Observe Christopher Hitchens — once one of the foremost defenders of the Iraq war — get waterboarded. He can stand it for, oh, about two seconds…
“When about two dozen US veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during [World War II] and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects. Back then, they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners’ cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them…” It was a time when America considered waterboarding to be a practice punishable by the death penalty…
“The use of torture by the US has proved so counter-productive that it may have led to the death of as many US soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11…”
“Under traditional interrogation methods, [Aby Zubaydah] provided us with important actionable intelligence. We discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber … There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified…”
“At the height of the American-led war on terror, George W Bush began to encounter an unexpected problem. The use of harsh interrogation techniques on captured Al-Qaeda terrorists caused a damaging rift with leading US allies, among them Britain and Israel…”
Call it the ideological space between Lewisnkygate and Torturegate. Andrew Sullivan illustrates how conservative pundits’ views have changed on investigating crime in the White House, now that it’s a Republican administration under the microscope…
Alyssa Peterson, an Arabic-speaking interrogator for the US military, was called upon to engage in “enhanced interrogation.” After two days in “the cage,” she refused to work there anymore. And a few days later, she killed herself. Naturally, the circumstances of her death were covered up…
“Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link. There’s a word for this: it’s evil…”
Pirate flag
Where the pirates came from
Since the collapse of Somalia’s last real government in the early 1990s, the country’s coastline has become a favorite locale for overfishing by foreign vessels and dumping of toxic waste, including radioactive uranium. Is it any wonder, then, that the country’s once-thriving fishermen have turned to other means of livelihood? “Somali piracy has metastasized into the country’s only boom industry…” ALSO: “Organized piracy syndicates operating in Dubai and other Gulf states are laundering vast sums of money taken in ransom from vessels hijacked off the Horn of Africa…”Doomsday 2012
It’s fun to make fun of the doomsday theorists proclaiming an end to the world in 2012, based largely on predictions made by the Mayans thousands of years ago. Well, the claim that the Mayans predicted the end of the world in 2012 is on shaky ground; more reasonable is the theory that a confluence of natural forces could result in a geomagnetic storm in 2012 that could wipe out the modern world…Even greater
GPS analysis has found that the Great Wall of China is a thousand miles longer than previously thought…Strathclyde Jedi
Eight members of Scotland’s Strathclyde police service have listed Jedi as their religion on a diversity survey. “The Force appears to be strong in Strathclyde Police with their Jedi police officers and staff. Far from living a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, some members of the noble Jedi order have now chosen Glasgow … as their home…”Iraq toll
Executions are the leading cause of death in Iraq… More than eighty-seven thousand people have been killed in the war since 2005…Ceylon bloody Ceylon
Six and a half thousand ethnic Tamil civilians have been killed in Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war in just the past three months… ALSO: “Emaciated, dehydrated and with terror etched on their faces, more than 100,000 refugees have surged into overcrowded camps and hospitals in the town after escaping the Tigers, who had held them as human shields for months…”A breathtaking decline
From China to Pakistan to Iran, “the global landscape is littered with evidence that America’s superpower status is fraying … Our world is changing far more rapidly and profoundly than we – or our politicians – will admit. America’s own triple-A rating, its superpower status, is being downgraded as rapidly as its economy…”Mona Lisa long con
The theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911 was a shocking crime that was nonetheless quickly solved and resolved. But was it all just a front to scam six American millionaires, who each thought they were secretly buying the real Mona Lisa?How inbreeding killed the Hapsburgs
“Scientists have found that the Hapsburg [royal family's] fashion of marrying their relatives to keep their dynastic heritage intact had dire consequences for subsequent generations, which culminated in the last heir to the Spanish throne being sickly and impotent. A study into the genetics of [Charles II of Spain's] immediate ancestors has found that he was so inbred that he probably suffered from at least two inherited disorders…Our fruity galactic core
If you could take a deep breath at the center of our galaxy, you would smell strawberries…Selling out your Twitter
“If your friends have been tweeting about Skype, an iPod or Cisco cell phones lately, they might not be doing it because they’re concerned consumers. A service called Magpie is recruiting Twitter users to let advertisers send out messages through their accounts in exchange for cash…”Bill Maher lets ‘er rip
“It’s sad what’s happened to the Republicans. They used to be the party of the big tent; now they’re the party of the sideshow attraction, a socially awkward group of mostly white people who speak a language only they understand. Like Trekkies, but paranoid…”Hitlermania
A watercolor by Adolf Hitler has fetched $14,000 at an auction, prompting Tanya Gold to proclaim: “I thought the whole point of the Second World War was to eradicate Nazism from the face of the earth … But we seem to have a new kind of Nazi domination - a cultural domination.” How is it that Adolf Hitler has become the world’s most famous celebrity?Calgary, UK
What does it say about Alberta’s self-confidence if the province’s tourism ads feature the English countryside?What fresh hell awaits the economy?
So the great banking crisis seems to be over (and I stress seems). Up next: The great credit card collapse…Multicultural cavemen
DNA analysis suggests that there were no less than three different subgroups of Neanderthal…The secret to longevity
For decades, Nobel prize-winner Rita Levi-Montalcini has been taking daily doses of a molecule known as “nerve growth factor” by way of eyedrops. As she celebrates her one-hundredth birthday, some are wondering: Is NGF the elixir of life?And finally: Chairman Meow…
And finally finally: Alex Andreev’s “hermetic” art…
And finally finally finally: Hate taxes, regulations and government? Love guns? It’s better in Somalia!
The above quote illustrates in sharp relief exactly why the world should stand up to the Turkish government and demand that it recognize the existence of the Armenian genocide of 1915. But if the Armenian community is waiting for Barack Obama to call it a genocide, they’ll have to wait longer. The US president backed off his election campaign promise, and opted for the word “atrocities” instead. Yet to the genocide-denying Turkish government, even Obama’s watered-down language wasn’t good enough…
Weren't things just simpler back then?
Does file-sharing have a future?
The founders of the world’s biggest file-sharing website, the Pirate Bay, have been found guilty of facilitating intellectual property theft and are facing a one-year prison sentence; but the fact that the Pirate Bay is little more than a search engine for files leads some to wonder: Which search engines will be next?Yes, it does — because it’s only human
It may be the whole fight over file-sharing is a lost cause anyway. In the age of digital replication, argues Adrian Bowyer, intellectual property doesn’t stand a chance. As humans, we are evolutionarily programmed to share and to give away ideas–including things like music and books–especially when we are not made poorer by it, as is the case with file-sharing. The battle against file-sharing is a battle against human nature…And the rights-holders benefit, too
“As the initial furor over P2P died down, labels began monitoring file sharing networks through BigChampagne and other services. The data they find there continues to help them in any number of ways, from choosing which leaked song to use as the single, to where a band should tour based on the IP addresses of its fans, to figuring out which artists should perform on the same bill…”
Hats off to NonStampCollector for this hilarious little bit of blasphemy…
“Sri Lanka’s Srebrenica”
One hundred thousand ethnic Tamils are trapped between Tamil Tiger forces and the advancing Sri Lankan army. The world is on the brink of a brutal massacre and nobody cares…
Defending Milton Friedman
…isn’t easy when his most enthusiastic supporters ended up ruining the global economy. And yet, “by making a principled case for free markets, international trade, and individual rights, Friedman actually helped create the opposite of global misery. Millions of people continue to be lifted out of poverty worldwide based on these principles. If more politicians had listened to Friedman’s warnings about loose money and ill-conceived interventions in the economy, we might have avoided the latest round of economic misery as well…”
Can we save the world by polluting more?
Until the 1980s, lead was a standard ingredient in gasoline, and its presence in air pollution may actually have caused global cooling during the mid part of the twentieth century. Ironically, when we were a more polluting society, we were doing more about global warming than we are now…
What it takes to be a cop
“A Federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by a man who was barred from the New London police force because he scored too high on an intelligence test…”
One big prison
Eritrea “is widely using military conscription without end, as well as arbitrary detention of its citizens, says Human Rights Watch. Hundreds of Eritrean refugees forcibly repatriated from countries like Libya, Egypt and Malta face arrest and torture upon their return…”
J.G. Ballard, 1930-2009
“Ballard was a poet of the occult fear, the subliminal horror. His work explored the unexpressed, anarchic euphoria lurking in the interstices of modern, rational civilization, the longing to smash things up…”
Google buys books…all books
“The Authors Guild — which represents a measly eight thousand writers — brought a class action against Google on behalf of all literary copyright holders, even the authors of the millions of “orphan works” whose rightsholders can’t be located. Once that class was certified, whatever deal Google struck with the class became binding on every work of literature ever produced. The odds are that this feat won’t ever be repeated, which means that Google is the only company in the world that will have a clean, legal way of offering all these books in search results…”
The Hugo Chavez Book Club
“A thirty-six-year-old historical tract attacking the imperialist exploitation of Latin America has become an improbable overnight bestseller after the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez abruptly presented a copy to Barack Obama…”
Against his wishes
Vladimir Nabokov had wanted his final book, The Original of Laura, to be tossed in the garbage bin. But then, Nabokov said the same thing about Lolita, and now The Original of Laura is hitting the shevles…The resilience of life
Two million years ago, a community of microbes was trapped underneath an ice sheet in minus-ten-degree weather in Antarctica. They’re still there today, eking out a living by breathing iron… More…A sister’s secrets
“Sister Jesme says when she became a nun she discovered priests were forcing novices to have sex with them. There were also secret homosexual relationships among the nuns and at one point she was forced into such a relationship by another nun who told her she preferred this kind of arrangement as it ruled out the possibility of pregnancy…”The evolution of Hezbollah
“Political engagement has seen Hezbollah change from a revolutionary party that once believed in establishing an Islamic state in Lebanon, into a political group involved in daily governmental politics, unions, and concerned with its supporters’ demands…”Hope no more
“A growing number of Obama enthusiasts are starting to entertain the possibility that their man is not, in fact, going to save the world if we all just hope really hard. This is a good thing. If the superfan culture that brought Obama to power is going to transform itself into an independent political movement, one fierce enough to produce programmes capable of meeting the current crises, we are all going to have to stop hoping and start demanding…”At long last
The Obama administration has announced the US’s first plans for a nationawide network of high-speed rail… But can it work? “The bullet trains of Japan and the TGV superfast trains of France are impressive. But they serve smaller areas that are far more densely populated…”Are the death penalty and war on drugs just too expensive for hard times?
“Trenchant ethical matters such as the death penalty, the legalization of drugs and global warming have all shifted to the side as the economic crisis dominates the centre of our attention. Moments of economic catastrophe have a way of sharpening priorities, separating necessities from frills. As the long, slow slide into recession gets deeper and more pronounced, an uncomfortable reality seems to be emerging: that moral debate is a luxury for more prosperous times…”The “socialist” tag backfires
“A new Rasmussen poll finds that while fifty-three percent of Americans think ‘capitalism’ is better than ’socialism,’ twenty percent think socialism is better … All the conservative shouting about how Obama is a socialist has had the unexpected effect of educating a sizable portion of the public to think of socialism as synonymous with ‘European socialism’ (i.e., democracy plus private industry plus nice, soft, 400-thread safety nets) instead of Soviet-style ’socialism’…”Israel gets ready
“The Israeli military is preparing itself to launch a massive aerial assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities within days of being given the go-ahead by its new government … Two nationwide civil defence drills will help to prepare the public for the retaliation that Israel could face…”Prison role reversal
The number of black people in American prisons on drug crimes is declining, while the number of imprisoned white people is on the rise. Could the switch from crack to meth be behind the trend?And finally: Amazing images of the Aurora Borealis…
And finally finally: A public health ad in Botswana offers advice on safe sex: Just pleasure yourself…
And finally finally finally: Garry Trudeau goes gonzo, and covers the G-20 summit–as Roland Hedley…
A legacy of torture
“The critical thing to remember is that the first person to be subjected to the torture program was not the person Bush and Cheney thought he was, gave up lots of useful (and accurate) information under traditional interrogation techniques, had no information that came close to the “ticking time bomb” criterion used to justify the torture program … and was brutally tortured anyway. More to the point, the idea that CIA officers were begging to use these torture methods is nonsense. They were forced to do so by higher ups…”
In trying to justify torture, Bush administration lawyers performed incredible acts of logical contortion. The “tortures memos” are little more than a collection of rambling lunacy…
Yes, they even contemplated using insects…
“While Obama has turned the page [on torture], many others haven’t — including the people, and their allies, who think waterboarding was a good idea. Without [an inquiry into torture], if Mitt Romney (the man who pledged to double the size of the prison at Guantánamo) is president in 2013 — or 2017 — we could start torturing all over again…”
