Later On

From a Glenn Greenwald column:

… Apparently, The Godfather of Neoconservatism [Norman Podhoretz] believes that American Jews do — and should — base their political beliefs not on what is best for their own country, but on what is best for a foreign country (Israel).  According to him, even though Obama shares most of their views on political matters ("on abortion, gay rights, school prayer, gun control and assisted suicide, the survey data show that Jews are by far the most liberal of any group in America"), American Jews should have nonetheless voted for McCain because of McCain’s alleged "long history of sympathy with Israel."  Isn’t this the "dual loyalty" argument that nobody is allowed to make upon pain of being accused of all sorts of bad things — that the political beliefs of some American Jews are shaped primarily or even exclusively by loyalty to Israel?  Yet here we find not Walt and Mearshimer or Chas Freeman making this claim, but Norman Podhoretz.

This extreme and flagrant double standard has been permitted for a long time now.  Neocons arrogate unto themselves the right to make appeals to what they believe is the "dual loyalty" of American Jews — most of whom, in fact, reject their radical ideology — when trying to coerce support for their agenda.  Podhoretz’s Commentary Magazine convened a "symposium" of some of the nation’s most typical war-loving neocons to discuss his new book, and virtually everyone of them argued that American Jews should shift their political loyalties to the Right because the Right is "better for Israel" — as though considerations of what’s best for a foreign country is how most American Jews (rather than just neocons) decide how they vote in American elections.  Neocons have long gotten away with this manipulative game: simultaneously demanding that American Jews support the Right on the ground that the Right is allegedly better for Israel (i.e., a "dual loyalty" appeal) while branding as "bigots" and "anti-Semites" anyone and everyone who points out that neocons think this way.

The reason why Podhoretzian neocons are so frustrated that more Americans Jews don’t respond to their pressure tactics is because …

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"Preventive detention" (aka "imprisonment for thoughtcrime") seems to be on the table. Greenwald:

By all accounts, the White House is going to unveil its proposal for indefinite detention within the next four to eight weeks, and it has begun dispatching proponents of that scheme to lay the rhetorical groundwork.  In The Washington Post today, one of the proposal’s architects — Law Professor Robert Chesney, a member of Obama’s Detention Policy Task Force — showcased the trite and manipulative tactics that will be used by advocates of indefinite detention to win support for their radical program [anyone doubting that detention without trials is radical should recall that Obama's own White House counsel Greg Craig told Jane Mayer back in February that it's "hard to imagine Barack Obama as the first President of the United States to introduce a preventive-detention law"; New York Times reporter William Glaberson wrote that "Obama's detention policy "would be a departure from the way this country sees itself"; Sen. Russ Feingold warned that it "violates basic American values," "is likely unconstitutional," and "is a hallmark of abusive systems that we have historically criticized around the world"; The New York Times' Bob Herbert said that "Americans should recoil as one against the idea of preventive detention"; and the Obama policy's most vigorous Congressional proponents are Tom Coburn and Lindsey Graham].

According to Chensey, though, the real extremists are those "on the left" who oppose preventive detention; those who believe that radical liberties such as criminal charges, trials and due process are necessary before the state can put someone in a cage for life; those who agree with Thomas Jefferson that trial by jury is "the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."  Chesney insists that such people (these "leftists") are (as always) the mirror images of the extremists on the Right, who "carelessly depict civil-liberties advocates as weak-kneed fools who are putting American lives at risk."  These two equally partisan, radical, extremist sides (i.e., those who believe in due process and trials and those who oppose them) are — sadly — "shrink[ing] the political space within which reasonable, sustainable policies [i.e., Chesney's preventive detention scheme] might be crafted with bipartisan support."

This is how political debates are typically carried out in Washington by the Serious Centrists and Responsible Adults.  Chesney writes an entire Op-Ed defending the soon-to-be-unveiled preventive detention policy without describing a single aspect of it.  To Serious people, the substance of the policy is irrelevant.  What matters is that anyone who opposes it is a radical, partisan, shrill extremist.  Conversely, as long as the Obama administration stays somewhere in the middle of the two sides — between Tom Coburn and Russ Feingold — then it proves they are being sensible, moderate and responsible, regardless of how extreme and dangerous their proposal actually is, and regardless of how close to Coburn and as far from Feingold as they end up.  That’s the manipulative formula that always passes for "debate" in Washington and it’s what is meant by "centrism" and "bipartisanship." …

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That’s one powerful .22. The case is a necked-down .50 BMG case. Photo via The Firearms Blog. (The cartridge is a joke, BTW.)

Sounds like an interesting book:

Backstory in Blue: Ellington at Newport ’56

by John Fass Morton

A review by Stanley Crouch

Through our remarkable technology we witness the fundamental dilemma of our age, which is the use of machines that bespeak the genius of the species for the trivialization of the profound. We have thus become accustomed to a blizzard of fluff delivered by ingenious high-tech means. An aspect of this fluff is music polluted by its attachment to the cheap, demeaning imagery of videos or losing gravity while largely used as a background score for the activities of a distracted public. People are uncomfortable in silence because it can breed needless contemplation and may engender a floating into the deeper world of the self. In our moment of deracinated intimacy, too many of us have settled for a blob of backbeats and recording-studio tricks that do not swallow but melt away the great force of music in a perpetual submission to contrived novelty.

For all of the shortcomings imposed upon a Washington, D.C., Negro born in 1899, much more was possible for the young Duke Ellington than there would have been had he arrived in our time. To tell it as it actually was, the varieties of bigotry were where they should have been because heroes need huge obstacles to teach them what they must know in order to achieve the victories demanded of them. Ellington succeeded both in adapting to the new technology and in learning how to make recording equipment into his tool rather than a dehumanizing gimmick or even a technological special effect to which he and his artistic purposes could become secondary. The technology submitted to him, not he to it.

Considered from all sides, Ellington was not only the most impressive genius produced by jazz but perhaps the greatest of all twentieth-century artists, because he redefined and refined his idiom in a world far more complex and extreme, ranging from the violent to the sublime, than the worlds inhabited by such aesthetic peers as James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, and Igor Stravinsky. (In his memoir Music Is My Mistress, Ellington described being summoned more than a few times by the New York City police, taken to the morgue, and asked if he knew a murdered man last seen dancing to the jungle band at the Cotton Club. That he always denied knowing the corpse, even if he did, tells us that he knew a loose lip could sink your own ship.) Ellington produced a body of work so large that it still intimidates our most serious music scholars, and it looms even more imposingly because he best understood that his was an age in which the performing arts would be remade by technology. In Picasso, Gertrude Stein says that people do not ever really change; what changes is the way in which they see themselves. This applies perfectly to Ellington. As the summoning power of electrical enhancements and preservations of given moments evolved, Ellington deftly used them, with an authority that increased as he came to understand exactly where he was and what specific things made his time different from those of artists who had come before him and before the technology that was too massively influential to ignore.

Always a contemplative and secretive man, this musician had to learn on the wing because there were no predecessors who could provide models or give him advice…

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Patrick Smith, of "Ask the Pilot" at Salon.com, asks the question:

I’m old enough to remember Moammar Gadhafi being interviewed by Mike Wallace on "60 Minutes." It was the late 1970s. I was 13, maybe 14. Then and now, the thing about Gadhafi is that you want to like and respect him. If nothing else, his posing and preening add flash and charisma to the world stage. And how can you not appreciate a world leader so true to his Bedouin roots that he conducts state business in a tent?

Well, two good reasons might be Libya’s human rights record and its sponsorship of terrorism. Gadhafi has, in recent years, openly forsaken such behavior, dismantling Libya’s nuclear program and working to improve its ties with Europe and America. One presumes his reasons for doing so are not entirely altruistic — so it goes in geopolitics — but whatever his motives, there are those who will neither forgive nor forget.

In early December 1988, the U.S. embassy in Helsinki, Finland, received an anonymous tip claiming that a Pan American Airways flight from Frankfurt, Germany, to New York would be bombed in the coming weeks. Deciding not to publicize the threat, officials warned Pan Am and sent notice to embassies around Europe. All was quiet until Dec. 21, the winter solstice and just a few days before Christmas.

That morning, on the Mediterranean island of Malta, just south of Sicily, two men smuggle a brown Samsonite suitcase onto an Air Malta jet bound from the capital, Valletta, to Frankfurt. The men are later alleged to be Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah and Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi. Fhimah is the former head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines. Megrahi works as the airline’s station manager at the Valletta airport. Prosecutors will argue the men are operatives acting on behalf of the JSO, the Libyan Intelligence Service. Inside the Samsonite, and wrapped in a wool sweater, is a Toshiba radio. Inside the radio, fitted with both a timer and a barometric trigger, is a Semtex-laden bomb.

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The stunning razor is the Merkur Big Grip, with a grip turned from solid aluminum. It weighs 3.7 oz (including an Astra Keramik Platinum blade) and stands 4 inches tall. Merkur calls it the “Alu,” which I believe shows that they don’t have a marketing department. I call it the Big Grip.

It seemed to me to be designed for guys with big hands and/or arthritis, but in fact it’s a pleasant razor to use. With a Merkur Classic head, it provides a fine shave, and the weight and size of the grip results in a different way of holding the razor—kind of cradling it in your hand.

Here it is in a size comparison with a Merkur Hefty Classic (“HD”):

As to the shave: the Boreal boar-bristle brush requires more breaking in, but I still got a good lather—and a very fragrant one, with Sandalwood filling the air. I had to return to the puck for more lather for the third pass, but still: no lather problems at all. And the razor and blade performed admirably: I enjoy for the moment a totally smooth face. TOBS Sandalwood was the obvious finish, and I’m still enjoying the fragrance.

One more day of light blogging, and then back to my regular blogging.

Paul Armentano in Huffington Post:

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has once again released their annual survey on "drug use and health" — you know, the one where representatives of the federal government go door-to-door and ask Americans if they are presently breaking state and federal law by using illicit drugs. The same survey where respondents have historically under reported their usage of alcohol and tobacco — these two legal substances — by as much as 30 to 50 percent, and arguably under report their use of illicit substances by an even greater margin. The same survey that — despite these inherent limitations — "is the primary source of statistical information on the use of illegal drugs by the U.S. population." Yeah, that one.

So what does the government’s latest round of ‘statistical (though highly questionable) information’ tell us? Nothing we didn’t already know.

Despite 70+ years of criminal prohibition, marijuana still remains widely popular among Americans, with over 102 million Americans (41 percent of the U.S. population) having used it during their lifetimes, 26 million (10 percent) having used it in the past year, and over 15 million (6 percent) admitting that they use it regularly. (By contrast, fewer than 15 percent of adults have ever tried cocaine, the second most ‘popular’ illicit drug, and fewer than 2 percent have ever tried heroin — so much for that supposed ‘gateway effect.’) Predictably, all of the 2008 marijuana use figures are higher than those that were reported for the previous year — great work John Walters!

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Igor Volsky at ThinkProgress:

A new Census report finds that, in 2008, the number of people without health insurance increased from from 45.7 million to 46.3 million (the number of uninsured has increased by 7.3 million since 2000). The report suggests that a weakened economy and rising health care costs are pushing more Americans towards so-called safety-net coverage. According to the data, “the percentage of people covered by government health insurance programs increased to 29.0 percent in 2008,” up from from 27.8 percent in 2007. The uninsured rate declined significantly for Americans under 18 and over 65 — the two groups who are eligible for government-sponsored coverage. The Wonk Room has more on the importance of public programs.

Update: Pat Garofalo highlights the new poverty data: The poverty rate has risen to an eleven-year high of 13.2 percent, with 39.8 million people in poverty (an additional 8.3 million people fall below the poverty line under Bush).

Dan Colman blogs:

During the lazy days of summer, we quietly launched a new, free iPhone app. Now summer is fading, people are getting back to work, students back to school, and it’s time to get the word out. This app takes our intelligent media collections and let’s you listen to them on the go. Once you download the app, you can listen to free audio books, university courses, foreign language lessons, science podcasts and other intelligent content on the iPhone.

The app opens all media files in native iPhone software — iTunes, Safari, the YouTube player, etc. You will need WI-FI (Apple says so) to download the content. This app, which was very generously developed by Fred Hsu, is a work in progress. Don’t hesitate to give us feedback. And, if you don’t mind, please leave a nice review/rating in the App Store and spread the word.

Lastly, let me leave you with some praise that we received today. “I love this application. Been using it a lot for the Biology – Human Anatomy Courses available. Thank you so much for developing this app. Absolutely Brilliant!!!” Does this intrigue you enough to check it out?

Bruce Schneier:

Interesting video:

A new class of global actors is playing an increasingly important role in globalization: smugglers, warlords, guerrillas, terrorists, gangs, and bandits of all stripes. Since the end of the Cold War, the global illicit economy has consistently grown at twice the rate of the licit global economy. Increasingly, illicit actors will represent not just an economic but a political force. As globalization hollows out traditional nation-states, what will fill the power vacuum in slums and hinterlands will be informal non-state governance structures. These zones will be globally connected, effectively run by local gangs, religious leaders, or quasi-tribal organizations — organizations that will govern without aspiring to statehood.

Malware is one of Nils Gilman’s examples, at about the nine-minute mark.

The seven rules of the illicit global economy (he seems to use "illicit" and "deviant" interchangeably in the talk):

1. Perfectly legitimate forms of demand can produce perfectly deviant forms of supply.
2. Uneven global regulatory structures create arbitrage opportunities for deviant entrepreneurs.
3. Pathways for legitimate globalization are always also pathways for deviant globalization.
4. Once a deviant industry professionalizes, crackdowns merely promote innovation.
5. States themselves undermine the distinction between legitimate and deviant economics.
6. Unchecked, deviant entrepreneurs will overtake the legitimate economy.
7. Deviant globalization presents an existential challenge to state legitimacy.

The comments on Schneier’s post are also worth reading.

The Grosvenor brush is, as you can see (click photo and click the result for full size), a mix of badger and boar bristle. It does a fine job—I got enough lather from the Floris London JF for four passes, and I’m sure that will improve as the brush breaks in. The HD, loaded with an Astra Superior Platinum blade, did a fine job—three passes were all it took. And the Floris JF aftershave was a fine finish.

The Brother-in-Law and his wife are in town, so light blogging for a few days.

Renee Schoof at McClatchy:

The Arctic was cooling for 1,900 years because of a natural change in Earth’s orbit until greenhouse gas accumulation from the use of fossil fuels reversed the trend in recent decades, according to a study published Friday in Science magazine.

Scientists reconstructed the temperature record of the past 2,000 years using evidence from tree rings, ice cores and lake sediment, and found a steady cooling trend in Arctic summer temperatures of about 0.5 degrees Celsius — 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit — during the first 1,900 years. The cooling was caused by a slow natural cycle in Earth orbit that continues in this century.

"The summer cooling would likely be continuing today were it not for the increase of greenhouse gases from fossil fuel burning," said David Schneider, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and one of the authors of the study. "The results are important in showing that the dramatic changes happening today — and particularly the rapidity of the changes — are not natural."

Darrell Kaufman, a professor of geology and environmental science at Northern Arizona State University and the lead author of the study, put it this way: "The warmth in the Arctic during the second half of the 20th century, combined with the last decade, is striking against the backdrop of the previous 1,900 years. … The second half of the 20th century was warmer in the Arctic than any other half-century of the last 2,000 years."

Further, 1999 to 2008 was …

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Take a look.

Very interesting article at MakeUseOf.com:

I recently went out on a mission to find the perfect tool to manage my writing life.  But the journey ended up with my frustration at not being able to single out one app that fit my needs – the tool that can:

• store notes and web pages from my research stage for offline view.
• quickly create a to-do list and alarms out of assignments and tasks, and be able to be synchronized to iCal (then to my mobile) so I’ll always get reminders wherever I am.
• access my email easily.
• track and record my writing assignments and submissions.
• post to blogs and also serve as a word processor – both in WYSIWYG and HTML view.
• show the word count for each of my submissions.

The most important thing is the whole features should come free and in one package (as I’m a bit tired switching back and forth between applications).

Then I remembered about Firefox – the browser that can be transformed into almost anything that we want it to be, and wondered whether I can expand it to be THE writing tool I’m looking for.

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Via John Cole at Balloon Juice:

Good post with many good tips for finding the best deals on legitimate software. It begins:

Here are  tips to help you purchase licensed software programs online at a price that is much less than the suggested retail price. You’ll also learn about useful sites that offer excellent deals on popular software titles. These include comparison shopping search engines, coupon code databases and sites that offer educational discounts on software to students and parents.

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David Sirota writes a useful column clarifying the differences between a "party" and a "movement." Well worth reading. It begins:

The difference between parties and movements is simple: Parties are loyal to their own power regardless of policy agenda; movements are loyal to their own policy agenda regardless of which party champions it. This is one of the few enduring political axioms, and it explains why the organizations purporting to lead an American progressive "movement" have yet to build a real movement, much less a successful one.

Though the 2006 and 2008 elections were billed as progressive movement successes, the story behind them highlights a longer-term failure. During those contests, most leaders of Washington’s major labor, environmental, antiwar and anti-poverty groups spent millions of dollars on a party endeavor — specifically, on electing a Democratic president and Democratic Congress. In the process, many groups subverted their own movement agendas in the name of electoral unity.

The effort involved a sleight of hand. These groups begged their grass-roots members — janitors, soccer moms, veterans and other "regular folks" — to cough up small-dollar contributions in return for the promise of movement pressure on both parties’ politicians. Simultaneously, these groups went to dot-com and Wall Street millionaires asking them to chip in big checks in exchange for advocacy that did not offend those fat cats’ Democratic politician friends (or those millionaires’ economic privilege).

This wasn’t totally dishonest. Many groups sincerely believed …

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Dean Baker in the Guardian:

To combat the financial crisis set off by the collapse of the housing bubble, the Federal Reserve Board has lent out more than $2tn through various special lending facilities. While the Fed discloses aggregate information on the loans made through each of the facilities, it will not disclose how much money it lent to specific banks or under what terms. By contrast, the Treasury puts this information about its $700bn TARP bailout up on its website.

Partly in response to this huge increase in the Fed’s power (its secret lending is equal to two-thirds of the federal budget), more than 270 representatives in Congress have co-sponsored a bill that would have the Government Accountability Office audit the Fed. In principle, this audit would examine the Fed’s loans and report back to the relevant congressional committees, which could decide to make this information public.

Most people might consider it perfectly reasonable to have Congress’s auditing arm review what the Fed has done with $2tn of the taxpayers’ money to ensure that everything is proper. After all, we wouldn’t let other government agencies spend one millionth of this amount ($2m) without some sort of record that could be verified.

However, the Fed and its chairman Ben Bernanke, do not see it this way. Bernanke warned Congress last month that such an audit could jeopardise the Fed’s independence, which in turn, "could raise fears about future inflation, leading to higher long-term interest rates and reduced economic and financial stability".

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I have a post on italic handwriting, and Inga Dubay and Barbara Getty have an excellent column in the NY Times, not only introducing italic handwriting but also (at the bottom) offering an alternative grip that may help you write better and with more comfort. You can download the column as a printable PDF so you can do the exercises.

Read about the update here.