Author: Ed That Goes Ping

Yahoo! News – U.S. OKs Evidence Gained Through Torture


Yahoo! News – U.S. OKs Evidence Gained Through Torture

Statements produced under torture have been inadmissible in U.S. courts for about 70 years. But the U.S. military panels reviewing the detention of 550 foreigners as enemy combatants at the U.S. naval base in Cuba are allowed to use such evidence, Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle acknowledged at a U.S. District Court hearing Thursday.

OK, let’s be fair. If American military tribunals under Bush’s oversight weren’t allowed to use evidence obtained under torture, they’d have no evidence at all. You don’t want to cripple our nation’s defenders do you?

Like I always say, Bush will go down in history as The Torture President.

Part of a general pattern: Illiberals (known colloquially as “conservatives”) generally think you can solve problems by hurting people. They don’t like laws that keep them from doing so, because when they are unable to hurt people, they don’t know where to begin.

Why Things Are Probably Going to Suck Soon

Two words: Peak Oil. What do Dick Cheney, Michael Moore, George W. Bush, the vice-president of the Iranian National Oil Company, energy investment banker Matthew Simmons, one of George W. Bush’s energy advisors, and many others agree about?

We’re past Peak Oil. Starting in the next few years oil prices will skyrocket and a lot of things which depend on cheap oil (like the U.S. economy) are going to break irrevocably.

With regards to oil, we’re a lot like a lottery winner who didn’t invest a dime, and is just burning through his cash, buying more and more, and then it starts to get scarce, and he just tries not to think about it… Until it all falls down. If he’d invested in something outside of his lottery stash, he could have been set up for life, but it was easier to just spend the ready cash. (I speak as someone who would unfortunately probably behave this way if he won the lottery.)

What if the fall of civilization that the older ones among us expected to happen because of nuclear war happened anyway cause we didn’t plan for what happened when the oil was gone?

I’ll tell you, I’d sure suck at eking out a living in a desperately impoverished post-industrial Dark Age.

Post-Election Mosh

Huh. There’s a post-election-theft, I mean post-election version of Eminem’s “Mosh” video. (grab the torrent here if you can.)

I like it but the original video was about voting as a revolutionary power, and it’s clear that with enough chicanery from corrupt Republicans in positions of power (that’s almost redundant these days), you can vote all you want; they’ll just throw votes away or modify vote totals until they get their 51% “mandate.” And the news media won’t dare cover the story seriously.

I guess the new video is kind of about not backing down even in the face of a victory by the bastards. But it just seems these days that there is no hope. They’ve got the power, they’re going to keep the power by any means necessary.

I wish things were like they are in the original video. I wish we had a system where you could actually vote a killer and torturer out of office, where the exploited could rise up and kick out the exploiters.

But things aren’t like that, apparently. We live in the Republican States of America. And are likely to for the foreseeable future.

Hope, and belief in the power of actual democracy in America, are so pre-November 2.

UPDATE:

Actually, to put things a little less bleakly — the little people rising up and fighting the big bad guys is still fighting — and fighting is essentially illiberal. The people who are all about the fighting and killing and getting their way with violence are the conservatives, the Bushies, the Republicans. They believe that you can solve problems by hurting people. This video advocates demonstration, not violence, but it does its best to dress it up in a mood of righteous combat. And there’s the problem. Fighting, force, is never going to be on the side of liberalism, because getting your way by force is essentially illiberal — conservative. You can’t win by playing their game on their field. You just can’t.