Later On

James Fallows discovers that his preferred running style (a style I think of as sprinting: running on the balls of your feet) is the right way to go. His post begins:

For lo these many decades of several-times-per-week running, I have favored the "land on the front of your feet" policy. This is the way you naturally run if you’re sprinting — up on the balls of the feet — and it is the way that has always felt most comfortable to me. But it is at odds with prevailing "heel-strike" practice, and it makes me wonder about standard running shoes, with their enormous multi-inch layers of padding at the back, under the heel, where I need it least. My shoes typically wear out when the area at the front of the shoe, under the balls of my feet, is all abraded away, and the big, thick rear cushions still look new.

Now, science weighs in to say that I’ve been doing it right all along! Or, more specifically Nature weighs in, with a report today here saying that fore-foot running, which also turns out to be the way people naturally run if they’re barefoot, is fundamentally much easier on your joints and bones and therefore easier to bear over the years. There’s a six-minute video on the topic here, which has a variety of "actual scientific" stress-diagrams, like the ones below, showing how the decelerative shock of landing is buffered and spread out over time by fore-foot landings.

Observe the sharp, vertical impact spike from a heel landing (straight-up line with two red circles): …

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Greenwald:

As I wrote at the time, I thought the condemnations of Rep. Joe Wilson’s heckling of Barack Obama during his September health care speech were histrionic and excessive.  Wilson and Obama are both political actors, it occurred in the middle of a political speech about a highly political dispute, and while the outburst was indecorous and impolite, Obama is not entitled to be treated as royalty.  That was all much ado about nothing.  By contrast, the behavior of Justice Alito at last night’s State of the Union address — visibly shaking his head and mouthing the words "not true" when Obama warned of the dangers of the Court’s Citizens United ruling — was a serious and substantive breach of protocol that reflects very poorly on Alito and only further undermines the credibility of the Court.  It has nothing to do with etiquette and everything to do with the Court’s ability to adhere to its intended function.

There’s a reason that Supreme Court Justices — along with the Joint Chiefs of Staff — never applaud or otherwise express any reaction at a State of the Union address.  It’s vital — both as a matter of perception and reality — that those institutions remain apolitical, separate and detached from partisan wars.  The Court’s pronouncements on (and resolutions of) the most inflammatory and passionate political disputes retain legitimacy only if they possess a credible claim to being objectively grounded in law and the Constitution, not political considerations.  The Court’s credibility in this regard has — justifiably — declined substantially over the past decade, beginning with Bush v. Gore (where 5 conservative Justices issued a ruling ensuring the election of a Republican President), followed by countless 5-4 decisions in which conservative Justices rule in a way that promotes GOP political beliefs, while the more "liberal" Justices do to the reverse (Citizens United is but the latest example).  Beyond that, the endless, deceitful sloganeering by right-wing lawyers about "judicial restraint" and "activism" — all while the judges they most revere cavalierly violate those "principles" over and over — exacerbates that problem further (the unnecessarily broad scope of Citizens United is the latest example of that, too, and John ‘balls and strikes" Roberts may be the greatest hypocrite ever to sit on the Supreme Court).  All of that is destroying the ability of the judicial branch to be perceived — and to act — as one of the few truly apolitical and objective institutions.

Justice Alito’s flamboyantly insinuating himself into a pure political event, in a highly politicized manner, will only hasten that decline.  On a night when both tradition and the Court’s role dictate that he sit silent and inexpressive, he instead turned himself into a partisan sideshow — a conservative Republican judge departing from protocol to openly criticize a Democratic President — with Republicans predictably defending him and Democrats doing the opposite.  Alito is now a political (rather than judicial) hero to Republicans and a political enemy of Democrats, which is exactly the role a Supreme Court Justice should not occupy.

The Justices are seated at the very front of the chamber, and it was predictable in the extreme that the cameras would focus on them as Obama condemned their ruling.  Seriously:  what kind of an adult is incapable of restraining himself from visible gestures and verbal outbursts in the middle of someone’s speech, no matter how strongly one disagrees — let alone a robe-wearing Supreme Court Justice sitting in the U.S. Congress in the middle of a President’s State of the Union address?  Recall all of the lip-pursed worrying from The New Republic‘s Jeffrey Rosen and his secret, nameless friends over the so-called "judicial temperament" of Sonia Sotomayor.  Alito’s conduct is the precise antithesis of what "judicial temperament" is supposed to produce. 

Right-wing criticisms — that it was Obama who acted inappropriately by using his  SOTU address to condemn the Court’s decision — are just inane.  Many of the Court’s rulings engender political passions and have substantial political consequences — few more so than a ruling that invalidated long-standing campaign finance laws.  Obama is an elected politician in a political branch and has every right to express his views on such a significant court ruling.  While the factual claims Obama made about the ruling are subject to reasonable dispute, they’re well within the realm of acceptable political rhetoric and are far from being "false" (e.g., though the ruling did not strike down the exact provision banning foreign corporations from electioneering speech, its rationale could plausibly lead to that; moreover, it’s certainly fair to argue, as Obama did, that the Court majority tossed aside a century of judicial precedent).  Presidents have a long history of condemning Court rulings with which they disagree — Republican politicians, including Presidents, have certainly never shied away from condemning Roe v. Wade in the harshest of terms — and Obama’s comments last night were entirely consistent with that practice.  While Presidents do not commonly criticize the Court in the SOTU address, it is far from unprecedented either.  And, as usual, the disingenuousness levels are off the charts:  imagine the reaction if Ruth Bader Ginsburg had done this at George Bush’s State of the Union address.

What’s most disturbing here is .…

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MakeUseOf.com’s Ryan Dube has a useful post:

I’m not really the type of person that sends faxes all that often. There may be an occasion or two when I have to forward information to my insurance company or the Human Resources department at work, but those times are very few and far between. However, since I don’t fax very often, whenever I do have a need to send a fax I used to scramble to find an available fax machine. After I started writing for MakeUseOf, I decided to reassess this occasional need and come up with a solution that would make use of available free online technologies and resources. I started looking for an answer to the question, “Can I send an email to a fax machine?”

And so began my quest into the world of free online faxing. The only requirement that I set when I started this search was that the resource must be free, it must allow, at a minimum, a full textual document to be sent over the Internet. The ability to send formatted documents would be a plus, but since most of the time I just need to send over information, the ability to send an text email to a fax machine is really all I usually need…

Continue reading to see his comments on the 5 services he identified that can do this. 

Janet Raloff in Science News:

Last weekend, London’s Sunday Mail quoted the lead author of a chapter in a purportedly authoritative 2007 climate-change assessment as saying that he deliberately used unsubstantiated sources for conclusions about the rate of glacier melting in the Himalayas. After two days, I finally reached the scientist in question — Murari Lal — in Ghaziabad, India, where he chairs the Climate, Energy and Sustainable Development Analysis Centre. Lal doesn’t dispute that mistakes were made in the inclusion of some numbers in his chapter of the report — ones that likely exaggerated projections of glacier melting. But he strenuously challenges the newspaper’s charge that those mistakes were politically motivated.

In that newspaper story, the Mail’s David Rose quoted Lal as saying about the Himalayan glacier melt projection: “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”
But Lal counters that he never said that. He’s not saying he was quoted out of context. He flatly denies ever uttering those words. He similarly denies several of the other quotes attributed to him in that article. And he points out that the newspaper misidentified his field of study as glaciology. He is, in fact, a climatologist.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which issued the report in which the disputed Himalayan glacier data appeared, has called the use of a non-peer-reviewed source — in this case a report by the World Wildlife Fund — a mistake.

I asked Lal how he happened to rely on that WWF material.

None of the IPCC chapter’s authors were glaciologists, he said, so “we entirely trusted the findings reported in the WWF 2005 Report and the underlying references as scientifically sound and relevant in the context of climate change impacts in the region.” Those underlying references, he says, cited projections by a renowned Indian glaciologist. So Lal says his team deferred to what appeared to be that scientist’s assessments (projections that have apparently since been retracted).

“As authors,” he says, “we had to report only the best available science inclusive of a select few (non-peer-reviewed sources) which is ‘policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral’ — and that’s what we collectively did while writing the Asia Chapter.”

Keep in mind, Lal argues, the 2035 figure contained in his chapter — as a date at which Himalayan glaciers might disappear — was not a prediction, but a projection. IPCC authors are prohibited from making their own predictions, he said. And, he argues, his team didn’t. Indeed, he maintains, “We did not violate the existing IPCC procedures in any manner.”

So, what is his current assessment of the Himalayan melt situation? …

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If you’ve ever driven a long commute for any length of time, you’ve probably experienced driving while lost in thought, then on looking around you don’t realize quite where you are. This morning’s shave was a bit like that. I finished a pass, and I didn’t really know whether it was the first pass or the second. So I did either a 2-pass shave or a 3-pass shave—and in any event, it’s quite a nice shave.

The Omega “Colors” brush is a fine brush and it did a great job with Vintage Blade’s Herbal Citrus shaving cream. Then the Apollo Mikron with a much-used Swedish Gillette shaved so smoothly and easily I lost track of the passes.

A splash of Penhaligon’s Blenheim Bouquet was a perfect finish.

Scott Horton has an interesting post at Harper’s:

In December 2007, John Kiriakou, a former senior CIA operative, made a series of public comments about the agency’s use of Bush-era torture techniques. In one interview, he described in detail how waterboarding was authorized. As he noted, the CIA agents wrote up a proposal, higher-ups in the agency cleared it, then the proposal was vetted by the Justice Department, and finally it went to the National Security Council in the White House, where it was approved again. His account validated speculation that the Justice Department was squarely in the middle of the process, giving its blessing to criminal acts, and that the White House gave the ultimate sanction. But then Kiriakou went on, in an appearance with ABC’s Brian Ross, to claim that waterboarding worked wonderfully. He claimed that terrorist Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the technique. The statement was immediately heralded by torture advocates, such as Rush Limbaugh, as evidence that waterboarding had worked.

Except that, according to others at the agency, Kiriakou wasn’t involved in the process and didn’t know what he was talking about. The more detailed account that emerged with the declassification of Justice Department memoranda showed that Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded 83 times, with doubtful results.

Now Kiriakou recants. Jeff Stein reports in a must-read in Foreign Policy:

On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up. “What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts,” he writes. “I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence.” But never mind, he says now.

“I wasn’t there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time.”

In other words, Kiriakou was spreading baseless agency rumors. He goes on to state that he subsequently learned, through press accounts, that his claims to ABC just weren’t true. But he takes it one step further. He concludes that he and fellow agents were actually being deceived by torture-apologists.

“In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own.”

As Stein notes, Kiriakou’s false statements about the efficiency of waterboarding instantly swept America’s mainstream media—in addition to ABC, they appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, NPR, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and numerous other media. How many of these sources will now acknowledge that the reports they propagated were false? Don’t hold your breath.

This will drop it.

Basically, it is what people should have been doing already if they could get away from a mindset of keyboard over-reliance. And it’s done quite well, so far as I can tell. Take a look: http://www.apple.com/ipad/

Still, Apple has a habit of skimming the cream for a few months, then cutting the price in half and coming out with a better model just above that.

I guess wait and see—but I did ask to be notified.

Barry Eisler has a good post:

I’m just about done with Tim Weiner’s phenomenal Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Two themes are at the heart of the book.

First, the Agency has been incompetent from its inception. The roster of incompetence includes subversion operations that cost the lives of hundreds of agents and accomplished nothing; CIA-managed coups that backfired; the Bay of Pigs; and many others. Even operations that "succeeded" were pyrrhic. Installing the Shah via a CIA-sponsored coup in Iran in 1953, for example, created enmity that resulted in the Khomeini revolution and hostage crisis of 1979 and continues to this day.

Second, the Agency and its political masters have consistently lied to the American public about CIA domestic law breaking. Anyone horrified at the notion that the modern CIA kidnaps and tortures terror suspects at secret prisons should understand that these activities aren’t aberrant, but are in fact the legacy of programs like Project Artichoke and Project MKULTRA, in which the Agency built secret prisons in Germany, Japan, and the Panama Canal Zone, prisons where suspected double agents were tortured and dosed with heroin, amphetamines, sleeping pills, and LSD. And, like the interrogation videotapes the CIA now claims it destroyed in 2005, the CIA also destroyed its records of these earlier illegal activities.

It’s tempting to conclude from all this that the CIA should never have been in the operations business — after all, incompetence measured against subversion of the Constitution seems a bad bargain. But it’s hard to see what CIA analysis has accomplished, either…

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Tom Ricks at Foreign Policy:

When retired Army Col. Stuart Herrington talks about intelligence, and especially about interrogation issues, I listen. His time in Vietnam was captured well in his book Silence was a Weapon also published under the title Stalking the Vietcong. He ran a secret interrogation operation on an island off the coast of Panama after the invasion of Panama, where, he says, much was learned about Noriega’s relations with Cuba and the PLO. He ran a similar secret operation after the 1991 Gulf War. In 2004, he was asked to look into U.S. intelligence operations in Iraq and produced a scathing report that, to my knowledge, has never been released. (As I understand it, the report wasn’t classified, but only two copies were made of it.) To my knowledge, he was one of the first people to blow the whistle on Abu Ghraib and on the broader abuse of prisoners that was occurring in many locations in Iraq back then.

Last November, Herrington gave a speech at Fort Leavenworth, sponsored by the CGSC Foundation, in which he explored how U.S. interrogation operations went badly off track after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, becoming both  abusive and counterproductive. But he also worries that the remedies instituted could cripple our intelligence gathering efforts.

One of the most striking aspects of his talk is the cold professional contempt he has for Cheney, Rumsfeld and others who not only encouraged a brutal approach, but were amateurish in doing so.

Herrington began his talk by looking back to Vietnam, where he insisted on  providing his prisoners (and intelligence targets) with “unconditional decent treatment—food, medical c, and clothing.” He showed his Vietnamese colleagues, fond of using “water torture and electrocution,” that “One can employ legions of effective stratagems to achieve control over a potential recruit, but brutality, abuse, and torture have no place.”

He used the same approach after the invasion of Panama and the Gulf War, in each case establishing “guest houses” were prisoners were given air conditioned rooms and treated well. “We afforded unconditional decent treatment to our Iraqi guests,” he said. “We did not gloat over the coalition’s lopsided victory, but channeled their anger towards Saddam Hussein, who had set them up for defeat and humiliation.”

His bottom line:

“There was no room on our team for charlatans who believed in sleep deprivation, inducing hypothermia, stress positions, face slapping, forced nudity, water boarding, blaring heavy metal music, or other amateurish, ineffective and ethically flawed tricks.”

Posted after it was mentioned in this excellent comment.

Annie Laurie has a good comment at Balloon Juice:

I finally got around to reading my dead-trees copy of James Fallows’ “How America Can Rise Again“, the cover story in the Jan/Feb. Atlantic. It’s an excellent article, which deserves to be read in its entirety—especially since the online version actually makes use of all those intertoobz goodies, like embedded video and links to the books and websites discussed in the article itself.

That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. One thing I’ve never heard in my time overseas is “I wish we had a Senate like yours.” When Jimmy Carter was running for president in 1976, he said again and again that America needed “a government as good as its people.” Knowing Carter’s sometimes acid views on human nature, I thought that was actually a sly barb—and that the imperfect American public had generally ended up with the government we deserve. But now I take his plea at face value. American culture is better than our government. And if we can’t fix what’s broken, we face a replay of what made the months after the 9/11 attacks so painful: realizing that it was possible to change course and address problems long neglected, and then watching that chance slip away.

The most charitable statement of the problem is that the American government is a victim of its own success. It has survived in more or less recognizable form over more than two centuries—long enough to become mismatched to the real circumstances of the nation…
Every system strives toward durability, but as with human aging, longevity has a cost. The late economist Mancur Olson laid out the consequences of institutional aging in his 1982 book, The Rise and Decline of Nations. Year by year, he said, special-interest groups inevitably take bite after tiny bite out of the total national wealth. They do so through tax breaks, special appropriations, what we now call legislative “earmarks,” and other favors that are all easier to initiate than to cut off. No single nibble is that dramatic or burdensome, but over the decades they threaten to convert any stable democracy into a big, inefficient, favor-ridden state. In 1994, Jonathan Rauch updated Olson’s analysis and called this enfeebling pattern “demosclerosis,” in a book of that name. He defined the problem as “government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt,” a process “like hardening of the arteries, which builds up stealthily over many years.”

We are now 200-plus years past Jefferson’s wish for permanent revolution and nearly 30 past Olson’s warning, with that much more buildup of systemic plaque—and of structural distortions, too. When the U.S. Senate was created, the most populous state, Virginia, had 10 times as many people as the least populous, Delaware. Giving them the same two votes in the Senate was part of the intricate compromise over regional, economic, and slave-state/free-state interests that went into the Constitution. Now the most populous state, California, has 69 times as many people as the least populous, Wyoming, yet they have the same two votes in the Senate. A similarly inflexible business organization would still have a major Whale Oil Division; a military unit would be mainly fusiliers and cavalry. No one would propose such a system in a constitution written today, but without a revolution, it’s unchangeable. Similarly, since it takes 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster on controversial legislation, 41 votes is in effect a blocking minority. States that together hold about 12 percent of the U.S. population can provide that many Senate votes. This converts the Senate from the “saucer” George Washington called it, in which scalding ideas from the more temperamental House might “cool,” into a deep freeze and a dead weight.

The Senate’s then-famous “Gang of Six,” which controlled crucial aspects of last year’s proposed health-care legislation, came from states that together held about 3 percent of the total U.S. population; 97 percent of the public lives in states not included in that group. (Just to round this out, more than half of all Americans live in the 10 most populous states—which together account for 20 of the Senate’s 100 votes.)

And to forestall anybody squawking before they click through, no, Fallow’s answer emphatically does not involve a constitutional convention.

From Clive Thompson’s blog:

I never thought I’d see the day when the US government would deliberately condone the murder of citizens based merely on suspicion. Once, we’d collect evidence, bring charges, and then have a public trial in which the accused could confront his accusers and defend himself before a jury of his peers. Surprisingly the accused is often found "not guilty." Occasionally serious misdeed by the prosecution come to light, but on the whole this system has served us well.

But with the rapid pace of modern life, once suspicions are sufficiently aroused, the government will simply murder the citizen in question. Saves lots of time.

Greenwald:

The Washington Post‘s Dana Priest today reportsthat "U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people."  That’s no surprise, of course, as Yemen is now another predominantly Muslim country (along with Somalia and Pakistan) in which our military is secretly involved to some unknown degree in combat operations without any declaration of war, without any public debate, and arguably (though not clearly) without any Congressional authorization.  The exact role played by the U.S. in the late-December missile attacks in Yemen, which killed numerous civilians, is still unknown.

But buried in Priest’s article is her revelation that American citizens are now being placed on a secret "hit list" of people whom the President has personally authorized to be killed:

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military,authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. . . .

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, "it doesn’t really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them," a senior administration official said. "They are then part of the enemy."

Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called "High Value Targets" and "High Value Individuals," whom they seek to kill or capture.  The JSOC list includes three Americans, including [New Mexico-born Islamic cleric Anwar] Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi’s name has now been added. 

Indeed, Aulaqi was clearly one of the prime targets of the late-December missile strikes in Yemen, as anonymous officials excitedly announced — falsely, as it turns out — that he was killed in one of those strikes.

Just think about this for a minute.  Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests."  They’re entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations.  Amazingly, the Bush administration’s policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges — based solely on the President’s claim that they were Terrorists — produced intense controversy for years.  That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution.  Shouldn’t Obama’s policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind — not imprisoned, but killed — produce at least as much controversy?

Obviously, if U.S. forces are fighting on an actual battlefield, then they (like everyone else) have the right to kill combatants actively fighting against them, including American citizens.  That’s just the essence of war.  That’s why it’s permissible to kill a combatant engaged on a real battlefield in a war zone but not, say, torture them once they’re captured and helplessly detained.  But combat is not what we’re talking about here…

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An email from the Center for American Progress:

In tonight’s State of the Union address, President Obama will propose freezing "non-security" discretionary spending at the fiscal year 2011 level for fiscal years 2012 and 2013. The freeze is designed to save $250 billion over 10 years, and will "exempt security-related budgets for the Pentagon, foreign aid, the Veterans Administration and homeland security, as well as the entitlement programs": Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Of course, Obama’s proposal immediately evoked comparisons to Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) call for a spending freeze during the 2008 presidential campaign, a proposal that Obama repeatedly condemned as an "example of unfair burden sharing," and "using a hatchet where you need a scalpel." But the White House responded to the criticism by saying that the freeze differs from McCain’s across-the-board cut and will operate as more of a cap, with some programs receiving less funding while successful programs and administration priorities will receive more. "It’s not a freeze on every agency or every program," said Rob Nabors, deputy White House budget director. "We’re not giving up the priorities."

Read the rest of this entry »

The Wife, a handbag and scarf connoisseur, pointed out this great post. I learned from her, BTW, that the Hermès way regarding the contents of a handbag is that nothing should simply be loose in the bottom of the handbag: everything is contained in various specialized little containers: a wallet, a coin purse, a glasses case, and so on. Luckily, Hermès sells various little containers.

The post begins:

Far before I boarded the plane to Paris, my mother asked me something in the solemn kind of voice you usually expect from someone who wants to borrow money or needs help burying a body in the desert. “You’ll go to the Hermès sale with me, won’t you?” she requested, eyes wide. I laughed a little, amused by the dramatics, but nodded.

For those who don’t know Hermès, it’s a Parisian luxury goods and fashion house that sells things I never thought would have a three-digit price tag, like beach towels. Scarves are one of its specialties and are what interest my mother, an avid collector. For years, she’d dreamed about attending the mythical biannual Hermès sale in Paris. This January was her first opportunity.

And so, good little anthropology student that I am, here is an account of the first day of the January 2010 Hermès sale, alternately titled, “Gird Your Loins, They’re Bringing Out the Plissés.” (Plissé is a kind of scarf. Trust me, before last week, I knew nothing about them either.)

1/20/2010.

3:45am. My mother wakes me up, brimming over with nervous energy. Blearily, I drink two sips of the coffee offered to me and get dressed. As I put on a scarf that cost me 6 euro at a Parisian marketplace, I dimly register that I’m not quite Hermès’ target audience.

4:41am. We arrive at Porte Maillot, near the outskirts of Paris. It is still very dark. My mother pays our taxi driver, with whom she has just maintained a chipper conversation for our half hour drive. God knows I don’t have that kind of energy. Maybe I’m adopted.

4:43am. There are four other people here, lined up in the cold outside the building doors. The way my mom was talking, I was expecting hordes. Is matricide still illegal?

Continue reading.

A reader pointed out this website, with which he is working. Looks useful.

I’ve been wondering about this lately. Conservatives claim to love the Constitution, so you’d expect them to honor the ACLU, an organization completely and totally devoted to defending the Bill of Rights. But you’d be wrong. So why?

So far as I can tell, it’s because the ACLU is still at the first line of defense: those most likely to suffer from denial of their rights are not, by and large, popular people—rights are always denied first to the marginalized. Once those have no rights, then the denial can proceed to more mainstream subgroups.

As a result, the ACLU frequently defends the rights of unpopular people—most notably, perhaps, neo-Nazis, but also atheists, gays, people of color, the poor, women in male-dominated professions, minorities, and so on.

The position of the conservatives seems to be that only people whom they like are entitled to rights. Those they dislike should have no rights. Thus their hatred of the ACLU.

I am not sure of this. Perhaps some conservative readers can explain their opposition to a group dedicated to protecting the Bill of Rights.

Megs is not actually pooping mice, you’ll be relieved to know. It’s just that some of her mice happened to lie in an odd position. Note the orange catnip carrot, one of her favorite toys. Kitties seem to love certain toys, and this is one for Megs.

Yesterday I had a brief exchange with a climate-change denier in the comments. I was struck by the great sensitivity of denialists, and how asymmetrical it is.

Take, for example, lying. Deniers tend to dismiss all of the tens of thousands of peer-reviewed studies and the conclusions of 99% of the publishing climatologists because they detected (somewhere) a lie in the cracked emails from the UK climate center (I actually saw only a few snarky comments) and a news story in the Telegraph (which I blogged), written without even talking to the scientist the story focused on.

Their idea seems to be that if any single instance of lying can be found or inferred, then the whole body of knowledge is false.

Let’s now turn to the studies that support the deniers, and what do you find? Perhaps not lies, but statement after statement that is contrary to facts. For example, that the warming trend is due to the sun. That statement is false, as studies have repeatedly shown that the sun’s radiation cannot be the cause. So I think that qualifies as a lie. Yet deniers are quite comfortable with still accepting the denialist position despite the quantity of evident falsehoods.

The other sensitivity is to conflicts of interest. Many deniers claim that scientists worldwide are in a kind of conspiracy (though absolutely no evidence has been found to support this conspiracy claim, not even in the hacked emails), or at the very least are poised to somehow make money from the effort to fight global warming. (Money will be made in bringing new green technologies to market, but that money will undoubtedly go to corporations, not scientists.)

Yet when one points to the obvious (and enormous) conflicts of interest in the oil and coal industries, who are funneling millions into the fight against facts, is apparently either invisible to or accepted by deniers.

It reminds me strong of “It’s OK if you’re a Republican.”

UPDATE: Just spotted this succinct summation in a comment at Skeptical Science:

Likewise, the fact that so many self-described “skeptics” were willing to uncritically accept the L&C 2009 paper without a second look is a nice demonstration of how credulous rather than skeptical most of these so-called skeptics are. A genuine skeptic would subject claims on all sides of a question to close examination. In the case of “climate skeptics” however, there’s a fascinating combination of extreme, exaggerated skepticism towards mainstream climate science coupled with an utter lack of skepticism towards any paper, no matter how weak, that appears to contradict mainstream climate science.