Later On

Interesting:

Researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston have identified a new strategy for treating type 2 diabetes, identifying a cellular pathway that fails when people become obese. By activating this pathway artificially, they were able to normalize blood glucose levels in severely obese and diabetic mice. Their findings will be published online by Nature Medicine on March 28.

Epidemiologists have long known that obesity contributes to type 2 diabetes. In previous work, researcher Umut Ozcan, MD, in Division of Endocrinology at Children’s, showed that the brain, liver and fat cells of obese mice have increased stress in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), a structure in the cell where proteins are assembled, folded into their proper shapes, and dispatched to do jobs for the cell. In the presence of obesity, the ER is overwhelmed and its operations break down. This so-called "ER stress" activates a cascade of events that suppress the body’s response to insulin, and is a key link between obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Until now, however, researchers haven’t known precisely why obesity causes ER stress to develop. Ozcan and colleagues now show that a transcription factor that normally helps relieve ER stress, called X-box binding protein 1 (XBP-1), is unable to function in obese mice. Instead of traveling to the cell nucleus and turning on genes called chaperones, necessary for proper ER function, XBP-1 becomes stranded.

Probing further, the researchers found the reason: XBP-1 fails to interact with a protein fragment called p85, part of an important protein that mediates insulin’s effect of lowering blood glucose levels (phosphotidyl inositol 3 kinase or PI3K). Ozcan’s group identified a new complex of p85 proteins in the cell, and showed that normally, when stimulated by insulin, p85 breaks off and binds to XBP-1, helping it get to the nucleus.

"What we found is, in conditions of obesity, XBP1 cannot go to the nucleus and there is a severe defect in the up-regulation of chaperones," says Ozcan. "But when we increase levels of free p85 in the liver of obese, severely diabetic mice, we see a significant increase in XBP1 activity and chaperone response and, consequently, improved glucose tolerance and reduced blood glucose levels."

When people are obese, the insulin signaling that normally increases free p85 is impaired, leading to more ER stress and more insulin resistance, ultimately leading to type 2 diabetes. But Ozcan thinks this vicious cycle can be circumvented through strategies that increase levels of free p85. His group is taking further steps to activate this novel pathway to create new treatment strategies for type 2 diabetes.

Source: Children’s Hospital Boston

William Selway and Martin Braun in Bloomberg:

JPMorgan Chase & Co., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.and UBS AG were among more than a dozen Wall Street firms involved in a conspiracy to pay below-market interest rates to U.S. state and local governments on investments, according to documents filed in a U.S. Justice Department criminal antitrust case.

A government list of previously unidentified “co- conspirators” contains more than two dozen bankers at firms also including Bank of America Corp.,Bear Stearns Cos., Societe Generale, two of General Electric Co.’s financial businesses and Salomon Smith Barney, the former unit of Citigroup Inc., according to documents filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on March 24.

The papers were filed by attorneys for a former employee of CDR Financial Products Inc., an advisory firm indicted in October. The attorneys, as part of their legal filing, identified the roster as being provided by the government. The document is labeled “list of co-conspirators.”

None of the firms or individuals named on the list has been charged with wrongdoing. The court records mark the first time these companies have been identified as co-conspirators. They provide the broadest look yet at alleged collusion in the $2.8 trillion municipal securities market that the government says delivered profits to Wall Street at taxpayers’ expense.

“If the government is saying they are co-conspirators, the government believes they have sufficient evidence that they can show they were part of the conspiracy,” said Richard Donovan, a partner at New York-based law firm Kelley Drye & Warren LLP and co-chair of its antitrust practice. Donovan isn’t involved in the case.

The government’s case centers on investments known as guaranteed investment contracts that cities, states and school districts buy with the money they receive through municipal bond sales. Some $400 billion of municipal bonds are issued each year, and localities use the contracts to earn a return on some of the money until they need it for construction or other projects.

The Internal Revenue Service sometimes collects earnings on those investments and requires that they be awarded by competitive bidding to ensure that governments receive a fair return. The government charges that CDR ran sham auctions that allowed the banks to pay below-market interest rates to local governments.

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While President Obama continues to avert his eyes, more information comes out. Marcy Wheeler at her blog:

The AP has a long article out providing details behind the Salt Pit death of a detainee named Gul Rahman–a former militant associated with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who was captured on October 29, 2002 at the home of Hekmatyar’s son-in-law, Dr. Ghairat Baheer, along with the Baheer and three others. A week later, Rahman was separated from the others. On November 20, he was doused with water and left in 36 degree cold, only to die a few hours later.

Aside from finally providing details on a story that has long been know, the story is interesting for the way it shows the how the CIA’s torture system fit with DOJ’s approvals in the Bybee Memos. The Rahman death shows that CIA’s managers (probably in the Counterterrorism Center) were involved in direct guidance on a technique that got someone killed. That technique was specifically not approved in the Bybee Two memo. But when CTC worked to exonerate the guy in the field–the manager of the Salt Pit–they pointed to the intent language of the Bybee One memo, and claimed that anything short of intending severe pain could not qualify as torture. Ultimately, CIA’s managers used the Get Out of Jail Free Card that John Yoo had written them to prevent accountability when they gave approval for a technique that got someone killed.

Gul Rahman died from water dousing

The AP describes how, in response to Rahman’s resistance to US guards (he threw a latrine bucket), he was subjected to stress positions and dousing.

At one point, the detainee threw a latrine bucket at his guards. He also threatened to kill them. His stubborn responses provoked harsher treatment. His hands were shackled over his head, he was roughed up and doused with water, according to several former CIA officials.

The exact circumstances of Rahman’s death are not clear, but the Afghan was left in the cold cell on the morning of Nov. 20, when the temperature dipped just below 36 degrees. He was naked from the waist down, said two former U.S. officials familiar with the case. Within hours, he was dead.

Though the AP doesn’t say it, the language used here makes it clear CIA thought of this as water dousing–a technique that would not be approved by DOJ for use until August 26, 2004. After Rahman died, the CIA tried to invent the Legal Principles document as a way to authorize murder and other crimes, but Jack Goldsmith would go on to not only refuse to consider that document OLC authorization, but to refuse to approve water dousing specifically in March 2004.

In other words, three years and our third review of this case later, and DOJ still hasn’t decided whether wetting someone down in close to freezing temperatures is a crime, even though this was a torture technique that DOJ had not approved at the time.

The Salt Pit manager relied on the advice of his superiors

Now, the guy who wet down Rahman apparently wasn’t working off a list of approved techniques. Rather, he was asking for guidance from his superiors.

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Andrew Sullivan hits the nail squarely on the head: the Second Vatican Council indeed affirmed that the Catholic laity function as the mystical body of Christ and are as immune from error (the laity as a whole) as is the Pope (with the Pope’s infallibility restricted to matters of faith and morals and ex cathedra pronouncements: he doesn’t simply drip infallibility—in fact, there’s a wonderful story told about Cardinal Gibbons on his return from the First Vatican Council (1869-70), which declared the Pope’s infallibility (for which Cardinal Gibbons voted): On being asked if he really thought the Pope was absolutely infallible, he replied, “Well, he called me ‘Cardinal Gaboons.’” ). Sullivan’s post:

A reader writes:

In the later of section of Bishop Morlino’s letter that you didn’t include in your quote, he explains — correctly, I believe — that Roman Catholicism is based on a theory of apostolic succession, in which only members of the Church hierarchy have “authority” to define Catholic positions because only they have been called by Jesus Christ: “That’s what we mean when we say that the Church is Apostolic. The bishop is a true Apostle insofar as he teaches with the Holy Father, and the priest is a true Apostle insofar as he teaches with the bishop — that’s how it works.” As a Lutheran, I don’t accept this theory, myself, but it strikes me as a fairly complete, even airtight, answer to your many criticisms of the Pope and the Church.

You’ve been suggesting that bishops have to be “accountable,” that they have “moral authority” only to the extent that they satisfy the rest of us (at least, satisfy ordinary Catholics) that they’re conducting themselves morally. In other words, you’re assuming that the source of their authority lies in common values, the wider community, or some other human agency. This, however, is not Church teaching. To the Church, authority comes not from humans but from Jesus Christ — who, conveniently enough, speaks to humankind through the Church (NOT the Bible — that’s a Protestant view — but only the Bible as the Church interprets it), which means that as a practical matter, the Church hierarchy is not, and does not propose to be, accountable to anyone but itself.

I understand why you reject this view. Modern people in general reject it. But that’s because modern people are heirs of the Protestant Reformation. What you’ve essentially been saying is that the Catholic Church, too, needs to act and think in Protestant terms. If it doesn’t, you say, you wonder how it will “survive.” OK, but if it follows your wishes, it will survive only as another denomination of Protestantism. So, really, it faces a choice between two kinds of non-survival: further shrinkage into a tiny rump of pre-modernists who accept unaccountable authority (that’s what you seem to be warning against), and the disappearance of what makes it distinctively Catholic in favor of a surrender to Protestant modernity (that’s what the bishops seem to be resisting — and understandably so, I think).

Three words: Second Vatican Council. It mattered. It means that the faithful also have a role to play in our church, because we are the church.

From a post by Paul Rosenberg at OpenLeft, based on a Harris Interactive Poll:

If you want, you can chant “Correlation is not causality” as you examine the chart.

Matt Taibbi:

The Holy See’s reaction to both stories has been swift. An unsigned editorial this week in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano attacked the New York Times by name, accusing the paper of willfully ignoring the “truth” of Ratzinger/Benedict’s record and of attempting “to instrumentalize, without any foundation in fact, horrible episodes and sorrowful events uncovered in some cases from decades ago.” The media, it continued, showed a “despicable intent of attacking, at whatever cost, Benedict XVI and his closest collaborators.”

Earlier in the week, New York’s archbishop, Timothy Dolan, used his blog to dismiss the New York Times reports and defend the pontiff’s record by arguing that authorities outside the church also are culpable. Stories about sexual abuse by priests were “fair” if “unending,” he wrote. But he condemned the media for portraying child sexual abuse “as a tragedy unique to the church alone. That, of course, is malarkey.”

via A pope with a problem – latimes.com.

Anyone who’s interested in losing his lunch should read the above-mentioned blog entry by New York archbishop Timothy Dolan in defense of Pope Benedict; the archbishop’s incredibly pompous and self-pitying rant is some of the most depraved horseshit I’ve ever seen on the internet, which is saying a lot.

One expects professional slimeballs like the public relations department of Goldman Sachs to pull out the “Well, we weren’t the only thieves!” argument when accused of financial malfeasance. But I almost couldn’t believe my eyes as I read through Dolan’s retort and it dawned on me that he was actually going to use the “We weren’t the only child molesters!” excuse. Dolan must have very roomy man-robes, because it seems to me you’d need a set of balls like two moons of Jupiter to say such a thing in public and expect it to fly. But this is exactly what Dolan does; he bases his entire defense of the Church on the idea that others are equally culpable. The relevant section of his piece:

What adds to our anger over the nauseating abuse and the awful misjudgment in reassigning such a dangerous man, though, is the glaring fact that we never see similar headlines that would actually be “news”:  How about these, for example?

–    “Doctor Asserts He Ignored Abuse Warnings,” since Dr. Huth admits in the article that he, in fact, told the archdiocese the abusing priest could be reassigned under certain restrictions, a prescription today recognized as terribly wrong;

–    “Doctor Asserts Public Schools Ignored Abuse Warnings,” since the data of Dr. Carol Shakeshaft concludes that the number of cases of abuse of minors by teachers, coaches, counselors, and staff in government schools is much, much worse than by priests;

–    “Doctor Asserts Judges (or Police, Lawyers, District Attorneys, Therapists, Parole Officers) Ignored Abuse Warnings,” since we now know the sober fact that no one in the healing and law enforcement professions knew back then the depth of the scourge of abuse, or the now-taken-for-granted conclusion that abusers of young people can never safely work closely with them again.

The most revolting part of this response is the last bit about how “no one knew… back then” the depth of the scourge of abuse, or the fact that child molesters cannot be allowed near children ever again once caught. Dolan is trying to get us to focus on the 1962 case, but the truth is that as recently as this last decade, the Church’s doctrinal office elected to proceed with church trials for less than 10% of the 3000 cases of abuse reported to them between the years of 2000 and 2010.

And just a few days after this blog entry of Dolan’s, the Times would come out with another story indicating that the current Pope, then a Cardinal named Joseph Ratzinger, seems to have quashed an effort to bring a serial child abuser named Lawrence Murphy to a church trial. The inaction of Ratzinger’s office resulted in Murphy being allowed to die “in the dignity of the priesthood,” which was his wish as expressed in a letter to then-Cardinal Ratzinger in January 1998.

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Kevin Drum has a good list, with some of my own favorites included. Take a look.

Very interesting post by Andrew Sullivan, quoting Ryan Sager:

Ryan Sager’s guess:

[M]y theory of why no one in politics likes to think about political science: because it renders them powerless. How do you do your job as a political consultant when the truth is that 90% of the success or failure of what you do will be determined by the unemployment rate? If you’re a political journalist, how do you write a story every day for a year (or three years, given our current presidential election system) saying, essentially, “Well, the fundamentals still make it exceedingly likely the president will be reelected.” If you’re a politician… well, then you’re a sociopath anyway, so perhaps it’s not worth getting into this scenario too deeply.

And then there’s the fact that so many political scientists are quant-wonks you’d run from if you met them in a Starbucks. And, yes, I have a PhD in political "science".

Interesting post by Shankar Vedantam, a science reporter with the Washington Post and a Nieman fellow at Harvard University.

In the Dictator Game, a volunteer is given a certain goodie — raffle tickets, lottery tickets, money etc — and asked to divide it among a group of people that includes himself or herself. No one in the rest of the group has recourse to discussion or appeal, so the volunteer effectively plays “dictator.”

In this Hidden Brain Puzzle, you are given 100 lottery tickets and asked to share them with three other people. You can keep all 100 — and improve your odds of winning the raffle — or divide the tickets equitably. No one will know what you did, so this is entirely between you and your conscience. You are then asked whether being happy or sad makes it more likely for you to make a selfish decision.

I based this puzzle on an interesting experiment recently conducted by Hui Bing Tan and Joseph P. Forgas involving the Dictator Game. They measured whether volunteers reported feeling happy or sad and asked them to play the dictator game with 10 raffle tickets. They found that happy people tended to be far more selfish than sad people. Happy people were much more likely to hog the raffle tickets, rather than share them with others, whereas sad people were far more likely to think about the feelings of others. The result meshes with a growing body of work that suggests that while happiness feels great for us individually, it seems to have less than salutary effects on the hidden brain when it comes to thinking about the perspectives and feelings of others.

In an article published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the researchers write, “ The kind of mood effects on selfishness demonstrated here may have important implications for real-life behaviors in romantic relationships, organizational decisions, and many other everyday situations where decisions by one person have incontestable consequences for others. Interestingly, our results further challenge the common assumption in much of applied, organisational, clinical and health psychology that positive affect has universally desirable social consequences. Together with other recent experimental studies, our findings confirm that negative affect often produces adaptive and more socially sensitive outcomes.”

How does this research square with your own experience? Are you a more generous person when you are a sadder person?

Katrin Bennhold and Nicholas Kulish in the NY Times:

When Pope Benedict XVI was archbishop of Munich and Freising, he was broadly described as a theologian more concerned with doctrinal debates than personnel matters. That, say his defenders, helps explain why he did not keep close tabs on a pedophile priest sent to his archdiocese in 1980 and allowed to work in a parish.

Yet in 1979, the year before Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, approved the Rev. Peter Hullermann’s move to Munich, the cardinal blocked the assignment to the local university of a prominent theology professor recommended by the university senate. And in 1981, he punished a priest for holding a Mass at a peace demonstration, leading the man to ultimately leave the priesthood.

Pope Benedict’s four-and-a-half-year tenure as archbishop is among the least-examined periods of his life, but his time presiding over 1,713 priests and 2.2 million Catholics was in many ways a dress rehearsal for his present job tending to the Roman Catholic Church’s more than one billion members worldwide.

As archbishop, Benedict expended more energy pursuing theological dissidents than sexual predators. Already in the early 1980s, one could catch a glimpse of a future pope preoccupied with combating any movement away from church tradition. Vatican experts say there is little evidence that Benedict spent much time investigating more than 200 cases of “problem priests” in the diocese, with issues including alcohol abuse, adultery and, now under the microscope, pedophilia.

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The Senate is, of course, the cause of the backlog of confirmations waiting: the Senate simply will not do its job, which is to confirm or disconfirm the proposed appointments. Jack Balkin has a good post (below) on what will happen if the GOP carries through on the promise of opposing everything—but there’s a strong possibility, I think, that the GOP discipline will break down following the big Healthcare Reform fight, because too many Senators saw the total opposition as a loss for the GOP. We’ll see. In the meantime, Balkin:

The victory of President Obama and the Democrats in passing historic health care legislation has changed the political climate in Washington.
What has not changed is the basic structural problem that American government faces. It is a problem for the Democrats today. It will be a problem for the Republicans in the future if nothing is done about it.

The problem is the Senate.

No matter how great last weeks’ victory, the Democrats still need 60 votes in the Senate to pass major new legislative initiatives. They will get little cooperation from the Republicans. We now have the equivalent of parliamentary style parties– featuring strong party discipline by the party out of power– in a system that is not a parliamentary democracy.

This combination is unsustainable.

The Senate got to 60 votes on health care in December. That is what made possible the use of House passage plus reconciliation in March.

But that 60 vote majority is now gone. Very soon Americans will figure out that the President and his party can achieve almost nothing. And at that point the President’s recently gained aura as a winner who can do great things will dissipate.

The country needs to do a great deal more to deal with the economic crisis. There must be new financial regulations. Legislation to promote economic growth and job creation. And there are also important energy and environmental initiatives.

For each of these measures, the President will need 60 votes in the Senate.

The opposition party has given notice that it will not cooperation with the President and his party on anything. The Republicans will resist not only legislative initiatives, but also basic appointments to the Executive branch, as well as judicial appointments. There may be a few exceptions like the recent jobs bill, and we might possibly see minor reforms on financial regulation, but in the months leading up to the 2010 and 2012 elections, it is likely that the Republicans will double down on their policy of virtually complete intransigence.

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Steve Benen:

Much of the attention surrounding President Obama’s recess appointments focuses on the National Labor Relations Board, in large part because Republicans don’t want labor-friendly representatives on the panel.

But Matt Yglesias highlights five of the 15 nominees who received appointments yesterday, in the hopes of emphasizing just "how absurd the level of GOP obstructionism has become."

* Jeffrey Goldstein will be Undersecretary of Treasury for Domestic Finance.

* Michael Mundaca will be Assistant Secretary of Treasury for Tax Policy.

* Eric Hirschorn will be Undersecretary of Commerce for Export Administration.

* Michael Punke will be Deputy US Trade Representative and head up the office in Geneva.

* Islam A. Siddiqui will be Chief Agricultural Negotiator, Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

It’s worth appreciating the fact that all five of these nominees have jobs directly related to the economy, and most of them were blocked from receiving votes in the Senate because Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) hasn’t been satisfied with — get this — enforcement of prohibitions on internet gambling. Kyl wanted enforcement in January, the administration said June, so Kyl effectively responded, "No Treasury Department officials for you."

And so, in the midst of a global economic crisis, the United States government has endured vacancies in important offices because one right-wing senator was pouting over a six-month delay in implementing regulations on internet gambling.

There’s simply no way to defend this. As former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker recently put it, "How can we run a government in the middle of a financial crisis without doing the ordinary, garden-variety administrative work of filling the relevant agencies?"

Fortunately, President Obama got tired of asking that question yesterday.

Matthew Yglesias:

On the subject of recess appointments, James Fallows has this on Alan Bersin who’ll now be heading Customs of Border Patrol:

Bersin was an all-Ivy star football player at Harvard. Then he went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. Then he went to Yale Law School. Then he was a U.S. Attorney in California.Then he was head of a Justice Department unit overseeing US-Mexico border affairs. Then the head of the San Diego school system. Then the Secretary of Education for California, under Arnold Schwarzenegger. Recently he has been an Assistant Secretary at DHS. Last month the past three commissioners of CBP, including two from the GW Bush administration, wrote to Republican Senators asking them, please, to get Bersin into the job rather than leaving this very important agency leaderless.

Instead the Republicans placed various holds on Bersin and the others and would not bring him to a vote. Thus, good for Obama in saying, Enough.

(A) This is a sign of an opposition political party gone mad. But (B) this is a poor way to organize a government. The number of political appointees in the executive branch should be reduced, the proportion of political appointees requiring congressional confirmation should be lowered, and some kind of express track to an up-or-down vote for nominees should be established. Confirming judges—lifetime members of a coequal branch of government—is one thing, but a president needs to be able to staff his administration

I first heard the line from Stephen Colbert, but last night I realized that it’s true.

Consider that a highly authoritarian movement or regime must, to exert its control, enforce a definite worldview, generally one that communicates fear since that keeps the followers in line. Maintaining a specific worldview over time requires the inviolability of certain unquestioned “facts.”

But, as we all know, things change: new discoveries are made, various old ideas turn out to be wrong, people move on, etc. But this on-going change is highly dangerous to an unchanging worldview, so control must be exerted—thus the conservative effort to control media and rewrite history. We’ve seen the history rewriting going on in real time in Texas, where the effort is not so much to introduce false statements (I don’t think that this could currently succeed: too many people watching) as to omit from the history books the events, persons, and facts that contradict or are inconsistent with the conservative worldview. The first time someone raised on state-approved histories reads something like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present, their head probably explodes: so many things they were never told, they never had a chance to learn.

So writers and historians and scientists come under lots of suspicion and pressure from conservatives: writers, historians, and scientists want to explore and reveal reality, and reality is no friend to the conservative mindset, which seeks above all to maintain itself unchanged, to conserve its vision of what the world is like.

In contrast, liberals, and particularly progressives, are interested in change and in learning, and progressives like to learn new information that will expand their thinking, bring in new ideas, and change their current point of view. (This might account for the perceived liberality of institutions of higher learning.)

Reality really does have a liberal bias, at least insofar as reality encourages the recognition of the inevitability of change and the importance of harnessing change for the benefit of everyone. And generally reality will inevitably undermine any fixed mindset.

Last night I roasted a couple of "roast-cut" loin lamb chops form Whole Foods. I call them "roast-cut" because they’re as thick as they are tall—last night’s had 2 ribs each—so they are like little roasts. I cook them at 310 for 35-40 minutes, then let sit for 10 minutes. Wonderful.

I also sautéed in olive oil a head of chopped radicchio, along with two scallions, white and green parts cut on the diagonal, and 3 cloves minced garlic. At the end, I stirred in about 2 Tbs oyster sauce. Very tasty and refreshingly bitter.

It’s hard not to read something into the omission of Dawn Johnsen from those getting recess appointments.

Just finished watching the strange Chinese fantasy that Tsui Hark created in Zu Warriors. Typical Tsui Hark fare: fascinating, vigorous action, semi-comprehensible plotline, overall very satisfying (for me, YMMV).

Apropos, it occurred to me why totalitarian/authoritarian regimes hate writers: You can’t corral the pesky creatures: they go and write fantasy and satire and such things, with plots involving re-establishing righteousness in some fictitious world in which the villains do various villainous things, and you can’t exactly object to that, still there’s something about it that’s not exactly right, etc.

Greenwald:

A newly leaked CIA report prepared earlier this month (.pdf) analyzes how the U.S. Government can best manipulate public opinion in Germany and France — in order to ensure that those countries continue to fight in Afghanistan.  The Report celebrates the fact that the governments of those two nations continue to fight the war in defiance of overwhelming public opinion which opposes it — so much for all the recent veneration of “consent of the governed” — and it notes that this is possible due to lack of interest among their citizenry:   “Public Apathy Enables Leaders to Ignore Voters,” proclaims the title of one section.

But the Report also cites the “fall of the Dutch Government over its troop commitment to Afghanistan” and worries that — particularly if the “bloody summer in Afghanistan” that many predict takes place — what happened to the Dutch will spread as a result of the “fragility of European support” for the war.  As the truly creepy Report title puts it, the CIA’s concern is:  “Why Counting on Apathy May Not Be Enough”:

The Report seeks to provide a back-up plan for “counting on apathy,” and provides ways that the U.S. Government can manipulate public opinion in these foreign countries.  It explains that French sympathy for Afghan refugees means that exploiting Afghan women as pro-war messengers would be effective, while Germans would be more vulnerable to a fear-mongering campaign (failure in Afghanistan means the Terrorists will get you).  The Report highlights the unique ability of Barack Obama to sell war to European populations (click on images to enlarge):

It’s both interesting and revealing that the CIA sees Obama as a valuable asset in putting a pretty face on our wars in the eyes of foreign populations. It is odious — though, of course, completely unsurprising — that the CIA plots ways to manipulate public opinion in foreign countries in order to sustain support for our wars.  Now that this is a Democratic administration doing this and a Democratic war at issue, I doubt many people will object to any of this.  But what is worth noting is how and why this classified Report was made publicly available:  because it was leaked to and then posted by WikiLeaks.org, the site run by the non-profit group Sunshine Press, that is devoted to exposing suppressed government and corporate corruption by publicizing many of their most closely guarded secrets.

* * * * *

I spoke this morning at length with Julian Assange, the Australian citizen who is WikiLeaks’ Editor, regarding the increasingly aggressive war being waged against WikiLeaks by numerous government agencies, including the Pentagon.  Over the past several years, WikiLeaks — which aptly calls itself “the intelligence agency of the people” — has obtained and then published a wide array of secret, incriminating documents (similar to this CIA Report) that expose the activities of numerous governments and corporations.  Among many others, they posted the Standard Operating Manual for Guantanamo,documents showing how corrupt offshore loans precipitated the economic collapse in Iceland, the notorious emails between climate scientists, documents showing toxic dumping off the coast of Africa, and many others.  They have recently come into possession of classified videos relating to civilian causalities under the command of Gen. David Petraeus, as well as documentation relating to civilian-slaughtering airstrikes in Afghanistan which the U.S. military had agreed to release, only to change their mind.

All of this has made WikiLeaks an increasingly hated target of numerous government and economic elites around the world, including the U.S. Government.  As The New York Times put it last week:  “To the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret.”  In 2008, the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center prepared a secret report — obtained and posted by WikiLeaks — devoted to this website and detailing, in a section entitled “Is it Free Speech or Illegal Speech?”, ways it would seek to destroy the organization.  It discusses the possibility that, for some governments, not merely contributing to WikiLeaks, but “even accessing the website itself is a crime,” and outlines its proposal for WikiLeaks’ destruction as follows (click on images to enlarge):

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Take a look.

Kathryn Hill at the Kitchn [sic]:

When I was a kid, my mother made almost everything from scratch, including barbecue sauce. I grew up eating this barbecue sauce, and to my taste buds, no other sauce is as good as this recipe. The recipe came from my Aunt Marlyn, and it’s a combination of sweet, savory, and tangy all at once. And yes, in my family, we call it Psycho Sauce. I just made a mess of pork ribs the other night with this, and it was heaven. This sauce is really easy to make!

My Aunt Marlyn’s Psycho BBQ Sauce Recipe

This recipe fills a Mason jar [what size? – LG]. Can be used on ribs, steaks, burgers, chicken, etc. This sauce keeps in the fridge for a long time.

Ingredients:
1 Tbsp salt
1 Tbsp dry mustard
1 Tbsp chili powder
1 Tbsp paprika
1/2 cup plus 1 Tbsp packed light brown sugar
1/4 cup plus 2 Tbsp catsup
1/4 cup plus 2 Tbsp cider vinegar
3 Tbsp lemon juice
1/4 cup plus 2 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1/4 cup plus 2 Tbsp vegetable oil
1/2 cup plus 1 Tbsp water

Preparation:
In a saucepan, combine the 5 dry ingredients. Blend in the catsup until smooth – this helps to smooth out the dry mustard so it doesn’t float when the liquids are added. Blend in the remaining ingredients.

Bring to a boil over medium heat, and then reduce to a simmer and stir until thickened, about 10 minutes.