Later On

John Cole:

Today’s NYT headline on a Sestak story might as well be “Sestak Ignores Specter’s Request to Get Off His Lawn”:

White House Embraces Upstart Who Beat Specter

A 58-year-old former Admiral who’s spent two terms in Congress is an “upstart” only in a world where age and senility are taboo topics. Reporters who would cringe at the notion of an 80 year-old performing a bypass, or a 76 year-old prosecuting a murder trial, routinely ignore the fact that Specter and Bennett are elderly men whose prime was well in the past.

The men who beat Bennett in Utah were 30-40 years younger than Bennett. Utah has the lowest median age of any state in the country. But I haven’t seen a single mention of the relevance of Bennett’s age in any of his political eulogies.

A big part of the reason that age is off limits is that the Village also venerates incipient senility within its ranks. If they started pointing out that 70 and 80 year-olds might be better off retired, people would start wondering why we’re still watching Sam Donaldson and reading David Broder.

Very nice article on the Mississippi River’s influence on Mark Twain, by Laura Barton in Intelligent Life:

“NOTICE—Neither the Mark Twain Museum nor the City of Hannibal employs Mark Twain impersonators or look-a-likes.” This poster, hanging in the window of a justice of the peace, tells a cautionary tale about the Missouri town where Mark Twain grew up: half a million people now flock here each year, drawn by the legend of the man himself and his immortal creations Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.

Hannibal is a city of some 17,750 people which labels itself “America’s Home Town”. On the outskirts there is industry—food-processing and cement and agricultural chemicals—but at its heart there is tourism. The main drag is a run of fudge shops and ice-cream parlors, art galleries and antiques stores, and Twain is everywhere: there’s a Tom Sawyer Diorama Museum, a Mark Twain Hotel, Dinette, Motor Inn and River Boat, the Mark Twain Caves and a Mark Twain Museum.

It is evening, midweek and out of season, and the streets of Hannibal are quiet except for the workmen restoring Becky Thatcher’s house and the chirping of crickets. A handful of teenagers cluster near the Twain Museum, where a sign advises: “America’s Official Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher appear here every Friday and Saturday at 11:30am, Sunday 1pm”. The air is still warm, but the light casts cool, sharp shadows on the path down to the riverbank and splays itself in great burnished ripples across the river.

Here, 700 miles from the headwaters, the Mississippi stretches three-fifths of a mile wide, far across to the dark, wooded banks of Illinois. It runs north into Iowa and south to Kentucky, but right on this particular curve the river lies deep and silty, its banks rich with black walnut, maple and hickory trees, and the water itself, dappling blue and gold and olive-green. Standing here, I agree with Twain, who called this view “one of the most beautiful on the Mississippi”.

Mark Twain died 100 years ago this April. He was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 40 miles from this spot, in Florida, Missouri, in 1835. He seemed to steal into writing, first as a composer of humorous verse, then as a travel writer, before he wrote “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, which drew heavily on his youth here in Hannibal. For me as for millions of schoolchildren around the world, “Tom Sawyer” was a first encounter with Twain. Not yet in my teens, I was swept up by tales of playing pirates on river islands, murders in graveyards, hidden treasure and getting lost in underground caves. But even at that stage, it was his tone as much as his material that made an impression: he tugged at your sleeve and wheedled his way past your reservations with a naive, bobbing enthusiasm. Like Sawyer himself, he was the best kind of bad influence.

In later years, studying American Literature with a capital L, I returned to Twain— to Sawyer and his partner-in-crime Huck Finn, as well as to the political satire “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”, to his journalism, commentary and his travel writing—“Innocents Abroad”, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and “Life on the Mississippi”. He could be verbose, and a grouch, and at times he was all elbows and sharp teeth, but he was also piercingly funny, and few could turn a phrase quite so neatly: “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds,” for example, or “Sometimes I wonder, whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.” He was a great social commentator too, an opponent of imperialism and racism, a supporter of women’s rights and labour unions. But more than anything it was his voice that caught me; like that of Walt Whitman, it rang out as something new, something uniquely and compellingly American.

To know Twain fully, you first have to know the river…

Continue reading. I fully agree with the sentiment, and Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi is still a wonderful read. I wrote my senior essay in college on Twain, a paper titled The Education of Huckleberry Finn, and over the years I realized how I was going in the right direction but barely scratched the surface. Occasionally I think of returning to the essay, expanding the part on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a book that set the stage for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

John Cook at Skeptical Science:

Lake Tanganyika, in East Africa, is the second largest lake in the world (by volume). The lake supports a prodigious sardine fishery which provides a major source of animal protein for the region as well as employment for around 1 million people. Direct observations over past 90 years find that Lake Tanganyika has warmed significantly. At the same time, there’s been a drop in primary productivity in the lake impacting sardine populations. To further explore this matter, geologists took lake cores to determine the lake’s surface temperature back to 500 AD (Tierney 2010). They found that warming in the last century is unprecedented over the last 1500 years.

Figure 1: Lake Surface Temperature from Lake Tanganyika palaeorecord for the past 1,500 years, measured in core KH1 (red line) and MC1 (dark red line). Orange shading is 95% error bars.

What effect does temperature have on the lake’s sardine population? To answer this question, a proxy for primary productivity was also reconstructed from the lake cores. Primary productivity was determined from the percentage of biogenic silica in the sediment. They found that over the last 1500 years, when temperature rose, primary productivity fell. In the last 150 years, productivity plummeted from relatively high levels during the early 1800s to some of the lowest sustained values during the past 1,500 years.

How does temperature affect primary productivity? When the surface of the lake warms, the waters become more stratified. This makes it harder for cold currents to rise from the bottom. These currents carry nutrients from the depths toward the surface as food for algae. Sardine then feed off the algae. A less productive lake means fewer fish and therefore less food and income for those living in the region.

The stratification is confirmed by deep-water instrumental measurements which find less warming at deeper layers, revealing an increased temperature gradient. Nevertheless, another possible cause in changing rainfall is explored. Higher rates of precipitation may increase primary productivity. Charcoal levels in the lake cores were used as a proxy for humidity (e.g. – low humidity leads to drought which corresponds with more bushfires). However, they found a weak correlation between charcoal levels and productivity. The stronger relationship between temperature and productivity led the authors to conclude that it’s temperature, not rainfall, that is largely controlling primary productivity.

There’s also a strong match between Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions and the Lake Surface Temperature reconstruction. Temperatures on Lake Tanganyika have largely followed global trends over the past 1500 years as well as the past half-century. From this, the authors infer that surface temperatures in this region vary in concert with the global average and that the recent anomalous warming is a response to anthropogenic greenhouse-gas forcing. As lake temperature and primary productivity are closely related, this is evidence of another impact of man-made global warming on humanity – in this case, the communities and regional economy around Lake Tanganyika.

Janet Raloff in Science News:

“It’s not rocket science.” That’s how a Purdue University mechanical engineer described his calculations of startling amounts of oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from fissures in heavily damaged piping at a BP drill site. During a May 19 science briefing convened by the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, Steve Wereley walked members of Congress through his use of particle image velocimetry to explain how he and other engineers track changes in video images of gases or liquids to estimate the volumes billowing before their eyes.

This technique has been around for a quarter century and has thousands of practitioners. So it’s “well-established,” Wereley said. And when done carefully – with good starting imagery – its accuracy can approach 99 percent, he observed.

Six days earlier, BP for the first time publicly released seafloor video of the oil spewing from pipes at the site of its Deepwater Horizon accident. As soon as engineers saw this video, Wereley and a few of his colleagues started mapping features in the roiling plumes and measuring how quickly those identified features sped downstream. Landmarks of known dimensions helped them calculate cross-sections of the plume and its density.

After probing a 30-second live-action snippet from the well’s damaged riser pipe, a conduit that had essentially served as a huge straw to carry oil from the seafloor to a floating platform 5,000 feet above, Wereley calculated the gusher’s flow rate. Then he projected the daily quantity emerging from the pipe’s wound – a staggering 70,000 barrels per day.

On May 18, BP released a few more video clips, this time showing a 1.2 centimeter diameter hole in another segment of piping. Wereley’s preliminary calculations indicate that the jet of high-pressure oil shooting out of it unleashes somewhere in the neighborhood of another 25,000 barrels of oil each day. With 42 gallons in a barrel, “It seems incomprehensible that so much oil would be coming out of that hole,” he acknowledged. But this tiny breach is upstream of a plume shooting out of the riser pipe, he explained, “so its flow is at a considerably higher pressure.” 

An hour or so earlier, at a hearing before the House Transportation Committee, BP America president Lamar McKay was asked whether his company still subscribed to the view that the damaged well’s maximum release rate hovered around 5,000 barrels a day. “That is the best estimate,” he said. But estimates are hard to make, he noted, since there’s no way to attach a flow meter to the top of the gashes in the damaged pipe.

But when Purdue’s Wereley was asked to hazard a reasonable estimate of the damaged well’s oil-release rate, he concluded that BP’s quantity was a pipedream. A far more likely figure, he offered, was 95,000 barrels a day, plus or minus 20 percent. At least four other independent engineers have pegged the figure at between 25,000 and 100,000 barrels a day, he reported. So all of these estimates from outside the industry “are considerably higher than BP’s,” he pointed out, “and there’s a good overlap between the outsider estimates.”

This would suggest BP’s number is an outlier, said subcommittee chairman Ed Markey (Dem.-Mass.). It is, Wereley assured him.

Is there any chance BP got the number right, Markey asked?

“I don’t see any possibility – any scenario – under which their number is accurate,” Wereley said. He could envision his own estimate dropping, if longer streams of video were made available and they showed large quantities of gas were being emitted, temporally edging out the oil. The big variable, he said is the gas-to-oil ratio emanating from the well. BP has those numbers but hasn’t shared them yet. And the oil giant also has not been sharing much video.

Earlier in the day, Rep. Markey said, he put in a formal request to BP asking that it begin making live streaming video from its wellhead available to the public.

That’s a good start, Wereley said. But the video he’s seen was “compressed” so that much of the fine detail in its data was missing. What proves critical for high-quality flow analyses, he emphasized, is “original unadulterated footage.”

Markey pledged to look into getting it.

Of course BP is hiding the full extent of the damage. Yesterday, BP got the Coast Guard to help them keep CBS News photographers away from the shore of Louisiana, where the oil is starting to land. BP will hide, stall, distort, lie, and do anything they can to minimize the knowledge of the damage and to avoid paying the full costs of the damage.

Matthew Yglesias:

Reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s debate with Peter Beinart I’m struck by how frequently Goldberg deploys a tactic of topic-switching. He’s really interested in emphasizing the idea that Israel faces incredibly serious national security threats from Hezbollah and Iran. I think he’s overstating it, but the fact of the matter is that it’s simply not relevant to what Beinart is talking about, which is the maltreatment of Israel’s Palestinian subjects and the prospect of increasing maltreatment of Israel’s Arab citizens. The former simply isn’t relevant to the latter. In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s the United States was faced with serious security threats from Germany & Japan and then later the Soviet Union. It was also engaged in serious mistreatment of African-Americans. The mistreatment of African-Americans didn’t invalidate the legitimacy of the security concerns, but by the same token the reality of the security concerns didn’t mitigate the wrongness of Jim Crow.

And I mean not that it didn’t outweigh the wrongness of Jim Crow, it didn’t mitigate it at all. Not even a little. It just wasn’t relevant. The Israeli government shouldn’t be ruling over a population of non-citizens in the Occupied Territories and dispossessing them of their land. The settlements are not a form of defense against Hezbollah. The settlements don’t impede Iran’s nuclear program. On the contrary, elites in Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf tend to broadly share the Israeli government’s outlook on the regional security situation but public outrage at Israeli maltreatment of Palestinians makes it difficult for them to cooperate effectively with Israel. America didn’t have Jim Crow because it was afraid of the Russians, America had Jim Crow because many white Americans liked it that way and many other white Americans didn’t care enough to do anything about it. Israel doesn’t take Palestinian land and build houses on it because it’s afraid of Hezbollah, they take the land because many Israelis want the land and because most of the rest of Israelis don’t care enough to stop them.

Rand Paul, GOP candidate for the Senate in Kentucky, turns out to hold some strange beliefs. From a ThinkProgress post by Ian Millhiser:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is one of the greatest accomplishments of the 20th century, banning whites-only lunch counters and similar discrimination in hiring, promotions, hotels and restaurants. Yet, in a recent editorial board interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal, GOP Senate candidate Rand Paul explained why he believes that this landmark law should not apply to private business owners:

INTERVIEWER: Would you have voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

PAUL: I like the Civil Rights Act in the sense that it ended discrimination in all public domains, and I’m all in favor of that.

INTERVIEWER: But?

PAUL: You had to ask me the “but.” I don’t like the idea of telling private business owners—I abhor racism. I think it’s a bad business decision to exclude anybody from your restaurant—but, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership. But I absolutely think there should be no discrimination in anything that gets any public funding, and that’s most of what I think the Civil Rights Act was about in my mind.

Read the whole post—it’s worth it. I just wanted to comment on his strange idea that the government shouldn’t tell private business owners what to do.

That idea shows that Dr. Paul lives in a planet far from reality. Any business owner knows that governments regulate businesses carefully: minimum wage laws, laws regarding work hours and overtime, laws that regulate fire exits, ventilation, maximum occupancy—not to mention the Uniform Commercial Code, a mountain of legislation regulating businesses. "Private" in a business refers to the funding and the ownership, but the business itself falls under the rule of law and regulation, and disallowing racial discrimination is only a tiny part of the laws affecting business.

It is interesting, though, that Dr. Paul focused on this one, a law that racists clearly hate. I can only think that he is trying to build support among racists, and he doesn’t believe that government action to disallow effective racism is in the public interest.

I wouldn’t vote for this guy for dog-catcher. And it seems that having an African-American president has aroused the racists among us.

Back from blood draw, deciding against eating breakfast out. I’m still feeling the effects from yesterday’s wonderful but too-large lunch (see photo), so couldn’t muster interest in breakfast out.

I just took the final 1/4 of a 37.5 mg capsule of Effexor XR, and I am now officially no longer taking an anti-depressant, which sort of makes me sad.

Just joking. Very glad to get shut of it, and we’ll see now how I cope—quite well, I anticipate. Retirement at least avoids all the job-related problems.

Here’s the lunch, but doesn’t show the extremely nice salad melange with crumbled blue cheese that was the first course:

Cella is an Italian shaving preparations that’s like a very soft soap or a stiffish shaving cream, very like Figaro and Virgilio Valobra. Comparing Cella and Figaro: Figaro is porcelain white, has a strong (and attractive) bitter-almond fragrance, and makes a fine lather. Cella is more almond colored, has the ingredients listed on the bottom of the container (so I know, for example, that it is tallow-based), has a much less noticeable almond fragrance, and makes a fine lather.

The fine lather in this case was created with the Simpson Key Hole 3, and the Gillette Executive (gold-plated Fat Boy) set at 5 and holding a Gillette 7 O’Clock SharpEdge blade did a fine job: excellent smoothness in process and finish. A splash of Geo. F. Trumper and I’m out to get a blood draw.

If you’re learning a language, flash cards are the norm, but they’re useful for learning almost anything. Take a look at this Cool Tool.

Andrew Sullivan:

Goldblog interviews Peter Beinart in two parts (one, two). Peter:

I’m not asking Israel to be Utopian. I’m not asking it to allow Palestinians who were forced out (or fled) in 1948 to return to their homes. I’m not even asking it to allow full, equal citizenship to Arab Israelis, since that would require Israel no longer being a Jewish state. I’m actually pretty willing to compromise my liberalism for Israel’s security and for its status as a Jewish state. What I am asking is that Israel not do things that foreclose the possibility of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, because if it is does that it will become—and I’m quoting Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak here—an "apartheid state."

And foreclosing the possibility of a Palestinian state is exactly what the current Israeli coalition wants to do.

You ask what has changed. First, year after year of settlement growth at triple the rate of the Israeli population (including this year, since in practice, Netanyahu’s "partial freeze" has led to no slowdown of building, and in any case he has said it will not be renewed after September).

The more the settlements expand, the more settlers–including fanatical settlers–take over parts of the Israeli bureaucracy and become integral to the Israeli army and rabbinate, all of which makes the prospect of removing them without outright civil war more remote. These people have already murdered an Israeli Prime Minister, and they routinely use violence against Israeli troops and Israeli leftists, not to mention Palestinians.

Their young "hilltop youth" are so extreme that they actually scare the settler old guard. "When will the state of Israel wake up and realize that it is facing a real threat from an enemy within," those words are not from a dove, they are Ben Dror Yemeni, the hawkish editor of Maariv last year. And it’s not just the growth and increased radicalization of the settlers, it’s the emergence of a political coalition determined to protect them and make a Palestinian state impossible.

I definitely have memories of his being honest, but that’s from many years ago. I guess people change. From the Center for American Progress in an email:

President Bush’s massive tax cuts for the rich included a provision that that repealed the estate tax in 2010.

Though the tax is slated to spring back to the 2001 rate in 2011, the House passed a bill late last year to re-establish the tax at the reduced 2009 level.

Under this rate, estates worth less than $3.5 million pay no taxes at all, while larger estates pay 45 percent of anything above that threshold.

As a bill to reinstate the tax is negotiated in the Senate, some senators have been pushing to cut this tax on multi-millionaires even lower to 35 percent, while raising the exemption to $5 million.

Iowa’s Sen. Chuck Grassley (R) has signed onto the plan, thus coming out in support of what could be an enormous tax break for his own family.

Grassley’s net worth is between $2.1 and $5.2 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, so his entire estate could be exempted under a $5 million exemption.

Moreover, Grassley’s proposed tax cut would affect few families other than his own.

If the 2009 rate were made permanent, 99.8 percent of estates would owe no tax at all.

If these levels were made permanent, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities points out that "[o]nly three percent of taxes owed" would be from estates that are, like Grassley’s, worth less than $5 million.

The vast majority of current estate tax revenue comes from the "extremely wealthy," with 62.5 percent of revenue coming from estates worth more than $20 million.

Beyond this, the cut would cost $60 to $80 billion in lost revenue, which would have to be offset with spending cuts or other tax increases.

As the Wonk Room’s Pat Garofalo has noted, it’s a huge waste to spend $60-80 billion in order to help the wealthiest 0.2 percent of households while we have soaring deficits and high unemployment.

Andrew Sullivan:

The prime minister of Israel has repeatedly compared the establishment of a Palestinian state to the Holocaust. His foreign minister, and protégé, has flirted with advocating the physical expulsion of Israeli Arabs. The spiritual leader of his government’s fourth-largest party has called for politicians who advocate ceding territory to the Palestinians to be struck dead. West Bank settlements are growing at triple the rate of the Israeli population, and according to a recent Tel Aviv University poll, 80 percent of religious Jewish Israeli high schoolers would refuse orders to dismantle them. One-third of Jewish Israelis favor pardoning Yigal Amir, the man who murdered Yitzhak Rabin.

I was raised to love Israel, and I will teach my children to love it. But we don’t get to choose what is true. And if you love Israel not only because it is a Jewish state but also because it is a liberal democratic Jewish state, a state that strives to embody the best in the Jewish ethical tradition, there is only one decent response to these truths: fury. If you’re not angry, you’re either not paying attention or you don’t care.  — Peter Beinart.

He goes on to counter Chait’s criticisms of his NYRB piece one by one. Read it all. It’s a devastating expose of Chait’s own indifference to the changing realities in Israel, and of his anti-anti-Israel position. What I found particularly depressing about Chait’s response was the failure to respond to the specific facts Peter has laid out. Instead we have a condescending psychoanalysis of Peter that is built on a previous piece and that seeks to explain Beinart’s evolution is being about Beinart, not Israel or reality. Why does that non-argument sound familiar? It’s about as relevant as where Peter’s essay was published (although it is interesting that a former editor of TNR could never have such an essay printed in its pages).

I await Chait’s future engagement with the facts on the ground. If only he were as tough on Israel’s right as he is on America’s.

Steve Benen:

The House was all set last week to approve the America COMPETES Act, a jobs bill with a specific focus on boosting investing in science, research, and training programs. It was scuttled by a deliberately absurd Republican motion related to pornography, which Dems were afraid to vote against because they knew it’d be used in attack ads.

The little stunt — eerily reminiscent of a farcical scene from "The Simpsons" 15 years ago — delayed consideration of the bipartisan bill, which is due to come back to the House floor today. (Under a suspension of the rules, the GOP won’t be able to use a motion to recommit, but the bill will need a two-thirds majority to pass.)

The American Enterprise Institute’s Norm Ornstein explains in his latest column that last week’s antics, orchestrated by the House Republican leadership, were a sad display. Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) were "visibly exultant" when the America COMPETES Act was needlessly delayed, which only reinforces our worst fears about their abilities as lawmakers.

John Boehner used to be a serious legislator. Eric Cantor is smart and a justifiably rising star in the GOP firmament. But they are becoming the Bart Simpsons of Congress, gleeful at smarmy and adolescent tactics and unable and unwilling to get serious. Instead of encouraging a constructive relationship with the serious and fair-minded legislators on the Democratic side, they are adding to the traction of their take-no-prisoners counterparts. What a shame.

Ornstein has a higher opinion of Boehner’s and Cantor’s abilities than I do — I simply cannot recall a time when Boehner was a "serious legislator" — but the larger point is an important one. The leaders of the House Republican caucus, including a man who may be Speaker of the House in January, are at their most comfortable acting like children. They’ve grown to love gimmicks and stunts, and approach the substance of policymaking with all the seriousness of a kid who enjoys the popping sound of bubble-wrap a little too much.

And if Republicans excel in the midterms, Boehner and Cantor will perceive it as a reward for their antics, which only encourage them to be more ridiculous.

I’ve been mulling over this peculiar comment that I got on this post on how Rima Fakih won Miss USA and promptly sent the Right into hysterics. Here’s the comment in its entirety:

If that bomb in Times Square didn’t fizzle last week, do you think she would have won the pageant?
If hundreds were killed, would you use the word ‘paranoia’?
If mommies and daddies didn’t come home from work, would you still laugh at anything using the word ‘Terrorist’ in its title?

I want to focus on the "thinking" that goes into believing that a terrorist attack by a Pakistani immigrant would disqualify a Lebanese immigrant woman from a beauty contest.

Since Lebanon is distant from Pakistan—and since Miss Fakih has resided in the US since she was 7 years old—it’s VERY unclear to me why the two are connected in any way. I suppose it’s because she’s a Muslim, but al Qaeda is Sunni and she’s Shi’a and the two sects are at daggers drawn.

Still, assuming that the religion is the reason, I’m wondering about contests held when the IRA was actively into terrorism, setting off bombs not only in Belfast but across England. Suppose that the Miss USA winner was Irish—and Catholic, like the IRA. Would she be thought an inappropriate winner?

Somehow I don’t think so. Like ignoring the terrorist attack on the mosque, the situation reveals a huge ugly amount of religious bigotry in our country. And bigots are bigots because their thought processes don’t work very well.

And I still HIGHLY recommend the hilarious comedy Terrorists, available as Netflix Watch Instantly. One thing I particularly like about the movie is the progression of security-theater as the police chief gradually realizes his opportunity to enhance his position and privileges.

It’s also funny how literally no one listens to what the "terrorist" says—instead, they seem to supply from their own internal fears and beliefs what they think he must have said, from the stoner store clerk (who clearly hears the guy say that he wants to party) to the guy running the souvenir shop at the giant stool (who hears the guy say he wants to climb up on top of the stool and have a party), everyone is playing out the drama in their own head.

It’s not a movie that punches you with the jokes—most will slip by if you’re not paying attention. But it’s a very funny movie, and it’s based on the silly aspects of how the US has responded to terrorism: security theater.

Matt Yglesias notes the strange silence from the mainstream media, including the hysterical Right (aka Fox), who generally wet themselves when a terrorist attack occurs even without an explosion, rushing forward with unsolicited advice about not giving suspects a Miranda warning (because terrorist suspects are ipso facto guilty), etc. Yglesias:

Apparently there was a terrorist attack on American soil earlier this week. What’s more, though fortunately nobody was killed in the attack, unlike in the much-hyped Underpants Bomber or Times Square plots, the perpetrator actually managed to build a working bomb. But somehow this attack, despite its greater technical sophistication, hasn’t obtained nearly the same level of media attention. And I just can’t figure out why:

FBI officials in Jacksonville, Fla., say they have found the remnants of a pipe bomb used in a possible hate crime at a mosque during evening prayers.

Along with local police, the FBI launched an investigation after an explosion shook the Islamic Center of Northeast Florida at 9:35 p.m. Monday, when approximately 60 people were inside praying. No one was injured.

It’s a huge mystery to me what could possibly account for the difference.

Bruce Schneier:

This doesn’t seem like the best idea:

Authorities in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh are planning to set up an outsourcing unit in a jail.

The unit will employ 200 educated convicts who will handle back office operations like data entry, and process and transmit information.

It’s not necessarily a bad idea, as long as misuable information isn’t being handled by the criminals.

The unit, which is expected to undertake back-office work for banks, will work round the clock with three shifts of 70 staff each.

Okay, definitely a bad idea.

Working in the unit will also be financially rewarding for the prisoners.

I’ll bet.

For some reason I’m reminded of the Right-wing movement across many states to allow open- and concealed-carry of firearms in bars, with the armed people free to drink. What could go wrong? UPDATE: At least one governor still has common sense.

You may have seen this new feature in the NY Times: a philosophy blog. I didn’t blog it because its first post was the hoary chestnut "What is Philosophy?" But Open Culture has some additional info in a post by Wes Alwan:

This week, The New York Times began a philosophy blog called The Stone, moderated by Simon Critchley. The series will address “issues both timely and timeless – art, war, ethics, gender, popular culture and more.” And it will ask: “What does philosophy look like today? Who are philosophers, what are their concerns and what role do they play in the 21st century?”

Not everyone is happy with the choice of Critchley as moderator, but it looks like there will be participants to suit all temperaments: “Nancy Bauer, Jay Bernstein, Arthur C. Danto, Todd May, Nancy Sherman, Peter Singer and others.”

Critchley begins with a question bound to invite snarky comments: What is a Philosopher? Such comments have a long history … And so the natural starting point for any answer to that question is the popular conception of philosopher as bullshit artist and “absent-minded buffoon”: “Socrates tells the story of Thales, who … was looking so intently at the stars that he fell into a well.” That’s a conception that, I have to admit, troubled me when I was a philosophy graduate student and led me to drop out. And it has troubled philosophers historically: many a sober treatise begins with the unflattering comparison of philosophy to the empirical sciences and the stated goal of remedying this deficiency. And some strains of analytic philosophy argue that the solution to philosophical problems is to realize that there are no such problems, and that philosophy has a relatively modest supporting role in clarifying the foundations of science.

True to my philosophical pedigree, I think that the question is in a way its own answer: philosophical problems naturally elide into the problem of what philosophy is and what it is that philosophers do. One level of reflection tends to lead to the next, and doubt to self-doubt. Philosophers are people who spend their time trying to figure out what they’re doing with their time and why they’re doing it. And so for instance, questions about how we should live (ethics) and what we can know (epistemology) are also questions about whether the life of the mind is worthwhile and whether philosophical pursuits are properly scientific. The unavoidable state of affairs here is that philosophy falls perpetually into one crisis (or well) after another –recent department closures are just one example.

One way of remedying the nagging thought that philosophy is merely a retreat from worldly affairs, practicality, and life in general is to do precisely what The New York Times has done here, and try to initiate more popular and less academic conversations about the subject. (And to get in a plug, it’s what I and two other philosophy grad school dropouts have tried to do with our podcast, The Partially Examined Life; and what I think Open Culture does with its focus on the intersection of education and new media).

For Critchley, the question of time is paramount to answering his opening question: newspapers and blogs are typically focused on timeliness rather than timelessness, and they’re meant for busy people who want to quickly absorb “information.”

But that tension is inherently philosophical.

Wes Alwan lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he works as a writer and researcher and attends the Institute for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture. He also participates in The Partially Examined Life, a podcast consisting of informal discussions about philosophical texts by three philosophy graduate school dropouts.

Janet Raloff at Science News:

Manufacturers have been adding the germ fighter triclosan to soaps, hand washes, and a range of other products for years. But here’s a dirty little secret: Once it washes down the drain, that triclosan can spawn dioxins.

Dioxins come in 75 different flavors, distinguished by how many chlorine atoms dangle from each and where those atoms have attached (their locations indicated by the numbers in the front part of a dioxin’s name). The most toxic is 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, or TCDD. Some related kin bearing four to eight chlorines are also toxic, just less so.

Triclosan’s dioxin progeny belong to this infamous family, but aren’t the ones that have typically tainted the environment. And, before you ask: No one knows how toxic triclosan’s dioxins are. Few investigations have been conducted because chemists considered them arcane and too rare to pose a threat.

Patented in 1964, triclosan quickly found use in medical supplies. By 1987, manufacturers were adding it to liquid hand soaps for the consumer market. Within a little more than a dozen years, three-quarters of all such liquid hand soaps would contain the chemical. And as these soaps were used, triclosan washed down residential drains along with chlorinated tap water, forming super-chlorinated triclosan.

In wastewater treatment plants, the bonus chlorine atom or two that tap water had added to the molecule tends to be stripped off, notes William Arnold, an environmental engineer at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. But in the finishing stage at those treatment plants, most water gets one last chlorine-disinfection step, which “will re-chlorinate the triclosan,” he says, before the water is released out into rivers.

Arnold’s group and others have demonstrated in the lab that …

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After reading this how-to and finding this source for a red-wine-vinegar mother, I’m very tempted. I just have to find a one-gallon crock. Comments from those who have tried this would be quite welcome.

Companies and governments have legitimate reasons to keep some things secret, but once the mechanism is in place, the temptation to high bad errors in judgment by making those secret as well will always be irresistible to those who run the system—and of course it is their own bad errors they wish to hide. So they become extraordinarily sensitive to leaks from whistleblowers—as the NSA did, when a whistleblower violated secrecy to show that NSA had terribly bungled its operational upgrade. That is secrecy designed not to protect the country as to protect incompetent administrators—who, to be fair, need a lot of protection or their incompetence would be exposed, and then where would they be?

Glenn Greenwald:

This is a reminder that one can’t run around exposing the secrets of the most powerful governments, militaries and corporations in the world without consequences (h/t):

The Australian founder of the whistleblower website Wikileaks had his passport confiscated by police when he arrived in Melbourne last week.

Julian Assange, who does not have an official home base and travels every six weeks, told the Australian current affairs program Dateline that immigration officials had said his passport was going to be cancelled because it was looking worn.

However he then received a letter from the Australian Communication Minister Steven Conroy’s office stating that the recent disclosure on Wikileaks of a blacklist of websites the Australian government is preparing to ban had been referred to the Australian Federal Police (AFP).

Last year Wikileaks published a confidential list of websites that the Australian government is preparing to ban under a proposed internet filter — which in turn caused the whistleblower site to be placed on that list.

The Australian document was so damaging because the Australian government claimed that the to-be-banned websites were all associated with child pornography, but the list of the targeted sites including many which had nothing to do with pornography.  That WikiLeaks was then added to the list underscores the intended abuse.

Forcing Assange to remain in Australia would likely be crippling to WikiLeaks.  One of the ways which WikiLeaks protects the confidentiality of its leakers and evades detection is by having Assange constantly move around, managing WikiLeaks from his laptop, backpack, and numerous countries around the world.  Preventing him from leaving Australia would ensure that authorities around the world know where he is and would impede his ability to maintain the secrecy on which WikiLeaks relies.

Secrecy is the crux of institutional power — the principal weapon for maintaining it — and there are very few entities left which can truly threaten that secrecy.  As the worldwide controversy over the Iraqi Apache helicopter attack compellingly demonstrated, WikiLeaks is one of the very few entitles capable of doing so and fearlessly devoted to that mission.  It’s hardly surprising that those responsible would be harassed and intimidated by governmental agencies — it’d be far more surprising if they weren’t — but it’s a testament to how truly threatening they perceive outlets like WikiLeaks to be.  I hope to speak with Assange later today and will provide more details as I know them.