Later On

Spencer Ackerman in the Washington Independent:

The New America Foundation’s Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann have a new report out tallying how many civilians have died in the Pakistani tribal areas thanks to the CIA’s drone strikes. Their conclusion: the strikes have killed, since 2006, between 750 and 1000 people; 20 of them have been “leaders of al Qaeda, the Taliban, and allied groups”; and “the real total of civilian deaths since 2006 appears to be in the range of 250 to 320, or between 31 and 33 percent.” That low?

Bergen and Tiedemann got their report by tallying up media reports on the drone strikes. They explain:

Our analysis of the drone campaign is based only on accounts from reliable media organizations with substantial reporting capabilities in Pakistan. We restricted our analysis to reports in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, accounts by major news services and networks–the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, CNN, and the BBC–and reports in the leading English-language newspapers in Pakistan–The Daily Times, Dawn, and The News–as well as those from Geo TV, the largest independent Pakistani television network. (Links to all those individual reports can be found in Appendix 1 of this paper.)

They don’t pretend their material is “accurate down to the last civilian death in every drone strike.” And they’re probably right that this is the best that can be compiled through open-source material. (I would go so far as to suggest that the CIA probably doesn’t have much better methodology, either.) But how to account for the variance in what a “militant” is? A lot of times, the way these press reports generate their descriptions of “militants” are through phone calls made from stringers to people in the vicinity of a strike. “[O]f those killed in drone attacks from 2006 through mid-October 2009, between 500 and 700 were described in reliable press reports as militants, or some 66 to 68 percent,” the authors write. Not the most precise measurement.

After all, who’s a “militant”? A cook in a village known to be swarming with Taliban? Someone who pays taxes to a shadow government? How do we judge the complicity of a given population? There’s a spectrum here, running from insurgent to civilian effectively held hostage. As a result, it’s probably fair and sensible to read Bergen and Tiedemann’s report as a low estimate for civilian deaths from the drones.

I asked the CIA about the report, even though it typically doesn’t comment on anything Pakistan-drone-related. To my surprise, agency spokesman George Little responded, “The CIA employs lawful, highly precise, battle-tested tactics and tools against al-Qaeda and its violent allies.  Al-Qaeda and its sympathizers, though still very dangerous and determined, have seen both their leadership and their fighting capabilities eroded.” So nothing specifically on the New America report one way or the other — I can’t tell if that quote supports it or undermines it, truth be told.

Update: Ackerman adds to this initial report.

Interesting article by Tom Shone at More Intelligent Life:

“What is a masterpiece and why are there so few of them?” asked Gertrude Stein in 1936. An answer has finally arrived from an economist, Tyler Cowen. In his new book “Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World”, Cowen argues: “The current trend…is that a lot of our culture is coming in shorter and smaller bits…When access is easy, we tend to favor the short, the sweet and the bitty. When access is difficult, we look for large-scale productions, extravaganzas and masterpieces.”

His point is not that great works are in decline, blotted out by clouds of grey mediocrity massing on the horizon. It’s that when communications are slow and information scarce, we favour works of art that aggregate and summarise and synthesise. A glance at the list of all-time top-selling records reveals that those albums that bestrode the 1970s and 1980s like colossi—from “Dark Side of the Moon” to “The Joshua Tree”—are now relics of the past. The last band to attempt one, Guns N’ Roses, almost killed themselves in the process, spending 17 years on an album, “Chinese Democracy”, that promptly went phut.

The list of Best Film Oscars tells a similar story, with epics like “The English Patient” and “Titanic”, which ruled the Nineties, giving way to small, left-field, indie hits—“Crash”, “No Country For Old Men”, “Slumdog Millionaire”. When Scorsese finally won his Oscar, it was not for his wayward epics but for his scrappy cop drama “The Departed”.

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Pretty cool.

An interesting email from the Center for American Progress:

On Friday, the Center for American Progress (CAP), in partnership with California First Lady Maria Shriver, released The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, a groundbreaking examination of how "women’s changing roles are affecting our major societal institutions, from government and businesses to our faith communities." For the first time in American history, women are half of all U.S. workers and mothers are the primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of American families. Considering that in 1967, women made up only one-third of all workers, this is a dramatic transformation that fundamentally changes how all Americans work and live, "not just women but also their families, their co-workers, their bosses, their faith institutions, and their communities." Unfortunately, America as a nation has not yet come to terms with what this means. "This report tries to chapter those things out and say all of these institutions have failed to adapt to this change that has happened, and that in order for them to survive and become smart about the American worker they must adapt and must change," Shriver said on NBC’s Meet The Press yesterday. "Our policy landscape remains stuck in an idealized past," writes CAP President and CEO John Podesta in his preface to the report. "This report contemplates what a new America should look like after we finally embrace this important new dynamic in our lives and the changes it has caused in our homes and businesses."

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Mind Hacks:

Science News has a brilliant special issue on the ‘science of slumber’ that tackles sleep disorders, the mental impact of sleep deprivation, how sleep differs across species and the still mysterious question of why we need to sleep.

I found the article on two seemingly straightforward sleep disorders, insomnia and narcolepsy, the most interesting. They seem straightforward because they appear as a lack and an excess of sleep, but as the piece makes clear, they are still quite mysterious.

Insomnia is particularly interesting because having trouble sleeping happens to everyone at some point, so in itself, it’s not abnormal – meaning that research into what triggers it is unlikely to find anything striking.

Instead research has shifted to try and understand what prevents insomnia from resolving naturally so it becomes a chronic condition:

Sleeplessness may be brought on by traumatic events such as a death in the family, an illness such as cancer or anything else distressing, causing a person to lie awake at night with a racing mind. For a subset of people, though, insomnia has no prompting signal — a condition called primary insomnia.

Regardless of the trigger (or lack thereof), temporary insomnia has a nasty way of becoming a habit. Poor sleep habits can become ingrained. When trouble sleeping persists for three or four nights a week over several months, insomnia is considered chronic.

It may turn out that untangling the prompting signals of insomnia, as many sleep researchers attempt, is a fool’s errand, says Michael Perlis, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program in Philadelphia. “The whole zeitgeist has changed,” he says. Most sleep researchers now agree that “once insomnia goes chronic, it stays that way,” regardless of the prompting signal, Perlis says. So rather than focusing on the immediate trigger for insomnia, many scientists are trying to figure out why it becomes chronic and how to prevent that from happening.

I also liked the short piece that briefly compares the amount of type of sleep between lots of different animals. It seems dolphins don’t have REM sleep. I wonder if that means that they lack or have very limited dreams?

Anyway, a great collection of articles and all freely available online.

Via Open Culture:

Dan Colman writes:

The Bayeux Tapestry famously offers a pictorial interpretation of the Norman Conquest of England (1066), a pivotal moment in medieval history, and the events leading to the invasion itself. Currently residing in France, the tapestry measures 20 inches by 230 feet, and you can now see an animated version of the story it narrates. The clip above starts roughly halfway through the story, with the appearance of Halley’s Comet, and concludes with the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

Glenn Greenwald:

Yesterday I wrote about the first installment of the account by The New York Times‘ David Rohde of his seven months as a hostage held by the Taliban, and specifically how — as he put it — some of "Washington’s antiterrorism policies had galvanized the Taliban."  His second installment is now available, describing his first several weeks of captivity after being moved to Pakistan, and it includes this:

For the next several nights, a stream of Haqqani commanders overflowing with hatred for the United States and Israel visited us, unleashing blistering critiques that would continue throughout our captivity.

Some of their comments were factual. They said large numbers of civilians had been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Palestinian territories in aerial bombings. Muslim prisoners had been physically abused and sexually humiliated in Iraq. Scores of men had been detained in Cuba and Afghanistan for up to seven years without charges.

To Americans, these episodes were aberrations. To my captors, they were proof that the United States was a hypocritical and duplicitous power that flouted international law.

When I told them I was an innocent civilian who should be released, they responded that the United States had held and tortured Muslims in secret detention centers for years. Commanders said they themselves had been imprisoned, their families ignorant of their fate. Why, they asked, should they treat me differently?

Just consider how often those thoughts repeat themselves throughout the Muslim world, how many people have been filled with rage and unrestrained anti-American hatred as a result. As the Open Society Institute’s Jonathan Horowitz told me from Kabul when I interviewed him in July, our practice of imprisoning people at Bagram with no charges by itself enrages much of the Afghan population that might otherwise be helpful or at least neutral.

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From a Steven Benen post:

A month ago, Harvard Medical School researchers published a key study that found nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year — one every 12 minutes — because of a lack of health insurance. CBS News reported, "After factoring in education and income, smoking, drinking and obesity, researchers found that the uninsured had about a 40 percent higher risk of death, linking 45,000 American deaths a year to lack of insurance. In 1993 it was 25 percent."

The US turned itself inside out when fewer than 3,000 died on 9/11—but doesn’t seem all that concerned that 45,000 die each year because of the way the US delivers (or fails to deliver) healthcare.

The health (and education, for that matter) of its citizens should be a national priority for any nation.

One thing I like about the Roku is that it allows me to movie surf: I watch 20 or so movies at a time, jumping from one to another, and each movie starts exactly where I left off. (The Wife thinks this is weird, but it seems quite natural to me: the same way I read books.) Some especially good titles I’m currently watching:

Bon Cop, Bad Cop – I’ve already mentioned this one, but it gets better and better.

Dr. Who, Season 1 – I’d heard lots about Dr. Who and didn’t get why it was so good, but I added the first season to my Watch Instantly queue just to check it out. My God! it’s good. I was completely hooked before I finished the first episode, and now Season 2 and 3 are also in the watch instantly queue.

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies – A French parody of a James-Bond-like series, and totally wonderful. Some quite witty things among the humor.

Film Geek – A wonderful indie comedy. I unfortunately understand the protagonist only too well.

The IT Crowd, Seasons 1, 2, and 3: Comedy gold for techies and those who work with them.

WALL-E – The scenes with subdued lighting don’t play too well, but overall: still great.

Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 – And I don’t even like football.

Played – Crime caper movie with Vinnie Jones.

A Bridge Too Far – WWII and Monty overreaches.

It Happened One Night – Still great. When Clark Gable took off his shirt to reveal that he wasn’t wearing an undershirt, men all over the country stopped wearing undershirts—at least for a while. This movie was the first of the screwball comedies.

Carbide & Sorrel – A comedy from East Germany, made in 1962.

Crazy Little Thing – An indie romantic comedy—so far excellent.

There—that’ll keep you busy.

First thing this morning I took Megs to the vet, and let me tell you that I now want a pubic option for pets: $121 for a quick visit just to get meds. Apparently Megs picked up a ringworm infection during her Great Adventure, and it only this weekend became evident: little raised circles on the back of one ear. The vet took one look, then carried Megs out for an exam under UV light—apparently ringworm (actually a fungus) fluoresces. So long as I was there anyway, I had them clip Megs’s nails.

Megs is a trouper: totally silent for the entire trip. She doesn’t like the vet’s office much, and wants to stay in her carrier, but she tolerated it. Very happy to get back into the carrier though.

I got a lotion to rub onto her ear three times a day for two or three weeks. Fungi are hard to kill because they are so closely related to animals.

After all that, I treated myself to breakfast at Toastie’s.

Glenn Greenwald explores the implications:

This is one of those rare instances of unadulterated good news from Washington:

The Obama administration will not seek to arrest medical marijuana users and suppliers as long as they conform to state laws, under new policy guidelines to be sent to federal prosecutors Monday.

Two Justice Department officials described the new policy to The Associated Press, saying prosecutors will be told it is not a good use of their time to arrest people who use or provide medical marijuana in strict compliance with state laws.

The new policy is a significant departure from the Bush administration, which insisted it would continue to enforce federal anti-pot laws regardless of state codes.

Criminalizing cancer and AIDS patients for using a substance that is (a) prescribed by their doctors and (b) legal under the laws of their state has always been abominable.  The Obama administration deserves major credit not only for ceasing this practice, but for memorializing it formally in writing.  Just as is true for Jim Webb’s brave crusade to radically revise the nation’s criminal justice and drug laws, there is little political gain — and some political risk — in adopting a policy that can be depicted as "soft on drugs" or even "pro-marijuana."  It’s a change that has concrete benefits for many people who are sick and for those who provide them with treatments that benefit them.  So credit where it’s due to the Obama DOJ, for fulfilling a long-standing commitment on this issue.

Beyond the tangible benefits to patients and providers, there is the issue of states’ right.  Fourteen states have legalized medical marijuana, many by referendum.  The Bush administration’s refusal to honor or even recognize those states’ decisions — by arresting people for doing things which are perfectly legal under state law — was one of many examples giving the lie to the conservative movement’s alleged belief in federalism and limited federal power (see here, for instance, how John Ashcroft and GOP Senators tried deceitfully and undemocratically to exploit the aftermath of 9/11 to prevent Oregon from implementing its assisted suicide law).  Constitutionally and otherwise, what possible justification is there for federalizing decisions about whether individuals can use marijuana for medical purposes?  Ironically (given the "socialism" and "fascism" rhetoric spewed at it by the Fox News faction), the Obama administration’s decision is a major advancement for the rights of states to have their laws respected by the federal government.

This action also reflects the clear sea change taking place, both domestically and especially internationally, regarding drug policy.  When Mexico decriminalized drugs for "personal use" in August, the silence — including from Washington — was deafening: …

Continue reading.

A perfect shave today, assisted by a two-day stubble and the right tools: a Wilkinson shave stick and the Simpsons Key Hole 3 Best to gin up a great lather, then a Merkur slant bar with a much-used Swedish Gillette blade. Three easy passes to a perfectly smooth visiage. A splash of Stetson Sierra, and I’m on my way.

If you play music, this post should be of interest.

UPDATE: link fixed.

Also note this post.

Interesting:

A 21-year Michigan State University experiment that distills the essence of evolution in laboratory flasks not only demonstrates natural selection at work, but could lead to biotechnology and medical research advances, researchers said. Charles Darwin’s seminal Origin of Species first laid out the case for evolution exactly 150 years ago. Now, MSU professor Richard Lenski and colleagues document the process in their analysis of 40,000 generations of bacteria, published this week in the international science journal Nature.

Lenski, Hannah Professor of Microbial Ecology at MSU, started growing cultures of fast-reproducing, single-celled E. coli bacteria in 1988. If a genetic mutation gives a cell an advantage in competition for food, he reasoned, it should dominate the entire culture. While Darwin’s theory of natural selection is supported by other studies, it has never before been studied for so many cycles and in such detail.

"It’s extra nice now to be able to show precisely how selection has changed the genomes of these bacteria, step by step over tens of thousands of generations," Lenski said.

Lenski’s team periodically froze bacteria for later study, and technology has since developed to allow complete genetic sequencing. By the 20,000-generation midpoint, researchers discovered 45 mutations among surviving cells. Those mutations, according to Darwin’s theory, should have conferred some advantage, and that’s exactly what the researchers found.

The results "beautifully emphasize the succession of mutational events that allowed these organisms to climb toward higher and higher efficiency in their environment," noted Dominique Schneider, a molecular geneticist at the Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France.

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Brad Plumer at The New Republic:

I enjoyed the original Freakonomics quite a bit. It surveyed some fun-to-read economic research that Steve Levitt had done at the University of Chicago, and while a lot of that work was employed in the service of trifling questions (“Do sumo wrestlers cheat?” “Do game-show participants discriminate?”), it was clear Levitt was a clever economist who could gin up fascinating “natural experiments” to crack open everyday mysteries.

So now Levitt and his co-author Stephen Dubner have a sequel, Superfreakonomics, which includes a chapter on climate change. Do they deploy Levitt’s trademark economic techniques to shed new light on old questions? Because that might be useful! Alas, no, there’s nothing of the sort. Levitt and Dubner just parachute into the field of climate science and offer some lazy punditry on the subject dressed up as “contrarianism.” There’s no original research. There’s nothing bold or explosive. It’s just garden-variety ignorance. As William Connelly, a former climate modeler at the British Antarctic Survey says in his review of the book’s climate chapter (which he has posted):

Diagnosis, in brief: (1) they write about stuff they clearly don’t understand (2) they pick a catchy reverse-common-wisdom nugget as a headliner without the having the slightest interest in whether it is true or not (3) they pick an expert to talk to, but since they don’t have a clue about the subject they don’t know how to pick a good expert, or even understand what the expert says (4) there is a grain of sense in there, but so badly wrapped in trash it is nearly unfindable.

In just a few dozen pages, Dubner and Levitt manage to repeat the myth that the scientific consensus in the 1970s predicted global cooling (quite untrue), imply that climatologists are unaware of the existence of water vapor (no, they’re quite aware), and traffic in the elementary misconception that CO2 hasn’t historically driven temperature increases (RealClimate has a good article to help with their confusion). The sad thing is that Dubner and Levitt aren’t even engaging in sophisticated climate-skepticism here—there’s just a basic unwillingness to gain even a passing acquaintance with the topic. You hardly need to be an award-winning economist to do that.

What’s more, as Joe Romm reports, the main scientist that Levitt and Dubner actually interviewed, Ken Caldeira, says they’ve completely twisted and mischaracterized his views—a glaring bit of journalistic malfeasance. And, as Matt Yglesias points out, one of Dubner and Levitt’s arguments rests on the (demonstrably wrong) premise that solar panels are always black. Now, as a journalist, I’m all in favor of having people write about things they’re not an expert in—and mistakes do happen—but this is a little absurd.

Meanwhile, over at The New York Times website, Dubner is complaining that critics are all engaged in “shrillness” (without linking to any of the criticisms of his book) and appears to be quietly removing comments when readers attempt to point to Connolley or Romm’s critiques. Guess they don’t make hard-charging contrarians like they used to.

Update: Dubner responds to the charge about twisting Caldeira’s work, but doesn’t address any of the errors that scientists like Connolley have pointed out. Maybe he’ll get around to that soon.

UPDATE: Brad DeLong takes a crack at listing the errors.

The above is from a fascinating article by Kevin Hall at McClatchy:

As the housing market collapsed in late 2007, Moody’s Investors Service, whose investment ratings were widely trusted, responded by purging analysts and executives who warned of trouble and promoting those who helped Wall Street plunge the country into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

A McClatchy investigation has found that Moody’s punished executives who questioned why the company was risking its reputation by putting its profits ahead of providing trustworthy ratings for investment offerings.

Instead, Moody’s promoted executives who headed its “structured finance” division, which assisted Wall Street in packaging loans into securities for sale to investors. It also stacked its compliance department with the people who awarded the highest ratings to pools of mortgages that soon were downgraded to junk. Such products have another name now: “toxic assets.”

As Congress tackles the broadest proposed overhaul of financial regulation since the 1930s, however, lawmakers still aren’t fully aware of what went wrong at the bond rating agencies, and so they may fail to address misaligned incentives such as granting stock options to mid-level employees, which can be an incentive to issue positive ratings rather than honest ones.

The Securities and Exchange Commission issued a blistering report on how profit motives had undermined the integrity of ratings at Moody’s and its main competitors, Fitch Ratings and Standard & Poor’s, in July 2008, but the full extent of Moody’s internal strife never has been publicly revealed.

Continue reading.

Remember that commenter who said we should just trust businesses to do the right thing?

One of the amusing/frustrating things about the GOP today is its open and utter hypocrisy. Steve Benen finds yet another example:

Karl Rove is just outraged that the White House would snub a news outlet it considers partisan. He complained incessantly about the Obama team’s disdain for Fox News this morning.

"The administration is making a mistake for itself," Rove continued. "But more importantly, it is demeaning the office of the president by taking the president and moving him from a person who wants to be talking to everybody and communicating through every available channel the same, if you oppose me, you question me, if you are too tough on me, by gosh, me and my people are not going to come on, we are going to penalize you. That is just wrong, fundamentally wrong."

Now, one can debate whether the White House’s decision to treat Fox News like a partisan propaganda outlet is wise or not. I believe it’s the right call. But putting that aside, let’s pause to appreciate the comical irony of Rove’s whining.

It was, after all, George W. Bush who became the first modern president to refuse literally every interview request from the New York Times over the span of nine years. The NYT‘s Sheryl Gay Stolberg explained about a year ago, "[Bush] White House officials are quite open about the fact that we have not gotten an interview because they don’t like our coverage."

Did Rove find this decision "demeaning" to the presidency? Was Rove in the West Wing, arguing at the time that the president should be "talking to everybody and communicating through every available channel"?

For that matter, the Bush White House went after NBC News in May 2008, accusing the network of deceptive editing and blurring the lines between "news" and "opinion." Officials from the Bush team began treating NBC and MSNBC as political opponents.

Did Rove find this "fundamentally wrong"? I don’t recall him complaining at the time.

I can appreciate the fact that Karl Rove is an embarrassingly partisan hack. It’s been his role for so long, it’s entirely expected. But it’s the kind of attacks he launches that I find interesting.

Rove ran a White House that embraced a "permanent campaign," so he’s accused the Obama team of embracing a "permanent campaign." Rove embraced the politics of fear, so he’s accused Obama of embracing the politics of fear. Rove relied on "pre-packaged, organized, controlled, scripted " political events, so he’s accused Obama of relying on "pre-packaged, organized, controlled, scripted" political events. Rove looked at every policy issue "from a political perspective," so he’s accused Obama of looking at every policy issue "from a political perspective."

It’s hard to launch political attacks that are ironic, hypocritical, and examples of projection, all at the same time, but Rove is a rare talent.

One way, of course, is to minimize their motivation. Glenn Greenwald:

The New York Times‘ David Rohde writes about the seven months he was held hostage by a group of extremist Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan and conveys this observation about what motivates them:

My captors harbored many delusions about Westerners. But I also saw how some of the consequences of Washington’s antiterrorism policies had galvanized the Taliban. Commanders fixated on the deaths of Afghan, Iraqi and Palestinian civilians in military airstrikes, as well as the American detention of Muslim prisoners who had been held for years without being charged.

Apparently, when we drop bombs on Muslim countries — or when Israel attacks Palestinians — that fuels anti-American hatred and militarism among Muslims.  The same outcomes occur when we imprison Muslims without charges in places like Guantanamo and Bagram.  Imagine that.  Recall, according to Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower, what prompted 9/11 "ringleader" Mohammed Atta to devote himself to a suicide mission, as recounted by Juan Cole during the Israel/Gaza war:

In 1996, Israeli jets bombed a UN building where civilians had taken refuge at Cana/Qana in south Lebanon, killing 102 persons; in the place where Jesus is said to have made water into wine, Israeli bombs wrought a different sort of transformation. In the distant, picturesque port of Hamburg, a young graduate student studying traditional architecture of Aleppo saw footage like this on the news [graphic]. He was consumed with anguish and the desire for revenge. As soon as operation Grapes of Wrath had begun the week before, he had written out a martyrdom will, indicating his willingness to die avenging the victims, killed in that operation–with airplanes and bombs that were a free gift from the United States. His name was Muhammad Atta. Five years later he piloted American Airlines 11 into the World Trade Center. (Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, p. 307: "On April 11, 1996, when Atta was twenty-seven years old, he signed a standardized will he got from the al-Quds mosque.  It was the day Israel attacked Lebanon in Operation grapes of Wrath. According to one of his friends, Atta was enraged, and by filling out his last testament during the attack he was offering his life in response").

On Tuesday, the Israeli military shelled a United Nations school to which terrified Gazans had fled for refuge, killing at least 42 persons and wounding 55, virtually all of them civilians, and many of them children. The Palestinian death toll rose to 660.

You wonder if someone somewhere is writing out a will today.

One could — and should — ask that question every time the U.S. or Israel engages in another military strike that kills Muslim civilians, or for that matter, every day that goes by when we continue to wage war inside Muslim countries.  Rohde adds this about what motivates these Taliban: …

Continue reading. To some extent, we’re now sowing what we shall reap in the future. (This includes global warming, of course.)