Later On

Some things I just don’t think I’ll get used to. I really liked the looks of the recipe to which I linked earlier today—the Vietnamese stir-fry of beef and sweet potatoes—except that I just couldn’t get my head around serving potatoes on rice. I wanted to comment, but in order to leave a comment, I had to click “Accept” to this request:

Somehow the notion that I must provide my profile picture (presumably so they can determine race), gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, and any other information from Facebook simply in order to comment strikes me as excessive. Obviously this is the trend, so obviously I will be offering fewer and fewer comments. (I also tend to avoid Facebook because I have no idea what information the site collects nor what it does with that information.)

Brave new world.

This story is just breaking, and this report by Brian Bennett appears in the LA Times:

An elaborate Iranian-backed plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States was disrupted by FBI and DEA agents, officials said Tuesday.

Members of an elite Iranian security force planned to detonate a bomb at a busy Washington restaurant, killing Adel Al-Jubeir, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S. and possibly over 100 bystanders, according to documents filed in New York federal court.

The State Department has listed Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism since 1984.

The current plot was infiltrated by a Drug Enforcement Agency informant posing as a member of a Mexican drug cartel, officials said. The plotters planned to pay a member of the Zetas cartel $1.5 million to carry out the attack, and two advance payments of nearly $50,000 each were wired to an FBI-controlled bank account in August, they said.

An Iranian American, Manssor Arbabsiar, 56, has been arrested in the case. An Iran-based member of the secret Quds Force unit of that country’s Revolutionary Guard, Gholam Shakuri, was also charged but is not in custody, officials said. . .

Continue reading. And here’s the NY Times story.

I resisted doing a Kindle edition for a few years, despite getting occasional requests, but I finally caved. My fear was how photos would work with the Kindle. But now I’ve had the book converted, and this guide for the novice wetshaver is now available in two formats:

Printed version at $12.95, but discounted by Amazon to $9.25.
Kindle version at $8.99.

The Kindle version is also listed at Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, and Amazon.fr, though the price in the UK is not yet shown. Amazon.ca will not have the Kindle version, but I’m told that Canadians can simply buy it through Amazon.com and it will be delivered via the 3G system. (If any Canadians try this, I’d be interested to know whether it actually works.)

UPDATE: I was reminded that a free Kindle reader is available for iPad, iPhone, Android phones, computers (for those who still use the older technologies, such as us wetshavers), and the like. The app includes the ability to retrieve the books so getting the files happens automatically. This is all so weird…

UPDATE 2: I just heard from a guy in Australia who bought the book (from Amazon.com) last night. I had no idea that people in Australia will now have access. That’s very cool—and I’m pleased that my vendor list includes a number of Australian vendors.

That’s for pharmaceutical drug dealers, of course, those that were pushing “hillbilly heroin” (Oxycodone). The DEA seems to have badly messed-up priorities. The story by Guy Taylor in Salon begins:

An epidemic of Oxycodone abuse has struck America in the last decade. The number of emergency room visits stemming from non-medical abuse of the narcotic prescription painkiller drug rose by 256 percent between 2004 and 2009, according to the U.S. government’s Drug Abuse Warning Network.

In March 2010, Washington state Attorney General Rob McKenna said his state was “losing more people to prescription drug overdoses in a typical year than to traffic accidents.” In Florida, the Medical Examiners commission found more than 1,500 people died of Oxycodone overdose  in 2010, a four-fold increase over the 350 who died in 2005. The supply of Oxycodone, says Jim Hall, director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Substance Abuse at Nova Southeastern University, went “far beyond the legitimate medical need of the state.”

The epidemic is not likely to abate soon. The explosion of pain management clinics in Florida, dubbed “pill mills,” prompted the state Legislature last year to close a loophole that had allowed physicians to fill Oxy prescriptions on the spot. Authorities say a half-billion doses of Oxycodone and its generic equivalents were distributed in the state during 2009 alone. An unknown number wound up in the hands of “patients” who had come from out of state to have prescriptions filled by multiple pill mills, before driving home to resell the pills on the black market.

The scope of damage wrought by Oxycodone’s oversupply in Florida is felt nationwide. In Maine, an official from the state’s Office of Substance Abuse sent me an internal spreadsheet showing that more than 4 million prescription painkiller pills had been legally prescribed by state physicians in 2010, five times the amount legally dispensed in 2006. Officials in Ohio went one step further, identifying the per capita amount of opioids being prescribed county-by-county. Jackson County, in the southern part of the state, won the alarming distinction of having more than 130 doses for every resident in 2010. The number of pills prescribed in Ohio has risen by 900 percent since 1997, a powerful indicator that the market for pills has become oversaturated.

“There’s just no way that there’s been a 900 percent increase in pain,” says Stacey Frohnapfel-Hasson, chief of communications for Ohio’s Department of Alcohol and Drug Addiction Services.

A 1,200 percent increase

One of the most disturbing things about the prescription pain pill abuse epidemic is that it could have been avoided, or at least mitigated, if the DEA had fulfilled the responsibilities vested in it under federal law.

That’s the view of Gene Haislip, who, until his retirement in 1997, spent 17 years as the head of a one of the least-publicized law enforcement entities in Washington: the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Office of Diversion Control.

“For those of us who devoted our careers to the DEA and drug enforcement, we really love the agency, but you can’t love them when they screw up,” Haislip told Salon. “You’ve got to have some kind of principles.”

It’s well known that narcotic prescription drugs sold in the United States must first be approved by U.S. Food and Drug Administration before they can be legally mass produced and marketed. Less known is the fact that the DEA – and specifically, the Office of Diversion Control – then has the power and responsibility to decide how much of a particular drug can be legally manufactured and sent to market each year.

The pharmaceutical companies that make Oxycodone and its two dozen generic equivalents — such as Endocodone, Oxyfast and Percocet — are required by law to present an annual application to the Office of Diversion Control seeking approval for a quota of the drug’s annual production. Should a company desire to manufacture more than the previous year, it must request an increase — and the DEA must approve.

The DEA declined to respond to my request for the names of the companies that have been granted the biggest manufacturing quota increases in recent years. But information gleaned from the agency’s website, combined with statistics provided by Haislip, show the aggregate increase granted to all companies making the potent painkiller has been staggering.

In 1997, a year after prescription drugmaker Purdue Pharma first brought Oxycontin (the first branded version of Oxycodone) to market, the total production quota approved by the Office of Diversion Control was 8.3 tons. By 2011, it had risen to 105 tons, an officially sanctioned 1,200 percent increase over the same period that saw Oxycodone emerge as what Haislip calls “the Cadillac of America’s prescription drug abuse crisis.”

That the DEA allowed for the increases in the face of widespread illegal and non-medical use shows a ”serious lack of accountability and oversight,” says Haislip.

“The DEA is the lone federal agency with the power to decide how much of the drug gets made and put out there; it alone has had all the responsibility to do something about this problem,” he said. “The way I did it for 17 years, which was basically the way it had always been done even before the DEA was the DEA, is that when a significant diversion problem occurred, the quota increase requests would come under greater scrutiny.”

“With Oxy,” said Haislip, “there has been a significant diversion problem since the late 1990s, so the requests should have come under greater scrutiny.” That apparently didn’t happen, he says.

What’s particularly disturbing, Haislip asserts, is that the DEA has failed to . . .

Continue reading. We spend a lot of money on the DEA, which seems to be ineffective and obtuse. This, from later in the same article, might explain why:

. . . The drug companies also benefit from a proverbial “revolving door” between government and special interests. West Virginia’s lawsuit was resolved in 2004 when Purdue Pharma agreed to pay $10 million over four years into drug abuse and education programs in the state. The settlement was negotiated on Purdue Pharma’s behalf by Eric Holder Jr., then a private attorney, who five years later became the chief of the Justice Department, which oversees DEA.

There is also a revolving door between the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control, and the pharmaceutical industry. For example, Mark W. Caverly served as chief of the Liaison and Policy Section within the Office of Diversion Control at DEA until early this year. It was his job to work with DEA-regulated industries and associations, providing interpretations of federal law and regulations to congressional staff, DEA registrants and the general public. In May, Cegedim Relationship Management, a consulting firm based in New Jersey and owned by a French multinational, announced it had hired Caverly.The firm specializes in facilitating “compliance” with DEA regulations.

Cegedim’s chief compliance officer, Ron W. Buzzeo, is himself a DEA retiree who served as a deputy director of the Office of Diversion Control from 1982 through 1990. In an interview, Buzzeo dismissed the suggestion that there might be a conflict of interest. “To help somebody meet the regulatory requirements? Why would that be a conflict of interest? I don’t understand the question,” he said. . . .

A NY Times editorial today offered some praise for a tiny step toward Senate reform:

Democrats scored a small but significant victory for the cause of progress in the Senate late last week when they voted to prohibit one of the many delaying tactics that keep the chamber tied up in pointless partisan arguments. It was a long way from desperately needed filibuster reform, but it showed that sufficiently frustrated senators can take action to prevent the Senate from being a total dead weight.

Unlike the House, the Senate has long safeguarded the rights of its minority party to prevent a simple majority from swiftly bulldozing bills into law. Any senator has the right to prolong debate on an issue, unless 60 senators vote to cut off a filibuster, a move known as cloture. Then there is a limit to the amendments that can be introduced.

On Thursday, Republicans tried to get around that limit with a multitude of “motions to suspend the rules,” which violate the concept of cloture and could keep debate going even after a supermajority votes to move on. Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, decided that he had had enough andprompted a majority to vote to end this practice. It will now be out of order to try to suspend the rules once 60 senators have voted to end debate.

Any change that chips away at the gridlock in the Senate should be encouraged. Over the last three or four years, Senate Republicans have made a mockery of the minority party’s protections, routinely filibustering virtually every bill, blocking nominations and spending hours on political stunts designed to stymie and embarrass President Obama and the Democrats.

They are doing this with far greater frequency than Democrats did when they were in the minority, helping to explain why Congress has the lowest approval ratings ever measured. (Democrats had a chance to cut filibuster abuse earlier this year but were too timid to seize it.)

The wheel-spinning on Thursday was typical. The Senate was considering a bill to . . .

Continue reading.

The FBI has a dynamite reputation for breaking up terrorist plots they instigated and pushed along, but perhaps in solving actual crimes they are not quite so splendid. The problems with their case against Ivins continue to mount, and I am totally unpersuaded by the prosecutors’ statements that, sure, they would have convinced a jury. Easy to say, and I think EVERY prosecutor enters a case convinced that s/he can convince the jury. What determines whether that conviction is accurate is actually going to trial and convincing the jury by being able to refute the arguments and issues raised by the defense. Sometimes a prosecutor’s belief that he can convict the defendant turns out to be a false belief, which is exactly why we have trials and defense attorneys. Otherwise, we could save a lot of time simply by asking the prosecutors whether the defendant is guilty or not, and then sentencing him or setting him free. (Exception: a recent change in US law, due not to legislation but simply to Presidential fiat, holds that if the President of the US wishes to execute someone, no trial is needed or defense allowed—the person is simply killed, which somehow proves that he was guilty of something that deserved the death penalty).

Bruce Ivins never went to trial, so we don’t know what a defense attorney could have done. But read this account by Stephen Engelberg, Greg Gordon, Jim Gilmore and Mike Wiser in McClatchy and you’ll see it’s not the slam-dunk that the FBI claims that is. (And of course, that earlier “slam dunk,” that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, turned out to be totally false.) Their account begins:

Months after the anthrax mailings that terrorized the nation in 2001, and long before he became the prime suspect, Army biologist Bruce Ivins sent his superiors an email offering to help scientists trace the killer.

Already, an FBI science consultant had concluded that the attack powder was made with a rare strain of anthrax known as Ames that’s used in research laboratories worldwide.

In his December 2001 email, Ivins volunteered to help take things further. He said he had several variants of the Ames strain that could be tested in “ongoing genetic studies” aimed at tracing the origins of the powder that had killed five people. He mentioned several cultures by name, including a batch made mostly of Ames anthrax that had been grown for him at an Army base in Dugway, Utah.

Seven years later, as federal investigators prepared to charge him with the same crimes he’d offered to help solve, Ivins, who was 62, committed suicide. At a news conference, prosecutors voiced confidence that Ivins would have been found guilty. They said years of cutting-edge DNA analysis had borne fruit, proving that his spores were “effectively the murder weapon.”

To many of Ivins’ former colleagues at the germ research center in Fort Detrick, Md., where they worked, his invitation to test the Dugway material and other spores in his inventory is among numerous indications that the FBI got the wrong man.

What kind of murderer, they wonder, would ask the cops to test his own gun for ballistics?

To prosecutors, who later branded Ivins the killer in a lengthy report on the investigation, his solicitous email is trumped by a long chain of evidence, much of it circumstantial, that they say would have convinced a jury that he prepared the lethal powder right under the noses of some of the nation’s foremost bio-defense scientists.

PBS’ “Frontline,” McClatchy and ProPublica have taken an in-depth look at the case against Ivins, conducting dozens of interviews and reviewing thousands of pages of FBI files. Much of the case remains unchallenged, notably the finding that the anthrax letters were mailed from Princeton, N.J., just steps from an office of the college sorority that Ivins was obsessed with for much of his adult life.

But newly available documents and the accounts of Ivins’ former colleagues shed fresh light on the evidence and, while they don’t exonerate Ivins, are at odds with some of the science and circumstantial evidence that the government said would have convicted him of capital crimes. While prosecutors continue to vehemently defend their case, even some of the government’s science consultants wonder whether the real killer is still at large.

Prosecutors have said Ivins tried to hide his guilt by submitting a set of false samples of his Dugway spores in April 2002. Tests on those samples didn’t display the telltale genetic variants later found in the attack powder and in sampling from Ivins’ Dugway flask.

Yet records discovered by “Frontline,” McClatchy and ProPublica reveal publicly for the first time that Ivins made available at least three other samples that the investigation ultimately found to contain the crucial variants, including one after he allegedly tried to deceive investigators with the April submission.

Paul Kemp, who was Ivins’ lawyer, said the government never told him about two of the samples, a discovery he called “incredible.” The fact that the FBI had multiple samples of Ivins’ spores that genetically matched anthrax in the letters, Kemp said, debunks the charge that the biologist was trying to cover his tracks.

Asked about the sample submissions, as well as other inconsistencies and unanswered questions in the Justice Department’s case, lead federal prosecutor Rachel Lieber said she was confident that a jury would have convicted Ivins.

“You can get into the weeds, and you can take little shots of each of these aspects of our vast, you know, mosaic of evidence against Dr. Ivins,” she said in an interview. But in a trial, she said, prosecutors would urge jurors to see the big picture.

“And, ladies and gentlemen, the big picture is, you have, you know, brick upon brick upon brick upon brick upon brick of a wall of evidence that demonstrates that Dr. Ivins was guilty of this offense.”

Scientists who worked on the FBI’s case do not all share her certainty. Claire Fraser-Liggett, a genetics consultant whose work provided some of the most important evidence linking Ivins to the attack powder, said she would have voted to acquit.

“I don’t know how it would have been possible to convict him,” said Fraser-Liggett, the director of the University of Maryland’s Institute for Genome Sciences. “Should he have had access to a potential bio-weapon, given everything that’s come to light? I’d say no. Was he just totally off the wall, from everything I’ve seen and read? I’d say, yes.

“But that doesn’t mean someone is a cold-blooded killer.” . . ..

Continue reading.

I found this email quite interesting. I have to admire the guy for seeking treatment and learning social skills that most possess without thinking about. As he says, for him it’s like speaking a foreign language he learned as an adult: being able to functional, but having to think more about it.

The same thing is true for many: they must consciously attend to things that many can do automatically. For example, I must think more about my food—I can’t just go on autopilot. Tried that, got to 250 lbs.

And people with Asperger’s syndrome must be coached on simple social skills, such as making eye contact while speaking. Most people simply do this; many with Asperger’s can do it as well, they simply must do it consciously.

We all, I think, have areas in which we do well only with conscious effort—and nothing wrong with that.

I just spotted two recipes on Mark Bittman’s blog that look good:

Vietnamese stir-fried sweet potatoes and beef

Spicy no-mayo coleslaw

Obviously I will make changes. The writer of the first recipe suggests serving it on rice or grain… Yes, I do like rice with my potatoes, and perhaps some pasta and bread as well. </irony>

I limit my intake of starch, and for me the sweet potato is more than enough—indeed, I would cut back the proportion of potato somewhat. I also will reduce somewhat the proportion of oil—indeed, I probably will brown the beef (if I use beef) without oil.

Same thing with the coleslaw: I’ll cut the oil in half.

But both recipes look quite tasty with these relatively minor modifications.

Mantic59, famed for his shaving YouTube videos, has started a new multi-part shaving blog, Sharpologist.com. You navigate through the posts using the post titles that appear above the current post. (At the link, only one title, since you’re at the top of the stack.)

Mantic asked several shaving guys to be contributors, myself among them. It’s a fun site to browse, and I want to call your attention to this post, which includes a video of Jim Rion using a Japanese straight razor for his morning shave. It’s interesting to me partly because it’s intriguing to see that razor in use, but also because of the sounds of shaving. I am a firm believer in a quiet bathroom for shaving: no running water, no fan, no radio. I think the auditory feedback is both pleasant and helpful. This video gives you a little sample and also offers a look at a mode of shaving you might want to try—the weekend shave, for example, might be pleasant as a straight-razor shave, with the added benefit that a straight-razor shave on Saturday morning gives you two days to heal before you return to work.

I finally had to try Czech & Speake, a super-premium soap. I got the travel size, in an extremely cool black metal case (anodized aluminum?) with precise-feeling threads.

Unfortunately, this first lather was nothing exceptional, so I’ll be trying again. It wasn’t the Wee Scot, I’m sure: that brush regularly makes excellent lather from a wide variety of soaps. Put it down to random variation for now.

Despite the so-so lather, I got a good shave, thanks to the Mühle open-comb (not their current model, which is too harsh for me) and the Astra Keramik Platinum blade it holds. I also use Prairie Creations’s pre-shave oil to do an Oil Pass at the end, to polish the finish.

A rinse, dry, and some of Geo. F. Trumper’s very pleasant Coral Skin Food.

I’ll be return to C&S soon to test it further.

They rig the trials. How? Here’s how:

Extremely interesting article by Theo Anderson via James Fallows:

What is America, and what is an American? If anything binds us together across space and time, it is our ideals and the stories we tell about our pursuit of them. From the beginning, we set ourselves against Europe’s hierarchies. We exalted democratic government, equality of opportunity and individual freedom. We conceived of our experiment as “the last best hope of earth,” in Lincoln’s words.

But ideals don’t live in a vacuum; they take root in the soil of institutions. Beginning with our first experiments in self-government, the dissonance between our ideals and our institutional practices—especially the tolerance and extension of slavery—created tensions that finally tore us apart.

The South’s alternative vision of the good society was defeated in the Civil War, and our 20th-century history can be told as a narrative of halting progress toward greater tolerance and equality. The major plot points include regulations on corporations in the early 1900s; women’s suffrage in 1920; a social safety net in the New Deal; the Supreme Court’s rejection of Jim Crow laws in 1954; the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s; the gay rights victories since the 1970s.

This narrative suggests that our democratic experiment is working, albeit slowly. If we have never been entirely unified in our ideals, the Civil War at least re-unified our institutions. A century and a half later, we rally around the same flag. Or so we think.

The deeper truth is disquieting. The rhetoric of Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Rick Perry about the “real America” is not imagined: They and those who oppose them live in different Americas, embodying different ideals and meaning different things to their loyalists.

How we reached this impasse is a fascinating question. The answer to it raises profound doubts and questions about how—and whether—we can move forward as “one nation, indivisible.”

The split could be said to have begun at Harvard in the decades between the Civil War and the turn of the century, when the university’s president, Charles Eliot, initiated a series of reforms that transformed the paradigm of higher education in the United States.

From the colonial era through the Civil War, Harvard’s intellectual life revolved around the Bible. Harvard’s mission was to train gentlemen of high moral character by giving them a solid grounding for their faith.

Eliot moved Harvard away from this ideal and toward the model of a modern research university. Expanding the boundaries of knowledge through research became the institution’s focus. Most universities followed the lead of Harvard and that of Johns Hopkins University, founded in 1876 for the sole purpose of pursuing a secular research agenda.

This new mission for universities created a spectacular fragmentation of knowledge. By the early 20th century, the old-school generalist who taught everything from Latin to literature and history was a relic. The new university required scholars to specialize in defined fields. This rise of experts within the academy reflected the increasing importance of expertise in American society, as careers in the professions came to require specialized training.

The progressive movement of the early 20th century grew out of these developments. Progressives hoped to make the new knowledge emerging from universities relevant to the actual world. After the First World War, the window of opportunity seemed wide open. John Dewey—the Columbia University philosopher and quintessential progressive—supported U.S. involvement in the war because he believed that the federal government’s new powers would be used, at the war’s end, to reconstruct society along more egalitarian lines.

Dewey had eloquent critics on the left, most notably Randolph Bourne, a young intellectual who rejected the idea that a militarized state could ever be mobilized for progressive purposes. Dewey, stung by the criticisms, used his influence to have Bourne banned from most progressive publications.

Bourne’s critique ultimately proved correct. But if Dewey was wrong in that case, and if he behaved appallingly toward Bourne, the essence of his vision won out. He and other progressives had been hopeful about the potential of harnessing knowledge to power for the purpose of reconstructing society; and from that point forward, for better and worse, progressive hopes for social reform have been heavily invested in educational and governmental institutions, and a loose, complicated alliance of the two realms.

GOP: God’s Only Party

Religious conservatives pushed back by mobilizing and building a parallel universe of institutions to preserve what they believed to be the truth.

The cause of their exit from mainstream American institutions was religious liberalism—”modernism,” as it was called. Religious modernists accepted scholarly work about the human origins of the Bible while still valuing scripture as a source of wisdom. They accepted evolutionary theory while still holding out the possibility of divine purpose in the universe. They tried, in general, to reconcile religious truth with the knowledge emerging from the academy.

Modernists felt at home within America’s mainstream, but religious conservatives felt betrayed. They built their own network of institutions to defend the old-time religion. Bob Jones University, founded in 1927, emerged from this era.

Two developments added energy and power to this wave of conservative Christian institution building. One was the new technology of radio, which in the 1930s opened the way for freelance evangelists to build their own ministries based on charismatic appeal.

The other crucial development was the popularization of a new account of humanity’s fate: premillennial dispensationalism, or p.d. for short. It posits that human history can be divided into several ages, or dispensations, and that the current age will conclude with the Battle of Armageddon. However, seven years before that battle, Jesus will return to earth for the redeemed, and they will be “raptured” to heaven.

Much more than a theological perspective, p.d. is among the most potent and important political ideas of the last century. Its first great popularizer in the United States was Cyrus Scofield, whose annotatedScofield Reference Bible was published in 1909. Since then, p.d. has grown ever-more influential. It was the subject of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s; and it was the plot-driving device in the Left Behind books, which are among the bestselling works of fiction in the 1990s and 2000s.

The political influence of p.d. is located in its premise that all human institutions are irredeemably corrupt. Since conditions in this world will steadily deteriorate, the duty of the true Christian is to remain faithful to the gospel as the world descends into godless chaos.

Skeptics regarding p.d.’s influence rightly note that a relatively small minority of the population actually adhere to the theology. But unified and highly galvanized groups wield outsized power in American politics. The hard work of actually getting things done, whether for good or ill, depends on the energy and organization of “marginal” groups who represent minority opinions and which, more often than not, are fired by religious faith. That truth has been driven home with frightening clarity by the recent debt-ceiling debate and by the radicalism of the leading Republican presidential candidates—nearly all of whom, not coincidentally, profess faith in some variation of p.d. theology.

Today, the currents of victimization, separatism and fatalism coursing through p.d. have spread beyond the true believers to dramatically reshape the GOP. What has recently come to the fore within the Republican Party, but has been building within it for decades as the religious right’s influence has grown, is a new Confederacy: a nation within a nation, certain of the degeneracy of the usurper “United States,” hostile toward its institutions of education and government, and possessing a keen sense of its own identity as a victimized, righteous remnant engaged in spiritual warfare. As Michele Bachmann put it when explaining her position as a tax accountant for the IRS, she took a government job because she wanted to infiltrate “the enemy.”

America on its knees?

Pundits argue that our current dysfunction stems from disagreements about the proper scope and size of government or the limitations of “free markets.” These explanations miss the heart of the matter. America’s divisions involve fundamental questions of trust and truth: What authorities do you believe? Whose definition of truth do you accept?

For the pragmatic and progressive America that grew out of secularized higher education, truth has a provisional, this-worldly orientation. It’s more evolutionary than eternal in character—a fluid body of knowledge and interpretation, subject to revision and expansion.

For the Confederacy that now dominates the GOP, truth is solid and fixed and divinely embedded in the structure of the universe. Humanity’s responsibility is to accept and believe the truth rather than test ideas against actual experience. The Confederacy’s obsession with “originalist” interpretations of the Constitution—a twin of biblical literalism—is the classic example: truth must be eternal, universal.

Pragmatists and progressives defer to experts and professionals. They expect truth claims to be supported by evidence that emerges from research and testing. They put their faith in this process, and in the communities of inquiry—the disciplines—legitimized by secular institutions of higher education.

The new Confederacy rejects that process wholesale. Its leaders and authorities are the spiritual descendants of the conservative Christians and charismatic radio preachers who broke away from religious modernism in the 1920s and 1930s. For these leaders and their followers, faith justifies—and verifies—itself. You don’t believe an idea because it’s true. It’s true because you believe it.

This is why, in the “real America” of Bachmann, Palin and Perry, it is self-evident that cutting taxes increases revenues; the founders were evangelical Christians; evolution is bunk; climate change is a hoax; the United States has the best healthcare system in the world; we can transform the Middle East into a garden of democracy; Kenya native Barack Obama has slashed the military budget; the war on drugs is worth the cost; and so on. These are all leaps of faith. The new Confederates flat-out reject or ignore any counter-evidence, because they have their own fount of truth. FOX News is the obvious example, but decades before the rise of FOX—going back to the early 20th century radio evangelists—conservatives had been quietly building their own media and networks for “truth” telling.

And here is the unsettling thing for anyone concerned about this fraught moment in the American experiment. Though they’re clueless, the leaders of the new Confederacy do offer a seductively egalitarian vision. The solutions to all our problems can be found, they promise, not through actual experimentation or so-called knowledge, but from the simple faith of ordinary citizens.

Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, summed up the egalitarian fatalism at the heart of the new Confederacy this summer, in a letter inviting fellow politicians to his prayer rally in Houston. “Some problems are beyond our power to solve, and according to the Book of Joel, Chapter 2, this historic hour demands a historic response,” he wrote. “There is hope for America. It lies in heaven, and we will find it on our knees.”

In 2009, Perry flirted with the idea of Texas leaving the Union—a fact that is astonishing yet unsurprising. It is astonishing because it’s hard to believe a politician of Perry’s rank and visibility would openly muse about secession—and remain a viable presidential contender. Imagine the outrage on FOX News if Barack Obama had once said anything similar.

It’s unsurprising because the truth is right there: Perry, Bachmann and Palin and the segment of the GOP they represent have already seceded from the Union. Spiritually speaking, they live in a radically different vision of “America,” one with its own faith-based realities and aspirations. . . .

Continue reading.

Lower-case Gtd. Haircut accomplished. I’m switching from BofA to our local credit union, and I’m still going through the start-up glitches: I withdrew $60 this morning at an ATM, and the receipt shows I withdrew $100. I didn’t, so I have to resolve that tomorrow. (Bank not open today: Columbus Day.)

I’ve packaged up a pen to send to Classic Fountain Pens for some nib work, and even went to the PO to mail it. Columbus Day.

I treated myself to a sushi luncheon for getting a haircut, something I do not enjoy: hamachi sashimi (with shiso leaf , and two saba (pickled mackerel) nigiri (partly so as to include a starch). Pickled mackerel is a lot like pickled herring and with much the same nutritional value: both oily fish high in B12 and omega-3. I also really like the seaweed at the Ocean Sushi place near the PO.

I get nervous when laws are made secret—that somehow violates the very notion of law: explicit rules that we must follow or pay a penalty of some sort. Having a secret law violates common sense: how do you obey something you don’t even know?

Obama has a secret law (classified, so nobody can know the contents) that allows him to order the assassination of American citizens without trial. Now that he’s publicly acted on the law, with the assassination of Awlaki (and anyone near to him: it was a drone missile), people are naturally wanting the law to be made public. But the US no longer has a public government: we are moving into an era of secret government laws, policies, groups, and actions.

Here’s a lengthy and excellent column that comments on the Charlie Savage story from yesterday and offers some good links for further reading:

Several months after President Obama ordered Anwar Awlaki killed by the CIA, the Obama DOJ — specifically lawyers within its Office of Legal Counsel — produced a memorandum legally authorizing this action. Despite multiple requests, the Obama administration refuses to release that memo to the public.  Several DOJ officials, hiding behind anonymity, have apparently refused to leak the memo, but have now selectively described parts of it to The New York Times‘ Charlie Savage – presumably the parts they wanted him to know about — and he then reported on what they said (offering some important counter-points along the way). As Savage put it:

The secret document provided the justification for acting [against Awlaki] despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war, according to people familiar with the analysis.

I’ve already addressed, repeatedly and at length, the substance of the claim that the President has the power to secretly order American citizens killed by the CIA far from any battlefield and without a whiff of due process, and won’t repeat those arguments now.  I will, however, note that the Bush administration’s refusal to release OLC memos which provided the legal justifications for the President’s most controversial War on Terror actions prompted extreme criticisms from Democratic legal scholars.

As but one example, Obama’s original choice to head the OLC, Dawn Johnsen, repeatedly railed against this Bush practice of concealing OLC memos as “secret law,” writing that “the Bush Administration’s excessive reliance on ‘secret law’ threatens the effective functioning of American democracy” and “the withholding from Congress and the public of legal interpretations by the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) upsets the system of checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches of government.”  In her April, 2008testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, she was nothing short of scathing on the practice of concealing OLC memos (note that the Bush DOJ, even when withholding OLC memos, at least would sometimes publicly present its legal reasoning in a far more formal and comprehensive way than anonymous leaks of purported summaries of parts of these memos to theNYT).

These are not operational actions being concealed, but legal conclusions that bind the Executive Branch, which is why Johnsen and others described it as “secret law” and condemned it as so un-democratic. It basically means citizens cannot even know the laws that prevail in the country. Now we have the Obama DOJ refusing to release the Awlaki OLC memo — which purported to authorize the President to assassinate a U.S. citizen without due process — and is also concealing OLC memos purporting to describe the legal limits of its surveillance powers, which it also refuses to disclose even in the face of lawsuits. May we say that this conduct “threatens the effective functioning of American democracy”? 

One part of Savage’s article that is receiving much attention is his revelation that the Awlaki memo “was principally drafted by David Barron and Martin Lederman, who were both lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel at the time.”  Lederman became known to many people during the Bush years when he used his blog to relentlessly attack the legal arguments underpinning the Bush/Cheney effort to expand executive power in the name of the War on Terror.  Judging by numerous emails and the like, many people find it surprising that this very same Marty Lederman, having been appointed to the OLC by a Democratic President, would now be the person supplying the legal justification for one of the most radical War on Terror powers of all: the ability to assassinate U.S. citizens with no due process.

For reasons I’ll discuss in a minute, I don’t find this surprising at all; after all, Harold Koh was long one of the leading advocates for a narrow interpretation of the President’s war powers under the War Powers Resolution, only to become the architect — once appointed to the State Department — of the ludicrous claims offered to justify President Obama’s fighting the war in Libya even in the face of a Congressional vote refusing to authorize it.  That’s just how Washington functions (during the Clinton years, John Yoo actually objected that Clinton had “exercised the powers of the imperial presidency to the utmost” and had “accelerated the disturbing trends in foreign policy that undermine notions of democratic accountability and respect for the rule of law”; once appointed by Bush, Yoo helped codify the most sweeping presidential powers imaginable).  People who aren’t willing to adhere to that dynamic rarely end up in positions of power there, and if they refuse, never will again.

I do want to focus on one aspect of what Lederman apparently wrote in justifying the Awlaki killing. What led him to conclude that the President had this power despite all the above-referenced legal and constitutional impediments? According to Savage, it was this: “the Justice Department concluded that Mr. Awlaki was covered by the authorization to use military force against Al Qaeda that Congress enacted shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — meaning that he was a lawful target in the armed conflict.” So the AUMF allowed the President to designate Awlaki an “enemy combatant” without a shred of due process, and then to act against him using the powers of war, because we are at war with an entity for which Awlaki had become a combatant.

There are many problems with that reasoning, but one in particular that deserves attention now is this: that was exactly the theory repeatedly offered by the Bush DOJ for far less draconian acts than assassinating a U.S. citizen, and it was one that the very same Marty Lederman categorically rejected.  As I’ve noted many times, one of the most controversial Bush/Cheney acts was its claimed power to detain U.S. citizen Jose Padilla without charges or due process — not to kill him, but merely detain him — on the theory that the AUMF authorized the President to designate him as an “enemy combatant” and treat him accordingly.  The Marty Lederman of the Bush years was aghast at the very idea, writing on September 9, 2005: . . .

Continue reading. There’s a lot more in this column worth reading. In an update he quotes Marcy Wheeler, who points out what the anonymous DoJ officials leaked to Charlie Savage was more classified than anything Bradley Manning is alleged to have leaked. I wonder when these guys will be imprisoned and stripped naked to sleep under bright lights. I’m not holding my breath.

Extremely smooth and pleasant shave today. First, a two-day stubble seems to shave nicer. Second, I was enjoying the feel of the New Forest brush in working up the lather so I spent more time than usual brushing lather into my beard.

Three passes with the vintage Merkur Slant holding a Schick Platinum Plus blade, a visit with the alum bar, a final rinse, dry, and a hearty splash of Tabac aftershave. Man, do I feel good.

And I’m doing my Pilates Hundreds every morning now. I finally figured out how to remember: I put my folded yoga mat in the middle of the bedroom floor before I go to bed. (And Megs likes that, she immediately settles herself on it to judge the comfort. Comfort seems fine.) I figure I’ll continue the Hundreds and maybe next week add the Roll Up.

Portugal seems to be making incredible social progress. A few years back, they decriminalized ALL drugs. Results: incredibly positive. Here’s the report (PDF) from the Cato Institute, written by Glenn Greenwald.

And now the country has legalized same-sex marriages. Frank Bruni writes in the NY Times:

WHEN she turned 38 last month, Brenda Frota Johnson got a sweet surprise: a formal “happy birthday” from her longtime partner’s mother.

It wasn’t a gift or even a card, just a succinct text message, but even so, it had no precedent over the 10 years that she and her partner, Isabel Advirta, 39, had been making a life and a home here together.

Why this birthday? The two women share a theory.

“Brenda’s now officially a part of the family,” Advirta said recently as they watched their 3-year-old daughter, Salomé, play in a leafy Lisbon park.

Johnson agreed. “It’s because we’re married,” she said. That legal blessing — that loftiest of imprimaturs — has changed little between them but a lot around them.

With minimal international attention, Portugal — tiny, overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Portugal — legalized same-sex marriage last year. Although the country is hardly seen as a Scandinavian-style bastion of social progressivism, it’s one of just 10 countries where such marriages can be performed nationwide, and in this regard it finds itself ahead of a majority of wealthier, more populous European countries, like France, Germany, Italy and Britain. In the United States, only six states and the District of Columbia allow gay marriage. How did that happen? And what wisdom do the answers offer frustrated supporters of same-sex marriage here and elsewhere around the globe?

With a potent case of Portugal envy, I went there and talked with advocates and politicians at the center of its same-sex-marriage campaign and with gay and lesbian couples who married after the law took effect in June 2010. All were still pleasantly stunned by what Portugal had accomplished.

It was only a little more than a decade ago that a country first legalized same-sex marriage, and that happened in precisely the kind of forward-thinking, bohemian place you’d expect: the Netherlands. About two years later, Belgium followed suit.

Then things got really interesting. The eight countries that later joined the club were a mix of largely foreseeable and less predictable additions. In the first category I’d put Canada, Norway, Sweden and Iceland. In the second: . . .

Continue reading.

Interesting op-ed by Susan Thomas in the NY Times:

. . . As a 42-year-old Brooklyn mother of three, what I care about is lunch, and feeding my family on a tenuous and unpredictable income. And so I have 20 fresh-egg-producing hens and a little garden that yields everything from blackberries to butternut squash to burdock root.

My turn with spade and hoe started a few years ago when I found myself divorced and flat broke. My livelihood as a freelance writer went out the window when the economy tanked. I literally could afford beans, the dried kind, which I’d thought were for school art projects or teaching elementary math. And I didn’t know how to cook.

Luckily, my late father had hammered into me that grit was more important than talent. So, when I couldn’t afford fancy food — never mind paraben-free shampoo — for my babies, I figured, if peasants in 11th-century Sicily did all this, how hard could it be?

I researched how to raise hens from chicks so we could get our omega-3-filled eggs. I learned to stretch a single piece of cheap meat into nearly a week’s worth of dinners. I made my own cleaning products. Not because I liked it. Because it was cheap.

My goal was to have healthy, unprocessed food for $10 or less a day. Cereal was the first thing to go. It dawned on me that making granola was a matter of tossing oatmeal and nuts into a bowl with a little oil, honey and spices — and then baking until brown. No more $14 boxes of fancy grains with pomegranate antioxidants.

Bread wasn’t hard either; it was just a drawn-out procedure. Yeast, water, a little honey, salt, whole wheat flour, and assorted seeds. Mix; wait for rising; knead; wait; knead; wait; bake. I made batches and froze them. So long, Eli Zabar’s 10-buck Health Loaf. Hi there, homemade loaf for less than $1. I soon realized that . . .

Continue reading.

Take a look. Quite amazing.

An intriguing column by Glenn Greenwald:

It’s fascinating to juxtapose America’s reverence for Steve Jobs’ accomplishments and its draconian drug policy with this, from the New York Times‘ obituary of Jobs:

[Jobs] told a reporter that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. He said there were things about him that people who had not tried psychedelics — even people who knew him well, including his wife — could never understand.

Unlike many people who have enjoyed success, Jobs is not saying that he was able to succeed despite his illegal drug use; he’s saying his success is in part — in substantial part — because of those illegal drugs (he added that Bill Gates would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once”).  These quotes (first published by a New York Times reporter) have been around for some time but have been only rarely discussed in the recent hagiographies of Jobs: a notable omission given that he himself praised those experiences as an integral part of his identity and one of the most important things he ever did.  A surprisingly good Time Magazine article elaborates on this Jobs-LSD connection further:

The paradoxes of love have perhaps never been clearer than in our relationships with Apple products — the warm, fleshy desire we feel for such cold, hard, glassy objects. But Jobs knew how to inspire material lust. He knew that consumers want something that not only sparkles and awes, but also feels accessible, easy to use, an object with which we want to merge and to feel one and the same. . . .

Not coincidentally, that’s how people describe the experience of taking psychedelic drugs. It feels profoundly artificial yet deeply real, both high-tech and earthy-crunchy, human and mystically divine — in a word, transcendent. Jobs had this experience. . . . As attested by the nearly spiritual devotion so many consumers have to Jobs’ creations, the former Apple chief (and indeed many other top technology pioneers) appeared to have found enduring inspiration in LSD. Research shows that the psychedelic experience is, in fact, long lasting: a new study published last week found that people who took magic mushrooms (psilocybin) had long-term personality changes, becoming more open, more curious, more intellectually engaged and more creative. These personality shifts persisted more than a year after taking the drugs.

America’s harsh prohibitionist drug policies are grounded in the premise that the prohibited substances have little or no redeeming value and cannot be used without life-destroying consequences.  Yet the evidence of its falsity is undeniable. Here is one of the most admired men in America, its greatest contemporary industrialist, hailing one of the most scorned of these substances as integral to his success and intellectual and personal growth.  The current President commendably acknowledged cocaine and marijuana use while there is evidence suggesting the prior President also used those substances.  One of America’s most accomplished athletes was caught using marijuana at the peak of his athletic achievements.  And millions upon millions of American adults have consumed some or many of those criminally prohibited substances, and themselves will say (like Jobs) that they had important and constructive experiences with those drugs or know someone who did.

In short, the deceit at the heart of America’s barbaric drug policy — that these substances are such unadulterated evils that adults should be put in cages for voluntarily using them — is more glaring than ever.  In light of his comments about LSD, it’s rather difficult to reconcile America’s adoration for Steve Jobs with its ongoing obsession with prosecuting and imprisoning millions of citizens (mostly poor and minorities) for doing what Jobs, Obama, George W. Bush, Michael Phelps and millions of others have done.  Obviously, most of these banned substances — like alcohol, gambling, sex, junk food consumption, prescription drug use and a litany of other legal activities — can create harm to the individual and to others when abused (though America’s solution for drug users — prison — also creates rather substantial harm to the drug user and to others, including their spouses, parents and children: at least as much harm as, and usually substantially more than, the banned drugs themselves).  But no rational person can doubt that these substances can also be used responsibly and constructively; just study Steve Jobs’ life if you doubt that.

Jobs’ praise for his LSD use is what I kept returning to as I read about the Obama DOJ’s heinous new policy to use the full force of criminal prosecutions against medical marijuana dispensaries in California.  In October, 2009, I enthusiastically praised Eric Holder and the DOJ for appearing to fulfill Obama’s campaign promise by refraining from prosecuting medical marijuana dispensaries in compliance with state law (a “rare instance of unadulterated good news from Washington,” I gushed).  As I wrote:

Criminalizing cancer and AIDS patients for using a substance that is (a) prescribed by their doctors and (b) legal under the laws of their state has always been abominable.  The Obama administration deserves major credit not only for ceasing this practice, but for memorializing it formally in writing.

Yet now, U.S. Attorneys in California will expend substantial law enforcement resources to persecute medical marijuana dispensaries that sell to consenting adults even though those transactions have been legalized by the voters of California and 16 other states (to see what a complete reversal this is of everything Obama and Holder previously said on this subject, see here).

Progressives love to point out the hypocrisy of social conservatives who righteously rail against (and demand legal sanction for) the very same sexually sinful behavior in which they enthusiastically engage — and rightly so.  But what about a society that continues to imprison millions of human beings for using substances that vast numbers of people in the nation have secretly used and enjoyed, or which empowers people with the Oval Office, or reveres people like Steve Jobs, who have done the same?  The DOJ claims dispensaries are now masking non-medical marijuana sales, leading to this question: even leaving aside the rather significant (and shameful) fact that drug laws are enforced with overwhelming dispropritionality against racial minorities, what possible justification is there for putting someone in a cage for using a substance they choose to use without any evidence that they’ve harmed anyone else or even risked harm to anyone else?

All of this becomes even more incomprehensible when one considers . . .

Continue reading.