Peter Krupa

Not only is the United States imprisoning people without trials and denying them the right to file writs of habeas corpus, it is threatening the lawyers that offer to represent those people on a pro bono basis. From the New York Times:

The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism [Charles D. Simpson] said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties. 

…

In his radio interview, Mr. Stimson said: “I think the news story that you’re really going to start seeing in the next couple of weeks is this: As a result of a FOIA request through a major news organization, somebody asked, ‘Who are the lawyers around this country representing detainees down there?’ and you know what, it’s shocking.” The F.O.I.A. reference was to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by Monica Crowley, a conservative syndicated talk show host, asking for the names of all the lawyers and law firms representing Guantánamo detainees in federal court cases.

Mr. Stimson, who is himself a lawyer, then went on to name more than a dozen of the firms listed on the 14-page report provided to Ms. Crowley, describing them as “the major law firms in this country.” He said, “I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.” 

As my lovely wife pointed out, threatening lawyers who are representing politically unpopular clients is something Hugo Chavez would do. This does not make me proud of my country.

Bush’s plan for Iraq can be summed up as follows: Do what we did before, but better, and more of it. Oh. Great. A lot of people voted for George W. Bush because they thought he was a good leader. Part of being a good leader, however, is knowing when to quit.

From the New York Times:

New York City, with its rich history of public playgrounds, is on the verge of a bold experiment in the way children play, one that could accelerate the trend away from monkey bars, swings and seesaws used by generations of city children.

In an unusual public-private partnership, the city is developing a playground near the South Street Seaport that will have trained “play workers” on hand to help children interact with features of the new playground: water, ramps, sand and specially designed objects meant to spur the imagination.

The concept is not just another accouterment for Manhattan’s pampered toddler set. Rather, city officials say, it reflects the latest thinking about child-rearing.

The person who thought this up had one too many Master’s degrees.

I get a Google News Alert in my e-mail everyday for the term “Cuba.” Mostly it’s propaganda from the state-run “news” agencies like Prensa Latina, Granma, CubaNet, etc. One interesting thing, however, is that you can track how relationships between the Venezuela-Cuba axis and other countries are working out. For example, I don’t think I’ve seen Brazil in a headline for a good six months.

Hmmmm…

Malcom Gladwell had a piece in the New Yorker recently that touches on this. It describes how a team of US intel geeks dedicated their time to listening to Nazi propaganda during World War II, and from the propaganda alone made surprisingly accurate predictions about what was going on behind the scenes.

It made me realize you can probably do the same thing with the Cuban news service. Anyway, one thing is for sure: the Cuban propaganda people (and, by extension, the AP and Reuters) need to learn some new headlinese words for “criticized.” At present, the Cuban government “slams” just about everything.

A Google search for “Cuba slams,” in quotes, turned up 23,500 hits. Among the things Cuba was slamming were Costa Rica, various US policies, Judicial Watch, the UN Human Rights Commission, the European Union, and, strangely enough, Canada. Fortunately they haven’t slammed me yet. But when they do, I’ll be waiting.

First of all, Venezuela is screwed for the foreseeable future - really, seriously screwed. The story is too long to summarize, but Bloomberg.com has a nice roundup of the carnage. Hugo Chavez is going on a nationalization spree, starting with the power company and the telecoms, and he’s making eyes at the oil fields in the Oronoco Belt that are half-owned by private investors.

As a result, all financial indicators (stock markets, bond futures, etc.) are going crazy, and the value of the bolivar in street trading has dropped to almost half the official exchange rate. The cherry on the sundae: He called the head of the Organization of American States a “pendejo,” which literally translates as “pubic hair,” but more accurately means “dumbass.” Nice.

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Second of all, I don’t know if you realize this, but all human beings have biases that affect our “rational” judgment, making it not very rational at all. And the authors of an article in Foreign Policy have discovered that those biases help explain why we human beings prefer hawkish foreign policy advice:

… When we constructed a list of the biases uncovered in 40 years of psychological research, we were startled by what we found: All the biases in our list favor hawks. These psychological impulses—only a few of which we discuss here—incline national leaders to exaggerate the evil intentions of adversaries, to misjudge how adversaries perceive them, to be overly sanguine when hostilities start, and overly reluctant to make necessary concessions in negotiations. In short, these biases have the effect of making wars more likely to begin and more difficult to end.

There you have it. The hippies will never succeed, because Mother Nature won’t let them. Ironic, that.

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But, third of all, and if you haven’t slit your wrists yet, Slate.com has a surprisingly entertaining piece of travel writing about buying a pet falcon in Dubai:

I began to pepper him with questions. What were the specs on these falcons? What exactly were they capable of?

By way of response, he pulled out his cell phone, punched some buttons, and held the screen in front of my face. On the small display, I could make out a film of a falcon flying in the desert, its wings pumping up and down. A few seconds in, the bird swooped and totally blitzkrieged a helpless animal that appeared to be—I swear to God—some sort of small antelope.

At this point, I realized: I must have a falcon. I inquired as to the cost. The shopkeeper explained that this depends on the size of the falcon and its skill. But in general, they’ll run you about five grand apiece.

Which is clearly worth it, when you think about it.

Clearly.

We. Cannot. Send. More. Troops. To. Iraq. We don’t have them. We don’t have the money. We don’t have the bodies. We don’t have a mission. There is no defined enemy to fight. There is no defined friend to defend. It would not be a heroic last-ditch effort. It would be heroic last-ditch stupidity. There was no glory in the Charge of the Light Brigade. There was no glory in Pickett’s Charge. There was no glory in any of the battles of the Somme. There were, however, a lot of dead soldiers, and a lot of live politicians and generals who told us how gloriously the soldiers died.

This is not a game of Risk. You cannot throw your last units into battle, roll the dice for the hell of it, lose, and then go eat ChexMix. Willfully destroying the US military - its equipment, its morale, its soldiers - and accomplishing nothing is not good foreign policy. Neither is going in double-or-nothing when you’re $350 billion in the hole.

Will someone. Please. Stop the insanity.

As regular readers of this blog may have noticed, I haven’t written much recently about Venezuela and Hugo Chavez since his re-election in December. After a 20+ point margin of victory in an internationally-monitored election, there isn’t much left to say.

Venezuelans elected him, and so they deserve whatever consequences his bad policies will have on down the road.

Still, it’s a peculiar moment because it’s the first time during the Information Age that an entire country has voted overwhelmingly for a presidential candidate whose widely-know policies promise to decrease civil rights and democratic checks and balances.

Chavez hasn’t dilly-dallied about fulfilling his mandate either. First, he’s clamping down on that pesky freedom of expression thing by not renewing the license of opposition TV station RCTV, thereby making clear what’s in store for anyone else who doesn’t want to toe the line. The Organization of American States is protesting, but what do they know.

Second, he’s moving to pull all his supporters - who at the moment are members of various left-wing parties - under one giant red banner. That’s right, he’s moving toward a one-party state. In doing so, he also purged … er … fired his long-standing vice president, Vicente Rangel, because (according to Chavez) a commemorative ceremony under Rangel’s management went slightly wrong. What a scandal.

Even better, in his place, Chavez has appointed as his new vice president the guy who was in charge of the “politically neutral” National Elections Council during the 2004 referendum to recall Chavez.

Hooray for democracy. But hell, you get what you pay for.

I finally saw Mel Gibson’s much-ballyhooed Apocalypto. It was a good action movie. And there’s not much else to say. Because that’s what it is: an action movie.

Did he inaccurately depict the historical, cultural, and technological richness of the Mayan culture? Sure. But while it might be true that Gibson exaggerated the Mayan human sacrifice thing, it’s also true that a person can’t really run six miles after being shot in the lung.

Get it? Action movie. Ammo is endless. The Russians are sinister. Good-guy wounds are flesh wounds. Bad-guy wounds are fatal. Details of cultural and historical significance are probably fudged in order to get a good angle on that bad-ass Steven Segal round-house.

The real story, as far as I’m concerned, is the media’s obsession with Mel Gibson’s obsession with violence. Last time there was this much hand-wringing over cinematic violence was probably in a Congressional hearing on the topic. It was like someone handed out talking points. Here’s two headlines:

Slate: “A Pre-History of Violence: Mel Gibson’s bloody, bewildering Apocalypto”

Salon: “Apocalypto: Mel Gibson’s latest pretends to care about the fall of man, but it really only wants to impale, flay, disfigure and torture him. Sound familiar?“

And the lede to the New York Times review:

“I’m going to peel off his skin and make him watch me wear it.” This grisly threat is delivered by one of the main bad guys in Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto.” The promised flaying never takes place, but viewers who share this director’s apparently limitless appetite for gore will not be disappointed, since not much else in the way of bodily torment has been left to the imagination.

Great, thanks. We already knew this, it’s a Mel Gibson movie. Imagine a review of a Tarantino movie with the headline, “Tarantino: What he really wants is more blood,” and then an explanation of how he’s botched Japanese culture.

Something Mel’s critics never get around to mentioning is that the reason the gore in his movies is so excruciating is because, meanwhile, there’s usually a family waiting to be saved, or a young love that’s been snuffed out. Sappy stuff, sure, but in terms of violence, that’s what makes the difference between a gore-for-gore’s-sake slasher flick, and something with characters and pathos.

Today I realized that some day, after I’m estranged or long-lost, have made my fortune in West African diamonds, and have millions of dollars stuffed away surreptitiously in a Nigerian bank account, if it so happens that I die in a gruesome car accident and my accountant (an honest man) is desperately casting around for some relation to send my millions to, and the only relation he can find is my nephew Hamish via the internet, and the only e-mail address available with which to contact Hamish is ungabe34564@yahoo.co.nr, and the only keyboard available to my accountant is STUCK ON CAPS LOCK SO IT LOOKS LIKE HE’S YELLING…

Well, poor Hamish, after a furious bout of “spam” deletion, will probably erase his chance at riches. Click. Poof. Gone. The vagaries of fate.

Interesting column today in the New York Times about the “epidemic of diagnosis:”

This epidemic is a threat to your health. It has two distinct sources. One is the medicalization of everyday life. Most of us experience physical or emotional sensations we don’t like, and in the past, this was considered a part of life. Increasingly, however, such sensations are considered symptoms of disease. Everyday experiences like insomnia, sadness, twitchy legs and impaired sex drive now become diagnoses: sleep disorder, depression, restless leg syndrome and sexual dysfunction.

Perhaps most worrisome is the medicalization of childhood. If children cough after exercising, they have asthma; if they have trouble reading, they are dyslexic; if they are unhappy, they are depressed; and if they alternate between unhappiness and liveliness, they have bipolar disorder. While these diagnoses may benefit the few with severe symptoms, one has to wonder about the effect on the many whose symptoms are mild, intermittent or transient.

The whole thing is very good, and provides an interesting response to people who point out how much more the US spends on health care in comparison to socialist countries.

Maybe the reason is that we’re all so much sicker…