Month: May 2009

A wonderful new blog. Who doesn't need a $32 million golden bathroom?

Renard Sexton reports from Sierra Leone:

…over 40% of civil conflicts in the 20th century had a link to natural resources, often as a contributing cause, by financing arms, or acting as a flashpoint for small-scale conflict that becomes embroiled in larger ethnic, political or economic conflict, which can spiral out of control.

In the post-conflict period, extraction of natural resources (mining, timber, firewood forestry, fishing) is often the only livelihood option for returning displaced populations. All too often, unsustainable practices become embedded as the new norm, setting up the conditions for severe resource stress in the future.

Unfortunately, natural resources and environment are often given less attention in the immediate post-conflict period than they deserve, given their importance. Hopefully this will change in the future as more emphasis is given to the issue.

Bill Kristol provides a curtain-raiser for a Cheney speech next week that promises to entrench the notion that the Republican party is the Torture Party.

As always, Kristol’s sole principle seems to be the wielding of power. He, like Cheney, is beginning to understand that history is beginning to gel around the assumption that the Bush-Cheney administration presided over the worst attack on US soil in history and failed to capture or bring to justice any of its perpetrators, put the next generation into unparalleled and unsustainable debt, did nothing to combat climate change, viciously opposed the civil rights movement of its time, shrunk the GOP to one in five voters, precipitated the worst recession since the 1930s, took the US into two grueling, unwinnable wars, humiliated the US at the UN with fatally flawed intelligence for war in Iraq, and destroyed the credibility and endurance of the Geneva Conventions, thus ensuring that future captured Americans will be tortured with no recourse.

What to do about this? Do a self-accounting? Figure out how these appalling errors were made? Apologize? Nah:

An intelligent and knowledgeable advocate–even if he’s personally not so popular–can do a lot to get an issue front and center. And the debate of that issue can do political damage to the existing administration and its congressional allies. The real question any Republican strategist should ask himself is this: What will Republican chances be in 2012 if voters don’t remember the Bush administration–however problematic in other areas–as successful in defending the country after 9/11? To give this issue away would be to accept a post-Herbert-Hoover-like-fate for today’s GOP. That’s why Republicans should listen carefully when Cheney gives a speech this week in which he’ll lay out the case for the surveillance, detention, and interrogation policies of the Bush administration in the war against terror.

If Kristol and Cheney believe that conservatism should become the political philosophy that gives the executive branch absolute power to tap any phone without a warrant, seize anyone in the US or world, deny them any due process and torture them for “intelligence”, then they are welcome to do so. But at some point, surely, decent conservatives who believe that the West’s defense does not need a police state and a torture regime will fight back. At some point, surely, some conservatives will advocate a sane intelligence-gathering policy and an adult understanding that total security is impossible in a free and interconnected world – and that only unscrupulous, cynics pretend otherwise for the goal of manipulating public fears for political advantage.

Or are they all still as bullied by Rove and Cheney and Kristol as they were for the eight years these goons ran their party and their country into the ground?

Probably:

While no human being is known to have died from staying awake, animal research strongly suggests it could happen. In the 1980s, a University of Chicago researcher named Allan Rechtschaffen conducted a series of groundbreaking experiments on rats. After 32 days of total sleep deprivation, all the rats were dead. Curiously, researchers still do not agree on the cause of death. It’s possible that the rats’ body temperature dropped so much that they succumbed to hypothermia. Another theory posits that the rats’ immune systems became so depressed that bacteria normally sequestered in their intestines spread throughout their bodies—though Rechtschaffen counters that his rats perished even when they were administered antibiotics. A third explanation points to some evidence of brain damage among the sleep-deprived rats. It’s also possible that extreme levels of stress contributed to the rats’ demise.

Around a hundred prisoners died during interrogation by US forces under George W. Bush.

In what can only be called a genius move for the Democrats and a terrible blow to the GOP, Obama has coopted Utah governor John Huntsman to be his new ambassador to China. Huntsman is the one of very few – Jeb and Crist are the others, in my view – who could rescue the GOP from generational oblivion. He's a conservative from Utah, but understands how ugly, bitter and extremist the Republicans have become. A pro-civil union Mormon who gets the problem of climate change, Huntsman was the un-Cheney. And Obama just snagged him.

Don't under-estimate Obama's policial cunning, guys. But for those of us with some small hope of restoring decency and moderation to the right, this is a major blow. What Obama is doing is bringing all the sane conservatives  – from Crist to Huntsman to Gates – into his orbit.

And Cheney gets to be the the face of the GOP future.

Michael Steele tries to find a way to appeal to the next generation in stigmatizing gay couples. At this point, one has to realize he is dumber than Wurzelbacher.

Eli and Reihan argue that my opposition to the Bush-approved torture of prisoners is not a serious argument but a sincere expression of emotion. But the two, of course, are not mutually exclusive categories. It is possible to make a very serious argument about the ineffectiveness and danger of the executive branch's use of torture – and also express emotion about what that has done to the integrity of the war on terror, the moral standing of the West, and the suffering and death imposed on human beings in custody. If I ever stop feeling anything about naked prisoners beaten and left for long periods of time in frozen cells, or slammed against walls, or turned into mental cases, then I will cease to be the human I am. And Eli and Reihan must surely also understand that I believed in this war and wanted it to succeed because it would defang evil, not perpetuate it, and advance human rights, not violate them in the worst way imaginable. You can no more torture your way to the rule of law than you can destroy a village in order to save it.

It is, moreover, unfair to say I have compared the Bush administration with the Nazis. I haven't.

I have shown how the exact techniques deployed by the Gestapo were used by Cheney and called by the exact same name – verschaerfte Vernehmung; and how the exact techniques used by the Khmer Rouge were authorized by Bush. These are simply facts that people have to face. This does not mean that the American system of government is the same as that under Hitler in Germany, or that Bush was Hitler. It does mean that human acts are human acts. The act of torture is the same whoever perpetrates it. There is no moral way to torture someone. America is not by virtue of being America somehow immune from the same evil that has occurred throughout human history; and the human beings running the American government are no more and no less human than those who controlled ghastly regimes in the past.

In fact, the American constitution makes no sense unless you see this. The founders assumed that Americans are as bad and as good as anyone else; and that therefore the rule of law and constitutional checks and balances are our only guarantee against tyranny. When the Cheney wing of the GOP asserts that the executive has the capacity to do anything to anyone outside the constitution and the law, and that it is also empowered to use torture to acquire "intelligence", then the entire ballgame is over. You have given a few people the power to destroy others without due process and to create reality to buttress their power. If Democrats had done this, rule of law conservatives would have exhibited no less outrage than I have.

Reihan knows and likes these people. They are not strangers to me either. But war crimes are war crimes. And the act of torture is no less evil because the people who do it are elected to office and charming at dinner parties.

(Photo: David Addington, legal architect of the torture program, by Melissa Golden/Getty.)

Trying its hand at viral marketing, the Social Security Administration made a video announcing this year's most popular baby names, featuring an infant Elvis impersonator, creepy fake arms, and a plug for Medicare Prescription Drug benefits.  Click here and cringe.

A reader writes:

Unfortunately it is not possible to respond to McWhorter, so by default I am responding to you.

The discovery of the nude figurine in Germany, now dated at 35,000 years, is interesting not because it confers bragging rights on Europe, or implies that "real" human beings emerged during some Paleolithic Big Bang. That data point is more complex than that. The first and most important thing about the object is that it implies that a consciousness similar to our own at an even further point in the past than previously thought. McWhorter is sketching out an idea that consciousness similar to our own coincided with the emergence of homo sapiens as a sub-species, in Africa, and 150,000 years ago. Maybe, maybe not.

But we have no record of this: we do have the archaeological record in Europe. What is more interesting about the discovery is that the artifact may be connected with the Neanderthal presence in Europe, and the Neanderthal hominids split off from the human tree several hundred thousand years before homo sapiens even evolved in East Africa, and were active in Europe and West Asia for tens of thousands of years before homo sapiens showed up.

Is McWhorter willing to concede the possibility that the development of homo sapiens today may have been due to interaction with other hominids — not just Neanderthals — who evolved much earlier, and who also were distributed throughout the Eurasian continent? Or is he simply attempting to confer bragging rights on Africa in response to perceived Euro-centrism?

I just think it's interesting that there were doable hominids 37,000 years ago. Why can't we all just get along and enjoy that?

Peter Wayner worries that piracy will destroy authors’ earnings: