World's hottest pepper can strip paint

As much as I like hot, this may be a bit much for me. Years ago I had a neighbor from Trinidad (or was it Tobago?) who used to bring back liters of hot chili relish made from scotch bonnet peppers. He would slather it on to his sandwiches and pretty much everything else. It was good but quite hot. These days I visit a Cambodian restaurant that makes a pretty good bird's eye chili condiment that can be added to the food. I love it and use what I think is a lot but the Cambodian guests really pile it on.

How hot is too hot?

Yes, the Naga Viper, the latest claimant to the world's-hottest-pepper crown, outdistances its predecessor, the Bhut Jolokia, or "ghost chili," by more than 300,000 points on the famous Scoville scale of tongue-scorching chili hotness. Researchers at Warwick University testing the Naga Viper found that it measures 1,359,000 on the Scoville scale, which rates heat by tracking the presence of a chemical compound. In comparison, most varieties of jalapeño peppers measure in the 2,500 to 5,000 range -- milder than the Naga Viper by a factor of 270.

You might think the Naga Viper would hail from some part of the world with a strong demand for spicy food, such as India or Mexico. But the new pepper is actually the handiwork of Gerald Fowler, a British chili farmer and pub owner, who crossed three of the hottest peppers known to man -- including the Bhut Jolokia -- to create his Frankenstein-monster chili.

"It's painful to eat," Fowler told the Daily Mail. "It's hot enough to strip paint." Indeed, the Daily Mail reports that defense researchers are already investigating the pepper's potential uses as a weapon.

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Like China, Lieberman bullies the internet to censor WikiLeaks

Who died and made Lieberman emperor? More from Glenn Greenwald.

Those are the benign, purely legal documents that have now been removed from the Internet in response to Joe Lieberman's demands and implied threats. He's on some kind of warped mission where he's literally running around single-handedly dictating what political content can and cannot be on the Internet, issuing broad-based threats to "all companies" that -- by design -- are causing suppression of political information. I understand Tableau's behavior here; imagine if you were a small company and Joe Lieberman basically announced: I am Homeland Security and you are to cease being involved with this organization which many say is a Terrorist group and Enemy Combatant. What Lieberman is doing is a severe abuse of power, and even for our anemic, power-revering media, it ought to be a major scandal (though it's not because, as Digby says, all our media stars can process is that "Julian Assange is icky").

If people -- especially journalists -- can't be riled when Joe Lieberman is unilaterally causing the suppression of political content from the Internet, when will they be? After all, as Jeffrey Goldberg pointed out in condemning this, the same rationale Lieberman is using to demand that Amazon and all other companies cease any contact with WikiLeaks would justify similar attacks on The New York Times, since they've published the same exact diplomatic cables on its site as WikiLeaks has on its (added: the only diplomatic cables posted on the WikiLeaks site thus far are the ones published by the newspapers with which WikiLeaks partnered -- such as the NYT, Guardian, Der Spiegel, etc. -- and they include those newspapers' redactions; no other cables have yet been posted to the WikiLeaks site). What Joe Lieberman is doing is indescribably pernicious and if "journalists" cared in the slightest about their own self-interest -- never mind all the noble things they pretend to care about -- they ought to be vociferously objecting to this.

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Krugman: Why people like 'the Incredible Shrinking President' don't like Social Security

With a nice nod to Digby, Paul Krugman makes an essential cultural point about Beltway opposition to Social Security — it's all about class (my emphasis throughout):

[A] fair number of “centrist” Democrats – probably including the Incredible Shrinking President — seem willing, even eager, to join up with Republicans in cutting Social Security benefits and raising the retirement age. ... The question you have to ask is, why are Democrats such suckers on this issue?

And why Social Security particularly, and not Medicare? For Krugman, the reason is revealing:

When medical expenses are big, they’re big; even the very affluent are grateful when Medicare pays the bills for their mother-in-laws bypass or dialysis. The importance of Medicare, in short, is obvious to all but the very rich.

Social Security, by contrast, is something that matters enormously to the bottom half of the income distribution, but no so much to people in the 250K-plus club. A 30 percent cut in benefits would represent disaster for tens of millions of Americans, but a barely noticeable inconvenience for VSPs [Very Serious People] and everyone they know. A rise in the retirement age would be a vast hardship for people who do manual labor, but if anything a gift to VSPs, who don’t want to step aside in any case. And so on down the line.

So going after Social Security is a way to seem tough and serious — but entirely at the expense of people you don’t know.

I'm calling this a cultural analysis because he's talking about people who pick their targets based on their own starting point. For example, some people want skate-boarders banned because they have brittle bones; others want the government to murder Julian Assange because they're government-hating Teabagging freedom-lovers. It's a function of your starting point.

The political analysis is equally simple, but it uses power as the dynamic — If you're in the predator group, you get to eat the prey. It's just a matter of feeding; no ill will intended.

GP

("The Incredible Shrinking President"? Well, that one's gonna stick.) Read the rest of this post...

From the BBC: 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats

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WikiLeaks blocked for federal workers because it's classified

Never mind the fact that the same data can be read at the NY Times or The Guardian website. Talk about security theater! At least people like Joe Lieberman are satisfied because now the US government is just like China with its censorship policy towards federal workers.

The Obama administration is banning hundreds of thousands of federal employees from calling up the WikiLeaks site on government computers because the leaked material is still formally regarded as classified.

The Library of Congress tonight joined the education department, the commerce department and other government agencies in confirming that the ban is in place.

Although thousands of leaked cables are freely available on the Guardian, New York Times and other newspaper websites, as well as the WikiLeaks site, the Obama administration insists they are still classified and, as such, have to be protected.

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98% of Fed lending during crisis went to six banks

Step back and think for a minute who was also fighting against reform to prevent another crisis. They made sure they all moved through the worst economic crisis in decades, living standards in place, before throwing millions into scaling back reform. Now they're throwing money at the GOP who they know will give them an even easier ride. It's like a rigged gambling table where no matter what numbers are drawn, they win. CNBC's Net Net:

Over the lifecycle of the PDCF program, The Federal Reserve lent a total of about $8.95 trillion to primary dealers of government securities. (This group is already a very small club: Currently, the New York Fed lists a total of 18 institutions authorized to perform this function.)

But the concentration of the vast majority of PDFC funds was far narrower than that. Institutions that ultimately went on to become just six banks—Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan—received at total of about $8.78 trillion through the PDFC program.

That $8.78 trillion figure represents over 98 percent of the funds lent by the PDFC program.

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BP lawyers fighting over size of spill so they can save billions

Obviously the President isn't going to stand up and fight back but maybe someone else in Washington wants to? It's insane to tolerate BP and their legal tactics after everything they did to ruin the environment.

BP is mounting a new challenge to the U.S. government's estimates of how much oil flowed from the runaway well deep below the Gulf of Mexico, an argument that could reduce by billions of dollars the federal pollution fines it faces for the largest offshore oil spill in history.

BP's lawyers are arguing that the government overstated the spill by 20 to 50 percent, staffers working for the presidential oil spill commission said Friday. In a 10-page document obtained by The Associated Press, BP says the government's spill estimate of 206 million gallons is "overstated by a significant amount" and the company said any consensus around that number is premature and inaccurate.

The company submitted the document to the commission, the Justice Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

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Nirvana Unplugged, Come As You Are

For the moment over here, we're still stuck with the cold and a touch of snow. My big plan this morning was to run out for 90 minutes on the bike before the new weather front arrives. We have snow coming down and it's 28F (feels like 18F) so I might try to wait it out a bit. Elsewhere in Europe it's much, much colder. We're not used to anything this cold so early in the season and a city like Paris isn't ready for much snow because it generally doesn't happen. Last year we have 3 or 4 inches one day and that was probably the most I ever saw in a decade or more. Read the rest of this post...

WikiLeaks: Yemen offered US 'open door' on al-Qaeda attacks

When you think about the regular US missile attacks in Yemen, this also is not much of a surprise. But again, looking at the killings there that obviously take out both the bad guys as well as the innocent, who is the real terrorist? It's laughable that some on the right can seriously talk about Julian Assange as a terrorist. The last time I checked, he wasn't bombing weddings and killing innocent men, women and children with remote missile strikes.

Remind me again how killing like this protects or defends democracy because it's not obvious.

While Saleh's government publicly insists its own forces are responsible for counter-terrorism operations, the cables detail how the president struck a secret deal to allow the US to carry out cruise missile attacks on Aqap targets. The first strike in December last year, which killed dozens of civilians along with wanted jihadis, was presented by Saleh as Yemen's own work, supported by US intelligence.

But a cable dated 21 December from the ambassador Stephen Seche recorded that "Yemen insisted it must 'maintain the status quo' regarding the official denial of US involvement. Saleh wanted operations to continue 'non-stop until we eradicate this disease.'" A second attack took place on 24 December.

A few days later, in a meeting with General David Petraeus, then head of US central command, Saleh admitted lying to his population about the strikes.

"We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours," Saleh told Petraeus on 2 January. That prompted the deputy prime minister, Rashad al-Alimi, who was also at the meeting, to joke he had just "lied" by telling parliament the bombs in Arhab, Abyan, and Shebwa (the al-Qaida strongholds) were American-made but deployed by Yemen.

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