Once over.
A lot going on, as always. I'm going to just set them up and knock them down today.
The governors are right, though, when they say that this has nothing to do with hunting. I'm no fan of hunters (understatement alert), but if you need more than 10 bullets in your rifle to bag a deer, you shouldn't be carrying any kind of firearm.
Zero Dark Bogus. Oscar time again, and looks like Zero Dark Thirty will be on the list for best picture, best actress, best defense of official torture. Full disclosure: I have not seen this movie, nor am I likely to, so I will confine my comments to the one issue I almost never hear discussed in relation to the torture controversy surrounding the film: the effectiveness question. If it is true that they present torture as having led to the finding of Bin Laden, the filmmakers are providing non-factual support for the central argument for official torture. Yes, it is a basic moral issue, but it is also a policy issue, and if filmmakers propagate the dubious notion that torture extracts usable intelligence, they are doing the public a severe disservice.
From what I have read, I'm pretty confident that the Bush administration waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Al-Libbi dozens of times to extract confessions - false or not - that would justify invading Iraq, not that would lead to Bin Laden. They wanted that war, and the desperate lies of tortured detainees helped them get it. Those fabrications, extracted through waterboarding, found their way into Bush's State of the Union in 2003. That was no accident. That was the product of a deliberate policy, and it worked.
Make a movie about that, Kathryn Bigelow.
luv u,
jp
Guns, guns, guns. Just heard excerpts of various "state of the state" addresses, including Cuomo (or "governor comb-over" as Matt calls him) and Connecticut's Malloy. I agree with the intent of limiting the firepower of weapons sold in NY and Connecticut, but I have my doubts that a state-by-state approach will ever be effective. The gun nut that lived a block away from me had his gun taken away by police, and yet he still walked into the local AT&T store with an unregistered handgun (one that had been originally stolen out of somebody's car in South Carolina) and tried to blow away everyone behind the counter because he was dissatisfied with the service. If we fix the gun and ammo loopholes in New York, what's to stop someone from driving to Pennsylvania to make their 2nd Amendment purchases?
The governors are right, though, when they say that this has nothing to do with hunting. I'm no fan of hunters (understatement alert), but if you need more than 10 bullets in your rifle to bag a deer, you shouldn't be carrying any kind of firearm. Zero Dark Bogus. Oscar time again, and looks like Zero Dark Thirty will be on the list for best picture, best actress, best defense of official torture. Full disclosure: I have not seen this movie, nor am I likely to, so I will confine my comments to the one issue I almost never hear discussed in relation to the torture controversy surrounding the film: the effectiveness question. If it is true that they present torture as having led to the finding of Bin Laden, the filmmakers are providing non-factual support for the central argument for official torture. Yes, it is a basic moral issue, but it is also a policy issue, and if filmmakers propagate the dubious notion that torture extracts usable intelligence, they are doing the public a severe disservice.
From what I have read, I'm pretty confident that the Bush administration waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Al-Libbi dozens of times to extract confessions - false or not - that would justify invading Iraq, not that would lead to Bin Laden. They wanted that war, and the desperate lies of tortured detainees helped them get it. Those fabrications, extracted through waterboarding, found their way into Bush's State of the Union in 2003. That was no accident. That was the product of a deliberate policy, and it worked.
Make a movie about that, Kathryn Bigelow.
luv u,
jp
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