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Does torture really work? - Profiler's Perspective - MSNBC.com

You would think common sense would tell us that information obtained by torture is unreliable. Unless you believe those "witches" condemned in Europe really had flown through the night on brooms to worship Satan and caused their victims to vomit pins. Like most ordinary people, those accused of witchcraft would eventually confess to anything, however disgusting, improbable or impossible, just to stop the torture. In England the rules for questioning suspects were fairly close to the techniques being discussed in this article. The things we think of as "torture" such as the rack, hot irons, iron maiden, etc. were not permitted. However sleep deprivation, confinement, convincing the prisoner that the situation is hopeless, and so forth were.

How likely is it that in inexperienced hands the same techniques that had those accused of witchcraft confessing to having met the devil in a dark lane will produce reliable intelligence? To ask the question is to answer it. Not likely at all.

I agree with the columnist that if the life of a family member were at stake I would do anything to get the information that would save them. But whatever I did would risk only my own soul's well being, not the soul of my nation. No military command can completely eliminate the outside-the-boundaries field interrogation or those who become over zeaous when poorly supervised, but it is time to put out a clear message from the top levels of command that torture is not the American way.

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Yale, Columbia grad teaching assistants strike - Education - MSNBC.com

Blame Bush? I recall that the battle for university recognition of graduate teaching assistant unions has been going on through several administrations, both Republican and Democrat. And does no one find it ironic that such basitions of socialist thought as Yale and Columbia shamelessly deny that those who do the grunt work of undergraduate education are actually "workers"?

Further, the quest for unionization and benefits does not address another major issue, particularly for graduate students in the humanities. Universities use graduate fellows in several ways. The fellows teach the classes that many senior faculty do not care for, the beginning composition classes, the general subject survey courses, the discussion sections for the large lecture courses. They also fill the graduate seminars that senior faculty do like to teach. These factors encourage the university to expand graduate programs despite the fact that they know many of their students will never find work in their field. Come on boys and girls, can we spell  exploitation? I thought we could.

I imagine most people have noticed the topicality of vampires these days. They seem to be everywhere: tv, movies, traditional horror fiction and, increasingly they and other supernatural types appear in mysteries, which were once the clear domain of the rational, scientific and explicable. Watson may have had his doubts, but Holmes never for a moment harbored any suspicion that the Hound of the Baskervilles was a supernatural apparition. And, of course, it turns out to be a throughly mortal dog decked out with flourescent paint. Even children's literature, such as ScoobyDoo cartoons, would adhere to the formula that the spooky doings at the old mansion would turn out to be the efforts of greedy developers to scare off the rightful tenants. Looking back, I try to see when the genre bounderies began to blur, a subject for more study, I suspect.

There is a scene in Moscow on the Hudson, a film in which Robin Williams, playing a Russian defector, is shopping for coffee in a NY supermarket. He becomes overwhelmed by the choices and has some sort of seizure. This seems to be the perpetual risk of shopping for any but the most basic commodities in America. Or probably the entire technologically connected world. Whether choosing a new appliance, a new cell phone plan, or in my case, trying to pick a web host, the choices become so overwhelming that it becomes a matter of exhaustion rather than of completely researched choice. It would be impossible to learn about and comprehensibly compare all the available options. Or at least so I tell myself after settling on what seems to be a reasonable deal.

The only comparison I can make with my younger days is shopping at the farmer's market. In my case, it was Denios Farmer's Market and Auction, in Roseville CA, an institution that still exists, although I believe they have dropped "auction" from the title. You didn't buy the peaches at the first stall unless you were rushed for time. Another booth, deeper in, might have the same variety at a better price, or in better condition, or a different variety. Or the apricots might look better than the peaches. And so on. But if you delayed too long the first vendor might run out, or have only the picked over remnants of the morning's harvest. But at least the task was finite, it was possible to view all the stalls at a given market. And f you were a regular customer you would become familiar with the regular stall keepers and know to look in a particular corner for the vendor who always had the earliest sweet corn.