Wednesday, June 18

A timeline to Bush government torture 

"[I]t is increasingly clear that the administration sought from early on to implement interrogation techniques whose basis was torture. Soon after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Pentagon and the CIA began an orchestrated effort to tap expertise from the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape school, for use in the interrogation of terrorist suspects.

...SERE training has nothing to do with effective interrogation, according to military experts. Trained interrogators don't work in the program. Skilled, experienced interrogators, in fact, say that only a fool would think that the training could somehow be reverse-engineered into effective interrogation techniques.

But that's exactly what the Bush government sought to do. As the plan rolled forward, military and law enforcement officials consistently sent up red flags that the SERE-based interrogation program wasn't just wrongheaded, it was probably illegal.

On Tuesday, the Senate Armed Services Committee conducted a hearing on the evolution of abusive interrogations under the Bush administration. Through a series of memos and documents released by the committee, some old and some new, the following timeline has now been established." (Salon)

6/18/2008 11:46:00 PM   •  

There are more than 11 miliion refugees in the world 

"U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said numbers were rising again after several years of decline in which refugees returned to countries including Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Angola." (Associated Press)

6/18/2008 01:51:00 PM   •  

How to Balance 17 Dominos on One 

Video (5min)

6/18/2008 01:49:00 PM   •  

Waiting for the Water to Fall 

"New York City is now 10 days away from the unveiling of “Waterfalls,” the much anticipated (and hyped) $15 million public art project by the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. The project, the biggest public art installation since “The Gates,” the Christo and Jeanne-Claude work in Central Park in 2005, is already being hyped, with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg saying the work could evoke the awe that led 16th-century European explorers to compare the New York shoreline to the Garden of Eden. (Seriously.)" (New York Times)

6/18/2008 01:45:00 PM   •  

Looking Forward to Intelligent Civilized Discourse in the Coming Presidential Race? 

Think Again’ (Thnik Progress)

6/18/2008 01:28:00 PM   •  

Wired Nostalgia 

On the occasion of its fifteenth anniversary, Kevin Kelly waxes nostalgic about Wired's early years. Probably interesting only if you are a Wired fan.

6/18/2008 01:03:00 PM   •  

A McCain-Lieberman ticket? 

Walter Shapiro in Salon: "Joe-mentum slants too far right for Democrats, but it would (believe it or not) move the Republicans toward the center."

Not as if he is the first to have thought of this likelihood.

6/18/2008 07:56:00 AM   •  

Monday, June 16

Happy Bloomsday 

Bloomsday resources from Jorn Barger. Molly Bloom's soliloquy from Penelope (Episode 18): ...the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharans and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down Jo me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

6/16/2008 01:23:00 PM   •  

A Remarkable Photo From Tornado Country 

One indelible image: "When the weather turned violent and stormy on Tuesday evening, Lori Mehmen, who lives in the small farming town of Orchard in northeastern Iowa, looked out her front door and saw a funnel cloud bearing down — and evidently had the presence of mind to grab her digital camera and capture this shot before taking cover." (The Lede, New York Times)

6/16/2008 02:09:00 AM   •  

Wake Up and Smell the Coffee? 

"Drinking a cup of coffee can wake you up, but perhaps just a whiff of Java is enough to reverse the effects of sleep deprivation on the brain... It seems to work for rats..." (The Neurocritic)

6/16/2008 12:24:00 AM   •  

Sunday, June 15

An Interview with Jeff Warren 

"'...Consciousness exists in more wildly varied and abundant forms than simple waking, sleeping, and dreaming. By describing some of its different stations, I hope not only to give you some insight into the biological and psychological processes that underlie our changing experience of consciousness -- to reveal, as it were, some of the operating rules of the Self -- but also to show why this matters...[:] not only that we have far more agency over our changing mental states than most of us suspect, but also that each of these states taps into its own unique blend of knowledge and insight.'

Warren is an engaging field guide in these adventures, and The Head Trip will interest anyone curious about the black box of consciousness. In the interview below, he explains why “dreaming is bananas,” why we shouldn’t listen too seriously to the evolutionary psychologists’ Just-So stories, and why we should think more explicitly about our habits of mind." (Bookslut)

6/15/2008 11:54:00 PM   •  

Mind like a comic strip 

"To the editor:

David Bainbridge's description of consciousness (26 January, p 40), including, for example, the fact that we do not know where in the brain consciousness happens, was evocative. Scott McCloud, in his book Understanding Comics, describes a comic's story as whatever is happening in the blank spaces between the panels.

What if our minds function like a comic: they snap pictures, and our consciousness is simply the story the mind constructs around those pictures?" (New Scientist)

6/15/2008 11:29:00 PM   •  

Friday, June 13

At Last GLAST 

Astronomy Picture of the Day: "...[T]he Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope [is] now in orbit around planet Earth. GLAST's detector technology was developed for use in terrestrial particle accelerators. But from orbit, GLAST can study gamma-rays from extreme environments in our own Milky Way galaxy, as well as supermassive black holes at the centers of distant active galaxies, and the sources of powerful gamma-ray bursts. Those cosmic accelerators achieve energies not attainable in earthbound laboratories. GLAST also has the sensitivity to search for signatures of new physics in the relatively unexplored high-energy gamma-ray regime."

6/13/2008 03:23:00 PM   •  

Thursday, June 12

Meme-Watch: Hypermiling 

A Google Search

6/12/2008 10:57:00 PM   •  

Iraqis Condemn American Demands 

"High-level negotiations over the future role of the U.S. military in Iraq have turned into an increasingly acrimonious public debate, with Iraqi politicians denouncing what they say are U.S. demands to maintain nearly 60 bases in their country indefinitely.

Top Iraqi officials are calling for a radical reduction of the U.S. military's role here after the U.N. mandate authorizing its presence expires at the end of this year. Encouraged by recent Iraqi military successes, government officials have said that the United States should agree to confine American troops to military bases unless the Iraqis ask for their assistance, with some saying Iraq might be better off without them." (Washington Post)

6/12/2008 10:52:00 PM   •  

Justices Rule Terror Suspects Can Appeal in Civilian Courts 

SCOTUS sides with the Constitution, for once. (New York Times) In a 5-4 ruling, with the usual suspects in dissent, the Court ruled that denial of habeas corpus rights to the detainees is unconstitutional, and that they are to be heard in civilian courts. A monumental rebuff to the criminal dysadministration, but they got five years of illegal detention in under tthe belt before the rule of law reasserted itself.

6/12/2008 10:46:00 PM   •  

Apple's new iPhone augurs the inevitable return of the Bell telephone monopoly 

Tim Wu writes in Slate Magazine:

"The wireless industry was once and is still sometimes called a "poster child for competition." That kind of talk needs to end. Today, the industry is more like an old divorced couple; the bickering spouses are AT&T and Verizon, the two halves of the old Bell empire. (To its credit, the Bell company, in internal memos, proposed a wireless phone in 1915 and then spent 70 or so years deciding how to deploy it without hurting its wired-phone business.) While you can't blame this on the iPhone, nearly every non-Bell phone company is, in the long tradition of such firms, dying or being purchased. Sprint Nextel lost an astonishing $29.5 billion in a single quarter last year—a loss of nearly double the annual revenue of Google. Alltel, one of the last independents, is being bought by Verizon. The exception is T-Mobile, which, while healthy, simply doesn't have the spectrum to play with the bigs. By the end of this year, we may find that the wireless world, in industry structure at least, will be pretty close to where it was at the beginning of the 1990s, before 'deregulation.'"

6/12/2008 10:43:00 PM   •  

Wednesday, June 11

Camille Paglia on Obama, Hillary, etc. 

"Hillary's authentic contribution to feminism is to have demonstrated for the first time that a woman can win state primaries -- even if she needed her husband's help as well as racially divisive tactics to do so. This welcome development will surely encourage big donors to support future presidential campaigns by women, who (like Elizabeth Dole) were previously forced to drop out early for lack of funding. Obama's meteoric success will also benefit female candidates, who can hope to break out of the pack as suddenly as he did. Past predictors of electoral success have been exploded, and all bets are off.

...Hillary's sex helped her more than hurt her. What the media repeatedly claimed was her success in debate was predicated on her silencing of her male competitors, who were bullied into excess caution in dealing with a woman. Not one Democratic male dared attack or rebut her with the zest shown by all the Republican candidates jousting with each other. Hillary had to be coddled with elaborate deference -- or the delicate little woman would squawk bloody murder (as she did when she petulantly complained about always being given the first debate question). All of this rubbish was resurrected last week in the thousand mawkish excuses found by the media and her crooning acolytes for "giving her time" to withdraw from the race. No man would have been treated in that overconcerned way -- as a frail vessel of quivering emotion. Yet another blot on feminism, courtesy of Clinton, Inc.

And here’s another whopping female advantage: Hillary could jet around the country with an elaborate, color-keyed wardrobe and a professional hair and makeup crew, who plastered and insta-lifted her with dewy salon uber-ointments and cutting-edge technology before every appearance. No male candidate has ever had that theatrical privilege. (John Edwards, in contrast, was heaped with scorn for his simple yet pricey haircuts.) When the mega-prep for some reason failed -- as on a frigid morning in Iowa -- the resultant photo of Hillary in realistically wrinkled 60-year-old mode caused repercussions around the world. Golda Meir, with her robustly lived-in face and matriarchal jowls, would have given ever-primping Hollywood Hillary a derisive Bronx cheer.

There can be no doubt that Hillary's travails have reignited the feminist wars, which sputtered out in the mid-'90s after the rousing triumph of the insurgent pro-sex wing of feminism to which I belong. Grab your swords and saddle up, ladies! The spectral Steinem is clinging to Hillary like a limpet. Oh, and there's Susan Faludi wispily brooding in Steinem's papoose. Get ready to rumble: Male-bashing feminism is back with a vengeance. (Salon)

Point worth pondering, even though dedicated contrarian Paglia delights in skewering nothing more than feminist ideology. BTW, given how it transformed society in the last three decades, what would be so bad about finally introducing some male-bashing rhetoric to one of the last public bastions of sexism, the Jurassic political scene?

6/11/2008 07:42:00 AM   •  

Dennis Kucinich in the House of Representatives, June 9: 

"Resolved, That President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate..." (.pdf)

6/11/2008 12:52:00 AM   •  

Tuesday, June 10

Satellite Tracking 

"US and Canadian readers, enter your zip code below, hit Go!, and you will find out what is going to fly over your area in the nights ahead. There are hundreds of satellites in Earth orbit; we cut through the confusion by narrowing the list to a half-dozen or so of the most interesting. At the moment we're monitoring Jules Verne, the International Space Station, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Genesis prototype space hotel." (spaceweather.com)

6/10/2008 10:36:00 PM   •  

McCain Googling for VP? 

Choosing a vice president may not be that complicated after all. (Reuters)

6/10/2008 10:22:00 PM   •  

What will Bush be remembered for? 

Salon best of Table Talk:

• "... He's made us all aware that 'it can happen here.'
  
  
• His legacy? The next time you have a chance to vote for a president you would like to have a beer with ... DON'T.
  
  
• He's got some brush cleared. He lowered the bar for the next president. He almost succeeded in uniting the Democratic Party. No one has ever been able to do that.
  
  
• How can you call him a failure when he's achieved all that while taking a record number of vacation days?
  
  
• His nicknames for other people are sometimes borderline creative.
  
  
• He made it highly unlikely Jeb would get his chance.
  
  
• He put Crawford, Texas, on the map.
  
  
• And almost took New Orleans off it.
  
  
• He's shown us that it's okay to redefine words and phrases ('Mission Accomplished'?)."

6/10/2008 07:00:00 PM   •  

The George W Bush Presidential Library 

"Construction is now well underway. You'll want to be one of the first to make a contribution to this great man's legacy...

The library includes:

* The Hurricane Katrina Room (still in the planning stage).
* The Alberto Gonzales Archive, where no-one can find anything.
* The Texas Air National Guard Room. (Attendance optional.)
* The Walter Reed Hospital Room, where they don't let you in.
* The Guantanamo Bay Room, where they don't let you out.
* The Weapons of Mass Destruction Room, which no-one has yet been able to locate.
* The Iraq War Room. Here, after you complete your first tour, you are routed onto second, third, fourth, and sometimes fifth tours.
* The Dick Cheney Room -- complete with shooting gallery -- in an undisclosed location.

Also included:

* The K-Street Project Gift Shop, where you can buy (or steal) an election.
* The Airport Men's Room, where you will be able to meet some of your favorite Republican senators.

To highlight President Bush's accomplishments, the museum will be equipped with an electron microscope to help you locate them.

The President has said that he doesn't care that much about the individual exhibits -- just that he wants his museum to be better than his daddy's." (wordwizard.com; thanks to pam)

There are no plans yet for where in the library to put the President's book (the librarians are still waiting for him to finish coloring it).

6/10/2008 06:59:00 PM   •  

Sunday, June 8

Digital Forensics: 

5 Ways to Spot a Fake Photo (Scientific American)

6/08/2008 08:04:00 PM   •  

Put Your Money Where Your Indie Rock Is 

Eliot Van Buskirk: "With CD sales declining and labels whining, it might seem crazy to view recorded music as fertile ground for investment. But for thousands of fans-turned-music-investors on SellaBand and Slicethepie, it makes perfect sense to gamble on a favorite band's future...

By having fans fund albums, these sites hope to channel money toward projects more likely to succeed. It's like holding a fundraiser to usurp the executive producer's traditional moneybags role, while crowdsourcing the A&R (artists and repertoire) guy's job." (Wired Listening Post)

6/08/2008 10:53:00 AM   •