Later On

This, unfortunately, is not so astonishing as it should be.

Very interesting post by Bernard Avishai at TPM Café:

The blaze is barely quelled, but the political firestorm is already spreading. I don’t mean the posturing and second-guessing by ministers and various political figures; those, like Shas Interior Minister Eli Yishai, cynically calling for a national inquiry into who did what over the past few days, or even into whether successive governments over the past few years have done enough to equip firefighters.

Rather, the fire is quickly becoming a metaphor for something deeper and potentially explosive in the Israeli political conversation, namely, the horribly skewed priorities of Israeli leaders pretty much since the 1967 war, but especially since the first Likud government in 1977.

The vast majority of middle class families on the coastal plain have seen the traffic and smog in greater Tel Aviv become insufferable, while commission after commission stalls out on providing a subway; the coastal highway become either stop-and-go or a death trap; the water-line in the Kinneret sink while desalination plants stall; the universities and secondary schools lose ground both in national budgets and OECD ratings; the crime rate soar; the Israel Broadcasting Authority become an embarrassment as compared with, say, the BBC; line-ups for ultra-sound machines getting longer.

In case after case, rightist coalitions have insisted the money was simply not there, and so Western standards for “quality of life” remained out of reach; the country’s most responsible citizens have shrugged, more or less, and returned to work, knowing that rates of participation in Israel’s workforce is actually among the lowest in OECD nations, around 57%, because of the amount of money supporting ultra-orthodox “learning.”

The Carmel brush fires have suddenly given all of this frustration a powerful symbol–a kind of Katrina event. Just who have the governments been serving?

PERHAPS THE SIGNAL moment came on Channel Two Friday evening, when the fires were at their worst, and the newscast’s most forceful commentator, Amnon Abramovich, let loose with what a great many in the audience was thinking. “If you are not a settler or a Haredi lobby,” he said (I am paraphrasing),”you might as well forget getting anything from the Israeli government in recent years.”

His words carried added poignancy, since Turkey—which Netanyahu’s government has singled out for its putative drift into Islamosomething—had just promised to send aid; and the series of reports preceding Abramovich’s commentary implied something that proved untrue but all too plausible, namely, that the fires had been arson, set by insurgent Israeli Arab youth. This was the other elephant in the room, which government after government has disregarded: the growing, dangerous alienation of a fifth of Israel’s population—about which more in my next post.

All in all, the fires have awakened Israel’s silent, slim majority to the paradox of their lives; that regional cooperation is not a myth, and that they are rich enough—global enough—to expect to live better than they do; yet their governments keep propping up settlement projects costing up to $20 billion over the years and engaging in diplomatic spitefulness against neighbors who criticize the very occupation they themselves have come to question…

I doubt that it will happen, but there’s a chance. Two brief posts:

Merkley Lays Out A Course For Reforming The Filibuster In The Next Senate: ‘Mark This Date On Your Calendar’ (ThinkProgress)

Is It Finally Time to Reform the Filibuster? (Kevin Drum)

Nancy Youssef reports for McClatchy:

WikiLeaks’ release of tens of thousands of classified government documents on three separate occasions this year has prompted U.S. officials to add layers of new safeguards. But that very impulse has sparked debate among experts about whether those new protections might make national security secrets more vulnerable, not less.

Of particular concern is that officials will be tempted to keep documents under wraps by giving them higher classifications so that fewer people have access to them. That sort of thinking, some argue, is exactly what created the situation where a disaffected Army private in Iraq could download the confidential reports of ambassadors and generals on their meetings with top foreign officials and give them to WikiLeaks.

“Too much information is being called classified, and we are protecting trivia and crown jewels with the same level of security,” said Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. Classifying more “is a predictable reflex (in light of WikiLeaks), but I think it needs to be thought through carefully.”

Since WikiLeaks began this week publishing classified State Department cables that date back to 1966 and touch on nearly every international issue, the State Department removed its cables from the Defense Department’s Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRNet, the Pentagon’s classified computer system, and the White House has ordered agencies across government to look for better ways to protect information.

In its announcement, the White House said that every government agency that deals with classified information has been ordered to assemble a team “of counterintelligence, security, and information assurance experts” to review the agency’s procedures for “safeguarding classified information against improper disclosures.” . . .

Continue reading. Of course, the difficulties that increased secrecy will create for governments are part of the point of WikiLeaks, as Assange has explained.

The censors have become more active on the Web as the powerful (governments, large businesses) become more aware of the power of the Web: some people, when they recognize power, want to control it as a way of possessing it. Dan Gillmor writes about this process which is now underway, most recently triggered by the discomfort that Wikileaks created among the powerful. Gillmor:

The WikiLeaks affair is highlighting the Internet’s soft underbelly: the intermediaries on which we all rely to store our information and make it available. We are learning, to our dismay, that we cannot trust them. Combine that with increasing government intervention, we’re also learning that the Internet is somewhat easier to censor than we’d assumed.

This should worry anyone who believes that we’re going to move our data and online lives into the fabled “cloud” — the diffused online array of hardware and services where, proponents say, we can do our online work, play and commerce without the need for storing data on our own personal computers. Trusting the cloud is becoming an act of faith, and it’s time to question that faith.

And the situation should absolutely chill everyone who believes in free speech — and especially the people who call themselves journalists. Sadly, however, too many of them have been cheering on people who want to make WikiLeaks disappear. Do they realize that it could be their own turn someday?

WikiLeaks has been under attack all week from governments that want to hide their misdeeds, not just legitimate secrets. That’s unsurprising, to put it mildly, despite the hypocrisy of official Washington’s loathing of Internet blocking in other countries while it works so hard to make it happen here.

The government and other anti-WikiLeaks forces don’t have even the thinnest legal case for taking WikiLeaks off the Internet, however — much less the news organizations, here and abroad, that are discussing the leaked diplomatic cables contained in the latest trove — and they know it. So they’re attacking the intermediaries, and they’re getting results.

WikiLeaks had put some of its trove on Amazon.com’s “Web services” servers — a system designed in part to help third-party websites meet extraordinary demand. But as the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes, WikiLeaks

found itself kicked off of Amazon’s servers earlier this week. WikiLeaks had apparently moved from a hosting platform in Sweden to the cloud hosting services available through Amazon in an attempt to ward off ongoing distributed denial of service attacks.

According to Amazon, WikiLeaks violated the site’s terms of service, resulting in Amazon pulling the plug on hosting services. However, news sources have also reported that Amazon cut off WikiLeaks after being questioned by members of the staff of Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman. While it’s impossible to know whether or not Amazon’s decision was directly caused by the call from the senator’s office, we do know that Lieberman has proposed “anti-WikiLeaks legislation” and that he has a history of pushing for online censorship in the name of “security.”

Amazon’s statement isn’t just full of doublespeak and nonsense. It’s already been shown to be false in at least one respect: an untrue assertion that WikiLeaks was publishing willy-nilly the documents without vetting them to redact the names of people they might put in danger. In fact, as Glenn Greenwald has noted, news organizations have released far more of the documents than Wikileaks has itself posted. But Amazon’s terms of service do give it the right to remove just about anything it chooses, for almost any reason or, effectively, no reason at all.

That’s Strike 1 to our faith in the Internet. We are all, to one degree or another, forced to rely on the good will of larger enterprises that host and serve the media we create online. So when a company as big as Amazon — and it’s huge in the Web services arena — yanks down content this way, it is demonstrating that we cannot fully trust it with our content, either. And if Amazon, a powerful enterprise, can be bullied, which one can’t?

Strike 2 came with the news that EveryDNS — a company that helps Internet users find specific Web addresses via the Domain Name System. — had booted WikiLeaks off its service. An analogy: Suppose your local library removed the card for a book you wanted from its catalog. The only way you could find the book would be to look through all the shelves. This is roughly what EveryDNS did.

Strike 3? Look at . . .

Continue reading.

Greenwald also comments on this issue.

Reporters Without Borders has a strong comment.

Yesterday was a weight-loss fail: I had some bacon on hand and ended up cooking and eating it all (2 pieces at breakfast, cut up with my egg and oats; 2 pieces at lunch, cut up into a salad; and 4 pieces at dinner, eaten as the protein (and fat) course). So today my weight is up a bit.

On the other hand, no real harm done, and I did Pilates yesterday and 15′ of Nordic Track this morning, and it’s easy to get back on track—for one thing, the bacon’s gone now, and I won’t buy more. This is a long-haul project and a day’s setback doesn’t really bother me: I try to use it to recommit to the effort, and I am definitely back to the Nordic Track.

OTOH, it’s harder to blog these days: the political scene is so bad and so depressing that I find it hard to read about it, much less write. Frank Rich has a perceptive piece on how thoroughly Barack Obama has lost his way and gone off-track. The GOP and Big Business now have the bit in their teeth and we are going to see some very bad things happen.

This video includes dubbing of the cat voices:

I’m pretty sure you won’t spot the deception, so I’ll just tell you: I didn’t use that brush, I used this one, which I first read about in this post and immediately ordered. It arrived, but I forgot I had it until after I took the morning photo, but when I spotted it, I thought I should at least give it a try. Some new horsehair shaving brushes (just like boar and badger brushes) have a distinct animal odor. I have no idea whether this brush had such an odor—it wouldn’t have stood a ghost of a chance against QED’s Patchouli, Tea Tree, and Peppermint shaving soap, which has its own strong fragrance.

I did soak the new brush while I showered, and it generated quite a good lather—and, I was surprised to find, it held plenty of lather for three passes: I never had to return to the soap. Three passes of the Mühle open-comb with a Swedish Gillette blade left my face smooth and fresh and ready for a splash of Acqua di Parma aftershave.

Assuming I’m correct in my understanding that the highest law of the land—viz., the ratified signing of the treaty called the UN Convention Against Torture—makes torture a war crime and also requires the investigation of allegations of torture and other war crimes, with failure to do so being itself a war crime, then we face a developing tradition of US war-criminal presidents—and the precedent, once established, is hard to break: if you’re president n in the series, then either you go along, becoming a war criminal yourself, or you call for an investigation and public proceedings, with prosecutions as needed, thus putting all your surviving predecessors on trial: not very appealing, in either direction. And, of course, you inevitably get the president who thinks, “Hey, if I’m a war criminal anyway, I might as well milk it a bit…”

But suppose the circumstances were something like this: Suppose the first war-criminal president—the one responsible for the actual initial war crimes—belongs to political party A, and then his successor belongs to the other political party, B. Normally, of course, the two parties are often at odds, so one would expect swift, just, and legally mandated action on the part of the successor president. But suppose—and all this is hypothetical—that the successor fancied himself a great compromiser and bridger of differences and, to curry favor with political party B, put the kibosh on any investigations of publicly admitted war crimes. Thus the series could begin, EXCEPT: the next president has a unique opportunity to nip the whole thing in the bud. If the third president in the series decides that she or he does not wish to be a war criminal, s/he has the unique chance to do a BIPARTISAN investigation (and trials, should the investigation reveal that war crimes were indeed committed—and I think nothing less than the full Nuremberg will do): one president from each party will stand in the docket, and the pain will be shared—and, more important, neither party will gain undue advantage, except that the third president’s party is somewhat at risk in the short term.

But I think it has to be done.

Our local Whole Foods just began carrying Lucero olive oils and balsamic vinegars in the bulk section, and I tried a couple—incredible quality for about $8/pint (for the balsamic). I got a traditional balsamic and a peach balsamic, but they also have fig and blueberry and others.

Take a look. Great stuff.

There’s been some discussion in the comments. I highly recommend this post and the links in it, and not only to Zach.

By all means read the analysis quoted at the end of this post on James Fallows’s blog. It strikes me as quite likely. It begins:

Trying to decipher the riddle that is now John McCain is probably nothing more than pop-psychology, but I’ll give it a shot. The obvious insight is that McCain is now bitter. For years, he conducted himself as an amiable and bi-partisan war hero. He was loved by the media, appearing on Meet the Press, Hardball, This Week with Geoege Stephanopolous. Rarely was there critical treatment of him, and it showed in national polls.

But in 2000, the South Carolina primary changed him forever. The reservoir of good will that he spent years nourishing was of no use to him anymore. In fact, it made things worse. Rove used McCain’s cross-appeal against him, undermining any support he might have had with conservatives. And somewhere in his mind, McCain must have known that while he was suffering and sacrificing in a Hanoi hell pit, George W. Bush was essentially dodging his duties by enlisting in the National Guard. He then watched Bush win the nomination by aligning with “the agents of intolerance” than McCain had famously denounced.

When in 2003, . . .

Makes one ashamed to see politicians so overtly supporting torture. Obama truly is a puzzle. David Corn reports at Mother Jones:

In its first months in office, the Obama administration sought to protect Bush administration officials facing criminal investigation overseas for their involvement in establishing policies the that governed interrogations of detained terrorist suspects. A "confidential" April 17, 2009,cable sent from the US embassy in Madrid to the State Department—one of the 251,287 cables obtained by WikiLeaks—details how the Obama administration, working with Republicans, leaned on Spain to derail this potential prosecution.

The previous month, a Spanish human rights group called the Association for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners had requested that Spain’s National Court indict six former Bush officials for, as the cable describes it, "creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture." The six were former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; David Addington, former chief of staff and legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney; William Haynes, the Pentagon’s former general counsel; Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy; Jay Bybee, former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel; and John Yoo, a former official in the Office of Legal Counsel. The human rights group contended that Spain had a duty to open an investigation under the nation’s "universal jurisdiction" law, which permits its legal system to prosecute overseas human rights crimes involving Spanish citizens and residents. Five Guantanamo detainees, the group maintained, fit that criteria.

Soon after the request was made, the US embassy in Madrid began tracking the matter. On April 1, embassy officials spoke with chief prosecutor Javier Zaragoza, who indicated that he was not pleased to have been handed this case, but he believed that the complaint appeared to be well-documented and he’d have to pursue it. Around that time, the acting deputy chief of the US embassy talked to the chief of staff for Spain’s foreign minister and a senior official in the Spanish Ministry of Justice to convey, as the cable says, "that this was a very serious matter for the USG." The two Spaniards "expressed their concern at the case but stressed the independence of the Spanish judiciary." . . .

Continue reading. Two US presidents in a row apparently guilty of war crimes involving torture. Amazing.

Somehow I’m unmoved to blog. I did get to wondering at the excitement over Wikileaks. That little scandal seems like a nothing-burger compared to things happening right before our eyes: the GOP killing unemployment benefits "because of the deficit" while simultaneously INSISTING that the wealthiest Americans need tax cuts. Houses are being foreclosed all over the country—families thrown into the streets—and still the government (and business) take no action except to try to make escaping foreclosure more difficult. In the Senate, rampant and obvious bigotry is on display and may carry the day: to the shame of the US, the (stupid) DADT policy may not be killed.

And Obama’s puerile Federal pay freeze shows pretty clearly that he’s in over his head and starting to flail. Krugman expounds on why this action is a total fail in so many directions.

Looking at all that, I just felt I should spend more time with the Indo-Europeans.

On thinking about the characteristics of the Eclipse shave—smooth, comfortable, close—I was reminded of the way the new iKon razor shaves. And on inspecting the Eclipse head you see that it is in effect an open comb with with a small bar attached to the back of the tips of the comb (undoubtedly to protect against bending a comb tooth). Indeed, the openings between the teeth of the Eclipse go all the way through.

So today, with an excellent lather created by the Omega 643167 from Mama Bear’s English Leather, I shaved with the two razors, alternating between them during each pass. Both razors have a Swedish Gillette blade, so that is common.

My impression is that the two shave in quite a similar manner. The weight of the iKon is greater and the handle is thicker in diameter, so there was no confusion. But in terms of feel of head and smoothness of shave, I would rate them as very much alike.

My first thought: Greg should put a small magnet in the base of the iKon handles.

A splash of Spanish Leather and I’m good to go.

Steve Benen has an excellent report:

Proponents of repealing "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" have been looking to this week as the last, best chance to convince the Senate to do the right thing. The combination of the Pentagon’s report on servicemembers’ attitudes and a high-profile hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee would, if all went well, give Democrats the boost they need to finish their work.

So far, repeal advocates have reason to be pleased. The Pentagon’s report was arguably even more encouraging than expected, and today’s hearing, featuring testimony from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen, and the co-chairmen of the Pentagon’s Working Group who prepared the study, answered every possible objection. Every Republican rationale was raised, considered, and debunked.

If you missed the hearing, which will have a second day tomorrow, Igor Volsky did a great job compressing hours of exchanges into this six-minute clip:

But a point Greg Sargent raised seemed especially important: "Military leaders essentially pleaded with GOP Senators to support repealing DADT, arguing that the failure to do so would put the state of our military at serious risk. In his testimony this morning, Defense Secretary Robert Gates put this as clearly as you could ask for."

For Republicans open to even the slightest bit of reason, this should offer them all the cover they need. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense — both of whom were appointed by a conservative Republican president, incidentally — said approving the pending repeal provision is what’s best for the U.S. military. Period. Full stop.

We already know that, for the clear majority of Senate Republicans, this is irrelevant. Just a few years after it was deemed outrageous and unpatriotic for elected politicians to ignore the judgment of our military leaders during a time of war, the GOP Senate caucus will no doubt try to kill DADT repeal anyway, because, well, they and their base really don’t like gay people. That these gay people are willing to volunteer to put their lives on the line for the rest of us is apparently irrelevant.

But repeal proponents don’t need all the Senate Republicans; they need a handful of Senate Republicans. Going into today, there were in upwards of five GOP members who were at least open to doing the right thing.

If they were paying attention today, looking for reassurance, the course ahead should be obvious.

I recall a story, which I’ve probably recounted before, about a railway passenger (in the very old days) who requested the fig pudding for dessert in the dining car. On being informed that the kitchen was out of the dish, he became outraged, shouted, and sulked. The conductor wired ahead to the next stop to have someone go buy a fig pudding, which they did, and the train picked it up at the stop, minutes later. The waiter returned to the irate diner and told him the good news: fig pudding was now available. The guy shut up a second, thought about it, and said, "The hell with it! I’d rather be mad."

For some reason I was reminded of this story as I read this report by Tanya Somanader in ThinkProgress:

Well-versed in obstructing help to the hungry, House Republicans first blocked, then voted against the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act yesterday, a bill that “would give more needy children the opportunity to eat free lunches at school and make those lunches healthier.” The Senate passed this bill by unanimous consent in August — essentially a 100-0 vote in favor of providing school meals to the nation’s 17 million hungry kids.

But 157 House Republicans had a different message for hungry children: get in line. During the House’s first attempt to pass the bill yesterday, Republicans “used a procedural maneuver” to add an amendment requiring background checks for child care workers. Recognizing it as a poison pill, House Democrats delayed the final vote till today rather than allow an amendment to “kill the bill.” The main champion of this tactic Rep. John Kline (R-MN) decried the Hunger-Free Act as a Democratic ploy to increase government spending. On the House floor yesterday, Kline insisted the bill was massive “deficit spending,” dismissing the bill’s offsets as a “stalling tactic that obscures government expansion”:

KLINE: The people are telling us, stop spending money we don’t have…this bill spends another $4.5 billion on various programs and initiatives and creates or expands 17, 17 separate federal programs…The majority claims this bill is paid for. They want us to believe we can grow government with no cost or consequences, but the American people know that’s just not true.More spending is more spending. Whether or not those dollars are offset elsewhere in the massive federal budget, but one offset is particularly questionable. The truth is that, at least some portion of the billions of new program costs is deficit spending. This money was borrowed from our children and grandchildren in 2009 when it was put in the stimulus. That borrowed money is simply being redirected today. It was borrowed then and its borrowed now. This bill with its so-called pay for is merely a stalling tactic. It obscures government expansion in the short-term so this bill can become law and its spending can become permanent.

Watch it:

An equally indignant Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) called the pay-for “a farce!” “It’s a farce, it’s a lie. And it’s borrowing more from our children and this kind of idiocy just has to stop,” he added.

The only “lie” emanating from the House floor yesterday came directly from Kline and Broun. The bill is indeed paid for, unfortunately with offsets from food stamp benefits included in the Recovery Act. Because of the Congressional pay-as-you-go rules that prohibits deficit spending on non-emergency measures, Democrats reluctantly raided much-needed food stamp funds — again — to pay for the Hunger-Free Act. Kline and Broun’s outrage at such a strategy is curious, considering Republicans have pushed the same exact strategy in the past.

Not only is their “deficit spending” cry hypocritical, it is also a downright lie. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the offsets in the Senate bill will actually generate “total savings that effectively meet or exceed costs” while simultaneously providing meals to hungry children. Essentially, 157 Republicans voted to block the holy grail of legislation. The House did, however, pass the bill today and it will now go to the President for signature.

The GOP’s continuing callous treatment of those in need was not lost on Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH). “If cutting off unemployment insurance for out-of-work Americans wasn’t enough, House Republicans are now blocking critical legislation to help schools feed thousands of hungry children,” he told ThinkProgress. “Childhood nutrition shouldn’t be a partisan issue. But Congressional Republicans – intent on blocking any progress while President Obama is in office – are willing to put hungry children in the partisan crosshairs.”

UPDATE: Congress today passed the child nutrition bill, sending it to the President for his signature.

The Wife once heard someone on the radio announce the title as though it were “Take the a Train”.

Excellent post by Bruce Schneier:

Securing the Washington Monument from terrorism has turned out to be a surprisingly difficult job. The concrete fence around the building protects it from attacking vehicles, but there’s no visually appealing way to house the airport-level security mechanisms the National Park Service has decided are a must for visitors. It is considering several options, but I think we should close the monument entirely. Let it stand, empty and inaccessible, as a monument to our fears.

An empty Washington Monument would serve as a constant reminder to those on Capitol Hill that they are afraid of the terrorists and what they could do. They’re afraid that by speaking honestly about the impossibility of attaining absolute security or the inevitability of terrorism — or that some American ideals are worth maintaining even in the face of adversity — they will be branded as "soft on terror." And they’re afraid that Americans would vote them out of office if another attack occurred. Perhaps they’re right, but what has happened to leaders who aren’t afraid? What has happened to "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"?

An empty Washington Monument would symbolize our lawmakers’ inability to take that kind of stand — and their inability to truly lead.

Some of them call terrorism an "existential threat" against our nation. It’s not. Even the events of 9/11, as horrific as they were, didn’t make an existential dent in our nation. Automobile-related fatalities — at 42,000 per year, more deaths each month, on average, than 9/11 — aren’t, either. It’s our reaction to terrorism that threatens our nation, not terrorism itself. The empty monument would symbolize the empty rhetoric of those leaders who preach fear and then use that fear for their own political ends.

The day after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab failed to blow up a Northwest jet with a bomb hidden in his underwear, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said "The system worked." I agreed. Plane lands safely, terrorist in custody, nobody injured except the terrorist. Seems like a working system to me. The empty monument would represent the politicians and press who pilloried her for her comment, and Napolitano herself, for backing down.

The empty monument would symbolize our war on the unexpected, — our overreaction to anything different or unusual — our harassment of photographers, and our probing of airline passengers. It would symbolize our "show me your papers" society, rife with ID checks and security cameras. As long as we’re willing to sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety, we should keep the Washington Monument empty.

Terrorism isn’t a crime against people or property. It’s a crime against . . .

Continue reading.

The instructor spent the entire session working on some problems she noted in the previous joint class with The Wife and me. It’s strange how you can do something over and over (it feels like) and then suddenly it clicks into place and feels totally different.

I am highly satisfied with Pilates and its effects, and I think that getting individualized instruction (both alone and in the two-person class) was extremely wise: in a large class, the instructor really cannot spend enough time with each individual student to resolve difficulties the student is having, plus the class includes people at all levels, from raw beginner to advanced student. The effect is that you might be basing your moves on someone who knows as little as you. And working from a book alone is hard because you really do need someone who knows the exercises to spot the small mistakes you make that undermine the entire effort.