Here's a good source for information about whistleblowers: Whistleblowers Protection Blog.
Established in 1988, the National Whistleblower Legal Defense and Education Fund (“the Fund”) is a non-profit public interest law firm that works in conjunction with the National Whistleblower Center. The attorneys for the Fund represent employee whistleblowers who have reported malfeasance in private corporations and government agencies.
You don't see many of these Guantanamo exit interviews in the American media. This particular story about a man named Saad Iqbal Madni was published by a website called The World Can't Wait. The way he was treated by American officials is despicable. We desperately need to make sure that the story of American torture at Guantanamo, and elsewhere is fully told, and that it never happens again. If you are a United States Citizen, this activity was done in your name.
Mind over matter, right? When your body aches and begs to stop running, you tell it to keep moving. When your body wants to go to sleep, you exert the will to make it to stay awake, or you make its arms pour coffee into its mouth. We make our bodies drive our cars to work lest those utility bills don’t get paid and “We” will suffer the consequences. Nietzsche began Chapter V of the Gay Science with the following quote as an illustration of his own conception of fearlessness (attributed to Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, Vicomte de Turenne (1611-75) a great French general):
Sometimes during a battle he could not help trembling. Then he talked to his body as one talks to a servant. He said to it: “You tremble, carcass; but if you knew where I am taking you right now, you would tremble a lot more.”“We” are in charge, right? Except when we are not. I can think of no better example than when we are nauseated, and our body dramatically takes over, the reverse peristalsis hurling out the offending food, dominating even our minds, until it’s over. Only then can “we” take over again. Consider food traveling in the other direction, too. So many of us tell our bodies to stop eating, yet our bodies keep eating. Day after day. We remind it to look in the mirror and we tell it about our tighter-fitting clothes, yet our bodies don’t care.
We got a good blast of snow yesterday. This is the view out the front door that greeted my children this morning, right after they heard that school had been canceled.
Many of us, much of the time, run around snapping lots of photos to document our lives. There is an alternative to this "fast photography," as described by Tim Wu at Slate. It is a technique for enhancing our experience of the moment:
[S]low photography is the effort to flip the usual relationship between process and results. Usually, you use a camera because you want the results (the photos). In slow photography, the basic idea is that photos themselves—the results—are secondary. The goal is the experience of studying some object carefully and exercising creative choice. . . . Step 1 in slow photography is spending a long time studying the subject. As one guide enjoins, "pay more attention to your subject than to your camera." . . . When you look carefully and avoid trying to label what you see, you inevitably start to notice things that you mightn't have otherwise. . . .Step 2 is the exercise of creative choices—the greatest pleasure that our automatic cameras rob us of. What should be in the frame and what should be excluded is the most obvious decision, but there's also exposure, depth of field, and more technical choices beyond that. Making such deliberate decisions requires a little bit of courage, for you cannot blame the camera if the results are bad. Yet these choices are, to my mind, the whole game. They are what individualizes photography, what puts the stamp of your personality on the photo.