Later On

Today I used Klar Kabinette again, using it like Goliath’s shave stick, sort of fun. Once again a fine, thick lather, thanks in part to the Rooney and Monterey’s relatively soft water. Then three passes with the English Gillette open-comb Aristocrat: smoothness itself, thanks to the Swedish Gillette blade. A splash of 4711 and I’m good to go.

More Roma tomatoes today, for sure.

I just uploaded to Anki the basic wordlist for Spanish from P.J.T. Glendening’s Teach Yourself to Learn a Language (a book written long before the teaching tools of the Internet became available, but withal a useful little book). In this earlier post, I quote his explanation of the basic wordlist.

I’ve been learning this wordlist along with the vocabulary from the textbook. A fair amount of overlap, of course.

If you want to download the new deck, install Anki on your computer or smartphone or whatever, then click “download” and search for the title “Basic Spanish wordlist”.

I love it when a meal just comes together. After class I wanted to pick up some light protein and decided on a fresh fillet of Dover sole—but, on the way (as so often happens) I was seduced by lovely produce I hadn’t planned to buy: I saw some luscious-looking Roma tomatoes, and thought, “Slow-roasted Roma tomatoes.” And I saw some fresh green garlic, available only in early Spring, so naturally I had to buy a handful of stalks of that, for something or other: get it while it’s available. And the fish was for dinner and I was peckish now, so I got four big shrimp to poach as a protein snack. But when we got home the first thing I did was to halve the Romas vertically and lay them out on my Silpat baking sheet, brush with the Fiery Chili Olive Oil, dust with salt and pepper, and put into a 350ºF oven. I know that 200º for 8-10 hours (or overnight) is good, but I was in a hurry.

Nice shrimp (with some chipotle sauce I had), and when dinner rolled around, I immediately took out three stalks of the green garlic and sliced those up. I still had a little liquid in the sauté pan from poaching the shrimp, so I started the garlic simmering in that while I considered my next move.

While I thought, I sprinkled a little salt in with the garlic, ground in some pepper, and shook in a bit of crushed red pepper—not enough to make it really spicy, just enough to give it body.

The tomatoes! Of course! They were far from done, but they had shrunk down a fair amount, concentrating the flavor, and I would simmer them some more. I took off four of the halves and returned the rest to the oven. The four halves I chopped and added to the garlic. That was simmering. I would add fresh parsley or basil but had neither. I needed a starch—and I had just the thing: the smoked couscous I had ordered from Quebec.

I took the package out and looked to see what constituted one serving, and—surprise! No nutrition facts! No serving size, no caloric content, not macronutrient analysis, no sodium content. So far as nutritional information, you are no better off then with a street vendor in a third-world country.

What’s wrong up there? I thought they were Socialist—a strange sort, if it is that deficient in government regulation. I knew already that they didn’t care much about the environment, but food, forchrissake!

So I went with about 3 Tbsp (scant 1/4 cup), let that simmer. I decided to give a little more flavor, oil, and liquid, and added a tablespoon of Bragg’s vinaigrette. It was pretty thick at this point, so I poured in about 1-2 Tbsp coconut vinegar, cut the Dover sole fillet (7 oz) into four pieces and laid it across the top, sprinkled it with one Meyer lemon, diced, put on the lid, kept the heat at low, and let it simmer slowly for 10 minutes. Perfecto.

Fresh strawberries for dessert. And I’m pleased at how, over the whole day, I balanced out my servings, even though eating lunch on the run (because of class). And with only 2 oz of protein in the morning (one egg at breakfast, another for lunch), I brought that up with the shrimp and the fish.

As I figured this out and totted up the counts and totals, I realized that this is what I now do. I don’t keep a written food journal, so to know what I’m eating in a day, I have to keep track in my head. And by now I feel right when it balances the way I want.

I also realized that this is exactly mindful eating: knowing what you are eating and what you have eaten, not eating anything unconsciously, without recognizing, acknowledging, measuring, and counting it. Without knowing what I’m eating, I would have trouble balancing my food intake. Some do it unconsciously, I suppose. I do it consciously.

This came up in discussion with other students, so I thought I’d post the link again for all. I was surprised to discover that the PDF file of the exercises had been lost. I’ve replaced it and it again can be downloaded.

This little self-directed course really works, provided you actually spend 30 minutes a day, each day, doing the exercise as directed. Persist, and by the end you’ll be amazed at the number of ways—and how much—you are able to improve the drafts of your writing.

I had a post long ago with ideas for popcorn seasonings. Mark Bittman has a post of general advice about making popcorn, and he offers these seasoning ideas as part of that post:

Toss any of these with just-cooked popcorn, alone or in combination. Since some are more potent than others, start with a light sprinkle and taste as you go.

• Chopped fresh herbs
• Black pepper
• Chili powder
• Curry powder, or garam or chaat masala
• Old Bay seasoning
• Five-spice powder
• Toasted sesame seeds
• Cayenne or red chile flakes
• Grated Parmesan cheese
• Brown sugar
• Finely ground nuts or shredded, unsweetened coconut
• Chopped dried fruit

In spite of the fact that changing one’s opinions in the light of new information is one of the most common of life experiences—and indeed, education consists of little else—it can still be difficult. As Steve of Kafeneio would probably say, the Ego feels threatened by such a change—indeed, it seems that the Ego feels threatened by just about everything—and so some will persist in expressing beliefs they no longer hold simply because they are embarrassed to say that they have changed their opinion in the light of new realizations and new information.

So I’m impressed by this post by Louis Marinelli:

Having spent the last five years putting all of my political will, interest and energy into fighting against the spread of same-sex marriage as if it were a contagious disease, I must admit that it is hard for me to put the following text into words let alone utter them with my own voice.

Whether it is an issue of disbelief, shame or embarrassment, the one thing that is for sure is that I have come to this point after several months of an internal conflict with myself. That conflict gradually tore away at me until recently when I was able to for the first time simply admit to myself that I do in fact support civil marriage equality.

While I have come to terms with this reality internally, speaking about it, even with the closest members of my family, has proven to be something difficult for me to do.

In short, if there is an issue of disbelief surrounding my newfound support for civil marriage equality, it is disbelief from those who surround me. If there is an issue of shame, it is a result of acknowledging the number of people I have targeted, hurt and oppressed. And if there is an issue of embarrassment, its roots lie in the face-to-face encounters I have had and expect to have with those with whom I once toiled over this very contentious issue.

I understand that those whom I approach now are well within their right to disbelieve and question me and my motives. I accept that is the result of what I have done over the past few years and would therefore like to take this time to, as openly as I can, discuss the events that brought about my change of heart.

As you may already know, I was the one behind the 2010 Summer for Marriage Tour which the National Organization for Marriage sponsored and operated throughout July and August last year. It was my doing when, in March that year, I approached Brian Brown, then Executive Director of the National Organization for Marriage about sponsoring and participating in a series of traditional marriage rallies scattered around the Nation.

In fact, the tour route itself, while chosen largely by NOM itself, incorporated as many of the sites I had originally chosen and helped independently organize. Other locations were added due to strategic, political or simply logistical purposes.

Ironically, one of the last tour stops added to the itinerary was Atlanta and I bring this site up because it was in Atlanta that I can remember that I questioned what I was doing for the first time. The NOM showing in the heart of the Bible-belt was dismal and the hundreds of counter-protesters who showed up were nothing short of inspiring.

Even though I had been confronted by the counter-protesters throughout the marriage tour, the lesbian and gay people whom I made a profession out of opposing became real people for me almost instantly. For the first time I had empathy for them and remember asking myself what I was doing.

If my transition from opponent to supporter of same-sex civil marriage was a timeline, Atlanta would be indicated by the first point on the line. The next point on that timeline would be two months later…

Continue reading.

Some good Esperanto sites:

Lernu — dedicated to teaching Esperanto

Esperanto.net — information in multiple languages about Esperanto

Gluten intolerance (aka celiac disease) seems to be more common that I at first thought likely. The problem is diagnosis: not only does the disease present differently in different people, but many who suffer from the malady think that the way they fell is simply how they feel: it’s life.

The problem is that wheat flour is pressed upon us constantly: baskets of bread in restaurants, sandwiches for lunch, and wheat flour as a thickener in all sorts of processed food.

The most straightforward way to find whether you suffer from gluten intolerance is to go on a gluten-free diet, though that does require some thought, effort, and careful reading of food-product labels. But if you are gluten-intolerant, doing this can make a surprising difference. Take this account:

. . . That’s when I removed bread, pasta, cookies, pastries, sweeteners and essentially anything processed from my diet. I decided to go gluten-free and ditch all processed food after an extended period of feeling devoid of energy, sluggish, “blah.” I won’t lie – the first few weeks were equivalent to “diet rehab.” Weaning off the unhealthy choices I used to rely on meant giving up the little highs that got me through the day (a delicious morning latte, a comforting carb-loaded lunch).

But the sacrifice of this new eating practice (even in light of those first few sucky weeks) is nothing compared to what I’ve gained.

I’m twenty pounds lighter, generally happier and more vibrant. By ditching the foods that weren’t honoring my body I’ve ushered in a new clarity. I’ve derived a great deal of power from building my own plan, my way. . .

Here are Mayo Clinic guidelines for a gluten-free diet.

It strikes me that anyone who regularly feels sub-par should try going gluten-free for a few months just to see what happens. After all, we do not have a minimum daily requirement for gluten: giving it up is merely a minor inconvenience, and who knows what you might discover?

Another very fine lather—no surprise, since I imagine Collier Row is, save for fragrance, the same formulation as the Notting Hill used yesterday. The fragrance, according to my unreliable nose, includes orange, and the lather was thick and generous. Three passes with the Elite Razor—with some additional work in polishing, since the Astra Keramik blade was on its last legs and was replaced after the shave. A generous splash of New York, and I’m more or less ready for class.

First, Paul Krugman’s column today in the NY Times:

What have they done with President Obama? What happened to the inspirational figure his supporters thought they elected? Who is this bland, timid guy who doesn’t seem to stand for anything in particular?

I realize that with hostile Republicans controlling the House, there’s not much Mr. Obama can get done in the way of concrete policy. Arguably, all he has left is the bully pulpit. But he isn’t even using that — or, rather, he’s using it to reinforce his enemies’ narrative.

His remarks after last week’s budget deal were a case in point.

Maybe that terrible deal, in which Republicans ended up getting more than their opening bid, was the best he could achieve — although it looks from here as if the president’s idea of how to bargain is to start by negotiating with himself, making pre-emptive concessions, then pursue a second round of negotiation with the G.O.P., leading to further concessions.

And bear in mind that this was just the first of several chances for Republicans to hold the budget hostage and threaten a government shutdown; by caving in so completely on the first round, Mr. Obama set a baseline for even bigger concessions over the next few months.

But let’s give the president the benefit of the doubt, and suppose that $38 billion in spending cuts — and a much larger cut relative to his own budget proposals — was the best deal available. Even so, did Mr. Obama have to celebrate his defeat? Did he have to praise Congress for enacting “the largest annual spending cut in our history,” as if shortsighted budget cuts in the face of high unemployment — cuts that will slow growth and increase unemployment — are actually a good idea?

Among other things, the latest budget deal more than wipes out any positive economic effects of the big prize Mr. Obama supposedly won from last December’s deal, a temporary extension of his 2009 tax cuts for working Americans. And the price of that deal, let’s remember, was a two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts, at an immediate cost of $363 billion, and a potential cost that’s much larger — because it’s now looking increasingly likely that those irresponsible tax cuts will be made permanent.

More broadly, Mr. Obama is conspicuously failing to . . .

Continue reading.

And then there is the blast of criticism from Constitutional scholars on how Obama is betraying the Constitution:

On December 15, when I first reported the inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning’s detention, I did not assign any blame to — or even mention — Barack Obama. Although, as Commander-in-Chief, Obama was technically responsible for Manning’s treatment, there was no evidence that he even knew about it, let alone planned it. But since then, the Manning controversy exploded into national prominence and Obama has explicitly defended the treatment, leaving no doubt that it directly reflects on who he is as a leader and a person.

For that reason, as The Guardian reports this morning, a letter signed by “more than 250 of America’s most eminent legal scholars” that “includes leading figures from all the top US law schools, as well as prominent names from other academic fields” — featuring “Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor who is considered to be America’s foremost liberal authority on constitutional law”; who “taught constitutional law to Barack Obama and was a key backer of his 2008 presidential campaign”; and “joined the Obama administration last year as a legal adviser in the justice department, a post he held until three months ago” — not only denounces Manning’s detention but also the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner’s personal responsibility for it:

[Tribe] told the Guardian he signed the letter because Manning appeared to have been treated in a way that “is not only shameful but unconstitutional” as he awaits court martial in Quantico marine base in Virginia. . . . Tribe said the treatment was objectionable “in the way it violates his person and his liberty without due process of law and in the way it administers cruel and unusual punishment of a sort that cannot be constitutionally inflicted even upon someone convicted of terrible offences, not to mention someone merely accused of such offences”.

The harsh restrictions have been denounced by a raft of human rights groups, including Amnesty International, and are being investigated by the United Nations’ rapporteur on torture. . . .

The intervention of Tribe and hundreds of other legal scholars is a huge embarrassment to Obama, who was a professor of constitutional law in Chicago. Obama made respect for the rule of law a cornerstone of his administration, promising when he first entered the White House in 2009 to end the excesses of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism. . . .

The protest letter, published in the New York Review of Books, was written by two distinguished law professors, Bruce Ackerman of Yale and Yochai Benkler of Harvard. They claim Manning’s reported treatment is a violation of the US constitution, specifically the eighth amendment forbidding cruel and unusual punishment and the fifth amendment that prevents punishment without trial.

In a stinging rebuke to Obama, they say “he was once a professor of constitutional law, and entered the national stage as an eloquent moral leader. The question now, however, is whether his conduct as commander in chief meets fundamental standards of decency.”

Professor Benkler, echoing the point that I’ve repeatedly emphasized as I believe it to be the most important one, said “Manning’s conditions were being used ‘as a warning to future whistleblowers’.” Indeed, Manning’s treatment lacks even a pretense of justification; it — just like the Obama administration’s unprecedented war on whistle-blowers — is clearly meant to threaten and intimidate future individuals of conscience who, like Manning, might consider exposing government deceit, corruption and illegality: one of the few remaining avenues for learning what the Government does.

Aside from what conduct like this reveals about Obama, it also severely undermines the ability of the U.S. to exercise any shred of moral leadership in the world. Consider this series of events: . . .

Continue reading. And there’s an update to the above that you should not miss:

Late last week, Manning’s counsel, David Coombs, documented that the Quantico brig was failing to follows its own rules, as it denied “official visit” authorization to Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a representative of Amnesty International, and Juan Mendez, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on Torture formally investigating Manning’s detention conditions. Now, Mendez, in remarkable language, has spoken out in condemning the U.S., as The Guardian reports: 

A senior United Nations representative on torture, Juan Mendez, issued a rare reprimand to the US government on Monday for failing to allow him to meet in private Bradley Manning, the American soldier held in a military prison accused of being the WikiLeaks source. It is the kind of censure that the UN normally reserves for authoritarian regimes around the world.

Mendez, the UN special rapporteur on torture, said: “I am deeply disappointed and frustrated by the prevarication of the US government with regard to my attempts to visit Mr Manning“. . . .

Mendez, who has been investigating complaints about his treatment since before Christmas, said the US department of defence would not allow him to make an “official” visit, only a “private” one. An “official” visit would mean he meets Manning without a guard present. A “private” visit means with a guard and anything the prisoner says could be used in the planned court-martial.

Mendez pointed out that his mandate was to conduct unmonitored visits, and that had been the practice in at least 18 countries over the last six years.

“Since December 2010, I have been engaging the US government on visiting Mr Manning, at the invitation of his counsel, to determine his condition,” Mendez said. “Unfortunately, the US government has not been receptive to a confidential meeting with Mr Manning.”

Caring about what the U.N. thinks about things like torture is so very 2007. In response, the U.S. should condemn China again. And it’s quite telling how one must go to to a British newspaper to read about U.S. abuse of a U.S. service member.

Now that I have installed my Esperanto keyboard mapping (Mac only), I’m eager to get back to it. But first I need to reach a good resting place in Spanish. In the meantime, y’all go on ahead:

Ed Brayton:

I think Conor Friedersdorf is on to something with this explanation for why the data shows a decrease in religious faith with an increase in education:

To me, there are better explanations for the fact that “the more university education a person receives, the more likely he is to hold secular and left-wing views.” One is that people who attend college leave home. That is to say, they leave their church, the community incentives to attend it, and the watchful eye of parents who get angry or make them feel guilty when they don’t go to services or stray in their faith. Suddenly they’re surrounded by dorm mates of different faiths or no faith at all. For many of these students, it turns out that their religious behavior was driven more by desire for community, or social and parental pressure, than by deeply held beliefs.

Yep, I think that has a whole lot to do with it. One’s religious faith is easier to maintain when it doesn’t run into any alternatives, when it’s simply treated as a given. As long as people stay within the same social milieu their entire lives, they remain in the same religion by sheer inertia. Having to confront those of different religions — or no religion — means having to think about one’s beliefs. Merely finding out that there are alternative ways of thinking can be quite a shock to those raised in a narrow religious community.

I also think of something my high school french teacher told me when I graduated and prepared to go on to college. Education, he told me, is the process of disillusionment. I didn’t know what he meant at the time; a year later, when I returned home from my freshman year in college, I knew exactly what he meant. In that short period of time I had learned that many of the things I took for granted about the world were false.

This seems very much like illegal vandalism, not to mention a thumb in the public eye. Siddhartha Mahanta reports in Mother Jones:

There’s a Mike Huckabee mystery that won’t go away.

Send a public records request seeking documents from his 12-year stint as Arkansas governor, as Mother Jones did recently, and an eyebrow-raising reply will come back: The records are unavailable, and the computer hard drives that once contained them were erased and physically destroyed by the Huckabee administration as the governor prepared to leave office and launch a presidential bid.

In 2007, during Huckabee’s campaign for the GOP presidential nomination, the issue of the eradicated hard drives surfaced briefly, but it was never fully examined, and key questions remain. Why had Huckabee gone to such great lengths to wipe out his own records? What ever happened to a backup collection that was provided to a Huckabee aide?

Huckabee is now considering another presidential run, and if he does enter the race, he would do so as a frontrunner. Which would make the case of the missing records all the more significant. These records would shed light on Huckabee’s governorship—and could provide insight into how a President Huckabee might run the country. Meanwhile, observers of Arkansas’ political scene—including one of Huckabee’s former GOP allies—say the episode is characteristic of a politician who was distrustful and secretive by nature.

In February, Mother Jones wrote to the office of Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe seeking access to a variety of records concerning his predecessor’s tenure, including Huckabee’s travel records, calendars, call logs, and emails. Beebe’s chief legal counsel, Tim Gauger, replied in a letter that “former Governor Huckabee did not leave behind any hard-copies of the types of documents you seek. Moreover, at that time, all of the computers used by former Governor Huckabee and his staff had already been removed from the office and, as we understand it, the hard-drives in those computers had already been ‘cleaned’ and physically destroyed.”

He added, “In short, our office does not possess, does not have access to, and is not the custodian of any of the records you seek.”

“Huckabee just absolutely doesn’t trust anybody,” says one former high-ranking Arkansas Republican. “In my experience, if you don’t trust people, it’s because you’re not trustworthy.”

The person who may know the most about Huckabee’s records—or lack of them—is Jim Parsons. A self-described gadfly, Parsons is a former Green Beret turned good-government crusader who has filed dozens of Freedom of Information requests targeting Arkansas politicos on both sides of the aisle, including the Clintons. Shortly after Huckabee left office, Parsons went to battle with the state over his records.

In January 2007, Parsons requested “a copy of all information” on the Huckabee administration’s computers the day he left office. Beebe’s office provided Parsons with a January 9 memo addressed to Huckabee from the Arkansas Department of Information Systems, reporting that all of the gubernatorial hard drives had been “crushed under the supervision of a designee of [Huckabee's] office.” That is, a Huckabee aide had made sure all this information was destroyed.

The memo included another tantalizing piece of information: The information stored on the drives had been saved on a backup, which was handed over to Huckabee’s then-chief of staff, Brenda Turner. The history of the Huckabee administration, then, was locked away, under the watchful eye of a former aide. What did she do with this information? Where is it now? Turner, who now runs the PR shop for a Arkansas-based purveyor of Christian-themed greeting cards, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. (Contacted via his political action committee, Huckabee didn’t respond to questions about his records.)

Parsons requested the backups and eventually filed a lawsuit against Huckabee and Beebe, alleging that the new governor had siphoned taxpayer money from an emergency fund to pay to replace the destroyed hard drives. Altogether, the new equipment cost over $335,000. Huckabee countered that the information on the hard drives included private details, such as social security numbers, that shouldn’t be released to the public. In the end, Parsons’ suit was dismissed—largely because he didn’t name Turner, who apparently possessed the records, as a plaintiff.

What do the Huckabee files hold? The records could provide details on any number of unsettled controversies involving . . .

Continue reading.

These all sound very good—my favorite being:

Here a puree of ripe avocado meets pineapple, lime juice, and vanilla, with fresh coconut water to thin it out.

My first go with the Notting Hill shaving soap from BullgooseShaving.net, and I found it highly satisfactory: loads of thick creamy lather, using the Omega synthetic-bristle brush. Three smooth passes with the Slant, a modicum of Trumper’s Coral Skin Food, and the day looks appealing.

I was thinking about the relative merits of the electronic flashcards for my Spanish class: those I made via Anki versus those supplied via the textbook “Supersite”. The latter are pre-made, let you go through with Spanish prompts or English prompts, and pronounce clearly each Spanish word, for you to mimic.

The automatic audio is quite good, no doubt, and I in fact continue to use those cards for first learning and occasional review. But against that the Anki approach has what to my mind is an insurmountable advantage: the management and scheduling of the cards I see.

Every morning I spend 20 minutes or so going through the Anki cards of the day. These are a mix of new vocabulary, difficult vocabulary, and vocabulary due for review. I don’t have to think about it, I don’t have to schedule it—I just have to go through the cards each day and click one of Again, Hard, Good, Easy after I see the answer. That’s it. Based on my response, the cards are automatically scheduled for their next appearance: this same session, tomorrow, or some later day—those that are easiest I now won’t see for 3 months or so.

And it automatically presents each card twice, once with the Spanish as the prompt, once with the English, and it schedules separately the two directions (so that an easy Spanish to English will not be seen so soon as a difficult English to Spanish).

This management and scheduling capability is infinitely superior to the Supersite—there I would have to schedule myself, and the groups of cards would mix difficult and easy vocabulary, etc.

Still: the Supersite offers audio—but, if I wanted to do the work, I could add audio to the Anki deck.

This story is, unfortunately, horrible. David Cloud reports in the LA Times:

Nearly three miles above the rugged hills of central Afghanistan, American eyes silently tracked two SUVs and a pickup truck as they snaked down a dirt road in the pre-dawn darkness.

The vehicles, packed with people, were 3 1/2 miles from a dozen U.S. special operations soldiers, who had been dropped into the area hours earlier to root out insurgents. The convoy was closing in on them.

At 6:15 a.m., just before the sun crested the mountains, the convoy halted.

“We have 18 pax [passengers] dismounted and spreading out at this time,” an Air Force pilot said from a cramped control room at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, 7,000 miles away. He was flying a Predator drone remotely using a joystick, watching its live video transmissions from the Afghan sky and radioing his crew and the unit on the ground.

The Afghans unfolded what looked like blankets and kneeled. “They’re praying. They are praying,” said the Predator’s camera operator, seated near the pilot.

By now, the Predator crew was sure that the men were Taliban. “This is definitely it, this is their force,” the cameraman said. “Praying? I mean, seriously, that’s what they do.”

“They’re gonna do something nefarious,” the crew’s intelligence coordinator chimed in.

At 6:22 a.m., the drone pilot radioed an update: “All … are finishing up praying and rallying up near all three vehicles at this time.”

The camera operator watched the men climb back into the vehicles.

“Oh, sweet target,” he said.

None of those Afghans was an insurgent. They were men, women and children going about their business, unaware that a unit of U.S. soldiers was just a few miles away, and that teams of U.S. military pilots, camera operators and video screeners had taken them for a group of Taliban fighters.

The Americans were using some of the most sophisticated tools in the history of war, technological marvels of surveillance and intelligence gathering that allowed them to see into once-inaccessible corners of the battlefield. But the high-tech wizardry would fail in its most elemental purpose: to tell the difference between friend and foe.

This is the story of that episode. It is based on hundreds of pages of previously unreleased military documents, including transcripts of cockpit and radio conversations obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the results of two Pentagon investigations and interviews with the officers involved as well as Afghans who were on the ground that day.

The Afghan travelers had set out early on the cold morning of Feb. 21, 2010, from three mountain villages in southern Daikundi province, a remote central region 200 miles southwest of Kabul.

More than two dozen people were wedged into the three vehicles. Many were Hazaras, an ethnic minority that for years has been treated harshly by the Taliban. They included shopkeepers going for supplies, students returning to school, people seeking medical treatment and families with children off to visit relatives. There were several women and as many as four children younger than 6.

They had agreed to meet before dawn for the long drive to Highway 1, the country’s main paved road. From there, some planned to go north to Kabul while others were headed south. To reach the highway, they had to drive through Oruzgan province, an insurgent stronghold.

“We traveled together, so that if one vehicle broke down the others would help,” said Sayed Qudratullah, 30, who was bound for Kabul in hope of obtaining a license to open a pharmacy.

Another passenger, Nasim, an auto mechanic who like many Afghans uses one name, said that he was going to buy tools and parts.

“We weren’t worried when we set out. We were a little scared of the Taliban, but not of government forces,” he said referring to the Afghan national army and its U.S. allies. “Why would they attack us?”

American aircraft began tracking the vehicles at 5 a.m. . .

Continue reading.

I mentioned earlier the 9-day summer course at UCSD (note that in the upper-right corner at the link, you can choose to view the page in English or in Esperanto).

I have decided that I definitely will attend, but not this summer: I am fearful about awakening my Esperanto while I am still trying to get my Spanish to jell. But by summer of 2012, I should (a) have completed my three semesters of Spanish (¡Adelante! Uno, Dos, y Tres), and (b) have enough time to brush up my Esperanto before the course begins—especially with all the on-line learning assistance now available.

Hope to see you there.   (In fairness, I should mention that Esperanto is a lot of fun, as languages go, and quite interesting in many aspects—and, of course, learning Esperanto facilitates the learning of subsequent languages:

Four primary schools in Britain, with some 230 pupils, are currently following a course in “propaedeutic Esperanto”—that is, instruction in Esperanto to raise language awareness and accelerate subsequent learning of foreign languages—under the supervision of the University of Manchester.^[26] Studies have been conducted in New Zealand,^[27] United States,^[28][29][30] Germany,^[31] Italy^[32] and Australia.^[33] The results of these studies were favorable and demonstrated that studying Esperanto before another foreign language expedites the acquisition of the other, natural, language. This appears to be because learning subsequent foreign languages is easier than learning one’s first foreign language, while the use of a grammatically simple and culturally flexible auxiliary language like Esperanto lessens the first-language learning hurdle. In one study,^[34] a group of European secondary school students studied Esperanto for one year, then French for three years, and ended up with a significantly better command of French than a control group, who studied French for all four years. Similar results have been found for other combinations of native and second languages, as well as for arrangements in which the course of study was reduced to two years, of which six months is spent learning Esperanto.^[35]

This suggests that if you (or someone you know) is thinking about foreign-language study, they might well want to learn Esperanto now to lay a foundation for subsequent language acquisition.

Extremely interesting analysis, which begins:

The Washington Post this morning published a lengthy article detailing the fortune — and now the trouble — generated for its parent company, The Washington Post Co., as a result of its acquisition of Kaplan Higher Ed. While The Post continues to lose money, Kaplan — particularly its sprawling network of for-profit “universities” which the company began building in 2000 — generates huge profits for the company, profits on which the Post Co. depends almost completely for its sustainability.

Indeed, the newspaper has become little more than a side vanity project for the Post Co. and the Graham family which continues to dominate it; it is now, at its core, in the business of profiting off of lower-income students who pay for diplomas, often obtained via online classes. “The fate of The Post Co. has become inextricably linked with that of Kaplan, where revenue climbed to $2.9 billion in 2010, 61 percent of The Post Co.’s total,” the article detailed; “the company is more dependent than ever on a single business,’ [CEO Donald] Graham wrote in last year’s annual report, adding that the newspaper had never accounted for as large a share of overall company revenue as Kaplan does today.”

The article is largely devoted to recounting the corruption and abuses which pervade the for-profit education industry in general and Kaplan in particular (saddling poor people with debt in exchange for nothing of real value). But what I found most notable is how dependent is this industry — including The Washington Post Co. — on staying in the good graces of the Federal Government. Because these schools target low-income students, the vast majority of their income is derived from federal loans. Because there have been so many deceptive practices and defaults, the Federal Government has become much more aggressive about regulating these schools and now play a vital role in determining which ones can thrive and which ones fail.

Put another way, the company that owns The Washington Post is almost entirely at the mercy of the Federal Government and the Obama administration — the entities which its newspaper ostensibly checks and holds accountable. “By the end of 2010, more than 90 percent of revenue at Kaplan’s biggest division and nearly a third of The Post Co.’s revenue overall came from the U.S. government.” The Post Co.’s reliance on the Federal Government extends beyond the source of its revenue; because the industry is so heavily regulated, any animosity from the Government could single-handedly doom the Post Co.’s business — a reality of which they are well aware: . . .

Read the whole thing: it explains a lot.

Via Ed Brayton, who provides the Facebook link (worth clicking):

Homosexuality is found in over 450 species. Homophobia is found in only one. Which one seems unnatural now?