Danger Do Not Watch This
unless you want your brain to explode
As Lawrence Welk puts it at the end of the video, “a modern spiritual.” Ahem.
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unless you want your brain to explode
As Lawrence Welk puts it at the end of the video, “a modern spiritual.” Ahem.
Oh my god, I really am sick now. Here’s your fucking Global War On Terror. Doesn’t this make you proud to be an American?
It’s a Salon exclusive, so you’ll have to sit through a brief commercial to read the article. But please do. Even though doing so has made me physically nauseous and I’m ready to cry.
It just sickens me to read this. And, like Dan Froomkin, I have to ask: “Where is the outrage?” Everybody in Congress and the media just la-de-das along as if this is all completely normal. Sad to say, maybe it is these days.
Still I cannot believe that we are even debating whether to use torture on detainees. First, all the professional intelligence opinions I’ve read say it doesn’t produce reliable information. But mostly, it’s wrong: It. is. mother. fucking. WRONG. Period. Done. Over.
Don’t give me the “ticking time bomb” scenario bullshit either. Here’s a novel idea: in the extremely unlikely event of such a situation arising, why not leave things the way they’ve always been: the President/CIA/Army/whoever do what they think they have to do, and afterwards face the consequences of a legal investigation. Instead of shredding the Constitution, the Geneva Convention, and endangering our captured troops, in order to pretend the real world resembles a TV show like 24.
But still, the Republican Presidential candidates (and let’s not forget Kit Bond, either) try to out-macho each other on this whole waterboarding thing. Equal parts mind-boggling and nauseating. Feh.
Update: As Digby says, Torture Works. Also, apologies to Simon and Garfunkel for the title today.
Update 2: I am on a weekly email list sent by our Congressman, Emanuel Cleaver, with whom I have always been pretty impressed. In today’s [Friday] post, he put it better than just about anyone I have heard: “America's policy and practice on how it treats those in our custody at home and abroad is far less about the effectiveness of torture than it is a fundamental question of who we are as a nation. Even if torture was reliable (and we know that it is not) it would not reflect who we are as a people. I am proud that this provision was included in the [Intelligence Authorization Conference Report]; I hope it sends a clear message that as representatives of the people, we do not believe agents of our government should behave like barbarians.”
I’m not a follower of Noam Chomsky by any means, but boy has he ever got a point in this video. Via Glenn Greenwald, who said, this “explains a great deal about many things,” whether you’re liberal or conservative or whatever.
My apologies for the way the video appears on this page. My layout is 400 pixels wide, while the video is 425 pixels wide. God knows what Internet Explorer (possibly the worst web browser in the world) will do to my layout as a result. Anyway, click on the YouTube logo to see it on that site. Or you can live without the rightmost 25 pixels. In any case, I think the video makes an extremely important point.
Apparently I’m not the only one who has sorely missed The Daily Show since the writers’ strike has been on. NPR did an interview with one of the writers yesterday.
The recent news has been chock full of incidents and situations crying out for Jon Stewart and company to distill into a golden comedic nutshell, one that explodes in your brain and leaves you laughing helplessly all through the commercial break. Just for one example, what about Bush’s stance on Iran since we learned about the NIE (which apparently Cheney has been trying to keep from release for nearly a year)? Even Dan Froomkin, not known as a funnyman, called that an example of neck-snapping spin.
But no. We’ll just have to keep trudging through this gray Kafka-esque nightmare, unenlightened by the satiric gems that give us the perspective (and belly laughs) we so badly need. [FWIW, I’m with the writers on this one. The web is revolutionizing the delivery of entertainment and they have to be compensated fairly for that.]
Okay, back to drum edits. You all have a good weekend, okay?
Few people know this about me, but one of my passions is creating information graphics: figuring out how to present complex topics in a graphic format so they are readily understood. It comes up occasionally in my work, though not as often as I would like. In a better planned life I would have probably pursued this into a lucrative career. Oh well. That’s what happens when you put the horse before the cartographer, or something like that.
I offered the previous paragraph as an explanation for my excitement on discovering HistoryShots.com. The site only offers 15 prints so far, but they are amazing and wonderful: Race to the Moon, History of Political Parties I, Conquest of Everest, Genealogy of Pop/Rock Music, History of France from 1787 to 1833, etc. If you’re just itching to give me a Christmas present, you could do worse than one of these.*
A few quick posts here today, before I dive back into the studio again.
First, Barack O’Bollywood. OMG. It has no discernible political meaning, but wow. Any readers who just now took acid (because we know reading blogs is one of the best things you can do while tripping) should probably wait a little while before clicking the link, to be sure you get the full effect. Via Salon’s globalization blog, How The World Works.
Speaking of HTWW, I have to give Quote of the Day yesterday to a post on the Chinese black market in virtual items, to wit: “Chinese citizens paid real money to buy fake money so they could vote for fake singers aspiring to be real singers. This makes How the World Works very happy.”
Here’s a fun link Elise sent me this morning. It's a really slick Flash app that lets you turn your photo into an elf. Fair warning: it’s an Office Max promotion, but the corporate stuff isn’t too intrusive, and the dance is really funny. Here’s mine.
Here is a rather lovely quote from last month’s National Geographic, in an article on the Hubble Space Telescope written by Timothy Ferris (Coming of Age in the Milky Way):
Surveying the whole panoply of physics, from quasars imaged by Hubble near the edge of the observable universe to the sub-atomic realms probed by particle accelerators, one increasingly gets the sense that science has as yet detected only the tip of an iceberg. Consider the question of dimensionality: On how many dimensions is the universe built? Newton got by with just the three dimensions of familiar, everyday space. Einstein improved on Newton’s accuracy by adding time as a fourth dimension: His gravitational fields bend space within four-dimensional space-time. But gravitation is only one of the many fields that … pervade the vacuum of space. If you’re trying to write a unified theory of all the known particles and fields, you may find yourself working in a dozen or more dimensions. And for all we know there are multitudes of as yet undetected particles, each with its own field, implying still more dimensions.
Are these dimensions real, or—as philosophers came to consider Ptolemy’s Earth-centered model of the universe—just a handy way of calculating? Increasingly, physicists suspect that they are real. If so, the perceived universe is but a glimmer on the surface of something much larger and more complex, and the known laws of nature are not bedrock but a kind of weather, like the clouds that form over mountain peaks….
Just a thought. Whole books have been written on the way physics increasingly resembles Zen Buddhism, of course, but I haven’t found a more concise or beautiful way of putting it than Ferris did right there.