Would you believe I’m still tinkering with the deltiolographs?
Until then:
A goddamned amusement park.
Here we are, in the deeps of Howard Beale time, and following a link from a link to a link I find myself at Tom Spurgeon’s massively inclusive list of lists of Things to Do in San Diego When You’re Chuffed, and damned if I didn’t end up wishing I’d gone to Comic-Con. —I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
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
Have you got anything without spam?
Dealing with the junk mail, I find an envelope from our auto insurance provider, Nationwide, and on the off-chance it’s something I should pay attention to, I open it. —It’s an offer to switch our auto insurance policy to Nationwide, where we could save up to $523 a year over our current rates.
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.
Kiss them for me.
Hey! It’s the weekend of the massive San Diego Comic-Con. We didn’t go this year, but it sure sounds like Jesse Hamm’s enjoying himself.
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?
Coffee.
The Spouse and I recently went through a couple of weeks where we eschewed coffee and alcohol and sugar and bread and nuts and milk and eggs and cheese and butter and yogurt and red meat, that last not proving too difficult, as I’m nominally vegetarian (though I’m eating more fish, which is completely the fault of the decent sushi joint that’s walking distance from our house), and as I’m nominally vegetarian and do most of the cooking, the Spouse finds herself vegetarian de facto. Even the lack of coffee wasn’t too bad after the first few days with the headaches and the grumpiness. I drank a lot of green tea.
And it wasn’t as bad as you’d think. Anytime you force your diet out of its usual rut you get creative, or so I’ve found. Menus spark up. I found whole chunks of cookbooks I hadn’t seen yet. That lovely gratin with the red onions and the olives and the tomato and the thyme. That “Mexican” stir fry, with the black beans and the corn. The Tuscan white bean and tomato soup with the kale roughly chopped and tossed in to wilt. —Though the tofu with the tasty spicy sauce didn’t turn out exactly as Madhur Jeffries advertised. (Really, the worst of it—aside from the daily infusions of foul herbal nostrums which, we do this again, I’ll just skip, thanks—was the lack of cheese. And eggs. I do like the dairy.)
But the point is not to trade recipes whose names and particulars I can’t bring to mind here at work, away from my cookbooks. The point, despite the relative ease with which I did without it over the course of the two weeks, is the coffee.
Before we did this two-week purge, I used to drink my coffee out of a mug like this:
With milk enough and two spoons of sugar. (It’s a big mug; a bowl of coffee, as the Spouse would put it.) I’d have two of those as I read my blogs and newsfeeds before I considered myself human enough to face the rest of the day.
Now, though? I drink one, maybe two, of these:
And I drink it dead black. No sugar at all. The very idea of doctoring the stuff is on the edge of ick to me, now; has become, oddly, alien.
Weird.
Oh, right.
I was—“procrastinating” is such an ugly word—I was organizing some notes, looking over the list of proposed titles for upcoming fits and remembering which ones I’d found epigrams for and which ones I hadn’t, when I tripped over “Frail,” there between an as-yet unnamed bit at no. 14 and “Plenty” at no. 16.
“Frail.” Hadn’t that been the one with the O’Brian quote? Aubrey to Maturin, or Maturin to Aubrey, one of ’em anyway laughing at what little it is that separates quickness from death? Which the hell book was that from? And why isn’t the quote in the neat little text file I’ve got of all my other epigrammic candidates?
So I opened up the various other text files I’ve accumulated over the years where notes have been stashed and squirreled away, and searched them with the various search tools at my disposal, looking for “frail.” Bupkes.
Did I forget maybe to put it somewhere? Noted it en passant, said to myself, oh, hey, keen, let’s remember to come back and get this later, okay? And then forgot? As it wouldn’t be the first time.
Okay. Okay. We could go look for it. Except I ran across it the last time I was bingeing through the first seven or so of the Aubrey-Maturin books, and I have no earthly idea which one it was in. And I don’t remember enough of the context to make skimming at all viable. Not through seven books. (Maybe I should start bingeing again? Put down The Orientalist and Evasion and Civilizations Before Greece and Rome and The Demon Lover and pick up Master and Commander for another go-round, grimly determined to pounce this time?)
I think I was actually typing “frail” in the Seach Inside the Book! feature over at Amazon when it hit me: maybe I’d written it down. You know, on paper. With a pen. In the main black notebook I’ve been using when I’m not, you know. Near a keyboard.
Found it in two: “Bless you, Jack, an inch of steel in the right place will do wonders. Man is a pitiably frail machine.” —Although I still don’t know which book. Or what context. Oh, well.
(At least I got a blog post out of it. Now. What in hell am I going to quote for “Surveilling”?)
Participatory culture.
Could someone with a direct line to Jane Yolen and Mark Teague pass this along to them? It’s just about the best review a book can garner.
Send more cops! Send more paramedics!
teaotter has a public service announcement for your consideration.
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.)
A critical failure on my pop-culture roll.
It wasn’t until this morning over breakfast that I realized why it is Kitty Pryde’s doing that fucked-up splashing thing with her fist on the last page of Astonishing #15.
Something I read that I liked.
There ought to be an anthem for grocery shopping, because carefully and clinically choosing the stuff you’ll be made out of is grade-A autonomy.
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.
