Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not.
PHILLIPS: Do you think they’re taking what you’re saying and incorporating it into foreign policy?
ROSENBERG: I wouldn’t go that far. But I would say—I would say that Bible prophecy is an intercept from the mind of God. It’s actually fairly remarkable intelligence, and that’s why my novels keep coming true, because mine are on this side of the Rapture, leading up to Jerry and Tim’s books, but they suggest events that the Bible does lay out that will get us closer to those events. And, in fact, one by one in The Last Jihad, my book The Last Days, The Ezekiel Option, and now The Copper Scroll, have this feeling of coming true. I think that’s why a million copies have sold. They’re New York Times best-sellers, because they’re based on Bible prophecy, and they are coming true bit by bit, day by day.
PHILLIPS: Joel, do I need to start taking care of unfinished business and telling people that I love them and I’m sorry for all the evil things I’ve done?
ROSENBERG: Well, I think that would be a good start. I mean, Jesus loves the people of the Middle East. Matthew 15—Jesus was in southern Lebanon. Why? Telling the people of Lebanon that he loved them, that God loved them.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a simper.
We do what we’re told.
Many of the abusive interrogation methods that were being used at Nama were clearly authorized by the command structure at the camp. [“Sgt.] Jeff [Perry”*] told Human Rights Watch that written authorizations were required for most abusive techniques, indicating that the use of these tactics was approved up the chain of command.
There was an authorization template on a computer, a sheet that you would print out, or actually just type it in. And it was a checklist. And it was all already typed out for you, environmental controls, hot and cold, you know, strobe lights, music, so forth. Working dogs, which, when I was there, wasn’t being used. But you would just check what you want to use off, and if you planned on using a harsh interrogation you’d just get it signed off.
I never saw a sheet that wasn’t signed. It would be signed off by the commander, whoever that was, whether it was 03 [captain] or 06 [colonel], whoever was in charge at the time. . . . When the 06 was there, yeah, he would sign off on that. . . . He would sign off on that every time it was done.
[...]
Jeff also said that the commanding officer at Nama would sometimes tell the interrogators that the White House or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had been briefed on intelligence gathered by the team, especially intelligence about Zarqawi:
[They’d say:] “Rumsfeld was informed, such and such a report is on Rumsfeld’s desk this morning, read by Secdef . . . it’s a big morale booster for people working 14 hour days. Hey, we got to the White House!”
—No Blood, No Foul:
Soldiers’ Accounts of Detainee Abuse in Iraq
Human Rights Watch, July 2006
Volume Number 18, No. 3(G)
via Talking Points Memo
At this point, many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner. Some test subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment. Most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner.
If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this order:
- Please continue.
- The experiment requires you to continue, please go on.
- It is essential that you continue.
- You have no choice, you must continue.
If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.
[...]
There is a little-known coda to the experiment, reported by Philip Zimbardo. None of the participants who refused to administer the final shocks insisted that the experiment itself be terminated, nor left the room to check that the victim was well without asking for permission to leave, according to Milgram’s notes and recollections when he was asked on this point by Zimbardo.
—“Milgram experiment,” Wikipedia
The meme of innocence.
I’m not much of one for tit-for-tat (oh, who am I kidding), but the boys at Sadly, No! make one hell of a point.
Cui malo?
I know, I know: mocking the intellectually crippled is the jeu du jour of the left-blog elite, but people, really: Dobson and his ilk aren’t the ones comparing the homosexually inclined to dogs that moo; the Gill Foundation is. Sherman’s just pointing up the fatal flaw in Norman’s well-meaning but breathtakingly dim-witted argument: the proper stance in the fight for basic human rights isn’t I can’t help it I was born this way but what the fuck business is it of yours who I spend my life with?
The first one’s always the hardest.
This horrible, soulless monster, meanwhile, has to decide whether she’s going to carve notches on her keyboard or paint cute little nooses on the lid of her laptop. This one gets to choose between a swastika or a stylized icon of a burning cross. —Trouble with eliminationist rhetoric is pretty soon it’s all you’ve got left, and the thing I’d like to ask those who insist on playing them to our us is this: you really want to go there? Because in the long run, we outnumber you. And history will not be kind.
There’s still a kibosh on the man-hand jokes, though.
Okay. Now you can mention her name, and her eyes will fill not with dead light, but clammy fear and greasy despair, and Jesus will toss confetti for his frolicking kittens. (All due props to the Rude Pundit.)
Althæaphage.
I got an email here. Uh, “Rush,” uh, “now that two of our own have been tortured and murdered by the terrorists in Iraq, will the Left say that they deserved it? I’m so sick of our cut-and-run liberals. Keep up your great work.” Bob C. from Roanoke, Virginia. “PS, I love the way you do the program on the Ditto Cam.” [Laughter.] I read… no, I added that! He didn’t, he didn’t put that in there. [Laughter.] You know, it—it’s—I—uh… I gotta tell ya, I—I—I perused the liberal, kook blogs today, and they are happy that these two soldiers got tortured. They’re saying, “Good riddance. Hope Rumsfeld and whoever sleep well tonight.” I kid you not, folks.
Do I even need to tell you that not a single liberal kook said anything of the kind?
It’s not that they lie. It’s not even that they lie so brazenly, so completely, so shamelessly. It’s that people believe them. It’s not that if only we were speaking out against their lies with more volume and vigor and vim. The indisputable fact of us, being where we are and doing as we do, is enough to give them the lie direct. But the people who believe them don’t pay any attention, and if they do happen across us, they don’t listen. They don’t have to.
Go, Google Abu Zubaydah. Read up on how important he was: a top Bin Laden deputy, al-Qaeda’s top military strategist, their chief recruiter, the mastermind behind 9/11. He’s thirty-five. Two years younger than me. We caught him in 2002. He’d been keeping a diary for ten years, written by three separate personalities. His primary responsibility within the foundation was to make plane reservations for the families of other operatives.
“I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied.
So we tortured him. We tortured him, and he told us all sorts of things about 9/11, and over a hundred people we’ve since indicted on the strength of his coerced word, and “plots of every variety—against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, ‘thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each… target’.”
And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”
At least the president didn’t lose face.
As above, so below: the self-similarity of the wingnut function; string theory for echthroi. Too much has been swallowed ever to turn around and come back up; it’s basic human nature to prefer being wrong to ever admitting one might not have been right. (The sort of human nature one is supposed to outgrow, yes, but.)
“Ignorance is a condition. Stupidity is a strategy.” Cliché? Hell, it’s a shibboleth: Welcome to the Reality-based Community. —Ignorance we can deal with, with the talking and the listening and the reasoning and the debating and the citing. Stupidity requires a different approach. Pathological liars so epically insecure they’ve made up their own network called “Excellence in Broadcasting” and call themselves “America’s Anchorman”? That shit writes itself, but our real fight’s altogether elsewhere.
How terribly civil.
Colleen Holmes, a stay-at-home mother in Portland, Ore., reported an exchange with a Verizon Wireless customer agent that illustrated not only the dismay some Americans feel about the newly disclosed domestic surveillance but also the fear of terrorism that, for many, more than justifies the program.
Holmes said she was so angry about reports that the government was collecting telephone calling records on millions of Americans that she called Verizon Wireless to explore canceling her service and switching to Qwest.
“It’s your constitutional right to voice your opinion,” she quoted the customer service agent as having told her. “If you want planes to fly into your building . . . “
Hey, Verizon? Go fuck yourself.
“...an awfully big adventure.”
Belle has been paying more attention to the Fighting Keebees than I have; she’s found they’ve gone straight from singing “Over There” to playing “Waltzing Matilda.” She quotes a chickenhawk auxiliary:
I think [Tapscott, Morrissey, and Bainbridge] may be suffering some variant of PTSD, worn down by defending difficult positions at the forefront of the battle against irredentist [sic] Democrats in Congress and their fifth-column [sic] in the media.
Which is, itself, enough to send Kieran Healy shrieking for a bottle of Sorkin.
You don’t want the truth because deep down, in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that blog. You need me on that blog.
But it’s Bruce Baugh with the piercing insight that once and for all demolishes the meme: oh, I see. Oh, I get it.
Talking with Mom and Dad about their personal histories led me to this association: what the war party bloggers have done is recreate the experience of being a child in World War II. They write patriotic essays and make patriotic collages, and get pats on the head and congratulations from the authorities. They watch diligently for the mutant, I mean, for the subversive among us, and help maintain the proper atmosphere of combined courage and vigilance. They are not expected to manage the family books, nor invited into discussion of the nitty-gritty, and it seldom occurs to them that there’s even a possibility there—that’s for the grown-ups, and rightly so.
Salad days.
Yes, I know the Online Integrity signing statement is nothing more than a cudgel wielded by some particularly witless hypocrites, but nonetheless, I must take exception to Chris Bowers’ seemingly sensible initial reaction. “In 2006,” he says,
I have no plans to steal candy from children, or to take money from the collection plate at church. I do not plan to spit on people I pass on the sidewalk, nor do I plan to set fire to a school. I have no intention of committing insurance fraud, insider trading, bank robbery, sexual assault, murder, or genocide. I do not plan on doing any of these things, because I think they are ethically wrong. I also do not plan to sign a pledge indicating that I am not going to do any of these things.
Perhaps; perhaps. But: back in the late ’80s, tail-end of the Reagan years, orientation week or somesuch at Oberlin, and various student groups are proselytizing from card-table pulpits outside Wilder. And if I tell you no one would ever have been so tub-thumpingly stupid as to set up an affirmative action bake sale back then, well, maybe you’ll see where I’m going, but maybe not. —One of the organizations was of course Amnesty International, and one of the buttons they had for anyone to pick up and pin to their jacket (for this was the ’80s, after all) was a red one, I think, that said in big bold white block letters:
STOP TORTURE
And my friend’s rolling her eyes at this, my friend who’s written more than her share of letters to political prisoners. “Oh, that’s brave,” she says. “What, we’re celebrating basic human decency now? You really think someone’s ever going to come up and see that button and say to you, no, no, we need to torture more—”
(Ah, but Michelle Malkin was somewhere in that crowd. So you never know. —Even then, we never knew.)
It takes a nation of millions to hold us back.
Jared’s story illustrates a growing national problem as the military faces increasing pressure to hit recruiting targets during an unpopular war.
Tracking by the Pentagon shows that complaints about recruiting improprieties are on pace to approach record highs set in 2003 and 2004. The active Army and the Reserve missed recruiting targets last year, and reports of recruiting abuses continue from across the country.
A family in Ohio reported that its mentally ill son was signed up, despite rules banning such enlistments and the fact that records about his illness were readily available.
In Houston, a recruiter warned a potential enlistee that if he backed out of a meeting he would be arrested.
And in Colorado, a high school student working undercover told recruiters he had dropped out and had a drug problem. The recruiter told the boy to fake a diploma and buy a product to help him beat a drug test.
Violations such as these forced the Army to halt recruiting for a day last May so recruiters could be retrained and reminded of the job’s ethical requirements.
The Portland Army Recruiting Battalion Headquarters opened its investigation into Jared’s case last week after his parents called The Oregonian and the newspaper began asking questions about his enlistment.
He’s an autistic 18-year-old who didn’t even know a war was going on in Iraq.
“When Jared first started talking about joining the Army, I thought, ‘Well, that isn’t going to happen,’ “ said Paul Guinther, Jared’s father. “I told my wife not to worry about it. They’re not going to take anybody in the service who’s autistic.”
But they did. Last month, Jared came home with papers showing that he not only had enlisted, but also had signed up for the Army’s most dangerous job: cavalry scout. He is scheduled to leave for basic training Aug. 16.
Officials are now investigating whether recruiters at the U.S. Army Recruiting Station in Southeast Portland improperly concealed Jared’s disability, which should have made him ineligible for service.
He won’t be going, thanks to the Oregonian.
On Tuesday, a reporter visited the U.S. Army Recruiting Station at the Eastport Plaza Shopping Center, where Velasco said he had not been told about Jared’s autism.
“Cpl. Ansley is Guinther’s recruiter,” he said. “I was unaware of any type of autism or anything like that.”
Velasco initially denied knowing Jared but later said he’d spent a lot of time mentoring him because Jared was going to become a cavalry scout. The job entails “engaging the enemy with anti-armor weapons and scout vehicles,” according to an Army recruiting Web site.
After he had spoken for a few moments, Velasco suddenly grabbed the reporter’s tape recorder and tried to tear out the tape, stopping only after the reporter threatened to call the police.
With the Guinthers’ permission, The Oregonian faxed Jared’s medical records to the U.S. Army Recruiting Battalion commander, Lt. Col. David Carlton in Portland, who on Wednesday ordered the investigation.
The Guinthers said that on Tuesday evening, Cpl. Ansley showed up at their door. They said Ansley stated that he would probably lose his job and face dishonorable discharge unless they could stop the newspaper’s story.
Our armed forces are cold-calling schoolkids with leads from No Child Left Behind red tape and county fair honeypots, under such ferocious pressure to put boots on the ground that Corporal Ansley’s put his career in the shitter for one more dubious checkmark in his ledger. —Yes, I’m asking for sympathy for this particular devil. After all, the consensus among the few who still support this war is that we aren’t fighting hard enough. 110% just won’t cut it, goddammit!
Can you even begin to imagine what it felt like, to realize what he’d done? Realize the line he’d crossed? Feel it go so searingly wrong that he tried to wrestle the tape out of the reporter’s recorder?
(Perhaps I have it wrong. Perhaps it was with a profound sense of entitlement that he went to the Guinthers’ door, cap in hand, to beg for his career; extremism in the defense, and all that, and why should I lose my job over your kid’s decision? —Perhaps. But I do try to see the best in people, when I can.)
—Meanwhile? Recruiting’s up up up for the Fighting Keebees. Not even two weeks, and they’ve got 300 recruits and counting!
Soar, you mighty chickenhawk. Soar.
Neither the first word nor the last on profanity, disputation, anger, and civility for bloggers.
The Dragonlord held the blade up, and said, “I was given this weapon of my father, you know.” He studied its length critically. “It is called Reason, because my father always believed in the power of reasoned argument. And yours?”
“From my mother. She found it in the armory when I was very young, and it is one of the last weapons made by Ruthkor and Daughters before their business failed. It is the style my father has always preferred: light and quick, to strike like a snake. I call it Wit’s End.”
“Wit’s End? Why?”
“Well, for much the same reason that yours is Reason.”
Piro turned it in his hand, observing the blade—slender but strong, and the elegant curve of the bell guard. Then he turned to Kytraan and said, “May Reason triumph.”
“It always does, at the end of the day,” said Kytraan, smiling. “And as for you, well, you will always have a resort when you are at your wit’s end.”
“Indeed,” said Piro with a smile, as they waited for the assault to commence.
—Steven Brust, The Viscount of Adrilankha
Making people laugh is the lowest form of comedy.
Kids these days, they have it so easy. Why, Michael O’Donoghue had to mock My Lai and savage Laraine Newman and make the Mormon Tabernacle choir scream in agony and die of a massive cerebral hemorrhage, obscure and half-remembered, to soldier through the sort of shocked silences Stephen Colbert got just by standing up in front of the president and the press and telling the fucking truth. —What does it mean that it isn’t our journalists anymore but our comedians who afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted? Pretty much what it always has, I guess. At least someone’s making an effort.
First, they win. Then we attack them. Then we laugh at them. Then we ignore them…
My sweet suffering Christ, they’re playing the role of the unjustly oppressed right to the bitter hilt. That right there above, ladies and gentlemen, is an attempt by the supporters of preemptive war, the apologists for torture, the real men who go to Caracas, to reclaim the word “chickenhawk.” Maybe white boy can’t say “nigga,” but that is finally once and for all okay: he can now bellow “My Yellaphant!” with pride.
(Cap’n Ed even went the “Webster’s defines ‘chickenhawk’ as” route:
When we looked into it, it turns out that the chicken hawk is a pretty impressive predator. It’s the largest of its family. This species vigorously defends its territory, getting even more aggressive when the conditions get harshest. It adapts to all climates. Most impressively, it feeds on chickens, mice, and rats.
Make of that what you will.
(Well. I can make a hat, or a brooch, or a pterodactyl, or a mighty fascist-looking eagle displayed on a field of gules, you eliminationist twerp.)
A new broom sweeps clean.
They say I worry too much. Do I worry too much? I’m worrying too much, aren’t I.
That woman.
Yes, she’s a horrible, soulless monster. Yes, her latest “book” is an insult to millennia of literate endeavor. But my God, do you have to keep posting those photos of her in your blogs? —Every time you say her name, you feed the dead light in her eyes, and Baby Jesus is forced to strangle another frolicking kitten. (Also, the man-hands jokes, and the bits about the Adam’s apple? Not getting funnier every time you tell them. Hate to be brutal, but.)
Go, and do thou likewise.
According to Susan Tully of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), many Roman Catholics are unhappy with their church leaders who, like Mahony, advocate for illegal aliens. “I am a Catholic, and there’s a whole bunch of us who are calling for a boycott of the Catholic Church,” she says.
“In other words,” Tully explains, “we’re telling other Catholics, ‘If you want to go to church to receive communion and a service or whatever, that would be fine, but do not financially support [the church].” And as for Cardinal Mahony, she contends, it is important for church members to remember what is truly motivating him.
—“Activist Urges Boycott of Catholic Leaders Who Support Illegal Aliens,” Agape Press
And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?
He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou?
And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.
And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.
But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?
—The Gospel According to Saint Luke,
chapter 10, verses 25 – 29
—cross-posted to Sisyphus Shrugs
