"I've suffered for my music and now it's your turn"

Not my best performance ever, but I don't like to do more than one take. Stop me before I sing again America - impeach, indict and imprison these people and I'll promise not to do this again.

It's only torture when they do it

Can we call it torture now?

From The New York Times:

China inspired interrogations at Guantanamo

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

Drowning on Dry Land

I dislike Christopher Hitchens for his knee jerk contrarianism and think he's a pompous ass most of the time, but I'll be the first to admit he puts words together very well even when doing so in the service of a stupid idea (see: Iraq, invasion of). With the possible exception of his remarks on the death of Jerry Fawell, his televison appearances usually make me want to smack him. Say what you like about the man, but this took some serious testicular fortitude.

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure.

Addendum: While I still think it took some cojones to volunteer to be tortured, especially a second time, I think Chet has it just about right when it comes to how much respect is owed to Hitchens for finally realizing that torture is torture, not an "enhanced interrogation technique" when his nose was literally rubbed in it.

Clearly I was remiss in my earlier choices and left out some vital Canadiana - that's what happens when you blog on lunch hour!

And I won't even talk about the time Al Purdy came to me for advice...

War on the press

This article is four years old, who wants to bet the law hasn't changed?

Happy Canada Day, eh!
Canada Day comes a day early on this side of the Pacific, and Tokyo in July is a bit warm for the traditional national costume of wrist-to-ankle Stanfields, checked flannel shirt, jean, kodiak boots and touque, but don't worry about me, I will be celebrating in the traditional manner:



and for those of you without access to adequate quantities of maple syrup, Molson's and back bacon, there's this bit of knowledge that all Canadians need:



While the political system in my homeland may not be the best, with limited prospects for it getting any better anytime soon、I still think it is the best place in the world to live and I hope to get back there permanently sooner rather than later. For now, you can listen to this:

Memories, misty water-coloured memories

Go put on some polyester, crank up the Barry Manilow, set the wayback machine for 1974 and LET'S EAT.

h/t to Canadian Cynic

Black day in June, almost July

Is it possible to overdose on schadenfreude? Because this has been a good week for it.

Satire is dead
Putting the "fun" in "Fundemental" again this week, Focus on the Family leader and close personal friend of Jesus and George W. Bush, Rev. James Dobson has accused Barack Obama of distorting the Bible and having a "fruitcake" interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

Glass houses, stones, blah, blah, blah...aw screw it, insert your own snark here. I'll be in the bar. We're having a wake for satire. Apparently it was crossing the street and go run over by the streetcar called "Reality"

Which side is he on?
Dear Ralph Nader,
Haven't you done enough damage already?
Please, just shut up and stay home this year. Please.
And spare us the justifications about how no one should have to vote for the lesser of two evils. Electoral politics is and has always been about choosing the least bad candidate and the higher the office, the truer this becomes. Voltaire was right when he said "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien" - If it hadn't been for the electoral temper tantrum you led in 2000, the United States would have had four-- probably eight--years of the less-than-perfect Al Gore, who I think we can agree would, for all his shortcomings, have been far better for the USA and the rest of the world than the unspeakable disaster that is George W. Bush.
Ralph, your suggestion that the only reason anyone is voting for Barack Obama is white guilt is both offensive and incorrect. And frankly, irrelevant. I don't care whether Barrack Obama get elected by using white guilt, negative ads, witchcraft or frickin' satellite-based mind-control laser beams. I don't think he's the messiah, I just think he will do a lot less damage than John McCain. Could the United States and the Democratic Party do better? Maybe, maybe not. But it's not like your shit doesn't stink, Ralph, so spare us the Jiminy Cricket act.

Karma's a bitch - Payback edition
Once upon a time, I worked here. I didn't like it much, mostly because the people I worked for were, not to put too fine a point on it, dishonest pricks. Naturally, I was very upset last fall when all these bad things happened to worse people. Imagine how I feel today.

Police to arrest ex-president of Nova over embezzlement
The Yomiuri Shimbun
OSAKA--Osaka prefectural police plan to arrest on Tuesday former President Nozomu Sahashi of the failed language school chain Nova Corp. on suspicion of instructing the firm's accountants to misappropriate the reserve funds of the firm's employees, The Yomiuri Shimbun learned Monday.
Regarding "Ochanoma Ryugaku," a system through which Nova students could take lessons from home, the police have learned a large amount of money was sent from Nova to a communications firm owned by Sahashi.
According to sources close to the investigation and others, Sahashi instructed employees in late July to transfer 320 million yen from the reserve fund to Nova's bank account through a Nova Kikaku account he once managed.
Meanwhile, the Osaka Labor Bureau will send papers to prosecutors by the end of the week on Nova and Sahashi, over failing to pay its workers about 105 million yen, equivalent to salaries for about 400 Japanese employees and foreign instructors.

Happy Feet - Penguin Dance - The top video clips of the week are here

Anyone else for champagne?

Brass with balls

New spiritual leader of the moment

Retired Major-General Antonio Taguba was the first American officer to investigate claims of prisoner mistreatment at Abu Ghraib. He has not backed off, despite being "encouraged to retire" and is still insisting the emperor is bare-ass nekkid.

"There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”
-Anthonio Taguba, writing in the preface to a new report released by Physicians for Human Rights that uses medical evidence to confirm first-hand accounts of torture at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and Baghram.

Go watch the whole Democracy Now program from last week on Torture and then repeat after me: Impeach, Indict, Imprison.

"Well I'm not prejudiced, but..."
Reasonable people can and do disagree on whether certain comments or actions are racist or sexist, but only some kind of complete dope would deny that certain things are explicitly racist or sexist. So if you are a conservative who does not think of yourself as a racist, who is appalled by the recent hijinks of the racist shitheads at F0x News thinks, you really have to ask yourself why you are associating with the some of your fellow Republican and Conservative travellers - and these are the official functions and elected politicians the parties have some control over, let's not even get started on the bloggers and loose-cannon pundits.
Take a look at the comments on this story for an example of what I'm talking about. I'm sure many of the people here --I'm looking at you Diane72, Superpants and Peapod-- would blithely tell you that they don't have a prejudiced bone in their body, but that they know for a fact that (insert ridiculous racist claim here).

With God on their side

And frankly, they can have him/her/them/it. While we may or may not be locked in a "Clash of Civilizations,"  it certainly isn't the Christian West vs Muslim East one that the right imagines it to be. It is the clash between the secular, logical, reality-based world and the fundamentalist, unreasoning, faith-driven supernaturalists. Personally, I'll take the scientific side - we don't know everything, but we can learn and at least we are willing to live and let live. The other side, eh, not so much.

 The creationists sometimes try to pin the massacres, holocausts and pogroms of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot on atheism and their own misinterpretation of Darwin's theories as a justification of  "survival of the fittest" -- when the real cause of these horrible events, and indeed most of the evil that men do, is the "true believerism"  the notion that one is righteous that brooks no doubt, no reconsideration in the face of evidence that one's thesis is not airtight. It is that sort of inability to admit errors or tolerate dissent that leads to everything from the Iraq war to religiously driven fatal child abuse and deadly neglect.

And lest you think I am only picking on the Jesus-addled variety of superstitous dumbassery, consider this marvelous little episode and tell me blind belief in obvious chicanery does no harm.

(hat tips to Cat, the General,  MJS,  and David)

For Mrs. Rev.Paperboy
Happy 9th (!!!) anniversary

A nation shamed



Somewhere, Foster Hewitt is gnashing his teeth and wringing his hands.

I think the cell next to Lord Black is free...

Somewhere Hunter Thompson and H.L. Mecken are toasting Harold Meyerson's evisceration of Sam Zell:

"Instead, in Zell, what Los Angeles has is a visiting Visigoth, whose civic influence is about as positive as that of the Crips, the Bloods and the Mexican mafia. Life in San Quentin sounds about right. "

Arguments about counting column inches as a measure of quality of work aside (it is an assinine practice that rewards and thus guarantees bad writing) it has been under the Zell regime that Teh Pantload has been given a real column at a real newspaper. For that alone, Zell should be thrown in solitary, permanently.

Here come de Judge

"My life, the lives of my fellow passengers and crew, depends entirely on other people--invisible people--doing their jobs right. And who among us always does his job right?"

-Judge Alex Kozinski
Slate Magazine
July 19, 1996

More on His Honor from Slate this week:

"The problem with being a judge who loves to shock is that you're a flashy barracuda in a school of plain tuna, and you risk careening off into the high seas that are the province of public officials who are just too out there for their own good. Such is my thought after reading that Judge Alex Kozinksi posted porn on a web site he thought was private, but wasn't. The material included "a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal," we learn from the LA Times. We can't judge for ourselves anymore, because the site has been wiped clean, but if Judge Kozinski says that he found the porn funny, I bet he did--and it was probably offensive, too. Herein lies the Kozinski challenge. "

Glass houses, stones, yadda yadda yadda. Not surprisingly, this was a "conservative" Reagan appointee.

Taking the "Pal" out of "Principal"
Even here in conformity-and-decorum land, where teachers get fired for not singing the old militarist national anthem, even in the old Soviet Union, they would never dream of something like this: Cheer out loud at a graduation - get arrested. Clearly, some people really, really need to show they are in charge. Educators often complain that people like high-school principals are unfairly stereotyped as mean-spirited, petty tyrants -- I wonder where that stereotype comes from?

The Verdict is In

I try generally not to ascribe to conspiratorial evil-doing what can reasonably chalked up to stupidity, incompetence, arrogance and inertia. When New Orleans - a coastal city built largely below sea level - was hit by Hurricane Katrina, I was as horrified as the next person by the complete and utter failure of the U.S. federal government to respond in any meaningful way. But I just figured it was mostly a matter of a chain of dumb decisions - like putting a lawyer whose only other organizational experiece was running a club for horse breeders in charge of emergency management. Sure, there was evil involved - like the white deputies who opened fire on blacks fleeing the city to keep them from entering their parish, or even the pearl-clutching by shit-for-brains conservative bloggers and pundits who decried the "looting by savages" or the "lawlessness" by those trapped at the Superdome, though the two are hardly comparable in seriousness.
I tended to pooh-pooh or at least take with a grain of salt claims by some that the entire episode was some sort of monstrous pogrom against blacks or a cold-blooded, cynical attempt to wipe out a Democratic center in the South. No one could be that monstrous or cynical and cold-blooded, right? Not even as big a shit as Karl Rove could look at all those poor people drowning and think "How do I use this to partisan advantage?" right? I'll admit that, even after the invasion of Iraq, even given the torture scandals of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, I didn't think the Bush crowd were actually evil. I thought they were a bunch of violent, ignorant clowns, prone to lashing out at things they didn't understand, even occasionally vengeful agains their political enemies and driven by an ideology they didn't really even understand, but still the bottom line was that they were a bunch of red-nosed, floppy-shoed, horn-honking, Bozo-coiffed clowns.
I was right, they are clowns, but it turns out that they have patterned themselves on the clown from Stephen King's "It" that lives in the sewers and eats children. They are still hapless, clumsy, clowns prone to hitting each other with pies and seltzer bottles, but they are Evil (with a a capital E).

This is all you need to know about what plain rotten, filthy, lickers of Satan's taint these people are. The entire administration, past and present, should be locked in the darkest, dampest, most rat-and-roach-infested part of Angola Prison and left there.

"We landed at the 17th Street Canal," Landrieu says. "The story that day Karl Rove was feeding was: 'The president is on the job, the president has taken control, the president is going to rebuild, and despite the fact that the government and all these babbling fools down here can't do anything, the Corps of Engineers is on the job.' So we landed at the canal, five minutes from my house. I was so excited because they were finally doing something. The Corps of Engineers was there, and they had dump trucks and sandbags. All the cameras were there for the president, who was doing one of his famous press conferences about how he was going to do everything. So I thought, 'At least the guy is doing something, so show your manners and be good and smile.'"
...On Friday, Mary Landrieu had been with Bush and Blanco as they toured the 17th Street Canal, where, at last, major work had commenced to repair the damage that had been caused when the levee broke. "Then, on Saturday," Landrieu says, "George Stephanopoulos called and asked to do an interview with me, and I said, 'George, I'm tired of doing interviews. I have to work. And nothing you are airing is accurately showing what's going on down here.' He wanted to go to the Superdome, and I said, 'We still have people stranded on their roofs. If you want to tell the right story, I will help you tell the right story. You get a helicopter and I'll go up and I will show you what is actually happening. It's awful what's happening at the Superdome, but the reason the people can't understand the story is because the entire region is under 20 feet of water. People can't get into the Superdome to help. They can't get out. People are drowning in their homes.'
"So George and I went up in the helicopter and for three hours his jaw was dropping. Then I said, 'George, before we finish I have to show you one positive thing because I can't send you back to Washington to produce a story that shows nothing but devastation and disaster.' So I told the pilot to tack right so I can show George the 17th Street Canal and the work that was going on there. I swear as my name is Mary Landrieu I thought that what I saw with the president was still there -- people working, trucks, sandbags, everything. Then I looked down and saw one little crane. It was like someone took a knife and stabbed me through my heart. I lost it." There, in the cabin of the helicopter, as they flew above the breached canal below them, Landrieu sat devastated.
"I could not believe that the president of the United States, staged by Karl Rove himself, had come down to the city of New Orleans and basically put up a stage prop. It was like you had gone to a studio in California and filmed a movie. They put the props up and the minute we were gone they took them down. All the dump trucks were gone. All the Coast Guard people were gone. It was an empty spot with one little crane. It was the saddest thing I have ever seen in my life."

Hat tip to posse member Chet over at The Vanity Press, who has been burning up the blogosphere lately.