misguided and ruthlessly enforced attempt to achieve Communism overnight.

For the party newspaper to tell people that it was good for them to eat less at a time when it was also spinning fantasies about the bounty being engendered by the Great Leap was a relatively small, if telling, irony. At the larger, horrific center of Mr. Becker’s account is the widespread resort among the Chinese people to that most sickening form of desperation: cannibalism, the selling of human flesh on the market, the swapping of children so people could use them for food without committing the additional sin of eating their own.

It has of course been known for many years that the Great Leap produced a terrible calamity in China lasting from roughly 1959 to 1962. But Mr. Becker, who is the Beijing bureau chief of The South China Morning Post, has written the most compelling and complete account of that calamity, describing it systematically as it affected the countryside, the cities and the immense network of camps for ”rightists” and other political prisoners that China maintained at the time.

As his account unfolds, Mr. Becker puts to rest once and for all whatever illusions about the Great Leap may have survived less exhaustive studies. The most extreme of those illusions …

Continue reading.

It’s interesting that those who have been waterboarded (by someone else) say that it is torture, and those who say it’s not have NOT been waterboarded. Here’s a guy who maintained that waterboarding was not torture but decided to try it. You will note, however, that they did not strap him down and immobilize his arms, and they didn’t continue for 40 seconds.

Say, when is Sean Hannity going to go on the table? He promised.

Basar Likmeta in the Christian Science Monitor:

Tirana, Albania – While President Barack Obama made his case Thursday for the transfer of Guantánamo Bay detainees, one of the terror camp’s former prisoners was studying recipes in a restaurant kitchen here, doing his best to learn the chef skills that will support his new life in this new land.

Abu Bakker Qassim is one of five Chinese Uighurs released to Albania in 2005, after US authorities feared that repatriating them to China would expose them to persecution and human rights violations.

Seventeen of Mr. Qassim’s Uighur compatriots remain in Guantánamo, even though they have been found innocent of wrongdoing and have been cleared for release.

Although an increasingly heated debate in the US focuses on how to handle dozens of remaining suspected terrorists held at Guantánamo, the Obama administration faces an equally sticky dilemma over releasing the innocent Uighurs.

The president has gotten resistance from Congress, with some arguing that the Uighurs – guilty or not – could pose a security threat. Other countries are skittish of taking the men, worried of angering China, which wants them returned for trial.

When Qassim left his home in China’s Xingjian Province in 2000, his dream was to reach Turkey, or, preferably, Western Europe.

After setting up a shop in Kyrgyzstan for a year with little success, he joined a larger group of 17 would-be migrants as they set off through the neighboring Central Asian republics.

In 2001, just days before the start of a US bombing campaign aimed at overthrowing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the Uighurs arrived in the Afghan city of Jalalabad.

Four days after their arrival, Jalalabad was bombed. The Uighurs left to seek sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan. They could not know that, after an arduous march through the mountains of Tora Bora, the villagers who would greet them warmly on the other side of the border had, only a few days earlier, been blanketed by fliers from US aircraft, promising that whoever "hunts an Arab becomes a rich man."

Though they had no knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks, the men were handed over to the Pakistan authorities for the promised reward of $5,000. They would spend the next four months in jail in Kandahar, Afghanistan, before being sent to Guantánamo Bay.

"In Kandahar, the Americans realized we had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, but they still shipped us to Guantánamo," Qassim contends. "At that point, we understood that we were flying into hell."

Qassim spent the next five years behind steel bars…

Continue reading.

Tim F. at Balloon Juice:

Here’s a fun thought: imagine that you run a quasi-legal dictatorship, say, Burma or Uzbekistan. Naturally you’d love to jail and torture* those pesky dissidents, foreign spies, people who might be foreign spies, nose whistlers and hotel clerks who slighted your cousin. Hang ‘em from the ceiling for a few days and they’ll confess to making the weather cloudy.

How awesome is it if America says that first world countries do that too? If you are one of those regimes it’s like a whole new day.

(*) Obama says that he won’t let Americans torture. That’s nice. Bush said that too. Obama could, of course, change his mind without any apparent consequences. Maybe he really needs to torture just this one guy. Maybe the next President will decide that yeah, he kind of would like to torture people. Better lawyers than me can explain what will compel Jeb or Bobby Jindal to respect a law that has no criminal consequences.

As you may recall from Orwell’s 1984, thoughtcrime (in Newspeak, “crimethink”) is quite serious and consists of having illegal thoughts. The US is now ready to embrace this new feature, only we are calling it “preventive detention,” “detention” being Newspeak for “imprisonment.” Of course, since no actual (physical) crime is necessary to trigger this sort of imprisonment, it has the advantage of being applicable to anyone the government decides not to like. I don’t yet know whether the plan is to allow the selected person a trial, with a lawyer representing him or her, in which the accuser(s) can be questioned. It’s quite a change for the US, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out. UPDATE: No pesky trial, no opportunity for the victim to protest or defend him/herself in a court of law before an impartial judge. Just slam the cell door and check back on the victim from time to time until … what? We return to democracy and the Constitution.

At this point, I would like to state that all my own thoughts are quite innocuous, and mostly focus on kittens, bunny rabbits, and what I might have for dinner. Nothing to get excited about, Mr. President.

Some interesting comments on our new plan:

OLC’s Marty Lederman: An Opponent Of Preventive Detention?, by Spencer Ackerman

Yesterday President Obama announced his intent to establish a system of preventive detention to stop would-be terrorists from “carrying out an act of war” — even when they “cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted.” One of the most senior officials in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, though, has expressed reservations to such a system in the past.

Before Marty Lederman became deputy assistant attorney general for the OLC, he was a prolific blogger and Bush-administration critic (and before that, an OLC attorney during the late Clinton and early Bush years). Here, for instance, is an Opinio Juris colloquy with the Brookings Institution’s Benjamin Wittes about various detention issues. Wittes argued that Congress should “treat these detentions openly and candidly for what they are: preventive incarcerations designed to keep extremely dangerous individuals from acting on their deeply held murderous beliefs and instincts,” calling preventive detentions “a psychological Rubicon we simply need to cross.”

Lederman objected: …

Facts and myths about Obama’s preventive detention proposal, by Glenn Greenwald

In the wake of Obama’s speech yesterday, there are vast numbers of new converts who now support indefinite “preventive detention.”  It thus seems constructive to have as dispassionate and fact-based discussion as possible of the implications of “preventive detention” and Obama’s related detention proposals (military commissions).  I’ll have a podcast discussion on this topic a little bit later today with the ACLU’s Ben Wizner, which I’ll add below, but until then, here are a some facts and other points worth noting:

(1) What does “preventive detention” allow?

It’s important to be clear about what “preventive detention” authorizes.  It does not merely allow the U.S. Government to imprison people alleged to have committed Terrorist acts yet who are unable to be convicted in a civilian court proceeding.  That class is merely a subset, perhaps a small subset, of who the Government can detain.  Far more significant, “preventive detention” allows indefinite imprisonment not based on proven crimes or past violations of law, but of those deemed generally “dangerous” by the Government for various reasons (such as, as Obama put it yesterday, they “expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden” or “otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans”).  That’s what “preventive” means:  imprisoning people because the Government claims they are likely to engage in violent acts in the future because they are alleged to be “combatants.”

Once known, the details of the proposal could — and likely will — make this even more extreme by extending the “preventive detention” power beyond a handful of Guantanamo detainees to anyone, anywhere in the world, alleged to be a “combatant.”  After all, once you accept the rationale on which this proposal is based — namely, that the U.S. Government must, in order to keep us safe, preventively detain “dangerous” people even when they can’t prove they violated any laws — there’s no coherent reason whatsoever to limit that power to people already at Guantanamo, as opposed to indefinitely imprisoning with no trials all allegedly “dangerous” combatants, whether located in Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia, Western countries and even the U.S. …

Also, this from Rachel Maddow:

So you know some guy who’s being graduated from high school or college? Why not give the gift of an enjoyable morning shave by sending them a copy of Leisureguy’s Guide to Gourmet Shaving? In years to come, he’ll thank you repeatedly (and silently) each morning as he saves.

From the site, important information on the short timeline to sign up:

A quick fyi: On Monday morning, Stanford Continuing Studies opens up registration for its summer lineup of online writing courses. Offered in partnership with the Stanford Creative Writing Program (one of the most distinguished writing programs in the country), these online courses give beginning and advanced writers, no matter where they live, the chance to refine their craft with gifted writing instructors. As you will see, there are a couple of courses offered in conjunction with The New York Times. The idea here is that you’ll learn writing from a Stanford  writing instructor and then get your work reviewed by a New York Times book critic. Quite a perk. And the courses sell out quickly. For more information, click here, or separately check out the FAQ and the testimonials.

Caveat emptor: These classes are not free, and I helped set them up. So while I wholeheartedly believe in these courses, you can take my views with a grain of salt.

The list of courses is at the site, along with these links:

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That was an effective ad headline for many years. If they’re still laughing after you start to play, check out these sites for learning piano on-line.

The problem with adult beginners is that their mind gets ahead of their skills: they hear what they’re playing and it doesn’t sound good so they give up. What they lack is a "growth mindset," as described by Carol Dweck in her excellent book Mindset, a book I highly recommend. If they can focus on the process of learning and listen to their progress from week to week, it will go much better for them.

It must be that time of year: lots of packing info available. This post has 17 very good tips on packing.