Later On

It’s not exactly what I think of as a hand, but it can pick up just about anything, quite easily. The video is remarkable.

Greenwald has an extremely important (and cogent) column today on how the mainstream media have leapt to the Pentagon’s defense without a second’s thought (or any investigation of the matter). It begins:

The New York Times‘ John Burns yesterday responded to (and complained about) criticisms — voiced by me, Julian Assange and others — over his gossipy, People Magazine-style "profile" of Assange, which his newspaper centrally featured as part of its coverage of the WikiLeaks document release.  In a self-justifying interview with Yahoo! News‘ Michael Calderone, Burns makes several comments worth examining:

Burns said he doesn’t "recall ever having been the subject of such absolutely, relentless vituperation" following a story in his 35 years at the Times. He said his email inbox has been full of denunciations from readers and a number of academics at top-tier schools such as Harvard, Yale, and MIT.  Some, he said, used "language that I don’t think they would use at their own dinner table."

This is really good to hear:  quite encouraging.  Apparently, many people become quite angry when the newspaper which did more to enable the attack on Iraq than any other media outlet in the world covered one of the most significant war leaks in American history — documents detailing the deaths of more than 100,000 human beings in that war and the heinous abuse of thousands of others — by assigning its most celebrated war correspondent and London Bureau Chief to studiously examine and malign the totally irrelevant personality quirks, alleged mental health, and various personal relationships of Julian Assange.  Imagine that.  Then we have this from Burns:

Such heated reactions to the profile, Burns said, shows "just how embittered the American discourse on these two wars has become."

Oh my, how upsetting.  People are so very "embittered," and over what?  Just a couple of decade-long wars that have spilled enormous amounts of innocent blood, devastated two countries for no good reason, and spawned a worldwide American regime of torture, lawless imprisonment, and brutal occupation.  It’s nothing to get upset over.  People really need to lighten up.  And stop being so mean to John Burns.  That’s what really matters.  

After all — as he himself told you just a couple of months ago — there was just no way that he and his war-supporting media colleagues — holding themselves out as preeminent, not-to-be-questioned experts on that country — could possibly have known that an attack on Iraq would have led to such devastating violence and humanitarian catastrophe (except by listening to, rather than systematically ignoring, the huge numbers of people around the world loudly warning that exactly that could happen).  The last thing he should have to endure are insulting emails from people who seem to think that such episodes warrant anger and recrimination.  And that’s to say nothing of the obvious irony of a reporter complaining about our "embittered discourse" after he just wrote one of the sleaziest, most vicious hit pieces seen in The New York Times in quite some time.

Then there’s this:

The profile, Burns said, is "an absolutely standard journalistic endeavor that we would use with any story of similar importance in the United States" . . . . Burns added that the Times is "not in the business of hagiography" but in the "business of giving our readers the fullest context for these documents" and the Assange’s motivations. "To suggest that doing that is some kind of grotesque journalistic sin, and makes me a sociopath," Burns said, "strikes me as pretty odd."

This is the heart of the matter.  What Burns did to Julian Assange is most certainly not a "standard journalistic endeavor" for The New York Times.  If anyone doubts that, please show me any article that paper has published which trashed the mental health, psyche and personality of a high-ranking American political or military official — a Senator or a General or a President or a cabinet secretary or even a prominent lobbyist — based on quotes from disgruntled associates of theirs.  That is not done, and it never would be.

This kind of character smear ("he’s not in his right mind," pronounced a 25-year-old who sort of knows him) is reserved for people who don’t matter in the world of establishment journalists — i.e., people without power or standing in Washington and, especially, those whom American Government authorities scorn.  In official Washington, Assange is a contemptible loser — the Pentagon hates him and wants him destroyed, and therefore the "reporters" who rely on,  admire and identify with Pentagon officials immediately adopt that perspective — and that’s why he was the target of this type of attack.  After I wrote my criticism of this article on Monday, I was contacted by Burns’ co-writer, Ravi Somaiya, who defended this article from my criticisms.  I agreed to keep the exchange off-the-record at his insistence — and I will do so — but that was the question I kept asking:  point to any instance where the NYT ever subjected Someone Who Matters in Washington to this kind of personality and mental health trashing based on the gossip and condemnation of associates.  It does not exist.

As for Burns’ pronouncement that "the Times is ‘not in the business of hagiography’," he should probably remind himself of what he himself wrote about the Right Honorable Gen. Stanley McChrystal, after Burns had attacked Michael Hastings for daring to publish the General’s own statements that reflected badly on him.  Here’s what Burns wrote while falling all over himself in reverence of this Great American Warrior:

[A]ll that I know about General McChrystal suggests that he is, just as the Rolling Stone article suggested, a maverick of high self-belief and intensity, uncautioned in his disregard for the conventional, but for all that a soldier with a deep belief in the military’s ideals of "duty, honor, country." Though handed what many would regard as a poisoned chalice in the Afghanistan command, he had worked relentlessly to rescue America’s fortunes there. . . . grave misfortune it is, considering what is lost to America in a commander as smart, resolute and as fit for purpose as General McChrystal . . . .

General George S. Patton Jr. . . .  a man who was regarded at the time, like General McChrystal in Afghanistan, as the best, and the toughest, of America’s war-fighting generals. . . . In Iraq, we barely glimpsed General McChrystal, then running the super-secret special operations missions that were crucial in turning the tide against Al Qaeda and the Sunni insurgency under General Petraeus’s command; but he, too, continued the pattern of access after he took command in Afghanistan in June 2009. . . .

Reporters, of course, do best when they keep their views to themselves, to retain their impartiality. But it’s safe to say that many of the men and women who have covered General McChrystal as commander if Afghanistan, or in his previous role as the top United States special forces commander, admired him, and felt at least some unease about the elements in the Rolling Stone article that ended his career.

It seems Burns wrote that while standing and saluting in front of a large wall photograph of the General, or perhaps kneeling in front of it.  The only hint of a criticism was quite backhanded: that Chrystal  "blundered catastrophically" by failing to exercise sufficient caution when speaking to an Unestablished, Unaccepted, reckless, low-level loser like Michael Hastings, who simply did not know — or refused to abide by — the General-protecting rules that Real Reporters use when venerating covering for covering top military officials.  And despite writing 2,700 praise-filled words about McChrystal, Burns never once mentioned little things like his central involvement in the Pat Tillman fraud or the widespread detainee abuse in Iraq under his command, until a reader asked about it, and only then, he mentioned it in passing to dismiss it. Burns’ view of McChrystal is the very definition of journalistic hagiography.

Or consider this NYT profile of Gen. McChrystal by Elisabeth Bumiller and Mark Mazzetti, after he was named to run the war in Afghanistan, that was more creepily worshipful than any Us Weekly profile of a movie star whose baby pictures they are desperate to publish.  It goes on and on with drooling praise, but this is how it begins: . . .

Continue reading. It really makes the case that mainstream journalism is now more or less committed to protecting the Pentagon and covering for government missteps.

Sites that promote and support traditional wetshaving seem to be springing up all over the place. Here’s another: Shaving Products for Men Online.

Mark Kleiman notes an ominous new trend: firing employees because they must take meds. (I assume that the real purpose of this action is to get these people off the payroll, in part to reduce the company’s healthcare costs.) Kleiman:

Being intoxicated at work is a bad idea. So is showing up for work unfit to work for other reasons: for example, being under-slept. The fixation on the “drug-free workplace” has less to do with safety than with the culture wars; otherwise, more firms would test for alcohol, especially after lunch.

If impairment at work were the issue, firms would be better advised to use impairment tests rather than testing employees’ urine, because urine testing tells you whether a person used a given drug within the past 72 hours (longer for cannabis) and not whether the person is currently under the influence. (The cheek-swab test, which can also cover alcohol, is more specific to recent use, but that’s not the currently approved technology for workplace use.)

With the non-medical use of prescription drugs a rising problem, some companies have begun to test – and fire – workers for using such drugs (notably opioids such as oxycodone and hydrocodone and the benzodiazepine anti-anxiety drugs such as Valium and Xanax). At at least one company, seemingly run by mental and moral defectives, workers were fired, without warning, for using drugs according to medical direction.
Of course, someone can be just as zonked on a prescription drug as on a non-prescription drug, but again, the companies aren’t measuring intoxication, merely recent drug use. When it came to the illicit drugs, the excuse for the invasion of privacy involved in having an employer meddle in employees’ off-the-job activities was that taking those drugs involved breaking the law. But extending the rule to prescription drugs gives employers a convenient way of getting rid of employees with chronic medical conditions.

What’s shocking is the thinness of the evidentiary basis underlying the whole exercise. None of the studies purporting to show that testing positive predicts poor work performance has anything like adequate statistical controls.

There’s a simple way to find out whether workplace drug-testing is actually relevant to safety and work performance. What the employer gets back from the lab is a “positive” (drug metabolites present) or a “negative” (metabolites absent). But the testing equipment actually produces a quantitative measurement, converted to “positive” or “negative” by using some fairly arbitrary cut-off value. Test just above that value, you’re fired; test just below it and your employer never even knows.

So here’s the study I’d like to see someone do: the military, for example, which has an aggressive drug-testing policy. Draw a sample of people who tested “negative” and get the quantitative scores. If off-the-job drug use is really a risk factor for accidents, absenteeism, and poor work performance, then there should be an observable gradient, with people testing zero having better subsequent performance than people testing just below the cutoff.

The fact that none of “drug-free workplace” advocates, and none of the testing labs, have published such as study might suggest to the suspicious-minded that they might not like the results.

The Wife sent me this photo:

Edward Schumacher-Matos has an interesting column in which he supports marijuana legalization, and in particular supports state-by-state legalization which, as he points out, is exactly how Prohibition ended: individual states started re-legalizing alcohol before the Federal government finally caved. I hadn’t known that.

However, in the column he includes this paragraph:

There are good arguments against legalization. It could lead to more pot use, especially among young people. New breeds of marijuana get stronger, and abuse of them affects health. Many users of more powerful drugs started with pot. Criminal gangs will continue selling other drugs, so legalization won’t get them off the streets.

He does go on to say, "But so much in life is a balancing act. To my thinking, the costs of prohibition are much higher than the risks of legalization." I applaud that notion, but I do want to respond to those "good arguments" he advances.

1. Legalization "could lead to more pot use, especially among young people." And, as his statement implies, it could also lead to LESS post use, especially among young people. Once pot is legalized and regulated, will selling to minors (extremely common now) continue to be endemic? We don’t know, but we do know that alcohol and tobacco can be obtained by minors. It will depend on enforcement and giving the legal supply chain something serious to worry about if they break the regulations. I believe that marijuana is sufficiently available that we will see little difference in consumption.

BTW, I grew up in Oklahoma in the days when it was a dry state, and kept dry by the cooperative efforts of bootleggers and Baptists, both with an interest in keeping alcohol illegal. Alcohol did finally become legal on a summer day in 1958, a day on which I happened to be at home in my small southern Oklahoma town. People were more or less watching out their windows as the new state liquor store opened for business. They seemed to expect car chases, shootouts, and drunken brawls, but in fact it was a totally peaceful day, like any other day. And like all the days before, those who wanted alcohol bought it (only from a state store instead of a bootlegger) and those who didn’t want alcohol didn’t buy it. I expect the same result with legal marijuana.

2. "New breeds of marijuana get stronger, and abuse of them affects health." Now here is where one seriously expects a link. If marijuana is stronger, won’t people will simply smoke less at any given time? We’ve seen this sort of self-regulation in alcohol: people consume more wine at a sitting (by volume) than they do, say, Wild Turkey whiskey or Everclear straight ethanol. So stronger marijuana would seem, on the face of it, to mean that a joint will last longer and/or serve more people.

And what about those health effects? The column is extremely vague on this point, with no link or other justification for the statement. It almost seems as though he’s simply repeating something he’s heard. BTW, we do know for a certainty that tobacco smoking and drinking alcohol absolutely affect health and we know exactly how they do it. Why hold marijuana to a higher standard than these legal drugs? Or is the idea to make alcohol and tobacco illegal because "abuse of them affects health"? If not, why not? (based on his argument). He totally lost me with this sentence and its lack of substantiation.

4. "Many users of more powerful drugs started with pot." At this point, I’m sorry to say, I begin to question the writer’s intelligence. Is he not aware that the primary "gateway drug" that leads to use of more dangerous drugs is alcohol, not marijuana? And is he not aware that illegal drug dealers work hard to move their customers from low-profit, bulky marijuana into high-profit, compact hard drugs? Hasn’t he considered that the reason that some move on to harder drugs from marijuana is precisely that marijuana is illegal, so its sale and distribution is inextricably linked with other hard drugs, and legalization would break this bond? Has he even thought seriously about this issue?

5. "Criminal gangs will continue selling other drugs, so legalization [of marijuana] will not get them off the streets." This seems to me an argument for legalizing all drugs rather than an argument against legalizing marijuana. Certainly many people would be happy with (legal) marijuana and feel no need to move on—especially if they purchase their marijuana at a store with no other drugs around. And we do have an excellent report of the efficacy of Portugal’s decriminalization of all drugs.

By reader request, the Futur came out to play. First, I used Nanny’s Silly Soap Factory’s The Herby One. It’s a soft soap, and made a fine lather with the men-ü “artificial badger” shaving brush. The Futur did a very smooth job, save for a nick on the upper lip. That was my fault: I have a familial tremor, and occasionally it hits just as I place the razor for a sideways pass across the lip. But that’s why I have My Nik Is Sealed. The nick is now sealed, and a splash of Alt Innsbruck sets me up nicely for the day.

I would be remiss if I did not call your attention to this review.

I’m just back from my thrice-a-year cleaning and inspection. Everything’s fine—and in fact better than that. Apparently my fat loss (ca. 32 lb so far) has also improved my oral health: gum tissue that didn’t look so good when I was fatter is looking much better. I go in for the next visit in four months, and the hygienist said that if my gum tissue has continued to improve (presuming that I continue to shed fat), she’s going to have me come in only twice a year.

I had no idea that excess fat could affect oral health so significantly and obviously (to the trained eye).

Who was that guy who said that we can simply trust businesses because they generally do the right thing? Gardiner Harris and Duff Wilson report in the NY Times:

GlaxoSmithKline, the British drug giant, has agreed to pay $750 million to settle criminal and civil complaints that the company for years knowingly sold contaminated baby ointment and an ineffective antidepressant — the latest in growing number of whistle-blower lawsuits that drug makers have settled with multimillion dollar fines.

Altogether, GlaxoSmithKline sold 20 drugs with questionable safety that were made at a huge plant in Puerto Rico that for years was rife with contamination. Cheryl Eckard, the company’s quality manager, asserts in her whistle-blower suit that she warned Glaxo of the problems but the company fired her instead of addressing the issues. Among the drugs affected were Avandia, Bactroban, Coreg, Paxil and Tagamet. No patients are known to have been sickened by the quality problems although such cases would be difficult to trace.

Tony West, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Division, and Carmen M. Ortiz, the United States attorney for Massachusetts, announced the settlement in a news conference Tuesday afternoon in Boston. The outcome provides the highest whistleblower award yet in a health care fraud case.

GlaxoSmithKline released a statement saying that it regretted operating the Puerto Rican plant in violation of good manufacturing practices. The company said the problem involved only one plant that was closed a year ago.

The settlement is part of a growing tsunami of lawsuits that assert that drug makers misled patients and defrauded federal and state governments that, through Medicare and Medicaid, pay for much of health care.

Using claims from industry insiders, federal prosecutors are not only demanding record fines but are hinting at worse. Suffering a research drought, drug makers have laid off thousands of employees. Some of those dispatched have turned to bite the hands that once fed them, filing whistle-blower lawsuits that can start criminal investigations.

Those who win get a cut of the eventual fine. Ms. Eckard will collect $96 million from the federal government, a whistle-blower record, and she will collect additional millions from states.

The suits, all filed under seal, have for years been increasing in size and scope but the collective threat to the industry has been largely unnoticed because the growing mountain is obscured by a wall of judicial secrecy. Each successful claim begets more suits, with more being filed almost every week.

The suits are filed under a federal law originally intended to stop Civil War hucksters from selling rancid meat to the Union Army by paying bounties to tipsters. The pharmaceutical industry has become the law’s most successful target because the government now buys far more pills than bullets, and because fraud in health care is common…

Continue reading. Strange. It’s almost as if you couldn’t trust businesses to do the right thing.

I’m making changes in my diet and exercise, and I do notice that my diet—the foods I gravitate toward and eat regularly—has changed to a new normal, such that I look forward to my meals and generally have no problem avoiding excess eating and inappropriate foods. There are exceptions: Friday night I wanted a steak, so I bought one and I ate it with great relish. But I had a light lunch and only a salad with the steak. On Saturday, I discovered that Whole Foods was selling prepared pork belly, a dish I’ve dearly wanted to try. So I bought a piece—a piece that turned out to weight 1.4 lbs—and over the weekend consumed it. (Still, on Monday I had gained but 0.5 lb: if you mostly eat right, you can on occasion eat a bit more if you  immediately resume sensible eating—or so I’ve found).

Trent Hamm talks about the change process in an interesting post:

A long time ago, I wrote about the idea of a money free weekend – two days spent doing stuff that’s free or extremely close to it. At that time, the idea of a money-free weekend was a bit of a challenge for my family – we almost always spent money doing something each weekend.

Now, the opposite is true – most weekends are spent doing things that don’t cost anything at all. This past weekend, we carved pumpkins, roasted pumpkin seeds, went to a state park, worked on homemade Christmas presents, planned a birthday party, played some board games, fixed a child’s scooter, and went on a bicycle ride. Virtually none of that cost anything at all, but I found myself happily exhausted from all of the activity by Sunday evening.

In short, the thing that seemed like drastic, painful change in the past now seems like the norm.

I’ll give you another example from my life where this transition is ongoing. A few months ago, . . .

Continue reading.

Not explicit control, but the media today (particularly the TV and cable news programs and the NY Times and Washington Post) hew to the government line, never questioning authority on important issues. This is from a Greenwald column—the entire column is good, but read and think about just this extract:

Even Politico acknowledged and trumpeted this fact:

By stark and deliberate contrast, here’s how The New York Times framed these revelations to its readers (h/t Remi Brulin):

Three cheers for the U.S.!  While a handful of American soldiers — a few bad apples — may have abused Iraqi detainees in hellholes like Abu Ghraib, those detainees "fared worse in Iraqi hands," so we weren’t as bad as the new Iraqi tyrants were.  That’s the way The New York Times chose to frame these revelations.  And while that article mentions in passing that "most [abuse cases] noted in the archive seemed to have been ignored, with the equivalent of an institutional shrug," the vast bulk of the article focuses on Iraqi rather than American wrongdoing and even includes substantial efforts to exculpate the American role ("American soldiers, however, often intervened"). 

The difference in how (a) the NYT "reported on" — i.e., whitewashed — these horrific, incriminating revelations about the U.S. and (b) the rest of the world media reported on it, could not be more vast.  Again, even Politico understood its significance, as this was the first line of its article:  "Newly released Iraq war documents paint a devastating portrait of apparent U.S. indifference to a pattern of murder and torture by the Iraqi army, raising new questions about the Obama administration’s plans to transfer the nation’s security operations to Iraqi units."  But the NYT in its headline chose to venerate the superiority of American detainee treatment, while barely mentioning one of the most critical revelations from this leak.

Similarly, newspapers around the world heavily covered the fact that the U.N. chief investigator for torture called on the Obama administration to formally investigate this complicity in Iraqi abuse, pointing out that "if leaked US files on the Iraq conflict point to clear violations of the UN convention against torture, Barack Obama’s administration has a clear obligation to investigate them," and that "under the conventions on human rights there is an obligation for states to criminalise every form of torture, whether directly or indirectly, and to investigate any allegations of abuse."   Today, Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister called on the British Government to fulfill that obligation by formally investigating the role British troops might have played in "the allegations of killings, torture and abuse in Iraq."

But these calls for investigations — and the U.N.’s explanation of the legal obligation to do so — are virtually nonexistent in the American media.  The only mention in the NYT of the U.N.’s statement is buried deep down in a laundry list of short items on one of its blogs.  Along with most American media outlets, The Washington Post has no mention of this matter at all (while whitewashing American guilt, the NYT — in the form of Judy Miller’s former partner, Michael Gordon — prominently trumpeted from the start of its coverage the "interference" in Iraq by Iran in aiding "Iraqi militias," a drum Gordon has been dutifully beating for years). 

The notion that the Obama administration not only should — but must — investigate the role its military played in enabling this widespread, stomach-turning torture and abuse in Iraq is simply suppressed in American political discourse, most of all by the newspaper which played the leading role in enabling the attack on that country in the first place.  It’s not hard to see why.  The last thing American political and media elites in general want is a discussion of the legal obligations to investigate torture and bring the torturers to legal account, and the last thing which enablers of the Iraq War specifically want is a focus on how we not only allowed but participated in the very human rights abuses which we claimed (and still claim) our invasion would stop.

UPDATE:  Note, too, how the NYT in its article on brutal detainee abuse steadfastly avoids using the word "torture" to describe what was done, consistent with its U.S.-Government-serving formal policy of refusing to use that word where U.S. policy is involved.  By stark contrast, virtually every other media account uses that term to describe the heinous abuse of detainees chronicled by this leak, the only term that accurately applies:  see The Guardian ("American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes"); BBC (US "ignored Iraq torture"); Politico ("a devastating portrait of apparent U.S. indifference to a pattern of murder and torture by the Iraqi army").  Boing Boing appropriately mocks the NYT‘s increasingly humiliating no-"torture" policy by creating a euphemism-generator.

UPDATE II:  The Daily Beast has an extraordinary article today by Ellen Knickmeyer, who was The Washington Post‘s Baghdad Chief during much of the war.  The headline of the article is "WikiLeaks Exposes Rumsfeld’s Lies," and she writes:  "Thanks to Wikileaks, though, I now know the extent to which top American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world, as the Iraq mission exploded."  She documents how WikiLeaked documents prove that Rumsfeld and other top military and political officials outright lied about the state of Iraq in 2006.

This is the type of language which the NYT and Washington Post would never, ever use; it’s undoubtedly true that Knickmeyer could not have written this if she were still at the Post.  Our leading establishment news outlets use far more deference and respect and muted language when talking about High Government Officials.  They’ll unleash a slew of insults about Julian Assange’s mental health and alleged personality faults — and viciously malign anyone who lacks power in their world — but they would never dare use language like this when talking about a political or military official who wields power.  Knickmeyer had to leave the Post in order to speak the truth this way.

UPDATE III:  Michael Calderone of Yahoo! News documents how the Sunday news shows barely bothered to discuss the substance of the WikiLeaks documents at all.  Even worse, on ABC News, Diane Sawyer demands to know whether WikiLeaks — but not the U.S. Government officials responsible for perpetrating and sanctioning torture in Iraq — will be arrested.   To paraphrase that exchange:

WikiLeaks documents:  There was mass torture, abuse, government deceit, reckless civilian deaths in Iraq.

Diane Sawyer:  Will WikiLeaks be arrested?

As I wrote yesterday:  "serving the Government’s interests, siding with government and military officials, and attacking government critics is what they do. That’s their role. That’s what makes them the ‘establishment media’."

I find it shocking that the media in the US report as though they are controlled by government censors. At least we now have access to reportage from around the world, but how many in the US take advantage of that?

From the Center for American Progress in an email:

On Friday, the international organization WikiLeaks released The Iraq War Logs, a "huge trove of secret field reports" — 391,832 documents in all — from the U.S. military in Iraq. The archive is the second such cache obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to news organizations. The first, released in July, was a trove of 77,000 reports covering six years of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. National Security Network’s Heather Hurlburt described the reports as "add[ing] a numbing amount of new, awful detail to what we already knew about the Iraq war." The documents suggest that violence was reduced from 2007 "not only because the American military committed to more troops and a new strategy, but because Iraqis themselves, exhausted by years of bloody war, were ready for it." According to the New York Times, the deaths of Iraqi civilians also "appear to be greater than the numbers made public by the United States during the Bush administration."

ABUSE OF IRAQIS BY IRAQIS: While the newly released documents "offer few glimpses of what was happening inside American detention facilities, they do contain indelible details of abuse carried out by Iraq’s army and police." The Guardian reports that the documents reveal that "U.S. authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished." Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg "said the allegations of killings, torture and abuse were ‘extremely serious’ and ‘needed to be looked at.’" Joel Wing noted that "Iraq’s political parties were quick to put [the Iraqi police] to work in their internal struggle to form a new Iraqi government," with Iyad Allawi’s Iraqi National Movement saying "that the documents gave proof that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki should not stay in office."

IRAN IN IRAQ: The reports "underscore the seriousness with which Iran’s role [in Iraq] has been seen by the American military." According to the documents, Iran’s military "intervened aggressively in support of Shiite combatants, offering weapons, training and sanctuary and in a few instances directly engaging American troops." Robert Farley, an Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Kentucky, wrote that it is "utterly unsurprising" that Iran intervened in Iraq. "Attempting to manage the political situation in a neighboring country, while simultaneously weakening a potential enemy, is something that countries do." Iran’s involvement in Iraq has not primarily been military, but rather political and economic. As Center for American Progress analysts Brian Katulis and Matthew Duss wrote in April 2008, depictions of Iran’s role in Iraq as purely military "ignore an inconvenient truth: The leaders in Iraq’s current government are closely aligned with Tehran and represent some of Iran’s closest allies in Iraq." Iran has been similarly politically involved in neighboring Afghanistan. Afghan President Hamid Karzai "said Monday that his government receives as much as $1 million at least once or twice a year from Iran," just as he said Washington doles out "bags of money" to his office.

COSTS AND CONSEQUENCES: While the documents reveal that coalition forces found traces of past Iraqi weapons programs, Wired Magazine reported that, the "war logs don’t reveal evidence of some massive WMD program by the Saddam Hussein regime," as the Bush administration had claimed existed, but that "remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained." There are no earth-shattering revelations in the new cache, but they do deepen our understanding of the war’s disastrous consequences, both for the U.S. and for the region, particularly in regard to the wide-scale inter-community violence and sectarian cleansing that gripped the country in 2006-7. The violence led to the displacement of over 4.5 million Iraqis, both within and without the country, the vast majority of whom have been unable to return home, remaining displaced either inside Iraq or in neighboring countries. A February 2010 Center for American Progress report, The Iraq War Ledger, examined the costs and benefits of the Iraq intervention, and concluded "there is simply no conceivable calculus by which Operation Iraqi Freedom can be judged to have been a successful or worthwhile policy. The war was intended to show the extent of America’s power. It succeeded only in showing its limits."

I like BruceOnShaving’s multi-razor approach. For one thing, it allows me to use more of my razors more frequently. For another, it reminds me of (for example) the collection of hammers my step-father had: tack hammers, finish hammers, framing hammers, and so on: an appropriate hammer for each job.

This morning I picked the gold-laced quartz Elite Razor (a Merkur Classic head) for the rough cut (first pass with the grain) and the Feather premium stainless for the fine cut (XTG and ATG). Shown in the photo is the new packaging for Feather blades, though Feather assures us that the blade itself is unchanged.

I obtained a truly superb lather from Kell’s Original Energy shave stick—I love that fragrance, and the lather’s nothing to sneeze at either. The fragrance:

A stimulating blend of Citrus, including Grapefruit, Lemon and Lime, with hints of fresh Cucumber and Jasmine, and a touch of Pineapple, Blackberry and Champagne. Energy is an exciting mix that’s perfect for spring and summer.

Mine is the hemp/aloe blend. Great stuff.

And the shave went quite well: quick rough cut, then the finishing passes. A splash of Acqua di Parma and I’m good to go.

And really good movies, too. Here’s the list, with links.

Marian Wang of ProPublica writes this story with the heading "BP to Shutter the Safety Watchdog, Despite Rise in Employee Concern":

BP plans to close the independent watchdog office it established after a deadly refinery blast in Texas City that killed 15 workers, according to The Guardian. Despite a growing number of safety concerns reported to the ombudsman’s office by BP employees and contractors, the company told the U.K. newspaper that it would not extend the office’s tenure past June of next year.
Here’s the Guardian, on the uptick in the reporting of employee concerns since the office was established in 2006:

According to the internal figures, the number of concerns received by the ombudsman’s office increased almost fourfold between its inception and last year. Last year alone, the figure was up by two-thirds on 2008. Of the 252 known concerns received in total since 2006, 148 relate to BP’s Alaska operations. These include 50 specific safety-related concerns at the North Slope operations.

We’ve reported on some of those operations on the North Slope, including workers who were concerned about faked inspection reports and a persistent pattern of problems. As we noted, a 2004 inquiry into BP’s operation in Alaska had also found that workers operated in a “climate of perceived intimidation and threatened retaliation.”

The decision to shutter the ombudsman’s office comes on the heels of its oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and just weeks after the company announced a new safety division headed by Mark Bly, the chief investigator whose team — with help from BP’s lawyers— produced the company’s account of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

A BP spokesman told the Guardian that the ombudsman’s role was never meant to be permanent. The company currently has a program called OpenTalk that encourages employees to report concerns and allows them to stay anonymous if requested.

Here’s what BP’s 2009 annual report [PDF] said about both the OpenTalk program and the U.S. ombudsman’s office:

Our employee concerns programme, OpenTalk, enables employees to seek guidance on the code of conduct as well as to report suspected breaches of compliance or other concerns. The number of cases raised through OpenTalk in 2009 was 874, compared with 925 in 2008.

In the US, former US district court judge Stanley Sporkin acts as an ombudsperson. Employees and contractors can contact him confidentially to report any suspected breach of compliance, ethics or the code of conduct, including safety concerns.

"It has always been our intent to internalise the employee concerns process [into the OpenTalk programme], but only at the point in time when we felt the internal processes were sufficiently robust,” the BP spokesman told the Guardian. “Until that time the intent has been to keep the ombudsman employee concerns avenue in place."

In June, a CNN report about the independent safety office quoted a source within the office who said, “I’m surprised we’re still here.” According to that report, Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Michigan, said that the head of BP America, Lamar McKay, told him of plans to shut down the ombudsman’s office. Stupak told CNN he made known to McKay his concerns about doing so.

Rebecca Boyle has a very interesting article on the breakthrough that may allow commercial quantities of spider silk for special fabrics and ropes. Worth reading. From the article:

Excellent article that fully explains how to sauté mushrooms and why this method works and other methods fail.

I guess politicians tend to think alike, whether they are liberal or conservative: First, try to hide all problems, declaring them state secrets if possible. Second, if word of the problem gets out, viciously attack those who pointed out the problem, while totally ignoring the problem itself. Attacks start with smearing, but then hitting them with court trials can bankrupt them, so go for that.

We see this little drama over and over again, and currently it’s being played out with Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder. Wikileaks is really working, and naturally our government wants to shut it down: he’s exposing things the US has done, for God’s sake! We can’t have people knowing that!

And, of course, our wonderful corporate-owned media is only too happy to cooperate, so rather than skepticism and hard questions, the press swings into action by publishing the smears.

I noticed in the NY Times that suddenly Assange is crazy or off his meds or a real rapscallion or whatever, while more or less ignoring the facts he’s bringing out that our government has kept from us.

Greenwald has two excellent columns, and you should read both:

The Nixonian henchmen of today: at the NYT

NYT v. the world: WikiLeaks coverage

The second column begins:

To supplement my post yesterday about The New York Times‘ government-subservient coverage of the WikiLeaked documents regarding the war that newspaper played such a vital role in enabling, consider — beyond the NYT‘s sleazy, sideshow-smears against Julian Assange — the vast disparity between how newspapers around the world and The New York Times reported on a key revelation from these documents:  namely, that the U.S. systematically and pursuant to official policy ignored widespread detainee abuse and torture by Iraqi police and military (up to and including murders).  In fact, American conduct goes beyond mere indifference into active complicity, as The Guardian today reports that "fresh evidence that US soldiers handed over detainees to a notorious Iraqi torture squad has emerged in army logs published by WikiLeaks."

Media outlets around the world prominently highlighted this revelation, but not The New York Times: . . .

And his first two updates to that column:

UPDATE:  Note, too, how the NYT in its article on brutal detainee abuse steadfastly avoids using the word "torture" to describe what was done, consistent with its U.S.-Government-serving formal policy of refusing to use that word where U.S. policy is involved.  By stark contrast, virtually every other media account uses that term to describe the heinous abuse of detainees chronicled by this leak, the only term that accurately applies:  see The Guardian ("American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes"); BBC (US "ignored Iraq torture"); Politico ("a devastating portrait of apparent U.S. indifference to a pattern of murder and torture by the Iraqi army").  Boing Boing appropriately mocks the NYT‘s increasingly humiliating no-"torture" policy by creating a euphemism-generator.

UPDATE II:  The Daily Beast has an extraordinary article today by Ellen Knickmeyer, who was The Washington Post‘s Baghdad Chief during much of the war.  The headline of the article is "WikiLeaks Exposes Rumsfeld’s Lies," and she writes:  "Thanks to Wikileaks, though, I now know the extent to which top American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world, as the Iraq mission exploded."  She documents how WikiLeaked documents prove that Rumsfeld and other top military and political officials outright lied about the state of Iraq in 2006.

This is the type of language which the NYT and Washington Post would never, ever use; it’s undoubtedly true that Knickmeyer could not have written this if she were still at the Post.  Our leading establishment news outlets use far more deference and respect and muted language when talking about High Government Officials.  They’ll unleash a slew of insults about Julian Assange’s mental health and alleged personality faults — and viciously malign anyone who lacks power in their world — but they would never dare use language like this when talking about a political or military official who wields power.  Knickmeyer had to leave the Post in order to speak the truth this way.

The US would never—NEVER—involve itself in Afghan affairs, of course. Well, except for when we want. Does the US fully understand that Iran and Afghanistan share a border and have interests in common? Here’s an article on this completely unsurprising story.

I worry that we are governed by naïve dolts.