Later On

The US may torture, but it does not apologize—or allow any compensation to innocent victims. Why? Because we can, and we don’t care a fig about world opinion. Here’s some of the story of Khaled El-Masri, kidnapped, imprisoned, and tortured for weeks because the CIA thought he was Khaled Al-Masri.

If you have seen the fine albeit disturing movie Brazil, you’ll recall the travails visited upon the protagonist due to an errant fly causing a typo on an official document. Somewhat the same scenario played for El-Masri—in fact, the more I think about it, the more the incident resembles the movie plot.

Here’s an article in Salon that quotes El-Masri:

On New Year’s Eve 2003, Khaled el-Masri, now 48, was seized at the border of Serbia and Macedonia by Macedonian police who mistakenly believed that he was traveling on a false German passport. (Reportedly, he was mistaken for a suspected terrorist with the name al-Masri.)

He was detained for over three weeks before being handed over to the CIA and rendered to Afghanistan. Shortly after Khaled’s release from Afghanistan, staff within both the CIA and the U.S. State Department reported the mistaken identity of their detainee to senior personnel, and German prosecutors issued arrest warrants for 13 CIA agents allegedly involved in Khaled’s abduction. However, cables disclosed by WikiLeaks reveal that United States officials heavily pressured Germany to abandon the case. A February 2007 cable quoted the deputy U.S. chief of mission in Berlin as advising a German diplomat to “weigh carefully at every step of the way the implications for relations with the United States” if the agents were prosecuted. The German government withdrew the warrants five months later. The CIA analyst who advocated Khaled’s abduction and argued against his release was reportedly later promoted to chief of the Global Jihad unit hunting al-Qaida members.

Currently incarcerated in Germany (on unrelated charges), Khaled has stopped speaking about his experiences. His narrative is drawn from sworn and published statements made in the past. The excerpt below describes Khaled’s arrest by Macedonian police and his subsequent detention in Skopje, Macedonia. Khaled was held in a hotel room in Skopje for 23 days before being transported by the CIA to Afghanistan.

I asked them if I was under arrest and they said that I wasn’t, asking me if I saw any handcuffs on my wrists. They carried out another search of all my belongings. After this, three of them began interrogating me again. These interrogations were conducted in English, despite the fact that I have only a very basic grasp of the language. The three men asked many questions all at once, speaking at me and firing questions from all sides of the room. The interrogation lasted until at least 3 a.m. the next morning.

The men conducted similar such interrogations for the next three days. They observed my every move at all times. Even when I went to the toilet they asked me to leave the door open, although it was located in the same room where I was staying. When I was exhausted and tired of answering their questions, and after having been locked in this hotel room all this time, I demanded a translator. Then I asked to call the German embassy, a lawyer and my family. All my requests were refused.

At one point I became so angry that I demanded to be released and attempted to leave the room by force. During this particular incident, we all raised our voices, each of us speaking in our own language. Communication was clearly impossible. One of the men pulled out his firearm and held it level with my head. The other two placed their hands on their holsters in a threatening manner.

*   *   *

The watch was divided between nine men; they changed shifts every six hours. On the fifth day, a man with a bag appeared. He had sheets of paper and fingerprint ink. He also had a camera and took a few photographs of me: right profile, left profile and then frontal.

After about seven days, . . .

Continue reading. The Obama Administration has worked hard—and succeeded—at blocking El-Masri at every turn from getting any sort of compensation at all for what was done to him by our government. He has not even been given an apology, nor will the Obama Administration even admit that an error was made. Apparently, the administration believes that it would be a sign of weakness to admit an error, so they are brazening it out on the position that what was done to him was done on purpose and for a good reason. They just won’t tell us what the reason was. But watch your back: you could be next. (There has been no punishment for anyone (other than El-Masri) for what was done, and Obama has personally pledged that he will see that no one is ever punished for torturing innocents or even murdering prisoners, so long as it was done under official guidance and orders. There seems to no longer be any such thing as an illegal order. This opens a door I would rather have been kept shut.)

Abraham famously had orders from God to kill someone—in that case, Isaac, his son. And Abraham was all set to do it, when God changed the orders and spared Isaac.

On one level this pretty much demonstrates that Abraham was schizophrenic: people who hear voices from God telling them to kill people are prima facie schizophrenic. It’s an identifying characteristic.

OTOH, assuming that God exists (and the story’s true), there’s no earthly reason (literally) that God should not select a schizophrenic to carry out His wishes. Indeed, God often selects marginalized people—Jeremiah, Isaiah, and numerous characters selected by God fit that description. And, in Christian tradition, God Himself appears as a marginalized character (Jesus): an impoverished carpenter from a backwater town with no official position or standing—and in addition preaching things that went against the grain of officialdom (for which, as you may recall, He suffered greatly). Indeed, in the Christian religion God Himself (in the person of Jesus) famously warns that the wealthy will have a Hell of a time (as it were) getting into heaven. (I note that most modern Christians—particularly on the Right, which is fond of wealth—avoid discussing this teaching.)

Let me just insert this:

The meaning I’ve taken from this story is not that God wanted to see whether Abraham has sufficient faith to kill his only son on God’s orders—any God worth His salt will already know that—but rather a way for God to demonstrate to Abraham the depth of Abraham’s own faith.

Be that as it may, the message people get to kill someone, which they attribute to God (Who may or may not have in fact issued the message—how can you tell?), is a fairly common trope. A recent book explores one instance of a reputedly God-directed killing:

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
by Jon Krakauer

A review by Doug Brown

On July 24, 1984, two fundamentalist Mormon brothers brutally murdered their sister-in-law and her baby girl, believing they were fulfilling a revelation that one of the brothers had received from God. Today they reside in federal prisons. The older brother, Ron (who had the revelation), is on death row and following every avenue for appeal. The younger brother, Dan, is serving a life sentence and seems okay with it (Krakauer says he refers to prison as a “monastery”). Krakauer spoke to Dan for the book, but not Ron. Under the Banner of Heaven tells in parallel the story of the Lafferty brothers and their descent into fundamentalism alongside the history of the Mormon Church.

The modern Mormon Church is quick to distance itself from fundamentalists; most are excommunicated from the Latter-Day Saint (LDS) community. The church downplays the history of plural marriage (polygamy) in Mormonism, to the point of maintaining that Brigham Young was monogamous (history says otherwise). Polygamy is a central point of contention with fundamentalists — they feel the church went astray when it cooperated with U.S. law and renounced the practice in the late 1800s. A practice that is still a part of the church, though, is revelation. Mormons are encouraged to listen for messages from God, and much of the basis of Mormon dogma is a sequence of revelations that Joseph Smith and later church leaders have had. One doctrine of Mormonism that has terrible consequences is “blood atonement”; if acts are committed against Mormons, Brigham Young said this could sometimes only be rectified if the “sinners have their blood spilt upon the ground.” Fundamentalists are naturally drawn to blood atonement, and this element of Mormonism became a focus for the Lafferty brothers.

A fundamental point of Ron’s trial was whether he was insane. The defense argued he was; the prosecution argued no. As Krakauer details, if Ron Lafferty is insane, it could be argued that so are most religious people. He believed he was receiving revelations from God, but revelation is a tenet of Mormonism. Despite carrying out horrible crimes, he felt he was doing the right thing, and was thus divorced from reality. But so is everyone who goes to war with a cross or a star or a crescent around their neck. Ron did what he did because of his faith. Sure, the motive seems self-serving — Brenda Lafferty (the victim) had convinced Ron’s abused wife to leave him, so naturally Ron said that God wanted her “removed.” But there was much discussion between the brothers and their circle about whether the “removal revelation” was legitimately from God; the final decision, for Ron and Dan anyway, was yes. This discussion is a particularly sore point for Brenda’s family — several people knew about the revelation months before it was carried out, and no one warned her. Krakauer maintains one of these people was Allen Lafferty, Brenda’s husband. Ron had shown him the revelation and asked what he thought of it. Allen spoke against it, but never felt inclined to say, “Hey, honey, I had the creepiest talk with my brothers…”

Even before Under the Banner of Heaven was on the shelves, the LDS church preemptively attacked it. In a five-page screed that is reprinted in an appendix for the paperback, Krakauer is taken to task for focusing on the negative aspects of the church. It emphasizes that the Lafferty brothers weren’t members of the LDS church, having been excommunicated. Krakauer responds to each of the charges. In a few cases, he acknowledges having gotten facts wrong in the initial release (which were subsequently corrected for the paperback edition). But, for the most part, he defends the points made in the book.

Events have happened in the history of Mormonism that the church would rather sweep under the rug, like the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre (detailed in the book). And while the Laffertys had been excommunicated from the LDS church, their beliefs were rooted in the church. They believed they were being better Mormons than the LDS church leaders. To me, that was an important take-away lesson of the book — religious fundamentalists don’t necessarily believe something completely different from the mainstream; they just interpret the same texts more inflexibly and believe in their interpretation more deeply. In the hands of fundamentalists, religious belief is by definition intolerant, and often used for brutal ends. Under the Banner of Heaven is a scary book about the dark fringe of extremist religion and believers who are willing to lethally impose their dogma.

The Man With Two Brains stars Steve Martin (as Dr. Michael Hfurhuhurr) and Kathleen Turner (as his second wife—he’s a widower—who switches from passionate to sociopathic once vows are exchanged). Not a bad movie—I especially like the scene in which he pleads, fruitlessly, for a sign from his dead wife as to whether he should marry Dolores (Turner’s character).

Of course, though we must make do with one brain, we do have two minds, more or less: the conscious and the unconscious. Sometimes they’re in step, sometimes they’re at cross-purposes, and sometimes they seem just a little disconnected.

I was emailing my sister that I seemed to be able to lose weight at a rate (tops) of 2 lbs/week with good compliance to sensible eating, though my actual rate in practice (with some unsensible eating) is more like 1.5 lbs/week. Still, I’m now being extra careful with my meals because I’m just 175.8 lbs and I want to get to 170.

She emailed back to say that was good, that I could reach my goal in 3 weeks.

“Three weeks?!!” I thought. “What the hell? I was sort of thinking by Thursday.” But then I realized: ~6 lbs to lose at 2 lbs/week = 3 weeks.

Clearly my conscious mind—analytic and good at math—”knew” that it would be three weeks, but this had not be communicated somehow to my unconscious mind, so my “gut feeling” (those hunches and feelings that are communiques from the unconscious, as when you “just know” something) was that it would take 5 or 6 days.

That explained why I would get so discouraged: the typical pattern is a plateau for x days, and then amazingly rapid loss for a day or two, then back to slow—averaging out, for me, to around 1.5-2 lbs/week. But my unconscious seemed to be paying attention mostly to the dramatic-change days—naturally enough, those are the days I especially note and enjoy—so it was still with the notion that I could drop pounds rapidly.

Now that I realize the discrepancy and have been back and forth over it, I find that my “gut feeling” is no longer that I’ll achieve goal by Thursday. Indeed, my weight the past three days: 175.8, 175.8, 175.7. And rather than frustrated, I am now feeling, “That’s fine. Progress. It’s going to take three weeks anyway, and a few more days of hovering between 175 and 176 and I’ll suddenly drop to 174 or 173 and hover there for a while. But by mid-October, I’ll hit my 170.”

Live and learn.

So long as we’re talking about minds and brains, I had a little insight last night. Yesterday’s Pilates session was particularly good: I still required almost constant correction, but now I can correct, and am able to quickly adjust. I still can’t quite feel when I’m out of proper form, but on being told what to do, I can make appropriate adjustments. Moreover, my breathing was quite good for the whole session: I was aware of it and could control it, but mostly it just happened, and without effort. And time passed differently: it neither dragged (look at the clock after I feel 20 minutes have passed and see that it’s only been 10) nor went by fast (the reverse). I felt that time was passing at exactly the right rate, so that I felt neither hurried nor that things were dragging along. I’m not sure what being in the moment entails, but I really did enjoy that session.

And the rest of the afternoon and evening, I seemed to move around much better: more controlled, more assured, more economically. Hard to characterize, as you see. And I noticed, as I thought about various things, that I seemed internally to perceive things a little differently, as if from a slightly greater distance or perspective—as if being at a slight elevation, giving me a broader field of view. Again, difficult to describe, but somehow new and different.

It occurs to me that the mind is intimately intertwined with the brain—the mind, near as I can tell, is emergent from the brain’s regular activities (controlling our muscles and bodies and monitoring internal and external stimuli). And it’s perfectly obvious that changes in the brain produce changes in the mind, most notably in brain injuries. One painful example is the personality changes suffered by those whose brains suffered trauma due to explosions, as from IEDs.

Similarly, one expects that new structures, synapses, and networks in the brain would result in some sort of changes to the mind, even if subtle. And changes in the brain’s wiring—new synapses, connections, and networks—regularly occur as we learn new physical skills: those changes are exactly how, for example, we can play fluently a piano piece that was once totally impossible. It takes time to learn the piece because it takes time for the brain to develop the new structures and connections required.

In the case of Pilates, the new connections concern the entire body and a great variety of movements and postures. In addition, Pilates works on specific muscle groups and through the various apparatus helps one locate, train, and control muscles that have been long neglected and over which we had lost conscious control.

With the changes in the brain that result, one would expect some sort of evidence of those changes in the mind. And they do seem to happen—slowly, over time, if one persists.

This shave goes out to Anthony Qaiyum of Smallflower, whom I promised I would use an Elite Razor this morning.

The lather today is from Al’s Shaving Products, another artisanal vendor I only recently discovered. I ordered some samples, and today tried the Palermo shaving cream:

Palermo is a decisively masculine scent that opens on a delightfully refreshing and unconventional assortment of grassy green and light sweet notes. As it develops, it gains depth and support from some bolder herbaceous greens, very light spices, and soft woods. The resulting structure is so delicate, buoyant, and charming that it’s almost impossible to resist.

I’d say that the description is accurate: I sniffed several of the sample shaving creams I got, and this was most appealing—unusual but highly pleasant. You should note that he also provides shaving creams with custom fragrances—a very nice idea.

I used a Vie-Long badger+horsehair chimera brush—a really fine brush, IMO, and perhaps a good way for a badger fan to segue into horsehair. The shaving cream was too stiff to adhere to the brush when I twirled it—the tiny container may be part of the reason—so I just smeared some on my cheek and started brushing.

Excellent lather, and I really do like the fragrance. It creates a very thick lather, even after I added more water to the brush. Not that I wanted to thin it, but I do want water on my beard, and this lather absorbed additional water without noticeably thinning.

Very smooth shave with a previously use Astra Superior Platinum blade. The Elite razor—white quartz with gold lacings on a Merkur frame—did a fine job. The Merkur Classic head that he uses is good, and the weight of the razor with the stone handle was quite nice and made for smooth cutting.

A splash of Royall Vetiver, and I’m ready for Saturday.

Take a look.

This recipe sounds terrific. The ingredients:

1/2 standard-sized baguette, torn into 1-inch pieces
2 cups ice water, divided
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cups blanched almonds (reserve a few to garnish finished soup)
2 medium-sized cucumbers, peeled and roughly chopped
2 cups green grapes
1 tablespoon sherry vinegar, or to taste
1/3 cup mild extra-virgin olive oil
chopped green onions (for garnish)

Fascinating story in the NY Times about corruption in the NYPD, including infiltration of the Internal Affairs Unit. An interesting note to the story is this throwaway: “Internal Affairs, a unit that is still reviled in the department because of its focus on fellow officers.”

The police believe that they should have untrammeled powers and be able to do what they please with no investigation or punishment. They will protect each other. Those police with this view are simply an armed gang that wear uniforms. The idea that they should be free from investigation, when there’s a lengthy track record of misdeeds and corruption, is breathtaking.

We need a completely independent unit that will focus only on the police force, but be outside its reach. Until then.. well, read the story.

The NYPD does, however, seem to be much more disciplined and professional on the whole than the LAPD, and certainly than the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. Check out the story at the link.

Full disclosure: I do not color my hair, and some gray is visible in certain lighting situations.

This article in the SF Examiner by Samantha Smithstein explores the issue and has some surprising findings:

Going gray: it happens to all of us.  As we age (as dictated by our genetics), we stop producing pigmentation in our hair and what used to be blond, brown, red, black, or some combination, turns white, sliver, or gray.  It’s a challenge to figure out exactly how many women color their hair to cover that gray – but if you look around at all of the women you know who are ages 40 and above, you can get a pretty clear sense that it is more common than not.

Why do women color their hair?  The most common reason is that they don’t think having gray hair is attractive… but why is that?  Most would say it’s because gray hair is associated with aging, and aging in the US is considered to be unattractive.  Additionally, it has become so common for women to dye their hair that women with gray hair are considered to be unconventional or even counter-culture.  Women into their 80s and 90s color their hair more often than not.

Anne Kremer, author of Going Gray, writes that “most baby-boomer women have held on to the hedonistic forever-young part of their Woodstock dreams a lot more tenaciously than to the open-and-honest part.  And in doing so, they have presided over a narrowing of the range of acceptable looks for women.”  However, when she decided to let her hair go to its natural gray at the age of 48, she researched just how much having gray hair actually affected her attractiveness or her appearance of age.  When she posted her profile on a conventional dating site, she discovered that the profile of herself as a natural gray received three times more responses than the profile of herself with colored hair.  Furthermore, when she created a large-scale survey asking people to estimate the age of men and women, some with gray hair and some with not, people estimated those with gray hair to be only 2 years older than their actual age.  So does gray hair actually effect attractiveness or how old a person looks?

There has been, over the past few years, a slow but steady movement towards women allowing their hair to change naturally.  The website Going Gray, Looking Great boasts 200,000 page views a month by visitors from 126 countries, and has a photo gallery of models, politicians, actresses, singers, and professionals who are all naturally gray.  The San Francisco Chronicle ran an article recently about a local newscaster, Dana King, who had decided stop coloring her hair after covering a story about postmenopausal women in Ghana and feeling she was contributing to our society’s negative views about aging.

That same article, however, ends on a negative note. . .

Continue reading.

I recently published a link to three books by men who elected to live utterly alone, like Robinson Crusoe in the pre-Friday era. Though that lifestyle has a romantic appeal, it is lonely (we are a social animal) and it is dangerous (an illness or accident that would be no big deal in town can be fatal if you’re alone in the wilderness).

Indeed, I believe that one of the great benefits of living in society is that we can help each other, both directly (“Need a hand?”) and indirectly (I can purchase with little money items that I could never dream of making on my own—delivered to me by hordes of dispersed people working in diverse specialties, their pooled knowledge and effort embodied in, for example, the razor I used this morning.

Helping one another is the hallmark of civilized societies. We’re losing that, as Paul Krugman points out in his NY Times column today:

This week President Obama said the obvious: that wealthy Americans, many of whom pay remarkably little in taxes, should bear part of the cost of reducing the long-run budget deficit. And Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan responded with shrieks of “class warfare.”

It was, of course, nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it’s people like Mr. Ryan, who want to exempt the very rich from bearing any of the burden of making our finances sustainable, who are waging class war.

As background, it helps to know what has been happening to incomes over the past three decades. Detailed estimates from the Congressional Budget Office — which only go up to 2005, but the basic picture surely hasn’t changed — show that between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income of families in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. That’s growth, but it’s slow, especially compared with the 100 percent rise in median income over a generation after World War II.

Meanwhile, over the same period, the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. No, that isn’t a misprint. In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million.

So do the wealthy look to you like the victims of class warfare?

To be fair, there is argument about the extent to which government policy was responsible for the spectacular disparity in income growth. What we know for sure, however, is that policy has consistently tilted to the advantage of the wealthy as opposed to the middle class.

Some of the most important aspects of that tilt involved such things as the sustained attack on organized labor and financial deregulation, which created huge fortunes even as it paved the way for economic disaster. For today, however, let’s focus just on taxes.

The budget office’s numbers show that the federal tax burden has fallen for all income classes, which itself runs counter to the rhetoric you hear from the usual suspects. But that burden has fallen much more, as a percentage of income, for the wealthy. Partly this reflects big cuts in top income tax rates, but, beyond that, there has been a major shift of taxation away from wealth and toward work: tax rates on corporate profits, capital gains and dividends have all fallen, while the payroll tax — the main tax paid by most workers — has gone up.

And one consequence of the shift of taxation away from wealth and toward work is . . .

Continue reading. I would say our social contract is the US is fraying and headed toward failure, due primarily to vigorous work on the part of the GOP and its supporters. Here’s an example. Here’s another, about how serious work is being done to keep citizens from voting. This activity seems aimed at destroying the country and the principles it has until recently embraced, even if merely in lip service. That’s fading fast.

The name is from Kit ‘n’ Caboodle. Take a look, it will make you feel good. That feeling is important, I think, especially nowadays.

The Liberal Democrats seem to be taking a fresh look at the rationality and effectiveness of current drug laws and thinking of substantial improvements:

Members of Britain’s Liberal Democratic Party overwhelmingly adopted a resolution Sunday supporting the decriminalization of drug possession and the regulated distribution of marijuana and calling for an “impact assessment” of the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act that would provide a venue for considering decriminalization and controlled marijuana sales.

The resolution calls for an independent panel “to properly evaluate, economically and scientifically, the present legal framework for dealing with drugs in the United Kingdom.” Citing the Portuguese decriminalization model, the resolution called for consideration of reforms so that “possession of any controlled drug for personal use would not be a criminal offense” or that “possession would be prohibited but should cause police officers to issue citations for individuals to appear before panels tasked with determining appropriate education, health or social interventions.”

The resolution also calls for the review to consider “alternative, potential frameworks for a strictly controlled and regulated cannabis market and the potential impacts of such regulation on organized crime, and the health and safety of the public, especially children.”

The resolution includes a call for “widespread provision of the highest quality evidence-based medical, psychological and social services for those affected by drugs problems,” including the widespread use of heroin maintenance clinics for hard-core addicts.

The resolution also offers support for the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), whose scientific integrity has been under attack first by the former Labor government, which resulted in a number of high profile resignations, and then by the Conservatives, who have put forth a plan to no longer require a certain number of scientists to sit on the council. The council should “retain a majority of independent scientific and social scientific experts in its membership,” and no changes to the drug laws should take place without its advice, the resolution said.

The Liberal Democrats are the junior partner in Britain’s coalition government, having brokered a deal with Conservatives after the last parliamentary elections. The resolution will put the party in conflict with the Conservatives, who are opposed to any liberalization of Britain’s drug laws.

It also puts them at odds with Labor, which after a brief dalliance with downgrading marijuana offenses in 2004, overrode the advice of the ACMD to restore the old, harsher penalties the following year. The Liberal Democrats can continue to boast of having the most progressive drug policy position of any of Britain’s major parties. . .

Continue reading. Chances of a rational approach in the US: zero, I would say.

Starting your own business is the prototypical American dream, along with homesteading the wilderness. Kickstarter is a clever way for crowd-sourcing the financing for start-ups. Full disclosure: I have contributed to at least two start-ups via Kickstarter. Steven Kurutz describes Kickstarter and its work in an article in the NY Times:

PAULA PATTERSON was back in her studio the other night, where she has spent nearly every weeknight and too many weekends to admit since January. From her day job as a graphic designer at an executive search firm in Midtown, she takes the subway and the fickle B61 bus to Brooklyn (“I don’t know why they print a schedule,” she said). That leaves her about two hours to build another V-Luxe, the iPad stand she designed as a birthday gift for her boyfriend last summer and soon after decided to market online.

“If there’s one thing I failed to estimate, it was the time this project would take,” said Ms. Patterson, 41, looking exhausted but also relieved, because the last of the V-Luxes were boxed up on her work table, ready to ship.

The recipients were backers Ms. Patterson found last fall, through the Web site Kickstarter. For pledging at least $500 toward her $5,000 financing goal, they are entitled to a finished V-Luxe, which stands about 18 inches high, is made of three species of wood and looks a little like a classic Philco Predicta TV from the 1950s.

In turning to Kickstarter to finance the V-Luxe, Ms. Patterson is among a growing number of designers who are using the site to get their sketch pad ideas into production, through crowd-sourced financing. Scan Kickstarter’s design category, and there are dozens of projects in search of backing, from screen-printed glassware billed as “awesome glasses for awesome people” to a sustainable house intended for use in developing countries.

Of the various projects the site features, including film, books, musical recordings, fine art and, recently, a piano duet performance inspired by the punctuation in a work by J. D. Salinger, film remains the top category in terms of the amount of money raised since the site was started two and a half years ago. But at least half the site’s “blockbuster” projects — those that have received $100,000 or more in financing — have been design-related, said Yancey Strickler, one of Kickstarter’s founders.

In the current economy, that’s the kind of opportunity that designers, particularly those starting out, may have a hard time finding elsewhere.

“It’s been so gratifying,” said Ms. Patterson, who received a Ph.D. in architecture from the University of Washington in 2009, but has yet to find work as an architect. “Especially with this job market, when you’re a designer and your field barely has a pulse.” She used the roughly $5,900 she raised on Kickstarter, she said, to pay the rent on her studio in Red Hook, and to buy tools and materials.

More established designers are also finding the site helpful. Mr. Strickler said many of the designers who use Kickstarter are midlevel employees at design firms. “They have things they want to do,” he said, “but there’s no outlet in their job.”

Take the example of Tom Gerhardt and Dan Provost. Both men had degrees in environmental design and were working at design firms in Manhattan when they came up with the idea for the Glif, a plastic tripod mount and stand for the iPhone 4. They raised more than $137,000 on Kickstarter last fall, partnered with a factory in South Dakota and now sell the Glif for $20 on their Web site.

By April, Mr. Gerhardt and Mr. Provost, who are both 27, were successful enough to quit their day jobs and start their own design firm, Studio Neat. That was around the time they introduced their second Kickstarter project — a stylus for the iPad they call the Cosmonaut— for which they raised about $134,000.

They could have used Quirky.com, a social product development site that accepts ideas from inventors, handles the manufacturing and then pays them a royalty. But “for us, Kickstarter was the only option,” Mr. Gerhardt said. “A big thing was having control over the project.”

Scott Wilson already owned his own design firm, and before that had spent six years as global creative director for Nike, when he used Kickstarter to finance the TikTok, a wristband that turns an iPod Nano into a watch.

The campaign, which raised nearly a million dollars last year, was the most successful Kickstarter project to date. And “the single most amazing free P.R. in the history of design firms,” said Mr. Wilson, 42, who runs a Chicago firm called Minimal.

When his project received $80,000 in financing the first day, he said, “the visibility gave everyone in the supply chain confidence” and enabled him to get preferential treatment from his manufacturer.

It also inspired other designers. Dario Antonioni, who runs Orange22, a design consultancy in Los Angeles, said he decided to try Kickstarter after seeing Mr. Wilson’s success, which sent “shock waves” through the design community, empowering designers.

Mr. Antonioni, 38, turned to Kickstarter in July to finance the Botanist Minimal bench, a bentwood seat he designed. In the past, he said, his firm would have risked its own money, hired a manufacturer and hoped for enough retailer and consumer interest to turn a profit, or at least break even.

“The beauty of Kickstarter is it does away with that whole model,” he said.

The appeal for backers, particularly those who finance design projects, is what they get in return: a gift like a T-shirt for smaller contributions, and for larger ones, a well-designed product at a substantial savings. Mr. Antonioni’s backers, for example, could get the Botanist bench by pledging $299; it will eventually retail for around $800, he said. . .

Continue reading.

Imprisoning people for little or no reason—certainly no reason that would stand up in court, so great efforts must be made to keep the matter out of the courts—has serious effects. Most obvious are the effects on the prisoner (an entire TV series was devoted to a man mysteriously imprisoned who was never really given a reason—The Prisoner—and I wonder whether one day a TV series will be based on how enthusiastically the US has embraced imprisonment without due process or any recourse.

Take a look at this column, which begins:

The story of Jose Padilla, continuing through the events of yesterday, expresses so much of the true nature of the War on Terror and especially America’s justice system.  In 2002, the American citizen was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, publicly labeled by John Ashcroft as The Dirty Bomber, and then imprisoned for the next three years on U.S. soil as an “enemy combatant” without charges of any kind, and denied all contact with the outside world, including even a lawyer.  During his lawless incarceration, he was kept not just in extreme solitary confinement but extreme sensory deprivation as well, and was abused and tortured to the point of severe and probably permanent mental incapacity (Bush lawyers told a court that they were unable to produce videos of Padilla’s interrogations because those videos were mysteriously and tragically “lost”).

Needless to say, none of the government officials responsible for this abuse of a U.S. citizen on American soil has been held accountable in any way.  That’s because President Obama decreed that Bush officials shall not be criminally investigated for War on Terror crimes, while his Justice Department vigorously defended John Yoo, Donald Rumsfeld and other responsible functionaries in civil suits brought by Padilla seeking damages for what was done to him.

As usual, the Obama DOJ cited national security imperatives and sweeping theories of presidential power to demand that Executive Branch officials be fully shielded from judicial scrutiny (i.e., shielded from the rule of law) for their illegal acts (the Obama DOJ: ”Here, where Padilla’s damage claimsdirectly relate, inter alia, to the President’s war powers, including whether and when a person captured in this country during an armed conflict can be held in military detention under the laws of war, it would be particularly inappropriate for this Court to unnecessarily reach the merits of the constitutional claims” (emphasis added)).  With one rare exception, federal courts, as usual, meekly complied.  Thus, a full-scale shield of immunity has been constructed around the high-level government officials who put Padilla in a hermetically sealed cage with no charges and then abused and tortured him for years.

The treatment Padilla has received in the justice system is, needless to say, the polar opposite of that enjoyed by these political elites.  Literally days before it was required to justify to the U.S. Supreme Court how it could imprison an American citizen for years without charges or access to a lawyer, the Bush administration suddenly indicted Padilla — on charges unrelated to, and far less serious than, the accusation that he was A Dirty Bomber — and then successfully convinced the Supreme Court to refuse to decide the legality of Padilla’s imprisonment on the grounds of “mootness” (he’s no longer being held without charges so there’s nothing to decide).

At Padilla’s trial, the judge excluded all evidence of the abuse to which he was subjected and even admitted statements he made while in custody before he was Mirandized.  Unsurprisingly, Padilla was convicted on charges of “supporting Islamic terrorism overseas” – but not any actual Terrorist plots (“The government’s chief evidence was an application form that government prosecutors said Mr. Padilla, 36, filled out to attend an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in 2000″) – and then sentenced to 17 years in prison, all above and beyond the five years he was imprisoned with no due process.

Not content with what was done to Padilla, the Bush DOJ – and then the Obama DOJ – contested the sentence on appeal, insisting that it was too lenient; Padilla also appealed, arguing that the trial court made numerous errors in excluding his evidence while allowing the Government’s.  Yesterday, a federal appeals panel of the 11th Circuit issued a ruling, by a 2-1 vote, rejecting each and every one of Padilla’s arguments.  It then took the very unusual step of vacating the 17-year-sentence imposed by the trial court as too lenient and, in effect, ordered the trial judge to impose a substantially harsher prison term: . . .

Continue reading. The US is not the nation it once was.

The US loves to lock people up. The US has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world, and the growing gulag of prisons in foreign lands (so we can lock people up without having to worry about laws and rights) is another sign of the basic US attitude toward freedom and liberty.

Of course, it’s a self-licking ice-cream cone: we build the prisons and abuse the prisoners, which results in more people rebelling against the US presence in the country, which leads to the US killing or capturing and imprisoning more of the people, resulting in even greater anger, rinse and repeat until you have terrorists attacking on American soil, which provides an excuse to crack down on liberties and freedoms here—and build more prisons. Growth has been greatly stimulated by turning over prisons and security to private industry, an increasing trend. Private industry must grow profits, and if their profits come from imprisoning people, a lot of highly paid people with excellent contacts and money to distribute will spend all their waking hours figuring out how to imprison more people: three-strikes laws, mandatory minimum sentences, minimize paroles, keep prisons and prisoners secret so there will be less pressure to reduce prisons and prison populations, and so on: all the things we actually see happening.

Take a close look at our new Bagram prison.

Today I used another artisanal shave cream: a Lavender shaving cream from Em’s Place. The packaging she uses—the pump bottle—seems a natural to me for shower shavers, and it works quite well: pump a little cream into the brush and lather away.

A word about the fragrance: certain shaving soap/cream fragrances are to redolent of luxury, perhaps because of their association with traditional top-of-the-line English shaving soaps: lavender and rose, primarily, but also violet and sandalwood. Lime and almond, perhaps. But the first four, definitely. And the lavender fragrance of this shaving cream is terrific. It envelopes you securely for the entire shave. You should give her shaving cream a go, particularly if you’re a shower shaver. Fragrances available:

Unscented
Balancing
Bay Rum
Lavender
Lime Citrus
Minty Menthol
Outdoors
Skindicinal
Strengthening
Woodstock

Explanations of the fragrances found here (scroll down).

The Vie-Long horsehair brush I used this morning is one of the most attractive, but it doesn’t quite do as good a job on soaps as some of the others. OTOH, it did a fine job this morning with the shaving cream. I’ll try to use it in comparison with other horsehair brushes. (The similar model is boar and horsehair is a favorite brush.)

Three passes with a new Kai blade in the Edwin Jagger DE87 and I emerge with a perfectly smooth face. A swipe of the alum bar after the final rinse, and I put away the stuff—cleaning out the brush, BTW: I just read recently of a guy who never washed the lather out of his brush after the shave. It was only a Tweezerman, and it didn’t last the year. (Guys who regularly go out for a day’s shooting and put their gun away without cleaning it: same mindset, same result: equipment terminally damaged.)

Lather is slightly acidic and should be thoroughly rinsed out of the brush before the brush is left out to dry: rinse thoroughly with hot tap water and then, when all lather’s gone, rinse with cold water, shake, and set out to dry.

Once my kit was put away, a final rinse to rid my face of alum, dry, and a splash of 4711, a classic old-time fragrance.

BTW, I just took another thorough look at RoyalShave.com, a vendor about whom I know nothing: I discovered them one day, they had the usual shaving stuff, and I added them to the list. Today I went to the site and explored some. Man, have they added a lot of stuff. Quite a selection. Take a look.

Definitely a Cool Tool.

So my laptop suddenly warned me that the battery was about to expire—but it was plugged in! And then I noticed the little light on the power plug at the computer was not lit. I took the computer with power cord to a few different outlets: no light on any.

So it’s either the computer or the cord. I suspect the cord, but… So I go to the Apple store to seek help (and a new power cord, probably). The guy at the door wants to sign me up for a Genius Bar appointment in three hours, expecting that I will be happy to drive home, wait, and drive back.

I suggest that we just take a quick look to see if the problem’s the computer or the cord. Although I could tell he didn’t like the idea, I took one of the power cords on a display computer (they’re attached magnetically) and attached it my computer: the little light lit at once.

“It’s not the computer, it’s the power unit,” I said, showing him the light.

I wanted just to swap for a new power unit, but they refused to do that. Although the power unit is covered under warranty (I got the computer only a few months ago), and although the power unit is obviously bad and the replacement is there, and my customer file is readily available—No. Absolute refusal. I must talk to a technician. Or I could just buy the power adapter. $80.00.

So now I must wait (I’m writing this on my desktop) and return in  a couple hours. Custoner service, Apple style. I suppose it’s better than customer service, IBM style.

Still, I suppose it does give the store employees some satisfaction to force customers to follow their rules, especially when the rule is senseless. Power over others: the TSA runs on that.

The military has not in general done justice well. The usual response is to focus on enlisted personnel, using them as scapegoats in order that no officers suffer any punishment beyond mild administrative actions and those limited to lieutenants. Michael Doyle and Marisa Taylor report for McClatchy:

Six years ago, Congress tried cracking down on rape in the military. Prompted by disturbing reports of sexual assaults in military academies and war zones, lawmakers rewrote the rules. They wanted to protect victims and help prosecutors.

Now it’s clear that the effort backfired.

The politically attractive but poorly understood legal changes have incited courtroom confusion, judicial frustration and constitutional conflict. Extensive interviews and a McClatchy review of thousands of pages of court documents and internal studies find a congressionally caused crisis of military justice that few civilians know anything about.

The rewritten sexual assault law puts judges “in an impossible position,” the top military appellate court warned. Military lawyers find it “cumbersome and confusing,” a Pentagon task force noted. It leads to “unwarranted acquittals,” Defense Department officials added. And some judges call it unconstitutional.

“The law is an abomination as it is now written,” said Charles Gittins, a former military judge advocate who’s now a defense attorney.

Individual military judges likewise assail the new law. One, Marine Corps Lt. Col. Raymond Beal II, called it “horribly flawed.” Another, J.A. Maksym of the U.S. Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals, blasted it as “poorly written, confusing and arguably absurd.” Yet another, Air Force Col. Don Christensen, called it “almost incomprehensible.”

“If you had 100 monkeys with a typewriter, they’d probably come up with something like this,” Christensen declared during a 2009 aggravated sexual assault case.

A Senate bill introduced in June and proposed by the Defense Department tries to fix the problems that the earlier congressional action created. The bill is pending.

The present law now under fire has particularly complicated trials that involve intoxicated victims and those who say they’ve been assaulted by acquaintances, two common allegations in the military. The confusion about the law can lead to injustice.

Consider the case of a former Air Force enlisted man stationed at California’s Travis Air Force Base.

Stephen Prather, 23, had been accused of aggravated sexual assault by an intoxicated guest of a party that Prather and his wife threw in October 2007.

Prather said he and the guest had engaged in consensual sex. The woman, though, testified that she fell asleep and woke briefly to find Prather on top of her. When she awoke again, she said, she found semen on her underwear.

Prather had raised the woman’s alleged consent as a defense. Prosecutors countered that the woman, whom court documents didn’t identify, was too intoxicated to give consent.

The problem was that the rewritten law had shifted the burden of proof involving consent, appeals court judges concluded. Prather, as the defendant, had the burden to prove that the alleged victim was capable of consenting. Under the Constitution, though, it’s the prosecution that’s supposed to shoulder the burden of proof.

This “results in an unconstitutional burden shift to the accused,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces said of the new law in its February 2011 decision dismissing Prather’s conviction. . .

Continue reading.

Megs was lolling about the floor last night:

Good progress on my type 2 diabetes: my fasting blood glucose level was 87 (wow! It’s been years since it was below 100. It used to be regularly around 90-95); my HbA1c was 5.3%; and I officially no longer have to do blood-glucose readings. (I haven’t been, but the doc said this time that I could discontinue those.)

175.8 lbs this morning. Still want to get down to 170.