Trapped in the Dimension of Ideas

On Wednesday, the president will head off to his official Camp David retreat in Maryland for a four-day break -- seeking the quiet that evaded him in the millionaires playground on the US east coast. "He is looking to get a break from his vacation," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said. "I don't think you can replicate such a terrific place as Martha's Vineyard, but I do think that he's looking to get some more rest and relaxation when he goes up there," Burton said. The Camp David trip, over the Labor Day weekend, had been tentatively planned before Obama headed on vacation.

University grads everywhere may feel pressure to succeed, but the stakes ramp up when your school's co-founders include AI visionary Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation. Now recent grads of Singularity U have announced their strategies for using emerging technologies to help one billion people over the next 10 years.

Torture is an emotionally charged word, especially when it is used to further one’s political ends. One person’s torture is another person’s useful tool. What we are talking about is how far we are willing to go and with what tools available in our kit are we willing to use on hard cases to obtain vital information for our survival. Therefore, the end result is intelligence of reliable quality to act upon. Tools used in a battlefield situation will be different than tools used to obtain intelligence of a strategic value. It has been shown that use of sadistic torture, like pulling nails, electric shock, and other means of causing pain is counterproductive and will produce information that may be useless. The subject will say anything to get the pain to stop. So the interrogator is going to have to to get inside the head of the subject and take the subject on a psychological journey that will strip away the subject’s defenses. How deep one has to go depends on the subject and the value placed on the intelligence. The islamic hardcases, by nature of their beliefs and their training, can be very tough nuts to crack. So the interrogator has to look into his toolkit and see what would be an APPROPRIATE method to use, and put it to work. The stakes are high. Our survival as a nation and civilization are what’s on the line. We are at war, and we need the intelligence. People who use interrogation techniques and the T word to beat govt agencies on the head are not talking about humane behavior. They are playing politics. War is settling disputes when everything else has failed. War is about breaking things and killing people. And the gathering of intelligence by interrogation, using appropriate techniques, is part of war.

Those who choose to terrorise in a no-rules fashion should expect no rules to gallop over the horizon to rescue them. That this does happen can be seen as either (a) a manifestation of our ethical standards, or (b) a product of politically correct obfuscation, since those rules that exist were framed (quite some time ago)for the regulation of state-sponsored armies, not stateless actors. It depends on your point of view. In my opinion, once confronted by terrorism of the Al-quaeda variety, all bets are off and you do what has to be done, with extreme prejudice.

The problem with McCain’s acceptance speech was that there was no follow-through on how he wrapped it up. “Stand up and Fight!” he said. That was the closing refrain, repeated several times for emphasis. It was the most powerful part of the speech. Standing up and fighting against all the things that had been dragging down our society for so long was what we needed. But he never did that. He didn’t fight. He tip-toed through the rest of the campaign, pulling his punches and insisting the rest of the GOP pull theirs.