The military trainers who came to Guantanamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

I know there’s no one in the known universe who needs more ammo to support the idea that Guantanamo is an egregious black mark on American history, but this pretty much takes the cake.

After all, the feminist movement is built upon the cornerstone of women controlling their reproductive destinies — on the imperative of valuing women’s lives over the potential for life represented by a pregnancy. In the past, that often meant not talking at all about post-abortive women’s feelings about the fetus.

Hunh?  Maybe “not talking at all about post-abortive women’s feelings about the fetus” was just a helpful way of diverting attention away from the pro “life” movement’s favorite tactic– sentimentality.  Ever been to a rally?  I doubt most pro choice organizations would agree with this characterization of their motives for not being all, “Mwah, I cried after my abortion.”  First of all, not everyone needs counseling after an abortion.  The article acknowledges the fact that there is no “syndrome” identified, yet.  Second of all, just because some women do need counseling doesn’t negate the fact that the right to an abortion is important. 

Nowhere does the article factually prove the pro choice organizations are willfully withholding $$ from these counseling groups, like this synopsis on Jezebel would seem to imply.  In fact, I would like to know who the organization the author describes (Exhale, see http://www.4exhale.org/) solicits for funding and gets turned down by– because according to their annual report, 80% of their annual funding in 2005 was provided by foundations, among them several Planned Parenthood branches, which I think is pretty clearly a nod of support by the “pro choice movement.”

This would be a much better article if it emphasized the real point, which is hidden– general health foundations are wary of these programs, much more so than some monolithic “pro choice movement.”  Clearly the bigger issue, as always, and only underlining the entire purpose of being supportive of choice and reproductive freedom.

I started to search the man as to me very alone and 29 years and I do not have man if you wish to begin with me correspondence or easier to begin acquaintance
tell to me your answer. I shall wait much!

Nevermind that she thinks I’m a man, or that hitting “Reply” will bomb my hard drive– that’s golden prose.

On the subject of attractive women, here are two hitting new lows in the bizarre Michelle Obama media circus, this time on Bloggingheads talking about Obama’s arms. Yup. And this is one of many reasons why net-based media, no matter how finely it rakes the muck, still looks a lot like child’s play to the old school. Not to say TV media is much better. (Remember, Fox News thinks baby mama is an appropriate epithet on the evening news.)

This next segue is… not a segue.

Walking into work on Thursday, I heard the (now-unmistakable) high-pitched bleats of a kitten. I paused in the alley next door, where the resident drunk is always faithfully nursing a caguama (the Mexican answer to a 40 oz.) and offering to wash my car for a few pesos. And there was a tiny kitten, tied with what looked like a shoelance around his neck to the drunk’s bucket, which was filled with cleaning supplies and empty beer bottles.Needless to say, he came home with me. (The kitten, not the drunk.)

Tentatively, we’re calling him Ozzy. He weighs in at about 2.2 lbs. of sheer, unadulterated kitten energy. He’s got a clean bill of health, two recently-descended testicles, and he’s making a fierce daily bid to destroy my other two cats, who outweigh him by 10 and 19 pounds, respectively.

I am aware of the fact that I need to immediately stop acquiring cats on the street. With Ozzy, we’re officially at three street rescues. That puts the cat to human ratio at 3:2. A wise man once told me that as soon as your pets outnumber your humans, the revolution isn’t far behind.

On the subject of fail: Stop! A voluntary seeing-eye cat.

I swear to God, someday, I’ll have a cat like that. Meanwhile, I’m thankful for this wiki-how, which advises, and I quote, “After your cat’s first ‘butt-bath’, you may have to briefly clean and work on trimming your cat’s rear.” It also advises that I pay my overweight cat special attention throughout his “personal makeover”– i.e., the process of me shaving and cleaning his asshole and cat peen– so that “[we] are still friends.” Jesus, I wouldn’t want to lose his friendship, or anything.

Insert FAIL:

You probably can’t tell, but the one on the bottom is also a cat. Swear.

from Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times

It is hard for me to find the words to express what a massive, fraudulent, pathetic excuse for an energy policy this is.

from Erin Aubry Kaplan, Salon.com

And unlike Barack, she was a typical black American with no transcendent story about immigrant parents and being raised in exotic locales… All of this confuses white people mightily, far more than Barack’s biracial status. In their frame of reference, Michelle has no reason to be angry and every reason to be content… Michelle’s very presence is forcing the possibility of an enormous paradigm shift we’ve never had to make — that is, from whites at the top assessing blacks in America to blacks at the top assessing America itself.

Living in Cabo, Mexico on the flipside: enduring trickle down government corruption and an industry almost solely reliant on tourism without the infrastructure to support it.  In this case, hundreds of tour bus drivers protested a Supreme Court decision to only allow the taxi cab mafia to transport tourists on municipal roads (i.e., everywhere, except from the airport to the hotel).  Now tourists will have to board stinky taxis with mostly uneducated, dangerous drivers and pay top peso just to cross the highway to get from Point A to Point B.  And the American press hasn’t picked up on this yet, because the papers are always saturated with thinly-veiled press releases from companies with substantial financial incentive to maintain Cabo’s Stateside image of glamor and sparkling seas.

Meanwhile: lindsey AT reverse paranoia DOT com.