Zephyr Dear

While the modern computing era in many respects began with the IBM System/360 mainframe and further expanded with the minicomputer, normal consumers didn’t start encountering computers until the personal computer. And, while mainframes are technically still around (while minicomputers are decidedly not), what is unique about the PC is that it is very much still a part of modern life.

In fact, one of the defining characteristics of the three major epochs of consumer computing – PC, Internet, and mobile – is that they have been largely complementary: we didn’t so much replace one form of computing for another insomuch as we added forms on top of each other.¹ That is why, as I argued in Peak Google, many of the major tech companies of the last thirty years haven’t so much been disrupted as they have been eclipsed by new companies built during new epochs. All of the attention and relevance in tech especially is focused on emerging and growing companies, even as mature giants reap massive profits.

Every epoch has had four distinct arenas of competition that emerge in order:

• The core technology
• The operating system (i.e. the means by which the core technology is harnessed)
• The killer use case for:
  • Work/Productivity
  • Communication

Certainly computers can be used for more than work/productivity or communication, but those two use cases are universal and lead to the biggest winners and most important companies.

Epoch One: The PC

The PC epoch began on August 12, 1981. That is the day the IBM Personal Computer was released with an Intel 8088 processor running Microsoft DOS 1.0. This open design was the core technology; the only proprietary IBM chip inside was the BIOS, which was soon reverse-engineered by Compaq who released the first “PC compatible” computer 17 months later.

The operating system for the PC has been owned by Microsoft from the beginning; the Mac has garnered a profitable share at times (including today), but Windows versus Mac wasn’t really a contest, because with DOS Microsoft had already won the game.

The killer application for work/productivity on the PC was the spreadsheet specifically, and front-office general-purpose apps broadly, including the word processor and presentation software. While it took much longer, Microsoft eventually came to dominate this space as well with the Office suite.

The killer communication application on the PC ended up being open as well: email. Still, even here the most dominant player, at least in the corporate space (which is what mattered), was Microsoft once again, with Exchange on Windows Server. For all you young folks that can’t understand why us old people looked at Microsoft for so long with a mix of reverence and fear, well, now you know: the company in the end owned nearly every component of the PC epoch, and for all their struggles to remain relevant, Microsoft has never struggled to be profitable.

Epoch Two: The Internet

The Internet epoch began 14 years after the PC epoch, nearly to the day, with the Netscape IPO on August 9, 1995. The core pieces of the Internet had been around for years, and the World Wide Web was developed by Tim Berners-Lee and formally announced in August 1991 (clearly August is an auspicious month), but it was the “Netscape Moment” that woke everyone up to the possibilities of the Internet.

Here the battle for the OS – also known as the browser – was much more fraught. Netscape jumped out to a huge lead, holding over 90 percent usage share, but Microsoft fought back by bundling Internet Explorer for free with Windows, and, truthfully, from Internet Explorer 3 on, by having a better product. Eventually it was Internet Explorer that had over 90 percent market share, and Microsoft felt they had won the Internet.

However, it ultimately turned out that the browser wasn’t what mattered. Instead, the Internet made information, which for so long had been a scarce resource, abundant. So abundant, in fact, that it seemed impossible to make sense of it all, at least until Google came along. Search was the killer work/productivity application on the Internet: now you could instantly find the answer to just about anything on Google, and the company rightly dominated the category.

The killer communications app took even longer to appear, but it solved a problem not dissimilar to Google: Facebook didn’t just let you communicate with people you knew, it came to understand how nearly every single person online was connected. And, as the number of people online continued to grow, so did Facebook. For all the misguided talk of Facebook being under threat, the reality is that its position as the default interconnect between every person on earth is as secure as ever.

Epoch Three: Mobile

I would like to choose Google’s acquisition of Android as the beginning of the mobile epoch, just because it happened in August (2005, in this case), but the date that matters is January 9, 2007, when Steve Jobs announced Apple’s iPhone. The core technology was the smartphone; while Nokia, Palm and Blackberry had been building precursors, it was the iPhone with its multitouch screen, unfettered Internet access, and (eventual) App Store that defined the category.

Unlike the previous two eras, there has not been a single winner when it comes to the OS. In contrast to the PC, Apple was first-to-market. More importantly, smartphone buyers and smartphone users are usually always the same person, which allows Apple to differentiate itself according to the user experience and thus retain the top slice of the market. Android, meanwhile, was not only the first credible alternative to iOS, but also free, making it the operating system of choice for desperate phone OEM’s everywhere, and over time, allowing the OS to gobble up the vast expanses of the market driven primarily by price.

Right now the operating system war is roughly at equilibrium; with the iPhone 6 it seems likely that Apple is stealing some share back from Android, particularly at the high end, but Android is simultaneously pushing down and out into the developing world, expanding both its share of the market and the market as a whole. What is more interesting is looking at who will emerge in the communications and work/productivity space.

The Mobile Work/Productivity Space

If the PC epoch was about being omnipotent – computers can do everything, better! – and the Internet epoch about being omniscient – with Google, you can know everything – mobile is about being omnipresent. By virtue of being, well, mobile, smartphones extend computing to every aspect of our daily lives. That is why the killer applications and dominant companies in the mobile work/productivity space will be defined by how they bridge the online and offline worlds.

Chief among these companies, at least in my opinion, is Uber: the long-term potential of the company is about being the physical network that connects everything. Their success, though, is by no means assured. Moreover, there are other interconnects, like Airbnb or Postmates or Instacart, which are targeting verticals instead of everything everywhere. These examples are all built on the “sharing” economy, the sheer logistics of which are only possible because of smartphones.

Other work/productivity applications may continue to emerge – cameras are very interesting here – but I suspect the dominant companies have already been started.

The Mobile Communications Space

I’ve already made my case for the winning communications application back in February (the day before Facebook acquired WhatsApp) in an article called Messaging: Mobile’s Killer App:

Still, it’s only recently that the killer app for this era, when the nodes of communication are smartphones, has become apparent, and it is messaging. While the home telephone enabled real-time communication, and the web passive communication, messaging enables constant communication. Conversations are never ending, and friends come and go at a pace dictated not by physicality, but rather by attention. And, given that we are all humans and crave human interaction and affection, we are more than happy to give massive amounts of attention to messaging, to those who matter most to us, and who are always there in our pockets and purses.

As I note in that article, messaging is compelling not just because it enables a new kind of communication, but also because it is a platform in and of itself. Already LINE and WeChat are leveraging that platform to push applications, particularly games, and making money on the back end. In the future, I expect both to be major channels for direct marketing between companies and consumers, and in fact WeChat has pushed even further in China, offering e-commerce, taxi services, and more all through their messaging app.

It seems likely that the messaging battle will result in multiple winners: LINE already owns Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand, and is competitive in Indonesia and (they claim) in Spain, while WeChat is dominant in China. WhatsApp has the largest share worldwide, but that product is the furthest from being a real platform and a real business.² Messenger is clearly seeking to mimic LINE and WeChat, and is the likely winner in most Western countries.³

What’s Next

While the introduction of the iPhone seems like it was just yesterday (at least it does to me!), we are quickly approaching seven years – about the midway point of this epoch, if the PC and Internet are any indication.⁴ I sense, though, that we may be moving a bit more quickly: the work/productivity and communications applications have really come into focus this year, and while the battle to see what companies ride those applications to dominance will be interesting, it’s highly likely that the foundation is being laid for the core technology of the next epoch:

• Wearables is a possibility, and it certainly seems that Apple is trying to accelerate the category with their ambitious Apple Watch rollout. However, no matter how good the Apple Watch is, I’m not sure it’s an epoch definer, especially if it cannot truly stand alone

• Bitcoin is a definite possibility, particularly if there ends up being a “tick-tock” to epochs: device (PC), then protocol (Internet), device (smartphone), then protocol (Bitcoin). Blockstream, an attempt to create sidechains for non-monetary applications that run on top of Bitcoin, is particularly interesting in this regard⁵

• Both of the mobile applications that I identified could be core technology for the next epoch: were Uber to become ubiquitous, could businesses be built on top of it? What would such an operating system look like? An out-there idea to be sure, but in the realm of possibility.

  More likely is that the messaging services become so dominant that they render the underlying mobile platform unimportant. This too would be similar to the effect of the Internet on the PC: the biggest reason the Mac was able to make a comeback from near death was because the Internet – and web apps – ran everywhere. It didn’t matter what browser⁶ or OS was on your actual PC. Similarly, if all essential apps and servers are routed through your messaging service, then the underlying OS – whether iOS or Android – is increasingly irrelevant. In fact, I strongly believe this is the future in China in particular, one more reason why Apple is investing so strongly in non-tangible qualities like fashion.

What seems clearer is that today’s giants will continue owning their various categories in the context of their various epochs, even as they fade to – or continue in – irrelevance.

• Microsoft still sells a lot of Windows licenses, and businesses especially still rely on Office. Still, it’s striking how unimportant Microsoft’s defensive move into browsers ended up being, especially when you think about…

• Google seems strong, but as I’ve written previously, there is a lot about the company that feels like Microsoft: just as Microsoft jumped into the next epoch at the OS level for defensive reasons, Google too jumped ahead, also at the OS level, and also for defensive reasons. “Free” figured prominently in both strategies, and in the long run, it’s worth considering the possibility that Google’s Android dominance will have as much long term value to the company as Microsoft’s dominance of browsers – i.e., not very much at all. Ultimately, I expect an increasing amount of Google’s energy to go towards taking away what Microsoft has left: Chromebooks versus Windows, and Google Apps versus Office

• Facebook is in a unique position: while they were started as an Internet company, they were an exceptionally young one, and have clearly made a successful jump to mobile. Their position in mobile, though, while secure, is by no means dominant, and it’s interesting that they are in fact following the Microsoft/Google playbook: both the WhatsApp and Oculus acquisitions were about securing a stake in the OS for the next epoch

• Apple, as always, is following the beat of their own vertically-aligned drummer. They have (usually) good-enough services that work only on their exceptional hardware, and an OS advantage that matters to some number of people. More important in mobile is their ecosystem advantage: Apple has the best customers, devices, and OS, and thus gets the best apps, even though Apple isn’t exactly a benevolent ecosystem manager (members-only). I expect the company’s mobile position to be secure – they’re not going anywhere – and if wearables is the next epoch they are the best positioned: personal is what Apple is best at, and that’s exactly what wearables are

• Amazon’s most important role in these epochs is AWS, where they are locked in increasingly fierce competition with Microsoft and to a lesser extent Google for cloud dominance. It’s worth noting that Amazon is attacking this space from a very different direction: AWS is another low-margin product in a company built on low-margins, while Microsoft and Google have tons of cash from their high margin core but little experience competing on price

Do note, there are a lot of fascinating products and companies – Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, even Xbox – that I have not covered: it’s not that they aren’t important, but they aren’t epochal (there’s a decent chance this is where Apple Watch ends up). And, of course, there is the whole enterprise world, itself undergoing real disruption (members-only) from software as a service and the explosion of mobile. What an industry!

I have previously written Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats analyses for these five companies for Daily Update subscribers.

If you would like to read these analyses and receive similar notes every day in your inbox, why not treat yourself to an early Christmas present and sign up for Stratechery Daily Updates? And have a very Merry Christmas!

The post The State of Consumer Technology at the End of 2014 appeared first on stratechery by Ben Thompson.

Interstellar does in fact make sense– if it is viewed under the lens of Freudian dream logic.

In Slavoj Zizek’s In Defense of Lost Causes, he argues that the disasters in Hollywood blockbusters are in fact subsets of the “secondary” romantic plots between the lead characters. The catastrophes in the films are better understood as metaphors for the personal flaws which keep the two lovers apart. Once the psychological issues are confronted and vanquished the role of the monsters shifts to mediator and the disasters vanish as soon as their real purpose– the production of a hetero-normative couple– is achieved. For example, in Jurassic Park (1993), the dinosaurs represent the inability of the two paleontologists to have children. The monsters function as a mediator, convincing the reluctant Dr. Grant to be a father. This reading explains many mysterious moments in the film– like why the movie opens with Grant using a sickle-shaped raptor claw to pretend he is eviscerating an obnoxious child. Later on, once he is reconciled with children whom he must protect from the dinosaurs, the claw (a symbol of his revulsion for children, but at a more basic Freudian level, a symbol of his castration fears, that a child would play a Cronus to his Uranus) drops from his belt. The magical result: the next morning Grant is awoken by peaceful, herbivorous dinosaurs representing his new attitude toward fatherhood.

Likewise, Christopher Nolan’s new sprawling space epic, Interstellar, can more easily be read with this “secondary” romantic plot as the primary one. In the film, Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a restless former NASA test pilot whose dreams are deferred when a blight wipes out most of mankind, forcing the adventurer to become a farmer along with pretty much everyone else on earth. Terrified of the excesses of the 20th/early 21st century which wrought the disaster, his neighbors (and we assume the rest of mankind) exist as practical and austere but fearful luddites in a neo-Depression era America.

However (spoiler alert), Cooper’s dreams are soon revived when his young daughter Murphy (the name meaning, the films explains, “what can happen will happen”) discovers a “ghost” has manipulated gravity in her bedroom to spell out a mysterious set of coordinates. The coordinates lead our hero back to NASA where his former co-workers convince him to travel into outer space to find a new home for humanity.

To explain all the strange idiosyncrasies of Interstellar’s plot, let’s look at it as if it were not really about “saving humanity” but Cooper’s own interpersonal romantic problems– here an incestuous desire to sleep with his own daughter. (Zizek argues this is also the theme of the space epic Deep Impact [1998]). The desire is symbolically introduced in the first few moments in a strange scene that is otherwise unrelated to the rest of the plot. While in the midst of changing a tire with his daughter and son, an enormous phallic symbol in the form of an ancient drone flies over Cooper, interrupting an ordinary day of family routine with the fantastic. Cooper is seized with a wild desire to chase the object through vast swathes of fresh corn, ramming his battered and broken truck through the green crop in a raucous euphoric action sequence that reads if anything like an absurd wet dream. The adventure ends when the truck careens to tilt over the edge of a cliff– his sexual desire, threatening to destroy himself and his family. But here, literally teetering on the edge of the void, he gains control of the phallic object and through the technological medium of his laptop, invites his daughter to manipulate and control the phallus on the mousepad, allowing her to bring it in for a safe landing on green verdure.

After this, through various supernatural efforts expressed through the “ghost”, Cooper and his daughter try and separate from one another. The ghost (who we later learn is Cooper himself) commands Cooper to go away, but his daughter surreptitiously follows him and he is unable to escape her.

Soon, Cooper decides to flee as far away as possible, to fling himself into the remote regions of space, insisting that his daughter cannot accompany him. While his son is more or less indifferent to this idea, his daughter is deeply disturbed, leading to an emotionally intense scene in her bedroom in which Cooper promises that one day he will return and when he returns, because of relativity, they “might be the same age”. Likewise, his journey through space is filled with agony. He is torn between the immoral desire to return to his daughter and risk reproductive disaster (what the NASA scientists call “Plan A”) and a normal relationship with the fellow astronaut Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) and her pods of viable reproductive hexagons (“Plan B”). The “destruction of the human race” is here code for Cooper’s inner struggle between the two women.

This reading explains the strangest element of the film– the fact that the mysterious center of black hole (in a film that prides itself on scientific fidelity) turns out to be peephole into Cooper’s daughter’s bedroom, allowing him to watch her at every moment for all time. (Why not, for example, her laboratory instead?) The very limits of space itself cannot separate Cooper from his desire. His effort’s to get away from his daughter (to deny it) eventually find him trapped, confronting his obscene fantasy.

Finally, this interpretation explains an even more perplexing scene at the end of the film, in which Cooper, ejected from the literally perverted space of his daughter’s bedroom, finds her dying in bed, a decrepit old lady. Lacking any purpose, he asks his daughter what he should do with his life now that he has finally returned to her. Strangely his daughter tells him to go to a remote planet and pursue Amelia, the female astronaut, and enjoy a normal relationship with her– this, despite the fact that Murphy knows that her father and Amelia have just spent decades together in a spaceship. Somehow she assumes (or knows) that the two have not already entered into a sexual relationship.

But if Interstellar is about incest, why? To answer this question we must first recognize that the film is the latest entry in a new Hollywood genre, the post-post-apocalyptic film which includes such efforts as Oblivion (2013), The Hunger Games (2012-2015), Cloud Atlas (2012), Divergent (2014), and After Earth (2013). What distinguishes the post-post-apocalyptic movie from the simple post-apocalyptic offering is that we do not see humanity struggling to survive in the wake of a disaster as in The Day After (1983), but rather, the disaster has long since passed. The story begins well after society has re-organized into something new and all the pangs and trials of our present era are long since forgotten.

For example, in Hunger Games II: Catching Fire (2013), Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Laurence) again volunteers to replace her younger sister as a gladiator who had been selected by lot to compete in the eponymous contest. Like other P-P-A films, Hunger Games II: Catching Fire revels in the fantasy of undespoiled nature. When we first meet Katniss– before she is called upon to slay her fellow teenagers– it is among the green rushes and mists of the forest, a Diana figure, stalking game with her bow. Meat and food are scarce. She hunts out of necessity, dutifully returning the animals to her mother and sister to prepare a simple repast.

The narrative insists these hard-scrabble facts about her life are negative. The characters treat them as if they are unfortunate circumstances they must overcome. They are poor. Their house is shabby. They do not have enough to eat. The hunger games (not the film, but the contest in the film), if anything, offers a promise of material wealth out of which her family can rise out of squalor. Except it’s not squalid. We do not see Katniss, say, (as we do in the real economically devastated landscape of 80s Detroit in Michael Moore’s Roger & Me [1989]) snapping the necks of bunny rabbits then stripping the skin off them, breaking their bones, and scooping out their entrails. Nor do we see Katniss living in a mud-smeared hut, defecating into old plastic buckets. Rather, their home is like the houses of our present-day rich– that is to say, free of Ikea, made with real materials. The spaces she occupies don’t resemble our offices and homes, there’s no molded plastic or cheap modernity. It’s all stuff only found in nature or a vanished past– gleaming hardwood, worked leather, polished glass– not pressboard, duct tape, shipping containers, and plexi-glass.

Interstellar’s setting is the same. Cooper’s farmhouse is all burnished oak beams and shaker furniture. His existence is down to earth; he lives off the land, watches little league, and shops on main street as if he lived in 1920. The troubling and ugly excesses of consumerism are eradicated. There are no more shopping strips, McDonalds, and suburban malls– these are replaced by nature and an austere reverence for resource management.

In other words, the films are lying to us. The narratives claims they are showing us something bad (Katniss and her family suffering poverty in a remote backwoods, Cooper struggling to live off the land), when in fact, through their filmwork, costume work, and other visual art, they invite us to indulge in a lovingly polished and complete fantasy. The Hunger Games wants us to covet Katniss’s existence, not pity it. Why this double speak?

In earlier more utopian visions of the future like the Star Trek television shows in the 60s and 90s, the implicit assumption is that civilization is on the right track, we just need to keep going to improve. Star Trek’s “Star Fleet” is the United States purged of its obvious faults– namely materialism and capitalism. Western civilization’s best features are preserved and embellished– society is tolerant, pluralistic, gender-neutral, democratic, and dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. Star Fleet is an idealized vision of how America saw itself then– a defender of freedom, an enemy of tyranny who vanquished first fascism and then the Soviet Union, a civilizer, an innovator, a protector. Moreover, our scientific progress and the lattice of order it creates helps other societies. Just as the U.S. Navy sails around the world to provide disaster relief or medical aid though the technological marvel of its fleet, so too, the starship Enterprise (meaning our enterprise, that of the human race) alights from planet to planet fixing similar problems.

By contrast, the underlying assumption of the post-post-apocalyptic genre is the exact opposite– namely, our present society is fundamentally rotten and flawed at the core. Thus the only way to fix it would be for the inevitable collapse to arrive so it can be wiped away and we can begin again anew. This vision of America is like that of The Hunger Games’ Capitol “Panem”– an industrialized center greedily sucking away resources (including the young Katniss herself) from the rest of the globe which remains in squalid third world poverty. Here a more modern viewpoint is reflected: we in the west are hurting not helping other societies. Perhaps like the denizens of Panem (or the over-consuming Americans who caused the blights in Interstellar), we are standing on the top of an enormous, teetering, unsustainable, broken societal structure that despoils resources to benefit a few (us) at the expense of the majority (the rest of the world).

This terrifying idea, however, does not galvanize us all into action– rather it simply paralyzes us with fear. It is something we acknowledge but feel powerless to change in any fundamental way. What exactly is the correct course of action? Change our carbon footprint? Move to a commune? Quit our job in our office? Invest in ethical stocks? Buy American? Don’t own a cellphone? Perhaps the system is too massive, too entrenched, too confusing, to change? After all, we are literally clothed and fed by it. It scratches against us on the label of our shirts and pants. It makes our “fair trade” coffee less bitter. And so the shift is slight– our outward actions don’t change– we still drive cars, work in offices, and become fractional owners of anonymous corporate conglomerates through our 401Ks. Only our doubt grows larger– our certainty that we are doing any good or living in a way that truly benefits other people.

This is the reason we see Katniss hunting in her green glade or Cooper harvesting his corn– these images show us something we wish we could have– knowable and self-reliant supply chains. These characters have the luxury of knowing they aren’t harming someone in some distant impoverished place simply by earning their living. Moreover, in these worlds we no longer need wait with nervous bated breath– the looming disaster has already come and gone.

This new post-post-apocalyptic fantasy is inherently incestuous. Cooper’s inward looking perversion represents the basic modern view on which the genre is based, that of an inevitable self-consuming perversion (via science and technology) of the natural order which we cannot escape. It’s the environmental warning we know we don’t heed: we must go farther afield to find more sustainable resources because exploiting the one’s close at hand (like fossil fuels, Cooper’s daughter, or the earth itself) is unviable in the long term.

But also, on a grander scale, the film’s incest theme is about the twisted nature of our own fantasy. We indulge in these films to imagine living the full-blooded outdoor life of the poor absent the trappings of technology, when in fact, ironically, we are doing the opposite. We, like Cooper, are not looking far enough afield, we are literally trapped in our distorted “tesseract”, helplessly looking in on another dimension (here the two-dimensional world of the film) in which our absurd wish is made manifest through the very technological means and corporate interests we are trying to escape. And so, like the cooped-up Cooper, what we see is ourselves cooped-up. We are watching ourselves become trapped in an infinitely telescoping hall of mirrors, not really wanting to see any of it come true– or else why wouldn’t we just actually be outside rather than in the theater?

by Dish Staff

Daniel Genis, a former inmate, gets real about how going to prison raises your risk of getting murdered, and how little anyone will care if you do:

Obviously, incarceration increases one’s odds of a violent death. Living in a society openly governed by force with those who have demonstrated their familiarity with it increases the danger. There are steps to lower the risk: Don’t join a gang, don’t get high, don’t gamble or owe anyone—all fairly obvious. Also important: don’t join the dating pool or compete for the attention of homosexuals. If the most common reason for jailhouse murder is money, the second is jealousy.

I did 10 years without being scarred; I fought infrequently, only when I had no other option, and mostly in the beginning. Nevertheless, I saw a man die 10 feet from me in my first year.

I knew both killer and victim but not the reason. I knew only that the hit was commissioned; the man who took the contract was a specialist. He had come to prison with a parole date two decades away, but by the time I met him he would have to be Methuselah to ever see a board. With few other options, he became a hitman and killed many times. The victim was himself dangerous, and also the strongest man in the yard. He could lift a concrete table. But he couldn’t stop the shank to his heart. …

I was shown how much the value of my life had shrunk on my very first day in the state system. A notorious sex offender got off the bus with us. After processing in everyone else, the cops took him somewhere for a reminder of their thoughts on “rapos.” He was old, frail and handcuffed; 20 minutes later they had a crime to cover up. Something had gone wrong in that room and the guy was dead. His corpse was quickly re-shackled and returned to the bus. The paperwork was spotless: he had died in transit, the conjunction of a weak heart and long trip. I had nine years ahead of me and plenty of transit. Therefore I decided not to remember anything if anyone came investigating. But no one ever did.

Sunday night I went to bed watching the BBC World News reporting on the hostage situation in Australia and following #sydneysiege on Twitter until long after that hashtag had devolved into a swamp of authoritative speculation, earnest calls for prayer, and racist diatribes.

Sarah Proud and Tall’s post at Balloon Juice reflected a hopeful and helpful spirit that I saw expressed and demonstrated by many Aussies — that of people who weren’t eagerly excited to cooperate with a potential terrorist by enthusiastically seizing the opportunity to be terrorized. The #illridewithyou response that quickly arose was also an encouraging sight.

(The anti-kitten-burning coalition was also out in full force, as was the usual right-wing disappointment later on when the situation failed to escalate into the mass-casualty international event some apparently hoped would bring a sense of meaning to their otherwise meaningless lives.)

Much of the hyperventilating press coverage of the “siege” in Sydney emphasized that this was an unprecedented event — a day on which everything had changed for ever and ever for Australia. Nonsense, Juan Cole says:

In fact, Sydney had another hostage crisis, in 1984, in a bank. A formerly wealthy (secular) Turkish-Australian became unhinged at losing his fortune. Today’s incident is not more important than that one, which few now remember. Both of these hostage-takers were common criminals. Neither is a “terrorist.” Today’s Sydney hostage-taker is not representative of a new activity. He isn’t important, and ordering a black flag won’t make him so. The only one who can bestow recognition on this criminal is the mass media and the press. They shouldn’t do it.

Well put.

I awoke Monday to check on the latest updates from Sydney and learned that a similar situation was happening closer to home.

In one of the region’s deadliest shooting rampages, an Iraq war veteran shot and killed his ex-wife and five of her relatives early Monday, terrorizing four upper Montgomery County communities and sparking a manhunt that continued deep into the night, officials said.

The suspect, Bradley W. Stone, 35, of Pennsburg, had a “familial relationship” with all of the victims, officials said. Besides his ex-wife, he allegedly killed her mother, grandmother, sister, brother-in-law, and niece. The couple’s two daughters were unharmed.

The killings began before hours before daybreak, and sent SWAT teams scrambling from town to town and put schools into secure mode. Officers discovered bodies in homes in Souderton, Lansdale, and Harleysville, in Lower Salford. A 17-year-old boy, Stone’s former nephew, was shot and wounded

Several reports have said Stone is suffering from PTSD, but the deeper problem is a lethal case of MRA:

Nicole and Bradley Stone had divorced in 2009.

“They’ve been fighting for years, real bad,” a neighbor, Michele Brewster, told the Allentown Morning Call. “He’s been tormenting her. She’s gone to the police, and she has told everybody, ‘He’s going to kill me.’”

The Stones had been involved in a protracted custody battle over their two daughters, according to a friend of Bradley Stone.

“She was trying to hold the kids from him, and he just snapped,” theorized Matthew Schafte.

This is not an unusual story. This precise form of deadly violence happens all the time in America. Every day, several times a day. Men kill women. Every damn day.

“More women were killed by their husbands or boyfriends since Sept. 11 than all the Americans who were killed by 9/11 or in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Gloria Steinem said a few months ago, sparking a minor uproar among those who refused to believe it could possibly be true.

It’s true. Between 2002 and 2012, more than 15,400 American women have been slain by their “intimate partners.” Every day, several times a day, American men kill American women.

Here’s the appalling front and back covers of the special edition Rupert Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph rushed out in Sydney as the hostage crisis there unfolded.

The Daily Telegraph’s special edition featured three factual errors in its front page headline.

Rupert Murdoch’s error-ridden sensationalism also shapes the “journalism” of his American news outlets — from Fox News to the New York Post. But even those ratings-chasing carnival shows never speak of the ongoing slaughter of women by their intimate partners as a “death cult.” You didn’t see your local media covering the latest killing by the latest aggrieved male as “The instant we changed forever.” Nor will they cover the next such episode in such sweeping, hyperbolic terms.

But we do have a death cult. It’s not terrorists or jihadists. It’s American men killing American women. Every day.

by Dish Staff

A reader sent this in:

Can you answer which Republican figure said each quote? Answers after the jump:

On Obamacare:

1. Sarah Palin, former half-term governor of Alaska, vice-presidential nominee, reality show star

2. Ben Carson, surgeon and 2016 presidential contender. (Though his exact words were: “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”)

3. Bill O’Brien, New Hampshire state representative

4. Michele Bachmann, congresswomen

On torture:

1. Marco Rubio, senator

2. Palin

3. Peter King, congressman

4. Steve King, congressman

(Though the following quote from Dick Cheney would have made a better pick: “What are we supposed to do kiss him on both cheeks and say ‘please, please tell us what you know’?”)

it is fascinating, in a way, to watch stuff from the 90s and see how sexist and racist and homophobic it was, and realize lil kid me was watching all that thinking “i guess this is what adults have decided is cool and right”

The AAA games industry has hysterically overreacted to the failure of anyone to capture the lightning in the bottle that World of Warcraft.  It’s weird – AAA studios seem completely and totally oblivious to the fact that EverQuest was quite successful with – what, 450K subs max? WoW at the time, if you recall, stated they merely needed to match EQ to be successful.  Analysts at the time used to say stuff like ‘there might only be 600K to 1M MMO players in the world – how could WoW and EQ2 possible coexist?’  Even then, the breakout success of games like Lineage in Asia suggested that something could come along and blow the doors off of things.

Going back through my blog in the mid-aughts, people forget both how slow WoW’s roll to 12M actually was, and also how stunning most observers thought it was at every major milestone.  I remember when they hit 1M and were clearly still on the uptick, a lot of people discovered the need to recalibrate their definition of success.  As one example, Star Wars: Galaxies (which launched about a year prior) went from being considered a solid and respectable success at 250K subs to one that the corporate overlords apparently figured needed a disastrous reboot in the form of the ‘New Game Experience’.  Because WoW recalibrated what success SHOULD look like for a major MMO.  

And so everyone spent money assuming they’d land THOSE numbers, and then had to settle with lesser success — this seems to be true of WildStar, SWTOR and Elder Scrolls, all of whom had numbers that (I suspect) stabilized at places a lot closer to EQ’s order of magnitude than WoW’s.  This is still nothing to sneeze at –  SWTOR was still a money printing machine when I left, thanks largely to the F2P conversion.

All of this comes to mind when reading this fascinating article about the fall of THQ.  The whole thing is an awesome read, and it seems clear to me that the real fall of THQ was centered upon being built upon a core market that just evaporated out from under them – basically, their business model of making licensed (mostly) kids games for consoles didn’t survive the 360 console transition, as most of their audience was gravitating to mobile and tablets instead of consoles.  The article talks at length about how they realized too late that they needed to shift to more ‘core’ games, and how parts of their company never mentally made that jump of where they needed to be.

That being said, there’s a full chapter talking about how the Warhammer 40K project was a key part of bankrupting the company.  Largely because they insisted on spending big.  It’s hard to believe that, just a year or two before WoW went live, Shadowbane shipped with a dev team of, I dunno, 30 people.  Yes, that’s probably TOO small in this day and age, but if you calibrate your expectations, there’s still plenty of money to be made.

It seems like the AAAs have all fled that space.  There are still plenty of people who have faith in it though — they’re the MMO greybeards who know that there’s gold at the end of that Rainbow, and most of them are chasing the money on Kickstarter rather than go through AAAs.  The next generation of MMOs appears to be Shards Online by some Mythic Alumni, Shroud of the Avatar by Richard Garriott and some Origin alumni,  Pathfinder Online by Goblinworks, and Camelot Unchained by Mark Jacobs and some other Mythic Alumni.  It will be a smaller, humbler generation than any since the EQ/UO/AC days.  But of the AAAs stay gunshy, there could be a jackpot there waiting for one of them to hit.

Because, let’s face it, MMOs offer something that other genres don’t.  The community.  The relatively well-policed gaming environment.  The persistence.  The idea of burning down a guild’s castle in a raid with 100 other people.  That dream will always be powerful, it will always be evocative, and it will always excite the imagination.

I rested my head on my pillow. What a good day, I thought. What a good good day! It felt full, whole, satisfying.

What had made today so great? I pondered.

I thought for a minute, reached for my notebook and pen, and sketched the following:

All four of these elements had been present in my day in some capacity. I hadn’t worked long hours, but I had spent some time that morning in a flow state, working intensely on my book. I had gone for a long walk with Grendel that afternoon. I’d gone to a friend’s birthday party that night and had stopped to enjoy my favorite Mexican food on the way.

I was in a hurry, so I’d gotten take-out and eaten in the car, with the new Spoon album playing and the rain falling hard on my car. It was sort of magical and some of the most fun I’ve had alone. I only stayed at the party for a short while – long enough to catch up with friends and meet a few new people, but not so long that I felt drained. I left with electricity in my veins. What a good day.

Experimentation

Work, movement, alone time, social time. Hm.

Over the next several weeks, I began to experiment. In the morning I would ask myself what I could do that day in each quadrant. At the end of the day I would see which quadrants I’d hit and how I felt. Sure enough I would go to bed feeling the most satisfied on the days where I hit all four quadrants. On the days when I only hit one or two, I would feel scattered and irritable.

I noticed that my weakest, most infrequently hit quadrant was “movement,” so I began placing extra emphasis on talking walks, working out, and going to yoga class.

I also noticed that it was difficult to hit all four quadrants on days when I had a lot of obligations and errands to run. However, I found that on these days it was especially smart to prioritize the quadrants, because they really helped to counteract the irritation I felt from doing things like laundry and calling banks. It’s similar to meditation. It’s always the days when you feel as though you don’t have time to meditate that you most need to meditate. Even a few minutes is enough to make a difference.

The Formula for a Perfect Day

We’re all different and I don’t think that this formula will work perfectly for everybody. But it’s a good place to start. At the beginning of your day, see if you can think of something small to do in each quadrant.

1. Focused, important work

First off, when I say “work” in this context, I’m talking about your heart’s work: activities that feel meaningful and that light you up, whether or not they currently generate income.

People often try to pack too much work into their days and then end up feeling disappointed and unproductive at the end of the day because they didn’t meet their expectations. This is especially a problem for multipotentialites, who have so many exciting projects on their plates.

As Chris Guillebeau puts it,

We overestimate what we can accomplish in a day, but underestimate what we can accomplish in a year.

Pick one important item to do. Yes, one. And YES, important. Something with real meaning, something that lights up your heart, something with long term impact. If you have to focus on urgent work that day, that’s fine. But try to do one pomodoro of important work first (and learn how to differentiate between the two).

You don’t have to spend a long time in this quadrant. Even 20-40 minutes will do it. The key is to get into a flow state. Flow and meaning are what will leave you feeling satisfied at the end of the day.

Once you’ve worked on your important item, pat yourself on the back and then you can work on other things if you like, but think of these as bonuses. This way you’ll look back on your day and see all of the extra stuff you got done rather than looking back and feeling like a failure because you only knocked four tasks off of your list of ten.

2. Quality Alone Time

Quality alone time means something different for each of us. For some, this might mean reading a book. For others, it might mean doing something creative, engaging with a new interest, or going for a bike ride.

Your alone time should be “pointless” in the best sense of the word. You’re not trying to get anywhere or accomplish anything. You’re just enjoying spending time with yourself.

3. Movement

Again, movement can take many forms. Walks, workouts, yoga class. It can be anything that will get you out of your head and into your body.

4. Social Interaction

Try to do one small social activity every day. As an introvert, I prefer connecting with people one-on-one or in small groups. I occasionally go to larger parties or events. Some days I count my woodworking class as an item in my social quadrant since I usually end up chatting with people as I work on my projects.

A quick note for those of you in relationships: it’s really important for you to push yourself to spend time with people other than your partner. This is something I’ve struggled with in the past. It’s really easy to isolate yourselves, simply because it’s so much fun to be together! But it’s really important to get out and spend time with other people for your sense of independence and identity as well as the health of your relationship.

Activities that Hit Multiple Quadrants

Certain activities hit multiple quadrants. You can do focused important work in teams and hit both the work and social quadrants. A bike ride might count both as quality alone time and as movement.

That’s fine, especially on days when you’re really busy. But I do try to find four distinct activities to fit into the quadrants because I like the variety.

Capturing the “Essence” of the Quadrant Matters More than How Much Time You Devote to it

The activity you choose for each quadrant can be really small. It doesn’t need to take up much time, it just needs to capture the “essence” of the quadrant in question. Here are the “essences” of the quadrants:

Work: important + focused
Alone time: purposeless + fun
Movement: out of your head and into your body
Social: connecting with another human being

At the end of the day, pay attention to how you feel. And especially pay attention on days when you fall short in a quadrant. Do you feel any differently?

You may need to tweak this approach or replace the quadrants with your own “elements of a good day.” Not everyone needs the same things to feel good at the end of the day.

The Importance of the Occasional Unbalanced Day

There are occasionally days when the best thing to do is to ditch the attempt to have a perfect day and just succumb to doing what you feel like doing. Sometimes this means taking a whole day to yourself (quality alone time), spending a day hanging out with an old friend and going on an adventure (social interaction) or even going hard on a work project and just getting into a massive flow state that lasts all day. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. The occasional unbalanced day can really do a lot to break you out of a funk and help you feel refreshed.

Your Turn

Which elements do you need to have in your day to feel satisfied and whole as you hit the pillow that night? Let’s get a list of ideas and resources going in the comments below!

by Will Wilkinson

The Supreme Court ruled today, in a 8-1 decision, that a police stop based on a officer’s false beliefs about the law can lead to a legally valid search.

Nicholas Heien was stopped in his car by a Surry County, North Carolina cop for having only one working brake light, which is not against the law in North Carolina. Heien then stupidly consented to a search of his car, which turned up a bag of cocaine. Heien subsequently argued that the search ought not to valid, and the drug charge dropped, since the traffic stop was based on the officer’s mistaken understanding of the law. The crux of the issue, legally, is whether a police officer can have a “reasonable suspicion” that a law has been broken – that’s the prevailing standard for a valid stop – when that suspicion is grounded in ignorance of the law. The court says “reasonable mistakes of the law,” like the erroneous belief that two working brake lights is legally mandatory, may make the officer’s suspicion wrong, but not unreasonable.

This is too much. We’ve somehow arrived at a place where police can do pretty well whatever they like. Cops already have immense discretion to detain us. There’s a good deal of talk these days, and rightly so, about the “criminalization of poverty,” which is part of broader trend toward the criminalization of life through the proliferation of regulation. We are, all of us, breaking some law pretty much all of the time. Even if the cop is wrong about which law we happen to be breaking, he’s apparently not wrong to prevent us from going about our lawful business. When we’re all criminals, all suspicion, even ignorant suspicion, is “reasonable.”

Who gets the raw end of this deal? The most “suspicious” among us, of course. Michael Munger, a Duke University political scientist, gets to the heart of the issue of overcriminalization, and the dilemma it creates for those of us who want a state that is both active and just:

We have criminalized so many behaviors (in the Staten Island case, selling packs of cigarettes!) that we have given the police enormous pressure to perform — and gigantic latitude to act on prejudice, bigotry, and simple anger. The police, in their defense, have an impossible job. They have come to see almost everyone around them, every day, as a lawbreaker and a danger to society. Harvey Silverglate has famously estimated that most of us commit at least three felonies per day. The only thing that prevents us from being jailed is the discretion and public spiritedness of the prosecutor. …

As long as overreaching laws effectively criminalize being black or poor, it’s not surprising that the police will continue to treat black people and poor people as criminals. This kind of race-based law enforcement is given the stink eye by our friends on the left, but they can’t seem to draw the obvious inference: the answer is not better police or more enlightened officials. The answer is fewer laws. That’s the long division in our society, the most important difference that arises from class and social status. Decriminalize normal nonviolent daily activity, and the police will have fewer excuses to harass people they don’t like — people who often can’t fight back.

Now, I don’t think decriminalizing nonviolent daily activity is any sort of panacea. There’s a great deal more than needs to be done to rein in America’s lawless police, and I’ll be discussing some ideas for doing that over the next few days. But simplifying the law and decriminalizing peaceful daily life promises to somewhat reduce the exercise of the sort of police discretion which, when combined with our culture’s lingering ethos of white supremacy, amounts to systematic racial oppression. That’s worth doing. Moreover, simplifying the law reduces the chance that police will act on “reasonable mistakes” about what it says.

That said, I do disagree to some extent with Munger. Fewer laws isn’t the only obvious inference. Better police and more enlightened officials have got to be part of the answer, or reform is doomed before it begins. Like Munger, I think it’s idiotic to expect public officials to act like angels, and I believe we ought to design our institutions from unabashedly cynical assumptions about human motivation. But it is possible to demand a minimum standard of decent behavior without succumbing to what Munger calls the fantasy of “unicorn governance.” Other countries have secret agents that don’t torture people and police that don’t behave like lawless thugs, and that’s not too much to ask.

A sobering, intense email from TPM Reader AJ ...

Josh…

As one 70 year old Black man who was born and raised in “segregated America” and raised my son in the new and improved “post-racial” America, please let me help you out.

You wrote…

sketchamagowza:

Kramps

[support me on Patreon]

The venerable community organization ACORN shut down and dissolved in 2010.

Founded in 1970, ACORN was actually an umbrella organization pulling together dozens of other small grassroots, community-based advocacy groups. It became an effective voice promoting and magnifying political representation on behalf of poor, working-class and minority communities.

The phrase “community organization” and post-2008 color arousal on the part of the white right meant that ACORN became the unwitting embodiment of Fox Fear and a conservative punching bag. The group was targeted by fraudulent video activists and deep-pocketed legal harassment and was forced to close its doors permanently in 2010.

But the white right wing just can’t quit ACORN, and every year since then, despite the group’s non-existence, House Republicans have voted to ensure that the defunct organization does not receive federal funding.

So here’s a list of other now defunct and/or no-longer-existent organizations and entities the Republicans in the House might just as productively vote to deny future federal funding:

10. Napster

9. The USFL

8. Moxie soda

7. Polio

6. Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction

5. Saddam Hussein

4. The Seattle Pilots

3. The Commodore 64

2. The Battle of the Network Stars

1. Dick Cheney’s soul

are there any fanfics where Ana Steele and Will Graham get together and form the Actually, Honey, You’re Better Off Without Him support group?

they could invite Harley Quinn and Buffy Summers!

Phill Cameron, writing for Gamasutra:

Papers Please launched last year to both critical and commercial success, and placed you in the role of a border inspector working for a totalitarian regime. The demands on exactly what is required for entry into your country grow over the course of the game, until you implement a full body scanner to check for explosives and contraband.

It’s this scanner that Apple has deemed to be “pornographic content,” according to Lucas Pope, the games developer.

So here’s an App Store rejection that many disagree with, but which is easy to understand from Apple’s perspective. Apple tends to err on the side of running the App Store with Disney-esque family values. The company places inordinate value in its family-friendly reputation.

But:

• Pornography usually involves nudity, but nudity is frequently not pornographic. Pornography is famously difficult to define, but I think one aspect almost everyone would agree with is that pornography is intended to create sexual arousal. I haven’t played Papers Please, but by all accounts, it’s a serious game attempting to create a dystopian police state. The nudity seems to be oppressive and invasive, not pornographic.

• This case highlights the way Apple holds games (and apps in general) to a different standard than other iTunes content. Movies, music, and books are not held to the same PG-13-ish standards that apps are. I can buy A Clockwork Orange from iTunes, but if I made a game that showed the exact same things that are depicted in that film, it’d have little chance of being approved. Conversely, an R-rated movie version of Papers Please could depict this scene without a hitch when it comes to iTunes.

Update, 13 December: Developer Lucas Pope says Apple has asked him to resubmit the app with the nudity intact.

I won’t lie – when I was planning on when my last day with Bioware would be, the idea of coinciding it with the release of Civilization: Beyond Earth was pretty damned serendipitous.  I expected to go into a six month Sid Meier coma of one-more-turn up until the money ran out and my wife demanded I shower, get a job and start bringing home bacon again.  But I’ve found I’m not just reaching for the game.  Instead I’m reaching for Endless Legend.

CBE is a fine game, and in many respects it is an excellent evolutionary step to Civilization 5.  The game balance still has some flaws (trade is ridiculously overpowered, for example).  Right now, Civ 5 + Expansions is a better game.  A lot of that is just because Sid games seem to require at least one expansion to get all the kinks out, which is fine.  I strongly suspect CBE’s first expansion will move it from ‘Fine’ to ‘Excellent’.

The problem I can’t get past with CBE is ironically the same problem I couldn’t get past with Alpha Centauri – the formula that makes Civ wonderful is just a lot stickier when you wander through real human history.  For a lot of reasons, but earning ‘Autonomous Systems’ is just not as awesome a feeling as learning ‘the Wheel’ or ‘Gunpowder’.  Why?  Because we can map that onto our knowledge of human history.   We understand its impact implicitly.  We know where it should appear in the tech tree.  We can mentally compare our progress to real human history.  There’s just a whole bunch of hidden resonance in there, which CBE and SMAC just didn’t get access to.  The designers who tried did a fine job (a better one on SMAC than CBE, IMHO), but in a completely uphill battle.

Resonance is the idea that some games and game design elements are just plain sticky.  This can take many forms, but familiarity is one form that has proven to be successful over and over again.  As an example, I went to a talk once where a God of War combat designer talked about how the team liked to have Kraatos’ moves mirror, on some level, moves and poses you were familiar with from other movies.  In most cases, the move was different enough that the relationship was not completely obvious, but they felt, psychologically, those moves just felt better.

Similarly, I believe that Resonance is a huge part of why Asheron’s Call didn’t beat EverQuest, despite having some advantages.  AC tried desperately to invent its own bestiary and world from whole cloth, creating a litany of monsters that were all new!  Fresh! And original!  Meanwhile, EQ gave us the orcs, dwarves and elves that we grew up playing D&D with.  The result made the game immediately more relatable.  And in a day and age where you have a very brief window in order to win a player from another entertainment source, ‘immediately relatable’ is the whole ballgame.

Which on many levels sucks.  Resonance is a concept that nudges designers towards not straying too far afield.  Resonance is the reason why lazy designers reach for overused tropes – the free emotional impact in these existing tropes make it easier and quicker to build characters and tell stories, because players already on some level know the basics.  Take resonance too far, and you’ve got yourself a game that’s a total uninspired ripoff.  A game that lacks resonance feels too alien, too distant, or too unrelatable.

Long story short is that CBE, I found, to have a deficit of Resonance, and of Relatability that makes the game easy to get into, at least compared to other Civ games.  One thing they could have done better has been their approach to the factions – the alien, ethereal vibe they were going for – and the high level of abstraction representing them all.  Compare that to James Raynor, the voice and spirit of the Human faction in StarCraft.  He’s designed to be our stand-ins, to act as the avatar of humanity as it spreads its way across the stars into open conflict in an alien universe.  He’s a huge part of the reason that StarCraft resonates – it gives us something extremely strong and familiar we can latch onto, which made it possible for Blizzard to unfold the weirder and more esoteric parts of the experience.

At any rate, I won’t say I’m done with CBE – there’s still an awful lot to like.  But it will probably be parked on Steam until XPack #1 comes out.

A reader writes:

I was shocked by something James Mitchell (one of the supposed architects of the torture program) said in his VICE interview: torture wasn’t supposed to yield actionable intelligence and he’d be “stunned” if it did. Why? Because we tortured people just to play good cop/bad cop and to loosen them up to other questioning! Seriously.

I’m in disbelief, and I just wanted to make sure you all saw it. Thanks for all your hard work on this incredibly important story.

Former director Michael Hayden feels that he and his colleagues have been wronged:

It’s as if we were tried and convicted in absentia. We were not given an opportunity to mount a defense. And there was no discovery process by which alleged evidence could be revealed and challenged.

Friedersdorf puts this in its appropriate context:

So imprisoning Muslims without charges or trial is morally defensible, as Hayden sees it, as is killing without due process, even when scores of children predictably die as “collateral damage,” and even when U.S. citizens are targeted in secret. The no-fly list? Also just fine, no interviews required. But criticizing Hayden in a Senate report that was researched for years, based on CIA documents, and given to the current CIA director to review before publication? Criticizing him in a report that results in no penalties whatsoever without due process? That’s an outrage to him. Why, a man’s reputation is at stake!

aura-alora:

qwantzfeed:

HOT BONUS TIP: the phrase “in other words,” stacks well with a thesaurus, especially an automated one

comics! merchandise! AND patronage?!

Ew no. Please don’t do this.

As a teacher* NOTHING is more annoying than reading an essay full of filler words and repetition to make up a word count. Chances are that if you are not reaching the word count by several thousand words you have not touched on all points in great enough detail. Of course a certain amount of repetition is necessary to drive your point home, but I don’t see how an essay filled up by using this method could get you anything higher than a 60 - 65%.

Also, why are you advising students to write “if some of you are just joining us”—-who exactly would ‘just be joining’ you if its an ESSAY that a person has to read from beginning to end? Why are you using first person in an academic essay? 

'Trust me when I say'—ok. Why should I? Have you independently verified all of your information? If not, why are you making assertions that you can’t back up with facts and why would that be important information for your professor to know? This just sounds clumsy and unprofessional.

Actually the majority of these points are clumsy and unprofessional. But I assume it’s meant for lazy students and not for academic researchers. If you want to inflate your word count properly, I’ve given some tips below:

Actual Advice if you’re low on word count:

• Do more research on your topic.
• DO MORE RESEARCH ON YOUR TOPIC.
• This relates to the above point but: you can reiterate exactly what was said in a source as long as you properly relate it to your own topic. (NB: this does not mean you can plagiarise! Just put it in your own words and explain why it is relevant)
• Find case-studies that relate to your topic, explain how they relate to your topic and point out why they are needed. A single case study properly investigated could add at least a page to your essay. At most, it could make up the entire length of your essay.
• Use the P.E.E. method: Point (write out the main point you are making in the paragraph), Example (give examples which illustrate your point), Explain (Use your example(s) to explain the initial point you were making).
• Include linking paragraphs/sentences that summarise main points as they occur (this is where you can use your beloved repetition)
• Find alternative viewpoints on your topic and explain why those viewpoints are not viable.
• If your educator allows it, include pictures and statistics and explain these in the context of your argument.
• Examples are your best friend. If you are low on word count, stuff examples in your essay like a Thanksgiving turkey. You can even link it to a previous example and therefore use minimal re-explaining.
• If you absolutely MUST have meaningless filler, DO NOT EVER USE FIRST PERSON UNLESS IT IS EXPLICITLY STATED YOU MUST DO SO.
• Instead, conflate sentences which you have made concise: in other words, instead of saying ‘Jenny did X because of Y’ (6) write ‘This therefore proves that Y happened as a direct result of the action of Jenny doing X’ (17—word count more than doubled like WHOA!)
• Relating to the above point: use modifiers to conflate your writing. E.g. Instead of saying ‘language barriers were the reason that the Spanish enlisted Malintzin’, say ‘insurmountable language barriers were the main reason that the Spanish conquistadors enlisted Malintzin’. It will add a few precious words and will sometimes make your point sound more convincing than it actually is.
• Starting sentences with short filler sentences are just about the only thing I agree with in the comic, but the way they went about it was WRONG WRONG WRONG. Be sure that your short filler sentences are professional-sounding by asking the question, “Would I use this phrase in front of a president, CEO, my direct superior, or my lecturer?” If the answer is a resounding “NO”: DO NOT USE THESE SENTENCES.
• Your introduction and conclusion can also essentially be the filler. You can just reiterate all points you made in the exact same manner and then add a fancy ending as if you knew what you were doing like “As can be seen from the above essay and the points/examples/case studies given previously, it becomes obvious that xxxx is the reason that yyyyy happened.”

Disclaimer: I am a high school teacher, so my students rarely write anything above 1000 words. Even so, I think it would be the same across the board. Also, this is based on a) my experiences as a teacher, b) my experiences as student and c) my experiences at university. In short: this is basically just my opinion/perspective and shouldn’t be taken as a be-all and end-all. 

Personally, I’m not too nit-picky on the length of the essay as long as it is clear, concise and touches on all points in detail. I’d rather have ten pages of clear, structured writing than 15 pages of horse manure. However, if your teacher is nit-picky, and you *have* to use the method given in the Dino comic; go ahead. But I seriously doubt you’d get a very good grade.

TWO THINGS:

1. Okay, obviously YES it is AMAZING that a teacher has very seriously taken apart the joke suggestions in my joke comic featuring jokes!  
2. And YES I do in fact LOVE that this take-down has produced actual teacher-approved ways to inflate your word count: adjectives!  Unnecessary examples!  Include wrong points of view and then say why they’re wrong!  This is a gold mine for “how to inflate your word count in ways that won’t get you in trouble”.

The whole question of torture could have been avoided if the military had “just killed all these guys when they were captured on the battlefield,” when no one would have noticed, a former senior CIA officer told me over lunch today.

I set up an interview a few weeks ago with him to talk about the situation in Iraq. When we met today, naturally the subject of the Senate’s report on torture came up. He’s pretty hardline on military issues, as you’d expect.

In his view, torture is worse than killing people, because it doesn’t work, which was obvious before the release of the Senate report and further confirmed by it. A person being tortured will tell you anything you want to hear, even if it’s all lies, and a lot of the victims had to lie because they didn’t have valuable information to begin with.

“It doesn’t matter what tactics you use, you’re not going to get information if people don’t know anything and most of these Gomers didn’t know shit,” he said. “Who in the leadership was stupid enough to think they would? Why would these guys have detailed knowledge about plans and targeting? Even if they were hard-core jihadis who took part in operations, that doesn’t mean they would have knowledge of upcoming attacks.”

Once the U.S. went into “the business of interrogation,” U.S. allies in the “war on terror” were encouraged to hand over suspects — and they did, no matter how flimsy the evidence. Lots of others were turned in by bounty hunters. And of course we know that a lot of people falsely dimed out their personal enemies or political rivals.

Torture grew inevitably out of the militarization of the CIA that took place after 9/11, this former CIA officer said, when the agency was tasked with obtaining information to support battlefield needs. “That’s important but it’s tactical information and the military’s intelligence agencies should handle that,” he said. “The agency became more involved in interrogation than intelligence gathering. There’s a whole generation of young officers who think that intelligence gathering is getting information out of a guy shackled to a chair.”

The former CIA officer said he personally liked George Tenet “but he was a shitty DCI” and he is responsible for many of the agency’s post-9/11 failures. “The president should’ve demanded the heads of people. But to Bush, George [Tenet] was a good guy and it wasn’t his fault,” he said. “Fine, it wasn’t all his fault but it was partly his fault and there was no way the agency could move forward when the guys at the helm were all trying to escape responsibility for 9/11.”

At the same time, he said Senate Democrats are being totally disingenuous about their own role in tacitly condoning torture. They gave Bush a blank check when it was politically convenient and now they’re pretending to be shocked about what happened: “I’m familiar with congressional oversight and there’s no way people on the intelligence committees and in the leadership didn’t generally know what was going on. There’s no conceivable circumstances under which they wouldn’t have known. It’s like that scene from Casablanca, they had no idea. They’re lying.”

Photo: Lynne Sladky/AP

The post ‘A Lot of These Gomers Didn’t Know Shit’: Former CIA Officer on Torture Report appeared first on The Intercept.

[Re-posted from earlier today]

His interview last night is worth revisiting again. He says what he has previously said – adding nothing to the factual record, and addressing none of the specifics in the report. But he is also clearly rattled. He is used to proclaiming categorical truths about things he knows will never be made public. He is used to invoking what he says he knows from secret intelligence without any possibility of being contradicted. This interview is the first time he has made statements about torture that can be fact-checked by the record. And, he is proven to be a liar, as shown below.

When someone presents a public official with a large tranche of the CIA’s own documents and operational cables and internal memos, and that paper-trail contradicts previous statements by the public official, he has a couple of options. The first is to point out where any particular allegation is factually wrong, to show a flaw in the data, to defend himself factually from the claims presented. The second is to flail around, dodge any specifics and double-down on various talking points that evade the central facts at hand.

Cheney picked the second path. That tells you a huge amount, it seems to me. He doesn’t address the mountain of evidence. He is simply ruling it out of bounds – after admitting he hasn’t even read it! If you had a two-bit tax evader who is presented by the IRS with a tranche of his own tax records proving he was delinquent, and he simply insisted that he hadn’t read them and still emphatically denies the charge, he’s self-evidently guilty. Why is this not self-evidently the case with Cheney?

His response to the facts as documented is simply: I know otherwise. He gives no specifics. He merely invokes other CIA official denials as an authority – when they too are charged with war crimes. That’s like a gangster claiming he is innocent on the basis of his gang-members’ testimony. He blusters on. In a court of law, his performance would be, quite simply, risible as an act of self-defense. It becomes some primal scream version of “Because I said it worked!”

Now look at what else he said. He describes this as a classic example of politicians throwing the “professionals” under the bus. One is forced to ask: what professionals? All the professionals in interrogation in the military and the FBI were kept out of the torture program, which was assigned to two contractors, who assessed themselves, who had never interrogated anyone in their lives, and who had no linguistic or interrogation backgrounds. What this report does is throw the amateurs under the bus, and among those rank amateurs is Dick Cheney.

When Cheney is asked about a prisoner chained to the ceiling in a cell and forced to defecate on himself in a diaper, he says “I’ve never heard of such a thing.” As if that is relevant. If he hadn’t heard of such a thing, he should have. And if he hadn’t until this week, he could have read about it in the report. And then, revealingly, he immediately gets angry. He expresses no regret and no remorse about another human being’s unimaginable suffering. He cites the alternative to torture – legal powerful, effective interrogation that the report proves gave us great intelligence – as “kiss him on both cheeks and tell us, please, please tell us what you know”. Again, this is risible as an argument.

In fact, it is prima facie evidence that torture was used as a first resort, and it was a first resort because Cheney already knew it was the only way to get intelligence. How he knew we don’t know. No one in professional interrogation believed or believes it. So you have clear evidence that the decision to torture was taken early on – and nothing was allowed to stand in its way. This was an ideological decision – not a policy judgment based on evidence.

Here’s the truly revealing part. Cheney is told about a prisoner, Gul Rahman, who died after unimaginable brutality – beaten, kept awake for 48 hours, kept in total darkness for days, thrown into the Gestapo-pioneered cold bath treatment, and then chained to a wall and left to die of hypothermia. The factors in his death included “dehydration, lack of food, and immobility due to ‘short chaining.” This is Cheney’s response:

3,000 Americans died on 9/11 because of what these guys did, and I have no sympathy for them. I don’t know the specific details … I haven’t read the report … I keep coming back to the basic, fundamental proposition: how nice do you want to be to the murderers of 3000 Americans?

But Gul Rahman had nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 plot.

He had engaged in no plots to kill Americans. He was a guard to the Afghan warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, part of an organization that began by fighting the Soviets in occupied Afghanistan. It had alliances with al Qaeda at the time, but subsequently engaged in peace negotiations with the Karzai government. His brother claims Rahman was even involved in rescuing Hamid Kharzai in 1994. To equate him with individuals who committed mass murder of Americans or who were actively plotting against Americans is preposterous. He was emphatically not a threat to the US. Yet we tortured him to death. And the man running the torture camp was promoted thereafter.

To put it more bluntly, Cheney’s response is unhinged. It is suffused with indiscriminate rage which is indifferent to such standards as whether the prisoner is innocent or guilty, or even if he should be in a prison at all. He is acting out a revenge fantasy, no doubt fueled in part by the understanding that 3,000 Americans lost their lives because he failed to prevent it – when the facts were lying there in the existing surveillance and intelligence system and somehow never got put together.

What we have here is a staggering thing: the second highest official in a democracy, proud and unrepentant of war crimes targeted at hundreds of prisoners, equating every single one of the prisoners – including those who were victims of mistaken identity, including American citizens reading satirical websites, including countless who had nothing to do with any attacks on the US at all – with the nineteen plotters of one terror attack. We have a man who, upon being presented with a meticulous set of documents and facts, brags of not reading them and who continues to say things that are definitively disproved in the report by CIA documents themselves.

This is a man who not only broke the law and the basic norms of Western civilization, but who celebrates that. If this man is not brought to justice, the whole idea of justice in this country is a joke.

(Photos: scenes from Abu Ghraib prison, showing the results of torture techniques pioneered by Dick Cheney.)

For the CIA officials involved in torture, one thing was clear from the very beginning: The only way they would be forgiven for what they did was if they could show it had saved lives.

It was the heart of their rationale. It was vital to public acceptance. It was how they would avoid prosecution.

The executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s grindingly exhaustive torture report released Tuesday indelibly captures CIA officials  turning their back on human decency,  and it all starts with a “novel” legal defense floated in November 2001 by CIA lawyers – and arguably prompted by their White House masters, lurking offstage  –  that the “CIA could argue that the torture was necessary to prevent imminent, significant, physical harm to persons, where there is no other available means to prevent the harm.”

Specifically, they pointed out: “states may be very unwilling to call the U.S. to task for torture when it resulted in saving thousands of lives.”

And so, when the tragically predictable sequence of events began to unfold – and torture, as it always has, produced false confessions and little to no intelligence of value – admitting that it had failed was not even an option.

Instead, those involved made up stories of success.

They insisted that Abu Zubaydah was a top al Qaeda figure who, only after being waterboarded, provided information that foiled a major attack on the U.S. – even though Zubaydah wasn’t in al Qaeda, the plot was a farce, and the only related information he provided came before he was tortured.

They cast Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s false confessions as deadly threats, then announced they had been thwarted.

They viciously brutalized people, some of them entirely innocent, and described what they were doing as an art and a science.

Senate investigators, who had access to millions of pages of original CIA cables and other source material, used most of the 499 pages in Tuesday’s release documenting example after example of CIA officials doing gruesome things, then telling convenient falsehoods to each other, to their bosses, to the White House, to anyone who questioned them, and to Congress – all to prove to everyone that torture worked.

By mid-2003, the CIA’s constant mantra was that “enhanced interrogation tactics” had “saved lives,” “thwarted plots,” and “captured terrorists.” Saying otherwise was like blasphemy.

The end result was that when President George W. Bush and other top government officials finally told the public about the program, they trafficked in almost nothing but misinformation.

Should we call these lies? The Senate report doesn’t. (Then again, it also doesn’t call what happened “torture”.)

The people who actually knew the facts certainly lied, obliging the requests from their superiors for examples of effective torture.

Maybe some of the people who heard the lies, and passed them on, let themselves believe they were true. For the CIA, that would be even worse, because a susceptibility to lies is a fatal flaw for an agency charged with providing fact-based intelligence to keep the nation safe.

What the Senate’s summary tells us is that the modern CIA is actuated by fantasy and faith. It’s a familiar charge; we saw the same pattern in the CIA when its political masters wanted a case for war in Iraq.

Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden observed on Tuesday that “The current CIA leadership has been alarmingly resistant to acknowledging the full scope of the mistakes and misrepresentations that surrounded this program for so many years.”

There are no indications the CIA is ready to turn things around, of course. CIA Director John Brennan went to extraordinary lengths to  stymie and discredit the investigation. And now, he is rebuffing its conclusions.

Brennan’s statement Tuesday acknowledged “shortcomings” and “mistakes,” but reasserted “that interrogations of detainees on whom [enhanced interrogation techniques] EITs were used did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives.” He angrily rejected the report’s “inference that the Agency systematically and intentionally misled” Congress, the Executive Branch, and the public.”

And while they remain offstage by design, nothing in this report in any way exonerates the people who were running the show from the White House.

Other reports and works of journalism have clearly identified Vice President Dick Cheney as the prime mover in creating a torture regime that extended not just to the black sites, but to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and elsewhere. Cheney was no victim of misinformation; he was its architect.

And George W. Bush might have remained unfamiliar with the details until as late as 2006 – “According to CIA records, when briefed in April 2006, the president expressed discomfort with the ‘image of a detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper, and forced to go to the bathroom on himself’.” But he must have had some idea what Cheney and others were up to in the basement.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The report adds nauseating new details to the already substantial record of the CIA’s enthusiastic descent into savagery after capturing its first terror suspects, post-9/11.

There’s the image of the CIA’s first fully documented torture victim, Abu Zubaydah, becoming “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth” after a session of repeated near-drownings on the waterboard.

There are descriptions of sleep deprivation that “involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours, usually standing or in stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their heads.”

The report identifies 26 detainees, out of the CIA’s 119 in total, who the agency itself determined should never have been held at all. That unfortunate group includes “Abu Hudhaifa, who was subjected to ice water baths and 66 hours of standing sleep deprivation before being released because the CIA discovered he was likely not the person he was believed to be,” and “Nazir Ali, an ‘intellectually challenged’ individual whose taped crying was used as leverage against his family member.”

The report also creates new additions to the CIA’s lexicon of torture euphemisms, such as “rectal rehydration” and “rectal feeding”:

At least five detainees were subjected to rectal rehydration or rectal feeding. There is at least one record of Abu Zubaydah receiving “rectal fluid resuscitation” for “partially refusing liquids.” … KSM was subjected to rectal rehydration without a determination of medical need, a procedure that KSM interrogator and chief of interrogations [REDACTED} would later characterize as illustrative of the interrogator's "total control over the detainee."

The authors don't just document these new atrocities, they cite them to illustrate how baldly CIA officials deceived others about what was really going on.

A particular sore point is the inaccurate information the CIA fed to Congress. First CIA officials disavowed torture, and promised that the Senate Intelligence Committee would be notified about every individual detained by the CIA. Then came the misinformation and the outright subterfuge.

A 2005 proposal from Senator Carl Levin to establish an independent commission to investigate detainee abuse, for instance, "resulted in concern at the CIA that such a commission would lead to the discovery of videotapes documenting CIA interrogations." As a result, the CIA destroyed them.

Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency (NSA), at a conference hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), August 6, 2013 in Washington, DC.

The summary devotes a 37-page appendix on “Inaccurate CIA Testimony” by former CIA Director Michael Hayden in one Senate Intelligence Committee hearing alone.

At the April 12, 2007, hearing, Director Hayden verbally provided extensive inaccurate information on, among other topics: (1) the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, (2) the application of Department of Defense survival school practices to the program, (3) detainees’ counter interrogation training, (4) the backgrounds of CIA interrogators, (5) the role of other members of the interrogation teams, (6) the number of CIA detainees and their intelligence production, (7) the role of CIA detainee reporting in the captures of terrorist suspects, (8) the interrogation process, (9) the use of detainee reporting, (10) the purported relationship between Islam and the need to use the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, (11) threats against detainees’ families, (12) the punching and kicking of detainees, (13) detainee hygiene, (14) denial of medical care, (15) dietary manipulation, (16) the use of waterboarding and its effectiveness, and (17) the injury and death of detainees.

Hayden told the Senate Intelligence committee: “Punches and kicks are not authorized and have never been employed.” But interviews conducted for two CIA internal reviews described the treatment of Gul Rahman, the detainee who died at the Salt Pit. One witness stated:

[T]here were approximately five CIA officers from the renditions team… they opened the door of Rahman’s cell and rushed in screaming and yelling for him to “getdown.” They dragged him outside, cut off his clothes and secured him with Mylar tape. They covered his head with a hood and ran him up and down a long corridor adjacent to his cell. They slapped him and punched him several times… a couple of times the punches were forceful. As they ran him along the corridor, a couple of times he fell and they dragged him through the dirt (the floor outside of the cells is dirt). Rahman did acquire a number of abrasions on his face, legs, and hands, but nothing that required medical attention. (This may account for the abrasions found on Rahman’s body after his death. Rahman had a number of surface abrasions on his shoulders, pelvis, arms, legs, and face.)

Hayden also lied to Congress about how many detainees were held. At first, the CIA’s lowball numbers were, amazingly enough, just a mistake

Internal CIA documents indicate that inadequate record keeping made it impossible for the CIA to determine how many individuals it had detained. In December 2003, a CIA Station overseeing CIA detention operations in Country [REDACTED] informed CIA Headquarters that it had made the “unsettling discovery” that the CIA was “holding a number of detainees about whom” it knew “very little.”

But five years later, when a CIA officer informed Hayden that the correct number was 112 or more, the officer sent himself an email to memorialize the conversation: “DCIA instructed me to keep the detainee number at 98 –  pick whatever date i [sic] needed to make that happen but the number is 98.”

At a 2006 congressional hearing, then-CIA director Porter Goss said the CIA’s interrogation program is “not a brutality. It’s more of an art or a science that is refined.”

But the report provides new, horrifying details about what it calls COBALT – the notorious Salt Pit facility in Afghanistan, that one CIA official described as a “dungeon.”

The CIA kept few formal records of the detainees in its custody at COBALT. Untrained CIA officers at the facility conducted frequent, unauthorized, and unsupervised interrogations of detainees using harsh physical interrogation techniques that were not—and never became—part of the CIA’s formal “enhanced” interrogation program. The CIA placed a junior officer with no relevant experience in charge of COBALT. On November [REDACTED], 2002, a detainee who had been held partially nude and chained to a concrete floor died from suspected hypothermia at the facility.

Although most of the misinformation documented in the report dates back to the Bush years, Senate investigators also debunked the narrative – spread by Obama-era CIA officials – that torture was responsible for the capture of bin Laden.

Within a day of the UBL operation, the CIA began providing classified briefings to Congress on the overall operation and the intelligence that led to the raid and UBL’s death. On May 2, 2011, CIA officials, including CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, briefed the Committee. A second briefing occurred on May 4, 2011, when CIA Director Leon Panetta and other CIA officials briefed both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Armed Services Committee. Both of these briefings indicated that CIA detainee information—and the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques—played a substantial role in developing intelligence that led to the UBL operation.

The report documents the ample information the CIA had from other sources about the courier who ultimately led them to bin Laden.

The CIA did not receive any information from CIA detainees on Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti until 2003. Nonetheless, by the end of 2002, the CIA was actively targeting Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti and had collected significant reporting on Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti—to include reporting on Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti’s close links to UBL.

In fact, the information in the report supports the argument that torture may have slowed the hunt for bin Laden.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Attorney General Eric Holder has frequently stipulated “that the Department of Justice will not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the legal guidance given by the Office of Legal Counsel regarding the interrogation of detainees.”

The Senate report makes clear that the DOJ memos giving legal cover to CIA officers were based on crucial misrepresentations by the CIA of its needs and its conduct. The DOJ memos “relied on the CIA’s claim that the techniques were necessary to save lives,” the investigators wrote.

Although the CIA proceeded to interpret its authorities more generally, the initial memos were largely derived from what the CIA told DOJ about Zubaydah, and much of that was simply not true.

Most notably, CIA “headquarters” informed DOJ and White House officials in July 2002 that Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation team believed he possessed information on terrrorists and terrorist threats in the U.S. “The CIA officials further represented that the interrogation team had concluded that the use of more aggressive methods ‘is required to persuade Abu Zubaydah to provide the critical information needed to safeguard the lives of innumerable innocent men, women, and children within the United States and abroad,’ and warned ‘countless more Americans may die unless we can persuade AZ to tell us what he knows.’”

But according to the CIA cables the Senate investigators reviewed, the interrogation team had not made any such determination — quite the contrary. They wrote that they were operating under the assumption that Zubaydah was “not holding back actionable information concerning threats to the United States beyond that which [he] has already provided.”

The report also finds that some tactics employed by the CIA went beyond what was allowed by those memos, concluding for instance that the routine use of nudity, abdominal slaps and cold-water dousing were not approved by the Justice Department.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Supporters of the CIA’s interrogation tactics prefer not to call them torture. And some media outlets still shy away from the term. But it’s preposterous to call them anything else.

And one telling series of events described in the report (initially revealed in a 2009 New York Times article by Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane) makes it clear that CIA officials knew exactly what it was they were doing.

It’s a White House tradition that the President makes an obligatory and anodyne proclamation each year on the occasion of the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.

In 2003, George W. Bush’s included the following language:.

The United States is committed to the world-wide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. I call on all nations to speak out against torture in all its forms and to make ending torture an essential part of their diplomacy.

But when then-CIA general counsel John Rizzo heard about that statement – along with a quote from White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan that all prisoners being held by the U.S. government were being treated “humanely” — he panicked.

Rizzo wanted to make sure this didn’t represent a change in policy.

He called John Bellinger, then the legal advisor to the National Security Council, to “express our surprise and concern at some of the statements.”

Rizzo told his CIA colleagues that it “might well be appropriate for us to seek written reaffirmation by some senior White House official that the Agency’s ongoing practices… are to continue.”

CIA director George Tenet then sent a memo to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice seeking reaffirmation of White House support because “recent Administration responses to inquiries and resulting media reporting about the Administration’s position have created the impression that these [interrogation] techniques are not used by U.S. personnel and are no longer approved as a policy matter.”

Not coincidentally, it was right about then that the CIA started making a major effort internally to build the case that what they had been doing was effective.

The report documents, for instance, the effort by the chief of ALEC station – the CIA unit charged with finding Osama bin Laden – requesting information from his subordinates on the “value and impact” of CIA detainee information, which he said was being compiled for senior CIA leadership. He wrote asking for information “that helped reveal or stop plots, reporting that clinched the identity of terrorist suspects, etc.”‘

Subordinates responded enthusiastically. And information started flowing up the chain of command.

On July 29, 2003, as a result of DCI Tenet’s July 3, 2003, request seeking reaffirmation of the CIA’s detention and interrogation policies and practices. Tenet and CIA General Counsel Scott Muller conducted a briefing for a subset of the National Security principals. According to a CIA memorandum, Muller represented that CIA “detainees subject to the use of Enhanced Techniques of one kind or another had produced significant intelligence information that had, in the view of CIA professionals, saved lives.”

The CIA briefing provided the “results” of using the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques in briefing slides with the heading: “RESULTS: MAJOR THREAT INFO.” The slides represented that KSM provided information on “[a]ttack plans against US Capitol, other US landmarks”; “[a]ttacks against Chicago, New York, Los Angeles; against towers, subways, trains, reservoirs, Hebrew centers, Nuclear power plants”; and the “Heathrow and Canary Wharf Plot.” The slides also represented that KSM identified Iyman Paris, the “Majid Khan family,” and Sayf al-Rahman Paracha. These representations were largely inaccurate.

Eventually, those lies made their way up to George W. Bush.

On September 6, 2006, President Bush delivered a speech based on information provided by the CIA, fully vetted by the CIA, that was full of misinformation.

Marc Thiessen, who wrote the speech and is now a columnist for the Washington Post, described its genesis several years later:

This was the most carefully vetted speech in presidential history — reviewed by all the key players from the individuals who ran the program all the way up to the director of national intelligence, who personally attested to the accuracy of the speech in a memo to the president.

But as the report powerfully argues, the speech “included numerous inaccurate representations about the CIA program and the effectiveness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.”

In fact, the CIA’s vetting of the speech, which is detailed in CIA “validation” documents, made it even more inaccurate.

One week before the scheduled speech, a passage in the draft speech made inaccurate claims about the role played by Abu Zubaydah in the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh and the role of Abu Zubaydah and Ramzi bin al-Shibh in the capture of KSM, but did not explicitly connect these claims to the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.

CIA records show Zubaydah played no role in the capture of al-Shibh, and the capture of KSM had absolutely nothing to do with either of them. But the final version of the speech went even further, directly connecting the use of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” against Zubaydah to bin al-Shibh’s capture.

Bush also said: “Once in our custody, KSM was questioned by the CIA using these procedures, and he soon provided information that helped us stop another planned attack on the United States.”

But the convoluted story Bush told was completely untrue and unsupported. The CIA “validated” the claim with a June 2003 cable, leaving out any mention of a March 2003 cable which showed that information about the alleged plot, such as it was, actually came out before KSM said anything.

“Terrorists held in CIA custody have also provided information… [that] they helped stop a plot to hijack passenger planes and fly them into Heathrow or the Canary Wharf in London,” Bush said.

But according to Senate investigators:

A review of records indicates that the Heathrow Airport and Canary Wharf plotting had not progressed beyond the initial planning stages when the operation was fully disrupted with the detentions of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, KSM, Ammar-al-Baluchi, and Khallad bin Attash. None of these individuals were captured as a result of reporting obtained during or after the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques against CIA detainees.

The Senate report also exposes what was perhaps the Bush administration’s single most cited example of how torture saved American lives as, quite literally, a joke.

Bush and others frequently said that information gained by waterboarding led to the disruption of a plot by U.S. citizen Jose Padilla in Chicago that involved blowing up apartment buildings in the United States and possibly “using a ‘dirty bomb’ in the U.S.”

But the Senate report discloses that that Padilla and his associate, Binyam Mohammed, conceived what the CIA called the “Dirty Bomb Plot” after reading a satirical magazine article, “How to Make Your Own H-Bomb,” that instructed would-be bomb makers to enrich uranium by putting liquid uranium hexafluoride in a bucket, attaching a six-foot rope to the bucket handle, and swinging “the rope (and attached bucket) around your head as fast as possible… for about 45 minutes.”

According to the Senate report, that’s exactly how Padilla was planning to build the “dirty bomb.” That ludicrous plan is what landed him in a military brig for three and a half years, labeled as an enemy combatant, before the Bush administration released him to federal court to face other charges.

Jose Padilla, center, is escorted to a waiting police vehicle by federal marshals near downtown Miami, Jan. 5, 2006.

Furthermore, CIA operational cables and other records showed “that the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques played no role in the identification of Jose Padilla or the thwarting” of any plot. When Zubaydah provided information on a “dirty bomb” attack, he didn’t identify Padilla by name – and in any case, whatever he did say was while talking to the FBI, three months before the CIA started torturing him. And the CIA first heard about Padilla from a foreign government, the report states.

A fascinating footnote to the Padilla case involves the CIA’s refusal to admit its error, even years later. In 2008, the Intelligence Committee sent the CIA a question: “Why was this information [related to Padilla], which was not obtained through the use of EITs, included in the ‘Effectiveness Memo’?”

Committee investigators found that one CIA official drafted a response admitting that the agency had “simply inadvertently reported this wrong. Abu Zubaydah provided information on Jose Padilla while being interrogated by the FBI.”

But someone higher up on the foodchain had that draft killed. The truth was simply too much of a threat.

Photo: Dennis Brack/Black Star/Getty Images; Hayden: Mark Wilson/Getty Images; Padilla: J. Pat Carter/AP

The post For CIA, Truth About Torture Was an Existential Threat appeared first on The Intercept.

[Re-posted from earlier today]

Nine years ago, Charles Krauthammer wrote an essay in The Weekly Standard defending the use of torture by the United States. I responded with the essay excerpted below in The New Republic. I went back and read that debate this morning, just to see how it holds up in the wake of the mass of evidence we now have from the CIA itself about the torture that the US actually authorized and practiced under the Bush administration.

And what strikes me is how admirably emphatic Charles was about the gravity of the issue nine years ago. Here is a sentence and a sentiment I have yet to read in the various commentaries on the right since the report was published yesterday:

Torture is a terrible and monstrous thing, as degrading and morally corrupting to those who practice it as any conceivable human activity including its moral twin, capital punishment.

It seems to me that in a civilized and decent society, this is not something open to much caviling. Even if you believe, as Charles did, that torture was defensible in some very exacting circumstances, it is still a monstrous, morally corrupting evil. And yet that sentiment is strangely nowhere to be found on the current right. Which is itself proof of the statement. What we once instinctively regarded with moral horror has, over the years, become something most Americans are comfortable with. This is what torture does. In the words of Charles Krauthammer, it degrades and morally corrupts those who practice it. And so it has:

Notice that Krauthammer’s maximal position in 2005 is now dead last in public opinion: his view that torture should be used extremely rarely commands less than 20 percent support and is beaten by those Americans who now believe that torture should be employed often. Yes: often. And this, of course, is not an accident. When a former president and vice-president openly back torture, and when the CIA has been engaging in a massive p.r. campaign to argue – against what we now know are incontrovertible facts from the CIA’s own records – that it saved thousands of lives, it will affect public opinion. There are always atavist and repellent sentiments in war time. The difference now is that a huge section of the elite endorses them.

Whom should we torture? Krauthammer rules torture out of bounds for prisoners of war; permits it in the case of very few high-value terrorists; and then offers up a difficult category of torture victims – those with information about a “ticking time-bomb”:

Third, there is the terrorist with information. Here the issue of torture gets complicated and the easy pieties don’t so easily apply. Let’s take the textbook case. Ethics 101: A terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City. It will go off in one hour. A million people will die. You capture the terrorist. He knows where it is. He’s not talking … Question: If you have the slightest belief that hanging this man by his thumbs will get you the information to save a million people, are you permitted to do it? Now, on most issues regarding torture, I confess tentativeness and uncertainty. But on this issue, there can be no uncertainty: Not only is it permissible to hang this miscreant by his thumbs. It is a moral duty.

Now consider what we now know about whom we tortured under the torture program under Bush and Cheney. First off, we tortured 26 people who were cases of mistaken identity. We tortured 26 innocent people. This is so far outside any of the parameters that even Krauthammer allowed for that it beggars belief. Amy Davidson:

Footnote 32, the same one that outlines the motives for holding Nazar Ali, has a devastating litany, starting with “Abu Hudhaifa, who was subjected to ice water baths and 66 hours of standing sleep deprivation before being released because the CIA discovered he was likely not the person he was believed to be,” and including many others, such as,

“Gul Rahman, another case of mistaken identity.… Shaistah Habibullah Khan, who, like his brother, Sayed Habib, was the subject of fabrications.… Haji Ghalgi, who was detained as “useful leverage”…. Hayatullah Haqqani, whom the CIA determined “may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time”…. Ali Jan, who was detained for using a satellite phone, traces on which “revealed no derogatory information”.… Two individuals—Mohammad al-Shomaila and Salah Nasir Salim Ali—on whom derogatory information was “speculative”.… and Bismullah, who was mistakenly arrested … and later released with $[redacted] and told not to speak about his experience.”

It seems to me that proponents of torture should be horrified by this revelation. If torture is a monstrous thing, if it corrupts all who do it, as Krauthammer believes, what incalculable damage has been done by the US torturing innocents, in one case to death? Where was there any remorse – yes, remorse – expressed by the CIA yesterday for this compounding of a crime and a mistake?

Now consider Krauthammer’s view of who should be doing the torturing:

The exceptions to the no-torture rule would not be granted to just any nonmilitary interrogators, or anyone with CIA credentials. They would be reserved for highly specialized agents who are experts and experienced in interrogation, and who are known not to abuse it for the satisfaction of a kind of sick sadomasochism Lynndie England and her cohorts indulged in at Abu Ghraib.

We now know that the CIA contracted out the torture to two individuals without “specialized knowledge of al Qaeda, a background in counterterrorism or any relevant cultural or linguistic experience.” They had never interrogated anyone – yet they got a $181 million contract to run the program. They were sadists:

John Rizzo, the acting CIA general counsel who met with the psychologists, wrote in his book, “Company Man,” that he found some of what Mitchell and Jessen were recommending “sadistic and terrifying.” One technique, he wrote, was “so gruesome that the Justice Department later stopped short of approving it.”

They had a pecuniary interest in the criminal enterprise. And they were making things up as they went along:

One email from a CIA staff psychologist said “no professional in the field would credit” their judgments. Another said their “arrogance and narcissism” led to unnecessary conflicts in the field. The director of interrogations for the CIA called their program a “train wreck” and complained that they were blending the roles of doctor and interrogator inappropriately.

So the architects of the torture program also violated a core part of Krauthammer’s defense of torture. And shockingly so. Why aren’t the defenders of torture horrified by this amateurism? Where are the Republican voices of outrage that a serious torture program was handed out to amateur contractors who had no idea what they were doing and no moral compass at all?

Krauthammer also described two torture techniques he would approve of. One was the injection of sodium pentathol – which, given the rank brutality of the actual torture sessions – would have been a mercy, but was not widely used (so far as we know). The second technique was waterboarding, the torture perfected by the Communist Chinese, and for which previous US servicemembers were prosecuted. But notice what Charles says waterboarding is:

Less hypothetically, there is waterboarding, a terrifying and deeply shocking torture technique in which the prisoner has his face exposed to water in a way that gives the feeling of drowning. According to CIA sources cited by ABC News, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “was able to last between two and 2 1/2 minutes before begging to confess.” Should we regret having done that? Should we abolish by law that practice, so that it could never be used on the next Khalid Sheikh Mohammed having thus gotten his confession?

We now know that those CIA sources were lying. KSM was waterboarded 183 times over a matter of weeks. And the waterboarding was not just 2 1/2 minutes of panic. It was full-fledged, endless, soul-breaking, body-destroying torture of a kind practiced in the past by totalitarian or authoritarian police states:

Within days of the Justice Department’s approval to begin waterboarding the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, the sessions became so extreme that some C.I.A. officers were “to the point of tears and choking up,” and several said they would elect to be transferred out of the facility if the brutal interrogations continued. During one waterboarding session, Abu Zubaydah became “completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.” The interrogations lasted for weeks, and some C.I.A. officers began sending messages to the agency’s headquarters in Virginia questioning the utility — and the legality — of what they were doing. But such questions were rejected.

Krauthammer argued that the torture should “not be cinematic and ghoulish.” I wonder if he regards the following as non-ghoulish:

The interrogators didn’t know the languages that would have been useful for real intelligence, but they did come up with a lexicon of their own: “walling,” which meant slamming a person against a wall; “rough takedown,” in which a group would rush into a cell yelling, then drag a detainee down the hall while punching him, perhaps after having “cut off his clothes and secured him with Mylar tape”; “confinement box,” an instrument to make a prisoner feel he was closed in a coffin (the box came in large or small sizes); “sleep deprivation,” which might mean being kept awake for a hundred and eighty hours before succumbing to “disturbing hallucinations”; the ability to, as the report put it, “earn a bucket,” the bucket being what a prisoner might get to relieve himself in, rather than having to soil himself or being chained to a wall with a diaper (an “image” that President Bush was said to have found disturbing); “waterboarding,” which often itself seems to have been a euphemism for near, rather than simulated, drowning; “rectal rehydration as a means of behavioral control”; “lunch tray,” the assembly of foods that were puréed and used to rectally force-feed prisoners.

This is what the talk of family could look like: “CIA officers also threatened at least three detainees with harm to their families—to include threats to harm the children of a detainee, threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee, and a threat to ‘cut [a detainee’s] mother’s throat.’ ” The interrogation of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri included “implying that his mother would be brought before him and sexually abused.”

What this report proves – not asserts, but proves – is that the torture the US inflicted on prisoners was of an uncontrolled, nightmarish quality whose impact was so great that even the junior grunts on the night beat at Abu Ghraib knew what they were supposed to do. Remember what so many Republicans said after Abu Ghraib? They were horrified, when they could blame it on someone at the very lowest rung of the totem pole. But when it was sanctioned by the very highest levels of the CIA – and inflicted on two dozen innocents – it was kosher.

In a civilized society, there really would be no debate over this. And before 9/11, there wasn’t. Ever since, this country has slid and then fallen out of the civilized world and out of the core American traditions of humanity and legal warfare. Krauthammer can be seen as emblematic of that slide – someone whose early abhorrence at torture and defense of it only in its mildest and rarest forms has slowly succumbed to a full-fledged defense of a program that violated every rule he said should be in place to protect us from the abyss. This is not surprising. When you start to torture, the sheer evil of what you are doing requires that you believe ever more in its value. You can never admit error, because it would mean you have committed crimes against humanity without even the defense of acquiring any useful intelligence. You are revealed as monsters – and you cannot accept that of yourself or of those you know. And so you insist – with ever-rising certainty – that the torture worked – even though that’s irrelevant as a matter of morality and of law, and even though your own internal documents prove that it didn’t.

And so you become the monster you were supposed to be fighting. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Mathematics: God laid down axioms, and all else followed trivially.

Law: In the beginning, God gave His creatures free will, wisely limiting His own liability for any damage they might cause.

Computer Science: God threw something together under a 7-day deadline. He’s still debugging.

History: God wrote the Bible, which claims that the heavens and earth were created by God. This is exactly why you can’t always trust primary sources.

Literary Theory: After creating the world, God left scant evidence of His existence, as a deliberate exploration of the problematic nature of authorship.

Political Theory: When God created the world, He made sure to favor incumbents, being one Himself.

Economics: God created us in His own image, as rational consumers. But as sinners, we strayed.

Physics: God modeled the universe on the card game Mao: There are lots of strange rules and He refuses to explain any of them.

Chemistry: On the second day, God created entropy, to make sure the universe would turn itself off if He accidentally left it running.

Psychology: God said “Let there be light,” but what did He mean by that?

Political Science: In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth: pork-barrel construction projects that greatly benefited His district.

Medicine: In the beginning, God created a great clinical trial, although He hasn’t told us yet whether mankind received the treatment or the placebo.

Accounting: On the sixth day, God created man, whom he tasked with conducting a proper audit of His other creations.

Finance: God invested His creatures with life, and has received only a middling return on investment.

I’m reposting this in advance of the release of the torture report, and because (via Digby), the ACLU is making a similar argument in all seriousness.

Consider an effort to measure the misdeeds of the ‘global war on terror.’ On the one side of the balance sheet, we have Richard B. Cheney. This gentleman, now in private life, is a self-admitted and unrepentant perpetrator of war crimes – specifically, of ordering the torture of Al Qaeda detainees. Along with other senior members of the Bush regime, he is also guilty of the outsourcing of even viler forms of torture through the extraordinary rendition of individuals to regimes notorious for torturing prisoners (including the dispatch of Maher Arar, who was entirely innocent, to the torturers of Syria). The Obama administration has shown no enthusiasm whatsoever for prosecuting Cheney, or other Bush senior officials, for their crimes. While Obama has effectively admitted that they were torturers, he has indicated, both through public statements and continued inaction, that he would prefer to let bygones be bygones.

On the other, we have Chelsea Manning. She appears to be a confused individual – but her initial motivation for leaking information, if the transcripts are correct, were perfectly clear. She was appalled at what he saw as major abuses of authority by the US, including incidents that he witnessed directly in Iraq. There is no evidence that her leaking of information has caused anything worse than embarrassment for the US. Yet she is being pursued by the Obama administration with the vengefulness of Greek Furies. While Manning was being kept in solitary confinement, and treated in an inhuman fashion, Richard Cheney was enjoying the manifold pleasures of a well-compensated private life, being subjected to no more than the occasional impertinent question on a Sunday talk show, and the inconveniences of being unable to travel to jurisdictions where he might be arrested.

It would appear then that the administration is rather more prepared to let bygones be bygones in some cases than in others. High officials, who ordered that torture be carried out and dragged the US into international disrepute, are given an ex post carte blanche for their crimes, while a low-ranking soldier who is at most guilty of leaking minor secrets at the lowest levels of classification, was treated inhumanely and sentenced to decades of imprisonment.

So here’s my proposal. It’s perfectly clear that Richard B. Cheney will never be prosecuted because a prosecution would be politically inconvenient. If that’s the Obama administration’s decision (and it’s pretty clear that it is the Obama administration’s decision), then the administration should own it. The president should grant Richard Cheney a pardon for his crimes. Simultaneously, as an acknowledgement that the high crimes of state officials should not go unpunished while the lesser crimes of those who opposed the Iraq war are exposed to the vengefulness of the military tribunal system, Chelsea Manning should receive a complete pardon too.

I can’t imagine that Richard B. Cheney would like getting a presidential pardon. Indeed, I rather imagine that he’d vigorously protest it. It would serve as the best formal acknowledgment that we’re likely to get that he is, indeed, a criminal. Obviously, it would also be an unhappy compromise for those who think that he should be exposed to the full rigors of the law. But I personally think that it would be an acceptable compromise (others may reasonably disagree), if it were applied to both sides rather than just one.

(Originally posted with minor differences here

At Religion Dispatches, Daniel Silliman interviews Matthew Avery Sutton about his new book, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism. The title of the piece tells you where this is going: “It’s the Apocalypse Stupid: Understanding Christian Opposition to Obamacare, Civil Rights, the New Deal and More.”

Sutton is a history professor at Washington State, and his book is being published next week by Harvard University Press. So this isn’t some snarky blogger lobbing spitballs here but, like, scholarship and footnoted intellectual history and whatnot. But Sutton’s scholarship might seem familiar to anyone who’s been following the spitball-lobbing at this particular snarky blog.

This is pretty terrific stuff. Sutton hits on two big themes in particular that I think are really important to anyone trying to understand white evangelical Christianity and/or American politics: First, the pervasive and pernicious anti-government influence that comes from the anti-Antichristianity of “Bible prophecy” and Rapture mania, and second, the confusion that comes from imagining that Rapture-obsessed premillennialism retreated into a-political quietism during the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement before re-entering politics in the Reagan years.

That second point reinforces the argument Carolyn Renée Dupont makes in Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1975. The white evangelicals who upheld white supremacy and Jim Crow throughout the 20th century claimed to be a-political, but there’s no reason for us to accept that claim without examining it. Otherworldly religion supports the status quo. That doesn’t make it non-political. Far from it.

And but so, go read the whole thing at Religion Dispatches, but I’m going to quote big chunks of Sutton’s argument here.

From Spire Comics’ 1974 adaptation of Hal Lindsey’s “There’s a New World Coming.”

Sutton’s two-sentence summary of his argument captures the implicit and explicit political view that tens of millions of white evangelical readers have been absorbing from the Left Behind series. Sutton says:

My argument in a nutshell is that the apocalyptic theology that developed in the 1880s and 1890s led radical evangelicals to the conclusion that all nations are going to concede their power in the End Times to a totalitarian political leader who is going to be the Antichrist. If you believe you’re living in the last days and you believe you’re moving towards that event, you’re going to be very suspicious and skeptical of anything that seems to undermine individual rights and individual liberties, and anything that is going to give more power to the state.

Tim LaHaye’s John Birch Society propaganda in the Left Behind series is an extreme form of that premillennial anti-government suspicion. For most white evangelicals, as Sutton argues, the suspicion of government arises from the fear of a coming Antichrist one-world government. For LaHaye, I think, cause and effect go in the other direction. He was precommitted to his anti-government, yet authoritarian, Bircher ideology and therefore drawn to Antichrist mythology and “Bible prophecy” ideology as a way of giving that political agenda a religious expression.

But, as Sutton argues, people like LaHaye, John Hagee and Hal Lindsey are only able to sell so many books because the supposed “mainstream” of white evangelicalism is preaching and teaching the exact same thing — the same pop-apocalyptic theology and the same thinly cloaked Bircherism:

Billy Graham gets a pass from a lot of scholars who pay very little attention to his apocalypticism. I think that’s wrong. I think it’s been a core of his ministry. In 1949, when Graham had his first major revival in Los Angeles, the famous one that put him on the map, the revival began just days after Harry Truman announced that the Soviets had tested an atomic bomb. So Graham used this to say, the end is near, the time is close. You have to get saved today because Jesus is coming back.

He would say getting people saved is the engine driving him, but the reason there’s an urgency to getting people saved is that Jesus may be coming back before we wake up in the morning. And he would say that at every revival campaign. That was his message.

He wrote about it more than just about any other topic. He published books on apocalypticism in the 1960s and the 80s and the 90s and 2010. In 2010, writing as a 91-year-old, he believed this message was one of the most important things he could leave behind on this earth. In this book he says the signs are now clearer than ever. He’s written a lot of books, but five on apocalypticism? I don’t know that he’s covered any other topic in five books.

In this interview, Sutton himself doesn’t say a great deal about the origins of this white evangelical apocalyptic theology, but once you grasp his main point about the political effect of this theology, the cause and the root of this ideology becomes clearer. Premillennial dispensationalism, as he notes, “developed in the 1880s and 1890s” and produced/embodied/nurtured a religious sensibility that ws fervently opposed to a more centralized form of government. Is it simply a coincidence that this came immediately after Reconstruction and the revolutionary expansion of federal authority embodied in the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments?

Sutton provides a valuable service by showing how white evangelical Rapture ideology influenced these Christians to oppose FDR and the New Deal, but I suspect the real roots of this — and the origins of this ideology, or of its popularity — go back a half-century earlier, to white resentment (North and South) over Reconstruction.

This is the one place that I think Sutton goes astray in his nutshell summary quoted above. “If you believe you’re living in the last days and you believe you’re moving towards that event,” he writes, “you’re going to be very suspicious and skeptical of anything that seems to undermine individual rights and individual liberties.” But that’s not an accurate description of the political effect of “Bible prophecy” ideology. Rapture enthusiasts and Anti-Antichristians have never been civil libertarians. They have never been champions of “individual rights and individual liberties.” They have always been, instead, champions of states’ rights in opposition to the federal government.

And “states’ rights” has always been a euphemism. Always. From Calhoun to the Dixiecrats to the tea party.

Here’s some more choice quotes from Matthew Sutton:

What I found in my research was that apocalypticism was central to fundamentalists and evangelicals. What made them most distinct, what set them apart from liberal Protestants is not what we’ve traditionally thought. It’s not questions of the virgin birth or how you read the Bible or questions of the nature of the incarnation or the literal resurrection of Jesus or Jesus’s miracles. All those matter, all of those things do set them apart, but they don’t affect how they live their daily lives. The one thing that affects how they live their daily lives is that they believe we are moving towards the End Times, the rise of the Antichrist, towards a great tribulation and a horrific human holocaust.

In their minds, the imminent Second Coming would not be as important as getting people saved. Salvation, converting sinners, would be the most important thing driving them. But in terms of how they’re shaping and organizing their own lives, I think apocalypticism has been the driving force for much of the last century. It has fueled the movement and shaped it in fundamental ways.

If you haven’t been in the archives it’s really unbelievable to read these articles, these sermons and these letters, to realize how much apocalypticism saturated the minds of fundamentalists and evangelicals in the 20th century. The looming rise of the Antichrist was just the forefront of their thinking.

And they say that. Over and over again. They’re very clear.

This is significant because to believe the world is rapidly moving to its end effects how you vote, how you’re going to structure your education, how you understand the economy, how you’re going to treat global events, how you’re going to look at organizations like the United Nations. …

… It’s a relatively complicated theology that fundamentalists and then evangelicals drew from a lot of different influences, a lot of different impulses. The key to unlocking their theology is to see some fairly obscure passages from the books of Daniel, Ezekiel, Revelation, and Jesus’s sermon in Matthew 24 through their eyes.

But their conclusions, broken down to their simplest form are these: We’re living in the church age and we’re moving towards the Rapture. Jesus will Rapture all true believers out of this world, they’ll just disappear, they’ll go up to heaven with Jesus, and then with the loss of Christian influence in the world, Satan will have free rein to take power through a political leader, called the Antichrist, who is then going to rule over the world for seven years. This period is called the Tribulation. Antichrist rule will lead to a series of wars, which will then culminate with Jesus coming with an army of saints and fighting the battle of Armageddon, in the literal land of Palestine. Jesus will defeat the Antichrist, vanquish evil and then establish a new kingdom. …

The rough picture is that we’re moving towards the End Times. Instead of the idea that Christians are building the kingdom of God on earth, the earth is on a quick, slippery slope descending to hell. …

… What apocalypticism did was give white evangelicals a framework and a rationale for fighting the Civil Rights movement, for example. In the last days, they insisted, there will be lawlessness. So they saw the Civil Rights movement as an example of people who break the law. Whiteness influenced these evangelical theologians, and when we compare them with African American theologians we can see how their sensitivities influenced the way they read, understood, and applied the Bible.

but don’t worry! after 10 full minutes of soaking, he turned the hose onto the other house for another 10 minutes. he timed it so it was completely fair

let me tell you a story about this strip. i had the idea, drew it last week, and was scared to post it because it’s political. so i didn’t. last night i posted it to my patreon as a behind-the-scenes thing. someone (a little overzealously, but forgivably) shared it on twitter, where within 6 hours it became the most shared piece of work i have ever made.

Vi Hart and Nicky Case created a brilliant "playable post" that challenges you to arrange two groups of polygons to make them "happy" by ensuring that no more than 2/3 of their neighbors are different. Read the rest

In 1985/86 the comic genius Kyle "Why I Hate Saturn" Baker interned at Marvel, where editor Jim Salicrup had him create "It's Genetic," a series of one-panel funnies making fun of superheros that ran in Marvel Age. Read the rest

“I have known cops who haven’t had a racist bone in their bodies and in fact had adopted black children, they went to black churches on the weekend; and these are white cops. They really weren’t overtly racist. They weren’t consciously racist. But you know what they had in their minds that made them act out and beat a black suspect unwarrantedly? They had fear. They were afraid of black men. I know a lot of white cops who have told me. And I interviewed over 900 police officers in 18 months and they started talking to me, it was almost like a therapy session for them I didn’t realize that they needed an outlet to talk,” – Constance Rice, civil rights attorney.

Aaron Blake highlights a poll finding “that 60 percent of Americans disagree with the lack of an indictment against officer Daniel Pantaleo”:

Although 40 percent disagree “strongly” with there being no indictment in Garner’s case, just 24 percent say the same about the case in Ferguson. And in Ferguson, there’s majority support — 52 percent — for no indictment. So basically, Americans as a whole favor no indictment in Ferguson. In Garner’s case, they overwhelmingly think there should have been one. And in fact, just one-quarter of Americans agree with the grand jury’s decision not to indict.

This suggests, does it not, that the gloomiest assessments of America’s ability to see through race are too dire. If we were truly racially polarized, we’d see similar responses to similar white-cop-black-victim scenarios. Which means we have some common ground to stand on.