Later On

Very interesting interview of Stephen Singular by Teresa Cotsirilos in Salon. It begins:

It’s been almost two years since George Tiller, who was one of the country’s few providers of later-term abortions, was gunned down in his church in Wichita, Kan. His brutal murder was followed by a heated national debate over who and what was responsible for it. Tiller’s killer, Scott Roeder, was a diagnosed schizophrenic who appears to have acted alone. But anti-abortion activists and several prominent commentators — most notably Fox News host Bill O’Reilly — had spent years issuing heated attacks on Tiller for his work. Did their emotionally charged rhetoric — O’Reilly would ridicule the doctor as “Tiller the baby killer” — create a climate conducive to Roeder’s action?

In his new book, “The Wichita Divide: The Murder of Dr. George Tiller and the Battle Over Abortion,” crime journalist Stephen Singular explores these issues — and concludes that Tiller’s murder can only be understood within the context of right-wing extremism that has  become increasingly mainstream. We caught up with him earlier this week:

You’ve been reporting on right-wing extremist activity since 1987, when you looked into the 1984 murder of talk radio host Alan Berg. How has it changed in the past 25 years?

You know, when I wrote about Alan Berg, I was writing about some very marginalized people. These were a bunch of white guys without jobs, and no money and no prospects and nothing going on; some had been to prison.

Now, [when we talk about the persecution of George Tiller,] we’re talking about the attorney general of the state of Kansas. Now we’re talking about some of the most successful figures in the American media — we’re talking about multimillionaires who get paid to demonize people on national television, who get paid millions and millions of dollars to tell people [that] Tiller['s] the Baby Killer, who get paid to deny all the complexities we’re talking about, it’s not just. It’s an entire society that’s said, “Hey, we’re going to reward this kind of behavior.”

And that filters down. It affects everything. It’s an emotional atmosphere, and it not only affects the general culture — think about the people who are at risk in that culture, emotionally, psychologically. [People] who are on edge, like [Dr. Tiller's murderer] Scott Roeder, [who was] diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager. Or the man who killed Alan Berg, Bruce Pierce, [who was] clearly mentally unstable. This stuff filters down. And then when the blood hits the wall, and the bullets fly, everyone stands back and says, “Well we never intended that. We were just talking.”

You talk a lot about Bill O’Reilly, who demonized Dr. Tiller on his show. Do you consider commentators like O’Reilly to be responsible for the way someone like Roeder might perceive their statements?

Continue reading.

Very smooth shave today. I do love the fragrance of Sweet Gale, and the TOBS artificial badger produced a fine lather. Three smooth passes with the Pils—with its extremely hefty head driving the blade’s edge—and then a splash of Klar Seifen to finish. Dang! I meant to try Mantic59′s trick of applying the aftershave to my wet face, instead of drying my face first (as I normally do): habit overcomes intentions, a familiar story.

Today I suddenly thought that the silent auction shave kit should certainly include My Nik Is Sealed. I forget, because now I very seldom have any need for it. It’s now been added.

We had early evidence of Obama’s character when he solemnly vowed that he would vote against telecom immunity, and then subsequently voted in favor. And he has continued that pattern, explicitly promising how he would act and then, once he’s made the gains from the promise, breaking it.

Greenwald has a good column that looks at several examples of this sort of fraud. From the column:

No minimally honest or rational person can reconcile the President’s Friday signing statement with the vow he gave during that campaign event, nor can any such person reconcile his claimed war powers regarding Libya with the view he emphatically expressed during the campaign. And, of course, the list of similar departures from his own claimed views during the campaign is depressingly long: from railing against the evils of habeas corpus denial to fighting to deny habeas review to Bagram detainees; from vowing to protect whistleblowers to waging the most aggressive war in American history against them; from condemning the evils of writing bills via secret meetings with industry lobbyists to writing his health care bill using exactly that process; from insisting that Presidents have no power to detain or even eavesdrop on Americans without due process to asserting the power to assassinate Americans without due process, etc. etc. etc.

It would be one thing if these full-scale reversals were on ancillary issues. But these are fundamental. They’re about the powers of that office and the nature of our government. And Obama made these issues the centerpiece of his campaign.  These campaign statements are nothing less than vows made to voters about how he would exercise the power he was seeking if they voted for him.  To insist during the campaign that Presidents have no power to start wars without Congress or to ignore laws the President believes are unconstitutional — and then do exactly that once he’s been vested with that power — is a form of fraud. And, ironically, it’s exactly this behavior that breeds the cynicism that he has repeatedly identified as the central poison in our political culture.  Whatever one thinks about the policies in question on the merits, it should be impossible to defend or justify the radical inconsistency between what he pretended to believe and what he’s doing.

Among the first thing I do each morning is run through my Spanish flashcards. Anki feeds them to me in both directions: Spanish as the prompt and, separately, English as the prompt. (You can set up the deck to use only one side as the prompt or both sides—and the two sides get different review schedules if one direction is easier than the other.)

I enjoy this interlude because I know 80-90% of the cards immediately (most of them now are review), which makes me feel good. The rest are either new—fine, I’m happy to learn a new word—or difficult—fine, I do need to review those daily (and, of course, with that sort of review they are quickly learned and I don’t see them for a while).

I came across derecho/a this morning. It means both “right” (the direction) and “straight”. So if I’m driving and I come to an intersection, and I ask, “¿Izquierda?” (“Left?” — the word looks weird because it’s a Basque root: Spanish has a fair number of words from Basque and also from Arabic.), and I get the answer “¡Derecho!“, do I turn right? or go straight?

English, of course, has a similar ambiguity: driving at speed on a freeway, you suddenly see the road split. “Left?” you say, and the navigator responds, “Right!” Does that mean “correct” or “take the right-hand path”?

In fact, when I lived in Cleveland, a Christian quartet on tour missed their flight by exactly that mistake—and the plane subsequently crashed and killed everyone on board. The quartet saw that as God sending a message to them personally about how important their work was. Hard cheese for the others on that flight. They probably wish God had just sent a telegram or some such.

It’s not the modernity—we’ve always had modernity, since every age in its time is modern—it’s the ascendance of the behemoth corporation and the resources it commands and moves. Read this fascinating article about how a little check-up went ugly fast. From the article:

. . . It’s worth thinking about what a relatively short time we’ve been swimming in synthetic chemicals. The Synthetic Century, let us say, has been full of grand achievements and equally grand consequences, many of them unintended. In 1918, a scientist named Fritz Haber won the Nobel Prize for figuring out how to make synthetic nitrogen, a key component of soil, and thus “improving the standards of agriculture and the well-being of mankind.” But during World War I, his technology also helped Germany make bombs from synthetic nitrate and, later, poison chlorine and phosgene gas. In World War II, Hitler used another one of Haber’s compounds, Zyklon B, in Nazi concentration camps. After the wars, synthetic fertilizers paved the way for the explosion of industrial-scale agribusiness, which has, in turn, created great wealth but also unprecedented levels of pollution, monoculture and processed foods.

In his book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” Michael Pollan outlines the way our industrial food chain floats on an ocean of cheap oil. This is also true of our vast array of consumer products. Although coal companies in the mid-1800s were processing coal gas for lighting and synthesizing other products like dyes, this was but a baby step compared to what happened a hundred years later. Since World War II, Big Oil and, more recently, Big Coal and Big Natural Gas, have supplied our economy not just with energy for our homes and cars but with the very building blocks of our domestic lives: not only our plastics but our fertilizers and pesticides, our furniture, our personal care products, even our clothing. Consider this: in the last 25 years, the country’s consumption of synthetic chemicals has increased 8,200 percent.

The trouble with such rapid proliferation of products made from petrochemicals, of course, has been that the production and use of synthetic chemicals has vastly outpaced our ability to monitor their effects on our health and the environment. We learned to love what chemicals could make; we just never bothered to wonder if there could be a downside. By the mid-1970s, there were some 62,000 chemicals in use; today the number is thought to be closer to 80,000. The EPA has a full set of toxicity information for just 7 percent of these chemicals, and the U.S. chemical industry, a $637-billion-a-year business, is so woefully underregulated that 99 percent of chemicals in use today have never been tested for their effects on human health. Fewer than 3 percent of these chemicals have ever been tested for carcinogenicity. Far fewer (or none) have been assessed for their effect on things like the human endocrine system or reproductive health.

The human immune system has evolved over millennia to combat naturally occurring bacterial and viral agents. It has had only a few decades to adjust to most man-made contaminants, many of which are chemically similar to substances produced naturally by our own bodies. The effects of this are far from fully understood. “We face an ocean of biologically active synthetic organic compounds,” the ecologist Sandra Steingraber writes. “Some interfere with our hormones, some attach to chromosomes, some cripple the immune system, some overstimulate certain enzymes. If we could metabolize them into benign compounds and excrete them, they would be less of a worry. Instead, many accumulate. So they are doubly bad: they are similar enough to react with us, but different enough not to go away easily.”

What becomes clear, if you stop to think about it, is that what’s gotten into us is not just chemicals but culture. We aren’t just saturated with chemicals, after all; we are saturated with products, and marketing, and advertising, and political lobbying. Fifty years ago, it was not uncommon to see advertisements for DDT featuring an aproned housewife in spike heels and a pith helmet aiming a spray gun at two giant cockroaches standing on her kitchen counter. The caption below reads, “Super Ammunition for the Continued Battle on the Home Front.” Another ad shows a picture of a different aproned woman standing in a chorus line of dancing farm animals, who sing, “DDT is good for me!” DDT was marketed as the “atomic bomb of the insect world,” but also as “benign” for human beings. And we believed it.

Our ignorance is not an accident. We are not meant to know what goes into the products we use every day. The manufacturers of most American-made products tend to keep the ingredients and formulations of their products secret, and rarely mention that individual ingredients might (or do) cause cancer, or impede fetal development, or lead to hormone imbalances. It seems that the intention in packaging is to make information harder to find, not easier — an imitation of information, not information itself. With so little information, it’s easy to see why we have become so complacent. And why we have allowed ourselves to live, albeit uncomfortably, with assurances that these products are “safe.” A single exposure to these chemicals never killed anyone, we tell ourselves. This is true. But smoking a single cigarette never killed anyone, either. The trouble with exposure to toxic chemicals, as with exposure to tobacco, is that the impact is cumulative, long-lasting and, frequently, slow to reveal itself.

So here we are.

Almost 50 years after Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” and the tide of synthetic chemicals is only rising. We are faced, every day, with an overwhelming number of choices as consumers: Do I choose this detergent or that one? This mattress or that one? The chemical lawn-care company or the “green” one? This shouldn’t be so hard. We’re talking about washing our children’s hair. Or cleaning the sink. Or tending a garden. Why has this become so complicated? And on what information do we make our decisions? . . .

The institution of gay marriage in modern times—in the modern state—dates back 10 years: the first gay marriages were in the Netherlands.

This reminiscence of the struggle—and the usual dire predictions of the calamities that would follow if two people in love were allowed to marry and they were the same sex—is a good read. I do not understand the reference to the 10th anniversary being the “diamond” anniversary. Have we had anniversary hyper-inflation? As I recall, it takes 50 years just to reach the golden anniversary, and 25 more to get to the diamond. I suppose it’s the result of a modern tendency to want right now things that take time. Such impatience strikes me as unseemly, grasping, and dull. YMMV.

The Younger Grandson’s elementary school in Baltimore is having a silent auction to raise funds for the little children. I’m contributing:

• Autographed copy of Leisureguy’s Guide to Gourmet Shaving, Fourth Edition
• Omega artificial badger brush
• Elite Razor gold-laced black onyx handled razor with Merkur Classic head
• Collier Row shaving soap from Portman Square
• A blade sampler (thanks, Zach!)

I gave some thought to the package, some of which you see in the photo above. My assumption is that the winner and/or ultimate recipient is not accustomed to traditional wet-shaving—thus the book.

I wanted the brush to be totally reliable and require no special care, and the artificial badger meets those criteria—and works up a great lather to boot.

Collier Row I picked because I know of no common shaving foams or gels that have an orange fragrance—and an orange fragrance in the morning is quite pleasant. So this should be a novelty. It doesn’t hurt that the Portman Square soft shaving soaps (or hard shaving creams) produce abundant good lather quite easily: again, our guy is probably a beginner.

And for a beginner the Merkur Classic head is an excellent starting place. And the Elite Razor pieces from natural stone (they also offer exotic woods, synthetics and more) are by nature unique. The black onyx with gold lacings is elegant and unusual.

I put together a pretty good sampler from my stash, including Astra Superior Platinum, Wilkinson Sword UK, Gillette 7 O’Clock SharpEdge, and others.

Aftershave is something that any shaver will already have—and probably have his favorites as well. So aftershave will not be part of the package. I picked Alt Innsbruck because it seemed to fit the day.

So today’s shave was a goodbye to these pieces. I’ll ship this off to The Eldest later this week.

And the shave? Extremely good. I used a new Astra Superior Platinum blade, great lather, three passes, and a splash Alt Innsbruck (which somehow made me think of Salems: the menthol/tobacco fragrance, I imagine).

OMG: I almost forgot to include the fresh bar of MR GLO. I’m adding that now. For me, a shave that doesn’t begin with MR GLO is not a real shave. YMMV.

UPDATE: I’ve now also added My Nik Is Sealed.

The past week my weight crept down a couple of days, reaching a low of 180.9, and then reversed course and today is 184.6: a BMI of 25.0 (overweight) once more.

I have made a couple of changes that will pay off over time: the 30-minute walk that I’ve done a few times doesn’t seem to hurt my knee at all, and I will continue that as a daily activity. And TYD’s idea of using a recumbent exercise bike instead of a recliner for watching movies strikes me as excellent. I’m thinking that this bike will be quiet—and the readout is mounted low so it won’t interview with watching the screen. I can put it where the Nordic Track now stands, and put the Nordic Track in storage for now: the walks replace the Nordic.

I’ll give this one more week, and then if necessary will return to a written food journal. I know the drill, and that weight will come off again.

The wait is over: the crop has come in strong, and now the harvest begins. Facebook is the world’s largest vault of corporate-accessible private information on preferences, friends, and trends, and now all that information that people volunteered is being monetized by selling access to people who fit specific profiles. After this post, I’m unhooking from Facebook. Jessica Guynn reports in the LA Times:

Julee Morrison has been obsessed with Bon Jovi since she was a teenager.

So when paid ads for fan sites started popping up on the 41-year-old Salt Lake City blogger’s Facebook page, she was thrilled. She described herself as a “clicking fool,” perusing videos and photos of the New Jersey rockers.

Then it dawned on Morrison why all those Bon Jovi ads appeared every time she logged on to the social networking site. . .

Continue reading.

I’m eating a (steamed) beet, which shows (in horizontal cross-section) five distinct rings. These beet cannot be 5 years old, can it? I would imagine that they grow at most a season. But: 5 rings. Is the beet 5 years old? and, if not, what causes the rings?

My blog is now connected to Twitter and Facebook. I’m not sure what the impact will be…

Via Ed Brayton:

I do not understand Twitter, but I can learn. I discovered that I have 44 followers—patient souls, because until today I think I had done but a single tweet.

I decided to dig a little into it, so I am tweeting from time to time now.

I’m @leisureguy, naturally.

Interesting; Marjorie Garber has written some great books on Shakespeare:

The Use and Abuse of Literature
by Marjorie Garber

A review by Todd Gitlin

In a time when reading has devolved into a means for the efficient conveyance of information, and sustained reading is in decline even as the techniques for distributing “text” multiply by the hour, lovers of literature insist, or pray, that their stock-in-trade not be dehydrated, shrink-wrapped, freeze-dried, shaken down, translated, or otherwise reduced to shadows of grander somethings — ideologies, deep structures of consciousness, hard-wired linguistic capacities, or some other fundamentals. If literature were a person, she would be freaking out.

Actually, she is. Literature’s anxiety about its own obsolescence worsens both inside and outside the academy. But it was already acute more than a half-century ago, when Saul Bellow warned, in a little flight of disdain called “Deep Readers of the World, Beware!” that “meanings” were “a dime a dozen.” It was better, Bellow wrote, to read literature “from the side of naivete than from that of culture-idolatry, sophistication, and snobbery.” Bellow dug deep into his own well of sophistication — more or less Freudian, at that juncture — suspecting that “the deepest readers are those who are least sure of themselves” or, even more disturbingly, that “they prefer meaning to feeling.” Nowadays, those who write about literature seem even less sure of themselves.

The situation is worse in the academy, where literature migrated to take refuge from the gross marketplace, only to discover that the professors no longer found literature quite so interesting or exclusive. There were, after all, plenty of “literatures” to choose from. Today, with Taylorite bean-counters prowling the universities like John Boehner on a budget-slashing tear, demanding that the humanities prove their utilitarian value in a hyper-competitive, resource-stretched world, even English departments are understandably prone to obsolescence anxiety. From a practical (that is, fundraiser’s) point of view, provosts want to know, what is the study of texts worth? Neuroscience labs, econometric models, and computer science are obviously sexy, but who really needs George Eliot?

Marjorie Garber is a prolific Shakespearean (as in her lucid and non-sectarian Shakespeare After All) and one of our finest practitioners of cultural studies. As a writer, she has come a ways from the doctrinaire Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, when she staked out her subject cleverly, coyly, and clumsily. (“The fetish is the phallus, the phallus is the fetish”; “the figure of the transvestite specifically as rupture or disruption here enters the discourse of gender and power with an unsettling force.”) Sex and Real Estate was a witty and smart hybrid of Walter Benjamin and Benjamin Franklin. (It deserves a revised and extended second edition to take account of the bursting bubble and possible implications for ruptured romance.) She has a versatile mind, at home in the wild as well as on the Upper West Side.

After a generation of work exposing literature as ideology’s mask, insisting that cultural practices like cross-dressing were worthy of maximum attention, Garber appears to have changed her mind. She now insists that literature is irreducible. It is not a portal to something more important than literature. She celebrates “the non-’about’-ness of literature, its refusal to be grounded or compromised by referentiality.” “Literature is a first-order, not a second-order, phenomenon,” she writes, demolishing the pretensions of cognitive science, which claims to have found the master key that unlocks the cultural universe. “It is not simply a clever kind of code developed by the mind to ensure that we all possess a mental Rolodex of figures enabling the nimble linking and blending of commonly held thoughts. It does not merely frame concepts or conceptual metaphors in pleasing or memorable phrases. Language makes meaning, or rather, meanings; it does not merely reflect it.”

Do not approach books as if they need to be unmasked, Garber insists. Do not tell them to come out with their hands up. Do not reduce Proust to a series of talking points. Do not repackage Tolstoy as a self-help manual. “We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its ultimate refusal to be applied or used even for moral good.” But then she tries to have her text while eating it: “This refusal, indeed, is literature’s most moral act.” The question she does not answer is, Why trouble literature with the need for moral acts? Why not leave it alone, to be itself?

Garber will not accept that literature is the shadowed, cave-bound, lesser light that Plato’s Socrates found so flimsy. Literature is not “an instrument of moral or cultural control,” and reading is more than a sensory exercise, but rather “a way of thinking” (her italics). Indeed, “the very uselessness of literature is its most profound and valuable attribute.” Reading, in other words, is an autonomous experience, and one to cherish. One thing that follows is that our recurrent memoir scandals have been mystified, because the telling of truth is the telling of a story and the telling of a story entails literary technique. But while biography, say, following Virginia Woolf, should combine scholarship, psychological insight, and wit, it should remain, with Woolf, “fairly ferocious about the importance of ‘the substance of fact.’” She refuses to slide down the slippery slope toward making things up.

This is quagmire country, and Garber’s prolix and repetitive style leave her views opaque. At one point, she is oddly equivocal about Colm Tóibín’s fine novel about Henry James, The Master, when she says that “the term novel allows the author to have things both ways: the gravitas of biography and the freedom to identify and psychologize that comes with the writing of (a certain kind of) fiction.” What’s wrong with equivocation when it is delivered with style? Isn’t it really just complication, which is one of the writer’s duties? She wants to draw the line at increasingly common hoax memoirs — for example, fabricated Holocaust stories and James Frey’s tricks — but is sufficiently postmodern to have trouble explaining what’s wrong with them. “The claim of truth invites not only the suspicion but perhaps even the formal inevitability of the lie,” she says. That little weasel-word “perhaps”! But if all writing is approximate, then are all imperfections of accuracy equivalently suspicious? She cites a sentence to this effect from Derrida, but one swallow of Derrida does not make a summary.

Garber spots the absurdity of the populist mood, as in the current surfeit of memoirs: “the memoir craze, like American Idol and reality television, makes everyone a hero.” But she, too, veers toward laissez-faire, maintaining, for example, that literature is “a status rather than a quality. To say that a text or a body of work is literature means that it is regarded, studied, read, and analyzed in a literary way.” But then we are back at the high significance of Madonna Studies. Is Madonna as valuable as Shakespeare? If not, why not? Shouldn’t literature professors be able to answer that question? Or does the market decide? If there were a Sarah Palin School of Literary Studies, Dan Brown would be canonized, and damn the elitists who would object. But on what ground would Marjorie Garber object? The populist ghost still stalks her enterprise, and when it shakes its bony finger, her book becomes more of a testimony to the crisis of literature than a resolution of it.

Todd Gitlin’s latest book is Undying.

A strange set of values in the DEA. Alex Parene reports in Salon:

Producing and distributing illegal drugs is a profitable business, because there will always be a lot of demand and because illegality allows you to charge a great deal of money. That illegality also means that the people who produce and distribute the drugs are generally not responsible corporate citizens. So thanks to our expensive, terribly ineffective and endless war on drugs, lots of people are dying.

The Washington Post recently reported that the victims of Mexican drug cartel violence increasingly include children, who are being specifically targeted in order to terrorize people and intimidate potential business rivals:

The children’s rights group estimates that 994 people younger than 18 were killed in drug-related violence between late 2006 and late 2010, based on media accounts, which are incomplete because newspapers are often too intimidated to report drug-related crimes.
[...]
Government figures include all homicides of people younger than 17, capturing victims whose murders might not have been related to drugs or organized crime. In 2009, the last year for which there is data, 1,180 children were killed, half in shootings.

This article is actually almost a week old, but I did not notice, until it was highlighted by Jonathan Blanks, this astounding quote from America’s top drug warrior:

U.S. and Mexican officials say the grotesque violence is a symptom the cartels have been wounded by police and soldiers. “It may seem contradictory, but the unfortunate level of violence is a sign of success in the fight against drugs,” said Michele Leonhart, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration. The cartels “are like caged animals, attacking one another,” she added.

It seems “contradictory” because that is absolutely appalling spin. For one thing, these “caged animals” are actually attacking civilians and children. And they are doing so because the drug war has made their chosen industry both profitable and dangerous enough to make murder and brutality effective means of winning competitive advantages. If this is a sign of success, maybe we should reconsider waging this war.

Leonhart, a DEA lifer, is actually a Bush appointee, reappointed by President Obama. She is, obviously, an inflexible zealot when it comes to drug prohibition. This is easily the worst and most offensive thing she’s said that I’ve read, but she does have a history of asinine remarks. This is the sort of quote — dead children are a sign that we’re winning! — that should lead to a resignation. But it probably won’t.

 Very interesting article in the NY Times Magazine by James Vlahos:

Dr. Levine’s magic underwear resembled bicycle shorts, black and skintight, but with sensors mounted on the thighs and wires running to a fanny pack. The look was part Euro tourist, part cyborg. Twice a second, 24 hours a day, the magic underwear’s accelerometers and inclinometers would assess every movement I made, however small, and whether I was lying, walking, standing or sitting.

James Levine, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has an intense interest in how much people move — and how much they don’t. He is a leader of an emerging field that some call inactivity studies, which has challenged long-held beliefs about human health and obesity. To help me understand some of the key findings, he suggested that I become a mock research trial participant. First my body fat was measured inside a white, futuristic capsule called a Bod Pod. Next, one of Dr. Levine’s colleagues, Shelly McCrady-Spitzer, placed a hooded mask over my head to measure the content of my exhalations and gauge my body’s calorie-burning rate. After that, I donned the magic underwear, then went down the hall to the laboratory’s research kitchen for a breakfast whose calories were measured precisely.A weakness of traditional activity and obesity research is that it relies on self-reporting — people’s flawed recollections of how much they ate or exercised. But the participants in a series of studies that Dr. Levine did beginning in 2005 were assessed and wired up the way I was; they consumed all of their food in the lab for two months and were told not to exercise. With nary a snack nor workout left to chance, Dr. Levine was able to plumb the mysteries of a closed metabolic universe in which every calorie, consumed as food or expended for energy, could be accounted for.

His initial question — which he first posed in a 1999 study — was simple: Why do some people who consume the same amount of food as others gain more weight? After assessing how much food each of his subjects needed to maintain their current weight, Dr. Levine then began to ply them with an extra 1,000 calories per day. Sure enough, some of his subjects packed on the pounds, while others gained little to no weight. . .

Continue reading.

UPDATE: Now I want to buy one of these.

UPDATE 2: Looking around the apartment, I would have trouble fitting in a treadmill desk, however cool it might be. As a fall back, I started this repeating interval timer (click the little + to set it) to go off every 10 minutes so long as the computer is open, whereupon I will stand and do 10 squats. That should help. — Later: Switched to every 20 minutes. 10 minutes is too frequent.

An interesting question with an interesting answer. Check out this article by Gretchen Reynolds in the NY Times Magazine:

Let’s consider the butterfly. One of the most taxing movements in sports, the butterfly requires greater energy than bicycling at 14 miles per hour, running a 10-minute mile, playing competitive basketball or carrying furniture upstairs. It burns more calories, demands larger doses of oxygen and elicits more fatigue than those other activities, meaning that over time it should increase a swimmer’s endurance and contribute to weight control.

So is the butterfly the best single exercise that there is? Well, no. The butterfly “would probably get my vote for the worst” exercise, said Greg Whyte, a professor of sport and exercise science at Liverpool John Moores University in England and a past Olympian in the modern pentathlon, known for his swimming. The butterfly, he said, is “miserable, isolating, painful.” It requires a coach, a pool and ideally supplemental weight and flexibility training to reduce the high risk of injury.

Ask a dozen physiologists which exercise is best, and you’ll get a dozen wildly divergent replies. “Trying to choose” a single best exercise is “like trying to condense the entire field” of exercise science, said Martin Gibala, the chairman of the department of kinesiology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

But when pressed, he suggested one of the foundations of old-fashioned calisthenics: the burpee, in which you drop to the ground, kick your feet out behind you, pull your feet back in and leap up as high as you can. “It builds muscles. It builds endurance.” He paused. “But it’s hard to imagine most people enjoying” an all-burpees program, “or sticking with it for long.”

And sticking with an exercise is key, even if you don’t spend a lot of time working out. The health benefits of activity follow a breathtakingly steep curve. “The majority of the mortality-related benefits” from exercising are due to the first 30 minutes of exercise, said Timothy Church, M.D., who holds the John S. McIlhenny endowed chair in health wisdom at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La. A recent meta-analysis of studies about exercise and mortality showed that, in general, a sedentary person’s risk of dying prematurely from any cause plummeted by nearly 20 percent if he or she began brisk walking (or the equivalent) for 30 minutes five times a week. If he or she tripled that amount, for instance, to 90 minutes of exercise four or five times a week, his or her risk of premature death dropped by only . . .

Continue reading.

Here is an excellent video from Mantic59. His videos just get better and better, and this one merits a special mention.

Red on Red, the first novel (and second book) by NYC police detective Edward Conlon is extremely well written and absorbing. Highly recommended. (I finally worked my way up the hold list at the library and got my copy—for two weeks.)

The UK conservatives tackled their deficit the old-fashioned, no-nonsense way: cut government spending to the bone, and to hell with Keynes.

And, of course, what has happened and is happening is exactly what economists like Krugman have been saying for years and years.

I’m sure the conservatives will be staggered to discover that their pet theories, dismissed by economists, were dismissed because their pet theories are stupid, ugly, and wrong.