Later On

And then prosecute the hell out of any whistleblower who reveals the screw-up, as the Obama Administration has repeatedly done (despite its lip-service to transparency and openness—cf. the NSA equipment screw-up). Here’s another cover-up in progress, reported by Eric Lichtblau and James Risen in the NY Times:

For eight years, government officials turned to Dennis Montgomery, a California computer programmer, for eye-popping technology that he said could catch terrorists. Now, federal officials want nothing to do with him and are going to extraordinary lengths to ensure that his dealings with Washington stay secret.The Justice Department, which in the last few months has gotten protective orders from two federal judges keeping details of the technology out of court, says it is guarding state secrets that would threaten national security if disclosed. But others involved in the case say that what the government is trying to avoid is public embarrassment over evidence that Mr. Montgomery bamboozled federal officials.

A onetime biomedical technician with a penchant for gambling, Mr. Montgomery is at the center of a tale that features terrorism scares, secret White House briefings, backing from prominent Republicans, backdoor deal-making and fantastic-sounding computer technology.

Interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials and business associates and a review of documents show that Mr. Montgomery and his associates received more than $20 million in government contracts by claiming that software he had developed could help stop Al Qaeda’s next attack on the United States. But the technology appears to have been a hoax, and a series of government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency and the Air Force, repeatedly missed the warning signs, the records and interviews show.

Mr. Montgomery’s former lawyer, Michael Flynn — who now describes Mr. Montgomery as a “con man” — says he believes that the administration has been shutting off scrutiny of Mr. Montgomery’s business for fear of revealing that the government has been duped.

“The Justice Department is trying to cover this up,” Mr. Flynn said. “If this unravels, all of the evidence, all of the phony terror alerts and all the embarrassment comes up publicly, too. The government knew this technology was bogus, but these guys got paid millions for it.”

Justice Department officials declined to discuss the government’s dealings with Mr. Montgomery, 57, who is in bankruptcy and living outside Palm Springs, Calif. Mr. Montgomery is about to go on trial in Las Vegas on unrelated charges of trying to pass $1.8 million in bad checks at casinos, but he has not been charged with wrongdoing in the federal contracts, nor has the government tried to get back any of the money it paid. He and his current lawyer declined to comment…

Continue reading.

I know that some will object to pointing out the inconsistency between promises and performance in the Obama Administration, but this kind of rot gradually destroys government and our confidence in it, so it seems worth noting. Not that I expect the Obama Administration to do anything other than stonewall, cover-up, and attack its critics, while suing the socks off anyone who reveals what’s going on.

Floris No. 89 for both shaving soap and aftershave. Floris makes an excellent soap, as one would expect, and the lather was ample using the Sabini badger brush. Three smooth passes with the all-Feather combo (razor and blade), a good splash of the No. 89 aftershave, and I was ready for the day—some time back, in fact, but things got busy.

Take a a look at this story in Bloomberg BusnessWeek by Eric Pooley and Philip Revzin and note the anomalous weather events that have hit the current harvest so hard:

As the Tunisian dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali discovered in January, there is no surer route to political oblivion than to deny people access to affordable food. On Dec. 17, after Tunisian police assaulted a street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi and seized his produce cart because, according to his family, he couldn’t afford to pay bribes, the 26-year-old Bouazizi doused himself with accelerant and lit a match. He died two weeks later. The riots that ensued—propelled in part by anger over high food prices—drove Ben Ali from power and spread to Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, and Algeria. Ben Ali may be remembered as the despot who was toppled by a vegetable cart.

The hunger that has roiled the Middle East was not caused by the whims of autocrats and cops. It began last year with crippling drought in Russia and later Argentina, and torrential rains in Australia and Canada. The deluges in Saskatchewan were so sustained and intense that farmers couldn’t plant some 10 million acres of wheat, according to the Canadian Wheat Board. “What is typically the driest province was never wetter,” said the governmental agency Environment Canada. Shrunken wheat harvests in those countries, along with cool, wet summer weather in the American Midwest that delayed the U.S. harvest, helped drive wheat prices at the Chicago Board of Trade up by 74 percent in the past year. Corn traded in Chicago rose by 87 percent during the same period. More recently, grain prices have spiked even higher because of yet another drought, this one threatening China’s wheat crop, the world’s largest. In that country’s eight major wheat-producing provinces, some 42 percent of winter wheat cropland has been hurt by a dry spell, according to Agriculture Minister Han Changfu.

Overall, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome says global food prices surged in January to record levels, based on data reaching back to 1990. “Whenever you get the market as tight as we are now, hoarding becomes widespread,” says Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist at the FAO. Wheat prices may keep rising until the summer, he predicts, because importers are speeding up purchases to outrun inflation. Prices are more likely to stay high or go higher in the next six months, he adds, than to decline.

Whether the world tips into agricultural catastrophe this year depends on the fate of the wheat on the North China Plain. “You need two perfect harvests through the summer of 2012 to get stockpiles back to an acceptable level,” says Jason Lejonvarn, a commodities strategist at Hermes Fund Managers in London. Unless sufficient moisture reaches the parched seedlings, a net exporter of wheat could become a net importer of wheat, further stressing world markets. Short of that, a Chinese ban on wheat exports would also send prices higher, meaning that global grain shortages—once thought to be a disaster of the past—could return. Even American commodities buyers are feeling the pinch. “There is not one crop you can point to that is without supply problems,” says Steve Nicholson, a commodity procurement specialist for International Food Products in St. Louis. “Production is not keeping up with demand.”

Even if the worst does not come to pass, this sudden fracture in the global food supply represents a massive test—or, more accurately, a series of them.

Continue reading. What do you think are the odds of getting two perfect harvests in each of the next two years, given the weather patterns we’ve been seeing? I would guess not higher than 20% at best.

Later in the story the obstacle to tackling the problem is mentioned:

The final test posed by the current crisis is the toughest of all. Scientists have been warning for years that carbon emissions from cars, planes, factories, and power plants would make the global climate warmer and more chaotic—altering weather patterns to make some places more prone to drought and others more prone to floods. And climate campaigners have been wondering for years what it would take to galvanize the U.S. and other nations into action. The newly ascendant Republicans in Washington won’t acknowledge the existence of the problem, let alone debate its solutions. But other leaders are speaking up. In South Korea, when President Lee Myung Bak launched a task force to study food shortages, he was blunt: “There is an increasing likelihood of a food crisis globally,” he said, “due to climate change.” Business leaders are equally frank. “The fact is that climate around the world is changing,” says Sunny Verghese, chief executive officer at Olam International, among the world’s three biggest suppliers of rice and cotton. “That will cause massive disruptions.”

The GOP is amazing in its ability to ignore reality in favor of fantasy, regardless of the damage done.

By storing in their body fat the toxins that businesses have poured into the river system, the fish protect themselves, but… Here’s the story in Science News by Janet Raloff. (Warning for Creationists: Story provides an example of evolution in action. Avert your eyes.) It begins:

Some fish in New York’s Hudson River have become resistant to several of the waterway’s more toxic pollutants. Instead of getting sick from dioxins and related compounds including some polychlorinated biphenyls, Atlantic tomcod harmlessly store these poisons in fat, a new study finds.

But what’s good for this bottom-dwelling species could be bad for those feeding on it, says Isaac Wirgin of the New York University School of Medicine’s Institute of Environmental Medicine in Tuxedo. Each bite of tomcod that a predator takes, he explains, will move a potent dose of toxic chemicals up the food chain — eventually into species that could end up on home dinner tables.

From 1947 to 1976, two General Electric manufacturing plants along the Hudson River produced PCBs for a range of uses, including as insulating fluids in electrical transformers. Over the years, PCB and dioxin levels in the livers of the Hudson’s tomcod rose to become “among the highest known in nature,” Wirgin and his colleagues note online February 17 in Science. Because these fish don’t detoxify PCBs, Wirgin explains, it was a surprise that they could accumulate such hefty contamination without becoming poisoned. His team now reports that the tomcod’s protection traces to a single mutation in one gene. The gene is responsible for producing a protein needed to unleash the pollutants’ toxicity.

All vertebrates contain molecules in their cells that will bind to dioxins and related compounds. Indeed, these proteins — aryl hydrocarbon receptors, or AHRs — are often referred to as dioxin receptors. Once these poisons diffuse into an exposed cell, each molecule can mate with a receptor and together they eventually pick up a third molecule. This trio can then dock with select segments of DNA in the cell’s nucleus to inappropriately turn on genes that can poison the host animal.

The tomcod actually has two types of AHRs, . . .

Continue reading.

Interesting article by Bruce Bower in Science News:

Babies living in bilingual homes get a perceptual boost by 8 months of age that may set the stage for more resilient thinking later in life, scientists reported February 18 at the American Association of the Advancement of Science annual meeting.Infants raised bilingual from birth can distinguish not only between their two native tongues but between two languages they’ve never been exposed to, just by watching adults speak without hearing what they say, said psychologist Janet Werker of the University of British Columbia.

Babies being raised to speak one language lack these visual discrimination skills, Werker and her colleagues have found.

Given regular exposure to two languages, infants develop a general ability to track closely what they hear and see in decoding languages, Werker proposed. In the visual realm, such information may include lip movements, the rhythm of the jaw opening and closing, and the full ensemble of facial movements while talking.

Her earlier studies found that newborn babies that had been exposed prenatally to two languages prefer to listen to those languages over others and distinguish between sounds in the tongues that they regularly hear spoken.

“Bilingual infants are able to keep their languages distinct from birth and may develop an increased sensitivity to voice and face cues for different languages,” Werker said.

Early perceptual strides taken by infants in bilingual homes may represent . . .

Continue reading.

It occurs to me that my having been on a reduction diet for 9 months may account for my current frequency of posts concerning food and recipes in particular. Once I’m on maintenance, I bet my food interest wanes to a more normal level.

It’s been quite rainy here this week, but as we say in this part of the country, February showers bring March flowers. Still, driving in the heavy overcast and heavy rain, with poor visibility and wet roads, is no fun.

In California we have a law that requires headlights to be on if (a) visibility is poor and/or (b) the windshield wipers are working. So out on the highway, you see all these cars and trucks driving with their lights on, except every now and then. About 10% left their lights off, in violation of the law.

What was interesting was that, with only a few exceptions, the lights-out vehicles were all pick-up trucks. It was obvious, and it certainly surprised me. The non-truck lights-out vehicles were all enormous SUVs.

The pattern was so clear, I started to wonder at it. It was not all pick-up trucks, by any means. But of those not obeying the law in this situation, virtually all did drive pick-up trucks. Of course, for any given driver one doesn’t know whether the cause is simple ignorance (the Army does have a saying that 10% never get the word) or contempt for the law or a self-perceived act of noble rebellion.

I run into time pressure some mornings. This morning, for example, I had the pleasure of sleeping in an extra hour (until 7:00) while outside the rain poured. Then up and soon on the Nordic, getting Don Quixote back home at the end of the first part. Then I like to eat breakfast, shower, and write a letter or two, which takes some time since I write by hand (for enjoyment: I like the writing and I like the stationery I use—I have quite a collection). And it’s Friday, so I started the laundry as soon as I was dressed. I got the washing cycle complete before I left, and started the dryiing.

I’m still enrolled in my Healthy Way reduction effort until the end of February: a 9-month effort. And I have to date lost (as of this morning) 65.1 pounds, which puts me within 10 pounds of goal. And, of course, I have still 10 days to go—let’s see, if I can lose a pound a day… Still, I’ll certainly be well within 10 lbs of goal, and I can lose the last bit on my own as I make the transition to maintenance.

So: a stop at Healthy Way, a stop by Whole Foods (where I picked up some tempeh for one-pot meals). Then back home to fold clothes. And I assembled a one-pot meal, by which time it was time for Pilates.

The one-pot meal turned out to be extremely tasty. I am wondering whether the wonderful flavor might be due to the juices from all the cooking vegetables getting a chance to intermix—but of course that happens in soups and stews as well. However, this method uses much less liquid than a soup or stew, so the stunning taste of the vegetable mixture may be more intense.

At any rate, the layers, bottom layer first, top last:

1/4 large onion, coarsely chopped
1 cup marble-sized potatoes
4 large cloves garlic, minced
8 oz lamb — I think the cut was “inner round”: very little fat
salt, pepper, crushed red pepper, a sprinkling of salad herbs (a mix)
1/2 large red bell pepper, but into 1″ squares, more or less
1 Italian eggplant, cut into rounds (not peeled)
1 Tbsp olive oil brushed onto the eggplant
1/4 cup pitted kalamata olives, coarsely chopped
Red chard, stems and leaves, chopped—as much as will fit
1 large tomato, sliced

Added just a splash of brown rice vinegar and balsamic vinegar. I figured it would not need any liquid, and it didn’t. There was plenty of liquid in the bottom: delicious, but I wished I had used rice or pasta or quinoa (which would have sopped it up) instead of potatoes.

And that’s why today has been busy. Plus tonight I have a one-hour OS X session at the Apple store.

I very much like Special 218, so it was an obvious choice for today. A wonderful fragrance and fine lather, worked up the the Omega brush. Then three smooth passes of the Apollo Micron with a trusty Swedish Gillette blade, a splash of Floris No. 89 aftershave (the fragrance reputedly favored by James Bond), and I was ready for what has turned out to be a busy day.

I had LASIK on both eyes some years back. I still wear glasses and, because of the resulting correction, my glasses now require a “slab-off” on one lens so that the bifocals will work. That’s a problem primarily because it means I can no longer wear progressive lenses, which had solved the distance problem: by tilting one’s head, one gets a good correction for all the distances between “distant” and “reading”—specifically, for me, the computer screen. So now I have special computer glasses along with bifocals (the latter for reading and for distance).

But still: I can see pretty well even without glasses, which was definitely untrue before: my uncorrected vision before LASIK was on the order of 20/900. Still, this article should give anyone pause:

How are your eyes?

That’s all anyone ever wants to know these days: How my eyes are doing after my collision with Lasik almost three years ago. Are they still dry? Do they still hurt when exposed to sunlight? Is my vision still blurred? And what about glasses — am I still wearing them?

The answer: Yes, yes, yes and yes. Emphatically, resoundingly, blindingly yes. My eyes sting. They burn. I look at neon signs and the colors bleed into a fluorescent Rorschach test. I have difficulty deciphering black lettering on white boards; I have personally helped elevate the stock of Allergan, which manufactures Refresh Plus, the drops that allegedly help dry eye.

Clearly, this is all very annoying, but at this point, I’m used to it. It’s just one of the things I live with, like PMS and hangnails. And in the grand scheme of things, it’s not so bad. According to Market Scope, LLC, an ophthalmic industry research firm, nearly 15 million procedures have been performed in the U.S. over the last decade, with a 95.4 percent patient satisfaction rate. Lasik is also a $1.6 billion industry — which, as Michael Lewis points out in “The Big Short,” was initially created to replace the revenue stream lost to declining cataract surgery reimbursement rates.

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I have been cooking more and more with fennel. It was a new vegetable to me, but is now readily available, and I like it. Doesn’t this look great?

Here’s the recipe.

It was news to me, at any rate. I’m writing the weight-loss book using Scrivener, which is working quite well since it runs on both Windows (new version in public beta) and on the Mac (original version, which I bought). I keep everything in synch via DropBox.

Scrivener is a great little program, but considerably more complex than a mere word processor. It allows you to write a long work by writing short bits (called “documents”), which you can organize in hierarchical structures and view (and rearrange) on a corkboard, as an outline, or as the text of the individual documents. — Oh, what the heck: just download it from LiteratureAndLatte.com and try it out. You can get a trial version for free, and if you write pieces of any length, it’s terrific. Windows or Mac, it makes no difference.

But I did not at first quite know how to use it, so I ended up with a project with lots of documents written with no real organization, because I hadn’t (a) figured out the software and (b) figured out the book. But you have to leap in if you’re going to learn: that’s how you learn, far as I can tell. (Again: we’re talking practical knowledge here, and that can’t be gained without getting experience, which is the polite term for making lots of beginner mistakes as you play with the capabilities, for it is through play that learning occurs.)

Finally, I realized I had created an enormous pile of unorganized stuff that I couldn’t get my head around, so I stepped back, started a new project, knowing what I then knew, and that went quite well. Pretty soon I was trying to figure out how to get the stuff from that first-draft project into the second. I’ve been worrying about this for a week. If only, I thought, I could have both projects open at once, so I could copy and paste, etc.

Finally, tonight I tried opening the first project and then opening the second project. Duh: of course they both opened, each in its own window. That’s the whole idea of this sort of interface. And, I bet you any money, you can readily move documents from one project to another by drag-and-drop or the like. (I really do need to watch the Scrivener training video, I guess.)

UPDATE: Well, this video certainly demonstrates the limitations (or inefficiency) of relying on play alone to learn something new—it does help to draw on instructional resources. I was committing the error of those who refuse to read chess books, believing that through their own play they can rediscover all that has been found through four centuries of strategic exploration and development.

If you do any writing of documents of any length at all, you owe it to yourself to watch the video and then download and use Scrivener for the 30-day free trial.

(There are other videos on the Scrivener site, including a 10-minute introduction.)

Take a look. Thanks to The Wife for the link.

An email from The Center for American Progress:

When President Obama took office amidst the worst recession in three generations, he immediately focused his energy on enacting a comprehensive plan to revive the nation’s economy. Newly elected Republicans, however, have interpreted their temporary rise to power in an entirely different way. Where Obama saw an immediate need to grow the nation’s economy, GOP leaders are seizing their moment to force longstanding GOP fantasies upon the people they govern. Several GOP-led states are pushing plans to strip state workers of their collective bargaining rights. Twelve states are considering unconstitutional bills “nullifying” the Affordable Care Act. Arizona Repub licans are lining up behind a plan to unconstitutionally strip citizenship from millions of Americans. New Hampshire Republicans have returned to the GOP’s favorite pastime of denying gay Americans their constitutional rights. Given the opportunity to lead, far-right politicians have decided instead to ignore the nation’s needs and pursue their own narrow, unpopular ideological vendettas.

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The following report is bad but not shocking if one is familiar with the ethics and morality of modern business. Reported by Tony Pugh for McClatchy:

As if finding work weren’t hard enough already, a federal agency warns that some employers are excluding jobless workers from consideration for openings.The practice has surfaced in electronic and print postings with language such as “unemployed applicants will not be considered” or “must be currently employed.” Some ads use time thresholds to exclude applicants who’ve been unemployed longer than six months or a year.

Evidence of the practice has been mostly anecdotal, and information about how widespread it may be is sketchy.

But with unemployment at 9 percent and millions of people struggling to find jobs, the practice has caught the attention of regulators, lawmakers and advocates for the unemployed.

“At a moment when we all should be doing whatever we can to open up job opportunities to the unemployed, it is profoundly disturbing that the trend of deliberately excluding the jobless from work opportunities is on the rise,” said Christine Owens, the executive director of the National Employment Law Project.

Members of Congress contacted the Department of Labor and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last year to see whether the practice violates federal employment laws against discrimination.

While the unemployed aren’t a protected class under civil rights laws, the practice could be legally problematic if it has a disparate or discriminatory effect on groups of job seekers who are subject to civil rights protections.

In a public meeting Wednesday at EEOC headquarters, several witnesses testified that . . .

Continue reading.

I’m trying to study in the library but cannot avoid hearing the (loud) conversation at a table about 15′ from my chair. Three college-age people, 2 men and a woman, and the loudest is the young man trying to impress the woman with his having been arrested 11 times and in college only because it was a condition of probation. What’s weird is that she seems attracted and impressed by what would be for anyone sensible a flashing red warning sign to get far, far away. But perhaps she has problems of her own: I just heard him say that he could help anyone through the court procedure.

Vanilla all the way, more or less. Fine lather from Mama Bear’s Sandalwood Vanilla, worked up with the TOBS “artificial badger” brush—and I was thinking as I brushed my face that I cannot imagine a reason for not using an artificial badger: inexpensive and great performance. Three smooth passes with the Eclipse Red Ring, a splash of Raw Vanilla aftershave, and I’m off to campus for the day. There’s a lot to learn in Spanish.

One Spanish question: So far common use has been made of “hay”, meaning “there is, there are”. In English one goes to some lengths to avoid “there is” and “there are” because they are limp and dead phrases: “there” in this case is just deadwood—a placeholder while the speaker or writer thinks of what he intends to say. One editing task is to go through a manuscript and remove all instances of “there is” and “there are” that one possibly can.

But is it like that in Spanish? I don’t know. I need to find a good book on Spanish prose style, and while I’m at it, a etymological dictionary in Spanish (about Spanish).

I’m watching Red, with Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, Mary-Louise Parker, Earnest Borgnine, Richard Dreyfuss, and others. Very enjoyable, but it hinges on a strange premise. It’s a spoiler, so if you haven’t seen the movie, don’t click the link to read the rest of this post.

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Very interesting report in the NY Times by Sheryl Gay Stolberg:

Halfway around the world from Tahrir Square in Cairo, an aging American intellectual shuffles about his cluttered brick row house in a working-class neighborhood here. His name is Gene Sharp. Stoop-shouldered and white-haired at 83, he grows orchids, has yet to master the Internet and hardly seems like a dangerous man.But for the world’s despots, his ideas can be fatal.

Few Americans have heard of Mr. Sharp. But for decades, his practical writings on nonviolent revolution — most notably “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in 24 languages — have inspired dissidents around the world, including in Burma, Bosnia, Estonia and Zimbabwe, and now Tunisia and Egypt.

When Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement was struggling to recover from a failed effort in 2005, its leaders tossed around “crazy ideas” about bringing down the government, said Ahmed Maher, a leading strategist. They stumbled on Mr. Sharp while examining the Serbian movement Otpor, which he had influenced.

When the nonpartisan International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which trains democracy activists, slipped into Cairo several years ago to conduct a workshop, among the papers it distributed was Mr. Sharp’s “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action,” a list of tactics that range from hunger strikes to “protest disrobing” to “disclosing identities of secret agents.”

Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian blogger and activist who attended the workshop and later organized similar sessions on her own, said trainees were active in both the Tunisia and Egypt revolts. She said that some activists translated excerpts of Mr. Sharp’s work into Arabic, and that his message of “attacking weaknesses of dictators” stuck with them.

Peter Ackerman, a onetime student of Mr. Sharp who founded the nonviolence center and ran the Cairo workshop, cites his former mentor as proof that “ideas have power.”

Mr. Sharp, hard-nosed yet exceedingly shy, is careful not to take credit. He is more thinker than revolutionary, though as a young man he participated in lunch-counter sit-ins and spent nine months in a federal prison in Danbury, Conn., as a conscientious objector during the Korean War. He has had no contact with the Egyptian protesters, he said, although he recently learned that the Muslim Brotherhood had “From Dictatorship to Democracy” posted on its Web site.

While seeing the revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak as a sign of “encouragement,” Mr. Sharp said, “The people of Egypt did that — not me.”

He has been watching . . .

Continue reading.