Later On

Excellent post by Dan Colman at Open Culture:

Back in 1972, the English art critic John Berger developed Ways of Seeing, a BBC television series that smartly questioned many of our traditional assumptions about art and art appreciation. It introduced the world to postmodernist ways of looking at art, and did so with a degree of accessibility that few scholars have pulled off since. That same year, Berger turned the acclaimed television series into a book (also called Ways of Seeing) and, forty years later, the text still circulates widely in college classrooms, helping students to see paintings, photography, films and even literature in new ways. Today, we wanted to dust off the original BBC series, and present the first of the four original episodes. You can start watching Episode 1 above and get the remaining parts here (Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4). UBU Web hosts all four episodes (each running 30 minutes), along with lots of other greats bits of arts video. Find it here.

One task I discovered with long-term weight loss is to discover where your diet is leaking (like leaks in a boat: stuff coming in that you want to stay out). If you’re basically eating right (according to your scrupulously honest food journal) and you’re exercising, yet your weight refuses to budge, look for a leak.

Several times in this effort I have stalled.

The first time I remember was before I got my diet right: I had to trim the starches a bit more than the originally suggested diet based on my weight and goals. Once I had trimmed the diet, weight loss resumed, then it gradually stalled. I then found the first leak: pomegranate juice. Drinking around 2 fl oz of pomegranate juice daily has been  found to significantly and noticeably improve arterial health. So I started drinking a little pomegranate juice in a large glass of water. I do that daily, and so I didn’t enter it in the food journal: it’s just part of the baseline intake.

But then one day I looked at the pomegranate juice bottle: 1 cup = 160 calories. And I was drinking multiple cups per day—because I was not measuring the intake, I didn’t realize. So I started drinking 1/2 cup of the juice a day, period. That plugged that leak (and I definitely have noticed that I buy much less pomegranate juice). Once I made that change, the stall ended.

The next stall was when I realized I had no choice but to exercise: one can do only so much from diet alone, assuming you want to lose weight healthfully. So I started the Nordic Track.

This last stall has been five weeks of hovering in the range 218-220 lbs. Last night I was contemplating the reasons for the stall after eating a modest dinner (a small portion of the braised chard with chicken and steel-cut oats). I returned my dish to the kitchen and, because I was thinking about it, I noticed a sudden STRONG impulse to take a bite of the leftover chard from the big skillet: just a forkful. Nothing to write home about—and, more important, not enough to journal.

I recognized the impulse, resisted, and discovered how strong it was: it was an impulse that presumed its own satisfaction, and when the bite of food did not materialize, there was a kind of impulse explosion—so much so that I spoke aloud: “There you are!” The strength and emotional content of the frustrated impulse seemed very like the temper tantrum of a two-year-old not getting something he wants.

I returned to my chair and thought about it. I had noticed this “just a bite more” impulse before, and I thought I had conquered it, but here it was again, freshly reinforced apparently—and over the course of the evening, every time I left my chair the impulse strongly returned: if I got up to check my email or go to the bathroom or refresh my glass of tea—each time the “have just a bite” impulse was there. (I suppose at some level I was “thinking” that it was okay: if I never got up specifically to eat something, then the eating was “by the way” and would have no effect.) This impuse was particularly strong when I put away the leftovers and emptied the pan into the storage bowls: it was if some part of me thought it had an inalienable right to a last bite as I put the food away.

I realized that, in terms of psychosynthesis, I had a subpersonality that really wanted to eat and was clever in distracting my attention and hiding its actions from my conscious mind. I never was getting up to get a bite of food—always for some other task: having a bite just appended itself to that existing (and, dietarily speaking, harmless) task. And because I drink a lot of (white) tea, I get up fairly often: that’s how I was able to eat an entire second portion of the dinner the previous evening, which I did notice at the end but somehow dismissed: “I ate too much,” I thought, without examining how I ate that second portion.

And because each bite is just a bite, it didn’t seem worth journaling—so the bites remained out of sight of my conscious mind: I could review the journal and see nothing amiss, yet those bites quickly added up to another portion each evening: eating two dinners instead of one.

I did not have a single additional bite of the dinner last evening—and I noticed the periodic emergence of the “have-a-bite” impulse, which was extremely strong once I consciously noted it. And this morning my weight is a new low: 214.4 lbs.

The best precaution and practice is to make sure the food journal includes ALL the food ingested, even the amounts too small to record—because if you create a loophole like that (a bite too small to record), the part of you that wants to eat will exploit it, and you can be sure that you will end up taking many, many small bites. Any food intake not measured and recorded will be exploited—like the pomegranate juice was.

I think I’ve now plugged the last leak, and my food journal will present to my conscious mind an honest record of my intake. If I do take “just a bite” of something, I’ll enter it in the journal with a “B” prefix. And when dinner ends, it ENDS: no more bites, not even when putting the food away. No evening foods.

UPDATE: I was thinking more about how taking a bite seemed okay provided I hadn’t gotten up specifically to take the bite. That is not an argument that can withstand conscious scrutiny, but that of course was not its purpose: the idea behind it was to create a vague feeling that everything’s okay so that my conscious mind doesn’t get involved (“Move along. Nothing to see here.”)—because once I start thinking consciously about what’s going on, the game’s over and the leak is plugged. Lesson learned: Unjournaled bites quickly add up to a bushel.

UPDATE 2: In thinking about this problem/solution, I considered life after reaching goal—life on maintenance. One cannot eat consciously at all times—life impinges, attention drifts, and the fat subpersonality can strike again with much the same tactic (distracting attention while consuming lots of small portions). But the solution is clear: watch one’s overall weight, and if it drifts upward, immediately bring out the tools to ensure a conscious examination of what I’m doing: the exercise log and the food journal. Once one can examine a true (and complete) record of exercise and food intake, the source of the problem—and the solution—will, I think, be obvious.

Janet Raloff writes in Science News:

Women don’t develop gout — an arthritic condition prone to excruciatingly painful flare-ups — at nearly the same rate as men. But as in men, its incidence has been creeping up in women, according to a new report. Also as in men, a second new report finds, fructose-sweetened beverages appear to pose a particularly potent gout risk for women.

Potentially aggravating this trend: New data indicate that sweetened soft drinks appear to be a richer source of fructose than had been assumed.

The new data signal a dietary trend that can trigger pain and can potentially cripple joints — but is avoidable, says Martin Underwood of the University of Warwick Medical School in Coventry, England, who is unaffiliated with the new studies. Moreover, he adds, gout’s growing incidence potentially points to an even bigger threat because studies have begun to point to gout as an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

Gout develops when the blood becomes saturated with uric acid, a breakdown product of purines, which are a constituent of many foods, especially red and organ meats. When uric acid precipitates out into the joints and crystallizes, intense pain develops. Researchers consider severely elevated uric acid levels in blood, or hyperuricemia, a silent indicator of gout.

At the American College of Rheumatology meeting in Atlanta, Hyon Choi of the Boston University School of Medicine and his colleagues reported November 9 that incidence of hyperuricemia increases with age and now afflicts some 31 percent of U.S. adults 65 and older — an estimated 8.4 million people. Their data came from the most recent National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which interviewed and took health measurements from more than 24,000 adults selected to offer a representative cross section of Americans.

Women seldom develop gout pain prior to menopause, because female sex hormones help keep uric acid levels low, notes Choi. But after menopause, women’s risk of the disease rises to about half of the rate in older U.S. men, he reports.

Over the past decade, Choi’s team has uncovered a host of gout triggers. Two years ago, for instance, he and Gary Curhan of Harvard Medical School linked risk of the disease in men with elevated consumption of fructose — a principal sugar in fruit that is present in all sugar-sweetened beverages. It made sense, the researchers pointed out, since fructose independently triggers the body’s production of uric acid from adenosine triphosphate, a molecule that stores and transports energy.

At a November 10 presentation at the rheumatology meeting, Choi, Curhan and Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health now extend fructose’s gout risk to women…

Continue reading.

And we didn’t go crazy. Patrick Smith reports in Salon:

Here’s a scenario:

Middle Eastern terrorists hijack a U.S. jetliner bound for Italy. A two-week drama ensues in which the plane’s occupants are split into groups and held hostage in secret locations in Lebanon and Syria.

While this drama is unfolding, another group of terrorists detonates a bomb in the luggage hold of a 747 over the North Atlantic, killing more than 300 people.

Not long afterward, terrorists kill 19 people and wound more than a hundred others in coordinated attacks at European airport ticket counters.

A few months later, a U.S. airliner is bombed over Greece, killing four passengers.

Five months after that, another U.S. airliner is stormed by heavily armed terrorists at the airport in Karachi, Pakistan, killing at least 20 people and wounding 150 more.

Things are quiet for a while, until two years later when a 747 bound for New York is blown up over Europe killing 270 passengers and crew.

Nine months from then, a French airliner en route to Paris is bombed over Africa, killing 170 people from 17 countries.

That’s a pretty macabre fantasy, no? A worst-case war-game scenario for the CIA? A script for the End Times? Except, of course, that everything above actually happened, in a four-year span between 1985 and 1989. The culprits were the al-Qaidas of their time: groups like the Abu Nidal Organization and the Arab Revolutionary Cells, and even the government of Libya.

First on that list was the spectacular saga of TWA Flight 847, a Boeing 727 commandeered by Shiite militiamen in June of ’85. Even before that crisis ended, Sikh extremists would blow up Air India Flight 182 off the coast of Ireland — the deadliest civil aviation bombing in history. The Abu Nidal group then murdered 20 people at the airports in Rome and Vienna, followed in short order by the bombing of TWA Flight 840 as it descended toward Athens. Abu Nidal struck again in Karachi, attacking a Pan Am 747 with machine guns and grenades. Then, in December 1988, Libyan operatives planted the luggage bomb that brought down Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in what would stand until 2001 as the worst-ever terror attack against a U.S. target. The Libyans later used another luggage bomb to take out UTA Flight 772 over Niger in September 1989.

Also occurring in that same span were the non-terrorist bombing of a Korean Air Lines 707 and the downing of a San Francisco-bound Pacific Southwest Airlines flight by a recently fired employee who burst into the cockpit and shot both pilots.

I bring all of this up for a couple of reasons.

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You’ll recall the promise that the DEA would not go after medical marijuana patients who were complying with state law? It was a lie, another damned lie. Philip Smith reports:

A panel on the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the marijuana cultivation and distribution conspiracy convictions of California Dr. Marion "Mollie" Fry and her partner, Dale Schafer. Fry and Schafer, both medical marijuana patients, had been sentenced to five years in federal prison in the case, but were free on bail pending the appeal. There is no word yet on when they will have to report to prison or whether they will try further appeals.

After developing breast cancer, Dr. Fry turned to medical marijuana, and she and Schafer built up a medical marijuana practice, with Dr. Fry writing recommendations and she and Schafer growing and distributing marijuana to patients. They did so with the understanding from local law enforcement that they were in compliance with state law.

But local law enforcement was working with the DEA, and the couple was raided, arrested, and convicted of violating federal drug control laws. Because they were convicted of growing more than 100 plants, they face mandatory minimum five-year prison sentences.

They appealed the conviction, arguing that because local law enforcement agents were cooperating with the DEA at the same time they were assuring the couple they were in compliance with state law, local law enforcement was in effect working for the feds to entrap them. They also argued that local law enforcement entrapped them for sentencing purposes by encouraging them to grow more than 100 plants, the number that triggers a mandatory minimum sentence. And they argued their convictions should be overturned because they were not allowed to mount a medical marijuana defense.

But the 9th Circuit panel didn’t buy any of it. In the opinion authored by Judge Richard Tallman, the court held that Fry and Schafer did not prove they were entrapped and that they were correctly precluded by Supreme Court precedent from mounting a medical marijuana defense. Now, the health-care providing couple are most likely headed to federal prison for their efforts.  

OTOH, the CIA agents who deliberately (and illegally) destroyed the video tapes of the torture sessions and the evidence of war crimes? No penalty whatsoever: they walk away as free as birds.

Obama and Holder: names that in my mind will live in infamy.

At 25 minutes a day, I now do the Nordic Track before showering. I dress for the Nordic on rising, and after a little time to wake up and a couple of glasses of water, I climb aboard and resume listening to Robinson Crusoe get his life in order.

Nanny’s Silly Soap Company’s Eucalyptus made a very fine lather with the Lucretia Borgia artificial badger brush. Three smooth passes of the iKon razor holding a Swedish Gillette blade, and a perfectly smooth face. A splash of Jade East, and I’m ready for the day.

This morning I awoke and found that the pounds I lost with the plateau buster are back. I was very bummed out, but the Healthy Ways counselor helped.

First, the gain is totally explicable in looking at the food journal. I tend to celebrate with food (bad idea), and to celebrate the weight loss I cooked the Braised Chard with Chicken and Steel-Cut Oats—chicken thighs, skin on, browned in olive oil, with the oil used as well to cook the onions and garlic and be there in the oats and kale. Plus I had two portions over the course of the evening. Plus, since I had to use 1/2 cup white wine in the dish, I had an open bottle of wine, so two glasses of wine were consumed (one glass with each portion). Huh. Maybe all that has something to do with it.

Second, the key is obviously to control portion size—and that includes the number of portions. So I got out my kid’s plate again and will be using that for meals.

Third, I need low-calorie ways to celebrate. For starters, I bought three liters of sparkling mineral water at Whole Foods along with a bunch of limes and Meyer lemons. That will be a pleasant change.

Finally, even with portion control I will need to keep up aerobic exercise. I’m at 25 minutes nonstop on the Nordic Track cross-country ski machine. I’ll keep that up and on Sunday go to 30 minutes for a week. Ultimate goal is 45 minutes a day, something I’ve done before and isn’t bad at all if you have something to listen to. (After Robinson Crusoe, I have Dombey and Son queued up: the novels written to be read aloud seem to work best—no surprise.)

Again, it was tremendously helpful to be able to talk to a counselor instead of settling down into a blue funk.

How on earth do we stop this sort of thing?

We’ve seen corruption become overt in our Courts: Scalia socializing with Cheney when Cheney was part of a case Scalia was judging, Clarence Thomas’s wife’s fundraising activities, and now this by Sam Alito, reported at ThinkProgress by Lee Fang:

Last night, the American Spectator — a right-wing magazine known for its role in the “Arkansas Project,” a well-funded effort to invent stories with the goal of eventually impeaching President Clinton — held its annual gala fundraising event. The Spectator is more than merely an ideological outlet. Spectator publisher Al Regnery helps lead a secretive group of conservatives called the “Conservative Action Project,” formed after President Obama’s election, to help lobby for conservative legislative priorities, elect Republicans (the Conservative Action Project helped campaign against Democrat Bill Owens in NY-23), and block President Obama’s judicial appointments. The Spectator’s gala last night, with ticket prices/sponsorship levels ranging from $250 to $25,000, featured prominent Republicans like RNC chairman Michael Steele, hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer (a major donor to Republican campaign committees and attack ad groups), and U.S. Chamber of Commerce board member and former Allied Capital CEO William Walton. Among the attendees toasting Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), the keynote speaker for the event, was Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito.

It’s not the first time Alito has attended the Spectator dinner. In 2008, Alito headlined the Spectator’s annual gala, helping to raise tens of thousands of dollars for the political magazine. According to Jay Homnick, a conservative who attended the 2008 Spectator gala, Alito spent much of his speech ripping then Vice President-elect Joe Biden as a serial plagiarizer.

As Alito entered the event last night, I approached the Justice and asked him why he thought it appropriate to attend a highly political fundraiser with the chairman of the Republican Party, given Alito’s position on the court. Alito appeared baffled, and replied, “it’s not important that I’m here.” “But,” I said, “you also helped headline this same event two years ago, obviously helping to raise political money as the keynote.” Alito replied curtly, “it’s not important,” before walking away from me.

After the gala, I again tried to approach Justice Alito — this time, with a video camera in hand — to ask him about the ethical issues raised by his right-wing political fundraising. Before I could come close to him, his security guards threatened me with arrest. Watch it:

Apparently, Alito is a regular benefactor for highly political conservative fundraisers. Last year, he headlined the fundraising dinner for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) — the same corporate front that funded the rise of Republican dirty trickster James O’Keefe and anti-masturbation activist Christine O’Donnell. According to the sponsorship levels for the event, Alito helped ISI raise $70,000 or more.

Documents exposed by ThinkProgress last month revealed that Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas have also attended secret political fundraisers. We published a memo detailing fundraising events, organized by oil billionaires David and Charles Koch, to fund Republican campaigns, judicial elections, and groups running ads in the 2010 midterm election. The fundraisers, attended by some of the nation’s wealthiest bankers, industrialists, and other executives, help fund much of the conservative infrastructure. The memo stated the Thomas and Alito were past participants of the Koch fundraisers. Ian Millhiser, ThinkProgress’ resident legal expert, noted:

A Supreme Court justice lending a hand to a political fundraising event would be a clear violation of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, if it wasn’t for the fact that the nine justices have exempted themselves from much of the ethical rules governing all other federal judges. Nevertheless, a spokesperson for the Supreme Court tells ThinkProgress that “[t]he Justices look to the Code of Conduct for guidance” in determining when they may participate in fundraising activities.

That Code provides that in almost all circumstances, “a judge should not personally participate in fund-raising activities, solicit funds for any organization, or use or permit the use of the prestige of judicial office for that purpose. A judge should not personally participate in membership solicitation if the solicitation might reasonably be perceived as coercive or is essentially a fund-raising mechanism.”

While justices like Alito, Thomas, and Scalia have actively participated in highly political pro-Republican fundraisers, their rulings are increasingly in favor of the corporate right. Last month, a new study found that the Supreme Court has lurched to the far, corporate right in recent years. It found that a “cohesive” conservative majority of Justices Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Scalia and Kennedy favored the position of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s largest big business lobby, over 80% of the time.

Ed Brayton:

Here’s an appalling truth revealed by the latest Gallup poll on capital punishment:

The use of the death penalty has been declining worldwide, with most of the known executions now carried out in five countries — China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. Anti-death penalty groups in the U.S. continue to fight the use of the death penalty, particularly when there are high-profile instances of its use, such as this year’s execution in Virginia of Teresa Lewis, the first woman to be executed in that state in almost 100 years. Despite this, Gallup’s latest update in October shows no diminution in the strong majority level of support for the death penalty in cases of murder within the U.S.

Iran, Iraq, China and Saudi Arabia — good partners to have when it comes to justice and due process, aren’t they? Here’s something even crazier to add to that data. Another new poll shows that 83 percent of Americans believe that innocent people have been wrongly put to death in this country and only 6 percent believe it hasn’t happened — and they still support the death penalty.

I don’t have a moral problem with the death penalty. I do have a moral problem with using the death penalty given the innumerable ways that our criminal justice system is, in fact, unjust and unfair and unequal in the justice it metes out. In a system where even 25% of the confessions turn out to be false, there is no way in hell we should be putting anyone to death.

Frank Pasquale has an interesting post at Balkinization:

Is the US becoming a third world nation? Arianna Huffington’s recent book makes the case, arguing that crumbling infrastructure and vast inequality herald a new era of unaccountable elites. She argues that “our financial system [has] become a bad carnival game where the rich always get the grand prize and the average American walks away empty-handed.”

Matt Taibbi directly connects financialization with the decline of common infrastructure in his new book, Griftopia. He describes a litany of roads and bridges “already leased or set to be leased for fifty or seventy-five years or more in exchange for one-off lump sum payments of a few billion bucks at best, usually just to help patch a hole or two in a single budget year.” Taibbi says the process is “stripping wealth out of the heart of the country,” reminiscent of the extractive industries of Nigeria or Equatorial Guinea. Even the New York Times‘s moderates are finding the US uncomfortably close to a “banana republic,” with Nicholas Kristof concluding that “You no longer need to travel to distant and dangerous countries to observe . . . rapacious inequality. We now have it right here at home.”

Attorneys have a difficult time coming to grips with this new political economy. Many wholeheartedly believe that today’s chief executives deserve to make four or five hundred times the average worker’s wages (rather than the roughly fifty-fold multiple prevalent in 1980 America, and elsewhere in the world today). Perhaps the nation’s richest 1 percent in some sense deserves to have captured 80% of the increase in income from 1980 to 2005. These are moral claims that cannot be conclusively proven or disproven.

But we as attorneys can at least insist on a common rule of law for all. And that’s what our legal system has grievously failed to provide during the foreclosure crisis. As the indisputably pro-market Jonathan Macey notes, “the banks have created significant legal exposure for themselves ‘by committing fraud upon the courts.’” And yet the first thing our Congress could think to do was to endorse legal cover for them, as eagerly as it retroactively immunized warrantless wiretapping.

Was that merely a case where the grandeur of “democracy” deserved to trump punctilious formalism? Had it occurred in isolation, perhaps. But coming after a long line of bailouts, megabonuses, and the refusal of big banks to play even their basic utility role in our economy, it is inexcusable. As Joseph Stiglitz explains, . . .

Continue reading. See also this post. And also this post on cultures of impunity.

Harriet Hall has an interesting post at Science-Based Medicine:

Melanie Thernstrom has written a superb book based on a historical, philosophical, and scientific review of pain: The Pain Chronicles: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering. Herself a victim of chronic pain, she brings a personal perspective to the subject and also includes informative vignettes of doctors and patients she encountered at the many pain clinics she visited in her investigations. She shows that medical treatment of pain is suboptimal because most doctors have not yet incorporated recent scientific discoveries into their thinking, discoveries indicating that chronic pain is a disease in its own right, a state of pathological pain sensitivity.

Chronic pain often outlives its original causes, worsens over time, and takes on a puzzling life of its own… there is increasing evidence that over time, untreated pain eventually rewrites the central nervous system, causing pathological changes to the brain and spinal cord, and that these in turn cause greater pain. Even more disturbingly, recent evidence suggests that prolonged pain actually damages parts of the brain, including those involved in cognition.

Sometimes the original problem creates new ones as the patient distorts posture and avoids exercise in an attempt to reduce the pain.  In chronic pain, the protective mechanism of avoidance becomes maladaptive. Muscles atrophy from disuse and new sources of pain develop. Jerome Groopman, MD, in The Anatomy of Hope, told how he conquered years of chronic back pain by realizing that his pain was not a warning to avoid further damage but a false message that he could refuse to listen to; with exercise and physical therapy he rebuilt his muscles and became pain-free.

Dr. John Sarno believes that chronic musculoskeletal pain is a manifestation of “tension myositis syndrome” due to repressed negative emotions. He recommends renouncing all treatments, accepting that pain is only in the mind, and resuming normal activities. I don’t accept his psychosomatic premise, but there is a grain of truth in his method. If patients can re-frame their thinking and resume normal activities despite the pain, they are more likely to improve than if they maintain the self-image of a sick, disabled victim. [I just watched The Secret Garden, which has that as its theme. – LG]

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We as a species are working hard to destroy our habitat—and we are succeeding. (But, of course, John Shimkus, the Republican who is aiming for chairmanship of the Energy Committee in the House believes that God has promised everything will be okay (see this video and this post by Juan Cole). Somehow, I do not find that reassuring—quite the contrary, in fact.)

Joe Romm blogs:

A special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (Biological Science) — “Biological diversity in a changing world” — paints a bleak picture of what Homo ’sapiens’ sapiens is doing to the other species on the planet.

Prior to this year, I wrote about extinction only occasionally — since the direct impact of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions on humanity seemed to me more than reason enough to act.  But the mass extinctions we are causing will directly harm our children and grandchildren as much as sea level rise.  In particular, I believe scientists have not been talking enough about the devastation we are causing to marine life (see “Geological Society: Acidifying oceans spell marine biological meltdown “by end of century”).

In 2007, the IPCC warned that “as global average temperature increase exceeds about 3.5°C [relative to 1980 to 1999], model projections suggest significant extinctions (40-70% of species assessed) around the globe.”  That is a temperature rise over pre-industrial levels of a bit more than 4.0°C.  So the 5°C rise we are facing on our current emissions path would likely put extinctions beyond the high end of that range.

Given the irreversibility of mass extinction, and the multiple unintended consequences it engenders, it must be considered one of the most serious of the many catastrophic impacts we face if we don’t act soon.

The special issue contains 16 articles by leading scientists.  The abstracts are all online as is the lead piece, also titled, “Biological diversity in a changing world,” by the two biologists who organized the Royal Society’s scientific “Discussion Meeting” and edited the issue.

The authors, Magurran and Dornelas, note that “there are very strong indications that the current rate of species extinctions far exceeds anything in the fossil record,” and conclude that while extinctions are inevitable:

It is the mass extinction currently underway, caused by overexploitation of natural resources, that needs to worry us. Similarly, environmental change has always been prevalent, and has helped shape biodiversity patterns of today. In contrast, never before has a single species driven such profound changes to the habitats, composition and climate of the planet….

As for the oceans, famed oceanographer and ecologist Jeremy Jackson, concludes in his article, “The future of the oceans past“:

Major macroevolutionary events in the history of t he oceans are linked to changes in oceanographic conditions and environments on regional to global scales.  Even small changes in climate and productivity, such as those that occurred after the rise of the Isthmus of Panama, caused major changes in Caribbean coastal ecosystems and mass extinctions of major taxa. In contrast, massive influxes of carbon at the end of the Palaeocene caused intense global warming, ocean acidification, mass extinction throughout the deep sea and the worldwide disappearance of coral reefs. Today, overfishing, pollution and increases in greenhouse gases are causing comparably great changes to ocean environments and ecosystems. Some of these changes are potentially reversible on very short time scales, but warming and ocean acidification will intensify before they decline even with immediate reduction in emissions. There is an urgent need for immediate and decisive conservation action. Otherwise, another great mass extinctio1n affecting all ocean ecosystems and comparable to the upheavals of the geological past appears inevitable.

Jackson is the director of the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.  Our ongoing efforts to wipe out sea life may lack the media-grabbing pizzazz of a Titanic oil spill, but it does not lack the punch (see Nature Geoscience study concludes ocean dead zones “devoid of fish and seafood” are poised to expand and “remain for thousands of years”).

As Jackson explains in his 18-minute TED talk,”How we wrecked the ocean”: . . .

Continue reading. In the meantime, the GOP is amassing lies to prevent any action being taken. The truth will overwhelm them in time, but by then it will be too late.

Paul Rosenberg blogs at OpenLeft:

If liberals were ever looking for a good subject over which to call for their smelling salts and fainting couches, holy crap here it is.  Martin Joel Erzinger, an "ultra-wealth" fund manager hit-and-runs a cyclist leaving him seriously injured.  The local Republican DA, Mark Hurlbert has declined to press felony charges opting for misdemeanor counts instead.  His reasoning reads quite literally like something out of the medieval times’ treatment of nobility:

"The money has never been a priority for them [DD note: the victim is a medical doctor]. It is for us," Hurlbert said. "Justice in this case includes restitution and the ability to pay it."

Hurlbert said Erzinger is willing to take responsibility and pay restitution.

"Felony convictions have some pretty serious job implications for someone in Mr. Erzinger’s profession, and that entered into it," Hurlbert said. "When you’re talking about restitution, you don’t want to take away his ability to pay."

See, as long as the esteemed and noble lord pays the peasant for the damage, no harm should befall his excellency.  Problem solved.

This blog has more including the Colorado Attorney General’s response to a Facebook campaign to have him intervene:

UPDATE: Rather than address legitimate concerns of his constituents, Attorney General John Suthers has removed his Facebook page.

Daniel De Groot :: Too rich to jail (updated)

My own thoughts tend toward Hurlbert’s humiliating defeat to a teabagger in seeking the Republican nomination for State senate.  Did he think (or know) this would ensure support of the establishment for his next attempt at higher office?  

Anyway, I can’t think of a worse precedent to let stand than overtly excusing serious personal crimes by the rich solely due to the implied loss of income in prosecuting them.  I know prosecutorial discretion is an important part of the Justice system, but I don’t think too rich to jail was what any defenders of that principle have in mind.  I also know some cynics will inevitably point out that the rich have usually received much better treatment by the system for their misdeeds, but there is an important threshold being crossed here in doing it so nakedly and brazenly. 

Bonus irony from Hurlbert’s profile:

As an experienced prosecutor, Mark knows it is important not to simply secure convictions, but to seek justice. He makes victims a priority and is dedicated to providing victims a strong voice in the justice system.

What say you, cyclist victim?

"Mr. Erzinger struck me, fled and left me for dead on the highway," Milo wrote. "Neither his financial prominence nor my financial situation should be factors in your prosecution of this case."

Brief perusal of the limited major news coverage of this seems to be gravitating toward the "drivers versus cyclists" angle.  That’s stupid and it’s our fault if we leave cycling safety advocates alone on the field fighting this.  This is completely about the fundamental principle of equality before the law regardless of wealth.

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Andrew Sullivan has a thoughtful post on how the Right is basing its worldview on a foundation of lies:

It seems to me that the last year or so in America’s political culture has represented the triumph of untruth. And the untruth was propagated by a deliberate, simple and systemic campaign to kill Obama’s presidency in its crib. Emergency measures in a near-unprecedented economic collapse – the bank bailout, the auto-bailout, the stimulus – were described by the right as ideological moves of choice, when they were, in fact, pragmatic moves of necessity. The increasingly effective isolation of Iran’s regime – and destruction of its legitimacy from within – was portrayed as a function of Obama’s weakness, rather than his strength. The health insurance reform – almost identical to Romney’s, to the right of the Clintons in 1993, costed to reduce the deficit, without a public option, and with millions more customers for the insurance and drug companies – was turned into a socialist government take-over.

Every one of these moves could be criticized in many ways. What cannot be done honestly, in my view, is to create a narrative from all of them to describe Obama as an anti-American hyper-leftist, spending the US into oblivion. But since this seems to be the only shred of thinking left on the right (exacerbated by the justified flight of the educated classes from a party that is now openly contemptuous of learning), it became a familiar refrain – pummeled into our heads day and night by talk radio and Fox. If you think I’m exaggerating, try the following thought experiment.

If a black Republican president had come in, helped turn around the banking and auto industries (at a small profit!), insured millions through the private sector while cutting Medicare, overseen a sharp decline in illegal immigration, ramped up the war in Afghanistan, reinstituted pay-as-you go in the Congress, set up a debt commission to offer hard choices for future debt reduction, and seen private sector job growth outstrip the public sector’s in a slow but dogged recovery, somehow I don’t think that Republican would be regarded as a socialist.

This is the era of the Big Lie, in other words, and it translates into a lot of little lies – "death panels," "out-of-control" spending, "apologies for America" etc. – designed to concoct a false narrative so simple and so familiar it actually succeeded in getting into people’s minds in the midst of a brutal recession. And integral to this process have been conservative "intellectuals" who should and do know better, but have long since sacrificed intellectual honesty for the cheap thrills of enabling power-grabs. And few lies represent this intellectual cooptation of talk radio/FNC propaganda better than the lie that Obama has publicly rebutted the idea of American exceptionalism.

Where does one start? Where one always starts with these things – Jonah Goldberg:

Last year, when asked if he believed in American exceptionalism, President Obama responded, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."

This reminded me of the wonderful scene in Pixar‘s "The Incredibles," in which the mom says "everyone’s special" and her son replies, "Which is another way of saying no one is." But at least the president made room for the sentiment that America is a special place, even if he chalked it up to a kind of benign provincialism.

Oh really?

Here is the full Obama quote:

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. I’m enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world. If you think about the site of this summit and what it means, I don’t think America should be embarrassed to see evidence of the sacrifices of our troops, the enormous amount of resources that were put into Europe postwar, and our leadership in crafting an Alliance that ultimately led to the unification of Europe. We should take great pride in that.

And if you think of our current situation, the United States remains the largest economy in the world. We have unmatched military capability. And I think that we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.

Now, the fact that I am very proud of my country and I think that we’ve got a whole lot to offer the world does not lessen my interest in recognizing the value and wonderful qualities of other countries, or recognizing that we’re not always going to be right, or that other people may have good ideas, or that in order for us to work collectively, all parties have to compromise and that includes us.

And so I see no contradiction between believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and recognizing that that leadership is incumbent, depends on, our ability to create partnerships because we create partnerships because we can’t solve these problems alone.

In other words, Obama emphatically doesn’t reduce the idea of American exceptionalism to "benign provincialism." Quite the contrary: he explicitly asserts that the values enshrined in the Constitution are exceptional, and defends them and the US’s history in front of a foreign audience. It’s worth pointing out this factual error at such length because everyone in the conservative movement has already made it.

And that’s hardly an exaggeration. Here are Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry:

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We’re not leaving, and we’re not succeeding. Vietnam reprised. Kevin Drum:

Last May, after reading about Gen. David Petraeus’s ironclad promise that we could begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan by next year, I said, "Promise or not, I’ll bet that next year, when the drawdown is supposed to start, Petraeus tells us we need to stay." A month later, after reading Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s comments on problems with the Kandahar offensive, I said, "It sure sounds to me as if McChrystal is starting the PR campaign for this now."

But those were just guesses. Today, McClatchy’s Nancy Youssef says it’s a done deal:

The Obama administration has decided to begin publicly walking away from what it once touted as key deadlines in the war in Afghanistan in an effort to de-emphasize President Barack Obama’s pledge that he’d begin withdrawing U.S. forces in July 2011, administration and military officials have told McClatchy.

….What a year ago had been touted as an extensive December review of the strategy now also will be less expansive and will offer no major changes in strategy, the officials told McClatchy. So far, the U.S. Central Command, the military division that oversees Afghanistan operations, hasn’t submitted any kind of withdrawal order for forces for the July deadline, two of those officials told McClatchy.

….Last week’s midterm elections also have eased pressure on the Obama administration to begin an early withdrawal. Earlier this year, some Democrats in Congress pressed to cut off funding for Afghanistan operations. With Republicans in control of the House of Representatives beginning in January, however, there’ll be less push for a drawdown. The incoming House Armed Services chairman, Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif., told Reuters last week that he opposed setting the date.

Roger that. Apparently Pentagon officials now consider 2014 to be the new 2011. I’m sure that will change sometime around 2013 though.

Matthew Norman writes in The Independent:

May the Lord the former president so ostentatiously worships have mercy on my soul, and those in Iraq without water, electricity and medicine forgive me, but I just cannot suppress a twinge of sympathy for George W Bush.

The source of this pity pang isn’t the usual one with those struggling bemusedly with the loss of power (Mrs Thatcher literally unable, for example, to dial a phone number). So far as the practicalities, Mr Bush has adapted well. Apparently he concludes his memoir Decision Points with the familiar anecdote of how, within days of leaving Washington, he was picking up his dog’s mess with a plastic bag in a Texas park. Evidently he regards this as a cute vignette of the transience of power, as well as his own endearing lack of pomp. Yet what causes the stab of pity is the stupidity at which it hints.

How could anyone in possession of a three-figure IQ (still a moot point with Bush) fail to see what a golden gift that image is to satirists? There he is, in the cartoon in my head, scooping up a couple of Cumberland sausages while following him, shovelling up the Augean Stable-sized steaming pile he left behind in the Oval Office, is Barack Obama at the wheel of an industrial digger.

This blindness to visual imagery is quite a motif, judging by Times extracts and an interview with its editor. Apart from being attacked for indifference to black people by Kanye West, the rapper Obama dismissed as a jackass, all his greatest regrets are pictorial public relations disasters.

His sadness over Hurricane Katrina is not for the victims in New Orleans, as Mr West understood, but for the damage done to his reputation by that snap of him staring blankly and aloofly down on the catastrophe from the window of Air Force One. His paramount distress over Iraq is not over the loss of life, civilian and military, but how that banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished” on the aircraft carrier came to make him look naive and vainglorious. He reveals his shallowness and vapidity with these reflections in the most crystalline of clarity, and hasn’t a notion he is doing so.

It takes a certain minimal intelligence for the truly dim to have a notion of their own dimness, but this is denied him. Unlike Mr Tony Blair, who emerges from his well-calibrated if often chilling memoir as a man of colossal cleverness (though not intellect), W has the self-awareness of a bison. There seems even less to him than met the eye, and there was precious little of that. Astounding as it appears, we misoverestimated him.

And so the Wagner Question poses itself yet again. Every Saturday when the Brazilian sea monster murders his X-Factor song, 14 million people ask themselves how and why he is there. Reading these ghost-written titbits, you ask yourself the same. How in the name of all the saints did George W Bush, wastrel drunkard son of an East Coast patrician family, find his way to Pennsylvania Avenue by playing the genial good ol’ boy from the South, and why in heaven’s name did he want it anyway? And answers come there none.

The reduction of Bush’s two terms to a satirical sequel to one of those US prep school movies in which the smirking, idiot boy breaks the honour code but is rescued by his Brahmin dad had come to seem shamefully hackneyed. But the one cliché worth trotting out here is that clichés are clichés because they are true. Somehow this half-witted frat boy journeyed, via some jovially preposterous sequence of events involving failed oil deals and baseball team franchises, from japes with Alpha Sigma Phi to possession of the nuclear codes.

Nothing, not even W himself, is ever quite that simple, and palpably there was an edge of madness in the family. In his teens, when his mother Barbara had a miscarriage, he relates, he drove her to the hospital. “I never expected to see the remains of the foetus,” he recalls, “which she had saved in a jar to bring to the hospital. I remember thinking there was a human life, a little brother or sister.” Enough in that alone, to drive any adolescent to drink, you’d have guessed, yet the tale is told as a homily to his mother’s wisdom, and in some impenetrable way to justify his pro-life, anti-stem cell research hard line.

Continue reading. The blurb:

It takes a certain minimal intelligence for the truly dim to have a notion of their own dimness, but this is denied George Bush. He has the self-awareness of a bison.

Interesting list (you have to read the items one by one) of accomplishments in the first two years of the Obama Administration.