Month: August 2009

What Cheney Forfeited II

Another small example of the impact of the U.S. condoning and deploying torture. Here's an account in the August National Geographic of a reporter captured in Darfur:

What can be said about those days?

An agent of the istikhbarat pawed through my cell’s pit toilet each morning, looking for what I can’t say. His work was unrewarded because I was on a hunger strike. I was protesting my being held separately, in solitary confinement. I resumed eating on the eighth day when the guards informed me they would force-feed me through a rubber tube. “Like Guantanamo,” they said.

There is a grueling piece in the current Harpers on the continuation of force-feeding at Gitmo as a form of torture.

Capitalism And the Soul

DAISIESDanKitwood:Getty

A reader writes:

This post struck a chord.  You say the point of money is freedom, not money itself (agreed) — and that believing "only" in capitalism is soul-killing.  Last night I had trouble sleeping and happened to pick up and reread most of The Abolition of Man.  Lewis argues:

There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world.  What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) 'ideologies,'  all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole, and then swollen to madness, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess.

Meanwhile the cave-dwelling moneyless blogger writes:

If you think you can't survive without corporations and banks, you have no faith, and all your talk of God is utter nonsense.  You are using the name of God in vain.  Then you wonder why the word "God" is so loathsome to people.

Capitalism – "swollen to madness."

Don't get me wrong. I love capitalism and the free market. I believe in capitalism in as much as history has yet to show a more efficient or democratic way of allocating resources and rewarding effort. But to believe only in capitalism, to see this money-making machine as an end-in-itself, is spiritual death. And if capitalism is to survive, a citizenry capable of retaining spiritual perspective is critical. Note this isn't an endorsement of fundamentalist politics. It's an endorsement of the role private faith plays in keeping the West coherent and alive. I fear fundamentalism is actually discrediting that, killing it slowly with neurotic fear masked as religion. And that leaves us vulnerable to hardest of the fundamentalists – the Jihadists.

Yes, this is a religious war.

The Flarf Movement

The lede of Shell Fischer's article in Poets & Writers:

Almost a decade after its creation, the experimental poetry movement Flarf—in which poets prowl the Internet using random word searches, e-mail the bizarre results to one another, then distill the newly found phrases into poems that are often as disturbing as they are hilarious—is showing signs of having cleared a spot among the ranks of legitimate art forms. Despite the group's penchant for shocking content and outrageous titles (Sharon Mesmer's "Annoying Diabetic Bitch," for example, or Gary Sullivan's "Grandmother's Explosive Diarrhea"), many in the literary world are taking the poems seriously.

(Hat tip: Kottke)

The Limits Of Kindling

Nicholson Baker is not a big e-Book fan:

Yes, you can save nine dollars if you buy the Kindle edition of “The Algorithmic Beauty of Seaweeds, Sponges, and Corals,” by Jaap A. Kaandorp, et al.—it’ll cost you $85.40 delivered wirelessly, versus $94.89 in print. New Scientist says that Kaandorp’s book is “beautifully, if sometimes eccentrically, illustrated with photographs, drawings and computer simulations.” The illustrations are there in the Kindle version, but they’re exceedingly hard to make out, even if you zoom in on them using the five-way clicker switch, or “control nipple,” as one Kindler called it. An award-winning medical textbook titled “Imaging in Oncology” (second edition) is for sale in the Kindle Store for $287.96. Tables are garbled. The color coding—yellow for malignancy, blue for healthy tissue—has been lost. Arrows pointing to shadowy tumors become invisible in the gray. Indeed, the tumors themselves disappear.

“You Are What You Eat”

Fridgeimage

Ariel Ramchandani reviews Mark Menjivar's fridge portraits:

Whether we are looking at a hacked-up buck, glowing red in a freezer next to a bottle of tequila ("Carpenter/Photographer | San Antonio, TX | 3-Person Household | 12-Point Buck | 2008"), a lone jar of organic mayonnaise next to a black plastic bag on vacant shelves ("Street Advertiser | San Antonio, TX | 1-Person Household | Lives on $432 fixed monthly income | 2007"), or an impeccable medley of citrus, beer and yogurt ("Community Volunteer | San Angelo, TX | 1-Person Household | Completely blind and lives alone. | 2007"), the effect is compellingly voyeuristic, a mix of banality with bright spots of difference. (Keep your eye out for the frozen rattlesnake.) One wonders if shopping lists, medicine cabinets or glove compartments would be so revealing.

More images here.

$20 Per Gallon

Freakonomics interviews Chris Steiner, author of $20 Per Gallon. He has some interesting, if controversial, predictions:

Remember when everybody fell all over themselves trying to land a gig at an internet company during the late 1990’s? Those jobs were instant tickets to riches, or so we thought. When gasoline reaches $8 per gallon, energy-related startups will form the new craze. That’s where the hot jobs will be. IPO’s, wild sums of venture money, 23-year-old C.E.O.s — all of it will be resurrected from that movie called 1999. Or perhaps the market will recall the mistakes we made in the past and dial back its reaction … or perhaps not.

Reihan loved the book. $20 a gallon is about the only thing that could unleash the genius of the market in energy innovation. And nothing else will really do anything to abate climate change. Bring it on!

What Cheney Forfeited

AAAAA

The above is the front-page of the government paper, Keyhan, in Iran. The big headline circled in red says:

“Evidence of Mousavi’s Betrayal of Iran Exposed!”

And the smaller headline, also circled in red, reminds readers that America has no standing to criticize prisoner abuse any more:

“Evidence of Inhuman Torture of Detainees by Americans in Bagram Prison [Afghanistan]"

There isn't a tyrant anywhere who isn't more legitimate today because of Dick Cheney's adoption of torture as an American value.