#Politics

This makes me ill. If you ever needed even more argument that waterboarding is indeed torture of the most insidious and despicable kind (precisely because some people don’t think it is torture and condoned it), go spelunking through these Salon memorandums on what was done to Guantanamo detainees.

Waterboarding for dummies - Torture - Salon.com

… what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding ‘session.’ Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to ‘dam the runoff’ and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second ‘applications’ of liquid in each two-hour session - and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session - a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding - the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

Leveraging the total and well justified outrage at the banks over their massive bailouts, The Robin Hood Tax project rebrands the Tobin Tax idea (and prior to that Keynes’ idea of a tax on all financial transactions) to try to divert bailout money and questionably speculative activity (rather than wealth creation) to assist in social causes, combatting climate change and other social priorities.

Totally love this idea, even as a former economist. I’d love to see it pushed despite practical difficulties. Oh, and absolutely fantastic performance by Bill Nighy in the Curtis directed short (and how can you not love seeing the Gherkin in the background?).

Missed this video when it was making the rounds a while back. Interesting way of viewing the history of human rights, but I think its initial question that is posed is a valid one; how many of us could name the human rights we and the rest of the people on the planet are heir to ?

via my brother (of all the people you’d never think would send something like this.)

While I think it may be a wee bit over the top, you have to love Umair Haque’s latest “The Builder’s Manifesto” on the need for Builders instead of Leaders. Definitely an idea here.

This relationship isn’t working out. Its time for us to explore other government opportunities. We’ve tried to make it work. But it’s not us — it’s you (really).

I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership lately. Specifically: why, today, when a wave of crises is sweeping the globe, does leadership seem to be almost totally absent?

How embarrassing for us all internationally. Not just a Fossil of the Day award, but we beat out all the other shamed attendees to win the overall Colossal Fossil of the Year award (dead link). Will someone please call an election and his ridiculous, lame duck Bush-esque government out of office, please ? It’s making us look like schmucks internationally.

‘Fossil of the Year goes to CANADA, for bringing a totally unacceptable position into Copenhagen and refusing to strengthen it one bit. Canada’s 2020 target is among the worst in the industrialized world, and leaked cabinet documents revealed that the governments is contemplating a cap-and-trade plan so weak that it would put even that target out of reach.

Want to really make those politicians and bureaucratic weasels suffer as well as making their attempts to pass stupid legislation as costly to them as possible ?

Read Keane’s guide on letter writing your pollies - love the stuff about throwing in random extra issues or questions on unrelated matters so they have to expend resources and can’t use canned responses, cut and paste mail merges or have to pull on resources from other departments.

Story of Stuff author Annie Leonard presents her reasons that Cap and Trade is flawed and that the most important thing we need to do is agree on the global cap. Great animation: plain speaking, clear, concise and most of all, understandable.

More info at her website .

mySociety , the force behind such excellent online pro-democracy tools in the UK as TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow are calling for proposals for the next amazing online tool they need to build.

Got a great idea, but lack the development muscle to make it happen ? Here’s your chance to create something with clear social, civic or democratic value and make the UK a better place (and it needs it).

Frightening short piece from the Atlantic about the effects of Tiananmen censorship on cultural memory. I find this amazingly Orwellian and chilling as all hell. I think we all hope to live in a world where censorship doesn’t work as a form of repression.

I have spent a lot of time over the past three years with Chinese university students. They know a lot about the world, and about American history, and about certain periods in their own country’s past… But you can’t assume they will ever have heard of what happened in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago. For a minority of people in China, the upcoming date of June 4 has tremendous significance. For most young people, it’s just another day.

I love the work the folks at MySociety are doing these days. Mapumental is a great bit of geekery allowing someone to figure out where they can live based on commute, housing prices and scenery. Check out the jaw-dropping demo below since the thing is still in private beta. I so wish they would have this for rental prices added in.