Archive for June, 2004

This Is the Strawman that Broke the Camel’s Back

Allen June 24th, 2004

Well, the news has finally broken. Rumsfeld did approve specific coercive interview tactics on detainees.

What tactics did he approve?

  • Use of scenario to convince the detainee that death or severe pain could be imminent for him or his family. No, he denied the use of that tactic.
  • Exposure to cold weather or water. Nope, not that either
  • Use of a wet towel or dripping water to induce a perception of suffocating. Nope.
  • Waterboarding. Definitely not.
  • Mild noninjurious physical contact such as grabbing someone’s arm, poking them in the chest or light shoving. Dingdingdingdingding. You got it!

    • Read Captain’s Quarters for the original take on the CNN article, Bush: ‘I have never ordered torture’.

    From the CNN article:

    Meanwhile, a source told CNN that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld never approved a controversial interrogation technique called “water boarding.” That source had told CNN the opposite Monday.

    The senior defense official who provided the original information to CNN now says Rumsfeld only approved “mild, noninjurious physical contact” with a high-level al Qaeda detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and specifically did not approve a request to use water boarding.

    The tactic involves strapping a prisoner down and immersing him in water to make the subject feel as though he is drowning.

    The documents released Tuesday, as described by administration officials, help to show what ideas were discussed versus what was actually rubber-stamped by the White House in terms of the legal limits of interrogation.

    “We want to drive home what was approved and what was speculated about. It is a distinction that has been lost,” one official told CNN.

    Senior administration officials say there were a lot of “academic” musings or “opinion” memos written after the terrorist attacks about how to apply interrogation laws and rules to the war on terrorism.

    One official said it was “uncharted territory,” and people at various agencies were trying to figure out how to deal with its legalities.

    Emphasis in italics mine.

    A lot has been made over the fact that the administration consulted with lawyers to see what is and isn’t illegal when interrogating prisoners. I don’t know about you, but I’m rather glad they did this. If you don’t know where the line is, how do you know when you’ve crossed it?

    Life Trumps Bloggin

    Allen June 24th, 2004

    Still have lots of stuff to do at work and home, so blogging will still be spotty. Still have lots of draft posts, but I’m still resisting doing a link dump.

    Cool Tool

    Allen June 23rd, 2004

    Go visit MusicPlasma to view how bands you like are related. Type in the name of a band and related bands are shown as connections. The larger the number of connections, the more popular the band.

    [Via ???]

    Fahrenheads

    Allen June 23rd, 2004

    Just as Rush has his “dittoheads”, I would suggest that Michael has his Farenheads — knee-jerk liberals who swallow Michael’s bilge without batting an eye. From what I can gather from Christopher Hitchens’s article Unfairenheit 9/11, Christopher is not a Farenhead.

    The concluding remarks from the article are classic (one of many such passages in the article):

    Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless, and contrived war between three superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (…) is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban, and the Baath Party and that the war against jihad is about nothing. If Moore had studied a bit more, or at all, he could have read Orwell really saying, and in his own voice, the following:

    The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States …

    And that’s just from Orwell’s Notes on Nationalism in May 1945. A short word of advice: In general, it’s highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It’s also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history.

    If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed.

    Hitchens calls his column at Slate Fighting Words. I see Christopher as a liberal neo-conservative curmudgeon — someone willing and wanting to speak their mind about topics of the day without regard to the consequences. Several of his recent articles ripped into Ronald Regan and the Abu Ghraib scandal.

    You can read interviews with Christopher Hitchens about Mother Theresa (not a big fan) as well as a highly recommended interview with Frontpagemag.com.

    [Via Allah Is In the House]

    Punditry

    Allen June 23rd, 2004

    Skip if you don’t like puns. I found these to be pretty good in an email I received from a friend.

    No Pun In Ten

    1. A vulture boarded a plane, carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess stops them and says “sorry sir, only one carrion per passenger.”

    2. Nasa recently sent a number of Holsteins into orbit for experimental purposes. They called it the herd shot round the world.

    3. Two boll weevils grew up in South Carolina. One took off for Hollywood and became a rich star. The other stayed in Carolina and never amounted to much-and naturally became known as the lesser of two weevils.

    4. Two Eskimos in a kayak were chilly, so they started a fire, which sank the craft, proving the old adage you can’t have your kayak and heat it too.

    5. A three-legged dog walks into an old west saloon, slides up to the bar and announces “I’m looking for the man who shot my paw.”

    6. Did you hear about the Buddhist who went to the dentist, and refused Novocain? He wanted to transcend dental medication.

    7. A group of chess enthusiast checked into a hotel, and met in the lobby where they were discussing their recent victories in chess tournaments. The hotel manager came out of the office after an hour and asked them to disperse. He couldn’t stand chess nuts boasting in an open foyer.

    8. A woman has twin sons and gives them up for adoption. One goes to an Egyptian family and is named “Ahmal”. The other is sent to a Spanish family and is named “Juan”. Years later, Juan sends his birth mother a picture of himself. Upon receiving the picture, she tells her husband she wishes she also had a picture of Ahmal. He replies, “They’re twins for Pete’s sake! If you’ve seen Juan, you’ve seen Ahmal!”

    9. A group of friars opened a florist shop to help with their belfry payments. Everyone liked to buy flowers from men of god, so their business flourished. A rival florist became upset that his business was suffering because people felt compelled to buy from the friars, so he asked the friars to cut back hours or close down. The friars refused. The florist went to them and begged them to shut down. Again they refused. So the florist hired Hugh Mctaggert, the biggest meanest thug in town. He went to the friar’s shop, beat them up, destroyed their flowers, trashed their shop, and said if they didn’t close he’d be back. Well, totally terrified, the friars closed up shop and hid in their rooms. This proves that only Hugh can prevent florist friars.

    10. Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot his whole life, which created an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him frail, and with his odd diet, he suffered from very bad breath. This made him …….. a super callous fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.

    11. And finally there was a man who sent ten puns to some friends in hopes at least one of the puns would make them laugh. Unfortunately, no pun in ten did!!

    Cool Site of the Day

    Allen June 22nd, 2004

    NationMaster - “a vast compilation of data from such sources as the CIA World Factbook, United Nations, World Health Organization, World Bank, World Resources Institute, UNESCO, UNICEF and OECD.”

    Warning — This can be a huge timewaster for factoid surfers.

    [Via The Daily Ablution]

    You Reach a Fork in the Road

    Allen June 22nd, 2004

    Down which you may travel four different paths.

    Read “Does Anyone Doubt That We Really Are At War?” to view Donald Sensing’s take on where we go from here.

    Those of you who really doubt that we are at war are excused from clicking on the link. Be sure to tune in tomorrow when we learn that 9/11 was actually filmed in the same studio where they shot the moon landings.

    To quote Donald:

    1. Over time, the United States engenders deep-rooted reformist impulses in the Islamic lands, leading their societies away from the self- and other-destructive patterns they now exhibit. It is almost certainly too much to ask that the societies become principally democratic as we conceive democracy (at least not for a very long time), but we can (and must) work to help them remit radical Islamofascism from their religious and political cultures so that terrorism does not flourish.

    2. The Islamofascists achieve their goals of Islamicization of the entire Middle East, the ejection of all non-Muslims from Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Persian Gulf, the destruction of Israel, and the deaths of countless numbers of Americans.

    3. Absent achieving the goals stated just above, al Qaeda successfully unleashes a mass-destructive, mass-casualty attack against the United States and total war erupts between the US and several Islamic countries.

    4. None of the above happen, so the conflict sputters along for decades more with no real changes: we send our troops into combat intermittently, suffer non-catastrophic attacks intermittently, and neither side possesses all of the will, the means and the opportunity to achieve decisive victory. The war becomes the Forever War.

    Of course, Islamicization of the entire Middle East is just the starting position. Remember, in the Islamofascist’s mind, the world is divided into the “House of Islam” and the “House of War” (Bernard Lewis’s The Crisis of Islam). Just because we concede the ME to them, doesn’t mean the fighting is over.

    Set Your Phasers on ‘Stun’

    Allen June 18th, 2004

    Read Real ray-guns to learn about advanced energy weapons being developed. Some of the Taser-like items include:

  • A weapon under development by Rheinmetall, based in Dorf, Germany, creates a conducting channel by using a small explosive charge to squirt a stream of tiny conductive fibres through the air at the victim (New Scientist print edition, 24 May 2003).
  • Meanwhile, Xtreme Alternative Defense Systems (XADS), based in Anderson, Indiana, will be one of the first companies to market another type of wireless weapon. Instead of using fibres, the $9000 Close Quarters Shock Rifle projects an ionised gas, or plasma, towards the target, producing a conducting channel. It will also interfere with electronic ignition systems and stop vehicles.

    • Some human rights group are complaining that the weapons might be used as torture devices. Well, duh! A bottle of Coke and a chair can be used as a torture device. Almost anything can be used as a torture device.

    I don’t know about Amnesty International and that group, but I would welcome a non-lethal weapon that can be used as crowd control. Much less likely to result in mass killings. And a weapon that can stop a car barreling at a checkpoint is far preferable than several hundred rounds from a SAW.

    [Via BoingBoingBlog]

    The Two Things You Should Know About Blogging

    Allen June 18th, 2004

    In a recent email sent to me by TopFive.com (of which I recommend ClubTopFive), they had a link to The Two Things. This is a site dedicated to “The Two Things You Should Know About X.” The premise being that everything other else is support for the Two Things.

    An example would be the Ten Commandments and Jesus’ statement: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

    So what are my two things about blogging? Well, to borrow from SDB:

    1. There are linkers who link to what caused them to think about something.
    2. There are thinkers who don’t link to what caused them to think about something.

    Seriously, occasionally I simply link (but have never link-dumped, yet) to an article that I feel is of interest with little or no comment. But most of the time I try to expand on, or comment on, the original link.

    So go enjoy The Two Things above.

    President Clinton’s My Life

    Allen June 18th, 2004

    I was listening to NPR’s Morning Edition report on President Clinton’s My Life on my way in to work today and had several reactions to the piece.

    As a basis of understanding, I still like Clinton in some ways. I realize many conservatives loath him, but I never reached that point. He was weak in his response to prior terrorist actions, but no more so than previous presidents. I have problems with him lying under oath, but that’s sort of like hating dogs because they pant during the summer. It’s simply built in. I feel that Clinton’s impeachment seriously lowered the bar for future impeachments. Anytime you start an investigation into corruption regarding real estate speculation and end up with why some intern was doing funky things with a cigar means the investigation was never really about real estate speculation.

    Having laid that groundwork, here are some thoughts on what struck me funny. All quotes are paraphrases.

    01:19 Self-Serving:
    Clinton says, “A lot of people say memoirs are dull and self-serving. I hope mine are interesting and self-serving.” Classic line. Even if Clinton was a lying SOB, at least he was an entertaining lying SOB.

    01:45 Badge of Honor:
    Clinton says, “I think my impeachment is a badge of honor.” While I feel that it was probably not in the best interest of the public to impeach you, it is not a badge of honor. It’s a stain — not something you can simply dry-clean away.

    02:00 Conseling To Save the Marriage:
    He and Hillary underwent a year-long session in counseling to save their marriage. I can think of another reason why Hillary stayed married to him.

    02:15 Harry Potter:
    The publisher is releasing the book at 12:01AM, hoping to generate a “Harry Potter” type feeding frenzy in the reading public. If so, what Harry Potter book are they hoping to emulate?

  • Harry Potter and Protagoras’ Stone
  • Harry Potter and the Hall Closet of Secrets
  • Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Trouskaban
  • Harry Potter and the Intern on Fire
  • Harry Potter and the Order of the Harpy

    • OK, OK, enough gratuitous jokes.

    03:50 Unpleasant War:
    One bookstore owner says that it is understandable why some look back on Clinton with fondness, given the unpleasant war going on. As opposed to all the pleasant wars we’ve had in the past? Perhaps she ought to stock books other than Clinton’s memoir and Pat-The-Bunny.

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