With every bad a little good comes. Or if you’re a pessimist, with every good a little bad comes. This morning I dropped my work laptop (stupid boy). Fortunately my wireless card broke its fall, so the laptop is fine but not the wireless card. On the upside the laptop wasn’t charging batteries before, but now it does.
A friend posted one among a number of comments I’ve seen talking about keeping the Republicans in power other wise ‘the children‘ (Democrats) will be back and ruin the country. I’m not sure where this phrase comes from, but it seems to be confused at best. Ironically it is being used* with reference to the situation in North Korea. ThinkProgress has a nice summary of the situation there:
North Korea’s bombs are built with plutonium. They produce their plutonium in a reactor they built during the Reagan presidency, starting around 1984. They separated enough plutonium for perhaps two bombs during the first Bush presidency.
When they tried to make more plutonium under President Bill Clinton, he said he would go to war to stop them. He had plans prepared for the attack. The North Koreans backed down.
Bill Clinton froze the program in its tracks. North Korea did not separate a gram of plutonium while Bill Clinton was in office. He also stopped their missile tests.
George Bush walked away from the deal in his first months in office. In March 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell said he wanted “to continue the process begun under Clinton.†Bush cut him down.
…
He [Bush] failed. He issued threats and drew lines in the sand. The North Koreans walked right past them. They threw out the IAEA inspectors in December 2002, while Bush was preparing to invade Iraq. The month after the invasion, they withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. In 2005, they reprocessed plutonium from the fuel rods Clinton had made them keep in pools under IAEA inspection. They took another load of fuel out of the reactor and processed more plutonium. They reloaded the reactor to make even more plutonium. They tested missiles, they made bombs, now they have tested a bomb.
(*Note: I don’t mean it’s being used ironically, sadly)
The BBC tells us that Sainsbury’s has withdrawn some of its own-brand muesli (that’s granola for you colonial types) from the shelves following the discovery of moth parts in the mix. Pretty unpleasant, of course, but presumably one of those things that happen from time to time when you’re selling food that looks like moth parts. But hidden in the article is a clue to the true unpleasantness involved here (emphasis mine):
“As soon as the issue was identified through an increase in customer complaints, the product was withdrawn from stores.”
One wonders what the baseline is for moth part complaints.
Glenn Greenwald takes a disturbing look at the case of Jose Padilla, the US citizen accused of some sort of terroristic activities (apparently it’s not clear exactly what – perhaps that’s a state secret). The whole thing is worth a read; here’s just a taster:
For nearly two years – from June 9, 2002 until March 2, 2004, when the Department of Defense permitted Mr. Padilla to have contact with his lawyers – Mr. Padilla was in complete isolation. Even after he was permitted contact with counsel, his conditions of confinement remained essentially the same.
He was kept in a unit comprising sixteen individual cells, eight on the upper level and eight on the lower level, where Mr. Padilla’s cell was located. No other cells in the unit were occupied. His cell was electronically monitored twenty-four hours a day, eliminating the need for a guard to patrol his unit. His only contact with another person was when a guard would deliver and retrieve trays of food and when the government desired to interrogate him.
I’m a pretty solitary sort generally, but I suspect I’d be toying with madness after that much time on my own in a cell, even without the beatings and stress positions that formed the ‘highlights’ of his weeks. I have no idea if Padilla is an unfortunate who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or a terrorist mastermind who should rot in hell forever. What I do know is that the government claims, and arguably has, the power to do this to one of its citizens without any demonstrated reason, and for as long as it chooses. The only check is that it has to be acceptable to a supervisor – that’s not a standard I would accept at Applebee’s, let alone in what used to be the shining city on a hill.
Iraq is more free every day. The lives of the citizens are improving every day. And one thing is for certain; there won’t be any more mass graves and torture rooms and rape rooms. (emphasis added)
George W. Bush
Remarks to Reporters
January 12, 2004
Win:
Daylight Tuesday brought the discovery of at least 86 shot or strangled men across the city, most of them with hands tied and many of them tortured, according to police. They included 27 corpses in one of the first mass graves to be found in the capital since the U.S. invasion three years ago.
Washington Post
At Least 86 Found Shot Or Strangled In Baghdad
March 12, 2006
Place:
As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein’s former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government’s torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the “Black Room.”
New York Times
Before and After Abu Ghraib, a U.S. Unit Abused Detainees
March 19, 2006
And show:
Strong anecdotal evidence gathered by organisations such as that of Yanar Mohammed and by the Iraqi Women’s Network, run by Hanna Edwar, suggests rape is also being used as a weapon in the sectarian war to humiliate families from rival communities. “So far what we have been seeing is what you might call ‘collateral rape’,” says Besmia Khatib of the Iraqi Women’s Network. “Rape is being used in the settling of scores in the sectarian war.”
The Observer
Hidden victims of a brutal conflict: Iraq’s women
October 8, 2006
You see, technically we don’t know that the rapes are being done in officially designated rooms, so broadly speaking Bush was right.