Game Changer

I’ll admit that, like a lot of Americans, I’ve been hesitant to become outraged on the topic of torture. Mostly I’ve been watching to see how it will shake out. And then I read this statement released yesterday, from former U.S. Army psychiatrist at Guantanamo Bay, Maj. Charles Burney:

“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”

OK now I’m outraged. We weren’t just torturing detainees and enemy combatants for information, we were torturing them under false pretenses to prove the nonexistent al Qaida/Iraq link, the link that the Bush administration touted as justification for war. For a long time I’ve thought the torture issue was small potatoes compared to the crime of declaring an unjust war. Now it turns out we’ve knowingly tortured people to support our pre-existing conclusion? We literally beat people into submission to prove an Iraq/al Qaida link?

This freaks me out. I knew the Bush administration were shady and vile, but I honestly did not think they were truly Evil. They wanted a war, so they beat people into saying things to justify it. Somebody has to prosecute this.

Full story here.

The US Marriage Schism

And while we’re on the subject of marriage, I came across this terrific diagnosis of marriage in America today, from Andrew J. Cherlin:

Americans believe in two contradictory ideals. The first is the importance of marriage: we are more marriage-oriented than most other Western countries. The second is the importance of living a personally fulfilling life that allows us to grow and develop as individuals—call it individualism. Now, you can find other countries that place a high value on marriage, such as Italy where most children are born to married couples and there are fewer cohabiting relationships. And you can find countries that place a high value on individualism, such as Sweden. But only in the United States do you find both.

Read the whole interview. It’s a great spotlight on where marriage is in today’s world. It looks like the book would be a great read, especially for anyone who considers marriage to be this unchanging, immovable cultural object.

Definitions

As so many people are concerned with marriage being between a man and a woman, I’d like more people to defend the notion that war should be between a country and another country.

Wars fought between a country and a nebulously defined concept should be considered null and void. Wars between a country and randomly distributed individuals across multiple countries should also be outlawed.

If the purpose of marriage is to produce children, then the purpose of war is to produce victory. And how can victory ever be achieved without someone declaring surrender?

On a similar note, humans should never be allowed to marry animals because animals cannot give consent. Nor can nebulously defined concepts or randomly distributed individuals across multiple countries. Beyond that, what consenting individuals or countries do in the privacy of their own lands is none of my business.

Tom Cruise Spammers

A few years ago[1], I wrote a short blog entry about Tom Cruise, and a few days ago I got a comment on it, either from a spam bot or some extremely motivated non-English speaker. Take a look. The URL behind the commenter’s name appears to have no malicious code inside it. My guess is it’s a test site for blog spammers.

In other news, I wrote a nice piece of wishful thinking for OK Communicator today, as well as an entry on Iranian music I had originally composed for this blog, but thought I would shift it over to OKC.

And did I not mention the recent Wall Street Pillow Fight? Or my walk home from work last week, with the storm coming in? Or the Michael Manring show? Sorry I’ve been out of touch.

1.) Wow. Have I really been doing this for that long?

More Economic Ramblings

“The fall of the Berlin Wall really was a strong message that communism does not work as an economic system. The collapse of Lehman Brothers on Sept. 15 again showed that unbridled capitalism doesn’t work either.” – Joseph Stiglitz

I’ve long suspected that systems of government and economics are only as good as the people who believe in them and support them without manipulating them for personal gain. Monarchies have been too susceptible to individual corruption. Communism has been too susceptible to party manipulation. Capitalism has used the pursuit of personal gain as its economic engine, and that seemed to work well for quite some time. But we may now be seeing that, over the arc of the 19th and 20th centuries, democratic capitalism has been harder to manipulate directly by individuals, but more easily manipulated by corporations and other groups.

This systematic corruption seems to have taken shape via the accrual of very minor crimes being built into a global economy over time. Mortgage-backed securities, for example, in and of themselves aren’t criminal acts, but are apparently intensely susceptible to mathematical fudging. So we got where we are not by the corruption and manipulation of a king or a party but by the financial tinkerings of a few and the general fiscal ignorance of the many (myself included – like many Americans, I hope, I’m learning more and more about economics these days).

The key to Stiglitz’s quote is the bridle, I think. Government has to set limits because people are not mature enough to police themselves; power corrupts. The invisible hand is only as good as a thoroughly informed populace and thoroughly transparent businesses. As complex as our society has become, those requirements may not be possible.

Walking Zen

Walking in NYC can be difficult, primarily because of all the other moving obstacles. NYC pedestrians, if they are destination-focused, tend to walk much the way commuters in, say, Dallas, drive: at a constant speed of just-past-comfortable, and with a desire to get out from behind anyone in their way.

Much like my fellow New Yorkers, I have a particularly swift walking pace. This speed is set unconsciously by the nervous system, and I’ve recently learned that walking rhythm is actually is handled by the spinal cord itself without any assistance by the brain. This means that whenever walking speed has to be altered, the task of changing pace is transferred up to the brain for a conscious decision. I’ve noticed that I get vaguely agitated when this happens.

Breaking rhythm seems to be something my body wants to avoid. When presented with a jam of people, my feet will often take the same number of steps, just in progressively smaller strides (often until I’m making near-imperceptible baby steps). It’s as though my brain is an irascible boss that my nervous system really doesn’t want to bother.

All of this depends on whether or not I’m actively trying to get somewhere. If I have no particular destination and am just enjoying walking around, I tend to move slower and with more flexibility to changes in speed. I mosey.

So my goal for my daily commute is to mosey more. But it’s hard. I have to really pay attention to each step. Unlike meditation, where breathing is controlled voluntarily in an effort to quiet the mind, walking mindfully requires the exertion of energy and a lot of environmental navigation (the tracking and predicting of others’ movements and the shifting of speed and position to compensate). To actively subvert natural biorhythms is a tricky business. The brain has only so much bandwidth with which to juggle all these activities, which is probably why it farmed out the walking rhythm to the spinal cord in the first place.

It’s a challenge. Most of the time I end up just reminding myself every few minutes to slow down.

I Was of the Understanding That There Would Be No Math

For the first time in my life, I have a job that requires me to use algebra on occasion. I’ve come up with a tough, yet basic linear equation that I’d like to tell Excel to perform in steps. Maybe you can tell me how in this example:

What number multiplied by 18%, plus itself = 1180?

Or, (X*.18) + X = 1180

Solve for X. The answer is 1,000 but show your work. I need to know how to tell Excel to perform it.

The First Documented Case of Legitimately Funny Conservative Humor

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Political humor thrives on opposition. The liberal Bloom County flowered under the conservative Reagan/Bush period. The Daily Show exploded under Bush II. But no one really rose to the occasion during the Clinton era, unless you consider Rush Limbaugh to be an Andy Kaufman-esque performance artist/comedian[1]. Also, P.J. O’Rourke is too libertarian to qualify for the job and Mallard Fillmore as a comic strip is a misshapen, humorless, Unholy Thing That Should Not Be, so the less said about it, the better.

Now that a Democrat is in office, conservative comedy has the green light. And finally, the GOP may be able to bring the goods. In blog form, a concept that is actually hilarious…Barack Obama’s Teleprompter’s Blog.

The prose is pitch-perfect, and so well characterized that I almost wonder if it’s not being written by an extremely self-deprecating liberal.

1.) Which I kind of do, actually. He knows he a huckster. He has to. All talk radio hosts do. So does Ann Coulter.

Texas Vacation

I attended my fourth SXSW last week in Austin. For reference, that’s 2005, 2006, 2007 and now 2009.

There weren’t as many acts this year that I was face-slappingly excited to see, although the trip itself was thoroughly enjoyable simply because of the weather, the chance to bike around town, and to see a guitar show and record convention.

This is the first year I took videos, though:

St. Vincent
Nellie McKay
Maps & Atlases
6th Street on Thursday

Sadly I neglected to bring my camera’s battery charger, so my documentary efforts were cut short by Friday evening. D’oh! Still, I managed to get in a few nice pics of Andrew Bird, Ben Harper, Gomez, American Princes, and a bunch of St. Vincent, my new crush.

All this in addition to my usual batches of old signs, peculiarities, sundries and whatnot.