"Judicial notice" an oxymoron?

Scott Horton writes about the awful decision in Mohammed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, which we ranted against last week. The case

involved claims by an individual that he was seized and then tortured in a proxy arrangement directed by the CIA. Jeppesen Dataplan was directly involved, restraining and transporting the victims with knowledge that they would be tortured; that knowledge is exhibited, for example, in briefings to the company’s employees. These facts were established beyond any reasonable doubt without the need to turn to classified information. Indeed, one of the most respected courts in the English-speaking world--the Court of Appeal in London--had already viewed the formidable evidence and demanded a criminal investigation, now pending. The British court concluded, just as the Ninth Circuit was legally obligated to do, that state-secrecy claims could not be used to block discovery of evidence of crimes. Under the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which adopts the position that the U.S. Justice Department took in 1946, the crime of disappearance connected to torture is a crime against humanity, with no statute of limitations and no defense of superior orders applicable.

The Holder Justice Department would have us believe that it is protecting state secrets essential to our security. That posture is risible, and half of the court saw through it. The dilemma faced by the Justice Department was rather that evidence presented in the suit would likely be used in the future (not in the United States, obviously) to prosecute those who participated in the extraordinary renditions process. Twenty-three U.S. agents have already been convicted for their role in a rendition in Milan. Prosecutors in Spain have issued arrest warrants for a further 13 U.S. agents involved in a botched rendition case that touched on Spanish soil. Prosecutors in Germany have opened a criminal investigation into the use of Ramstein AFB in connection with torture and illegal kidnappings. Prosecutors in Poland are pursuing a similar matter. And Prime Minister David Cameron was recently forced to brief President Obama on his decision to direct a formal inquiry which could lead to prosecutions tied directly to the subject matter of the Mohamed case. This is the remarkable background to the case decided by the Ninth Circuit, and remarkably not a single word about this appears anywhere in the opinion--or even in most of the press accounts about it.

This is bad, people. This is ve-must-halt-these-proceedings-in-the-name-of-Reich-zecurity bad. Whatever the merits of the case -- and we may find those out in the UK proceeding -- it's outrageous that the feds can get a case dismissed on the face of the complaint by merely alleging to the courts that "state secrets" are implicated.

Getcher antioxidants today -- at McDonald's!

Robert Waldmann complains that McD's gets a bad rap for its food being "filled with preservatives":

I think that BHA and BHT are good for you.

The weird thing is that health food enthusiasts are convinced of two things -- that anti-oxidants are healthy and that preservatives are unhealthy. The only problem is that "anti-oxidant" and "preservative" are synonyms.

This is not (quite) a logical inconsistency. Their view is that natural preservatives are healthy and that synthetic anti-oxidants are unhealthy. There is essentially no evidence supporting this hypothesis and people have been looking for such evidence for decades. * * *

To get technical, preservatives are anti-oxidants and oxidative stress (roughly rusting) is allegedly implicated in cancer and cardio-vascular disease. I note that there was a dramatic increase in US life expectancy in the 70s (similar to the increase in the 40s following the introduction of penicillin). This was due to reduced incidence of heart attacks. It was ascribed to improved diet and increased exercize. Sure mac, that's why we are so much thinner than we used to be.

Now continuing improvement can be partly explained by statins (one can be overweight, eat lots of saturated fat, never exercize and have low LDL cholesterol these days -- that's my plan). Also some by bypass surgery and shunts and stuff. This is mostly post 70s. There is a huge mystery in the data which can be explained if it is noted that anti-oxidants reduce arterio-schlerosis in model systems (over-fed rats).

In any case, the claim that anti-oxidants prevent arterioschlerosis is absolutely totally very respectable and BHA and BHT are anti-oxidants. There is a fairly large literature asserting that this or that food contains anti-oxidants. In each case which I checked, the anti-oxidant was compared to BHA or BHT (or both).

So why are people so deeply convinced that BHA and BHT are bad for our health ? One reason is that extremely large doses cause cancer of the fore-stomach in mice and rats.

This result was part of the evidence which convinced people (including the guy who taught me organic chemistry) that organic chemistry was a menace, because many many synthetic organic chemicals are carcinogenic. In 1979, he predicted a big increase in cancer in the 80s roughly 20 years after they began flowing into our diet (20 year lag from aggregate cigarette smoking and lung cancer). That didn't happen -- aggregate cancer incidence is almost completely explained by age (to the fifth) and cigarette smoking. My view is that many compounds which are carcinogenic in huge doses are safe in small doses and in other cases the carcinogenisis depends on the fifth power of the dose which amounts to pretty much the same thing. Also I am not a mouse and don't have a fore-stomach.

Now if only the value meal came with a beer. (H/t Drum.)

The translation error that broke the world

As someone who just quit reading a translation of Oblomov upon finding the word "alright," I take pleasure in relaying the information that an error in translation caused the Great Depression. This from a comment (by "Justin") at a Tyler Cowen post about the effects of France's "gold hoarding" from 1927-32:

From Kindleberger, "The World in Depression":

"The central issue at the first Hague Conference [in August 1929] had been the unwillingness of Philip Snowden, the Labour chancellor of the exchequer [for UK] to accept the experts' recommendation on the division of [WWI] reparations... The Prime minister and the foreign office thought it absurd [for Snowden] to raise an international conflict and threaten to break up the conference over 80% of 2.5million pounds sterling. In the course of the debates, Snowden called an argument by Chéron, the French minister of finance, "ridiculous and grotesque," an expression strong in English but still stronger in French [see footnote]. This led to difficulty. Shortly thereafter, Quesnay [from the Bank of France], in the company of two other experts, Pirelli from Italy and Francqui from Belgium waited on Leith-Ross [UK economic advisor] and stated that the French government viewed Snowden's attempt to change the division of the Young Plan as inadmissible. If he did not change his demand, he went on, the French government would convert its sterling into gold and transfer it to Paris. As he tells the story, Leith-Ross rang for a messenger and had the men shown out without a reply. Most opinion holds that the serious British gold losses of August and September, which amounted to $45 million, were the result of capital flows to New York after the Federal Reserve discount rate was finally raised. On the other showing, the words "ridiculous and grotesque" led to French conversions in London and forced the Bank of England to put up its discount rate. This, rather than the failure of the Hatry companies, triggered off the rise in the Bank of England discount rate and the collapse of the New York stock market."

"[footnote]: Schmidt, who was present at the The Hague as a German interpreter, claims that ridicule et grotesque is an inexact translation of "ridiculous and grotesque". The latter expression could be used in the House of Commons; the former would not be accepted in the Chamber of Deputies... When I happened to recount this story for Rene David, a french professor of international law, he extended it. He had been in London at the time, and he said that the French interpreter, realizing his mistake, apologized the next day and offered the press a correction. "Ridiculous", he explained, meant "laughable", "funny" or "amusing", while "grotesque" meant "bizaare", "curious" or "original". He therefore should have translated "ridiculous and grotesque" as amusant et original."

A cautionary tale for translators everywhere!

(Post title of course alluding to this book, possibly on a bargain table in a bookstore near you, and very much worth reading. Ahamed notes that ridicule et grotesque implies "bad faith and utter stupidity," and adds that Chéron "sent his seconds to demand an apology -- the French were only just weaning themselves off the practice of dueling.")

Nietzsche and the will to power: notes from a CLE class

As readers of Nietzsche know, he tinkered with a project for a book called The Will to Power, but abandoned it well before he went mad. His enterprising sister published selections from his notebooks under that title as if it were his "unpublished masterpiece," creating no end of misunderstanding for many years.

Much moreso than "the superman" or "the eternal recurrence," the will to power has a good claim to be a central part of N's thought. A problem for his readers has been that, while being the anti-metaphysician par excellence, N. has also been accused of making "will to power" into some kind of metaphysical substrate of reality. Besides being a rather odd error for N. of all people to make, this reading also relies heavily on the notebooks, tho not entirely so.

The will to power is best understood in terms of interpretation, as may be seen from those who best exemplify it in N's view -- the creators of moral systems, those who invent and implement values for a society. N.b. that after he abandoned the Will to Power project, his next notion was for a magnum opus called The Revaluation of All Values (of which The Antichrist was supposed to be vol. 1).

Reading in a modern selection from the notebooks, I think I've identified some of what N. was up to with his "metaphysical" notions of will to power. Take what appears a troubling note from June-July 1885:

The triumphant concept of "force," with which our physicists have created God and the world, needs supplementing: it must be ascribed an inner world which I call "will to power," i.e. an insatiable craving to manifest power; or to employ, exercise power, as a creative drive, etc. The physicists cannot eliminate "action at a distance" from their principles, nor a force of repulsion (or attraction). There is no help for it: one must understand all motion, all "appearances," all "laws, as mere symptoms of inner events, and use the human analogy consistently to the end.

This "must" is, to say the least, spectacularly unconvincing. One would think N. would prefer to escape "the human analogy" altogether.

Leaving aside the very dubious grasp of even late 19th-c. science possessed by a prematurely retired professor of classical languages, I think what's up here is that N. (1) believes in a fundamentally a-human, value-free, indifferent cosmos, and (2) finds that belief utterly useless for the creator of values. True, the world is alien to human desires and fears and couldn't care less if we prosper or perish; but then, why should we let the truth distract us from the project of creating civilized humans? One "must" imagine nature in terms of "the human analogy" because anything else is boring to Nietzsche.

This rather cavalier dismissal of scientific thought is made more clear when we compare the above passage to a somewhat later notebook entry:

A force we cannot imagine (like the allegedly purely mechanical force of attraction and repulsion) is an empty phrase and must be refused rights of citizenship in science -- which wants to make the world imaginable to us, nothing more!

Again, this is a remarkably narrow notion of what "science" (presumably, wissenschaft, which can mean more like "academic discipline" than a hard science) is properly concerned with. But again, N. is concerned with what the world means to humans, what we can imagine. I guess he would've had no use for the world of quantum mechanics, where we can use mathematics to make amazing predictions of real events, but at the cost that, quite plainly, we cannot imagine what it is we are describing. (As Bohr said, whoever thinks he understands quantum physics, doesn't understand it.)

In short: N. did not "really think" that the world, or organic matter, was "made of" will to power; he simply thought that, inasmuch as thought's inseparable from interpretation (and thus from will to power), the question of what the world "is really made of" was simply not very interesting, and at worst, an invitation to nihilism ("atoms and the void"). Far better, in N.'s view, to believe a value-supporting falsehood about the world, than to pursue an ultimately nihilistic "will to truth" to the point of undoing our values and, therefore, ourselves.

Torture: it's not a crime, it's a "state secret"

People like Jon Chait enjoy professing to be dumbfounded by liberals' lack of enthusiasm for the Democrats in 2010.

Perhaps that's because Chait et al. don't much care about news like this:

Plaintiff Ahmed Agiza, an Egyptian national who had been seeking asylum in Sweden, was captured by Swedish authorities, allegedly transferred to American custody and flown to Egypt. In Egypt, he claims he was held for five weeks “in a squalid, windowless, and frigid cell,” where he was “severely and repeatedly beaten” and subjected to electric shock through electrodes attached to his ear lobes, nipples and genitals. Agiza was held in detention for two and a half years, after which he was given a six-hour trial before a military court, convicted and sentenced to 15 years in Egyptian prison. According to plaintiffs, “[v]irtually every aspect of Agiza’s rendition, including his torture in Egypt, has been publicly acknowledged by the Swedish government.”

* * * “even the most compelling necessity cannot overcome the claim of privilege if the court is ultimately satisfied that [state] secrets are at stake.” United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1, 11 (1953). After much deliberation, we reluctantly conclude this is such a case, and the plaintiffs’ action must be dismissed. Accordingly, we affirm the judgment of the district court.

(First excerpt plucked from LGM; opinion here.)

The dissent -- there is, thankfully, a dissent -- notes the backstory of Reynolds:

Even in Reynolds, avoidance of embarrassment—not preservation of state secrets—appears to have motivated the Executive’s invocation of the privilege. There the Court credited the government’s assertion that “this accident occurred to a military plane which had gone aloft to test secret electronic equipment,” and that “there was a reasonable danger that the accident investigation report would contain references to the secret electronic equipment which was the primary concern of the mission.” 345 U.S. at 10. In 1996, however, the “secret” accident report involved in that case was declassified. A review of the report revealed, not “details of any secret project the plane was involved in,” but “[i]nstead, . . . a horror story of incompetence, bungling, and tragic error.” Garry Wills, Why the Government Can Legally Lie, 56 N.Y. Rev. of Books 32, 33 (2009). Courts should be concerned to prevent a concentration of unchecked power that would permit such abuses.

So you would think.

I'll leave you on this 9/11 eve with two sets of quotes, one from Antonin Scalia (quoted in the above dissent) --

Arbitrary imprisonment and torture under any circumstance is a “ ‘gross and notorious . . . act of despotism.’ ” Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507, 556 (2004) (Scalia, J., dissenting) (quoting 1 Blackstone 131-33 (1765)). But “ ‘confinement [and abuse] of the person, by secretly hurrying him to [prison], where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten; is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.’ ” Id. (Scalia, J., dissenting) (quoting 1 Blackstone 131-33 (1765)) (emphasis added).

-- and the other from the late David Foster Wallace:

... can we trust our elected leaders to value and protect the American idea as they act to secure the homeland? What are the effects on the American idea of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, PATRIOT Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance, Executive Order 13233, corporate contractors performing military functions, the Military Commissions Act, NSPD 51, etc., etc.? Assume for a moment that some of these measures really have helped make our persons and property safer—are they worth it? Where and when was the public debate on whether they’re worth it? Was there no such debate because we’re not capable of having or demanding one? Why not? Have we actually become so selfish and scared that we don’t even want to consider whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?

Osama bin Laden and his thugs never had the power to disgrace the United States of America. George W. Bush and Barack Obama have done so. Fuck 'em, all three.

The present economic situation, in technical terms

If a seasoned blogger like Brad DeLong can steal ("quote") an entire blog post from Karl Smith, well, who is TBA not to emulate his bettters?

There is a critical point that I fear the commentariat is just not getting. In my darker moments I fear that some of my fellow economists aren’t getting it either but we aren’t going to go there.... We have very low capacity utilization (75%) and very high unemployment (10%). That is, we have factories sitting idle for lack of workers – low capacity utilization. At the same time we have workers sitting idle for lack of factories – high unemployment. There are machines waiting to be worked and people waiting to work them but they are not getting together. The labor market is failing to clear.

This is a fucking disaster.

Excuse my language, but you have to get that this is a big deal. This is not a big deal like the GOP doesn’t appreciate public goods. Or, Democrats don’t understand incentives. Or some other such second order debate that could reasonably concern us in different times. This is a failure of our basic institutions of production. The job of the market is to bring together willing buyers with willing sellers in order to produce value. This is not happening and as a result literally trillions of dollars in value are not being produced.

Let me say that again because I think it fails to sink in – literally trillions of dollars in value are not being produced. Not misallocated. Not spent on programs you don’t approve of or distributed in tax cuts you don’t like. Trillions of dollars in value are not produced at all. Gone from the world entirely. Never to be had, by anyone, anywhere, at any time. Pure unadulterated loss.

Time and time again I see people speak about recessions as if they are a bad harvest – an unfortunate event wherein we have to figure out how to go with less. Some say we should all sacrifice – some say the sacrifice should be based on X or Y. Some say each family should take their lumps as they come.

However, they are all getting the basic idea wrong. This is not a bad harvest. The problem isn’t that there is less to go around. The problem is that we are creating less, building less, making less.

We have people who would be working but are instead watching Judge Judy. We have machines that could be spinning but are literally rusting for lack of use. This is a coordination disaster.

The question is how do we end this thing as quickly as possible. How do we stop wasting our basic resources (men and machines), day-after-day, month-after-month, year-after-year.

So when I hear this debate drift oft into how Republicans don’t appreciate the value of infrastructure – I suffer infinite eye roll. This is the time for this? You would watch the core economy grind down while you argue over the need to fix a pothole!

When I hear the GOP running some nonsense about how Obamacare is scaring small business I find myself beating back the desire for autodefenestration. Can we let this go already! There are real issues that need to be dealt with.

Now maybe some people want to explain to me how what appears to be a massive market failure is actually something else: a skill mismatch, a great recalculation, etc. I am willing to have that debate.

Of those that agree that this is the result of insufficient aggregate demand we can debate the fastest means of spurring such demand: aggressive monetary policy, payroll tax cuts, something else we haven’t thought of – I am all ears.

However, these are the limits of rational disagreement.

Side arguments that are basically proxy battles for your general theory of government are sadistic tribalistic grandstanding. You chatter and dawdle while Rome burns.

See the original post for charts, update, etc.

Lies, damned lies, and lawyerly lies

Legal news you probably can't use, except as cautionary tales:

-- Philip Thomas reports on Judge Mills' discovery sanctions against Harrah's. The case arose out of a charter-bus accident, but the present issue is some stunningly brazen misconduct, including old-fashioned lying to the court, regarding some materials requested in discovery. (NMC had some good posts on the case, but they seem to've been casualties of his former blog host's own misconduct.)

Anyway, Judge Mills's sanction is that he's resolving against Harrah's the issue of whether the charter bus was Harrah's agent. We had thought this was a disappointingly slight punishment, but NMC (commenting at Thomas's post) corrects us:

The view up here among lawyers is that this ruling was devastating to Harrah's-- apparently, the bus wreck is all but indefensible. You also are missing the part where he says he's going to apply Ark. law and there are no damages caps.

Throughout the part of the hearing I attended, Harrah's was saying that a dispositive sanction about joint venture meant it was doomed.

It was not a slap on the wrist. It's a zap that will cost Harrah's way into the millions.

One wonders if they'll seek to recover against their attorneys.

-- The other legal news is that the sealed court order in the dispute between State Farm and Jim Hood has been unsealed, thanks to Alan Lange and some Mississippi TV stations who persuaded the district court to unseal the entire document. NMC gives the background. Lange and NMC flag the contrast between what Hood told the court --

Judge Bramlette: All right, Mr. Hood, you’re going to be approached by the media and we want to know what you’re going to say. And you’ve already said it off the record. There’s a request that it be on the record. And go ahead and say that, sir.

Mr. Hood: Yes, your Honor. In order to protect the seal, certainly, the only comment would be that the the case was dismissed. And, of course, they’ll ask me about the criminal case; and I would not make any comment, which is always what I’m bound ethically to do, is not to make any comment about the criminal case, say “I can’t comment about that”.

-- and what he told the public:

allegations lodged against me by this insurer (State Farm) were shown to be false when a federal judge recently threw out a lawsuit it had filed against my office.

Disappointing, to say the least.

The Great Leap into Famine

Last week, NMC flagged a roundup of topics that China experts would love to know more about. Leading the list was the famine of 1959-62, during the "Great Leap Forward" under Mao.

All the details may never be known, but there's a new book about it:

In brutal fact, between 1959 and 1962, at least forty-three million Chinese died during the famine .... Most died of hunger, over two million were executed or were beaten or tortured to death, the birth rate halved in some places, parents sold their children, and people dug up the dead and ate them.

The cause of this disaster, the worst ever to befall China and one of the worst anywhere at any time, was Mao, who, cheered on by his sycophantic and frightened colleagues, decreed that before long China's economy must overtake that of the Soviet Union, Britain and even the US. Mao suggested that 'When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill,' and declared that anyone who questioned his policies was a 'Rightist', a toxic term eventually applied to thirteen million Party members. * * *

Now Frank Dikötter, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and at Hong Kong University, has laid out the vast horror in detail, drawing on local and provincial archives that have only recently become available to approved foreign scholars.

An interesting assertion is that local archives are sometimes more accurate than central ones:

Until recently, Dikötter states, most accounts of the famine have been based on central government sources that are often incomplete or untrue. What he found during his years rummaging in archives throughout China was that such central documents were transmitted in fuller, less censored versions to the provinces and below. In addition, the archives he saw contained letters of complaint or justification from local officials and even ordinary people, minutes from local and even central meetings, and statistics which were either falsified to hoodwink Mao or local superiors, or were subtle enough to reveal that awful things were happening. For example, in 1960 in the 'model province' of Henan, in Xinyang alone 'over a million people died ... Of these victims 67,000 were clubbed to death with sticks'. When this came to Mao 'he blamed the trouble on class enemies'. On another occasion, when the Chairman learned that there had been terrible deaths in one town he had hitherto admired, 'Mao simply switched his allegiance to the next county down the road willing to outdo others in extravagant production claims.' Mao and his cronies insisted, as one of them put it as reports of deaths rolled in, that 'This is the price we have to pay; it's nothing to be afraid of. Who knows how many people have been sacrificed on the battlefields and in the prisons [for the revolutionary cause]? Now we have a few cases of illness and death; it's nothing!' Every detail was locally recorded and explained - or obscured. Take this report from 25 February 1960 in Yaohejia village: 'Name of culprit: Yang Zhongsheng ... Name of victim: Yang Ecshun. Relationship with Culprit: Younger Brother ... Manner of Crime: Killed and Eaten. Reason: Livelihood Issues.'

Society completely unravelled. In the newly established communes, peasants following Mao's lunatic advice ploughed their paddies uselessly deep. They dismantled their houses to use as fertiliser, and melted down their tools to make the steel Mao had decreed was the mark of an advanced socialist country (after all wasn't Stalin 'the man of steel'?). Other peasants abandoned their fields and marched miles to work all night constructing mammoth water schemes that often came to nothing, while their families died without grain at home. The only reason millions more didn't starve, as Dikötter describes in detail, is because of their desperate ploys to steal food.

Naturally, few Chinese learn about this today, and what they do learn is mostly lies.

"No littering" is clear -- "no torture" isn't. So now you know.

Quoting David Luban's post in full:

Today the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the conviction of Daniel Millis, convicted of littering because he left sealed bottles of drinking water in a desert wildlife refuge. He explained that he left them "along frequently traveled routes for unlawful entrants to the United States." He belongs to a group called "No More Deaths," and the opinion quotes his testimony: "humanitarian aide [sic] is never a crime."

The majority overturned his conviction because a reasonable person might not understand that leaving drinking water for people dying of thirst is littering. The United States countered that the water bottles constitute "garbage" in the sense of the statute. After foraging through some dictionary definitions of "garbage" and "discarded," the majority concludes that the regulation is too ambiguous to enforce in this case.

Judge Jay Bybee - he of the torture memo - dissents. Littering is littering, and Bybee finds that the regulation is as clear as a sunny day in the desert. This is the same Jay Bybee who thinks that terms like "torture" and "severe suffering" are so vague that it would be unfair to apply statutes prohibiting them to interrogators who waterboard people and keep them awake for a week at a time, naked and hanging in chains.

The man should be in prison, and instead he's one of the highest judges in the land. Shameful.

... Bybee's colleague in crime, John Yoo, isn't very articulate in his own defense, it appears. (Via LGM.)

Is it the birth certificate thing?

Stopped by the store last night and saw the cover of Newsweek:

For those of you with normal vision, that's:

The Making of a Terrorist-Coddling, Warmongering, Wall Street-Loving, Socialistic, Godless Muslim President*

*who isn’t actually any of these things

by Jonathan Alter

Why does Jonathan Alter think that Obams isn't actually president? When did *this* rumor start?

I'm guessing "healthcare" wouldn't go over too well, either

Use "case law" rather than "caselaw.” See Memorandum from Charles Fried to OSG Attorneys (Oct. 2, 1987) (calling for "total extirpation" of this "barbarism").

Thus the USDOJ Office of the Solicitor General Style Manual, a document of which I learned via a Volokh post. Not linked on the OSG's site, but they will e-mail you a copy, it turns out.

The manual's purpose is to supplement the Bluebook for the stylistic peculiarities of the Supreme Court. It seems that there must be a Supreme Court Style Manual on which this document is patterned, and indeed, there must be a fair number of ex-clerks working in OSG, so the exact genesis of this manual would be of interest.

Anyway, now you can cite the SG way! Use only as directed.

In Iraq till 2020? Or a coup first?

Tom Ricks is back from vacation and passes along some Iraq pessimism unallayed by Obama's declaration of "Mission Accomplished":

Meanwhile, in the under-reported Iraq story of the month, the Iraqi army chief of staff said the U.S. military needs to stay in Iraq for another decade. "If I were asked about the withdrawal, I would say to politicians: "the US army must stay until the Iraqi army is fully ready in 2020," said Lt. Gen. Babaker Zebari.

And in the second most under-reported story of the month, here is a comment from an Iraqi politician, quoted by the awesome Anthony Shadid of the New York Times:

A leading politician related a recent conversation he had with a top Iraqi general. The politician asked about the possibility of a coup. The general, he said, deeming the talk serious, pulled out a map of the capital and provided a disconcertingly elaborate plan to execute one: overturning trucks to block the route from the main American base to the Green Zone, seizing television stations, besieging Parliament, and so on.

Whatever happens in Iraq is not, ultimately, in America's control.

Titanic ... bitchslapped a pussy lil iceberg on my way to NY

If Historical Events Had Facebook Statuses.

Drinkers live longer

If that's a good thing:

Moderate drinking, which is defined as one to three drinks per day, is associated with the lowest mortality rates in alcohol studies. Moderate alcohol use (especially when the beverage of choice is red wine) is thought to improve heart health, circulation and sociability, which can be important because people who are isolated don't have as many family members and friends who can notice and help treat health problems.

But why would abstaining from alcohol lead to a shorter life? It's true that those who abstain from alcohol tend to be from lower socioeconomic classes, since drinking can be expensive. And people of lower socioeconomic status have more life stressors — job and child-care worries that might not only keep them from the bottle but also cause stress-related illnesses over long periods. (They also don't get the stress-reducing benefits of a drink or two after work.)

But even after controlling for nearly all imaginable variables — socioeconomic status, level of physical activity, number of close friends, quality of social support and so on — the researchers (a six-member team led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas at Austin) found that over a 20-year period, mortality rates were highest for those who were not current drinkers, regardless of whether they used to be alcoholics, second highest for heavy drinkers and lowest for moderate drinkers.

Nietzsche had the answer: the human organism can handle only so much reality. Or possibly that was Lovecraft. Same difference. (H/t 3QD.)

"How to Lose a Case in 100 Pages or More"

That's the subtitle of the article "Writing Bad Briefs," a how-(not-)to by NY judge Gerald Lebovits. The endnote to his article indicates that the same rhetorical device has been used many times before, but Judge Lebovits applies it with zest:

The more typefaces in your brief, the more you’ll distract the judge from finding any good arguments your client might have. You’re closer to losing than you think if your brief looks like a ransom note. Challenge yourself to write each paragraph in a different typeface. If you really want to signal that you and your brief are losers, write each sentence in a different typeface: one in Times New Roman, another in Courier, and a third in Garamond. When neon lights fail, bold, underline, and italicize, preferably all at once, and all in quotation marks. How else are you going to emphasize your lack of forthcoming content, show sarcasm, and prove your paranoia? Then uppercase as many words as you can. Capitalizing excessively makes your writing memorable, albeit unreadable.

I will have to plagiarize all this for a CLE one day.

H/t Max Kennerly.