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Category: Commentary (Page 16 of 27)

Commentary on most any topic.

Flickr Explore

Finally got a couple of photos into Explore! again on Flickr. Yay!

Click the photos to see larger versions.

Greenish transparent jumping spider. This spider makes it apparent that Salticidae are different from ordinary spiders in many ways. For example, their legs are not operated by muscles and tendons, but by hydraulics. You can also see the tiny black dot at the tip of each leg — the spider’s “foot”. Each of those contains around 600,000 microscopic setules which enable these spiders to stick to surfaces by means of the Van der Waals force (an electrical effect). When walking on the ceiling, each of those tiny black “feet” can hold up to 170 times the spider’s weight.

On Flickr

Here’s a fairly common sight in the tropical regions of Central America, the Brown Bark Scorpion. I’m holding this one here by blinding him with a bright light. They have several pairs of eyes and you can see its primary eyes shining like diamonds. Since I startled it, it’s playing possum, playing dead. Notice the tail flopped over to one side and legs all askew. There’s actually nothing wrong with this scorpion and it’s quite alive.

On Flickr

 

 

The Torturers’ Manifesto

To read the four newly released memos on prisoner interrogation written by George W. Bush’s Justice Department is to take a journey into depravity.

Their language is the precise bureaucratese favored by dungeon masters throughout history. They detail how to fashion a collar for slamming a prisoner against a wall, exactly how many days he can be kept without sleep (11), and what, specifically, he should be told before being locked in a box with an insect – all to stop just short of having a jury decide that these acts violate the laws against torture and abusive treatment of prisoners.

In one of the more nauseating passages, Jay Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal judge, wrote admiringly about a contraption for waterboarding that would lurch a prisoner upright if he stopped breathing while water was poured over his face. He praised the Central Intelligence Agency for having doctors ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy if necessary.

These memos are not an honest attempt to set the legal limits on interrogations, which was the authors’ statutory obligation. They were written to provide legal immunity for acts that are clearly illegal, immoral and a violation of this country’s most basic values.

It sounds like the plot of a mob film, except the lawyers asking how much their clients can get away with are from the C.I.A. and the lawyers coaching them on how to commit the abuses are from the Justice Department. And it all played out with the blessing of the defense secretary, the attorney general, the intelligence director and, most likely, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

The Americans Civil Liberties Union deserves credit for suing for the memos’ release. And President Obama deserves credit for overruling his own C.I.A. director and ordering that the memos be made public. It is hard to think of another case in which documents stamped “Top Secret” were released with hardly any deletions.

But this cannot be the end of the scrutiny for these and other decisions by the Bush administration.

Until Americans and their leaders fully understand the rules the Bush administration concocted to justify such abuses – and who set the rules and who approved them – there is no hope of fixing a profoundly broken system of justice and ensuring that that these acts are never repeated.

The abuses and the dangers do not end with the torture memos. Americans still know far too little about President Bush’s decision to illegally eavesdrop on Americans – a program that has since been given legal cover by the Congress.

Last week, The Times reported that the nation’s intelligence agencies have been collecting private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans on a scale that went beyond the broad limits established in legislation last year. The article quoted the Justice Department as saying there had been problems in the surveillance program that had been resolved. But Justice did not say what those problems were or what the resolution was.

That is the heart of the matter: nobody really knows what any of the rules were. Mr. Bush never offered the slightest explanation of what he found lacking in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act when he decided to ignore the law after 9/11 and ordered the warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ overseas calls and e-mail. He said he was president and could do what he wanted.

The Bush administration also never explained how it interpreted laws that were later passed to expand the government’s powers to eavesdrop. And the Obama administration argued in a recent court filing that everything associated with electronic eavesdropping, including what is allowed and what is not, is a state secret.

We do not think Mr. Obama will violate Americans’ rights as Mr. Bush did. But if Americans do not know the rules, they cannot judge whether this government or any one that follows is abiding by the rules.

In the case of detainee abuse, Mr. Obama assured C.I.A. operatives that they would not be prosecuted for actions that their superiors told them were legal. We have never been comfortable with the “only following orders” excuse, especially because Americans still do not know what was actually done or who was giving the orders.

After all, as far as Mr. Bush’s lawyers were concerned, it was not really torture unless it involved breaking bones, burning flesh or pulling teeth. That, Mr. Bybee kept noting, was what the Libyan secret police did to one prisoner. The standard for American behavior should be a lot higher than that of the Libyan secret police.

At least Mr. Obama is not following Mr. Bush’s example of showy trials for the small fry – like Lynndie England of Abu Ghraib notoriety. But he has an obligation to pursue what is clear evidence of a government policy sanctioning the torture and abuse of prisoners – in violation of international law and the Constitution.

That investigation should start with the lawyers who wrote these sickening memos, including John Yoo, who now teaches law in California; Steven Bradbury, who was job-hunting when we last heard; and Mr. Bybee, who holds the lifetime seat on the federal appeals court that Mr. Bush rewarded him with.

These memos make it clear that Mr. Bybee is unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the Constitution. Congress should impeach him. And if the administration will not conduct a thorough investigation of these issues, then Congress has a constitutional duty to hold the executive branch accountable. If that means putting Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales on the stand, even Dick Cheney, we are sure Americans can handle it.

After eight years without transparency or accountability, Mr. Obama promised the American people both. His decision to release these memos was another sign of his commitment to transparency. We are waiting to see an equal commitment to accountability.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/opinion/19sun1.html

U.S. Now Deporting Citizens

Pedro Guzman has been an American citizen all his life. Yet in 2007, the 31-year-old Los Angeles native — in jail for a misdemeanor, mentally ill and never able to read or write — signed a waiver agreeing to leave the country without a hearing and was deported to Mexico as an illegal immigrant.

“The more the system becomes confused, the more U.S. citizens will be wrongfully detained and wrongfully removed,” said Bruce Einhorn, a retired immigration judge who now teaches at Pepperdine Law School. “They are the symptom of a larger problem in the detention system. … Nothing could be more regrettable than the removal of our fellow citizens.”

It’s impossible to know exactly how many citizens have been detained or deported because nobody keeps track. Kara Hartzler, an attorney at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in Arizona, testified at a U.S. House hearing last year that her group alone sees 40 to 50 jailings a month of people with potentially valid claims to citizenship. “These cases are surprisingly, painfully common,” she said.

The U.S. is Going to Miss the Biggest Opportunity of the 21st Century

Electric vehicles are the wave of the future. Bio-diesel (algae, bacteria), and electric, and combinations of the two are where the future lies. But the U.S. is going to blow it.

For most of the 20th century, the U.S. was the world leader in car manufacturing. This is no longer the case and it looks like the mammoth dinosaur corporations that make up “Detroit” are so hidebound they’re unable to cope with the coming changes. Now it’s looking like the whole thing is going to go bankrupt in the U.S.

But, cars are not dead. In fact, there will be more car sales in the 21st century than in the 20th century as the billion people in China, and the billion people in India reach a level of income that enables them to have cars. The U.S. car industry could be there, ready for the market, but it won’t be.

In order to change this, just about everything from the past must be dropped and new procedures put in place, from corporate governance down to the lowest position in the company. Design cycles must be vastly accelerated. It’s no longer possible to spend five years taking a car from concept to production. In five years, all of the technology changes, and any product that passes through the standard Detroit design cycle will be obsolete before it hits the streets. Consider the Chevy Volt. How long have we been hearing about it? Years. And it’s still years from introduction. That’s ridiculous.

Will it get fixed? I doubt it. But there’s a tremendous opportunity sitting there. The U.S. could again become the leading car maker in the world with the latest technology and best value. But I fear it will not happen. By the time things change in the U.S., if they change, market leadership will have already moved to Asia where the problem is understood and companies move much more quickly to adapt to technology and changing markets.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/business/global/02electric.html?th&emc=th

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