Camille Paglia gets U2-ey

The new U2 song "Magnificent" has sparked a Bible/God debate over at Camille Paglia's column at Salon, as she and some readers battle over the song's meaning. Here's her retort to a long and detailed question from reader Don Stockton:

Thank you very much for your good wishes. And my thanks also to Joseph Hartman of Arlington, Va., who wrote in to argue as eloquently as you have that the U2 song is "a psalm to God."

However, I must respectfully disagree. "Magnificent" is definitely a magnificat, a hymnlike song of praise, and it is permeated with religious references -- much as love songs often were in African-American soul music. But as I interpret Bono's lyrics (from my classroom experience as a teacher of poetry), there are several key details suggesting that it is not God but the audience who is being addressed. "I didn't have a choice but to lift you up": Surely Bono is not telling God that He needs lifting! It's the audience who need intervention and exaltation. "You and I will magnify": Devout humans do the magnifying, not God, the subject of that magnification.

Yes, Bono is saying he was destined to sing -- like the Celtic bards before him. He was one of the chosen few even as a squalling infant. "I was born to be with you in this space and time": the "you" here is not God, who exists outside of space and time, but other mortals subject to limitation. The soul had to leave God to come to earth. In professing uncertainty about what is beyond the grave, Bono is rejecting Christian orthodoxy. The "Magnificent" to whom he sings might well be God, but it could also be the universe or life itself.

Pretty heady stuff for a rock band, eh?

For MJ, RIP

PC Guy Roasts Obama

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

"I'm a Bono fan"

So says James Logan Jones Jr., the current United States National Security Advisor and a retired United States Marine Corps four-star general.


This was revealed in the Brain Williams White House special, as they showed a copy of U2's "No Line on the Horizon" on his desk.

Have I mentioned how much I like this Obama guy?

Nancy Pelosi is a Red Herring

red herring- n.

1. A smoked herring having a reddish color.
2. Something that draws attention away from the central issue.

I'm referring to the second definition here. The central issue we are distracted from?
The Torture and Why We Did It.
Sure, she knew about it, and most of us could figure out that it was happening (perhaps not to the extent we have since learned), but the central issue is not that she knew about it, the central issue is that we were doing it, and more importantly, why we were doing it. I can see using it in a limited fashion for the "ticking time bomb" scenario, but what we did was beyond the pale.

From Joy-Ann Reid at Common Dreams:

"Most Americans have long since accepted that the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq was flawed, if not totally false. What we didn't know until recently, was that to sell that case, members of the Bush administration, possibly including Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld - maybe even the president of the United States, were willing to do things we're accustomed to ascribing to the North Koreans or Maoist Chinese: using torture not to get good information, but to produce false confessions, to justify an unnecessary war.

The evidence just keeps coming. On Thursday, Colin Powell deputy Lawrence Wilkerson, and former NBC News investigative producer Robert Windrem, offered stunning news. In Wilkerson's words:

... what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop."

And what's the latest news on al-Libi, from The Washington Post:

"A former CIA high-value detainee, who provided bogus information that was cited by the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war, has died in a Libyan prison, an apparent suicide, according to a Libyan newspaper."

More from Joy-Ann Reid:

"You'd think that these would be top stories, worthy of serious consideration by a press corps that so shamefully let down the American people in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. The implications of these new revelations are stunning: a sitting president, vice president and defense secretary, selling a false case to the American people about an impending invasion of a country that had done no harm to us, and then using torture to produce false confessions in order to further the lie. Instead, the vaunted press corps is fixated - almost to the point of obsession - with Speaker Pelosi."

Torture itself is wrong, but using torture to knowingly produce false information to justify a war? That's beyond the pale.

And that's why Pelosi is a red herring. She may have known and gone along with the administration, but who directed our torture program, who implemented it and why? That's the real central issue here.

Bonus: Star Trek fans will appreciate this article from Slate that describes the episode when Piccard gets tortured. There...are...four...lights! Watch this to see clips from that episode:

Heels at da White House

Bobby Frasor made this great behind the scenes video of the Tar Heels at the White House.
This is a must-see for Heels fans (and recruits).

Not Just Anyone's Cockatoo

I heard about the dancing Cockatoo on NPR yesterday. Bono uses the term "Cockatoo" in one of their new songs called "Breathe", so this just blew me away.



Here's the NPR story, enjoy.

Bush Waterboards Reagan

What did Reagan do regarding waterboarding? He prosecuted and jailed the offenders. As I've said before, George W. Bush ain't no Ronald Reagan.

"George W. Bush's Justice Department said subjecting a person to the near drowning of waterboarding was not a crime and didn't even cause pain, but Ronald Reagan's Justice Department thought otherwise, prosecuting a Texas sheriff and three deputies for using the practice to get confessions.

Federal prosecutors secured a 10-year sentence against the sheriff and four years in prison for the deputies. But that 1983 case -- which would seem to be directly on point for a legal analysis on waterboarding two decades later -- was never mentioned in the four Bush administration opinions released last week."

So Bush's Justice Dept. purposely ignored the Reagan precedent on waterboarding. Bush II should have emulated Reagan more... it seems to me he had none of Reagan's compassion.

We Tortured to Justify War

Frank Rich at the New York Times boils down why we tortured, and it's worse than we think. We tortured in particular to get info that linked Al Qaeda with Iraq, in order to justify going to war.

...Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: "A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful." As higher-ups got more "frustrated" at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, "there was more and more pressure to resort to measures" that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration's ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee's memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) "Downing Street memo," in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." A month after Bybee's memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on "Meet the Press," hyping both Saddam's W.M.D.s and the "number of contacts over the years" between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus "intelligence" from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.

Last week Bush-Cheney defenders, true to form, dismissed the Senate Armed Services Committee report as "partisan." But as the committee chairman, Carl Levin, told me, the report received unanimous support from its members - John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman included.

Levin also emphasized the report's accounts of military lawyers who dissented from White House doctrine - only to be disregarded. The Bush administration was "driven," Levin said. By what? "They'd say it was to get more information. But they were desperate to find a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq."

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to "protect" us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from "another 9/11," torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House's illegality.

If we are to remain proud to be Americans, we must see justice served here.

Tyler Hansbrough 3D

tylerhansbrough3D, originally uploaded by Watts4.

That's right, National Champs, baby.

3D HD from Panasonic?

Looks like I have something to add to my wishlist....if they ever make this thing. Gizmodo luvs some 3D.

Champions

3D Movies Not the Next Big Thing?

Slate's Daniel Engber has a terrific article on the pitfalls of 3D movies, and why the new crop isn't really better than the old style:

"There are plenty of other problems with 3-D movies that might contribute to the sore eyes, headaches, and nausea. As a general rule, the greater the disparity between the two image tracks—that is to say, the farther apart the two cameras are placed during shooting—the greater the illusion of depth in the finished product. That's a plus for the filmmakers, who tend to favor extreme special effects, pickaxes flying off the screen and all that. On the other hand, the more pronounced the disparity, the more difficult it is for the viewer to fuse the two perspectives into a coherent scene. That could lead to double-vision, uncomfortable flickering, and—yes—eyestrain.

So if the new 3-D movies are still giving us headaches, why has no one bothered to mention them? It may be that the visual fatigue, however pervasive, is small enough to hide in the novelty of the experience—we're so jazzed up that we barely notice our eyes hurt."

I like the new-style 3D movies much better than say, Jaws 3D... they are better. The U23D movie on IMAX was sensational. But yeah, as long as we need glasses to see 3D, there is going to be some discomfort. I find looking at anaglyph pictures much easier on the eyes than movies, and this article helps explain why. Cool article with lots of detail, even if it does douse some water on the new 3D fire.

U2 in Fez Cool Video

Cool video of early "No Line" sessions in Fez, complete with different lyrics for Unknown Caller at the end. I found the video enjoyable.


U2 in Fez from Juan Andrés Milleiro on Vimeo.