Later On

A NY Times editorial from a couple of days ago:

The Supreme Court sent an important message when it ruled in Roper v. Simmons in 2005 that children under the age of 18 when their crimes were committed were not eligible for the death penalty. Justice Anthony Kennedy drew on compassion, common sense and the science of the youthful brain when he wrote that it was morally wrong to equate the offenses of emotionally undeveloped adolescents with the offenses of fully formed adults.

The states have followed this logic in death penalty cases. But they have continued to mete out barbaric treatment — including life sentences — to children whose cases should rightly be handled through the juvenile courts.

Congress can help to correct these practices by amending the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, which is up for Congressional reauthorization this year. To get a share of delinquency prevention money, the law requires the states and localities to meet minimum federal protections for youths in the justice system. These protections are intended to keep as many youths as possible out of adult jails and prisons, and to segregate those that are sent to those places from the adult criminal population.

The case for tougher legislative action is laid out in an alarming new study of children 13 and under in the adult criminal justice system, the lead author of which is the juvenile justice scholar, Michele Deitch, of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. According to the study, every state allows juveniles to be tried as adults, and more than 20 states permit preadolescent children as young as 7 to be tried in adult courts.

This is terrible public policy. Children who are convicted and sentenced as adults are much more likely to become violent offenders — and to return to an adult jail later on — than children tried in the juvenile justice system.

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Fascinating article in Mother Jones by Daniel Schulman:

It was March 2002, and Del and Barbara Spier were flat broke. The Texas couple, grandparents of five and owners of a small, Houston-based private investigations firm, were more than $260,000 in debt. They carried balances as high as $18,600 on more than a dozen credit cards and were saddled with $80,000 in outstanding bank loans and a $95,000 mortgage. In their bankruptcy filing, the Spiers’ company, which they founded in 1987 and named the Agency for Investigation and Protective Services, was deemed of "no marketable value."

Although their circumstances looked dire, the Spiers were about to become millionaires. By May, Barbara Spier had filed the paperwork to form a new corporation called US Protection and Investigations. Soon, thanks to the contracting sweepstakes that was the war in Afghanistan, she was signing an $8.4 million deal with the Louis Berger Group. The multinational construction and engineering company had landed a $214 million contract to rebuild Afghanistan’s infrastructure—roads, water and sanitation, power and dams—from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). USPI’s job was to provide security for contractors repairing a 300-mile road stretching from Kabul to Kandahar.

Much of the work was to be done in remote and dangerous territory, prone to sporadic Taliban assaults and blighted with unexploded Soviet-era ordnance and land mines. "Sections of the Road are subject to hijackings, robberies, and killings," Berger acknowledged in its contract with USPI. "Organized terrorist groups are operating within the Road corridor environs, and expatriates have been intentionally targeted in recent incidents." Safeguarding the hundreds of contractors working on the road, the construction conglomerate warned, would be "challenging."

Given the stakes of the project—key to the effort to stabilize Afghanistan—USPI was a strange choice. Berger could have turned to a well-established security outfit with deep experience in conflict zones. Instead, it handed a noncompete contract to a firm with no reputation to speak of and a freshly bankrupted management team.

For the Spiers, the Berger windfall engineered a …

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Interesting article and interview in Salon by Sarah Karnasiewicz:

Animals of the genus Homo are defined by their little mouths, large guts, big brains — and appetite for bratwurst. This, at least, is the provocative theory of evolution put forth by Dr. Richard Wrangham in his fascinating new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.

Wrangham, the Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, began his career studying chimpanzees alongside Jane Goodall, and rose to academic acclaim as a primatologist specializing in the roots of male aggression. Naturally, he tends to think of most scientific questions in relation to chimps. And so it was that a few years ago, while sitting in front of his fireplace preparing a lecture on human evolution, he wondered, "What would it take to turn a chimpanzee-like animal into a human?" The answer, he decided, was in front of him: fire to cook food.

For years, accepted wisdom has held that it was a transition to meat eating that prompted human evolution — which makes Wrangham’s hypothesis a radical departure. Yet, the more he tested his theory, the more he found the science to back it up: Cooked food is universally easier to process and more nutritionally dense than raw food, which means adopting a cooked diet would have given man a biological advantage. The energy he once spent consuming and digesting raw food could be diverted to other physiological functions, leading to the development of bigger bodies and brains. And Wrangham’s "cooking hypothesis" not only explains the physical changes that humans underwent but also the social ones: Cooking created a sexual division of labor that informs our ideas of gender, love, family and marriage even to this day. "Humans are adapted to eating cooked food in the same essential way as cows adapted to eating grass, or fleas to sucking blood," Wrangham concludes. "And the results pervade our lives, from our bodies to our minds. We humans are the cooking apes, the creatures of the flame."

Salon spoke with Wrangham, 60, by telephone from his research station in Uganda, about the dangers of strictly raw-food diets, why women are the ones who cook and the tricky business of calorie counting.

For years scientists have suggested that the making of tools, and then using tools for hunting and meat-eating, were factors that prompted the evolution of man as we know him. You push that theory farther to say that it was not eating meat, but cooking it and eating it, that’s responsible for the transformation. How did you make that leap? …

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The Center for American Progress:

Yesterday, Elizabeth Edwards, a former bankruptcy attorney and now Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, testified before the House Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law on the rise in bankruptcies in America and its relation to increasing health care costs. "Successful health reform must not just make health insurance affordable, affordable health insurance has to make health care affordable," said Edwards. Calling for affordable health care, Edwards referenced a recent Harvard study finding that "at least 62 percent of bankruptcy debtors can trace at least part of their financial hardship to medical debt." Steffie Woolhandler, co-author of the Harvard study, testified with Edwards and said "private insurance is a defective product that leaves millions of middle-class families vulnerable to financial ruin." In response to these failures, President Obama has argued for a public option as an important part of providing affordable health care to every American. But some Democrats in both the House and Senate are advocating dropping the public option from their respective health reform bills. Edwards’ testimony, though, highlights the need to get health reform right. "To ignore the fact that medical costs are an underlying problem of the economic meltdown we’ve experienced would be to turn a blind eye to a significant problem that we can solve," Edwards told the committee.

I still do not understand why the US seems incapable of implementing a comprehensive universal single-payer healthcare system. Other countries can do it, but the US is just not up to it. Weird. But the US can’t seem to run passenger trains or mass transit in most places. The Center for American Progress:

Congress may be moving one step closer to reforming health care, as the Senate Finance Committee nears agreement on a bipartisan compromise. Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) vowed that the committee would wrap up its work by the end of next week. This deal, however, will most likely not contain a public option or a mandate for employers to provide employees with health insurance. While many progressives are upset with this outcome, it’s important to remember that this is not the final legislation: After the bill passes the Senate Finance Committee, it will still need to be reconciled with the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and House bills, both of which include a public option. While these lawmakers continue to hammer out the details, many Republicans, conservative activists, and industry lobbyists continue to spread misinformation and push for indefinite delays in the hope of killing any chance at change. Yesterday in a "tele-town hall" sponsored by AARP, President Obama addressed this obstruction, underscoring that no one is talking about "socialized medicine," despite what conservatives are charging. "I think that we’ve been so accustomed to hearing those phrases that sometimes we can’t sort out the myth from the reality," Obama said.

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Despite to sputtering denials for a gaggle of pseudo-climate-experts (dentists, TV meteorologists, politicians, and scientifically illiterate people with too much time on their hands—and the Republican party), the conclusion of actual climatologists and all the leading scientific associations is that climate change is happening and it is caused by human activity. Here the AAAS tries to explain:

See also the AAAS resources for climate change.

Here’s an opinion from the Fox News legal analyst, reported by Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress:

On Monday, Fox News Legal Analyst and former New Jersey state Judge Andrew Napolitano told to the conservative network’s audience that police broke the law when they arrested Professor Henry Louis Gates for disorderly conduct. Gates was charged with disorderly conduct during a conflict with police on his own property, but as Napolitano explained, the law only “allows an arrest for being disorderly if you are in public. … So if Professor Gates was arrested because of the words he used to police inside his house, on the front porch or on the front lawn, it was an improper arrest.” Napolitano added that police violated Gates’ Fourth Amendment rights the minute they entered his home without his permission:

The law says, unless [a police officer] witnesses a felony…or unless he has a piece of paper from a judge—a search warrant or an arrest warrant—saying “you can go in that house,” he can’t go in the house. So when Professor Gates said “no you can’t come in,” and the police went in anyway [the police] violated the federal Constitution.

Watch:

Ever since President Obama criticized Gates’ arresting officer — who happens to be white — for mishandling this arrest, the right wing has ramped up its racially charged rhetoric against the President, with Fox’s Glenn Beck claiming that Obama’s statement somehow proves that the President “has a deep-seated hatred for white people.” If Beck actually bothered to watch his own network’s legal analysis, he’d know that this attack doesn’t hold water.

Last night I watched the DVD of the first season of The IT Crowd and I loved it. It’s a BBC series, and the programs are short (144 minutes for all 6 first-season episodes), just perfect for a now-and-then pick-me-up. Recommended.

The DVD for the second season is now at the top of my queue.

Another Kell’s Originals Soap this morning, this one still the lovely Amber fragrance with with the Hemp and Aloe Vera blend. I used the Omega Pro 48 boar brush, and I did get three passes worth of soap from it, though the third pass was somewhat thin on the ground, as it were. Still, a lovely lather and a fine shave with the Gillette 1940′s Aristocrat—I picked the razor this morning because it’s the very one shown on the cover of the book. The Asco blade of several uses still did a good job, but I decided that it was time to retire that one.

I moved the book from Lulu.com because their shipping charges were too high: one copy of the book shipped domestically cost around $11 just for shipping and handling. With the new store, not only are shipping charges less (one copy ships for $3.60), but I also have been able to drop the price back to the original $11.95. (The Second Edition was $12.95.)

The new edition has an updated vendor list and additions to the text, including information about boar brushes.

If you want to email everyone you know to tell them to buy it, the store URL is:

www.gourmetshaving.com

I’ll be interested in any feedback on the new book you care to offer.

And I agree with it. Robin Wells at Huffington Post:

We’ve embarked on a national attempt to find something redeeming in the Gates-Crowley affair – to find the "teachable moment." Obama’s gracious and politically astute offer to bring the two men together is an example of what Obama does best – creating an uplifting moment of reconciliation, a feel-good moment in which each party can have their say in front of the cameras. But like a family psychodrama, I suspect that most of us know that it won’t stop there, and nothing will really have been resolved. Like a marriage counselor who has seen this particular couple’s arguments many times before, we know on a gut level that some hard truths are going to have to be addressed before the fractious couple that is white and black America can start to move on.

Yet, it’s important to be clear that I’m not applying any kind of moral equivalence to the actions of Professor Gates and Officer Crowley. On the facts as we know them, I believe that the treatment of Professor Gates was unjust and unprofessional. Yes, he was belligerent to a police officer. But that is no crime, and nowhere has Officer Crowley shown that there was any chance of a crime being committed, confirmed by the Cambridge Police Department’s quick decision to drop the charges against Professor Gates. Police officers are trained to be professionals, and a professional would have recognized that an obstreperous sexagenarian who walks with a cane standing in his own house and faced with a phalanx of armed police officers is no threat. And if Office Crowley had paid attention to his diversity training, he would have been prepared for the outrage accompanying perceived acts of racial profiling. The hard truth is that Officer Crowley’s defense that he was just doing his job just doesn’t wash. Having verified the facts, he had every opportunity to apologize to Professor Gates for the misunderstanding and leave. The hard truth that America needs to hear is that incidents of racial profiling and unfair treatment by the police and judiciary are oppressive facts of life for African American men even today.

However, the weary marriage counselor knows that finding a bogey-man and leaving it there isn’t going to get this couple out of their troubles. Rather, it’s likely to dig them in deeper into their self-justification.

The hard truth that Professor Gates needs to hear is that he is the one who handed over his power to Officer Crowley. Letting his agitation get the better of him, Gates lost the ability to shape the outcome of the encounter and set up his own victimization by a poorly trained police officer.

So what should Professor Gates have done instead? …

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Sounds like a book to read:

Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America
by Anne-Marie Cusac

A review by Robert Perkinson

In his inaugural address, Barack Obama pledged to renew the nation’s founding creed, to carry forward "that precious gift, that noble idea…that all are equal, all are free." Some 1.8 million people gathered on the National Mall to hear the new president on that icy January morning. Yet a considerably larger mass — equivalent to adding the population of Boston to the celebration — spent the same day behind bars. For America is not only the land of the free, as the Navy chorus chanted from the presidential dais. It is also, to an extraordinary extent, the land of the unfree, the most incarcerated society on earth.

The United States was not always so locked down. For most of the twentieth century its incarceration rate hovered near one-tenth of one percent, roughly the same as in other industrial free societies. Then, from the early 1970s forward, the federal and state governments began extending sentences, curtailing judicial discretion and restricting early releases. The prison population soared. By the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, approximately one out of every 100 adults was in jail or prison, a proportion unmatched in the history of democracy.

During this same period, racial disparities in the criminal justice system have widened. At mid-century, during segregation, the black imprisonment rate was about four times higher than that of whites; by 2005 it was seven times higher. If current trends continue, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in three black men born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime. For the grandchildren of Brown v. Board of Education on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder, American justice has become more separate and unequal, not less.

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Matt Taibbi:

The AP reports that “after weeks of secretive talks, a bipartisan group in the Senate edged closer Monday to a health care compromise that omits two key Democratic priorities but incorporates provisions to slow the explosive rise in medical costs.” The deal was likely to “exclude a requirement many congressional Democrats seek for large businesses to offer coverage to their workers” and a “provision for a government insurance option.” The Wall Street Journal says that “individuals familiar with the negotiations suggested” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus “would like to unveil a deal later this week. But unclear Monday was whether” ranking Republican Sen. Charles Grassley “would sign onto the deal and pave the way for committee action next week.”

via USNews.com: Political Bulletin: Tuesday, July 28, 2009.

Well, as the French would say… Quelle surprise!

It’s funny, earlier this summer I was watching the Federer-Roddick Wimbledon Final. Great match in a way, final set was 30 games long, one of the all-time epic battles. And yet, as I watched it, I thought to myself, “This has to be the least suspenseful epic sporting event of all time.” Because there was never any doubt in my mind that Federer was going to win the match. I simply could not envision a scenario where anything else than a Federer victory could happen. I think I even turned it off at 7-7 in the final set, figuring I could catch Federer’s award ceremony later on.

It’s the same with this health care bill. Who among us did not know this would happen? It’s been clear from the start that the Democrats would make a great show of doing something real, then they would fold prematurely, ram through some piece-of-shit bill with some incremental/worthless change in it, and then in the end blame everything on Max Baucus and Bill Nelson, saying, “By golly, we tried our best!”

Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with Max Baucus, Bill Nelson, or anyone else. If the Obama administration wanted to pass a real health care bill, they would do what George Bush and Tom DeLay did in the first six-odd years of this decade whenever they wanted to pass some nightmare piece of legislation (e.g., the Prescription Drug Bill or CAFTA): they would take the recalcitrant legislators blocking their path into a back room at the Capitol, and beat them with rubber hoses until they changed their minds.

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Dean Baker in Truthout:

As part of his health care package, President Obama proposed creating an independent commission of medical experts that would determine the medical procedures for which Medicare will pay. The reason is that patients now receive many costly procedures that provide little or no medical benefit. If we can reduce this waste, we can have large savings, while possibly even improving health outcomes. President Obama describes this as promoting good medicine.

    He has a case, but there is one problem with this picture. If the plan is to promote good medicine, why are we just doing it for the elderly receiving Medicare? Why don’t we want good medicine for everyone?

    Specifically, the government could apply the experts’ judgments on appropriate procedures to any insurance plan that receives government support. This would mean that any plan that enrolls patients with government subsidies would be bound by the expert panel’s judgment. If we are confident that our experts will be acting based on sound medical evidence, why shouldn’t their assessment apply everywhere?

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Christopher Joyce for NPR:

When wildlife biologists visited a remote spot in Canada called Banks Island in the spring of 2004, they discovered thousands upon thousands of dead musk oxen. It took years to determine the cause. They called it "rain-on-snow" — the worst case of it ever documented.

Musk oxen clash horns in a battle for dominance on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula. Researchers suspect that herds of reindeer, musk oxen and other Arctic animals may face starvation as a warming climate affects their ability to access food.Laurent Dick/AP

"Long story short, about 20,000 musk oxen starved to death because of this event," says geologist Jaakko Putkonen. It was a "humongous event" that took place in the fall of 2003.

Putkonen, who is a professor at the University of North Dakota, has since discovered a few anecdotal accounts of big rain-on-snow events that killed reindeer in the Arctic and in Scandinavia.

What happens is this: Unusually warm weather drops rain on top of snowpack. The rain either pools at the surface or trickles down to the soil below the snowpack, then freezes into a sheet of ice. Musk oxen, which are shaggy, cow-sized animals that weigh hundreds of pounds, can’t break through the ice to browse on plants underneath the snow. Sooner or later, they starve.

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Mike Blanchfield in the Calgary Herald:

Thousands of people pour out of Manhattan onto the waiting armada of ships. The "October Surprise” has hit with a vengeance – a massive hurricane has flooded and paralyzed New York City.

Dozens of world leaders watch the disaster unfold beneath them as they are airlifted from the United Nations General Assembly that had just convened on the banks of the now overflowing Hudson River.

"I guess the problem was that we counted on this not happening, at least not yet. Most scientists assumed the worst effects of climate change would occur later in the century,” the president of the United States writes in his diary. "The culmination of disasters, needed cleanups, permafrost melting, lower agricultural yields, growing health problems and the like are taking a much terrible toll, much greater than we anticipated 20 years ago.”

This presidential diary entry is, of course, fiction. But its inclusion in the 120-page November 2008 report by the National Intelligence Council, a Washington security think-tank, illustrates a grim and troubling reality that is causing worry in such diverse places as the Pentagon and British Defence Ministry, major aid agencies, the United Nations and, of course, among environmentalists.

Real life 21st Century threats due to climate change – massive flooding, droughts, population explosions, massive migrations of uprooted and desperate people facing life-threatening food and water shortages – have made "climate security” a buzzword that now extends far beyond the war rooms of western capitals.

The trepidation is very real that this will be the driver for war on a scale we have yet to see on this planet, bringing tension to stable parts of the world, making the tense places worse.

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Mary Bottari at PRWatch.org:

Neil Barofsky, Special Inspector General of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (a.k.a. the “SIGTARP “) caused quite a stir in Washington last week when he released a quarterly report that attempted to tally up the total dollar amount of federal government commitments related to the bailout. Those commitments include federal government programs that spend taxpayer money or issue loan guarantees in an attempt to rescue financial services institutions and support the economy. While the administration and the media has focused on the $700 billion in bailout funds explicitly authorized by Congress, Barofsky tried to bring a little transparency to the complex array of federal programs including those of the Treasury and the opaque Federal Reserve. His report put the potential outlay of taxpayer dollars of the combined 50-plus programs at an astonishing $23.7 trillion.

The $23.7 trillion represents the first attempt by anyone in the federal government to provide a little "truth in lending" regarding the real, maximum cost to U.S. taxpayers of the bailout. To put this number in perspective Politico noted that the figure was larger than the total cost of all the wars the United States has ever fought, not to mention double the U.S. Gross Domestic Product.

To be clear, this number represents the maximum potential outlay. Not all of this money will be spent and some funds may be recouped. Barofsky reports that only $441 billion has actually been spent so far. Of course, even $441 billion is a huge outlay.

Administration spinmeisters promptly attempted to belittle the report. Most amusingly, a spokesperson from the Treasury Department characterized the numbers as misleading and inflated, even though they were generated from Treasury’s own data, and department officials had read and commented on Barofky’s report prior to its public release. For Barofsky’s response to the administration spin, check out his interview with ABC’s Jake Tapper.

This all would have been a short -lived kerfuffle in the halls of Washington except that the Washington Post recently reported that Treasury has asked the Department of Justice to issue a ruling placing the SIGTARP office more directly under the control of the Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy F. Geithner. This move clearly aims to undermine Barofsky’s independence and give Geithner the authority to quash the release of information from his office. No word yet from Justice on whether or not “truth in lending” will be official administration policy.

Interesting interview by Scott Carney with one of the Somali pirates. It begins:

For his story on the economics of Somali piracy, WIRED contributing editor Scott Carney spoke to one of the ocean-going hijackers. They talked about how to negotiate a ransom, when to kill a hostage, and how to avoid the Navy. Here’s the uncut version of that interview:

What was your job before you start this one or what forced you to become a pirate?

Every government in the world is off our coasts. What is left for us? Nine years ago everyone in this town was stable and earn[ed] enough income from fishing. Now there is nothing. We have no way to make a living. We had to defend ourselves. We became watchmen of our coasts and took up our duty to protect the country. Don’t call us pirates. We are protectors.

How do you pirates decide on what ransom to ask for? What makes them negotiate downwards?

Once you have a ship, it’s a win-win situation. We attack many ships everyday, but only a few are ever profitable. No one will come to the rescue of a third-world ship with an Indian or African crew, so we release them immediately. But if the ship is from Western country or with valuable cargo like oil, weapons or then its like winning a lottery jackpot. We begin asking a high price and then go down until we agree on a price.

How do you know a ship in far away coast in the first place and its flagship?

Often we know about a ship’s cargo, owners and port of origin before we even board it. That way we can price our demands based on its load. For those with very valuable cargo on board then we contact the media and publicize the capture and put pressure on the companies to negotiate for its release.

From what I’ve seen, initial demands tend to be about 10 times the previous publicized ransom, is this a rule of thumb?

We know that we won’t get our initial demands, but we use it as a starting point and negotiate downwards to our eventual target.  But as a rule, yes, that’s about right…

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