Later On

TheShavingRoom.co.uk is a terrific and clearly long-established forum. Should have listed this long ago. Simple ignorance on my part.

Check it out.

The reader reviews are back on Amazon.com’s listing of the book. I really like those since they clearly demonstrate that the people actually buying the book like it and find it worth their while (and money).

Check out Nanny’s Silly Soap Company, which makes a variety of handmade soaps including shaving soaps and creams.

Scott Horton at Harper’s:

When stories originally surfaced to the effect that President Obama had authorized the killing of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, my first reaction was to say that the criticism of some civil libertarians was overblown. A warrior fighting on the battlefield against U.S. forces in a conflict has no privilege against being killed because he is a U.S. citizen—that’s a well-settled norm of the laws of war, upheld by the Supreme Court in Ex parte Quirin (1942). Surely the Obama Administration would justify its action under these principles: there must be evidence linking al-Awlaki to an imminent, military threat involving al Qaeda and its associated forces, and evidence putting him in a command and control position. I waited to hear confirmation of that, and perhaps even to get a taste of the evidence.

But studying the Obama Administration’s statements over the last two months and reviewing the Justice Department’s response to a lawsuit filed by civil-liberties organizations acting on behalf of al-Awlaki’s father, I come away with a different impression: we’re looking at another power grab for the imperial president.

This whole affair did not have to figure on the public policy stage. The Obama Administration could, of course, have kept the whole matter secret. Moreover, if it really had the national security and state secrecy concerns that DOJ lawyers now claim in their briefs, that’s just what it would have done. Instead, on April 7, “high-level U.S. officials” advised a series of national publications, including the Washington Post and New York Times that the National Security Council, headed by President Obama, had issued paperwork to authorize a lethal attack on al-Awlaki. These reports were confirmed (obliquely) by former National Intelligence Director Dennis C. Blair. Then Counterterrorism Advisor John Brennan spilled the beans in an interview with the Washington Times. It decided to shove the case of al-Awlaki into the political spotlight—perhaps as the latest chapter in the Obama team’s “¿quién es más macho?” struggle with their Bush-era predecessors. Having done so, they had an obligation to the American public to step out of the shadows and fully explain their rationale for authorizing the execution of a U.S. citizen. They have the same obligation to a federal court. They don’t have to tell us how they plan to kill him. They have to tell us why they feel they have legal authority to do it and what facts they have that justify this extreme claim of presidential power. The self-serving claims of the Justice Department’s briefwriters notwithstanding, the basis for the president’s claim of legal authority cannot itself be a secret.

The Justice Department’s brief is filled with slithering evasions and half-truths about what the administration previously said and did. It invokes state secrecy defenses, claiming that this is something “rarely done,” and that the government is entitled to stop the case from proceeding. And it argues that al-Awlaki can avoid the threat of extrajudicial execution simply by walking into the U.S. embassy in Yemen and turning himself in—a legitimate call if there were criminal charges pending against him, but where are they? This is the typical niggling of lawyers out to defend their client in a lawsuit without revealing much of their hand. But it is fundamentally unworthy of the American government, and it reveals an attitude to the public and the courts that borders on contempt. I picked up this brief expecting to nod in agreement with Obama on this issue, and I came away concerned about an unseemly game plan.

I have no doubt that the Obama Administration will prevail in this litigation. The court handling the case is likely to employ one of several judicial escape pods. It will find that al-Awlaki senior cannot represent the interests of his son, for instance, or it will determine that the issue presented is essentially a political question in which federal courts shouldn’t meddle. Indeed, any federal court would feel awkward reviewing the executive’s decision to designate targets in a war. But these findings would be acts of judicial cowardice. The executive should be forced to explain itself.

No doubt the government has concluded that al-Awlaki is a heinous figure who has committed serious crimes and should be made to pay for it. But for all of the massive operations recently undertaken in Yemen, I see no evidence yet that the government is trying to apprehend him and charge him for any criminal acts–even though it has spelled out facts suggesting that it could easily do just that. Is the rationale that a bullet to the head or a bomb dropped on his house would be far more expedient than an indictment and a trial? That sends a chill down my spine. It seems increasingly that the Obama White House is using the al-Awlaki case to establish a new principle: the president’s power to order extrajudicial executions of American citizens. I don’t for a second question the principle established in Quirin, and I believe that the president can in some circumstances target and remove figures in a command-and-control position over hostile forces even if they are removed from a conventional battlefield. But I am deeply suspicious of the need to add to the president’s theoretical powers by killing a U.S. citizen in Yemen who could certainly be captured, brought back to the United States and put on trial.

A number of commentators have questioned the president’s claim of authority to assassinate, some calling it “tyrannical.” As a wise observer wrote of the suspension of the habeas corpus right of Americans in 1777, tyranny comes “when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts…. Now a line is drawn, which may be advanced further and further at pleasure, on the same arguments of mere expedience on which it was first described.” This process of steady erosion has long been under way in our country. When the executive claims the power to take the life of a citizen without recourse to law and legal process, and seeks to sustain that under vague claims of commander-in-chief authority, that claim is in its essence tyrannical.

Take a look at the smörgåsbord of chemicals industry serves up for you to put on your face.

Yesterday’s bread and olive oil at lunch, followed by the depth-bomb scoop of delicious ice cream, made me fear that I would lose a lot of ground. In fact, I lost 0.1 lb: 218.9 lbs Saturday morning, 218.8 lbs this morning: BMI 29.6 (drawing farther away from the obesity shore). OTOH, I know how you can think things are fine and in fact it’s a trap waiting to be sprung, so today I’ll eat quite carefully indeed.

The plane trip will be done with my carry-on food: 4-5 apples, 8 Ry-Vita crackers (4 starch servings), 5 boiled eggs, and salad (no dressing) if I can pick it up on a stop. Sort of boring, but then it’s going to be a boring day, though I’m taking along books and Kindle, MP3 player and magazines.

Normally I skip shaving on Sunday so that I can enjoy shaving a two-day stubble on Monday, but today I decided to skip that practice because I’m determined to get to the bottom of the Frank brush mystery. Ryan, in comments, suggested that I try the Frank with a shaving cream, an excellent idea—I’m so soap-oriented it had not occurred to me. I anticipated success—shaving cream seems to be congealed lather, more or less—and success is what I had: very fine and copious lather. Perhaps, contrary to all my statements and beliefs, I have found a brush suited for shaving creams but not for soaps—but I don’t believe that. Tomorrow I try a soap again. It’s a badger brush. It has to work.

So today I enjoyed copious lather—enough for 3, 4, or 8 passes—and also the excellence of TOBS Avocado, certainly one of my favorite shaving creams—not for the fragrance, which is light, but for feel and performance (and, I admit, the idea of rubbing a warm avocado all over my face).

The rhodium-plated Fat Boy with its Swedish Gillette blade did a very fine job indeed—and, speaking of the rhodium plating, I knew that it would improve the razor’s appearance—that much is evident from the photos at the Razor Emporium site—but I didn’t know that I would feel a definite surge of pleasure each time I picked up the razor to use. It is so classy looking!

A splash of Pashana because I enjoyed it yesterday so much. I like this aftershave, but it’s not a good choice for travel: the fragrance lingers. When I travel, I like to use Thayers aftershave, which has essentially no fragrance at all. That’s what you want when you’re jammed into an airplane seat, cheek by jowl with fellow travelers.

Extremely intriguing article by Dan Jones in New Scientist:

Doom and gloom are the order of the day across most of the western world. Economies are faltering, the cost of living is going up and many people’s real income is falling. For some, unemployment is a reality now or in the near future. If the pursuit of happiness is supposed to be one of our goals, prospects appear bleak.

Take a closer look, and it isn’t that simple. In fact, economic hard times have little impact on how happy most people feel. Indeed, it would appear that we humans are built to experience happiness, and understanding why is helping us work out what enhances our feelings of well-being. It even points to ways we can adapt to cope with the hardships the recession may bring, and keep smiling whatever happens.

One thing that is clear is that once life’s basics are paid for, the power of money to bring happiness is limited. In fact, it can be positively harmful to our sense of well-being. Jordi Quoidbach of the University of Liège, Belgium, and colleagues recently asked a group of people to taste a piece of chocolate in their laboratory. They found that the wealthier members of the group spent less time savouring the experience, and reported enjoying the chocolate less than the subjects who weren’t so well off. The same was also true of one group in a separate experiment. This time, half the people had been primed with images of money before they tasted the chocolate. These participants enjoyed the tasting less than a group who had not seen the images, suggesting that just the thought of money is enough to stem our enjoyment of life’s simple pleasures (Psychological Science, vol 21, p 759).

So just what is it that makes us happy? Happiness can take the form of many different positive emotions (See “Happiness is…”), and some hints of what makes us happy may come from work that questions why these emotions first evolved. The answer isn’t as obvious as it is in the case of negative emotions. These are clearly beneficial in the rough and tumble of survival: anger readies us to fight an opponent, fear makes us run away from danger, and disgust steers us away from contaminated foods and other sources of infection. Although there is no shortage of evidence that feelings of pleasure – obtained by finding a tasty meal or a sexy mate, for example – are important in rewarding and consolidating beneficial behaviours, it is harder to explain how the more diffuse positive emotions such as awe, hope or gratitude evolved.

This troubled psychologist Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, so she started looking for evolutionary benefits that pleasure might confer. “I thought there must be more to it than this,” she recalls…

Continue reading, it’s just getting good. And, given the relatively large payoffs from experiencing happiness and other positive emotions, it makes sense to deliberately and systematically develop ways to provide the best chances for that happiness. The article includes a sidebar:

Mood boosters

• Write a diary. Simply writing about a positive experience has been shown to increase people’s life satisfaction, with the benefits lingering for two weeks after the task (Journal of Clinical Psychology, vol 62, p 1291). A further study found that a group of subjects who wrote about their emotions for just 2 minutes a day, over two days, reported fewer physical health complaints four weeks down the line (British Journal of Health Psychology, vol 13, p 9).

• Dispute negative thinking. This is a technique borrowed from cognitive behavioural therapy, in which you catch negative thoughts as they arise and ask: “Is there really reason to think like this? Can I reframe this in a more positive way?”

• Meditate. Barbara Fredrickson and colleagues have shown that meditation can relax both your body and your mind, with many beneficial effects for well-being and happiness (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol 95, p 1045). It’s not easy, however, and you may need some training before you get going.

• Nurture meaningful relationships with family and friends. More than simply improving your well-being, it might just save your life. “Social resources and ties to groups are one of the key buffers protecting us against unhappiness,” says Fredrickson. A recent meta-analysis of 148 studies on links between the quantity and quality of social relationships and mortality suggests that being socially isolated is about as bad for your health as smoking or drinking excessively, and worse than being obese (PLoS Medicine, vol 7, p e10000316).

• Beware consumerism. Buying more possessions won’t make you as happy as spending money on social activities or new and exciting experiences (The Journal of Positive Psychology, vol 4, p 511).

I wonder how many who read the above decide to give some of the above techniques a try to see what happens.

I do love a good “talk” movie (e.g., My Dinner With Andre—come to think of it, about time to watch that again), and I’m watching an extremely interesting one: Waking Life. The Netflix blurb:

Director Richard Linklater’s mesmerizing animated film follows a young man (Wiley Wiggins) as he floats in and out of philosophical discussions with a succession of eccentrics and passionate thinkers, all the while uncertain whether he’s conscious or dreaming. Thanks to each character’s oddball charm, the ethereal conversation is as dynamic as the animation, resulting in an innovative film that is by turns droll, disturbing, and provocative.

UPDATE: Just finished it—loved it! And I particularly liked the music—I sat through the entire end credits just to listen to the music. What style would you call that?

First stop was a fabric store I had spotted on an earlier trip. I thought The Wife would be interested—and she was, since (she says) most fabric stores have sort of given up the game and sell only quilting fabric. This store, though, was a real fabric store and in looking at all the possibilities, I thought that everyone should learn to sew.

This fabric, for example, would make a fine tie, a good blouse, etc. (For all photos, CTE.)

And The Wife liked this one, except (she commented) the map is inaccurate, a comment that cracked me up.

We saw some cool stuff in our walk along Pacific Garden Mall. This carved watermelon, for example, in front of a Thai restaurant that we’ll try on our next trip:

Here are a couple of displays in the store Bead-It. (Bead stores, like hair salons, strive for puns in the name.) First, bead pies:

Next, bead sushi:

Very pleasant outing. And we went home as soon as we felt like it, always a big plus (and why we don’t like parties on boats).

A very nice razor, and I do like this photo. CTE, as always:

Very nice outing. We had lunch at Gabriella’s, very tasty indeed. I had a green bean & shrimp salad with red onion, cucumbers, and a great dressing. The Wife had a very tasty green salad. Then I made the mistake of walking across the street to a local ice-cream parlor with their handmade ice cream. I tasted the Fig Leaf flavor and had one scoop. Oh, boy, what a mistake. I don’t think I can eat food that rich any more. Very uncomfortable and I think I’ll have a nice big glass of ice water for dinner.

Then we wandered a bit down Pacific Garden Mall and went into The Vault, an upscale jewelry store that also has a nice selection of William Henry knives. I have a fairly large collection of WH knives that I accumulated when Matt had his workshop just down the street from where I worked in Santa Cruz. He’s since moved his operation to Oregon and gone pretty upscale, though his knives were always extremely good. And he now makes fountain pens, money clips, and other stuff. Take a look. He has worked steadily and it shows: the quality and ideas have improved significantly, and his quality was always excellent. The locking mechanism on the pocket knives is much improved.

He seems to have observed that most of us open and close our knives and pens more than we use them—and opening and closing are significant actions since they are the first and final steps in using the tool. He has thus devoted considerable though, effort, and design to make the opening and closing superlative experiences, or so it seems to me: opening one of his knives are pens is a distinct and noticeable pleasure, and the same is true of the closing. The experience of the knife/pen is thus framed between two excellent experiences, which cannot help but improve the overall customer experience. Very impressive.

While I knife-shopped, The Wife got acquainted with a very cute and tiny dog. Talking with the owner was illuminating. (We’re not dog people, so this knowledge was new.) First, if you convince your dog that you are the alpha member of the pack, you have few problems, but if you spoil the dog and the dog feels that it is the alpha dog, you have lots of problems—not only with behavior, but an alpha dog feels free to run away, while a beta dog sticks to home and his/her alpha master.

Also, the very small dogs were bred to be companions, which the large dogs are bred to work. Thus large dogs get antsy if they don’t have work and start chewing things, etc. Small dogs are quite happy—so long as they have a companion. But if you leave the small dog alone, you get problems there, too: a companion dog wants/needs its companion.

A stunning contrast:

1. A well-educated, well-compensated professor at a major university

2. A 48-year-old guy working as a dishwasher at a crab shack in Florida

Brad DeLong’s response to 1 here and Michael O’Hare’s response here.

There. That’ll keep you busy (and amazed).

Barry Eisler has a new post well worth reading—and while I’m at it, let me recommend his series of thrillers: top-notch. His post begins:

Andrew Sullivan’s defense of President Obama’s claimed power to have American citizens assassinated nicely reveals much of the illogic behind, and many of the dangers inherent in, America’s Forever War. Let’s examine it point by point.

1. Assassination of American citizens, even if arguably extreme, has only been ordered applied, so far as we know, to four individuals.

When the government attempts to claim some controversial power, it tends to establish the alleged principle behind that power through the facts most convenient for its case. It’s no coincidence, therefore, that the government has used Anwar al-Awlaki, whose name and face are a perfect fit for the popular image of Scary Foreign Terrorist, to make its case for a presidential assassination power. From a public relations perspective, it would have been more difficult to establish the power through the announcement of the impending assassination of someone named, say, Mike Miller, a white Christian. For the same reason, Jose Padilla was a good choicefor the test case the Bush administration used to establish its power to arrest American citizens on American soil, hold them incommunicado in military facilities, and try them in military commissions. Similarly, the CIA was careful to introduce the news about its torture tapes with a low number — just two or three — and then, once the principle of the tapes had been established in the public mind, to mention the real (as far as we know) number, which was ninety-two.

Imagine you’re a top West Wing spinmeister discussing how to recruit influence-makers into supporting the president’s power to assassinate American citizens. Would you claim the power as broadly as possible, right up front? Or would you soft-pedal it, by initially attaching the power to one man with a dark beard and a scary-sounding name? The answer is obvious. Then, later, once the principle has been established, you can use it more expansively, knowing the influence-makers will have a hard time reversing themselves because, after all, they’ve already supported the principle, and knowing that the public will go along because now it’s been properly inoculated against the shock of a full-blown admission.

But even leaving all that aside, the "but it was done to only a few people" argument is pretty weak. The acceptability of government conduct ought to turn on its legality, not on how many people were subjected to it. Presumably Sullivan wouldn’t offer this defense of government conduct if the conduct in question had been torture, though of course this was a primary Bush administration defense of its torture regimen — that only three people were waterboarded.

2. . . .

Continue reading.

Joe Conason in Salon.com:

When exploiting public fear of Islam, as so many Republicans have chosen to do in this election cycle, a favorite tactic is to treat "American Muslim" as a synonym for "homegrown terrorist." But the threat of jihadi attack is not the only form of violent extremism that worries law enforcement officials. According to an extensive investigation by Barton Gellman posted Thursday on the Time magazine website, they are deeply concerned about the growing prospect of violence from the far right.

Last spring, conservatives angrily denounced a Department of Homeland Security study of the violent potential of the revived militia movement as a political abuse by the Obama administration — and forced DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano as well as the White House to back away from the report. But Gellman’s reporting shows that top officials at the FBI and other agencies are in fact deeply concerned over that possibility. While they don’t expect a mass militia assault on Washington or on federal officials in the countryside, they worry about what a deranged loner, armed and trained by a militia group, might do when he becomes impatient waiting for the right-wing revolution. As they listen to the furious rhetoric emanating from organizations such as the Ohio Defense Force, they search nervously for any sign of the next Timothy McVeigh.

A former Washington Post reporter who twice won the Pulitzer Prize, Gellman is now a senior fellow at New York University’s Center for Law and Security, focusing on issues of domestic terrorism. His Time investigation reveals deeply troubling and previously unreported details of some recent incidents of right-wing terror, including neo-Nazi James von Brunn’s assault on the Smithsonian in Washington and an attempted "dirty bomb" plot that almost came to fruition.

Gellman’s sources say that von Brunn, who murdered security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns on June 10, 2009, with a rifle shot, was actually planning to kill White House political advisor David Axelrod — a "seismic political event" that came close to occurring. Much as von Brunn hated the president, he viewed Axelrod, who is Jewish, as a symbol of the Jewish conspiracy he believed to be controlling Obama. Although federal officials never disclosed von Brunn’s real plans, they quickly arranged a Secret Service detail for Axelrod.

Gellman also delves into the plot by a Maine-based neo-Nazi named James Cummings, who liked to dress up in a Gestapo trench coat, to detonate a device filled with deadly radioactive material using plastic explosive, in hopes of killing Obama before his inauguration. Unlike Jose Padilla, the Islamist and former Chicago gang member once accused of plotting to build a dirty bomb, Cummings actually had access to millions of dollars and significant amounts of thorium, cesium and uranium. He planned to bring a dirty bomb hidden in a motor home to Washington to kill Obama and perhaps hundreds of bystanders.

Fortunately for the president and the country, if not for his wife, Cummings was a chronic domestic abuser as well as an insane traitor. Tired of being beaten and threatened by him, she shot Cummings dead on Dec. 9, 2008, before he could execute his scheme.

Said a Maine police detective who investigated the shooting, and came to believe that Cummings could have mounted a major terrorist attack: "If she didn’t do what she did, maybe we would know Mr. Cummings a lot better than we do right now."

Too many violations of the law within the FBI, and too much reluctance to curb their authoritarian impulses. Here’s a report from Dan Burns of the Minnesota Progressive Project:

Last Friday morning, FBI agents raided the homes, and an office, of some Twin Cities peace activists.  Nobody was arrested, but grand jury subpoenas were issued.  Raids were also conducted, and/or subpoenas issued, in Chicago and elsewhere.

First, if you haven’t already seen it, please review this diary, by regular MnPP contributor Curmudgeon.

This post is primarily about informed speculation as to the real motives of law enforcement in this. It is possible that at least some of the people and organizations targeted really have seriously broken, or were planning to seriously break, the law.  But given that nobody was arrested, and nobody targeted seems to have a history as the type that could reasonably be regarded as posing a serious "terrorist threat," I think that those of us that suspect far less noble and worthwhile motives on the part of "The Bureau" are not lacking in justification. And that’s about as "fair and balanced" as I’m prepared to be.  If you don’t agree with me that this whole thing has all the trappings of an egregious, self-serving, vicious stunt (though of course it’s also deeply disturbing, in numerous ways), you may not wish to keep reading.

So what do you suppose that the FBI and its associates are really up to?

1. Nowadays, it apparently doesn’t take much to be considered a threat, according to our great nation’s highest court.  From the Minnesota Independent article linked at the top of this diary:

Peter Erlinder, the controversial William Mitchell College of Law professor and a longtime Anti-War Committee member, told the media that the committee was being targeted under an expanded definition of what constitutes "material support for terrorism," upheld by a recent US Supreme Court decision. The Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder case, he said, confirmed that a US citizen could be prosecuted for even offering legal counsel to a member of a group labeled as a terrorist organization by the State Department. He suggested that the Anti-War Committee’s fact-finding meetings with Palestinian and Colombian dissidents may have opened themselves up to these raids under the loose guidelines.

In other words, the grossly politicized farce that is the United States Supreme Court, strikes again.

Harassment, intimidation, and far worse, for those who don’t care to toe the line, is a long and contemptible practice among twisted powermongers, throughout human history.  (If you read the linked post, be sure to get to the update, about CNN coverage. Though don’t neglect the part about the agents confiscating a photo of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)

3. Given that peace activist Coleen Rowley used to work for the FBI, I do believe that her commentary is highly relevant.  She covers a lot of ground, but I’d like to highlight this, as another motive:

But perhaps what is more important here than a "let’s make work on a slow day" is the perverse career incentives that serve to pressure FBI counter-terrorism agents to produce "stats" (statistics). An agent gains "stats" for serving subpoenas, national security letters for records, executing search warrants, contacting confidential sources, etc., whether or not any relevant evidence is obtained via this "work" and whether or not it leads to prosecution or preventing a crime. It is a well known fact that nearly 1,000 people were rounded up and detained (mostly in New York City) immediately after 9-11. None of those detained were ever identified as "terrorists" but that’s when these career enhancing "stats" began to be awarded for each detention, arrest, subpoena, search warrant, etc.

FBI Director Robert Mueller was nominated, in July 2001, by then-President George W. Bush. And confirmed by the Senate 98-0. He’s rarely been hesitant to "push the envelope."

And, especially since 9/11, few elected officials have dared to stand up to apparent misbehavior, to say the least, on the part of those ostensibly charged with "protecting" us against the unholy forces of evil. Go back and look at the photo at the top of the Minnesota Independent post. No wonder the reactionaries are terrified, and anything goes. 

This time I used the Frank brush with Dovo shaving soap, a good latherer. But again, at the third pass, the lather in the brush was thin and sparse. Weird. It is a badger shaving brush and should work like one. I was sufficiently nonplussed to take my Rooney Style 2 Finest and try it. I easily got 4 passes of good lather and rinsed it out at that point.

I don’t understand this. Maybe it’s me, but then I was able to get good, copious lather from the Rooney. I’ll have to mark this a shaving mystery and continue to use the Frank brush from time to time to see whether things improve. But I would now not recommend this as a beginner brush. The Omega 643167 (they really need a catchier name) remains my recommendation.

Still, by returning to the soap, I had plenty of lather for all three passes. I decided to use the Gillette Toggle this morning after reading this post and learning that its blade adjustment is not like that of the Fat Boy. I loaded a new Schick Platinum Plus blade and after three passes enjoyed a perfect shave.

A splash of Pashana and I’m ready for our outing: we’re going up to Santa Cruz today to poke around.

So far, chronological order:

Getting Back to the Phantom Skill

The Frisbee of Art

Hatching the Pot

This documentary should be fascinating, especially since the US has a fairly large number of unindicted war criminals, currently being protected by Barack Obama in overt violation of the law (as he launches his program to assassinate Americans without due process or judicial review). Andrew O’Hehir in Salon:

Maybe the title of the documentary "Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today"sounds a little pedantic and old-fashioned. That’s because the "today" in question is not, like, today but 1948, when this film was completed by a United States military team and shown in occupied Germany. A compact and devastating record of the history-making trial — held in the symbolic birthplace of the Nazi Party — that held two dozen leading Nazi officials to account for the crimes of the Holocaust and other World War II atrocities, "Nuremberg" was never shown in U.S. theaters, and the master negative and soundtrack were destroyed, for reasons that remain mysterious. (But which can, I believe, be deduced from the evidence.)

Viewed cynically, the immediate purpose of "Nuremberg" was to convince the defeated German population that the blame for their material privation and collective despair lay not with the victorious Allies but with the deranged criminal regime that had led their nation into war in the first place. But writer-director Stuart Schulberg (an Army sergeant and the brother of famous screenwriter Budd Schulberg) clearly had larger goals in mind. For one thing, the Nuremberg trials presented a startling example of postwar global cooperation, with Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson serving as lead prosecutor alongside a team of British, French and Soviet colleagues. (This release is the result of a lengthy restoration process led by Sandra Schulberg, the director’s daughter, and Josh Waletzky.)

For another, Nuremberg introduced an explosive and controversial principle into international law: the idea that political, military and business leaders could be held personally liable for waging aggressive warfare, for murdering civilians or captured enemies, and for the ambiguous category of "crimes against humanity." It was one thing to apply these new juridical concepts to the universally loathed Nazi regime, but quite another to confront the fact that they applied to everyone else as well. Jackson himself wrote to President Harry Truman that the Allies "have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for … We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practicing it." Jackson was talking about the Soviet Union, of course — and it is more than a little rich that Stalin’s murderous totalitarian state had the temerity to participate in a war-crimes tribunal — but as the Cold War proceeded, both superpowers became highly uncomfortable with the theory and practice of international criminal law.

You won’t get any sense of the fascinating (and ongoing) legal and philosophical debate surrounding the Nuremberg trials, which have been attacked as a fraudulent exercise in "victors’ justice" and defended as a breakthrough for international human rights. Schulberg paints in broad strokes, creating an intensely riveting  78-minute portrait that tries to capture both the flavor of a dramatic 10-month trial — one of the 20th century’s first and biggest media spectacles — and the horrific history that provoked it. We hear extended snatches of Jackson’s famously eloquent opening and closing statements, witness key moments in the testimony of the odious and unrepentant Hermann Göring — who committed suicide the night before his scheduled execution — and listen to a number of other high-ranking Nazis plead for their lives.

Schulberg intercuts …

Continue reading.

Get those broken people out of there! Ed Brayton:

In the last few years the FBI has been caught violating statutory law (FISA and the Patriot Act) and the 4th amendment several times. They’ve filed thousands of illegitimate National Security Letters to obtain information without a warrant, lied to Congress and much more. And no it’s revealed that FBI agents and supervisors routinely cheat on an exam to test their knowledge of the limits of their own authority.

A Justice Department investigation has found that FBI agents, including several supervisors, cheated on an important test covering the bureau’s policies for conducting surveillance on Americans.

Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine said Monday that his limited review of allegations that agents improperly took the open-book test together or had access to an answer sheet has turned up "significant abuses and cheating."

They cheated on an open book test.

Fine called on the bureau to discipline the agents, throw out the results and come up with a new test to see if FBI agents understand new rules allowing them to conduct surveillance and open files on Americans without evidence of criminal wrongdoing…

In the inquiry into the exam, the inspector general looked only at four FBI field offices and found enough troubling information to warrant a comprehensive review by the FBI.

In one FBI field office, four agents exploited a computer software flaw "to reveal the answers to the questions as they were taking the exam," Fine said.

Other test-takers used or circulated materials that essentially provided the test answers, he said.

Fine said that almost all of those who cheated "falsely certified" that they did the work themselves, without the help of others.

They cheated and they lied to cover up that fact. Fire them. Every one of them. They cannot be counted on to follow the rules, including the 4th amendment’s protections.