America - Fuck Yeah!

You know, there are people out there who don't understand what it means to be an American!

I mean, you know what we learned today? That secret prisons where people got waterboarded led us to Osama!!!

Yeah! Waterboarding worked! How about that, libs? We got actionable intelligence by torturing somebody! Awesome, right?

I mean, yeah, there's this guy, Mohammed Basardah. He talked. He spilled all kinds of names and locations and everything else. They couldn't shut him up, he talked so much. They rounded up all kinds of people based on what he said. He gave them so much intel, they let him go out of gratitude for the help.

But, I mean, that's where it gets funny, right? Because Basrdah turns out to be just a small-time pot dealer in Mecca. He made up all this stuff, and threw in some names of people he didn't like, or that he'd heard of, or just fake names. So we round up all these people, and they have no idea what's going on, right? But we have "actionable intelligence" saying that they DO know, right?

So, they act like they don't know anything, and do we have a choice? Hell, no! We have to waterboard them to get the truth out! I mean, yeah, they don't know what the "truth" is, because it's just stuff Basardah made up, right?

But that's what's so funny!

Same thing with these people that the Pakistani tribes sold to us - they were just passing through, but we were offering thousands of dollars in bounties! What could the tribesmen do? How could they resist that kind of money? So they sold us tourists - can you blame them?

Now, we have these people in custody, and they claim they're innocent, right? As if! So we have to waterboard them, or chain them up, or do the sleep deprivation thing, until they answer us, right? I mean, do we have a choice?

You know, looking back, maybe there are some hippies who'll try to claim that when we torture innocent people, we might be making another generation of people who will stop at nothing to kill us. But what do they know, right?

Because we're Americans, motherfucker! We do what's right! Even if it seems like it's wrong! I mean, this is what we have got to do, right?

Right?

...right?

Finally!

So, ten years and several billion dollars later, we finally took the fucker down?

Let me just point out that in the coming week, right-wing pundits will try to claim that Obama should not receive any credit for this. Of course, in the meantime, all the evidence shows that Bush had the chance to get him and let him go. (After all, the unkillable boogeyman is a better way to get unlimited funds than a guy you pick up in the first few months of a manhunt.)
_________

Update: from Pam at Pam's House Blend:

Welcome to Abbottabad

Local forecast - partly cloudy, high 32°C, low 14° C … less one infamous tourist (terrorist).

The etymology of the name is a compound of two words, Abbott and Abad. Abbott refers to General Sir James Abbott, a British army officer after whom the city and the district are named.  Abad means a place of living in Urdu.  Note:  Abad is also the old English spelling of the modern word Abode.  Oh, yes.  Before I forget:

Obama got Osama!

Monday morning update: This article by Juan Cole, Obama and the End of Al Qaeda offers a worthwhile retrospective.

How Rebecca Black and Glee Are Destroying the World

Pitch adjustment has probably been around as long as there's been recorded music. George Martin is famously credited with getting two different takes of the same song, originally played at slightly different tempos, and splicing them together using a Vari-control pitch shifter to match them together (this is most obvious in the slight distortion in John's voice during the line "Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to...").

But then, in 1997, Dr Harold "Andy" Hildebrand, a former geophysicist studying seismic activity, developed and patented a process called Auto-Tune™. And in doing that, he may have destroyed the concept of music entirely.

Auto-Tune™ is phase vocorder, an audio processor which can be used both live and in recorded tracks, which adjusts the voice to the nearest true semitone and correct the pitch to match whatever scale is specified.

It can also be used to distort a voice - most famously, Cher's warble in 1998's Believe.

Auto-Tune™ is still considered the industry standard. In 2009, a 24-year-old Brooklyn musician named Michael Gregory started a viral series of videos making extensive use of the technology.

Although the success of Autotune The News led to the first release of original music by the Gregory Brothers, the strategy backfired to a certain extent:

Andrew (Gregory, the guitarist in the group) also makes folk music, but, unfortunately, many of the Brothers' new fans have no patience for anything that's not "Auto-Tune the News."

But those are effects. The more insidious use of autotuning is its prevalence in the music industry. It's almost impossible to find a CD where a singer doesn't tweak, warp, or totally alter their voice.

"It usually ends up just like plastic surgery," says a Grammy-winning recording engineer. "You haul out Auto-Tune to make one thing better, but then it's very hard to resist the temptation to spruce up the whole vocal, give everything a little nip-tuck." Like plastic surgery, he adds, more people have had it than you think. "Let's just say I've had Auto-Tune save vocals on everything from Britney Spears to Bollywood cast albums. And every singer now presumes that you'll just run their voice through the box."

All of this leads to lazy singers, unwilling to practice; lazy musicians, happy to take someone else's work, loop it, and claim that the result is an "original" composition; and lazy performers who go on tour to lip-synch to their own music.

Sir Elton John's live reputation is second to none. Even when he's not actually performing.

His off-the-cuff remarks at the Q magazine awards ceremony last week, when he reacted with undisguised horror to the very notion of Madonna being nominated for best live act, surely represented the great singer-songwriter at his extemporaneous best. "Madonna, best f---ing live act? F--- off! Since when has lip-synching been live?"

At many of today's big live music events, the only thing that can really qualify as live is the dancing. I once saw Madonna drop her microphone without it affecting her vocal performance one whit.
...
It doesn't matter whether you have the pyrotechnic vocal skills of Michael Jackson or the somewhat more limited range of Kylie Minogue, you cannot throw yourself about like an aerobics instructor on fast-forward while delivering a perfectly honed, exquisitely phrased vocal.

And in many cases, performers can't deliver a "perfectly honed, exquisitely phrased vocal" in the first place.

If you watch Glee, a TV show ostensibly about singers, you won't hear a single note that hasn't been chopped up, glued back together, polished and shined until it's practically unrecognizable.

It's not just the lifeless characters, bad acting, unoriginal scripts and robotic music that can make Glee painful to watch, it's the unreality of the way music is portrayed. Characters burst into "song" without ever practicing a note. This leads to unreal expectations among young singers, that they don't need to rehearse (the Trophy Wife teaches voice, and runs into this problem on a daily basis) - they expect to just open their mouths and watch liquid gold flow out.

Which leads us to Rebecca Black. A 13-year-old girl from Orange County, her mother paid $2000 to the Ark Music Factory (the musical version of a vanity press) who gave her a choice of two songs; and after a 12-hour video shoot and a digital bludgeoning of the vocal track, she became an international sensation with an artificial song sung by a robotic voice with only a passing resemblance to her own.

Friday has been called "the worst pop song of all time," and that's a fair assessment. It's also symbolic of the place music has ended up: lifeless, heartless, pre-processed blandness; uninteresting gruel served to children who don't know any better than to call it "music."

It's time to grow up, America

Listen to this message. And remember one thing: the birther message that Donald Trump was able to ride was only possible because Barack Obama was black.

Would it have been possible for anyone, at any time, to make an ignorant claim like this, that Obama wasn't truly an American, if he had, in fact, been white? If his father had been Barry O'Bama, an Irishman, who'd gone back to the ancestral shores of Ulster, would anyone have been able to carry this ignorant, racist message as far as Donald Trump (and his media representative, Joseph Farah) were able to flog it?

Would anyone have cared if Obama was a white man?

(OK, I'll even add a caveat - "a white man with no Russian background"? Because, yes, they're that stupid...)

If Barack Obama wasn't different from "you and me" - if he wasn't "the other" - if he didn't seem "foreign"...

GOD DAMN IT!! If he wasn't black!

If Barry O'Bama was a white man raised in Chicago, would anybody have gone to the ignorant, racist extremes that the GOP has gone in the last 4 years?

Yes, if you ever worried about the birth certificate of the duly elected president of the United States, you are a useless, inbred racist fuck. You might as well pull out your bed-sheets with the eye holes cut out.

Welcome to the 21st Century.

The Death of the Birther Movement?

Well, now he’s gone and done it. Yessirree, our Kenyan Moozlum radical soshulist Sharia-promulgating President has apparently released his full, hopelessly official birth certificate. (All the online papers probably lead with this story, so just Google one for yourself.) Birthers across the nation are no doubt spraying their morning tea all over the kitchen table, wondering how to organize their lives in the wake of this catastrophe. “Oh the humanity,” ladies and gentlemen!

So why did the president do such a thing? It is ridiculous that he should have felt it necessary, but at the same time, producing one’s birth certificate, I think the White House must have opined, isn’t the same as getting into a fracas with a covey of your crazy opponents. No, it’s a more final gesture, sort of like throwing down a royal flush at a poker game. You win. All they can do is grumble and pay up. Politically it’s arguably astute in that it takes the wind out of birther sails just as the 2012 campaign is getting underway. I say arguably because it isn’t entirely clear to me why, from a purely Machiavellian electoral standpoint, the Democrats would want to do that – the birthers marginalize the GOP with everyone outside the party, so having them around isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

But beyond short-term electoral considerations, the decision may have had something to do with a statesmanlike appreciation of the importance of numbers in a democratic-spirited country. The percentage of Republicans who profess belief that the president is from Mars, or Kenya, or Indonesia, or Canada, or – well, anywhere but the United States – was becoming alarming. Wasn’t it something like 67% when you combine the “don’t know” polling respondents with the “O Hell No, he’s definitely not one of us!” respondents? That’s the combo number I’ve run across a few times.

If two out of three people in one party have been convinced by vicious demagogues (or have convinced themselves even before such help came along) to think you are, or might be, the Brother from Another Planet, I guess you might as well try to set them straight even if it’s a bit embarrassing.

This gesture won’t end what Capt. Fogg aptly calls “Obamahate culture” because that’s founded on racism rooted in centuries of oppression, fear, and rage. But it will probably cut into the numbers – now perhaps only a third, or even (if we want to be optimistic) a fourth or fewer, of Republicans will keep insisting that the President isn’t American and will eventually take that firm belief with them to their graves. That’s still a lot of addled, ignorant, confused or mendacious and dishonorable people to reckon with, but it’s better than two-thirds.

It may not seem like much of a transformation, but I’ve long suggested that ultimately, a small number of percentage points one way or the other means the difference between continued democracy and a rough-beast’s slouch towards dictatorship, plutocracy, or some other unbearable form of government. A small but persistent percentage might make the difference between getting a majority of people to do abominable and stupid things and being rejected by them for making such suggestions.

The First Thing Is to Admit What We Don't Know

I search for truth in our shared experiences, our disagreements, the good that humankind promotes and the evil that we enact. We are artists and poets, writers and musicians, but destroyers of life. The one thing we never are is boring. It matters not one whit as to whether you believe or don't believe in God, for me it's about examining all of the possibilities. Science offers many answers but not all. Science is continually changing because valid science is born of a hypothesis and proof (See the scientific method). Sometimes the hypothesis cannot be proven. Sometimes the proof reveals a totally unexpected truth.

However, science without contemplation, without moral considerations can lead us into dark places. The medical experiments of Josef Mengele and others were clearly a search for scientific proof gone wrong. The whole science of eugenics was a perversion of science, yet for a time, those who believed in eugenics boldly cited scientific proof to support their beliefs. Is science bad and responsible for the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the United States' own little foray into forced sterilization of some of its citizens, mostly poor and black? Of course not, but such events are an indication that science can be perverted just as any other belief system.

Just as many of the Christian faiths in the U.S. sought to justify slavery, so did science. Negroes were judged inferior. Skulls were measured, brains were studied and the conclusion was that black people were intellectually inferior to whites, an idea that continued to be presented as having a scientific basis in 20th century works such as The Bell Curve. From the early 1920s to the 1970s, some 65,000 men and women were sterilized in this country, many without their knowledge, as part of a government eugenics program to keep so-called undesirables from reproducing. Then there were the scientific experiments known as the Tuskegee syphilis study. The clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama, studied the natural progression of untreated syphilis in poor, rural black men who thought they were receiving free health care from the U.S. government.

The current worship of nuclear power is a perversion of science. We have the science to create nuclear power plants but it seems highly irrational to play with a substance that creates radioactive waste that is toxic to all life in some misbegotten belief that we can keep it under control. Depending on the half-life of the radiation, it could stay in a person for much longer than a lifetime. The half- life is the amount of time it takes for a radioactive material to decay to one half of its original amount. Some materials have half-lives of more than 1,000 years. I find this no more rational than the religious sects that deny medical treatment to their children because they believe that if they pray hard enough God will heal them.

What is inherent in our nature that makes us need to believe in something so strongly that we exclude reason and compassion from our thought processes? Our belief in science created the first atomic weapon, a weapon capable of wreaking havoc and devastation, a weapon capable of leaving behind lethal radioactive waste with an indefinite shelf life, when reason should have perhaps suggested that just because we could didn't mean that we should. Science has helped us create more efficient ways of killing; we can now kill humans and leave the buildings standing. What an accomplishment!

Am I opposed to science? No. Science has also been used to promote the greater good and I would not condemn all of science for its missteps. However, a belief in science is just as potentially dangerous as an unwavering belief in a man with a beard who lives in the clouds. Looking inwardly isn't about justifying our worst impulses; it's about studying what makes us who we are in order to find our way to being better than we are. Most people act without ever considering why they act. This is why mobs form so easily and get so out of control. Individually, most would not engage in the type of vicious and sadistic behaviors that they will as a group. How do we move beyond this mob instinct?

I think that it is far more complex than simply declaring that all people need to embrace science and reason. Either can be perverted as much as any religious belief because the issue lies within ourselves not the stars (Thanks Will). Certainly there have been magnificent advancements in science that have benefited us all; however, humankind has also used science to develop even more efficient ways of killing one another. Hanging the solution to today's problems solely on science or reason is no more rational than announcing that it's all in God's hands.

For me this is where psychology and philosophy must be added to the mix. Science is a type of knowing, based on proposing a hypothesis and designed experiments test and hopefully prove that theory. But that which makes us human goes beyond the concrete, factual answers that science can provide. What we do with that science is based on a complex working of human nature and science hasn't designed an experiment to take the full measure of what makes us tick.  Perhaps psychology and philosophy lack the straightforward factuality of science but it is their study that continues to reveal the human psyche, bit by bit.

I doubt that I will persuade anyone who finds all of this to be some esoteric discussion based on belief that cannot be proven to consider this seriously but at least let's respect that we have differing perspectives.

Happy Eostre Ishtar Easter!

OK, so it's been a long weekend of religious observances. I mean, two days ago it was Good Friday (mine was just OK, but that doesn't matter here).

Friday was also the feast day of Saint Epipodius of Lyon (then known as Lugdunum). He was tortured and martyred during the second century in France, and is the patron saint of bachelors and people who've been betrayed or were victims of torture. (Which you could say covers the entire male gender. * rimshot *)

(Funny story - Epipodius had a companion, a Greek named Alexander. Both were lifelong bachelors, and they lived and worked together. And were tortured and killed together, when it comes to that. And both were canonized. All this in spite of the Catholic Church's hatred of homosexuality. Hmmm...)

Yesterday was St George's Day, which is an unofficial national holiday in England. And today, of course, is the annual celebration of the Great Zombie Uprising of 33 A.D.

No, I'm serious. It's right there in the Bible:

and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; and coming out of the graves after His resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many. (Matthew 27:52-53)

Fortunately for the people of Jerusalem, these were all holy zombies, so they couldn't hunt for brains on the Sabbath.

Now, I self-identify as an agnostic, but that's mostly because I don't put the time into thinking about things that don't really matter to me. I'm probably better identified as a doubting agnostic, because if there is such a thing as a god, I'm pretty damned sure (heh) that he or she isn't the one the Christocrats want to promote.

But for whatever reason, these idiots don't want to stop trying to brainwash everybody else into their tiny-minded philosophy. They even end up in court over this kind of behavior, and almost alway lose. And really, that's the way things should be - it's right there in the Constitution - but some people don't want to accept that. So they can't remember little things.

Simple things, like the fact that public schools, paid for by our tax money, shouldn't have blatantly religious banners hung in the auditorium,

The "War on Easter" never really caught on (although that doesn't stop the idiots from trying to resurrect it, because irony is beyond them).

In Illinois, a Circuit Court judge just ruled that pharmacists can refuse to sell "morning-after" pills if they feel like causing an unwanted pregnancy that it's against their religious principles.

Over in Texas, Governor Goodhair was able to declare this "a Weekend of Prayer for Rain," despite the fact that God obviously wanted the drought. (You kind of expect it out of Texas, though - the home of Poledancing for Jesus.)

But these people keep getting voted back in, because there are enough of the certifiably insane people out there: you know, the types of people who think a home circumcision is a good idea. (Because, you know... Jesus!)

Various government agencies keep wasting time and tax dollars by starting meetings with a prayer .

The God-swallowers keep trying to claim that America is a Christian nation and founded on "Christian values" (mostly hatred and homophobia), despite the fact that most of the Founding Fathers were deists (most of whom believe that God may have started it all, but really doesn't care about us any more). Mike Huckabee is the latest guy to try and argue that only Christians should be elected.

A lady in Kansas was approved for a state-funded liver transplant which will save her life. Of course, that wasn't good enough for her - she's a Jehovah's Witness, and she's suing the state to pay to send her to Nebraska, where she can get a bloodless transplant. (You know, since she believes dead folks go to "a better place," why is she trying to save her own life?)

See, folks, it's simple. You can believe whatever stupid crap you want, but as soon as you try to force your religion on the rest of us, that's when you need to be stopped.

Hardwired

By Capt. Fogg

As I've suspected, there's an increasing amount of evidence that one is born on one side of the fence or another; predestined to be what they call conservative these days or Liberal. Yes, I'm very wary of these terms, since they mean what their enemies say they mean and have little to do with conserving anything real, or with the concept of reform, but still, there seem to be two kinds of minds and it's hard to account for it as merely the product of experience or study or intelligence.

Yes, I've joked about the far right not having a sense of humor that differs from meanness and I can think of all kinds of nominally Liberal reformers who would crumble if they ever smiled, but that impression isn't unique to me and I find it compelling. Some people find their view of reality far too serious, too dangerous and threatening to find much to laugh about, unless it's to laugh about the discomfiture and humiliation of an enemy.

That there are indeed two kinds of minds; two predispositions toward political, religious and sociological poles, is compelling, not that I would suggest using any evidence for it to dismiss arguments from either side. Sometimes, Conservative is actually conservative and Liberal is just Liberal and the truth may be neutral.

There may be important evidence for physical differences between those who feel threatened, respond to perceived threats with more aggression, more disgust and less tolerance for uncertainty. A taste for strongly held credos about morality and politics almost defines such people and we usually call them conservatives. A distaste for absolute moral judgments; for saying something is "just wrong" without considering the results defines those we want to call Liberals.

"Liberal Brains" seem more tolerant of uncertainty than conservatives according to a study of brain scans of 90 volunteers at University College London. Brain scans revealed, or so it's claimed, physical differences

"Previously, some psychological traits were known to be predictive of an individual's political orientation, our study now links such personality traits with specific brain structure."

says researcher Ryota Kanai.

"People with a large amygdala are "more sensitive to disgust" and tend to "respond to threatening situations with more aggression than do liberals and are more sensitive to threatening facial expressions. Liberals are linked to larger anterior cingulate cortexes, a region that "monitor(s) uncertainty and conflicts"

So is this cause or effect? Are these findings real? Maybe it's too soon to tell and I can certainly identify some traits that would make me more conservative than the stereotypical Liberal. What I am is for others to say, but I certainly find fault in many standard Liberal shibboleths, even if I'm intolerant of certainty and that includes being certain that the study means anything.

"Our findings are consistent with the proposal that political orientation is associated with psychological processes for managing fear and uncertainty"

says the report and that feels right, even if many wrong things feel right. I'm just not afraid of the conservative bogeymen like net neutrality, graduated income tax, single payer health programs or Social Security. I am however concerned about the danger of inflexible creeds that seem to need a great deal of misplaced faith to follow and a government that follows such things without regard to the will of the electorate, the lessons of history or even the demands of common decency. I believe in uncertainty.

So is my anterior cingulate cortex bigger or smaller and does size matter? It's not as though I'm free of fear, I just fear the fearful and the things they do.

God Control

By Capt. Fogg


I've said quite a bit about gun control; pretty much all I'm going to say, actually. There is something far more pernicious, more dangerous and more in need of control however and that's God. It's hard to deny although that doesn't prevent most people from denying it, God has been on the wrong side of things as often as the right side: slavery, conquest, persecutions, genocide. You name it; God has been the universal justification as often as the universal opponent.

So it isn't surprising that God now seems to be against Net Neutrality. Sure he is -- and our founding fathers who don't seem to have believed in the kind of god who gets involved in such matters as free markets thought so too. That's the thing about God's likes and dislikes and mysterious plans: people just make them up as they go along.

Take David Barton, for instance, allegedly one of the country's most influential Evangelicals. He thinks that government should stay out of the lives of selected people and should, in the name of freedom and less intrusive government, regulate the most private and personal consensual sexual behavior. That's nothing new, of course, but it may surprise you that according to the Gospel as invented by Barton, God hates net neutrality and wants the internet dominated by the powerful and rich. God and the Puritans brought us prosperity because we're not socialists. The rest of the world got their prosperity from the Devil apparently and Jesus was just joking about rich men and heaven. How can we question that?

God wills it -- just like God willed the Crusades and the extermination of European Jews: just like he willed the divine right of kings and the right of the Church to approve their power. He demanded a secular Democracy in the Colonies, some of them, while simultaneously mandating the power of George III, Rex Dei Gratia.

Face it, it's long since been far out of hand and the will of god has become indistinguishable from the background noise of commerce. Did God have an interest in boosting tobacco sales. He obviously, if we're to believe this radio troll, has an interest in the rights of corporations which exceeds his concern for the poor. Does God like free markets, or does he like kings? Does the Bible speak against Net Neutrality or call it Socialism. Does God hate Socialism or does he like you to share everything you have with the poor and sick? Depends on who you ask and of course I won't be asking the Religious right who I can't tell from the Religious wrong of late.

One thing our constitution does uphold, is the free exercise of religion, so lunatics and tyrants and even evil men like Barton get to rave on unmolested. The government can't really exercise God control and more than God can control the evil spewed out by Barton's forked tongue. It's up to me and you to be aware that whether or not it was God, Guns and Guts that made America "great" those things will serve any master with equal ferocity. Mention God and nobody can shut you up, nobody can really contradict you and millions will follow you through the gates of hell, raging and bellowing, cheering and jeering like the lost souls we are.