From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.
Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
The difference between a presidential candidate and a fool in love is only a matter of Secret Service protection.
Now that’s practically poetry.
Reading a news piece on Pew’s new study on religious affiliations in America, I was astounded by this fact:
[R]oughly 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics.
That’s in addition to the 25% of Americans who are currently Catholic. More though – that means a large percentage of Catholics – especially factoring in the Latino immigrants who have swelled the number of U.S. Catholics – have left the Church to become “former Catholics.”
I have a lot of ideas and reflections about this topic, but at the moment, I’m keeping them to myself until I have a chance to give them the benefit of a night’s sleep.
[digg-reddit-me]Jonah Goldberg at the National Review believes that the debate over American torture is “stinks of political opportunism.” He apparently missed the point made by Morris David, the chief prosecutor for the military commissions in Guantanamo this weekend in the Times. And he apparently doesn’t care to take into account the fact that torture often produces false evidence. But he does have this to say:
I don’t like waterboarding, and I hope we never use it again. I have respect for those who believe it should be banned in all circumstances. But I do not weep that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed spent somewhere between .03 and .06 seconds feeling like he was drowning for every person he allegedly helped murder on 9/11.
Then again, I think it would be horrific if we used that logic to justify waterboarding. It’s not a technique that should be used for punishment. Nor do I think that evidence obtained from forced confessions should be used in trial. Those are paving stones on the road to a torture state.
Reading this, I guess that Mr. Goldberg and me have more in common than meets the eye. But what Mr. Goldberg doesn’t acknowledge here is that whether or not “coerced interrogations” will be used as evidence is still an open question in the upcoming trials of the “Guantanamo Six”. More important, he doesn’t deal with the executive acceptances of torture – from redefining it to mean only “pain equivalent to death or major organ failure” as John Yoo did while advising President Bush, to the many less dramatic instances where evidence of torture was “lost” or destroyed, as lower level employees were blamed for following vague directives to “take off the gloves”.
I think many sympathize with Mr. Goldberg’s formulation – of not caring for torture, but not caring about the fates of these mass murderers.
What Mr. Goldberg doesn’t seem to get is that he is not just apathetic about the torture of men who likely deserve it – he is also giving the President of the United States, an individual in a position of extreme power, a license to break the law when subservience to the law is the only thing that separates a President from a King.
If the President believes he or she must break the law in order to save lives, and judges that breaking the law is the only course available – then he or she should do so. But upon breaking the law, they must then submit to it. For if an individual is able to break the law with impunity, the entire system breaks down.
There is sometimes an esoteric poetry to scientific explanations of the world. In the Scientific American, Chip Walter described the “primal effects” of a kiss:
Visceral marching orders boost pulse and blood pressure. The pupils dilate, breathing deepens and rational thought retreats, as desire suppresses both prudence and self-consciousness. For their part, the participants are probably too enthralled to care. As poet e. e. cummings once observed: “Kisses are a better fate / than wisdom.”
Morris Davis, an Air Force colonel, who was the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from 2005 to 2007 made a powerful point by telling this story from American history:
Twenty-seven years ago, in the final days of the Iran hostage crisis, the C.I.A.’s Tehran station chief, Tom Ahern, faced his principal interrogator for the last time. The interrogator said the abuse Mr. Ahern had suffered was inconsistent with his own personal values and with the values of Islam and, as if to wipe the slate clean, he offered Mr. Ahern a chance to abuse him just as he had abused the hostages. Mr. Ahern looked the interrogator in the eyes and said, “We don’t do stuff like that.”
Today, Tom Ahern might have to say: “We don’t do stuff like that very often.”
A depressing sign I saw on my way back from work a few days ago:
Came across reddit: this easy-to-use “play any song you want” music player. Just type in the name and artist, and the song plays.
They don’t have everything – but they have a lot. Going for more obscure tracks, I found they had about half of the ones I looked for – including modern-day jazz and classical performances, country, and alt-rock. For more mainstream titles, I tried fewer, but every one came up.
This isn’t the best music player – you can’t create playlists for example. But when you want to play a song for someone – it’s right there. When you need to listen to a particular song for some reason – again it’s there.
Wish I had been there for this:
At least two actors who openly oppose torture have accepted parts on the [the television show 24].
From Rebecca Dana of the Wall Street Journal‘s story entitled “Reinventing 24” in yesterday’s paper.
The sentence jumped out at me as I read the piece. The sentence suggested a kind of furtiveness to opposition to torture – suggesting those who “openly promote the homosexual agenda“, who “openly embrace socialist medicine”, who “openly promote apostate Catholicism“, “openly promote keyword spamming“, “openly promote intolerance“, “openly promote cigarettes to minors” “openly embrace prejudice“, who “openly oppose a living wage“, “openly oppose any talks with Iran that might resolve the nuclear issue“, who “openly oppose what built this Nation“, and those who “openly embrace the hysterical homophobia mouthed by Christian fundamentalist groups from all over the country“. ((I acknowledge these are not exact quotes – I have changed the tenses and in some sentences deleted phrases in order to conform all of them to the structure I set up; but I have attempted to maintain the original meaning of each.))
In almost every usage I was able to find, adding the adverb “openly” to describe a political act indicates a kind of shame associated with that act. The openness is supposed to shock – “Not only does this candidate seem to accept x view, they openly promote it!”
I don’t blame Ms. Dana for using the phrase – but it was shocking to find it associated with opposing torture. Have we really come that far as a nation that opposing torture is now somewhat embarrassing? I don’t think so. But enough mainstream conservatives have defended torture as to make it an acceptable point of view in the press.
There is shame in that.