Afghanistan Slipping Away?

Two new polls suggest worrying erosion for support for the West in Southwest Afghanistan and a modest up-tick in support for the Taliban. Money quote:

Confidence in the ability of provincial governments in the Southwest to provide security is down by 20 points; confidence in the ability of the Taliban to provide security, while still much lower, is up by 19 points. As noted above, there’s been a 29-point drop in the number who say the Taliban has “no significant support at all” in the area. And very unfavorable views of the Taliban have fallen from 62 percent last year to 44 percent now.

The Religious Roots Of Waterboarding

Now maybe some Southern Baptists will get the courage of their own convictions:

King Ferdinand declared that drowning—called the third baptism—was a suitable response to Anabaptists. Water as a form of torture was an inversion of the waters of baptism under the (grotesque) belief that it could deliver the heretic from his or her sins.

In the Inquisition, the practice was not drowning as such, but the threat of drowning, and the symbolic threat of baptism. The tortura del agua or toca entailed forcing the victim to ingest water poured into a cloth stuffed into the mouth in order to give the impression of drowning. Because of the wide symbolic meaning of "water" in the Christian and Jewish traditions (creation, the great flood, the parting of the Red Sea in the Exodus and drowning of the Egyptians (!), Christ’s walking on the water, and, centrally for Christians, baptism as a symbolic death that gives life), the practice takes on profound religious significance. Torture has many forms, but torture by water as it arose in the Roman Catholic and Protestant reformations seemingly drew some of its power and inspiration from theological convictions about repentance and salvation.

More blog-commentary here.

New Media and Porn

Logoblack

What has happened to mainstream Hollywood could be nothing compared to what’s about to hit the porn industry. YouPorn’s stats tell the story:

YouPorn lets users upload and watch a virtually unlimited selection of hardcore sex videos for free. The user-generated clips on YouPorn—like those on YouTube, the site it mimics—range from the grainiest amateur footage to the slickest professional product. Also, like YouTube, the site has far more traffic than income. Just nine months after going live, in September 2006, YouPorn was on pace to log about 15 million unique visitors in May, Jones told the Vivid executives, and its audience was growing at a rate of 37.5 percent a month. Today, YouPorn is the No. 1 adult site in the world; Vivid.com, a pay site, is ranked 5,061. According to Alexa, a website-ranking company, YouPorn’s overall rank is higher than CNN.com (84), About.com (114), and Weather.com (195).

And it’s all free. A fascinating glimpse into our horny peer-to-peer future here.

The Left vs Obama

Krugman is not alone:

We do not need Obama to heal the rift between good and evil, or to bind up the nation’s wounds with Bush’s venom still in her bloodstream. Obama’s balms of civility and bipartisanship may lull Americans into complacency, but they seem ill-equipped to end the outrages and injustices of the current administration’s policies and restore America to moral solvency.  Obama has given us no indication that he will exercise the bold, far-reaching, and, yes, partisan leadership that will be necessary to undo the travesties of the past seven years.

Quote For The Day

"In the absence of some startling new evidence, the crux of the issue turns out to be this: Do you believe the legacy of American racism, in all its complexity, can explain depressed black IQ scores, even when controlling for all other factors, including socioeconomic status? Is the black experience, in other words, so unique as to constitute, for nearly all black Americans, a separate wheat field? If you say yes, then good news: You believe (along with the most prominent environmentalists) that the black-white IQ gap will close in the next 50 or so years. If you think no, then bad news: You believe, with the most prominent hereditarians, that blacks as a group must resign themselves to higher rates of poverty, unemployment, divorce, and violent criminality purely as a matter of genetic fate," – Stephen Metcalfe, Slate.

Abstract Expressionism?

Monet1922

Or just going blind? A fascinating article on how various ailments affected the painting of some of civilization’s greatest artists. Money quote:

What has long been known about Monet’s later years is that he suffered from cataracts and that his eyesight worsened so much that he painted from memory. He acknowledged to an interviewer that he was “trusting solely to the labels on the tubes of paint and to the force of habit.”

Now, thanks to modern digital techniques, scientists and critics can have a better idea how cataracts changed what Monet saw. This year, an ophthalmologist at Stanford, Michael F. Marmor, described in The Archives of Ophthalmology creating computer simulations of Monet’s world as his lenses yellowed, blurring vision and turning patterns of color and light into muddy, unfocused, yellow-green inkblots.

The result was the above. The contrast with his earlier work is quite striking. (Hat tip: 3QuarksDaily. Painting: The Japanese Footbridge by Monet, 1920 – 22.)

Hersh Vindicated?

From a piece in May 2006:

"Inside the Pentagon, senior commanders have increasingly challenged the President’s plans . . . A crucial issue in the military’s dissent, the officers said, is the fact that American and European intelligence agencies have not found specific evidence of clandestine activities or hidden facilities; the war planners are not sure what to hit… [A] high-ranking general added that the military’s experience in Iraq, where intelligence on weapons of mass destruction was deeply flawed, has affected its approach to Iran. ‘We built this big monster with Iraq, and there was nothing there. This is son of Iraq,’ he said.”

Hat tip: Shaun Mullen. In the end, Cheney simply couldn’t match the facts about Iran. And the Iraq debacle doubtless strengthened his critics.

Huckabee and the NIE

Does he gain the most? Larison notes Huckers’ recent statement on Iran:

While there can be no rational dealing with Al Qaeda, Iran is a nation state looking for regional power, it plays the normal power politics that we understand and can skillfully pursue, and we have substantive issues to negotiate with them.

He certainly sounds more clued-in than Romney, Giuliani or McCain. Paul is the exception, again, who proves the rule.