President Grant was right

 

Grant remarked that "if we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason & Dixon . . . but between patriotism & intelligence on the one side & superstition, ambition & ignorance on the other." He went on to say, "Encourage free schools and resolve that not one dollar of money appropriated to their support . . . shall be appropriated to the support of any sectarian school.

This should be front page news.

Bush and Cheney lied us into war.  But we knew that.  Even back then.

What Digby said.

Eclipsing intelligence...

The solar eclipse in pictures.

France bans Monsanto corn.

Street art.

The man who wishes the Google would ignore...

Congress is getting dumber, if you couldn't tell by now.  Especially in their dealings with them wimmen folk.

From lemons to lemonade: Reaction uses carbon dioxide to make carbon-based semiconductor:

(Phys.org) -- A materials scientist at Michigan Technological University has discovered a chemical reaction that not only eats up the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, it also creates something useful. And, by the way, it releases energy.

Ok, I'm ready! Let me go pick some lemons in my backyard... oh.  Rats.

Watching the wonderful series called the Ascent of Man

by Jacob Bronowski. Standing in a concentration camp, Bronowski made a observation which applies today to those who wish to vilify science and education while insisting their religious viewpoints are absolute:

There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts – obedient ghosts, or tortured ghosts.

It’s said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That’s false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

The Era of Stupid

Started when the Republicans decided that liberals were too educated and elite and intelligent and used facts and stuff to win arguments....

Good.

Have at it.

In a move that will put Britain's relationship with U.S. intelligence agencies under intense and possibly damaging scrutiny, British Prime Minister David Cameron has launched an unprecedented inquiry into whether security services were involved in the torture of terrorism suspects.

Americans don't 'torture', remember? (Nudge nudge wink wink) We just do necessary enhanced interrogations!



Renaming a war crime doesn't change the fact it's a crime, Georgie. Semantics won't save your prezidenting legacy.

Taking steps

To start undoing what has been done in our name:

Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas), the chairman of the House intelligence committee, introduced an amendment to the 2010 intelligence authorization bill imposing a 15-year criminal sentence on any “officer or employee of the intelligence community” who tortures a detainee. (Twenty years if the torture involves an “act of medical malfeasance”; life if the detainee dies.)

And

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates is concerned about possible misconduct in Afghanistan by the private security firm formerly known as Blackwater and has promised to review the issue, the Pentagon said.

So what does Blackwater do?

A Code Pink protester claimed a high-ranking Blackwater official threatened his life during a break of a Senate Armed Services hearing focused on the military contractor's actions in Afghanistan.

Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin reported that the threat was made by Johnny Walker, a program manager with one of Blackwater's subsidiaries. Walker testified at the hearing about the role his company, Paravant, played during its mercenary deployments to the Middle East.

But then this is going on:

In an interview with the Pakistani TV station Express TV, Defense Secretary Robert Gates confirmed that the private security firms Blackwater and DynCorp are operating inside Pakistan. “They’re operating as individual companies here in Pakistan,” Gates said, according to a DoD transcript of the interview. “There are rules concerning the contracting companies. If they’re contracting with us or with the State Department here in Pakistan, then there are very clear rules set forth by the State Department and by ourselves.”

And the realization that if we didn't have mercenary groups, we'd be unable to fight the wars we're in. We don't have the troops.

Yet the court sides against Rumsfeld:

CHICAGO � A federal judge refused Friday to dismiss a civil lawsuit accusing former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld of responsibility for the alleged torture by U.S. forces of two Americans who worked for an Iraqi contracting firm.

U.S. District Judge Wayne R. Andersen's ruling did not say the two contractors had proven their claims, including that they were tortured after reporting alleged illegal activities by their company. But it did say they had alleged enough specific mistreatment to warrant hearing evidence of exactly what happened.

Andersen said his decision "represents a recognition that federal officials may not strip citizens of well settled constitutional protections against mistreatment simply because they are located in a tumultuous foreign setting."

Andersen did throw out two of the lawsuit's three counts but gave former contractors Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel the green light to go forward with a third count alleging they were unconstitutionally tortured under procedures personally approved by Rumsfeld.

Update 3/7:UPDATE:

A Xe spokesman has told Talking Points Memo that they are unaware of any plans for the RNC to hold a fundraiser at their Moyock, N.C. facility. The spokesman said he was unsure why there was a slide in an RNC fundraising presentation that suggested otherwise. RNC Communications Doug Heye also told Politico's Ben Smith, who broke the story, that "No such Blackwater event ever existed," despite the calendar entry.

The Republican National Committee plans to hold an April fundraiser at a Moyock, N.C. compound owned by the military contracting firm formerly known as Blackwater, Politico reports.

According to an RNC fundraising document uncovered on Wednesday, RNC "Young Eagles" -- party major donors under 40 -- will meet at the facility in the spring.

Not to brag

But we're smarter than they are! Nyah nyah.. *cough* ... ahem:

(CNN) -- Political, religious and sexual behaviors may be reflections of intelligence, a new study finds.

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

The IQ differences, while statistically significant, are not stunning -- on the order of 6 to 11 points -- and the data should not be used to stereotype or make assumptions about people, experts say. But they show how certain patterns of identifying with particular ideologies develop, and how some people's behaviors come to be.

But we knew this a long while back....

Update: David Corn ponders the facts: Are Democratic Presidents Smarter Than Republican Presidents?

It's WTF Thursday!

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Many detainees locked up at Guantanamo were innocent men swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants, a former Bush administration official said Thursday. "There are still innocent people there," Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told The Associated Press. "Some have been there six or seven years."

Wilkerson, who first made the assertions in an Internet posting on Tuesday, told the AP he learned from briefings and by communicating with military commanders that the U.S. soon realized many Guantanamo detainees were innocent but nevertheless held them in hopes they could provide information for a "mosaic" of intelligence.

Most of us who were reading the news and searching the blogs knew this many years ago, that children and old men were involved, that innocents were swept up in the dragnets.... and that we did fuck all to get them out. We've tortured them, made many go insane, and all for 'intelligence'?

Bullshit.

Tell me again exactly why it was that we had to torture? Why?

As I've said before, the top administrators of the Bush cabal did it because they wanted to:

Sometimes urban legends are based on truth

Like Cheney is a vampire... but I digress:

Nearing the end of eight years as Vice President, Dick Cheney bluntly dismissed the frequent suggestion that he was the one calling the shots in the White House. “It’s an urban legend,” he said. “It never happened.” […]

“This whole notion that somehow I exceeded my authority here, was usurping his authority, was simply not true.” Cheney said “there was never any question about who was in charge: it was George Bush and that’s how we operated.”

No wonder he's denying he had a hand in the stovepiping of Iraqi intelligence before the war and the pressuring of analysts and shutting up the Army War College with Rumsfeld's help. The PNAC neocon plan for war turned out so well...

Think Progress lists a few "legends":

Here are just some examples of Cheney abusing his vice presidential powers:

– Argued he was not part of the executive branch but instead a “barnacle” hanging between the legislative and executive branch.

– Cheney’s office failed to provide data on its classification and declassification activities as required by Executive Order 12958. “Cheney’s office provided the information in 2001 and 2002, then stopped.”

– Top Cheney aide David Addington “typed a substitute signature line” for Alberto Gonzales on a memo re-authorizing Bush’s illegal wiretapping program.

– “The Cheney team had…technological supremacy over the National Security Council staff. That is to say, they could read their e-mails,” said former Colin Powell aide Lawrence Wilkerson.

– Documents prepared for the then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice were “routed outside the formal process” to Cheney.

– A Cheney lawyer told the Secret Service in September 2006 “to eliminate data on who visited Cheney at his official residence.”

Next he'll be telling us his undisclosed secret location is a castle in Transylvania....

But he was so cute and fuzzy!

BEIJING – A college student in southern China was bitten by a panda after he broke into the bear's enclosure hoping to get a hug, state media and a park employee said Saturday.

[snip]

He said the student was bitten in the arms and legs. Two foreign visitors who saw the attack ran to get help from workers at a nearby refreshment stand, who notified park officials, the employee said.

The student was pale as he was taken away by medics but appeared clear-headed, he said.

"Yang Yang was so cute and I just wanted to cuddle him. I didn't expect he would attack," the 20-year-old student, surnamed Liu, said in a local hospital, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

Clear-headed is really not the most appropriate adjective nor does mentioning he's a college student automatically indicate common sense....

It apparently doesn't matter to Republicans if you're smart or not...

Michael Berube (via Atrios):

I’ve been reading the GOP campaign as being not merely an assault on liberal elites—like I say, that’s old news—but a frontal attack on the very idea of standards of plausibility in argument. To friends and family (and one or two inquiring reporters), I’ve been calling it the National Insult My Intelligence Tour 2008. It’s as if they’re simply trying to see how much amazing shit they can get away with (like this amazing shit!), even though (as many people have noted) this strategy requires them to run against the very constituency McCain had courted for over a decade—the elite Beltway punditocracy, McCain’s base.

And in so doing, they’re laying a fairly obvious trap for actual liberal elitists like me. When I was speaking at the Belmont Humanities Symposium last month, the topic of presidential debates came up—partly because the forum was about debate, check, and partly because Belmont is hosting the second presidential debate. And in response to one student’s question, I said (among other things) that I can’t stand it when liberals go around saying that Obama is going to wipe the floor with McCain in the debates, or that the Biden-Palin debate will turn the lights out on the whole campaign, because too many liberals and progressives continue to think it’s all a matter of being the smartest person in the room. There are plenty of Republican-voting people out there, I said, who are resentful and (guess what) bitter . . . because they truly believe they are being governed by high and mighty muck-a-mucks who sneer at their pastimes and their cherished local traditions, and they don’t see Obama (or Hillary either!) as someone who’ll give them the time of day. If this election gets framed as Ordinary People against Mr. Extra Extra Smart, I thought, the Democrats are going down in flames. Every time a liberal says, “of course our side should win this—we’re so much smarter than they are,” he (or she!) plays right into the right’s cultural-resentment script. And they make themselves sound like nineteen-year-old Objectivists into the bargain.

The financial crisis may have altered these dynamics, insofar as it seems to have alerted millions of Americans to the virtues of having a president who knows what he’s (or she’s) talking about.

Interesting to consider...we will be able to elect the first black president ever all because of George Bush and the neocons. There was a pony in that big shitpile!

Why it's not worth your time

To argue about global warming with those who refuse to accept facts. Or scientific studies. Or science.

I guess this just reflects the political attitudes of the time....

No military assistance link between Iran and Iraq has been proved

Even when we tortured captured Iranians: (my bold)

WASHINGTON - The George W Bush administration's campaign to seize and detain Iranian Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) officials in Iraq, presented by Bush himself in January as a move to break up an alleged Iranian arms smuggling operation in Iraq, appears to have run its course without having been able to link a single Iranian to any such operation.

Despite administration rhetoric suggesting that the US military had solid intelligence on which to base a campaign to break up Iranian-sponsored networks supplying armor-piercing weapons, what is now known about the kidnapping operations indicates that the actual purpose was to obtain some evidence from interrogations that would support the administration's line that the IRGC's elite Quds Force is involved in assisting Shi'ite forces militarily.

None of the remaining six Iranians now held by the US military, however, has provided any evidence for the administration's case, despite many months of very tough interrogation usually employed on "high-value" detainees.

Wayne White, former deputy director of the US Bureau of Intelligence and Research Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia, told Inter Press Service he believes the administration badly wanted to get information from the Iranian detainees that they could use to make their case, but it has been unable to do so.

"I'm convinced that they haven't gotten anything out of them," he said in an interview. "They haven't come up with anything they can shop around."

The program has also been a political embarrassment in relations with US allies in Iraq. US military seizures of Iranians whom the US military claimed were IRGC Quds Force officers have been condemned not only by the Shi'ite government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, but also by Kurdish leaders. The US military apologized in August for "a regrettable incident" in which eight Iranians were arrested in Baghdad, and soon freed after Iraqi protests.

And the US quietly released nine Iranian detainees last week, two of whom were seized in the Kurdish city of Irbil in January, saying they were "of no continuing intelligence value".

So... what is the next step when we've found torture doesn't work. Do we just dump the victims out on the nearest road and tell them not to have any hard feelings? Is there any realization that this torture has created many more terrorists? This time with a very rational reason for hating the United States?

Update: And while we're on the subject, Iran isn't close to having a nuclear weapon:

Kuwait City, Kuwait (AHN) - Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday that Iran is far from acquiring nuclear armament. He declared that an Islamic attack by the country is unlikely at this point, refuting the concerns and the claims of the current U.S. government about Iran's dangerous nuclear weaponry potential.

The United States and some of its allies have recently been pressing down on Iran, challenging its claims of ambitions for a peaceful nuclear program. The U.S. government has raised the alarm on Iran's uranium enrichment program, and threatening to slap the nation with heavy sanctions.

Mr. Powell expressed his doubts and disagreements regarding this sentiment, saying "I think Iran is a long way from having anything that could be anything like a nuclear weapon," as quoted by the Associated Press.

In an investigation done by the U.N. nuclear watchdog the IAEA, it was revealed that there was no solid evidence of Iran developing nuclear power for the sake of atomic weapon acquisition. The Iranian Ambassador to Pakistan, Mashallah Shakeri, further insisted this claim.

Resistance is futile

Besides, we've collected all your emails and phone conversations for years. What's the problem?

Chet Scoville of Vanity Press catches this quote and demands Kerr be fired:

As Congress debates new rules for government eavesdropping, a top intelligence official says it is time that people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people's private communications and financial information.

Corporations should be trusted? Just what planet is he living on?

An historical file?

Or just fucking hysterical? Via Ripley at Zen Cabin, the Chicago Tribune:

WASHINGTON—Two intelligence assessments from January 2003 predicted that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and subsequent U.S. occupation of Iraq could lead to internal violence and provide a boost to Islamic extremists and terrorists in the region, according to congressional sources and former intelligence officials familiar with the prewar studies.

The assessment on post-Hussein Iraq included judgments that while Iraq was unlikely to split apart, there was a significant chance that domestic groups would fight each other and that ex-regime military elements could merge with terrorist groups to battle any new government.

The second NIC assessment discussed “political Islam being boosted and the war being exploited by terrorists and extremists elsewhere in the region,” one former senior analyst said. It also suggested that fear of U.S. military dominance and occupation of a Middle East country—one sacred to Islam—would attract foreign Islamic fighters to the area.

The former senior [intelligence] official said that after the NIC papers were distributed to senior government officials, he was told by one CIA briefer that a senior Defense Department official had said they were “too negative” and that the papers “did not see the possibilities” the removal of Hussein would present.

They knew. They lied. People died. Impeach, convict, jail.

Scientist are just now finding out

That doggies are smart?

London, April 27 Dogs possess humanlike learning ability - they don't simply copy what they see while learning new tricks but interpret them, says a new study.

In the experiment, a well-trained Border collie bitch demonstrated to untrained dogs how to pull a lever for food using her paw. If she did this while carrying a toy ball between her teeth, the dogs in her audience would instead tug the lever with their mouths when their turn arrived.

They would have saved time if they just went to NTodd's blog.

Update: More on the testing, with pics.

Women in today's society

Via Pharyngula, smallboyonherbike wrote:

My customers often annoy me. They often make me mad, and often I think they are idiots.

However, they seldom make me want to physically assault them.

Today, though, I came very close to hitting someone.

I work at a bookstore. I was cashiering today when a woman and her two kids (a boy and a girl, both somewhere between 13-15) came up to the register. The mom was buying 2 celeb gossip magazines, and the boy put down a book. The girl then walked up and set down the newest volume of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series.

The mom says "You can't buy that."

Girl: Why?
Mom: Because it's too big.
Girl: [Brother] is buying a book that big. It's not very expensive.
Mom: [Brother] is a boy. You're a girl. And girls shouldn't read big books like that. It's too thick. Boys don't like girls who read thick books. You want boys to like you, don't you?

The girl went and put the book away.

My daughter showed me this wonderful cartoon by Shinga in Deviant Art which speaks to this.

Osama determined to strike within the United States

With a nuclear device.

Frank Rich of the New York Times:

...The intelligence and counterterrorism officials back then were privately sounding urgent warnings like those in last week’s Times, culminating in the President’s Daily Brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The system “was blinking red,” as the C.I.A. chief George Tenet would later tell the 9/11 commission. But no one, from the White House on down, wanted to hear it.

The White House doesn’t want to hear it now, either. That’s why terrorism experts are trying to get its attention by going public, and not just through The Times. Michael Scheuer, the former head of the C.I.A. bin Laden unit, told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann last week that the Taliban and Al Qaeda, having regrouped in Afghanistan and Pakistan,

“are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States”

(the real United States, that is, not the fictional stand-in where this same scenario can be found on “24”). Al Qaeda is “on the march” rather than on the run, the Georgetown University and West Point terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman told Congress. Tony Blair is pulling troops out of Iraq not because Basra is calm enough to be entrusted to Iraqi forces — it’s “not ready for transition,” according to the Pentagon’s last report — but to shift some British resources to the losing battle against the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.

Just because Bush says so

Apparently no longer counts for much:
VIENNA, Austria -- Despite growing international concern about Iran's nuclear program and its regional ambitions, most U.S. intelligence shared with the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency has proved inaccurate and none has led to significant discoveries inside Iran, diplomats here said.

The officials said the CIA and other Western spy services have provided sensitive information to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency at least since 2002, when Iran's long-secret nuclear program was exposed. But none of the tips about supposed secret weapons sites provided clear evidence that the Islamic Republic is developing illicit weapons.

"Since 2002, pretty much all the intelligence that's come to us has proved to be wrong," said a senior diplomat at the IAEA. Another official here described the agency's intelligence stream as "very cold now (because) so little panned out."

The reliability of U.S. information and assessments on Iran is increasingly at issue as the Bush administration confronts the emerging regional power on multiple fronts: its expanding nuclear effort, its alleged support for insurgents inside Iraq and its backing of Middle East militant groups.