Current Events / Opinions in Science

Friday night philosophy.

nobody@vox.com(Snowy) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 03:21:16 -0700

I've been thinking about the meaning of life. And I really don't know what all the fuss is about. Philosophers go on and on, but never get there. Neither do the religious people. Oh, they'll tell you that they do, but like the philosophers, they'll go on and on, and eventually they all tell you that it's God. But what do they mean by God? It is, after all, just a word. So we all go off and put our own meanings to that word. And we're all happy. The philosophers have their God, the religious guys have theirs, and you and I have ours.

But it isn't a very satisfactory answer, is it. We're all talking about different Gods. So, I've decided to invent a new God. I've modestly decided to name it "Snowy". Snowy, the God, doesn't pretend to have any answers. The Snowy God just looks around, and says that the answers are there for those who seek them. And there isn't any best fit answer. Whatever answer makes sense to you is the right answer.

So, that's settled. Now, you may be interested in the Snowy answer. The Snowy God is the reason why we get out of bed in the morning. It's the reason why we go to work; why we spend so much of our lives despairing of, and exhalting in, relationships; and in our more reflective moments, why we wonder why.

And I'm happy to tell you that the Snowy God has it all figured out. And Snowy God reluctantly hands the baton on to a new God. It's called "Survival". And if we reflect on our lives we find that so much of it is spent genuflecting before its altar. We endure endless crap in our jobs in its name; we endure much heartbreak at the altar of relationships; and those of us who have children tremble at the adversity that we know they will have to overcome in their obeisance to God, Survival.

And that's just the way it is. The religious guys like to think that they have the measure of God, Survival. They say that, so long as you do what they say, then they have God Survival beat. Their God overcomes Survival God when you die. Because you don't actually die if you live this life the way they tell you to. But you just have to have faith that what they say is true, because they can't actually point to anyone who has come back from the dead, except one guy 2,000 years ago, who seems to be conveniently absent now. Yeah, right...

So, I think we can dismiss those guys, because they make one fundamental error. They assume that this wondrous, mind boggling, universe was created for the benefit of human beings, on a small, insignificant planet called Earth. Such an arrogance. I'll take the Snowy God, thanks. It makes so much more sense, don't you think?

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What Stratfor has to say about Iraq. Good read for those interested.

nobody@vox.com(Snowy) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:09:08 -0700

www.stratfor.com

Now for the Hard Part: From Iraq to Afghanistan

July 15, 2008

Related Special Topic Page

U.S. Military Involvement in Iraq

By George Friedman

The Bush administration let it be known last week that it is prepared to start reducing the number of troops in Iraq, indicating that three brigades out of 15 might be withdrawn before Inauguration Day in 2009. There are many dimensions to the announcements, some political and some strategic. But perhaps the single most important aspect of the development was the fairly casual way the report was greeted. It was neither praised nor derided. Instead, it was noted and ignored as the public focused on more immediate issues.

In the public mind, Iraq is clearly no longer an immediate issue. The troops remain there, still fighting and taking casualties, and there is deep division over the wisdom of the invasion in the first place. But the urgency of the issue has passed. This doesn’t mean the issue isn’t urgent. It simply means the American public — and indeed most of the world — have moved on to other obsessions, as is their eccentric wont. The shift nevertheless warrants careful consideration.

Obviously, there is a significant political dimension to the announcement. It occurred shortly after Sen. Barack Obama began to shift his position on Iraq from what appeared to be a demand for a rapid withdrawal to a more cautious, nuanced position. As we have pointed out on several occasions, while Obama’s public posture was for withdrawal with all due haste, his actual position as represented in his position papers was always more complex and ambiguous. He was for a withdrawal by the summer of 2010 unless circumstances dictated otherwise. Rhetorically, Obama aligned himself with the left wing of the Democratic Party, but his position on the record was actually much closer to Sen. John McCain’s than he would admit prior to his nomination. Therefore, his recent statements were not inconsistent with items written on his behalf before the nomination — they merely appeared s o.

The Bush administration was undoubtedly delighted to take advantage of Obama’s apparent shift by flanking him. Consideration of the troop withdrawal has been under way for some time, but the timing of the leak to The New York Times detailing it must have been driven by Obama’s shift. As Obama became more cautious, the administration became more optimistic and less intransigent. The intent was clearly to cause disruption in Obama’s base. If so, it failed precisely because the public took the administration’s announcement so casually. To the extent that the announcement was political, it failed because even the Democratic left is now less concerned about the war in Iraq. Politically speaking, the move was a maneuver into a vacuum.

But the announcement was still significant in other, more important ways. Politics aside, the administration is planning withdrawals because the time has come. First, the politico-military situation on the ground in Iraq has stabilized dramatically. The reason for this is the troop surge — although not in the way it is normally thought of. It was not the military consequences of an additional 30,000 troops that made the difference, although the addition and changes in tactics undoubtedly made an impact.

What was important about the surge is that it happened at all. In the fall of 2006, when the Democrats won both houses of Congress, it appeared a unilateral U.S. withdrawal from Iraq was inevitable. If Bush wouldn’t order it, Congress would force it. All of the factions in Iraq, as well as in neighboring states, calculated that the U.S. presence in Iraq would shortly start to decline and in due course disappear. Bush’s order to increase U.S. forces stunned all the regional players and forced a fundamental recalculation. The assumption had been that Bush’s hands were tied and that the United States was no longer a factor. What Bush did — and this was more important than numbers or tactics — was demonstrate that his hands were not tied and that the United States could not be discounted.

The realization that the Americans were not going anywhere caused the Sunnis, for example, to reconsider their position. Trapped between foreign jihadists and the Shia, the Americans suddenly appeared to be a stable and long-term ally. The Sunni leadership turned on the jihadists and aligned with the United States, breaking the jihadists’ backs. Suddenly facing a U.S.-Sunni-Kurdish alliance, the Shia lashed out, hoping to break the alliance. But they also split between their own factions, with some afraid of being trapped as Iranian satellites and others viewing the Iranians as the solution to their problem. The result was a civil war not between the Sunnis and Shia, but among the Shia themselves.

Tehran performed the most important recalculation. The Iranians’ expectation had been that the United States would withdraw from Iraq unilaterally, and that when it did, Iran would fill the vacuum it left. This would lead to the creation of an Iranian-dominated Iraqi Shiite government that would suppress the Sunnis and Kurds, allowing Iran to become the dominant power in the Persian Gulf region. It was a heady vision, and not an unreasonable one — if the United States had begun to withdraw in the winter of 2006-2007.

When the surge made it clear that the Americans weren’t leaving, the Iranians also recalculated. They understood that they were no longer going to be able to create a puppet government in Iraq, and the danger now was that the United States would somehow create a viable puppet government of its own. The Iranians understood that continued resistance, if it failed, might lead to this outcome. They lowered their sights from dominating Iraq to creating a neutral buffer state in which they had influence. As a result, Tehran acted to restrain the Shiite militias, focusing instead on maximizing its influence with the Shia participating in the Iraqi government, including Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

A space was created between the Americans and Iranians, and al-Maliki filled it. He is not simply a pawn of Iran — and he uses the Americans to prevent himself from being reduced to that — but neither is he a pawn of the Americans. Recent negotiations between the United States and the al-Maliki government on the status of U.S. forces have demonstrated this. In some sense, the United States has created what it said it wanted: a strong Iraqi government. But it has not achieved what it really wanted, which was a strong, pro-American Iraqi government. Like Iran, the United States has been forced to settle for less than it originally aimed for, but more than most expected it could achieve in 2006.

This still leaves the question of what exactly the invasion of Iraq achieved. When the Americans invaded, they occupied what was clearly the most strategic country in the Middle East, bordering Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Iran. Without resistance, the occupation would have provided the United States with a geopolitical platform from which to pressure and influence the region. The fact that there was resistance absorbed the United States, therefore negating the advantage. The United States was so busy hanging on in Iraq that it had no opportunity to take advantage of the terrain.

That is why the critical question for the United States is how many troops it can retain in Iraq, for how long and in what locations. This is a complex issue. From the Sunni standpoint, a continued U.S. presence is essential to protect Sunnis from the Shia. From the Shiite standpoint, the U.S. presence is needed to prevent Iran from overwhelming the Shia. From the standpoint of the Kurds, a U.S. presence guarantees Kurdish safety from everyone else. It is an oddity of history that no major faction in Iraq now wants a precipitous U.S. withdrawal — and some don’t want a withdrawal at all.

For the United States, the historical moment for its geopolitical coup seems to have passed. Had there been no resistance after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, the U.S. occupation of Iraq would have made Washington a colossus astride the region. But after five years of fighting, the United States is exhausted and has little appetite for power projection in the region. For all its bravado against Iran, no one has ever suggested an invasion, only airstrikes. Therefore, the continued occupation of Iraq simply doesn’t have the same effect as it did in 2003.

But the United States can’t simply leave. The Iraqi government is not all that stable, and other regional powers, particularly the Saudis, don’t want to see a U.S. withdrawal. The reason is simple: If the United States withdraws before the Baghdad government is cohesive enough, strong enough and inclined enough to balance Iranian power, Iran could still fill the partial vacuum of Iraq, thereby posing a threat to Saudi Arabia. With oil at more than $140 a barrel, this is not something the Saudis want to see, nor something the United States wants to see.

Internal Iraqi factions want the Americans to stay, and regional powers want the Americans to stay. The Iranians and pro-Iranian Iraqis are resigned to an ongoing presence, but they ultimately want the Americans to leave, sooner rather than later. Thus, the Americans won’t leave. The question now under negotiation is simply how many U.S. troops will remain, how long they will stay, where they will be based and what their mission will be. Given where the United States was in 2006, this is a remarkable evolution. The Americans have pulled something from the jaws of defeat, but what that something is and what they plan to do with it is not altogether clear.

The United States obviously does not want to leave a massive force in Iraq. First, its more ambitious mission has evaporated; that moment is gone. Second, the U.S. Army and Marines are exhausted from five years of multidivisional warfare with a force not substantially increased from peacetime status. The Bush administration’s decision not to dramatically increase the Army was rooted in a fundamental error: namely, the administration did not think the insurgency would be so sustained and effective. They kept believing the United States would turn a corner. The result is that Washington simply can’t maintain the current force in Iraq under any circumstances, and to do so would be strategically dangerous. The United States has no strategic ground reserve at present, opening itself to dangers outside of Iraq. Therefore, if the United States is not going to get to play colossus of the Middle East, it needs to reduce its forces dramatically to recreate a strategic reserv e. Its interests, the interests of the al-Maliki government — and interestingly, Iran’s interests — are not wildly out of sync. Washington wants to rapidly trim down to a residual force of a few brigades, and the other two players want that as well.

The United States has another pressing reason to do this: It has another major war under way in Afghanistan, and it is not winning there. It remains unclear if the United States can win that war, with the Taliban operating widely in Afghanistan and controlling a great deal of the countryside. The Taliban are increasingly aggressive against a NATO force substantially smaller than the conceivable minimum needed to pacify Afghanistan. We know the Soviets couldn’t do it with nearly 120,000 troops. And we know the United States and NATO don’t have as many troops to deploy in Afghanistan as the Soviets did. It is also clear that, at the moment, there is no exit strategy. Forces in Iraq must be transferred to Afghanistan to stabilize the U.S. position while the new head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. David Petraeus — the architect of the political and military strategy in Iraq — f igures out what, if anything, is going to change.

Interestingly, the Iranians want the Americans in Afghanistan. They supported the invasion in 2001 for the simple reason that they do not want to see an Afghanistan united under the Taliban. The Iranians almost went to war with Afghanistan in 1998 and were delighted to see the United States force the Taliban from the cities. The specter of a Taliban victory in Afghanistan unnerves the Iranians. Rhetoric aside, a drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq and a transfer to Afghanistan is what the Iranians would like to see.

To complicate matters, the Taliban situation is not simply an Afghan issue — it is also a Pakistani issue. The Taliban draw supplies, recruits and support from Pakistan, where Taliban support stretches into the army and the intelligence service, which helped create the group in the 1990s while working with the Americans. There is no conceivable solution to the Taliban problem without a willing and effective government in Pakistan participating in the war, and that sort of government simply is not there. Indeed, the economic and security situation in Pakistan continues to deteriorate.

Therefore, the Bush administration’s desire to withdraw troops from Iraq makes sense on every level. It is a necessary and logical step. But it does not address what should now become the burning issue: What exactly is the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan? As in Iraq before the surge, the current strategy appears to be to hang on and hope for the best. Petraeus’ job is to craft a new strategy. But in Iraq, for better or worse, the United States faced an apparently implacable enemy — Iran — which in fact pursued a shrewd, rational and manageable policy. In Afghanistan, the United States is facing a state that appears friendly — Pakistan — but is actually confused, divided and unmanageable by itself or others.

Petraeus’ success in Iraq had a great deal to do with Tehran’s calculations of its self-interest. In Pakistan, by contrast, it is unclear at the moment whether anyone is in a position to even define the national self-interest, let alone pursue it. And this means that every additional U.S. soldier sent to Afghanistan raises the stakes in Pakistan. It will be interesting to see how Afghanistan and Pakistan play out in the U.S. presidential election. This is not a theater of operations that lends itself to political soundbites.

Tell Stratfor What You Think

This report may be forwarded or republished on your website with attribution to www.stratfor.com

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From Crikey today. No wonder the conservatives are getting edgy.

nobody@vox.com(Snowy) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:23:35 -0700

http://www.crikey.com.au/

2 . Rundle08: Obama's eye-wateringly cute family interview

US correspondent Guy Rundle writes:

You write a story in the morning on a dead news day, you go to lunch, you come back and the whole world's gone haywire. To whit: your correspondent drafted a careful pseffe... sephologi... fseffepho... electoral analysis of some swing state demographics, and had no sooner sent it off than the networks go haywire with some advance copies of the Obama family interviews given for -- seriously -- Access Hollywood channel, which will be airing tomorrow.

Having said he wouldn't put his family front and centre during the campaign, Obama has done another brilliant/cynical switcheroo depending on your politics, and done an extended family interview lolling on the lawn in weekend casual clothes, the Obamas' two daughters talking about how the best thing about going to the White House would be that "you get to decorate your own room" and "we can get a dog!".

God, it was good. God it made me feel sorry for John McCain. The whole thing will further ram home the basic difference between Obama and McCain to millions of middle-American voters: we, the Obamas, are suburban parents just like you -- young, vigorous, beautiful, in the prime of our lives, still living it. Of particular brilliance was the exchange between Malia Ann, the Obamas' ten-year-old, chiding her father: "Daddy, you always leave..." "Oh, here we go," says Barack, smiling, Malia continues: "you always leave your bag in the hall and I trip over it."

Though Fox News may try and spin that last line as "Obama endangers daughter", I suspect that it, and the whole interview, will go down in history as Obama's Kennedy moment. And not merely a simulacrum of such -- this is really our first look at a black first family. God they look so good, so fresh and cool.

The McCains, meanwhile, are looking less like the first family, than one-half of the casting of a Malvern Amateur Theatre Company version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. They're that old couple who live next door in the big place from which you can occasionally hear raised voices ("at least I don't paint my face like a f-ing trollop, you c-nt" is the one all the neighbourhood kids remember).

Their adult kids visit sometimes. He was something in the Navy. She's, well, she's had a little (make hand sign of shaking ice in an empty glass) problem, or something of the sort. Sometimes when she comes to the door in one of her red-leather jackets -- we think it's an Arizona thing -- you can see the mascara's run in the tracks of the tears. This couple is not a potential first family, they're the middle chapters of a Larry McMurtry novel.

McCain, poor sod, like Orwell's elephant, will age instantly as soon as this interview hits the news cycle. He's already old and white -- in the backwash from the Beautiful Baracks, he's going to look like one of those Arcimboldo pix -- "Man composed entirely of frozen chicken parts". He's developed a low key style of press conference, where he natters on to journos while slurping from a Starbucks bucket-o-joe on the rockstar bus couches in the Straight Talk Express. In the wake of the Obamas' interview, he's gone to look less like one of the boys in the back of the bus, and more like the old codger at the diner counter hanging around waiting for someone to talk to.

God knows it couldn't get much worse for McCain. Today, for the second day in a row, the Iraqi government said they wouldn't sign any continuing memorandum on forces without it including an explicit withdrawal timetable.

God knows what McCain did when he first heard that. The White House called the first announcement "an error in translation", so the Iraqi government said it again the next day. In retrospect it vindicates McCain strategically, but who lives in retrospect? He's backed the farm on transcendental threats and Iraq as a place we'll be for a long, long time, and now the entire nation is chucking the Yanks out.

But seriously that's the least of his worries, when you look at that interview. Even the story about the interview is good -- that the Access Hollywood team, originally contracted to interview Mr and Ms Obama were setting up, "and the daughters just wedged themselves in between us."

Well, either that's true, or these daughters are trained girlbots, part of the Obama vast left-wing conspiracy, fed instructions ("squirm cutely Malia") from the DNC's mountain eyrie. Oh! And grand slam! Sasha (the six-year-old's) birthday is July 4. I submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, that if that wasn't planned, it is a sign from God that he was meant to be President, and that if it was planned, any couple who can hit that day on the money is either using some magical Kenyan folk medicine -- creams from my father -- or is so goddam on top of everything that we may as well let them run the UN as well.

MSNBC is running Obama family interview excerpts now, all the commentators are smiling and laughing, amidst all the hostility and drek, even while the dust moves, there rises the hidden laughter of children in the foliage quick, now, here, now, always... And I suspect, the nation, watching the Obama family interview will think as one, "if we follow them home, can they keep us?".

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Freedom of expression, McCain/Bush style.

nobody@vox.com(Snowy) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:05:33 -0700

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/90700/

Woman Arrested at McCain Event for "McCain=Bush" Sign

Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein, Majikthise at 5:46 PM on July 7, 2008.

61-year-old librarian single-handedly proves that McCain=Bush.

Librarian ejected at McCain Town Hall meeting

A 61-year-old librarian was ejected from an ostensibly public McCain campaign event at the Denver Center of Performing Arts in Denver, CO on June 7 because she was brandishing a deadly memetic weapon: a hand-lettered sign that read "McCain=Bush."

Carol Kreck was standing outside the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, which is located on city property. When she was asked to either discard the sign or get out, Ms. Kreck objected that she was standing on city property.

She was lead away by police officers and subsequently ticketed for trespassing. As she was being removed, Kreck asked if was being arrested. The officer answered, "Yes." (Approximately 1:03 into the video.)

Carol Kreck, QED. McCain=Bush.

As ThinkProgress notes: "McCain has apparently taken a page from the Bush playbook. In 2005, the White House had three activists expelled from a Denver public forum with President Bush because it was the administration’s policy “to exclude potentially disruptive guests from Bush’s appearances nationwide.”"

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Denialococcus evolureus

nobody@vox.com(dox^2) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:49:16 -0700

The sad thing is that this (also see this) comes from the same people that don't believe in anthropogenic contributions to planetary warming (even in the face of the evidence).

See... no matter what, whether it is evidence of bacterial evolution or human contribution to our climate, there are those who will not accept it, will not agree with it, and just throw up the kitchen sink to some how try and defend a belief system that doesn't jive with the facts. And it is more than just "natural skepticism" -- it is just out right, shake your head denial.

On a side note, as a microbiologist, I can always spot the non-biologist who tries to write about microbiology. In this case, they were seeking to inquire with Lenske about "E. Coli." Umm... they're called species. Where E. coli or Escherichia coli is a species designation whereby the second term is always lowercase and the binominal term is italicized.

To me "E. Coli" is a loud, blinking neon sign that (note sarcasm) extrudes, "I know what I am talking about and I am smarter than you."

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What are the odds of life having arisen by chance?

nobody@vox.com(Erik) — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 10:45:34 -0700

It's been a long time since I've blogged, not for any particular reason. It may be a long time before I blog again, as I tend to only write when a thought kicks around in my noggin long enough that I feel it's worth sharing and I'm pretty confident of what it is I want to say. (end disclaimer)

The title of this post is to my mind, probably the number one reason people believe in a god. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard a believer use this line of reasoning, I'd be drinking latte's with Gates and Buffet discussing how we're going to end poverty and disease with our pocket change. "The universe and life is so amazing that it couldn't possibly be the result of random chance.", or so they say.

The problem here is simply one of perspective. Looking at the state of the universe retrospectively and being so amazed at the extremely unlikely odds of it having formed this way from random chaos and nothing more complicated than the laws of nature is akin to refusing to believe that any one ever wins the lotto because the odds of winning the lotto are so slim.

Here's a little thought experiment to explain what I'm getting at. I'm going to flip a coin 1000 times. I'm no mathematician, so I wouldn't begin to be able to calculate the odds of getting any particular sequence of heads and tails ahead of time, but to the point I'm making it's not important. Let's just say the odds are pretty damned slim that anyone could predict ahead of time what the exact sequence of heads and tails will be for my thousand flips.

We do know however, that I will get some sequence of heads and tails. If I ask you to predict ahead of time what the results will be, it's safe to assume you would need some sort of super natural help to do so reliably. If we both look at the results after we flip the coin a thousand times, should we be then be equally amazed and perplexed by the result? I think not.

The same applies to the universe. Take the natural laws of the universe and set them in motion via the big bang, and just try to calculate the probability that there would eventually form a milky way galaxy with our sun and an earth and finally you and me. Your head would explode. You would have to be a god to predict that, or force it to happen a certain way. Retrospectively however, it's not hard to believe at all, it is simply the result we've arrived at.

It could have been very different. The universe could have formed with out an earth and you and I may have never been born, but we were. The sky could have been green, plants could have been super intelligent and we could be breathing carbon dioxide instead of oxygen. Anything you can think of, if it's possible with in the laws of nature, could have happened, but it didn't. This did...

You can't look at the state of the universe retrospectively and be amazed at the extremely long odds of it being so, any more than you can be dumbfounded by the result of my 1000 coin flips. It's not a pertinent question to ask anymore, as it has already happened.

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Hitchens, you fat fraud, you supported the killing, maiming and displacement of millions of people.

nobody@vox.com(Snowy) — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 02:23:42 -0700

http://www.alternet.org/rights/90292/?page=entire

Warmongerer and neocon Christopher Hitchens just noticed that waterboarding is torture!

Hitchens

Stop the presses! Christopher Hitchens just noticed that waterboarding is torture!

Hitchens announced the news like he'd brought it down from Mount Sinai, in a Vanity Fair article. "Believe me," he told a waiting nation, "it's torture." Well, yeah. It usually is, when it happens to you. When it happens to somebody else, it's "extreme interrogation." I thought everybody over the age of 5 knew that, but as usual, I misoverestimated the media. Hitchens' tame little torture session is the biggest S&M video on the web since "9½ Weeks."

Hitchens' video is totally fake -- there's even soft-rock background music playing on the video, better music than you usually get at the dentist's office, and his "interrogators" treat him more like a client getting a mud pack at a spa than a real suspect in Iraq. That makes it even more disgusting that Hitch caved in after only 11 seconds of having water poured over a towel on his face. Eleven seconds! Think about the timeline here: For five long years he supported this stuff when it was happening to other people. Once it happened to him, he needed exactly 11 seconds to see the light.

Of course if Hitchens had been a real Iraqi suspect, they'd never have had to waterboard him at all. They do that to tough suspects, not wimps like him. In a real torture cell, everything would be a lot tougher from the start. For example, Chris wouldn't be in the nice dress shirt and slacks he's wearing on the video. He'd be naked -- a gross image, what a lifetime of booze and lying does to the body, but we have to be hard-nosed here -- because keeping the prisoner naked is basic interrogation strategy, especially with a culture as horrified of gettin' nekkid as Arabs are. You'll recall that in those Abu Ghraib pictures, the prisoners were naked.

So that's fake already, and the video gets faker as it goes. The guys "interrogating" him are fat, middle-aged, mild-mannered dudes. They don't even yell at him. A real suspect in Iraq would be snatched off the street, smacked around until he passes out, stripped and dumped into a cell with a hood over his head. He wouldn't be able to sleep off his misery, either, because sleep deprivation is one of the oldest, most effective tortures. The interrogators would maintain this schedule for hours, days, weeks, depending on how well and how soon the victim breaks down. When they think he's ready -- like, they notice with satisfaction that he screams like a steam whistle every time he hears footsteps in the corridor -- they drag him out of his cell and strap him onto that waterboarding table.

Well, Chris is a busy man and didn't have time for all that background research, so what you see in this video is a guy who hasn't been so much as slapped or yelled at. Who probably just finished a 10-martini lunch at some upscale restaurant. That's ridiculous enough, but the interrogators make it even more ridiculous with their little introduction to the torture session. One guy says, "All right, listen up, I'm going to give you some instructions ..." Then he tells the fat man on the table, "We're going to place metal objects in each of your hands," and if he feels "unbearable stress" at any time, all he has to do is drop the objects and they'll stop.

I've had dentists who did root canals on me without being that nice; they stuck to "this is going to hurt." More to the point here, putting the victim in "unbearable stress" is, uh, the whole point of torture, or "extreme interrogation," or whatever you want to call it. The last thing you'd ever do is give the victim a sense of power, like he can stop the process by dropping a "metal object" on the floor.

That kind of etiquette is what you get from those expensive dominatrixes English dudes like to get whipped by, or those nerf BDSM sites that talk about "consensual power exchanges." What reminded me most of those BDSM sites is the "code word" they tell Hitchens he can use to stop the waterboarding: "That word is red, R-E-D." They ask him if he understands and he says, "Yes, sir." That "sir" only added to the ridiculous porn feel here, like Hitchens was paying a hundred pounds an hour to have Baron Whipsong or Lady Cruella, whichever way he likes it, wear out their riding crop on his eager little bum.

The real thing isn't nearly so nice. After you've been beaten on bruises (which hurt more each time) for a few days, they slam the cell door open, screaming abuse at you, kick you to your feet and take you down the corridor, slamming your head into the walls as often as they feel like it, and strap you down. And all the time they're screaming: "OK, you worthless (Arabic obscenity here) -- We're through with you! We don't even want you any more! Ever drown before, (obscenity)? Ever go swimming head-first, (obscenity)?"

If you remember "The Big Lebowski," you can get a better idea of what waterboarding is like by remembering the scene where the Dude walks into his bungalow, where Jackie Treehorn's yuppie thugs are waiting for him. The blond one grabs the Dude's hair and runs him headfirst into the toilet, screaming, "Where's the money, Lebowski? Where's the money, shithead?" See, the point is to show overwhelming, terrifying power over the suspect, not give him little safety words.

But all that niceness doesn't matter once the torturer's helper takes a plastic milk container full of water and pours it, bit by bit, over a towel covering Hitch's face. The "metal object," whatever it is, drops after 11 seconds. And of course these fake interrogators are all over Hitch, making sure he's OK. That's also totally fake, but why bother listing any more fake features of this nonsense? The truth is that anybody who's been through as much dentistry as I have knows that nobody holds out under torture. It's not just the pain, it's the fear of the pain. I used to try to be a hero like the ones in my war books every time I went to have a root canal from the mean old Armenian who did our dental work. He scrimped on the Novocain, so I had plenty of scope to practice. And I learned the same thing any sane person knows by the time they grow up: Nobody can resist torture. Just like anybody knows what having water poured over a towel on your face is like: It's like drowning. Duh. Anybody who wanted to know that already knew it.

So why does Hitchens make such a big show of just realizing it now, after five years of supporting it? To me, the answer's easy: He's withdrawing from Iraq, making a big Jesus-on-the-cross demonstration, like a public punishment, for supporting the war all this time. By getting himself tortured in this half-assed way, he gives himself a reason to see the light, desert from the Neocon forces before it's too late. Karl Rove won't be happy, though, because the last thing the GOP wants is for people to start realizing what we're actually doing in Iraq. Reminds me of the debate about abolishing flogging with the cat-o'-nine-tails in the British Navy. The first time the bill was introduced, everybody laughed at how ridiculous a notion that was. Then somebody thought of having a real cat-o'-nine-tails introduced to the House of Commons, a bloody old Exhibit A. Nobody said a thing; they just voted unanimously to forbid it.

That's all it takes to change anybody's mind about torture, getting one little 11-second whiff of it, even if it's nowhere close to the real thing. The interesting thing is not that Hitchens changed his mind; it's the strategic thinking that made him decide to do it now. The timing of this little martyr is the key here, and what it tells you is that Hitchens is declaring martyrdom and getting out. He just unilaterally withdrew from Iraq, and in only 11 seconds.

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Very, very interesting read. Not another anti US rant, but telling it like it is from (gasp) Murdoch

nobody@vox.com(Snowy) — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 01:21:23 -0700

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23968711-7583,00.html

Nirvana out of American reach

Paul Kelly, Editor-at-Large | July 05, 2008

THE energy, financial and political woes that grip the US signal a decisive shift in world power, mocking the liberal delusion that Barack Obama or John McCain can return American prestige and power to its pre-Bush year 2000 nirvana. There is no such nirvana. There is instead a new reality: the greatest transfer of income in human history, away from energy importers such as the US to energy exporters; the rise of a new breed of wealthy autocracies that cripple US hopes of dominating the global system; and demands on the US to make fresh compromises in a world where power is rapidly being diversified.

Far from the Obama-McCain contest being America's saviour, it has another dimension entirely: evidence of the generic failure of the US political system. The US struggles but seems unable to confront the world that exists. It slips into pessimism while fooling itself another irresistible revival is just around the corner. But the structural trends offer a different conclusion.

Despite cyclical fluctuations, world oil and energy prices will stay high, driven by long-run changes in supply and demand. This provokes a global wealth redistribution without precedent to oil exporters, mainly in the Middle East and Russia, that marches in tandem with China's export-driven current account surplus. It is an extensive transfer of economic power away from the US to nations that are not mainly democracies, a dynamic that is the subject of agonising review in seminars and debates in the US.

Flynt Leverett, former director of Middle East Affairs on the National Security Council, says: "The international economic position of the United States has deteriorated substantially since the new millennium. The big trends in global finance and energy markets are working against the US. There isn't any solving this problem in terms of making it go away. These are ongoing realities. The energy picture is not going to change: it is here to stay."

World oil prices have risen from $US16 a barrel in 2001 to $US140 ($145.50) a barrel today. No respite is in sight. This week the International Energy Agency warned that the oil market would stay tight for the next five years, with the capacity to expand supply severely restricted. Non-energy-rich developing nations will be crippled and confront recessions, dislocation and violence; giants such as the US will face deep political and economic adjustment. Australia is both a winner and a loser as its coal and gas export prices rise and it pays more for petrol; but it is a big winner overall from the broad-based commodity boom likely to run for decades.

Writing in the May-June issue of Foreign Affairs, US strategic analyst Fareed Zakaria, whose new book The Post-American World is reviewed in The Weekend Australian Review today, puts the oil trend into a wider context, arguing that the third great power shift of the past 500 years is under way.

The first was the rise of the Western world that began in the 15th century; the second was the rise of the US in the late 19th century; and the third is what analysts call the rise of the rest. This is the shift in power to parts (but not all) of the developing world that are "experiencing rates of economic growth that were once unthinkable" and whose total gross domestic product surpasses that of the industrialised nations. Countries driving this structural change are China, India, Brazil, Russia, the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and Gulf nations, and parts of Southeast Asia.

This points to a more complex global power structure, unlike the duopoly of the Cold War or the brief US unipolar period post-1989 that so deceived US President George W. Bush. For Zakaria, "on every dimension other than military power - industrial, financial, social, cultural - the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from US dominance. That does not mean we are entering an anti-American world. But we are moving into a post-America world."

Opinions are divided about the strategic consequences. In his new book The Return of History and the End of Dreams, US analyst Robert Kagan argues that "the world has become normal again" with the smashing of hopes for a post-1989 liberal international order based on democratic values and US dominance. Instead, Kagan argues, the future will witness a range of powerful nations aspiring to be global or regional powers - Russia, China, India, Japan, Europe and Iran - working in various forms of co-operation and competition with the US.

Energy and financial trends are reinforcing. Sovereign wealth funds from nations with a current account surplus have more than $US3trillion in assets and this figure will grow to $US12trillion by 2015. The biggest funds are those of China and the Gulf Co-operation Council. This technique, in one form or another, is followed by China, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Singapore, Brazil and Russia. Leverett says the GCC will surpass China to "become the world's most important investor".

Western oil companies own only about 8 per cent of proven oil reserves. Energy-rich governments and national oil companies own more than 80 per cent, a significant structural shift since the 1970s. As demand for energy continues, the cash reserves of oil exporters and their sovereign funds will expand dramatically. This drives a transfer of global financial power and creates huge imbalances.

Where do such funds go? They finance America's excess of consumption over savings. The US needs about $US2 billion each day to finance its trade deficit. These funds are coming, increasingly, from the energy and export-strong developing nations courtesy of their governments, which control sovereign wealth fund strategies. Going into US bonds and securities, such investments constitute a heavy US dependence on the developing world's trade surplus nations.

In his comments this week to the Carnegie Council workshop in New York, Leverett said that when US politicians talked about achieving energy independence, "either they don't understand how stupid that is or they do understand and say it anyway". He argued that the classic remedy to confront the US's declining currency was to raise interest rates and balance the budget, but there was no sign "that either McCain or Obama will do this". The US debate "was about some other planet from where we are now".

In the current issue of The American Interest, Gal Luft, from the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, argues that "perpetually high oil prices will undoubtedly transform the existing world economic order". Even below today's prices, OPEC could potentially buy the Bank of America with two months' worth of production and General Motors with six days' worth. This dictates only one sensible response: non-petroleum fuels must become the US's top strategic economic priority, to be introduced over a generation.

The US is tied to interdependence with sovereign wealth funds. In the present US crisis, Bear Stearns has disappeared but other US financial institutions would have sunk without the operation of these funds.

The US is hostage to global oil markets, for years having refused to embark on radical reforms to break its consumer oil addiction. The price of such refusals will plague the present generation of politicians and consumers.

Addressing the same Carnegie Council workshop, Nikolas Gvosdev, editor of another publication, The National Interest, said the idea that the US could determine the global order has been terminated. It is not clear whether the US Congress grasps this reality. The alternative world order to the liberal internationalism favoured by the US is that defined by state-to-state negotiations and agreements. This is the favoured model of Russia and China and many other emerging countries.

This model gives priority to state sovereignty and non-interference; it asserts the international system is for states, not individuals; it contradicts New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's theory of globalisation based on the rise of individualism via technology; and it means that the rise of the rest equates to a growing premium on state power as more countries feel able to assert their national interest.

This is the threat that dominates Kagan's book. "Chinese and Russian leaders are not just autocrats," he says. "They believe in autocracy. The modern liberal mind at 'the end of history' may not appreciate the enduring appeal of autocracy in this globalised world."

The logic of Kagan's position is that the UN Security Council is paralysed not just by different interests, it is paralysed by rival ideologies about the international system.

Kagan quotes Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as saying that "for the first time in many years a real competitive environment has emerged in the market of ideas" between different "value systems and developments".

China puts it bluntly: the selection of whatever social system by a country is the affair of the people (read government) of that country. This strikes at the deepest orthodoxy of US strategy and ideology. The first sentence of the 2002 National Security Strategy signed by Bush says: "The great struggles of the 20th century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy and free enterprise."

This claim is now in doubt. Such doubts will be reinforced by the shifts in global energy and financial power during the next decade. US analyst Steven Weber, who has written for The National Interest on the fracture between the West and the rest, says of Bush's declaration: "These are powerful sentiments, powerfully expressed. But they are simply not factual representations of today's operational global reality. The world doesn't look like that."

Zakaria remains an optimist. He says the choice for the US is between adjusting to a world of more diversity and viewpoints and watching a process of "greater nationalism, diffusion and disintegration" that rips apart the post-World War II order shaped by the US. He argues that the trend among emerging nations is still towards markets and some form of democracy.

In its presidential season, the US, far more than Australia, is caught with a political system unable to respond to challenges. The Obama-McCain contest is a cosmetic that conceals the nature of the US's difficulty. The downturn reflects problems in the financial system and the real economy.

For the US there is no easy solution to the structural forces driving oil, energy and financial markets. Yet much of the political debate remains in denial of these forces.

The task for the next president is to reform US economic and energy policy - to strengthen the US at home - and to conduct a foreign policy that recognises a more diverse world defined byinterdependence.

www.foreignaffairs.org
www.the-american-interest.com
www.nationalinterest.org

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Really? Oh no, I just couldn't believe Rupert's stooges would be guilty of this. Oh well, maybe...

nobody@vox.com(Snowy) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:15:03 -0700

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=591496

Fox News caught altering rivals' photos

17:00 AEST Thu Jul 3 2008

2 hours 8 minutes ago

New York Times editor Steven Reddicliffe (original on left).

By ninemsn staff

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New York Times writer Jacques Steinberg (original on left).

ICH today

nobody@vox.com(Snowy) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:33:09 -0700

'Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime": Ernest Hemingway

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"How many does it take to metamorphose wickedness into righteousness? One man must not kill. If he does, it is murder.... But a state or nation may kill as many as they please, and it is not murder. It is just, necessary, commendable, and right. Only get people enough to agree to it, and the butchery of myriads of human beings is perfectly innocent. But how many does it take?": Adin Ballou, The Non-Resistant, 5 February 1845

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"There have been periods of history in which episodes of terrible violence occurred but for which the word violence was never used.... Violence is shrouded in justifying myths that lend it moral legitimacy, and these myths for the most part kept people from recognizing the violence for what it was. The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed': ~Gil Bailie

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"Give me the money that has been spent in war and I will clothe every man, woman, and child in an attire of which kings and queens will be proud. I will build a schoolhouse in every valley over the whole earth. I will crown every hillside with a place of worship consecrated to peace": Charles Sumner

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