Later On

Interesting column by Peter Lovenheim in the LA Times:

When I was growing up in upstate New York in the late 1950s and ’60s, people didn’t exercise in public the way they do now. You didn’t see adults jogging, biking or power-walking on the street.

Except one. Nearly every day, a middle-aged woman of slight build walked rapidly through our suburban neighborhood, usually with her head down. No one knew her name, so we called her the Walker. She usually wore a simple blue or yellow dress, if memory serves, and when it rained she would wear a clear plastic raincoat with a hood pulled over her head. In the winter I recall a long, cloth coat, also with a hood; in driving snow she’d cover her face with a scarf.

Forty years later, when I’d moved with my wife and children back to what had been my parents’ home, I was amazed to see the same woman still walking through the neighborhood.

Resolved, finally, to meet her, I approached her one afternoon in 2003.

“Excuse me, ” I began. “I’ve lived on this street a long time and have always noticed you walking.”

Up close, she looked older, smaller and frailer than I had imagined.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve been walking here a long time.”

Her voice was shaky, but she spoke with a clear diction. She said she’d walked in the neighborhood almost every day since 1960.

“You’ve walked on our street every day for more than 40 years?” I asked.

“I didn’t miss many,” she said, smiling.

“In just one more year, I’ll be 90,” she added.

Her name was Grace Field.

In answer to my question, Grace said that in all the years she’d been at it, few people had stopped to speak with her.

I was, at the time, writing a book about how Americans live as neighbors and asked Grace if she’d be willing to talk with me about that. She agreed, and a few days later, I met her at her home. It turned out she lived in an apartment nearby. She’d never married, lived alone and walked each day, she said, for exercise.

Among the things I learned about Grace was that as a young woman she had studied at the Juilliard School and was an accomplished harpist and pianist.

What a waste, I thought; if only we’d gotten to know her, Grace might have made an interesting friend. Maybe she even could have given music lessons to children in the neighborhood.

I had not been particularly interested in neighborhoods until about 10 years ago when a tragedy occurred on my street: One evening, . . .

Continue reading.

Very interesting article about anti-inflammatories and cancer. As readers know, I have for years taken 1/2 tsp turmeric in my morning hot cereal, after reading a note about its anti-inflammatory action and the effects of that. You can readily Google and find information on tumeric—here’s an article that lists 20 health benefits.

The article that prompted this post is by Giorgio Trinchieri and begins:

What if taking aspirin could reduce your risk of cancer? Researchers have debated the relationship between inflammation and cancer for many years, but recent studies have reignited the discussion with evidence that taking aspirin daily for 5 years or longer can protect against death from colorectal and other solid cancers. If this observation indeed holds true, and aspirin can stave off cancer or reduce the risk of recurrence, this familiar, age-old drug could offer a tantalizingly simple treatment.

Unfortunately, aspirin and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are not without problematic side effects, increasing the risks of liver toxicity and bleeding in the stomach and brain when taken over extended periods of time. Researchers who have been studying the molecular pathways at the intersection of cancer and inflammation hope their findings may lead to more selective ways of reducing inflammation, eliminating or minimizing aspirin’s negative effects without sacrificing its benefits.When Peter Rothwell at John Radcliffe Hospital in Headington, Oxfordshire, and colleagues analyzed individual patient data from eight randomized trials in which patients took a daily aspirin for prevention of cardiovascular diseases, they noticed the aspirin takers had a lower incidence of death from cancer than those who didn’t take the drug.¹ Earlier studies had shown that daily use of aspirin and other NSAIDs over extended periods reduced the risk of colorectal cancer or polyp recurrence, but no clear evidence was previously available, at least in humans, that aspirin might also reduce the risk of other cancers. In the new study, the benefit of aspirin use was apparent after at least five years of treatment. In trials in which the patients had been taking aspirin for more than 7.5 years, the 20-year risk of cancer death (from the initiation of the trials) was reduced by approximately 30 percent for all solid cancers and by 60 percent for gastrointestinal cancers. For lung and esophageal cancer, the benefit was confined to subtypes of those cancers that originated in glandular tissue (adenocarcinomas). For colorectal cancer, the effect was high for cancer in the proximal colon but not in the distal colon.

These data clearly point to the importance of anti-inflammatory drugs in preventing the initiation and progression of both gastrointestinal and other solid organ cancers (including lung and prostate), and suggest that inflammation may be an underlying cause of cancer even in tumor types that had not been traditionally thought to originate within chronically inflamed tissues.

Inflammation and cancer genes

Although the role of inflammation in favoring carcinogenesis has generated much interest in the last 10–15 years, the Greek physician Claudius Galenus observed some similarity between cancer and inflammation almost 2 thousand years ago. Galenus originally used Hippocrates’s term “cancer” specifically to describe certain inflammatory tumors of the breast in which superficial veins appeared swollen and radiated, somewhat like the claws of a crab. Later the name was extended to include all malignant and infiltrating growths. In 1863 Rudolf Virchow noted white blood cells or leukocytes in neoplastic tissues and made a connection between inflammation and cancer. He suggested that the “lymphoreticular infiltrate” reflected the origin of cancer at sites of chronic inflammation. A seminal observation was made more than a century later, when Harold Dvorak of Harvard University noted that inflammation and cancer share some basic developmental mechanisms (angiogenesis) and tissue-infiltrating cells (lymphocytes, macrophages, and mast cells), and that tumors act like “wounds that do not heal.”

Researchers hope to find more selective ways of eliminating or minimizing aspirin’s negative effects without sacrificing its benefits.

Chronic inflammation can affect all phases of carcinogenesis, from favoring the initial genetic alterations that drive cancer formation, to acting as a tumor promoter by establishing conditions in the surrounding tissues that allow the tumor to progress and metastasize, and even triggering immunosuppressive mechanisms that prevent an effective immune response against the tumors.

In 2004 Robert Bass Jr. at the The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and colleagues showed for the first time that . . .

Continue reading.

Those who deny evolution have to ignore many facts—and, as this letter illustrates, totally misunderstand the facts that have accepted. (Note also the gratuitous insults and abuse the writer uses to bulk up his argument.)

But then we see this example of evolution being observed in action. And here’s another. So a person who believes that evolution does not happen has a serious problem in his or her reality-processing mechanism.

I’ll close with a nifty video I found via PZ Myers:

UPDATE: After thinking it over, I don’t much like this film as a whole. I do like the animation a lot, but the whole thing totally fails to be persuasive because of the distractors: the obscenities. I think the intent was to amuse, but if you really want to persuade, you don’t introduce irrelevancies that distract from the message—much as most love scenes do not include farts, though flatulence is perfectly natural. The film as presented includes, in effect, flatulence in a love scene.

UPDATE 2: Another thing that bothered me as I thought about the film is the strong self-congratulatory tone. Although the narrator is right on the facts, he’s completely wrong in his arrogant, condescending, uninformative stance. (He pretends to be informative, but as shown in his “difficulty” in recalling the name “aspirin”, he’s more interested in being insulting and presenting himself as superior.) Too competitive.

A very nice shave indeed. Thanks to Dandaman for the pointer to Klar Kabinette. Above is the package, which arrived yesterday: two enormous bars of shaving soap with a very nice, clean fragrance. Total weight 1.1 lbs (500 g), total price $20: very economical.

I used the bar as a shave stick, though it would be easy to cut off a section and put it in a bowl—I’ll probably do that, in fact. I also tried loading the brush directly on the bar, which works fine. Excellent lather: thick, with the aforementioned clean fragrance.

Three passes with my Joris, which The Wife got for me in Paris. It carries a Swedish Gillette blade, and it did a fine job.

Finally, I ended the shave with Geo. F. Trumper’s Coral Skin Food, a very pleasant and effective shaving balm.

Interesting post at The Firearm Blog:

David Huppert, of UNC-TV, visits a shoot organized for sound designers of NC-based video game producer Red Storm Entertainment. Red Storm are currently working on the latest game in the Ghost Recon franchise, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier.

A disturbing report in ProPublica by Sheri Fink:

U.S. officials say the nation’s health system is ill-prepared to cope with a catastrophic release of radiation, despite years of focus on the possibility of a terrorist “dirty bomb” or an improvised nuclear device attack.

A blunt assessment circulating among American officials says “Current capabilities can only handle a few radiation injuries at any one time.” That assessment, prepared by the Department of Homeland Security in 2010 and stamped “for official use only,” says “there is no strategy for notifying the public in real time of recommendations on shelter or evacuation priorities.”

The Homeland Security report, plus several other reports and interviews with almost two dozen experts inside and outside the government, reveal other gaps that may increase the risks posed by a nuclear accident or terrorist attack.

One example: The U.S. Strategic National Stockpile stopped purchasing the best-known agent to counter radioactive iodine-induced thyroid cancer in young people, potassium iodide, about two years ago and designated the limited remaining quantities “excess,” according to information provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to ProPublica. Despite this, the CDC website still lists potassium iodide as one of only four drugs in the stockpile specifically for use in radiation emergencies.

The drug is most effective when administered before or within hours of exposure. The decision to stop stockpiling it was made, in part, because distribution could take too long in a fast-moving emergency, one official involved in the discussions said. The interagency group that governs the stockpile decided that “other preparedness measures were more suitable to mitigate potential exposures to radioactive iodine that would result from a release at a nuclear reactor,” a CDC spokesperson said in an email to ProPublica.

Japan’s ongoing nuclear crisis may prompt officials to revisit that conclusion. With radiation levels higher than expected outside the evacuation zones in some areas, the Japanese government recently asked the United States for potassium iodide. The federal government agreed to send some of its dwindling stockpile of the liquid version used in children or adults, which is due to reach its expiration date within about a year. The government is currently “finalizing the paperwork,” according to an official with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Another example: While hospitals near nuclear power plants often drill for radiological emergencies, few hospitals . . .

Continue reading.

It had not occurred to me, but this year is the 50th anniversary of my college graduation (’61 St. John’s College, Annapolis MD). I realized it when I got a letter today announcing our 50th reunion this September.

I think I’ll go. Having lost the weight is a plus, of course, but the main reason is that a 50-year reunion doesn’t come around all that often, and I doubt I’ll make the next one.

So plans are being made…

An astonishing story in Popular Science by Bill Donohue:

It all began so hopefully. Al Gore proposed the satellite in 1998, at the National Innovation Summit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gazing skyward from the podium, the vice president described a spacecraft that would travel a full million miles from Earth to a gravity-neutral spot known as the L1 Lagrangian point, where it would remain fixed in place, facing the sunlit half of our planet. It would stream back to NASA video of our spherical home, and the footage would be broadcast continuously over the Web.

Not only would the satellite provide “a clearer view of our world,” Gore promised, but it would also offer “tremendous scientific value” by carrying into space two instruments built to study climate change: EPIC, a polychromatic imaging camera made to measure cloud reflectivity and atmospheric levels of aerosols, ozone and water vapor; and NISTAR, a radiometer. NISTAR was especially important: Out in deep space, it would do something that scientists are still unable to do today directly and continuously monitor the Earth’s albedo, or the amount of solar energy that our planet reflects into space versus the amount it absorbs.

We know some things about the Earth’s albedo. We know that solar radiation is both absorbed and reflected everywhere on Earth, by granite mountaintops in New Hampshire and desert dunes in Saudi Arabia. We know that cloud cover also reflects some of it. We also know that increased concentrations of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are currently causing the planet to retain more solar energy than it once did. But there is much we don’t know, because we don’t have a way to directly and constantly monitor albedo on a global scale—that is, to directly observe a key indicator of global warming.

To understand changes in the Earth’s climate, scientists rely on multiple and frequent readings of precipitation, temperature, aerosol and ozone levels, and a variety of other measurements, many of which are taken by Earth-monitoring satellites run by agencies such as NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the European Space Agency. But these spacecraft are all relatively close—at least 50 times as close as the L1 point—so their utility is limited. No space agency has ever launched a satellite capable ofseeing the whole Earth as a single, solar-energy-processing orb.

That’s exactly what Gore’s satellite was meant to do. He named it Triana, after Rodrigo de Triana, the sailor in Christopher Columbus’s crew who first spied the New World. In 1998, NASA enlisted a 62-year-old physicist named Francisco Valero to lead in the design of Triana.The agency expedited the program, with the goal of moving from conception to launch in three years, instead of the standard five or six. Giulio Rosanova, the mechanical-systems lead engineer for Triana, remembers bringing pepperoni rolls into work on Fridays, to cajole his crew of 15 into coming in on weekends. “We were excited,” Rosanova says.

In those days, optimism abounded in NASA’s earth-sciences division. In a promotional video, the agency suggested that its planet-monitoring mission would extend beyond Triana—that a subsequent companion satellite would be dispatched to L2, 930,000 miles away from Earth in the opposite direction, where it could constantly monitor the dark half of our planet. Together the two satellites would continuously watch the entire globe.

But in 2001, just a few months after the inauguration of George W. Bush, Triana’s launch plan was quietly put on hold. “We were preparing to transport it to the launch site when we heard,” Rosanova says. Instead, they wheeled the $100-million satellite into storage.

The mission entered a state of bureaucratic limbo. Around 2003, NASA renamed Triana the Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, but the satellite remained on the ground. During the Bush administration, it became politically vulnerable, largely because of its association with Gore. Dick Armey, then a Republican congressman from Texas, said of the satellite, “This idea supposedly came from a dream. Well, I once dreamed I caught a 10-foot bass. But I didn’t call up the Fish and Wildlife Service and ask them to spend $30 million to make sure it happened.” Despite the protests of independent scientists (including Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist and Nobel Laureate who wrote in a 2006 letter that “it would be a major waste of scientific effort and opportunity to discard such a meaningful mission”), NASA delayed the launch indefinitely.

Today, NASA officials aren’t eager to talk about it. When I first wrote to the agency last summer, I received a reply that made me feel like I’d asked about an unwanted pregnancy. “Currently DSCOVR is a mission without an agency,” NASA publicist Sarah DeWitt wrote. “NASA still has no direction from anyone to fly the mission, so we don’t really have anything definitive to say about its future as of right now.” She suggested I contact NOAA, the other agency with a hand in the mission. When I did, the publicist there advised me write to NASA.

So began my campaign. For the next eight weeks I would call, e-mail, and generally hassle various contacts at multiple agencies in a seemingly vain effort to see, with my own eyes, the only satellite that NASA has built but never launched.

Since 1999, NASA and NOAA have been calling for an integrated Earth-observing system—a network of satellites that, among other things, would consistently measure changes in the Earth’s climate. But that campaign is “languishing,” said a 2010 Government Accountability Office report, and there are “significant gaps in future satellite coverage.”

Meanwhile, Earth-observing satellites are subject to constant abuse. Cosmic rays grind on the delicate spectrometers that measure the planet’s radiation. Over time, the satellites stray from their orbit and sink nearer to Earth. The data they collect becomes inconsistent. In short, they have limited life expectancies, and some of NASA’s 14 Earth-observing satellites have already outlived theirs.

All of which makes DSCOVR’s decade of dormancy more puzzling. In addition to the continuous macrolevel monitoring of the Earth’s albedo that the satellite would perform, it could also be a . . .

Continue reading. Someone should study willful ignorance to see what drives that. But it does seem a clear refutation of Aristotle’s dictum that all men by nature desire to know—it’s obviously that some have a passionate desire to be ignorant.

I used to use the various simmer sauces that Trader Joe’s sells, but I gave those up with the diet. I would dump a jar of sauce over a skillet full of browned chicken and veggies, simmer for a while, and it was good, but too much.

Then I had a staggering realization: I didn’t have to use the whole jar. I looked at the label, and the sauce is not bad at all: low fat, reasonable sodium, and it states the size of one serving: 1/3 cup. So now I can put my veg and 4 oz. protein in a pan, use 1/3 cup of the simmer sauce, and have an easy meal quickly. I usually stir in 1/3 cup rice to the finished dish—and I’m currently using the smoked rice, very tasty.

Yesterday I got to looking at various bottle salsas. Some of those sound quite nice, and it occurred to me that they could also be used as a simmer sauce. They give the serving size as 2 Tbsp, but that’s as a condiment. I can use 1/2 cup as a simmer sauce with no harm done. I have some Dover sole, so tonight I’ll cook it (along with some veg) in the Mango Lime salsa, with perhaps a little Chipotle, Lime, and Garlic salsa to spice it up.

When I’m under pressure to learn something, I often find myself totally fascinated by something else and start stealing time from the assigned task to spend on the new interest. This is self-destructive behavior, but OTOH I do learn some interesting things. I first started seriously studying Esperanto when I was studying for my PhD comps in math—I did go on to learn Esperanto, but I dropped the math (and probably a good thing).

So now I’m studying Spanish but stumbled across Arimaa, and I keep sneaking in Arimaa games. At the site you will find videos that explain the game, and a chance to play against a series of bots, from extremely weak to relatively strong, arranged as a ladder: start at the bottom, playing the weakest, and work your way up as you get better. Pretty cool. Now back to Spanish.

This post by Ed Brayton is worth reading in its entirety because the person whose “argument” he addresses seems unable to comprehend the simplest and blandest of ideas. Aristotle observed someplace that trying to prove something that’s obvious using ideas that are not obvious is a mug’s game. (Those are not his exact words, of course: he wrote in Greek.) Ed is explaining things to a guy who has big trouble with simple ideas.

The instructor didn’t post any assignment for Tuesday’s class, so I went in cold—and I discovered that I really hate being less than totally prepared for class. That’s new: I certainly did feel not that way in college, but then when I was in college I didn’t really understand how to study or how to work. That came later (starting around age 24).

So I suffered through the class, and I noted that my classmates are significantly more fluent in conversation than I, possibly because they study with friends and practice talking Spanish to each other: practice makes a lot of difference, and I study alone and basically do not converse. So it goes.

So last night and this morning I’ve been doing some intense study and now will continue. Class at 11:00.

The emphasis today seems to be the fragrances: the mysterious fragrance of Special 218, followed—after a very smooth three-pass shave with the Feather—by a splash of Alt Innsbruck, a very business-like fragrance (it seems to me), redolent of the boardroom. The brush is the TOBS artificial badger, and it did a fine job: terrific lather.

Very intersting column in the LA Times by Jameel Jaffer:

In a recent interview with Newsweek magazine, former CIA lawyer John Rizzo spoke with surprising candor about the CIA’s “targeted killing” program. He discussed the scope of the program (about 30 people are on the “hit list” at any given time), the process by which the CIA selects its targets (Rizzo was “the one who signed off”) and the methods the CIA uses to eliminate them (“The Predator is the weapon of choice, but it could also be someone putting a bullet in your head”). In a wide-ranging conversation, Rizzo volunteered details about a highly controversial counterterrorism program that had previously been cloaked in official secrecy.

What was most remarkable about the interview, though, was not what Rizzo said but that it was Rizzo who said it. For more than six years until his retirement in December 2009, Rizzo was the CIA’s acting general counsel — the agency’s chief lawyer. On his watch the CIA had sought to quash a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by arguing that national security would be harmed irreparably if the CIA were to acknowledge any detail about the targeted killing program, even the program’s mere existence.

Rizzo’s disclosure was long overdue — the American public surely has a right to know that the assassination of terrorism suspects is now official government policy — but it reflects an opportunistic approach to allegedly sensitive information that has become the norm for senior government officials. Routinely, officials insist to courts that the nation’s security will be compromised if certain facts are revealed but then supply those same facts to trusted reporters. Sometimes the motivation for the disclosure is political and sometimes it’s personal, but in either case disclosure has little to do with the public’s need (or right) to know and everything to do with the official’s need to tell. Rizzo’s interview with Newsweek was particularly brazen, because Rizzo allowed his statements to be attributed to him rather than to the now-familiar “highly placed intelligence official.” But where the state’s ostensible secrets are concerned, it has become common for government officials to tell courts one thing — nothing — and reporters another.

Examples are easy to find. After Congress enacted the Patriot Act, FBI officials swore to a court that national security would be compromised if the FBI revealed how many times it had used a particularly controversial surveillance power. But when then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft realized that he could use the statistic to discredit critics of the act, he volunteered the statistic at a press conference. Similarly, the CIA filed affidavits in various lawsuits insisting that national security would be compromised if the government officially acknowledged its network of secret prisons, but at a subsequent press conference President Bush did exactly that. In a suit involving the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program, then-CIA Director Michael Hayden filed an affidavit asserting that the CIA could neither confirm nor deny allegations concerning clandestine interrogation techniques. But after disclosure became more politically palatable than continued concealment, Hayden confirmed publicly that three prisoners had been waterboarded in CIA custody.

In these instances, the government first insisted on secrecy and then later disclosed its putative secrets, but occasionally the chronology works the other way round. After the New York Times disclosed the existence of the National Security Agency‘s warrantless wiretapping program, . . .

Continue reading.

For normal builds and fitness levels, the normal weight produces a BMI in the range 18.5-24.9 (see this page, which includes calculator). This morning my weight was 183.9 (8.9 pounds from goal) and my BMI was 24.9.

I’ve noticed that, after losing a reasonable amount, it’s difficult for me to lose more for a couple of weeks or so—as though I “stick” at the new point. I believe that we’re advised to follow this pattern in any event—lose a bit, coast a bit, etc.—so no problem, but it’s interesting that my body seems to do that of its own. But now I’m losing again, and I hope to ride this to goal (175 lbs, BMI 23.7). FWIW, 21.7 is the midpoint of the “normal” range of BMI. I would hit that at 160 lbs, my weight in high school. But I think 172-175 is probably a good range for me.

The Grosvenor brush is available in a boar/badger mix, which is the brush that I have. I let it soak in hot water while I shower (because of the boar bristle content). It works up a nice lather and the boar gives it good resilience. Prairie Creations Tallow+Lanolin soaps are quite good, and the spiced rum is a nice fragrance. The Gillette NEW with a Swedish Gillette blade did three smooth passes, and a splash of Lustray Spice sent me on my way.

Interesting column by Glenn Greenwald:

Rachel Maddow last night issued a very harsh and eloquent denunciation of Obama’s decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before a military commission at Guantanamo rather than a real court. At the end of her monologue, Maddow focused on the contrast between how the Republicans treat their base and how Democrats treat theirs, specifically emphasizing that the White House announced this decision on the same day it kicked off Obama’s re-election bid. About that point, Rachel said this:

A Democratic President kicks his base in the teeth on something as fundamental as civil liberties — he puts the nail in the coffin of a civil liberties promise he made on his first full day in office — and he does it on the first day of his re-election effort. And Beltway reaction to that is. . . huh, good move. That’s the difference between Republican politics and Democratic politics. The Republicans may not love their base, but they fear them and play to them. The Democratic Party institutional structures of D.C., and the Beltway press in particular, not only hate the Democratic base — they think it’s good politics for Democratic politicians to kick that base publicly whenever possible.

Only the base itself will ever change that.

How will that happen? How can the base itself possibly change this dynamic, whereby politicians of the Democratic Party are not only willing, but eager, to “kick them whenever possible,” on the ground (among others) that doing so is good politics? I’d submit that this is not only one of the most important domestic political questions (if not the most important), but also the one that people are most eager to avoid engaging. And the reason is that there are no comforting answers.

One thing is for certain: right now, the Democratic Party is absolutely correct in its assessment that kicking its base is good politics. Why is that? Because they know that they have inculcated their base with sufficient levels of fear and hatred of the GOP, so that no matter how often the Party kicks its base, no matter how often Party leaders break their promises and betray their ostensible values, the base will loyally and dutifully support the Party and its leaders (at least in presidential elections; there is a good case that the Democrats got crushed in 2010 in large part because their base was so unenthusiastic).

In light of that fact, ask yourself this:  if you were a Democratic Party official, wouldn’t you also ignore — and, when desirable, step on — the people who you know will support you no matter what you do to them? That’s what a rational, calculating, self-interested, unprincipled Democratic politician should do:  accommodate those factions which need accommodating (because their support is in question), while ignoring or scorning the ones whose support is not in question, either because they will never vote for them (the hard-core right) or will dutifully canvass, raise money, and vote for them no matter what (the Democratic base).  Anyone who pledges unconditional, absolute fealty to a politician — especially 18 months before an election — is guaranteeing their own irrelevance.

It was often said that Bush/Cheney used fear as their principal political weapon — and they did — but that’s true of the Democratic Party as well. When it comes to their base, Democratic leaders know they will command undying, unbreakable support no matter how many times they kick their base, because of the fear that has been instilled in the base — not fear of Terrorists or Immigrants (that’s the GOP’s tactic), but fear of Sarah Palin, the Kochs and the Tea Party. Rachel herself made this point quite well before the 2010 election:

I talked at the top of the show tonight with Gail Collins about how one way to motivate your natural base for an election is to make your base afraid of what the other side has to offer. And that is true. That works. That works on both sides. It works for conservatives about liberals and it works for liberals about conservatives.

But one less soul-sucking way to motivate your base and to win an election and to keep winning elections and to, frankly, have history look kindly upon you, is to get your base to cheer for you — not just to cheer against someone else, but to see you standing up, not just to bad guys with worse ideas than you, but to see you standing up for what is right because you know it is right, because we know you know it’s right, even though you also know standing up for it is hard.

It may be that this fear of Republicans is rational (or, given how many GOP-replicating policies and practices the Democrats embrace, maybe it isn’t).  But whatever else is true, one thing is for certain: dedicated partisans who pledge their unbreakable, eternally loyal support for any Party or politician are going to be steadfastly ignored (or worse) by that Party or politician, and rightfully so. If you spend two years vehemently objecting that certain acts so profoundly offend your principles but then pledge unequivocal support no matter what almost two years in advance to the politicians who engage in them, why would you expect your objections to be heeded? Any rational person would ignore them, and stomp on your beliefs whenever doing so benefited them.

I’m not saying I know the answer.  Joan Walsh yesterday urged progressives not to organize for Obama until next year while nonetheless vowing to support his re-election, which (though well-intentioned) strikes me as merely reinforcing this dynamic. But what I do know is that Rachel’s optimistic proclamation that “only the base itself will ever change” this dynamic cannot be fulfilled without giving the Party and its leaders a true reason to pay attention or care about disenchantment (and, some day, to fear alienating their base). For those who are hopeful that this will happen, what do they envision will cause it? What would ever make Democratic Party leaders change how they view this dynamic?

* * * * *

In Slate, the normally rhetorically restrained Dahlia Lithwick has a superb article condemning Obama’s decision on the KSM trial as “appalling, cowardly, stupid and tragically wrong.”  Indeed, as I’ve documented before — virtually every country that suffers horrible Terrorist attacks — Britain, Spain, India, Indonesia — tries the accused perpetrators in its regular court system, on their own soil, usually in the city that was attacked.  The U.S. — Land of the Free and Home of the Brave — stands alone in being too afraid to do so.

Related to that:  the notion that political opinion in America would not allow Obama to do anything differently on these issues is empirically disproven; he ran on a platform of opposing all the measures he now supports and won decisively.  By itself, that proves that — when these debates are engaged rather than conceded — these positions are politically sustainable.  Obama adopts Bush Terrorism policies because he wants to and has no reason not to — not because doing so is a political necessity.

Finally — and as is usually true for this excuse — the notion that “Congress made him do it” is totally false: aside from the fact that the Obama administration long ago announced that it would retain the military commission system, the White House — long before Congress acted to ban transfers of detainees to the U.S. — removed decision-making power from the DOJ in the KSM case and made clear it would likely reverse Holder’s decision.  As The Atlantic‘s Andrew Cohen notes: . . .

Continue reading. I think it’s obvious that the Obama Administration takes an extreme conservative position with regard to the Bill of Rights and civil rights in general: they do not care for such rights at all, and ignore them as much as they can and fight against such rights in court if they cannot be ignored.

One of the primary jobs a government has, even in the eyes of the Right, is to protect its citizens. I would say that the mask filters below show that the governments involved are failing in that basic task:

Each filter shows the particulate matter that would otherwise have gone into the person’s lungs—and is going into the lungs of all in those cities who fail to wear air filters.

Of course, the US government has better standards for environmental safety—standards, let it be noted, under ceaseless attack from the Right, which would prefer that businesses be unfettered by governmental regulations of any kind, including environmental regulations.

The photo is from an interesting Cool Tools post for a mask. I wonder what the filters would look like after a ride through various American cities—not bad, I would imagine, in that the US seems to have abandoned manufacturing and heavy industry for the most part.

Here’s an interesting sounding recipe that looks easy. Using ground nuts to thicken a sauce is an interesting idea.

Fascinating column by Michael Kinsley, from which this paragraph:

As the Microsoft example suggests, the Washington culture of influence peddling is not entirely or even primarily the fault of the corporations that hire the lobbyists and pay the bills. It’s a vast protection racket, practiced by politicians and political operatives of both parties. Nice little software company you’ve got here. Too bad if we have to regulate it, or if big government programs force us to raise its taxes. Your archrival just wrote a big check to the Washington Bureaucrats Benevolent Society. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to do the same?