Government, Torture, War on Terror

I just had to read one more thing …

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Of course I had to check my RSS feeds one last time before I went to bed and came across this piece from Boing Boing on the CIA torture memos:

Salon's Mark Benjamin went spelunking in the recently released CIA
torture memos and comes back with a stomach-churning account of the
waterboarding practiced at Gitmo. This fine-tuned torture process
repeatedly took its victims to the brink of death (one victim was
waterboarded 180+ times) until many of them simply gave up on breathing
and tried to allow themselves to drown, only to be revived by unethical
medical personnel who collaborated with the war criminals conducting
the torture.

The
documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur
in each two-hour waterboarding "session." Interrogators were instructed
to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he
inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands
to "dam the runoff" and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee's
mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second "applications" of
liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a
detainee's nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to
keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a
session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners
were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

"This is revolting and it is deeply disturbing," said Dr. Scott
Allen, co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights
at Brown University who has reviewed all of the documents for
Physicians for Human Rights. "The so-called science here is a total
departure from any ethics or any legitimate purpose. They are saying,
'This is how risky and harmful the procedure is, but we are still going
to do it.' It just sounds like lunacy," he said. "This fine-tuning of
torture is unethical, incompetent and a disgrace to medicine."

As a friend noted, waterboarding isn't simulated drowning, it is drowning.  "Enhanced interrogation techniques" are just mealy mouthed words for hiding the war crimes that our government carried out.

Of course VP Cheney was a "big supporter of waterboarding" as reported to ABC News via Andrew Sullivan & The Atlantic:

KARL: Did you more often win or lose those battles, especially as
you got to the second term?

CHENEY: Well, I suppose it depends on which battle you're talking
about. I won some; I lost some. I can't…

(CROSSTALK)

KARL: … waterboarding, clearly, what was your…

CHENEY: I was a big supporter of waterboarding. I was a big
supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques that…

KARL: And you opposed the administration's actions of doing away
with waterboarding?

CHENEY: Yes.

It is too late to impeach him, but there is no statute of limitations on trying war criminals.

By Will Alone

By Will Alone: The Game

This site came about because of a nonviolent direct action miniatures game I have been working on.  I haven't done much with it since 2007, but if you want you can find the rules I wrote:

I have play tested it a few times, pictures of which you can see from the front page.

Send comments to me via jokeefe at jamesokeefe dot org or voice/txt to (617) 863-0385. 

That will have to do until I get around to updating them.

Spontaneous Ideas

A Consumer Controlled Credit Reporting Coop (C3RC)

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With the various cases of credit data getting lost or stolen (Social Security Administration, TJX among others), I have found that if I want to keep tabs on who is accessing my credit history, I have to pay one of the credit reporting agencies a monthly fee.  This strikes me as strange considering it is my credit history.  I generated it, thank you very much, and where fees and interest are involved, I paid for it.

There is a serious need of a consumer controlled credit reporting bureau.  One where I get to see my data any time I want, have an easy way to correct problems and approve/reject requests to view it.  Perhaps I could get money back when someone wants to view it.

Such a coop should also use alternative data on a person’s payment history: phone, gas and other utility bills.  In this regard, at least Payment Reporting Builds Credit provides such an alternative.

Spontaneous Ideas

I have snow idea

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It snowed about twelve inches in the Boston-area.  Since we don’t have a garage, or indeed off street parking, I had to shovel out the car.  Especially the snow that gathers under the car since it turns to ice and that can be very unpleasant to get caught sitting on when you are in a hurry to get out.

All this shoveling gave me that idea that if I put a fence, preferably one without any holes, around the car before it snows, then I wouldn’t need to shovel under the car or move the car to get at the snow.

Additionally, since we have no off street parking, we tend to pile up the snow at every possible location.  As the piles grow bigger, snow rolls down covering over the area you just cleared.  Another useful product would be a flexible barrier, such as with some compost fences, that you could put up at the border of one of these piles and would keep the snow in.  It would need to dissolve within a day in snow, after the snow froze in place.

Spontaneous Ideas

Research Topic: Does your blood type indicate how giving you are?

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Thinking about my blood type got me wondering whether there is a relationship between your blood type and how willing to give you are.  To refresh:

  • A’s can take blood from A and O, but can only give to A and AB.
  • B’s can take blood from B and O, but can only give to B and AB.
  • AB’s can take blood from AB, A, B and O, but can only give to AB.
  • O’s can take blood from O, but can give to anyone.

Based on these facts, O’s are able to give to the most people, AB’s the least and A’s and B’s are in between.  So the hypothesis is “Do O’s give the most, AB’s the least and A’s and B’s somewhere in between.

One easy way to test this hypotheis, assuming that there is no skew towards finding O’s on the part of the blood banks, is to look at the volume of blood donated every year by blood type.

Other tests could be to select a random group of people, test their blood type and look at how much money they donated as a percentage of their income, or the number of hours they volunteered in a year.

Spontaneous Ideas

Tickets for Parents Travelling Separately

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My wife and I are going to a wedding in a bit, and since we have kids, thought it would be a good idea to go in separate planes.  That way should, in the very unlikely event that the plane crash, only one of us would be lost.  Finding tickets so that our departure and arrival times were similar proved rather difficult.

It may have been the times we wanted to travel, though there seemed to be lots of available seats on the seat chooser.  I tried Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, United, American Airlines, and Price line, but the flights weren’t very good.  I could have chosen me going out on American and my wife going out on United, but due to flights and picking up the kids, I would need to return on United and my wife on American.  This makes getting fares a bit more difficult and the idea of having four one way tickets just didn’t seem like a good idea with the TSA looking over all flights.

If one of the travel sites, was able to accomodate parents desire to travel separately and present the flight possiblilities in an easier manner, I would be a happy person.

Spontaneous Ideas

Shopping is a joy

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My wife and I have a disagreement over the food shopping.  I do the shopping and she maintains the list .. on her computer.

I like the items on the list to be organized by where they are in the store, roughly.  Milk near the eggs and yogurt, vegetables and fruits in one section, etc.  Since my wife doesn’t do the shopping, she doesn’t know where things are, so I have to periodically go onto her computer and rearrange the list.

We also have different styles to updating the list.  For me, the list is everything that we could ever need from a particular store.  I go through what we have before I go to the store and cross of the things we don’t need.  My wife edits the list for each trip.

Now there was a nice little list keeping app for the Palm OS that I had awhile ago, but I lost it.  It is great if one person is the list maintainer and shopper.  When the responsibility is shared it breaks down.

What would be really useful would be a web site that allowed people to create, edit, organize and share shopping lists.  The basic service could be free with $ for alternative ways to access the data (iphone app, mac os interface, etc.)

An additional feature would be to list the average/lowest prices for each item on the list at stores in their area so someone could compare the price to what is at the store they are at.  A variation of this would be to look at the prices for the items on the list and find the store that has the lowest overall cost for the items.  If reliable, it could be an additional monthly fee.  However, these features would require some method to get the user to put the items into identifiable products and either some site scraping for the prices, or an Atom/RSS feed for the prices.  The price data would be a problem without some serious effort or buy-in from the supermarkets.

The musings of Jamie O'Keefe: pirate party activist, geek, father and gamer.