Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
CNN Reports. And I sense something…something I have not felt since…
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein aggressively defended her decision to release a controversial Senate torture report Tuesday, despite assertions from the CIA that interrogation techniques detailed in the report were effective in thwarting attack plans, capturing terrorists and saving American lives.
In a testy interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on “The Situation Room,” Feinstein said she wasn’t going to get into whether CIA Director John Brennan was lying about the torture techniques’ effectiveness, but that “there’s a big difference of opinion.”
Yes — there it is again. Someone “winning the argument” by refusing to discuss something.
Someone female. A female person no sane straight male person would ever want to take to bed & see naked…never, ever, ever ever ever. Which doesn’t matter, of course, except for one thing: Jumping Jehosephat, we certainly have been seeing a lot of this, haven’t we? Every place there is an idea being practiced, or proposed, that is execrable and cannot be defended. If you can’t win by accusing your opponent of racism, you go for the “yard duty teacher” approach, with I’m-not-gonna-do-this. Do the “bitch pitch.” I refuse to discuss this! I’m not gonna go there! I’m not going to get into that! Me, me, me, it’s all about me…anything to avoid discussing that which should not be discussed.
What a poor fit that is for her sales job. Here’s a report! Thought you should know! We need to discuss this some more! Okay, let’s discuss it. Oh, whoa, hey I’m not gonna get into that…
I remember ten years ago, I was seeing at least some persuasive thoughts delivered on both sides of this “torture debate.” It took some mulling-over for some people to realize, duh, hey waitaminnit: If this is wrong only because we would not want to have it done to us, and that’s all it takes to call something “torture” and therefore to intone with an air of finality that it ought not be done to anybody else, then that should apply to everything we do to these people (who want to kill us) that we wouldn’t want to have done to us. We’d have to turn them loose. If it doesn’t work that way, then why? What’s the difference?
No one’s come up with one.
Now, with the passage of a decade, we see people have started to noodle out the obvious. No longer are we seeing strong, persuasive points presented on both sides of the torture debate, points that make you think. What we’re seeing now is just a big turd. A turd being left by a lame-duck Congress.
What’s the upside? There isn’t one, except if you’re a democrat, or someone who wants to see democrats win. By 2006 this was working for them: We’d put them in power, and our government would stop dripping water on the heads of people who want to kill us…which would somehow make us all more morally elevated in some way, or something. We gave it a fair shot. It didn’t work, democrats did very little to elevate our moral standing, they did much more to elevate our debt, along with the cost of living. Which is what happens whenever they’re put in charge.
So we fired them, and now they want to make the discussion cyclical, so we can all revisit the parts of it that produced electoral results more to their liking. But it isn’t working, because in the interim, everybody’s been doing some learning. Well, maybe not everybody. But enough of us.
It isn’t that I doubt anyone will find out anything new from the release of the report. The surprise will be in who will do the learning, and what exactly it is that will be learned. I don’t think these are going to be in sync with the expectations of those who made the decision to release. Yeah, DiFi, I don’t think I’d want to get into that either.
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