from Mikhail Emelianov
. . . .let us begin with important distinctions between several groups of student communicators:
(a) Casual Informer: This is usually a guy (in most cases
likely to be a "dude") who just wants to inform you that he is not
going to be able to make it to class or to take the test - no
explanation is given, no excuse is produced, just a casual "I thought
you should know" message.
(b) Neurotic Informer: This one is a type of email that you
are very likely to get two or three times ("just making sure you got
this one, because I've checked my email 26 times in the last hour and
you have not yet responded to my note") - however, despite the neurotic
desperation and obvious anxiety, it does not really contain any
legitimate excuse, or, if it does, it is usually something very banal.
(c) Pleading Informer: This is an appeal to your sense of
pity, your humanity, your love of animals, your sense of justice etc.
Student appeals to a variety of common enough feelings but in a way
that hits too many targets and thus destroys the ultimate effect it was
meant to have.
(d) Demanding Informer: Not only is this one informing you
that a person will not be in class and gives very little in the form of
an explanation, it also asks that you provide a detailed account of
what will be taking (took) place in the class and promptly report back
to the student (sometimes by phone with a number included).
---------------------------------------------------------
from Andrew Sullivan
By focusing on waterboarding, we can sometimes forget that the other
"alternative techniques" for "enhanced interrogation" are also forms of
torture, even when they leave no permanent marks, or, in the words of
AEI's John Yoo, do not cause major organ failure. The term "stress
position" for example, when uttered by someone like Rush Limbaugh, who
described some of what happened at Abu Ghraib as nothing more serious
than fraternity hazing, can seem banal, even defensible. These
positions, which the president strongly supports, can nonetheless
become very quickly hideous acts of cruelty. Here's a photo of what the
Nazis called Pfahlbinden.
You can seen that individuals are contorted just by the weight of their
own bodies into positions of excruciating pain that lasts until it is
unbearable. In this picture, it does not appear that the methods are
being used to interrogate. They are being used for sadistic purposes.
They are worse thah the 'stress positions" we have evidence of in US
custody because the Nazi prisoners were literally suspended in the air,
their feet barely touching the ground.. But the victums of US stress
positions were chained to fixtures and wall with hands chained above
and behind the head, with feet barely on the ground. They had a tiny
bit more support for their feet, but it often made the procedure longer
and in end, therefore, more painful.
When you hear a banal phrase like "stress position", and hear people
dismiss it, remember that everything is in the doing. And when human
beings are given total control over others, they are capable of great
evil. Sane and civilized societies do not give permission for such
things. And they do not make excuses for them. And when they discover
they have been done, they investigate and prosecute those who broke the
law.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
from Marty Lederman
Senator McCain rightly insists that the U.S. may not (i)
torture; (ii) engage in cruel treatment prohibited by Common Article 3;
or (iii) engage in conduct that shocks the conscience, under the McCain
Amendment. He also insists that waterboarding violates each of these
legal restrictions, that the Bush Administration’s legal analysis has
been dishonest and flatly wrong, and that we need “a good faith
interpretation of the statutes that guide what is permissible in the
CIA program.”
The Feinstein Amendment would have accomplished all of these
objectives, but Senator McCain voted against it, presumably because he
wishes that the CIA be permitted to continue the use of other
of its enhanced techniques, apart from waterboarding. Those techniques
are reported to include stress positions, hypothermia, threats to the
detainee and his family, severe sleep deprivation, and severe sensory
deprivation. Senator McCain has not explained which of these he thinks
are not torture and cruel treatment, nor which he would wish to
preserve for use by the CIA. But if the President does as he has
promised and follows Senator McCain’s lead by vetoing this bill, the
CIA will continue to assert the right to use all of these techniques —
and possibly waterboarding, as well.
By contrast, Senator Clinton supports the Feinstein amendment, and Senator Obama does, too.
If Senator McCain believes that there are particular “enhanced”
techniques that are not in the [U.S. Army's] Field Manual, but that are also not
torture or cruel treatment, and wishes to allow the CIA to use them, he
should identify what they are, and offer legislation that would
authorize those, and those only, techniques, in addition to those
listed in the Field Manual. Otherwise, despite all his worthy efforts
in this area, Senator McCain is now facilitating the CIA’s use of
techniques that are unlawful, including some that are torture even by
Senator McCain’s own lights.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
from Nicholas Kristoff
The most famous journalist you may never have heard of is Sami al-Hajj,
an Al Jazeera cameraman who is on a hunger strike to protest abuse
during more than six years in a Kafkaesque prison system.
Mr. Hajj’s fortitude has turned him into a household name in the
Arab world, and his story is sowing anger at the authorities holding
him without trial.
That’s us. Mr. Hajj is one of our forgotten prisoners in Guantánamo Bay.
If
the Bush administration appointed an Under Secretary of State for
Antagonizing the Islamic World, with advice from a Blue Ribbon
Commission for Sullying America’s Image, it couldn’t have done a more
systematic job of discrediting our reputation around the globe. Instead
of using American political capital to push for peace in the Middle
East or Darfur, it is using it to force-feed Mr. Hajj.
. . . .Suppose the Iranian government arrested and beat Katie Couric, held
her virtually incommunicado for six years and promised to release her
only if she would spy for Iran. In such circumstances, Iranian
investments in public diplomacy toward the United States wouldn’t get
very far, either.
After Mr. Hajj was arrested in Afghanistan in
December 2001, he was beaten, starved, frozen and subjected to anal
searches in public to humiliate him, his lawyers say. The U.S.
government initially seems to have confused him with another cameraman,
and then offered vague accusations that he had been a financial courier
and otherwise assisted extremist groups.
. . . .Most Americans, including myself, originally gave President Bush the
benefit of the doubt and assumed that the inmates truly were “the worst
of the worst.” But evidence has grown that many are simply the
unluckiest of the unluckiest.
Some were aid workers who were
kidnapped by armed Afghan groups and sold to the C.I.A. as extremists.
One longtime Sudanese aid worker employed by an international charity,
Adel Hamad, was just released by the U.S. in December after five years
in captivity. A U.S. Army major reviewing his case called it
“unconscionable.”
Mr. Hajj began his hunger strike more than a
year ago, so twice daily he is strapped down and a tube is wound up his
nose and down his throat to his stomach. Sometimes a lubricant is used,
and sometimes it isn’t, so his throat and nose have been rubbed raw.
Sometimes a tube still bloody from another hunger striker is used, his
lawyers say.
“It’s really a regime to make it as painful and difficult as possible,” said one of his lawyers, Zachary Katznelson.
Mr.
Hajj cannot bend his knees because of abuse he received soon after his
arrest, yet the toilet chair he was prescribed was removed — making it
excruciating for him to use the remaining squat toilet. He is allowed a
Koran, but his glasses were confiscated so he cannot read it.
All
this is inhumane, but also boneheaded. Guantánamo itself does far more
damage to American interests than Mr. Hajj could ever do.
To stand against torture and arbitrary detention is not to be squeamish. It is to be civilized.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
from Phillip Larkin (with apologies to Sadie)
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.
Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.
So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
from ee cummings
Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death
-------------------------------------------------------------------
from Tara McKevey
There is a difference between satire and mockery. Satire, in its highest form, is inspired by rage.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
from Jack Kerouac
Everything
is the same, the fog says "We are fog and we fly by dissolving like
ephemera," and the leaves say "We are leaves and we jiggle in the wind,
that's all, we come and go, grow and fall" -- Even the paper bags in my
garbage pit say "We are man-transformed paper bags made out of wood
pulp, we are kinda proud of being paper bags as long as that will be
possible, but we'll be mush again with our sisters the leaves come
rainy season" -- The tree stumps say "We are tree stumps torn out of
the ground by men, sometimes by wind, we have big tendrils full of
earth that drink out of the earth" -- Men say "We are men, we pull out
tree stumps, we make paper bags, we think wise thoughts, we make lunch,
we look around, we make a great effort to realize everything is the
same" -- While the sand says "We are sand, we already know," and the
sea says "We are always come and go, fall and plosh" -- The empty blue
sky of space says "All this comes back to me, then goes again, and
comes back again, then goes again, and I don't care, it still belongs
to me" -- The blue sky adds "Don't call me eternity, call me God if you
like, all of you talkers are in paradise: the leaf is paradise, the man
is paradise, the sand is paradise, the sea is paradise, the man is
paradise, the fog is paradise."
. . . .But I remember seeing a mess of leaves suddenly go skittering
in the wind and into the creek, then floating rapidly down the creek
towards the sea, making me feel a nameless horror. . . . "Oh my god,
we're all being swept away to sea no matter what we know or say or do"
-- and a bird who was on a crooked branch is suddenly gone without my
even hearing him.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
from Kay S. Hymowitz
And that “coolness” points to what may be
the deepest existential problem with the child-man—a tendency to avoid
not just marriage but any deep attachments. This is British writer Nick
Hornby’s central insight in his novel About a Boy. The book’s
antihero, Will, is an SYM whose life is as empty of passion as of
responsibility. He has no self apart from pop-culture effluvia, a fact
that the author symbolizes by having the jobless 36-year-old live off
the residuals of a popular Christmas song written by his late father.
Hornby shows how the media-saturated limbo of contemporary guyhood
makes it easy to fill your days without actually doing anything. “Sixty
years ago, all the things Will relied on to get him through the day
simply didn’t exist,” Hornby writes. “There was no daytime TV, there
were no videos, there were no glossy magazines. . . . Now, though, it
was easy [to do nothing]. There was almost too much to do.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------
from Bob Herbert
. . . .do we have any real sense of what Senator Obama will do to stop the
stagnation of the middle class and resuscitate the American dream? Do
we have any reason to believe that during a Clinton presidency we’ll
see a transformation of the nation’s decaying infrastructure? Does John
McCain have the stuff to lead us from a long debilitating period of
dependence on foreign oil to a new and exciting world of energy
efficiency and innovation?
The essential question the candidates
should be trying to answer — but that is not even being asked very
often — is how to create good jobs in the 21st century. Thirty-seven
million Americans are poor, and roughly 60 million others are
near-poor. (These are people struggling to make it on incomes of
$20,000 to $40,000 a year for a family of four.)
The middle class
is hardly flourishing. In testimony before a House subcommittee last
year, Harley Shaiken, a Berkeley professor who is an expert on labor
and employment, remarked: “During a period of robust economic growth,
record profits and the fastest sustained productivity increases since
the 1950s, only a thin slice at the top of the economic heap is
enjoying higher living standards.”
Now the country is faced with
a possible recession and the likelihood of moving further backward
rather than forward on employment.
“We’re building exit ramps
from the middle class,” said Mr. Shaiken during an interview. “But what
is the path to the middle class for most Americans now? We need to
figure out how to resume building entrance ramps.”
The most
direct route to the middle class has always been a good job. An obvious
potential source of new jobs would be a broad campaign to rebuild the
nation’s infrastructure — its roads, bridges, schools, levees, water
treatment facilities and so forth.
Another area with big job
creation potential is the absolutely vital quest to develop alternative
sources of energy. That effort should carry the same high national
priority that was accorded the Manhattan Project during World War II.
I’d even call it Manhattan II.
There are moments in history that
demand not just talent in a nation’s leadership, but greatness — men or
women with the courage to dream bigger and the ability to convince
others that those dreams can be realized.
The presidential
candidates don’t seem to be rising to the nation’s many crucial
challenges with the sense of urgency and the creative vision that is
called for. Not yet, at least.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
from Steve Martin
Around this time I smelled a rat. The rat was the Age of
Aquarius. Though the era's hairstyles, clothes, and lingo still dominated youth
culture, by 1972 the movement was tired and breaking down. Drugs had killed
people, and so had Charles Manson. The war in Vietnam was near its official
end, but its devastating losses had embittered and divided America. The
political scene was exhausting, and many people, including me, were alienated
from government. Murders and beatings at campus protests weren't going to be
resolved by sticking a daisy into the pointy end of a rifle. Flower Power was
waning, but no one wanted to believe it yet, because we had all invested so
much of ourselves in its message. Change was imminent.
I cut my hair, shaved my beard, and put on a suit. I stripped my act of all
political references. To politics I was saying, "I'll get along without
you very well. It's time to be funny." Overnight, I was no longer at the
tail end of an old movement but at the front end of a new one. Instead of looking
like another freak with a crazy act, I now looked like a visitor from the
straight world who had gone seriously awry.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
from Ron Rosenbaum
Let us now praise incandescence. Not just the word but the
phenomenon, the warm radiance of glowing coals, the soft flare of
tungsten filament fire.
Let us praise it because its beauty is
suddenly under siege. For certain grimly utilitarian environmentalists,
aesthetic beauty is not an especially important environmental value.
Beauty's glass slipper can't compete with the environmentalists' tiny
carbon footprint.
Yes, the idiots in Congress, too torpid and
ineffectual to pass a health-care bill for children, have busy-bodied
themselves in a bumbling way with the way you light up your world. In
December, they passed legislation that will, in practice, outlaw
incandescent bulbs because they won't be able to meet the new law's
strict energy-efficiency standards. The result: Between 2012 and 2014,
incandescent bulbs will be driven from the market. Replaced by the ugly
plasticine Dairy Queen swirl of compact fluorescent lights.
From
a purely environmental perspective, this move is shortsighted. CFLs do
use less energy, which is good. But they also often contain mercury,
one of the most damaging—and lasting—environmental toxins. Not a ton of
mercury, but still: A whole new CFL recycling structure will be
required to prevent us from releasing deadly neurotoxins into the water
table. CFLs: coming soon to sushi near you.
Failing to properly
recycle your CFLs won't be the same as putting an Evian bottle in the
wrong slot. It'll be genuinely hazardous, particularly dangerous to
children. Way to go, congressional dimbulbs!
And God forbid you
break a bulb. If you do, you are advised by some experts to evacuate
the room for 15 minutes to escape the release of mercury vapor, then
scrub the area as though there'd been a plutonium spill, virtually
wearing a hazmat suit as you dispose of the glass shards.
Good
luck. But the greater crime of the new bulbs is not environmental but
aesthetic. Think of the ugly glare of fluorescence, the light of
prisons, sterile cubicle farms, precinct stations, emergency rooms,
motor vehicle bureaus, tenement hallways—remember Tom Wolfe's phrase
for the grim, flickering hallway lights in New York tenements:
"landlords' haloes"?—and, of course, morgues. Fluorescents seem
specially designed to drain life and beauty from the world. Don't kid
yourself if you hope Hell is lit by fire. More likely fluorescents.
Yes,
fluorescents. Buzzing, flickering, able to cause epileptic seizures in
the susceptible, in addition to headaches and other neurological
symptoms. Let's smash all the incandescent lights and replace their
glowing beauty with the harsh anatomizing light of fluorescence. The
flickering tinny corpse light of bureaucracies and penal institutions.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
One question I've been concerning myself with is why Kerouac's On the Road is so much better than everything else he wrote.
I've been enjoying the fruits of the beatnik era again (I'm almost done with the "original scroll" version of On the Road, and am going to read the "visions of cody" version next), and I discovered something really weird. Almost all of the travelling Kerouac chronicled in Road was done after completing successive drafts of his first novel (The Town and the City, which is supposedly supbar Thomas Wolfe, I haven't read it yet).
