What's it like to fight and die for nothing?

Over 20 soldiers from the Welsh Guards' unit of the British Army have died in the current offensive against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Independent (UK) has published what amounts to a wail of grief over the loss of these men in a conflict which an anonymous captain in their unit sees as endless and unavailing.

We are dealing here with a tenacious and stubborn enemy. Despite our dropping bombs on compounds that the enemy is using as firing-points, the very next day, new enemy fighters are back. ... Their numbers seem to stay constant, as opposed to decreasing --- all of which gives a strong indication that we will not be able to reduce their numbers to a level where they are tactically defeated.

It seems increasingly true that a stable Afghanistan will only be possible with some sort of agreement, involvement or power-sharing deal with the Taliban.

However, as the British Army units here are increasingly sucked into the turmoil of the latest "fighting season" there seems little evidence that anything is happening on the political and diplomatic stage. In the meantime, tour follows tour, during which the most intense fighting appears to achieve not much more than extremely effectively inflicting casualties on both sides, whilst Afghanistan remains the sick man of Central Asia.

The author is a veteran of two tours in Iraq, but somehow fighting in Afghanistan is more debilitating. He describes his reactions to fellow soldiers dying:

With each death I think each of us experiences a feeling of total shock, powerlessness and impotence. Within your mind you feel you have to do something, especially if you knew the individual. Back at home that might be to jump in the car and drive to some secluded spot where you can get out and scream at the top of your lungs to let out all the anguish. But here nothing of the sort is possible. You are all enclosed within your camp or patrol base; there is no refuge, no private corner to go to, to deal with your grief.

Around you everything else has to continue, and cannot stop. The radios still have to be manned and answered, the patrols still have to be planned, the convoys have to be organised. It is not as if you can take a day off to deal with the grief, to come to terms with it. And even if you could, what good would that do?

... I am just speaking for those of us who deal with the deaths and injuries in Afghanistan indirectly, as an explosion in the distance, followed by a report on the radio, then a helicopter coming in to pick up the casualty.

As for those who deal directly with the deaths and injuries, who have to go into the Viking vehicles after the explosion to pull out the casualties, who have to tourniquet the remaining stumps after both the legs of a person have been blown off, those who have to pick up the leftover pulpy fragments of a disintegrated body and put them into a bag, I am not sure how they react.

I would imagine in a similar way to the rest of us: you put it aside as soon as you can, as there is nothing to be achieved in thinking about it. All you will do is think yourself into a corner, where you are faced with the absurdity and horrid waste of it all. And if you let that take a hold, how are you meant to perform, drag yourself out of your tent at 4am after just three hours sleep, to go on another foot patrol, another 18-hour convoy, another 12-hour shift in the operations room?

How long will citizens of the United Kingdom be willing to keep sending their people into this fruitless hellhole? The Netherlands will leave Afghanistan in 2010 and Canada in 2011. Eventually Afghanistan will be a solely U.S. war, without an understandable mission and costing billions this country doesn't have. Just why is the United States so committed to this futility? Can't all the genius of the security apparatus be put to figuring out a less costly, in lives and money, way to ensure that some wackos in caves in distant mountains don't pull off another 9/11?

One gets the sense that our military is hamstrung by its procurement successes: got weapons of massive destruction, must use them. Hammer, meet nail. There has to be a better way.

Confessions of a former anti-immigrant activist

Robb Pearson got hooked on being noticed -- and then he got over it. He realized that the attention he'd gotten for agitating against immigrants had morphed into across the board anti-Latino racism. And that wasn't where he wanted the country he loved to go.

Given the incitement to racial rage at the President we're seeing these days from opponents of Obama's healthcare reform, Pearson makes an inspiring model of how good people can figure out they've gone off track and find their way back to community values they thought they were defending.

H/t Citizen Orange.

Lest we forget that people die ...

This sign marked the path to the Gay Head Light on Martha's Vineyard island, where, every year on August 6, people concerned about peace and nuclear weapons greet the dawn in memory of the Hiroshima bombing.

The determined band of peaceniks who attended might be heartened by the findings of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs 2008 opinion survey on our attitudes about foreign policy. Seventy-three percent of us think preventing the spread of nuclear weapons is very important. It's not clear from the report, whether respondents understand, as Cora Weiss, President of the Hague Appeal for Peace, said during the August 6 gathering: "If we won't get rid of them, others are going to want them and get them."

But it is clear in the same survey that, by and large, people in the United States are not gung-ho about aggressive military action all over the world.

President Obama is going to run into this reluctance as the war in Afghanistan heats up. Already, CNN reports that 54 percent of us oppose this effort, a gain of 9 points more opposition than showed up in May. That's after about 30 days of an offensive and 50 or so dead Americans. This is not a war that people think is necessary or are willing to give patient support to. George W. Bush used up and wore out whatever trust many had that Uncle Sam knows why our guys should die in faraway places.

The good folks from Peace Action West have been talking with Congresscritters about the Afghan war. Our representatives aren't exactly aggressive about protecting our interests. Rather, they floating along in a skeptical holding pattern:

While few members of Congress were eager to mount a strong opposition to the current approach in Afghanistan (especially against a president of their own party), I did not hear anyone strongly defend the strategy either.

There's room for constituent pressure to push more of them over into active opposition by the end of the year.

That seems the least we could do for Afghans and U.S. soldiers who are dying for no discernible purpose.

OFA, healthcare, and playing defense

The emails (and fund appeals) are flowing in. Those of us who've kept up a connection with the current iteration of the Obama campaign machine are being called to action in support of our President's healthcare reform. I think it is going to be a tough sell for the organizers. Some of the obstacles:

• At the meetings I've attended, many folks made it pretty clear that they are fans of single payer, government-run, healthcare reform, of doing away with insurance companies. Our guy took that option off the table before this round started and that remains disappointing.

• Congress has been muddling with this process for months, but we still don't know quite what is in it. That's a big problem; it's awfully hard to mobilize folks for something that seems nebulous.

• Moreover, whatever allegiance OFA inspires is in Obama, not in Congress. If anything, activists want their guy to pound some sense into dithering Washington hacks. But they aren't seeing him do that, on health reform, or anything.

• Because there's been so much process and so little substance, the other side has scored some hits. What will this thing cost? Will it chip away at existing healthcare coverage? This last one is ridiculously easy to sell to the public because gradual erosion is what almost everyone has experienced in dealing with the existing exploitative system.

• Obama activists don't fully believe this stuff, but nagging questions reduce their energy. After all, the President himself talks all the time about how we have to get health care costs under control. It's not hard to imagine that might mean cutting something we have that we like.

Ultimately, Obama's activists are CHANGE people. The campaign knew that and sold it. Now OFA is trying to mobilize the same group for modest, reasonable, incremental benefits. This is a tough sell; I'm not surprised that the other side is being more visibly successful in turning out anxious, fearful Obama opponents.

And yes -- I'll put in some time agitating for Obama-care, unless I think it has warped into something actively hurtful to access for most people. But this campaign is not a happy one; it is pure defense. If the right kills whatever half-assed healthcare "reform" we end up with, it will cripple many of the possibilities opened up by Obama's election and the hard won Democratic majorities in Congress.

But saying that is a far cry from the joy of last November. The prospect ahead is a long slog up a tough hill toward what may be a false summit, not a glad community dance.

Unsolicited testimonial

Today an electric hiccup swept through the hard drive of my laptop and swallowed my address book. Suddenly all nearly 1100 or so folks I've corresponded with or talked with over the last 15 years were gone. The section called "ALL" was simply empty, an 8Kb data shell.

Happily, I didn't have to freak out completely. Over a year ago, I had read about a company called Mozy that performed automated back-ups into online storage. So long as you were connected to the internet, your computer would be backed up. For a small fee, that seemed good insurance, in addition to my sporadic backups to an external drive. So I signed up.

Set up was not exactly a breeze. I was working from a slightly flaky wireless connection at a location where I was a temporary visitor. The instructions said the initial back up might take a while. I have a lot of data...


Soon I was getting this message:


But the connection kept failing. I'd see screens like this:


That is almost certainly illegible; here's an enlargement of the right panel:


As you can imagine, I was not encouraged. What did the electronic demon mean by "this should never happen"?

But I had a lot of time that week, so I kept restarting the process... Each time I'd see this:


Finally, after 13 days (!), Mozy report it was done.


That was over a year ago. Ever since, nearly every day, despite weeks of travel and all sorts of internet hook ups, Mozy has indicated it had updated my backup over night. Once or twice it seemed to have stopped; on each occasion tech support replied to my inquiries promptly. Though I never quite understood what they (or I?) did, it always resumed backing up.

And so, today, when my address book disappeared, I wasn't all that scared. And I was right. Within an hour I had all 1086 people back. Mozy had worked exactly as it claims to.

Now I need to figure out whether this episode means my aging laptop is on its way to electronic obsolescence...

A great year for fungi

It's been a terrible year here on Martha's Vineyard for tourism (what with the recession) and even for beach sunning (what with the endless rain.) But it has been a great year for mushrooms.


Since so much of what I do here is tromp around on trails, I'm having a marvelous time noting the considerable variety.


Apparently about 170 kinds have been catalogued on the island.


I wouldn't consider eating any of them -- too ignorant for that. But this one strikes me as ominous.


Something else has been eating this one. Probably an insect. Current climatic conditions are also healthy for many biting bugs.


These look a little like something I might see in a store, but I doubt it.


Quite quickly, they seem to rot into the forest carpet.


This looks like a fungus, but it is not, exactly. It's a Ghost Plant, Indian Pipe, or Corpse Plant, a parasite on fungi. It doesn't live on chlorophyll and usually grows in dense forests. I saw this specimen on a roadside. It's been a heck of a wet summer.

Bomb anniversaries

Sixty four years ago the Untied States dropped a (small) nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and killed some 70,000 people instantly and perhaps 140,000 more over the next few years. We can still hope to draw lessons from that catastrophic event. And we need to.

Fourteen years ago, Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell tried to capture some meanings of the nuclear bombings (we also blasted Nagasaki and another 200,000 souls two days later) in Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial. The book doesn't seem to have made much of a splash; you can get a copy today on Amazon for less than a buck. But some of it speaks loudly to the present moment.

Our shiny new President (actually he's getting a little tarnished these days, but he's still newish) says he wants nuclear disarmament. Thank goodness -- only a fool wouldn't. Lifton and Mitchell write thoughtfully about American presidents:

No one is more overburdened than a modern American president. As historians have pointed out, he must be both chief executive and king. ...

Harry S. Truman was a good man, a loving man, who made a decision to use the cruelest weapon in human history on a heavily populated city and then spent much of his remaining years defending that decision. ... Truman, we believe, experienced an atrocity-producing situation, a psychological and political environment structured so as to motivate the average person to engage in slaughter, in this case an unprecedented dimension of slaughter. ...

Our view is that, yes, Roosevelt could possibly have taken a different turn -- which means it was at least possible for Truman to do the same. One must add, however, that such an act on the part of either would have required an extraordinary combination of courage, moral vision, and capacity to step back from immediate pressures (on behalf of a commitment to humankind) -- a combination sufficiently rare that it should discourage all of us from creating situations in which it is required of any president.

That last point is to some extent the crux of it for people in the United States. We live in enough of a democracy so we have substantial responsibility for our politicians. We can't expect to ensure we always have moral geniuses at the helm of our political system. (We've demonstrated all too recently that we may not be able to assume even a normal level of brains in these guys.)

And so, to the greatest extent possible, it becomes the duty of citizens of a country that possesses the capacity to blow the planet away to encourage policies that value moderation and equanimity. We must strive not to put our leaders in situations that might lead them to commit atrocities.

And from that perspective, Lifton and Mitchell highlight an aspect of what was going on in 1945 that has far too nasty echoes in recent U.S. experience. They make no bones about observing that, in part, U.S. leaders felt justified in frying Japanese cities to get revenge against a racially inferior enemy.

[There were] elements of racism (strong on both sides) and revenge. Images of Pearl Harbor were still vivid ...

Interestingly, 50 years after the bombing, when the Smithsonian tried to present a retrospective about the bomb, what riled veterans was any mention of "vengeance" as a motive for the decision to go ahead. These U.S. G.I.s had experienced the nuclear blasts as reprieves from further combat, from the awful prospect of invading the Japanese islands. Yet it is hard to dismiss the revenge component. We've all lived bathed in it in recent years. A similar emotion rallied support behind George W. Bush's irresponsible war of choice on Iraq -- and lingers, underlying the unconsidered acquiescence President Obama is still getting for his Afghanistan folly. "They attacked New York and the Pentagon. We'll show 'em."

With the power of nukes, the destructive potential of war making has advanced beyond what the planet can survive. Revenge is no longer an allowable luxury. We have to create the conditions that enable leaders to give it up. *** A Londoner ruminated wisely about overcoming "terrorism" on the fourth anniversary of the bombings in his city's underground trains in 2005:

Four years on, the level of fear in London is back to what it was on 6th July 2005. People carry on their lives quite happily. The underground is packed with people not even giving a thought to the possibility of being blown up on the way to work. The majority of commuters this morning will not even remember that today is the anniversary of those deeply unpleasant events.

This is the best memorial.

Yes.

Truth in advertising?

Why the U.S. Navy would think it could recruit "sailors" by offering a chance to drive an armored vehicle down a desert road littered with roadside bombs is beyond me. I assume they tested this ad's efficacy.

It appeared in that bastion macho cool, Outside. Click on the picture to see the ad larger; hit your browser's "back" button to return.

Last name leads to watch list

During my long-past brush with the "no fly list," I remember feeling just as Amanda Malik does. What does the government mean by sticking miscellaneous citizens on a "watch list"?

Usually I only quote bits of stories that appear elsewhere on the net. However this is such a clear account of what it means to a very ordinary, middle American individual who finds herself enmeshed in the workings of the "Homeland Security" regime that I want to share a lot of it.

"It has to do with your last name."

At those words, I burst into tears. My husband, Mike, and I were standing in the airport in Islip, Long Island, trying to check into a flight on Southwest Airlines. The attendant behind the counter was filling out a form that said "Watch List" at the top.

My husband and I were the subjects of profiling.

To most, Malik looks like Ma-leek, which in Arabic means "king." It is a very common Arabic name. To us, it looks like Ma-lick, a Czech name that we share with many who are Eastern European. But because of our Arabic-looking name, we are now on the terrorist watch list.

To those who have been discriminated against because of their ancestry for their entire lives, this story might sound naïve. And I freely admit that up until this point, I was naïve. But I have a new sympathy and respect for people who have dealt with this for their entire lives, because I'm here to tell you that it is humiliating. Right down to the core. It is one thing to suspect that you are being discriminated against. It is another to be told flat-out that you are. This is a new and very unsettling experience for us, but one I'm afraid we're going to have to get used to. ...

Mike and I have always had to have a rather nonchalant attitude when it comes to airport security. Since Sept. 11, we've always been searched what seems like more than the average person or been pulled aside at the metal detector more than seemed to be normal. We've had our bags searched. I've had a rather large female security guard pat me down and feel underneath the underwire of my bra. We always joked that it was because he and, more recently I, had an Arabic-looking last name.

Apparently we were right.

It was funny until it was true.

It's embarrassing to have people look at you with suspicion when you have done nothing wrong. Innocent until proven guilty doesn't apply to the Homeland Security Watch List. You're at the mercy of a government agency that doesn't have to tell you anything about anything. ...

From now on, Mike and I will always travel with our passports and copies of our birth certificates. My fear is that someday we won't be allowed to board a flight or we will be detained by security for having the wrong name. It's so sad to me that in an effort to make it's citizens feel safer -- even if they actually aren't -- the U.S. is treating what I can only assume is millions of its citizens this way.

Amanda Malik has an advantage in taking on "Homeland Security" that most citizens don't have. She is a copy editor for the Lafayette-West Lafayette Journal and Courier where this was published. When my partner and I found ourselves on the no-fly list, we happened to be traveling to visit the sister of a pretty senior journalist. He took an interest in our experience. What do people without such connections do? Probably just shut up and know there is little they can do.

Professor Gates amid anxieties -- personal and social

When Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. fulfilled a long-standing commitment to read at the Martha's Vineyard Book Fair this morning, he drew a crowd.

And many cameras.

The good doctor is something of a known quantity here, but his recent celebrity thanks to Cambridge's Officer Crowley has kicked media interest in him up many notches.

His project -- tracing African American family trees -- embodied in In Search of Our Roots, both highlights the peoples' history in those ancestries and reveals the polyglot genetic origins of this country's population.

Rather to my surprise, Gates talked about aspects of his recent unpleasantness I had not known about. Apparently when a Black man attracts that much attention in a racially charged situation, the consequence is angry phone calls and death threats. (The Cambridge police department published his private, unlisted landline and cell numbers in their public report.) Harvard is urging him to move; his home has become dangerously visible to cranks.

A reporter asked Gates what the arrest brouhaha had meant to him personally. He said he was still trying to figure out. But he did say that the night before he went to DC for the White House visit, he dreamt he was arrested at the White House. Guess this sort of thing can throw you, even if you work at Harvard.

***Frank Rich had an insightful column on the Crowley-Gates circus in today's New York Times. He chalks up the extraordinary media enthusiasm for the story to commercial media exploitation of white anxiety caused by the demographic fact that this is ceasing to be a white country.

What provokes their angry and nonsensical cries of racism is sheer desperation: an entire country is changing faster than these white guys bargained for.

This Californian wants to point out that, despite its other problems, the experience of my state suggests that we might get through this transition more rapidly than the national media fixation would suggest.

In the mid-1990s, seeing the California electorate whipped into a racist frenzy by Republicans who exploited fear of immigrants and affirmative action to keep some waning power, some of us warned, "California is becoming the new Alabama." And so it seemed.

But after doing pretty well for a couple of turns, the purveyors of racial fear have completely marginalized themselves; aside from the Terminator's freak show election, Republicans haven't won statewide office in ten years. Not only are more people of color claiming their rightful place in the process, but also a significant fraction of white Californians have got over their expectation that their country will look like them. It never got as bad as it looked like it might -- perhaps the whole nation can also come to terms with reality more rapidly than we think. Perhaps that's why we elected Obama.

Voices from the recession

West Tisbury Flea Market, Martha's Vineyard, MA

Two vendors comparing notes:

"This month is supposed to be better, right?"

At the grocery store, two merchants meet and greet:

"How's it going?"

"It's slow."

"Me too; it's getting scary ..."

It's tough times here in this once booming bucolic playland. Summer business has to carry many residents through the whole year.

Waiting for electricity

Laith took that picture of a Baghdad sand storm on July 29. He reports that the high temperature that day was 109F -- perhaps falling to 83F overnight. And he wonders, why, after six years, his city still only gets about 5 hours of electric power a day? No electricity means no air conditioning.

I don't know what the Iraqi ministry of electricity was doing during six years since the invasion but definitely it did not implement any project because the power supply did not improve, on the contrary, it became worse. As an Iraqi man, I can not trust any more what the Iraqi government say about rebuilding this country.

Laith works for a U.S. newspaper; he's certainly no fan of the bad old regime. But he does remember expecting his city to have electricity. Before. Before the U.S. came marching in.

On top of the physical insecurity, this is what we're leaving Iraqis.

Bubble living

I really do live in a bubble -- and I'll stay right where I am, thanks.

Among people I know, it would be impossible to find anyone who does not believe that President Obama was born in the United States -- but the media keep discussing the so-called "birthers" who cling to this lunacy.

Turns out there's a reason I've never met one: they are clustered (quarantined?) in the South.



H/t Washington Monthly. Only 47 percent of Southerners know the right answer -- and we can assume most of the Black ones get it right, so that implies a strong majority of whites get it wrong.

This vein of ignorance is an example the core logic of white supremacy: no Black man could be qualified to be President; a Black man is President; hence he must be unqualified. Huh?

Taking stock of Obama's war

You probably have been watching the health care bruhaha in DC if you were paying any attention to politics in these lazy summer days -- but for too many people, both U.S. soldiers and their involuntary hosts and allies, we've got a war on. (Two actually, but this post is about Afghanistan.)

George C. Wilson has been a print reporter for more than a half century. He has some cautions to offer as the U.S. digs a deeper hole in central Asia.

In Afghanistan today, as in Vietnam yesterday, American military leaders are stressing the need to win the hearts and minds of the people. But as I saw for myself as a combat correspondent in Vietnam in 1968 and 1972, the job of keeping the bad guys out of remote villages day and night -- espe­cially at night when it is easy for guerillas to hit and run under the cover of darkness — is a constant, uphill struggle requiring thousands more troops than combat commanders think they can spare for pacification.

This is why the front page, off-lead story in The Washington Post of July 11 rang so true to me. It said Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new field commander in Afghanistan, “has concluded that the Afghan security forces will have to be far larger than currently planned if President Obama’s strategy for winning the war is to succeed … "

Here we go again.

If Obama defines the U.S. mission as pacifying the Afghan countryside and propping up a viable Afghan government, the mission's own logic will have him sending more and more troops until people in the U.S. get sick of casualties and expense in a faraway place. The peoples of NATO allies are already in this state. Meanwhile Obama will have become a failed President.

The only semi-rational mission for the U.S in Afghanistan is to define a doable victory and get the hell out as soon as possible. Killing Osama bin Laden or some other prominent plug-ugly would serve. But Julian Barnes reports in today's L.A. Times that's no longer our agenda:

U.S. military leaders have concluded that their war effort in Afghanistan has been too focused on hunting Al Qaeda, and have begun to shift Predator drone aircraft to the fight against the Taliban and other militants in order to prevent the country from slipping deeper into anarchy.

There's a proven recipe for failure in this trajectory. Sad for those, Afghan and U.S., who will have to suffer before this horror plays out.

Sadism and blowback

Khalilah Sabra, a spokeswoman for the Raleigh Muslim American Society, read a statement from Sabrina Boyd to a press conference.

Cambridge Massachusetts isn't the only jurisdiction whose cops have been acting stupidly lately. In fact, if this story is true, and I have no reason to doubt it, federal agents in North Carolina are not only being stupid, they are behaving viciously.

According the Raleigh News & Observer, here's how the feds treated the wife of the guy they arrested on terrorism charges this week.

[Sabrina] Boyd, whose family lives in the Johnston County community of Willow Spring, described a harrowing experience Monday afternoon when she answered the door to find a man she thought was a family friend wearing a shirt that appeared to be bloodied. He told her that Daniel and their three sons, Dylan, Noah and Zakariya, were in a serious car crash. He asked her to get into a Highway Patrol cruiser that would take her to Duke Hospital, where they were being treated.

Boyd summoned her daughter and pregnant daughter-in-law. They wrapped their heads in scarves, grabbed their Qurans and flew out the door. For Boyd, it was a particularly painful experience. Her 16-year-old son, Luqman, died in a car crash near their home in 2007.

When they arrived at Duke Hospital, the cruiser took them to a construction site at the rear of the facility. A man dressed as a doctor came out and asked whether she was the wife. When she said yes, he extended his hand. She told him she does not shake men's hands. He then grabbed her wrist and handcuffed her.

"I'm not a doctor. I'm an agent and your family is not in the hospital," he told her. "You're being detained, and you need to cooperate with us."

Boyd estimates she was then surrounded by 30 agents who frisked her and asked whether she had weapons or weapons of mass destruction.

While this ruse was going on, federal agents ransacked the Boyd home looking for evidence of Daniel Boyd's alleged involvement in terrorism. Guys, did you ever hear of just serving a search warrant? Presumably you had one.

The Washington Post has some interesting background on Mr. Boyd. Apparently the U.S.-born convert to Islam fought alongside the Afghan Muslim guerrillas the U.S.-backed against the Soviet Union during the 1980s. Bet the feds thought he was a useful guy then. But now:

"This case underscores the potential threat that U.S. citizens with foreign fighter experience pose upon returning to the United States, specifically in terms of inciting other U.S.-based individuals to follow their example," said David S. Kris, assistant attorney general for national security. "They return from conflict zones with combat experience, a network of contacts overseas and strong credibility with . . . recruits seeking an authority figure."

Ever hear of blowback? Wonder how we're going to feel in 10 years about Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney's pet mercenaries who were so servicable for privatizing current imperial wars?

A U.S. court may find that Boyd is guilty as hell -- we don't know that. But the feds, by their behavior and utterances, could hardly work harder at undermining trust in their case.

In transit today

Lighthouse at Gay Head.

Regular posting will resume from the other side of the country tomorrow.

Not done on the torture front...

Still catching up on what was happening in the world the last few weeks while I was working on changing the Episcopal Church. ...

On July 14, Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, was interviewed on Fresh Air about disclosures of novel government misconduct under the Bush regime that keep leaking into the light.

The New Yorker journalist made a wise observation:

[DAVE] DAVIES: You know, with the revelations that have come out over the past, you know, days and weeks, do you think the balance has shifted in terms of the pressure on President Obama to more aggressively investigate alleged wrongdoing during the Bush days, or will he stay on the course that he has charted so far, to do as little as possible?

Ms. MAYER: You know, I just don't know that he can stay on this course. I understand very much why he wants to do it. This - you know, he doesn't want to tangle his presidency up in endlessly trying to deal with the problems that the former president created in the war on terror. And you know, clearly President Obama's got his own positive agenda. ... The country probably agrees with his priorities in many ways, yet there is something about these legal problems that are coming out of the Bush years that you can't just sweep under the rug.

And I've been interviewing a number of experts on this area who say it's very much the experience that other countries have had when they've had scandals that involved allegations of torture. Frequently, everybody wants to just fix it and move on, but it doesn't go away - that these allegations are so serious, and they strike so much at the core of our values that people don't feel comfortable just letting perpetrators off the hook. And so it just keeps bubbling up and bubbling up until there's some kind of either a truth and reconciliation commission or some kinds of prosecutions or some way of just opening up what happened here because, you know, we're an open society, and torture is a major crime. So it's very hard to forget it.

My emphasis.

The whole transcript is worth reading. Mayer points out clearly why Eric Holder is loath to start with even the most clear cut prosecutions of offenses by CIA operatives and contractors: the line that will be taken by any competent defense will necessarily lead up the chain of command straight to the former Vice President's office and probably G.W. Bush himself. And that would (will?) make for a partisan political crisis in the current political context.

In which we revert to being a one-car family...

Can two fairly high functioning urban U.S. adults share only one car? We're about to find out. The 19-year old Honda went off to charity (or perhaps to be melted down for scrap) yesterday. We kept the 10-year old mini-SUV.

This shouldn't come as a horrible shock to us. Neither of us drive much. My diligent professorial partner bikes to her teaching job. I work from home and walk or BART everywhere I can. And living at 24th and Mission, that's a lot of places. The exceptions are for bulk shopping at the likes of Costco and getting to pretty places with soft trails on which I can run. How ironic is it that exercise-addiction leads to my driving?

Actually, we're returning to our roots. We lived together with only one vehicle (a truck as I was working in construction most of that time) for 14 years. Then the demands of work and caretaking came to mean we needed more conventional, individual transportation. So for 14 years, we've been multiply vehicular.

We don't think we need two cars anymore. It may turn out that we do. Employment demands may change. Rainy winters might discourage the bicyclist. The daily negotiations over who might need the car might discourage us both.

Since we live only a block from car sharing lots (CityCarShare and ZipCar), if this doesn't work so well, we'll probably consider that alternative.

I feel a little lighter...

NASA climate mapping toy

By way of the always interesting James Fallows, here's a site that lets you make your own maps of world temperature data since 1880.


This familiar projection of the world map shows that July has been getting warmer in the northern hemisphere over the last decade. Perhaps you might be less impressed by climate changes in winter if you live in Brazil or Argentina.


On the other hand, this polar projection of the same data shows very clearly that winter warming is significant on one side of Antarctica. No wonder chunks of ice shelf are falling into the sea.

Go play for yourself.

John Yoo gets schooled

Catching up on the world outside my sick bed and the Episcopal General Convention, I ran across this. [1:40] It seems to be from Australian TV.

If the legal system can't reach this apologist for torture, how long will universities be happy about having a guy around who draws this kind of activity?