“Oh, I know, Obama assures us that the money this time won’t be used to proselytize and that the churches, synagogues, and mosques won’t be able to discriminate against prospective employees on the basis of their religion. But at bottom, the faith-based initiative, no matter the clunky name Obama affixes to it (Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships), will amount to the same old government subsidy for religious groups. If you give a church a million dollar grant to cover a program it’s already running, that frees up a million bucks for that church to go find converts.”

• The question: Want to know if waterboarding is torture? Ask Christopher Hitchens

  Late last year, the writer, polemicist and fierce proponent of the US-led invasion of Iraq Christopher Hitchens attempted, in a piece for the online magazine Slate, to draw a distinction between what he called techniques of "extreme interrogation" and "outright torture".

• The answer: Believe Me, It's Torture: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com
  
  The author catches his breath after undergoing his first waterboarding session. Photographs by Gasper Tringale.

  You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

• Which catchphrases should be "thrown under the bus"? - By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine
• Yasmin Sethi - Product Design - Alice Chess Set

  A Chess Set inspired by the novel 'Alice through the Looking Glass' where the pieces magically turn transparent when they touch the board. In ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’ by Lewis Carroll, Alice falls through a mirror and on the other side of the mirror, she becomes a piece in a game of chess. Inspired by this, the chess pieces have an opaque mirror finish, when they touch the surface of the board they magically turn transparent and reveal the identity of the piece contained inside them. When removed from the board they revert to being opaque, hiding the identity of the piece. This is a comment on how a chess piece has no value unless it is in play on the board. If removed from the board, a pawn and a queen are equal, in that neither have any value.

  
  
  
• Obama advisor Greg Craig: Adding insult to injury - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

  In today's New York Times, James Risen -- who won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing Bush's illegal NSA spying program -- has an article reporting on Obama supporters who are criticizing Obama for his FISA reversal and who are attempting to defeat the bill which Obama supports. The article quotes Jane Hamsher, Markos Moulitsas and myself and features the very innovative effort by Obama supporters to use his campaign's social networking tools to urge Obama to oppose the FISA bill (more on that campaign here). For his article, Risen spoke with Obama adviser Greg Craig, a partner at the Washington law firm Williams & Connolly, and this is what Craig told Risen:

  Greg Craig, a Washington lawyer who advises the Obama campaign, said Tuesday in an interview that Mr. Obama had decided to support the compromise FISA legislation only after concluding it was the best deal possible. "This was a deliberative process, and not something that was shooting from the hip," Mr. Craig said. "Obviously, there was an element of what’s possible here. But he concluded that with FISA expiring, that it was better to get a compromise than letting the law expire."

  Craig's statement is flat-out false. FISA -- enacted in 1978 and amended many times to accommodate modern communications technology -- has no expiration date. The Protect America Act, which Congress enacted last August to legalize warrantless eavesdropping on Americans, had a 6-month sunset provision and thus already expired back in February, restoring FISA as the governing law. Thus, if Congress does nothing now, FISA will continue indefinitely to govern the Government's power to spy on the communications of Americans. It doesn't expire. What Craig said in defense of Obama is just wrong

  .
• Barack Obama Disgusts John McCain by Heeding John McCain’s Advice on Iraq | Indecision2008 | Comedy Central
• Seedmagazine.com | The Seed Salon | Tom Wolfe + Michael Gazzaniga
• This Week’s Sign of the Apocalypse: Stephen Baldwin | Indecision2008 | Comedy Central

• Cectic
• Making Fun of Christians (tip to pedantsareus)
• The Satirical Political Report » Citing His Vietnam Experience, Forrest Gump Declares for President
• Collosal critic reality check needed | The Australian(a review of James Wood's How Fiction Works )

  IT is not unusual, post-Foucault, to observe the decline of God as a source of meaning in the West since the Enlightenment and the subsequent diminishment of the power of the Bible. Nor is it unusual to point out that this occurred side by side with the rise of the novel.

• Scientist at Work - David Pritchard - Scientist Studies Whether Hookworms Can Protect Against Allergies - NYTimes.com

  In 2004, David Pritchard applied a dressing to his arm that was crawling with pin-size hookworm larvae, like maggots on the surface of meat. He left the wrap on for several days to make sure that the squirming freeloaders would infiltrate his system.

• Counting monkeys tick off yet another 'human' ability - life - 01 July 2008 - New Scientist
• Language Log » Charades does not reveal a universal sentence structure
• Propagated Misattribution about Dostoevsky « A Guy’s Moleskine Notebook

  Possibly the best-known quote from the works of Dostoevsky is from The Brothers Karamazov: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” The sentence does not appear, nor anything close to it. Nor does it appear in any of the other four Dostoevsky novels whose complete English texts are available online.

• Thirteen Hundred Rats: Fiction: The New Yorker What can I say, I'm a T. C. Boyle fan.

• We Must Preserve The Earth's Dwindling Resources For My Five Children | The Onion - America's Finest News Source


• Is a sniff of coffee as good as a sip? - brain - 13 June 2008 - New Scientist


• t r u t h o u t | Barack Care Versus John Care If you need a single reason to vote for Barack over John McCain this is it.


• Sexual hypocrisy and the Internet. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine Oh those community standards.


• Bottled Water Industry Faces Growing OppositionLast week’s decision in York County may be part of a national backlash. - CommonDreams.org


• Agents can randomly seize travelers' laptops or PDAs -- baltimoresun.com
• Good Math, Bad Math : "Market based" College Evaluations


• Markers award students for writing obscenities on GCSE papers - Times Online



• Charades reveals a universal sentence structure - being-human - 30 June 2008 - New ScientistIf Kim Jong Il plays charades, his hand gestures might look just like George Bush's, a new study suggests. It seems that, regardless of the sentence structure of their native tongue, non-verbal communication is the same across the globe.

  English, Spanish and many other Western languages build most basic sentences around a simple blueprint: a subject followed by a verb and object; for example, "mice eat cheese". Other languages, like Turkish and Korean, tend toward subject-object-verb construction, or "mice cheese eat".

  "There's something pretty fundamental about these orders," says Susan Goldin-Meadow, a linguistic psychologist at the University of Chicago, who led the study.

My son Chris told me I can't joke about John McCain getting shot down as a qualification to be president.

"You saw how your readers reacted to the Obama 08' new disappointment bumper sticker," he said. "You thought they'd all find it as funny as hell, like you did, and what happened, you lost more readers. They've had it with you. It's your very own bittergate. You're clinging to principles above party. You're clinging to some pollyanna notion of what ought to be. You think you deserve a world without kool-aid drinkers disguised as pragmatists. You thought it was funny, they didn't, and now you're talking about making fun of McCain's service to his country with some lame top ten things McCain's getting shot down qualifies him for."

"I protest," I said. "I respect his service, I'd have respected it even if he hadn't got shot down. Taking a million dollar jet out of the garage for just the 23rd time and crashing. Any dad understands how stuff like that happens. Your insurance rates go up, they think you're going to buy them a new one when they get home. They think they can use the experience on their resume, yes I understand."

"You can't joke about it," he said. "It would be in extremely poor taste."

"Okay," I said. " I was having trouble coming up with ten reasons anyway. I would have had to ask for help from the readers and they wouldn't help, they'd think it lame, they'd be disgusted."

"And anyway there's really not much something like that qualifies you for, maybe a character in a J.G. Ballard novel, but that's not funny."

Related:
Exploding Heads

Right On, General Clark. Do Not Back Down.

“Attacking” McCain’s Military Record

What Wesley Clark really said, and how the press missed it.

Slamming Wesley Clark

Plenty of Beltway institutions already existed for the purpose of cheering on any and all Democrats no matter what they do. If that's all that blogs are supposed to do, then there is no need for them. From the beginning, blogs have been devoted to opposing Democratic complicity and capitulation -- to protesting the lack of Democratic responsiveness to their supporters -- every bit as much as opposing GOP corruption and media malfeasance. That role is at least as important as the others.

A presidential election is a unique time when Americans are engaged in a discussion over our collective political values (at least more engaged than any other time). Why would anyone watch the Obama campaign use this opportunity to perpetuate and reinforce this narrative, and watch Obama embrace polices that are the precise antithesis of the values he espoused in the past, and not criticize or object to that? Criticisms of that sort aren't unhealthy or counter-productive. They're the opposite. Of course one ought to object if a political candidate -- even Barack Obama -- is advocating policies that trample on one's core political values or promulgating toxic narratives. That's particularly true since his doing so isn't necessary to win; it's actually more likely to have the opposite effect.

There is no question, at least to me, that having Obama beat McCain is vitally important. But so, too, is the way that victory is achieved and what Obama advocates and espouses along the way. Feeding distortions against someone like Wesley Clark in order to please Joe Klein and his fact-free media friends, or legalizing warrantless eavesdropping and protecting joint Bush/telecom lawbreaking, or basing his campaign on demonizing MoveOn.org and 1960s anti-war hippies, is quite harmful in many long-lasting ways. Electing Barack Obama is a very important political priority but it isn't the only one there is, and his election is less likely, not more likely, the more homage he pays to these these tired, status-quo-perpetuating Beltway pieties

• The baseless, and failed, "Move to the Center" cliche - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

  So what, then, is the basis for the almost-unanimously held Beltway conventional view that Democrats generally, and Barack Obama particularly, will be politically endangered unless they adopt the Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism and National Security, which -- for some reason -- is called "moving to the Center"? There doesn't appear to be any basis for that view. It's just an unexamined relic from past times, the immovable, uncritical assumption of Beltway strategists and pundits who can't accept that it isn't 1972 anymore -- or even 2002.

  Beyond its obsolescence, this "move-to-the-center" cliché ignores the extraordinary political climate prevailing in this country, in which more than 8 out of 10 Americans believe the Government is fundamentally on the wrong track and the current President is one of the most unpopular in American history, if not the most unpopular. The very idea that Bush/Cheney policies are the "center," or that one must move towards their approach in order to succeed, ignores the extreme shifts in public opinion generally regarding how our country has been governed over the last seven years.



• The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America | Democracy and Elections | AlterNet

  Here is an excerpt from " The Pornography of Power , and by the way the three winners in our contest are emzmcgee, dende blogger, and hiebz.



• Jesus and Mo » on Militant athesits


• On Language - Gaffe - A Glossary of Goofs - On Language - William Safire - NYTimes.com


• Annals of National Security: Preparing the Battlefield: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker


• Obama Assails Remarks by McCain on Offshore Oil Drilling - NYTimes.com

  The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran.
  by Seymour M. Hersh



• A Cartoon—By Mr. Fish (Harper's Magazine)


• Olympic starter's gun 'unfair' : Nature News


• Mechanism And Function Of Humor Identified By New Evolutionary Theory

  Alastair Clarke explains: "The theory is an evolutionary and cognitive explanation of how and why any individual finds anything funny. Effectively it explains that humour occurs when the brain recognizes a pattern that surprises it, and that recognition of this sort is rewarded with the experience of the humorous response, an element of which is broadcast as laughter.

  "By removing stipulations of content we have been forced to study the structures underlying any instance of humour, and it has become clear that it is not the content of the stimulus but the patterns underlying it that provide the potential for sources of humour. For patterns to exist it is necessary to have some form of content, but once that content exists, it is the level of the pattern at which humour operates and for which it delivers its rewards."



• Some Friendly Advice For McCain’s Veep Vetting Team » Mad Kane's Political Madness
• TPM Election Central | Talking Points Memo | Is Bobby Jindal -- Who May Be On McCain's Veep Shortlist -- An Exorcist?


• Guernica / Crisis Darfur