Later On

Wikileaks continues to provide useful information—though perhaps some will believe the denials reported below. (I don’t.) Thanks to TYD for pointing out this NY Times article by Duff Wilson:

Pfizer was accused of hiring investigators “to uncover corruption links” to Nigeria’s former attorney general and apply pressure to drop lawsuits against the company over a controversial 1996 test of antibiotics on children with meningitis, according to a secret State Department cable that related a company official’s account.

Pfizer, the world’s largest drug company, denied the cable’s allegation, which was contained in documents released by WikiLeaks. The cable indicated that the information alleging corruption on the part of the attorney general was spread through the media to publicly pressure him to drop the lawsuits.

“Any notion that the company hired investigators in connection to the former attorney general is simply preposterous,” Christopher Loder, a spokesman at Pfizer’s New York headquarters, said on Friday.

The former attorney general, Michael K. Aondoakaa, told The Associated Press that he knew nothing of any Pfizer attempt to investigate him. “If they were doing it behind my back, it’s very unfortunate,” he was quoted as saying.

Last fall, Mr. Aondoakaa dismissed a $6 billion lawsuit and criminal charges as part of a settlement agreement with Pfizer, after allegations that the drug maker’s experiment with antibiotics resulted in the deaths of Nigerian children. Pfizer contested the cause of the children’s deaths, but ultimately settled with the country for $75 million in one case, according to a Pfizer filing in November. Mr. Loder said the money was to pay Nigeria’s lawyers in the case.

Last year, the Nigerian state of Kano, where the experiments occurred, also accepted a $75 million settlement to drop criminal charges and a civil suit seeking more than $2 billion. Mr. Aondoakaa was not involved in the Kano settlement.

In the cable, dated April 20, 2009, United States officials described an April 9 meeting in Lagos with Enrico Liggeri, Pfizer’s company manager in Nigeria.

“According to Liggeri,” the cable says, “Pfizer had hired investigators to uncover corruption links to federal attorney general Michael Aondoakaa to expose him and put pressure on him to drop the federal cases. He said Pfizer’s investigators were passing this information to local media.”

The cable continued: “A series of damaging articles detailing Aondoakaa’s ‘alleged’ corruption ties were published in February and March. Liggeri contended that Pfizer had much more damaging information on Aondoakaa and that Aondoakaa’s cronies were pressuring him to drop the suit for fear of further negative articles.”

In seeking comment, Pfizer would say only that Mr. Liggeri was still employed as a manager in Nigeria, but it would not say whether the company had talked with him since the cable became public. Mr. Aondoakaa was not charged with any offenses.

Another part of the cable covers . . .

Continue reading.

Yesterday I decided to cook up something new for the starch course. I used a quart of Kitchen Basics beef stock, which is excellent.

1 qt Kitchen Basics beef stock
2 c whole-grain spelt (you could use whole-grain wheat, rye, kamut, etc.)

Bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover, and simmer until no liquid remains—about two hours. I check after 80 minutes, and then set the timer for shorter and shorter periods until finally the liquid is gone.

Use 1/2 cup as starch portion: in salad, in sauté, in soup, and so on—however you fix your meal.

I obviously spend a fair amount of time thinking about the changes I’m making (not merely to lose my excess body fat but to prevent its return) and observing myself to see how the changes are taking hold. Last night I realized that, since the first of June when I started this program, I’ve been more or less working through the process described in Changing for Good: The Revolutionary Program That Explains the Six Stages of Change and Teaches You How to Free Yourself from Bad Habits, by James O. Prochaska, John C. Norcross, and Carlo C. Diclemente. I highly recommend this book (and do so periodically). It describes a research-based structured program that has proven effective in making permanent changes.

They describe the process as consisting of six stages, with tasks appropriate for each stage. The common cause of failures in our reform efforts is that we don’t understand which stage of change we’re at and thus don’t know the tasks we should be addressing at this stage. This problem particularly afflicts programs that work with groups of people who are attempting to change some particular habits: in any group, people will be at different stages of the process, so (generally speaking) the advice being given is appropriate only for those at the appropriate stage and will not help the others. (One benefit of Healthy Way as opposed to, say, Weight Watchers, is that Healthy Way works with clients individually, and thus can advise each client appropriately for the stage at which the client finds himself. OTOH, this costs significantly more than a class-based approach—a common tradeoff: cost vs. effectiveness.)

To take an example: my habit of taking small bites of food (“just a taste”) more or less anytime I was around food and in particular throughout the evening: The Long Dinner.

The first stage is complete unconsciousness of the habit, and the first task is to raise consciousness by reading, observation, and the like. I only gradually became aware of the habit (as a habit) by keeping the food journal and trying to figure out why my weight loss was not correlating with the entries in the journal. The answer, I finally discovered, was that I was not entering those individual “bites.” That brought them to awareness, and then I started to observe how often they occurred.

Then there’s a process of several stages, in which you first decide to stop the habit, then find yourself still doing it and recognizing that you’ve done it only after the bite (in this case) is eaten. Then you recognize it as you take the bite. Then, gradually, your start to recognize the impulse as it forms and you can fight it: you still have the impulse, but it triggers a conscious response (at last). That’s the point I’m at now with the bites: I’m not taking them, but I still feel the impulse—which now (thankfully) triggers an immediate counter-impulse.

Ultimately, of course, the impulse itself dies away and you are established in a new habit and the issue never comes to mind again. This is my situation with respect to, for example, smoking a cigarette. I’m sure I had the impulse for a smoke at one time—I smoked cigarettes regularly in college—but after going through the fight and the process, I no longer even think of smoking a cigarette: it literally never comes to mind.

With food, of course, the situation is somewhat different: I do need to continue eating. But I’m pretty happy with a habit now forming of no food at all entering my mouth save at the two snacks (mid-morning and mid-afternoon) and mealtime. And meals are now easy to plan: protein, veg, and starch, with measured portions. (Measures of veg are approximate: they are not the problem.)

Given the prevalence of stress in our lives, it’s nice to find a free and easy way to counter its effects. Gretchen Cuda reports for NPR:

There are plenty of ways to relieve stress — exercise, a long soak in a hot bath, or even a massage. But believe it or not, something you’re doing right now, probably without even thinking about it, is a proven stress reliever: breathing.

As it turns out, deep breathing is not only relaxing, it’s been scientifically proven to affect the heart, the brain, digestion, the immune system — and maybe even the expression of genes.

Mladen Golubic, a physician in the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Integrative Medicine, says that breathing can have a profound impact on our physiology and our health.

“You can influence asthma; you can influence chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; you can influence heart failure,” Golubic says. “There are studies that show that people who practice breathing exercises and have those conditions — they benefit.”

He’s talking about modern science, but these techniques are not new. In India, breath work called pranayama is a regular part of yoga practice. Yoga practitioners have used pranayama, which literally means control of the life force, as a tool for affecting both the mind and body for thousands of years.

Judi Bar teaches yoga to patients with chronic diseases at the Cleveland Clinic. Bar uses yoga and modifications of traditional yoga breathing exercises as a way to help them manage their pain and disease.

“Our breaths will either wake us up or energize us. It will relax us, or it will just balance us,” Bar says.

She demonstrates a “firebreath.”

Read the rest of this entry »

It looks as though Wikileaks has its work cut out for it: our government grows more and more secretive because it’s doing more and more bad things.

From The Week:

The financial crisis, it seems, was even scarier than it appeared at the time, said Sebastian Mallaby in the Financial Times. Last week’s “document dump” by the Federal Reserve, occasioned by the Dodd-Frank financial reform act and a lawsuit by Bloomberg L.P., revealed that Fed efforts to rescue the financial system from autumn 2008 through spring 2009 were broader “and far riskier to taxpayers” than the public knew. All told, the Fed lent $3.3 trillion to U.S. and foreign banks, hedge funds, and even motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson “without a congressional say-so.” In rushing loans out the door, the Fed violated the cardinal rule of central banking, which is to lend freely in emergencies—but only against top-notch collateral and at punitive interest rates. Instead, the Fed accepted toxic assets as collateral and charged “palliative” rates. That the Fed could take such massive risks with the public’s money—and bitterly resist disclosing those risks—underscores “the might of unelected central bankers.”

Those central bankers continue to withhold crucial information, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. The documents give “a fuller picture of how the Fed intervened in the panic,” but we still don’t know why. Above all, we don’t know why Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke insisted on bailing out insurer AIG, “despite apparent resistance within the Fed.” The central bank refuses to release a memo to Bernanke from staffers that reportedly argues “that an AIG bankruptcy was not a systemic risk.”

Sad to say, bankers don’t always tell the whole, unvarnished truth, said Aaron Elstein in Crains­NewYork.com. Last April, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told shareholders that the bank hadn’t actually needed the Fed’s help—but “the program did save us money.” Last week we learned that JPMorgan Chase had hit up the Fed for secret loans on seven different occasions, utilizing a program created to spare banks from having to “embarrassingly make their needs known to the public.” Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn told the “whopper” that his firm could have survived the crisis without the Fed’s help. In reality, the firm “turned to the Fed every single day during the darkest weeks of the crisis,” for a total of 84 loans. So what else don’t we know about the “murky, shadow banking world” of hedge funds and the like, where much of the globe’s financial business is conducted? asked Gillian Tett in the Financial Times. It’s not just the Fed that must come clean. In return for its $3.3 trillion rescue, the Fed has “every right” to demand that players in this hidden world reveal the risks they’re taking—because the rest of us might someday have to pay for them.

Sorkin’s column is well worth reading in its entirety. It begins:

To hear Eric H. Holder Jr. tell it, the Justice Department is aggressively cracking down on financial fraud.

On Monday in Washington, Mr. Holder, the United States attorney general, announced with much fanfare the results of a new enforcement program: Operation Broken Trust. “With this operation, the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force is sending a strong message,” Mr. Holder declared, highlighting the Ponzi schemes, affinity frauds and investment scams his department had prosecuted.

In all, Mr. Holder said his new task force had brought cases against 343 criminal defendants and 189 civil defendants for fraud schemes that harmed more than 120,000 victims throughout the country, involving more than $8 billion in estimated losses.

It all sounded quite important, and the program’s slogan is pretty catchy. But after you get past the pandering sound bites, a question comes to mind: is anyone in the corner offices of Wall Street’s biggest firms or corporate America’s biggest companies paying any attention to Mr. Holder’s “strong message”?

Of course not. (I actually called some chief executives after Mr. Holder’s news conference, and not one had heard of Operation Broken Trust.)

That’s because in the two years since the peak of the financial crisis, the government has not brought one criminal case against a big-time corporate official of any sort. [emphasis added – LG]

Instead, inexplicably, prosecutors are busy chasing small-timers: penny-stock frauds, a husband-and-wife team charged in an insider trading case and mini-Ponzi schemes.

“They will pick on minor misdemeanors by individual market participants,” said David Einhorn, the hedge fund manager who was among the Cassandras before the financial crisis. To Mr. Einhorn, the government is “not willing to take on significant misbehavior by sizable” firms. “But since there have been almost no big prosecutions, there’s very little evidence that it has stopped bad actors from behaving badly.”

That is not to suggest that the government should not enforce the law just because certain crimes are smaller than others. The markets won’t work unless the public believes that the playing field is level and that someone is enforcing the rules.

But fraud at big corporations surely dwarfs by orders of magnitude the shareholders’ losses of $8 billion that Mr. Holder highlighted. If the government spent half the time trying to ferret out fraud at major companies that it does tracking pump-and-dump schemes, we might have been able to stop the financial crisis, or at least we’d have a fighting chance at stopping the next one. . .

Continue reading. It seems clear to me that one of the guiding principles that governs Obama’s decisions and actions is “Protect the powerful.” Certainly all his decisions seem to point in that direction. My own view is that the powerful are remarkably able to take care of themselves, and the government should be focusing its protection and support on the powerless.

Very interesting article in ScienceNOW by Carrie Arnold:

Chilling out might be the key to losing the weight you gained over Thanksgiving. New research shows that dieting makes the brain more sensitive to stress and the rewards of high-fat, high-calorie treats. These brain changes last long after the diet is over and prod otherwise healthy individuals to binge eat under pressure.

Most research on weight loss has focused on tweaking appetite regulation—helping people eat less, get full faster, and have fewer cravings. But once we lose weight, we have trouble keeping it off. Even weight-loss surgery doesn’t always help people maintain their more svelte physiques.

Maybe, thought Tracy Bale, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, the problem is stress. Stress causes the body to release the hormone cortisol, which fuels the blood with energy in the form of sugar, enabling us to flee from potential dangers. Over time, high stress levels lead to chronically elevated cortisol levels that can cause increased appetite and weight gain.

Bale and her co-authors hypothesized that dieting leaves people more susceptible to the chronic stresses of everyday life, making even the strongest dieter yearn for a pint of ice cream or a hot, cheesy pizza. Although one hot fudge sundae won’t cause significant weight gain, persistent stress could lead to a pattern of binge or comfort eating that undoes previous weight loss.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers cut daily food intake in mice by 25% for 3 weeks, until the rodents had lost about 10% to 15% of their original body weight. This regimen simulates a moderate diet and modest weight loss in humans. After exposure to mild forms of stress, such as loud noises, the hungry mice had higher levels of cortisol in their blood. And their cortisol levels stayed higher longer than in control mice. This indicates that the dieting mice were more stressed and took more time to calm down.

The mice were then allowed to return to their starting body weights to mimic yo-yo dieting, when people repeatedly lose and regain weight. After they had been eating standard lab chow for 1 week, the mice again underwent a series of mild stress tests to mimic the ups and downs of everyday life. The study, published today in The Journal of Neuroscience, reveals that ex-dieters remained more sensitive to stress than nondieters and were more likely to eat large amounts of high-fat mouse chow when under pressure.

Even this short, relatively mild food reduction resulted in long-term changes in gene expression, the researchers found. The mice that dieted had significantly higher levels of the protein that stimulates cortisol release, indicating higher sensitivity to stress. These mice also had higher levels of appetite-stimulating hormones after exposure to the high-fat binge food.

"This shows that environmental factors like dieting and exposure to high-fat foods can lead to long-term changes in gene expression that themselves may influence eating habits and stress response," says Cynthia Bulik, a psychologist and director of the Eating Disorders Program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who was not involved in the study.

Changes in gene expression may help explain why so many diets fail. Dieting increases stress sensitivity, and stress makes us seek out rewarding things like high-fat, high-calorie "comfort" foods.

"Dieting is tough because your brain is working against you," Bale says. Learning better ways to cope with stress may be the key to successful weight loss because "you aren’t prone to have stress drive you to want to consume." Bale thinks that designing medications to target these stress pathways may help dieters keep off the weight that they worked so hard to lose.

I’m lucky in that I am now retired: I believe that many people find their jobs a primary source of stress—not so much because of crazy bosses and malign co-workers (though those certainly don’t help if you run into them), but simply not having control of the timing and content of what you do is stress in itself. Feeling keenly that you don’t control your own (work) life raises stress to high levels.

The obvious answer, then, is to search for and implement strategies that mitigate against stress and its effects: meditation, exercise, and the like.

Glenn Greenwald is consistently good on this tempest in a teapot. From his latest column, a few snippets:

. . . Just to underscore this point a bit further, consider this remarkable (and remarkably good) Editorial from The Guardian yesterday, which not only vehemently defends WikiLeaks, but — extraordinarily — also justifies the "denial of service" attacks from anonymous individuals around the world aimed at various companies serving the Government’s war on WikiLeaks by depriving them of all services (MasterCard, Amazon, PayPal, etc.):

These companies all considered that their association with WikiLeaks damaged their brand image, a reflection prompted in some cases by a helpful call from the US state department. In essence they are trying to have it both ways: pretending in their marketing that they are free spirits and enablers of the cyber world, but only living up to that image as long as they don’t upset anyone really important. . . . .

The hacktivists of Anonymous may be accused of many things – such as immaturity or being run by a herd instinct. But theirs is the cyber equivalent of non-violent action or civil disobedience. It disrupts rather than damages. In challenging the credit card companies and the web hosts in this way, they are reminding these businesses that their brand reputation relies not only on how the state department sees them, but also on how they maintain their independence in the eyes of their users. . . .

In times when big business and governments attempt to monitor and control everything, there is a need as never before for an internet that remains a free and universal form of communication. WikiLeaks’ chief crime has been to speak truth to power. What is at stake is nothing less than the freedom of the internet. All the rest is a sideshow distracting attention from the real battle that is being fought. We should all keep focus on the true target.

The damage caused by the "denial of service" attacks on these companies has been trivial. Even a CNN article today — which absurdly asks in its headline: "Is WikiLeaks engaged in ‘cyber war’?" — quotes Bruce Schneier comparing "the pro-WikiLeaks attacks on MasterCard and Visa to a bunch of protesters standing in front of an office building, refusing to let workers in. It’s annoying, but it didn’t shut down the operation."  It was basically an act of civil disobedience — aimed at protesting the collusive role these corporations played in trying to punish WikiLeaks despite no finding of wrongdoing — which caused virtually no real damage.

Despite all that, it is impossible to conceive of any establishment media outlet in the U.S. uttering a peep of support for what those protesters did.  The immediate consensus in the American political and media class was that these activists were engaged in pure, unmitigated destruction — even evil — and should be severely punished. That’s because the greatest sin in our political culture is doing anything other than meekly submitting even to assertions of lawless and thuggish government and corporate power.  If the Government and the largest corporations collaborate to lawlessly destroy WikiLeaks for the crime of engaging in threatening journalism, then you simply write polite letters to Congress or complain on your blog; what you don’t do under any circumstances is resist or fight back using even symbolic gestures of disobedience.  That’s the authoritarian mentality pervading — defining — not only the establishment media but (as a result) much of the citizenry.

Just contrast the angry denunciations over these activists’ simplistic, relatively innocuous denial of service attacks, with the apathy toward (or even support for) the far more sophisticated and damaging "cyber attacks" launched at WikiLeaks, which resulted in their permanent removal from any recognizable URL (and now can only be found through some impossible-to-remember numerical address;added:  they are also now at wikileaks.ch).  Whoever was responsible for those attacks aimed at WikiLeaks — even if it were a government agency — is acting every bit as lawlessly as the adolescent (though well-intentioned) activists responsible for shutting down MasterCard’s website for a few hours. But it is only the latter transgressions that trigger any real anger.

Identically, note how few object to the fact that the DOJ is investigating the pro-WikiLeaks attacks, but not — of course — the ones directed at WikiLeaks.  That’s because we collectively believe — with the establishment media leading the way — that the most powerful authorities have the unfettered right to do whatever they want to anyone who is sufficiently demonized as Bad, while the worst sin is to do anything outside of approved (i.e., impotent) means to protest establishment power and authority, no matter how destructive and criminal the ends are to which that power and authority is being applied.

This is the same mentality that expresses such self-righteous outrage over the mere prospect that disclosures of the truth by WikiLeaks might hypothetically one day lead to the death of a single innocent person, while barely uttering any real anger over the massive numbers of innocents actually being killed right now by the U.S. Government.  And it’s the same mentality that purports to acknowledge the massive secrecy abuses, deceit and pervasive crimes of the U.S. Government, while demanding that one of the very few people who apparently risked something to do anything meaningful to stop all of that — Bradley Manning — be severely punished, or that Julian Assange be punished.  This is authoritarianism in its classic form — an instinctively servile loyalty to power even when it is acting corruptly, lawlessly and destructively — and it finds its purest and most vigorous expression in those who most loudly claim devotion to checking it: our intrepid adversarial journalists.

UPDATE:  For a slightly different but related service the establishment media dutifully provides to the Government, see this excellent Marcy Wheeler post from today, entitled:  "Hatfill and Wen Ho Lee and Plame and al-Awlaki and Assange."

UPDATE II:  CNN today spewed pure, absurd fear-mongering against WikiLeaks; Assange really is their new Saddam Hussein and WikiLeaks their new WMD.  And just to underscore the contrast between how media outlets around the world behave, the French newspaper Liberation — a mainstream center-left publication — announced today that it was creating a "mirror-WikiLeaks" site and hosting it on their paper’s website (its mirror site is here).  It is even possible to conceive of a mainstream American newspaper doing that?

UPDATE III:  The New York Times has a new article which, in the first paragraph, takes note of these facts:

For many Europeans, Washington’s fierce reaction to the flood of secret diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks displays imperial arrogance and hypocrisy, indicating a post-9/11 obsession with secrecy that contradicts American principles.

You don’t say.  Along those lines, former Bush OLC official Jack Goldsmith today said he agrees "with those who think Assange is being unduly vilified" and, further, is unable to see how WikiLeaks’ conduct can be distinguished from either that of The New York Times (both in this leak and past ones), as well as "Bob Woodward, [who], with the obvious assistance of many top Obama administration officials, disclosed many details about top secret programs, code names, documents, meetings, and the like."  He adds, with great understatement:  "the U.S. government reaction to WikiLeaks is more than a little awkward for the State Department’s Internet Freedom initiative."

Read the whole thing. The column opens with his comments on lies about Wikileaks that TIME magazine printed and refuses to correct: it’s so important to news organizations (which have completely failed at their journalistic investigative duties) to smear and slime Wikileaks for showing them up.

Thanks to TYD for passing this along:

Evidence is mounting that the first human civilization outside of Africa probably evolved in what is now the Persian Gulf. Recent discoveries suggest that we’re about to find a fairly advanced civilization sunk beneath the waters of the Gulf.

Archaeologist Jeffrey Rose has published a paper in Current Anthropology where he argues that we’ll find some of the earliest human civilizations on Earth in what was once a fertile basin fed by clear streams and lush with greenery.

According to Live Science:

The Gulf Oasis would have been a shallow inland basin exposed from about 75,000 years ago until 8,000 years ago, forming the southern tip of the Fertile Crescent, according to historical sea-level records.

And it would have been an ideal refuge from the harsh deserts surrounding it, with fresh water supplied by the Tigris, Euphrates, Karun and Wadi Baton Rivers, as well as by upwelling springs, Rose said. And during the last ice age when conditions were at their driest, this basin would’ve been at its largest.

Then, about 8,000 years ago, melting ice sheets eventually led to a wetter climate that flooded the Persian Gulf basin. That is also the time when we begin to find incredibly well-developed civilizations on the Gulf shoreline – civilizations that seem to have sprung fully-formed, with advanced seafaring technologies, out of nowhere. Unless, of course, they came from sunken cities hidden beneath the Gulf waters.

Live Science continues: . . .

Continue reading.

I now weigh 209.1 lbs (95 kg), and this morning I spent 18 minutes on the Nordic Track. I’ll hold it there for a few days. I am getting comfortably more than the recommended 100 minutes of cardio activity per week. Pilates this afternoon.

One thing I’m finding is that I’m really enjoying food on this diet. I suppose some heightened enjoyment is automatic once you cut back on your food intake: hunger is the best sauce, as the saying goes. But I also enjoy substantial variety of taste within the restrictions of sensible food selection. Let me go over just a single day.

Read the rest of this entry »

I really like the almond fragrance that Kell’s Original uses. A good lather using the Rooney Style 1, 1 Super Silvertip, with three good passes of the iKon with a Swedish Gillette blade. I felt a slight bit of roughness here and there, so I used a little jojoba oil to do an oil pass. A splash of TOBS No. 74—which I find I now don’t like so much as I did—and I’m ready to roll.

Osamah Khalil writing in the LA Times:

As Hurricane Katrina demonstrated the misplaced priorities of the George W. Bush administration, the Carmel fire has similarly exposed the reality of Israel’s domestic and foreign policy priorities. Rather than address these issues in his Dec. 7 Op-Ed article, Israeli Ambassador Michael B. Oren instead used the tragedy for cheap political gain. While Oren extolled the possible benefits of "enlightened cooperation" to achieve peace, he and the government he represents ignore that enlightened policies not only lead to cooperation and peace but are the requisite precursor.

Although Oren recognized the assistance of the Palestinian Authority in fighting the fire, he bemoaned that its leaders were "still declining to return to peace talks." Absent is the reason why: Israel’s ongoing settlement program in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem in violation of international law. Israel’s refusal to halt settlement construction, even after being offered unprecedented incentives from the Obama administration for a mere 90-day extension of its limited moratorium on building, stands in sharp contrast to its response to the Carmel fire.

It is telling that as an international coalition battled the Carmel fire, Israeli soldiers were deployed near the Palestinian villages of Bil’in, Nil’in and Nabi Saleh, where another coalition — Palestinians, Israelis and international activists — holds weekly nonviolent protests against Israel’s immense 480-mile "separation wall" and expanding settlements. As always, the protests were met by a combination of live ammunition, rubber bullets and tear gas — the latter causing some small brush fires.

Why were Israeli soldiers starting fires in Palestinian villages instead of fighting one in Israel? Because sustaining Israel’s occupation and settlement policy is paramount to its politicians and military leaders. Since Israel’s occupation began in June 1967, successive Israeli governments have placed a priority on colonizing the Palestinian territories. This effort has expanded frantically since the Oslo Accords were signed in September 1993, and today Israel directly controls almost 60% of the West Bank.

The emphasis on settlements has led some prominent figures in the Israeli media and government to call for the resignation of Interior Minister Eli Yishai. According to the Israeli daily Haaretz,although Yishai sought and failed to obtain the funds to boost his country’s firefighting budget, he never pursued the issue with the same vigor with which he advocated the expansion of settlements in occupied East Jerusalem. Yishai is a member of the religious Shas party, whose leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, claimed in his weekly sermon that the fire was "divine providence" because "fires only happen in a place where Shabbat is desecrated."

Though Oren condemned similar statements by a Hamas official and mentioned the threat posed by Hezbollah’s rockets, the inconvenient facts about Israel’s policy priorities and failures and the statement by Yosef were notably absent.

The fire has also laid bare the false claim that . . .

Continue reading.

No wonder they’re angry and stirred up. Shashank Bengali reports for McClatchy:

From the Saudi-Yemen border to lawless Somalia and the north-central African desert, the U.S. military is more engaged in armed conflicts in the Muslim world than the U.S. government openly acknowledges, according to cables released by the WikiLeaks website.

U.S. officials have struck relationships with regimes that generally aren’t considered allies in the war against terrorism, and while the cables show U.S. diplomats admonishing the regimes to respect the laws of war, they also underscore the perils of using advanced military technologies in complex, remote battlefields with sometimes shifty friends.

Cables released this week indicate that the United States:

• Provided Saudi Arabia with satellite imagery to help direct airstrikes against Shiite rebels after earlier strikes resulted in civilian casualties.
• Collaborated with Algerian forces in 2006 and 2007 to capture militants allegedly bound for Iraq and, more recently, obtained permission to fly U.S. surveillance planes through Algerian airspace to hunt suspected al Qaida members.
• Killed a militant Islamist leader in a 2008 airstrike in Somalia and, later, fielded requests from Somali officials to "take out" more suspected militants.

Experts said that the revelations of secretive American operations in Muslim countries could offer fodder to Islamist militants who accuse the United States of aggression against Muslims and of siding with authoritarian and unpopular regimes.

"This kind of feeds the al Qaida narrative, that we’re doing it everywhere," said Lawrence J. Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington and a former Pentagon official in the Reagan administration.

The Pentagon hasn’t acknowledged its role in Saudi Arabia’s sporadic fight against a Yemeni Shiite group known as the Houthi.

But a cable from the U.S. embassy in Riyadh says that in February, a senior Saudi defense official asked the U.S. for satellite maps of its border with Yemen to help the underequipped Saudi air force target the rebels, and the U.S. ambassador, James B. Smith, agreed.

A previous Saudi airstrike had hit a medical clinic, while another bombing run turned back when pilots learned that the target — selected by the Yemeni government — wasn’t a rebel site but instead the headquarters of a political opponent of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. . .

Continue reading.

Check out these “ten theses” about Wikileaks. The first three:

These 0.
“What do I think of Wikileaks? I think it would be a good idea!” (after Mahatma Gandhi’s famous quip on ‘Western Civilisation’)

These 1.
Disclosures and leaks have been of all times, but never before has a non state- or non- corporate affiliated group done this at the scale Wikileaks managed to with the ‘Afghan War Logs’. But nonetheless we believe that this is more something of a quantitative leap than of a qualitative one. In a certain sense, these ‘colossal’ Wikileaks disclosures can simply be explained as a consequence of the dramatic spread of IT usage, together with a dramatic drop in its costs, including those for the storage of millions of documents. Another contributing factor is the fact that safekeeping state and corporate secrets – never mind private ones – has become rather difficult in an age of instant reproducibility and dissemination. Wikileaks here becomes symbolic for a transformation in the ‘information society’ at large, and holds up a mirror of future things to come. So while one can look at Wikileaks as a (political) project, and criticize it for its modus operandi, or for other reasons, it can also be seen as a ‘pilot’ phase in an evolution towards a far more generalized culture of anarchic exposure, beyond the traditional politics of openness and transparency.

These 2.
For better or for worse, Wikileaks has skyrocketed itself into the realm of high-level international politics. Out of the blue, Wikileaks has briefly become a full-blown player both on the world scene, as well as in the national sphere of some countries. By virtue of its disclosures, Wikileaks, small as it is, appears to carry the same weight as government or big corporations – in the domain of information gathering and publicizing at least. But at same time it is unclear whether this is a permanent feature or a hype-induced temporary phenomenon – Wikileaks appears to believe the former, but only time will tell. Nonetheless Wikileaks, by word of its best known representative Julian Assange, think that, as a puny non-state and non-corporate actor, it is boxing in the same weight-class as the Pentagon – and starts to behave accordingly. One could call this the ‘Talibanization’ stage of postmodern – “Flat World” – theory where scales, times, and places have been declared largely irrelevant. What counts is the celebrity momentum and the amount of media attention. Wikileaks manages to capture that attention by way of spectacular information hacks where other parties, especially civil society groups and human rights organizations, are desperately struggling to get their message across. Wikileaks genially puts to use the ‘escape velocity’ of IT – using IT to leave IT behind and irrupt into the realm of real-world politics.

Continue reading.

This is regularly updated and is worth bookmarking. Here’s how it begins:

tment officials, many people have tried to think through the event’s implications for politics, media, and national security.

Writers pulling at the knot of press freedom, liberty, nationalism, secrecy and security that sits at the center of the debate have produced dozens of fantastic pieces. We’re collecting the very best here. This page will be updated often. New links will be floated near the top of this list.

Send suggestions to amadrigal[at]theatlantic.com.

For clarity’s sake, I’m sorting this archive into four sections. On the main page, you’ll find the links from the last day or so. Next, you’ll find the main stash of links on WikiLeaks. Third, you’ll find thinking about Julian Assange. The last section will contain links pertaining specifically to WikiLeaks and journalism.
Go straight there:

• More on WikiLeaks
• Julian Assange
• WikiLeaks and Journalism
• Everything on one page

 

I borrowed this lovely photo of iKon razors (long handle and bulldog handle, each with open comb head and straight-bar head) from BruceOnShaving’s post on how Pogonotomy, the new shaving forum, is doing. It’s going great. He explains at the link how Pogonotomy differs from other shaving forums.