Oh no! It's not a Playmobil toy, but a Contrarian regular directs us to "Charlie don't surf," a two-year-old post on the very peculiar website, Legofesto, featuring a (decidedly unofficial) Lego waterboarding device. Where will this stop? Legofesto describes herself as: A politics-junkie and news-hound, with a thing for lego. This is not a blog for children. She is very, very pissed off about how the War on Terror (or whatever we're now calling it) is prosecuted around the world, led by US/UK. Human rights abuses and real events in the world are recreated in lego. LEGO© in no way endorse this blog...

20 October, 2009

According to the website Raw Story, the Obama administration has reacted the the UK High Court decision (stayed pending appeal) to publish details of the torture inflicted on former Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed, and Obamaphiles will thre response hard to stomach: Meanwhile, US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said: "We are not pleased", adding that Washington kept such information confidential "to protect our own citizens." How exactly does it protect US citizens to be shielded from the information that CIA agents used scalpels on an illegally rendered prisoner's testicles? Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald continues to follow this story. A Contrarian reader points to this...

20 October, 2009

Contrarian reader Andrew Bourke flags the droll consumer reviews of the Playmobil Security Checkpoint on the Amazon website (scroll way down). Moneyquote: I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger's shoes cannot be removed. Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger's scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up. My son said "that's the worst security ever!". But it turned out to be okay, because when the passenger got on the Playmobil B757 and tried...

20 October, 2009

The British High Court has ruled that, pending appeal, it will finally publish seven paragraphs detailing the torture CIA agents inflicted on Binyam Mohamed. The court had earlier redacted the passage from a decision about Mohamed at the request of  British officials, who said it would jeopardize US-UK cooperation on security matters. The Telegraph, a British newspaper, quotes an anonymous official describing the explosive contents of the passage: The 25 lines edited out of the court papers contained details of how Mr Mohamed's genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated...

18 October, 2009

A cautious Contrarian reader writes: A friendly caution about taking pictures inside the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority pre-board screening area: If noticed, likely to attract unwanted security attention. Noted — but isn't this just further evidence that the real purpose of security theater is not to keep Canadians safe but to buttress the puffed-up functionaries charged with upholding these useless, colossally wasteful procedures? [caption id="attachment_2591" align="alignwrap" width="545" caption="Left: Stanfield International Airport 7 a.m., October 15. The security queue extends past the Clearwater Seafoods kiosk to the Air Canada check-in counter. Right: Half and hour later, inside the CATSA security zone. "][/caption] The overwhelming evidence...

18 October, 2009

Stanfield International Airport, 7:24 a.m. Update: Peter Spurway of the Airport Authority explains: "Yup. Possible security breach was being investigated. Pre board screening closed temporarily. Flights held. Hope your disruption not too long." ...

15 October, 2009
faulkner-cJames Fallows, author, Atlantic Magazine writer, and erstwhile speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, has cataloged with discernment his admiration for several of President Obama's landmark speeches over the last 18 months. So it was surprising to read his prediction that the president's acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize will flop. Fallow's argument is "probabilistic:" Of the hundreds of Nobel prize acceptance speeches delivered over the years, he contends, only one was ever noteworthy:  the three-minute oration by novelist William Faulkner, a man notorious for hating to make speeches. Here is Faulkner's remarkable address, delivered on December 10, 1950:
The full text is after the jump:
12 October, 2009

As the US right hurls ever more fantastic slippery slope arguments at health care reform, the Atlantic's James Fallows has challenged readers to come up with a single non-specious example of a metaphorical slippery slope. Aside from, "birth leads inevitably to death," they've been pretty much stumped. But one reader offered this 19th century advice from Thomas de Quincey, author of Confessions of an Opium Eater. If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun...

20 September, 2009

Green Party leader Elizabeth May likes to deride clean coal technology as "George Bush's favorite techno-fix" for climate change. But a new documentary from the Australian Broadcasting Company says the Bush administration actually undermined clean coal, even as it pretended to support the technology. Coal is our most abundant conventional energy resource, also our dirtiest. It contributes about half of greenhouse gas production in Nova Scotia, about 30 percent worldwide. So a technology that let us use this resource without producing greenhouse gas emissions would be a huge breakthrough in efforts to slow climate change. In 2007, MIT produced a study called,...

20 September, 2009
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