Later On

Continuing my exercise of my razors having the Merkur Classic head, I move along to the 1904—and it looks as though I’m also taking a tour of my QED soap collection.

The Plisson Chinese Grey looks a little wind-whipped to one side: after rinsing it after the last shave and shaking it out, I failed to straighten the bristles. No matter: once wet, they assumed their normal shape, and this time I left them standing fulling upright to dry. The brush produced an excellent lather from the QED Grapefruit & Peppermint, and the 1904, with a Swedish Gillette blade, did a fine job. A splash of Blenheim Bouquet and I’m good to go, if a trifle late.

Extremely interesting letter in New Scientist by Ben Haller, Montreal, Canada:

You report that researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered how the structure of a snail’s shell absorbs and dissipates impacts (23 January, p 17). They are then quoted as saying this could allow us to improve body armour – a comment I find particularly sad.

I can think of lots of ways this discovery could be used to help make life better: improved car bodies that protect us from accidents, damage-absorbing cases for laptops and other electronic devices, or better bicycle helmets.

Their paper indicates that funding for the research came from the US army, the Department of Defense and US defence supplier Raytheon, among others.

It is high time there was a real discussion in the scientific community of the ways that defence funding of research can distort science. Not only does it change the questions that we ask, directing us towards problems that are applicable to warfare, it also changes how we perceive the utility of our most general and useful discoveries.

Is finding new and improved ways to kill each other the best use we can think of for science?

So official recommendations to break the law are just flaws, eh? What about ordering torture in your official capacity? That also seems to be something for which people are not punished. Actually doing torture gets punished, but only if those doing it are enlisted personnel in the military (and not CIA).

Something is deeply wrong  in this country.

A strangely fascinating documentary, available as Watch Instantly.

I just made this recipe for lunch. I screwed up and didn’t notice in time that stems and leaves are cooked separately: stems first, then leaves added later. Still, very tasty.

The news just gets worse and worse. Denialism will eventually collide with reality, but by then it will probably be too late. Here’s the post at Climate Progress:

If you’re looking for summaries of “the best scientific papers on every aspect of climate change” that Tom Friedman’s promised in his column yesterday, you’ve come to right place.  If you want a review of the best papers in the past year (with links), click here.  If you want a broader overview of the literature in the past few years, focusing specifically on how unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gas emissions are projected to impact the nation and the world, try “Intro to global warming impacts.”

Marine life face some of the worst impacts.  We now know that global warming is “capable of wrecking the marine ecosystem and depriving future generations of the harvest of the seas” (see2009 Nature Geoscience study concludes ocean dead zones “devoid of fish and seafood” are poised to expand and “remain for thousands of years”).

The acidification of the ocean in particular is a grave threat  — for links to primary sources and recent studies, see “Imagine a World without Fish: Deadly ocean acidification — hard to deny, harder to geo-engineer, but not hard to stop” (and below).

A new Nature Geoscience study, “Past constraints on the vulnerability of marine calcifiers to massive carbon dioxide release” (subs. req’d) provides a truly ominous warning.  The release from the researchers at the University of Bristol is “Rate of ocean acidification the fastest in 65 million years.”

I am reprinting below a piece by award-winning science journalist Carl Zimmer published this week by Yale environment360, which explains ocean acidification and what this important study says:

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Big Man says:

I’m watching the coverage of this plane crash in Austin. The one where a dude flew a plane into the IRS building after burning his house.
And everybody is falling all over themselves not to call this cat a "terrorist."

It’s "possible terrorist-related activity" but it’s not terrorism and he’s not a terrorist. What the hell?

How can you fly a plane into a building out of spite, and have folks call it "suicide by plane?" That’s like calling it "suicide by portable chest bomb."

Why are media folks wondering if the FBI needs to be involved since it’s a local crime? Really son? Trying to kill federal employees on federal property is just a "local problem" now?

I bet if he had a Muslim surname it would be terrorism. Yep, wouldn’t be no question, just like the first thing you heard after the Fort Hood shooting was about how dude should be called a terrorist. But this white dude is heated at the federal government and attacks that same government by targeting innocents and he’s not a terrorist?

Oh, hell naw. Just no. Stop it you hypocritical bastards. Just stop.

Ulrike Putz wrote the article for Der Spiegel and Salon has a translation:

TEL AVIV — When she left, she left everything behind — even her name. She no longer wanted to be known as Sarah, the name her parents had given her. She’d felt imprisoned by that name for too long; it made her feel different and subject to laws that others imposed upon her. So, she started her new life with a new name, Mayan, the Hebrew word for "source."

It’s been seven years since Mayan "landed on planet Earth," as she puts it. But the 27-year-old doesn’t feel completely at home here yet. She’s a young, modern Israeli woman. Still, despite the dragon tattoo on her shoulder and the loose top offering occasional glimpses of her bra, there are always some moments that betray her past. For example, when her friends talk about old TV series, classic pop music or their first schoolyard crushes, Mayan can’t join in. Until she was 17 years old, Mayan lived in another world, a world where those things simply didn’t exist.

A life completely focused on religion

The "parallel universe" Mayan used to live in has around 550,000 inhabitants. It is the world of the Orthodox Jews in Israel, whose adherents live in tight-knit communities where everything revolves around religion. They radically shield themselves from modern life. Television is frowned upon, as is non-religious music, telephones and the Internet. News that is important to the community is disseminated via notices posted on walls. Boys and girls go to school, but their education is primarily focused on religion.

"Everyone can read and write, but math was over after simple multiplication," Mayan says. "When I left school, I didn’t even know what New York was, and I had never even seen a dog because nobody kept any pets."

According to Irit Paneth, it is this lack of education, in particular, that makes it almost impossible for doubters in these communities to break out of the inflexible corset of their belief. Paneth is a member of Hillel – The Right To Choose, an organization that helps those leaving the Orthodox faith start a normal life. "We are not against the religion," Paneth explains. "But Ultra-Orthodoxy is more like a cult that intellectually cripples children in the name of religion." For most young people who break away from the Orthodox life, she explains, it’s like leaping off a cliff into the unknown. "They come without money, without education in the classical sense, without any chance of employment," Paneth says…

Continue reading.

John Markoff and David Barboza in the NY Times:

A series of online attacks on Google and dozens of other American corporations have been traced to computers at two educational institutions in China, including one with close ties to the Chinese military, say people involved in the investigation.

They also said the attacks, aimed at stealing trade secrets and computer codes and capturing e-mail of Chinese human rights activists, may have begun as early as April, months earlier than previously believed. Google announced on Jan. 12 that it and other companies had been subjected to sophisticated attacks that probably came from China.

Computer security experts, including investigators from the National Security Agency, have been working since then to pinpoint the source of the attacks. Until recently, the trail had led only to servers in Taiwan.

If supported by further investigation, the findings raise as many questions as they answer, including the possibility that some of the attacks came from China but not necessarily from the Chinese government, or even from Chinese sources.

Tracing the attacks further back, to an elite Chinese university and a vocational school, is a breakthrough in a difficult task. Evidence acquired by a United States military contractor that faced the same attacks as Google has even led investigators to suspect a link to a specific computer science class, taught by a Ukrainian professor at the vocational school.

The revelations were shared by the contractor at a meeting of computer security specialists.

The Chinese schools involved are Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School, according to several people with knowledge of the investigation who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the inquiry.

Jiaotong has one of China’s top computer science programs. Just a few weeks ago its students won an international computer programming competition organized by I.B.M. — the “Battle of the Brains” — beating out Stanford and other top-flight universities.

Lanxiang, in east China’s Shandong Province, is a huge vocational school that was established with military support and trains some computer scientists for the military. The school’s computer network is operated by a company with close ties to Baidu, the dominant search engine in China and a competitor of Google.

Within the computer security industry and the Obama administration, analysts differ over how to interpret the finding that …

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Bernie Kerik, you’ll recall, was President Bush’s choice to head the Department of Homeland Security. Sam Dolnick in the NY Times:

Bernard B. Kerik, a former New York police commissioner who rose to national prominence, was sentenced to four years in prison on Thursday after pleading guilty to eight felony charges, including tax fraud and lying to White House officials.

Under the terms of a plea agreement, the prosecution and the defense recommended that Judge Stephen C. Robinson sentence Mr. Kerik to 27 to 33 months in prison. But the judge departed from the sentencing recommendations, giving Mr. Kerik a longer sentence because he said he had betrayed the public’s trust.

“I think it’s fair to say that with great power comes great responsibility and great consequences,” Judge Robinson said. “I think the damage caused by Mr. Kerik is in some ways immeasurable.”

Federal prosecutors had denounced Mr. Kerik, a former police detective who rose to the upper echelons of power, as a corrupt official who sought to trade his authority for lavish benefits. He pleaded guilty on the eve of his trial in November.

Wearing a pinstriped navy-blue suit, Mr. Kerik was thinner and clean-shaven — without the mustache he was long identified with — as he entered the courtroom in United States District Court here. He surveyed the gallery, packed with friends and supporters, embracing some, nodding to others.

When Judge Robinson offered him a chance to speak before sentencing, Mr. Kerik rose from the defense table and spoke in a low and gravelly voice.

“I make no excuses,” he said. “I take full responsibility for the grave mistakes I’ve made. Believe me when I say I have learned from this and I have become and will continue to become a better person. I know I must be punished. I only ask that you allow me to return to my wife and two little girls as soon as possible.” …

Continue reading.

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:

On January 21st, Lloyd Blankfein left a peculiar voicemail message on the work phones of his employees at Goldman Sachs. Fast becoming America’s pre-eminent Marvel Comics supervillain, the CEO used the call to deploy his secret weapon: a pair of giant, nuclear-powered testicles. In his message, Blankfein addressed his plan to pay out gigantic year-end bonuses amid widespread controversy over Goldman’s role in precipitating the global financial crisis.

The bank had already set aside a tidy $16.2 billion for salaries and bonuses — meaning that Goldman employees were each set to take home an average of $498,246, a number roughly commensurate with what they received during the bubble years. Still, the troops were worried: There were rumors that Dr. Ballsachs, bowing to political pressure, might be forced to scale the number back. After all, the country was broke, 14.8 million Americans were stranded on the unemployment line, and Barack Obama and the Democrats were trying to recover the populist high ground after their bitch-whipping in Massachusetts by calling for a "bailout tax" on banks. Maybe this wasn’t the right time for Goldman to be throwing its annual Roman bonus orgy.

Not to worry, Blankfein reassured employees. "In a year that proved to have no shortage of story lines," he said, "I believe very strongly that performance is the ultimate narrative."

Translation: We made a shitload of money last year because we’re so amazing at our jobs, so fuck all those people who want us to reduce our bonuses.

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Take a look at Sweet Home 3D.

Take a look:

Excellent post by Dennis G at Balloon Juice:

One thing that is predictable about the modern conservative movement is that a grifter can always return and can always get a job.

For example, let’s take a look at the real people behind the Tea Party movement and the mad libs rescramble of platitudes also known as the “Mt. Vernon Statement“.

A few weeks ago the Washington Post took a look at the people in DC that are actually doing the work to drive the Tea Party Movement.

Not surprisingly, it was a list of grifters.

Because of my years researching Jack Abramoff and his activities since 1978 quite a few of these names jumped out at me. They also caught the eye of another scholar of the modern conservative movement, Thomas Frank.

Tom is the author of “What’s the Matter with Kansas” and more recently, “The Wrecking Crew“. It was in the Wrecking Crew that Tom took a deep dive into the long history of conservative corruption. In 2008 Tom excerpted The Wrecking Crew in Harper’s Magazine and it is an important tutorial for anybody who wants to understand how corruption works in Washington.

These days Tom writes a weekly column in the Wall Street Journal (of all places) and it should be on your list of weekly reads. This week he took a look at the names mentioned in the WaPo article and explained some aspects of their grifter past: …

Continue reading.

Interesting point by Andrew Leonard in Salon.com:

I can’t say that I was surprised to learn, from a new report by former New York Times tax reporter David Cay Johnston, that "the incomes of the top 400 American households soared to a new record high… in 2007, while the income tax rates they paid fell to a record low…"

Nor was I shocked to learn that those 400 taxpayers, who boasted an average income of $344.8 million, paid an effective tax rate of 16.2 percent, which is "lower than the typical effective income tax rate paid by Americans with incomes in the low six figures."

This is America, right? We’ve come to expect shocking statistics on income inequality. They’re practically our birth right.

But then came the kicker:

The annual top 400 report was first made public by the Clinton administration, but the George W. Bush administration shut down access to the report. Its release was resumed a year ago when President Obama took office.

Because you know, if you are going to reward the richest Americans with tax cuts, it’s best if you keep the rest of us in the dark as to just how much money they’re making, and how little they are paying Uncle Sam.

My own view is that the top marginal tax rate (the rate charged only on the portion of the income over and above previous levels) should be at least 50% and I think 70% would be better.

Well worth watching:

How many of these erroneous memes have infected your own mind?

Styrofoam cups (lots more at the link):

And also take a look at "Emergence".

Very nice story in the NY Times by Nina Bernstein:

The judge and the juvenile had grown up on the same mean streets, 40 years apart. And in fall 1996, they faced each other in a New York court where children are prosecuted as adults, but sentenced like candidates for redemption.

The teenager, a gifted student, was pleading guilty to a string of muggings committed at 15 with an eclectic crew in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The judge, who remembered the pitfalls of Little Italy in the 1950s, urged him to use his sentence — three to nine years in a reformatory — as a chance to turn his life around.

“If you do that, I am here to stand behind you,” the judge, Michael A. Corriero, promised. The youth, Qing Hong Wu, vowed to change.

Mr. Wu kept his word. He was a model inmate, earning release after three years. He became the main support of his immigrant mother, studying and working his way up from data entry clerk to vice president for Internet technology at a national company.

But almost 15 years after his crimes, by applying for citizenship, Mr. Wu, 29, came to the attention of immigration authorities in a parallel law enforcement system that makes no allowances for rehabilitation. He was abruptly locked up in November as a “criminal alien,” subject to mandatory deportation to China — the nation he left at 5, when his family immigrated legally to the United States.

Now Judge Corriero, 67, retired from the bench, is trying to keep his side of the bargain.

“Mr. Wu earned his second chance,” the judge wrote in a letter supporting a petition to Gov. David A. Paterson for a pardon that would erase Mr. Wu’s criminal record and stop the deportation proceedings. “He should have the opportunity to remain in this country.”

The letter is one of dozens of testimonials, including appeals from Mr. Wu’s fiancée, mother and sisters, who are all citizens; from the Police Benevolent Association, where Mr. Wu used to work; and from his employers at the Centerline Capital Group, a real estate financial and management company, where his boss, Tom Pope, calls Mr. Wu “a shining star.”

But under laws enacted in 1996, the same year Mr. Wu was sentenced, the immigration judge hearing the deportation case has no discretion to consider any of it. For Mr. Wu, who remains in a cell in the Monmouth County Correctional Institute in Freehold, N.J., the best hope may be &

Our legal system is screwed up in all sorts of ways, and the inflexibility of the law—unable to take into account the context of circumstances—is one of the worst. Right now, the US is the unfriendly nation.