Later On

The Rooney 3/1 worked up a good lather from the Sweet Gale shaving soap, and I have to say that I like the fragrance. Three passes of the English Gillette Aristocrat Junior holding a Swedish Gillette blade and my beard was gone. A splash of Klar Seifen Classik and I was off to the coffee shop, where the woman behind the counter complimented me on the fragrance. In fact, she really liked it: a clean fragrance with no musky overtone.

You can make this a lot of ways. Here’s what I did today:

1 large onion, chopped
a few cloves garlic, chopped

Sauté those in 2 Tbsp Lucini Fiery Chili EV Olive Oil until softened

Add:

1.5 qt chicken stock (because I used 0.5 qt on the braised chard with chicken and steel-cut oats)
1 carrot, chopped
3 stalks celery, chopped
3 heads broccoli, chopped
1 bunch spinach, rinsed
Salt
Pepper

Bring to boil and then lower heat and simmer for 30 minutes. Blend—I used my immersion blender.

You could thicken this (add a little flour thoroughly mixed in with water), but I don’t find it necessary. I would normally have used 2 qts of stock, but since 1.5 qts is what I had…

You could also add herbs: thyme might be good, and marjoram.

Doesn’t that look good. Recipe here. I will not, of course, peel the squash. Why bother?

UPDATE: Just made this, and it’s the essence of sweet/savory scrumptiousness. As it happened, I have walnut oil on hand (refrigerated—else it goes over quickly). Comments:

1. Use a rimmed baking sheet: 2 Tbsp is quite a bit of oil and the rounds practically sauté in the hot oven.

2. Put the oven shelf high so that at the end you can simply turn on the broiler for the final browning. The browned bits are chewy and taste like brown sugar.

3. Timings I used: 20 min first side, 16 min second side, then broil until nicely browned.

4. They are so sweet that they would serve for dessert rounds with some sweetened (or unsweetened) yogurt cheese or the like. You could play that up with a dusting of cinnamon, but I would not forgo the salt. Other spices that come to mind to try: nutmeg, allspice, cloves, mace (the pound-cake spice), Chinese 5-spice, pumpkin-pie spice. Might skip the spices and drizzle with good balsamic vinegar, too.

5. I think having walnut oil specifically was a help, but I wouldn’t hesitate to make this with, say, a good olive oil. But it would be different, obviously, and perhaps tilted more toward the main course away from the dessert.

This recipe is a keeper. And so easy! Oh—and yeah, I did not peel the squash. The peel was chewy goodness at the end.

Take a look at this one. (Video at the link.) That’s the workspace I want.

I expect this trend to continue. Fox News is the news organization of America’s future, and the Washington Post is moving quickly to join. Matt Yglesias:

The Washington Post company is most identified with its newspaper, the Washington Post. But in fact its biggest source of revenue is its Kaplan subsidiary. Kaplan, in turn, is primarily identified with test prep work. In fact, however, its low-performing for-profit university unit is its biggest source of growth as Tamar Lewin points out in an excellent NYT piece:

Over the last decade, Kaplan has moved aggressively into for-profit higher education, acquiring 75 small colleges and starting the huge online Kaplan University. Now, Kaplan higher education revenues eclipse not only the test-prep operations, but all the rest of the Washington Post Company’s operations. And Kaplan’s revenue grew 9 percent during the last quarter to $743.3 million — with higher education revenues more than four times greater than those from test-prep — helping its parent company more than triple its profits. [...]

According to 2009 data released this summer by the Department of Education,only 28 percent of Kaplan’s students were repaying their student loans. That figure is well below the 45 percent threshold that most programs will need to remain fully eligible for the federal aid on which they rely. By comparison, 44 percent of students at the largest for-profit, the University of Phoenix, were repaying their loans.

So to clarify, the basic business model of the Washington Post Company’s key business unit is as follows. They say “in exchange for paying us money, we’ll provide you education services that pay off in the long run.” Potential customers think that sounds like a good proposition, and they avail themselves of taxpayer-subsidized loans in order to take the Post up on their offer. But 72 percent of the Post’s customers find that they’re actually unable to repay those taxpayer-subsidized loans.

Fairly reasonably, the Obama administration has proposed that taxpayers stop subsidizing programs with dismal performance rates. That way educational entrepreneurs at places like the Post will have to work on making sure they’re delivering some real value to their customers. Also quote reasonable, the Post would prefer to keep on getting free money from taxpayers and thus “spent $350,000 on lobbying in the third quarter of this year, more than any other higher-education company.”

But what’s more, Donald Graham has personally “gone to Capitol Hill to argue against the regulations in private visits with lawmakers” and just to make the full scope of his interest in the issue clear “[h]is newspaper, too, has editorialized against the regulations.” Meanwhile, it looks like the new GOP majority in the House of Representatives has decided that taxpayer subsidies to low-performing for-profit colleges like Kaplan is one of the forms of wasteful government spending they like. And presumably every member of congress is now on notice that the city’s most influential newspaper is prepared to go to bat for its corporate partners.

It’s obviously no secret to those living in Yemen. I suppose it’s mainly a secret from the American people, whose government more and more frequently is involved in doing things it doesn’t want the public to know—to the extent of letting torturers go scot-free, in clear violation of the law. But Obama doesn’t care. He’s not that into civil liberties, it seems.  Justin Elliott at Salon:

The Obama Administration has U.S. military trainers on the ground in Yemen and has already launched an attack and possibly multiple attacks in the country, drawing relatively little public attention and virtually no debate in Congress. Analysts and news reports suggest that the administration is now poised to escalate the secret war in Yemen, possibly by launching drone attacks targeting suspected terrorists.

The attention of the U.S. media briefly re-centered on Yemen late last month after explosives originating from the Gulf nation were found on two cargo planes in Britain and Dubai. The Obama Administration has fingered the Yemen-based group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) as responsible for the failed attempt. (AQAP also claimed responsibility.)  This is the same group that claimed responsibility for the failed attempt by Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day 2009.

But less attention has been paid to U.S. attacks on targets in Yemen — of which there have been at least two since 2002 — and the U.S. military role in training Yemeni forces as well as helping them carry out air strikes.

All of this is taking place in a nation that is beset by a struggling economy, two civil conflicts, and what has been called a "looming" water shortage.

Here’s a quick survey of U.S. military involvement in Yemen in recent years. There are two attacks that are widely thought to have been carried out by the United States. There are many other episodes in which the U.S. likely had some role; it’s often hard to say for sure because much of what we know comes from often contradictory news reports. The U.S. does not officially acknowledge the strikes.

* Nov. 3, 2002: An American Predator drone reportedly controlled by the CIA fires a missile at a car east of the capital of Sana’a. Six people are killed. The dead include Abu Ali al-Harithi, who the U.S. accuses of helping to plan the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in the harbor of the Yemeni city of Aden. U.S. citizen Kamal Derwish — whom the CIA knew was in the vehicle, according to the Washington Post — is also killed in the strike.

Derwish had been named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case of the Lackawanna Six, a group of Yemeni-American men who were convicted of providing material support to terrorists because they attended a training camp in Afghanistan. He was never charged with a crime. It’s not clear who the other four dead were; the Post reported at the time that "the other passengers were burned beyond recognition." After the attack, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says at a news conference that there are Americans on the ground in Yemen. "We have some folks in that country that have been working with the government and helping them think through ways of doing things," he says. The U.S. also begins providing weapons to the Yemeni government, the Washington Post reports at the time.

* Dec. 17, 2009: Dozens of people are killed after missiles hit settlements in the Abyan area in the south of Yemen. Citing a Yemeni parliamentary investigation, Amnesty International later says that 55 people were killed, of which 41 were civilians, including 14 women and 21 children. 14 of the 55 were suspected Al Qaeda members, though an Amnesty official tells Salon that only one was ever named.

The strike is initially reported as being conducted by "Yemeni security forces." But ABC reports a few days later that U.S. missiles were involved. Amnesty releases a report several months later with photos of an unexploded cluster bomblet and parts of a Tomahawk cruise missile that the group says could only have come from the U.S. military, possibly launched from a submarine or warship.

* January 2010: President Obama tells People Magazine, "I have no intention of sending U.S. boots on the ground in these regions," in reference to Yemen and Somalia. In fact, there were already at that time U.S. boots on the ground in Yemen — and the number has grown. According to According to the AP, there were 25 U.S. military trainers in Yemen as of September 2009, and their ranks doubled to 50 by September 2010.

"They may be playing a more active combat role as well. … I think it’s clear they’re more than trainers," Daveed Gartenstein-Ross of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies tells Salon.

* May 25, 2010: An air strike kills four people including Jaber al-Shabwani, the deputy governor of Ma’rib, a mistake for which the Yemeni government apologizes. There are reports that the strike was carried out by a U.S. drone, not the Yemeni military, but those are not confirmed. Citing unnamed officials, Reuters reports the same day that the U.S. has ramped up "intelligence gathering using surveillance aircraft, satellites and signals intercepts" and that it is sharing the information with the Yemeni government to assist in its strikes on "al Qaeda targets." Asked about the air strike, one U.S. official "acknowledged there was an increasingly ‘fine line’ between playing a supportive role and taking the lead."

The above timeline is not exhaustive; Amnesty estimated in an August report that Yemeni security forces "have killed at least 113 people since the beginning of 2009 in operations that the government said were targeting people they described as ‘terrorists.’" And the U.S. is thought to have been involved in at least some of those actions.

Asked this week about strikes on suspected terrorists, Yemen’s foreign minister told CNN, "The attacks are undertaken by the Yemeni air force, but there is intelligence information that is exchanged about the location of the terrorists by the Americans." And the Washington Post reported that U.S. drones have been flying over Yemen for the past several months, but they have not fired any missiles.

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Steve Benen:

Bloomberg News had this report this morning, but I feel like I’ve been seeing the similar reports for quite a while.

Investors around the world say President Barack Obama is bad for the bottom line, even though U.S. corporations are on track for the biggest earnings growth in 22 years and the stock market is headed for its best back-to- back annual gains since 2004.

That’s certainly one of the classic sentences of the year. The Obama White House is bad for profits, according to those making lots of money in the Obama era.

Indeed, we learned just two weeks ago that corporate profits since Obama’s inauguration that have risen faster "than during any other 18-month period since the 1920s." All told, profits have surged 62% from the start of 2009 to mid-2010, according to the Commerce Department. "That is faster than any other year and a half in the Fabulous ’50s, the Go-Go ’60s or the booms under Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton."
Obama’s bad for the bottom line? Are these people serious?

Indeed, Jon Chait recently noted that when it comes to politics, Dems have the worst of both worlds: "A top-heavy economy is causing them massive grief among suffering voters, and the only people who are actually doing well are lambasting them as socialists."

It’s all rather remarkable. Corporate profits are up; all of the major Wall Street indexes are up; and private-sector job growth is up.

At the exact same time, we’re also told that President Obama and the Democratic agenda are somehow "anti-business." It’s so drastic, in fact, that fat-cat conservatives and corporate lobbyists spent the entire year furiously raising money to elect Republicans. They were, apparently, outraged by the scourge of corporate prosperity.

What in the hell is going on here? Kevin Drum recently had a good item on the subject.

What’s remarkable about all this is that Obama is, patently, not anti-business. All of the corporate complaints above, when you dig an inch below the surface, amount to lashing out at phantasms. However, although Obama isn’t anti-business, it is fair to say that he’s not especially business friendly. And after decades of almost literally getting their every heart’s desire from Republican presidents and congresses, this has come as something as a shock to the corporate community. When Obama puts a tax break in the stimulus bill, it’s aimed mainly at the middle class, not the rich. When he hires a labor secretary, it’s someone who actually thinks labor laws should be enforced. When he says he wants to pass a healthcare reform bill, he actually does it. (Its impact on big business is close to zero, but no matter.) There’s no evidence at all that Obama wants to punish big business, but at the same time it’s quite plain that he cares much more about the middle class than he does about the rich.

And that’s pretty hard for them to take. So they’re apoplectic.

That strikes me as entirely right, but it’s also reminder not to take the big babies seriously when they complain about their already-big profits.

Paraphrasing a line from Raising Arizona, "There a word for that, and that word is named ‘stupidity’."

Take a look.

A short video, well worth watching.

Here’s an example of how craven we have become, cowering in fear at any untoward incident, gladly sacrificing our liberties for spurious promises of safety.

Patrick Smith, a professional airline pilot, blogs at 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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25 minutes on the Nordic again this morning and into chapter 5 of Robinson Crusoe. The effort is actually fairly easy: it’s the duration that makes the difference.

Yesterday, I made progress in Pilates. A lot of it seems to be finding how to "reach" certain muscles. For example, there’s a muscle that lets you move your little toe sideways, away from the other toes. Some people have easy control of this muscle, while most of us can’t even figure out how to make the muscle move. (Same with wiggling ears, lifting eyebrow, etc.) So a lot of this initial instruction is using the machines and metaphorical descriptions to help locate those muscles and eventually not only control them but feel what they’re doing.

Food is under control now that I know I cannot take a single unjournaled bite. So I close down all eating after dinner, which is when it tended to happen.

Weight this morning was 214.4 lbs.

This morning I picked up the Tres Claveles horsehair brush, with which I got a good lather from the ‘Exotic’ fragrance of Nanny’s Silly Soap. A good lather withal, and three easy passes with the Pils brought smoothness upon my face. A splash of Pinaud’s Clubman, and I’m good to go.

Dahlia Lithwick writes in Slate:

The old adage held that if they couldn’t get you for the crime, they would get you for the coverup. But this week, it was revealed that both the crime and the coverup will go permanently unpunished. Which suggests that everything in between will go unpunished as well.

In an America in which the former president can boast on television that he approved the water-boarding of U.S. prisoners, it can hardly be a shock that following a lengthy investigation, no criminal charges will be filed against those who destroyed the evidence of CIA abuse of prisoners Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.* We keep waiting breathlessly for someone, somewhere, to have a day of reckoning over the prisoners we tortured in the wake of 9/11, without recognizing that there is no bag man to be found and that therefore we are all the bag man.

President Barack Obama decided long ago that he would "turn the page" on prisoner abuse and other illegality connected to the Bush administration’s war on terror. What he didn’t seem to understand, what he still seems not to appreciate, is that what was on that page would bleed through onto the next page and the page after that. There’s no getting past torture. There is only getting comfortable with it. The U.S. flirtation with torture is not locked in the past or in the black sites or prisons at which it occurred. Now more than ever, it’s feted on network television and held in reserve for the next president who persuades himself that it’s not illegal after all.

In his new memoir, Decision Points, former President George W. Bush boasts that he not only granted his permission to water-board detainees but did so cowboy-fashion—with the words "Damn right." This admission has elicited barely a ripple of self-doubt among an American public that reconciled itself long ago to the twin propositions that torture can sometimes be legal and that every terror suspect is always a ticking time bomb. Bush’s contention that American torture "helped break up plots to attack American military and diplomatic facilities abroad, Heathrow airport and Canary Wharf in London, and multiple targets in the United States," has been largely rejected by British officials. (You may recall that earlier claims that Bush-era torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed led to the interruption of a plot to crash planes into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, were roundly debunked by my colleague Timothy Noah, who has shown that the Library Tower plot was disrupted in 2002, before the United States had even captured KSM, much less begun to torture him.)

But even the repeated assertions that torture saved American lives in this or that unfalsifiable international terror scenario is beside the point, as Ronald Reagan’s former Solicitor General Charles Fried has argued in Because It Is Wrong, a book co-authored with his son Gregory Fried. They argue that torture is immoral and illegal and that it has degraded and shamed this country. As the Frieds vividly demonstrate in their book, for all that torture hurts our enemies, it invariably hurts us even more. And as Charles Fried reminded an Australian newspaper again today, the illegality of water-boarding isn’t a close call, even though we have come to call it "simulated drowning" or "enhanced interrogation." It has been a crime for decades: "In the past we have prosecuted American soldiers who engaged in the equivalent of waterboarding. We have also prosecuted German and Japanese commandants who ordered it. Some were even executed."

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Cory Doctorow has a very interesting post at Boing Boing:

Public Knowledge’s Michael Weinberg has a new white paper: It Will Be Awesome if They Don’t Screw it Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology — the title says it all, really.

Traditional patent infringement is not necessarily well suited to a world in which individuals are replicating patented items in their own homes for their own use. Unlike with copyright infringement, the mere possession or downloading of a file is not enough to create infringement liability.[36] In order to identify an infringer, the patent owner would need to find a way to determine that the device was actually replicated in the physical world by the potential defendant. This would likely be significantly more time and resource intensive than the monitoring of file trading sites used in copyright infringement cases.

In light of this, following in the wake of large copyright holders, patent owners may turn to the doctrine of contributory infringement to defend their rights.[37] This would allow patent owners to go after those who enable individuals to replicate patented items in their homes. For example, they could sue manufacturers of 3D printers on the grounds that 3D printers are required to make copies. They may sue sites that host design files as havens of piracy. Instead of having to sue hundreds, or even thousands, of individuals with limited resources, patent holders could sue a handful of companies with the resources to pay judgments against them.

In addition to attacking the companies that make 3D printing possible, patent owners may try to stigmatize CAD file types in much the same way that copyright holders stigmatize the bit torrent file transfer protocol (or even MP3 files). Successfully equating CAD files with infringement could slow the mainstream adoption of 3D printing and imply that anyone uploading CAD files to a community site is somehow infringing on rights.

There’s no need to view again Shimkus repudiating modern science by reading God’s promise in Genesis. He states that God in infallible (though, curiously, he doesn’t claim infallibility for himself, so I guess we’re free to dismiss his deluded notions of science), though he neglects to observe that the vast majority of people living on this planet don’t really have much respect for the scientific aspects of Genesis—indeed, most are not even Christian.

Still, the GOP is fighting to keep global warming happening, regardless of danger to ourselves and other species. After all, what’s the point of being really stupid if you can’t do really stupid things?

In the meantime, Ethan Siegel (an actual scientist) lays out the physics case in favor of AGW. It seems quite clear.

I suspect this is another example of how the threat of terrorism is destroying America (and common sense). Marcy Wheeler:

Remember the former JSOC guy in charge of Homeland Security for PA who hired an Israeli-connected private intelligence company to collect information on environmentalists and peace activists? Well, it will surprise none of you that they were comparing Rainforest Action Network to Al Qaeda and trying to set up their own network of people informing on US citizens.

It turns out the homeland security office or its private consultant were doing more than just monitoring law-abiding citizens.

They were comparing environmental activists to Al-Qaeda.

They were tracking down protesters and grilling their parents.

They were seeking a network of citizen spies to combat the security threats they saw in virtually any legal political activity.

And they were feeding their suspicions not only to law enforcement, but to dozens of private businesses from natural gas drillers to The Hershey Co.

It was only a matter of time before the corporations running our country would equate–as ITRR did–embarrassing one of those corporations with terrorism.

And if that bugs you, just gorge yourself on some Hershey kisses. You can rest assured those Hershey kisses haven’t been damaged by scary peace activists or environmentalists!

Greenwald:

Last week at NYU Law School, I was on a panel — along with NYU Law Professor Burt Neuborne, Chicago Law Professor Geoffrey Stone, and FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force Supervisory Agent Niall Brennan, moderated by Time‘s Barton Gellman — which examined whether the threat of Terrorism was being exploited to erode core First Amendment/free speech rights, including the First Amendment right to advocate violence as recognized by the 1969 Supreme Court case Brandenburg v. Ohio.  The 1-hour event — which contained discussion of Obama’s assassination program and Anwar al-Awlaki — is worth listening to.  The video is below.  My initial presentation was the last one of the four panelists and begins at 30:00, and a quick rebuttal from me of a few of the other panelists’ points begins at 50:50.

At roughly 53:00, the Q-and-A session with the audience began, and the first questioner was NPR’s national security reporter Dina Temple-Raston, whose Awlaki reporting I had criticized just a couple days earlier for uncritically repeating claims told to her by anonymous Pentagon officials.  She directed her rather critical multi-part question to me, claiming, among other things, that she had seen evidence of Awlaki’s guilt as a Terrorist (which she had not previously reported or described in any detail), and that led to a rather contentious — and, in my view, quite revealing — exchange about the role of journalists and how Awlaki can and should be punished if he is, in fact, guilty of any actual crime:

UPDATE:  My Salon colleague Justin Elliot has a new article today examining the serious violence which the U.S. has been bringing to Yemen during the Obama presidency, as well as current plans for still-more escalation of our secret war in that nation.  Why would anyone in Yemen possibly advocate targeting the U.S. with violence?  It’s such a bewildering mystery.

I was raised in Oklahoma but left more or less for good 53 years ago. The place seems to have gone downhill. Tanya Somanader at ThinkProgress:

Oklahoma voters recently celebrated the novelty of becoming the first state to ban the non-existent threat of Sharia law. Under the “Save Our State” constitutional amendment, Oklahoma courts are forbidden from considering or using international and Sharia law in their rulings. Beyond the obvious First Amendment problems with the law, in their zealous “war” against the phantom Sharia menace, Oklahomans might find unexpected collateral damage to the Ten Commandments, businesses, and now, Native Americans.

Oklahoma has the second largest population of Native Americans in the U.S and law experts like Oklahoma University law professor Taiawagi Helton point out that language in the law banning courts from looking at “legal precepts of other nations or cultures” could pose a problem if applied to tribal legal cases, as the tribes are considered sovereign nations. In fact, the Oklahoma Indian Affairs Commission released an official memo on October 20 explaining how the “lack of specific tribal law language” could “damage the sovereignty of all Oklahoma tribes” and “starkly reminds [the Commission] that some Oklahoma lawmakers forgot that our nation and state were built on the principles, blood, and back of other nations and cultures, namely, ou[r] tribes”:

[The law]completely ignores the possibility that an Oklahoma state court may be called upon to apply the law of any of the 39 Indian tribes located with the borders of Oklahoma to resolve a dispute.[...]

The language of this proposed amendment starkly reminds us that some Oklahoma lawmakers forgot that our nation and state were built on the principles, blood, and backs of other nations and cultures, namely, out [sic] tribes. It also ignores that Oklahoma tribes have become valuable economic partners with the State that it cannot afford to ignore or exclude.

If SQ 755 is approved, the lack of specific tribal law language could easily be interpreted by a state judge to leave no room to refer to a tribe’s law to determine the existence of a valid waiver of a tribe’s sovereign immunity, for example. Thus, SQ 755 has the potential to provide state court judges with yet another opportunity to further erode tribal sovereignty. A state court judge could rely on the amendment’s absence of recognition of any tribal law to avoid or disavow its application.Tribes and tribal members should be aware of this glaring omission for Oklahoma courts to look to and apply our tribal laws when appropriate, and vote on this question accordingly.

Ohio University international law professor Peter Krug said Oklahoma businesses that deal with companies overseas could also suffer as “many transactions between companies rely on international treaties to uphold contracts” and “lawyers could take advantage of the lack of clarity in the language” to challenge cases.” “I think we will see extended legal arguments from both sides, and, quite honestly, any court decision that addresses [the amendment] will likely be appealed,” he said.

Fortunately, as Helton notes, it is unlikely that courts will uphold the law. A federal judge’s temporary order to block the law on Tuesday certainly lends credence to that notion.

And Ed Brayton on the same topic:

Politico devoted their "arena" on Tuesday to various perspectives on the Oklahoma ban on Sharia law. They apparently couldn’t find a single person to defend that absurd law, but they did find some interesting statements against it. Here’s Thomas Lippman from the Council on Foreign Relations:

This initiative is a product of ignorance so profound it takes one’s breath away. Nobody is promoting Shariah law in the United States. Even if anyone were, it would be a futile quest because there is no single body or school of Shariah law and it has never been codified.

And Brad Bannon, whoever he is:

What a relief!

With Osama Bin Laden poised to become the next chief justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court, Oklahomans reacted in the nick of time to make sure Islamic law, Shariah doesn’t become the basis of the state’s legal code. This is a major defeat for the Muslim majority that runs Tulsa. On the other side of the world, voters in Yemen voted to prevent English common law from becoming the law of that land.

Thank God that Oklahomans put an end to this insanity. There’s already one state, Louisiana, that does not follow English common law. If another state had abandoned the English common law basis of our legal system, there would have been chaos nationally in the legal system. It would have been just a matter of time before Nebraska adopted the Confucian code for Cornhuskers to use to settle disputes in that state.

With a thriving economy and full employment in their state, Oklahomans could afford to experiment with their legal system. But few states have that luxury.

This is new to me, but it seems to be popular. Jason Fitzpatrick at Lifehacker.com has a post on it, and he likes to this post by Chetan Surpur:

A year ago, I switched to the Colemak keyboard layout. I’ve since had zero pain in my hands when typing for many hours straight, I’ve been able to type faster, and I make fewer mistakes while typing.

A few months ago, I decided to try the biphasic sleep cycle. It worked as advertised, allowing me to get better sleep and need less of it. I used to sleep for 9 – 10 hours each day, and now I need just 6 – 7.5 to stay just as sprightly, if not more.

A few weeks ago, after these successful life hacks, my friend told me about the eccentric work cycle that he follows.

“You might think it’s crazy and stupid, but it works for me,” he said. “I sit at my desk and work for 30 minutes without distraction, completely absorbed in my work. Then, after the 30 minutes are up, I drop whatever I’m doing and go do something fun for 30 minutes. During this relaxation time, I don’t think about work at all – I play games, write, whatever, but no work. After 30 minutes, I go back to my desk, rinse and repeat.”

Immediately, I thought,

‘That won’t work for me.’
‘Switching context that often would be too distracting.’
‘When I’m in my groove, I can’t drop it and come back to it easily.’
‘It sounds like it would take twice as long to get anything done!’

‘Hmmm. Screw it. I’ll give it a shot.’

You can probably tell by now where this story is going.

Abracadabra

It works.

• While working on a software project, I would get stuck on a bug and spend hours trying to figure out what went wrong, addicted to the quest and unable to stop, even when I run out of ideas on what else to try.Now, I stop at the 30 minute mark and relax for half an hour, and when I come back to my computer, my calm mind has a divine inspiration in the first 5 minutes and I blow the bug to smithereens, saving countless hours of exasperation.
• I would dread each essay assigned in my humanities class. I would have to spend 2 hours planning my essay, 3 hours staring at Microsoft Word and then another 4 hours painstakingly writing the essay for school (a total of 9+ precious hours down the drain). Most of these hours would be spent in frustration, hating life and the college humanities requirement, and refreshing Gmail and iGoogle every 5 minutes, putting off the time I would have to buckle down and write.The other day, I spent a total of 3.5 hours (1 hour planning and 30 minutes on each paragraph) and finished my latest essay, no sweat.

  Oh, and while writing the essay, I also ended up finishing the Halo Reach campaign.

• I used to cordon off entire days to study for my midterms, and spend most of them procrastinating and wasting time.Now, I know that given 8 hours, I’ll have complete focus for 4 of them, and that’s all the total concentrated studying I need for the midterm. Planning is easier, and so is the studying process.
• And the best part is, I don’t stress about work as much. I know exactly how much I can get done given a set amount of time. Time is now my bitch, not the other way around.

Revealing the trick

So why does it work? . . .

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And, on the same theme, Brett Hagberg has a good post:

As much as workaholics like to claim that they’re superior because they work more hours, don’t listen to them.

Workaholics do work more hours than the rest of us, but they don’t work smart hours. They may sit at their desks forever, but that doesn’t mean that they’re using their time well 100% of the time. In fact, odds are good that the quality of their work is lower because they work in long, uninterrupted sessions that are a big drain on their brains’ mental energy. As the quality of their work drops, so do their productivity and their morale – resulting in one overworked, unhappy worker.

Workaholics of the world: start working smarter instead of keeping yourself up all night working on a project. Here are 5 ways to get started:

Work in Short, Uninterrupted Spurts

Too often, we subject ourselves to long, fatiguing work sessions. This takes that concept and throws it out the window. Working in 20-40 minute spurts with 5-10 minute breaks has helped my productivity out a lot. It allows you to zone in on your work for a short period of time and allows your brain to recover and have a bit of fun after you’re done your work. The allure of the break (where you can do anything you want) will keep you motivated to do your work and will prevent you from getting distracted during your designated work times. The result? Much better efficiency and morale while working.

Focus and Cut Out the Noise

Going along with number 1, you should elimate every distraction possible. Turn off your cell phone, close your email, get off Twitter, stop checking Facebook, stop listening to music, and focus while you’re doing your work. Do your best to not get distracted by the any number of things that could be claiming your attention, and do your work with the greatest attention to detail. You’ll work faster and better if you cut out all the noise – I know, for example, that my writing improves dramatically when I don’t listen to music while I work. As they say – “Distractions are the enemy of productivity”.

Prioritize . . .

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