Happy Birthday, Ansel Adams

"The Tetons and the Snake River" (1942) Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.
National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the National Park Service. (79-AAG-1)
(Licencing: Public domain because it was taken while Ansel Adams was working for the US government.) 

More photos can be found at Wikimedia Commons. Above photo via Wikipedia.

Tip of the hat to Library of Congress (@librarycongress) on Twitter.

Ten Years After: The Path to Iraq and 'Hubris'

On Monday (9 p.m. ET/PT), a new MSNBC documentary will investigate the deceptions which the Bush administration used to go to war in Iraq. It derives from the book Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (2006), by Michael Isikoff and David Corn.*

For an article in Mother Jones, Corn describes doubts which prominent Bush administration figureheads held at the time, revealing this scene in the film about former Secretary of State Colin Powell:

[. . .] Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff at the time, recalls the day Congress passed a resolution authorizing Bush to attack Iraq:

Powell walked into my office and without so much as a fare-thee-well, he walked over to the window and he said, "I wonder what'll happen when we put 500,000 troops into Iraq and comb the country from one end to the other and find nothing?" And he turned around and walked back in his office. And I—I wrote that down on my calendar—as close for—to verbatim as I could, because I thought that was a profound statement coming from the secretary of state, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

Wilkerson also notes that Powell had no idea about the veracity of the intelligence he cited during that UN speech: "Though neither Powell nor anyone else from the State Department team intentionally lied, we did participate in a hoax."

In March there will be the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

"Hubris": New Documentary Reexamines the Iraq War "Hoax" [Mother Jones], by David Corn (February 16, 2013) [Read February 17, 2013]

* Update: David Corn, of Mother Jones, has just won a Polk Award for his reporting in 2012, specifically for the '47% video' starring Mitt Romney at a fundraiser. ("LIU Announces 2012 George Polk Awards in Journalism," February 17, 2013 [Long Island University])

Follow-Up: Mandatory Minimums for Drug Trafficking?

To recapitulate part of what I wrote in November:

It was in New York State where the Rockefeller Drug Laws were passed into practice in 1973. Under these laws, anyone who was convicted of selling, for instance, 60 grams of marijuana would have to be sentenced to a minimum of fifteen years.

This measure was also used in future drug laws like the federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act.

All of this legislation revived (as far as I have gathered) the mandatory minimum sentences which had been removed from federal law three years earlier.

Since then, 'mandatory minimums' have been seen as a problem because they force the courts to imprison convicted criminals for excessively long periods of time — without adequately redressing, or even exacerbating, crime rates.

*

Forty years after the legislation, the American radio broadcasting company NPR (together with the North Country Public Radio's Prison Time Media Project) is running a series on the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Today it described the experience of G. Prendes, a native of New York State who was affected by the Drug Laws after he was arrested at the age of 23 and then jailed, convicted, and imprisoned for a fifteen-year term.

ACCORDING to the article,

in 1977, he made the big mistake that put him in the crosshairs of the new laws: He agreed to help with a drug deal, selling a pound of cocaine upstate in Rochester, N.Y. It was a sting.

[. . . The former prisoner,] Prendes was a first-time offender, and no one saw him as a kingpin drug dealer.

*

The effects were harsh for him individually but they also victimized a broader sphere:

Ottolenghi's Hot Yoghurt and Barley Soup

Though this blog is unlike a proper news website in other respects, here is an article in the 'filler' tradition for the holidays.

Hordeum — barley
Photo courtesy USDA,
via Wikipedia

The new cookbook Jerusalem has been well received and has even landed in the bookshelves of Gwyneth Paltrow. I received it for my birthday and have made a handful of its Middle Eastern recipes already. The latest is the hot yoghurt and barley soup.

The barley and the water it is cooked in are enriched by sautéd onions, yoghurt, mint, parsley, and spring onions to make the soup. Further details shall be kept unrevealed for reasons of not spoiling the mystery (and, copyright).

Yesterday I made it the first time and left the barley too long; it was waterlogged and much of the cooking liquid had disappeared. The right response to this contingency was, as it proved, not to make up the difference with more water; that otherwise vitally important compound of hydrogen and oxygen was in the end the defining flavour of the broth. I tasted the soup toward the end of proceedings, then rushed in some 70 g of butter to thicken it; fortunately we were philistines and had wieners with it, so no one went unsatisfied. Today the grains were on the hearth for roughly twenty minutes' total, not even counting the simmering time, but they rested in the pot soaking up water while I prepared the rest of the recipe. This may not be ideal either, but everything retained its flavour and the barley's texture was quite nice.

As far as the garnish is concerned, I sautéed the spring onions until one or two bits were a little browned in the same pan (pot, but we'll pretend it was a better-suited pan) which had held the onions, so that the spring onions would be even more flavourful but gentle. It proved to be a good idea, though the pristine white-and-green contrast of the soup was further marred by this step.

***

Jerusalem
by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi
[Ebury Press]

Cracking the Nut

The Guardian has been showing the Royal Ballet's Nutcracker, presented in the UK's Covent Garden in 2009, in two parts on its website.

So I watched it the day it went up on the internet. I thought the standard of acting was astonishingly good, as well as the detail in the costumes, which are distractingly Jane Austen adaptation-like; the settings, mannerisms and dress all seem to hearken quite faithfully to the ideal of domesticity in 19th-century Germany. In this sense it is probably not as close to the source material; E.T.A. Hoffmann was I think a subversive writer and his Nutcracker is dark and trippy and funny like many of his other works. On the other hand, I once saw an unhealthy interpretation on television, which inflicted some emotional scarring which I've fortunately for the most part forgotten, so there is no need to go to the other extreme! Either way, this Covent Garden imagining is self-consciously indulgent and much like Zeffirelli's Metropolitan Opera art direction seems to be — perfect for people who like tradition and like to be pampered. The question of its balletic nature is probably best left to more knowledgeable heads than mine.

Since the Guardian film is only temporarily available,  here is this production from 2008 — in the same opera house, much the same cast and same stage direction, with the notable difference that another ballerina (Alexandra Ansanelli) is the Sugar Plum Fairy.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

From the Book of Hours for Engelbert of Nassau (1470s)
By an unknown Flemish miniaturist, manuscript in the Bodleian Library.
Courtesy of Web Gallery of Art, via Wikimedia Commons.

Commentary: Mandatory Minimums for Drug Trafficking?

Disclaimer: Since I am not an expert, some of this may be inaccurate. Mistakes are likely mine and not due to the sources.

Since the Anti-Drug Abuse Act came into effect in the United States in 1986, the definition of "drug trafficking" in the courts has meandered considerably from the definition which the bill's sponsors had in mind.

This legislation requires courts to imprison everyone who is convicted of drug trafficking for minimum sentences which tend to comprise five to ten years. But prosecutors are able, according to the statute, to require these sentences even for unsystematic and non-violent crimes, and even as an alternative to treatment.

In the state of Iowa, even the possession of 5 grams of meth leads to a 5-year minimum sentence ("unless," the Governor's Office of Drug Control Policy recommends, "the defendant pleads guilty and/or cooperates with the prosecution of other defendants.").* On the federal level, crimes involving 5 g of crack cocaine or 500 g of powder cocaine roughly result in the same sentence; 50 g/5kg in the 10-year sentence.**

* Methamphetamine is an unusual case; other controlled substances, e.g. heroin and cocaine, may be met by milder sentencing where, for example, a first offense occurs. Marijuana, K2 ('synthetic cannabis'), and controlled Schedule IV medicines like diazepam are exempted from any mandatory minimum.
** "Report to the Congress: Cocaine and Federal Sentencing Policy," p. 5. Until the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, the simple possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine was also punished with a 5-year minimum mandatory sentence. Having even an enormous amount of any other drug except Rohypnol would lead to a year's imprisonment at most. Since there was a racist element to the sentencing (in 2006 81.8% of crack cocaine offenders were African American [p. 15]) it became an urgent issue; a sentencing disparity of 18-to-1 still exists.

"DRUG trafficking," according to a critical article on the American Civil Liberties Union's website, presently covers furnishing a methamphetamine dealer with a cold medicine (pseudoephedrine) which is used to make the drug, being a middleman, or picking up drugs for a friend. By contrast, Senator and co-sponsor Robert Byrd had wanted the law to target crime bosses and dealers higher in the hierarchy.

In a 2002 report the United States Sentencing Commission had formulated the principle:

(3) enhanced sentences generally should be imposed on a defendant who, in the course of a drug offense –
  (i) murders or causes serious bodily injury to an individual;
  (ii) uses a dangerous weapon (including a firearm);
  (iii) involves a juvenile or a woman who the defendant knows or should know to be pregnant;
  (iv) engages in a continuing criminal enterprise or commits other criminal offenses in order to facilitate the defendant's drug trafficking activities;
  (v) knows, or should know, that the defendant is involving an unusually vulnerable victim;
  (vi) restrains a victim;
  (vii) distributes cocaine within 500 feet of a school;
  (viii) obstructs justice;
  (ix) has a significant prior criminal record;
  (x) is an organizer or leader of drug trafficking activities involving five or more persons.*

*Report to the Congress: Cocaine and Federal Sentencing Policy, p. 7

Also,

The Subcommittee on Crime of the House Committee on the Judiciary generally defined serious traffickers as "managers of the retail traffic, the person who is filling the bags of heroin, packaging crack cocaine into vials . . . and doing so in substantial street quantities" and major traffickers as "manufacturers or the heads of organizations who are responsible for creating and delivering very large quantities."*

*Report to the Congress: Cocaine and Federal Sentencing Policy, p.8

MELISSA Harris-Perry of the television channel MSNBC commented during a roundtable discussion on her show on November 18th that there has been no proof, in any case, that mandatory minimum sentencing has any effect on crime rates.

It has however been proven to exacerbate imprisonment rates, correctional institutes' overcrowding (the population in federal prisons is now three times what it was in 1986, fed by the influx of drug offenders on mandatory sentences), costs, injustice in that the prosecution is felt to be disproportionate to the offense, and indirect and broader problems like broken families, cyclical criminality and poverty. The prisoner may also be forced to serve his sentence in a far harsher way than was ever intended; for instance, young prisoners are sometimes put in solitary confinement as a method of shielding them from older fellow inmates. Solitary confinement is generally increasingly used, also for suicide risks and many other problems; and one factor which arguably contributes to its popularity is overcrowding.

Illustration: Statue of Themis in the Central Statue Square, at the Legislative Council Building, in Hong Kong.
Photo by ChvhLR10, via Wikimedia Commons. (CC BY-SA 3.0) Licence.

*