markinore
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Posts posted by markinore
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NOW HELL IN THE HELL WOULD SOME TIN PAN DIRECTOR MAKING SHITTY MOVIES ALL THE WAY FROM THE US OF A HAVE EVIDENCE OF PRISONERS BEING TORTURED IN IRAQ OR AFGHANISTAN??????????
What a relief! I was concerned on some level that my boy Michael may have done something (or failed to do something) that contributed to somebody's suffering. I mean, I respect the guy, but you know--the feet of clay thing. Thanks to GD, I can relax. Moore couldn't have known about any torture of prisoners because our military did such a great job of covering it up that NOBODY could POSSIBLY have taken ANY PICTURES that ... oh, never mind.
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According to klenke, “A true documentary is absent of bias.” Can you name such a documentary? All documentaries are biased, your dictionary definition notwithstanding. Yes, even what you see on the Discovery Channel about the mating habits of wildebeests is based on selective presentation of observations and an opinion of the director.
All of Michael Moore’s films are biased. I do not think he would dispute that. Nor do I think he would dispute that he selects which facts he presents. Certainly, the accuracy of his statements is subject to fact checking. If there are errors (and I bet there are), he should be called on them.
I am surprised that Ray Bradbury takes offense at the play on words referring to his classic work. I had inferred from Bradbury’s work that he would sympathize with Moore’s outlook, but obviously I was wrong. I am more surprised that any artist would feel that his work is somehow immune to commentary by later artists.
As we (at least some of us) see the movie, I think the most pertinent point to look for (and potentially criticize) is whether Moore had evidence of prisoners being tortured. If he did and did not call attention to it earlier, he may by his inaction be guilty of allowing the continuation of these heinous actions.
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Steroids do help endurance athletes, both by building muscle and by accelerating recovery from strenuous workouts. Erythropoietin (EPO) stimulates the production of red blood cells, improving your oxygen carrying capacity and therefore the efficiency of your cardiopulmonary system.
I hope the allegations about Lance are false. From what I have read, there doesn't seem to be too much of a smoking gun. The least believable charge was that Lance asked for makeup to cover up needle marks. He's got to have a million nicks and cuts from riding and other training, so why would a needle mark be particularly noticable and need to be covered up?
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I think I pretty much qualify.
I am somewhat stable, frequently single, late 40s, mostly employed, one of a kind, phobic about NS/ND's, I have been called a dog, and I am most definitely in Oregon.
Close enough?
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The soldier looks so sad. It reminds me of when I worked in the operating room at the University of Iowa in the late '80s and they made us wear pink scrubs.
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A friend of mine from college who went into advertising worked for the company that had the Subaru account when Martina Navratilova did some ads for them. He and his colleagues concluded that lesbians had a particular affinity for Subies and that they should try to exploit that market. It became such an article of faith with them that they referred to the car as a "Lesbaru."
I don't know if they sold any more cars based on the Martina ads, but you know it must have been tough to be a macho guy who bought his Outback based on Crocodile Dundee, and then found he was driving a Lesbaru.
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There was an interesting experiment in Helena, Montana, when a smoking ban in public places was put into effect. After about six months, the bad was ruled illegal, and smoking resumed. There is only one hospital in Helena, so all people who had suspected heart attacks were taken there. They went back and looked at their data. During the six months the smoking ban was in effect, the number of heart attacks dropped significantly. When the ban was overturned, the number of heart attacks reached their previous level.
I am not sure myself about whether people should have a right to smoke, whether bar or restaurants owners should have a right to permit it, whether it should be left to market forces to decide, etc. But one thing that seems pretty clear is that smoking bans do have a positive influence on health.
What I wonder about and what was not made clear from the study is whether the reduced number of heart attacks is due to fewer people being injured by second hand smoke or whether smokers were helped by being forced to smoke less.
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MrE, the writing of a paper answering a question does not necessarily constitute direction by Bush's Administration or the Justice Department. From what I read, Justice was simply answering a question on legality and legal exposure that was posited by CIA. Nothing wrong with that. They are giving an opinion on THE LAW, not directing POLICY. They are two different things.
The issue here is not that torture was approved by Bush (there is no evidence that that is true) or that torture occurred (hard to argue with). The issue is that lawyers working for this administration made the rather stunning determination that the President of the United States can order torture and it is perfectly legal.
How can any thinking person not be appalled by such a statement? As a species, we may be hard pressed to justify our "civilization," but at least there is one principle that pretty much anyone who purports to be civilized can agree with: torture is wrong. It's wrong if you do it. It's wrong if I do it. It's wrong if you have a "good reason" to do it. It's wrong if you're just doing it for fun.
Now if you are a leader and a lawyer or another advisor of tells you that something as heinous as toruture is okay, you have an obligation to explicitly reject that advice and preferably to fire the person who gave it to you.
Unless, of course, the lawyer was just telling the client what he wanted to hear.
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That little Slate article about Reagan by Christopher Hitchens and posted above was perhaps the most ignorant, mean-spirited piece of crap I've read in recent memory.
Mean-spirited? Perhaps. Would you care to point out anything that is factually incorrect?
And for those of you who think that it is inappropriate to criticize Reagan so soon after his death, will you please notify us when your tender sensibilities will allow us to do so?
How about now?
How about now?
Now?
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I was just reminded of a joke from the Clinton era referring to Reagan: "Remember the good old days, when sleeping with the president meant attending a cabinet meeting?"
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The lasting legacy of Reagan was that he made selfishness socially acceptable. Prior to Reagan, even conservative Republicans were temperate in reducing rich people's taxes, support for public education, and assistance for the least fortunate in our society. Nixon, for example, came up with the idea of the negative income tax to replace welfare, an idea that in retrospect seems remarkably progressive. Reagan, because of his genial nature and personal warmth, helped to achieve a cultural transformation. This is now evident in reduced government regulation of corporations (see Enron), shifting the tax burden to the middle class, deterioration of schools, and the proliferation of "privatized" services such as gated neighborhoods, private schools, private security services,and selling off of public hospitals.
I had forgotten, however, just how intellectually limited Reagan was until I read the following which appeared on Slate by Christopher Hitchens: http://slate.msn.com/id/2101842/
Not long ago, I was invited to be the specter at the feast during "Ronald Reagan Appreciation Week" at Wabash College in Indiana. One of my opponents was Dinesh D'Souza: He wasn't the only one who maintained that Reagan had been historically vindicated by the wreckage of the Soviet Union. Some of us on the left had also been very glad indeed to see the end of the Russian empire and the Cold War. But nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.
Ronald Reagan claimed that the Russian language had no word for "freedom." (The word is "svoboda"; it's quite well attested in Russian literature.) Ronald Reagan said that intercontinental ballistic missiles (not that there are any non-ballistic missiles—a corruption of language that isn't his fault) could be recalled once launched. Ronald Reagan said that he sought a "Star Wars" defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R. Ronald Reagan professed to be annoyed when people called it "Star Wars," even though he had ended his speech on the subject with the lame quip, "May the force be with you." Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars. Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the "End Times" foreshadowed in the Bible. In the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal, on two separate occasions, that he himself had assisted personally at the liberation of the Nazi death camps.
There was more to Ronald Reagan than that. Reagan announced that apartheid South Africa had "stood beside us in every war we've ever fought," when the South African leadership had been on the other side in the most recent world war. Reagan allowed Alexander Haig to greenlight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, fired him when that went too far and led to mayhem in Beirut, then ran away from Lebanon altogether when the Marine barracks were bombed, and then unbelievably accused Tip O'Neill and the Democrats of "scuttling." Reagan sold heavy weapons to the Iranian mullahs and lied about it, saying that all the weapons he hadn't sold them (and hadn't traded for hostages in any case) would, all the same, have fit on a small truck. Reagan then diverted the profits of this criminal trade to an illegal war in Nicaragua and lied unceasingly about that, too. Reagan then modestly let his underlings maintain that he was too dense to understand the connection between the two impeachable crimes. He then switched without any apparent strain to a policy of backing Saddam Hussein against Iran. (If Margaret Thatcher's intelligence services had not bugged Oliver North in London and become infuriated because all European nations were boycotting Iran at Reagan's request, we might still not know about this.)
One could go on. I only saw him once up close, which happened to be when he got a question he didn't like. Was it true that his staff in the 1980 debates had stolen President Carter's briefing book? (They had.) The famously genial grin turned into a rictus of senile fury: I was looking at a cruel and stupid lizard. His reply was that maybe his staff had, and maybe they hadn't, but what about the leak of the Pentagon Papers? Thus, a secret theft of presidential documents was equated with the public disclosure of needful information. This was a man never short of a cheap jibe or the sort of falsehood that would, however laughable, buy him some time.
The fox, as has been pointed out by more than one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. He met his second wife—the one that you remember—because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see. Year in and year out in Washington, I could not believe that such a man had even been a poor governor of California in a bad year, let alone that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon.
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These terminally ill patients are carefully evaluated before any drugs are prescribed to them.
As much as I trust doctors, I just have a hard time believing that all those who are legally permitted to assist suicide are truly adept at the psychological evaluation of a patient making that request. Most primary care doctors spend a lot of time trying to heal people or care for chronic illnesses and make them more tolerable, and would have a difficult time making the careful evaluation that you seem to think is automatic. Most specialty doctors are even less familiar with these kinds of end of life decisions. When the legislature passed that law, it did not automatically result in doctors suddenly being able to answer not just medical questions but profoundly larger questions of life or death.
Doctors are involved because the drugs used are PRESCRIPTION medications.Obviously, if we thought that easy suicide should be possible without a prescription, the law could be rewritten accordingly. A number of effective agents for committing suicide are not drugs at all.
So tell me, what "painless" ways to kill oneself are you familiar with?Probably the most painless is carbon monoxide poisoning. I could go into the details of how this is done, but I would prefer not to take the responsibility of possibly influencing anyone to actually do it. There is a wide range of poisons that can be obtained that also work quickly and painlessly. If you chose to use a poison, it would be advisable to do some research to make certain that you don't use one that will just make you sick or cause other serious injury short of death. Again, I think it is unwise for me to specify what poison is "good" for this purpose.
I have some familiarity with this subject having spent a lot of time with my dad before he died (prior to the law). He was sick for many years and contemplated suicide. At his request, I researched things very carefully. I left it up to him to decide what to do. I was grateful that he decided not to kill himself. I treasured his remaining days that he spent with me and his grandsons. I do not mean to suggest that his was the right choice for everyone. I do suggest that suicide can be accomplished without a doctor.
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Assisted suicide in Oregon doesn't provide a chickenshit way out. You still have to make the decision "pull the trigger" if you will. It simply provides a dignified way out. What is wrong with allowing a terminally ill patient a repectable exit?
Perhaps I did not express myself well. I have great sympathy for a terminally ill person and for his or her family. It is not clear to me why the doctors need to be involved in this. I doubt that most doctors have the training or experience to evaluate a patient requesting assisted suicide and differentiate between someone who is clinically depressed, someone who is having a bad day, someone who feels coerced, etc. There are many easy and painless ways to kill yourself without prescription drugs. If you truly believe in individual autonomy, perhaps you would prefer that the law allow a person to obtain drugs to commit suicide over the counter.
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As much as I enjoy Ashcroft having his ass kicked and as much as I believe states should be able to make their own decisions in this type of issue, I do have qualms about physicians participating in assisted suicide. I believe that the primary goals of physicians should include preserving life and alleviating pain. Sure, a terminally ill individual on high dose pain medication may intentionally or inadvertently overdose, but that is far different from being prescribed something for the explicit purpose of causing death.
I guess in a way I have a problem with saying, "I want to die, but I'm too chickenshit to kill myself, so I want a doctor to do it for me." Most people who want to kill themselves can find plenty of ways to do it without involving doctors. True, there may be the occasional individual who is both alert and sane enough to desire death but is too feeble to carry it out. I think such people are rare, and I am not sure we should overturn hundreds if not thousands of years of medical ethics for a minuscule number of such difficult cases.
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Fifty years from now the only thing people will remember is that we ousted Hussein, on dubious premises, and what the eventual outcome was...democracy sweeping the region, a quick transition to radical islamic theocracy..whatever. The eventual outcome will do more to color the perception in the history books than any prison abuse scandal.
Wow, you sure are confident. What is it that we remember about Vietnam? All the positive things that the U.S. did there? I think for most people the memories are of how badly the war was conceived and conducted and how many lives were lost for reasons that can't quite be remembered. For some there are other memories of events that were not representative but nevertheless indelible: My Lai. Kent State. When we try to make predictions of how our actions will go down in history, in may be useful to consider the longer perspective. Chou En Lai, in meeting with Nixon and Kissinger, was asked what he thought of the French Revolution. "Too soon to tell," was his reply.
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Clearly you think you are above every other person who serves, served, or will serve in the future. You shit on every other American who has a child serving when you tell your kids to run away from mandatory service and you shit on every other American that answered the call when it came for them whether they agreed or disagreed with the conflict at hand.
On the contrary, I agree with Michael Moore's comment from Fahrenheit 9/11 (MAYBE coming to a theater near you) regarding our soldiers: "They serve so that we don't have to. They offer to give up their lives so that we can be free. It is, remarkably, their gift to us. And all they ask for in return is that we never send them into harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary."
Granted, Moore is overreaching to speak for all members of the armed forces. I think, however, that it profoundly expresses what is or what should be an implied contract between a free society and its military defenders. WWII was "absolutely necessary;" the current mess is not.
You, GD, are obviously fully informed of the risks of what you do. You have chosen to accept the risks, and I respect your willingness to stand on your principles. I will grieve if an ill fate befalls you. While all deaths in this war are tragic, I would probably grieve a bit more for the children of Mr. Radon's babysitter, who join the military not out of choice but out of necessity, in order to get money for college or escape a bad marriage.
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Thanks for posting that, Foraker.
I suggest that all of us who are against this war volunteer for positions on the draft board--and then just grant everyone an exemption!
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Ha,,,, hope your a gun nut like me too!!!! If not I have a few AK-47's I can sell you for your fight.
I'm well supplied, but thanks.
The chance of you getting drafted is pretty low. Unless of corse we get a Democrate in office.The chance of my getting drafted is zero. The chance of my sons' getting drafted is not. If we get a "Democrate" in office and he starts a draft, then he is my mortal enemy.
I'd like to see your face when old junior says dad I'm going into the Army.. :-)Thankfully, the chance of that is zero also. My kids are as antiwar as I am.
BTW can you help me plant flags on Veteran graves this Memorial weekend or will you be too busy climbing?Gee, planting flags on graves? What a wonderful, feel-good activity. Sorry, no. I'll be too busy working on preventing the need for more graves.
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I am old enough to have been eligible for the draft during Vietnam. I was active in movements against the war and the draft. Sometimes when I was asked what I thought I was accomplishing, I said "At least I may prevent my sons from having to worry about being drafted."
Now that people are talking about the potential for a draft, I have to recognize that my sons, 16 and 18 years old, are definitely at risk. As determined as I was 30 years ago to prevent my hypothetical children from being sent to a stupid war, I am even more determined now to prevent my living, breathing, actual boys from getting their asses shot off for the glory of Bush, Cheney, et al. I am sure I am not alone.
At the height of the draft resistance movement in Vietnam, as many as 90% of those called up by some draft boards (mostly in New York)didn't show. If there is any attempt to try a draft again, I suspect we can make that percentage just as high over even more of the country.
Back in the '60s and '70s, a lot of us who fought the war were impassioned but naive, disorganized, and inconsistent. Now, we might be older and grayer, but we just may be a lot more dangerous.
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because Pamela Anderson became a U.S. citizen.
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The best way out is to get the oil production flowing. This is Iraq's meat and potatoes. This single industry has the potential to employ hundreds of thousands and bring prosperity to the whole nation.
Perhaps you're right to focus on economic development. Too much of the administration's focus has been on the trappings of democracy, e.g., elections, without due regard for the historical absence of the traditions of democracy in that country.
With respect to development of the oil industry and its infrastructure, do you think this is possible without a massive U.S. military presence for five to ten years? Even if regular military personnel were partly or completely replaced by private contractors, would that be fundamentally different--especially to the fundamentalists?
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Here's how the 25 billion will be spent:
http://www.thedailyfarce.com/national.cfm?story=2004\05\national_bushand25billiondollars_05200400012
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GD, I appreciate your perspective, as always. So what do you think should be done next? I understand your premises to be that politicians fucked up from the beginning by not sending enough troops to do the job right, and sending more troops now isn't practical (from a political standpoint, both in the U.S. and Iraq). I agree. Can you suggest some sort of a way out? As much as I opposed starting this war, I am concerned that the quickest way out for us would inevitably result in civil war. This could be a situation that is worse for the average Iraqi than either Saddam or U.S. occupation.
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That can't be right. Revenue from Iraq's oil was going to pay for everything. Dubya promised.
Baby Smashers!
in Spray
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I showed it to my kids, who laughed their asses off, and said "Jesus, Dad, we're lucky they didn't have those things when we were little."