Later On

It’s been a while, and the obvious effects of global warming are becoming more serious and more numerous—I’m talking about extreme weather events, not the on-going loss of phytoplankton, which really hasn’t hit yet (though down 40% from the 1950′s, it will have to drop more to catch people’s attention as sea life dies off).

A couple of things that might affect your answer:

A looming oxygen crisis and its impact on our oceans

In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming

UPDATE: More data that conservatives consider important in deciding whether global warming is real: Al Gore is still fat and he has a large house. (I don’t quite understand the relevance, but conservatives believe these facts are central to case against global warming.)

I personally enjoy and am energized by solitude, but for others it’s uncomfortable to the point of being frightening. A friend passed along the link to this instructional video:

Steve Benen:

Major media outlets continue to give him a pass, but the ongoing FBI investigation into Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) took an interesting turn recently when the scandal-plagued Republican started begging for cash for his legal defense fund.

Ensign, at the center of a humiliating sex/corruption/ethics scandal, registered his legal defense fund as a tax-exempt 527 political organization, which itself was a bizarre move. But this week, the right-wing senator sent out his first appeal to help pay his legal bills, acknowledging his adultery, but denying corruption allegations that appear to be plainly true.

Nevada journalist Jon Ralston described the appeal as "galling," adding that by sending the letter, Ensign "showed that not only does he lack self-awareness, but he thinks most people who receive the letter are ignoramuses."

That mistake — this is just about sex! — did not lead to a "difficult legal battle." Ensign is in legal jeopardy not because he slept with his wife’s best friend and his best friend’s wife — that never sounds less grotesque, does it? — but because of how he tried to cover it up, pay off the couple through Mom and Dad and then try to hush up the cuckolded husband by importuning people he regulates to hire him.

The vast majority of people, I think, would forgive Ensign for weakness of the flesh — the social conservative base he pandered to, notwithstanding. But his manipulation of the lives of Cindy and Doug Hampton and his shameful attempt to play the victim now have outraged many who might have been forgiving.

As for "being accused of things I absolutely did not do," I ask: Really? Do tell. All we’ve heard is "no comment" for more than a year. What is there in the past that should induce us to believe him?

Also note, instead of taking responsibilities for his own outrageous behavior, Ensign blamed his legal difficulties on Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which the far-right senator dismissed as a "liberal organization" going after him without cause.

CREW’s Melanie Sloan responded, "Senator Ensign had an extended affair with a campaign staffer, who happened to be married to his chief of staff Doug Hampton, fired them both, and had his parents pay them off without properly reporting it to the Federal Election Commission. He then conspired to help Mr. Hampton to set up a lobbying business to lobby his own office, in violation of federal law. So what exactly are the things that Senator Ensign is being accused of that he did not do?"

What a good question.

I read something a day or two ago about how listening to music while exercising—particularly if the beat matches the rhythm of your movements—made a significant difference, so I got out my Cowon D-2, charged it up, ripped some new tunes (the complete Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker), and got on the Nordic Track ski machine. I’m pleased to report that my own experience is consistent with the finding: I did 10 minutes pretty easily and thought about doing 12 but came to my senses. I’ll move the poods around for a while, and perhaps tomorrow go for 12 minutes.

I have no choice but to exercise: I’m not going to lose more with diet control alone.

UPDATE: Here’s the report.

At last: http://www.honeybeesoaps.net/

The fight against police abusing their power will not end: human frailty means that some members of the police force are drawn to that occupation for the wrong reasons, and weeding out those offenders is just like weeding a garden: a never-ending task. It’s an easier task if police departments themselves recognize the danger and the need for transparency and openness, but (as you can see with the police campaign against being recorded while they are serving the public) police departments often resist—and, one suspects, for reasons like those in this NY Times report by Martin Fackler:

On a December morning in 1991, Toshikazu Sugaya’s quiet, anonymous existence in this sleepy city north of Tokyo ended abruptly with a knock on his door.

It was the police. They wanted to question Mr. Sugaya, then a 45-year-old divorced school bus driver with no friends, in connection with the grisly murder in 1990 of a 4-year-old girl. After 13 hours of interrogation, during which Mr. Sugaya says the police kicked his shins and shouted at him, he tearfully admitted to that murder and to killing two other girls. He was convicted of one murder and sentenced to life in prison.

But last year, after prosecutors admitted that his confession was a fabrication made under duress and that a DNA test used as evidence had been wrong, Mr. Sugaya was released. A court later acquitted him.

The disclosure that Mr. Sugaya had been wrongfully imprisoned for more than 17 years shocked Japan even more than his conviction as a serial killer had. His release drew a barrage of news media coverage, shaking the public’s faith in the police and the courts at a time when Japan’s prolonged economic decline has created growing doubts about Japan’s national institutions in general.

Mr. Sugaya, now 63, has become a national figure, and perhaps the country’s most vocal critic of forced confessions — a recurring problem here. He has written or co-written three books, including one titled “Falsely Convicted,” and tours the country giving talks about his experience.

“I tell people not to believe the police,” said Mr. Sugaya, a small, slightly built man whose face seems almost hidden behind a large pair of wire-rim glasses. “Look what they did to me.”

Indeed, with slumped shoulders and an almost cowering demeanor that brings to mind a frightened animal caught in car headlights, Mr. Sugaya seems as unlikely a crusader against the abuse of power as he did a serial killer. But he can be disarmingly open, and his voice exudes a quiet confidence that he says he acquired in prison, where he learned to fend for himself.

During those years, he said, he met other convicts who told him they had been convicted because of false confessions. He said a desire to help them and others is one reason he has embraced his newfound celebrity, though he remains visibly uncomfortable with all the attention.

“I want to go back to my quiet life of before,” Mr. Sugaya said. “But when I think that others have suffered the same treatment as me, I want to work to help them.”

Before his ordeal, Mr. Sugaya described himself as …

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Chisun Lee at ProPublica:

The government’s case for keeping the Guantánamo Bay prisoner locked away seemed airtight. He had confessed to overseeing the distribution of supplies to al-Qaida fighters battling U.S. forces in Afghanistan, even describing the routes where pack mules hauled the packages.

But a federal judge rejected Fouad Mahmoud Al Rabiah’s confessions, concluding that he had concocted them under intense coercion. Even statements that the government insisted Al Rabiah had made under noncoercive, or "clean," questioning were tainted, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled, and she ordered that Al Rabiah be released.

The government has lost eight of 15 cases in which Guantánamo inmates have said they or witnesses against them were forcibly interrogated, according to ProPublica’s review of 31 published decisions that resolve lawsuits filed by 52 captives who said they’ve been wrongfully detained. Because some of the judges’ opinions are heavily redacted, it’s impossible to be sure there aren’t more cases in which the government offered interrogation evidence collected under questionable circumstances. More than 50 such lawsuits are still pending, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court gave Guantánamo inmates the green light to challenge their detention in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Judges rejected government evidence because of interrogation tactics ranging from verbal threats to physical abuse they called torture. Even in the seven cases the government won, the judges didn’t endorse aggressive methods. In six, they decided the detainees’ stories of abuse simply weren’t credible or were irrelevant to the outcome. In one, the prisoner had repeated self-incriminating statements in military hearings, which the judge viewed as less intimidating than the interrogations he found unacceptable.

The 15 decisions offer the most detailed accounting to date of how information obtained from the Guantánamo inmates through controversial tactics is standing up in court. They come in cases initiated by detainees seeking release via a writ of habeas corpus, not cherry-picked by prosecutors. Criminal law experts say the judges’ opinions help explain why the government has decided not to pursue criminal convictions against some detainees. Such evidence would pose even greater problems in criminal trials, for which requirements of proof are more demanding.

The Obama administration has already said that at least 48 of the remaining 176 prisoners at Guantánamo will be held indefinitely because they’re too dangerous to release but can’t be prosecuted successfully in military or civilian court. They’ve said that coercion-tainted evidence is one obstacle.

In most of the cases the government lost, the judges rejected …

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Very cool:

Lots of fine cars, but also lots and lots of people. I avoid crowds, so I’m having a quiet, gentle weekend.

Good review:

The Book of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks

by Bethany Keeley

A review by Megan Zabel

You’ve seen them on billboards, church marquees, and bathroom stalls: a pair of renegade quotation marks that ultimately results in an unfortunate, unintentional innuendo. You might think that a book comprised solely of photos of publicly displayed punctuation gaffes, accompanied by witty commentary, might get old after awhile. Well, you would be wrong.

The Book of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks, based on the popular blog created by Bethany Keeley, features reader-contributed photos of these superfluous punctuation faux pas. The book’s organized into categories like "At Work," "Social Graces," and "In the Bathroom," and Keeley provides funny commentary without being overly snarky. Even though the book repeats a different shade of the same joke over and over, the variations manage to seem wholly original when applied to different contexts. What self-respecting consumer of words could help from giggling after seeing a billboard that reads:

"Jesus" is Coming

Or, what about a customer feedback box from a national restaurant chain (I’m looking at you, Taco Bell) with a sign proclaiming:

"We Care." Please Let Us Know How You Feel

English is complex — so what’s the big deal if these avant-garde painters of language take the laws of grammar into their own hands and use the world’s billboards, Post-it Notes, and sandwich boards as their canvases?

This is the big deal: Rules are rules, folks. Just like stop signs, speed limits, and laws that prohibit you from marrying your cousins, the regulations placed on the use of punctuation were created to benefit society as a whole. They exist so you don’t unwittingly make fun of your own products, accidentally give the impression you’re not being honest, or unintentionally dispute the existence of "the Lord." (See what I did there?)

Some might argue that only privileged people with soft hands have the time or energy to poke fun at the misuse of punctuation. Perhaps these bold folks going hog-wild with the quotation marks simply have more pressing things to worry about. Maybe so. They’re trying to get people to buy their "soup," attend their "church," or simply just "flush" the toilet. They want emphasis and don’t care how they go about achieving it.

Sorry, you syntax rebels, I’m taking the hardliner approach. We’ve got punctuation for a reason, and it’s to fine-tune the sentiment behind our communication. Anyone with the wherewithal to own a business, buy billboard space, or design a product label should know better. Or use a proofreader. Google it. Something! If you break the rules, prepare to pay the price. (Which is being publicly shamed in this book.)

With that said, Keeley is fairly gentle. She focuses more energy poking fun at the absurdity of the unintended implications and less calling out the language skills of the perpetrators. Read it and chuckle with a good conscience, and think: Oh, that zany language of ours. Always up to "something."

He waited, but when he spoke, he did a fine job. Greenwald has high praise, worth clicking the link. He added this update later:

To anyone wanting to quibble with what was done here — the timing, the wording, etc. — I’ll just pose this question:  when is the last time a President voluntarily entered an inflammatory public controversy by taking a position opposed by 70% of the public?

A poem worth reading:

The Great Lie

by Tim Lewis

The first part of the Great Lie
Is to deny
That slavery was savage, barbaric—
Instead, bleating and placating
With soft metaphor and subtle explication
That so many owners were good and kind,
And most slaves redeemably well-treated,
Never whipped, never maimed,
Never shipped into coffle lines,
Iron masks or necklaces of horns,
But lofted with warmed clothes, adorned quarters,
And a living comfortable and soft

The second part of the Great Lie
Is to …

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My Tres Claveles horsehair brush did a terrific job today—I’m learning how to use it and/or it is breaking in nicely. Three passes with loads of lather. OTOH, the Gillette 7 O’Clock SharpEdge blade in my Gillette English Aristocrat was on its very last legs, so it’s not exactly a BBS shave—but it’s plenty good enough for Saturday. A splash of Alt Innsbruck and we’re off and doing.

Well worth reading.

More info here.

Absolutely astonishing. Dr. Schlessinger is a sick woman.

Bob Grant writes at TheScientist.com:

Plant scientists around the world are warning that hundreds of years of accumulated agricultural heritage are in danger of being plowed under after a Russian court ruled today (August 11) that the land occupied by a world-renowned plant bank on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg may be transferred to the Russian Housing Development Foundation,which plans to build houses on the site.

The fate of the collection at the Pavlovsk Experimental Station,which includes more than 70 hectares planted with 5,500 different varieties of apples, pears, cherries, and numerous berry species — most of which occur nowhere else on Earth and were developed over hundreds of years by farmers in northern Europe, Scandinavia and Russia — was decided in Russia’s Supreme Arbitration Court at 10:30 AM, Moscow time.

"It’s a bad day for biodiversity," said Cary Fowler,director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which has for months been trying to raise awareness of the dire situation at the decades-old collection. The collection of plants was started in 1926 by the father of seed banking, revered Russian geneticist Nikolai Vavilov."Unless somebody intervenes, we’re going to stand there at the gates and watch the bulldozers destroy thousands of varieties that are growing in a collection that dates back to 1926," Fowler told The Scientist.

The Scientist‘s emails to both the Russian Ministry of Economic Development and the housing development foundation were not answered before publication.

Sergei Alexanian, vice director for foreign relations at the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry,which maintains the collection at Pavlovsk, told The Scientist that the institute immediately appealed the decision, which buys about one month while the court addresses the appeal. In that time, researchers at the Vavilov Institute and around the world will appeal to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin — the only two people who have the authority to overturn the ruling — to save the collection. "It’s crazy to destroy the collection," Alexanian said. "This collection belonged not only to the institute and the Russian people, but also to the world community. That’s why we want to appeal to their reason."

"It’s a valuable and unique collection of strains, and its loss would be a serious blow to agriculture," agreed Peter Raven,director of the Missouri Botanical Garden.

Mike Ambrose, seed bank manager at John Innes Center in the UK, told The Scientist that the genetic diversity held in the Pavlovsk collection is irreplaceable. "These collections have survived World War II and very difficult times in the intervening years, and for them to be bulldozed down by a property developer would be a very sad fate, not just for Russia but for agriculture worldwide," said Ambrose, who works frequently with scientists at the Vavilov Institute.

Alexanian was not sure how much money is devoted to maintaining the collection, but did say . . .

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Julian Sanchez posts at a Cato Institute blog:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation trumpets a surprising privacy win last week in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. In U.S. v. Maynard (PDF), the court held that the use of a GPS tracking device to monitor the public movements of a vehicle—something the Supreme Court had held not to constitute a Fourth Amendment search in U.S. v Knotts—could nevertheless become a search when conducted over an extended period.  The Court in Knotts had considered only tracking that encompassed a single journey on a particular day, reasoning that the target of surveillance could have no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in the fact of a trip that any member of the public might easily observe. But the Knotts Court explicitly reserved judgment on potential uses of the technology with broader scope, recognizing that “dragnet” tracking that subjected large numbers of people to “continuous 24-hour surveillance.” Here, the DC court determined that continuous tracking for a period of over a month did violate a reasonable expectation of privacy—and therefore constituted a Fourth Amendment search requiring a judicial warrant—because such intensive secretive tracking by means of public observation is so costly and risky that no  reasonable person expects to be subject to such comprehensive surveillance.

Perhaps ironically, the court’s logic here rests on the so-called “mosaic theory” of privacy, which the government has relied on when resisting Freedom of Information Act requests.  The theory holds that pieces of information that are not in themselves sensitive or potentially injurious to national security can nevertheless be withheld, because in combination (with each other or with other public facts) permit the inference of facts that are sensitive or secret.  The “mosaic,” in other words, may be far more than the sum of the individual tiles that constitute it. Leaving aside for the moment the validity of the government’s invocation of this idea in FOIA cases, there’s an obvious intuitive appeal to the idea, and indeed, we see that it fits our real world expectations about privacy much better than the cruder theory that assumes the sum of “public” facts must always be itself a public fact.

Consider an illustrative hypothetical.  Alice and Bob are having a romantic affair that, for whatever reason, they prefer to keep secret. One evening before a planned date, Bob stops by the corner pharmacy and—in full view of a shop full of strangers—buys some condoms.  He then drives to a restaurant where, again in full view of the other patrons, they have dinner together.  They later drive in separate cars back to Alice’s house, where the neighbors (if they care to take note) can observe from the presence of the car in the driveway that Alice has an evening guest for several hours. It being a weeknight, Bob then returns home, again by public roads. Now, the point of this little story is not, of course, that a judicial warrant should be required before an investigator can physically trail Bob or Alice for an evening.  It’s simply that in ordinary life, we often reasonably suppose the privacy or secrecy of certain facts—that Bob and Alice are having an affair—that could in principle be inferred from the combination of other facts that are (severally) clearly public, because it would be highly unusual for all of them to be observed by the same public.   Even more so when, as in Maynard, we’re talking not about the “public” events of a single evening, but . . .

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Tim Johnson reports for McClatchy:

The drug war in Mexico is at a crossroads. As the death toll climbs above 28,000, President Felipe Calderon confronts growing pressure to try a different strategy — perhaps radically different — to quell the violence unleashed by major drug syndicates.

Even an elder from his own party, former President Vicente Fox, is taking potshots at Calderon, telling him that his policy is seriously off-track.

Many Mexicans don’t know whether their country is winning or losing the war against drug traffickers, but they know they’re fatigued by the brutality that’s sweeping parts of their nation.

Calderon urged his countrymen this week not to gauge the drug war by the relentless rise of the death toll. In early April, newspaper tallies put the toll at around 18,000, but legislators then leaked a higher official estimate: 22,700. Earlier this month, the nation’s intelligence chief said that 28,000 people most likely had been killed since Calderon came to office in late 2006.

"The number of murders or the degree of violence isn’t necessarily the best indicator of progress or retreat, or if the war . . . is won or lost," the president told opposition party chiefs at a meeting called to pull the nation behind his counter-drug strategy. "It is a sign of the severity of the problem."

Calderon had called the party bosses — along with academics and civic leaders — into public sessions on how to improve security and get the upper hand against the drug gangs, several of which are engaged in bloody warfare over smuggling routes.

"What I ask, simply, is for clear ideas and precise proposals on how to improve this strategy," the president said at one session.

What Calderon, a bespectacled economist with a professorial manner, got instead was a barrage of criticism. The government should send soldiers back to their barracks, he was told, and do more to attack money-laundering and to protect judges. Several politicians, including Fox, suggested that Calderon consider legalizing narcotics.

The near-daily brainstorming sessions were interrupted when Calderon flew to Colombia to attend the swearing-in last Saturday of President Juan Manuel Santos, and that nation’s success in battling cocaine cartels has served as a reference point for the discussions.

So have several disclosures and news events that underscore the levels of corruption that are corroding law enforcement efforts. Among them:

• Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna said last Friday that narcotics cartels paid around $100 million a month in bribes to municipal police officers across Mexico, ensuring that their activities went undisturbed.
• Some 250 federal police officers abducted a commander briefly last weekend in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, accusing him of being in cahoots with traffickers and forcing the police to extort citizens.

Calderon is seeking support for wholesale police reform in Mexico, where some 33,000 officers belong to a federal police force and another 430,000 belong to disparate state or municipal forces. He’s pointed to Colombia’s unified national police as an example of how to make headway against organized crime.

Calderon wants to abolish the . . .

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