perfidy

I'm waiting for the first conservative idiot commentator to characterize criticism of this sick turn of events as "aid and comfort to the enemy".

CBS News: Abuse of Iraqi POWs

What, are we finished talking about this already?

Does anyone seriously believe that this is the only occurrence? The army itself has indicated it knows of other incidents; they're just not public yet.

Exactly how well is the battle for "hearts and minds" going, at this point?

We have well-defined success criteria in Iraq: Some form of democracy, a "westernization", the restoration of human rights. What are our criteria for failure? At what point, exactly, do we decide that the pooch is screwed, and it's time to go? In business you don't throw good money after bad.

The President's answer to this is never. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we have continuous stories of prisoner abuse, every two weeks, for the next year. Can we succeed in Iraq if something like that happens? The answer is NO. The chance of success is ZERO. So that's one situation under which we'd "cut and run", which is a shitty way of putting it. When a business shuts down a money-losing line of business, we don't call it "cut and run", we call it sensible management.

Likewise, the phrase "cut and run" is being used to characterize a political decision that could potentially be very damaging to the people in power. Both sides of the debate have fallen into the language trap.

I'm not saying it's time to leave Iraq; what I'm saying is that in the light of failures of intelligence, failures of planning, and failure to win hearts and minds (with worsening chances for ever achieving it), exactly why are we still there? Are those goals achievable?

Enumerating possibilities and framing responses to them is called planning. This seat-of-the-pants administration reaps now from the sown seeds of its simplistic, ass-kick, deceptive, and lowest common denominator approach to foreign policy.

Welcome back.

I'm sure by now all of you have had a chance to see (and recoil from) the shameful conduct of some of our soldiers in Iraq.

Rather than be redundant, I'm going to turn this screed over to Sgt. Stryker.

Every single angle of this story is disgusting and infuriating, but let me start with Staff Sergeant Chip Frederick. He's charged with "maltreatment for allegedly participating in and setting up a photo, and for posing in a photograph by sitting on top of a detainee. He is charged with an indecent act for observing one scene. He is also charged with assault for allegedly striking detainees – and ordering detainees to strike each other."

What's his defense for failing not only as an NCO, but as a human being? "'We had no support, no training whatsoever. And I kept asking my chain of command for certain things...like rules and regulations, says Frederick. 'And it just wasn't happening.'"

The first rule of a coward, when caught, is to play stupid. The second is to blame someone else. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure I don't need a superior to tell me that attaching wires to someone's genitals or beating the living shit out of them is unacceptable. What are you, a fucking idiot?

. . . .

[D]id anyone ever tell you that maintaining discipline and standards of conduct is your main charge as an NCO? Did this piece of training slip through the cracks as well? You know, I wear the same uniform. I'm an NCO as well. Not only have you disgraced yourself, your unit, your country and humanity, your actions have disgraced me and everyone else who wears that uniform. Your stupidity, ignorance, and cruelty have stained all of us, because of that uniform we all wear. It's the binding tie that connects not only all of us serving today, but everyone who has ever served and those who will serve in the future. That uniform is stained with the noble blood of those who've fallen in battle for their country, but you have smeared that uniform -my uniform!- with the excrement of malevolent barbarism.

You have failed in every possible way a soldier can fail. You failed, as an NCO, to maintain basic standards of military order and discipline. You failed, as a soldier, to maintain the highest standards of conduct required of you by the United States Government. You failed, as a human being, to afford even the slightest bit of dignity and respect to those placed under your care. And what do you have to say in your defense? You only offer excuses that blame everyone else but yourself. You, and those who shared in your depravity, are a disgrace and a shame. May the military justice system have more mercy on you than you could muster for your own prisoners.

As with everything in life, there is a Simpsons quote that applies to the situation: "Videotaping this crime spree is the best idea we ever had!" (Jimbo Jones, episode 5F13). The difference is, of course, that Jimbo Jones is a cartoon figure who stole a Parking Enforcement buggy, and the accused soldiers are disgraceful fuckwit douchebags masquerading as worthy human beings who have given our enemies the perfect propaganda, and have signed the death warrants of many soldiers and citizens of free nations around the world. Nice work, guys. Al Jazeera wasn't quite getting the message across on their own.

GeekLethal found a wonderful toy, with which you can create wonders such as this: 

A list of classic books is working its way 'round the blogging classes. I picked it up from the Oldsmoblogger who picked it up from others. And now I bring it to the Ministry, because Lord knows we need another reason to think we're so-damned-smart.

Books actually read are bold; portions only or Cliff's Notes don't count.

Forthwith, the list:
Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel GarcÃ-a - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

Today in Slate, an argument against individual investment Social Security accounts.

The short version:

Average yearly return of US stock market over last 20 years: 12%
Average yearly return on holdings of individual holders of Vanguard 401(k) accounts: 4%

In general, institutional investors and trustee investors do a good job, Joe and Jane blow do a terrible job. Of course, this has far greater implications than just it maybe being a good idea to keep the Blows from meddling in their SocSec porfolios, but that's the hot button issue of the the day, so I'm gonna lean on that button 'til Buckethead squawks.

Just like in a horror movie.

The woman is walking from her parked car to her home after work. She drops something and, as she's stooped to pick it up, sees the bad guy charging her from the treeline.

She gets into her house, but can't bolt the door before he's upon her. Muttering obscenities and a chilling monologue, he shoves powerfully against the door. She ends up on her butt, on her own kitchen floor...just seconds before she'd been just walking toward her house, and suddenly she's in mortal danger...then he's in the house, nearly upon her...she sees the gun in his hand....she thinks of her teen daughter, also in the house...terrified, adrenalin racing, she sees his eyes...

Then she pulls her 9mm from her waist and puts 3 rounds in his fucking head.

Real life, not a horror movie. The incident took place in Detroit, and the lady in question said it was like "Friday the 13th...except it was Tuesday." Police determined that she had actually fired 6 rounds, but the autopsy showed (probably a very brief autopsy) that cause of death was multiple gunshots to the mellon.

Now, any person who can go from her everyday mundane pattern to immediate mortal danger, be off balance, ambushed, needing just a little more urging to head into panic, yet have it together enough to put 3 rounds in the bad guy's head is fabulous. Just fabulous. That's the difference training can make, as opposed to just packing to feel safer.

Opponents of Michigan's new concealed-carry statute "predicted a large increase in self-defense-type shootings". I'm not sure why that's a bad thing; would those CCW opponents be happier, and feel safer, if this lady and her daughter were dead and this convicted fellon was still marauding about with his unregistered weapon?

She has admitted she has conflicted feelings over all of this. She knows she did the right thing by defending herself and her daughter, but is not thrilled she had to kill someone. Personally, I'd rather be alive and feel bad about killing the bad guy than be dead.

No, really. Johno's post didn't include a link to the story, so there it is.

Norbizness (who I have not linked in some time, to my shame) has a hilarious post up - rap lyrics translated into middle-management speak. Example:

"Law enforcement officials seem intent on confiscating my current narcotic harvest."

"Please pass me the amplification device, so that I may extend my present line of discourse. The alliance of particular Californian neighborhoods is a portent of imperilment."

Fun, fun, fun

The University of Nebraska is working on perfecting the most devious and insidious use for robots yet. More invasive yet coddling than the robotic refrigerator, more inconvenient than the Sirius Cybernetics Nutri-Matic, and clearly a harbinger of a coming world where humans are nothing more than meatsacks to be shunted from place to place according to the whim of some malevolent Cray with a Playstation mind.

Reports already suggest our children are more tolerant of authority than their elders, yet mistrustful of politicians and actual individual figures thereof. What better surrogate than the electronic partners they have been weaned on? And what better way to take control than to automate the very sources of inconvenience, delay, and implacable authority, objects that already inspire feelings of helplessness, resignation, and inevitability?

What is this new menace?

What form have they taken?

Why should you arm your automobile with an aluminium bat, a reenforced bumper, and a law-enforcement brakes and steering package?

That's right. Those orange barrels are moving on their own. Weep for the children of tomorrow, for their future is as bleak as an Ohio winter.

The MIT Student Newspaper has an interview with everyone's favorite music industry pimp, Jack Valenti. It seems that Jack is not too solid on the whole concept of "Fair use."