Later On

I’ll be making this recipe. When I’m in Santa Cruz, I like to stop by Tacos Moreno and get their delicious tongue tacos.

Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel:

Mike Isikoff and Dan Klaidman put up a post about an hour ago letting the first blood for the Obama Administration’s intentional tanking of the OPR (Office of Professional Responsibility) Report. In light of Obama’s focused determination to sweep the acts of the Bush Administration, no matter how malevolent, under the rug and “move forward” the report is not unexpected. However, digesting the first leak in what would appear to be a staged rollout is painful:

…an upcoming Justice Department report from its ethics-watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), clears the Bush administration lawyers who authored the “torture” memos of professional-misconduct allegations.

While the probe is sharply critical of the legal reasoning used to justify waterboarding and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques, NEWSWEEK has learned that a senior Justice official who did the final review of the report softened an earlier OPR finding. Previously, the report concluded that two key authors—Jay Bybee, now a federal appellate court judge, and John Yoo, now a law professor—violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted a crucial 2002 memo approving the use of harsh tactics, say two Justice sources who asked for anonymity discussing an internal matter. But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed “poor judgment,” say the sources. (Under department rules, poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct.) The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action—which, in Bybee’s case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry.

The news broken in the Newsweek Declassified post is huge, assuming it is accurate, and the sense is that it is. In spite of the weight of the report, the report tucks the substantive content behind the deceptively benign title “Holder Under Fire”. The subject matter is far too significant though for it to have been casually thrown out. Consider this description of the OPR finding on the nature and quality of the critical August 1, 2002 Torture Memo:

The report, which is still going through declassification, will provide many new details about how waterboarding was adopted and the role that top White House officials played in the process, say two sources who have read the report but asked for anonymity to describe a sensitive document. Two of the most controversial sections of the 2002 memo—including one contending that the president, as commander in chief, can override a federal law banning torture—were not in the original draft of the memo, say the sources. But when Michael Chertoff, then-chief of Justice’s criminal division, refused the CIA’s request for a blanket pledge not to prosecute its officers for torture, Yoo met at the White House with David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief counsel, and then–White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. After that, Yoo inserted a section about the commander in chief’s wartime powers and another saying that agency officers accused of torturing Qaeda suspects could claim they were acting in “self-defense” to prevent future terror attacks, the sources say. Both legal claims have long since been rejected by Justice officials as overly broad and unsupported by legal precedent.

Hard to figure how this finding and conclusion could be determined by David Margolis to warrant the “softening” of the original finding of direct misconduct. Margolis is nearly 70 years old and has a long career at DOJ and is fairly well though of. Margolis was tasked by Jim Comey to shepherd Pat Fitzgerald’s Libby investigation. In short, the man has some bona fides.

Margolis is, however, also tied to the DOJ and its culture for over forty years, not to mention his service in upper management as Associate Attorney General during the Bush Administration when the overt acts of torture and justification by Margolis’ contemporaries and friends were committed. For one such filter to redraw the findings and conclusions of such a critical investigation in order to exculpate his colleagues is unimaginable.

One thing is for sure, with a leak like this being floated out on a late Friday night, the release of the full OPR Report, at least that which the Obama Administration will deem fit for the common public to see, is at hand. Mike Isikoff and Dan Klaidman have made sure the torturers and their enablers can have a comfortable weekend though. So we got that going for us.

Via Smarterware, this post by Alex Payne:

For years, me and thousands of other techies have been wondering what comes after the Personal Computer as we’ve known it. Yesterday, in Apple’s iPad, we caught a glimpse. If I had to pick one predominant emotion in reaction, it would be “disturbed”.

The iPad is an attractive, thoughtfully designed, deeply cynical thing. It is a digital consumption machine. As Tim Bray and Peter Kirn have pointed out, it’s a device that does little to enable creativity. As just one component of several in a person’s digital life, perhaps that’s acceptable. It seems clear, though, that the ambitions for the iPad are far greater than being a full-color Kindle.

The tragedy of the iPad is that it truly seems to offer a better model of computing for many people – perhaps the majority of people. Gone are the confusing concepts and metaphors of the last thirty years of computing. Gone is the ability to endlessly tweak and twiddle towards no particular gain. The iPad is simple, straightforward, maintenance-free; everything that’s been proven with the success of the iPhone, but more so.

From iPhone to iPad

The iPhone can, to some extent, be forgiven its closed nature. The mobile industry has not historically been comfortable with openness, and Apple didn’t rock that boat when it released the iPhone. The iPhone was no more or less open than devices that preceded it, devices like those from Danger that required jumping similar bureaucratic hurdles to develop for.

That the iPad is a closed system is harder to forgive. One of the foremost complaints about the iPhone has been Apple’s iron fist when it comes to applications and the development direction of the platform. The iPad demonstrates that if Apple is listening to these complaints, they simply don’t care. This is why I say that the iPad is a cynical thing: Apple can’t – or won’t – conceive of a future for personal computing that is both elegant and open, usable and free…

Continue reading.

Via Schneier on Security:

Extremely interesting video.

Fallows:

If it is so incredibly cold….
…. how can “warming” of any sort be an issue?* The latest snowfall and deepfreeze across the eastern US is a good occasion for mentioning a new paper on James Hansen’s site at Columbia University. The paper is called, conveniently, “If It’s That Warm, How Come It’s So Darned Cold?” and is available in PDF here.

Read the whole thing, but Tweet-scale version of the answer is: Things are getting warmer, just not where most Americans/Europeans would notice this year.

For the world as a whole, 2009 was the second warmest year on record, and the 2000s were the warmest decade. (See NASA/ Goddard Institute for Space Studies report here.) As more and more people have heard, this winter’s we-are-no-longer-amused cold siege in the middle latitudes of North America, Europe, and Asia (where most people live) is a result of a rare flip in the Arctic Oscillation. Explanation here. It’s plenty hot elsewhere. NASA chart of the overall global trends.

Hansen’s paper also quotes this comment on a site run by a climate scientist in Seattle:

“I wonder about the people who use cold weather to say that the globe is cooling. It forgets that global warming has a global component and that its a trend, not an everyday thing. I hear people down in the lower 48 say its really cold this winter. That ain’t true so far up here in Alaska. Bethel, Alaska, had a brown Christmas. Here in Anchorage, the temperature today is 31. I can’t say based on the fact Anchorage and Bethel are warm so far this winter that we have global warming. That would be a really dumb argument to think my weather pattern is being experienced even in the rest of the United States, much less globally.”

This knowledge, plus double Under Armour long underwear, should keep me warm as I head out soon.

The Wife heard an interview on Fresh Air about Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet. Fascinating book—I’m about 2-3 chapters into it—and if you use the Internet, you probably should read this. The scale of the fight is amazing, and some very serious mobsters are working it for all they can. Meantime, law enforcement is lagging.

Highly recommended.

The Wife recently surprised me with this voice recorder: the Olympus 6200pc. I like it a lot: very small, very light, and a cinch to operate. It will hold a lot of talk: 77 hours at high quality, 444 in LP mode.

To organize that, you can record in any of 5 folders (A-E), so that (for example) A = work-related, B = club notes, C = personal project, etc.

Within a folder, the files are numbered consecutively in the order recorded. A folder can hold up to 200 files (which is kind of weird—I would expect that number to be, say, 255). You can pause a recording and resume, and you can at any point put in an index mark (up to 10, numbered consecutively). If you actually press “stop”, then pressing “record” again will start a new file. Each file carries the date and time the recording began.

I find that I’m using folder A for reminders—short notes of around 10-20 seconds in length.

It records in .WAV files and has a USB cable (quite short) to transfer those files to your computer if you want.

Really a terrific little device.

Thanks to TYD for pointing out this interesting report by Brad Stone in the NY Times:

As Venture Beat and other blogs have noticed Friday evening, books from Macmillan, one of the largest publishers in the United States, have vanished from Amazon.com.

The question is why.

I’ve talked to a person in the industry with knowledge of the dispute who says the disappearance is the result of a disagreement between Amazon.com and book publishers that has been brewing for the last year. Macmillan, like other publishers, has asked Amazon to raise the price of electronic books from $9.99 to around $15. Amazon is expressing its strong disagreement by temporarily removing Macmillan books, said this person, who did not want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Macmillan is one of the publishers signed on to offer books to Apple, as part of its new iBooks store. Its imprints include Farrar, Straus & Giroux, St. Martins Press and Henry Holt. The publisher’s books can still be purchased from third parties on the Amazon site.

Apple, as we’ve reported before, will allow publishers more leeway to set their own prices for e-books. It’s not clear yet if publishers can withhold books from Amazon while giving them to other parties like Apple. I’ve spoken to two antitrust lawyers who say it could raise legal issues.

Macmillan has not yet returned a request for comment. Amazon refused to comment.

I used the Giovanni Abrate Omega boar brush again today—third use, if I recall correctly—and I got three full passes of lather from it. Out of curiosity, I tried a fourth lathering, but no go at that point. So that is excellent progress.

So I used the Progress razor with a still-newish Gillette 7 O’Clock SharpEdge, a very good blade for me and got a wonderfully smooth shave with not a nick. And Stetson Classic is a fine finish.