Later On

This morning my weight was up somewhat—it happens—but I noticed that I then became extremely judicious in my food choices for the rest of the day, with the thought in the back of my mind, "If I don’t lose weight, I won’t be getting my money’s worth." Thus a fierce commitment to lose weight so that they don’t cheat me.

Hey, whatever works.

The book I’m reading today is Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. I do like Clay Shirky: he looks at things from an unusual perspective, and explores implications in unexpected directions, but makes it so clear that you keep nodding, "Of course, of course." You get that feeling of having somehow already known what you’re only now reading—because, I think, the elements were all present and recognized, but they needed still to be put into a narrative: the dots must still be connected. Because we’re familiar with the elements, we get the idea that we were also familiar with the connection, but quite often that’s not the case.

Welcome to the brave new world of Obamacare: he cares enough to send assassins. I thought it was just one, but it seems as though the target list includes dozens:

When The Washington Post‘s Dana Priest first revealed (in passing) back in January that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens targeted for assassination, she wrote that "as of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens."  In April, both the Post and the NYT confirmed that the administration had specifically authorized the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki.  Today, The Washington Times‘ Eli Lake has an interview with Obama’s top Terrorism adviser John Brennan in which Brennan strongly suggests that the number of U.S. citizens targeted for assassination could actually be "dozens":

Dozens of Americans have joined terrorist groups and are posing a threat to the United States and its interests abroad, the president’s most senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security said Thursday. . . . "There are, in my mind, dozens of U.S. persons who are in different parts of the world, and they are very concerning to us," said John O. Brennan, deputy White House national security adviser for homeland security and counterterrorism. . . .

"If a person is a U.S. citizen, and he is on the battlefield in Afghanistan or Iraq trying to attack our troops, he will face the full brunt of the U.S. military response," Mr. Brennan said. "If an American person or citizen is in a Yemen or in a Pakistan or in Somalia or another place, and they are trying to carry out attacks against U.S. interests, they also will face the full brunt of a U.S. response. And it can take many forms."

Nobody — or at least not me — disputes the right of the U.S. or any other country to kill someone on an actual battlefield during war without due process.  That’s just obvious, but that’s not remotely what Brennan is talking about, and it’s not remotely what this assassination program is about.  Indeed, Brennan explicitly identified two indistinguishable groups of American citizens who "will face the full brunt of a U.S. response":  (1) those "on the battlefield in Afghanistan or Iraq"; and (2)those "in a Yemen or in a Pakistan or in Somalia or another place."  In other words, the entire world is a "battlefield" — countries where there is a war and countries where there isn’t — and the President’s "battlefield" powers, which are unlimited, extend everywhere.  That theory — the whole world is a battlefield, even the U.S. — was the core premise that spawned 8 years of Bush/Cheney radicalism, and it has been adopted in full by the Obama administration (indeed, it was that "whole-world-is-a-battlefield" theory which Elena Kagan explicitly endorsed during her confirmation hearing for Solicitor General).

Anyone who doubts that the Obama administration has adopted the core Terrorism policies of Bush/Cheney should listen to the concession — or boast — which Brennan himself made in his interview with Lake:

Mr. Brennan toward the end of the interview acknowledged that, despite some differences, there is considerable continuity between the counterterrorism policies of President Bush and President Obama.

"There has been a lot of continuity of effort here from the previous administration to this one," he said. "There are some important distinctions, but sometimes there is too much made of those distinctions. We are building upon some of the good foundational work that has been done."

I would really like never to hear again the complaint that comparing Bush and Obama’s Terrorism and civil liberties policies is unfair, invalid or hyperbolic given that Obama’s top Terrorism adviser himself touts that comparison.  And that’s anything but a surprise, given that Brennan was a Bush-era CIA official who defended many of the most controversial Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies.

I’ve written at length about the reasons why targeting American citizens for assassination who are far away from a "battlefield" is so odious and tyrannical, and I won’t repeat those arguments here.  Suffice to say — and I’m asking this literally — if you’re someone who believes, or are at least willing to acquiesce to the claim, that the U.S. President has the power to target your fellow citizens for assassination without a whiff of due process, what unchecked presidential powers wouldn’t you support or acquiesce to?  I’d really like to hear an answer to that.  That’s the question Al Gore asked about George Bush in a 2006 speech condemning Bush’s claimed powers merely to eavesdrop on and imprison American citizens without charges, let alone assassinate them:  "If the answer is yes, then under the theory by which these acts are committed,are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited? . . . If the president has th[is] inherent authority. . . . then what can’t he do?"  Can anyone defending this Obama policy answer that question?

One other thing that is truly amazing: . . .

Continue reading.

Not any easier, but I’m doing the exercises. Maybe next week they’ll seem easier.

I found the sweet spot for me: 6.5 minutes. Let the eggs come to room temperature (overnight), pierce the big end of the eggs with an egg piercer, place them gently in boiling water and after 6.5 minutes remove them with a slotted spoon to a large bowl of iced water and let them cool. The yolk has started to cook, but the center is still runny.

D.R. Harris Lavender is, as you can see, another shaving cream where the dyer’s hand was too free. Still, it created an extremely nice lather with the Omega Lucretia Borgia synthetic-bristle brush, and the Gillette English Aristocrat Jr. with an Astra Keramik blade did a fine three-pass shave, finished with a splash of Royall Spyce [the spelling mistakes are part of the charm, I assume].

Very good talk from Open Culture. Comments are by Don Colman:

Who couldn’t use this? A basic introduction to Einstein’s thinking – one that assumes no prior knowledge, just an open mind. In one short hour, Ramamurti Shankar (Professor of Physics & Applied Physics at Yale) breaks down Einstein’s theories and formulas for a lay audience. If this whets your appetite, then you’ll want to download Shankar’s free course called The Fundamentals of Physics. You can download it here (iTunes – YouTube – Web Site), or find it in the Physics section of our big collection of Free Online Courses.

Related Content:

Modern Physics: A Complete Introduction

Bill Gates Puts Richard Feynman Lectures Online

Learning Physics Through Free Courses

There. That’ll keep you busy.

Click image, then click result to enlarge fully.

Does this quotation from George Orwell remind you of anything?

All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts.  A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency.Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side . . .  The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

It’s sort of nice to know that the phenomenon is not isolated to the GOP. The quotation comes from a column well worth reading.

Tobias Wolff of Flavorwire lists some lists of summer reading:

With summer comes sunshine, idle afternoons, and book lists meant to fill up sunny, idle afternoons with reading. We decided to make a one-stop location — a list of lists, if you will— to help navigate your page-turning adventures this season. Expect a radiant dose of business, politics, education, and pure pleasure to accompany your beach blanket and sunscreen. Leave a comment with a link — or just a few suggestions — if you’ve a summer reading list you’d like to share.

1. The New York Times
Who and what to expect: Chuck Palahniuk, Christopher Farnsworth, John Grisham, and guilt-free yarns about vampires.

2. Arts Beat
Who and what to expect: Moss Hart, Frank Rich, Jose Quintero, and memoirs about the theater.

3. Los Angeles Times
Who and what to expect: Gary Shteyngart, Roseanne Cash, Zoë Ferraris, and a diverse selection of 60 upcoming titles.

4. Brooklyn Public Library
Who and what to expect: Zoë Heller, Jonathan Lethem, Edmund White, and books about New York City.

5. Mother Jones
Who and what to expect: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Lawrence Wright, Tobias Wolff, and words that critically examine the world we live in.

6. Details
Who and what to expect: Bret Easton Ellis, James Lord, David Mitchell, and musings about what it means to be a man.

7. Deep South Magazine
Who and what to expect: Susan Rebecca White, John Brandon, Rebecca Wells, and tales about all things Southern.

8. Businessweek
Who and what to expect: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Stephen R. Covey, Thomas L. Friedman, and course readings for ambitious MBA students.

9. UC Berkeley
Who and what to expect: Alex Haley, Greg Mortensen, Mike Rose, and reasons why our education system is failing us and how to make it better.

10. HTMLGIANT
Who and what to expect: Roman Jakobson, Adam Robinson, Avital Ronell, and an esoteric list for literature lovers.

11. NPR
Who and what to expect: Brady Udall, Sam Wasson, Kyoko Mori, and recommendations from three bookstore employees across the country.

12. Wall Street Journal
Who and what to expect: Yoko Ogawa, John Steinbeck, Javier Marías, and a wide range of new titles to old classics, high-brow sophistication to low-brow satisfaction.

Naturally enough, Sharon Angle refuses to be interviewed (because her mind is a rat’s nest of weird ideas). But she does illustrate how the GOP hates the poor—indeed, hatred of the poor is so marked in the GOP (including their legislative priorities) that I think it must have interesting psychological roots, like the homophobe’s hatred of Teh Gay usually is found to reflect the person’s fear (and, at some level, recognition) of his own homosexuality. (Science News, for example, reported a study in which homophobes watching gay porn became measurably aroused (measurements from strain gauge on penis), whereas men who lacked negative feelings about homosexuals did not become aroused.)

Steve Benen has this:

The evidence continues to pile up to suggest Republican lawmakers and candidates actively dislike — on a personal level — those who’ve lost their jobs in the recession.

Take Sharron Angle, the extremist Republican Senate candidate in Nevada, for example. Nevada recently passed Michigan as the state with the highest unemployment rate in the country, so it stands to reason that candidates in the state would be sympathetic to the plight of the jobless.

But Angle doesn’t quite see it that way. This video, put together by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) campaign, highlights the Republican candidate’s perspective on the unemployed, whom she describes as "spoiled." Angle added in a separate public appearance, "As your U.S. Senator, I’m not in the business of creating jobs."

This fits into a larger pattern for the party. One GOP congressman recently compared the unemployed to "hobos." In the House, GOP lawmakers tried to eliminate a successful jobs program. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) actually started pushing a measure to require the unemployed to take mandatory drug tests in exchange for benefits. Kentucky’s Rand Paul wants the jobless to quit their bellyaching and "get back to work."

And this week, a unanimous Republican Senate caucus will apparently kill a tax-extenders bill that will, in turn, cut off unemployment benefits for hundreds of thousands of struggling Americans, and cut off state aid that will lead to hundreds of thousands of additional layoffs.

What did the unemployed ever do to offend the Republican Party this much?

Barry Eisler has an interesting insight into why people believe that torture (of others) can save them from danger. And, BTW, I did finish Inside Out and highly recommend it if you’re thriller-inclined. Eisler:

Recently an otherwise seemingly thoughtful person said to me, "I know torture ordinarily doesn’t work because you can’t coerce someone into giving you trustworthy information. But don’t you think there are times when the government has to step over the line to save lives? You know, if terrorists have a nuclear bomb or something?"

The juxtaposition in his question is fascinating and not at all uncommon. It boils down to …

Continue reading.

I have a temporary crown. Just back from dentist, only to return in 3 weeks for permanent crown. I go with gold, the material of choice. The white ceramic looks better, but does not perform so well.

From Dan Colman at Open Culture:

RSA offers up another animated video explaining what makes us tick. This time, they’re featuring a lecture by Daniel Pink, the bestselling author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Revisiting research also found in Dan Ariely’s new book, The Upside of Irrationality, Pink drives home the point that traditional motivation schemes – namely, bonuses – rarely achieve their intended results. In fact, the bigger the bonus, the bigger the decline in performance. Or so studies show again and again. So what does motivate us? The desire to be self-directed. The will to master something. The hope to make a contribution. It’s all what Pink calls “the purpose motive,” and it’s the stuff that keeps this site moving along.

Related Content:

Dan Ariely on the Irrationality of Bonuses

Barbara Ehrenreich on The Perils of Positive Psychology

Philip Zimbardo on The Secret Powers of Time

Interesting article by Janet Raloff in Science News:

Resveratrol, a constituent of grapes, peanuts and certain other plants, can fight the proliferation of fat cells and improve the uptake of sugar from the blood, a pair of new studies show. Their findings suggest mechanisms to explain why grape products, including wine, have developed a reputation as heart healthy,obesity-fighting and beneficial for people developing diabetes.

The French Paradox — why France’s fatty cuisine has not saddled its population with rampant heart disease — has mystified nutrition researchers for decades. The French penchant for drinking lots of wine has suggested one explanation. And a number of studies have indicated that alcohol of all types can, in moderation, fight heart disease, diabetes and more.

However, resveratrol has been gaining renown as a potentially pivotal player in the French Paradox. This compound, which some plants make as a natural antibiotic to fight pathogenic bacteria and fungi, has a number of different but equally beneficial actions in human cells. Diets rich in the chemical seem to protect the heart, slow weight gain, boost the rate at which the body burns fat (at least in studies with mice) and even extend lifespan (again, in mice).

But a nagging question has been how resveratrol achieves such benefits. And that’s what the two new studies homed in on.

Ariel Roguin of the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, and his colleagues focused on the heart. Many age-related features of cardiovascular disease trace to the body’s waning ability to rehab parts of vessels that have sustained disease or injury. Contributing to this problem is an age-related decrease in endothelial progenitor cells, or EPCs — essentially blood-vessel repair squads that the bone marrow makes to patch up the endothelium, or interior surface, of damaged blood conduits.

Indeed, the Israeli team notes, “the decreased ability of older people to repair the vascular endothelium has been attributed partially to an age-associated decline in EPC number and function.” In the July American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Roguin’s team offers data indicating that among 30-year-olds who previously had consumed no more than two drinks a week, upping their intake to a glass of red wine daily improved both vascular function and the quality of their EPCs.

Fifteen men and women took part, drinking 250 milliliters (8 fluid ounces) of red wine daily for three weeks. To gauge how well their vessels worked — how responsive they were to changing conditions — the researchers tightened a blood-pressure cuff on each volunteer’s forearm for 5 minutes to reduce blood flow. Afterward, they measured how quickly vessels dilated and returned blood flow to normal. Sick vessels don’t dilate quickly…

Continue reading.

As you see, the Geo. F. Trumper rose is MUCH more vivid than the T&H Rose: dye added with a free hand. So I tend not to use my nice silvertips with this shaving cream. The Plisson Chinese Grey did a fine job, and three passes with the Gillette English Aristocrat produced a smooth face. A splashof the 4711 aftershave, and I’m ready for the day.

I don’t think so. Take a look at this column by Greenwald:

After I fulfilled Jonathan Chait’s plea for a substantive response to his and Jonathan Bernstein’s argument that the President is weak and impotent when it comes to influencing Congress and thus not to be blamed for what they do or don’t do, he "replies" today by ignoring most of the arguments I made and distorting the rest.  Others have responded to my argument a bit more substantively, but I’m content to let stand the extensive arguments I made yesterday which, in my view, disprove this excuse-making and detail the extensive leverage Obama has over Congress (and which he’s used when it was important to him).  But since this "weak Presidency" excuse has become so prevalent, I just want to make three brief, additional points about all of this:

First, just read this — and focus on the last sentence — from a New York article last month by John Heilemann about the role the Obama administration played in killing numerous progressive provisions in the financial reform bill:

Geithner’s team spent much of its time during the debate over the Senate bill helping Senate Banking Committee chair Chris Dodd kill off or modify amendments being offered by more-progressive Democrats. A good example was Bernie Sanders’s measure to audit the Fed, which the administration played a key role in getting the senator from Vermont to tone down. Another was the Brown-Kaufman Amendment, which became a cause célèbre among lefty reformers such as former IMF economist Simon Johnson. "If enacted, Brown-Kaufman would have broken up the six biggest banks in America,” says the senior Treasury official. ‘If we’d been for it, it probably would have happened. But we weren’t, so it didn’t‘."

Please read that last quote again.  How bizarre that a "senior Treasury official" believes that Brown-Kaufman died because the administration wanted it to, but would have been enacted if the White House wanted that outcome.  According to Jonathan Bernstein and Jonathan Chait, anyone who believes that the administration can exert substantial leverage over the domestic policy which Congress enacts is spouting "ignorant nonsense that betrays a deep lack of understanding of how the government of the United States works."  How delusional of this senior Treasury official to think that the administration had the power to make the financial reform legislation more progressive than it is if it wanted that.  It’s almost as though he thinks that the White House exerts influence over members of the President’s party with regard to what legislation is and is not enacted.  That Treasury official probably just needs to sit in on one of Bernstein’s Political Science classes to learn about how the Government really functions:  all that super-sophisticated Bernstein analysis about how weak the President is because it’s the Congress that introduces legislation and the President has no vote and thus no leverage.

Second, Chait — hauling out the decades-old, trite TNR playbook – says that anyone (such as me) who believes that "Obama secretly opposed the public option. . . is revealing himself as a fanatic."  Hey, Jon Chait:  meet that ignorant "fanatic" Russ Feingold, who said this about the public-option-free health care bill:

Read the rest of this entry »

But perhaps he’s missing the point on purpose? Or he just didn’t think it through? Mistermix tries to explain the problem, but I doubt that the guy will ever understand.

Gabriel Schoenfeld in the WSJ:

The Wikileaks videos also do not reveal the hundreds upon hundreds of cases in which American forces refrain from attacking targets precisely because civilians are in harm’s way. That is today an iron rule in Afghanistan, and one for which our soldiers are themselves paying a price in increased casualties. Yet even with the greatest care, armed conflict cannot be sanitized. In almost every war America has ever fought, things on occasion go badly awry. In World War II, instances in which Allied forces massacred captured enemy soldiers were not unheard of. While such cases were a blemish on our military honor, broadcasting the facts to the world and thereby stiffening enemy morale would have been unthinkable in the midst of the great global conflagration.

Although our current struggle does not compare to World War II, there can be no doubt that the dissemination of military videos—far more potent in their impact than written dispatches—can have a profound affect upon our soldiers, inflaming opinion against them in the battlefield and placing their lives at risk. Such videos also undermine the larger counterinsurgency mission of winning hearts and minds. That is why the military keeps them classified. [...]

Schoenfeld is a think-tanker neocon who’s an expert on the media, so it’s interesting to see what’s implicit in his argument. First, the “hearts and minds” he’s concerned about aren’t actually experiencing what’s going on in those videos. Hell, most Afghanis don’t even have an Internet connection. As for “stiffening” the morale of the “enemy”—if their morale isn’t stiffened by an almost-decade of occupation, will one or two videos more make much difference?

The real risk of Wikileaks is that the videos posted there will convince Americans that our endless entanglement there is both brutal and useless. That’s why Wikileaks are so essential, and why they’re a target: Nobody else is doing it.

The military routinely classifies things not because they are truly a matter of national security, but because they are embarrassing to the military or to some particular officer who has the authority to get the materials classified. Cover-up: that is the most important military virtue, based on occurrence.

And we certainly cannot depend on our corporate-owned, corporate-friendly media to report anything that might rock the boat. Corporations like things to run smoothly, keep the dirty work behind the scenes. (Cf. BP’s aggressive efforts to prevent media coverage of the effects of the spill.)

Not always, but usually. Certainly in this case (though the guy was hanging in there until it became public: Vitter obviously didn’t care about the facts, but was sensitive to the publicity). Steve Benen:

When looking ahead to this year’s most competitive Senate races, most observers tend to overlook Sen. David Vitter’s (R) re-election campaign in Louisiana. At first blush, that seems odd — after all, Vitter ran on a right-wing, "family-values" platform and then got caught with prostitutes. He’s also spent the last six years fighting on the wrong side of almost every issue.

The polls, for now, show Vitter leading anyway. That may soon change.

For one thing, Vitter has chosen to fight for BP and oil companies, which might not go over well in Louisiana under the circumstances. For another, Vitter has kept Brent Furer on the payroll.

Who’s Brent Furer? He’s the Senate aide who allegedly held his ex-girlfriend hostage, "threatening to kill her, placing his hand over her mouth, and cutting her in the hand and neck."

After drinking at a restaurant, the two returned to Furer’s Capitol Hill apartment, the report says. Furer "would not let her leave." He "pulled on her coat, which caused it to rip," then "pulled out a knife and stabbed [her] in the hand," the police report says.

Charging documents allege that Furer became angry when he found phone numbers for other men in her blackberry. He smashed her phone when she tried to call 911, the records say, and he shoved her to the floor when she tried to leave, then held his hand over her mouth and threw her on a bed.

Demopoulos told police Furer "uttered the words to her, ‘Do you want to get serious.’" Then, the arrest warrant states, Furer "grabbed an unknown object and held it under her neck. The suspect asked the complainant, ‘Do you want to die?’ The complainant replies and she stated, ‘No, I don’t want to die.’"

After a 90 minute standoff, Furer made her promise not to call police, and then allowed her to leave. She fled to a friend’s house, and was taken by ambulance to the hospital. A slash on her chin took eight stitches to close, the police report says.

Brent Furer now receives taxpayer money to oversee women’s issues for Sen. Vitter. I wish I were kidding, but there’s nothing funny about this.

Vitter is well aware of Furer’s transgressions. Vitter is also well aware of the fact that Furer has been arrested on four other occasions — three times from DUI, and once for cocaine possession. Indeed, at present, Furer remains wanted on an open warrant in Baton Rouge.

The ABC News report noted, "Those who have had encounters with Furer say his presence on Vitter’s payroll raises serious questions about the senator’s judgment."

You think?

Update: That was quick — Furer resigned this morning.