The consequences of de-sensitizing ourselves to torture

I wonder about those who argue that waterboarding is not torture-- can they really believe it? I suppose so. Otherwise, how could this happen? Joshua Tabor, a U.S. soldier based in Tacoma, Washington, allegedly waterboarded his 4 year-old daughter because she refused to recite the alphabet. He chose the CIA-approved technique because he knew that his daughter was afraid of water, a phobia that will surely be an ongoing issue for the poor girl. If Christopher Hitchens is to be believed, she'll wake up with nightmares for quite some time. Hitchens was a supporter of the torture technique, at least until he underwent it. His column at Vanity Fair following the experience is titled, "Believe me, it's torture." See for yourself, if you've got a sadistic streak: There seems to be little doubt that Mr. Tabor has some other issues, as neighbors reported seeing him wandering the neighborhood wearing a kevlar helmet and threatening to break windows. But I can't help but think that our collectively cavalier attitude towards the use of torture, even on innocent women and children, has had a de-sensitizing effect on us. Note this paragraph from Fox News:

"Joshua did not act as though he felt there was anything wrong with this form of punishment," the police report said.
And why would he? We, as a people, have not felt that there's anything wrong with it. If it's good enough for innocent Muslim women and children, why not use it on our own children? My heart hurts to think about the shock, the pain, and the terror that was inflicted on this poor girl at the hands of her own father. It's painful to me to think about all of the people that we have tortured, and I can only hope that this incident brings us closer to the point where we can unequivocally say, "Torture is wrong".

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An inside look at Reverend Billy Talen’s Church-of-Not-Shopping

Reverend Billy is a clown and a prophet. All dressed up, he is a serious clown, self-honed and bearing sharp claws in the best tradition of court jesters. At the recent True Spin Conference in Denver Colorado I had a chance to meet the Reverend Billy of The-Church-of-Not-Shopping. Reverend Billy is an outwardly cartoonish persona constructed by actor Billy Talen. Talan has been at it for so long and so intensely, however, that it is difficult to see where Talen ends and Reverend Billy begins. Even while he was discussing his mission during his presentation at True Spin, he was prone to erupt into his preacher voice, standing up and beckoning those present to heed the central tenet of his Church: that we “Not Shop.” Although Reverend Billy is famous for his anti-consumerist sermons, he also preaches on numerous other social justice issues. One of those other concerns is that free-flowing conversational and intellectual space—the place where naturally-occurring culture used to thrive—is now jam-packed with the profit-seeking messages of corporations seeking to deny us the natural flow of our social interactions. "They want to sponsor our stories." He is concerned that corporations have filled our heads with their music and their values, and their buy-oriented slogans, largely displacing us of our ability and desire to construct original thoughts through natural conversion. Billy argues that we need to ramp down the shopping because on a daily basis we are selling our very souls when we unnecessarily buy. We have remade ourselves into commodities, and our unwitting plan is to deliver ourselves to our sponsors. Pop quiz: according to Rev. Billy, what is the best thing you can get someone for Christmas? Answer: nothing. Why should we stop shopping? Reverend Billy might answer you with the Title to his 2007 documentary: "What Would Jesus Buy?" No words really work well to introduce you to Reverend Billy. Take a moment, if you will, to allow Amy Goodman to introduce him to you. Those who think Reverend Billy is only a clown fail to listen closely to his serious message, perhaps because of the outrageous way with which he delivers it. But make no mistake that Billy has carefully constructed both his message and his means of delivering it. He delivers it in a way that seems absurd in order to bring a modicum of attention to his message. You see, Americans love their shopping their conveniences, and they fiercely resist any suggestion that they need to change their ways.

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Expensive CEO’s of charities

How can one really justify a salary of $1 Million to run a charity? Consider the case of Brian A. Gallagher, who is paid $1,037,140 to run The United Way. Or consider the American Red Cross, which pays its top person, Gail J. McGovern, $495,187 per year. These are stats from 2009 provided by Forbes. Here's how you fix this problem: Pass a law to make all charities disclose the salaries of its top ten highest earning officers and employees on all solicitations for donations.

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Cost of our new high-speed trains is dwarfed by the tax dollars we waste in our Afghanistan and Iraq “wars.”

President Obama has recently announced that he will allocate $8 billion ($4 billion each year, over two years) to develop a new system of high-speed passenger rail service. This is an excellent idea. The new rail lines will be created within 10 geographical corridors ranging from 100 to 600 miles long. Note, however, that the high-speed rail line system will be an extremely expensive project, and that the $8 billion bill will need to be paid by 138 million tax-paying Americans. Dividing the $8 billion cost by the number of taxpayers, we can see that, on average, each taxpayer will pay almost $60 ($30 per year, for two years) to support this massive new high-speed rail service. Again, this high-speed rail project will cost an immense amount of money. Consider, though, how small this pile of rail money looks when compared to the amount of money we are wasting in the "wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan. For 2009, the United States spent approximately $87 billion for Iraq and $47 billion for Afghanistan. The fiscal 2010 budget requests $65 billion for Afghanistan operations and $61 billion for Iraq. the cost of these two "wars" together is $126 billion for 2010. Compare these expenditures on a bar chart: Graph by Erich Vieth

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New graphically illustrated book is filled with sex and violence.

R. Crumb has recently released his illustrated "The Book of Genesis." Caveat for parents of small children: No visual detail is left out. As Crumb indicates on the book cover, "Adult Supervision Recommended for Minors."img_1972 Crumb used the actual words from commonly used translations of the Bible, and simply interpreted what was going on, illustrating each passage with a cartoon-like drawing--the book is filled with many hundreds of drawings, quite a few of them explicit in their sexuality and in their violence. Crumb worked hard to show the expressions you might expect on Bible characters facing the situations they allegedly faced. Notice, for example, the expression on Noah's face (in the thumbnail at right), when hearing God disclose His genocidal intentions. Crumb is a well-known artist and illustrator, "critical, satirical, subversive view of the American mainstream." Reading Crumb's book makes me wonder whether Crumb is being sincere or coy in his claim that it was not his intention to ridicule or make visual jokes. There's a hint in Crumb's Introduction: "If my visual, literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis offends or outrages some readers, which seems inevitable considering img_1971that the text is revered by many people, all I can say in my defense is that I approached this as a straight illustration job, with no intention to ridicule or make visual jokes. That said, I know that you can't please everybody." In an interview published by USA Today, he gives more hints, but nothing definitive. Consider this: "So much of [the Bible] makes no sense. To think of all the fighting and killing that's gone on over this book, it just became to me a colossal absurdity. That's probably the most profound moment I've had — the absurdity of it all." But also consider another Crumb quote from the same article: "[The Bible] seems indeed to be an inspired work." My suspicion is that Crumb is at his subversive best in writing drawing The Book of Genesis, and that the commentary he offers in his book is his attempt at plausible deniability. Just my suspicion, based upon my belief that the best counter-argument to "inerrancy" is to encourage people to actually read the Biblical text, combined with the fact that illustrating Genesis will make it more likely to be read by many people, especially teen-agers and young adults. Crumb's book fascinates me. I read/viewed a big chunk of it today, and wondered whether any folks who believed that the Bible is inerrant would dare have their young kids read this version, even though its text matches commonly used translations and even though the drawings fairly match the text. There's an awful lot of senseless sex and violence in the Bible, which is even harder to ignore in Crumb's edition than in the versions of the Bible that lack drawings. But ignore these parts many religious folks do. Most Believers with whom I've spoken freely admit that they cherry pick when they read the Bible. Statistics bear out that great numbers of Believers fail to read the Bible carefully. At bottom, Crumb's work seems accurate, perhaps too accurate, to be recommended to members of most congregations, but it's a fascinating thought experiment to imagine a preacher conveying such graphic details of the Book that irritates me mostly to the extent that it is considered inerrant. After all, if the Bible is really inerrant (or even if it is only somewhat inspired), and if it's authored by the Creator of the Universe, why would anyone skimp on any of the the inconvenient details?

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