Later On

Thanks to Jack in Amsterdam for the pointer. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reports at the Telegraph:

The labour force contracted by 661,000. This did not show up in the headline jobless rate because so many Americans dropped out of the system. The broad U6 category of unemployment rose to 17.3pc. That is the one that matters.

Wall Street rallied. Bulls hope that weak jobs data will postpone monetary tightening: a silver lining in every catastrophe, or perhaps a further exhibit of market infantilism.

The home foreclosure guillotine usually drops a year or so after people lose their job, and exhaust their savings. The local sheriff will escort them out of the door, often with some sympathy –– just like the police in 1932, mostly Irish Catholics who tithed 1pc of their pay for soup kitchens.

Realtytrac says defaults and repossessions have been running at over 300,000 a month since February. One million American families lost their homes in the fourth quarter. Moody’s Economy.com expects another 2.4m homes to go this year. Taken together, this looks awfully like Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

Judges are finding ways to block evictions. One magistrate in Minnesota halted a case calling the creditor "harsh, repugnant, shocking and repulsive". We are not far from a de facto moratorium in some areas.

This is how it ended between 1932 and 1934, when half the US states declared moratoria or "Farm Holidays". Such flexibility innoculated America’s democracy against the appeal of Red Unions and Coughlin Fascists. The home seizures are occurring despite frantic efforts by the Obama administration to delay the process.

This policy is entirely justified given the scale of the social crisis. But it also masks the continued rot in the housing market, allows lenders to hide losses, and stores up an ever larger overhang of unsold properties. It takes heroic naivety to think the US housing market has turned the corner (apologies to Goldman Sachs, as always). The fuse has yet to detonate on the next mortgage bomb, $134bn (£83bn) of "option ARM" contracts due to reset violently upwards this year and next.

US house prices have eked out five months of gains on the Case-Shiller index, but momentum stalled in October in half the cities even before the latest surge of 40 basis points in mortgage rates. Karl Case (of the index) says prices may sink another 15pc. "If the 2008 and 2009 loans go bad, then we’re back where we were before – in a nightmare."

David Rosenberg from Gluskin Sheff said it is remarkable how little traction has been achieved by zero rates and the greatest fiscal blitz of all time. The US economy grew at a 2.2pc rate in the third quarter (entirely due to Obama stimulus). This compares to an average of 7.3pc in the first quarter of every recovery since the Second World War.

Fed hawks are playing with fire by talking up about exit strategies, not for the first time. This is what they did in June 2008. We know what happened three months later. For the record, manufacturing capacity use at 67.2pc, and "auto-buying intentions" are the lowest ever.

The Fed’s own Monetary Multiplier crashed to an all-time low of 0.809 in mid-December. Commercial paper has shrunk by …

Continue reading.

What drives me crazy are the unexplained irregularities that pop up in the lessons, sans comment. E.g.,

undécimo = eleventh

once de enero = the eleventh of January

Why “once” instead of “undécimo”? No idea—and no explanation. I did figure out (through consulting other books) that “once” is the cardinal number (eleven) and not the ordinal (eleventh). And we do say “cinco de Mayo” and not “quinto de Mayo”, so perhaps in Spanish one uses the cardinal numbers when giving a date of the month. But the oddity is unexplained. Moreover, LiveMocha teaches the ordinals by circling the numbers on a calendar page, which would indicate that ordinals are used for dates of a month. Grrrrrr.

primero = first

octavo = eighth

Two examples from Spanish for Dummies:

Vivo en el octavo piso. = I live on the eighth floor.

En el primer piso hay un florería. = On the first floor there’s a flower shop.

In the first example, the terminal –o of the ordinal is retained, in the second it is dropped (without indication—i.e., it’s not “el primer’ piso”). So what sort of rule governs whether to drop the –o or not? No idea, and no comment in the book.

This is why having a live teacher is helpful. Maybe I’ll find one.

UPDATE: Okay, I found the info online. In stating the date, the cardinal number, not the ordinal is used, except sometimes for the first day, when primero can be used in place of uno.

Nice little video. I would have blogged it, but my Firefox seems to have developed partial amnesia. Formerly, I had a toolbar just beneath the Navigation Bar and the Bookmarks Toolbar where I parked quite a few buttons—the Foxly URL-abbreviating button, the VideoPod blog-a-video button, and others. That toolbar has vanished without a trace, taking the buttons with it, though those extensions are still installed (as I can see from Tools, Add-ons). No idea where the bar went. :sigh:

It’s amazing to me that religious fundamentalists can deny that evolution doesn’t happen when so many examples can be found. TYD points out another one, reported by Henry Fountain in the NY Times:

The White Sands of New Mexico are a good place to study evolution in progress. One reason is that the terrain, gypsum dunes white as a sheet of paper, is so different from the surrounding area. Another is that the dunes formed only about 6,000 years ago.

“From an evolutionary perspective, that’s really the blink of an eye,” said Erica Bree Rosenblum, a professor at the University of Idaho who has been studying evolution at White Sands for much of the past decade. Her focus has been on three lizard species that elsewhere are dark skinned but in White Sands have each evolved a white-skinned variety that makes them hard to find. “It’s really obvious what’s happened,” Dr. Rosenblum said. “Everybody got white so that they could better escape from their predators.” It’s a great example of convergent evolution, of species independently acquiring the same traits.

One question about convergent evolution is the mechanism by which it happens. Sure, these three lizards all developed white skin, but did they do it in the same way? Dr. Rosenblum and her colleagues have provided answers to this question in a paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“At first blush it seems like the answer is yes,” she said. In at least two of the lizard species, the researchers found that mutations on the same gene, linked to the production of the skin pigment melanin, were responsible.

The second part of the story is more interesting, Dr. Rosenblum said…

Continue reading.

Kiera Butler in Mother Jones:

I’ve long been a proud drinker of tap water. Here in the Bay Area, most of our water comes from the famously pristine Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, surrounded by 500 square miles of wilderness in Yosemite National Park. What impurities could possibly make it into such a remote place?

Plenty, turns out. The Environmental Working Group recently tested the water in 45 states and found 316 contaminants. Nearly two thirds of those contaminants are not regulated by the EPA—meaning local water authorities aren’t required to filter them or even monitor their levels. I looked up San Francisco’s water in the EWG database and learned that my tap water contains eight pollutants. Relatively speaking, that’s actually not too bad: In other cities (Pensacola, Florida, Riverside, California, and Las Vegas, Nevada, topped the dirty water list), researchers found high levels of unregulated chemicals like perchlorate, a key ingredient in rocket fuel shown to be toxic to the thyroid gland, and MTBE, a gasoline additive that can cause kidney and liver damage.

So what’s the solution? Not bottled water, says EWG researcher Nneka Leiba. "Often it’s just tap water in a bottle. And then there’s the price." (EWG researchers found 38 contaminants in 10 popular brands.) Another problem: the environmental impact of manufacturing, shipping, and disposing of all those bottles. (Check out Mother Jones‘ exposé of Fiji Water’s ecologically and socially questionable practices here.)

Your best bet is a good filter. Carbon models—the kind in the popular Brita filters—are fairly affordable (you can get a refrigerator pitcher filter for about $10), and they remove most contaminants (though not perchlorate, MTBE, or arsenic). Reverse osmosis filters, which hook up to your faucet, are pricier (around $200), but they’ll keep almost all contaminants out of your tap water.

Continue reading for the very informative comments, with other suggestions on good equipment to purify water (and other horror stories about municipal priorities that conflict with safe drinking water.

Doesn’t seem to be all that good. For example, via The Cachagua Store, this report by Christopher Leake at the Mail:

The United States was accused last night of refusing to share with Britain the latest technology it uses against roadside bombs which have killed scores of Allied troops in Afghanistan.

US Army Lieutenant-General Thomas Metz, who retired last week as the chief officer specialising in counter-measures against the attacks, claims the UK and other coalition forces have been denied information which could save lives.

Lieut-Gen Metz has urged the Pentagon to share top-secret methods used by US forces to detect the so-called Improvised Explosive Devices and the terror networks which build them.

But Pentagon chiefs have refused, arguing that if the information falls into the hands of the Taliban, new ways will be found to beat the technology.

IEDs kill more coalition forces than any other weapon used in Afghanistan.

Lieut-Gen Metz – a 61-year-old holder of two Distinguished Service Medals – described the US as ‘very timid’ in sharing intelligence.

He said: ‘If you’ve got information about the network, you don’t have to share how you got that information.

‘But it would surely be nice if your allies and your coalition partners got that part of the information that they needed to be successful.’

The officer said IEDs were often located using unmanned drone aircraft equipped with sensors to detect where ground has been disturbed to bury explosives. It is understood Britain does not possess this technology.

The Americans also use robotic helicopters to track the vehicles of insurgents planting bombs.

Military sources say there is no question of the US refusing to use its superior technology to help save the lives of British combat troops…

Continue reading. Wonder how the US military would feel if the tables were turned: the Brits discovered how to disarm IEDs safely but refuse to tell the US? I guess the US military would feel okay about that: reciprocity is the measure of fairness.

Great story in the News & Observer by Martha Quillin:

Barrie Davis has long wanted to look into the eyes of the pilot who nearly blasted his P-51 Mustang out of the sky over a field in Romania during World War II.After 65 years, he’ll finally get his chance.

In a rendezvous arranged by a magazine writer and his filmmaker son, Davis and his wartime nemesis, Ion Dobran, will meet face to face for the first time later this month.

//

It will be different now, of course. Davis, who flew for the U.S. Army Air Corps, and Dobran, a Romanian Air Force pilot, both went on to become aces during the war. Just months after their dogfight, Romania changed sides, fighting with Allied forces to defeat Hitler.

After the war, both men went home and resumed their civilian lives. Davis went into newspapers and printing, running Gold Leaf Publishers. Dobran worked a series of trades before becoming a pilot in civil aviation. A world apart, they worked until they could retire. But each held on to the memories of military service and wondered, at times, about the fellow in that other plane.

“I’m just eager to see him,” Davis said of Dobran. “I never saw him or his airplane the day he shot me up.”

Davis had been an eager recruit.

A 1940 graduate of the former Wakelon High School in Zebulon, Davis enrolled in early 1941 at Wake Forest University. That fall, he dropped out to enlist in service just as America was about to enter the war.

The way he remembers it, the Air Corps sorted men this way: …

Continue reading.

Thanks to Jack in Amsterdam, Chris Hedges at TruthDig:

Corporations, which control the levers of power in government and finance, promote and empower the psychologically maimed. Those who lack the capacity for empathy and who embrace the goals of the corporation—personal power and wealth—as the highest good succeed. Those who possess moral autonomy and individuality do not. And these corporate heads, isolated from the mass of Americans by insular corporate structures and vast personal fortunes, are no more attuned to the misery, rage and pain they cause than were the courtiers and perfumed fops who populated Versailles on the eve of the French Revolution. They play their games of high finance as if the rest of us do not exist. And it is a game that will kill us.

These companies exist in a pathological world where identity and personal worth are determined solely by the perverted code of the corporation. The corporation decides who has value and who does not, who advances and who is left behind. It rewards the most compliant, craven and manipulative, and discards the losers who can’t play the game, those who do not accumulate wealth or status fast enough, or who fail to fully subsume their individuality into the corporate collective. It dominates the internal and external lives of its employees, leaving them without time for family or solitude—without time for self-reflection—and drives them into a state of perpetual nervous exhaustion. It breaks them down, especially in their early years in the firm, a period in which they are humiliated and pressured to work such long hours that many will sleep under their desks. This hazing process, one that is common at corporate newspapers where I worked, including The New York Times, eliminates from the system most of those with backbone, fortitude and dignity. 

No one thinks in groups. And this is the point. The employees who advance are vacant and supine. They are skilled drones, often possessed of a peculiar kind of analytical intelligence and drive, but morally, emotionally and creatively crippled. Their intellect is narrow and inhibited. They rely on the corporation, as they once relied on their high-priced elite universities and their SAT scores, for validation. They demand that they not be treated as individuals but as members of the great collective of Goldman Sachs or AIG or Citibank. They talk together. They exchange information. They make deals. They compromise. They debate. But they do not think. They do not create. All capacity for intuition, for unstructured thought, for questions of meaning deemed impractical or frivolous by the firm, the qualities that always precede discovery and creation, are banished, as William H. Whyte observed in his book “The Organization Man.” The iron goals of greater and greater profit, order and corporate conformity dominate their squalid belief systems. And by the time these corporate automatons are managing partners or government bureaucrats they cannot distinguish between right and wrong. They are deaf, dumb and blind to the common good.

These deeply stunted and maladjusted individuals, from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to Robert Rubin to Lawrence Summers to the heads of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America, hold the fate of the nation in their hands. They have access to trillions of taxpayer dollars and are looting the U.S. Treasury to sustain reckless speculation. The financial and corporate system alone validates them. It defines them. It must be served. This is why e-mails from the New York Fed to AIG, telling the bailed-out insurer not to make public the overpaying of Wall Street firms with taxpayer money, were sent when Geithner was in charge of the government agency. These criminals sold the public investments they knew to be trash. They used campaign contributions and lobbyists to turn elected officials into stooges and gut oversight and regulation. They took over retirement savings and pensions and wiped them out. And then they seized some $13 trillion in taxpayer money so they could lend it to us with interest. It is circular theft. This is why we will endure another catastrophic financial collapse. This is why firms like Goldman Sachs are more dangerous to the nation than al-Qaida…

Continue reading. Or, as one commenter once advised, we could simply trust the firms to do the right thing.

Thomas Geoghegan in the NY Times:

About the Senate, a college professor of mine used to say, “One day, the Supreme Court will declare it unconstitutional.” He was joking, I think.

But the Senate, as it now operates, really has become unconstitutional: as we saw during the recent health care debacle, a 60-vote majority is required to overcome a filibuster and pass any contested bill. The founders, though, were dead set against supermajorities as a general rule, and the ever-present filibuster threat has made the Senate a more extreme check on the popular will than they ever intended.

This change to the Constitution was not the result of, say, a formal amendment, but a procedural rule adopted in 1975: a revision of Senate Rule 22, which was the old cloture rule. Before 1975, it took two-thirds of the Senate to end a filibuster, but it was the “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” filibuster: if senators wanted to stop a vote, they had to bring in the cots and the coffee and read from Grandma’s recipe for chicken soup until, unshaven, they keeled over from their own rhetorical exhaust.

For the record, nothing like Senate Rule 22 appears in the Constitution, nor was there unlimited debate until Vice President Aaron Burr presided over the Senate in the early 180os. In 1917, after a century of chaos, the Senate put in the old Rule 22 to stop unlimited filibusters. Because it was about stopping real, often distressing, floor debate, one might have been able to defend that rule under Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, which says, “Each house may determine the rule of its proceedings.”

As revised in 1975, Senate Rule 22 seemed to be an improvement: it required 60 senators, not 67, to stop floor debate. But there also came a significant change in de facto Senate practice: to maintain a filibuster, senators no longer had to keep talking. Nowadays, they don’t even have to start; they just say they will, and that’s enough. Senators need not be on the floor at all. They can be at home watching Jimmy Stewart on cable. Senate Rule 22 now exists to cut off what are ghost filibusters, disembodied debates.

As a result, the supermajority vote no longer deserves any protection under Article I, Section 5 — if it ever did at all. It is instead a revision of Article I itself: not used to cut off debate, but to decide in effect whether to enact a law. The filibuster votes, which once occurred perhaps seven or eight times a whole Congressional session, now happen more than 100 times a term. But this routine use of supermajority voting is, at worst, unconstitutional and, at best, at odds with the founders’ intent.

Here’s why…

Continue reading. Full disclosure: I contributed to Thomas Geoghegan’s recent Congressional campaign (he lost), and I highly recommend his books, particularly Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back.

Eric Jaffe in the LA Times:

If your doctor advised a treatment that involved leeches and bloodletting, you might take a second glance at that diploma on the wall. For the same reason, you should think twice about whom you see as a therapist, says a team of psychological researchers.

In a November report that’s attracting controversy the way couches attract loose change, three professors charge that many mental health practitioners are using antiquated, unproved methods and that many clinical psychology training programs lack scientific rigor.

The accusation has reignited a long-standing "holy war" within the psychological profession.

On the one side sit the report’s authors and other like-minded psychologists who say that too many clinicians favor personal experience over scientific evidence when deciding on a patient’s treatment. They are particularly unsettled by the number of therapists — especially from training programs that grant a higher degree known as doctor of psychology, or PsyD — who ignore the most-studied type of treatment: cognitive behavioral therapy.

"Too many clinical psychologists tell us they don’t look to research, they don’t look to science," says Timothy Baker of the University of Wisconsin, lead author of the report, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

On the other side of the fight are psychologists who say that what matters most is not the type but the quality of mental health treatment and who fear that the push toward cognitive behavioral therapy — which is cheaper but not effective for everyone — is being used by insurance companies to cut down on costs.

The new report’s authors and their supporters "are largely people who not only don’t practice themselves — and therefore have no idea what would be relevant to practice — but have a tremendous disdain for people who do practice," says psychologist Drew Westen of Emory University.

The debate comes at a critical moment in mental health care. In the last 20 years, …

Continue reading.

The Arko shave stick, despite its modest price (around $2), produces a very fine lather, confirmed again this morning with the help of the Simpsons Persian Jar 2 Best. The Hoffritz slant bar, with a newish Astra Keramik blade, provided a very smooth and easy shave, finished with TOBS Bay Rum. All good.

Hoisted from comments:

[This  post comes from Carl McGinnis, a citizen of the United States, who has seen the horrors of immigrant detention after ICE detained his legal immigrant friend, Noureddine Feddane. He tells us that it is not just about undocumented immigrants but even people who follow the rules get burned in our archaic and inhumane immigration system].

I am a citizen of the United States and I have a friend that is from Paris, France here on a student visa with a double Masters Degree and working on his PhD in International Finance. Noureddine Feddane has been here since 2005. His visa is valid until March of 2010, his passport is valid until 2014, and his I-20 is current. He is not what people call an ‘illegal immigrant.’ In 2007, he fell in love and in Dec. 2008 married a U.S. citizen that just happens to be addicted to prescription medications. He knew nothing about this. But he was arrested due to her mistakes. The reality is that his American wife was taking advantage of him and when his money was gone so was she. Janet Napolitano just wants to deport him rather than correct the problem, and make the American accountable. This is wrong. We should have some sort of protection built into the system. Judge Rex Ford would not listen to reason without the wife in court and all witnesses were not given time to testify. This is not what I thought American Justice was all about. I was wrong. It is all a game our Government plays with our lives.

Noureddine was placed in detention and scheduled for deportation. He has been in the detention  center in Pompano Beach Florida for 5 months now. This couple has lost all there savings on lawyers, she lost her job, and they are in the process of losing their home. All this was caused because ICE has the wrong person in jail.

I have written many letters to Janet Napolitano, Senator Bill Nelson, Representative Ginny Brown-Waite and even President Obama. But no one will listen. What is illegal in this case is the way DHS is treating this guy, who is 51 and has never had a traffic violation.  While in the detention center, He has been beaten by another inmate and suffered cracked ribs and bruised body, denied him food and proper medical treatment. Noureddine is diabetic and they will not give him the proper food or medical attention. The phone system is very poor and hardly works. I suspect that they plan it that way so the detainees cannot contact their lawyers and family. I fear he will be next on the long list of persons that have died while in detention. I beg for someone to go and listen to his story. They do not allow any form of media in because they don’t want anyone to know what they are doing.

Until you go to one of these detention centers and see with your own eyes, you will not believe what America is doing. I was shocked, on my first visit and after almost 6 months of seeing what happens and how they have to live, I am still in shock. It is all about the money. My friend has never cost America anything until they locked him up. He is in a private prison owned by a company called GEO based near Miami, Florida. They are paid very well by our tax dollars, but the treatment is unbelievable. I wonder how many politicians have stock in this company. They are doing quite well even in a bad economy.

Six months ago I had no idea that we treated immigrants in this way, especially when they are here legally and have done nothing wrong. I knew nothing about ICE and how they operate illegally. I was under the impression that DHS was here only to protect us from terrorists. And I had no idea of the millions of our tax dollars were being wasted to imprison people that could be out of detention and have their family support them until a decision is made in immigration court. I do not understand why we have to pay our hard earned tax dollars to house and feed persons that are not dangerous.

When they have to lock up a man who has done nothing wrong, make him spend thousands in fees, ICE is giving way too much importance to them selves. How can we turn such educated people away simply to boost the ego of ICE officers and add another number to the Janet Napolitano deportation list, so that the Obama Administration can look like it is doing its job of ‘cracking down on criminals?’

Something has to change soon. I feel it is my duty as an American to let as many people as possible know the truth. I visit the detention center every Saturday and spend the rest of the week writing letters. This New Year, lets do something worthwhile. Let’s go back to protecting the country rather than making up stories to justify the expansion of a national security complex. Let’s end businesses profiting from immigrant detention and restore our image as a nation of immigrants.

Interesting book:

Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World (MacMillan Science)

by Eugenie Samuel Reich

A review by David Kaiser

For many years, historians of the Renaissance have lauded the value of forgeries and fakes. Counterfeit documents, passed off as real, offer invaluable clues about the wider culture in which they were made. They illuminate subtle, taken-for-granted assumptions and habits of the time; after all, forgers must have had particular ideas in mind about what counted as genuine when crafting their fakes. Anthony Grafton, the distinguished Princeton historian, has gone even further. In his 1990 book, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship, Grafton argues that much of what we recognize as scholarship in the humanities today — entire fields such as literary criticism, jurisprudence, the history of ideas, religion, art and more — matured thanks to a constant back-and-forth engagement with frauds and forgeries. Those fields took form by honing esoteric techniques for scrutinizing documents and works of art, perpetually improving clever ways to sort authentic wheat from forged chaff. A kind of arms race ensued: As methods for detecting forgeries improved, forgers grew more sophisticated in designing fakes, and so on down through the ages

What could that possibly have to do with modern science? A great deal more than we might suspect. Just in the past few years, the scientific world has been rocked by a series of high-profile frauds. Within the physical sciences, accusations arose in 2002 of data rigging in a search for exotic nuclei at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The curious story of Igor and Grichka Bogdanov broke that same year: Twin theoretical physicists working in France, they were widely suspected of having succeeded in getting nonsense articles through peer review at major physics journals. Then it was the biologists’ turn. Late in 2005, South Korean researcher Hwang Woo-Suk was accused of having fabricated the data on which at least two of his articles in Science about stem cells and cloning were based. A few weeks earlier an MIT associate professor of biology, Luk Van Parijs, had been dismissed for fabricating and falsifying data in a paper published in Nature Genetics as well as in unpublished manuscripts and on grant applications.

But one fraud outstripped them all, eclipsing the others with its sheer audacity. Between 2000 and 2002, Jan Hendrik Schon, a researcher at Bell Laboratories, published more than 20 articles on electrical properties of unusual materials. He shot to the very top of the booming field of "molecular electronics" — a wonder field in which researchers aim to shrink computer chips down to single-molecule components. At Schon’s peak, he was submitting 4 or 5 articles per month, most of them going to top journals like Science and Nature. He hit his record in autumn 2001, turning out 7 articles that November alone. The output was staggering. It’s rare for a scientist — even a string theorist, beholden neither to instruments nor to data — to submit 7 articles in an entire year, let alone one month. And Schon’s papers were no run-of-the-mill exercises. In them, he announced one unbelievable discovery after another: He had created organic plastics that became superconductors or lasers; he had fashioned nanoscale transistors; and more. The editors of Science hailed one of his many contributions as a "breakthrough of the year" in 2001. The CEO of Lucent Technologies (parent company of Bell Labs) likewise touted Schon’s work when courting investors. Everything Schon touched seemed to turn to research gold.

Alas, it was fool’s gold. Following a formal investigation in 2002, Bell Labs dismissed Schon. The investigating committee, chaired by Stanford professor Malcolm Beasley, considered serious allegations against 24 papers by Schon and his coauthors, including 8 published in Science and 5 in Nature. The committee concluded that at least 16 of the papers showed clear evidence of scientific misconduct. Another 6 struck the committee as "troubling," even if they were not indisputably the result of intentional fraud.

According to the Beasley committee, Schon’s misconduct fell into three basic categories: …

Continue reading.

Margalit Fox in the NY Times:

Mary Daly, a prominent feminist theologian who made worldwide headlines a decade ago after she retired from Boston College rather than admit men to some of her classes, died on Sunday in Gardner, Mass. She was 81 and had lived for many years in Newton Centre, Mass.

A friend, Linda Barufaldi, confirmed the death, saying Professor Daly had been in declining health recently.

A self-described “radical lesbian feminist,” Professor Daly maintained a long, often uneasy relationship with Boston College, the Jesuit institution where she had taught theology since the 1960s.

In 1999, Professor Daly left the college after a male student threatened suit when he was denied a place in her class on feminist ethics. She had long limited enrollment in some advanced women’s studies classes to women only, maintaining that the presence of men there would inhibit frank discussion.

Professor Daly did let men enroll in her introductory feminism courses and offered to tutor them privately in the advanced subjects.

Among the first American women to train as a Roman Catholic theologian, Professor Daly challenged orthodoxies from the start. She came to wide attention in 1968 with the publication of “The Church and the Second Sex” (Harper & Row), in which she argued that the Catholic Church had systematically oppressed women for centuries.

Her next book, “Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation” (Beacon, 1973), explored misogyny in religion in general.

“She is a central figure in 20th-century feminism,” Robin Morgan, the feminist writer and former editor of Ms. magazine, said in a telephone interview on Monday.

Professor Daly’s work was the subject of a critical anthology, “Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly” (Pennsylvania State University, 2000), edited by Sarah Lucia Hoagland and Marilyn Frye.

If Professor Daly’s ideology placed her outside mainstream academic and religious life, then that, by her own account, was where she was glad to be. Formerly a practicing Catholic, she came to regard organized religion as irreparably patriarchal, in later years calling herself “post-Christian.” Where her scholarly concerns had once been largely theological, she gradually came to regard them as spiritual in the broadest sense of the word…

Continue reading.

This is a horror show. It really does seem to be that our national institutions are failing badly. Congress is more or less done—owned by the finance industry, military contractors, and other organizations with big bucks and no ethics. And now this. Someone once wrote that the best way to judge a nation was on how it treated the most vulnerable. The US fails.

Nina Bernstein at the NY Times:

Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.

But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.

The documents, obtained over recent months by The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, concern most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003, after the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security.

The Obama administration has vowed to overhaul immigration detention, a haphazard network of privately run jails, federal centers and county cells where the government holds noncitizens while it tries to deport them.

But as the administration moves to increase oversight within the agency, the documents show how officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.

As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.

In another case that year, investigators from the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other detainees were at risk.

The investigation found that jail medical personnel had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect: When the drug was supposedly administered, Mr. Romero was already dead.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I got up at 7:30, my DSL was down. I called the ISP and got a message that they were working on a mail server. Finally, at around 11:00, I called again, and they were back up, but I had to reboot my modem and router. That done, I’m back in business.

I used the time to read Herodotus, and I have to say that The Landmark Herodotus is the one to get: every place name is identified and located on a map that’s nearby in the texts (except for places that have vanished totally and their location is unknown). This clears up the main stumbling block I had in reading Herodotus before: I couldn’t figure out the locations he was talking about. OTOH, I do think the Robin Waterfield translation is more readable—maybe I’ll read both.

I did my 11 minutes on the Nordic Track. It wasn’t so long ago (5 weeks?) that I was struggling to do 6 minutes. Adding a minute a week is a good way to move up for the older exerciser.

My morning blood glucose readings are suddenly high—well, maybe not suddenly. After weeks and weeks of seeing a morning reading 115-120, I got tired of taking the reading, and when I took a reading a couple of days ago, it was 145. And it’s been 145 the two mornings since.

I think that the culprit is potatoes. I had had to give up potatoes before, but I thought with all the exercise, weight loss, and so on, potatoes were safe again. Guess not. Today is a day of careful eating and no potatoes and we’ll see what tomorrow morning will bring.

This is quite timely: a series of brief (2-3 paragraph) articles on fitness topics.

Let’s get physical: Nine facts about fitness

What counts as exercise?

How much, and how often?

How do you know if you’re getting fit?

Is pumping iron really necessary?

Can jogging kill you?

Is getting fit easier for some people?

Can you be fat and fit?

Do you need to ‘push fluids’?

What if you get injured?

Editorial: Only the big picture of health will do

I just got this kabocha squash at Whole Foods, with a plan to make this recipe:

Kabocha Squash Soup

Yield 4 servings
Time 30 minutes

Ms. Kano soaks the kelp in cold water for about eight hours. But you can slowly heat the water and kombu to save time, as long as they don’t boil, which will turn the stock bitter.

• 1 3- to 4-inch piece kelp (kombu)
• 1 teaspoon light sesame or other neutral oil
• 1 6-ounce block firm tofu, drained and roughly crumbled by hand
• 4 ounces kabocha, pumpkin, or butternut squash peeled and cut in 1/4-inch dice (about 2/3 cup)
• 4 fresh shiitake mushroom caps, sliced lengthwise into strips
• 3 tablespoons soy sauce
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 scallions, trimmed and cut into 1/2-inch pieces

1. Place kelp and 4 cups water in pot over low heat until first bubbles appear; do not boil. Let sit.

2. Put oil in saucepan or medium skillet with deep sides, and turn heat to medium; add crumbled tofu, and cook, stirring, until slightly browned at edges. Add kabocha and shiitake, and continue to cook, stirring, for another minute.

3. Add kelp broth; when liquid comes to a boil reduce heat to barely a simmer and cook until kabocha is tender, less than 10 minutes.

4. Season with soy sauce and salt. Just before serving, add scallions.

I blogged about the tree (with photos) here and here. Today I took The Wife to see the tree, and it turns out that there’s a little notice (1 typed page in a plastic protector) attached to the fence. The tree, a Banksia praemosa,  is native to western Australia. It’s not fire-resistant, so when fires happen, the trees are killed but sprout anew from the seeds.

UPDATE: More info here.

Most of the weight-loss programs seem to ask you to set a goal (the weight you want to be and the date you want to hit that weight), then on a graph draw a straight line from today’s date and weight to the goal date and weight—the idea being that if you are able not to go above that line (when graphing date/weight), you’ll do fine..

I don’t like this for any number of reasons, the main one being that for me it doesn’t work. It starts out fine and may even work for a few weeks. Inevitably, though, I drift above the line and shortly after that abandon the effort.

This time, though, is different. My goals do not include a specific weight nor a specific date. My goal is to change my lifestyle with respect to food, exercise, and reading—and while I’m at it, learn Spanish. I’m building a new lifestyle and a new group of habits that, as a by-product, will result in my losing weight (and becoming better educated), but the goal is the lifestyle, not its by-products.

Moreover, the focus on the goal moves one’s attention from today: "Well, I’ve got until December 31—no need to get my knickers in a twist. I’ll have this big meal and dessert today, and then tomorrow be more careful."

My thought is always to focus on today: what is my checklist for today? what things do I still need to do today before I can check off everything on the list?

By focusing only on today, I usually enjoy 4 successes a day (and on days when I do weights, 5 successes). If I miss a success—today I skipped Nordic Track—I can still check off the walk, the Herodotus, and the Spanish study: 3 successes, 1 miss. Not a bad day, but I can do better tomorrow.

Initially I had more things I wanted to be working on daily—Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, for example—but I like the success rate I’m now enjoying, and I’m taking some pains to keep this whole effort easy and pleasant for me. Thus the daily tasks are generally 15 minutes (the minimum) with some at 30 minutes. And I have a lot of unscheduled time for other things I enjoy. These things increase the likelihood that I’ll continue.

As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, we experience flow when we are engaged in a task that provides immediate feedback (e.g., playing the piano: you can immediately tell if you hit a wrong key), demands our focused attention, and uses about 85% of our capability (less, and you get bored; more, and you get tense and start making mistakes). As you get better (e.g., at playing the piano), you maintain the 85% figure by moving to more difficult pieces. Right now the projects I’m doing seem about that level: almost all days I can do them all, but some days I have to let one go. If I added more projects, I would have difficulty getting around to all of them in a day.

Flow is the psychological state that in retrospect we call "happiness." I highly recommend his book, BTW. Another book helpful in this project is Carol Dweck’s Mindset, which orients us toward welcoming difficulties (such as the Spanish "r" and "rr") as the signature of things that we have not yet mastered and thus represent an opportunity: if we work steadily at the difficulty over time, we’ll overcome it and thus grow.