Later On

Extremely interesting article in Salon by William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel who has taught cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy, officers at the Naval Postgraduate School, and currently teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. It begins:

The killing of Osama bin Laden, “a testament to the greatness of our country” according to President Obama, should not be allowed to obscure a central reality of our post-9/11 world. Our conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya remain instances of undeclared war, a fact that contributes to their remoteness from our American world. They are remote geographically, but also remote from our day-to-day interests and, unless you are in the military or have a loved one who serves, remote from our collective consciousness (not to speak of our consciences).

And this remoteness is no accident. Our wars and their impact are kept in remarkable isolation from what passes for public affairs in this country, leaving most Americans with little knowledge and even less say about whether they should be, and how they are, waged.

In this sense, our wars are eerily like those pursued by European monarchs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: conflicts carried out by professional militaries and bands of mercenaries, largely at the whim of what we might now call a unitary executive, funded by deficit spending, for the purposes of protecting or extending the interests of a ruling elite. . .

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Useful source of content for iPad owners.

An extremely nice lather from the Otoko this morning, thanks to the TOBS artificial-badger brush and my taking the time to load the brush fully. Nice fresh fragrance to the Otoko, too. Three passes with the iKon, my Swedish Gillette blade starting to tug, and then a splash of Pashana. Time for a blade change…

Interesting:

Interesting question, and research provides an interesting answer. However, in thinking about my own undergraduate education, I do think the St. John’s program was different, at least in those days. (I’ve not been to the college for many years.) The St. John’s program was skills-oriented rather than content-oriented, and the entire program was structured to exercise the targeted skills—the liberal arts—more or less constantly, beginning with having a single four-year program of study so that students end up talking mainly about their studies because it’s the one thing they all have in common: everyone there is studying, has studied, or will study whatever you are studying at the time. So that’s what is discussed, and that on-going discussion, rooted in difficult texts, exercises many of the skills imparted (reading, listening, reasoning, explaining, and so on).

It’s becoming more obvious the closer corporations get to having complete control: they already control enough that they can start to be more overt in their actions (cf. Citizens United). And now this.

Some may object that this is the GOP, not corporations, but it’s been obvious for years that the GOP is the party of the corporations, and the GOP’s mission is to protect corporations at whatever cost.

UPDATE: Another obvious example of corporations taking control of the government.

I’ve not heard of “resistant starch” before. I came across this article on Fitday and am exploring the concept. Maybe I’ll cook up some hulled barley, which seems to be a good source.

Quite a fascinating post by Richard Clayton. It begins:

The Internet is, by very definition, an interconnected network of networks. The resilience of the way in which the interconnection system works is fundamental to the resilience of the Internet. Thus far the Internet has coped well with disasters such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina – which have had very significant local impact, but the global Internet has scarcely been affected. Assorted technical problems in the interconnection system have caused a few hours of disruption but no long term effects.

But have we just been lucky ? A major new report, just published by ENISA (the European Network and Information Security Agency) tries to answer this question.

The report was written by Chris Hall, with the assistance of Ross Anderson and Richard Clayton at Cambridge and Panagiotis Trimintzios and Evangelos Ouzounis at ENISA. The full report runs to 238 pages, but for the time-challenged there’s a shorter 31 page executive summary and there will be a more ‘academic’ version of the latter at this year’s Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS 2011).

Internet interconnectivity is a complex ecosystem with many interdependent layers. Its operation is governed by the collective self-interest of the Internet’s networks, but there is no central Network Operation Centre (NOC), staffed with technicians to leap into action when trouble occurs. The open and decentralised organisation that is the very essence of the ecosystem is essential to the success and resilience of the Internet. Yet there are a number of concerns.

First, the Internet is vulnerable to . . .

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Dan Colman at Open Culture:

Love and longing, hope and fear – these threads run throughout all literature, whether we’re talking about the great ancient epics, or contemporary novels written in the East or the West. That’s the main premise of Invitation to World Literature, a multimedia program organized by David Damrosch (Harvard University), and made with the backing of WGBH and Annenberg Media.

The program features 13 half-hour videos, which move from The Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2500 BCE) through García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). And, collectively, these videos highlight over 100+ writers, scholars, artists, and performers with a personal connection to world literature. Philip Glass, Francine Prose, Harold Ramis, Robert Thurman, Kwame Anthony Appiah - they all make an appearance.

Each video is accompanied by readings and related materials. You can get started with Invitation to World Literature here, or find a trailer introducing the series here.

This recipe uses a very clever tick to make tofu sponge up the marinade: you buy firm tofu, cut it into slabs, and freeze them. Then thaw, squeeze gently in a towel to remove the water, and marinate. Read the whole thing.

Quite a variety of flowers are beautifully in bloom, but most of the photos did not work. Here are three:

I thought the above quite colorful.

This is one of the two trees with strange catkins, native to Australia. It depends on fires for propagation.

I have no idea what these little fruits are, but I doubt that they’re edible. The color is a very nice orange.

It was Steve of Kafeneio who pointed out to me that l’Occitane Cade is only so-so on its own, whether shaving cream or soap, but the two together in a superlather are exceptional. So this morning I used my big Rooney 3,2 to create the superlather: a good lather from the soap, worked up on the beard to which a smear of shaving cream is applied.

It works well, and the iKon open-comb is always a treat. A splash of the Klar Seifen sandalwood, and I’m ready for a walk before class.

Interesting article by Jonathan Lear, a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. It begins:

On March 10, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley committed the sin of speaking frankly. During a talk at MIT, he was asked by a researcher to explain the treatment of Bradley Manning. Though he did not think Manning’s treatment amounted to torture, as the questioner had alleged, and though he thought the commander at Quantico was acting within his legal authority, Crowley nevertheless said that the conditions of Manning’s detention were “ridiculous, counterproductive, and stupid.” Three days later, Crowley was out of a job.

As a philosopher, I found his remarks fascinating. The ancient Greeks had a term for Crowley’s actions. They called it parrhesia, the ability to speak one’s mind even when doing so involves social risk. Crowley’s remarks were striking because parrhesia is rarely practiced in American politics, and almost never practiced, at least on the record, by government spokesmen. I wanted to know more about what Crowley had done, so I arranged to meet him for lunch in Washington.

Going into our conversation, I realized there was a possibility that Crowley had simply spoken impulsively. But as our lunch progressed, it became clear to me that Crowley understood what he was doing. When I am interviewing someone, I do not just listen to what they say (and, in any case, I did not expect to extract a backstory from a seasoned spokesman). Instead, I listen for . . .

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Very good Pilates session today, moving into the 7th month. Today I finally figured out some moves, doing them correctly for the first time. This was a private session, and the instructor took me through a carefully selected sequence of exercises, carrying forward into each some things I learned in the previous one in the sequence.

What I got is hard to explain, especially for me who lack full understanding, but the first thing I noticed was that I was able to tighten some abdominal muscles that are very low in my abdomen, just above the pubic bone, and that seemed to do good things. Also I was finally able to relax my head and neck and upper body, which continually demands to be part of the action, even if I’m working with my legs.

At any rate, I felt a definite sense of progress. That six-month point seems to hold. In this case, I think it has taken quite a while for the muscles I was never using to develop to the point where they could take on their proper role, and a little more time to convince my head, neck, and upper body that everything was under control and that could relax.

It’s still intermittent, of course. Just like any change of habit (and certainly we follow habitual patterns of body movement), at first you recognize that you’ve done it wrong again, and then that you’re doing wrong at the time you’re doing it, and then that you’re about to do it wrong. Slowly things get learned.

If you go for Pilates, which certainly has worked for me, give it at least 8 months.

That was another promise: to protect whistleblowers. It was a lie, deliberate and calculated. More on the war on whistleblowers here.

It’s an ominous sign when regulators start wanting to make life easy for the companies and industries they are supposed to regulate. Often such a lessening of effort is the effect of making sure the lead regulator understands that s/he has a cushy, lucrative job awaiting them in the industry if s/he cooperates…

[UPDATE: Perfect example of what I just mentioned.]

John Sullivan reports for ProPublica:

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is routinely waiving fire rule violations at nearly half the nation’s 104 commercial reactors, even though fire presents one of the chief hazards at nuclear plants.

The policy, the result of a series of little-noticed decisions in recent years, is meant to encourage nuclear companies to remedy longstanding fire safety problems. But critics say it is leaving decades-old fire hazards in place as the NRC fails to enforce its own rules.Fires present a special risk to nuclear plants because they can knock out cables that control-room operators need to safely cool down a reactor. The explosions and fires at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant have shown what can happen when operators can’t activate pumps, valves and other equipment needed to prevent damage to the radioactive core.

At the Browns Ferry plant in Alabama, where a devastating cable fire 36 years ago prompted the NRC to adopt tough new fire rules, the plant still doesn’t comply with the requirements to protect cables.

Hazards at other plants include . . .

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Eric Cantor is a leader in the GOP, not some fringe figure. And here he is in action.

The ACLU takes Eric Holder to task for saying one thing and doing another. I doubt that their letter (PDF), though excellent and well worth reading, will do any good: Holder is clearly operating in bad faith. He also promised to obey US law and investigate allegations of torture, which violates the highest law of land. Has he done it?

BTW, Ed Brayton has more on Canada’s refusal to extradite a prisoner to the US since the US uses torture on prisoners (in some cases resulting in deaths of prisoners), with the torturers (and murders) granted full immunity for their crimes.