USA: Now, With Less Torture!*

* Some restrictions may apply. The definition of torture is subject to change without notice. Incarcerators’ decision may be final.

So anyway, we now have
a shiny new law that outlaws torture.

With a few caveats.

Like, the president gets to define what constitutes “torture”, so as long as he can rationalize that something is just high-spirited hijinks or “tough interrogation techniques” or approaches but does not exceed the pain of organ failure, or even if God just told him to do it, then hey, it’s not torture.

And what if you’ve been locked up when you haven’t done anything? Well, if the administration says you’re an unlawful combatant (at their discretion, natch), then you don’t even have the right to have a judge tell you WTF you’re locked up. In other words, if you think you’re being tortured illegally, who are you gonna complain to? And if you think you should have the right to habeas corpus because you’re not an unlawful combatant, well, the people who have you locked up say you are, so who are you gonna complain to?

Another sad and ironic part is that this certainly isn’t going to help our troops in the field. Not that this is news to anyone, except possibly the people at the head of this administration.

Back in the 4th century BC, Alexander the Great introduced a new wartime strategy. Unlike previous conquerors, when he captured a city, he didn’t slaughter the inhabitants and burn the city to the ground. Rather, he would execute the king and spare the population. This meant that the defenders were fighting to defend their king, their city, and their wealth, but not their lives, so they had less of an incentive to fight to the bitter end.

More recently, during WWII, Joseph Stalin decreed that any Soviet soldier taken prisoner by the Germans obviously hadn’t fought hard enough, and was therefore a traitor. Any POWs who were returned to the Soviet Union were executed for treason. Consequently, faced with a choice between possible death in combat, and surrender to the Germans, followed by months or years in a POW camp, followed by execution by firing squad, the Soviet army put up a hell of a fight.

Now we have become a nation that, shocked by the photos that came out of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, looked deep into its soul, and said, “I don’t think we should do anything like this… but why don’t you decide for us, Mr. President?”

In other words, we are a country that tortures.

And now, in Iraq and Afghanistan, any insurgent, terrorist, or poor schmuck caught at the wrong place at the wrong time and staring down the barrels of a dozen marines’ rifles is going to have to ask himself, “do I want to surrender, and probably be tortured, and spend the next forever chained naked to a cell door in a pool of my own shit, or do I want to risk fighting my way out, and maybe take a few of them with me?”

News flash: that’s not what we want them to think. What we want them to think is “Fuck this shit. This isn’t worth dying for. I’ll just surrender, and have some war stories to tell my kids.”

Is this really that hard to grasp?

(Crossposted to daily Kos.)

Hovind Trial Begins

The Pensacola News Journal reports
that jury selection for Kent Hovind’s trial begins today. If a jury is selected quickly enough, there might also be time for both sides’ opening remarks. I won’t speculate on whether this is likely, though.

Hovind himself hasn’t written anything about this since
Sep. 27, when he wrote

As for the media, well, they just need a new piece of meat to grind up every day to sell their papers. Truth and the destruction of innocent lives mean nothing to them.

This explains why the only paper to have covered this trial so far is the Pensacola News Journal, which has only published a few local news briefs like the one above.

Sorry, Kent, but you’re no OJ Simpson. The only people who care about your trial are creationism wonks like me.

Pagegate Just Got Gayer

…thanks to Lawrence O’Donnell at HuffPo, and this tidbit in the Post:

The staff member said Hastert’s chief of staff, Scott Palmer, met with the Florida Republican at the Capitol to discuss complaints about Foley’s behavior toward pages.

Palmer, who shares a townhouse with Hastert when they are in town, is more powerful than all but a few House members.

I know that prime real estate in DC is expensive, but Hastert makes $212 grand a year. I don’t know how much Palmer makes, but I bet he’s not hurting either, so I can’t imagine them being roomies for financial reasons.

I suppose it’s possible that Hastert and Palmer feel they need 24-hour access to each other in case an important issue comes up in the middle of the night, or because they’re firmly committed to saving gas by car-pooling, but let’s face it: you’re all thinking the same thing as I am: Hastert is teh gay.

Which wouldn’t—or shouldn’t—be a big deal, except for the fact that they’re members of the party that mobilized the troops in the last election by stirring up fears that OMG the gays are going to sap our precious bodily fluids!

It’s not the gayness. It’s not even the coverup (if any). It’s the hypocrisy.

Gil Dodgen: Uncommonly Dense

Gil Dodgen posted the following over at Uncommon Descent:

All computational evolutionary algorithms artificially isolate the effects of random mutation on the underlying machinery: the CPU instruction set, operating system, and algorithmic processes responsible for the replication process.

If the blind-watchmaker thesis is correct for biological evolution, all of these artificial constraints must be eliminated. Every aspect of the simulation, both hardware and software, must be subject to random errors.

Of course, this would result in immediate disaster and the extinction of the CPU, OS, simulation program, and the programmer, who would never get funding for further realistic simulation experiments.

All I can say is “wow”. Either Dodgen is having us all on (which I doubt, since he’s started a new thread to respond to the charge that he doesn’t know WTF he’s talking about), or he honestly doesn’t understand the difference between the simulated environment and the machine doing the simulating.

Presumably he also believes that when NOAA simulates the effect of a hurricane hitting the Florida coast, they have to pour rain onto their computers. And that every time an orc dies in World of Warcraft, a real orc dies in some distant land.

I know that I’m often too rooted in the concrete and have trouble going from a collection of facts to a general principle, but damn!

Pay No Attention to that War Behind the Curtain

This image is from a screenshot
of
this week’s Newsweek site, showing the covers of the paper editions in various areas.

Let’s play “One of these things is not like the others”. Notice anything different about the US edition? Where exactly are the signs of this “liberal media bias” thing I keep hearing about? Or did the editors think that Americans should be insulated from unpleasant facts like the fact that we might be losing in Afghanistan? Could the looming election have anything to do with it?

Grrr…

(Hat tips to
Rising Hegemon
and
Democratic Underground)

Update, Sep. 26, 2006: a friend of mine suggested another, perhaps more cynical explanation: Newsweek thinks that the American public is bored with Afghanistan, and they figured that they’d get more sales with Annie Leibowitz than with that boring and depressing stuff in Afghanistan.

Bill Clinton Bitchslaps Chris Wallace on Fox News

Crooks and Liars has the video. Go watch it. It’s beautiful.

Basically, Chris Wallace asked Clinton why he didn’t do more to kill or capture Osama bin Laden. Clinton went on a tear, explaining why the question is a load of dingo’s kidneys, how the GOoPers were whining about Clinton obsessing over bin Laden instead of concentrating on more important matters, how Fox News is the right wing’s mouthpiece, and that that they never ask these sorts of questions of the people in power today. Oh, and as an extra touch of class, he didn’t mention that the people criticizing him today were too busy organizing a witch hunt over a real estate deal and a blow job.

Mr. Clinton: could you please help the Democratic party? They need some balls.

Pirate Mode Code

I don’t know whether anyone noticed, but on Talk Like A Pirate Day, all the text on this site was converted to pirate lingo.

This was done through
that I consed up for the occasion. Feel free to steal download and use it.

Nuclear War Update: It Happened, Really!

Wiley has provided a good summary of Yisrayl “Buffalo Bill” Hawkins‘s prediction of a nuclear war on Sep. 12:

Read More

Senate Gets an Early Start on the Weekend

In the sidebar of http://www.senate.gov/:

Friday, Sep 22, 2006

The Senate convened at 9:30 a.m. and adjourned at 9:40 a.m. No record votes were taken.

I wish I could come in for ten minutes and vote to give myself the rest of the day off.

When I rule the world, there’ll be a time clock on Capitol Hill. And if anyone takes time off like this, it’ll come out of their salary.

(HT curvemudgeon, Wonkette.)

Arrrr, Me Mateys!

Avast, ye salty sea curs! Today be Talk Like A Pirate Day. Ye’ll comment in piratey and like it, else walk the plank like the scurvy dogs ye be!

(Actually, ye’ll comment in piratey courtesy of Dougal Campbell’s Pirate Filter. The rest of the site be usin’ a custom JavaScript filter that ye’re welcome to add to yer booty chest, seein’ as how it’s licensed under the GNU Plunder License.)