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In the battle of almonds vs. salmon, everyone is a loser

by KimFrenchg Posted on December 29, 2014

almond oy

In the battle of almonds vs. salmon, everyone is a loser

By on 29 Dec 2014commentsShare

It’s a day that ends with Y, so the world is met with yet another entry in the voluminous tome entitled 2014: Year of the War on Almonds. Today, the No. 1 Enemy of the Nut is none other than the noble but needy salmon!

In the Westlands Water District of the San Joaquin Valley, 15 percent of farmland is planted with almond trees. Almonds have surged in popularity among farmers in recent years because A) they are delicious (cut to me gleefully sprinkling almonds on everything I eat) and B) even though they are fucking expensive (cut to me weeping at the grocery store cash register), people will still buy them (see A). And while almond trees do not need to be replanted from season to season, they require huge quantities of water to flourish — just over one gallon per almond.

An old-ish state law in California requires that in dry times (like right now!) surfacewater supplies be diverted to replenish salmon habitats. Farmers, one might expect, are not really into that — and those in the Westlands Water District have unsuccessfully tried to lobby to change these regulations. From the New York Times:

The proposals in the failed legislation — which was sponsored by Representative David Valadao, Republican of Hanford, in the southern San Joaquin Valley agricultural heartland — “would upend a whole number of laws” and long-established priority rights to surface water, said Kate Poole, a water expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

She added, “We have clearly exceeded the ability of our water supplies — including surface and groundwater — to meet the demands we’re putting on it. We have to change, stretching how much we can get out of each drop through expanded urban and agricultural efficiency.” But, she said, “the Republicans in Congress seem to want to go in the other direction and upend the centuries-old priorities and give water to more politically powerful wealthy interests.”

It’s worth noting that Not All Almond Farmers are wealthy nut barons — as Grist fellow Madeleine Thomas reported earlier this year, there’s been a trend in California farmers turning from dairy to almonds just to stay financially viable.

We can argue until the cows come home (spoiler: They are not coming home, because they have turned into almond trees) about whether farmers or fishermen will suffer more from this conflict. However, the true victim is undeniably Gwyneth Kate Paltrow, who survives exclusively on a diet of soaked organic nuts, wild salmon, and fire-roasted copies of A Rush of Blood to the Head. Can we please all get over ourselves and JUST THINK OF OL’ GWEN? Seriously!

Source:
Water Source for Almonds in California May Run Dry

, The New York Times.

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In the battle of almonds vs. salmon, everyone is a loser

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It Is the 100th Anniversary of the WWI Christmas Truce

by TedPmuzswto Posted on December 25, 2014

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Go to war and every politician will thank you, and they’ll continue to do so—with monuments and statues, war museums and military cemeteries—long after you’re dead. But who thanks those who refused to fight, even in wars that most people later realized were tragic mistakes? Consider the 2003 invasion of Iraq, now widely recognized as igniting an ongoing disaster. America’s politicians still praise Iraq War veterans to the skies, but what senator has a kind word to say about the hundreds of thousands of protesters who marched and demonstrated before the invasion was even launched to try to stop our soldiers from risking their lives in the first place?

What brings all this to mind is an apparently heartening exception to the rule of celebrating war-makers and ignoring peacemakers. A European rather than an American example, it turns out to be not quite as simple as it first appears. Let me explain.

December 25th will be the 100th anniversary of the famous Christmas Truce of the First World War. You probably know the story: after five months of unparalleled industrial-scale slaughter, fighting on the Western Front came to a spontaneous halt. British and German soldiers stopped shooting at each other and emerged into the no-man’s-land between their muddy trenches in France and Belgium to exchange food and gifts.

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It Is the 100th Anniversary of the WWI Christmas Truce

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How You Can Fake Solving a Rubik’s Cube

by Bonita2376 Posted on December 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Matt Parker isn’t your average stand-up comedian. He doesn’t draw his material from the banalities of everyday life, like many of his peers. His routine substitutes equations and mathematical concepts for toilet humor and political jabs. And the audience loves it.

So how did he become a mathematical comedian? “During the day, I was teaching math to teenagers, and then in the evening, I was telling jokes to drunk people in comedy clubs—which actually is a surprisingly similar skill set,” explains Parker on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. He says he gradually began to work bits about “what it’s like to be a nerd” into his routines, and eventually “people started showing up expecting me to talk about math.”

“This is my ideal Venn diagram,” adds Parker. “If I can do math and stand-up at the same time, that’s brilliant.”

Parker has also just released a book—Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension—packed full of clever jokes and a lot of really interesting math. What sets it apart from a number of other recent math books is the fact that the reader is encouraged to actually do some math, rather than just read about it. “I put in loads of puzzles, hands-on activities, things you can build,” says Parker. “And you can read the book without doing them, but if you want to, you can get your hands dirty.”

This is the appeal of Parker’s brand of math: He wants you to not just understand the concepts, but to be able to use them to impress your friends. Take a look at the video above, for example, in which he describes how to cheat your way into “solving” a Rubik’s Cube in fewer than three minutes. (It might even help you get into Princeton.)

If that isn’t impressive enough, try this hack: Tell your buddies that you have the magical ability to recognize fake credit card numbers. Have them write down a series 16-digit numbers, one that they copy from an actual credit card and several that they just make up. Now, starting with the first digit in each sequence, take every second digit and double it. If doubling a digit produces a two-digit answer, add those two digits together. You should now have eight new digits. Add up all these new digits along with the eight remaining digits that you didn’t double. If the result is a multiple of 10, it could be a real credit card number. If not, you have one of your friends’ randomly-generated foils. “The reason we put that strange pattern in there,” explains Parker, is that “when you type it into a website, the website can do that calculation. If the answer is not a multiple of 10, it knows it’s not a real card.”

Parker bemoans the fact that many people don’t realize how much math affects their daily lives. “They think that math isn’t helping when, in fact, it is!” he exclaims. “It’s making their lives possible.”

But even Parker took a detour in his education before committing to a life in mathematics—the “dark days” in college when he was studying mechanical engineering. “I got about halfway through a mech-eng degree before I realized that if I finished it, it would leave me dangerously employable,” he jokes. “And I also realized that what I really liked was just doing the equations—that it was the actual math behind the engineering that set my world on fire.”

So what is it about math that ignites Parker’s passion? “It’s basically like a murder mystery,” he says. What can make an otherwise decent thriller turn sour is if there’s a nonsensical ending—if the author just brings in a random character at the very end and calls him the murderer, the reader will lose interest in that author’s work. “But a good book, you get to the end and go, ‘Oh, that makes sense, there were hints all along,'” says Parker. “And that’s mathematics. You get to the end, you go, ‘That was hard work, but it’s great.'”

Listen to the full interview with Matt Parker below:

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How You Can Fake Solving a Rubik’s Cube

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Someone Needs to Invent a Great Non-Opioid Painkiller

by JulianaWillifor Posted on December 22, 2014

Mother Jones

Austin Frakt writes about the stunningly widespread use and abuse of narcotic painkillers in the US:

Opioids now cause more deaths than any other drug, more than 16,000 in 2010. That year, the combination of hydrocodone and acetaminophen became the most prescribed medication in the United States. Patients here consumed 99 percent of the world’s hydrocodone, the opioid in Vicodin. They also consumed 80 percent of the world’s oxycodone, present in Percocet and OxyContin, and 65 percent of the world’s hydromorphone, the key ingredient in Dilaudid, in 2010. (Some opioids are also used to treat coughs, but that use doesn’t seem to be a major factor in the current wave of problems.)

When I got out of the hospital a couple of months ago, I was in considerable pain. The answer was morphine. For about two weeks, I took a couple of low-dose morphine tablets each day. Then the pain eased and I stopped.

I resisted the morphine at first, and my doctor had to argue me into using it regularly. “You broke a bone in your back,” she told me. “Your pain is legitimate. We have a lot of experience treating pain with morphine, and you’ll be all right.”

I finally listened, and the morphine did indeed work as advertised. But it somehow got me thinking. Morphine? That’s the best we can do? This stuff was invented 200 years ago. And while there are newer painkillers around, they’re all opioids of one kind or another with all the usual horrible side effects1. How is it that in over a century of research, we still know so little about pain that we haven’t been able to create a powerful, non-opioid painkiller?

I’m not really going anywhere with this. I’m just curious. Are there any good books, or even long magazine articles, about this? Why is that even after gazillions of dollars of effort, we’re still relying on variants of the opium poppy for serious pain relief? It’s the 21st century. How come we can’t do better?

1Addiction, nausea, wooziness, constipation, etc.

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Someone Needs to Invent a Great Non-Opioid Painkiller

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The 9 Best Cookbooks of 2014

by JillianSnelling Posted on December 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Another year, another spate of brilliant cookbooks. Here are the ones that made the biggest impression on me, in no particular order.

Bitter: A Taste of the World’s Most Dangerous Flavor, with Recipes, by Jennifer McLagan. In 2005, nearly a decade before “bone broth” emerged as a craze, McLagan came out with Bones, a delicious defense of a culinary resource people normally discard. Three years later, when people like me were still mostly shunning the lard jar, she produced the equally excellent Fat, which she called an “appreciation of the misunderstood ingredient.” McLagan, perhaps the most idiosyncratic and underrated cookbook author of our time, has now trained her powers on the stuff that makes you grimace the first time it hits your palate: radicchio, dandelion greens, hops, brassicas, chicory, citrus zest, coffee, etc. “Without bitterness we lose a way to balance sweetness,” she instructs. “Food without bitterness lacks depth and complexity.” Bitter brims with luminous mini-essays on the science and philosophy of taste, and delivers dozens of straight-ahead recipes that teach us to tame and celebrate the most challenging of the five basic flavors.

Great gift for: People with adventurous palates.
Killer dish: Dandelion salad with hot bacon and mustard dressing.
Dish I’m dying to try: Pork chop (bone-in, fat lined) in coffee and black currant sauce.

Bar Tartine: Techniques & Recipes, by Nick Balla and Cortney Burns. Based on a single meal several years ago, I’ve always assumed San Francisco’s Bar Tartine—sister to the justly venerated Tartine Bakery—specialized in simple bistro food. So I wasn’t overly excited when this substantial, beautifully produced tome arrived. But rather than deliver yet more versions of steak frites or coq au vin, the book reads like a manifesto written by radical gourmet homesteaders—one of the weirdest and most compelling cookbooks I’ve picked up in years. I got lost in the rabbit warrens of the opening “projects kitchen” section, where the authors lay out in detail all the stuff they make from scratch. “Our dairy program began humbly—with yogurt, sour cream, and kefir—and evolved to include all the products we currently use: blue cheese, pepper Jack, gouda, triple creams, feta, and fresh cheeses such as mozzarella, goat cheese, and farmers cheese,” the authors declare. Whoa. Ever wondered how to make your own kefir butter? Balla and Burns have you covered. I had never heard of “black garlic” before. Turns out, “holding garlic at 130 F for two to three weeks renders the cloves as black as tar.” Is that a good thing? “All of the characteristic sharpness disappears and is replaced with a molasses-like sweetness and an aroma reminiscent of licorice.” Then there’s the spice mixes. Forget, say, homemade curry powder. Think “charred eggplant spice,” a powder that “tastes like the pure flavor of earth and smoke” (other elements: charred, dehydrated chile peppers, huitlachoche—a corn fungus—and green onions.) Surprisingly simple (but never obvious) recipes follow the opening section’s wild innovations. I predict this book will be seducing and flummoxing me for years. Also, I’ve got to get myself back to Bar Tartine.

Great gift for: Anyone with radical gourmet homesteader tendencies; and jaded home cooks in search of inspiration.
Killer dish: Chilled beet soup with coriander & yogurt.
Dish I’m dying to try: Someday? Smoked potatoes in black garlic vinaigrette with ramp mayonnaise.

Plenty More: Vibrant Vegetable Cooking from London’s Ottolenghi, by Yotam Ottolenghi. Have we reached peak Ottolenghi? That was my question when I cracked the latest from the ubiquitous London chef, whose classics Plenty and Jerusalem seem to grace the shelves of most everyone I know, and won a spot in my 2012 best-of list. Known for his colorful, vibrant, vegetable-centered Mediterranean fare, the London-based, Israeli-born chef has been profiled in The New Yorker and interviewed on every foodie podcast. Does he have anything more to say? Hell, yes. Plenty More ventures farther afield from the author’s native Mediterranean region than his other works, copping techniques and ingredients from Thailand, Iran, India, and more. It draws you in with the delectable photography, and keeps you hooked with irresistible combinations: oranges and dates; beets with avocado and peas; leeks with goat cheese and currants; and so on. Ottolenghi isn’t a vegetarian, but he’s a wizard of vegetables, and a master at conjuring up hearty meals by combining them with grains and legumes.

Great gift for: Anyone who thinks vegetarian food is boring; anyone who likes to cook and eat.
Killer dish: Pea and mint croquettes.
Dish I’m dying to try: Fried umpa (an Indian semolina porridge) with poached eggs

Honorable mentions

• In Afro-Vegan: Farm Fresh African, Caribbean & Southern Flavors Remixed, the Bay Area writer/chef/activist Bryan Terry pulls off a mean feat: He uses stylish, spicy vegan fare—light on tofu and heavy on grains, greens, and legumes—to lure readers into recognizing the “centrality of African-diasporic people in defining the tastes, ingredients, and classic dishes of the original modern global fusion cuisine—Southern food.” Terry’s argument is unassailable—as convincing as his gorgeous peanut stew with winter vegetable and cornmeal dumplings.

• Despite the ongoing gluten-free fad, bread is having its day, as are books on baking. No home baker will want to miss In Search of the Perfect Loaf, in which the food politics writer and editor Sam Fromartz visits the epicenters of the global baking renaissance—Paris, Berlin, San Francisco, etc.—talking to its main characters and committing an epic and appealing nerd-out (with recipes) in service of home-cooked leavened dough. In Josey Baker Bread, San Francisco’s most celebrated young baker (yes, his name and vocation are identical) shows us how the pros do it.

• San Francisco’s The Slanted Door is a fancy restaurant that applies Vietnamese techniques and condiments to Northern California’s bounty. The Slanted Door, by chef-owner Charles Phan, is a surprisingly unfussy guide to working the restaurant’s magic at home.

• For the drinkers on your list, American Spirit is a spirited guide to what author James Rodewald calls the nascent “craft distilling revolution.” At the center of Rodwald’s book is a scandal. Because of loose labeling laws, most of the “artisanal” liquor on the market involves clever businesspeople “rebottling something that had been made at a larger distiller and calling it their own.” Rodewald profiles the (still relatively few) mavericks who actually are producing their own hooch—and teases out the considerable challenges of making great whiskey and other spirits on a small scale in an industry dominated by liquor giants and false marketing.

• After reading Rodewald, you’ll want to sip something stiff. Death & Co.—a sumptuous cocktail manual from the instant-legend East Village speakeasy of the same name—delivers dozens upon dozens of ideas for taking the edge off in high style. I can’t imagine a more comprehensive snapshot of the mixology craze.

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The 9 Best Cookbooks of 2014

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Here’s How the Sony Hack Is Like 9/11

by CristinLambrick Posted on December 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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I doubt that I’m the first to say this, but has anyone noticed a striking a similarity between 9/11 and the Sony hack? Not in terms of scope or malevolence, of course, but in terms of—what’s the best word here? Creativity? Bang for the buck?

Here’s what I mean. The 9/11 attack wasn’t especially sophisticated. In fact, it was famously crude and butt cheap. All it took was a few guys who learned rudimentary piloting skills and then carried some box cutters on board four airplanes1. The reason it worked is that it was brilliant. Nobody had ever considered that hijackers could take control of a plane without so much as a single cheap handgun, and even if they could, no one had really figured that they could do anything much worse than fly the plane somewhere and maybe engineer a hostage crisis. But al-Qaeda thought different. They understood that (a) box cutters would be good enough to hold pilots and passengers at bay for an hour or two, and (b) this was long enough to fly their airplanes into a pair of iconic skyscrapers, killing thousands in an extraordinarily gruesome way. They took a crude, simplistic weapon and figured out a way to cause damage that was both tangibly enormous and emotionally outsized.

The Sony hack is a far smaller thing, but it shows a lot of the same hallmarks. Despite what press reports say, it wasn’t really all that sophisticated. It was, to be sure, a step up from box cutters, but it’s not like North Korea tried to hack into a nuclear power plant or the Pentagon. They picked a soft target. In fact, based on press reports, it sounds like even in the vast sea of crappy IT security that we call America, Sony Pictures was unusually lax. Hacking into their network was something that probably dozens of groups around the world could have done if they had thought about it. And like al-Qaeda before them, North Korea thought about it. And they realized that a Sony Pictures hack, done right, could have an outsized emotional impact. Like 9/11, it was a brilliant example of using a relatively crude tool to produce a gigantic payoff.

So what happens next? The 9/11 attack was huge, but even for its size it provoked a mammoth overreaction that continues to this day. Will the Sony hack do the same? After the dozens of credit card hacks of the past couple of years corporations are finally getting the news that they need to secure their networks better, and the Sony hack might prompt even more companies to finally get serious about IT security. That would be good. On the other hand, it could also provoke an overreaction that ends up locking down corporate infrastructure so tightly that workplaces turn into digital gulags. That would be dumb.

So then. Better corporate IT security: good. Massive overreaction: bad. Let’s get things right this time.

1It also required recruiting 19 guys willing to die for a cause. This is definitely uncommon. But it doesn’t really change the basic nature of how al-Qaeda managed to pull off such a massive attack.

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Here’s How the Sony Hack Is Like 9/11

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Obama Sounds Like He’s About to Reject the Keystone Pipeline

by LoganCrookes Posted on December 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the Grist website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Speaking at his end-of-the-year press conference on Friday afternoon, President Obama sounded very much like he’s poised to reject the Keystone XL pipeline. He gave his sharpest assessment to date of its potential costs and benefits—lots of costs and few benefits.

Climate hawks rejoiced, not only because of Obama’s implied opposition to Keystone, but because he finally confronted American ignorance of how the oil market works, and attempted to reorient our energy policy around reality.

At the press conference, Obama took a question from The Washington Post‘s Juliet Eilperin on what he will do about the Keystone XL pipeline, which congressional Republicans plan to try to ram through in January. Eilperin said Obama has in past comments “minimized some of the benefits” of Keystone. Obama responded that he has merely accurately characterized the benefits, which are objectively minimal, and walked Eilperin through a lesson in macroeconomics.

Here are the highlights:

I don’t think I’ve minimized the benefits, I think I’ve described the benefits.

At issue on Keystone is not American oil, it is Canadian oil that is drawn out of tar sands in Canada. That oil currently is being shipped through rail or trucks, and it would save Canadian oil companies and the Canadian oil industry an enormous amount of money if they could simply pipe it all the way through the United State down to the Gulf. Once that oil gets to the Gulf, it is then entering into the world market and it would be sold all around the world… There is very little impact, nominal impact, on US gas prices, what the average American consumer cares about, by having this pipeline come through.

And sometimes the way this gets sold is, let’s get this oil and it’s going to come here and the implication is that’s gonna lower oil prices here in the US It’s not. There’s a global oil market. It’s very good for Canadian oil companies and it’s good for the Canadian oil industry, but it’s not going to be a huge benefit to US consumers. It’s not even going to be a nominal benefit to US consumers.

And video of Obama’s whole answer:

It has been a source of aggravation to climate hawks that Obama has often pandered to the economic ignorance of the American public when it comes to gas prices. Obama’s “all of the above” energy strategy falsely asserts that increased domestic production of oil will reduce “our dependence on foreign oil,” as if there really were any such thing. Oil is a global commodity. Prices are set by global supply and global demand. Whether the oil we buy happens to be drilled in the US, Canada, Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, or Libya makes no difference. We are subsidizing our adversaries who produce oil as long as we are filling our gas-guzzlers with it. More oil production in the US, or oil importation from Canada, will not inoculate us against the price shocks caused by supply disruptions in the Middle East or elsewhere.

The whole American debate around energy policy has been perverted by the public’s failure to understand this basic concept. Republicans, of course, eagerly fan the flames of economic illiteracy. Obama’s approach has usually been to try to split the difference between this foolishness and smart energy policy by promising to increase domestic production of both renewables and fossil fuels. But now Obama has confronted these public misperceptions and tried to educate the public so that energy policy can be decided on a more rational basis.

As for Keystone, Obama went on to observe that the other supposed benefit, construction jobs, is real but small and temporary. Meanwhile, our transportation and clean water infrastructure crumbles and Republicans refuse to appropriate money to fix and improve it, which would create more jobs and lasting economic effects than construction of any pipeline. “When you consider what we could be doing if we were rebuilding our roads and bridges around the country, something that Congress could authorize, we could probably create hundreds of thousands of jobs, or a million jobs,” he said. (In fairness, Obama has refused to propose raising the gasoline tax to fund more transportation investment.)

And Obama mentioned the cost of climate change and the possibility that Keystone would exacerbate it. “If we’ve got more flooding, more wildfires, more drought, there are direct economic impacts on that,” he said.

The main Keystone drawback Obama neglected to mention is the local environmental risk to the communities the pipeline would pass through due to possible leaks.

Nonetheless, green groups were overjoyed. NextGen Climate, the organization funded by Tom Steyer, immediately sent out video of Obama’s answer with the subject line, “KEYSTONE XL GETS THE PRESIDENTIAL SEAL OF DISAPPROVAL.” We don’t actually know that, yet, but it’s looking likely.

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Obama Sounds Like He’s About to Reject the Keystone Pipeline

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Sean Penn on Sony Pulling "The Interview": This Sends ISIS an "Invitation"

by RolandoRoland Posted on December 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Actor and activist Sean Penn, no surprise, has some thoughts about the Sony hacking and the movie studio’s decision to pull The Interview after cyber-saboteurs linked (by the FBI) to North Korea threatened moviegoers and theaters. Here’s a statement Penn sent me:

It’s not the first time culture has been threatened by foreign interests and corporate caution. See then Disney CEO Michael Eisner’s interview with Charlie Rose in 1997, when Disney was dealing with pressure from China about Martin Scorcese’s Tibet film, Kundun. Eisner said, “we do not take, as a company, a position either in human rights or not in human rights. We are a movie company. We’re an entertainment company.” That was a pretty shocking statement. (Disney, which was looking to expand its ventures in China, did end up distributing the film, but distribution was limited and the advertising budget was low—and despite these concessions, Disney was largely frozen out of the Chinese markets for years.) This week, the distributors who wouldn’t show The Interview and Sony have sent ISIS a commanding invitation. I believe ISIS will accept the invitation. Pandora’s box is officially open.

The damage we do to ourselves typically outweighs the harm caused by outside threats or actions. Then by caving to the outside threat, we make our nightmares real. The decision to pull The Interview is historic. It’s a case of putting short term interests ahead of the long term. If we don’t get the world on board to see that this is a game changer, if this hacking doesn’t frighten the Chinese and the Russians, we’re in for a very different world, a very different country, community, and a very different culture.

I’m not sure the world has come to terms with all the implications of the hacking. I was in Liberia and Sierra Leone right at the beginning of the Ebola outbreak in April. It did seem to those of us there that the response was neither coming swiftly or with a true sense of urgency. This feels the same. This matter should be before the UN Security Council today.

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Sean Penn on Sony Pulling "The Interview": This Sends ISIS an "Invitation"

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How Will We Look Back on Drone Strikes in 2019?

by NielPostma231 Posted on December 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

It was December 6, 2019, three years into a sagging Clinton presidency and a bitterly divided Congress. That day, the 500-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s long fought-over, much-delayed, heavily redacted report on the secret CIA drone wars and other American air campaigns in the 18-year-long war on terror was finally released. That day, committee chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR) took to the Senate floor, amid the warnings of his Republican colleagues that its release might “inflame” America’s enemies leading to violence across the Greater Middle East, and said:

“Over the past couple of weeks, I have gone through a great deal of introspection about whether to delay the release of this report to a later time. We are clearly in a period of turmoil and instability in many parts of the world. Unfortunately, that’s going to continue for the foreseeable future, whether this report is released or not. There may never be the ‘right’ time to release it. The instability we see today will not be resolved in months or years. But this report is too important to shelve indefinitely. The simple fact is that the drone and air campaigns we have launched and pursued these last 18 years have proven to be a stain on our values and on our history.”

Though it was a Friday afternoon, normally a dead zone for media attention, the response was instant and stunning. As had happened five years earlier with the committee’s similarly fought-over report on torture, it became a 24/7 media event. The “revelations” from the report poured out to a stunned nation. There were the CIA’s own figures on the hundreds of children in the backlands of Pakistan and Yemen killed by drone strikes against “terrorists” and “militants.” There were the “double-tap strikes” in which drones returned after initial attacks to go after rescuers of those buried in rubble or to take out the funerals of those previously slain. There were the CIA’s own statistics on the stunning numbers of unknown villagers killed for every significant and known figure targeted and finally taken out (1,147 dead in Pakistan for 41 men specifically targeted). There were the unexpected internal Agency discussions of the imprecision of the robotic weapons always publicly hailed as “surgically precise” (and also of the weakness of much of the intelligence that led them to their targets). There was the joking and commonplace use of dehumanizing language (“bug splat” for those killed) by the teams directing the drones. There were the “signature strikes,” or the targeting of groups of young men of military age about whom nothing specifically was known, and of course there was the raging argument that ensued in the media over the “effectiveness” of it all (including various emails from CIA officials admitting that drone campaigns in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen had proven to be mechanisms not so much for destroying terrorists as for creating new ones).

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Continued:  

How Will We Look Back on Drone Strikes in 2019?

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On Torture, Dick Cheney Isn’t the Problem. We Are.

by SusannaRusconi Posted on December 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Rich Lowry is a satisfied man:

After a week of condemnations of the CIA interrogation program, and talk everywhere of how it violated our values and weakened our standing in the world, the verdict of public opinion is in: People support it….In the case of Cheney v. Feinstein, Cheney wins—at least with the public.

This is the most discouraging part of the whole torture debate. It’s one thing to learn that Dick Cheney is every bit the vicious wretch we all thought he was. But time after time since 9/11, polls have shown that the American public is basically on his side. As a nation, we simply don’t believe that a comprehensive program of state-sanctioned torture is wrong. On the contrary: we think it’s just fine as long as it’s done to other people. If we’re a Christian nation, as we’re so often reminded, we’re still an Old Testament one.

Taken from: 

On Torture, Dick Cheney Isn’t the Problem. We Are.

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