A master of music came with the intent

To give me a lesson on my instrument.
I thanked him for nothing, but bid him be gone,
For my little blogwatch should not be played on!

…Despite the cute intro (you all should get the Baltimore Consort’s “Art of the Bawdy Song” CD!! I got it off Amazon Marketplace this past week, having last heard it freshman year of college, and it is fun fun fun in the sun sun sun), most of these links are pretty awful. Sorry….

Balkinization: Fun with war crimes! (…See what I mean about these links?) Actually I’m with the commenting professor who says focusing on humiliation and degradation is at least as important as focusing on cruelty. My only problem with the section on torture in Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain was that it completely ignored humiliation, when it seems to me that humiliation is the point of the pain, and a big part of what distinguishes the pain of torture from the pain of e.g. dentistry. Whether I’m right about that or not, though, wouldn’t change the points made here.

A “hardcore urbanist” reads Jane Jacobs for the first time. Via Virginia Postrel.

Jonathan Rauch on Louisiana life a year after Katrina:

….Back in St. Bernard many people, presented with such arguments, will concede that every rule has its reasons. When a fire marshal told Voitier, the school superintendent, that she could not use an urgently needed mobile classroom because the doors were too close together, he was following a rule that may well make sense in normal times.

The trouble is that nothing–not anything–is normal in St. Bernard. The collective effect of all the rules and procedures has been to slow recovery in the early stages, when momentum was critical. Still more damaging, perhaps, is the psychological toll, a gooey mixture of anger and demoralization that drains energy and amplifies despair. It amounts to bureaucracy fatigue. Most welfare mothers know this feeling well, and many become used to it (or learn to game the system), but St. Bernard had always cherished its sense of independence. The parish was stunned by the hurricane, and then was stunned again to be pitched into a blizzard of pettifoggery, precisely when it felt too prostrate to cope.

more; via Hit & Run; seriously, please do read.