Enhanced Interrogation Techniques

Well, I found this article from Slate interesting. Hard to know exactly how true it is, but it rings truer to me than lots of the stuff I've read about waterboarding, etc:

EITs were used to break the will to resist, not to extract information directly. Hayden acknowledged that prisoners might say anything to stop their suffering. (Like the other panelists, he insisted EITs weren't torture.) That’s why “we never asked anybody anything we didn’t know the answer to, while they were undergoing the enhanced interrogation techniques. The techniques were not designed to elicit truth in the moment.”

There's torture, and then there's torture of course. This was the clever stuff.

They figured they were smarter
than the ordinary martyr,
leaving no marks behind,
but shattering the mind.

Kindergarten Weapons Violation

Expelled for bringing clear plastic toy gun to school:

Naomi McKinney, a kindergarten student, is such a threat that she’s not allowed at all on school grounds, her parents say. The Sumter County School District says it has a zero-tolerance policy against guns in schools, and would require the Board of Trustees to review the case if she's to return.

Massive media exposure followed... and then:

Expulsion reversed for kindergartner who brought toy gun to school for 'show and tell'

Cute kid. Photogenic. Maybe she's a holy terror, but it's not obvious on the outside. And it was a serious error to think this sort of expulsion was justified.

Rules are rules!
(And fools are fools.)

Speculation Mode On

Reportedly, scientists are on a hunt for the utilization of quantum effects in everyday biology.

"There are definitely three areas that have turned out to be manifestly quantum," Dr Turin told the BBC. "These three things... have dispelled the idea that quantum mechanics had nothing to say about biology."

Three possible quantum manifestations discussed in the article are:

1. photosynthesis
2. smell
3. the ability of birds to navigate by magnetic fields.

I feel oddly vindicated. For years, I've heard people say that quantum effects all "net out" in ordinary life. And yet, humans have the ability to utilize quantum effects in significant technological devices. So - why shouldn't nature have done the same thing?

I'm reminded of the human heart. I've read that no one knew what it was for - until humans invented the pump. Then someone said oh, nature invented one first.

For hundreds of thousands of years,
we heard it going lub-dump
but until we invented the thing
we had no idea we were hearing a pump.

Wacky Weather

It soared into the 60s today in Chicago, and then tonight we had a January thunderstorm downpour on my walk to the train. My shoes were soaked.

But they're forecasting 8 degrees again, very soon.

I'm ready for Spring,
it would be very nice,
but tomorrow will bring
more ice.

Belle Isle

South of the United States, and North of Canada, lies Belle Isle.
Well, it's not really South of the United States, since it's part of Michigan. But one developer wants to change all that and turn Belle Isle into a charter city, a "free market utopia".
Somehow I don't think this will happen:

Private investors buy the island from a near-bankrupt Detroit for $1 billion. It then would secede from Michigan to become a semi-independent commonwealth like Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands.

I don't think it could "secede". But... I believe Michigan could "cede" the island to the Federal government. Yes, states in the past have ceded land to the Federal government.

It's an island dream
and a wild scheme
and it doesn't seem
very likely.

Flare Path by Rattigan

Last  night we saw an old play by Terence Rattigan, Flare Path.

Rattigan was a tail gunner for the RAF at the start of World War II, and the play is set in that world - not in the planes, but on the ground, at a small hotel with a view of the air station's landing strip.

The play had a successful revival in London in 2011, so I suppose that's why i showed up in Chicago in 2013, courtesy of Griffin Theatre.

I liked it, and the audience liked it too. I was struck by some similarities t Casablanca. It's a drama about an emotional love triangle in the midst of war - and about how the sense of wartime duty affects the fabric of relationships.

As usual with Rattigan, you get a lot of British understatement, but there is a fabulously emotional scene at the core of the play, where a brave fighter confesses to his fear to his wife.

When the fear runs through their brains
and pulses through their veins
like a mad distorting drum,
even heroes
can feel like zeroes,
but they somehow overcome.

Google Cars Will Be Good For Bars

The more the merrier, except... the more drunk drivers the scarier.

Snowball

One of my nieces was in London when it snowed recently - snowed a lot for London apparently. And she showed the locals how to make a snowman. They didn't know about rolling a small ball into a big ball in wet "packing" snow.

It made me reflect on the idiomatic verb, snowball:

Increase rapidly in size, intensity, or importance - the campaign was snowballing

The visual is of a snowball rolling along getting bigger and bigger.

But if you live somewhere warm
and have never seen a giant snowball form...
the metaphor will be lame,
its impact not the same.

On a tangent, the collected Calvin & Hobbes Snowman Strips.

Phones in Overtones

I was reading an old play, Overtones, by Alice Gerstenberg, and I came across a funny detail in the printed text: the word "phone" appeared with an apostrophe in front of it: 'phone

Evidently this was to indicate that the word "phone" was a contraction.

It occurred twice in the printed text, each time with the apostrophe:

HETTY [The telephone rings] There she is now.

[Hetty hurries to 'phone but Harriet regains her supremacy.]

HARRIET [Authoritatively] Wait! I can't let the telephone girl down there hear my real self. It isn't proper. [At the 'phone.] Show Mrs. Caldwell up.

Now, of course, that short word "phone"
very often shows up alone,
feeling, for sure, no need to be
accompanied by an apostrophe.

David Coleman Headley

A Chicago man involved in the Mumbai terrorist attack got 35 years from a judge. His name surprised me:

David Coleman Headley's meticulous scouting missions facilitated the assault by 10 gunmen from a Pakistani-based militant group, which killed 160 people -- including children.

What surprised me was that his name sounded so English. But there's a backstory:

Daood [Sayed] Gilani was born in Washington, D.C., where his father, Sayed Salim Gilani, worked for the Voice of America. His father was also a diplomat who worked in the Pakistani embassy in Washington D.C. for some time. His Maryland-born American mother, (Alice) Serrill Headley (1939–2008), worked as a secretary at the Pakistani embassy in Washington at the time of his birth.

His name change let him slip into India more easily.

Headley's U.S. passport, his new Western and English sounding name, and the fact that the passport and his visa application made no mention of his prior name or his father's nationality, made it easy for him to obtain an Indian visa from the Indian consulate in Chicago. He falsely stated on his visa application that his father's name was William Headley and that his own name at birth was "Headley", a claim that was difficult to refute since the U.S. passport, unlike the Indian one, does not provide the father's name, and does not require endorsements on name changes by the passport holder.

He hid his vile game
behind his new name.

Shovel Unready

We've barely had snow in Chicago this season. Just dustings. A friend is hoping we finally get some. He wants to cross country ski in the local woods.

As for me
I'm not eager to ski.
I'll do just fine
With more sunshine.

Union Trouble

The UK only seemed to be 3/4 of the way into the EU in the first place. By which I mean mostly that they weren't using the the Euro as currency. Which in hindsight, at the moment, looks like genius. But now...

Anti-Europe sentiment in the U.K. is at some of its highest levels since the early 1980s. And, frustrations with the EU are more pronounced among Conservatives, with opinion polls having shown support shifting away from the Tories to the U.K. Independence Party, whose main goal is Britain’s withdrawal from the EU.

So there's talk of having a national referendum - to decide whether to stay in the European Union or not.

I have no idea how that will go.

But I want to relate some anecdotal data. I was talking to an acquaintance, an ex-pat Englishman who lives here, and he was talking about "Americans" and I referred to him as a "European"... and he politely corrected me on the usage.

I suppose it's too late
to talk them into becoming our 51st state.

Ham Sandwich Nation

Glenn Reynolds, law prof and blogger, has a short essay online, under the title: Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime.

The titular sandwich refers to a saying among lawyers: "A good prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich."

It seems to me that doing so would make him a bad prosecutor, actually.

Ham sandwiches are not meant
to be charged with bad intent.

Stop Her Before...

A woman writing in the NY Times wants her right to own a gun taken away. Why? Because she suffers from depression.

You’d look at me and never know that sometimes my fight against the urge to die is so tough the only way I get through it is second by second; I live by the second hand.

Well, there are already laws restricting the gun-buying rights of the mentally ill. Perhaps she doesn't meet the technical criteria of being banned from such purchases.

I guess we could set up a national database where the depression-prone could voluntarily register as a danger to self and others.

But, if what we're trying to prevent is this woman's suicide, I suspect this approach would not help much. There are so many ways to kill yourself. And, thinking about the particular situation of this woman, people of her gender don't tend to favor guns for the job.

The preferred female way of ending up dead
is an overdose of a med.

50 Degrees, 9 Miles

Weather was warmly unseasonable,
making a long run seem reasonable.

Full Use

Ann Althouse:

This is getting strangely close to the argument that used to be made for discriminating against women in law school admissions (or for excluding them altogether): Since women are less likely to fully use their legal education, we shouldn't give what could be a man's seat to a woman.

It seems to be true that women are "less likely to fully use their legal education", at least by some measures of "full use".

You can say it's because "women seek more balance in life". That's an acceptable way of noting a statistical gender difference. Of course, it's not true for all women. Generalizations about humans always come with asterisks about the exceptions.

But... I also don't think men deserve all the seats just because they are more likely to be hard-driving full-time long-career lawyers. I mean, do law schools have to decide who to admit strictly on a "what's good for society" basis? I doubt very much that they are in a position to do so.

Actually, I imagine that, in an open market, law schools would want to admit students who can bring in money and a good reputation for the school. This is going to include women, and lots of them, since right now a lot of smart young women want to be lawyers.

Must it be the responsibility of a college,
when allocating a seat,
to judge by the most complete
use of its faculty's knowledge?

Scanners Vanish

I'm going to miss putting my hands over my head for my glamour shot:

The Transportation Security Administration confirmed Friday that it will pull the plug on "nude" airport scanners that produce a full body image of the traveler, replacing a technology that has sparked national controversy over privacy and safety.

The article doesn't quite say why this plug is being pulled. Well, the TSA sometimes works in mysterious ways.

My main complaint was that they never sent me a copy of my photo.

I also think the whole "consent of the governed" angle was not working in favor of these machines. People were not becoming accustomed to them.

I suspect the agency was getting rated
as "most hated".

Lights Out, Everybody

I went to see Lights Out, Everybody: A Tribute In Horror To Arch Oboler at Dream Theatre. I would highly recommend it as an evening of entertaining theater. Unless, that is, horror stories are just not your cup of tea.

I should admit that, even though he was born here in Chicago, I hadn't really been aware of Arch Oboler, a writer whose career included radio dramas, TV shows, and film work too.

The show at Dream is an adaptation, by Jeremy Menekseoglu, of three Oboler tales: Momma, It Happened In Paris, and Murder Castle.

In the photo, you can see Hasket Morris as the lead character in Murder Castle, which is based on the true story that is also told in The Devil In The White City. Morris is marvelously creepy.

Denise Smolarek shows up in all 3 tales, with a different accent and personality each time - once as a nightmare mother-in-law, once as a subterranean necklace-maker, and once as a rather well-intentioned but ill-fated housekeeper.

The show moves along briskly under Giau Truong's direction. The six actors are all strong, and those with multiple roles create distinct personalities for each.

It's a scary ride
with a slippery slide
or two
into goo.

Tradition

Tonight, on her birthday, we ate grilled cheese,
a ceremony to evoke
basking briefly in memories
of what she liked, of how she spoke.

Maybe It's The Captions

Dogs may be better friends, and may give better licks, but on the World Wide Web, the cats have funnier pics.