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Well, if you’re living in the east bay, anyway, you might have to clear out some poop, because you probably just felt a 5.6 richter earthquake.

Turns out it was just west of San Jose and Milpitas, a 5.6.

Mukasey so far has refused to say explicitly what his position is on the lawfulness of the interrogation technique, which simulates drowning.

Wikipedia does say: “Waterboarding is a form of torture^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]} ” That’s right. Nine citations.  Forms of waterboarding were used as far back as the Spanish Inquisition. Even our good media has a myopic view of the world. Media doesn’t even remember it’s own previous role in exposing the uses of such torture: In 1968, during the Vietnam War, the Washington Post published a controversial photograph of American soldiers waterboarding a North Vietnamese POW near Da Nang.

Wiki also says: All countries that are signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture have agreed they are subjected to the explicit prohibition on torture under any condition, and as such there exists no legal exception under this treaty. (The treaty states, No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.) Additionally, signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights also agreed to its Article 5, which states, No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

And we are most certainly a signatory to that Convention.

Humanity may split into two sub-species [sometime over the next 100,000 years].

But that’s not the weird ass science part. That’s the normal part. The weird part?

He carried out the report for men’s satellite TV channel Bravo.

Now that’s just weird.

Read a column in the local newspaper by Bill O’Reilly, where he points fingers at the media for all our problems or something, I don’t really care to remember what he said because it’s not pertinent to the conversation at hand. However, in the column he accused the NYT of being lefties, or liberal, or some other insult. Today I read this in the NYT:

The change in Iran’s negotiating team comes as the Security Council agreed to delay new sanctions against Iran drawn up because of its refusal to stop producing enriched uranium, which can be used to make electricity or fuel weapons.

No mention that the current level of enrichment in Iran is terribly poor (3 or 5 %?) and the level needed to make bombs is somewhere close to 95%, and that they are  years away from that technology. Liberal, left-leaning bias.

You’ll have to click the link if you really want to read it, because I really want the artist to get ad revenue.

You’ll have to click the link if you really want to read it, because I really want the artist to get ad revenue.

You’ll have to click the link if you really want to read it, because I really want the artist to get ad revenue.

You’ll have to click the link if you really want to read it, because I really want the artist to get ad revenue.

It might strike many as a paradox, but Mr Crenshaw believes that in a culture that values human life above all, the right to take that life away is an essential tool of justice.

Either life is sacred, or it is not. But in our culture, it’s not the killing that counts, it’s who you’re killing that counts. Innocent Iraqi’s are okay, because we’re pursuing the ‘terrorists,’ first-world babies, even the products of rape or ones that would kill their mothers in childbirth are not (babies that die as collateral damage in Iraq are cool too. The U.S. military does not do body counts… unless they’re ‘militants’ they’re hoping on scoring some media points with. Look at us, we got the bad guys. Rawr.). Murderers, even ones that may have been falsely convicted, are cool. As long as you get someone, even if it wasn’t the right person, you have justice for the family because they feel a sense of vindication when the ‘murderer’ dies.

Now, in this case, the death penalty was overturned twice before he was finally convicted in 1990. There is no physical evidence linking him to the scene of the crime, but he was convicted anyway. DNA evidence, which has exonerated many, many death row convicts, even ten, twenty years after their crimes were committed, will not be allowed in this case, because Alabama politicos have been hot-nuts to have this guy killed for the last twenty years, and don’t want to appear as wrong-headed blood-thirsty bastards if he was truly exonerated, as his daughter believes DNA evidence will show him.

Some more choice quotes:

Alabama’s governor has made it clear he wants Arthur to die as soon as possible, and that the current furore over the chemicals used to deliver the ultimate punishment is an annoying distraction.

…

“What do we have to do? Put a mask over them and just take away their oxygen? I want justice,” she [Miriam Shenane] said, in her office in the state capital, Montgomery.

…

Tommy Arthur’s daughter, Sherrie Arthur Stone, was still a teenager when her father was first sentenced to death.

For years, she thought he was probably guilty, and deserved the jail time he spent earlier in his life.

But now she is convinced of his innocence, fuelled largely by her disillusionment with a judicial system she views as callous and incompetent in Alabama.

Articulate and earnest, but clearly scarred by years of legal and emotional battle, she stopped living in the state a long time ago.

“I was basically told by investigators, if I didn’t leave the state, I’d be found dead on a back road,” she told the BBC.

“They clearly want to murder my father, which is what this is going to be. It’s not going to be an execution, it’s going to be a murder.”

U.S. forces in Iraq discovered nearly 19 tons of explosives in a weapons cache north of Baghdad this week, one of the biggest finds of its kind, the U.S. military said on Saturday.

“It’s a crippling blow against the enemy, it’s really huge,” said Peggy Kageleiry, a spokeswoman for U.S. forces in northern Iraq.

Interesting. Crippling, huh? I’d like to dispute that subjective statement for a second. Why,  you ask? Oh, how quickly we forget our history.

Oh yeah, that’s right, in 2003, 377 tons of explosives were looted from Iraqi depots unsecured after our invasion of their country. 377-19=358 tons left. Now, I know a lot of huge carbombs have been exploded in the past four and a half years, but somehow I doubt this 19 tons really represents a ‘crippling blow.’ Also, I’m quite sure more than the 377 tons quoted was looted. How many secret stockpiles were there that we never knew about that are now in enemy hands? I mean, we ‘knew’ Saddam had WMDs, that’s why we invaded his country. But that turned out to be a complete lie. Which really calls into question how much any of our intelligence about that mess can be truly trusted. I’m quite honestly surprised they haven’t tried to pin this cache of explosives on Iran. They try everything else.

And tell him to post that shit on Youtube letting the world know what U.S. media corporations don’t want us to see about the truth in Iraq.

 The film’s distributor, Magnolia Pictures, ordered the faces of dead Iraqis shown in a montage of photographs at the end of the film be blacked out.

“We were always open about letting him make the sort of film he wanted to make,” Bowles said in an interview, adding not many distribution companies would have supported the film at all.

You should be happy with your own bowl of soup kid. What, do you want to get the dickens beat out of you?

The 67-year-old director said he blames “the insurance companies” for exercising too much control over film distribution. Bowles admitted Magnolia could not insure the film if it ran the unedited photos, which were too graphic to run in mainstream newspapers or television reports

Apparently the truth about what our sons and daughters are doing in Iraq is ‘too graphic’ for us to see. That scares the fuck out of me, personally, because that means some way fucked up shit is going on over there and we’re getting the wool pulled over our eyes. But go ahead, elect someone that’s willing to bomb the fuck out of Iran or Pakistan to look good politically, to look like they’re doing something for us.

Any politician that supports warring with other countries unprovoked should be forced to enter the military as a new recruit when we go to war, or be required to send their children out there. But all throughout history the sons and daughters of the aristocracy get away with murder without ever having to get their hands bloody, and they send the proletariat out to die for their convenience and enrichment. I for one am sick of this shit, but, as I said the other day, bread and circuses.

But when the empire crumbles those bread and circuses wont provide much succor against our collapsing society or an invading army, whichever comes first.

Life expands exponentially. Anyone that hasn’t noticed that the timespans of empires has gotten shorter and shorter throughout history needs to take another look at the book.

Oh wait, you’re too busy watching reruns of Seinfeld.

So what would they know about where the bombs come from. I mean, we bombed them back to the dark-ages civilization-wise, so it should be obvious that they wouldn’t know about the links to Iranian weapons that we claim are in there country. They must have ulterior motives, because we sure don’t have any ulterior motives about claiming Iran is doing bad things that would require us to invade them.  

The commander of NATO-led troops in Afghanistan said on Thursday a shipment of hi-tech roadside bombs intercepted in Afghanistan on September 5 had originated in Iran and it was difficult to conceive Tehran’s military did not know about it.

“Iran is our neighbor, is our friend and Iran has had major role in the reconstruction of Afghanistan,” Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta said during a visit to the western city of Herat on the border with Iran.

“The government of Afghanistan has no documents (to show) that Iran’s government is involved in the shipment of arms,” he told Reuters.

A smear campaign during the primary in February 2000 here had many in South Carolina falsely believing that Mr. McCain’s wife, Cindy, was a drug addict and that the couple’s adopted daughter, Bridget, was the product of an illicit union. Mr. McCain’s patriotism, mental well-being and sexuality were also viciously called into question.

…

The bruising episode left him rancorous toward Mr. Bush, yet schooled in what it takes to win. Mr. McCain fell into a “very dark place,” in the words of one acquaintance, re-emerging as a more pragmatic, traditional Republican who now regularly reaches out to many of Mr. Bush’s allies, speaks comfortably to religious conservatives and has all but abandoned the maverick story line of 2000.

“He regrouped, and he dug real deep to figure out how to make the best of that situation,” said the acquaintance, Ed McMullen, who heads a South Carolina public policy group.

I guess I can believe Republicans could do that to their own guy. Makes me kinda sad, though. More sad still that McCain would allow himself to be leashed like that. He sought to not play ball, and he got eviscerated by lies. And he took that as a lesson that he needed to play ball the way they wanted to. They showed him they would take their ball and go home if need be. Sad, that in this day and age lies like that are the norm and unquestioned at the time. All that counts is the now, the rhetoric. The actions of people and the truth of history is forgotten almost instantly, with all the bread and circuses we find in this modern life.

Is it just me, or does RealityTV (including celebrity ‘reality’ tv and paparazzal cinema verité footage) remind anyone of the coliseum of ancient Rome and the battles within, albeit with less death and more humiliation? Condemnation in the court of public opinion, acclaim for the winners but looking for any weakness to tear that winner down next season.