In Memoriam

Luise Rainer, actress and Academy Award winner.

Potpourri for 300, Alex

1. Confession of a former religious-right icon.

   And that strategy was simple: Republican leaders would affirm their anti-abortion commitment to evangelicals, and in turn we’d vote for them — by the tens of millions. Once Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency, “we” would reverse Roe, through a constitutional amendment and/or through the appointment of anti-abortion judges to the Supreme Court or, if need be, through civil disobedience and even violence, though this was only hinted at at first. In 2016, the dream we had will become a reality unless America wakes up. The Republicans are poised to destroy women’s rights. They have a majority on the Court to back them up.

   Frank Schaeffer, Salon, via AlterNet
    
2. Not that American anti-intellectualism is news, but it's extending to not reading what you slam.

   There are a number of factors at play in the current rash of controversies. One is a rather stunning sense of privilege, the confident sense of superiority that allows someone to pass sweeping judgment on a body of work without having done any study at all. After the Chronicle of Higher Education published an item highlighting the dissertations of five young PhD candidates in African-American studies at Northwestern University, Chronicle blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley wrote that the mere titles of the dissertations were sufficient cause to eliminate all black studies classes. Riley hadn't read the dissertations; they're not even published yet.

   Patricia Williams, The Guardian, via AlterNet
3. Scientific article fraud.

   Last month, Retraction Watch published an article describing a known and partially-related problem: fake peer reviews, in this case involving 50 BioMed Central papers. In the above-described article, Seife referred to this BioMed Central discovery; he was able to examine 6 of these titles and found that all were from Chinese authors, and shared style and subject matter to other “paper mill-written” meta-analyses.

   Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism
   
4. Norman Spinrad with some recent economic American history.

   The Great Depression of the 1930s, with unemployment rates triple those at the peak of the Great Recession, with a stock market crash that famously had wall street mavens jumping out of windows, with no such thing as unemployment insurance, Social Security, and so forth to cushion it at all, was such a catastrophe that it could only result in one kind of revolution or another, meaning a discontinuity, violent or not, democratic or not, a Communist revolution which was a real fear at the time, a Fascist revolution ala the replacement of the Weimar Republic by the Third Reich, or, as fortunately happened, something like the New Deal.

Almost Forgot

• Batocchio (Vagabond Scholar) has up the Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2014, posts chosen by various bloggers as their best writing for the year.  Everything listed is a gem.
• Southern Beale on Nashville's police chief and what happened there during the recent protests.

And it's time for a little research on IMDb. I may come up for air later this week.

Happy Holidays

Joys of the season to you, whichever day(s) of celebration you celebrate.

Yesterday I commemorated the last day of Chanukah.  Today I am enjoying the festival of Chinese food and a movie.  Tomorrow is both Boxing Day and the first virtue of Kwanzaa.  Solstice and Yule are in there, too.  Midnight mass was exhilarating ("Hallelujah Chorus" singalong and liturgical dance audience participation); wish you'd been there.  [ETA: And how could I have forgotten Festivus?!]

Isaac Newton, Clara Barton, and Fr. Seamus Genovese, Happy Birthdays to you!

Comparative Outrage 101

What distinguishes this case from this case.  Compare and contrast.  Show your work.

Poisons in the Well

• Antibiotic resistance:  Not just the zombie apocalypse anymore.

  Antibiotic resistance currently accounts for an estimated 50,000 deaths in the US and Europe, which have surveillance to support those numbers. (The CDC puts the number for the US at 23,000.) But the project estimates that the actual current death toll is 700,000 worldwide.
  
  If antibiotic resistance were allowed to grow unchecked — that is, if there were no successful efforts to curb it or no new drugs to combat it (the latter is very plausible) — the number of deaths per year would balloon to 10 million by 2050. For comparison, that is more than the 8.2 million per year who currently die of cancer and 1.5 million who die of diabetes, combined.

  (Maryn McKenna, Wired.)
• "Right-wing" pundit claims rapes are down.  Zandar disagrees:

  So keep in mind reported sexual assaults are down. The ones that aren't reported, well. I can't imagine why efforts to drag a woman who tries to report sexual assault through the mud, calling her a liar, and trying to destroy her utterly would lower the rate of reported sexual assaults. There's no epidemic because it's not being reported, and it's not being reported because those who do are treated worse by America than those who actually assault women on college campuses, ergo, there's no epidemic because the numbers "don't fit the left's narrative".
  
  It's a neat little package of self-loathing we bundle our young women up in, isn't it? If you report assault, you're worse than the person who assaulted you and you're assumed to be lying because of "the statistics" show assault on college campuses are down. If you don't report it, well, then the assault statistics are down, so there's no problem. College campuses are safer than ever!

  I have ceased to believe that anyone on the "right" can discuss an issue without dropping a large lie into the punchbowl.
• Speaking of lies, apparently some on the "right" are trying to equate abortion with birth control.

  The answer here is obvious. Rand Paul wants you to believe that Republicans don’t want to “ban birth control,” just as Joni Ernst wants you to believe that her support of personhood is a private matter that will have no policy ramifications. These are lies. Whether or not the right will own up to its dishonesty, and, as Dreweke points out, reveal the “full breadth of their anti–reproductive health and rights agenda” depends on if the public will keep letting them get away with it.

  [Emphasis added.]  (Katie McDonough, Salon, via AlterNet.)

Just So You Know

I may not have been clear in my scribblings over the last six or so years.  It's possible.  There's a school of thought that says if any misinterpretation of writing is possible, that is the misinterpretation that will be seized upon.  Unearthing examples will be left to the reader.

So.

Let me be blunt:

Torture is wrong.  Torture is unethical and immoral.  Torture is counterproductive.  Torture is evil.

Are we clear on that?  If not, the Internet is huge.

Commentary on the Feinstein report.  (James Wimberly, The Reality-Based Community.)

Wider implications.  (Pecunium, Better Than Salt Money, who has been writing about interrogation from the point of an interrogator for a long time now.)

Roundup of "conservative," "right-wing," and "Republican" responses to the report.  You may notice a certain bent to their reactions.  (Terrance, Republic of T) Additional video for the strong of stomach.  (Three of these videos come with Mature Content warning screens.  Take that seriously.)

Because They Know They are Doing Evil in the Sight of God

Why it's rare to hear apologies for torture.

Excerpt:

In the second half of the 20th Century, Britain's security forces developed what they called the "five techniques": hooding, white noise, a diet of bread and water, sleep deprivation, and being forced to stand in a stress position against a wall for long periods.

We now know that British agents trained officers of Brazil's military dictatorship in these techniques.

The report of Brazil's Truth Commission into the excesses of the dictatorship - published on the same day as the US Senate Intelligence committee's report into the CIA's "detention and interrogation program" - quoted former Brazilian President Ernesto Geisel saying that officers learned from the British secret service. They "practised torture with discretion", he said, while Brazil's "inexperienced staff did it in a more extrovert and open manner".

The British government, like the US until the Obama presidency, has always denied that its techniques, which were still being used in the Northern Ireland conflict in 1971, constituted torture. The European Court of Human Rights also ruled in 1978 that they constituted "inhuman and degrading treatment" rather than torture, though it will soon be asked to reconsider.

Regardless of the label, the brutality of these techniques was widely condemned when details were revealed. The UK's international reputation was tarnished and it lost a good deal of moral authority in its fight against terrorism. [Added emphasis mine.]

ETA: See also Jon Carroll's column. And don't buy into fear.

In Memoriam

• Mary Ann Mobley, actress and former Miss America
• Ken Weatherwax, actor (Pugsley Addams, et al.)
• Nathaniel Branden, psychotherapist (and ex of Ayn Rand)

Not Just Waterboarding

New York Times reporting on the Senate report on the CIA interrogation program.

It was worse, more brutal and more concealed from nominal oversight.

Nice to know the US now has the moral authority of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Spanish Inquisition.