Later On

Interesting report in the Christian Science Monitor by Scott Peterson and Payam Faramarzi:

Iran guided the CIA’s “lost” stealth drone to an intact landing inside hostile territory by exploiting a navigational weakness long-known to the US military, according to an Iranian engineer now working on the captured drone’s systems inside Iran.

Iranian electronic warfare specialists were able to cut off communications links of the American bat-wing RQ-170 Sentinel, says the engineer, who works for one of many Iranian military and civilian teams currently trying to unravel the drone’s stealth and intelligence secrets, and who could not be named for his safety.

Using knowledge gleaned from previous downed American drones and a technique proudly claimed by Iranian commanders in September, the Iranian specialists then reconfigured the drone’s GPS coordinates to make it land in Iran at what the drone thought was its actual home base in Afghanistan.

“The GPS navigation is the weakest point,” the Iranian engineer told the Monitor, giving the most detailed description yet published of Iran’s “electronic ambush” of the highly classified US drone. “By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain.”The “spoofing” technique that the Iranians used – which took into account precise landing altitudes, as well as latitudinal and longitudinal data – made the drone . . .

Continue reading.

Of course, since the drone was in Iranian airspace, they were perfectly within their rights to bring it down. I don’t see how anyone could deny that, and I imagine the US would do the same if a hostile nation — Iran, for example — flew drones into US airspace.

Related stories:

• Backchannels: Obama taking heat for asking for US drone back? Pay little heed.
• DC Decoder: Could Iran copy the ‘beast’? US aircraft have been reverse-engineered before
• CIA cover blown in latest spy-versus-spy with Iran
• Opinion: Lieberman and Collins: Shipping industry must choose between Iran and the US

Clinical autopsies are becoming less common—and that’s a bad thing. Marshall Allen explains in ProPublica:

When Renee Royak-Schaler unexpectedly collapsed and died on May 22, no one ordered an autopsy.

Not the doctors at Howard County General Hospital in Columbia, Md., where the 64-year-old professor and cancer researcher was pronounced dead.

Not the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, which passed on the case because no foul play was involved.

And not Royak-Schaler’s physicians at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who had diagnosed cancer in her hip two days beforehand but acknowledged they didn’t know what had caused her unforeseen death.

A half-century ago, an autopsy would have been routine. Autopsies, sometimes called the ultimate medical audit, were an integral part of American health care, performed on roughly half of all patients who died in hospitals. Today, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show, they are conducted on about 5 percent of such patients.

As Royak-Schaler’s husband, Jeffrey Schaler, discovered, even sudden unexpected deaths do not trigger postmortem reviews. Hospitals are not required to offer or perform autopsies. Insurers don’t pay for them. Some facilities and doctors shy away from them, fearing they may reveal malpractice. The downward trend is well-known — it’s been studied for years.

What has not been appreciated, pathologists and public health officials say, are the far-reaching consequences for U.S. health care of minuscule autopsy rates.

Diagnostic errors, which studies show are common, go undiscovered, allowing physicians to practice on other patients with a false sense of security. Opportunities are lost to learn about the effectiveness of medical treatments and the progression of diseases. Inaccurate information winds up on death certificates, undermining the reliability of crucial health statistics.

It was only because of Royak-Schaler’s connections that her case ended differently. Her colleagues at the University of Maryland School of Medicine urged her husband to authorize an autopsy and volunteered to conduct it for free.

In her case, as in so many, the autopsy revealed a surprise: Royak-Schaler, the renowned cancer researcher, had cancer ravaging her body — in her lungs, kidneys, abdomen and the marrow of her bones. A blood clot, likely related to the tumors, caused her sudden death.

Jeffrey Schaler has wrestled with anger that his wife wasn’t diagnosed sooner but said knowing how she died was better than not.

“There’s a sense of peace that accompanies that knowledge,” he said.

For the last year, ProPublica, PBS “Frontline” and NPR have probed America’s deeply flawed system of death investigation, focusing primarily on forensic autopsies, which are conducted by coroners’ offices and medical examiners when there is suspicion of an unnatural death. State laws vary, but the preponderance of deaths that occur in hospitals are considered natural. When deaths are unexplained, unobserved or within 24 hours of admission, hospitals may be required to report them to local coroners or medical examiners, but such  agencies rarely take hospital cases.

Hospital physicians, with consent from patients’ next of kin, may . . .

Continue reading. And even when autopsies are authorized, problems may ensue. Marshall Allen also reports on a case in Texas:

“Your husband is dead,” the doctor told Linda Carswell.

This was not supposed to happen. Jerry Carswell had been admitted to Christus St. Catherine Hospital in Katy, Texas, with kidney stones. The previous night, he’d been walking around his room, talking about basketball and the upcoming presidential election with his son, Jordan. The plan was for the 61-year-old to be discharged that morning.

Instead, at about 5 a.m., a phlebotomist entered Jerry’s room to draw blood and found him lying across the bottom of his bed, not breathing, mottled and blue, without a pulse. Staffers performed CPR for 25 minutes to no avail. Carswell was pronounced dead at5:30 a.m. on Jan. 22, 2004.

Upon learning the news, Linda and Jordan Carswell rushed to Jerry’s bedside. Lying there, sheets and blankets folded halfway up his chest, he looked as if he could be dozing, except for the tubes running out of his mouth — remnants of the failed resuscitation effort. Linda shrieked and grabbed her husband’s cold hands, trying in vain to stir him.

The on-call doctor suggested that the Carswells authorize an autopsy, launching the family on a traumatic journey that still isn’t over.

Clinical autopsies, once commonplace in American hospitals, have become an increasing rarity and are conducted in just 5 percent of hospital deaths. Grief-stricken families like the Carswells desperately want the answers that an autopsy can provide. But they often do not know their rights in dealing with either coroners or medical examiners, who investigate unnatural deaths, or health-care providers, who delve into natural ones.

For the last year, ProPublica, PBS “Frontline” and NPR have examined flaws in the U.S. system of death investigation, finding that mistakes in America’s morgues have sometimes helped convict the innocent and allowed the guilty to go free.

The Carswells’ experience illustrates a different kind of injustice. Their case would play out in pathology labs, lawyers’ offices and courtrooms for more than seven years. It led to a rare $2 million fraud judgment against Christus St. Catherine, which was found by a jury to have deceived Linda Carswell about Jerry’s autopsy. It also led to state legislation designed to strengthen families’ entitlement to comprehensive, independent postmortem reviews.It has not, however, led to closure or accountability. Thanks to an incomplete autopsy, Jerry Carswell’s cause of death remains unknown. He also has not been laid fully to rest. His heart, retained by the pathologist who conducted his postmortem examination, sits in a refrigerated cabinetin a hospital lab to this day.

None of the hospital employees involved in the Carswell case would answer questions from . . .

Continue reading.

The military’s record of veracity is weak. Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman are two names that remind of the tendency of the military to lie through its teeth whenever it thinks it can get away with it. Now the USMC Medal of Honor has been awarded based on a false account. Jonathan Landay has a lengthy report in McClatchy:

With Dakota Meyer standing at attention in his dress uniform, sweat glistening on his forehead under the television lights, President Barack Obama extolled the former Marine corporal for the “extraordinary actions” that had earned him the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor.

Obama told the audience in the White House East Room on Sept. 15 that Meyer had driven into the heart of a savage ambush in eastern Afghanistan against orders. He’d killed insurgents at near-point-blank range, twice leapt from his gun turret to rescue two dozen Afghan soldiers and saved the lives of 13 U.S. service members as he fought to recover the bodies of four comrades, the president said.

But there’s a problem with this account: Crucial parts that the Marine Corps publicized and Obama described are untrue, unsubstantiated or exaggerated, according to dozens of military documents McClatchy examined.

Sworn statements by Meyer and others who participated in the battle indicate that he didn’t save the lives of 13 U.S. service members, leave his vehicle to scoop up 24 Afghans on his first two rescue runs or lead the final push to retrieve the four dead Americans. Moreover, it’s unclear from the documents whether Meyer disobeyed orders when he entered the Ganjgal Valley on Sept. 8, 2009.

The statements also offer no proof that the 23-year-old Kentucky native “personally killed at least eight Taliban insurgents,” as the account on the Marine Corps website says. The driver of Meyer’s vehicle attested to seeing “a single enemy go down.”

What’s most striking is that all this probably was unnecessary. Meyer, the 296th Marine to earn the medal, by all accounts deserved his nomination. At least seven witnesses attested to him performing heroic deeds “in the face of almost certain death.”

Braving withering fire, he repeatedly returned to the ambush site with Army Capt. William Swenson and others to retrieve Afghan casualties and the dead Americans. He suffered a shrapnel wound in one arm and was sent home after the battle with combat-related stress. Meyer’s commander, Lt. Col. Kevin Williams, commended him for acts of “conspicuous gallantry at the risk of his life … above and beyond the call of duty.”

But an exhaustive assessment by a McClatchy correspondent who was embedded with the unit and survived the ambush found that the Marines’ official accounts of Meyer’s deeds — retold in a book, countless news reports and on U.S. military websites — were embellished. They’re marred by errors and inconsistencies, ascribe actions to Meyer that are unverified or didn’t happen and create precise, almost novelistic detail out of the jumbled and contradictory recollections of the Marines, soldiers and pilots engaged in battle.

The approval of Meyer’s medal — in an unusually short time — came as lawmakers and serving and former officers pressed the military services and the Pentagon to award more Medals of Honor because of the relatively few conferred in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Only 10 of the decorations have been awarded since 2001, seven of them posthumously.

Meyer is the first living Marine since the Vietnam War to be awarded the honor. It was first bestowed in 1863.

The process for awarding the medal — designed by Navy rules to leave “no margin of doubt or possibility of error” — involves reviews by commanders at every level of the nominee’s chain of command and then by top Pentagon officials. The nominating papers — known as a “medal packet” — typically comprise dozens of sworn witness statements, maps, diagrams, a draft citation and a more detailed account of the nominee’s deeds.

As the Afghan and Iraq wars wind down, senior Marine Corps officials conceded the pressure to award more medals, and to do it quickly. One senior Marine official told McClatchy that the service felt that it deserved the decoration after having served in the toughest, most violent areas of Afghanistan and Iraq.

In response to McClatchy’s findings, the Marine Corps said . . .

Continue reading. So far as I can recall, no punishment was meted out for the outright lying in the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman cases: business as usual, apparently.

Of course, the SEC is heavily staffed from the industry it pretends to regulate, so that might be part of the answer. In ProPublica Jesse Eisinger looks at arguments for and against going to trial:

Does the Securities and Exchange Commission suffer from trialphobia?

Ever since Judge Jed S. Rakoff rejected the S.E.C.’s settlement with Citigroup over a malignant mortgage securities deal, the agency has been defending its policy to settle securities fraud cases. But the public wants a “Law & Order” moment, and who can blame them?

In this column, co-published with New York Times’ DealBook, I monitor the financial markets to hold companies, executives and government officials accountable for their actions. Tips? Praise? Contact me atjesse@propublica.org

Of course, there was one criminal trial. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn brought a case against two Bear Stearns hedge fund managers who blew up the firm’s internal fund, eventually leading to the demise of Bear. They were acquitted.

But so far, there’s been no civil trial in a major case directly related to the biggest economic fiasco of our time: the financial crisis.

The S.E.C. contends that it has received more than $1.2 billion in penalties from financial crisis cases, having accused 81 people and entities, 39 of them chief executives and other senior officers. And it doesn’t avoid trials altogether. The agency has averaged almost 14 trials a year from 2008 to 2010, compared with about eight from 2001 to 2003. Finally, in cases that haven’t yet gone to trial, the S.E.C. has charged some low-level bankers from big Wall Street firms — but no masters of the universe.

As for the near future, the agency might actually have a financial crisis trial. Right now, it looks as if cases against the mortgage bank IndyMac, the brokerage firm Stifel Nicolaus and the executives who blew up the Reserve Primary money market fund could go to court. But do you see the pattern? None of those is a major investment bank. The S.E.C. is just not hauling in the big boys.

That could change if the S.E.C. sued Citigroup. As Judge Rakoff noted, Citigroup is a “recidivist,” repeatedly flouting securities laws. In its settlement with the bank, the agency cited only one mortgage securities deal, but as my ProPublica colleague Jake Bernstein and I wrote, there are many more that look just as rotten.

Yet the reason for putting Citigroup in the dock goes beyond the bank itself. The S.E.C. is not getting big enough settlements out of the largest banks. It’s not bringing enough financial cases. It isn’t going after the big banks’ top executives. It’s being way too cautious in its interpretation of its role as defender of the fairness and sanctity of the markets. The frustration, shared by Judge Rakoff and the rest of humanity, is all the greater because the agency rarely, if ever, gets anyone to admit guilt when they settle.

This renders the settlements little more than turning on the light in a kitchen full of roaches. Instead of teaching the banks a lesson, the settlements merely show how the bad actors are scattered everywhere — and the public watches the banks scurry into the pantry to feast some more.

To the S.E.C., this view is profoundly unfair.

The agency’s message is, “if you want to resolve a case short of a contested proceeding, come in and be prepared to provide the type of relief we would obtain at the end of a trial,” said Lorin L. Reisner, the S.E.C.’s deputy director of enforcement.

“And where that’s not available, we’ll go to the mat.”

On a case-by-case basis, the S.E.C.’s argument for settling is strong. While the public loves a court case, lawyers often believe that trials are failures. They are expensive, time-consuming and capricious, especially in financial cases that are often so complex they challenge even sophisticated juries.

Generally, securities regulators can rack up more enforcement actions by settling. And the agency would do only civil trials anyway; it’s the Justice Department that undertakes criminal trials, which probably are a greater deterrent to white-collar crime.

Fair enough. But here’s the rub: By taking this doctrine too far, the S.E.C. has undermined its negotiating position. . .

Continue reading.

Fermented foods are fun, but I doubt that I will undertake getting this fermentation jar, though I do like the idea and want to try it. If you’re seriously interested in fermented foods (kimchi, sauerkraut, miso, yogurt, bread, beer, and the like), check out this book.

Bradley Manning faces trial, but no one went to prison over the massacre of civilians. New findings reported in the NY Times by Michael Schmidt:

One by one, the Marines sat down, swore to tell the truth and began to give secret interviews discussing one of the most horrific episodes of America’s time in Iraq: the 2005 massacre by Marines of Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha.

“I mean, whether it’s a result of our action or other action, you know, discovering 20 bodies, throats slit, 20 bodies, you know, beheaded, 20 bodies here, 20 bodies there,” Col. Thomas Cariker, a commander in Anbar Province at the time, told investigators as he described the chaos of Iraq. At times, he said, deaths were caused by “grenade attacks on a checkpoint and, you know, collateral with civilians.”

The 400 pages of interrogations, once closely guarded as secrets of war, were supposed to have been destroyed as the last American troops prepare to leave Iraq. Instead, they were discovered along with reams of other classified documents, including military maps showing helicopter routes and radar capabilities, by a reporter for The New York Times at a junkyard outside Baghdad. An attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of smoked carp.

The documents — many marked secret — form part of the military’s internal investigation, and confirm much of what happened at Haditha, a Euphrates River town where Marines killed 24 Iraqis, including a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair, women and children, some just toddlers.

Haditha became a defining moment of the war, helping cement an enduring Iraqi distrust of the United States and a resentment that not one Marine has been convicted.

But the accounts are just as striking for what they reveal about the extraordinary strains on the soldiers who were assigned here, their frustrations and their frequently painful encounters with a population they did not understand. In their own words, the report documents the dehumanizing nature of this war, where Marines came to view 20 dead civilians as not “remarkable,” but as routine.

Iraqi civilians were being killed all the time. Maj. Gen. Steve Johnson, the commander of American forces in Anbar, in his own testimony, described it as “a cost of doing business.”

The stress of combat left some soldiers paralyzed, the testimony shows. Troops, traumatized by the rising violence and feeling constantly under siege, grew increasingly twitchy, killing more and more civilians in accidental encounters. Others became so desensitized and inured to the killing that they fired on Iraqi civilians deliberately while their fellow soldiers snapped pictures, and were court-martialed. The bodies piled up at a time when the war had gone horribly wrong.

Charges were dropped against six of the accused Marines in the Haditha episode, one was acquitted and the last remaining case against one Marine is scheduled to go to trial next year.

That sense of American impunity ultimately poisoned any chance for American forces to remain in Iraq, because the Iraqis would not let them stay without being subject to Iraqi laws and courts, a condition the White House could not accept. . .

Continue reading. And yet for some mysterious reason Muslim countries don’t like the presence of US troops. Can anyone explain this mystery? And by what right do they think Americans should be subject to their laws? (Americans, of course, can go kill people in any country whenever we want—cf. the recent drone killings in Yemen and President Obama’s discovery that he has the right to order the death of American citizens whenever he wishes, without any trial or due process.)

The Eldest reports that her neighborhood has been suffering a rash of thefts of packages: with the holiday season in full swing and many people having to be away at work for the day, packages of presents are often left on porches in her residential neighborhood, and some person or persons not yet known has been systematically taking the packages.

Fortunately, we kept a list of the presents we sent—our package was one of those taken—and we’re currently replacing as many of the presents as we can. Only two are irreplaceable, fortunately, and of course the loss hits us (who know what the presents were) more than the recipients (who will not know what they missed).

In the greater scheme of things, this is no biggie, I recognize. But we’re saddened. I’m hoping to hear soon that other packages we sent have arrived safely. Those that went to Canada are already there.

UPDATE: Package was delivered tonight, 15 Dec. All is well. Worry never pays.

Glenn Greenwald noticed the same thing I did:

In one of the least surprising developments imaginable, President Obama – after spending months threatening to veto the Levin/McCain detention bill – yesterday announced that he would instead sign it into law (this is the same individual, of course, who unequivocally vowed when seeking the Democratic nomination to support a filibuster of “any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecom[s],” only to turn around – once he had the nomination secure — and not only vote against such a filibuster, but to vote in favor of the underlying bill itself, so this is perfectly consistent with his past conduct). As a result, the final version of the Levin/McCain bill will be enshrined as law this week as part of the the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). I wrote about the primary provisions and implications of this bill last week, and won’t repeat those points here.

The ACLU said last night that the bill contains “harmful provisions that some legislators have said could authorize the U.S. military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians, including American citizens, anywhere in the world” and added: “if President Obama signs this bill, it will damage his legacy.” Human Rights Watch said that Obama’s decision “does enormous damage to the rule of law both in the US and abroad” and that “President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.”

Both groups pointed out that this is the first time indefinite detention has been enshrined in law since the McCarthy era of the 1950s, when — as the ACLU put it — “President Truman had the courage to veto” the Internal Security Act of 1950 on the ground that it “would make a mockery of our Bill of Rights” and then watched Congress override the veto. That Act authorized the imprisonment of Communists and other “subversives” without the necessity of full trials or due process (many of the most egregious provisions of that bill were repealed by the 1971 Non-Detention Act, and are now being rejuvenated by these War on Terror policies of indefinite detention). President Obama, needless to say, is not Harry Truman. He’s not even the Candidate Obama of 2008 who repeatedly insisted that due process and security were not mutually exclusive and who condemned indefinite detention as ”black hole” injustice.

There have been several persistent myths circulating about this bill and President Obama’s position on it that need to be clarified once and for all:

First, while the powers this bill enshrines are indeed radical and dangerous, most of them already exist. That’s because first the Bush administration and now the Obama administration have aggressively argued that the original 2001 AUMF already empowers them to imprison people without charges, use force against even U.S. citizens without due process (Anwar Awlaki), and target not only members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban (as the law states) but also anyone who “substantially supports” those groups and/or “associated forces” (whatever those terms mean). That’s why this bill states that it does not intend to change the 2001 AUMF (even as it codifies far broader language defining the scope of the war) or the detention powers of the President, and it’s why they purposely made the bill vague on whether it expressly authorizes military detention of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil: it’s because the bill’s proponents and the White House both believe that the President already possesses these broadened powers with or without this bill. With a couple of exceptions, this bill just “clarifies” — and codifies — the powers President Obama has already claimed, seized and exercised.

I’m embedding the video of the segment I did last night on Cenk Uygur’s TV program where I elaborated on this point: this is not to mitigate how heinous this bill is, as there are real dangers to codifying these powers in law with bipartisan Congressional support as opposed to having the President unilaterally seize them and have some lower courts recognize them. Instead, it’s a reflection of how horrible the civil liberties status quo has become under the Bush and Obama administration. This is the reason why civil libertarians have been so harshly critical of this President. It’s the reason civil liberties groups have been saying things like this even when saying them was so unpopular: it’s because Obama has, for three years now, been defending and entrenching exactly the detention powers this law vests, but doing it through radical legal theories, warped interpretations of the 2001 AUMF, continuities with the Bush/Cheney template, and devotion to Endless War and the civil liberties assaults it entails. See the newspaper excerpts below for more proof of this.

Second, as I documented at length last week, Obama’s veto threat wasnever about substantive objections to the detention powers vested by this bill; put another way, he was never objecting to the bill on civil liberties grounds. Obama, as I documented last week and again below, is not an opponent of indefinite detention; he’s a vigorous proponent of it, as evidenced by his continuous, multi-faceted embrace of that policy.

Obama’s objections to this bill had nothing to do with civil liberties, due process or the Constitution. It had everything to do with Executive power.The White House’s complaint was that Congress had no business tying the hands of the President when deciding who should go into military detention, who should be denied a trial, which agencies should interrogate suspects (the FBI or the CIA). Such decisions, insisted the White House, are for the President, not Congress, to make. In other words, his veto threat was not grounded in the premise that indefinite military detention is wrong; it was grounded in the premise that it should be the President who decides who goes into military detention and why, not Congress.

Even the one substantive objection the White House expressed to the bill — mandatory military detention for accused American Terrorists captured on U.S. soil — was about Executive power, not due process or core liberties. The proof of that — the definitive, conclusive proof — is that Sen. Carl Levin has several times disclosed that it was the White House which demandedremoval of a provision in his original draft that would have exempted U.S. citizens from military detention (see the clip of Levin explaining this in the video below). In other words, this was an example of the White Housedemanding greater detention powers in the bill by insisting on the removal of one of its few constraints (the prohibition on military detention for Americans captured on U.S. soil). That’s because the White House’s North Star on this bill —  as they repeatedly made clear — wasPresidential discretion: they were going to veto the bill if it containedany limits on the President’s detention powers, regardless of whether those limits forced him to put people in military prison or barred him from doing so.

Any doubt that this was the White House’s only concern with the bill is now dispelled by virtue of the President’s willingness to sign it after certain changes were made in Conference between the House and Senate. Those changes were almost entirely about removing the parts of the bill that constrained his power, and had nothing to do with improving the bill from a civil liberties perspective. Once the sole concern of the White House was addressed — eliminating limits on the President’s power — they were happy to sign the bill even though (rather: because) none of the civil liberties assaults were fixed. As Mother Jones‘ Adam Serwer explained: . . .

Continue reading: there’s a lot more, and it’s a vitally important issue. Obama is dismantling the civil liberties that the US once valued.

Today I used Pré de Provence shaving soap, “She Butter Enriched.” The list of ingredients:

Potassium Palmate, Sodium Palmate, Potassium Palm Kernelate, Sodium Palm Kerneate, Glycerin, Water (Aqua), Fragrance (Parfum), Palm Kernel Acid, Sodium Chloride, Pentasodium Pentetate, Tetrasodium Etidronate, Rosemary Extract – Soybean Oil (Rosmarinus Officinalis – Glycine Soja)

Missing from the list: Shea Butter (Butyrospermum Parkii). I did some searching, but most sites simply do not list the ingredients, and I could not find a manufacturer’s site.

I did get a good lather from the soap, but I’m disinclined to use the soap simply because it both claims to include Shea Butter and also does not list it as an ingredient: the contradiction is troubling, and my tendency is to ignore the soap. I used it today because after trying and liking the Altesse, I decided to try all the soaps I sort of avoided, and this one is high on list.

Good lather, but I’m back to ignoring it because of the inconsistency on the label (claiming both to have and not to have Shea Butter). That’s troubling. I have emailed the importer, and should I get an answer I’ll update this post.

The brush that produced this good lather is my Rod Neep brush with the 1940 coin in the base. It really was a good lather, with or without shea butter.

Three passes with the ancient Gillette I decided to try, using a new Kai blade. Razor is uncomfortable and the shave was not enjoyable. Too bad: it goes back into the big box of surplus razors.

Still: a close shave, and the Vitos Lavanda aftershave was not unpleasant.

Today was a Learning Shave.

UPDATE: I just heard from European Soaps, Ltd., the importers of Pré de Provence. Apparently the current labels do indeed list shea butter among the ingredients. I will update this with the current label information when they send it to me. In the meantime, The Wife thinks that the omission of shea butter from the ingredients list on my soap is due to France and the US having different labeling requirements, which led to the label error on my (old) tin of the soap. It is a good soap, though.

Denial can be amazingly strong. Anne Lamott tells of a friend who was using cocaine to the extent that she woke up one morning with the pillow stuck to her face because her nose had bled so much, but she still didn’t think she had any sort of problem with cocaine…

Representatives and Senators on the payroll of Big Business interests somehow think that if they don’t take notice of the money they’re accepting in exchange for their votes, we won’t either. Bill McKibben talks about an uncomfortable moment in a column in the LA Times:

It was one of those uncomfortable moments when you suddenly realize you’re in the wrong place, that you’re a rube from the sticks in a sophisticated city whose customs you don’t quite understand.

Politico was sponsoring a “Washington Year in Review” symposium last week, and they’d invited me to be part of the energy panel. So even though I’d spent barely three weeks in Washington this year (and the most memorable nights were spent in its central cellblock for protesting outside the White House to block the Keystone XL pipeline), I found myself traveling down from Vermont to share a stage with Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.).

I was a little nervous, because Terry had recently introduced a bill to force the rapid approval of the Keystone pipeline, overriding the president. But we talked back and forth amiably enough, as I explained why the jobs figures for the proposed project he kept repeating were wrong. Markey pointed out that the Canadian tar sands oil that would be transported through the pipeline, far from enhancing U.S. energy security, was destined to be sold abroad. It was all “agree to disagree” harmony.

But then, in passing, I said something that to me seemed so obvious it didn’t even occur to me anyone would object: that it was clearly Big Oil that wanted the pipeline revived, and that it was using the congressmen it funded heavily to make it happen.

Beside me, I could feel Terry bristle. He quickly interjected, something to the effect of, are you saying that we’re “bought off”? And I suddenly felt bad, as if I indeed had said something wrong. I stammered; I tried to say I didn’t know anything about him in particular, that I was sure he’d eventually be part of the solution and so on. But the frost stayed in the air; he seemed genuinely hurt that anyone could think he had a conflict.

Is it really possible that people in Washington don’t understand what the rest of the country — left, right and center — believes about them: That they take campaign money from corporations in return for doing their bidding?

I went home and looked up Terry in the database of the Dirty Energy Money Campaign, compiled by Oil Change International. Koch Industries had given him $15,500. Exxon Mobil had given him $25,500. The Petroleum Marketers Assn. had tossed in $12,500. ConocoPhillips, Chevron, BP — all in all since 1999, he’d gotten $365,798 from the fossil fuel industry, and in the latest tally the site states he’d “sided with “dirty energy interests in 100% of selected votes.”

The same was true for all the other sponsors of the legislation to thwart the review of Keystone and build it fast, climate be damned. I understand that this kind of corruption is  . . .

Continue reading.

Quite an interesting post at Open Culture with detailed analysis of an action sequence that did not work.

Using evidence in defining government policies: a crazy idea, but it just might work. The UK blog Transform has an interesting post:

We were surprised and impressed recently when we came across a little known piece of work that shows how a government, well disposed to using evidence to influence its drug policy, can employ science to make a positive difference.

Earlier this month Steve Rolles and Danny Kushlick attended an event at the House of Lords. One of the presentations was by Pavel Bem, a conservative MP in the Czech Parliament.  He presented the results of an impact analysis that effectively paved the way for the contemporary Czech decriminalisation of drug possession in 2002.  The initiative was, in effect, a perfect experiment.

This is the brief history:

• 1993    Governmental Drug Commission
• 1993    1st National Drug Strategy – drugs decrminalised for persoanl possession
• 1998    Criminal Law penalizing possession brought in
• 1999    Impact Analysis Project (PAD) of the New Drugs Legislation (GDC)
• 2002    PAD outcomes prove negative impacts
• 2002-10 New National Drug Strategy and New Penal Code – decriminalises possession

A period of decriminalisation of possession was briefly interrupted by recriminalisation.  Following an impact analysis of the recriminalisation, showing negative outcomes, drugs were decriminalised again.

The following is taken from the TNI’s excellent Drug Law Reform in Latin America Website:

The first major post-communist reform of Czech drug laws was completed as early as 1990. Among other legislative changes that were seen as returns to democratic and humanistic values, capital punishment and punishment for simple possession of illegal drugs were abolished.

However, in 1997 a proposal was submitted to the Czech parliament that would re-introduce criminal penalties for drug users for possession of any amount of illegal drugs. The government subsequently submitted its own more modest proposal introducing criminalization of possession, but only for amounts that were “bigger than small”, which was approved by parliament in April 1998.

The law was subsequently vetoed by Vaclav Havel, then president of the Czech Republic. Then, the parliament overturned the president’s veto and the amended law went into effect on January 1, 1999. Following these turbulent events, the National Drug Commission proposed that the government evaluate the impact of the new amendments by means of funding a scientific study.

The researchers were asked to address five hypotheses that the Czech government wanted to have tested. The hypotheses were: “After the introduction of the penalty for possession of illegal drugs,
(1) availability of illegal drugs will decrease;
(2) number of (prevalence of) current drug users will decrease; or at least
(3) the incidence of new users will decrease;
(4) there will be no increase in the negative health consequences related to illegal drugs; and
(5) social costs will not increase.”

The study, “An Impact Analysis Project of the New Drug Legislation in the Czech Republic” (October 2001), concluded that the implementation of a penalty for possession of illicit drugs for personal use did not meet any of the tested objectives and was loss-making from an economic point of view.

Download the summary document (PDF).

The importance of this social experiment cannot be underestimated.  It shows that if government is willing to operate according to evidence then the policy change can be made in accordance with it.

Whilst this was not a full impact assessment as we understand it (for instance, it didn’t explore the possibility of legal regulation), it is important to know that this kind of work is possible to conduct, and that if done well, it can affect policy decisions.

Impact Assessment can be conducted at all levels of government, from city to transnational.  We call on policy makers at every level to ensure cost-effectiveness of expenditure and demonstrate that key impacts are being achieved.  And we ask drug policy activists to pressure them to do so.

For more on Impact Assessment: . . .

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I haven’t yet read of drones being used in this country for attacks on civilians, though it seems common in other countries. I’m sure we’ll get there soon. Here’s a good summary of the current situation.

The Obama Administration continues its aggression against civil rights in the US by jailing people born in the US for “immigration violations.” Obama really does seem to have a strong authoritarian streak. Julia Preston reports in the NY Times:

A growing number of United States citizens have been detained under Obama administration programs intended to detect illegal immigrants who are arrested by local police.

In a spate of recent cases across the country, American citizens have been confined in local jails after federal immigration agents, acting on flawed information from Department of Homeland Security databases, instructed the police to hold them for investigation and possible deportation.

Americans said their vehement protests that they were citizens went unheard by local police and jailers for days, with no communication with federal immigration agents to clarify the situation. Any case where an American is held, even briefly, for immigration investigation is a potential wrongful arrest because immigration agents lack legal authority to detain citizens.

“I told every officer I was in front of that I’m an American citizen, and they didn’t believe me,” said Antonio Montejano, who was arrested on a shoplifting charge last month and found himself held on an immigration order for two nights in a police station in Santa Monica, Calif., and two more nights in a teeming Los Angeles county jail cell, on suspicion he was an illegal immigrant. Mr. Montejano was born in Los Angeles.

This year the immigration agency has been rapidly extending its leading deportation program, known as Secure Communities, with a goal of covering the whole country by 2013. Under that program, fingerprints of every person booked at local jails are checked against Department of Homeland Security immigration databases. If the check results in a match, federal immigration agents can issue detainers, asking local law enforcement authorities to hold a suspect for up to 48 hours.

Detentions of citizens are part of the widening impact on Americans, as well as on immigrants, of President Obama’s enforcement strategies, which have led to more than 1.1 million deportations since the beginning of his term, the highest numbers in six decades.

John Morton, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the agency gave “immediate and close attention” to anyone who claimed to be a citizen.

“We don’t have the power to detain citizens,” Mr. Morton said in an interview on Tuesday. “We obviously take any allegation that someone is a citizen very seriously.”

Later this month, Mr. Morton said, the immigration agency will publish new forms for its detainers. The forms, in several languages, will require the police to notify suspects who are being held on federal immigration authority, he said. They will also provide a hot line where detainees can call the immigration agency directly.

Exact numbers of Americans erroneously held by immigration authorities are hard to come by, since they are not systematically recorded. In one study, 82 people who were held for deportation from 2006 to 2008 at two immigration detention centers in Arizona, for periods as long as a year, were freed after immigration judges determined that they were American citizens. . . .

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Ruth Marcus seems to get quite a bit wrong, but in today’s column in the Washington Post, in recounting the factual history behind Gingrich’s self-serving “memories” of past events, she provides a good insight into Gingrich’s character and reliability:

 

For a man who likes to tout his expertise as a historian, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has a decidedly revisionist approach when it comes to his own history.

In 1997, Gingrich became the only speaker in history to be reprimanded by the House of Representatives. He agreed to pay $300,000 to settle the matter, which involved using charitable groups to promote his political views and submitting misleading documents to the House ethics committee.

 

The ethics charges sound like ancient history. They involve dreary matters of tax law. But the episode is worth revisiting because it offers insights into Gingrich’s bombastic, push-the-boundaries style. More troubling, in recent days, Gingrich has been blatantly dishonest in his self-interested rewriting of this history, dismissing the ethics sanction as the action of “a very partisan political committee.”

As Gingrich relates the story, “The Democrats filed 84 charges against me; 83 were dismissed. The only one which survived was the fact that my lawyers had written a letter inaccurately and I signed it.”

Referring to California Democrat Nancy Pelosi, who served on the panel, Gingrich said last week, “If she was in the middle of it, how nonpartisan and just do you think the process was?”

How partisan? The ethics panel, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, voted 7 to 1 in favor of the reprimand. The dissenting Republican, Lamar Smith of Texas, said Gingrich had made “real mistakes” but called the penalty “way too severe.”

The House agreed to the reprimand by a similarly overwhelming margin, 395 to 28. “The penalty is tough and unprecedented,” the committee chairman, Connecticut Republican Nancy Johnson, said on the House floor. “It is also appropriate.”

Another Republican on the ethics panel, Porter Goss of Florida, said he found “the fact that the committee was given inaccurate, unreliable and incomplete information to be a very serious failure on [Gingrich’s] part.” Indeed, Gingrich’s own lawyer told the ethics committee that the speaker “recognizes the serious nature of the charges and the seriousness of his admission.”

The ethics investigation stemmed from a Gingrich-inspired enterprise during the early 1990s . . .

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A very good shave today, but still learning the right angle for the Rotbart and got a few small nicks on my upper lip from the ATG pass.

I use the Proraso pre-shave soap again—I’m thinking now that it’s good. It has a different feel than MR GLO—slippier as you apply it—and so far as I can tell they are the equal as pre-shave treatments.

The Morris & Forndran brush got a wonderfully thick and dense lather from the Otoko soap, and the Rotbart did a very smooth shave with a Personna 74 blade of just one use. I like the razor: despite minor nicks—which bowed instantly to My Nik Is Sealed—it feels good in the hand the head works well.

The Vitos aftershave comes in a spray bottle, but works well: I just spray my hand and then rub over my shaved beard.

Altogether, a good start. And the cocoa powder in the breakfast cereal was pretty good: not so much as to give a definite “chocolate” taste, but enough to add depth to the pepper sauce.

I am augmenting my usual breakfast cereal. To the usual:

2 Tbsp rolled oats
2 Tbsp oat bran
2 Tbsp chia seed
2 Tbsp hulled hemp seed
2 Tbsp wheat germ
1/2 tsp turmeric

I’m adding:

2 Tbsp flax seed
1/2 tsp unsweetened cocoa powder (Scharffenberger, specifically)

I add just over 1 c. boiling water (I have the kettle to a boil for tea anyway) and continue cooking until it’s thick, just three-four minutes, stirring constantly.

To that I’ll add the pepper sauce and top with egg over easy and Bac’Uns. It’s tasty to me. But we’ll see what the cocoa powder does…

UPDATE: Two things: I have a 2 Tbsp measuring spoon, so the above is quite easy. Also, the cocoa worked well: deepened the flavor of the pepper sauce without getting too chocolatey: a kind of mole effect.

Thanks to Nick for pointing out this test by Popular Mechanics:

These look like an enormous help.