Later On

This is big. The column begins with a little snark, but in this case it is, I think, well deserved. It begins:

In October, 2007, candidate Barack Obama — in response to the Bush administration’s demand for a new FISA law — emphatically vowed that he would filibuster any such bill that contained retroactive amnesty for telecoms which participated in Bush’s illegal spying program.  At the time, that vow was politically beneficial to Obama because he was seeking the Democratic nomination and wanted to show how resolute he was about standing up against Bush’s expansions of surveillance powers and in defense of the rule of law.  But in a move that shocked many people at the time — though which turned out to be completely consistent with his character — Obama, once he had the nomination secured in July, 2008, turned around and did exactly that which he swore he would not do:  he not only voted against the filibuster of the bill containing telecom amnesty, but also voted in favor of enactment of the underlying bill.  That bill, known as the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, was then signed into law by George W. Bush at a giddy bipartisan signing ceremony in the Rose Garden, which — by immunizing telecoms and legalizing most of the Bush program — put a harmless, harmonious end to what had been the NSA scandal.

Beyond telecom amnesty, the FISA Amendments Act also wildly expanded the Government’s power to conduct warrantless surveillance of telephone calls and emails.  In large part, the bill was intended to legalize the illegal Bush NSA program that had caused so much faux controversy among Democrats.  As Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin put it:  ”Through the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, Congress has legitimated many of the same things people are now complaining about”; separately, Balkin contended that Obama voted for the bill because, as President, he himself would want the same powers Bush had to intercept people’s communications without bothering with court approval.

When trying to placate his numerous supporters furious over his reversal, Obama insisted he voted for the bill with “the firm intention — once I’m sworn in as president — to have my Attorney General conduct a comprehensive review of all our surveillance programs, and to make further recommendations on any steps needed to preserve civil liberties and to prevent executive branch abuse in the future” (that promise caused his then-large band of faithful followers to evangelize that Obama only voted for the bill to make sure he won the election, so that he could then use his majestic power to fix civil liberties abuses of the type he had just voted for; that was when people were still willing with a straight face to invoke the 11-dimensional chess justification for everything he did).  Needless to say, it would have been unhealthy in the extreme holding one’s breath for that “we’ll-fix-it-when-I’m-President” promise to be fulfilled, as — more than 2 years into his presidency — nothing like it has remotely happened.

Immediately upon enactment of the Bush/Obama-supported FISA Amendments Act, the ACLU filed a lawsuit seeking to enjoin its enforcement on the ground that the law’s expanded warrantless eavesdropping powers violated the Fourth Amendment.  Aside from its warped and radically enlarged “state secret” doctrine, the Bush administration’s standard tactic for avoiding judicial review of their illegal eavesdropping programs was a two-step “standing” exercise grounded in extreme cynicism:  (1) they shrouded their eavesdropping actions in total secrecy so that nobody knew who was targeted for this eavesdropping, and they then (2) exploited that secrecy to insist that since nobody could prove they were actually subjected to this eavesdropping, nobody had “standing” to contest its legality in courts (that’s how the Bush DOJ got an appeals court to dismiss on procedural grounds a lower court ruling that their NSA program broke the law and violated the Constitution).

In the case brought by the ACLU, . . .

Continue reading.

The Wife told me that she knew that I would love a laptop, which is why she so strongly recommended that I get one. And get one I did: first an HP enormous laptop that I immediately returned because I started having problems from the get-go and the on-line adviser said that the OS was somehow munged.

Then I tried a netbook that I got with reward points. It was simply too small: could not read the screen.

Then I got a regular Dell, and again with the reading problems plus the touchpad was hypersensitive and I was constantly sending the cursor into outer space by brushing it accidentally.

Then I got to try out a couple of MacBooks on the trip East and found them quite workable.

So here we are: I’m sitting in my chair, wonder what fungus it is that makes tempeh—and is tempeh originally from Thailand? (I know it’s from SE Asia.)

Yep, the mold is a fungus, and that mold produces no significant amounts of B12. However, in Indonesia (where tempeh originated) a bacterium also is part of the fermentation, and that bacterium seems to produce B12. In the West, however, the bacterium is not used—great care is taken to use only pure strains of the mold—so a tempeh-oriented eater should make sure to get adequate B12 (which most of us get from meat protein).

I was interested to see in the Wikipedia article that Swedish scientists made tempeh with barley and oats in 2008. I swear I’ve seen multigrain tempehs on the shelf in Whole Foods for some years—but of course 2008 is indeed some years ago. Still, that doesn’t sound likely (and it is in Wikipedia), but it raised an interesting question: why barley and oats? Was that to get a complete protein? But barley and oats are both grains, so they would be deficient in the same way, wouldn’t they?

So a Google search on “barley and oats complete protein” produced this useful note by bethany646 on eHow:

Vegan or vegetarian and not getting enough protein? Learn how to combine monocots and dicots to make a complete protein. These complete proteins can be converted by your liver into all the essential amino acids your body needs for cellular metabolism.

1. First you need to chose a monocot, or a seed that can’t be split. For example, a corn kernel can’t be split, at least not without destroying it. Choose from rice, corn, wheat, barley, or oats. These are just some common monocots when actually there are thousands to choose from.

2. Next, decide what kind of delicious dicot, or seed that splits to accompany your monocot. Some dicots include rice, lentils, peas, peanuts, and almonds.

3. Now that you’ve chosen your monocot and dicot, eat them together to make a yummy complete protein. For example, a whole wheat peanut butter sandwich, barley and lentil salad, or peas and corn. My favorite is rice with black beans. Add a little olive oil and cilantro and you’ve got yourself a very delicious complete protein. Enjoy!

So barley and oats are not a complete protein. They should have used barley and rice, for example.

Great to have such easy access to information. If I’d had this as a kid, you would never have gotten me outside.

UPDATE 1: Then I got to wondering about best sources for B12. I’m pleased to see sardines high on the list.

UPDATE 2: Lots of tempeh info at this link, including how to make your own: http://www.tempeh.info/

Very good Pilates session today. Although my form continues to require lots of correction, at least now I have an idea of what to do when a correction is offered instead of being totally confused.

When I gave a brief talk at Healthy Way the other evening on my 65-lb weight loss (or, more impressively, my 1040-ounce lost—and much of it was lost a few ounces at a time, though occasionally two or three pounds would mysteriously vanish between weighings), they had “before” and “after” photos, and I was stunned when I looked at the “before” photo and saw that my shoulders were up around my ears. My Pilates instructor used to say that, but I didn’t realize how obvious it was to an impartial observer until I saw that photo. Thank heavens for Pilates.

She’s competent, fair-minded, and knows well the industry she will regulate: that’s why the Right and the bankers hate and fear her and are doing everything they can to destroy her. Bad news: Her chief protector is Barack Obama, not a guy you can depend on. Paul Krugman writes in today’s NY Times:

Last week, at a House hearing on financial institutions and consumer credit, Republicans lined up to grill and attack Elizabeth Warren, the law professor and bankruptcy expert who is in charge of setting up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Ostensibly, they believed that Ms. Warren had overstepped her legal authority by helping state attorneys general put together a proposed settlement with mortgage servicers, which are charged with a number of abuses.

But the accusations made no sense. Since when is it illegal for a federal official to talk with state officials, giving them the benefit of her expertise? Anyway, everyone knew that the real purpose of the attack on Ms. Warren was to ensure that neither she nor anyone with similar views ends up actually protecting consumers.

And Republicans were clearly also hoping that if they threw enough mud, some of it would stick. For people like Ms. Warren — people who warned that we were heading for a debt crisis before it happened — threaten, by their very existence, attempts by conservatives to sustain their antiregulation dogma. Such people must therefore be demonized, using whatever tools are at hand.

Let me expand on that for a moment. When the 2008 financial crisis struck, many observers — myself included — thought that it would force opponents of financial regulation to rethink their position. After all, conservatives hailed the debt boom of the Bush years as a triumph of free-market finance right up to the moment it turned into a disastrous bust.

But we underestimated the speed and determination with which opponents of regulation would rewrite history. Almost instantly, that free-market boom was retroactively reinterpreted; it became a disaster brought on by, you guessed it, excessive government intervention.

There remained, however, the inconvenient fact that some of those calling for stronger regulation have a track record that gives them a lot of credibility. And few have as much credibility as Ms. Warren.

Household debt doubled as a share of personal income over the 30 years preceding the crisis, and these days high levels of debt are widely seen as a major barrier to recovery. But only a handful of people appreciated the dangers posed by rising debt as the rise was happening. And Ms. Warren was among the foresighted few. More than a decade ago, when politicians of both parties were celebrating the wonders of modern banking and widening access to consumer credit, she was already warning that high debt levels could bring widespread financial disaster in the face of an economic downturn.

Later, she took the lead in pushing for . . .

Continue reading.

No, I’m not talking about Qaddafi and his war on his citizens. I’m talking about the US government and its “War on Drugs”—which is in fact a war on drug users. Radley Balko takes a look at what our government is doing to its citizens:

At 12:30 a.m. on January 5, just three days before Jared Lee Loughner opened fire at a Tucson gathering hosted by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), a SWAT team in Framingham, Massachusetts, conducted a drug raid on the home of 68-year-old Eurie Stamps. Stamps wasn’t the target of the raid. Nor was he armed when the police shot him. In fact, police had found their suspects, Joseph Bushfan—the 20-year-old son of Stamps’ girlfriend—and Devon Talbert, also 20. The two were arrested outside the home. They still went ahead with the raid, which ended with Stamps’ death.

On January 12, four days after the Tucson massacre, Sal and Anita Culosi settled a lawsuit against Fairfax County, Virginia, police Detective Deval Bullock. Five years earlier, Bullock shot and killed their son, 38-year-old optometrist Sal Culosi, during a SWAT raid on his home. The reason for the raid: Culosi was suspected of wagering on college football games with friends.

Later the same month, Berwyn Heights, Maryland, Mayor Cheye Calvo settled his civil rights lawsuit against Prince George’s County, Maryland, and its police department. In 2008 a SWAT team from that department raided Calvo’s home after intercepting a package of marijuana that had been sent there. Police broke down Calvo’s door, immediately shot and killed his two Labrador retrievers, and held him and his mother-in-law handcuffed and at gunpoint for hours before realizing they were innocent. The package had been randomly sent to Calvo’s address as part of a drug smuggling scheme; a plant at the delivery service was supposed to intercept it before it was delivered. To this day, officials in Prince George’s County say that if they could do it all again, they would conduct the raid the same way.

Within hours of the Tucson massacre, pundits and politicians were denouncing anti-government rhetoric, falsely suggesting that the use of targets, crosshairs, and other gun imagery in political campaigning, along with strong denunciations of public officials, mostly from the Tea Party right, was responsible for the tragedy. But before, during, and after the massacre, they remained oblivious to an actual, measurable, and significant increase in the government’s use of violent tactics against its own citizens. Indeed, the policies that led to the violence that claimed the lives of Stamps, Culosi, and scores of other innocents in recent years are supported by nearly all of the pundits and politicians who took to blogs, op-ed pages, and the airwaves to condemn those who condemn the government.

Who Is More Violent?

What happened in Tucson was an atrocity. But such actual, as opposed to rhetorical, attacks on public officials are rare. The last sitting congressman to be assassinated was Rep. Leo J. Ryan (D-Calif.), killed in 1978 by members of Jim Jones’ cult in Guyana. Despite a flurry of unsourced media reports about a dramatic increase in threats against members of Congress, Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Terrance Gainer told Politico shortly after the Tucson shootings that the  number of threats against members is “very low.” Gainer added, “I think we have to keep this in some perspective.”

Official government violence against nonviolent Americans and residents, by contrast, occurs daily. And for the last 30 years it has been increasing at an alarming rate. From the early 1980s to the mid-2000s, University of Eastern Kentucky criminologist Peter Kraska conducted an annual survey on the use of SWAT teams in the United States. Until the late 1970s, SWAT teams were generally used in emergency situations to defuse conflicts with people who presented an immediate threat to others, such as hostage takers, bank robbers, or mass shooters. But beginning in the early 1980s, police departments across the country began using SWAT teams to serve drug warrants.

Kraska found that the number of SWAT deployments in America increased from 3,000 per year in the early 1980s to around 50,000 by the mid-2000s. That’s about 135 SWAT raids per day. The vast majority of those are for drug warrants.

In May 2010, after an open records request from local newspapers, . . .

Continue reading. The government’s violence against its own citizens should stop.

A four-day stubble calls for horsepower, so I brought out the big guns: J.M Fraser shaving cream, curiously effective at softening the beard and a long-time favorite—and it’s inexpensive, to boot. The Simpson Persian Jar 2 Super worked up a good lather, and I took my time working it into my beard. Then the Hoffritz Slant Bar, with a still newish Swedish Gillette blade, went to work. The stubble never had a chance. A splash of New York on my exceptionally smooth face, and I’m ready to hit the books some more—though I do have Pilates today. (I did 25 minutes on the Nordic, to boot.)

The last few days I have been somewhat frantically massaging my brain to soak up more Spanish: I’m facing an oral exam on Thursday in which I must chatter on about things with my limited vocabulary. The problem is getting into a sentence and then finding I’m trapped: no vocabulary with which to escape. I suppose I can jump overboard and escape the sentence with “… es intersante, ¿verdad?” but I’d rather speak as though I were not a babbling idiot.

I have to admit that I miss Esperanto and its wonderful vocabulary structure. For example, the correlatives:

“Correlatives” in general are words that function together, such as (in English) “either… or” and “neither… nor” and “not only … but also”. Esperanto uses the term for a set of useful words that are related, like “who”, “someone”, “what”, “where”, “then”, “always”, etc.

Two other words may be used in conjunction with these, where appropriate:

• ĉi – indicates proximity. For example, tio = that, tio ĉi or ĉi tio = this.
• ajn – indicates “any”. For example, tio = that (thing), tio ajn = anything; io = something, io ajn = anything at all.

TABLE OF CORRELATIVES

.

The ki- words are used as both interrogatives and relatives. This set of words is enormously useful and easily learned, a characteristic in general of Esperanto vocabulary, which uses a system of affixes to derive many different words from a single root. For example, from the Wikipedia article on Esperanto vocabulary a few suffixes:

The text in the table includes an interesting example: a word made up of two suffixes clapped together: aĉigi.

The aĉ- part is a general pejorative, with the suffix -aĉ used to indicate a pejorative sense: hundo means “dog,” so hundaĉo would mean something like “cur” or “mongrel” (in the pejorative sense).

The -ig- means “to cause” — boli means “to boil” (intransitive, as in “water boils when heated enough”), so boligi means “to boil” in the transitive sense: to cause to boil, as in “I boil water for tea.” In English, of course, we use the same word and determine whether it’s transitive or not from context.

The final -i in aĉigi is simply the infinitive ending, which makes it a verb.

Take another root—verd- meaning “green,” most often encountered as an adjective: verda. But we can use -ig- to make verdigi, to make green: Mi verdigas la domo: I “green” the house—a succinct way of saying that one is painting the house green.

You can see that the system of affixes allows one to easily create words on the fly: grab the root that reflects the idea, snap on the affixes to tailor it to the context and the need, and Bob’s your uncle.

Esperanto is a lot of fun. Now, back to Spanish.

This is totally fascinating. Via Open Culture:

The thing I like about IFC/GOPM meals is that they are always so tasty—and a lot of variety is possible. Today:

1 large spring onion
3 oz (1.5 servings) whole-wheat broad noodles
1/4 cup milk (leftover from seasoning the Emil Henry pot)
1/2 chicken breast, 8 oz, cut into chunks
5 cloves garlic, minced
salt, pepper, crushed red pepper
1 large red bell pepper, cored and cut into squares
1/2 moderate size Italian eggplant, sliced
1 yellow crookneck squash, coarsely chopped
1/2 head cauliflower, broken into florets
1/2 bunch red chard, chopped
6 kumquats, cut in half
1 large tomato, sliced

Pour-over:

2 Tbsp vinaigrette
1 Tbsp mirin
1 Tbsp Worcestershire
1 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
2 tsp Dijon mustard

Whisked that together, poured over, put into oven, turned oven off somehow, went back in 45 minutes to a warm pot of uncooked food. Took it out, turned oven back on to 450ºF, and waited while it reheated. Once hot, put the pot in again and cooked for 45 minutes.

As she says in her patent application, overcooking is not a problem in this method if your times are at all reasonable.

You see what I mean about the veggie content: I would never have had this variety of veggies in a single meal—nor the total amount compared to the amount of starch and protein.

Last night I watched the animated movie Hoodwinked and enjoyed it a lot. It’s a family movie with some songs, but the story and characterizations are quite satsifying. And it has quite a good cast.

As I finish my weight-loss journey, I realize that the months of recording what I ate and how much I weighed each day, and reflecting on the data in my journal, has changed how I look at food. Much of the emotional crust (from childhood memories and experiences as well as the overburden from billions of dollars spent in marketing food and food products) has been stripped away: when I look at food now, I tend to see both less and more than I did before: less of the emotional appeal and more of the effects. When I think of a 12-oz juicy steak, what most strikes me is that it’s enough for three meals, and if I ate the whole thing, I would quickly regret it.

This is not to say that I’ve lost my enjoyment of food: I still love a tasty meal. But food no longer seems relevant to my emotional life and needs: it’s food, not a friend (or enemy). And viewing food more dispassionately has led to improved food decisions.

Some years back I decided that I had to start eating more vegetables, but I found that difficult somehow. One reason I like Indoor Firepit Cooking so much is that it’s now easy to include more vegetables in my diet—and a greater variety as well. And, of course, the ease in cooking and clean-up is also very appealing.

So as I gradually approach my target weight, I think that maintaining it will be easier than I thought. Perception does shape behavior, and the way I look at food now makes it easy to keep a balanced approach to my diet.

Salt the steak before cooking—at least 40 minutes before, and ideally the night before, letting it then rest in the fridge uncovered overnight. (Of course, you bring it to room temperature before cooking.) And turn it often as you cook, using a fork if you want.

Some surprises there, right. But the article (with video) is convincing. Take a look.

Very interesting idea:

Walled States, Waning Sovereignty
by Wendy Brown

A review by Jacob Mikanowski

Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there’s been a strange increase in wall-building. It’s not just a resurgence in the construction of physical walls, like the Israeli West Bank barrier, the US-Mexico border fence, or similar barriers on the edges of the European Union or the borders of India, Saudi Arabia, and a host of other countries; it’s also an upsurge in the desire for enclosure, as if nations could wrap themselves safely behind walls, like blankets.

Wendy Brown begins Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, her lucid, critically astute, and ultimately frustrating study of the contemporary revival of wall-building, by pointing out that these new walls never accomplish what they ostensibly set out to do. They can’t stop trans-border migration or smuggling, and they don’t prevent crimes; they just disperse their effects. Nor are walls able to do anything meaningful about security: they can’t repel enemy armies, and they’re powerless in the face of more diffuse threats, like suicide bombers and biological weapons.

Walls don’t work, but they keep getting built — but as Brown observes, there is a deeper paradox to their popularity. Walls sit on national borders, but the forces they are meant to keep out and control are transnational, dispersed, and decentered. Meanwhile, the very notion of erecting new barriers around states runs counter to today’s dominant ideologies of globalization, all of which imagine a world without boundaries, whether in the name of free markets, global governance, universal democracy, or humanitarian interventionism. In this fantasy landscape of cooperation and interdependence, walls stand out as an anachronism. So if they aren’t useful, and they aren’t fashionable, what are these walls really for, and where does the desire for them come from?

Read the rest of this entry »

This is very cool: an experiment in varying the expressivity of a piece of music. Video here.

Busy morning of lots of Spanish review (interesting factoid: “o” (= or) acquires an accent when used between numerals: 25 ó 30 libros, for example. My guess it is to distinguish it clearly from a zero.

I’m quite liking the Emil Henry pot (thanks, Steve), and I’m using it to make a Petrale sole dish via the Indoor Firepit Cooking method, aka GOPM:

2 small leeks, sliced (white part only)
1/3 cup converted rice
1/2 lb Petrale sole
juice of half a lime plus a little balsamic vinegar
salt, pepper, crushed red pepper
capers
4 mushrooms, sliced
1 yellow crookneck squash, coarsely chopped
1/2 Italian eggplant, sliced
greens (well, purples) from two beets, chopped

Pour-over:

2 Tbsp Bragg’s Ginger-Sesame vinaigrette
1 Tbsp sherry vinegar
1 Tbsp Worcestershire
1 tsp Dijon mustard

Whisk and pour over the top.

The two beets I grated raw, chopped one spring onion and added that, then a Tbsp of the vinaigrette, salt, and pepper, which made a very nice salad. (They were small beets.)

A couple of days ago it struck me how very little fat I use in this method of cooking: 2 Tbsp of the vinaigrette amounts (I guess) around 2 tsp of oil, which is then spread over two meals. I like that it requires so little oil—and, of course, that one gets a good amount of vegetables.

I rather like the Emile Henry pot, and I’ll like it a lot more once I scrub away the remaining burnt-milk residue. I made a new Indoor Firepit Cooking meal:

1/3 c rice
2 leeks, white part, sliced
1 Tbsp sherry vinegar
1/2 chicken breast (8.1 oz)
salt, pepper, crushed red pepper
4 mushrooms, sliced
2 small fennel bulbs and thick stalks, sliced
beet greens from 1 beet, chopped
Meyer lemon, chopped

The pour-over:

2 Tbsp Bragg’s Ginger-Sesame vinaigrette
1 Tbsp sherry vinegar
1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 Tbsp barley miso (3 years old)
2 tsp Dijon mustard

Whisk together and pour over.

45 minutes in 450ºF oven, and a very nice lunch and, later, dinner: fast, easy, tasty, nutritious, and lots of veggies.

I grated the raw beet that was attached to the greens, put on 1 Tbsp Bragg’s vinaigrette, and had that as a salad while the IFC pot cooked.

It’s POURING rain here. I suddenly realized that I have an umbrella on order.

Except the US prefers not to learn from other countries, of course. Janet Raloff reports in Science News:

Radioactive iodine released by the Chernobyl nuclear accident has left a legacy of thyroid cancers among downwinders — one that shows no sign of diminishing. Details of one at-risk population emerges in a new study of some 12,500 Ukraine residents who were children at the time of the April 1986 accident.The new data also point to what could be in store if conditions at Japan’s troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power complex continue to sour. Since March 12, public fears have been building about the possibility that people living near the earthquake-ravaged electrical-generating complex could be hit by substantial fallout from radioactive plumes that might be emitted with little notice.

On Wednesday, March 16, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission seemed to justify those fears when it issued a statement saying it “believes it is appropriate for U.S. residents within 50 miles of the Fukushima reactors to evacuate.”

Such a recommendation is warranted, NRC said, “when projected doses could exceed 1 rem to the body or 5 rem to the thyroid.” A rem is a dose of radiation, one that’s equal to 0.01 sievert (the corresponding SI unit).

Japanese officials in recent days have reported dose rates as high as 0.4 sievert per hour near damaged reactors and used-fuel pools at the Fukushima facility. But doses at the entrance gate have only peaked at values about two percent as high. So to understand the new NRC announcement, it would appear the agency’s intel points to the potential not only for large plumes of radioactive materials — but also ones that might cause harm well beyond the 18.6-mile (30 kilometer) perimeter that Japanese officials have identified as constituting a high-risk zone.

The iodine risk
The six-reactor Fukushima complex lost power following the earthquake and accompanying tsunami. As a result, those reactors that were up and running lost their cooling, which allowed their fuel to overheat. To relieve the pressure which might compromise a reactor’s protective vessel, safety crews periodically vented a little of the gas building up inside those vessels. Some iodine-131, a radioactive byproduct of the fissioning in a nuclear reactor, escaped during those controlled releases.

That’s not a health concern. What is: . . .

Continue reading.

The sad state of forensic “science”, as described here by Radley Balko:

After countless scandals in recent years, the problems with America’s forensics system are finally getting some national attention. In December, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) introduced a bill to reform the country’s crime labs. In January, ProPublica and Frontline teamed up for a year-long investigation into the ways criminal autopsies are conducted across the country. In North Carolina, the state legislature is considering reforms to that state’s crime lab, which was rocked by a damning 2010 investigation commissioned by the state attorney general and a follow-up report by the Raleigh News and Observer that uncovered widespread corruption, hiding of exculpatory findings, and a pro-prosecution bias among crime lab workers. All of this comes on the heels of a congressionally commissioned 2009 report from the National Academy of Sciences that found expert witnesses in many areas of forensics routinely give testimony that is not backed by good science.

So the good news is that we are starting to see some skepticism, even some outrage, about the way forensic science is used in criminal cases. The bad news is that the solutions politicians and policy makers are proposing, while better than nothing, do not really address the primary problem. That problem is perverse incentives.

To be sure, there are other problems with the forensics system. For starters, many forensic disciplines, such as hair and carpet-fiber analysis, blood spatter analysis, and especially bite mark analysis, have not been subject to rigorous scientific testing. Even fingerprint analysis is not the sure thing it was once thought to be. Many of these fields were either invented by law enforcement agencies or honed and refined by them. The fields have not been subjected to peer review, and the methods by which, for example, a carpet-fiber or ballistics analyst produces a “match” are not blind. On the contrary, the analyst often knows the details of the crime and which sample implicates the suspect. When done this way, these analyses are not science, but they are often presented in court as if they were.

Some of the policies now under consideration at the state and federal levels could help with these problems. Leahy’s bill would require any crime lab that receives federal funding to be accredited and to make sure all of its analysts are certified. (It isn’t clear who would do the accrediting and certifying.) The bill would also provide funding for scientific research into the various forensic fields to establish best practices and standards and to ascertain the scientific validity and accuracy of those fields. The North Carolina legislature is considering a bill that would create an advisory panel to oversee the state crime lab. The bill also would make it a felony for a crime lab worker to willfully withhold exculpatory information. The fact that such misconduct is not already considered a crime speaks volumes.

These laws would help ensure that only forensics backed by science gets into the courtroom, and they would at least cut down on blatant corruption in crime labs. But the main problem driving nearly all the recent forensics scandals is . . .

Continue reading. At the link is also a podcast.

Sounds interesting:

Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition
by David Garland

A review by Marie Gottschalk

In the 1950s and 1960s, politicians and public officials in the United States generally did not view opposition to the death penalty as a major political liability. Indeed some of them were outspoken foes of capital punishment. To demonstrate his faith in rehabilitation, Michael Disalle, Ohio’s governor from 1959 to 1963, made it a point to hire convicted murderers to serve on his household staff. Governor Terry Sanford’s numerous statements against capital punishment were so well known that prisoners on North Carolina’s death row pointedly referred to them in their clemency appeals. Chub Peabody, who was elected governor of Massachusetts in a tight race in 1962, vowed that he would not sign a death warrant even for the Boston Strangler, if he were ever caught and convicted. During this period, public support for capital punishment was rapidly eroding, falling by 26 percent from 1953 to 1966, when for the first time more Americans were against the death penalty than for it.

A decade later, the death penalty re-emerged as a central issue in American politics. Executions resumed in 1977 after a decade-long moratorium, first hesitantly and then with matter-of-fact regularity. Politicians began to boast about their willingness — indeed, their eagerness — to execute their own citizens, including child offenders (something done almost nowhere else in the world) and the mentally retarded. A campaign commercial in the Texas gubernatorial race in 1990 portrayed former governor Mark White walking down a hallway displaying larger-than-life photos of the men put to death during his administration in 1983-1986. “Only a governor can make executions happen,” White declared as ominous music played in the background. “I did, and I will.” During the Democratic primaries in 1992, Governor Bill Clinton made a point of flying back to Arkansas to sign the death warrant of Rickey Ray Rector, who had turned a gun on himself after killing a police officer in a robbery gone awry and ending up severely mentally handicapped. Lower taxes and more executions were key planks of Newt Gingrich’s platform in 1995. The Republican leader even proposed mass executions (“27 or 30 or 35 people at one time”) as a weapon in the war on drugs.

What explains this dramatic about-face? A number of analysts point to the symbolic value of capital punishment in American politics. They stress how American society deploys the death penalty to express its fear of crime and its revulsion of criminals. But this begs the question of why capital punishment became such a powerful symbol in the United States but not elsewhere. The institution of capital punishment in the United States has been stubbornly impervious to rational or scientific arguments about its limited impact on deterring crime and enhancing public safety — arguments that have contributed to its undoing in other Western countries. In the United States, the growing momentum to abolish capital punishment sparked a powerful counter-movement in the mid-1970s that succeeded in bringing back executions with a vengeance.

Read the rest of this entry »

Joel Reynolds in the LA Times:

The specter of nuclear disaster in Japan has prompted nuclear industry representatives in the United States to offer reassurances that no such thing could happen here. Our plants are better designed, they say, our system of government oversight is stricter, and a quake of that magnitude is highly unlikely.

If you believe that, I have a fail-safe blowout preventer from the Gulf of Mexico I want to sell you.

Some 25 years ago, on behalf of a group of San Luis Obispo residents called Mothers for Peace, I urged the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and then the federal courts to block the operating license for the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant. The facility, located on the Central Coast of California, sits just a couple of miles from the Hosgri earthquake fault, which is believed to be capable of generating a magnitude 7.5 temblor.

We argued that the plant should not be granted an operating license because, among other concerns, emergency plans for the facility were inadequate and failed to consider the possibility that an earthquake might trigger events leading to a release of radiation — the very circumstances that have now occurred in Japan.

The commission rejected our concerns and even prohibited its staff and the public from considering them. Their view was that the plant had been designed to withstand the “maximum credible earthquake” for the site and that therefore an earthquake couldn’t lead to a nuclear accident.

After initially granting a temporary stay of the license, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, by a 5-4 vote, agreed with the commission. In a decision written by then-Judge Robert Bork (and joined by, among others, now-Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and former special prosecutor Kenneth Starr), it concluded that the probability of a simultaneous earthquake and radiological accident at Diablo Canyon was “so small as to be rated zero” and, on that basis, that the commission was right to ignore it.

Judge Patricia Wald, joined by now-Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and others, dissented vehemently, calling the NRC’s decision . . .

Continue reading.