Later On

For reasons unknown to me, but probably because, in the US today, it works, the GOP has specialized in outright lies and fabrications, which they continue to repeat even after the falsehood is exposed. Sarah Palin, for example, continues to talk about the "death panels" in the Affordable Care Act.

Here’s one where Allen West quite clearly called for censoring the American media—the GOP hates a free press, preferring closely controlled press—and then lies about it. The link includes the lie and the refutation, which consists of him quite clearly calling for "censoring" the media: he did it on the radio. But now he lies.

Steve Benen:

There are still political observers, in the media and out, who seem to think the status quo on filibusters, holds, and judicial nominees is normal. Dems do it under Republican presidents; Republicans do it under Democratic presidents. It’s just how the process goes.

Except those assumptions are tragically wrong. What we’re seeing now just isn’t normal.

As the first congressional session of Obama’s presidency draws to a close, what began as a slow process of confirmation has ballooned into a full-blown judicial crisis. The Senate has overseen the slowest pace of judicial staffing in at least a generation, with a paltry 39.8 percent of Obama’s judges having been confirmed, according to numbers compiled by Senate Democrats. Of the 103 district and circuit court nominees, only 41 have been confirmed.

By this time in George W. Bush’s presidency, the Senate had confirmed 76 percent of his nominees. President Clinton was working at a rate of 89 percent at this point in his tenure. [...]

Ronald Reagan had twice as many judges confirmed by this time in his presidency, with his 87 confirmations dwarfing Obama’s total. George H.W. Bush had moved 70 judges through the Democratic-controlled Senate.

With fewer judges on staff, those left must take on that many more cases. For example, each judge on a Denver panel two robes short is responsible for 593 instead of 430 cases. The slow pace of confirmations has led to a federal judiciary with nearly one in eight seats empty, as a foreclosure crisis fueled by rampant fraud floods the courts.

For Senate Republicans, none of this matters. The key is to prevent a Democratic president from putting qualified jurists on the federal bench, and make it easier for the judiciary’s shift to the right to continue unabated. As a result, qualified judicial nominees who enjoy broad bipartisan support get stuck by secret holds and pointless filibusters, not because they’re undeserving, but because GOP senators would rather have a vacancy crisis than judges nominated by Obama.

As even conservative judges have insisted, these tactics are undermining the way the American system of justice functions — or in this case, doesn’t. That makes Republican petty and hyper-partisan tactics more than just a nuisance; this is arguably quite dangerous.

With that in mind, now is also a good time to mention that there’s a growing push for the Senate to reform the way the institution operates, and a new initiative was launched this week called Fix the Senate Now. Among the groups involved are SEIU, the AFL-CIO, and other leading labor organizations, as well as the Sierra Club, Daily Kos, and Common Cause.

In the meantime, on the Hill, Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Tom Udall (D-N.M.) are taking the lead on reforming the way the Senate does business. I’ll have more on their efforts later in the week.

Take a look at how this young man is being treated:

Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime.  Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months — and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait — under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture.  Interviews with several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning’s detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard) who confirmed much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is subjected to detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries.

Since his arrest in May, Manning has been a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems.  He nonetheless was declared from the start to be a "Maximum Custody Detainee," the highest and most repressive level of military detention, which then became the basis for the series of inhumane measures imposed on him.

From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement.  For 23 out of 24 hours every day — for seven straight months and counting — he sits completely alone in his cell.  Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he’s barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions.  For reasons that appear completely punitive, he’s being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch).  For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs.  Lt. Villiard protested that the conditions are not "like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole," but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out.

In sum, Manning has been subjected for many months without pause to inhumane, personality-erasing, soul-destroying, insanity-inducing conditions of isolation similar to those perfected at America’s Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado:  all without so much as having been convicted of anything.  And as is true of many prisoners subjected to warped treatment of this sort, the brig’s medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation.

Just by itself, the type of prolonged solitary confinement to which Manning has been subjected for many months is widely viewed around the world as highly injurious, inhumane, punitive, and arguably even a form of torture.  In his widely praised March, 2009 New Yorker article — entitled "Is Long-Term Solitary Confinement Torture?" — the surgeon and journalist Atul Gawande assembled expert opinion and personal anecdotes to demonstrate that, as he put it, "all human beings experience isolation as torture."  By itself, prolonged solitary confinement routinely destroys a person’s mind and drives them into insanity.  A March, 2010 article in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law explains that"solitary confinement is recognized as difficult to withstand; indeed, psychological stressors such as isolation can be as clinically distressing as physical torture."

For that reason, many Western nations — and even some non-Western nations notorious for human rights abuses — refuse to employ prolonged solitary confinement except in the most extreme cases of prisoner violence.  "It’s an awful thing, solitary," John McCain wrote of his experience in isolated confinement in Vietnam. “It crushes your spirit."  As Gawande documented: "A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam . . . reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered."  Gawande explained that America’s application of this form of torture to its own citizens is what spawned the torture regime which President Obama vowed to end:

This past year, both the Republican and the Democratic Presidential candidates came out firmly for banning torture and closing the facility in Guantánamo Bay, where hundreds of prisoners have been held in years-long isolation. Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain, however, addressed the question of whether prolonged solitary confinement is torture. . . .

This is the dark side of American exceptionalism. . . . Our willingness to discard these standards for American prisoners made it easy to discard the Geneva Conventions prohibiting similar treatment of foreign prisoners of war, to the detriment of America’s moral stature in the world.  In much the same way that a previous generation of Americans countenanced legalized segregation, ours has countenanced legalized torture. And there is no clearer manifestation of this than our routine use of solitary confinement . . . .

It’s one thing to impose such punitive, barbaric measures on convicts who have proven to be violent when around other prisoners; at the Supermax in Florence, inmates convicted of the most heinous crimes and who pose a threat to prison order and the safety of others are subjected to worse treatment than what Manning experiences.  But it’s another thing entirely to impose such conditions on individuals, like Manning, who have been convicted of nothing and have never demonstrated an iota of physical threat or disorder.

In 2006, a bipartisan National Commission on America’s Prisons was created and it called for the elimination of prolonged solitary confinement.  Its Report documented that conditions whereby "prisoners end up locked in their cells 23 hours a day, every day. . . is so severe that people end up completely isolated, living in what can only be described as torturous conditions."  The Report documented numerous psychiatric studies of individuals held in prolonged isolation which demonstrate "a constellation of symptoms that includes overwhelming anxiety, confusion and hallucination, and sudden violent and self-destructive outbursts."  The above-referenced article from the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law states:  "Psychological effects can include anxiety, depression, anger, cognitive disturbances, perceptual distortions, obsessive thoughts, paranoia, and psychosis."

When one exacerbates the harms of prolonged isolation with the other deprivations to which Manning is being subjected, . . .

Continue reading.

The only thing I can figure out is that our government has hidden some extremely bad things from us, and Obama is determined to keep them secret no matter the damage to the country or the Constitution. I am rapidly losing respect for Obama, and my respect for Eric Holder is long gone.

Ezra Klein has a good review of the various tax-cut options: the Democratic proposal, the GOP proposal, and the Obama-GOP deal. Bottom line (click to enlarge):

This is wonderful for the wealthy, terrible for the country.

You’ve undoubtedly noticed that there have been fewer new posts in recent months. The reason is in part due to my disgust with the politics and political direction of the country. John Cole says it very well:

I don’t think I’ve ever been as demoralized, cynical, and disgusted with politics as I am right now. The whole thing just makes me sick to my stomach. I really can not believe that we have a major party that is behaving the way the Republicans are, and even worse, I can’t believe they are being rewarded for this behavior. They were rewarded at the polls, the Democrats are in disarray, and the country is sort of just stalled. Nothing meaningful can be accomplished, and the Republicans and the media don’t care.

I’ve scanned the news for something interesting and uplifting to write about, and every headline I see just depresses me and makes me want to go back to bed or smash my computer and tv. And the worst thing is I don’t see anything changing. This is a structural problem, with the rich, the corporate masters, the media, and the money party pulling the strings. I’m not the sharpest tack, but I try to at least pay attention, and I find it hard to attain the information I need to make a good decision. I’m waffling back and forth on the tax deal because there really is nowhere to get a critical, unvarnished look at things. If I’m having this much trouble, how are other people who aren’t obsessed with things working these issues out.

And that is when I get more depressed. They probably aren’t. They’re just voting for their team. Sarah Palin shoots animals and hates the lieberals! One of us!

Fuck it.

My weight has changed little over the past three days, but that’s fine: I know now what I’m doing. I looked back to my weight a week ago (I use the Withings scale—it’s wi-fi enabled and charts my readings on the Web): I’ve lost 2.5 lbs over the past week, which is plenty.

I continue to be fascinated by the novelty of the phenomenon of my knowing exactly what I’m doing with respect to food and meals. I thought I knew that stuff before, but (as my Pilates instructor puts it) I had memorized it, not learned it.

Last night I thought of an analogy: I’ve never played golf, but I certainly know the game (in a general sense). I know the idea—start with a drive from the tee and sink the ball into the hole as few shots as you can. I know (in general) the clubs: the driver, the woods, the irons, the putter, the sand wedge. That is, I know what they’re for, though I’ve never used them. I know enough to know that golf shoes are mandatory.

But in spite of all this knowledge (gained from TV, magazine articles, and the like), if you put me out on a golf course to play, I would (in a very true sense) have no idea of what I’m doing. Despite knowing the goal (sink the ball in as few strokes as possible), I am not only unskilled and unpracticed, I don’t even know how to approach a course or a hole: I have no idea of any strategies, any good plans of play. I would just hit the ball, using one or another club, until I got frustrated, decided the game was stupid, and quit.

And that’s more or less how I approached my daily meals: I knew the nutritional values of food, I knew how to cook, but I didn’t understand the game or how to play it. The Healthy Way counselors acted for me just as a golf pro or golf instructor would for the beginning golfer: explain how to play and how to plan the play of a hole, observe performance and suggest improvements and tactics to improve. And, in time, I would be able to play on my own without needing such close instruction. And, in a way, playing a round of golf is similar to a day of food: you have not only a general idea, but specific strategies for each hole (or meal). But as you play (or go through the day), you will in general have to improvise within your overall plan: play the shot from where it lies, or adjust the meal as needed in view of the specific foods on hand and in view of what else you may have eaten. But with true understanding, this kind of improvisation is trivial: you know what you’re doing.

The odd thing is that people don’t hesitate to get professional assistance in many fields—preparing taxes, dental care, haircuts, sports lessons, and so on—for some reason getting professional help to learn good food strategies and how to plan your foods: that’s a “crutch” (though, as I do like to point out, crutches are extremely useful, and few who need one turn it down in favor of limping along on the sprained ankle or broken leg). Using a crutch until your strength is sufficient: that seems quite sensible to me. And if you want to do something well, getting professional instruction and coaching also makes sense to me.

I think I’ve now learned the basics. The remaining time on my contract will be firming up my new food habits and continuing to lose weight until I reach goal and begin to learn the maintenance skills. (I’ve already signed up for the maintenance program.)

This morning’s shave is thanks to Bruce Everiss (of BruceOnShaving.com and the forum Pogonotomy), who sent me the razor (a Wilkinson Classic) and a La Toja shave stick.

The Wilkinson Classic is a very nice razor indeed. At 1.5 ounces, it weights slightly more than 7 of the Gillette click-shut razor I used the other day. Indeed, the Classic is quite satisfactory as a “real” razor. It’s a two-piece razor, handle-and-base plus the separate cap. The handle turns in the base, like the Pils.

I got a fine lather with the La Toja. The shave stick in the package looks exactly like the Valobra, but is white instead of tan:

La Toja on the left, Valobra on the right. The bases:

The La Toja gave a very nice lather indeed with the Lucretia Borgia brush, and the Wilkinson, carrying one of the Wilkinson Sword blades packaged with it, provided an excellent 3-pass shave.

There’s nothing wrong with this razor at all: it can be your regular razor, something I cannot say about the Gillette click-shut. Many thanks to Bruce for sending it.

A splash of La Toja, and then a quick picking-up-the-apartment: the cleaning ladies are here today.

Several of my razors have a spiral pattern around the handle, like a barberpole. I was idly staring at the shelf of razors as I brushed my teeth, and I noticed that on every single one the spiral was down to the right, and then it occurred to me that this was, in effect, a bend dexter in heraldry: a bar across the field, slanted down to the right. The other direction, the bend sinister, is used for an illegitimate son. (The term “bar sinister” is used in ignorance to refer to the bend sinister.) The spiral is (in effect) a stack of bends dexter.

I wonder whether all spiraled razor handles have spirals down to the right.

Darryl Cunningham Investigates is a blog, and one post consists of a truly wonderful (and clear) explanation of the case for global warming conveyed via a comic, which begins:

Continue reading.

Interesting article in the NY Times by Perri Klass, MD:

As recently as 2002, an international group of leading neuroscientists found it necessary to publish a statement arguing passionately that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder was a real condition.

In the face of “overwhelming” scientific evidence, they complained, A.D.H.D. was regularly portrayed in the media as “myth, fraud or benign condition” — an artifact of too-strict teachers, perhaps, or too much television.

In recent years, it has been rarer to hear serious doubt that the disorder really exists, and the evidence explaining its neurocircuitry and genetics has become more convincing and more complex.

Even so, I’ve lately read a number of articles and essays that use attention (or its lack) as a marker and a metaphor for something larger in society — for the multitasking, the electronic distractions, the sense that the nature of concentration may be changing, that people feel nibbled at, overscheduled, distracted, irritable.

But A.D.H.D. is not a metaphor. It is not the restlessness and rambunctiousness that happen when grade-schoolers are deprived of recess, or the distraction of socially minded teenagers in the smartphone era. Nor is it the reason your colleagues check their e-mail in meetings and even (spare me!) conversations.

“Attention is a really complex cognitive phenomenon that has a lot of pieces in it,” said Dr. David K. Urion of Harvard, who directs the learning disabilities and behavioral neurology program at Boston Children’s Hospital. “What we’re specifically talking about in kids with attention deficit is a problem compared to age- and gender-based peers in selective attention — what do you glom onto and what do you ignore?”

Moreover, the disorder occurs along a broad spectrum, from mild to extreme. Boys are more likely to be hyperactive and impulsive, girls to be inattentive. (One reason many girls don’t get an official diagnosis is that those with the inattentive form may be well behaved in school, but still unable to focus.)

“There’s a lot we still don’t know,” said Bruce F. Pennington, a professor of psychology at the University of Denver and an expert on the genetics and neuropsychology of attention disorders. “But we know enough to say it is a brain-based disorder, and we have some idea about which circuits are involved and which genes.”

Imaging studies of people with attention deficits have shown a consistent pattern of . . .

Continue reading.

More and more frequently I see people who are in positions of power, and who wield that power, who are stunningly ignorant: uninformed, misinformed, and malinformed. Some of these are, in addition, stupid (cf. Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona). Yet they have power and they exercise power, making decisions that affect the lives of others. I shudder. Meanwhile, many in Congress (and in the Obama Administration and Dept of Justice) are eager to muzzle the press—and at the very least imprison anyone who informs the press. Greenwald has an excellent column on this effort, with interesting quotations. This will not end well.

Example of stunning ignorance reported by Ian Millhiser in ThinkProgress:

In an interview with CBS News today, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) claimed that the Affordable Care Act must be unconstitutional for the same reason that Congress could not require people to buy guns:

Never before in our history has the federal government ordered Americans to buy a product under the guise of regulating commerce. Imagine, Bob, if this bill were that in order to protect our communities and homeland security, every American had to buy a gun. Can you image the reaction across the country to that? Well, the truth of the matter is, the same legal power is at stake in ordering us to buy health insurance.

Cuccinelli’s comparison between health care and guns is unfortunate, since it reveals his utter ignorance of American legal history. Indeed, rather than trying to “imagine” what the reaction to such a hypothetical law might be, Cuccinelli could learn exactly what America’s reaction was to an actual law simply by picking up a history book. As it turns out, President George Washington signed a law that was almost identical to the one Cuccinelli railed against on CBS:

[E]very citizen, so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter,provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch, with a box therein, to contain not less than twenty four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball; or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch, and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder; and shall appear so armed, accoutered and provided, when called out to exercise or into service, except, that when called out on company days to exercise only, he may appear without a knapsack.

Sadly, this failure to familiarize himself with an important historical fact is par for the course for Ken Cuccinelli. Cuccinelli’s original legal brief challenging the Affordable Care Act was riddled with legal errors, including an embarrassing claim that the Boston Tea Party somehow renders health reform unconstitutional. Likewise, Cuccinelli still refuses to drop a witchhunt against a leading climate-change scientist despite the fact that his office’s own incompetence already got him tossed out of court once.

Here’s quite a different example. The position is not so august, but still it’s an official with his own power, demonstrating ignorance (and incivility to boot). The report is by Tanya Somanader in ThinkProgress.

The paranoid environment created by the 9/11 attacks has allowed for a myriad of civil rights infringements under the guise of national security. Airport security especially ratcheted up racial profiling, marking any Middle Eastern sign or symbol a suspicious target, particularly the turban. Even turbaned individuals with no affiliation with Islam or the Middle East, such as Sikh men, have become “a superficial and accessible proxy for the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks” and a “target of discriminatory conduct,” including employment discrimination, harassment, and violence.

But now, this long-permitted prejudice is creating diplomatic tension between the U.S. and India. Today, the Indian press reported on an incident last month in which Houston, Texas airport security officials detained Indian’s UN envoy Hardeep Puri in a holding room for 30 minutes because he was wearing a turban. As a Sikh, Puri is obliged to keep all hair intact and his head covered in public at all times. The turban symbolizes self-respect and piety — “touching of the head dress in public is not allowed” and can only be removed “in the most intimate of circumstances.”

However, as officials present during the incident told Turtle Bay, airport security officials ignored Puri’s religious requirements and long-standing protocol exempting dignitaries from such treatment and demanded to physically check his Turban themselves until Puri informed them that TSA regulations allow him to check himself:

Airport security agents in Austin pulled Singh aside into an enclosed glass holding room for questioning after he refused a request to remove his turban or allow inspectors to touch it, an Indian official who witnessed the incident told Turtle Bay. “He said no, you cannot check my turban,” according to the Indian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “I won’t allow you to touch my turban.”

The Indian official said Singh offered to touch the turban himself and to allow the security agents to run a check of his hands for traces of explosives, but he said that one security official refused. Singh insisted that the security official had no right to check his turban, citing TSA regulations for searches of foreign diplomats. “Obviously you don’t know your own rules. Please check your rules,” he told the security agent, according to the Indian official. “The person insisted that he had to do it. He said, ‘Don’t tell me the rules.’”

The Indian official said that the security officials finally checked the security regulations and issued an apology to the Indian ambassador. He said he was unaware of whether his government had filed an official complaint with the United States over the issue.

This is the second incident in which a U.S. airport security gaffe has insulted the Indian government this month. Earlier, Mississippi airport officials created another diplomatic row when Indian ambassador Meera Shankar was picked out of a security line at an international airport in Mississippi and subjected to a pat-down simply because she was wearing a Sari. After the Indian government’s strong rebuke, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Mississippi’s Gov. Haley Barbour (R) both issued statements assuring Shankar that they will make sure such treatment does not happen in the future.

As for the Puri incident, the Indian Foreign Minister SM Krishna said today that they have “taken it up with the U.S authorities and the matter is at that stage.” Former Indian diplomats, however, have “reacted aggressively” to the incident, saying that “if Washington does not change its policy on searches, diplomats from the U.S. should also be ready to face such security in India.”

Just back from the endocrinologist, who dropped the Zetia and cut the glipizide in half. I’m on my way—and I still have 34 lbs to lose!

For some reason the Nordic was harder this morning, but I did it all without stopping because Robinson Crusoe has just meet the savage who will become his companion on the island.

I’m very chuffed to be dropping meds.

Not a band I’m familiar with, but I like it.

A commenter is thinking seriously about buying an iKon—the same as above, only in stainless (which that one was until I had it gold plated at Razor Emporium). So today’s shave goes out to Ryan—that doesn’t work so well as with dj programs on the radio, does it?

Special 218 is one of my favorite shaving soaps—and I bet it’s equally terrific as a shave stick—and once again I got a great lather with the mysterious fragrance. Then three passes with the iKon holding a Swedish Gillette blade: shaving perfection.

A splash of Acqua di Parma and I’m off to see the endocrinologist.

It’s unfortunate that our revulsion at the sexual abuse of children results in secrecy about it. One terrible result of that was the Catholic church’s ability to protect and support pedophiles for decades, but (as Catholics will remind us) the abuse is not limited to the Catholic church (though the church is, I think, unique in how it was an organization worked systematically to protect pedophiles and also provide them new venues: when their activities were discovered in one place, the church would transfer them to a fresh parish, where they could begin again. If the police really began to close in, the offender was often transferred to another state or country.

But abuse most commonly happens, I expect, in a family setting. This extremely disturbing report by Roy Wenzel in McClatchy is hard to read, but I believe that it is important for people to know that such abuse is not rare, and if the signs are detected one’s suspicions should be reported to authorities. The report begins:

Read the rest of this entry »

From Transform:

Great to see yet more mainstream media coverage of the drug law reform debate, this time in a special issue  of The Nation Magazine. The cover story includes a visual riff on the logo of the infamous D.A.R.E drug prevention program, a gag used previously by Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP is covered in one of the feature articles, by SSDP director Aaron Houston – see below).

The feature content list is as follows (most available online for non-subscribers):

• Rebalancing Drug Policy – A special Nation forum, with contributions from Ethan Nadelmann, Marc Mauer, Bruce Western, Tracy Velázquez, David Cole and Laura Carlsen.
• Breaking the Taboo – The prospects for reforming drug policy have never been so good. Ethan Nadelmann
• Beyond the Fair Sentencing Act – Congress’s vote to scale back mandatory sentences for federal crack cocaine offenses was a watershed in the long campaign for better drug policy. Marc Mauer
• Decriminalizing Poverty – America doesn’t have a drug problem. It has a poverty problem. Bruce Western
• The Verdict on Drug Courts – Drug courts have helped some addicts recover. But they may be delaying expansion of treatment programs that will best reduce harms from addiction. Tracy Velázquez
• Restoring Lost Liberties – (Subscribers only) The drug war has been waged not only on traffickers and users but on liberty and equality. David Cole
• A New Model for Mexico – (Subscribers only) The problem with the drug war in Mexico is not that it’s unfunded. It’s unwinnable.Laura Carlsen
• Altered State: California’s Pot Economy – Despite the defeat of Proposition 19, growers in California are expanding a profitable system for cultivating pot. Sasha Abramsky
• Budding Prospects: Youth Activists Push Marijuana Reform – Fueled by serious funds, young advocates of legalization are poised for big gains. Aaron Houston
• Obama’s Drug War – The administration is promoting failed law enforcement programs as economic stimulus. Michelle Alexander
• As Juárez Falls – The killing in Juárez bears less resemblance to warfare between cartels than to criminal anarchy. Ed Vulliamy
• The Wachovia Whistleblower – How American banks make money from drug dealers by laundering their money. Ed Vulliamy

Well worth reading. It begins:

To listen to this discussion, click here.

Glenn Greenwald: My guest today on Salon Radio is Nir Rosen who I think is unquestionably one of the best war journalists and commentators in the country probably in the world. He is a freelance writer photographer, film-maker, and he is currently a scholar associated with the New York University Center on Law and Security, and he has just written a book that I finished reading actually today entitled Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World. It’s really an amazing book. It describes the impact of multiple American wars on families and people in various countries including Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and other countries where Nir has spent a great amount of time. I’m really excited to talk about this book. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me today.

Nir Rosen: Thanks for reading the book.

GG: It was definitely my pleasure, and I mean that sincerely. One of the things that struck me about the book was, there’s a lot of factual analysis and reporting from what you’ve seen of the kind that one would expect, but also there are a lot of parts of the book I think are very personal in tone and perspective, and that’s clearly because you’ve spent so much time in war zones and places devastated by war in the Middle East and other parts of the Muslim world. Can you talk about just what your experiences have been, like where have you been over the last decade and more so what led you to start visiting these dangerous and war-torn places, and what drives you now to do that?

NR: Well I’ve been working as a journalist since April 2003, when the war in Iraq came to an end. I got to Baghdad April 13, 2003, and that was really the beginning of my career as a journalist. I was very curious; I knew—I was in DC at the time—I knew that we weren’t going to get the full story, we weren’t going to get the point of view of the Iraqi people. It was clear that the war was predicated on lies to the American people and the US Government and US military wouldn’t be able to understand or deal with the culture and politics of Iraq.

So I came with a real curiosity and a certain sense of anger as well, just for being lied to. I very quickly made a lot of friends in Baghdad. It was pretty easy to operate there in those days, very safe. Those friends introduced me to their friends and their relatives, and ended up meeting the nucleus of a network of contacts and friends that I rely on to this day. I just got back from Iraq a couple of months ago and I’m going again in a few weeks. I became very emotionally attached to the country, to the people, and their plight and struggle.

But I’ve also spent most of the last eight years in neighboring countries as well, and in particular Lebanon where I was living, I was able to witness first-hand the effects of Iraq in terms of instability and militias and Sunni/Shia violence. What motivates me in part is an anger at being lied to which I realize maybe late by some standards when I was a freshman in college that the government and the media so often deceive us, and then I was angry and the anger remains as a key motivating factor, and I think mistrust of authority whether it’s a militia leader or an American general is one of key motives and what inspires me to actually try to find out for myself what’s going on on the ground and avoid official statements and people in government offices we know are just going to give you propaganda, but they are so often treated as the main sources in the mainstream media.

GG: One of the topics that you convey really well in this book is how much of a gap there is between how American elites talk about our wars and the reality of those wars and the things that you actually see by being there and in an unembedded function, and there’s this interesting speech that I’ve written about a few times by Ashleigh Banfield, who at the time was an MSNBC war reporter who was sort of the rising star of the MSNBC and NBC news and she was relatively new to covering wars, and she had come back from Iraq and she gave this speech at Kansas State University and she talked about the huge disparity between how television conveys wars to the American people and the reality of wars and all the things that embedding does in terms of distortions and this sliver of reality that ends up being conveyed.

What do you think are the realities of American wars and occupations that end up getting the shortest shrift in terms of how elites talk about our wars and what the American citizenry ends up hearing about them?

NR: I suppose with the majority of what Americans get to see is the American point of view, or even a limited one at that, but the point of view of white people who speak English. Very few voices from the occupied side, from the other side, are permitted. Too often when American journalists actually visit a country, if they’re not going to focus on American elite or the American military, they end up focusing on local elites, people who speak English, the Ahmed Chalabi types, people who are sort of like us, they will serve you wine and talk about their favorite football team back when they were at university in the US, but not people who actually have any popularity or legitimacy on the ground.

It’s harder to meet those people—you have to deal with diarrhea and drinking dirty water sometimes and mixing with people who aren’t like you, they’re not going to serve you alcohol, they’re not going to speak English most of the time. It’s just inconvenient, and I think most journalists don’t want to put up with that kind of inconvenience when it’s much more convenient to be with American soldiers who are a lot more like you and in the evening you can go back to the chow hall and get a burger and chit chat with them, rather than putting up with the risks both gastrointestinal and more serious of actually reporting on people that they’re besieging in the occupation.

I guess one thing we miss is . . .

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I enjoyed Freedom Writers, which I watched last night. It made me reflect that another way America’s downfall is visible: when its citizens live in communities wracked by criminal gangs, with great danger of being shot—and the government simply lets it continue. That’s not a country that is protecting its citizens, one of the basic tasks of government.

And it’s not just Long Beach or Watts. Many cities have large areas in which the government has failed and life is dangerous. The US. A government that fails to protect its citizens—day in, day out, for decades—is not much of a government.

Last night I was thinking about how this weight-loss counseling program works. It was triggered by a question emailed from a friend: “Do you go every day?”

No, I said, I go Mon-Wed-Fri, usually, though on rare occasions may miss a day. The visit consists of a weigh-in, a discussion of any problems or questions, and 2-3 new packets of the daily supplement: just enough to get you through to the next visit. I believe that the true purpose of the supplements (containing some B vitamins, vitamin C, etc.) is to strongly encourage the client to show up for the next visit (for a new supply of supplements, but mainly for the counseling).

The counseling is useful in various ways:  every 10 lbs of weight loss I get a body-composition analysis, advice on specific foods is useful for many, and there are tools that can help—a two-day plateau buster, for example. But I believe that the true value of these sessions is that they encourage a kind of psychoanalytic process. In psychoanalysis, as I understand it, the (Freudian) psychiatrist does not ask many questions. Mainly the analysand talks and reflects. The idea (in its simplest terms) is that regular and frequent examination of one’s thoughts and actions over a long period can lead to understanding and change. (Outraged psychiatrists feel free to correct me in the comments.)

Think about it: you’re having a brief private (closed-door) conversation with your counselor. You have to talk about something, and one’s weight problem and what one is currently doing about it is the obvious topic. And the talking is pretty much up to you. That amounts to a kind of fat-focused psychoanalysis.

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A compact little shave, eh? This is to welcome back the Feather Premium razor, which took a trip back east to visit another shaver for a while. Back and with a new Feather blade, it delivered a wonderful shave, helped by the terrific lather the Omega 643167 worked up from the Valobra shave stick. Then a splash of Klassik, and I’m good to go.