Month: January 2005

The Torture President Tells Congress: “Keep Your Hands Off Our Torture.”

Reuters News Article

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Bush administration urged Congress to drop a legislative proposal that would have curbed the ability of U.S. intelligence to use extreme interrogation tactics, the White House acknowledged on Thursday.

But White House spokesman Scott McClellan insisted President Bush has made clear that his administration opposes the use of torture under any circumstances.

“We’ve made it very clear that we do not condone torture. The president would never authorize torture and that applies to everyone,” he said at a news briefing.

Has anyone compiled a list of all the separate pieces of evidence that the White House knowingly approved of and encouraged torture? They mainly just don’t like using the word. “Extreme interrogation tactics” seems to be the preferred nomenclature, which makes it sound like something out of a Mountain Dew commercial.

I read this stuff, about how the Administration is completely opposed to torture, and also completely opposed to anyone saying they’re not allowed to torture people… and I can’t help thinking of Monty Python and the Philosophy Faculty of the University of Wallabaloo… “Rule Two: No member of the faculty is to maltreat the Abos in any way at all…. if there’s anybody watching.”

Rules One and Three, of course, are “No Poofters!” which I guess would apply to the nationwide “get out the bigot vote” efforts for the 2004 elections, with the anti-gay-marriage proposals on the ballot in all the battleground states.

Wabi Sabi

I happened across a book today at the store called Wabi Sabi Simple. It introduced the aesthetic of “wabi sabi” — which is, among other things, the idea that “things that have been handled, that are aged have more value than things that are pristine” as a friend who studies Japanese language and culture put it. That’s the “wabi” side of it. The “sabi” side is about the beauty of alone-ness, melancholy, sort of. Well, they’re very culturally loaded concepts and nothing I’m going to do justice to in a blog entry. Suffice it to say it was something I wanted to look into further and learn about.

So I go to the glorious Web. And this is why I’m blogging it. What do I find when I look for wabi sabi on the wonderful world wide freaking web?

  • At the top of the list, this wiki article which starts as a straightforward discussion of the topic and ends up in a big debate over whether or not Extreme Programming is Wabi Sabi. I kid you not. Freaking hacker culture, thinks it owns everything, even Japanese aesthetics. Ptooey.
  • But that was nothing. The real horror begins Here, at Fox News:

    NEW YORK — Imperfection is beauty.
    That’s the concept at the heart of wabi sabi, the new “it” theme in popular design that brings nature to everything from cars to kitchen countertops….in People magazine’s 2003 spring fashion hot and not list, wabi sabi was described as “in” and feng shui, the once-chic Chinese art of positioning objects to create positive effects, as “out.”

Kami preserve us.

Wapsi Square

Wapsi Square has been one of the few webcomics I read daily for a while now. I started it when the creator, Paul Taylor, did a guest comic for PvP.

It’s kind of a “chick comic” despite being drawn/written by a guy; the cast are overwhelmingly female. It’s more of an ongoing drama than a gag strip; there are punchlines but they’re almost always very low key, not laugh-out-loud things. You stay not for The Funny (as Websnark puts it) but for The Story. (And maybe for Monica in her 8-ball shirt! But I digress…) There’s a lot of just ordinary people life drama, but there’s also a big dose of fantasy/supernatural: the main character, Monica, is involved with some strange supernatural forces, including the Aztec god of alcohol.

Quibbles: the pace can occasionally be glacial, with single conversations stretched out into a week or two….or three… or forever… Sometimes the style of drawing, e.g. the proliferation of wide-eyed toothy smiles, gets on my nerves… But these are minor quibbles: the art and writing are very good overall. (I actually quit reading for a while when the pace got TOO glacial and I despaired of anything ever actually happening again in the comic, but I got sucked back in.)

I thought I’d blog it because a recent strip happens to contain a succinct plot summary, so it might be a nice place for a new reader to drop in.

Other “must read” comics for me are Achewood, Questionable Content, and some newspapaer stuff like Dilbert, Agnes, Boondocks, Pearls Before Swine, and FoxTrot. Oh, and the aforementioned PvP, and Penny Arcade.

UPDATE:

Did I just say the art and stuff were “good overall”? Sometimes they are amazing.

Small personal bummer.

I interviewed for a job last week, and got the “sorry, we found somebody else” letter yesterday. A bummer. I’m working right now but it’s a weird situation — I’m doing contract programming for a company which keeps promising it’s going to hire me on as a salaried programmer soon, but says they’re not financially ready to take on a new employee right now. So that’s a non-ideal situation, and since I can’t force them to change their minds on that I’ve been looking around at other jobs. This one seemed like a real winner: a local Perl programming job.

I’d actually turned down two jobs I was interviewing for before this one because the salaries offered weren’t quite what I needed. So I had high hopes going in to this one. I was offered those other jobs, why not this one? But no. Not this time.

I’m grateful I’m not on a real job hunt where I’m doing this all day every day and getting rejections constantly, I guess. But this seemed like such a great possibility.

Lansing State Journal:At least 2 dead in vehicle pileups on I-96 near Lansing

Lansing State Journal:At least 2 dead in vehicle pileups on I-96 near Lansing

At least two people died and more than 25 others were injured in multiple pileups involving more than 100 vehicles in thick fog Wednesday afternoon on eastbound Interstate 96 east of Lansing, authorities said.

Drive CAREFULLY in the sloppy Michigan winter weather, folks…

The couple said their son called them from a cell phone on I-96 and told them, “I’m standing here in the road and I’m not sure how I got here.” They said Christopher Morrow told them his Toyota Celica “folded up like an accordion” when it crashed.