Later On

I’ve now entered all the lesson 2 vocabulary into Anki, including vocabulary from footnotes and some closely related words—e.g., if I’m making a card with el peligro (danger), I might as well throw in peligroso/a (dangerous).

I should be able to do a lesson a day. Only 4 lessons to go…

As part of establishing a police state, it’s important that people fear the police and in particular fear to make any complaints about what the police do. When that is established, the police can do whatever they want. Great strides have been made in this direction: the Supreme Court under Roberts has established that prosecuting attorneys and DA have immunity for misconduct so long as the misconduct concerns their official duties. For example, a DA who gets a conviction by hiding the evidence that establishes the defendant’s innocence cannot be sued. The Court feels that it’s important to allow such officials to do whatever they damn please in their official capacity.

Similarly, when John Ashcroft directed that a man be locked up, held under harsh conditions, and shipped from prison to prison, even though the man was never charged with anything and was a model American citizen, the Supreme Court found that Ashcroft was immune from lawsuit: Ashcroft could do whatever he wanted to the man, so long as it was done in prisons.

And the Courts also did not allow lawsuits for the cases in which the CIA kidnapped various innocent people and took them into other countries so they could be tortured at least, and then finally let them go (at least, the ones we know about; the ones they murdered and buried in the back country will never come to light, but such actions would be completely consistent with the way the CIA now operates, outside the law and with complete immunity).

So it’s completely consistent with this direction that police forces are turning with fury on those who record police misbehavior (with cellphone cameras, for example). Consider this story by Radley Balko at Huffington Post:

When Chicago police answered a domestic disturbance call at the home of Tiawanda Moore and her boyfriend in July 2010, the officers separated the couple to question them individually. Moore was interviewed privately in her bedroom. According to Moore, the officer who questioned her then came on to her, groped her breast and slipped her his home phone number.

Robert Johnson, Moore’s attorney, says that when Moore and her boyfriend attempted to report the incident to internal affairs officials at the Chicago Police Department, the couple wasn’t greeted warmly. “They discouraged her from filing a report,” Johnson says. “They gave her the runaround, scared her, and tried to intimidate her from reporting this officer — from making sure he couldn’t go on to do this to other women.”

Ten months later, Chicago PD is still investigating the incident. Moore, on the other hand, was arrested the very same afternoon.

Her crime? At some point in her conversations with internal affairs investigators, Moore grew frustrated with their attempts to intimidate her. So she began to surreptitiously record the interactions on her Blackberry. In Illinois, it is illegal to record people without their consent, even (and as it turns out, especially) on-duty police officers. . .

Continue reading. The article is more amazing than you expect.

A hard-hitting and non-hysterical report that shows how badly Obama is treating our country. He is becoming a danger to future generations by establishing policies that are antithetical to human and civil rights and are in fact contrary to his own promises.

Read it and think about where the nation will be in 10 years from now, given how far it’s declined in the past decade.

You will want to bookmark this site.

I just learned that Ray Bryant died 11 June 2011, age 79. He was great. Here’s just a sample:

A few peoples still live as hunter-gatherers, and two of them have been studied intensively: the Hadza people of Tanzania and the !Kung San (also known as the Jun/twasi) of the Kalahari Desert. Here’s an intriguing review of a book on the Hadza and how they live.

My friend David is very good at “getting” movies and his insights have been helpful to me. For example, for a while I kept confusing Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, and David explained that Pacino is the one who always has at least one strong monologue in any movie he does. Right! Somehow that tag made it easier, and also when I watch a Pacino movie now I await The Monologue with great interest. In a very good political movie, City Hall, for example, he makes a stunning funeral oration, playing the role of a NYC mayor speaking at the funeral of an African-American child accidentally killed by police gunfire. (The cast also includes John Cusack, Bridget Fonda, Danny Aiello, David Paymer, and Martin Landau—well worth the rental.)

David saw Groundhog Day, the comedy by Harold Ramis with Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell, and Chris Elliott. He really disliked the movie (which is truly a great movie). His reaction was so negative, he wondered at what had triggered it. The more he thought about it, the more he realized it was because the lead character, played by Bill Murray, was too close to his own situation: stuck in a rut, doing the same thing every day, and the only escape is to change oneself. In other words, he disliked the movie because it was saying things he didn’t want to hear.

The immediate adverse visceral reaction to a more or less neutral situation is always worth examining: it’s a sure sign that some part of you—the unconscious part—has recognized in the situation a “threat” to your overall sense of well-being: namely, that it’s bringing up something you do not want to face.

Trent Hamm has an interesting post on this phenomenon in his own life. That immediate angry rejection is quite valuable if it’s treated as a signal to dive deeper into the situation and figure out where that response is coming from. It may signal some serious structural problems that you need to address before they get much worse.

This is the more general case of the situation in which you find someone intensely annoying because they remind you of aspects of yourself that you don’t like and do your best to ignore: it’s harder to ignore them when they are seen in someone else.

Lawrence Wilkerson was Chief of Staff for Colin Powell, and Wilkerson has continued to speak out strongly against US foreign policy—and he knows whereof he speaks. Here is a series of videos in which he explains and expounds upon his views.

The title, as the article by Rachel Ehrenberg in Science News points out, spans 12 orders of magnitude—i.e., a difference that is on the order of 10¹²: the wires have a width one-trillionth their length. Fascinating technology.

Take a look at the Cool Tools post on SeatGuru.com. Certainly worth a bookmark for you travelers.

Check out NewspaperMap.com: every newspaper in the world today, it seems like, plus the “historical” button provides access to newspapers of the past. You can specify locations, filter by language, and so on. Could provide much term-paper fodder, plus the chance to get the local take on events.

The evidence is intriguing. Melissa Healy reports in the LA Times:

Training a child to hold a whole cluster of items in his or her memory for even a short time may feel like trying to hold a wave on the sand. But a study published Monday says it’s a drill that can yield lasting benefits.

Children who’ve had such training have better abstract reasoning and solve problems more creatively than kids who haven’t, the study found.

But here’s a warning to parents already grooming their young children for entry into elite universities: Don’t automatically rush out to enroll your young genius in brain-training summer camp or invest in DVDs promising to deliver high IQs. These drills, the scientists found, pay the greatest dividends for children who actually need them and who find the escalating challenge of the games fun, not frustrating. . .

Continue reading. It makes sense: if you’re doing abstract reasoning or trying to solve a problem, mathematical or otherwise, you do have to keep things in your short-term memory in order to work with them (combine, compare, etc.). The easier you can do that, the better your overall performance is likely to be. I again recommend Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer, as an excellent overall survey of and introduction to scientific studies of memory and various memory-training techniques.

Several of you are bicyclists, and I was hoping you might own one of these bikes and could tell us about it. Steve? Scott?

Detailed photos and more information in this post.

Another really wonderful shave. I must be improving, though perhaps some credit should go to the tools. I selected La Toja shave stick this morning, based on a SOTD post at Pogonotomy which reminded me how very nice La Toja is: it seems to do nice things for the skin. And BTW, I should mention that the occasional photos in the STOD threads at Pogonotomy highlight the lameness of my snapshots. Scan down one of the threads and take a look.

With the Sabini brush I worked up a very nice lather indeed on my face, though I think Creamy Lather™ probably cannot be achieved with face lathering. Still, no complaints about the lather: rich, thick, and pleasant to make. Perhaps the smoothness of my shave reflects the time I spent on my beard working up the lather: I was experimenting to see whether I could get Creamy Lather. I didn’t, but I did end up lathering longer than usual—and enjoying it.

Three passes of the OSS, again treating it as a regular straight rather than tracking which particular side I was using, and once again I got a wonderful shave. The Shark blade is holding up well.

A splash of the Provence Santé aftershave, and I’m raring to blog. This aftershave (which includes shea butter as an ingredient) is a big thicker than the regular splash, though not a balm, and the fragrance is quite subdued. I need to have The Wife do a fragrance validation check: I can’t decide whether I like it or not.

I noticed that I am happy to eat large when out in a restaurant, and I think it’s because a) I eat light the day before (if it’s a planned outing) and for a day or two after (in any case), and b) I rarely go to a restaurant. I don’t think my little dodge would work so well if I dined out even once a week.

At any rate, broccoli soup is for me a satisfying meal, and I made a truly great one tonight:

3 large heads very fresh organic broccoli (my CSA)
1/2 large Vidalia onion
1 large red spring onion, bulb only (my CSA)
6 short, stubby, very fresh organic carrots (my CSA) 
10 large cloves garlic, peeled

Put all that in a 4-qt pot (and you’ll have to pack it in and perhaps cook it down), and add water to just below the brim—just enough room so that it will not easily boil over. Add:

1-2 Tbsp Penzeys Chicken Soup Base
1 tsp salt
many grindings black pepper
a small shaking of crushed red pepper
1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce (homemade if possible)

Bring to boil, cover, and simmer 30-40 minutes—until everything is tender. Blend with immersion blender, simmer 5 minutes more.

I spooned a big lump of drained yogurt into the bowl, filled it with soup, and enjoy.

Tomorrow morning I’ll add some fresh dill from the CSA, simmer a while and blend. That will be a new wrinkle.

Then tomorrow afternoon I’m going to Whole Foods to get one bunch of organic spinach. That I’ll wash, drain, add, simmer, and blend: the mid-life spinach kicker.

I could get some shaved parmesan to add, but I think I’ll stick with nonfat yogurt for this go-around.

When correcting someone’s error makes them cling to it more closely (and the article at that link has excellent details). Interesting phenomenon, but highly visible these days.

Part of the problem is that many discussions do not follow a thread of argument, with the two parties working together to make sure each step is sound. Instead, most discussions I see—particularly on-line—work as though each participant has a deck of cards, each containing a fact or opinion or quotation. Participants take turns putting those cards on the table, but seldom do they try to work out connections or sequence. Indeed, sometimes it seems as if a player is looking only at his own cards, picking those he will lay down in his next turn, and not even looking at those placed by his discussion partner.

Part of that is the difficulty of carrying on a discussion through an exchange of written messages, of course, but mostly it seems to be that many people simply do not understand how to follow a reasoned argument, much less how to participate in one. And since that is a skill, it cannot be acquired by reading a book about it: one has to actually participate in reasoned arguments, over and over, with a coach looking on and offering help and correction until you gradually learn the skill. And with the skill being that of reasoned argument, you also need lots of fodder on which to exercise your developing skill: books and ideas that are sufficiently difficult to require close examination and argument, sufficiently rich to support multiple interpretations, and sufficiently significant so that you don’t feel your wasting your time in studying the works closely as background for (and checking of) your reasoned argument—the St. John’s Program, more or less.

The skills acquired include the ability to grasp when your position becomes untenable and unreasonable: to recognize when your argument is not working and doesn’t really make sense. And along with the skill of evaluating your own arguments is the equally important skill of evaluating your partner’s argument—to know when it makes sense and when it doesn’t—and how to work together to advance the understanding of both yourself and your partner.

The FBI is close to a rogue agency, routinely breaking laws in its eagerness to obtain convictions. What with all their cooperation with pathetic, would-be terrorists—the FBI plant suggesting plans, pushing the group to act, helping them get bomb-making materials, and then acting as a witness against them, all to avoid being charged with his own crimes and/or for the money—and routinely abuse of national-security letters, doing illegal searches and surveillance, and the like. And of course the FBI labs are notoriously incompetent, though full of pride. Remember the lawyer in Seattle that the FBI “proved” was in Madrid for the bombing there, based on his fingerprints? He had never left the country.

The FBI culture seems so toxic that I occasionally wish the agency would be disbanded and replaced with a new investigative arm.

And now the FBI is encouraging its agents to “push the envelope”, to skirt the law when possible (and when they believe they will not be caught).

A perennial question deftly answered and with good news about the future.

I’m still working on my weight-loss (5 lbs to go) and on my weight-loss book. One point I emphasize is the degree to which our behavior is derived from our perceptions, so that if you want to change your behavior, the most efficient and effective way is to change your perceptions, and I write about ways to do that.

Trent Hamm has an interesting post on one way to approach establishing perceptions that will drive constructive behavior: by a focus on what you view as the center of your life and making sure that is secure and is getting your attention. Worth the click.

Via Ed Brayton, more good news in ending the costly, destructive, counter-productive, and irrational War on Drugs. From the link:

6/7/2011 – Today the Connecticut House of Representatives passed SB 1014, a bill to make possession of less than 14 grams of marijuana a non-criminal violation for adults.  There was heavy debate about the concept, but the measure prevailed in a 90-57 vote. The legislation was passed by the Senate over the weekend.

Governor Dannel P. Malloy sponsored the bill and is now expected to sign it into law.

Speaking about the bill on the floor today Republican Rep. Brenda Kupchick seemed torn: “Someone wrote to me today that if I didn’t support this bill that I would be an active proponent to government intervention into the private lives of citizens and interfering with individual liberties. That actually bothered me.”

Rep. Gerald Fox, a proponent of the legislation and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, answered dozens of questions from his peers. Opponents seemed to be most concerned with lightening the criminal treatment for those ages 18-21. But Fox assured them that young adults would face the same penalties for marijuana as they do for underage drinking.

Rep. Fox also pointed out that by treating possession of small amounts as a non-criminal offense it would not hurt the future employment or military eligibility of young people.

“The penalty is different, but going to court remains the same,” said Fox.

Under the new bill adults in possession of less than half an ounce of marijuana would be punished with a $150 fine on the first occasion and $200-$500 for additional offenses. Those between the ages of 18-21 will need to appear in court and will also have their drivers’ license suspended for 60 days.

[UPDATE 5:05PM] Governor Malloy issued this statement today:

“Final approval of this legislation accepts the reality that the current law does more harm than good – both in the impact it has on people’s lives and the burden it places on police, prosecutors and probation officers of the criminal justice system. Let me make it clear – we are not legalizing the use of marijuana. In modifying this law, we are recognizing that the punishment should fit the crime, and acknowledging the effects of its application. There is no question that the state’s criminal justice resources could be more effectively utilized for convicting, incarcerating and supervising violent and more serious offenders.

“Modification of this law will now put Connecticut in line with the laws of two of our neighboring states, New York and Massachusetts, and a total of thirteen states across the country with similar statutes. I applaud the General Assembly in their passage of this legislation and will sign it into law. I would also like to specifically thank State Senator Martin Looney, who first introduced this legislation in 2009, for his support and advocacy of this issue.”

When the bill is signed into law Connecticut will be the 14th US State to make adult cannabis possession a non-criminal offense.