Later On

Via Andrew Sullivan:

Klein:

I just watched Brian Williams spend a precious five minutes of his evening newscast on the question of whether Barack Obama is actually American. Let me end the suspense: he is. There is a birth certificate. He was born in Hawaii. You knew that, right? But right-wing nutballs and media giants like Lou Dobbs—whose presence on CNN is a continuing, suppurating embarrassment to the Time Warner multiplex, of which this blog is a teeny-tiny denizen—continue to pound this dead mouse. (Of course, Dobbs has to find new rot to push since his old rot,  his half-crazed, anti-illegal immigrant rants is less relevant these days—according to the NBC news tonight, illegal immigration is way down). Desperation ain’t pretty when it comes in the form of plummeting Nielsons.

Let me tell you what this is all about: The President of the United States is named Barack Hussein Obama. He is the first chief executive of this grand and good nation not to be melanin-deprived. There are a fair number of frightened, ignorant, idiot white folks still prowling the streets. They listen to right-wing talk radio. They show up at Republican town meetings. They can not believe that a man named Barack Hussein Obama could actually have been elected President. I must admit, I relish their discomfort. But I wish they’d go away.

Kevin Drum references this report from the Pew Global Attitudes Project—and do click to see the whole thing—and includes one chart along with a good commentary. Click the link for the commentary, and here’s the chart (click to enlarge):

This post is excellent. He carefully explains how to read global temperature charts, detect trends, and avoid cherry-picking data points to arrive a false conclusion (e.g., "the globe is cooling!"), which you often see in posts and comments by climate-change deniers, prompted by falsified information from major oil and coal companies.

Read the whole post. Here’s just one chart he explains:

Unless you’re seriously into denying global warming, the trend should be evident. Global warming deniers tend to see the chart as depicted below, with the temperatures rising some, sure, but recently we have a cooling trend so we’re worried about an ice age.

This sounds interesting:

How the States Got Their Shapes
by Mark Stein

A review by Doug Brown

This is the sort of book that sells itself — all I really need to do is let people know it exists. As to what the book is about, the title says it all. This is the state-by-state story of why every line, jog, and crinkle on the U.S. map is where it is. Ever wondered why Oklahoma has its panhandle? Why is Michigan in two chunks, one of which looks like it should belong to Wisconsin? Why is South Carolina so much smaller than North Carolina? How come Wyoming takes a corner out of Utah, rather than vice versa? Why is Maryland such a strange shape that almost pinches off in the middle?

Answers to all those questions and more are here. Many borders are the result of squabbles between European royals back when the states were still colonies. Some are the result of more localized disputes later on. Some jagged lines are the results of poor surveying, and some are the result of much political discussion and compromise. Many western states are close to exactly 7 degrees of longitude wide and 3 or 4 degrees of latitude tall, one of the rare examples of elected officials taking a long view. There is a chapter for each state, and each is further divided into north, south, east, and western borders. Even some states that might seem to have obvious borders (like Hawaii) have more convoluted stories than one might expect. As might be anticipated, politics is ever present.

There is naturally a bit of repetition between entries, as the story of Oregon’s northern border is also the story of Washington’s southern border. However, even in these cases there is often a bit more local detail in each state’s respective chapter. One of the more interesting illustrations is in the Utah chapter, depicting a way the western states could have been divided. In this alternate model, Oregon and Washington would have been divided vertically along the Cascades. Oregon would have been a narrow coastal state, comprising what we today call western Oregon and western Washington. Washington and Idaho would have been inland square states beside Wyoming and a square Montana. It is interesting to ponder how different Northwest politics would be had that route been taken. However, Congress chose the horizontal division of Oregon and Washington rather than a vertical division, due to local objections. Anyway, if any of this is piquing your interest, How the States Got Their Shapes is an easy read, aimed at general audiences without talking down to them. Do you know how your state got its shape? You’re bound to learn something here you didn’t know.

Good article by Steven Thomma of McClatchy:

If President Barack Obama got anything indisputably right at his news conference this week, it was this: The American people don’t trust the federal government.

That’s a major reason he’s having such a hard time selling his plan to overhaul the nation’s health care. Even if they like Obama himself, people just don’t think that the government can handle anything big, let alone something as personal to them as their health care.

"I understand that people are feeling uncertain about this. They feel anxious, partly because we’ve just become so cynical about what government can accomplish that people’s attitudes are, you know, even though I don’t like this devil, at least I know it, and I like that more than the devil I don’t know," the president said.

"So folks are skeptical. And that is entirely legitimate, because they haven’t seen a lot of laws coming out of Washington lately that helped them."

They did trust Uncle Sam once.

In the 1930s, they looked to the government for help in the Great Depression, and Franklin D. Roosevelt used that trust to drive through the New Deal program, creating Social Security and a host of government programs.

In the 1950s, they trusted Dwight Eisenhower when he wanted to build the Interstate Highway System.

In the early 1960s, they did, too, and Lyndon Johnson used it to create Medicare and to enact civil rights legislation and the rest of his Great Society agenda.

No longer, however.

From Vietnam through the Watergate scandal, the Iraq war and the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina, Americans have soured on the very thought that the government can do things well. That makes it immensely difficult to convince them — or their members of Congress — to go along with anything that even looks like a government takeover of health care…

Continue reading.

UPDATE: Daphne Eviatar has a blistering take on this same situation. Well worth reading.

This is from Monday, but I missed it. Michael Doyle of McClatchy:

A federal district judge ruled Monday that the CIA repeatedly misled him in asserting that state secrets were involved in a 15-year-old lawsuit involving allegedly illegal wiretapping.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth also ordered former CIA director George Tenet and five other CIA officials to explain their actions or face potential sanctions.

Lamberth also questioned the credibility of current CIA Director Leon Panetta, saying that Panetta’s testimony in the case contained significant discrepancies, and rejected an Obama administration request that the case continue to be kept secret. He released hundreds of previously secret filings.

“The court does not give the government a high degree of deference because of its prior misrepresentations regarding the stated secrets privilege in this case,” Lamberth wrote. “Although this case has been sealed since its inception to protect sensitive information, it is clear . . . that many of the issues are unclassified.”

Lamberth’s ruling comes as some members of Congress are questioning the CIA’s credibility in a series of issues unrelated to the lawsuit, including …

Continue reading. Maybe the CIA should be shut down and a new organization built from scratch with clearer directives and limits.

Interesting article in Science News:

A macromolecule that was accidentally discovered when scientists left stuff sitting on a lab bench seems to soak up atmospheric carbon dioxide, a study now suggests.

The original find was made by a research team led by chemists at the University of Southampton in England. They were trying to design and create molecules that could capture negatively charged ions, such as chlorides and phosphates, on the surfaces of bioengineered cells. In one experiment, the researchers set aside an alkaline solution of various organic substances to evaporate, says geochemist John A. Tossell, author of the new study. When analyzing the crystals that formed, the team found that the organic macromolecule that made up the crystal unexpectedly contained carbonates, which form in solutions containing carbon dioxide.

The carbon dioxide in those carbonates probably came from the air in the lab and was converted to carbonate in the solution, says Tossell, of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He describes, in the Aug. 3 Inorganic Chemistry, the macromolecule’s ability to absorb carbonate…

Continue reading.

Matt Taibbi:

Key facts concerning Hormats’s role in the PetroChina IPO:

With the PetroChina IPO facing significant opposition from human rights advocates, Hormats assured members of the press that no funds from the offering would be used for work in Sudan.

These statements later proved to be inaccurate and misleading. Several large institutional investors, including Harvard, have since divested from PetroChina, citing human rights concerns.

The SEC later cited Hormats’s remarks as evidence of illegal market tampering, or “market conditioning,” in a larger case against Goldman Sachs, which the bank settled for $2 million.

via Eyes on the Ties » a blog by LittleSis » Blog Archive » New PAI report on Obama nominee’s role in PetroChina/Sudan financing.

Forgot to post this earlier, about last Friday’s nomination of Bob Hormats, a former Goldman banker, to a key post as Undersecretary of State under Hillary Clinton. Thanks to Kevin O’Connor at the Littlesis website for the heads-up.

Hormats has an odd past to say the least, and some friends of mine from my Russia days tell me I should remember his name, as he was apparently involved in the effort to get Russia to liberalize its markets back in the Yeltsin years. The thing people are focusing on, however, is his behavior surrounding Goldman’s handling of the PetroChina IPO. In the face of public criticism of the deal, which some worried would end up supporting a genocidal regime in Sudan (PetroChina had significant interests there), Hormats lied to a number of press outlets, including the still-pissed-about-it Washington Post, saying that none of the money from the China deal would end up in Sudan.

This was later proved untrue; moreover, just by saying anything at all, Hormats violated SEC rules against public statements that might arouse interest in a deal before it is registered with the SEC. As noted above, Goldman was eventually fined $2 million by the SEC for the incident, a classic example of “regulation” — the IPO was worth $3 billion, so the cost-benefit analysis here still looks pretty good from Goldman’s end.

Goldman in that deal also got punished for sending out promotional materials about the IPO to institutional investors before the SEC registration. I mention this because these materials are very amusing — the funniest being a section on PetroChina’s earnings potential that was headlined, “SIZE DOES MATTER.”

Given everything that’s gone on recently, I just don’t get what’s going on with Obama’s appointments. You’ve got to fill a key post at State, and you can’t find someone who isn’t a former Goldman banker with a controversial human-rights profile? There are an awful lot of people on the earth; why this clown? I find it impossible to believe that the administration is not sensitive to the current unpopularity of this bank, which raises the question of what the message is here. Even leaving aside the moral aspect of this, politically it just seems like such a strange move.

Very interesting article in ProPublica by Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein:

The morning of her second day at Starpoint Surgery Center in Studio City, nurse Melony Currier was found in the parking lot, passed out in her car.

Once roused, she was escorted to a drug-testing facility to provide a urine sample. In the restroom, she injected an anesthetic she had stolen from the surgery center, according to state records and a Starpoint official.

Currier, a participant in the state’s confidential recovery program for impaired nurses, had failed repeatedly — and spectacularly — at rehabilitation, the records show.

Over 4 1/2 years, she’d been discovered high in her car at a Hollywood hospital, stolen anesthetics at a San Gabriel Valley hospital, been convicted of burglary after taking more drugs from the same hospital and flunked a drug test.

Yet it wasn’t until Currier shot up at the drug-testing facility in September 2006 that she was kicked out of the recovery program. Though her evaluators labeled her a "public risk," the California Board of Registered Nursing didn’t impose discipline until 1 1/2 years later, leaving her free her to work without restriction in the interim, the documents show.

As the state begins overhauling regulation of California’s 350,000 registered nurses, one of the board’s most touted programs stands out as seriously troubled: drug diversion.

For years, nursing board officials have described diversion as a haven where good nurses can kick bad habits — without losing their licenses or their reputations.

But an investigation by ProPublica and the Los Angeles Times found participants who practiced while intoxicated, stole drugs from the bedridden and falsified records to cover their tracks…

Continue reading.

Cute:

I’ve read that the effect of pheromes is not that of an odor as we commonly understand it—indeed, pheromes may not even be detected as an odor, but rather as a decision. Somewhat the same thing for human echolocation. Mind Hacks:

Psychologist Lawrence Rosenblum has written an excellent short article about a remarkable group of blind mountain bikers who apparently use echolocation to avoid obstacles by making loud click sounds as they ride.

Rosenblum has studied human echolocation in the lab and has shown that we all have some ability to get an idea of the spatial layout of our environment from sound reflection.

But one of the most interesting bits is where he discusses the fact that while echolocation uses sound, we don’t always process it as a conscious hearing experience. It can seem to just be a ‘sense’ of where objects are.

To get a sense of how echolocation works, try this. Hold your hand up about one foot in front of your face with your palm facing your mouth. Put your front teeth together, open your lips, and make a continuous shhhhhh sound. As you make this sound, slowly bring your hand toward your mouth. You will hear the shhhh sound change. What you’re hearing is the sound reflecting from your hand colliding with the sound leaving your mouth. This interference turns out to be one of the most important types of sound dimensions we use to echolocate objects at close distances.

But this demonstration is exaggerated. The interference patterns used for echolocation are usually too subtle to be consciously heard. This highlights one of the most amazing aspects of echolocation: It’s rarely experienced as sound. Try using your shhhh sounds to walk slowly toward a wall with your eyes closed. As you come close to the wall, you’ll experience its presence as more of a feeling than a change in sound. It may feel as if there are air pressure changes on your face, an experience also reported by the blind (echolocation was once called “facial vision”). Echolocation is truly one of your implicit perceptual skills: It allows you to detect aspects of your environment without even knowing which sensory system you’re using.

As you might expect from our arboreal ancestry. Mind Hacks:

There’s an intriguing study about to be published in Psychological Science finding that people wearing prism glasses that shift everything to the right overestimate the passage of time, while people wearing left-shift glasses underestimate it.

The researchers, led by psychologist Francesca Frassinetti, asked participants to watch a square appear on-screen for varying time periods, and then reproduce the duration or half the duration with a key press.

Glasses that skewed vision to the left seemed to shrink time, while glasses that skew everything to the right expanded it.

Apart from the interesting perceptual effect, it gives further evidence for the idea that our internals model of space and time are heavily linked, to the point where modifying one has a knock-on effect on the other.

In fact, there is increasing evidence that other abstract concepts are implicitly understood as having a spatial layout. Experiments on the SNARC effect have found that numbers seem to have a ‘location’, with larger numbers being on the right and smaller numbers on the left.

At least, that seems to be the case for native English-speakers, but for Arabic speakers, where text is written right-to-left, the reverse seems to be true.

It would be interesting to whether Arabic speakers show a reverse time alteration effect of if they wear prism glasses. Whatever the answer, it would raise lots of interesting questions about how much language influences our abstract ideas and whether it only applies to certain concepts.

Prism glasses have long been a tool in psychology and there is a mountain of research on how we adjust to living in the world even when everything is shifted through the lens.

Tom recently found a fantastic (1950s?) archive film called ‘Living in a Reversed World: Some Experiments on How We See the Directions of Things’ where several volunteers are asked to wear prism glasses for weeks on end.

Hilarity ensues, at least at first, but as co-ordination skills adapt the volunteers can go about their daily tasks, to the point of being able to ride bicycles, even when their vision has been flipped around.

Via Mind Hacks, which has some interesting comments.

A useful database to see whether you can get some state or federal funding to help you improve your use of energy:

DSIRE is a comprehensive source of information on state, local, utility, and federal incentives and policies that promote renewable energy and energy efficiency. Established in 1995, DSIRE is an ongoing project of the NC Solar Center and the Interstate Renewable Energy Council funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

From left to right: the Vulfix 374, the Omega Pro 48, the Omega Pro 49 in Read, Old Post Road Oils No. 4 liquid shaving soap, and Speick aftershave. In front, my Merkur Progress with new Bolzano blade (difficult to make out) and new stainless stem and knob made by the guy who makes iKon razors (which I have on order). Obviously, I should have ordered it gold-plated, but it works like a charm, and it is more precise (made to better tolerances, I expect) than the Progress knob: this one zeroes right on the mark.

The Pro 48 and Pro 49 seem pretty much identical except for handle color, and both do a great job right out of the box and improve with use. The odor of the wet brush is hauntingly familiar. I think my grandfather (who used straight razor and strop) must have had a boar brush and the odor memory is from my youth.

The Old Post Road shaving soap was the big surprise: no lather at all. It doesn’t call for lathering in the instructions, but I assumed that with a brush I could get a lather. Nope. But it seemed to do a good job in that first pass.

After the first pass, though, I wanted lather—and to try out my new brush. I picked up the Dovo shaving soap, which comes in a little metal container with the (relatively small) puck at the bottom: ideal for creating a good lather with a boar brush. I worked up the lather in no time, and had a fine pass 2 and pass 3—the Bolzano blade is quite good.

In the end, a great shave.

UPDATE: I just received in the mail a very nice letter from Julian Tonning, the proprietor of Old Post Road Oils, in which he explains that the product I bought was specifically designed for the multiblade cartridge razors that most men use. And now that he mentions that, I can see how the liquid shaving soap would work quite well with such razors. (And if you still use a multiblade cartridge razor, you should give it a try.)

For us DE shaves, he modified the formula, including more aloe vera oil, and he very kindly sent me a 2.5 oz travel bottle of Bay Rum made with the modified formula. I’ll give that a go next week.

He also mentions that his customers are pretty evenly split between women and men, and that women particularly like his shaving preparationn.

There’s very little—big insurers find markets that they dominate and thus avoid competition. That’s why the government option is so important: it offers the only competition health insurers are likely to get. When politicians talk about the benefits of competition in the healthcare arena, they’re blowing smoke. Here’s an article from Business Week by Catherine Arnst. It begins:

The insurance industry is up in arms over congressional proposals to create a publicly financed competitor in an effort to bring down health-care costs. That may be because it doesn’t have to face much in the way of competition now: Most regions of the U.S. are dominated by just one or two health insurers.

Each year the American Medical Assn. (AMA) surveys the commercial health-insurance landscape and finds little if any competition. Its latest report says that, out of 314 metropolitan markets, 94% are controlled by one or two companies, or fewer. In 15 states, one insurer has 50% or more of the entire market.

Such market concentration has become a potent argument for supporters of a public insurer, President Barack Obama among them. With no need to generate profits, a public plan could offer lower premiums, thus bringing competitive pressure to bear on the private insurers to do the same.

Insurers argue that creating a public plan would be a disaster for their industry. They point to an analysis by the Lewin Group, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group (UNH), that predicts 103 million Americans would jump to the cheaper public option out of the 160 million now covered commercially. The Congressional Budget Office, however, estimates that only 9 million to 10 million would switch by 2019. Karen Ignagni, president of the lobbying group America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), told Congress in a letter that a public plan would “significantly increase costs for those who remain in private coverage.”

Insurers say they are already offering plenty of changes to their business practices to help further reform, so they should be spared this additional burden. AHIP favors ending the practices of charging higher premiums for sicker enrollees and denying coverage for preexisting conditions. “We do think comprehensive reform is needed,” says Alissa Fox, senior vice-president of Blue Cross Blue Shield…

Continue reading. And also from the article (click image to enlarge, then click it again):

Lots of interesting things happening, with a report in Obama Foodorama. From that report:

This week, food advocates are focusing on milk issues in Ohio, because last year, a handful of corporations helped pass a rule, issued in February 2008, that stipulates that Ohio’s dairy producers cannot use the widely used and understood term “rbGH-free” on labels and must rather describe products as “from cows not treated with artificial growth hormones.” The rule also requires that a disclaimer must be included stating that “no significant difference has been shown between milk derived from rbST-supplemented and non-rbST-supplemented cows.”

rBGH is a technological intervention that boosts milk output from cows, which can not only harm the cows, but which also has potentially grave effects on human health (a terrific Op Ed piece on the issue is here). The companies that got the rule passed in Ohio don’t want consumers to know when artificial bovine growth hormone (rBGH) is used in producing milk.

The companies that got the law passed in Ohio don’t want consumers to know when artificial bovine growth hormone (rBGH) is used in producing milk–so they attempted to block organic producers from labeling as artificial hormone free. During today’s mediation with the Ohio Ag department, the International Dairy Foods Association and Organic Trade Association hope to stop this rule from continuing. Good food activists and advocates worry that if the milk labeling rule stays on the books in Ohio, it will become the standard and spread to other states.

The organic advocates are regarding the labeling debate as a First Amendment issue, and for health care reform, the consequences of food related disease from rBGH should be considered, too. What kind of long-term illnesses will be created from artificial hormone laced milk? What kind of burdens will this place on our health care system?

If we’re talking about personal responsibility as a critical element of health care reform, consumers should have the right to be personally responsible for their choice of avoiding milk that’s potentially dangerous. Truthful labeling is critical for this. And will organic dairies be driven out of business if they can’t convince consumers that there’s a good reason to pay a little bit more for organic milk, by highlighting the fact that their product is artificial hormone free? Quite possibly. That has grave implications for insurance issues, too.

In advance of today’s mediation in Oho, activists from across the country have spent the week calling Ohio Governor Ted Strickland’s office about the issue, in response to an action alert from Food Democracy Now! as well as a CREDO alert. Ob Fo has heard from many reliable sources that callers were getting hung up on. According to Consumers Union, more than 4,000 letters and e-mails, and roughly 1,000 faxes, have been sent to Gov. Strickland in the last month from concerned Ohio citizens who want to see this rule changed…

Lots more at the link.

I don’t think so, myself. Here’s the story:

Is there a difference between covert propaganda and secretive campaigns to shape public opinion on controversial issues? The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) apparently thinks that there is.

The GAO recently ruled that the Pentagon pundit program did not break the law against taxpayer-funded domestic propaganda. The program involved some 75 retired military officers who serve as frequent media commentators. From 2002 to 2008, the Pentagon set up meetings between the pundits and high-level Department of Defense (DOD) officials. The Pentagon’s PR staff not only gave the pundits talking points, but helped them draft opinion columns and gave them feedback on their media appearances. The Pentagon also paid for the pundits to travel overseas, following carefully-scripted itineraries designed to highlight successes in Iraq and humane measures at the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

"There is no doubt," the GAO ruling states, "that DOD attempted to favorably influence public opinion with respect to the Administration’s war policies in Iraq and Afghanistan through the [pundits] with conference calls, meetings, travel, and access to senior DOD officials." However, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress concluded that the Pentagon pundit program wasn’t covert propaganda, for two reasons: the Pentagon didn’t pay the pundits for their favorable commentary, or conceal the program from the public.

However, the New York Times‘ Pulitzer Prize-winning reports on the program, along with the available internal Pentagon documents, reveal major holes in the GAO’s reasoning.

In finding that the pundits "clearly were not paid by DOD," the GAO ignores well-documented evidence — including statements from some of the pundits themselves — that the Pentagon access and information they received was as good as gold.

Many of the pundits are lobbyists, executives or consultants for military contractors. In these roles, their ability to attract clients and the rates they’re able to charge are directly related to the number of influential Pentagon contacts they have and their ability to learn privileged information. The Pentagon pundit program provided both in spades. "Some Pentagon officials said they were well aware that some analysts viewed their special access as a business advantage," reported the New York Times‘ David Barstow. Brent Krueger, a former Pentagon aide involved in the pundit program, told Barstow, "Of course we realized that. … We weren’t naive."

The Pentagon program even provided financial benefits to pundits without military industry ties…

Continue reading.

This is great news:

Source: O’Dwyer’s PR Daily (sub req’d), July 16, 2009

In what may be the first case against online astroturfing, New York’s attorney general has reached a settlement with a cosmetic surgery company. Lifestyle Lift will pay a $300,000 penalty and has agreed to "stop publishing anonymous positive reviews about the company to Internet message boards and other Web sites," according to a statement from Attorney General Andrew Cuomo‘s office. Concerned that "negative Internet posts had significantly hurt the company’s reputation," Lifestyle Lift directed its employees to post comments and even create websites praising the company’s facelift procedures, while pretending to be Lifestyle Lift customers. In one email, a Lifestyle Lift manager told an employee to "put your wig and skirt on and tell them about the great experience you had." Employees also tried "to ‘attack’ legitimate comments criticizing the company and tried to get such postings removed." One of the company’s websites, MyFaceliftStory.com, now clarifies that it’s run by Lifestyle Lift and no longer has stories from people claiming to have undergone the procedure. An archived version of the site from 2008 claims the site was started by "Ann," who wanted to respond to the online "horror stories about Lifestyle Lift," which she thinks "were probably from envious doctors and just made up."