Jane Mayer’s meticulously researched New Yorker report, “The Black Sites: A rare look inside the CIA’s secret interrogation program” sent me back to hilzoy’s earlier Obsidian Wings post on those Black Sites. Hilzoy’s conclusion provides a good introduction to Mayer’s longer report: Whenever I write a post like this, someone pops up in comments to ask why I am so concerned about the fate of terrorists. In many cases, I don’t have to engage with this question: many of the... Read more
“Man is born free,” Rousseau said, “but everywhere he is in chains.” I’m down with that. Free good; chains bad. Yep. Stands to reason, then, that freer is better. So any boundaries to freedom are worse, right? Well, not quite. Boundless freedom cannot be contained. Or sustained. In practice, it works about as well as the skinless balloon. Try to unleash freedom by taking away the rule of law and freedom will not survive. As attractive as the promised anarchist... Read more
If you believe that every human being has the right to self determination, then how do you cope with people who claim not to want that right? The BBC’s Steven Eke had a fascinating report last week on Russia’s Cossacks. The radio broadcast version of this story, ended with the man pictured at that link, Ataman Viktor Vasilyevich, explaining his ideal of the future of Russia: We need a tsar, one annointed by God. Then there’ll be complete order in... Read more
Left Behind, pp. 314-318 After a marathon, 80-page Monday during which Buck Williams never gets a chance to eat or sleep, the authors mercifully give Buck the day off on Tuesday. Buck doesn’t go to his office on Tuesday. He doesn’t write up his notes on the interview he conducted early that morning with Nicolae Carpathia. The Antichrist had given him a Big Exclusive Scoop about his plans for the U.N. and global disarmament, but Buck has apparently decided to... Read more
I suppose I should start with what it is not. The Catholic Encyclopedia entry on despair is exuberantly Pelagian: Despair … is the voluntary and complete abandonment of all hope of saving one’s soul and of having the means required for that end. Whoever wrote that was less interested in defining “despair” than he was in scoring points against Luther, Calvin and Arminius. “Unless a seed dies and falls to the ground,” Jesus said. No, no, this writer counters, the... Read more
The collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis seems to have prompted a wave of bridge inspections. The paper reports today that: Four of Delaware’s most vulnerable bridges will be inspected every six months instead of every year as a precaution in the wake of last week’s bridge collapse in Minneapolis. Sixteen other Delaware bridges with outdated “fracture critical” designs like the bridge in Minnesota will be examined more frequently, state Department of Transportation Secretary Carolann Wicks said Tuesday. Fracture... Read more
Bill McKibben has been warning us about climate change for nearly as long as Al Gore has. He addresses the subject with a kind of hopeful pessimism. McKibben is a Methodist — the sort of Methodist who would’ve made John Wesley proud. As such, he regards despair as a sin and hope as a duty. Books like his latest — Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future — are an expression of that duty. Such hope can... Read more
Here’s an astonishing figure: $17.5 billion. That’s what banks collect from their customers every year in “overdraft protection” fees. It sounds so benign — protection — like it’s there to look after your interest, but that’s not how it works. What it means is that your debit card will never again be declined due to insufficient funds. Instead, the bank will cover the difference, subtracting the full amount from your account and charging you $30 more for the service. Miscalculate... Read more
Left Behind, pp. 308-314 We’ve noted before that setting a story in the “not-too-distant future” can be particularly tricky. LaHaye and Jenkins faced a particularly daunting task, since back in 1995 they were setting out to produce a 12-book series to be published over the course of the following 12 years. It’s hard to fault them for not accurately predicting the technological changes that would occur between then and now, but they might have at least tried. Before filming Minority... Read more
Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., was interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition on Wednesday. The interview was unusual for Biden in that he actually seemed physically present rather than floating in the ethereal realm of meta-politics he usually makes his home. On the campaign trail or during his many appearances on cable and Sunday morning news shows, Biden tends to step back into a world of abstraction. Rather than telling the audience or the TV host what he actually thinks, he instead... Read more
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