Shameful

The “Justice” Department under Gonzales:

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, according to current and former officials. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.

Krugman: France is doing pretty well

Krugman points out that at least some of the France-bashing is uninformed and misdirected:

I was struck by something in the recent Times profile of Michael C. Jensen, who played a pivotal role in providing an intellectual rationale for gigantic executive paychecks. Now he feels some remorse – in fact, he sounds a bit like Boris Karloff in Frankenstein: “I have created a monthtah.” But he rationalizes it by saying that at least we’re doing better than those decrepit Europeans:

“As competition has intensified, corporations have flourished, but not necessarily the communities in which they are located or the workers they employ. Those are shortcomings that Mr. Jensen considers an acceptable price to pay for an American economy that he believes has outstripped Japan and Europe in growth and prosperity.”

Now, you hear things like that all the time. It’s a fixed idea among Americans that Europe – France, in particular – is an economic wasteland. According to documents leaked to the Boston Globe, Mitt Romney’s strategy is based on the equivalence “Hillary=France.” The horror, the horror.

But a visit to France – and/or a look at the statistics – makes it clear that the French economy gets a bum rap. I don’t want to go overboard here: France has a lot of problems. But it’s doing much better than the American caricature would have it.

French productivity – output per hour – is about the same as ours. What’s more, even during the period 1995-2005 – the years when we Americans were boasting about our productivity boom – French productivity grew only half a point slower than US productivity. And the US productivity boom now seems to be over.

Also, tales of mass unemployment are greatly exaggerated. French residents in their prime working years, ages 25-54, are as likely to be employed as their American counterparts (the employment-population ratio is 80 percent for both).

Now, it’s true that French GDP per capita is lower than ours. That reflects three things: the French work shorter hours; French people under 25 are less likely to be employed than young Americans, and the French are much more likely than Americans to retire early.

Short working hours are a choice – and it’s at least arguable that the French have made a better choice than America, the no-vacation nation.

Low employment among the young is a complicated story. To some extent it may represent lack of job openings. But a lot of it is the result of good things: young French are more likely to stay in school than young Americans, and fewer French students are forced by financial necessity to work while studying.

Finally, the French retire early. That’s a real problem: their pension system creates perverse incentives. We, of course, have this superb program called Social Security, which does a much better job.

So yes, France has problems. But what supersized CEO paychecks – or Hillary Clinton – have to do with avoiding France’s mistakes on pension policy is a mystery to me.

Still, what about the future? Aren’t we surging ahead in information technology?

Um, no. In fact, the US is being left behind in the broadband revolution.

So how about letting up on the Europe-bashing?

UC Berkeley videos on YouTube

Videos of UC Berkeley lectures. Free.

British Shorthair kittens

A British Shorthair silver tabby named Fluffy:

Plus you can search YouTube for “British Shorthair” and find quite a few clips.

Ending the expensive, endless war on drugs

An email from the Drug Policy Alliance:

I want to share with you an article that is seriously stirring up the drug policy debate around the world. It’s the cover story of Foreign Policy, a highly influential magazine on international affairs with a global readership.

Imust admit I have mixed feelings about the provocative words on the cover of the magazine: “Legalize It.” Why? Because I’m not sure that legalization is THE ANSWER to the world’s drug problems. For marijuana? Most likely, yes. But for all drugs? I just don’t know.

But I do know this: Global drug prohibition is an extraordinary failure that is responsible for stunning levels of violence, crime, corruption, disease and suffering throughout much of the world. More and more people, including global leaders, know it. But few dare speak out and say that this emperor has no clothes.

Why this silence?

It’s because the drug war, and the prohibitionist ideology which fuels it, is not about rational policy, and it’s certainly not about science, compassion, health or human rights. Rather, it’s become a sort of dogma–a secular fundamentalism that sees itself as immune from critical examination, and that views people like us as heretics.

Legalization may not be THE ANSWER to the world’s drug problems but it most certainly is THE QUESTION that needs to be on the table. It’s the question that requires people to re-examine the origins of the global drug prohibition regime. It’s the question that demands critical assessment of the costs, failures and harms of prohibitionist policies. And it’s the question that requires us to re-think our own worries and fears about ending prohibition.

Since this article was published a few weeks ago, I have heard from reliable sources that it is stirring up important debates at the highest levels of government in Latin America, Europe and even Asia. What I hear in the United States is that senior officials can’t wait until this issue is off the newsstands. The last thing they want is any real debate.

But, sadly for them, the debate keeps getting more real. FOX News did a surprisingly sympathetic report [see video clip below – LG]; John McLaughlin recommended the article this past weekend on his influential TV program, The McLaughlin Group; I’m doing one talk radio interview after another, from local and national NPR affiliates to powerful AM radio shows. And I am receiving emails from all sorts of people around the world, some of whom are translating the piece and posting it on foreign language websites. You can also listen to my debate on marijuana decriminalization with Dr. Herbert Kleber, the first deputy drug czar under William Bennett, on NPR’s Justice Talking.

You can help move the debate forward by sending the article link to your local newspaper and asking them to republish the piece, or contacting your local radio stations and urging them to discuss this important issue. You can also distribute hard copies of the article–we’ll send them to you for free from our online store. Let’s keep people talking.

Megs looking silly, Megs looking serious

Megs looking silly (left) and serious (right). She doesn’t have a great range of expressions, but she does well with what she has.

Democrats who make me gag

Dianne Feinstein is one. Joe Lieberman is another. It’s things like this (from a Greenwald column) that make me sick:

Speaking of the disease of the Washington Establishment, yet another report, this one from the Washington Post, indicates that “Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee have said there is consensus that the [telecom] companies should have some form of relief” for past lawbreaking with regard to allowing the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping on their customers in violation of the law.

The same article details the generally commendable effort of some House Democrats at least to compel the telecoms to disclose what they actually did here, but the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee — the Dianne Feinsteins and Jay Rockefellers — are pronouncing a “consensus” that telecoms should receive amnesty even though they have no idea what the telecoms actually did and have little interest in finding out. I’m in the process of trying to work with the ACLU and other groups and bloggers to determine what, if anything, can be done to derail this absolute travesty, but as is often the case when there is bipartisan Beltway support for some corrupt Establishment-protecting measure, outside pressures are irrelevant.

The behavior of telecoms and their bipartisan cast of lobbyists and advisors, meeting in secret with key Democratic Senators and administration officials to concoct their amnesty scheme, becomes an impenetrable process. This is a perfect microcosm of the Beltway disease.

GOP showing fear of the public?

Are they afraid to stand publicly behind their votes? Are they afraid to run on their record? Are they afraid of explaining their votes? Are fearful Representatives and Senators effective in meeting the challenges of today’s world?

Jaw-dropping comments from the media on the media

This is astonishing:

Via Matthew Yglesias, The Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz has weighed in with a long piece today on the fact that the press is lavishing a huge amount of attention on Hillary’s laugh.

Kurtz explains this phenomenon thusly:

The subtext here is that the media have collectively decided that the wife of the 42nd president is the inevitable nominee and a good bet to become the 44th Oval Office occupant. Lacking much of a horse race, since Clinton has maintained a 20-point national lead over Barack Obama all year, journalists are resorting to a classic general-election question: Are Americans ready to have this woman in their living rooms every night for four years? Are they comfortable with her personality? Do they like her voice? Plus, examining her personality quirks is more fun than deconstructing her stance on Iraq.

How nice. In a sense we should be thanking Kurtz here. He’s done us a public service by laying bare the media’s frivolity in all its inane glory. According to Kurtz, many of his colleagues are obsessing over The Laugh because examining Hillary’s personality is “more fun” than examining her Iraq stance, and they’ve all “collectively decided” that Hillary is the inevitable Dem nominee and is all but certain to be our next President. Isn’t that lovely? I understand that Kurtz was taking a gently ironic poke at his media colleagues. Still, I’d genuinely like to know what Kurtz, a media expert, actually thinks of all this. Should coverage be dictated by the fact that her laugh is a more “fun” topic than Iraq, or by the media’s collective decision that Hillary “is the inevitable nominee”? Should media folks make such a decision at all? Isn’t all this inanity kind of a bad thing?

I know, I know, this is all boring, earnest stuff. Still, I’m going to go out on a limb and stipulate that it matters who our next President is. But as Kurtz, the ultimate media insider, has now confirmed, to his media colleagues this is apparently just another laughing matter.

Practically the epitome of “beneath contempt.”

Modern times

The Eldest just sent me a link to the PDF of the Younger Grandson’s school newsletter. I commented that this was a great idea, and she wrote:

The school’s website actually has a PDF of every document that goes home in a child’s folder — EXTREMELY useful! 🙂

No more losing the notice on the way home…

Practical vs. theoretical knowledge

Interesting, especially to the Family Classicist:

Harvard classics researcher Mark Schiefsky has shown that many great technical innovations of antiquity, such as the balance and steelyard, were created by craftspeople with no theoretical training in mathematics. A steelyard is a balance with unequal arms, whose operation is based on ancient mathematician Archimedes’ law of the lever. Schiefsky poo-poos the idea that you need a fancy law to make a steelyard, and in fact has proven that steelyards were in use long before Archimedes explained it.

Schiefsky discovered evidence from early Greek writings that craftspeople in the 5th century B.C. used steelyards in the agora, or marketplace :

People assume that Archimedes was the first to use the steelyard because they suppose you can’t create one without knowing the law of the lever. In fact, you can–and people did. Craftsmen had their own set of rules for making the scale and calibrating the device. If someone brings a 100-pound slab of meat to the agora, how do you weigh it? It would be nice to have a 10-pound counterweight instead of a 100-pound counterweight, but to do so you need to change the balance point and ostensibly understand the principle of proportionality between weight and distance from the fulcrum. Yet, these craftsmen were able to use and calibrate these devices without understanding the law of the lever.

Secrecy for Congress, not for Telecoms

From Dan Froomkin’s column today:

Georgetown University law professor Marty Lederman blogs: “Think about that for a second. Numerous telecommunications executives and technicians were informed about this top-secret program, and (presumably) were given some account of why their participation would be legal notwithstanding FISA. But the Administration continues to refuse to inform Congress about that legal justification (even though it is now asking Congress to immunize the telecoms for having relied on the legal advice that Congress itself cannot see!); and moreover, the White House would not allow the Deputy Attorney General or the General Counsel of the NSA itself to be let in on the secret! . . .

“Obviously, the reason these officials were not ‘read into’ the program until Goldsmith and Ashcroft insisted upon it was not fear that they would leak vital information to Al Qaeda, but instead that the legal justification was so transparently flawed that it could not withstand any independent review at all — a judgment that turned out to be true, of course: As soon as anyone outside the Cheney/Gonzales/Yoo circle saw the legal analysis, they realized it was so extreme and untenable that they would have to resign if the President continued to act in reliance upon it. Goldsmith testified today that the NSA program was ‘the biggest legal mess I encountered [at OLC].’ In light of the August 2002 Torture opinion, that’s really saying something!”

And Pamela Hess notes for the Associated Press that while Goldsmith “said that parts of the President Bush’s much-criticized eavesdropping program were illegal . . . . he would not say exactly what law or constitutional principle the surveillance violated. Goldsmith said the White House has forbidden him from saying anything about the legal analysis underpinning the program — key details long sought by majority Democrats and some Republicans.”

Congress is supposed to provide oversight—and for a very good reason.

Is it okay to feed leftovers to your pets?

The short answer apparently is “yes.” Especially to dogs. Check out the Greek plan.

Books on journaling

For quite a while I had a fascination for books on journaling, and a good little collection has now been donated to the Monterey Public Library. But I still pay attention when I come across such a book, and this one sounds interesting, despite the frightening smile/grin the author exhibits. Certainly the author’s background and the publisher make the book more interesting.

Whenever I see such a book, I always first check the library to see if they have it (nope), and then check Abebooks to see if it’s available there, and this one is, though not at much savings yet: it was just published in July of this year.

Checking the library and Abebooks is easy: just click the link to Amazon, and then Book Burro and Library Lookup do the rest automatically (well, with one click for the latter). Note that Book Burro will do a library lookup for you as well, if you’re lucky enough to have your library onn the list.

David Allen’s achievement

Very interesting post this morning at Lifehack.org on the characteristics of good leadership through a brief discussion of the path that David Allen took on the way to developing his method of Getting Things done. Worth reading.

Walking effects

I certainly am sleeping better with all the walking, but I notice also that this morning my back’s a little stiff. Does walking affect the back?

Took my morning (pre-breakfast) blood glucose reading and entered it into SugarStats. My endocrinologist’s going to be so pleased to actually get a written record. 🙂

First research step: trying for a good shave

Okay, this morning was step 1: using the same Treet Blue Special blade and trying for a good shave again. Again I had a two-day stubble, and after a pre-shave wash with MR GLO, I used a soap that has produced a good shave previously: D.R. Harris Almond shaving stick.

I brought out the heavy artillery—the Rooney Style 2 Finest—and almost immediately had a great lather. I didn’t rush it, but worked the lather thoroughly over my beard, this way and that, enjoying the feel of lather and brush.

Then I picked up the Gillette open-comb Aristocrat and, using the blade from the last shave, made the first stroke: right cheek, from the sideburn down. Very smooth—no tugging. Curious, I tried a small stroke—really, just a partial stroke—on my lower lip, where my beard is particularly tough. A tiny bit of tugging. I realized suddenly that I shaved the beard on my chin and upper and lower lips last exactly because that was where the beard was toughest, and I was (unconsciously) letting that part of my beard sit soaking in the lather while I shaved the rest of my face.

I returned to the right cheek and finished that and my right neck—all smooth shaving, no tugging. Then (as is my habit) my left sideburn area and cheek and left side of my neck, finishing with the center of my neck, under my chin.

Then, finally the chin—and by now there was no tugging at all, just smooth shaving. This again makes me think that Monday’s problem was insufficient prep due to dry lather.

Finally, after the chin is done, the upper lip, where the toughest of my beard grows. Again: smooth cutting, no tugging.

I rinsed, relathered (and again took time to enjoy the lathering—what a great brush and great lather), and did the across-the-grain pass: all was smooth sailing shaving. Another rinse, another lathering, and the against-the-grain pass. Smooth and easy.

Hot-water rinse, cold-water rinse, dry, and apply Stetson aftershave—extremely pleasant, BTW. Hot-water rinse of razor, shake out, rinse in the jar of 91% rubbing alcohol and put up to dry. Rinse brush thoroughly: hot water, then cold water, then shake out and replace on rack.

Lesson learned: take your time in the lathering and make sure the lather is sufficiently wet. In the first pass, shave the toughest part of your beard last. (I had been doing this, though not consciously.)

Next step: see if I can replicate Monday’s sad experience by using same shave soap and brush and trying for the same lather conditions. I want to verify that the problem was the prep. Final step will be to use that same shave soap and brush again and pay more attention to the prep to see whether I get a good shave. So: no shave tomorrow, since I’m going for the same two-day stubble.