October 29, 2007
An Expert on Torture
A brief news note: On Saturday morning — despite a number of technical difficulties which included the New York hotel where he was staying replacing his room phone to reduce line noise — I talked with Dr. Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, who was up to New York delivering a report to the General Assembly. That conversation is scheduled to be the EP podcast of November 16. It's wide-ranging and runs slightly over an hour and I won't try to summarize it here. But towards the beginning I did want to get Dr. Nowak on the record on one thing: Is waterboarding torture? The question may not have as obvious an answer as one might think, because much of the technical literature on torture shies away from the sort of detailed rules one finds, for example, in criminal law. Dr. Nowak, however, stepped up to the plate and declared, quite unequivocally, that, yes, waterboarding is torture. Considering he's a very cautious, careful lawyer, and former judge, who's perhaps the world's preeminent expert on torture, this is quite a significant statement. I just thought you'd like to know.
October 21, 2007
Unexpected Downtime
I apologize for the site disappearing early Saturday morning. I woke up to find it gone, nearly had a heart attack, but soon learned that BlueHost had decided to move it physically from one server to another to better accommodate EP's growth. The move required changing DNS addresses, and that in turn required time for the address change to propagate throughout the internet. It's like updating a phone book listing. Within 48 hours most service providers will know to point to the correct address and visitors will be able to access the site again normally. Since it was down anyway I had BlueHost assign a fixed IP address (74.220.211.15), which should slightly increase access speed and slightly reduce CPU usage. Overall, I'm pleased rather than put out, as growth is good.
October 18, 2007
WWIII
Hiding in plain sight, the Tyrant yesterday announced a hugely significant departure in U.S. policy towards Iran. Something that, so far, I've only seen one commentator pick up on, despite the quote itself appearing in many news reports — such as, for example, this one from the New York Times. The Tyrant says "if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon." The knowledge necessary. That's a far cry from actually having a bomb and reflects pretty closely the hardest of hard-line Zionist positions. "The knowledge necessary," indeed, isn't all that far off. Such complex phrasing is most emphatically not something that George Bush could have thought of himself, but is evidence that a new, exceedingly dangerous term of art is bubbling up through the policy process. And that should alarm everyone who's fighting to pull us back from the brink of a new war.
October 17, 2007
Justice, Freedom, Democracy
President Kennedy made a mistake when he set up the Peace Corps. It should have been called, instead, the Democracy Corps, if establishment foreign policy hacks are to be believed. For decades now Washington has been obsessed with making the world safe for democracy, barrels blazing if necessary, to help those in need. Wherefore such emphasis? If asked what America means to me, democracy is not the first (or second, or third) thing that I think of — quite apart from the ridiculous spectacle of a patently undemocratic regime lecturing the world about democratic virtues.
October 15, 2007
Blue Ridge Country
Sharon's vacation will be over this Tuesday, and I'm starting to think I'm going to survive it. We did have a fantastic drive down Skyline Drive last week (the pic on the left I took at the Hogwallow Flats overlook), from Front Royal going south past the Thornton Gap, back up, exiting there, and via smaller highways back to Washington. In the morning we'd stopped at a local's local diner in Front Royal — its formica, new many decades ago, had been kept clean but showed wear — where I had half a cup of coffee (bad robusta) and she an english muffin (pre-slathered with something resembling butter). I mention this, because apart from tourists and those running chichi art studios or upscale restaurants, the locals appear to be extremely unhealthy. Either grossly overweight or rail-thin. With bad color. It's a wicked contrast, against the natural beauty of the mountains: these people are only a few short steps from third world norms. Not their fault, of course. But neither do they seem even dimly aware of their situation. How much of the U.S. hinterland is like that, I wonder?
October 14, 2007
Draft Dodgers
What with Blackwater killing innocent Iraqis regularly and at random, quite a few people have been questioning the wisdom of hiring mercenaries, but none have got at what this phenomenon means as well as Brendan O'Neill (a past EP guest). He argues, essentially, that far from representing Washington's authority, the mercenaries represent Washington's loss of authority, and legitimacy. Now, in the first place I think Brendan tends to conflate the idea of power generally with a particular kind of authority, which may be seriously inaccurate. Secondly, he cites an extremely high estimate for mercenaries — 200,000 — higher than I've seen almost anywhere else, and furthermore wrongly leaves the impression that they're all armed. They're not. Most are mess boys, truck drivers, and whatnot. About 15,000 are trigger-pullers, tops. Although that sounds like a lot less, and perhaps starts to appear unimportant compared to regular forces, consider that of the 160,000 troops in Iraq probably no more than 45,000 are combat arms. So it is, indeed, a relatively very large number. Otherwise, Brendan's very much on point. Instead of state authority used to wage war we've fallen back to the times when rich people in their gated and guarded estates (castles) hire thugs like Blackwater to carry out various vendettas.
October 1, 2007
Wines For the Times
Today I found myself, for the umpty-umpth time, bending a wine merchant's ear about how the quality of red wine has suffered, it seems to me, over the past 10 years or so. It's as if chemists from Boone's Farm have taken over the industry. No matter whether you're spending $10, $20, $30, or up on a bottle (I'm talking about French and American wine because that's mostly what I drink) what you're likely to get has all the appeal of cough syrup. Cloying sweetness, big fruit up front, and necessarily associated with all that an increasingly high alcohol content. Letting the grapes ripen longer both increases sugar and cuts tannins, but as to the latter there's nothing wrong with a few tannins if you let a good wine sit around for a while and mellow. What's happened to wine that tastes like it was made from grapes that grew somewhere? Give me back those earthy flavors with a hint of fruit perfume! I've started to wonder whether the people selling wine have any palate or whether they're just pandering to what they consider popular tastes? Have the growers completely fallen under the thumb of the négociants? Who's to blame? I have no answers, alas — I'm just lamenting the fact that most red wine doesn't taste like it's supposed to anymore.
