Later On

Sam Farr is my own Congressman, and the Marijuana Policy Project just sent me an email about him:

Following the enormous victory for medical marijuana patients and their caregivers on Monday, a strong MPP champion on Capitol Hill, Congressman Sam Farr (D-Calif.), plans to introduce an important bill in Congress next week.

While the new Department of Justice policy creates a de facto protection for patients and caregivers who are "in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana," the Farr bill — which MPP staff helped write years ago — will codify this protection in law.

It will also address another injustice:  Currently, medical marijuana patients in the 13 states where medical marijuana is legal are barred from telling federal jurors that their use of marijuana was for medical purposes, even when state laws explicitly permit medical use. Congressman Farr’s Truth in Trials Act would guarantee defendants in federal medical marijuana cases the right to explain that their marijuana was for medical use. And more importantly, defendants could be found not guilty if the jury finds that they followed state medical marijuana laws.
Will you please urge your member of Congress to co-sponsor this legislation? MPP’s online action system makes it easy: Just enter your contact information and we’ll do the rest.

This is such an exciting time for our issue. Thank you for standing with us in the fight.

I don’t rely on TIME much—for example, they list what they say are the 10 greatest electric guitar player of all time, and actually list 11. But Charlie Christian, who certainly should be close to the top of the list, is missing. They did get Les Paul, but what about Wes Montgomery? Chet Atkins?

Patrick Stack, with Claire Suddath, in TIME magazine:

On Oct. 19, the U.S. Justice Department announced that federal prosecutors would not pursue medical-marijuana users and distributors who comply with state laws, formalizing a policy at which the Obama Administration hinted earlier this year. Currently, 13 states allow doctors to prescribe medical marijuana to patients suffering from ailments ranging from AIDS to glaucoma, and in Maryland a prescription can soften punishment if a user faces prosecution. But until now those laws didn’t provide any protection from federal authorities. (Read "Can Marijuana Help Rescue California’s Economy?")

Should Professors Cheech and Chong ever receive university tenure teaching the medical history of their favorite subject, the course pack would be surprisingly thick. As early as 2737 B.C., the mystical Emperor Shen Neng of China was prescribing marijuana tea for the treatment of gout, rheumatism, malaria and, oddly enough, poor memory. The drug’s popularity as a medicine spread throughout Asia, the Middle East and down the eastern coast of Africa, and certain Hindu sects in India used marijuana for religious purposes and stress relief. Ancient physicians prescribed marijuana for everything from pain relief to earache to childbirth. Doctors also warned against overuse of marijuana, believing that too much consumption caused impotence, blindness and "seeing devils."

By the late 18th century, early editions of American medical journals recommend hemp seeds and roots for the treatment of inflamed skin, incontinence and venereal disease. Irish doctor William O’Shaughnessy first popularized marijuana’s medical use in England and America. As a physician with the British East India Company, he found marijuana eased the pain of rheumatism and was helpful against discomfort and nausea in cases of rabies, cholera and tetanus.

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I generally don’t think much of David Brooks, but this column is quite good. I found it via this post by Jonah Lehrer. Both are worth reading, and Jonah links to this New Yorker article that he wrote. Read ‘em all. The conclusion to his post:

So if personality is so context-dependent, then why do we believe so fiercely in the constancy of character? Why does everyone know their Myers-Briggs score? The answer returns us to the biased brain, and a mental flaw known as the fundamental attribution error. It turns out that when we evaluate the behavior of others we naturally overemphasize the role of personality – we assume people are always aggressive or always dishonest or always sarcastic – and undervalue the role of context and the pervasive influence of situations. Nobody, it turns out, is always anything.

This somewhat fuzzy photo of Megs (it’s only fair: she’s somewhat fuzzy herself) is the first with my new (used) Casio Exlim EX-S880 camera—a very thin guy that I can carry in my trousers pocket. I wanted a highly portable camera—the sort of thing most people have in their cellphone, but I don’t carry a cellphone and anyway to transmit photos from my celllphone requires a data-transfer plan for an extra $30/month—definitely not worth it.

So I went for this one, and I think it will do the job. I was motivated to get a carry-camera when I was walking and spotted a spectacular yellow fungus growing at the root of an aged tree. I wanted a photo, but: no camera.

I will no longer be foiled.

BTW, there’s a canard that British Shorthairs are not lap cats, which the photo refutes. Megs loves to lie on my lap and sleep or meditate. And since she’s petite, at 8.2 lbs, I also like her lying there. Molly, the elephant, would stop circulation in the legs if she were a lap cat.

The Younger Daughter mails a link to this table that compares and contrasts the Nook and Kindle. The Nook provides some clever enhancements, including the ability to lend your eBooks to other Nook readers (once each, and for two weeks only).

I grew up in southern Oklahoma, which has pretty boring autumns. But when I went to college in Annapolis, MD, I became acquainted with fall rains, wet leaves, and the utility of a good umbrella. This one at Cool Tools looks good:

It’s both highly durable and extremely compact: it folds down to the size of a two D-cell Maglite (about 6 ½ inches). Folded, it’s much smaller than the GoLite umbrella previously reviewed on Cool Tools, which is 25.5 inches long and doesn’t collapse. The Knirps is just a few grams heavier, and its coverage radius (37 inches) is 16 inches wider than the GoLite’s.

Megs is now totally on Evo canned food, and dressing it up with a sprinkling of FortiFlora is no longer needed. Getting her off kibble has had the unexpected effect of making her noticeably more affectionate. I suspect that the reason is that the connection between her food and me is much more obvious: when she was eating kibble, the kibble dish was always full, and so far as she could tell I had nothing to do with—it was a miracle bowl or something.

But with the canned food, she has learned the feeding times (and is not hesitant to remind me) and she recognizes the sound of the can opening. She rubs against my legs until that (in her view) makes me put the food down. Then she immediately eats for a few minutes.

She will return and eat more, I’ve found. I give her half a can in the morning and again in the evening, and I would say she cleans it up pretty well 3 times out of 4. The other time, she will leave a lot, but it’s hopeless to try to match the amount served with the amount she’ll eat: there’s no predicting it.

When she eats, she tends to smush the food over the bottom of the little dish, but if I later take up the dish and scoop the food into a pile to make it easier to at—well, that simply ruins it and she won’t touch it any more. But if I leave it smushed over the dish, she’ll work at it later and usually manage to eat most of it.

I’m still awaiting delivery of the meat grinder so that I can start making her food from scratch, but it’s probably good to let her settle on the Evo canned food for a while and not rush her from one new food to another.

Molly has proved more finicky, and does demand the bean-sized lump of pumpkin mixed in, but she too is gradually growing accustomed to the new food.

I’ll provide more updates along the way, but for now we’re stable at 1/2 can of Evo canned food each morning and evening, and I’m enjoying my newly affectionate kitty.

I stayed up late last night, more or less celebrating the clean apartment. (Cleaning ladies yesterday.) Probably will do intermittent blogging today.

Yesterday at Whole Foods I was given a sample of Tonnino line-caught yellowfin tuna that’s hand-packed in olive oil with oregano—basically canned tuna, but in a jar and the very best of tuna. The oregano olive oil was tasty beyond belief, and I immediately grabbed three jars of it: one for me to eat right away, one for The Wife, and one to save for later.

The oil was so good that I poured it into a sauté pan (there was about a tablespoon all told) over medium heat, then added minced garlic. When I smelled the garlic cooking, I added 1/2 head of radicchio chopped finely and sautéed that for a few minutes, adding some salt and pepper and a grinding of dried habanero. I didn’t stir too often: let it cook a while before stirring and turning. Man, it was good. Radicchio has a very nice bitter flavor, and now I want to make the same thing using a combination of radicchio and bok choy. The bowl of radicchio was a post-lamb-chop dish. (I roasted three lamb chops at 300º for 30 minutes: very tasty.)

The Semogue 2000 requires more break-in time that the Omega Pro 48, but it’s coming along: three good passes of very nice lather generated from Mama Bear’s Clove & Tangerine shaving soap. And I’ll use the brush again tomorrow, perhaps with a triple-milled soap.

The Gillette Fat Boy performed flawlessly as usual, and the much-used Swedish Gillette still managed a fine shave, though a blade change will soon be needed. And Jade East was a fine finish.

From Gearlog:

It wasn’t exactly the best-kept secret in the industry. After months of rumors and a few proverbial cats let out of the bag the morning of by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Barnes & Noble yesterday made official its stab at the e-book market–The Nook.

The book giant’s Kindle killer is Android-based, as speculated, and features two screens (also rumored prior to release)–one a standard electronic ink display for reader and one color touch screen. The reader also features 3G connectivity via AT&T (good luck using it in New York) and Wi-Fi, which can be accessed in Barnes & Noble retail locations.

The reader will begin shipping the end of next month for $259. The first 10,000 customers who pre-order will receive a free copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.

Steve Benen at Political Animal:

For proponents of the death penalty, the usual arguments tend not to be effective. Fears about inadvertently executing the innocent, philosophical objections to the government killing American citizens, evidence that capital punishment doesn’t actually deter crime … the typical points don’t seem to connect.

Perhaps it’s time to try a new direction: the death penalty is just too expensive. (via John Cole)

At 678, California has the nation’s largest death row population, yet the state has not executed anyone in four years.

But it spends more than $130 million a year on its capital punishment system — housing and prosecuting inmates and coping with an appellate system that has kept some convicted killers waiting for an execution date since the late 1970s.

This is according to a new report that concludes that states are wasting millions on an inefficient death penalty system, diverting scarce funds from other anti-crime and law enforcement programs.

"Thirty-five states still retain the death penalty, but fewer and fewer executions are taking place every year," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. "But the overall death row population has remained relatively steady. At a time of budget shortfalls nationwide, the death penalty is turning into an expensive form of life without parole."

The right cares about fiscal responsibility, right?

The same report asked 500 police chiefs from across the country about their priorities for reducing violent crime. The death penalty ranked last.

To counterbalance the billion-dollar salaries and multi-million-dollar bonuses, consider this:

"The level of poverty in America is even worse than first believed," the AP reports. The National Academy of Science finds that "approximately 47.4 million Americans last year lived in poverty, 7 million more than the government’s official figure." The new calculations put the poverty rate at 15.8 percent, or nearly one in six Americans.

The Center for American Progress:

Campus Progress reports that Morton Blackwell, founder of the right-wing young adult organization the Leadership Institute (LI), has launched a new social-networking site for young conservatives, called CampusReform. The site is dedicated to exposing supposed "bias" in universities that are "completely dominated by the left" and giving students a forum to report and organize against liberal professors. The site allows students struggling to meet the rising cost of tuition during the economic recession the opportunity to make money by reporting examples of "leftist abuse" by professors. Blackwell claims the site was born out of his "long-term awareness of how the campuses have become left-wing indoctrination centers." Even as LI spent $4.6 million last year to "conduct training seminars for college students and to assist with launching right-leaning newspapers on campus," Blackwell claims that CampusReform is "largest program ever created" in his organization’s history. CampusReform’s staff consists of 11 regional organizers, all providing services and resources to campuses across the country. LI has already bred conservative leaders like GOP strategist Karl Rove, Rep. Joe "You Lie" Wilson (R-SC), and Grover Norquist, head of Americans For Tax Reform. CampusReform also proudly points out that James O’Keefe, the filmmaker who posed as the pimp that led to the ACORN scandal, attended 10 different LI schools in addition to receiving funding from the Institute.

From the Center for American Progress:

SuperFreakonomics, the sequel to the pop-economics bestseller Freakonomics by economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner, "is bigger, more provocative, and sure to challenge the way we think all over again," publisher Harper Collins writes. However, "Levitt and Dubner have fallen into the trap of counterintuitiveness," Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman opines. "The problem with SuperFreakonomics," the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein writes, "is it prefers an interesting story to an accurate one." Instead of relying on Levitt’s interesting economic research, the authors "just decided to deploy the brand," the Center for American Progress Action Fund’s Matthew Yglesias writes, "to help sell copies of what’s really just a lot of third-rate political punditry." Levitt and Dubner begin the book by concluding that if you’re intoxicated "driving is safer than walking" — based not on actual research but on "shoddy statistical work." The authors boast about their time spent interviewing a $500-an-hour call girl, describing her as "essentially a trophy wife who is rented by the hour," while getting the economics and history of prostitution wrong. But the most serious concerns are raised by their treatment of climate change. As first reported by Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Joseph Romm, SuperFreakonomics devotes 44 pages to a contrarian view of climate change, calling global warming a "religion." They pit "true believers" and "doomsayers" such as Al Gore and James Lovelock against "agnostics" and people who may be "the smartest men in the universe," led by Microsoft billionaire and scientific dilettante Nathan Myhrvold, who warns that solar power isn’t a "good thing," preferring the "cheap and simple" solution to global warming of pumping acid rain pollution into the stratosphere to blot out the sun.

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Interesting question, and the answers are also interesting. Post includes links to the laureates’ autobiographies.

I don’t think so. Matthew Yglesias:

It’s certainly news that Human Rights Watch’s critics were able to get a former HRW chairman to slam the organization for having the temerity to hold Israel to the same standards of international humanitarian law to which it holds every other country. But Bernstein doesn’t appear to have any arguments to make that any of the instances of human rights violations HRW has documented didn’t take place. Instead his view is basically that Israel ought to be exempt from criticism because its enemies are mean:

Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields. These groups are supported by the government of Iran, which has openly declared its intention not just to destroy Israel but to murder Jews everywhere. This incitement to genocide is a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. [...]

The organization is expressly concerned mainly with how wars are fought, not with motivations. To be sure, even victims of aggression are bound by the laws of war and must do their utmost to minimize civilian casualties. Nevertheless, there is a difference between wrongs committed in self-defense and those perpetrated intentionally.

For one thing, The New York Times really shouldn’t publish op-eds stating that “the government of Iran . . . has openly declared its intention . . . to murder Jews everywhere.” There are Jews in Iran, unmurdered, subject to the same repressive dictatorship as Iran’s Muslims, with its abuses duly cataloged and condemned by Human Rights Watch.

The argument in the second graf I quote is, huffing and puffing aside, all there is to Bernstein’s argument. He thinks that Hamas and Hezbollah “started it” and Israel is acting in self-defense, and that countries acting in self-defense should generally be exempted from international humanitarian law and human rights norms. This is a thesis a lot of people seem eager to embrace in the specific case of Israel, but few people seem prepared to defend as a general proposition or to apply as a general matter. People don’t defend it as a general proposition because it’s not defensible. For one thing, this just isn’t what international humanitarian law says. Just war theory has always recognized specific ethical obligations of combatants that are unrelated to the justice of their cause, and international humanitarian law does the same. After all, subjectivizing the obligations of combatants in the way Bernstein proposes would drain the standards of all force. All participants in all wars think that they’re the good guys and the enemy is the bad guys.

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I have explanation for such terrible loopholes save that a lot of Representatives and Senators are eager to justify the enormous contributions they’ve received from the health-insurance industry. Lisa Girion reporting in the LA Times:

Despite growing frustration with the way health insurers deny medical treatments, major healthcare bills pending in Congress would give patients little new power to challenge those sometimes life-and-death decisions.

"Right now, the deck is stacked against patients," said Bryan Liang, director of the Institute of Health Law Studies at California Western Law School in San Diego. "Healthcare reform is not going to change the ball game."

Yet a patient’s ability to fight insurers’ coverage decisions could be more important than ever because Congress, in promoting cost containment and price competition, may actually add to the pressure on insurers to deny requests for treatment.

By requiring insurers to cover everyone, regardless of pre-existing conditions, healthcare reform will make it more difficult for insurers to control their costs, or "bend the cost curve," by avoiding sick people.

That leaves insurers with the other big cost-containment tool: turning down requests to cover treatments.

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