Bush’s Legacy

The Bush regime’s campaign to redefine “enhanced interrogation techniques” as not really torture, therefore acceptable has been successful. Too successful.

I wish this were satire. But apparently it’s not.

A supervisor at Prosper, Inc., a “self-help and motivational coaching” firm, waterboarded an employee as an example to co-workers, Chad Hudgens claims in Utah County Court. Hudgens says his boss, Joshua Christopherson, ordered co-workers “to hold Hudgens by the arms and legs … then slowly poured a gallon jug of water over Hudgen’s mouth and nostrils, thereby making it impossible for Hudgens (to breathe) for a sustained period of time. … Christopherson (then) told the team that he wanted them to work as hard on making sales as Chad had worked to breathe while he was being waterboarded.”

The company didn’t fire the manager who ordered an employee to be tortured. They’re defending him. And as far as I can find out, the manager hasn’t been arrested for attempted murder or even assault. Apparently everybody is okay with this. Except for the victim.

Bush’s legacy is to make torture not just an acceptable interrogation technique, but an acceptable management practice.

I want my country back.

Undergo the Vulcan Mind Meld

Via Avedon Carol’s (incomparable) Sideshow, TED presents Al Gore.

The anklebiting on reason

(with apologies to Al Gore)

The United States has always done better in producing inventors than in scientists. There is a deep rooted anti-intellectual strain that rebels against the patient discipline of science. The danger, of course, is that the US will end up technologically backward as a result. Inventors, i.e. applied scientists and engineers, rely on the aerie-faery, Harvard Yard, latte-sipping stuff in the same way that mechanics rely on the manufacturers of bolts and wrenches. It’s no accident that some of the hottest venture start-ups are centered around MIT and Stanford. And so the appearance of Ben Stein’s Expelled resembles nothing so much as the intestinal rumblings just ahead of an attack of turista. Maybe that’s where the film’s title comes from.

Via the invaluable Cursor, Scientific American tells us just how fake Expelled is:

1. Quotation from Darwin is selective, a device to connect evolution to eugenics and the Holocaust, whereas Darwin actually viewed compassion positively.
2. The scenes of Ben Stein speaking to a packed auditorium are staged.
3. Stein lied to scientists to get them to appear in the movie.
4. The intelligent design-sympathetic researcher that Expelled presents as having been fired from the Smithsonian actually was a temporary employee who was offered further employment
5. Expelled lies in claiming that science excludes the question of design out of atheism. In fact, it excludes it because it’s a non-testable hypothesis.
6. The film falsely connects science and atheism. While it’s true that scientists are more likely to be atheistic than the general population, many scientists are religious.

But, hey, there’s nothing like a film filled with flim flam to show just how dedicated to truth its producers are.

Good News

Looks like Paraguay is going to have its first actual shot at democracy:

Asunción, Paraguay; and Mexico City – A former liberal priest with no experience in Paraguayan politics might be the force that unseats the world’s longest-ruling party currently in power when voters head to the polls Sunday.

Fernando Lugo, who gave up the priesthood in 2006 for a presidential bid, is the front-runner in an election that could end 61 years of rule by the right-leaning National Republican Association, known as the Colorado Party.

Mr. Lugo’s opponents have painted him as Latin America’s newest leftist candidate, sure to follow in the footsteps of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez or Bolivia’s Evo Morales. While he does favor center-left policies – something that plays well with pockets of society here – his main draw comes from having no political attachments in a nation rife with corruption.

Let’s wish the former father well.