Later On

Kenneth Cooper, MD, the guy who started aerobic training, said that the training effect requires 12 minutes of effort, as I recall. Thus I am eager to get to 12 minutes on the Nordic Track, but even 7.5 minutes seems to be having some effect. Certainly the first 3 minutes are easier.

I realize that I’m blessed by being not only retired but with some cushion—too many face a retirement that promises to be problematic. I was thinking about this with my discovery of the power of a focus on "today." While you’re working, it’s generally extremely difficult to stick with daily plans at work (because of interruptions, meetings, crises, and the like), not to mention bosses who return from conferences full of ideas they want you to do. Indeed, when you’re following Covey’s 7 Habits you learn to schedule your important but not urgent work toward the beginning of the week, since if a day is blown out of the water by a crisis, you can possibly still do the work later in the week: scheduling early gives you a fallback.

Indeed, Bill Oncken wrote a classic management book, Managing Management Time, which basically consists of strategies to gain control of the timing and content of what you do: the best possible situation at work. (I highly recommend the book if you’re still working.)

So in the world of work, we grow accustomed to thinking of what we will do in the future: this weekend, when vacation or holidays roll around, and the like. The future focus, unfortunately, distracts us from today, which is really the day that we have.

But once retired, you have control of the timing and content of what you do, and it only remains to pick for today the things that fit with what you want to achieve and to learn to focus on today and not, say, the weekend, or the start of the week or the month or the year. Start now with what you can do today. If you do a little toward your goals each day, it quickly adds up.

Rose is the theme today: soap and rose water for the aftershave.

The Omega Lucretia Borgia Syntex brush delivered the usual fine lather from the Kell’s Original rose-scented shaving soap. My gold-veined white quartz razor from Elite Razors did a good job with a previously used Astra Keramik blade, save for one nick on the chin. My Nik Is Sealed closed that off immediately, and the rose water was a nice, if alcohol-free, aftershave.

Worth watching.

Alan I. Leshner is the chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and executive publisher of the journal Science. Here’s a column he wrote for the Washington Post:

Don’t be fooled about climate science. In April, 1994 — long after scientists had clearly demonstrated the addictive quality and devastating health impacts of cigarette smoking — seven chief executives of major tobacco companies denied the evidence, swearing under oath that nicotine was not addictive.

Now, the American public is again being subjected to those kinds of denials, this time about global climate change. While former Alaska governor Sarah Palin wrote in her Dec. 9 op-ed that she did not deny the "reality of some changes in climate," she distorted the clear scientific evidence that Earth’s climate is changing, largely as a result of human behaviors. She also badly confused the concepts of daily weather changes and long-term climate trends when she wrote that "while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can’t say with assurance that man’s activities cause weather changes." Her statement inaccurately suggests that short-term weather fluctuations must be consistent with long-term climate patterns. And it is the long-term patterns that are a cause for concern.

Climate-change science is clear: The concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide — derived mostly from the human activities of fossil-fuel burning and deforestation — stands at 389 parts per million (ppm). We know from studying ancient Antarctic ice cores that this concentration is higher than it has been for at least the past 650,000 years. Exhaustive measurements tell us that atmospheric carbon dioxide is rising by 2 ppm every year and that the global temperature has increased by about 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century. Multiple lines of other evidence, including reliable thermometer readings since the 1880s, reveal a clear warming trend. The broader impacts of climate change range from rapidly melting glaciers and rising sea levels to shifts in species ranges.

Thousands of respected scientists at an array of institutions worldwide agree that major health and economic impacts are likely unless we act now to slow greenhouse gas emissions. Already, sea levels are estimated to rise by 1 to 2 meters by the end of this century. Some scientists have said that average temperatures could jump by as much as 4 degrees Fahrenheit if the atmospheric carbon dioxide level reaches 450 ppm. We may face even more dangerous impacts at 550 ppm, and above that level, devastating events. U.S. crop productivity would be affected, while European communities might suffer increased fatalities because of intensely hot summers.

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Interesting. During the campaign, I certainly got a different idea of Obama’s priorities and never suspected that maintaining the government’s right to torture people was so high on the list. Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:

The Supreme Court today issued a blow to victims of abuse by U.S. officials during the “war on terror.” The high court this morning refused to review a federal appeals court ruling that dismissed a lawsuit by four British citizens who claimed they were wrongly arrested and mistreated at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., had ruled that government officials were immune from suit because it wasn’t clear at the time that abusing prisoners at Guantanamo was illegal.

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, has argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad.

The four men — Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed and Jamal al-Harith — were captured in late 2001 in Afghanistan and transferred to Guantanamo in early 2002. They were returned to the United Kingdom in 2004.

Represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Washington, D.C., lawyer Eric Lewis, the four men sued former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and senior military officers for prolonged arbitrary detention, torture, cruel and unusual punishment, and denial of their religious rights. The former prisoners say they were subjected to repeated beatings, sleep deprivation, extremes of hot and cold, forced nakedness, death threats, interrogations at gun point, menacing with unmuzzled dogs, and religious and racial harassment.

FWIW, I think most Democrats hold a different view on the legitimacy of torture, but Obama is the President we have, and Eric Holder is one of his minions.

Or know someone who does. Take a look.

Was he ever any good as a Senator? He’s certainly lost his way these days. For example, Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone :

Sen. Jim Webb (D-Virginia) has bravely proposed legislation to create a Blue Ribbon commission to conduct an 18-month, “top-to-bottom” review of America’s criminal justice system with the goal of bringing U.S. incarceration rates in line with the rest of the civilized world.

The commission is to make sweeping recommendations for reform, and is tasked in particular with developing proposals to “restructure our approach to drug policy.”

Enter unreconstructed drug warrior Sen. Chuck Grassley, who has released the text of an amendment that would ensure the commission not reach any conclusions that threaten 40 years of failure. The commission would be prohibited, thanks to Grassley, from examining any “policies that favor decriminalization of violations of the Controlled Substances Act or the legalization of any controlled substances.”

Below, the text of Grassley’s gag rule:

AMENDMENT intended to be proposed by Mr. GRASSLEY
….
SEC. ll. RESTRICTIONS ON AUTHORITY.
The Commission shall have no authority to make findings related to current Federal, State, and local criminal justice policies and practices or reform recommendations that involve, support, or otherwise discuss the decriminalization of any offense under the Controlled Substances Act or the legalization of any controlled substance listed under the Controlled Substances Act.

Jack Cole, a retired undercover narcotics officer who now heads the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) tells Rolling Stone that “Senator Grassley’s censorship amendment would block what Senator Webb is trying to achieve with this bill. All along, Senator Webb has said that in the effort to fix our broken criminal justice system ‘nothing should be off the table.’ That should include the obvious solution of ending the ‘drug war’ as a way to solve the unintended problems caused by that failed policy,” says Cole.

This is totally typical of the Republican/GOP/Conservative mindset: resolutely refusing to look at anything that challenges their view. (Probably this is why Conservatives so rarely go into science: they don’t want to commit examining new evidence and altering their views accordingly.)

Here’s a slightly different example, but shows the same approach: ignore facts that conflict with pre-existing views. And with Conservatives, all their views are pre-existing and unchangeable. (Cf. James Inhofe)

Pat Garofalo at ThinkProgress:

Last week, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) sent out a recruitment call for “new Republicans,” confirming that he sees “little use for a big-tent approach for his party.” As South Carolina’s The State put it, DeMint is setting himself up as a kingmaker, wading into national races to endorse far-right candidates.

And one of the issues about which DeMint feels very strongly is Social Security. In an interview with Bloomberg News’ Al Hunt, DeMint blasted Social Security as “socialistic,” and advocated reviving President George Bush’s Social Security privatization scheme:

DeMint considers Social Security a “socialistic” measure and blasts the American Association of Retired Persons for promulgating “socialist solutions”…In the interview, he talks of reviving President George W. Bush’s failed plan to partially privatize Social Security by having workers put a small percentage of the current levy in a personal savings account.

As CNN Money’s Allan Sloan wrote back in January, “someday, Social Security privatization will come back into vogue. When that happens, I’ve got two words that will remind you why it’s a bad idea: Remember 2008.” It’s quite shocking that we’re not even through 2009 yet, and 2008, at least for DeMint, is already forgotten.

But let’s review. As a Center for American Progress Action Fund report found, under a Bush-style privatization plan, a October 2008 retiree would have lost $26,000 in the market plunge. If the U.S. stock market had behaved like the Japanese market during the duration of that retiree’s work life, “a private account would have experienced sharp negative returns, losing $70,000 — an effective -3.3 percent net annual rate of return.” And this doesn’t take into account the full plunge of the stock market, which dipped below 7,000 in March 2009.

As the Cunning Realist pointed out, failed investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were both “blue chips, the sort of companies that proponents of private accounts insisted any new system would be limited to.” Can you imagine the mess that would have occurred — and the leverage those companies would have held — had not only the financial system’s health, but the retirement accounts of untold seniors, been tied up in them?

The Center for Economic and Policy Research found that, “as a result of the collapse of the housing bubble, the vast majority of baby boomers will be approaching retirement with little wealth outside of Social Security.” Privatization opponents would have had seniors sacrifice that safety net as well.

I highly recommend the comedy Bread and Chocolate. Funny and touching and with interesting insights into Switzerland and why it’s not surprising that they ban minarets.

His discovery: that some refuse to face reality. The column:

When I first began writing for The Times, I was naïve about many things. But my biggest misconception was this: I actually believed that influential people could be moved by evidence, that they would change their views if events completely refuted their beliefs.

And to be fair, it does happen now and then. I’ve been highly critical of Alan Greenspan over the years (since long before it was fashionable), but give the former Fed chairman credit: he has admitted that he was wrong about the ability of financial markets to police themselves.

But he’s a rare case. Just how rare was demonstrated by what happened last Friday in the House of Representatives, when — with the meltdown caused by a runaway financial system still fresh in our minds, and the mass unemployment that meltdown caused still very much in evidence — every single Republican and 27 Democrats voted against a quite modest effort to rein in Wall Street excesses.

Let’s recall how we got into our current mess.

America emerged from the Great Depression with a tightly regulated banking system. The regulations worked: the nation was spared major financial crises for almost four decades after World War II. But as the memory of the Depression faded, bankers began to chafe at the restrictions they faced. And politicians, increasingly under the influence of free-market ideology, showed a growing willingness to give bankers what they wanted.

The first big wave of deregulation took place …

Continue reading.

He had only a tenuous grasp on reality, it seemed to me, but now he’s gone completely round the bend. Zachary Roth at TPMMuckraker:

For a while now, there’s been plenty of evidence of Sheriff Joe Arpaio abusing his law enforcement powers to target political enemies. Indeed, Justice Department investigators are said to have been looking into the issue for the last year.

But Arpaio may now have taken things into a whole new realm. This week, the top cop for Maricopa County, Arizona, who has used media-friendly stunts to gain a national reputation as a law-and-order zealot and bête noir of illegal immigrants, announced the filing of a criminal complaint against his latest target: a judge who’s involved in several of the controversial cases Sheriff Joe has helped bring.

Superior Court Judge Gary Donahoe’s "crime"? It looks like it might not amount to much more than having made some rulings that America’s Toughest Sheriff didn’t take kindly to.

Here’s what’s going on. It gets convoluted, but bear with us — it’s worth it.

On Wednesday, Arpaio and his close ally, County Prosecutor Andrew Thomas, went before the cameras to announce that Donahoe was being charged "for hindering prosecution, obstruction of justice, and bribery."

Even after examining the grab-bag complaint and an accompanying press release (pdf), it’s difficult to tell just what Donahoe is being accused of.

The main charge seems to be that …

Continue reading.

From the Center for American Progress in an email:

On his second day in office, President Obama announced three principles that would guide his administration: 1) government must be transparent, to ensure public accountability; 2) government must be participatory, so that lawmakers, regulators, and other officials benefit from public input; and 3) government must be collaborative, seeking partnerships across agencies and with the private sector whenever such partnerships will improve Americans’ lives. Last Tuesday, the White House took an important step towards realizing this vision, releasing what may be the most ambitious open government policy in American history. Although much work remains before the policy becomes reality, the new Open Government Directive could potentially revolutionize the way Americans interact with government.

A NEW DIRECTION: Although Obama has made a some serious missteps on transparency, especially the adoption of Bush administration positions on national security secrecy, the Open Government Directive is the latest example of his effort to part ways with his obsessively secretive predecessor. In its earliest days, the Obama administration reversed many of the Bush era’s most infamous examples of secrecy — the Vice-President’s residence, for example, is no longer obscured on Google Maps. More importantly, Obama acted swiftly to ensure that government secrecy would be the exception, and never the rule. During the Bush administration, government officials were ordered to look for any excuse to deny Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Almost immediately after taking office, Obama ordered the Attorney General to reconsider this policy, and the Justice Department swiftly restored "the presumption of disclosure that is at the heart of the Freedom of Information Act."  In a similar vein, the administration released over a hundred thousand government datasets on websites like Data.gov, earning the ire of torture defenders by disclosing John Yoo and Jay Bybee‘s shoddy legal reasoning to the entire country.

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This story by Greg Miller and Julian E. Barnes in the LA Times amazes me. Obviously, drone strikes in a city have the likelihood of killing scores of civilians—very much, in fact, like what terrorists do: killing civilians heedlessly in pursuit of their goals. We rightly condemn this when done by terrorists, but the media seems silent when the terrorist act is done by the US military. The story begins:

Senior U.S. officials are pushing to expand CIA drone strikes beyond Pakistan’s tribal region and into a major city in an attempt to pressure the Pakistani government to pursue Taliban leaders based in Quetta.

The proposal has opened a contentious new front in the clandestine war. The prospect of Predator aircraft strikes in Quetta, a sprawling city, signals a new U.S. resolve to decapitate the Taliban. But it also risks rupturing Washington’s relationship with Islamabad.

The concern has created tension among Obama administration officials over whether unmanned aircraft strikes in a city of 850,000 are a realistic option. Proponents, including some military leaders, argue that attacking the Taliban in Quetta — or at least threatening to do so — is crucial to the success of the revised war strategy President Obama unveiled last week.

"If we don’t do this — at least have a real discussion of it — Pakistan might not think we are serious," said a senior U.S. official involved in war planning. "What the Pakistanis have to do is tell the Taliban that there is too much pressure from the U.S.; we can’t allow you to have sanctuary inside Pakistan anymore."

But others, including high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials, have been more skeptical of employing drone attacks in a place that Pakistanis see as part of their country’s core. Pakistani officials have warned that the fallout would be severe.

"We are not a banana republic," said a senior Pakistani official involved in discussions of security issues with the Obama administration. If the United States follows through, the official said, "this might be the end of the road." …

Continue reading.

In the current issue of the New Yorker:

Cost is the spectre haunting health reform. For many decades, the great flaw in the American health-care system was its unconscionable gaps in coverage. Those gaps have widened to become graves—resulting in an estimated forty-five thousand premature deaths each year—and have forced more than a million people into bankruptcy. The emerging health-reform package has a master plan for this problem. By establishing insurance exchanges, mandates, and tax credits, it would guarantee that at least ninety-four per cent of Americans had decent medical coverage. This is historic, and it is necessary. But the legislation has no master plan for dealing with the problem of soaring medical costs. And this is a source of deep unease.

Health-care costs are strangling our country. Medical care now absorbs eighteen per cent of every dollar we earn. Between 1999 and 2009, the average annual premium for employer-sponsored family insurance coverage rose from $5,800 to $13,400, and the average cost per Medicare beneficiary went from $5,500 to $11,900. The costs of our dysfunctional health-care system have already helped sink our auto industry, are draining state and federal coffers, and could ultimately imperil our ability to sustain universal coverage.

What have we gained by paying more than twice as much for medical care as we did a decade ago? The health-care sector certainly employs more people and more machines than it did. But there have been no great strides in service. In Western Europe, most primary-care practices now use electronic health records and offer after-hours care; in the United States, most don’t. Improvement in demonstrated medical outcomes has been modest in most fields. The reason the system is a money drain is not that it’s so successful but that it’s fragmented, disorganized, and inconsistent; it’s neglectful of low-profit services like mental-health care, geriatrics, and primary care, and almost giddy in its overuse of high-cost technologies such as radiology imaging, brand-name drugs, and many elective procedures.

At the current rate of increase, the cost of family insurance will reach twenty-seven thousand dollars or more in a decade, taking more than a fifth of every dollar that people earn. Businesses will see their health-coverage expenses rise from ten per cent of total labor costs to seventeen per cent. Health-care spending will essentially devour all our future wage increases and economic growth. State budget costs for health care will more than double, and Medicare will run out of money in just eight years. The cost problem, people have come to realize, threatens not just our prosperity but our solvency.

So what does the reform package do about it? Turn to page 621 of the Senate version, the section entitled “Transforming the Health Care Delivery System,” and start reading. Does the bill end medicine’s destructive piecemeal payment system? Does it replace paying for quantity with paying for quality? Does it institute nationwide structural changes that curb costs and raise quality? It does not. Instead, what it offers is . . . pilot programs.

This has provided a soft target for critics. “Two thousand seventy-four pages and trillions of dollars later,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, said recently, “this bill doesn’t even meet the basic goal that the American people had in mind and what they thought this debate was all about: to lower costs.” According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill makes no significant long-term cost reductions. Even Democrats have become nervous. For many, the hope of reform was to re-form the health-care system. If nothing is done, the United States is on track to spend an unimaginable ten trillion dollars more on health care in the next decade than it currently spends, hobbling government, growth, and employment. Where we crave sweeping transformation, however, all the current bill offers is those pilot programs, a battery of small-scale experiments. The strategy seems hopelessly inadequate to solve a problem of this magnitude. And yet—here’s the interesting thing—history suggests otherwise.

At the start of the twentieth century, another indispensable but unmanageably costly sector was strangling the country: agriculture.

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Woofta, it’s hard. And right now I’m doing just 7 min 30 sec. Great exercise machine, BTW.

A bit of a late start, but I was up late finishing a movie. I’m about to get on the Nordic for the morning workout, but still have a little white tea to drink.

I realized this morning that most fitness/weight loss programs are based on an incorrect model. The model normally used is that of a project: you set the project goal and the deadline, and from that you figure out what you need to achieve each week (or, even worse, each day). And then you "complete" the project, with success or not.

But fitness is not a project: it doesn’t have an endpoint. It is instead an ongoing effort—like education, properly conceived, which does not end with a degree and a graduation. Or like cleaning and organizing your home: it doesn’t have an endpoint.

So I think my focus always on today is the right idea: do the right things today, and forget about the goal and the deadline and all that. Do not look to the future: look to today. As a practical matter, the only things you can do you have to do today (whenever that is, it’s "today" at the time). By focusing on *today* and working out what you can do today (in terms of diet, exercise, organizing, and whatever), you can build up quite a string of "todays" and make a lot of progress without really thinking about it.

I do love to shave off my two-day stubble on Monday mornings. I got a wonderful lather from the Speick shave stick—it’s amazing how much lather a badger or synthetic bristle brush can work up from the soap that your whiskers scrape off from the stick: gobs and gobs of thick lather.

The Hoffritz slant bar with a still-newish Astra Keramik blade shaved me with perfection: no nicks, easy cutting, and a totally smooth face at the end, which appreciated the splash of Speick to finish the job.

From the Marijuana Policy Project in an email:

The great news just keeps coming in.

Minutes ago, Congress voted to finally lift the 11-year ban on Washington, D.C.’s medical marijuana law.

The House voted 221-202 and the Senate voted 57-35 to approve the measure.

For the last 11 years, under a provision known as the Barr amendment, Congress has prevented Washington, D.C. from implementing the medical marijuana law passed by 69% of voters in 1998.

Repealing this amendment has been a primary focus of MPP’s federal lobbying efforts for many years. In 2007, we even hired former Congressman Bob Barr (R-Ga.) — the original author of the amendment — to lobby to overturn it. And our lobbyists have worked directly with members of the House and Senate and their staff since 2006 to eliminate this democracy-unfriendly law.

In fact, senior appropriators in Congress sought out MPP staff to work through specifics and to help better understand D.C.’s medical marijuana law and the complicated legal maneuverings that led to the blocking of its implementation. 

MPP would like to thank Congressmen Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.), Dave Obey (D-Wis.), Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) for their strong and abiding support of allowing D.C. to implement its medical marijuana law.

I also want to thank MPP’s 29,000 dues-paying members, whose support helped to make this win possible. If you’d like to see more of these kinds of successes, I hope you’ll donate to MPP’s federal lobbying efforts. We’re turning supporters’ donations into results, and we can’t do it without you.

Today’s vote represents a victory not just for medical marijuana patients, but for all Americans, who have the right to determine their own policies without federal meddling. We’ll be celebrating this victory in D.C. at our anniversary gala on January 13, and I hope you’ll join us.

Harriet Hall in Science-Based Medicine:

An article written by 3 chiropractors and a PhD in physical education and published on December 2, 2009 in the journal Chiropractic and Osteopathy may have sounded the death knell for chiropractic.

The chiropractic subluxation is the essential basis of chiropractic theory. A true subluxation is a partial dislocation: chiropractors originally believed bones were actually out of place. When x-rays proved this was not true, they were forced to re-define the chiropractic subluxation as “a complex of functional and/or structural and/or pathological articular changes that compromise neural integrity and may influence organ system function and general health.” Yet most chiropractors are still telling patients their spine is out of alignment and they are going to fix it. Early chiropractors believed that 100% of disease was caused by subluxation. Today most chiropractors still claim that subluxations cause interference with the nervous system, leading to suboptimal health and causing disease.

What’s the evidence? In the 114 years since chiropractic began, the existence of chiropractic subluxations has never been objectively demonstrated. They have never been shown to cause interference with the nervous system. They have never been shown to cause disease. Critics of chiropractic have been pointing this out for decades, but now chiropractors themselves have come to the same conclusion.

In “An epidemiological examination of the subluxation construct using Hill’s criteria of causation” Timothy A. Mirtz, Lon Morgan, Lawrence H. Wyatt, and Leon Greene analyze the peer-reviewed chiropractic literature in the light of Hill’s criteria, the most commonly used model for evaluating whether a suspected cause is a real cause. They ask whether the evidence shows that chiropractic subluxations cause interference with the nervous system and whether they cause disease. The evidence fails to fulfill even a single one of Hill’s nine criteria of causation. They conclude: …

Continue reading.

I added one to my copy of Chrome: the Evernote clipper. Check ‘em out.

Very interesting. Here’s the first:

The mythic Northwest Passage still captures imaginations, but this September, two German vessels made history by becoming the first commercial ships to travel from East Asia to Western Europe via the northeast passage between Russia and the Arctic. Ice previously made the route impassable, but thanks to rising global temperatures, it’s now a cakewalk. "There was virtually no ice on most of the route," Capt. Valeriy Durov told the BBC. "Twenty years ago, when I worked in the eastern part of the Arctic, I couldn’t even imagine something like this."

The significance of this development varies depending on whom you ask. The passage could be a gold mine for the commercial shipping industry, opening up a vastly shorter and cheaper route from Asia to Europe. But for environmentalists, the news is a sign that climate change may be reaching a dangerous tipping point.

Scientists’ latest observations suggest that the Arctic might be largely ice-free during the summer within the next decade. The environmental consequences — increased flooding in coastal regions around the world and extinction of local animal species — are well known. But the thaw also opens possibilities for geopolitical competition. Russia has literally planted its flag beneath the Arctic ice, staking a claim to newly accessible natural resources, much to the consternation of the other northern states. The newly opened route will also benefit Russia by bringing new business to its eastern ports. With the scramble for the Arctic’s riches heating up, even peaceful Canada has been holding war games to prepare for possible military confrontation.