Later On

Some microphotographs of razor edges, both double-edged commercial blades and a well-sharpened and honed straight razor. The straight razor wins.

From betelgeux, who runs Wicked_Edge, where I mostly hang out, shaving-wise, these days.

The post title is a good question. It’s not as though Social Security is in any trouble. Indeed, it has a healthy surplus (most of which was “borrowed” by George W. Bush for his Big War in Iraq), and it could continue with no problem through the rest of this century with minor adjustments. But Barack Obama seems to think that he was elected to dismantle the program. Dean Baker looks at the issue in this column, which begins:

On his tour of the Midwest last week, President Obama again indicated his interest in cutting Social Security. He repeated a proposal that his administration first put forward in the debt ceiling negotiations: he wants to cut the annual cost of living adjustment by 0.3 percentage points.

This cut may sound small, but it adds up over time. A person in their 70s who had been getting benefits for ten years would see a reduction of 3 percent. By the time they were in their 80s, the cut would be 6 percent. And if they lived into their 90s, their benefit would be more than 9 percent lower as a result of President Obama’s proposal.

For an average retiree who can expect to get benefits for 20 years, President Obama’s plan would cut their lifetime Social Security benefits by roughly 3 percent. By comparison, his much feared tax increases on the rich would reduce the after-tax income of someone earning $300,000 a year by just 0.5 percent. In this case, a beneficiary who will be mostly dependent on their Social Security income in retirement will take about six times as large a hit relative to their income under President Obama’s plan to cut Social Security than a couple earning $300,000 would from his plan to raise their taxes.

This cut to Social Security seems especially inappropriate since the near retirees who would feel the full impact of this cut have just seen most of their wealth destroyed by the collapse of the housing bubble and the plunge in the stock market. The typical near retiree (ages 55-64) has just $170,000 in net wealth, including the equity in their home.

This means that if they used every last penny in their 401(k) and other savings, they would have just about enough money to pay off the mortgage on a typical home. This would leave them 100 percent dependent on Social Security for their income. And of course, half of near retirees have less than this amount, meaning that they will not even be able to pay off the mortgage on a typical home. But apparently President Obama feels that these people need to make greater sacrifices.

The determination to cut Social Security is especially strange given the finances of the program. Under the law, Social Security is financed by the designated Social Security tax. It does not contribute to the deficit, since the law prohibits payments from being made if there is not money in the Social Security trust fund. That means that if the trust fund were drained, rather than contributing to the deficit, full benefits would not be paid.

And the date where this could be an issue is still relatively distant. The Congressional Budget Office just released newprojections showing that the Social Security trust fund is fully solvent through the year 2038. Even after that date, the program would have enough money to pay 81 percent of scheduled benefits for the rest of the century. The folks who say that there will be nothing there for our children or grandchildren are just making it up or repeating the nonsense promulgated by some political hack.

Furthermore, this gap is not hard to close. Currently, the tax on the wages subject to the tax is capped at $107,000. The upward redistribution of income over the last three decades has caused a large share of wage income to escape taxation, as more money ends up in the pocket of CEOs and Wall Street types than ordinary workers. If all wage income were subject to the tax, then it would leave Social Security fully solvent for its 75-year planning period.

We could also go the route of increasing the tax on ordinary workers to cover the shortfall. After all, part of the story is that people are enjoying longer retirements, even if the wealthy have benefited much more from the increase in longevity than the typical worker. By 2040, average wages are projected to be 45 percent higher than today, adjusting for the impact of inflation. If just 5 percent of the projected wage growth over this period was used to finance Social Security, the program would be fully solvent for the rest of the century.

Most people would be surprised to know that 5 percent of the wage growth projected over the next three decades would be sufficient to keep Social Security solvent. After all, there is awell-funded and well-connected industry of people spreading disaster stories about Social Security and its massive deficit.

Many people will be taken aback by the idea of “projected wage growth,” after all most workers’ wages have been stagnant or falling in recent years. This is true. The projections refer to average wages, which had been rising, at least until the recession.

This brings up the fundamental point. . .

Continue reading.

I don’t really recall Neanderthals in the Genesis story—or DNA, for that matter—so I imagine that these findings will be denounced from the pulpit by scientific researchers such as Pat Robertson and the like. Still, it’s an interesting story even if it conflicts with Genesis account. Eryn Brown reports in the LA Times:

As recently as 2008, scientists thought that Neanderthals and modern humans had never mated.

Then, last year, they said that the two species had, but that the few Neanderthal genes that survived in modern human DNA were not functional.

Now researchers believe that key versions of immune system genes in modern humans appear to have been passed down by archaic relatives, including Neanderthals, after all.

Indeed, DNA inherited from Neanderthals and newly discovered hominids dubbed the Denisovans has contributed to key types of immune genes still present among populations in Europe, Asia and Oceania. And scientists speculate that these gene variants must have been highly beneficial to modern humans, helping them thrive as they migrated throughout the world.

This DNA has had “a very profound functional impact in the immune systems of modern humans,” said study first author Laurent Abi-Rached, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of senior author Peter Parham of the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Neanderthals were stocky hunter-gatherers who populated Europe and parts of Asia until about 30,000 years ago. In 2010, a team of biologists led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, sequenced the Neanderthal genome via DNA extracted from ancient bones.

From this, they estimated that 1% to 4% of modern Eurasian genomes came from our close hominid relatives.

No one knows what Denisovans looked like: The only confirmed evidence of the group, which is thought to have split from the Neanderthals about 350,000 years ago and migrated east, are a tooth and a pinkie finger bone found in a Siberian cave in 2008.

When Paabo and coworkers sequenced DNA extracted from the pinkie in 2010, they calculated that 4% to 6% of modern Melanesian genomes came from Denisovans.

In the new study, Abi-Rached and coauthors decided to focus on a small set of genes on chromosome 6 known as the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) class I genes.

HLA genes carry instruction for making HLA proteins, which help the immune system spot evidence of problems in cells — infection or cancer, for instance — so that it can wipe out abnormalities to fight disease. The genes come in many forms that vary in frequency around the world, probably because our genomes have been tailored by evolution to fight specific disease threats that exist in particular places.

Physicians regularly screen HLA types to find donor matches for transplant patients, providing a rich lode of data for the researchers. Millions of people around the world have had their HLA class I genes typed, giving the team a way to look for ancient Neanderthal and Denisovan HLA variants in present-day people, said coauthor Ed Green, a genome scientist at UC Santa Cruz.

The researchers carefully analyzed the region of the archaic genomes where the HLA genes were located. Then they compared them with the HLA regions of modern-day human populations of different parts of the world.

From the analysis, the scientists estimated, for example, that more than half of the genetic variants in one HLA gene in Europeans could be traced to Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA. For Asians, that proportion was more than 70%; in people from Papua New Guinea, it was as much as 95%. . .

Continue reading. What do these evolution deniers do, when we have actual specific DNA evidence? I suppose they just change the topic.

Burnishing the image of the CIA (“Criminals in Action”) is pretty much a fulltime job: the Agency has missed all the big events of our time, while busy running drugs and overthrowing democratically elected governments to install right-wing dictators, while teaching their minions the arts of torture. The CIA, so far as I can tell, is primarily a source of national shame, while it continually misses things like the building of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the Berlin Wall, whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and so on and on and on.

Now they are trying to rewrite the history of 9/11, as reported by Scott Shane in the NY Times:

In what amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath, the Central Intelligence Agency is demanding extensive cuts from the memoir of a former F.B.I. agent who spent years near the center of the battle against Al Qaeda.

The agent, Ali H. Soufan, argues in the book that the C.I.A. missed a chance to derail the 2001 plot by withholding from the F.B.I. information about two future 9/11 hijackers living in San Diego, according to several people who have read the manuscript. And he gives a detailed, firsthand account of the C.I.A.’s move toward brutal treatment in itsinterrogations, saying the harsh methods used on the agency’s first important captive, Abu Zubaydah, were unnecessary and counterproductive.

Neither critique of the C.I.A. is new. In fact, some of the information that the agency argues is classified, according to two people who have seen the correspondence between the F.B.I. and C.I.A., has previously been disclosed in open Congressional hearings, the report of the national commission on 9/11 and even the 2007 memoir of George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director.

Mr. Soufan, an Arabic-speaking counterterrorism agent who played a central role in most major terrorism investigations between 1997 and 2005, has told colleagues he believes the cuts are intended not to protect national security but to prevent him from recounting episodes that in his view reflect badly on the C.I.A.

Some of the scores of cuts demanded by the C.I.A. from Mr. Soufan’s book, “The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al Qaeda,” seem hard to explain on security grounds.

Among them, according to the people who have seen the correspondence, is a phrase from Mr. Soufan’s 2009 testimony at a Senate hearing, freely available both as video and transcript on the Web. Also chopped are references to the word “station” to describe the C.I.A.’s overseas offices, common parlance for decades.

The agency removed the pronouns “I” and “me” from a chapter in which Mr. Soufan describes his widely reported role in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, an important terrorist facilitator and training camp boss. And agency officials took out references to the fact that a passport photo of one of the 9/11 hijackers who later lived in San Diego, Khalid al-Midhar, had been sent to the C.I.A. in January 2000 — an episode described both in the 9/11 commission report and Mr. Tenet’s book.

In a letter sent Aug. 19 to the F.B.I.’s general counsel, Valerie E. Caproni, a lawyer for Mr. Soufan, David N. Kelley, wrote that “credible sources have told Mr. Soufan that the agency has made a decision that this book should not be published because it will prove embarrassing to the agency.”

In a statement, Mr. Soufan called the C.I.A’s redactions to his book “ridiculous” but said he thought he would prevail in getting them restored for a later edition.

He said he believed that counterterrorism officers have an obligation to face squarely “where we made mistakes and let the American people down.” He added: “It saddens me that some are refusing to address past mistakes.” . . .

Continue reading. The CIA denies everything. That’s what they do. A person who would trust the CIA should not be allowed out of the house without an escort.

I think we’ll see a lot of Rick Perry pronouncements that turn out to be false in every respect—not that I expect his supporters to criticize him for that. Indeed, that’s probably why they like him.

For example, his comment that the schools in Texas teach creationism or Intelligent Design or whatever the term is now used for the Genesis myth that is taken as literal truth by so many: they may indeed, but the curriculum guidelines and requirements are in conflict with his statement.

And Ezra Klein takes him to task for his obviously false statement about scientific support for anthrogenic global warming:

Over the past few days, fact-checkers have been kept busy debunkingthis statement from Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R), on why he doesn’t believe that humans are heating the planet: “I think we’re seeing it almost weekly or even daily, scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.”

It’s not a tricky argument to dismiss. In 2010, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a survey of 1,372 climate researchers, finding that 97 to 98 percent of those publishing in the field said they believe humans are causing global warming. That’s the same majority that existed in a similar 2009 survey. Dissenters do exist, thePNAS study found, but “the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced … are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.” Either way, the ranks of dissenters don’t appear to be swelling. (When contacted by the Washington Post, the Perry campaign responded with links to news stories that, reporter Glenn Kessler concluded, were “anecdotal in nature.”)

Still, it’s worth adding one overlooked point to all this fact-checking. It’s not just that Perry’s wrong. In many ways, the field of climate science is moving in precisely the opposite direction that he’s suggesting. Recall that back in 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change put out a report synthesizing the scientific work on global warming. While the report sounded quite certain on a number of topics—noting, for one, that it was “very likely” that most of the observed temperature increases since mid-century were due to man-made greenhouse gases—there were still plenty of vague spots in the report, especially with regards to sea-level rise.

Yet rather than poke further holes, much of the climate science that’s been published since 2007 appears to have strengthened the consensus, not weakened it. Another synthesis report published last May by Britain’s Met Office, looking at more than 100 peer-reviewed post-IPCC studies, found that the case for human influence has been bolstered: “We can say with a very high significance level that the effects we see in the climate cannot be attributed to any other forcings.”

Relatedly, at last year’s annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, UC Santa Barbara’s William Freudenberg gave a presentation in which he revealed that “new scientific findings [since the IPCC] are found to be more than twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is ‘worse than previously expected,’ rather than ‘not as bad as previously expected.’”(Credit for the links goes to Climate Progress’s Joe Romm.)

Granted, it’s always possible that what’s going on here is that, as Perry has charged, “there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.” Though that theory’s looking weaker by the day, too: The National Science Foundation, for instance, just . . .

Continue reading. I am strangely surprised at the inability of the American people to understand the most basic findings of science, combined with their eager willingness to swallow obvious nonsense: Jenny McCarthy as medical scientist, anyone?

Something to kick off the weekend:

I want to thank the commenter who focused my attention on rose-fragranced shaving soaps/creams/aftershaves. Rose is indeed a regal fragrance and adds a lot to one’s feeling of fitness and command for the day.

Cyril R. Salter is a stalwart name in shaving creams—their Vetiver is superb—and I recently ordered this tub as part of my rose expansion—the D.R. Harris Pink Aftershave is another part of that. It ginned up a terrific lather with the Edwin Jagger boar brush, though I felt it was cheating, in a way: that brush is not broken in enough to deliver that sort of lather with shaving soap.

Three smooth passes with the OSS holding (I’m sure—didn’t check) a Swedish Gillette blade, very easy, very pleasant. The alum bar, a rinse and a dry and a splash of Pink, and I’m ready for the day, which (being Friday) begins with laundry.

This recipe looks terrific to me. I’m definitely making it, and the six additional recipes she lists all look good, too.

Here are the ingredients:

1 pound (2 to 2 1/4 cups) dry Umbrian or green French lentils
4 cups chicken broth (optional)
1/2 cup dry-packed sun-dried tomatoes
1 large yellow onion
3 bell peppers (ideally a mix of orange, yellow, and red)
3 cloves garlic
1/2 cup olive oil, divided
1 cup walnuts, toasted and chopped
1 cup flat parsley leaves, roughly chopped
1 cup mint leaves, roughly chopped
1 1/2 ounces Parmesan cheese, divided (omit for a vegan salad)
1 lemon, juiced and zested
2 tablespoons pomegranate molasses
2 teaspoons flaky or kosher salt, or more to taste
Freshly ground black pepper

She notes that the pomegranate molasses is a critical ingredient.

UPDATE: Here are the other recipes that looked good:

• Winter Wheat Berry Salad with Figs & Red Onion
• Sweet and Savory Wild Rice Salad
• Warm Chickpea Salad with Cumin & Garlic
• Late Summer Lentil Salad
• Meyer Lemon Grain Salad with Asparagus, Almonds and Goat Cheese
• Five Grain Salad from Emeril Lagasse

I am reading with great interest and enjoyment Timothy D. Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious, about the role our unconscious self plays in our lives and, to some extent, how our conscious selves can gain the cooperation of the unconscious.

So when I saw that he has a new book out, I immediately ordered a copy, which arrived yesterday. Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change is already amazing. Wilson is a scientist, and like any scientist he strives to base conclusions on evidence, which necessarily involves collecting evidence—a step frequently omitted in designing social and psychological intervention programs. He begins the book with a description of the well-known CISD techniques frequently used in the aftermath of disasters. CISD = Critical Incident Stress Debriefing. This is the technique in which immediately after some traumatic incident (a mass shooting, for example) trained mental-health professionals meet with survivors and help them with debriefing, taking them through the incidents, helping them with their emotional responses, providing information on what to expect (nightmares, flashbacks, etc.), and in general helping them get over the incident and back into normal life.

That approach is so obviously the right way to go that it took a while before anyone started doing studies. Then they compared it to, for example, simply leaving the survivors alone and then, three or four months later, asking them to spend a few evenings writing about the incident and what it meant to them in their lives. No one else would read what they wrote, so they were free to write whatever they wished.

A comparison of outcomes—fully described in the book—shows that the CISD approach is worse than ineffective, it is highly damaging. The second approach, in contrast, really works and works well, for reasons he explains.

If you’re interested in your mind and your life, I highly recommend this book. And Strangers to Ourselves is quite good as well.

This Semogue brush is far from being broken in. I had to return to the soap and regen the lather for each pass. On the third pass, I got out my soapstone lathering bowl and brushed the lather vigorously in that, as much for brush break-in as for the lather (which was, BTW, significantly improved).

Still, I managed, and I think the brush—once its spirit is broken—will be good. And I certainly like the soap.

Three very smooth passes with a Feather blade in the Edwin Jagger DE89, a small dab of Coral Skin Food, and I’m ready to wait for the final proof, to be delivered this evening.

I haven’t yet decided what I’m celebrating, but it was a very nice luncheon at a little sushi place near the Monterey PO. I had sashimi: a small order of saba (pickled mackerel) that was quite fine and doubtless took care of my omega-3 intake, and a large order of an assortment that had quite a bit of hamachi (everyone’s favorite, I think), octopus, salmon, and maguro. Quite a bit of shredded daikon and several nice leaves of shiso, together with a small bottle of excellent junmai sake.

Interesting that the NYPD no longer considers itself restricted by the  boundaries of New York City or even of New York state. The NYPD now apparently considers itself qualified and authorized to conduct operations anywhere in the country—provided they can keep judges from seeing their work.

I think we’re starting a domestic Gestapo here. The secrecy and the barring of judicial review is particularly troublesome, as is the CIA involvement in domestic intelligence operations, something that I believe is clearly against the law: that’s the FBI’s purview, not that they’re very good at it. (Robert Hansen, previously mentioned.) And the FBI, like the CIA, reflexively breaks the law whenever it wants, with no repercussions. (If a whistleblower does reveal the misdeeds, they simply take out the whistleblower with lawsuits, threats of prison, etc. — the Obama Administration has developed this tactic to a high degree, including abusive imprisonment before any trial or charges.)

Here’s the story so far, much of which is still to be revealed, I’m sure. The Associated Press reports:

In New Brunswick, N.J., a building superintendent opened the door to apartment No. 1076 one balmy Tuesday and discovered an alarming scene: terrorist literature strewn about the table and computer and surveillance equipment set up in the next room.

The panicked superintendent dialed 911, sending police and the FBI rushing to the building near Rutgers University on the afternoon of June 2, 2009. What they found in that first-floor apartment, however, was not a terrorist hideout but a command center set up by a secret team of New York Police Department intelligence officers. After the attacks of Sept. 11, the New York Police Department has dispatched teams of undercover officers into minority neighborhoods and used informants to monitor sermons at mosques, even when there’s no evidence of wrongdoing.

From that apartment, about an hour outside the department’s jurisdiction, the NYPD had been staging undercover operations and conducting surveillance throughout New Jersey. Neither the FBI nor the local police had any idea.

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the NYPD has become one of the country’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies. A months-long investigation by The Associated Press has revealed that the NYPD operates far outside its borders and targets ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government. And it does so with unprecedented help from the CIA in a partnership that has blurred the bright line between foreign and domestic spying.

Neither the city council, which finances the department, nor the federal government, which contributes hundreds of millions of dollars each year, is told exactly what’s going on.

The department has dispatched teams of undercover officers, known as “rakers,” into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They’ve monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as “mosque crawlers,” to monitor sermons, even when there’s no evidence of wrongdoing. NYPD officials have scrutinized imams and gathered intelligence on cab drivers and food cart vendors, jobs often done by Muslims.

Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD’s intelligence unit.

A veteran CIA officer, while still on the agency’s payroll, was the architect of the NYPD’s intelligence programs. The CIA trained a police detective at the Farm, the agency’s spy school in Virginia, then returned him to New York, where he put his new espionage skills to work inside the United States.

And just last month, the CIA sent a senior officer to work as a clandestine operative inside police headquarters.

While the expansion of the NYPD’s intelligence unit has been well known, many details about its clandestine operations, including the depth of its CIA ties, have not previously been reported. . .

Continue reading. I don’t like the idea of secret police in the US, particularly when (a) they hide their activities from judicial review; and (b) the CIA is involved. The CIA is a criminal organization.

And in a cartoon, no less. (Via this interesting post on good tech news by James Fallows.)

The US has embraced a panoply of shameful policies, and arranging for the torture of its own citizens is one of the worst. Nick Baumann reports for Mother Jones:

WHEN GULET MOHAMED FINALLY returned home on a chilly Virginia morning in January, the 19-year-old from Fairfax was wearing the same outfit he had on when he disappeared a month earlier in Kuwait. Clad in a fleece hat and a gray Real Madrid sweatshirt, the straggly-bearded, wide-eyed teenager stepped out of arrivals at Dulles Airport and into a phalanx of television cameras. He wore a bewildered smile—as if he was still unsure of what had happened to him but was just grateful it was over.

For more than a year, Mohamed had been living in Kuwait City with an uncle. On December 20, 2010, according to legal records (PDF), he went to the airport to renew his tourist visa for an additional three months. The process took longer than usual. From a waiting area, Mohamed emailed his brother to let him know he’d run into some red tape.

Soon afterward, two men in street clothes came in, blindfolded him, escorted him out of the airport, and led him into the back of a vehicle. They drove maybe 15 or 20 minutes. When the men removed his blindfold, he was in a cell with white walls.

Later, the men—members of Kuwait’s security forces, Mohamed inferred—marched him to an interrogation room, where they shouted names at him in Arabic.

“Osama bin Laden! Do you know him?” “Anwar al-Awlaki?”

When he responded “no,” his interrogators slapped him across the face. As the days passed, Mohamed claims, they beat him with sticks on the soles of his feet, asked him to choose between torture by electrocution or power drill, and threatened his family.

Sometimes, Mohamed later told his lawyer, his captors escorted him, blindfolded, to another part of the facility, where a man who spoke with an American accent posed specific questions about his life in the US. He inquired about Mohamed’s siblings by name. “Don’t you know we know everything about you?” he asked.

MOHAMED IS ONE OF A GROWING number of American Muslims who claim they were captured overseas and questioned in secret at the behest of the United States, victims of what human rights advocates call “proxy detention“—or “rendition-lite.” The latter is a reference to the Bush- and Clinton-era CIA practice of capturing foreign nationals suspected of terrorism and “rendering” them to countries such as Egypt, Jordan, or Morocco (PDF) for interrogations that often involved torture.

Many of these episodes follow a similar script.

A US citizen is detained, questioned, and sometimes abused in a Middle Eastern or African country by local security forces. Often his interrogators possess information that could only have come from US authorities; some of the detainees say American officials have been present for the questioning. When the suspect is released from detention, he often discovers he’s on the no-fly list and can’t return home unless he submits to further questioning by FBI agents. Sometimes he’s denied access to a lawyer during these sessions.

In the past, the FBI has denied that it asks foreign governments to apprehend Americans. But, a Mother Jones investigation has found, the bureau has a long-standing and until now undisclosed program for facilitating such detentions. . .

Continue reading. Of course, Obama is protecting the foul miscreants responsible for such atrocities, while at the same treating with extreme harshness those who expose such wrong-doing. Hard to avoid condemning that sort of behavior. And of course the FBI lies about its behavior—it always does that because its behavior is so often reprehensible, even illegal. No one ever is punished, though, save for the whistleblowers. And Robert Hansen: they punished him.

Normally, in what passes for “journalism” these days, a news story will carefully quote both sides of an argument (often one side factual and the other crazy) and end the story there, satisfied that the reporter maintained “balance” and carefully avoided giving the reader any guidance as to facts in the case. An alternative is to quote critics of both sides of an argument, again with no guidance as to facts, but a true devotion to “balance.”

And yet in the Washington Post, one of the most devoted practitioners of this sort of pseudo-journalistic “objectivity,” we find in a story on climate change a careful recounting of the charges hurled in “climategate” with some acknowledgement that the investigations have consistently found no wrong doing, and a TOTAL ABSENCE of any mention of the thousands of misstatements, outright lies, conflicts of interests with heavy payments, and general bad behavior on the part of those opposing any action to ameliorate climate change. The opposition has consistently be caught in errors and lies, but the Post article never ever mentions those. Why? The Post editors themselves oppose taking any constructive actions to reverse or even ameliorate climate change, so they use the paper to achieve their goals.

Here is the relevant section from a recent story:

Missteps by scientists have given critics ammunition. Most notorious were “Climate-gate” e-mails hacked from computers at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain in 2009. The e-mails showed scientists being combative and clubby, but multiple investigations in both the United States and Britain cleared the researchers of scientific misconduct, concluding that there was no evidence they tried to cook the books, as critics had alleged.

Embarrassing errors were also found in a seminal 2007 report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was supposed to establish, beyond question, the scientific consensus. One passage in the 3,000-page report, for example, stated that massive glaciers in the Himalayas would vanish by 2035 — which isn’t true.

Such missteps revealed that the scientific establishment does not always function like a well-oiled machine and that climate science in the raw is a more contentious enterprise than the average academic news release might suggest. But the errors did not change the basic science behind the theory of anthropogenic, or human-caused, global warming.

That the planet has warmed is a fact hardly anyone disputes — it has been measured with instruments on land and sea and in space. That humans have contributed to the warming through industrial activities is a theory supported by multiple scientific organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA.

“Ultimately, we go back to physics. If you burn fossil fuel, you make CO2,” said Richard B. Alley, a geophysicist at Penn State University and author of “Earth: The Operator’s Manual.” “You can do this with bookkeeping. How much did we burn? How much CO2 does that make? Where is it? There it is.”

Isn’t it odd that none of the bad actions of those fighting taking action against climate change are mentioned or even alluded to. It’s as though proponents had this nasty business—which seems to have amounted to nothing—but the opponents are given carte blanche to do and say whatever they want, with no accountability.

I’m a progressive liberal, as you may have noticed, but of course I have my reasons. Satoshi Kanazawa is an evolutionary psychologist, and The Eldest pointed out this interesting article at Psychology Today:

It is difficult to define a whole school of political ideology precisely, but one may reasonably define liberalism (as opposed to conservatism) in the contemporary United States as the genuine concern for the welfare of genetically unrelated others and the willingness to contribute larger proportions of private resources for the welfare of such others. In the modern political and economic context, this willingness usually translates into paying higher proportions of individual incomes in taxes toward the government and its social welfare programs. Liberals usually support such social welfare programs and higher taxes to finance them, and conservatives usually oppose them.

Defined as such, liberalism is evolutionarily novel. Humans (like other species) are evolutionarily designed to be altruistic toward their genetic kin, their friends and allies, and members of their deme (a group of intermarrying individuals) or ethnic group. They are not designed to be altruistic toward an indefinite number of complete strangers whom they are not likely ever to meet or interact with. This is largely because our ancestors lived in a small band of 50-150 genetically related individuals, and large cities and nations with thousands and millions of people are themselves evolutionarily novel.

The examination of the 10-volume compendium The Encyclopedia of World Cultures, which describes all human cultures known to anthropology (more than 1,500) in great detail, as well as extensive primary ethnographies of traditional societies, reveals that liberalism as defined above is absent in these traditional cultures. While sharing of resources, especially food, is quite common and often mandatory among hunter-gatherer tribes, and while trade with neighboring tribes often takes place, there is no evidence that people in contemporary hunter-gatherer bands freely share resources with members of other tribes.

Because all members of a hunter-gatherer tribe are genetic kin or at the very least friends and allies for life, sharing resources among them does not qualify as an expression of liberalism as defined above. Given its absence in the contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes, which are often used as modern-day analogs of our ancestral life, it may be reasonable to infer that sharing of resources with total strangers that one has never met or is not likely ever to meet – that is, liberalism – was not part of our ancestral life. Liberalism may therefore be evolutionarily novel, and the Hypothesis would predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely than less intelligent individuals to espouse liberalism as a value.

Analyses of large representative samples, from both the United States and the United Kingdom, confirm this prediction. In both countries, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to be liberals than less intelligent children. For example, among the American sample, those who identify themselves as “very liberal” in early adulthood have a mean childhood IQ of 106.4, whereas those who identify themselves as “very conservative” in early adulthood have a mean childhood IQ of 94.8.

Continue reading. The article includes this graph of the data:

The Edwin Jagger was the boar brush of the day, and I love Klar Kabinett shaving soap: light rose fragrance, fulsome lather, great buy (1.1 lbs (0.5 kg) for $20). I got a very nice lather—brush still breaking in, though.

I haven’t used the Vision much since it froze up so badly I had to return it to Merkur. Something about that design needs some attention. But I got to thinking that if I don’t use it, there’s no point in having it, so I’ll just go for intense ultrasonic cleaning when I change blades. And it does deliver a very good shave: it’s somehow both massive and agile. I find it quite easy to manipulate—easier than the Futur, in fact, which is another heavy razor.

Three passes, swapping out one Swedish Gillette blade after the first pass for another that has seen light use.

I realized, thanks to a commenter, that I am woefully short of rose-fragranced aftershaves, so I just got the D.R. Harris Pink Aftershave, which seems to be a type of rosewater. It may have some alcohol content, but I would guess it’s relatively low. Still, a very nice splash, and they also make a balm, Pink Milk, that perhaps I shall someday try.

Very fine shave, and now to clean up for the cleaning ladies.

I believe that it’s important to list regularly to categories of music to which you’re not accustomed, and particularly to music beyond current popular hits. As you’ve observed, I like jazz quite a bit, but I also enjoy classical music from all ages: an incredible richness and variety.

This post at Lifehacker has some good tips on finding music that you’ll enjoy whose like you’ve not heard before. Don’t rush it: listen to enough so that you feel as though you have an understanding.

One problem with the article: the focus seems to be on short pieces rather than extensive, lengthy musical works (symphonies, chorales, operas, and the like), and I believe the direction he sends you would make it unlikely that you would stumble across, say, excellent chamber music and string quartets. But certainly the post gives a start.

The mention of chamber music brought vividly to mind a record club (12″ LPs, still relatively new—by the time I entered high school, LPs had been out for just 5 years, and stereo was still several years in the future) I joined in high school: the record envelopes were cloth covered on the front side, as I recall, and the records themselves were clear red vinyl: very spiffy indeed. The Chamber Music Society.

Here’s a piece of chamber music: each movement given its own video (a weird choice, in my opinion, but clearly tailored to the very short attention spans suffered by many these days): Schubert, Quartet in C, D 956:

1. Allegro non tropo

2. Adagio

3. Scherzo

4. Allegretto

The work is discussed here.

Woods of Windsor for both soap and aftershave. The Semogue 2000 boar brush worked up a good lather, though still not a Creamy Lather—I’m learning—and the Merkur Sledgehammer Slant Bar with a previously used Iridium Super blade performed quite well. I tried a couple of alum block experiments.

One was that I’ve read about using the alum block as a kind of resin bag to make your fingers more grippy—for holding the razor or for stretching wet (and thus slippery) skin. That works a treat. I used the alum block on my right fingers and that totally put an end to the razor’s tendency to twist (because of the weight combined with the spiral engraving combined with a wet hand): my hands locked on with a one-ton grip (or so it felt).

OTOH, the tip I had read about using the alum block in the polishing pass—to tighten the skin and thus raise the stubble: it did not work for me at all. The alum block made the skin grippy so the razor wouldn’t slide, and more lather didn’t help. So it goes.

Withal, a very nice shave and learning experience, with a good splash of Woods of Windsor to send me on my way.

Honeybee Soaps is back on the air! A great relief that her fine shaving soaps will continue to be available—but stock up while you can.

This morning I kick off the boar week with the Omega Pro 49 “Colors” brush. This one I’ve been using for a while, and I had no problem getting a very nice lather from Honeybee Soaps Floral Euphoria. Three easy passes with the Apollo Mikron holding a Swedish Gillette blade, and then a dab of Saint Charles Shave Aspect aftershave milk—very nice stuff.

Today I’ll begin daily Spanish study—beyond the daily vocabulary exercise via Anki, that is: working through the exercises in my text. (Today is the day that classes begin on campus, so I thought I’d use those sessions to time myself.)