See bookmark below. The Bush administration's human rights abuses were not as without precedent in American history as some of us would like to imagine, if this article is to be believed.

Sobering reading about the treatment of prisoner during Shrub's (George Bush the younger's) time in office.

Explaining the practice that many neocons like to pretend isn't torture.

Stories we shouldn't forget ... a few days after 9/11, a traditional sikh from Virginia is arrested for ... dressing like a traditional sikh. Quoting ... "At the police station, Singh was fingerprinted, strip searched, and photographed, and he said that instead of interrogating him, the police asked him questions like 'Why do you look like this?'" Racism, diluted by little other than cultural intolerance.

Another post about the Burges case in Chicago.

The investigation reported is one of those connected to Burges. Do you notice ... 1. That the authorites are just looking into the members of Burge's crowd, as if they were the only problem on the CPD. Please. Dealing with these thugs is a nice start, but it's only a start. One is left wondering, though, if this is where it will end. 2. That this wasn't exactly late breaking news or unknown in Chicago - the Reader did a series of articles on these fun, fun people back in the 90s, and word had hit the street long before then. Why wasn't anybody looking into this, then? That last question being rhetorical, of course, for reasons I'll get to, in a second. 3. That the human rights abuses mentioned took place during the 1980s, meaning that prosecution has been stalled for so long that, even if caught, most of the offenders will escape justice. 4. When, some years back, I and a few other demonstrators were on the street in Chicago, trying to raise a little consciousness about the issues surrounding the death penalty in Illinois, mentioning this very case, there's a reaction to which we became accustomed. The man on the street seeing absolutely nothing wrong with torturing confessions out of those accused of crimes. This is why, below, you see me suggesting that I was not surprised to see popular acceptance of the Bush administration's lavish use of torture. As a society, we had been there before, and hadn't seemed to be in any great hurry to get anywhere better.

See previous bookmark on my profile. Jon Burges, who has been found to have "solved crimes" by having suspects tortured into confessing, tripped across the law against perjuring oneself on the stand. What a shame. :)

Chicago's "finest", hard at work.

This link is not an endorsement; the author is writing propaganda. What you should keep in mind as you read this post is precisely what the author would have you forget - that the victim "confessed" to the acts that supposedly justified his torture, as he was being tortured, on behalf of the US government. That part, so far, doesn't really seem to be in dispute. Only the rightness of torturing confessions out of prisoners - and then playing make believe, and pretending that those are real confessions - seems to be, leaving us to ask "didn't the Middle Ages end a few centuries ago". Don't we all basically know what history shouldn't have had to teach our ancestors - that if you inflict enough pain on somebody, he'll say just about anything to make the pain stop? To attach the word "fascism" to a political ideology that supports this sort of thing is in no way excessive, and that's why I'm linking to this article. Watch the way in which the author, with not a single fact in support of his position, blusters his way past reality, treating a torture extracted confession as a source of unimpeachable truth, and gets you to not notice that he has done so. Learn how this creep works his magic, and when the next creep comes along, you'll be less likely to fall under his spell. Oh, and yes - this is the second penis related story to come out of Africa to be seen on this microblog in a row. Nothing deliberate in this; you're just getting the stories as I find them. Wondering if this one is going to be the start of a trend. Remembering Anthropology 100 back in undergrad, and some of its more graphic descriptions of body modification rituals on the continent, I suppose that's a possibility. One I'd really rather not explore more than absolutely necessary, but when somebody ends up being held prisoner and tortured for seven years because he visited a parody site, I think we need to get past our squeamishness and say something about that.

Front Page Magazine article about the disappearance of free speech rights seen in France, after a certain well known actress criticised a few cultural practices of the incoming Muslim immigrants, eg. ritual slaughter of animals. Support for PETA has now become a criminal act in France, it would seem, made so in the name of tolerance.

The people for the ethical treatment of animals have decided that if they get people to start calling fish "sea kittens", people will have trouble telling the difference between their pet cats and the alewives washing up on the beach. Yeah, that will work. They wrote a children's book for this campaign. One of the characters in it, "Tony the Trout", is said to have pursued a double major in neuroscience and environmental studies. Pity he didn't augment the neuroscience with a little psychiatry. Maybe he'd be able to diagnose the problem ailing the person who came up with this campaign.

Interesting how the warhead seems to be going off on the campus of Columbia College. I guess the bad guys are going to bring us to out knees by cutting off the supply of fashion illustrators and fiction writers? Those fiends! We would have never seen it coming. If you're read my stuff, you know exactly what I think of the Bush administration and how happy I was to see it leave Washington. I like a good neocon bash maybe even more than the next man. But, while this take on Bolton's remarks has been a popular one, I don't feel it's a reasonable one. As the article itself quotes Mr.Bolton "The fact is on foreign policy I don't think President Obama thinks it's a priority," said Bolton. "He said during the campaign he thought Iran was a tiny threat. Tiny, tiny depending on how many nuclear weapons they are ultimately able to deliver on target. Its, uh, its tiny compared to the Soviet Union, but is the loss of one American city" - here Bolton changes his tone subtly to prepare for the joke - "pick one at random - Chicago - is that a tiny threat?" Yes, there's a joke in that remark, but it's not the one that Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones wants it to be. The point of the joke is that if even one city gets hit, that's somebody's home and to that somebody, the difference between a vast nuclear arsenal and a small one isn't going to matter much. By naming the president's hometown in the hypothetical, he invites the president to put himself in the shoes of that person left facing a detonation close at hand. We don't have to guess how Obama would feel about such a prospect; it's the same way anybody would feel about it. To suggest, as the author does, that the audience validated a hope for mass murder by laughing at the joke is a disingenuous attempt to produce a hysterical response for the political gain of an already victorious faction. It's a cheap shot, and the author should have known better. This makes the Bush Administration and neoconservatism look bett

WARNING: profanity present at the other side of this link. Somebody changes the subject, but talks about how the disabled are treated, doing so with righteous anger. Good. I wish more people would.

Changes in behavior following changes in policy instituted on the advice of American environmentalists. The short form would seem to be that the large, powerful animals, accustomed to being fed by humans, came seeking food from them when the gifts ceased, and weren't shy about taking what they weren't given, including the lives and flesh of a few of the local residents.

WARNING: Profanity is present at the other end of this link. Tedious reading, but informative for those who, on hearing a job seeker complain about how he was treated by the people in personnel, think "oh, it's just him complaining". No, not even close. Horror stories from those dealing with Human Resources, and the rest of management, from those lucky enough to have permanent jobs to suffer through. How the neocon and libertarian supported doctrine of "employment at will" has been working out in the real world.

This is not a joke. Electrical stimulation of the animal's brain, in some of these cases, done experimentally for the purposes of mind control. Hmm. In medical research, what often follows animal testing? Thinking that I don't like this idea or the cruelty that has gone into testing it, one bit. One should think of the implications of one's work. WARNING: If you wander elsewhere on the blog this post is on, you will see offensive material used lavishly.

The Libertarian blog that the post reviewed immediately below on my profile came from.

A Libertarian rebuttal to the post two links down on my profile, written a little more intelligently than most, from somebody who I find myself liking a little - but still showing some of the glib blindness that drove me away from that movement. Eg. responding to the report of the selling of tainted meat by saying that one could prevent the problem by cooking the meat until it's medium (ie. greyish red, instead of grey outright, and only mostly tasteless). "See", she seems to be saying, "even without governmental regulation, you have a choice", not quite getting that it isn't a reasonable choice. Selling meat that doesn't have to be cooked to death to be safe is absolutely possible; my grocery does it with regularity and I cook it rare with regularity, without problems following. So is it reasonable that people in places where the merchants or those they buy from are not as ethical should have to maybe choose between enjoying their meals, or surviving them, just so that somebody else be slimy without undue interference? With how ever much charm, the author of this piece answers that question with a resounding "yes", and shows why Libertarianism is, as I've said, not about the promotion of personal freedom so much as it is about the promotion of personal irresponsibility.

The blog the last bookmark came from.

Some common sense on the subject of governmental regulation.