Later On

Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:

Yesterday’s announcement that the Obama administration will try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 suspects in federal court has been hailed as everything from “an important step forward for justice” by Human Rights Watch) to “a step backwards for the security of our country [that] puts Americans unnecessarily at risk” by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Glenn Greenwald has pointed out the irony of Republicans now raising fears of another terror attack simply because the president has decided to prosecute terror suspects in a way that’s consistent with American values.

But some important points are being drowned out by the hysteria. Retired Adm. John Hutson, now the dean of Franklin Pierce Law Center, yesterday observed that “there’s no particular reason to believe that if terrorists are going to take vengeance on the US for prosecuting these people, that that’s going to happen at the location or at a hard target.” A federal supermax prison or high-security New York City jail is actually “the least likely place for vengeance to be taken,” given the obstacles presented by all the security, he said on a conference call organized by Human Rights First. “The logical consequence of that stream of logic is that we not prosecute them at all to avoid some form of retribution.”

The other point largely overlooked is that while Attorney General Eric Holder announced plans to try the alleged 9/11 plotters in federal court, he also announced that the suspected USS Cole bomber, among others who’ve attacked U.S. soldiers or military targets, would be tried in the newly reconstituted military commissions. So are they getting a lesser trial?

“Despite the changes enacted by Congress this year, that untested system does not have the track record of fairness and justice that our criminal justice system has,” said Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) yesterday, after praising the decision to try KSM and his alleged co-conspirators in federal court.

Col. Morris Davis, the former chief military prosecutor for the commissions, made this important point Sunday in The Wall Street Journal: having two different justice systems “establish[es] a dangerous legal double standard that gives some detainees superior rights and protections, and relegates others to the inferior rights and protections of military commissions. This will only perpetuate the perception that Guantanamo and justice are mutually exclusive.”

Another former military prosecutor, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, …

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Interesting post by Marcy Wheeler:

A senior Counsel for the 9/11 Commission, John Farmer, has written a book exposing the degree to which our response to 9/11 was disorganized and and outdated–geared to respond to an attack from Russia rather than from terrorists. Most significantly, Farmer reveals that FAA and NORAD altered their chronologies of the day only after a briefing at the White House.

Perhaps nothing perturbs Farmer more than the contention that high-ranking officials responded quickly and effectively to the revelation that Qaeda attacks were taking place. Nothing, Farmer indicates, could be further from the truth: President George W. Bush and other officials were mostly irrelevant during the hijackings; instead, it was the ground-level commanders who made operational decisions in an ad hoc fashion.

[snip]

Yet both Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney, Farmer says, provided palpably false versions that touted the military’s readiness to shoot down United 93 before it could hit Washington. Planes were never in place to intercept it. By the time the Northeast Air Defense Sector had been informed of the hijacking, United 93 had already crashed. Farmer scrutinizes F.A.A. and Norad records to provide irrefragable evidence that a day after a Sept. 17 White House briefing, both agencies suddenly altered their chronologies to produce a coherent timeline and story that “fit together nicely with the account provided publicly by Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz and Vice President Cheney.”

We’ve know for a long time that the FAA records, in particular, were politicized. Given already documented proof that Cheney lied to hide the fact that he violated the chain of commend on 9/11 it’s not surprising that that politicization served Dick Cheney’s false narrative of leadership.

But we can add this book to the long list of proof that Cheney’s a big liar trying to hide his own incompetence.

I like dark chocolate, The Wife likes milk chocolate. But dark chocolate is where it’s at for stress. Jennifer Warner at WebMD:

Those stress-induced chocolate cravings may be justified after all. A new study shows that eating dark chocolate may lower levels of stress hormones in people feeling stressed out.

Researchers found that eating the equivalent of one average-sized dark chocolate candy bar (1.4 ounces) each day for two weeks reduced levels of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the “fight-or-flight” hormones known as catecholamines in highly stressed people.

The findings add to a growing number of recently discovered potential health benefits of dark chocolate. For example, cocoa has been found to be rich in a class of antioxidants called flavonoids, which have been linked to a number of health benefits.

Researchers are also investigating other compounds in dark chocolate that may offer other health benefits, such as improved insulin sensitivity, reduced blood pressure, and improved mood…

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Just back from Whole Foods. Some lovely fresh collards, which I think I’ll cook with bacon and onion. And a very nice fresh bunch of "rainbow" chard (i.e., red chard, green chard, Swiss chard all represented). Also I’m running out of pepper sauce, so this time I’m making it from jalapeños (green, no ripe available), habanero, and probably a couple of dried chipotles and a dried ancho.

I also go 2 lbs of ground turkey thigh meat for the little meatloaves. The new guy got some, weighed it: 1.75 lbs. He added some, weighed: 2.25 lbs. He took some off, and I was about to say whatever he got was okay, when the weight came up: 2.00 lbs. "My God!" I said. We made a couple of "close enough" jokes, then the big guy behind the counter (I think he’s the boss) told my guy, "You can go into the office for your peanut."

Another interesting graph from another interesting article:

While an individual glacier or two might be gaining mass, they are the exception, as the graph shows.

Interesting graph from an interesting article:

Explanation:

This graphic shows the ratio of record daily highs to record daily lows observed at about 1,800 weather stations in the 48 contiguous United States from January 1950 through September 2009. Each bar shows the proportion of record highs (red) to record lows (blue) for each decade. The 1960s and 1970s saw slightly more record daily lows than highs, but in the last 30 years record highs have increasingly predominated, with the ratio now about two-to-one for the 48 states as a whole.  (©UCAR, graphic by Mike Shibao.)

Amanda Terkel at ThinkProgress:

Last month, 30 Republican senators voted against Sen. Al Franken’s (D-MN) amendment that would punish defense contractors “if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.” His amendment was inspired by Jamie Leigh Jones, who was gang-raped by her co-workers while working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad in 2005, and then had to fight her employer for justice.

The GOP senators who sided with defense contractors at the expense of women — such as John Thune (SD) — have been facing an intense backlash. David Vitter (LA) refused to give a rape victim a straight answer when she confronted him about his vote, claiming that he is “absolutely supportive of any [rape] case like that being prosecuted criminally to the full extent of the law.”

Politico reports that Republicans are now scratching their heads at why the public is so incensed about their “no” votes:

Privately, GOP sources acknowledge that they failed to anticipate the political consequences of a “no” vote on the amendment. And several aides said that Republicans are engaged in an internal blame game about why they agreed to a roll-call vote on the measure, rather than a simple voice vote that would have allowed the opposing senators to duck criticism.

As BarbinMD writes, “Seriously? They voted against an amendment that was prompted by the brutal gang-rape of a young woman by her co-workers while she was working for a company under contract for the United States government, after which she was locked in a shipping container without food or water, threatened if she left to seek medical treatment, and was then prevented from bringing criminal charges against her assailants. And they failed to anticipate the political consequences?”

Thune is also claiming that Franken doesn’t really care about Jones and other rape victims whose employers have blocked them from seeking justice; he and other Democrats just wanted to “create a vote which they could use to attack Republicans.”

So basically, the only lesson they learned is that next time, they have to hide their votes when they decide to screw over women’s rights. That way, they can support their allies in the contracting business and the public will never find out.

Little individual servings of turkey meatloaf: how cute is that? And the recipe look quite easy (with lots of photos). Cook a batch on the weekend, and have them for lunch or dinner over the week. (The things in the meatloaf that look like raisins are dried cranberries.)

UPDATE: Just made it. Quite easy and very tasty indeed. I wondered about the absence of tomato (no ketchup or tomato sauce or tomato paste used), but in fact the taste is great the way it is. I got 12 little meatloaves from the recipe. Changes:

1 Tbsp thyme, not 1/4 tsp
I did use 1 c. dried cranberries
No Worcestershire sauce (it contains high-fructose corn syrup). Instead, I used about 1 Tbsp minced anchovies and 1 tsp soy sauce—the idea is to kick up the umami.
5 large cloves garlic, not 2.
I used about 1 Tbsp olive oil to sauté the onions, garlic, and minced anchovies.
I made 12 little meatloaves: filled the whole muffin tin.
They were easily done by 40 minutes at 360º  F.

Interesting point.

Kate Gladstone, who does Handwriting Repair, posted this comment:

BetterLetters has launched!

It’s already one of the 100 most downloaded medical apps (#94) in Apple’s USA App Store.

So far, its seven ratings by users average five stars out of five.

From the link:

BetterLetters was created to improve handwriting. It was inspired by the instructional handwriting font work of UK handwriting specialist Christopher Jarman. The app provides instructional lectures, both audio and written, along with practice fonts providing choices of writing style, guidelines, and directional arrows.
With BetterLetters, your iPhone or iPod Touch becomes a personal handwriting trainer.

Research shows that the fastest, clearest handwriters join some letters, not all of them: making the easiest joins and skipping the rest. Also, the fastest and clearest writers tend to use the simplest letter shapes, avoiding the complex and accident-prone letter formations of conventional cursive.

In fact, the earliest published handwriting books (half a millennium ago) taught a semi-joined style of this type – called “Italic” in reference to the style’s origins in Renaissance Italy – well before today’s more complicated cursive came along.

Now, more and more of those who seek better handwriting – doctors, teachers, and ordinary people of all ages in every walk of life – are reviving the Italic style because its high-speed clarity and simplicity agree with the findings of modern handwriting research and meet today’s continuing need for fast, legible writing whether on paper or in a pen computing environment. BetterLetters puts an Italic handwriting class in your pocket!

Unlike other handwriting apps, BetterLetters takes you beyond the worksheets. Over and above a set of sample letters and numerals to trace and copy, the BetterLetters application includes:

• User-selectable “ink” color. All letter and numeral examples display in black, but BetterLetters allows you to work with these on-screen examples in a color of your choice.

• Two variations on the Italic style: you have a choice of letters with, or without, lower-case exit-strokes. (Choose according to personal taste, or choose whichever version feels easiest for you to write.)

• A list of 299 practice words, chosen to include every letter combination in the English language. (You can also input your own practice words.)

• Onscreen instructional essays and audio by our handwriting specialist (Kate Gladstone, known internationally as the “Handwriting Repairwoman”) covering such topics as joins, stroke order, handwriting history, and development of speed.

• Built-in sketchpad for independent practice and application of handwriting skills.

• Links to handwriting instruction web-sites selected by our handwriting specialist to provide further resources for the study and practice of rapid, readable handwriting. (REQUIRES INTERNET CONNECTION: Wi-Fi, 3G.)

There will also be an article in the issue of GQ that goes on sale 18 November.

I want so much to go to this place. (Here’s their website.)

I like the Koh-I-Noor boar brush, so I’m eager to get it broken in. Woods of Windsor shaving soap again—a good soap that I like for my new boar brushes because the container helps in getting them loaded with lather. The Mühle razor did another great job—I’m growing fond of that razor. Then Woods of Windsor aftershave. (The print on the bottle was removed by a leak in shipment.) Very fine start to the weekend.

Barry Schwartz has an interesting column in Business Week in which he shows how incentives do not work because they cannot work. It’s a good column, but for a really thorough treatment, get Alfie Kohn’s Punished By Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes. That link is to Amazon, so you can read about it, but you can get secondhand copies quite cheaply.

While I’m at it, I’ll also recommend Alfie Kohn’s book No Contest: The Case Against Competition, also excellent. Here are copies for $1.

Schwartz’s column begins:

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Sounds like a very interesting book, here reviewed by Chris Farrell in Business Week:

How Markets Fail:
The Logic of Economic Calamities
By John Cassidy
Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 390 pp.; $28

Economist John Maynard Keynes had a weakness for rhetorical flourishes. At the end of his classic The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, he wrote: "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." To author John Cassidy, it’s a quote that applies to the practical decision-makers of our own time—and that explains the roots of our own Great Recession.

In his ambitious How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities, Cassidy, an economics writer for The New Yorker, offers a powerful argument that the current generation of investors and policymakers has been manacled by what he calls the "utopian" free-market school of economics. In an effort to debunk that "ideology," which he sees as holding sway in academia and among policymakers in recent decades, Cassidy marshals a deep understanding of economic intellectual history, deftly explaining the principal ideas of such towering figures as Adam Smith, Friedrich von Hayek, Léon Walras, Kenneth Arrow, Milton Friedman, and Robert Lucas. This long view allows him to place in context the free marketers’ notion that self-interest and competition "equals nirvana." In the author’s words: "Between the collapse of communism and the outbreak of the subprime crisis, an understandable and justified respect for market forces mutated into a rigid and unquestioning devotion to a particular, and blatantly unrealistic, adaptation of Adam Smith’s invisible hand." And it was this faith, he goes on to say, that led Alan Greenspan, among others, to turn a blind eye to what was happening in the real world of money and business.

Cassidy has his intellectual heroes, too. They are the advocates of what he calls "reality-based economics"—grappling with market failures, disaster myopia, speculative frenzies, and other economic complexities. John Maynard Keynes, the great scholar of economic-crisis management, is one such thinker. So are the experimental psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, and Hyman Minsky, the expert on financial manias. "Reality-based economics … affords the concept of market failure a central position, recognizing the roles that human interdependence and rational irrationality play in creating it," writes Cassidy. "If further calamities are to be avoided, policymakers need to make a big mental shift and embrace this eminently practical philosophy."

How Markets Fail is a nuanced book. That’s a major attraction in an era when …

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Very interesting article by Catherine Arnst in the current issue of Business Week:

Seven hundred billion dollars. That’s a ballpark estimate of how much money is wasted in the U.S. medical system every single year, according to a new Thomson Reuters (TRI) report. A sum equal to roughly one-third of the nation’s total health-care spending is flushed away on unnecessary treatments, redundant tests, fraud, errors, and myriad other monetary sinkholes that do nothing to improve the nation’s health. Cut that figure by half, and there would be more than enough money to offer top-notch care to every one of America’s 46 million uninsured.

None of the health-care reform bills on the table in Washington do anything meaningful to address that wasted $700 billion. Nor do they call for changes in the underlying flaw that drives much of the waste—the fee-for-service system that pays doctors and hospitals for the amount of medical care delivered rather than for its quality. Under fee-for-service there is no financial incentive for doctors to eliminate waste, since they wouldn’t pocket any of the resulting savings. They would just earn less.

By leaving this perverse reward system in place, Congress is virtually guaranteeing that health-care reform legislation, if passed, will do nothing to "bend the curve" of rising health-care costs, as President Barack Obama originally set out to do. Even the few cost-cutting efforts that the bills do include won’t go into effect until at least 2013. As a result, U.S. health spending is on track to double over the next 10 years, to $5.2 trillion, about 21% of the gross domestic product.

Or possibly not. Politicians may be reluctant to rein in the medical-industrial complex, but the private sector is forging ahead. Faced with health-care costs that keep rising 6% to 7% every year—even during this year of negative overall inflation—plenty of insurers, hospitals, employers, and communities are figuring out how to offer better care for less money. They are willing to take experimental leaps in an attempt to solve some of the health system’s most intractable problems.

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I think Steve C. and Scott F. will be very interested in this article by Jim Giles in New Scientist:

THE signs of the digital photography revolution are hard to miss, from cameras embedded in our cellphones to gigabytes of images stored on hard drives. But if you thought the revolution finished with the death of chemical film, think again. Computational photography promises equally dramatic changes, turning even the most ham-fisted of snappers into veritable Cartier-Bressons.

We are on the cusp of a new era in which every camera comes with a sophisticated built-in computer, says Ramesh Raskar of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who delivered a presentation on advances in computational photography at an imaging technology conference in Monterey, California, this week. Low-cost processing and memory combined with new digital sensors will deliver richer images created by fusing elements from multiple shots and even video.

Hints of the changes to come can be found in cameras such as Casio’s EX-F1, which launched last year and has been dubbed the first computational camera. In poor light, photographers face a difficult choice: use a flash, which can produce a harsh illumination, or go for a long exposure, where the risk of image blur increases. The EX-F1 offers a third option. It shoots a burst of images at long exposures and its computer merges the shots into a single image, reducing the blur as it does so. The process may not yet outperform established anti-blur techniques, such as using a tripod, but its existence is a significant advance in itself.

In labs around the world, researchers are developing a slew of other computational tricks for cameras. "We’re creating images that people have never been able to produce," says Marc Levoy at Stanford University in California.

Many of the new techniques tackle the old problem of …

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People in general seem to be incredibly stupid. Take a look at this:

Times are tough for tuna. The guidance of scientists that advise groups that manage tuna stocks is falling on deaf ears.

The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas meets this week in Brazil to set catch limits. ICCAT’s scientific advisers have told it that stocks of the giant bluefin tuna are plummeting towards collapse. Catches in 2008 were at three times the ICCAT limit, which is itself more than what its scientific advisers consider sustainable (see "Tigers of the sea"). "It’s like the year before the collapse of the northern cod," says Dan Pauly at the University of British Columbia, Canada. In 1992 the Newfoundland cod fishery collapsed. It never recovered.

Giant bluefin tuna stocks are plummeting, like the year before the collapse of the northern cod

As stocks fall in the Atlantic, the tuna fishing fleets are targeting the Indian Ocean. So far, stocks of several tuna species there appear in good shape, with the exception of the yellowfin. According to the scientists advising the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC), stocks of yellowfin are being overfished. The panel of scientists will meet later this month to discuss the available data, but it may prove futile: the IOTC’s member nations rejected the panel’s recommended catch limits in April. And in September, India launched a new ocean-observing satellite. It will be used to spot plankton blooms, which attract small fish and, in turn, tuna – so the fishing boats will know where to go.

So those who depend on the tuna for their livelihood have decided that the best course is to fish the tuna to extinction, probably within three or four years.

OTOH, we still have many people who begin smoking cigarettes after all that we know about them. You can see why I believe that humanity will fail to address global warming until the body count from that is multiple millions a year (at which point it will be too late, of course).

Very interesting article in the New Scientist. The intro:

This month marks the 150th anniversary of the most influential piece of popular science writing ever published. A few years ago, New Scientist listed reading On The Origin of Species as one of the 100 things to do before you die. To do so is to experience the extraordinary sensation of having a scientific genius enter your mind to guide you through his most important theory. Now we have asked the geneticist, evolutionary thinker and author Steve Jones to summarise and update the book for the 21st century – and, we hope, to inspire readers to experience Darwin’s astounding, world-changing writing first-hand

UNIQUE among scientific theories, evolutionary biology finds its roots in a popular book by a single author. The grey-bearded genius presented a new and radical view of existence: that life has changed over time and space, in part through a simple process called natural selection.

Charles Darwin called his work "one long argument". To a 21st-century reader it seems lengthy indeed, with only a single illustration to enliven its 150,000 words. But Darwin was a clear thinker and the book is an impressive piece of advocacy, moving from the familiar – how animals on farms have changed – to the less so, embryos and instinct included.

As for your doctrines I am prepared to go to the Stake if requisite… I trust you will not allow yourself to be in any way disgusted or annoyed by the considerable abuse and misrepresentation which unless I greatly mistake is in store for you… And as to the curs which will bark and yelp – you must recollect that some of your friends at any rate are endowed with an amount of combativeness which (though you have often and justly rebuked it) may stand you in good stead – I am sharpening up my claws and beak in readiness. — Thomas Henry Huxley

Darwin also shows how what might seem to be problems for his argument, such as the uncanny perfection of complex structures like the eye, are in fact part of the solution, and how apparent weaknesses in his case – the incomplete nature of the fossil record included – can easily be explained. Now and again he was wrong, as when, unaware of Gregor Mendel’s work on genetics, he claimed that inheritance is based on the mixing of bloods, but mostly he was right.

Darwin described the process of evolution as "descent with modification". Today that might be rephrased as "genetics plus time". Offspring resemble their parents because they inherit DNA from them, but the copying process is not precise. Every round has errors, or mutations, and although they are individually rare – with perhaps one or two mutations in working genes each generation in humans – they can soon build up vast diversity. A copy of a copy is always imperfect, and for that reason alone, evolution is inevitable.

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Interesting article in the Economist (click graph to enlarge):

THE Green Relief “natural health clinic” in a bohemian part of San Francisco doesn’t sound like an ordinary doctor’s surgery. For those who wonder about the sort of relief provided, its logo—a cannabis leaf—is a clue. Inside, in under an hour and for $99, patients can get a doctor’s letter allowing them to smoke marijuana in California with no fear of prosecution. In a state that pioneered bans on smoking tobacco, smoking cannabis is now easier than almost anywhere in the world.

California, with its network of pot-friendly physicians, offers the most visible evidence of a tentative worldwide shift towards a more liberal policy on drugs. Although most countries remain bound by a trio of United Nations conventions that prohibit the sale and possession of narcotics, laws are increasingly being bent or ignored. That is true even in the United States, where the Obama administration has announced that registered cannabis dispensaries will no longer be raided by federal authorities.

From heroin “shooting galleries” in Vancouver to Mexico’s decriminalisation of personal possession of drugs, the Americas are suddenly looking more permissive. Meanwhile in Europe, where drugs policy is generally less stringent, seven countries have decriminalised drug possession, and the rest are increasingly ignoring their supposedly harsh regimes. Is the “war on drugs” becoming a fiction?

Reformers are in a bold mood. Earlier this year a report by ex-presidents of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico called for alternatives to prohibition. On November 12th a British think-tank, Transform, launched a report* setting out ideas on how drugs could be legally regulated. For every substance from cannabis to crack, it suggests a form of regulation, via doctors’ prescriptions, pharmacy sales or consumption on licensed premises.

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Here’s their website. Here’s the ad: