ACSBlog: The Blog of the American Constitution Society: White House Chooses New Homeland Security Chief
: ‘According to American University Law Professor and ACS Faculty Advisory Herman Schwartz, Chertoff is the second major Bush cabinet nominee to be involved in the scandal over abusive treatment of detainees. In an August 18, 2004 op-ed published in Newsday, Schwartz writes that “[h]arsh ‘stress and duress’ tactics used by the CIA in early 2002 – such as simulated drowning – were reviewed and apparently cleared by the Justice Department Criminal Division, then headed by Michael Chertoff.”‘
Category: General
How to be Creative?
GapingVoid has made some good noise lately by releasing a Creative Commons licensed book on “how to be creative.” It’s in PDF form and also on the web.
I’d say it’s partly brilliant and partly wrong-headed.
I think that depending on who you are when you read it you are either going to take away the brilliant parts and think it’s a wonderful book or the wrong-headed parts and come away the worse for it.
Wrong-headed: he doesn’t (at least on the face of it) shake the myth of Successful People vs Losers. He’s always talking about failed creative people who work as waiters and whatnot. But then he’ll turn around and say: “Even if your path never makes any money or furthers your career, that’s still worth a TON.” Well, wait a minute. Should we pity the pathetic losers working as waiters because they didn’t have sufficiently different or unique ideas, or should we realize that what they’re doing may be “still worth a TON”?
There is a lot of this kind of conflict going on in the work. He takes a broad “everyone can do this, it doesn’t take special talent, just hard work” tack in one section, and then he talks about how really talented people “don’t need props” and mere hacks do. Wait, does talent matter or not?
Again and again he equivocates on really important issues. I think he says some really deep & true & important things, things where society’s assumptions are wrong and harmful, and we need to see the truth, but then he lapses back into those wrong assumptions on another page.
This is frustrating. But I think it’s a good book nonetheless, and I am really glad he wrote it and made it available. Lot of very very good stuff in there.
And I must admit I wrote this before finishing it, so I may have missed some very important stuff before the end.
Boing Boing: Desperate Ken Lay paying search-engines to return links to his
Boing Boing: Desperate Ken Lay paying search-engines to return links to his “version” of Enron.
You know all those cool “click for charity” things where you can click to give a buck to hungry people or something?
Now the magic of the internet has given us a link you can click to deliberately cost a robber-baron corporate scumhole five to twelve cents for nothing. (Unless you start reading and believing his web site, in which case it’s not for nothing…)
Exhuming Reagan?
One of the big secrets of the Reagan Administration was that they were collaborating with really viciously evil right-wing groups in Central America, “kill and torture civilians” kind of evil (you may remember them being called “freedom fighters”). Big scandal, but not covered much in American news. Think “School of the Americas,” think United-States-sponsored terrorism. It was funding for this whole thing, which had to be done secretly to keep it off the books, that precipitated the Iran-Contra scandal.
Apparently this is now being contemplated as a strategy for Iraq: “many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal.”
Link to Newsweek story.
This story suggests just what chilling things were implied by the reverence, piety, and even nostalgia for Reagan at the time of his death last year.
It’s not that people have forgotten the atrocities he and his crew were responsible for. It’s that they look back on them fondly.
Webcomics: Threat Or Menace?
PVP thanks Mike “Gabe” Krahulik for administering an appropriate dose of smackdown to Wiley, author of the Non Sequitur newspaper comic, who’s been not-very-subtly slamming webcomics and web publishing in general in his strips, ever since Scott Kurtz of PVP harshed the mellow of syndicated cartoonists in general by declaring the syndication model obsolete and offering his comic free to newspapers for advertising purposes.
Websnark has some good comments and summary on the whole situation.
All I wanted to say was that Danae, the character in Non Sequitur who’s being used to slam web publishing, is OK and all, but she’s no Agnes. Agnes rocks my world. I just wanted to get that out in the open.