Later On

First, the doctor wants to buy 4 copies of the shaving book to give to his friends who can’t believe that there’s a book on shaving.

Second, the low energy could really be anything: B vitamins, iron, thyroid, etc. So he’s having a blood workup done, and I’ll return. I did show him the little B-vitamin supplement provided by my diet counselor, and the doctor said that those were a good idea, but my low energy level is not from failing to take the supplement. That made me feel better.

So: all in all a good visit, and I’ll return for the analysis of the blood workup.

The US critics of Wikileaks are beside themselves with moral outrage over the release of secret diplomatic messages.

Indeed, their moral outrage is so noticeable that one wonders what other atrocities have so enraged them.

Greenwald takes a look at things that they condemn and things that seem perfectly okay to them and indeed worth strong support.

Somanader in ThinkProgress:

Yesterday, the Senate failed to extend unemployment benefits through next year, leaving over 2 million unemployed Americans without crucial aid in the midst of the holiday season. Senate Republicans refused to consider a year-long extension unless the cost is fully paid for. A particularly incensed Sen. Scott Brown delivered a “fiery speech” on the Senate floor last night, lambasting Democrats “for what he considers to be unwarranted diversions.” “We spent seven days on food safety!” Brown scoffed and reassured unemployed workers that “I have complete and total sympathy and understanding” and that “more than anybody here, I want to help.”

However, when Democrats offered him that opportunity, he single-handedly slapped away the chance. Trying to beat the clock, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) introduced a proposal Monday to extend benefits through 2011 at a cost of $56 billion without offsets. But when Democrats tried to pass the proposal yesterday, Brown blocked the effort, complaining that he’d “just found out” about it:

Hours before beefed-up benefits were set to expire at midnight, Democrats sought to extend them for another year. But they were blocked by Republican Senator Scott Brown, who said Democrats should have taken time to work out a compromise.

“It’s not the way to do business in the United States Senate, and if it is it needs to change,” Brown said. “We just found out today, or late yesterday, that we were even going to talk about this.”

After his objection, Brown offered his own proposal for a year-long extension as long as the Office of Management and Budget finds funds from already approved appropriations to pay for it. But Democrats turned down the plan because, as Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) noted, “we have to deal with the immediate crisis” and “the families that are struggling today.” This, of course, was the governing philosophy of both parties when they passed unemployment extension seven times under the Bush Administration. In fact, before yesterday, Congress went 40 years without allowing extended unemployment benefits to expire when the unemployment rate was above 7.2 percent. The unemployment rate today stands at 9.6 percent.

But, in a video released this morning, Brown defended his opposition, saying he “disagreed” that Congress should “pay for unemployment benefits” by “putting more debt on the credit card.” A curious position considering Brown is more than happy to slap the nation with a$830 billion bill in order to extend the Bush tax cuts for the top two percent of wealthy Americans. In touting the GOP’s absurd logic, Brown and his GOP colleagues champion an extension that provides “virtually no economic stimulus,” while rebuking one that “contribute[s] powerfully to the economic growth that is vital for a healthy budget.”

This morning, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D) called Brown’s vote against 60,000 Massachusetts workers “outrageous” and a “question of national character.” “We need Scott Brown to see and be worried about the people of the Commonwealth who are trying to get groceries on the table while they continue to look for work,” he said. But, according to his schedule, Brown is busy focusing on his Christmas-themed fundraisers this week.

Brad Johnson at ThinkProgress:

The annual international climate talks began this week in Cancun, Mexico, the beach resort city that has already lost most of its beaches to climate change. Negotiators for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — which the United States ratified in 1992 to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” — are working in the shadow of the collapse of American climate policy during one of the hottest years in recorded history. Increasingly violent storms and rising seas — fueled by the continued burning of fossil fuels — have “aggravated the folly of building a tourist destination atop shifting sand dunes on a narrow peninsula,” the Associated Press reports:

Cancun’s eroding white sand beaches are providing a note of urgency to the climate talks being held just south of this seaside resort famed for its postcard-perfect vistas. Rising sea levels and a series of unusually powerful hurricanes have aggravated the folly of building a tourist destination atop shifting sand dunes on a narrow peninsula. After the big storms hit, the bad ideas were laid bare: Much of Cancun’s glittering hotel strip is now without a beach. Hotels built too tall, too heavy and too close to the shore, as well as beaches stripped of native vegetation to make them more tourist-friendly, have contributed to the massive erosion.

To maintain the semblance of normality in this tourist destination, “tons of sand are being pumped from offshore sandbars by two huge dredgers and is then sprayed along miles of Cancun’s hardest hit areas.”

As we enter the season of gifts, I want to suggest how you can identify men who might appreciate the gift of Leisureguy’s Guide to Gourmet Shaving. Ask yourself one question, then ask the potential recipient one question.

First question: "Does he shave?" A "no" answer suggests that the book is not a suitable gift; a "yes" answer leads to the next question.

Second question (asked of the potential recipient): "Do you actually enjoy shaving?"

If he answers "No", then the book might well be a good gift for him. (See these reader reviews.)

Just a thought.

Excellent post at Cachagua Store. From the post:

Kobe is just one type of Japanese-style beef. Kobe is a city about 300 miles from Tokyo, part of the megalopolis that includes Kyoto. Cattle were raised here back in the day….still are, for that matter.

Americans love short names. (Corton and Pommard wildly outsell Pernand-Vergelesses in red Burgundy, for no other real reason). Kobe is so much easier to remember than Tottori, Tajima, Shimane, Mishima, and Okayama. We won’t even talk about Akaushi, much less Kochi and Kumamoto.

All Japanese cattle are controlled by the government….and always have been. All Japanese and Japanese style cattle are from a set of distinct breeds called "Wagyu"….which means "Japanese cows". Duh. All the other names and breeds are subsets of Wagyu….Japanese beef.

Cattle were introduced to Japan around 2,200 years ago for use as four-legged tractors. The relative value of their labor vs. their value of meat was incalculable. Eating a cow in Japan in 200 BC would be like taking apart a John Deer tractor to use the fenders as skillets. Until 1868 there was a complete ban in Japan of eating ANY four-legged animal.

Read the whole thing.

Getting to Yes, by Roger Fisher and William Ury, is one of those life-changing books because it provides a clear process for executing an essential skill: negotiating fair and robust agreements. Her Ury talks more about that:

Free on-line book for those who struggle to sleep.

I actually blogged earlier about this gun. It fires from the bottom chamber, so the recoil is lower, more in line with your arm, and thus the gun does not kick upward so much as most revolvers (which fire from the top chamber). Extremely clever, and designed by a guy who designed an automatic revolver, which neatly sidesteps the problem of most automatic handguns: the spring in the magazine clip. If you leave the magazine full, the spring weakens and can fail (because it is fully compressed for most of the time); if you leave the magazine empty, you then have to ask the bad guys to wait until you’ve had time to load the clip, which takes some time.

Steve at the Firearm Blog has a post on this. He notes:

American Rifleman have gotten their hands on the Chiappa Rhino Revolver and posted a review of it online.

Steve’s earlier post has a photo of the automatic revolver, now (alas) no longer in production.

The NY Times under Bill Keller seems to be modeling itself on a government-run news organization. Keller reported that he cleared the NY Times Wikileaks stories with the US government, giving them prior approval. And thanks to his obsequious and deferential attitude, the report the NY Times printed was incomplete and misleading.

Justin Elliott reports at Salon:

One of the first revelations in the WikiLeaks cables archive, first reported in a big story by the New York Times, is that U.S. intelligence has concluded that Iran obtained 19 medium-range missiles from North Korea. The Times story warned in its third paragraph that the "missiles could for the first time give Iran the capacity to strike at capitals in Western Europe or easily reach Moscow."

But the Times did not print the full December 2009 cable for its readers, complying with a request from the Obama Administration, the reasons for which are not clear. WikiLeaks did publish the cable, which you can read here.

And the thing that jumps out about the cable, which describes a U.S.-Russian meeting on Iran, is that the Russians expressed intense doubts about whether Iran had actually acquired so-called BM-25 missiles from North Korea. But these doubts were inexplicably left out of the Times story that set the international narrative on the issue. Neoconservatives in the U.S. have seized on the report to trumpet claims that Iran is a threat and to retroactively justify George W. Bush’s 2002 "axis of evil" speech.

Journalist Gareth Porter was first to tackle this:

The full text of the U.S. State Department report on the meeting of the Joint Threat Assessment in Washington Dec. 22, 2009, which is available on the Wikileaks website, shows that there was a dramatic confrontation over the issue of the mysterious BM-25 missile. …

The head of the U.S. delegation to the meeting, Vann H. Van Diepen, acting assistant secretary for international security and nonproliferation, said the United States "believes" Iran had acquired 19 of those missiles from North Korea, according to the leaked document.

But an official of the Russian Defence Ministry dismissed published reports of such a missile, which he said were "without reference to any reliable sources".

And indeed, if you read the cable, the Russian objections are quite clear: . . .

Continue reading.

Extremely sleazy practice by Amazon. Thanks to TYD for the link. Rob Pegararo reports in the Washington Post:

Kindle readers, take note: You may have been paying for books you could legally download for free–in nearly identical editions–elsewhere.

The titles in question aren’t just public-domain books that have long been freely available at such sites as Project Gutenberg. They appear to be the exact Gutenberg files, save only for minor formatting adjustments and the removal of that volunteer-run site’s license information.

Gutenberg contributor Linda M. Everhart complained in an e-mail in late October that Amazon was selling a title she’d contributed to Gutenberg, Arthur Robert Harding’s 1906 opus "Fox Trapping," for $4.

"They took the text version, stripped off the headers and footer containing the license, re-wrapped the sentences, and made the chapter titles bold," wrote Everhart, a Blairstown, Mo., trapper. She added that "their version had all my caption lines, in exactly the same place where I had put them."

In follow-up messages, Everhart pointed to such other instances of Kindle cloning as Eldred Nathaniel Woodcock’s "Fifty Years a Hunter and Trapper" (free on Gutenberg, 99 cents on Amazon), John R. Lockard’s "Bee Hunting" ($3.69 as a Kindle edition) and Martin Hunter’s"Canadian Wilds" ($3.16 from Amazon). These titles appear to be sold with Amazon’s standard digital-rights-management restrictions, a limit absent from Gutenberg downloads.

Producing a Gutenberg text is not easy, Everhart wrote. She said she downloads a scan of the book’s pages from the Internet Archive’s collection, runs it through optical-character-recognition software and then corrects mistakes and strips out extraneous data before formatting the text to Gutenberg’s strict guidelines. Next comes converting that text file into an HTML version with linked images that can finally be uploaded to Gutenberg.

Apparently it’s less work to convert that output to a Kindle Store download: "Canadian Wilds" appeared on Gutenberg Oct. 30 and showed up on Amazon a day later.

This activity is, however, permitted under the Gutenberg license. As its introduction explains: "If you strip the Project Gutenberg license and all references to Project Gutenberg from the ebook, you are left with a public domain ebook. You can do anything you want with that."

Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation chief executive Greg Newby expressed frustration about what he called an old problem for the non-profit organization. "Is this legal? Yes," he wrote in an e-mail Nov. 11. "Is it ethical? I don’t think it is."

Newby wrote that many other booksellers had engaged in this sort of harvesting but called Amazon "the worst offender," owing to the number of suppliers it works with.

Amazon spokeswoman Sarah Gelman did not deny the basic allegation in an e-mail last Wednesday that followed a series of queries to the company’s PR department: . . .

Continue reading.

Steve Benen:

The AP had an item late last night, noting that Senate Republicans were circulating a letter, "quietly collecting signatures" on a plan to "block action on virtually all Democratic-backed legislation unrelated to tax cuts and government spending."

This morning, the Senate GOP leadership unveiled their letter — signed by literally all 42 members of the Republican caucus — declaring their intention to hold the chamber hostage until the tax policy debate is resolved.

"[W]e write to inform you that we will not agree to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to any legislative item until the Senate has acted to fund the government and we have prevented the tax increase that is currently awaiting all American taxpayers. With little time left in this Congressional session, legislative scheduling should be focused on these critical priorities. While there are other items that might ultimately be worthy of the Senate’s attention, we cannot agree to prioritize any matters above the critical issues of funding the government and preventing a job-killing tax hike."

In practical terms, this means that the Senate Republican caucus will join arms and kill literally every piece of legislation in the lame-duck session — New START, funding U.S. troops, the DREAM Act, etc. — until the government is fully funded and they’re satisfied with the outcome of the debate on tax policy.

When the letter was being circulated yesterday, there was some hope that some of the less-conservative members — the Maine "moderates," for example — might not go along with the hostage-taking strategy. This morning, however, we learned that every Republican is on board with this plan. Even Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) is saying our national security needs through the pending arms treaty must take a back seat to tax cuts.

Also note the context: President Obama hosted a meeting at the White House yesterday with congressional leaders of both parties, and afterwards, everyone was all smiles. There was a renewed commitment to try to work together, find common ground, with an emphasis on bipartisanship.

A few hours later, the hostage letter was circulated by the GOP leadership, and less than a day after the bipartisan confab, literally every member of the Senate Republican caucus effectively told the world, "Screw bipartisanship; we’re playing hardball until we get what we want on tax cuts for the wealthy."

How Democrats — on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue — respond to this gambit remains to be seen.

* Postscript: Also note the unstated truth behind the threat — Republicans will block literally everything until they’re satisfied, at which point, they’ll try to block literally everything anyway.

Because Congress is filled with idiots like the one in this video. I shudder to think of the people who wanted this guy representing them.

And then there are two sort of depressing posts by Kevin Drum:

GOP Cynicism Gone Wild

Willful Self-Destruction

There’s no guarantee that the US can survive a political party that really, really wants to break things and absolutely refuses to acknowledge any reality that displeases them.

Megs this morning:

Very good shave after one adjustment. The Figaro created a fine bitter-almond-fragranced lather thanks in part to the G.B. Kent BK4 brush. Then the Apollo Mikron began and I was a little shocked by the blade: it didn’t seem to be nearly so smooth as I’m used to, but it did cut. Still, after the second pass I decided that the blade was definitely over, and I picked up the Rocket for the third ATG pass. On changing out the Apollo blade, I saw that it was a Ben Hur blade that I apparently used beyond its effective life. For next time, there’s a new Swedish Gillette blade now in the razor.