Later On

I used to mark up currency to play "Where’s George?" and I just got an email: a $20-bill that I marked and released has been reported. I spent it in Monterey and it turned up in Oakland, a distance of 87 miles. I released it 4 years, 245 days, 19 hours, and 5 minutes before it was reported, so it traveled about 1/2 mile/day.

George Zornick at ThinkProgress:

The Nigerian government will charge former Vice President Dick Cheney in a massive bribery case involving $180 million in kickbacks paid to Nigerian lawmakers, who awarded a $6 billion natural gas pipeline contract to Halliburton subsidiary KBR when Cheney was running the company. Godwin Obla, prosecuting counsel at the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, said indictments will be lodged in a Nigerian court “in the next three days,” and an arrest warrant for Cheney “will be issued and transmitted through Interpol.”

KBR already pleaded guilty in the U.S. last year in relation to the bribery scheme, and along with Halliburton agreed to pay a $579 million settlement. “This bribery scheme involved both senior foreign government officials and KBR corporate executives who took actions to insulate themselves from the reach of U.S. law enforcement,”said Acting Assistant Attorney General Rita M. Glavin of the Criminal Division at the time. Cheney was indeed a “KBR corporate executive” at the time, but was not specifically charged. The case revolves largely around the actions of London lawyer Jeffrey Tesler, who maintained strong connections with the Nigerian government and was hired by Halliburton subsidiaries to funnel money to them in order to obtain lucrative contracts. Halliburton Watch explains the Cheney connection:

[In June 2004], Halliburton fires Albert Jack Stanley after investigators say he received $5 million in “improper” payments from Mr. Tesler…. Halliburton spokesperson, Wendy Hall, said that during the years he ran KBR, Mr. Stanley reported to David Lesar, Halliburton’s president and chief operating officer at the time and CEO today. Mr. Lesar reported to Mr. Cheney when Cheney was chief executive…. According to the Dallas Morning News, “Mr. Cheney ran Halliburton when one of four suspicious payments occurred.” [...]

The Wall Street Journal reports on newly disclosed evidence by Halliburton, including notes written by M.W. Kellogg employees during the mid-1990s in which they discussed bribing Nigerian officials. The Financial Times of London said the evidence “raises questions over what Mr Cheney knew – or should have known – about one of the largest contracts awarded to a Halliburton subsidiary.”

A Cheney spokesperson told Reuters he had no comment, but would later today. It is important to note that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — of which Halliburton is a member — recently lobbied to weaken an important U.S. law that “stops American-based multinational firms from bribing foreign governments in order to win special business advantages,” as ThinkProgress detailed in October.

Via PZ Myers:

Via Glenn Greenwald, in an update to his column:

NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen has a characteristically insightful and thought-provoking analysis of WikiLeaks, expressed through a 14-minute video.  Regarding why many valuable sources prefer to give their documents and other leaks to WikiLeaks rather than traditional press outlets, he says:

In the American case, one of the reasons is that the legitimacy of the press itself is in doubt in the minds of the leakers.  And there’s good reason for that.  Because while we have what purports to be a "watchdog press," we also have — laid out in front of us — the clear record of the watchdog press’  failure to do what it says it can do, which is provide a check on power when it tries to conceal its deeds and its purpose. 

So I think it’s a mistake to try to reckon with WikiLeaks and what it’s about without including in the frame the spectacular failures of the watchdog press over the last 10, 20, 30, 40 years – but especially recently.  And so without this legitimacy crisis in mainstream American journalism, the leakers might not be so inclined to trust an upstart like Julian Assange and a shadowy organization like WikiLeaks . . . 

These kinds of huge, cataclysmic events [the Iraq War] within the legitimacy regime lie in the background of the WikiLeaks case, because if it wasn’t for those things, WikiLeaks wouldn’t have the supporters it has, the leakers wouldn’t collaborate the way they do, and the moral force behind exposing what this Government is doing just wouldn’t be there. . . . The watchdog press died, and what we have is WikiLeaks instead.

Most American journalists — represented by Jonathan Capehart in the video above and the Post‘s self-praising contrast between the Free, Robust American Press and the anemic, controlled "Arab media" — are so far away from even beginning to process those facts, indeed are constitutionally incapable of understanding or facing them, that they are just in a different universe than reality.  And that — combined with the fact that they are rooted in and dependent upon the very political system they are supposed to check and which these disclosures threaten — are the reasons why most of them react to WikiLeaks with an equal dose of confoundedness and contempt.

Greenwald also comments on the strange criticisms of the latest dump: that it is both a Grave Danger to US National Security and that it shows Nothing New. How can it be both? In fact, there’s a fair amount that’s new. Greenwald lists some:

If there’s Nothing New in these documents, can Jonathan Capehart (or any other "journalist" claiming this) please point to where The Washington Post previously reported on these facts, all revealed by the WikiLeaks disclosures: 

(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;

(2) the State Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA’s kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;

(3) the State Department under Bush and Obama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA’s torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see The Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Will Bunch today about this: "The day Barack Obama Lied to me");

(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War "investigation";

(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;

(6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post‘s own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by the WikiLeaks documents;

(7) the U.S.’s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal — a coup – but the State Department did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;

(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow the U.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,

(9) Hillary Clinton’s State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.

That’s just a sampling.

This is what Joe Lieberman and his comrades are desperately trying to suppress — literally prevent it from being accessible on the Internet.  And "journalists" like Capehart play along by continuing to insist there’s "nothing new" being revealed by WikiLeaks despite their never having reported any of this.  And since the disclosures, does anyone believe that any of these revelations have received anything close to meaningful attention by the American establishment media?  But remember — as Capehart’s newspaper taught us today — "revelations by the organization WikiLeaks have received blanket coverage this week on television, in newspapers" in Free America — showing what a Vibrant, Adversarial Press we are blessed with — but "in many Arab countries, the mainstream media have largely avoided reporting on the sensitive contents of the cables."

I just learned of a site that may be helpful and interest to those who travel: Wikitravel.org. Like all wikis, it is updated and revised by readers, and as more use it, it (in effect) gets more editors and contributors and thus becomes more valuable.

Take a look. Simplest way is to use it to look up your most recent trip and see how it might have helped there—plus you might even be able to contribute some text yourself.

As I’ve noted on many previous posts, one of the many problems that global warming creates is the failure of major food crops due to changing climate patterns: regions that once could grow plentiful crops relying simply on rainfall will soon find yields sharply decreasing. I suspect food wars will be even more intense than the energy wars we’re likely to see as part of the transition away from petroleum.

And the US, in the face of these problems, is busy shutting its eyes, putting it hands over its ears, and reciting ancient religious texts that "prove" that global warming is not happening. (They never address the scientific case or the actual evidence.) This is mainly the GOP, but certainly the Democrats have not shown any signs of growing a backbone, stepping up to the plate, and doing what’s right. It’s not a good time to have a president who seems to fear confrontation and who is inclined toward repressive government measures, with little regard for civil liberties.

At any rate, the problem will soon reach a magnitude that it cannot be ignored, though God knows the GOP will certainly try. Janet Raloff reports in Science News:

Since summer, signs of severe food insecurity — droughts, food riots, five- to tenfold increases in produce costs — have erupted around the globe. Several new reports now argue that regionally catastrophic crop failures — largely due to heat stress — are signals that global warming may have begun outpacing the ability of farmers to adapt.

Some one billion people already suffer serious malnutrition. That number could mushroom, the new reports argue, if governments big and small don’t begin heeding warning signs like spikes in the price of food staples.

Severe summer droughts in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan ravaged 2010 cereal yields. When Russia, the fourth largest wheat exporter, imposed an export ban in August, international markets responded with price spikes. Having sold around 17 million metric tons on world markets in 2009, Russia’s 2010 wheat exports are expected to fall closer to 4 million metric tons, according to a November Food Outlook report by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, or FAO. (Russia’s export ban is slated to remain in effect until next July.)

Overall, FAO reports, food imports by the world’s poorest nations are expected to cost 11 percent more in 2010 than a year earlier — and 20 percent more for some low-income food-importing countries. FAO predicts the total cost of 2010 food imports will be roughly $1 trillion — a near-record level. Contributing to the problem is a 2 percent drop in global cereal yields; earlier this year 2010 cereal production had been expected to post a 1 percent gain.

Food prices offer a good proxy for agriculture’s health, notes Gerald Nelson, an economist with the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C. Rising prices signal increasing resource scarcity, he explains, which can be triggered by expanding populations, growing incomes (because people can afford more and better food) and declining crop yields.

Recent food-price shocks and yield shortfalls initially surprised analysts, note IFPRI’s Derek Headey and Shenggen Fan in a November 18 report. Government officials had been lulled into complacency by decades of falling food costs. But prices bottomed out around 2000 and have since begun climbing in response to commodities speculation and a string of poor harvests, the pair notes.

Nelson and his colleagues have now used computer models to get some grasp on how crop yields and prices might respond, several decades out, to Earth’s continuing low-grade fever.

The team considered three scenarios of income and population growth that might reasonably be expected to occur between 2020 and 2050. Then they applied four “plausible” climate scenarios with warmer temperatures and anywhere from slightly to substantially wetter weather. They also included an “implausible fifth scenario of perfect mitigation (a continuation of today’s climate into the future).”

The resulting 15 scenarios all indicated that . . .

Continue reading.

Had to return to Sweet Gale. I do love the fragrance and the lather, the latter created this morning with the Rooney 3/1 Super Silvertip. Three extremely pleasant passes (after the rough blade yesterday) with the Eclipse and the Swedish Gillette blade, providing a smooth target for the splash of Klar Seifen Klassik.

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.