Month: May 2011

So why is Maggie Gallagher not trying to ban this?

"I’m told there was some confusion today on some programs … suggesting that I indicated that no one who was waterboarded at Guantanamo provided any information on this. That’s just not true. What I said was no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo by the U.S. military … Three people were waterboarded by the CIA … and then later brought to Guantanamo. In fact, as you point out, the information that came from those individuals was critically important," – Donald Rumsfeld, reversing himself from a previous statement.

The torture of KSM and al-Libi gave the US false information on this story, as even the torture advocates have conceded. They now argue that torture works because it gives false information. Which is what we call creative reasoning.

Or, rather, the rationalization of war crimes for which Rumsfeld, in a country run by the rule of law, should be prosecuted, not respectfully quoted.

Last week HuffPo interviewed GOP presidential candidate Gary Johnson. On the drug war:

So going back to 1999, I came to the conclusion… that 90% of the drug problem is prohibition-related, not use-related. That’s not to discount the problems with use and abuse, but that ought to be the focus. So in 1999, I advocated then, I advocate it now. Legalize marijuana. Control it, regulate it, tax it.

It’s never going to be legal to smoke pot, become impaired, get behind the wheel of a car, do harm to others. It’s never going to be legal for kids to smoke pot or buy pot. And under which scenario is it going to be easier for kids to smoke pot or buy pot? The situation that exists today, where it’s virtually available anywhere, and the person that sells pot also sells harder drugs? Or a situation where to purchase it, you would have to produce an ID in a controlled environment, like alcohol, to be able to buy it. I think you can make the case that it would be harder to buy it, in that controlled environment.

There will be two anti-interventionist libertarian candidates up there. And every time the debate widens, we all gain.

Shikha Dalmia considers the genre:

"Who should decide who one should marry – is it the parents or is it the boy and girls themselves?" asks the Indian-born and raised Dalmia. "In the West, in Hollywood movies, it's not even an issue. But it's a huge issue in that part of the world and all of Bollywood movies deal with that one central question."

Last week various bloggers debated the rationality of voting for or a against a party based on the state of the economy and the number of wartime casualties. Andrew Gelman reframes the argument. He points out that reasons for voting are not mutually exclusive:

For example, voter turnout is higher in elections that are anticipated to be close. This has a rational explanation—if an election is close, it's more likely that you will cast the deciding vote–and also a process explanation: if an election is close, candidates will campaign harder, more people will talk about the election, and a voter is more likely to want to be part of the big stories. These two explanations work together, they don't compete: it's rational for you to vote, and it's also rational for the campaigns to try to get you to vote, to make the race more interesting to increase your motivation level.

Copyranter comments on this ad for Kagatani knives:

Pretty creepy, once you're inside with the doors closed, especially late at night.

Reuters has shots of the helicopter wreckage and three bloody corpses. The news agency defends its decision to publish the gruesome photos and says that it "purchased [them] from a Pakistani security official who entered the compound about an hour after the U.S. raid took."

Earlier footage from ABC News here.

Peter Smith provides a legend:

These food deserts (marked in pink above) are places where there is "low income" and "low access"—or places where at least a fifth of the population lives at or below the poverty line and where there isn't a supermarket within a one-mile radius (or within a 10-mile radius in rural areas). All things told, about 13.5 million people nationwide have little or no access to stores selling healthful food.

Irked by a WSJ op-ed, Sara Mayeux defends prison guards and their salaries:

Look, the solution to the high cost of prison staff is to put fewer men and women in prison. If, however, a state is going to put itself into the business of the custodial care of hundreds of thousands of men and women, then it's going to have to hire people to oversee them. And, you know what, it's going to have to pay them semi-decently, and it's also going to have to allow them vacation. So what if it's seven weeks of vacation? So what if they retire at 55? Considering what Philip Zimbardo taught us that being a prison guard does to a person after even a day or two, I wouldn't exactly call that a sweetheart deal.